14 DAY TRIAL // During its first week online, the newly launched The Elder Scrolls Online was taken down, both in North America and in Europe, for two big periods by the development team at ZeniMax Online and publisher Bethesda, mainly in order to deliver patches to the MMO that improve gameplay and eliminate some bugs.
Predictably, those who have purchased the video game and were interested in playing it as much as possible were not happy with the decisions made by the two companies.
They were even further enraged by the choice of the maintenance periods, which seemed to coincide in part with peak play times, and by the fact that neither of them offered clear information on how long the downtimes would last when they were first announced.
Annoying the player base of a video game is never a good idea, but it is especially perilous for an MMO that launches in 2014, the age of the free-to-play titles, while still using a subscription-driven model.
The Elder Scrolls Online might be a good overall experience, but missteps from the developers might sink the game before it even gets off the ground.
Technical Ambition and the Price for It
When the new MMO was announced, the leader of the development team at ZeniMax Online talked about the new mega-server structure that the project would use and how it was designed to keep all the players together on the same infrastructure. The setup would allow gamers to experience massive Alliance versus Alliance battles that would not be seen in any other titles.
The promise was realized on launch, but the ambitious nature of The Elder Scrolls Online also means that when maintenance is required, the company needs to bring down the world for all the players in one major market, like Europe or North America, at the same time.
This is sure to create more problems with the community than other MMOs, where maintenance can be spaced out in order to affect different segments of gamers at different times.
ZeniMax Online should have been more interested in the reactions coming from their community of players than in the technical wizardry associated with their title.
It will be interesting to see whether the company finds a way to limit or even eliminate the impact of maintenance in the long term or if it is able to better communicate to the player base why it is required.
Always Connected, Sometimes Unhappy
The world of modern gaming has become increasingly accustomed to being always connected to the Internet and more and more of our modern gaming experiences have come to rely on the network for their core mechanics.
This creates better gameplay, but unfortunately, it also creates situations where gamers feel cheated and annoyed the instant they are unable to access their favorite titles. The problem is exacerbated on home consoles from Sony and Microsoft, where a problem with Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network can affect a wide range of video games and services.
It’s unlikely that any game creator will ever find a simple way of completely eliminating maintenance periods and problems with their network infrastructure, which means that all developers need to find better ways to decrease their length and better communicate with players in order to keep them happy.