Elder Scrolls MMO to be announced in May - report

Elder Scrolls MMO to be announced in May - report

Fri 16 Mar 2012 1:38pm GMT / 9:38am EDT / 6:38am PDT
Development

Sources reveal details of Bethesda's first MMO release

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Bethesda will officially announce The Elder Scrolls Online in May 2012, Toms Guide reports.

According to several anonymous sources, the game will be set around 1000 years before the events of the recent smash hit, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and several hundred years before the events of any other game in the series.

It will feature three playable factions, each represented by an animal: a dragon, a lion and a bird of prey.

Further details of the game remain a secret, but the sources claimed that Bethesda will announce the game in May, ahead of E3 and Quakecon in the summer.

At the start of this year, Bethesda ended its long-running legal battle with Interplay over the rights to a Fallout MMO at a cost of $2 million. As a result, it was widely believed that Fallout would be the company's first MMO project.

However, a May announcement would suggest that The Elder Scrolls Online has already been in development for some time. The timing would also be right to capitalise on the public excitement for Skyrim, which shipped 10 million units in 2011 despite only being released in November.

Update: Bethesda has issued us a "no comment" when questioned on the report.

13 Comments

Mike Stubbsy
Studying Extended National Diploma In IT (Level 3) Software Development

Skyrim, which shipped 10 million units in 2011despite only being released in December.
Didnt Skyrim launch in November ?

Posted:A year ago

#1

Terence Gage
Freelance writer

Yes; 11.11.11, to be precise. And you can't even mix up the UK & US date formats with that!

Posted:A year ago

#2

Top Comment You're right, I've edited that. I'm still playing Skyrim, I've lost track of all time.

Posted:A year ago

#3

Paul Vigneron
Business Development Manager, Europe

Nice recovery Matt!

Posted:A year ago

#4

Andrew Clayton
QA Weapons Tester

Am I the only one tired of seeing great series being turned into bad MMOs? How long before this becomes free-to-play as well?

Posted:A year ago

#5

Maybe it launches free to play? Given the development time for MMO's I reckon they started all around the time when WoW came out and showed how many user will go for MMO's.

Posted:A year ago

#6

Patrick Frost
QA Project Monitor

I would think that the Skyrim world is so complex that actually the team are very prepared to do an MMO. Good luck to them I say!

Posted:A year ago

#7

They will need to step up their QA work for an MMO. Bethesdays RPG`s have a history of being bugy and MMO`s are more difficult than singleplayer games no mater how big the world of Skyrim is it`s nothing compared to an MMO that features a lot more content and possibilities for technical problems. And thats without taking into account that they need to improve a lot of the gameplay like the meele combat and balancing.

I love the Fallout games and I like Skyrim, but unless they change their formula completely from their previous games and improve a lot on the mistakes they did so far it`s hard to say what the appeal would be of it besides of having the Elder Scrolls name and what new things it would bring to the table.

Posted:A year ago

#8

Whatever happens, I only wish it would not be about instancing all the time.

I find odd that these days the word MMO is used to describe games that you play all the time in an instance with up to 40 people. How is that different from battlefield?

Even on World of Warcraft, the actual world feels like it has no meaningful gameplay when it comes to the social aspects. During my years playing it I always waited for that time when there would be something to do on the areas other than leveling. Sadly it never happened.

Edited 2 times. Last edit by Robert Mac-Donald on 16th March 2012 7:30pm

Posted:A year ago

#9

Presumably this isn't being made by Bethesda Softworks (the main Skyrim/Fallout/Oblivion team), but by Zenimax Online. Recently during his DICE keynote, Todd Howard mentioned that Zenimax Online was "our online studio that has been working on a project for a number of years that hasn't been announced yet."

Posted:A year ago

#10

I love the idea of an Elder Scrolls mmo, I just hope it plays more like an Elder Scrolls game with loads of players, rather than a Warcraft clone set in the ES world.

Posted:A year ago

#11

I am going to be very disappointed if it does not have first-person viewpoint.

Posted:A year ago

#12

Gregore Candalez
Journalist and Account Assistant

Wow. I am mesmerized. Can you imagine, travelling from Cyrodil to Skyrim and then to Daggerfell?

Come on, guys, this is Bethesda we're talking about. They can't go wrong on an Elder Scrolls MMO. Expectations are high now.

Posted:A year ago

#13

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