14 DAY TRIAL // The Elder Scrolls Online is just one month away from its official launch date, and many gamers might still be holding off from picking up the game because of Bethesda’s decision to launch it using a monthly subscription business model.
But Pete Hines, the vice president in charge of public relations at the company, says that the team at ZeniMax Online working on the title will justify the monthly payment coming from gamers by launching a lot of high-quality content for the MMO.
He tells Gamespot that “We’re also very confident in our ability to support it with content. And not content of the magnitude of, it’s a new month, here’s a new sword or here’s a funny hat, but content that is real and significant and it feels like regular and consistent DLC releases.”
Other MMO titles have taken the step of selling the core game to the players and then charging them for each new downloadable content pack they are launching, but Hines says the idea would not be suited for The Elder Scrolls Online because it could cause splits in the overall community.
He adds, “When you’re talking about regular content, adding new features and new parts of the world, either you’re all in or you’re not.”
ZeniMax Online and Bethesda have not yet explained what kind of content they are planning to add to The Elder Scrolls Online after it is officially launched.
The MMO is set to arrive on both the PC and the Mac on April 4 of this year, and gamers can pre-order the title or get the Imperial Edition if they are aiming to get more real-world and in-game content.
A version for the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony is expected to arrive at some point during the summer, but no concrete date is yet available.
Bethesda says that it has no plans to offer cross-platform play and join the three game worlds into a single universe.
The Elder Scrolls Online will take gamers to a period 1,000 years before the event of the single-player titles linked to the franchise, with three big alliances fighting over control of the world.
At the same time they need to deal with a plot from a hostile Daedra, and the development team promises that the game will have both a deep lore and solid RPG and MMO mechanics.