[Megathread] Elder Scrolls Online

[Bigbazz]

TES:Online.. Publishers be like "So let's take a look at our options with this game"

"We can take the F2P model where we give them the game and then we tease them into spending money on extras... Or we could charge them a set fee at the door and give them the game as is, or we could even try the subscription model that is so successful with our competition!" Well that sounds great, I think we can use all of those!. Charge them for the game, with a monthy fee and give them some optional extras they can purchase, that sounds fantastic!


In the real world though that will last for 6 months before they need to "explore options". TES games are big hitters and Skyrim was awesome but I think this is doomed to fail. When I look back to STWOR I see an awesome single player game that could have been better if it wasn't forced into being an MMO. I loved that game but I was done with it once I had hit max level, probably my own fault for being lvl50 during the prelaunch tho. I see TES:Online as possibly being an unbelieveable game spoiled by trying to be an MMO, just like SWTOR.

[RoninaThorstone]

In the real world though that will last for 6 months before they need to "explore options". TES games are big hitters and Skyrim was awesome but I think this is doomed to fail.

All depends on your definition of fail. Age of conan is still putting out content and has a lively player base. I doubt that TESO is going to be able to 'fail' harder than AoC which by the industry perspective, is doing just fine.

Will it be as big as it could have been if they had gone with B2P with a cosmetic cash shop? No. It won't.

[Loaf Lord]

I still have this gut feeling they're gonna backpedal and make it B2P. They're now getting a pretty big backlash now that the word has spread. I was honestly surprised when they first announced it. I was 110% confident it was going to be B2P.

[RoninaThorstone]

I still have this gut feeling they're gonna backpedal and make it B2P. They're now getting a pretty big backlash now that the word has spread.

I know I won't be touching Wildstar or TESO until they switch to a sustainable model.

I've been down this road one too many times to not see what's coming.

[Bigbazz]

All depends on your definition of fail. Age of conan is still putting out content and has a lively player base. I doubt that TESO is going to be able to 'fail' harder than AoC which by the industry perspective, is doing just fine.

Will it be as big as it could have been if they had gone with B2P with a cosmetic cash shop? No. It won't.

Not fail as in "Lol game failed" but fail as in they will give up the subscription model in favour of F2P because what they are doing is not going to be sustainable. With so many games being F2P today and with these games offering so much for nothing it isn't viable in the current market of 2013 for a new game to just say "Oh we're having a shelf price, a subscription and microtransactions". People just aren't going to pay for it, I can see a lot of people buying the game and playing for the first month, at which point it will probably be very buggy and unbalanced. Followed by that there will be masses of complaints about these issues and people not resubbing.

Atleast that is what happened with SWTOR, which was just as big a release as TES:Online. It just isn't going to happen in the current market. WoW has a massive piece of the pie with who are hooked onto nostalgia and playing with their friends, a social thing. All the other MMO's came along and prooved that they can't try to use the same bit of pie as WoW to be successful, and all of them found more success with other models.


I'm fine with the sub model for TES:Online though, just not when they still charge a full shelf price and the microtransactions of F2P. They are taking the piss.

[Bigtimmy]

All depends on your definition of fail. Age of conan is still putting out content and has a lively player base. I doubt that TESO is going to be able to 'fail' harder than AoC which by the industry perspective, is doing just fine.

Will it be as big as it could have been if they had gone with B2P with a cosmetic cash shop? No. It won't.

I'm sure the game won't be an utter failure even if/when it goes B2P or F2P, even though such a transition almost always makes devs look bad when it happens to young games. The unspoken "fail" for me is that the unnecessary stumbling out of the gate that they seem to be setting themselves up for is squandering a great IP to a large extent. It doesn't have to be this way. They could be developing the game in a way that is more realistic about today's market (B2P most likely), instead of tacking a F2P model onto it later as a secondary measure.

I still have this gut feeling they're gonna backpedal and make it B2P. They're now getting a pretty big backlash now that the word has spread. I was honestly surprised when they first announced it. I was 110% confident it was going to be B2P.

I wouldn't rule this out entirely, but the odds are probably incredibly low. Stuff like adding a 1st person perspective were design decisions added by game developers. Stuff like business decisions (i.e. their subscription model) comes from the suits upstairs. The second group tends to be less amiable about player input, or even putting out a qualitatively "good" product.

[Sargerus]

They lost me at $60 and the $15/month sub, but microtransactions as well?

[corebit]

A lot of people of saying that ESO should go F2P, but the F2P market right now is already saturated with games. What makes the notion that ESO going P2P would be fail, but F2P somehow "guarantees" success when there is already a ton of F2P MMOs competing for your attention?

The SWTOR debacle is mostly of Bioware's own doing, not because they chose "P2P". A lot of things contributed to a player exodus from SWTOR including their choice of a shitty engine which was still in beta stage, their over-focus on story and dialogue when a large majority didn't give a fuck and just pressed spacebar, and the fact that they took to long to deliver critical features like group finder and fix bugs and balance the classes.

I am sure the developers already know of SWTOR's failure. Despite this fact FFXIV, Wildstar, and ESO are still saying they prefer the susbscription model, so they surely have done a ton of studies on this matter already. They are not stupid you know.

Let me point out that Blizzard itself is treating F2P with plenty of scepticism. As they said: "Some games double their audience, but some don't or even if they do, the increase doesn't last after the initial interest wears off." You can check out the Polygon interview.

[Loaf Lord]

Who's saying F2P? I think people here are wanting B2P for the most part. And I'm pretty sure Blizz came out and said that Titan probably won't have a sub fee, so if anything they're now skeptical about P2P still being a viable payment method. And what they said about F2P games is a huge Captain Obvious moment. "Some F2P games are successful, others aren't." Next they'll try and tell me that the sky is blue and that water is wet.

[Archangel Tyrael]

A lot of people of saying that ESO should go F2P, but the F2P market right now is already saturated with games. What makes the notion that ESO going P2P would be fail, but F2P somehow "guarantees" success when there is already a ton of F2P MMOs competing for your attention?

I haven't seen anyone in this thread claiming that F2p ''guarantees'' success.

Not one single person. What most people are getting at, is if the game will offer ''enough'' or ''be worth it'' to charge that sub fee.
As it stands, some people believe that this doesn't offer much in terms on innovation (or whatever...) to charge said fee, and that therefore it'd be a good idea to go F2P to get more people playing it.

That's what I noticed, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[Bigbazz]

The market is saturated with F2P games yeah, but TES:Online has all the drawbacks of the F2P model with a subscription slapped on top. Its still in the same market only it costs a lot more money. Guild Wars 2 went buy + micro with no sub, if TES:Online wanted microtransactions they should have followed Guild Wars 2, not jumped in with all the F2P games and said "oh and by the way we're still charging a sub and a box fee".

TES:Online like many before them fancy themselves able to eat a bit of the Blizzard WoW pie. Since currently WoW costs a box fee, a subscription aswell as offering microtransactions, but even Blizzard are seeing a quickly dying playerbase, a playerbase built up from a different era, a different generation of gaming. That generation/era is over and I'm not sure why TES:Online thinks it can come in as a new player with that model.


It's greedy and arrogent of them, and personally I dont think they will make a year, maybe not even 6 months before they need to make a change.

[Khain]

To echo this, just look at how Blizzard handles things. Possibly the largest amount of money that any MMO earns per month yet it takes them at minimum 6 months to put out a content patch. ANet however, with only the box cost of Guild Wars 2 being the barrier to entry, is pumping out content every 2 weeks!

Just because company A is earning more money than company B, dosn't mean company A can churn out content any faster than company B.

Now, the actual value of that content is highly subjective and down to the indivual to decide upon, but I know i'd sooner have regular updates every 2 weeks (which costs me nothing), than have to wait 6 months between content that I've got to spend £8.99 to play.

LOL please don't compare the amount of content on a GW2 with the ones on a WoW patch. A WoW Patch is the same as 10 GW2 patches.

[Edge-]

LOL please don't compare the amount of content on a GW2 with the ones on a WoW patch. A WoW Patch is the same as 10 GW2 patches.

But GW2 patches every two weeks. So every 20 weeks or so (which IIRC is about as often as Blizz patches) GW2 will have released enough content to compete with a Blizzard patch.

Patch size and frequency matter when combined. They don't matter individually.

[Pantelija]

Have to see. It depends a lot on how well the game releases. One may argue that 'OH MY STARS IT'S A BIG FRANCHISE!' but people said the same thing about SWTOR and look how quickly that fell down the pit where Aion and Rift are right now.

Wth are you talking about?

Aion was horrible from the start and had no real future (was obvious)

Rift didnt went F2P because it couldnt sustain itself but because they changed the Director of central department or however they call it and implanted some other dude who made radical changes to the game and F2P model was one of them (old dude was pro subscription model, new dude is F2P with micros)

SWTOR failed mostly because of Bioware developers having WoW syndrome (listening to vocal casual majority) and ruining the game patch by patch

ESO will do just fine with subscription model unless they pull off Tortanic like Bioware did and ruin the game with horrible patches in early months

[Khain]

But GW2 patches every two weeks. So every 20 weeks or so (which IIRC is about as often as Blizz patches) GW2 will have released enough content to compete with a Blizzard patch.

Patch size and frequency matter when combined. They don't matter individually.

Doesn't matter, WoW content needs a lot more tuning and testing, lore, cinematic, etc. It has to feel epic, while GW2...

[Edge-]

Aion was horrible from the start and had no real future (was obvious)

Actually, it's got a pretty healthy playerbase right now and indications are that while it's not a huge success, it's still doing pretty well in the West.

Rift didnt went F2P because it couldnt sustain itself but because they changed the Director of central department or however they call it and implanted some other dude who made radical changes to the game and F2P model was one of them (old dude was pro subscription model, new dude is F2P with micros)

Actually, Rift was still profitable before the F2P transition. They made it because of a combination of the F2P model being more profitable, and IMO Defiance tanking hard. It had very little to do with Hartsman leaving Trion.

SWTOR failed mostly because of Bioware developers having WoW syndrome (listening to vocal casual majority) and ruining the game patch by patch

Heh, they actually ignored the vast majority of the feedback they got about the game. Like, the vast amount of the feedback. Alpha testing? Completely ignored when it came to raids etc. The same goes for much of the beta testing as well.

ESO will do just fine with subscription model unless they pull off Tortanic like Bioware did and ruin the game with horrible patches in early months

It has a shot, it just needs to deliver an insanely good base product and then deliver rapid content updates afterwards. That or it needs to capture the console market in a way subscription based MMO's haven't done since FFXI.

It has to feel epic, while GW2...

Hello extremely subjective statement.

[corebit]

I haven't seen anyone in this thread claiming that F2p ''guarantees'' success.

Not one single person. What most people are getting at, is if the game will offer ''enough'' or ''be worth it'' to charge that sub fee.

Maybe not on this thread, but you can replace "F2P" with "B2P", my point is the same. People rejecting this game outright simply because of its payment model is just silly.

[

As it stands, some people believe that this doesn't offer much in terms on innovation (or whatever...) to charge said fee, and that therefore it'd be a good idea to go F2P to get more people playing it.

That's what I noticed, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

There is plenty of innovation ESO is bringing IMO. Megaserver technology, fully supported first-person view, etc. It's nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary, but no other MMO coming in 2014 AFAIK is bringing anything eye-popping either. What's most important is that they do right what they set out to do, and that it resonates with the gaming audience. If they do that it will be a success.

Like I said in a previous post, all this focus on payment model is really unnecessary. What will determine the game's success is not its payment model but its delivery of content.

Also, if GW2's model is so successful or acclaimed. Why aren't more MMOs rushing out and copying this model? I mostly see either F2P or P2P.

Edit: I'm not saying GW2 is a failure or anything. I actually share my opinion with Edge that declaring MMOs like GW2 or Tera "failures" is stupid.

[Pantelija]

Heh, they actually ignored the vast majority of the feedback they got about the game. Like, the vast amount of the feedback. Alpha testing? Completely ignored when it came to raids etc. The same goes for much of the beta testing as well.

True, i remember finding out the Dual Wielding fiasco and writting a message to PvP developer and having him respond with "We are aware of this BUG", then few hours later responding with "Dual Wield penalty and scaling is NOT a bug but intended"

Closed beta with horrible beta testers ruined that game for good

It has a shot, it just needs to deliver an insanely good base product and then deliver rapid content updates afterwards. That or it needs to capture the console market in a way subscription based MMO's haven't done since FFXI.

I agree on the insanely base product part but i dont agree with rapid content updates, SWTOR tried that and failed because devs were putting out content patches every few months while they were ignoring bugs and needed fixes that would adress PvP/PvE balance

Good base product at start and team working on overall game balance/fixes would be a real deal.

[vizzle]

I'm not following this thread religiously -- did I miss something? Did they release a list of their proposed cash shop and the items on it? Do they have items for sale that imbalance the game? Because that is the only reason why anyone should be freaking out about a cash shop. If it's just vanity shit, grow up. You should never not expect a cash shop with vanity items anymore.

This is 2013, not 2004, be realistic.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Here's the thing. If I'm an investor/big shot/person with money and the lead dev is trying to sell me his or her product, telling me that the game should have a box fee is an easy sell - there's ample market data showing me that millions of people are willing to shell out for a box on release, especially if it comes from a major IP like Star Wars or Elder Scrolls. It's also very easy to gradually reduce this price over time with no embarrassment.

But the major question I would ask is this: why do you want to limit your players to spending only $15 a month?

Ten years ago, the answer was simple: $15 is the industry standard, and as long as we can pull in a few hundred thousand people we'll have a healthy profit margin. But this isn't 2003 anymore, and games not only cost dramatically more to make, there are also a lot more of them. So as an investor, I have no idea why my developer is not adding microtransactions or a cash shop. Games like SWTOR and STO have proven that games with big IPs have an insane amount of whales (just stand by a mailbox after any SWTOR market update and watch as people open dozens and dozens of boxes at ~$3 a pop). I'm honestly a bit shocked that Activision/Blizzard hasn't tried to cash in on this yet. They charge absolutely outlandish rates for basic services ($25/15) because they can get away with it, but they assuredly have a massive untapped well of fanboy whales would easily dump hundreds of dollars a month into the game if they had something to buy.

Anyway, if I'm one of the execs for Zenimax, I don't know why I would calculate that a box + subs will make me more money than a box + whale cash shop fodder, especially in the long term. They could sell armor skins from old games and capitalize on nostalgia (see: SWTOR), they could sell minis (Mini M'aiq!), and all kinds of other stuff. And players trapped in the throes of new game fever are much more likely to dump a bunch of money up front for bank slots and such before they see all the problems with the game and grow bitter. But if you give all of that to them for free with a sub, they're probably going to quit after only giving you $15-30 total.