Why Bethesda hasn't at least put in a 1-4 player feature is beyond me. If they ever decide to add that feature to this series, I'd probably quit my job and never leave the house until they came to remove me from the premises.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
In many ways I think Darkfall and Mortal Online are both attempting to be what an online Elder Scrolls game would be. The core mechanics are there in both games and the overall feel is very Tamriel-esque. Unfortunately neither game comes anywhere close to the quality of an Elder Scrolls title, but I'm sure if Bethesda decided to do it, they could do it right.
Unfortunately I think there are a couple of problems with an MMO of this style:
1. Freedom means players have the freedom to ruin other players' days. If you give every player absolute freedom, that means that certain players will inevitably prey on others and this will lead to pissed off players leaving the game. The reality is that most of the MMO population is not ready for a world full of danger at every turn. Most people just get fed up and quit when they get PK'd too much.
2. Skill-based progression systems are imbalanced and lead to alpha builds. It happens in every skill-based game. Someone discovers what the currently most powerful build is and everyone else follows suit. You eventually end up with a game where everyone is the same until the overpowered build is nerfed and then everyone switches to whatever the new alpha build is. Perhaps it is possible to get a game like this to the point where every build is viable, but it certainly has not happened yet...
3. Player housing is limited. If you can actually buy or build houses on the open map, there will inevitably be a shortage of locations where such housing is possible. If you don't limit the areas where houses can be built, you end up with houses EVERYWHERE on the map. I personally find this extremely damaging to immersion. In both Darkfall and Mortal Online, nearly everywhere that is possible for houses to be built have been claimed already. Both games limit the areas where this can be done so that the maps are not overrun with houses like they were in UO and SWG.
4. FPS-style combat is hard to do. Both in terms of the technical difficulties involved in coding this type of game and in terms of playing it. Companies who have taken this approach have had to overcome some serious technical difficulties to get the combat system working in an MMO setting. Players also have a harder time with this type of combat system as it is much more skill-based than traditional MMOs and many players just aren't good enough at games to succeed at this type of system.
While I personally LOVE this type of game and hope that one day someone will do it really well in MMO-form, I think that it is very hard to do for all of the reasons I've listed here. Hopefully one day some developer (*cough* Bethesda) will give it a shot and prove me wrong.
So umm, how and where do you smelt ore into ingots?
And where do you find ore nodes for mining? Do you need anything equiped special or in your inventory?
If so, where do you get those items?
Crafting is grand and fun, but I haven't yet found/figured out how to do the mining part yet lol
I originally had the same questions, but they will eventually be answered. You won't get access to a Smelter until you reach Whiterun, the first mine and first town you hit does NOT have a Smelter which is a bit odd. And you can find pickaxes around in some Bandit camps near mines or in mines (that's where I got mine). Ore nodes I find randomly on any mountain or rock surface.
While it is cool to have crafting in a single player game like this, I hardly find Skyrim's crafting to be "interesting". Some MMOs have better (read more fun and interesting) crafting systems (Vanguard, UO, EQ2, Isteria). I've always liked TES' alchemy though, having to discover the qualities of the ingredients made it a bit more interesting.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
In many ways I think Darkfall and Mortal Online are both attempting to be what an online Elder Scrolls game would be. The core mechanics are there in both games and the overall feel is very Tamriel-esque. Unfortunately neither game comes anywhere close to the quality of an Elder Scrolls title, but I'm sure if Bethesda decided to do it, they could do it right.
Unfortunately I think there are a couple of problems with an MMO of this style:
1. Freedom means players have the freedom to ruin other players' days. If you give every player absolute freedom, that means that certain players will inevitably prey on others and this will lead to pissed off players leaving the game. The reality is that most of the MMO population is not ready for a world full of danger at every turn. Most people just get fed up and quit when they get PK'd too much.
2. Skill-based progression systems are imbalanced and lead to alpha builds. It happens in every skill-based game. Someone discovers what the currently most powerful build is and everyone else follows suit. You eventually end up with a game where everyone is the same until the overpowered build is nerfed and then everyone switches to whatever the new alpha build is. Perhaps it is possible to get a game like this to the point where every build is viable, but it certainly has not happened yet...
3. Player housing is limited. If you can actually buy or build houses on the open map, there will inevitably be a shortage of locations where such housing is possible. If you don't limit the areas where houses can be built, you end up with houses EVERYWHERE on the map. I personally find this extremely damaging to immersion. In both Darkfall and Mortal Online, nearly everywhere that is possible for houses to be built have been claimed already. Both games limit the areas where this can be done so that the maps are not overrun with houses like they were in UO and SWG.
4. FPS-style combat is hard to do. Both in terms of the technical difficulties involved in coding this type of game and in terms of playing it. Companies who have taken this approach have had to overcome some serious technical difficulties to get the combat system working in an MMO setting. Players also have a harder time with this type of combat system as it is much more skill-based than traditional MMOs and many players just aren't good enough at games to succeed at this type of system.
While I personally LOVE this type of game and hope that one day someone will do it really well in MMO-form, I think that it is very hard to do for all of the reasons I've listed here. Hopefully one day some developer (*cough* Bethesda) will give it a shot and prove me wrong.
Good post, Anubisan. I think that all of those problems can be fixed. I don't really think it's that hard either, for someone who can puzzle out how everything affects everything else in a good Sandbox MMORPG. But that sort of thinking isn't for everyone. We won't find the solutions from the kinds of Devs who make Themepark MMORPGs and don't believe in anything else.
Somewhere out there I believe are people who can do it. They are Devs, just not the people who have been running the show to this point. At least, for the most part. It's a challenge to all Developers...come up with the solutions that fit into a world design, and make us the "Ultimate MMORPG".
If TES was made into an mmo it would only be TES in name, the mmo would be dumbed down for the masses (you know the type, ive only an hour to play so all games should be designed for me) and would bear no resemblance to an elder scrolls game. The thought of raiding in an elder scrolls mmo makes me want to vomit.
for the same reason Bordelands should have been a mmo.
it just feels friggin empty and lifeless.
Now games like the ones bioware used to put out give you a cast of companions, etc, interactions that make it LESS lifeless and more like a story.
In this? "yay i got a house....and?"
For such a huge box there's just not enough sand in it.
The world is perfect for a shared played experience, be it co-op or mmorpg. as purely singleplayer game? not really.
Have you played Skyrim yet? From what I hear the world feels lively. I never really had the lonliness problem in Oblivion or Morrowwind, so maybe your just not suited to SPRPGs.
I think, and so does the Bethesda project manager, that a TES game would be terrible as multiplayer because it would detract from the world.
Unless you had some SERIOUSLY enforced law/morality system in place...
It might be kinda fun if the Skyrim MMO was exactly the same, only all the NPCs are characters unless no player is logged on as that NPC and someone gets to be the hero character. Or if players get to play as the monsters. I guess this wouldn't work though so no one would enjoy sitting around waiting for the hero to come talk to them and stuff lol.
I'd rather see Bethesda find a way to do multiplayer in the spirit of Dark Souls. Essentially, have players interact primarily indirectly and have it tie into the story's overall concept. Things like having traces of my game or consequences of my actions leak into other players' games... That'd be pretty sweet. Or even a scenario where players get sucked into a void and are forced into a situation where they can either work together or against each other - the results having an impact on each game.
That or a separate multiplayer experiance (such as in ME3) where the single player campaign can be affected by your multiplayer games. For example, leveling up soldiers that are imported into single player and will take part in an epic final battle or can be used as companions.
Maybe combine the two concepts. Keep the game single player but have one instanced town that actually passes you off to an online lobby. It would be very limited but would let you do a bit of social stuff like trade with other players or just hang out and show off your cool characters. Maybe you could buy certain materials there that aren't available in the normal game or have certain crafters of rare goods, unavailable anywhere else. It would really be little more than bonus fluff but it would allow you to mingle with other players while still within the context of the game. Then, when you leave the town, you get passed back from the lobby to your game.
I don't know if there's actually any reason to trade anything with anyone, or if socializing would be worth it, but if there was any interest in these kinds of things, this would be one way to go about doing it without compromising the single player experience.
I'd like to offer a polite, rational argument on why this is such a bad idea Mr Murphy. . .
*** Whacks Bill upside the head with a crowbar ***
WTF ARE YOU THINKING!!?? YOU STUPID, STUPID LITTLE MAN!!!!
Whoops! Sorry! That didn't come out the way I had intended.
/SARCASM OFF . . . though I am keeping the crowbar well at hand just in case.
While I would agree that it would be great if some good MMO companies would take a page from Bethesda's Skyrim creation book and use it to improve their own products, I agree with everyone else who said its best to leave Bethesda's games themselves the hell alone. Imagine how many years it would take for them to make a TES MMO of this quality. Imagine how much of the game worlds nuances would be lost in such a translation. Imagine how many more single player games they could have cranked out in that same amount of time with the same resources.
Even the idea of making the game multiplayer runs counter intuitive to TES's main strengths. Once a game is made multiplayer that locks out one of the coolest things about Betesda's little world. The ability for the fans to mod the crap out of it. Multiplayer would fetter that freedom badly if not completely.
Again, while I hope that other companies will look at what Bethesda has brought to the game world with Skyrim and be inspired, let's leave Bethesda alone to do what they do best. Create excellent SINGLE PLAYER RPGs.
So there we have it Bill, my two cents. I'm glad we had this little chat. I'm hoping it may have talked a bit of sense back into your Skyrim fevered brain.
*** looks meaningfully at crowbar ***
Next time, think, before you drink, before you drive me mad.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
Bethesda filed a legal suit against Interplay when they wern't doing as well as Bethesda wanted them to on the Fallout MMO. I highly doubt Bethesda would give away their baby to another studio, much less allow them to product as terrible of a product as cryptic likely will.
I think the only reason that Interplay got the Fallout MMO rights was because it was Interplay who initially held the IP until bethesda bought it from them.
i dont want a skyrim mmo, but i HOPE mmo developers learn from skyrim when trying to make a sandbox mmo, even a themepark mmo when it comes to crafting, xploration, and character progresion.
Skyrim is my very first TES experience (i never played older TES because i dont like first person perspective unless its a shooter), tho i go first person in skyrim for some combat (not all combat)... and i gotta tell that skyrim as an open world single player is better than all mmos out there today.
ironic how a single player game can teach mmo devs a lesson. I hope mmo devs learn to make features so well implemented like the ones in skyrim (at least before trying to ask for a subscription)...
As i'll say in every Skyrim thread... MMO requires PC (show me a quality MMO that isn't primarily PC based)... and the keyboard/mouse controls for Skyrim are BROKEN.
I'm so pissed at this game right now because I have no choice but to use the crap-tastic 360 controller. Being unable to bind the RIGHT hand to a skill/weapon properly is annoying and really destroys the gameplay. And no, opening the menu, equipping a weapon into the right hand, removing that weapon, then equipping a spell into the right hand every single time you want to change the spell in the right hand is NOT an acceptable workaround.
Not sure I want a Elder Scrolls MMORPG. Weird me that I am saying this, but I think they should run with this game engine add more areas to this game Skyrim and make it a co-op game. That I think would make the game better - not an MMORPG though. If anything, this game should be studied by MMORPG game makers to see how a "world" should be made. I've always said...give us a world, fill it with wonder, give players the tools to do things other that just slaughter mindless, stagnat mobs, and they will play the hell out of it. Skyrim is proving just that, it is shattering game records left and right.
Maybe combine the two concepts. Keep the game single player but have one instanced town that actually passes you off to an online lobby. It would be very limited but would let you do a bit of social stuff like trade with other players or just hang out and show off your cool characters. Maybe you could buy certain materials there that aren't available in the normal game or have certain crafters of rare goods, unavailable anywhere else. It would really be little more than bonus fluff but it would allow you to mingle with other players while still within the context of the game. Then, when you leave the town, you get passed back from the lobby to your game. I don't know if there's actually any reason to trade anything with anyone, or if socializing would be worth it, but if there was any interest in these kinds of things, this would be one way to go about doing it without compromising the single player experience.
Well you might as well just goto a Skyrim forum and post screenshots of your characters then haha. I think the easiest solution would be to allow 2 player coop in Skyrim. 4 players wouldn't work, at least in Skyrim since there are too many crampt areas that only 1 person can fit through. So forget having 4 people. Increasing the player numbers also increases the chaos within the game similar to how it does in Super Mario Bros 4 players on the Wii. Then you have to decide how the game decides how all players have died and how to reset them all. If it's an MMORPG then forget everything I said, make all dungeons have wide tunnels for 10 people to fit in horizontally to the walls, remove random monster spawns and just turn all monsters on and have respawn timers, create raid and pvp content and now you have a game similar to WoW...
2 player would make the most sense because Skyrim is built to handle 2 players (You and your companion). Essentially your companion would be the other player and would always have to be with the host player so you'd get dragged along with them. People would not like it though if they had to play as a preset companion. It would have to let them play as a character that they created from their own game which means players with different levels wouldn't want to play together since it would vastly ruin the game having a level 17 character on a level 2 server... It could be worked in though.
A skyrim MMORPG would have to remove First Person because imagine 10 people entering a cave with very little room and your cameras are all stuck inside each other's bodies (that's IF player clipping was turned off for friendlies...) and people in front of you are obscuring your view. Physics would have to be turned off entirely except maybe for each player's self and that's already a major part gone from the game that people enjoy.
Oh yeah I almost forgot. There's singleplayer only missions in Skyrim... So those parts would have to be removed or reworked... and then there's also singleplayer puzzles that would need to be reworked in Zelda: Four Swords or Portal 2 fashion.
As i'll say in every Skyrim thread... MMO requires PC (show me a quality MMO that isn't primarily PC based)... and the keyboard/mouse controls for Skyrim are BROKEN.
I'm so pissed at this game right now because I have no choice but to use the crap-tastic 360 controller. Being unable to bind the RIGHT hand to a skill/weapon properly is annoying and really destroys the gameplay. And no, opening the menu, equipping a weapon into the right hand, removing that weapon, then equipping a spell into the right hand every single time you want to change the spell in the right hand is NOT an acceptable workaround.
WTB KEYBOARD FIX!
sweet jesus... thank god i got the 360 version of skyrim... i couldnt take a game like this without a controller.... if they add controller support i might do the trade because the console version have craptastic graphics... pc version looks more real deal
As i'll say in every Skyrim thread... MMO requires PC (show me a quality MMO that isn't primarily PC based)... and the keyboard/mouse controls for Skyrim are BROKEN.
I'm so pissed at this game right now because I have no choice but to use the crap-tastic 360 controller. Being unable to bind the RIGHT hand to a skill/weapon properly is annoying and really destroys the gameplay. And no, opening the menu, equipping a weapon into the right hand, removing that weapon, then equipping a spell into the right hand every single time you want to change the spell in the right hand is NOT an acceptable workaround.
WTB KEYBOARD FIX!
Mods are already starting to come out. Hopefully, some clever and dedicated modder will soon deliver us from this evil.
Comments
Why Bethesda hasn't at least put in a 1-4 player feature is beyond me. If they ever decide to add that feature to this series, I'd probably quit my job and never leave the house until they came to remove me from the premises.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Not every piece of good IP has to become an MMO.
In many ways I think Darkfall and Mortal Online are both attempting to be what an online Elder Scrolls game would be. The core mechanics are there in both games and the overall feel is very Tamriel-esque. Unfortunately neither game comes anywhere close to the quality of an Elder Scrolls title, but I'm sure if Bethesda decided to do it, they could do it right.
Unfortunately I think there are a couple of problems with an MMO of this style:
1. Freedom means players have the freedom to ruin other players' days. If you give every player absolute freedom, that means that certain players will inevitably prey on others and this will lead to pissed off players leaving the game. The reality is that most of the MMO population is not ready for a world full of danger at every turn. Most people just get fed up and quit when they get PK'd too much.
2. Skill-based progression systems are imbalanced and lead to alpha builds. It happens in every skill-based game. Someone discovers what the currently most powerful build is and everyone else follows suit. You eventually end up with a game where everyone is the same until the overpowered build is nerfed and then everyone switches to whatever the new alpha build is. Perhaps it is possible to get a game like this to the point where every build is viable, but it certainly has not happened yet...
3. Player housing is limited. If you can actually buy or build houses on the open map, there will inevitably be a shortage of locations where such housing is possible. If you don't limit the areas where houses can be built, you end up with houses EVERYWHERE on the map. I personally find this extremely damaging to immersion. In both Darkfall and Mortal Online, nearly everywhere that is possible for houses to be built have been claimed already. Both games limit the areas where this can be done so that the maps are not overrun with houses like they were in UO and SWG.
4. FPS-style combat is hard to do. Both in terms of the technical difficulties involved in coding this type of game and in terms of playing it. Companies who have taken this approach have had to overcome some serious technical difficulties to get the combat system working in an MMO setting. Players also have a harder time with this type of combat system as it is much more skill-based than traditional MMOs and many players just aren't good enough at games to succeed at this type of system.
While I personally LOVE this type of game and hope that one day someone will do it really well in MMO-form, I think that it is very hard to do for all of the reasons I've listed here. Hopefully one day some developer (*cough* Bethesda) will give it a shot and prove me wrong.
So umm, how and where do you smelt ore into ingots?
And where do you find ore nodes for mining? Do you need anything equiped special or in your inventory?
If so, where do you get those items?
Crafting is grand and fun, but I haven't yet found/figured out how to do the mining part yet lol
You need a pickaxe in your inventory, and ore can be found in almost any mine and outside in remote places(on the top of mountains).
You smelt the ore at a smelter, it is usually located among the other crafting tools(grinding stone, skinning rack, smithy)
Ah gotcha gotcha. What do the nodes look like?
I've been checking wiki's and such and I explored a mine last night (by Riverwood) but I must have just missed everything.
Thanks!
Skyrim is amazing single player open world RPG but MMO?
Don't think so. Unless you had some SERIOUSLY enforced law/morality system in place...
I originally had the same questions, but they will eventually be answered. You won't get access to a Smelter until you reach Whiterun, the first mine and first town you hit does NOT have a Smelter which is a bit odd. And you can find pickaxes around in some Bandit camps near mines or in mines (that's where I got mine). Ore nodes I find randomly on any mountain or rock surface.
While it is cool to have crafting in a single player game like this, I hardly find Skyrim's crafting to be "interesting". Some MMOs have better (read more fun and interesting) crafting systems (Vanguard, UO, EQ2, Isteria). I've always liked TES' alchemy though, having to discover the qualities of the ingredients made it a bit more interesting.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Can you actually farm?
Can you buy the land/farm and grow your own crops?
If so, that'd be an amazing distraction.
Good post, Anubisan. I think that all of those problems can be fixed. I don't really think it's that hard either, for someone who can puzzle out how everything affects everything else in a good Sandbox MMORPG. But that sort of thinking isn't for everyone. We won't find the solutions from the kinds of Devs who make Themepark MMORPGs and don't believe in anything else.
Somewhere out there I believe are people who can do it. They are Devs, just not the people who have been running the show to this point. At least, for the most part. It's a challenge to all Developers...come up with the solutions that fit into a world design, and make us the "Ultimate MMORPG".
Once upon a time....
How about the most clear reason why?
for the same reason Bordelands should have been a mmo.
it just feels friggin empty and lifeless.
Now games like the ones bioware used to put out give you a cast of companions, etc, interactions that make it LESS lifeless and more like a story.
In this? "yay i got a house....and?"
For such a huge box there's just not enough sand in it.
The world is perfect for a shared played experience, be it co-op or mmorpg. as purely singleplayer game? not really.
# A GRIM, ODD, ARCANE SKY
# ANY GOD, I MARK SACRED
# A MASKED CRY ADORING
# A DREAMY, SICK DRAGON
If TES was made into an mmo it would only be TES in name, the mmo would be dumbed down for the masses (you know the type, ive only an hour to play so all games should be designed for me) and would bear no resemblance to an elder scrolls game. The thought of raiding in an elder scrolls mmo makes me want to vomit.
Great idea! The Skyrim should be epic and most interesting mmorpg for many people
Have you played Skyrim yet? From what I hear the world feels lively. I never really had the lonliness problem in Oblivion or Morrowwind, so maybe your just not suited to SPRPGs.
I think, and so does the Bethesda project manager, that a TES game would be terrible as multiplayer because it would detract from the world.
It might be kinda fun if the Skyrim MMO was exactly the same, only all the NPCs are characters unless no player is logged on as that NPC and someone gets to be the hero character. Or if players get to play as the monsters. I guess this wouldn't work though so no one would enjoy sitting around waiting for the hero to come talk to them and stuff lol.
Just pray to God that Cryptic isn't eyeing this.
I'd rather see Bethesda find a way to do multiplayer in the spirit of Dark Souls. Essentially, have players interact primarily indirectly and have it tie into the story's overall concept. Things like having traces of my game or consequences of my actions leak into other players' games... That'd be pretty sweet. Or even a scenario where players get sucked into a void and are forced into a situation where they can either work together or against each other - the results having an impact on each game.
That or a separate multiplayer experiance (such as in ME3) where the single player campaign can be affected by your multiplayer games. For example, leveling up soldiers that are imported into single player and will take part in an epic final battle or can be used as companions.
Maybe combine the two concepts. Keep the game single player but have one instanced town that actually passes you off to an online lobby. It would be very limited but would let you do a bit of social stuff like trade with other players or just hang out and show off your cool characters. Maybe you could buy certain materials there that aren't available in the normal game or have certain crafters of rare goods, unavailable anywhere else. It would really be little more than bonus fluff but it would allow you to mingle with other players while still within the context of the game. Then, when you leave the town, you get passed back from the lobby to your game.
I don't know if there's actually any reason to trade anything with anyone, or if socializing would be worth it, but if there was any interest in these kinds of things, this would be one way to go about doing it without compromising the single player experience.
I'd like to offer a polite, rational argument on why this is such a bad idea Mr Murphy. . .
*** Whacks Bill upside the head with a crowbar ***
WTF ARE YOU THINKING!!?? YOU STUPID, STUPID LITTLE MAN!!!!
Whoops! Sorry! That didn't come out the way I had intended.
/SARCASM OFF . . . though I am keeping the crowbar well at hand just in case.
While I would agree that it would be great if some good MMO companies would take a page from Bethesda's Skyrim creation book and use it to improve their own products, I agree with everyone else who said its best to leave Bethesda's games themselves the hell alone. Imagine how many years it would take for them to make a TES MMO of this quality. Imagine how much of the game worlds nuances would be lost in such a translation. Imagine how many more single player games they could have cranked out in that same amount of time with the same resources.
Even the idea of making the game multiplayer runs counter intuitive to TES's main strengths. Once a game is made multiplayer that locks out one of the coolest things about Betesda's little world. The ability for the fans to mod the crap out of it. Multiplayer would fetter that freedom badly if not completely.
Again, while I hope that other companies will look at what Bethesda has brought to the game world with Skyrim and be inspired, let's leave Bethesda alone to do what they do best. Create excellent SINGLE PLAYER RPGs.
So there we have it Bill, my two cents. I'm glad we had this little chat. I'm hoping it may have talked a bit of sense back into your Skyrim fevered brain.
*** looks meaningfully at crowbar ***
Next time, think, before you drink, before you drive me mad.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
Bethesda filed a legal suit against Interplay when they wern't doing as well as Bethesda wanted them to on the Fallout MMO. I highly doubt Bethesda would give away their baby to another studio, much less allow them to product as terrible of a product as cryptic likely will.
I think the only reason that Interplay got the Fallout MMO rights was because it was Interplay who initially held the IP until bethesda bought it from them.
i dont want a skyrim mmo, but i HOPE mmo developers learn from skyrim when trying to make a sandbox mmo, even a themepark mmo when it comes to crafting, xploration, and character progresion.
Skyrim is my very first TES experience (i never played older TES because i dont like first person perspective unless its a shooter), tho i go first person in skyrim for some combat (not all combat)... and i gotta tell that skyrim as an open world single player is better than all mmos out there today.
ironic how a single player game can teach mmo devs a lesson. I hope mmo devs learn to make features so well implemented like the ones in skyrim (at least before trying to ask for a subscription)...
As i'll say in every Skyrim thread... MMO requires PC (show me a quality MMO that isn't primarily PC based)... and the keyboard/mouse controls for Skyrim are BROKEN.
I'm so pissed at this game right now because I have no choice but to use the crap-tastic 360 controller. Being unable to bind the RIGHT hand to a skill/weapon properly is annoying and really destroys the gameplay. And no, opening the menu, equipping a weapon into the right hand, removing that weapon, then equipping a spell into the right hand every single time you want to change the spell in the right hand is NOT an acceptable workaround.
WTB KEYBOARD FIX!
Not sure I want a Elder Scrolls MMORPG. Weird me that I am saying this, but I think they should run with this game engine add more areas to this game Skyrim and make it a co-op game. That I think would make the game better - not an MMORPG though. If anything, this game should be studied by MMORPG game makers to see how a "world" should be made. I've always said...give us a world, fill it with wonder, give players the tools to do things other that just slaughter mindless, stagnat mobs, and they will play the hell out of it. Skyrim is proving just that, it is shattering game records left and right.
Well you might as well just goto a Skyrim forum and post screenshots of your characters then haha. I think the easiest solution would be to allow 2 player coop in Skyrim. 4 players wouldn't work, at least in Skyrim since there are too many crampt areas that only 1 person can fit through. So forget having 4 people. Increasing the player numbers also increases the chaos within the game similar to how it does in Super Mario Bros 4 players on the Wii. Then you have to decide how the game decides how all players have died and how to reset them all. If it's an MMORPG then forget everything I said, make all dungeons have wide tunnels for 10 people to fit in horizontally to the walls, remove random monster spawns and just turn all monsters on and have respawn timers, create raid and pvp content and now you have a game similar to WoW...
2 player would make the most sense because Skyrim is built to handle 2 players (You and your companion). Essentially your companion would be the other player and would always have to be with the host player so you'd get dragged along with them. People would not like it though if they had to play as a preset companion. It would have to let them play as a character that they created from their own game which means players with different levels wouldn't want to play together since it would vastly ruin the game having a level 17 character on a level 2 server... It could be worked in though.
A skyrim MMORPG would have to remove First Person because imagine 10 people entering a cave with very little room and your cameras are all stuck inside each other's bodies (that's IF player clipping was turned off for friendlies...) and people in front of you are obscuring your view. Physics would have to be turned off entirely except maybe for each player's self and that's already a major part gone from the game that people enjoy.
Oh yeah I almost forgot. There's singleplayer only missions in Skyrim... So those parts would have to be removed or reworked... and then there's also singleplayer puzzles that would need to be reworked in Zelda: Four Swords or Portal 2 fashion.
sweet jesus... thank god i got the 360 version of skyrim... i couldnt take a game like this without a controller.... if they add controller support i might do the trade because the console version have craptastic graphics... pc version looks more real deal
Mods are already starting to come out. Hopefully, some clever and dedicated modder will soon deliver us from this evil.