The Elder Scrolls Online is not yet ready for a playable demo, but at E3 2012 ZeniMax Online and Bethesda have delivered the next best thing, an expensive presentation with half an hour of video and commentary from the developer leading the team working on the game, Matt Firor.
The MMO is certainly ambitious, because the core aim is to simulate all of Tamriel and show players a world that is extremely varied and very beautiful even on older gaming PCs, with newer machines able to deliver a look that is quite close to that of Skyrim, if not as detailed.
ZeniMax Online is also keen on offering tons of choices, starting with the ability to
play solo through an entire story that deals with a stolen soul and takes the player through all the game areas, with fully voiced NPCs and a lot of sidequests and points of interest to explore.
Gamers can also choose to do normal raids and engage in high-level Player versus Player battles, which were only briefly shown at E3 2012, but that will involve
hundreds of players as well as siege engines and fortifications that can be partly destroyed and then repaired.
The Elder Scrolls Online will use the core health, stamina and magicka elements of Skyrim as the basis for character actions and the User Interface will be minimal, designed to allow gamers to look at the world and get environmental cues about enemy forces and how to deal with them.
Combat is designed to allow solo gamers to deal with groups of enemies, as long as the player is careful and deploys his powers widely, but makes cooperation important by allowing others to jump in at any time and then get full experience and loot rewards from those they vanquish.
There are many more details to be shown and a lot depends on the business model used by The Elder Scrolls Online, but this might be the first MMO to appeal to me personally.
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