I'm really hoping they fixed their mistake.

It looks like Diabo III may be the biggest letdown of the decade, but the new Elder Scrolls Online may topple it. Of course it is early in the decade, there is plenty of time for contenders.

Even more so than Duke Nukem Forever?

D3 is a much bigger letdown.

Agreed. Especially since it came out and had such potential. Then blizz destroyed it.

Well sheeeeeeee-it.

http://zelaron.com/apax/ifitaintthecapnhimself.jpg

How about commander?

I really want ESO to succeed, but I'm pretty sure it will suck.

Why do you think it will suck? I've barely heard anything about it and it isn't supposed to be released until next year. What are you basing your opinion on?

They've been going downhill since Morrowind as far as gameplay is concerned so it should come as no surprise that faith in Bethesda would be wavering. I want it to succeed more than anyone else, but it's going to be like Diablo. People will have such high expectations and then Bethesda will only deliver a mediocre product that only barely reaches the stated design features.

If you think Oblivion or Skyrim are mediocre, you're smoking crack. Skyrim is probably the best game I've played in the past few years, easily.

Most people who seem to be making the claim that TES Online will suck are making the argument based on the presumption that "all MMORPGs suck." I don't really think that's a valid argument, unless you are assuming that they will make an MMORPG exactly like the rest, and even then the argument is based on an assumption.

Of course, I'm not making the argument that it WON'T suck. It very well might. And if you didn't like Oblivion or Skyrim, it probably will suck.

I'm putting more hope on Fallout 4 than TES. At least the former will be console worthy.

The combat system doesn't seem very Elder Scrolls-like. Zenimax Studios has little experience. The game won't look as pretty as Skyrim. Plus, the whole Elder Scrolls series revolves around mods IMO.

Skyrim is awesome mainly because of mods. I still play the game today. And Morrowind. Oblivion I haven't touched in a year.

Mods make or break a game for me. Some of my favorite games (Diablo II, EVN, Minecraft) Have their story line, then after that you move onto mods. Tons and tons of playthroughs with completely different styles.

Less mods,

I would make the argument that Oblivion was mediocre. The game play was incredibly stale, the environments recycled, and the combat system was also fairly lame. The removal of tons of spells and weapon types, blah blah blah you get the picture. Skyrim was a step up in terms of graphics, epicness, and... dragons? In terms of openness of gameplay, which is something I treasure in an RPG, the Elder Scrolls has been backpedaling since Morrowind. After playing Morrowind, I accepted the limitations of games at that time as far as real openness (I mean here options given to the player in given situations), but instead of moving forward with new hardware at their disposal, they are moving backwards by simplifying things to the point of dullsville. Don't get me wrong, I played Skyrim quite a bit too, but after you get the only handful of spells in the game, or max the only three weapon skills, it can get pretty boring, and unbelievably constricting to the player. Actually what got me to stop playing Skyrim, on top of an ever increasing pile of shenanigans, is the existence of invincible NPCs (including children). Sure you'll throw the argument of story breaking at me by killing essential characters, but let's not pretend like we don't all save the game every 5 minutes. And the PC decision to make kids invulnerable just makes me feel like I'm being coddled as a gamer, which I don't need and I'm guessing you don't need either. Any argument about kids playing the game is a moot point since not only is the game rated M, but it could have an option for realism at the beginning of a game which would just set a token to "Children_Death=true" ad "Story_Characters_Death=True" and simply when you kill those characters if those tokens are set then they die and maybe it pops up a message for you (again this could be set by a token if you didn't want spoilers by knowing which characters are essential to the story). And speaking of saving every 5 minutes, that makes the game seem highly inconsequential. So what if I make a bad decision, I'll just reload it. I'm not blaming this on Bethesda as this just seems to be a trend in games lately, where you can just save and recover whenever and wherever. I guess the only reason I like this myself is when you're not sure if a game will behave realistically in a given scenario (the splinter cell series is notorious for this)

/endrant

I think they made certain NPCs invulnerable because of the n00bs who would QQ if they couldn't complete the quest and didn't realize the NPC had died. Plus the whole children dying could be considered offensive yadda yadda. Thankfully there's mods that make no NPCs essential.

I'm ok with the children and essential npc's being invulnerable. What I am not ok with it that I can not go and kill an entire town because the invul guys will come and kill me. It's a pain in the ass. If you're going to make invincible characters, don't make it so they can attack the player.

More importantly, make invulnerable NPCs incapable of qualifying as a "witness" to a crime. There's nothing more annoying than having such an NPC witness your crime, which makes it impossible to eliminate the witnesses.