Is this even coming out for consoles? I think it's PC only. If it is coming out for consoles it's even more screwed. You think people that have to pay for PSN and xbl are going to want ANOTHER fee to pay to play? You are out of your mind.
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Kotaku's Superannuation: The Elder Scrolls Online has cost $200 million
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
They were talking about removing PS+ and XBL requirement for this game. Most if not all Free to Play games and MMO's don't require PS+ on PS4.
simplythebest
Banned
Bankruptcy 2014!
It's on consoles for sure. How is this 200 million though? SWTOR cost that much because of the license and the voice work. Is it that big of a game? I'll check out the beta if I can get in, but I have heard nothing positive about this game yet. I hope it makes it's money back, but if it really cost that much, I think there are some execs at Bethesda/Zenimax that are freaking the fuck out right now...
There's still plenty to be made on MMOs, but yeah, PROBABLY not with bad wow clones.
Unknown Soldier
Member
Cause they're companies that are answering to shareholders that think they need to shoot for the moon. It' not like you can't make a profitable MMO that isn't millions of subscribers, not by a long shot. They looked at WoW 6 years ago and decided they were going for it.
Flying too close to the sun and all that jazz.
Ivory Samoan
Gold Member
I'm buying this day one, **** the naysayers - I think it's looking great.
Wiktor
Member
I don;t tink ESO is designed as WoW-like. Seems much more like Dark Age of Camelot. That said, this aproach might be too niche for such budget.
Wiktor
Member
F2P model makes sense solely for cheap games.
With stuff like ESO it's better to start with selling the game, then subs and after you take as much money as possible switch it to F2P.
Anyway, ESO isn't made by Bethesda anyway, so Bethsoft is still doing what they always done. Zenimax just sees this as additional source of revenue.
Aquamarine
Member
What a disaster waiting to happen. I really hope this doesn't significantly damage Bethesda...their primary studio needs to stay perfectly intact for future Elder Scrolls games.
Schnozberry
Member
So, what is everyone expecting, 6 months before it goes free to play and pay to win?
Hahaha, fair. I look at it the other way: I'll play pay MMOs I like and put up with iffy ones if I win free time, because I feel like it's a fair shake for the heavier server reqs and constant major content patches compared to the Live/PS4 PSN style of paying to let me connect to a friend's system.
Nothing wrong with that. In fact I think there will be great many people like you, but probably not enough, if past experiences are anything to go by.
I was day one on SWTOR with the collectors edition, because I thought it was going to be the next great MMO, if not overall gaming experience. In hindsight, I ended up not having a whole lot of fun. I went in thinking it was more than a wow clone with deep lore and story. It ended up being just that. My mistake was not playing the beta enough then getting overhyped. To compound it, I felt like a fool when it went F2P after dropping that much money and trying to convince myself that I should stick with it.
I see the same thing happening here, because if the Star Wars license doesn't stop a game from hitting free to play, I don't think the Elder Scrolls license is going do it. The game is probably going to be fun for many but I will be really surprised if it doesn't meet a similar fate.
charlequin
Banned
People were scandalized that WoW's launch budget was $40 million, lolz.
Wasn't EverQuest 1 like $10 million?
How can knowledge be gained when that knowledge is trying to penetrate rock star like arrogance.
DiscoJer
Member
Heck, NCSoft shut down City of Heroes, even though it was profitable, it just wasn't profitable enough for them...
Rogue_Ledr
Banned
I still do not understand the logic of creating this.
A series that has thrived for years giving people an epic single player experience re-made as an MMO?
Bad idea!
A series that has thrived for years giving people an epic single player experience re-made as an MMO?
Bad idea!
EQ1 peaked at like, 300k subscribers or something and was considered a monster success at that. Just goes to show how expectations have changed, and why it's so ridiculous that these companies keep trying to go for WoW peak like money.
Eh, it's definitely pretty wow-like. Elder Scrolls needed something other than a theme park MMO, with LARGELY hotkey based combat (it still basically is hotkeys), instead we got a theme park MMO with hotkey based combat and LEFT CLICK TO ATTACK ACTION.
Cato the Censor
Member
A lot of naysayers have played the beta. When i say nay, pictures flash before my eyes. Memories.
They are not pretty.
Dark_castle
Junior Member
I feel horrible saying it because I love TES but it does feel like SWTOR part 2. My guess is maybe 2 million at launch, dropping off HARD after the first month. Expect to hear a lot of 'current subscriber' number padding shortly after launch as they seek to maintain composure.
I'll get it on ps4 and pray that it got better since PAX.
I'll get it on ps4 and pray that it got better since PAX.
ElectricKaibutsu
Member
This would have done great in 2003.
The #1 production cost in game development is staff. To get a rough estimate of that, multiply $10k by the average number of staff by the number of months in development. The #2 cost is typically marketing. For this type of game, it's hard to say what they'll spend on marketing, since the sell through on a subscription-based game is going to be much lower and focused on a core user-base.
ref
Member
It really, really does. And that's really, really sad...
Wiktor
Member
Isn't ESO supposed to concentrate on Realm vs Realm?
It has a 3 faction pvp area, which is important sure, but all of the 'rest' IE what you do the entire way up, is theme park wow stuff through and through. I mean, even wow has the same kind of pvp. DAoC it is not.
Everyone who keeps saying this game looks and plays really really badly, are you basing your opinions on the really old 'weekend beta' build or the updated friends & family beta that's currently going on?
I haven't tried it myself but the game looks pretty decent to me having seen it being played, very strongly aping after Skyrim's aesthetics.
I haven't tried it myself but the game looks pretty decent to me having seen it being played, very strongly aping after Skyrim's aesthetics.
Snapshot King
Member
Problem with MMO development is that all these projects were started waaaaay back before the market crashed, and were years in when it did. ESO started development back in 2007 and plans were likely being discussed as far back as 2005-6 when it became obvious that WoW was a money tree.
For context, development on ESO started during the Burning Crusade era of WoW. They didn't know then that the entire market would essentially be contained entirely to WoW and then crash outside it. They probably should have, but hey, that's business.
"really old" as in, a month ago? Yeaaah. There are fundamental design problems with the game. It's not getting fixed without some major FF14 style restructuring.
The problem is that they just saw the money and said 'we need that' without having any inkling of how to go about it. Whether they started development years ago has little effect on the game today, games change significantly over the course of development all the time. Either way, it's kind of not our problem as the consumer, it's an issue where they saw the dollar signs attached to a game 7 or 8 years ago, and then continued to let that train roll forward without much innovation along the way. It does no good to be competitive with a 9 year old product - you can't match the content, so you have to better the gameplay, fi you're not doing that you simply have no space in the market. These are the games that literally subsist off of the fumes of the 'I want to play WoW but not ACTUALLY wow' crowd, just like the people that clung to stuff like TOR and Warhammer for so long. There will be subs, but not what they want there to be.
Wait, what, it's not open-world PVP, there's just a Tamriel Ilum? Wow, no wonder the impressions are so bad.
It's 3 distinct levelling 'tracks' in various sections of the world, and then you go into Cyrodil to actually fight each other for control of the capital. So imagine if it was DAoC, but with just one central frontier. You don't pvp in morrowind for example, or Skyrim or anywhere else.
I completely missed that game as I didn't have a PC at the time, but my father still talks about it like it was WW2.
Wow, that's literally worse world PvP than SWTOR - at least that had neutral areas on a few worlds from 25+ to prep you for the endgame PvP area at 50.
The Ps4 Looks Great
Banned
6,999,999 to go
Sadly, it won't be a new DAoC. The only thing that will (hopefully) resemble DAoC will be the new game from Mark Jacobs, Camelot Unchained.
And it won't have a PvE at all. I backed it just because of this. How so many MMO still try to create tons of quests and areas for levelling up, while almost completing ignoring the end game, baffles me.
When DAoC came out I spent 4 months to level up to 50, but I loved every second of it. There were no quests at the beginning (ok, to be fair, there were some, but I know no one that actually paid attention to them or liked them), so you needed others to continue. The modern MMOs all seem to forget that they're supposed to encourage you to play together with someone else.
Of course, DAoC was a bit different, as you had access to RvR combat from the very beginning if you wanted. And knowing that the end game was there, fleshed out and actually interesting, was the motivation to keep levelling up (and it was painfully slow after level 40).
Given that they screwed it up later, and even the same people haven't successfully remade DAoC pvp...I think it was basically them happening onto the golden pvp ratio. I'm not even huge into pvp (It's fun, I like doing it, but I like pve more typically), but DAoC was absolutely amazingly fun when it was clicking. Like all MMOs of that era, you had long spurts of downtime too though. I think that's a lot of where the modern designs fail, trying to be everything to everyone at all times kind of removes some of the urgency of it mattering when it happened.
I like you my man.
Derpcrawler
Member
I played beta weekend on PC, it's very bad game, like very shitty clone of WoW, but not as good and polished as WoW was in 2006, if you compare it to modern WoW (Cataclysm/MoP) it's much worse.
Citation needed for that 84 mil. figure. If it's true then I don't know what to say, Gamebryo and those 5 voice actors must be some premium grade shit.
I don't see how TESO is going to succeed, sure they'll recoup their costs but in the long-term it's just another money sink.
From what I understand, some semi-significant design changes went into the ~2 week old build that the F&F is running compared to what was available as a on/off weekend beta affair previously. You no longer are locked into the "3 levelling tracks of questlines" and can play it more like a regular ES game. Plus that it's actually now running on what will become the live unsharded megaserver when the game launches. That said, I'm only speaking from over-the-shoulder second hand experience at this point.
disastermouse
Banned
My girlfriend and I are both looking forward to this game. Outside of GAF, I've seen a number of positive preview pieces. I'm not expecting Skyrim online, I'm expecting an MMO with Elder Scrolls references and touchstones.