Hard confirmation, at last. Here are a few of my deepest wishes, assuming that TESO draws mostly upon standard MMO conventions:

* Give partying the kinds of incentives usually reserved for PvP. And why is PvP so heavily “subsidized” in most MMOs anyway, with the best drops, unique abilities, point rewards, etc? Most MMOs are really MOBAs that open with a single player “tutorial” that everyone does their best to skip past – and the developers give them every tool to do so. How about some kind of point rewards for leading your raid or quest group in various categories: best healer, best tank, best damage dealer, most successful counters/crowd controls, etc. What about making it impossible to fight difficult world mobs without a group?? Using the common standard of color-based difficulty, I say the best you should be able to handle on your own are greens and weaker yellows – an orange should be instant death solo. Once upon a time this was the norm in online gaming, and frankly I think it was better.

* A fast travel system is fine, but it should cost enough that you feel it (at least until you’re moderately wealthy). The prices should go up dramatically as the mob levels increase in areas you’re traveling through. After all, somebody has to providing serious security to make your carriage ride through hill giant country worry free. It might even require local currency if the game supported that. A certain degree of faction rep might also be required to use transport services as you advance through the game. Maybe the siltstrider drover isn’t ready to trust just any heavily armed orc who wants a lift.

* No. Flying. Mounts.

* The ability to grow in the world and really feel like your character is walking a certain path would be a huge bonus. TES games always had a bit of that in them: you could probably become a renowned hero in every town by the time you finished the game. However, MMOs typically make accomplishing that a matter of endlessly grinding content you’ve out-leveled. Let’s assume factions in Tamriel will be based on a typical MMO setup, with towns at the bottom and empires at the top – I’m assuming there would be the Cyrodillian Empire and an opposition empire, both vying to control the various nations outside their own kingdoms as has always been the story of Tamriel (Game of Thrones? Ha! Take a seat, punk). If that were the case then you wouldn’t have to accept some ridiculous “law vs chaos” faction lock-in when rolling your character. You’d simply choose from the available starting areas, possibly with some limitations based on race, and start questing for whomever you liked. If their are racial starting area limitations for reasons of game balance, they should be enforced. It should be extremely difficult to get a fresh character from where he started to someplace he normally wouldn’t have. Another cool approach would be to allow unusual race/location combinations for new characters but make them sacrifice something for the privilege: stunting their racial abilities somewhat, changing their starting attributes slightly, etc. Would a wood elf who grew up in a desert be the same as a regular one?

* No player guilds. Yes, you read that right. I despise guilds for several reasons. First off, a guild is just a chat room with a bank. Its one of the biggest immersion breakers, making every game into a liar’s contest complete with bulls__t drama and a phony sense of comradeship. The grouping mechanics I’d love to see would focus entirely on partying. Checking the details on a player would reveal their partying history for the last 30 days or so. Players would have some control over the level of detail others could see, but at the very least it should show what classes and levels of characters you’d recently partied with. Some kind of voting system to rate players in areas like teamwork, honesty, etc. would be fantastic as well. When the party broke up everyone would get to vote on each other and adjustments to player’s ratings would be averaged from that. There would need to be serious work to keep this from being abused but I think it would add a lot to the grouping experience and would help weed out the griefers, scammers and other undesirables. You would also be able to link a player’s name so others could add them or look at their details. I’ve only seen this implemented in one game, and it wasn’t that well done.

* RE: “guild banks”. Their usually a nightmare to manage and the source of many, many guild meltdowns. How about this: in every hotel room there would be a magic strongbox with a tabbed inventory. You could put an amount of stuff in there limited by whatever system Bethsoft uses. Any item you set as “viewable” could be seen by anyone on your friend list to which you had granted that right – you could also make an entire tab “viewable” with a single click. (Withdrawing the “view strongbox” right from a friend would prevent him from seeing viewable items.) When using your strongbox there would be a drop-down list with every friend’s name on it who has granted you view rights to at least one item in their strongbox: ideally you’d have two panes, one showing your strongbox and the other showing the currently selected player’s. If your friends want something from your strongbox they click on it, hit “request” or the like, and YOU get msgd/mailed a request for it (possibly in real time, maybe via a mail box, whatever). If you OK a request then the person can pull the item out of their own magic strongbox – it might even show up in a “received” tab to prevent auto-stacking. You could also show items to anyone on your friend list whether they had the right to view your storage or not by linking it to them. If that link was to something in your strongbox the other player(s) could request it. Guild bank functionality could be achieved by implementing “auto-request” and “auto-deposit” features that would allow trusted friends to freely remove and put things into each other’s hotel storage. I’m sure that there is probably some MMO that already has at least a few of these mechanics for dividing party loot but I’d love to see it made a universal method.

I could write several chapters like this..I better quit now.

I loved Oblivion and Skyrym and I thought this would be the next big hit!!!

This will be the next big hit

This would have been an awesome project if they had focused on transfering the look and feel of their singleplayer games to the MMO forumla. Adopting the FPS perspective for better immersion would have been a bold move for example, although I realize a number of traditional MMO mechanics would be hard to integrate. Alas, it seems from screenshots floating around the intertubes that this is just another WOW clone. That is not per se a bad thing, but the market seems rather crowded with generic MMOs already.

I think there’s a conflict between MMO innovations and what the market actually wants. If a game deviates too far from the traditional level-quest extravaganza, it’s confusing for audiences that are used to a hours of relaxing grinds.

The scary part is when you realize that most innovative MMO games aren’t considered MMOs at all. There’s a very popular game which has distinct roles and play styles, specialized equipment with different stats, levels, goal-driven quests with XP and loot rewards, PVP and PVE combat, and character customization, yet is NOT called an MMO. That game is Call of Duty. The only reason it’s not adopted by the MMO crowd is that they are clearly looking for something with tedious (or: relaxing) grinding, and possibly world-building. Any arguments about community should look at the elitist and hostile Everquest 1 playerbase first.