2781

You people are crazy. If Oblivion had coop where my friends and I could explore and roam the world, I’d never leave the house. An arena mode on the other hand? Jesus Christ, I can’t imagine a worse game for that. Elder Scrolls games have terrible combat, I have no idea why you’d devote resources into a multiplayer mode that’s only that.

Elder Scrolls multiplayer with random people would be horrible, but I’d love to be able to play with a buddy or two.

2782

Didn’t Battlespire have multiplayer? Both co-op and team deathmatch?

2783

Yeah coop is so often misunderstood. When I think coop, I do not think team deatch match or some cookie cutter map where we all have some kill count stats and look and play alike. Adventuring in a wide open world with friends is awesome. I guess MMOs are supposed to fill that void but lately… blah.

2784

Cooperative play in an elder scrolls game would be undeniably epic. Anyone who says otherwise misunderstands what is being suggested.

2785

Yeah, exactly. MMOs never really filled that void because of their very nature. When me and a friend of mine were playing through Morrowind together a room apart from one another and telling each other stories about what we find, what quests we did, what we discovered, it was all very exciting, and we both felt it was a shame that we each had separate worlds couldn’t do all those things together in one world. Later, we also played some MMOs together like DAoC and Shadowbane, and a couple of others, always lamenting that MMOs didn’t have well-constructed, really well realized worlds full of interesting quests and events like Morrowind did.

2786

Ya, the same kinds of stories were tools amost friends of mine about oblivion… Although, the best ones were about when the AI broke down and characters freaked out… Like when the fisherman ghost somehow caught the attention of the villagers in the town, causing them all to attack him, and then killed every person in the town.

MMO’s seem so flat and two dimensional by comparison. It’s like they have lost their fundamental RPG roots, embracing only the most base rat killer aspects.

Did anyone play gemstone online back in the day? That was maybe the last online RPG that had some sense of depth and reality to the world, which is ironic considering that it was entirely text based. But you knew pretty much everyone who played. The people in the game were much more three dimensional.

Of course, the game lagged bad when the server was under heavy load… And by heavy load, I mean 250 people online at the same time. Guess that experience doesn’t translate into modern MMO’s.

2787

I concur. Being able to wander an open world coop without having to sub to an MMO, and with more of a SRPG flavor, would be awesome.

When I heard M&B Warband had multi-player I had hopes until I read the details. Meh.

2788

That would be pretty amazingly awesome if done even remotely right.

2789

Sounds like Freelancer multiplayer, which I dug.

2790

Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. Freelancer MP was good times.

2791

What i am reading here is more “the promise of MMORPGs failed” than “I want a Elder Scrolls coop”.

Because what people are mentioning is exactly the experience that in theory would be given by MMOS, but they are failing in that, focusing on grind, “theme park” design, etc.

2792

Eh, i’d say it’s more of a large lan thing than a MMO; MMO’s, due to the size of the player base, tend to emphasize anonymity and non-social behaviour, the exact opposite of a lan party.

That said, I see your point and in a perfect world an MMO would just be a large size lan.

2793

What you guys suggest would be amazingly awesome, however I suspect this is something only a tiny majority would appreciate.

I think I am one of the few people that ever played Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 in multiplayer. It was IMMENSELY fun. Back when I used to haunt the Bioware boards and suggested that both Dragon Age and Mass Effect would be great with this kind of multiplayer, the amount of gnashing of teeth was surprising.

Most people have very unimaginative conceptions of co-op and multiplayer

2794

As evidenced by the resistance displayed in this thread.

I’ve played enough Co-Op to know it could work, no question. Whether there’s a market for it is still up for debate.

2795

I think its mostly a matter of people being afraid it will detract from the single player experience.

Most developer teams today have a fixed amount of time and money available to them, meaning it would be taken out of the single player part.

A few games have it quite well, like Assassins Creed which had quite robust multiplayer that didn’t seem to have detracted from the main singleplayer game, but then there are games like Bioshock where I think the consensus was that no-one is playing that anymore, and that it wasn’t the greatest thing ever.

2796

Which is a valid concern, and one I’m familiar with. I’d be annoyed if certain games, lets say a hypothetical GalCivIII, wasted time and resources on this, especially seeing how Elemental ended up. it was painful watching Stardock scramble to implement/tune multiplayer at release in the midst of all the other, bigger, issues staring players right in the face.

2797

In co-op they’d have to add more monsters and more loot and rebalance every area. If you think this wouldn’t detract from single player balance you’re pretty naive.

And you think Bethesda games have bugs NOW? I think their first online Elder Scrolls game would be the death of the series, unless it was entirely focused towards online.

2798

So doomy and gloomy you are.

2799

To be honest, Stardock did fuck all for MP, I actually tried it for kicks a couple months ago. It was a half-implemented abomination. :)

Stardock also suffered from the same MP myopia as well. They kept trying to come up with deathmatch, arena, and “competitive” modes which was just utterly bizarre to me.

The resource issue is absolutely a fair concern, though.

2800

Stardocks problem was that it said multi-player on the box, and they felt obligated to deliver on that promise – even though there were other, very pressing issues that needed attention first. Unfortunately, not much seemed to be done about it until the game was on the street.

This was the official word from Stardock about a week before release:

I’m pretty sure there was no functional multi-player until after the first few patches (about a month later) anyway, and then only in a very limited form.