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My thoughts on the upcoming TES-MMO
13 years ago
I'm torn on this personally. As much as I would like and hope I'm proven wrong, I feel that the game is going to be a huge let-down because some of the 'pros' they hype up for the game I fear will ultimately detract from the experience.
Reason 1: Graphics. Bethesda has with the release of Skyrim made -huge- leaps and bounds forward to improving the visual appeal of their games. The downside to this is to run the games on the higher settings you need a decently powerful PC/video card so you get the most out of it. And this is all just when you are the only player in the game. Now that we're looking at an MMO scale game though the graphics are likely going to take a -huge- dive, more or less counter-acting all the progress Bethesda made in Skyrim. The biggest reason I feel there's going to be a massive dive for graphic quality though is due to the idea that there should be...
One massive megaserver. There won't be any shards, or worlds, or the like. Everyone's going to be on the same game server all playing together. While this sounds awesome at first, this alone could be the biggest fault I find with the game, especially when you consider this tidbit about Skyrim: "During the first day of release, Steam showed over 230,000 people playing Skyrim concurrently." Now lets take that number into consideration for a moment. 230 -thousand- people were playing Skyrim through Steam alone. That's not including the people who bought the game retail. Sure, you -could- make the argument that "Hey, there are different starting zones, not everyone's going to be starting in the same location." Which is entirely true, but that doesn't change the bit that Even if each race had its own starter location, if you split it evenly 9 ways to account for all the races you will still be starting with an estimated 25,555 people. Just let that sink in for a moment. Really, just think about it. The instant you start the game, you are going to be surrounded by over twenty-five thousand clones of yourself. And if typical TES game formulas are to be followed, you'll all start out half-naked with no weapons or armor. But surely armor/weapon varieties will get better... right?
Unfortunately not.
One of the staples of TES games has been the tiers of armor available. Save for the rare unique bits here and there, and the faction armors the classifications of equipment have always been (in no particular order): Leather/hide, Robes, Iron, Steel, Dwarven, Elvish, Orcish, Glass, Ebony, and Daedric. So even if all heavy-armors were equivalent to each other (which flies in the face of every TES game so far) you're still left with a decent lack of variety in each respective class. Similarly, the old TES concept of "you keep what you kill" will be thrown out the window given that this is an MMO, not a solo grind to god-hood. So lets take this into consideration as well. If we figure that armor scales the same way it has in the previous games, an an equal distribution of classes (1/3 warrior 1/3 rogue, 1/3 mage) You will be identical to roughly 80,000 people at any given time. The actual number will probably be much higher as by the time a few days roll by, I imagine there will be -many- more people than just 230,000.
And speaking of these numbers, having that many people around is going to -seriously- impact questing. Yes, having the open questing style that Guild Wars adopted will alleviate a fair bit of stress, unfortunately I don't think that will be enough of a buffer to account for the sheer amount of people that will be playing. After all, a thousand people are trying to get a hit on one mob, that thing's going to be dead -very- quickly. Well before most of them get the chance to even touch it with their pinky finger. For the first week or so in fact I imagine it will very much be like a swarm of locusts, massive groups of players attempting quests time and time again until they either get fed-up and move on or achieve their goal, and move on. Either way -everything- is going to be full to the brim of people doing everything at once.
While I do have other concerns, this is sort of turning into a huge wall of text, so I think i'll end it there. But these reasons are the main ones why I feel the game is going to fall well short of the MMO crowd.
Reason 1: Graphics. Bethesda has with the release of Skyrim made -huge- leaps and bounds forward to improving the visual appeal of their games. The downside to this is to run the games on the higher settings you need a decently powerful PC/video card so you get the most out of it. And this is all just when you are the only player in the game. Now that we're looking at an MMO scale game though the graphics are likely going to take a -huge- dive, more or less counter-acting all the progress Bethesda made in Skyrim. The biggest reason I feel there's going to be a massive dive for graphic quality though is due to the idea that there should be...
One massive megaserver. There won't be any shards, or worlds, or the like. Everyone's going to be on the same game server all playing together. While this sounds awesome at first, this alone could be the biggest fault I find with the game, especially when you consider this tidbit about Skyrim: "During the first day of release, Steam showed over 230,000 people playing Skyrim concurrently." Now lets take that number into consideration for a moment. 230 -thousand- people were playing Skyrim through Steam alone. That's not including the people who bought the game retail. Sure, you -could- make the argument that "Hey, there are different starting zones, not everyone's going to be starting in the same location." Which is entirely true, but that doesn't change the bit that Even if each race had its own starter location, if you split it evenly 9 ways to account for all the races you will still be starting with an estimated 25,555 people. Just let that sink in for a moment. Really, just think about it. The instant you start the game, you are going to be surrounded by over twenty-five thousand clones of yourself. And if typical TES game formulas are to be followed, you'll all start out half-naked with no weapons or armor. But surely armor/weapon varieties will get better... right?
Unfortunately not.
One of the staples of TES games has been the tiers of armor available. Save for the rare unique bits here and there, and the faction armors the classifications of equipment have always been (in no particular order): Leather/hide, Robes, Iron, Steel, Dwarven, Elvish, Orcish, Glass, Ebony, and Daedric. So even if all heavy-armors were equivalent to each other (which flies in the face of every TES game so far) you're still left with a decent lack of variety in each respective class. Similarly, the old TES concept of "you keep what you kill" will be thrown out the window given that this is an MMO, not a solo grind to god-hood. So lets take this into consideration as well. If we figure that armor scales the same way it has in the previous games, an an equal distribution of classes (1/3 warrior 1/3 rogue, 1/3 mage) You will be identical to roughly 80,000 people at any given time. The actual number will probably be much higher as by the time a few days roll by, I imagine there will be -many- more people than just 230,000.
And speaking of these numbers, having that many people around is going to -seriously- impact questing. Yes, having the open questing style that Guild Wars adopted will alleviate a fair bit of stress, unfortunately I don't think that will be enough of a buffer to account for the sheer amount of people that will be playing. After all, a thousand people are trying to get a hit on one mob, that thing's going to be dead -very- quickly. Well before most of them get the chance to even touch it with their pinky finger. For the first week or so in fact I imagine it will very much be like a swarm of locusts, massive groups of players attempting quests time and time again until they either get fed-up and move on or achieve their goal, and move on. Either way -everything- is going to be full to the brim of people doing everything at once.
While I do have other concerns, this is sort of turning into a huge wall of text, so I think i'll end it there. But these reasons are the main ones why I feel the game is going to fall well short of the MMO crowd.
