14 DAY TRIAL // The developers at ZeniMax Online have detailed the way quests will work in the upcoming The Elder Scrolls Online and apparently player choice and consequence will be at the core of the MMO experience.
Paul Sage, who is a creative director working on The Elder Scrolls Online, has told Edge that, “You head into town to fight the werewolves, and then, hey, there are these people barricaded in a church. Do you want to help them out, knowing that, if you do, something else won’t be available to you?”
The developer says, “We spend a lot of time trying to work out how to give the player interesting choices like that. I’m okay with people being frustrated with not seeing the cool thing, as long as the thing they did was still cool.”
The developer says that all this effort adds to the immersion element of the MMO, adding, “When both things are cool, people have bought into the experience. It’s when they don’t care we’ve lost them.”
Sage says that choice and consequence are the main elements of the game, and after the team makes decisions about the way a quest works, they add the lore layer in order to give gamers yet another reason to immerse themselves in the world.
The team at ZeniMax Online has already said that it has a lot of creative freedom linked to the Elder Scrolls universe, mainly because their game takes place 1,000 years before the events players experienced during recent single-player releases.
The story of the MMO will see the gamer choose to align himself with one of three factions that are fighting over domination of Tamriel while also holding back the undead armies of the Imperials.
The Elder Scrolls Online is scheduled to launch on the PC during 2013 and the developers have not announced whether the game will be subscription-based or free-to-play.