You’ll still be able to fly solo on this one.
We all know the Elder Scrolls series was built on some of the strongest single player offerings around, so how are Zenimax Online Studios going to keep this intimate feeling when they go MMO with the Elder Scrolls Online? Director Matt Firor, in a recent interview with Game Informer, says they’re going to do it with solo content.
“The last thing you want to do is have the final confrontation with Mehrunes Dagon as he’s stomping across the Imperial City, and you see like 15 guys behind you waiting to kill him because they’re on the same quest.” Said Firor, speaking on the subject.
The Elder Scrolls online will feature instanced, single player content and this is how it will deliver the majority of the main story line. This is essentially the same experience that is offered in Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO where, if you ask me, it works quite well. In SWTOR, players can still join parties to explore, complete quests and run dungeons but each class, in each faction, has its own instances that must be completed alone. These instances are where the story is told and it seems that The Elder Scrolls Online will take a similar approach.
When asked about the exploration factor that is popular in other Elder Scrolls games Firor explained that “You’re going into a new area of the game, you see this interesting looking ruined tower off to the left and you see a town ahead of you. These games have, in fact brutally so, taught you to ignore the cool looking thing altogether and to go to the town where you know you’re going to find someone who is going to tell you to go back to the tower. Otherwise it’s useless to explore the tower. To me, this is dumb.”
So, unlike a number of MMO’s out there, you won’t necessarily have to have an active quest to be rewarded for exploring. What I’m taking away from all of this is, Zenimax Online Studios are looking to keep the elements that made the Elder Scrolls famous while still delivering an MMO experience. We’ll be watching this one closely, stay tuned for more.
