14 DAY TRIAL // Games made by Bethesda, particularly Elder Scrolls ones, are famous for their complexity but also for their problems. Zenimax Online Studios, the developer behind the upcoming The Elder Scrolls Online title, hopes to avoid many problems at launch by setting up a lengthy beta test stage.
The Elder Scrolls Online was announced earlier this month and generated quite a lot of interest among fans of the series.
Sadly, many were put off by the visual style and the track record of Bethesda, which made great games that were filled with bugs at least in the first weeks after their release.
Zenimax Online Studios hopes to avoid this problem, according to The Elder Scrolls Online’s Director, Matt Firor, who told Edge magazine about the array of things that can go wrong when making a game, especially an online one.
“It’s not only that,” he said relating to conventional bugs, “but there’s also many different types of tech problems when you create an MMOG. Account creation, servers, latency. The critical difference with MMOGs, though, is that you have a long beta test where you build up to thousands and thousands of players, and you tackle those problems as you run into them there.”
This top-notch quality from the beta stage, plus the lore of the Elder Scrolls universe will certainly draw in gamers, according to Firor, who emphasized the complex nature of the game’s world.
“Even now, I come across lore that I didn’t know existed. It’s just so deep. People play games for different reasons, but the people who respond to Elder Scrolls the most like to get immersed in a world so that they feel they’re living there. They like to have freedom of choice to do what they want to do, and that’s the part that resonates with us the most,” he added.
“This is what makes the IP so great for an MMOG already: people already know it’s the kind of game where they can head out and explore and be rewarded for it. That’s the one thing that player will learn immediately that’s different about us: if you see something in the distance, you can go and investigate and be rewarded for it,” Firor concluded.
The Elder Scrolls Online will be released in 2013 for the PC and Mac platforms. Expect to hear more details about it and its beta stage until then.