The Elder Scrolls Online Goes All-Out With Eight-Minute "Arrival" Trailer

[Andy Chalk]

The Elder Scrolls Online Goes All-Out With Eight-Minute "Arrival" Trailer

[video=8747 autoplay=0]
The Elder Scrolls Online "Arrival" cinematic trailer probably cost more than the whole of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Bethesda is defying conventional wisdom by releasing The Elder Scrolls Online as a subscription-based MMO in an era when subscription-based MMOs not named World of Warcraft are dead. Free-to-play is the only way to fly these days, so they say, and you only have to look at the humiliating climb-down of EA's Star Wars: The Old Republic for proof.

What's Bethesda doing? I don't know, but I do know this: It's not dicking around. The new "Arrival" cinematic trailer doesn't give us anything in the way of TESO gameplay but it's safe to say that the publisher pulled out all the stops to make it, then went out and found some more stops and pulled them out, too.

I'm a little confused by what's going, particularly at the end, but the short version is that it's all fun and games until the Daedra show up. It does make me wonder why the Mer caster didn't open up the can of whoop-ass she was carrying in her pouch before the interlopers from Oblivion showed up, but maybe she had a feeling that she should hold on to it for a special occasion. Like, say, Daedra.

Whatever the case, this is perhaps the most spectacular game trailer I've ever seen and quite likely the most expensive too, and while it's just eye candy and has almost nothing to do with the actual game, I'm willing to forgive that because, well... did you watch it?

Alongside the release of this new and utterly fantastic trailer, Bethesda also confirmed The Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Edition, word of which leaked out yesterday [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131767-The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Imperial-Edition-Leaked-by-Amazon], that will include a 12" statue of Molag Bal, a map of Tamriel, a Steelbook case and a whole bunch of other stuff that will make it very difficult for me to not throw money at it. The Imperial Edition will sell for $99.99 for the physical release and $79.99 for digital.

The Elder Scrolls Online comes out on April 4 for the PC and Mac, while PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions are expected in June.


Permalink

 

[Kieve]

Un-EDIT:
Okay, I did some digging to get my story straight, and my original comment stands. It's not Bethesda responsible, Andy, it's Zenimax. From the TESO website's legal page:

The Elder Scrolls®
© 1993-2006 Bethesda Softworks LLC, a ZeniMax Media company. The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax and their respective logos are registered trademarks of ZeniMax Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Elder Scrolls® Online (under development)
© 2012 ZeniMax Media Inc. The Elder Scrolls® Online developed by ZeniMax Online Studios LLC, a ZeniMax Media company. ZeniMax, The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda, Bethesda Softworks and related logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of ZeniMax Media Inc. in the US and/or other countries. All Rights Reserved

Basically, Zenimax is the one doing all the TESO stuff, but Bethesda Softworks still owns the "Elder Scrolls" trademark so they get a mention in the trailer. All the bits in your article where you're crediting Bethesda for the trailer and whatnot though, that's all Zenimax Online Studios, which Zenimax (parent company) created to push TESO while leaving Bethesda as a studio to continue with single-player endeavors.

On a personal note, I had a look at their pre-order page and am absolutely livid. One major point of contention TES fans have been arguing against since the announcement was race-locked factions. Well guess what guys? It's now a "pre-order bonus!" That's right, you can be a Dunmer working for the Dominion if you want, just gotta pre-order it. Proving once and for all that races don't need to be faction-locked for some nonsensical lore reasons, it's just a carrot on a stick. Screw you too, Zeni. Screw you too.

 

[JenSeven]

I still don't get why they did this.

Skyrim was one of the best single player games I played in a very long time. I think that goes for a lot of people.
This game is also clearly targeted at people that have played Skyrim.
Can't they see that an MMO is completely the opposite of Skyrim.

Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, each of them had the same defining characteristics: Freedom, Exploration and Story Focused.
These things CANNOT happen in an MMO.
Freedom gets restricted due to other player characters, factions, alliances, guilds, grinding, raids. These things do not encourage freedom, they set boundaries. Grinding especially, since we all know certain parts of maps are going to have higher level monster than others. So you can't explore freely since you will run into high level monsters.
So, already with the grinding and level designated areas we have also eliminated the Exploration.
Story focus and MMOs are never a combination. Since the game would need to be accessible to new players and individual stories for each character is pretty impossible (I think that Bioware Star Wars game tried something like that. Don't know how that was). If you have a server wide story progression new players will become lost and have no idea what is happening, and everyone, no matter their level will also progress at the same time (bit like WoW expansions, like Cataclysm). It's just not something I can see happening.

Sorry, but with this being marketed towards Skyrim player, this will only sour the memories those players have of Skyrim. TES is a completely different beast, and as it looks to me, a bit of a mess. A failed chimera. Something like Jeff Goldblum's Fly. Begging to be killed.

 

[josemlopes]

Spoiler: What I got out of the trailer

 

[Riotguards]

so all i got from that trailer was, sword fighting, duel wield magic, OP whips and undead thingies

and imperial city because, why not?

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

I liked the trailer, though still not buying it. I played a lot of different MMO's WoW, GW1 and City of Heroes and got really bored with them after a few weeks. Which is a shame as i love the TES world. What i do hope is that all these design aspects and variety in armour, weapons and the landscape/enemies will move over into TES6.

 

[webkilla]

1) the trailer says nothing regarding gameplay, also it doesn't feature Khajit master race

2) Holy balls that is well animated. Like, there were spots during the quieter moments when I wasn't sure if they had intercut it with live action footage. Well done

 

[Ickabod]

Well that was an 8 minute steaming pile of ****. Neat you can make a pretty trailer, but you can't show any gameplay, and what you do show is so generic that outside of the capital city there is no way that you would know that was a TES game. Seriously a portal from the sky, wouldn't the obvious choice be an Oblivion gate?

This is a disaster waiting to happen. I can see the desire to make a TES MMO, there is a rich lore available to draw from that could make a compelling world, but this doesn't show me anything like that. Right now all I see is another MMO entering the market with a big name behind it. Maybe we'll see the quest and story driven game that is true to the series that we have seen over the years, but I seriously doubt it at this point. Providing a "pretty" trailer that shows nothing actually in the game is desperation and hope that they can appeal to the general audience, rather than the people that have enjoyed the TES games.

Not to mention it's going to be $15 a month.

 

[bliebblob]

All I can say is:

Spoiler: Some criminal scum are about to get... stopped.

Get it? Because they're about to siege that one town from Oblivion?

Oh shut up, I didn't want it to be funny anyway. *grumbles*

XD made me lol. Imagine this one imperial guard captain theathrically standing before the gates of the imperial city. The undead horde dramatically walk up to him. And as he slowly looks up to the horseman he says, in a voice that would make Clint Eastwood gulp, "Stop right there... Criminal scum."

EDIT: better yet, just add one shot right after the ending: all the undead neatly herded into one person cells in the imperial prison. Some of them staring at eachother through the bars with a look of "Wait... What?".

 

[Matthi205]

I can somehow see them getting this right. I just have my doubts that they will get it right.

On one hand, it's possible to combine a Skyrim-like sense of freedom with the MMO genre, but it would throw the whole "MMORPG gameplay" idea together with balancing out of a nearby 2nd storey window. Being able to equip any weapon as any class and character, being able to play any class/race combination, being able to go anywhere and mess anyone's furniture and carefully conceived basket shelf up by stacking it on their head like a Russian Matroshka, being able to go up against higher level opponents if one is skilled enough... and lest we forget, actually being able to jump on top of someone's roof and light yourself on fire. That might be quite difficult to put in, and more to the point, balance against player progression so that people keep playing, balance for PvP et cetera.

On the other hand, I can see them doing it wrong and copying WoW combat instead of TERA combat in player involvement, plus trying to do the whole "questgiver -> quest -> tangible reward" thing where you get little boxes of dialogue and no dialogue trees to actually talk to people. At least the whole "playing with other people" thing is not as horrible, seeing as you can get it to only have you play with your friends or by yourself. Story... um. They're going to need really good AI to constantly write up new stories for new people, send them to different locations et cetera. And they'd also need to drop the "generic hero" and "generic recruit who does all of the work" concepts of player characters for it to have any meaningful impact whatsoever. Another thing here could be speech synth software that synthesizes your player character's name and puts it into conversations with NPCs - that could work, but requires a ton of effort and better servers to do.

As for this being the polar opposite of Skyrim: I don't think so, and from what I've heard and read about the game, it incorporates a lot of Skyrim's elements quite well... What we don't know is just how well it does so.

Could they maybe drop the subscription and have the game come with instructions and software for setting up a game server instead, with the option to play on official servers and pay for it? (Most normal MMO players aren't going to do this and fan-made servers aren't always reliable or low latency, so Zenimax would still make tons of money from subs) That way, it might sell a lot better, because of mod support and actual network play to have arena fights and the sort on - plus, you could play it at LAN parties, which is always a bonus. I can see a lot of people actually getting the game just for this and hosting their own servers (or rather, server clusters). What I can't see is having it survive on the sub model, and I also can't see it doing very well as F2P, either. Thus, options are limited: buy-to-play has Zenimax run servers basically for free, and the game being scrapped completely is improbable. So giving out server software for freebies is IMO a good option.


Another thing I'm curious about is the level of detail on the character models. Will we finally get some nice character models instead of the rather unrefined looking character models we have now? I mean, no doubt someone at Zenimax Online is making the things, why remove polygons when there are going to be PCs that can handle it in a couple year's time? (This is just a general gripe of mine with modeling for games: for you see, a lot of stuff is modeled in the original higher polygon count version that doesn't make it to the final model or only does so on the texture, which makes games age worse in my opinion).

 

[Falterfire]

Y'know, the longer I think about it, the more I think they made the right decision making it Subscription at first and then dropping to F2P. It lets them nab a bunch of money up front and get an official Quality marker to help them stand out from other F2P titles when they inevitably do make the jump. I have to imagine the F2P jump is already planned and the initial release as a Box+Sub model is part of a larger strategy.

Right? I mean, there's no way the people managing this think a Box+Sub model is actually sustainable anymore, right? Nobody's that crazy.

 

[CriticalMiss]

Why so much shaky cam? It's like the 'cameraman' had a seizure whilst riding an angry bull which was also having a seizure. And when you are going to make it look as good as this (which was undoubtedly expensive) it would be nice to actually see some of the detail.

 

[A-D.]

Well that was uninspiring. While the trailer is pretty and well animated..its just that, a pretty trailer. It tells me nothing about the game aside that for some reason people are bashing their heads in, but what is the motivation? Why are they fighting? Why are they suddenly joining forces against Daedra? Why is the imperial city totally fine when apparently everyone is supposedly fighting over it? Where's the gameplay?

Nothing in this trailer convinced me that TESO will be anything other than yet another wow-like MMO. The IP attached doesnt matter, SWTOR has the star wars license attached and yet even bioware and EA didnt manage to get out of wow-mechanics. TESO doesnt inspire confidence here either, 3 factions who are at war for dubious reasons because we need to have factions. Wow, arent you original. Race segregation based on factions because you totally would never see a Altmer outside of Summerset, or a Nord outside of Skyrim, right? This is a utter clusterfuck of done-to-death mechanics and ideas and the name wont save it. Give it a couple months, maybe a year, before this game is a utter ghost town.

Captcha: only way to be sure
I dont think nuking it from orbit is required captcha..

 

[Chester Rabbit]

Well that certainly was a cool CGI short. Nothing in it really resembled anything from the actual Elder Scrolls universe though, especially that generic elf who is supposed to be an Altmer. But they certainly did nail the Imperial City...good job guys, you managed to get the architecture right.

I have to say however, that did absolutely nothing for me in regards to making actually want to play that game. Seeing how there was absolutely not game to be seen. Then again it?s going to take a lot to actually sell me on a 60$ game which is then locked away behind a pay wall.

 

[Hagi]

Eh, I've learned to take a more relaxed approach to trailers like this.

See, there's two things that can happen:

1. The game turns out good. Yay! We've got a good game that's worth our money and an awesome trailer to top it off!
2. The game turns out bad. Yay! We've gotten to enjoy a completely free awesome trailer!

Either way, I profit. And all it requires for me to do so is to have a basic measure of patience to look into gameplay footage, trusted reviews etc. before buying if I decide I want it.

Seriously a portal from the sky, wouldn't the obvious choice be an Oblivion gate?

Oblivion gates are Mehrunes Dagon's thing. They're made of fire and earth because Mehrunes' associated with fire and earthquakes, things that cause widespread destruction and change. Which is his thing.

These portals are from Molag Bal. Enslavement and Domination are his thing, he's the King of Rape after all. Hence the chains and such. It's presumably coming from the sky as Molag Bal's plane of oblivion, Coldharbour, is a copy of Nirn (the world) except completely desecrated. So you know, his portals are in a mirrored position.

 

[Sight Unseen]

I still don't get why they did this.

Skyrim was one of the best single player games I played in a very long time. I think that goes for a lot of people.
This game is also clearly targeted at people that have played Skyrim.
Can't they see that an MMO is completely the opposite of Skyrim.

Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, each of them had the same defining characteristics: Freedom, Exploration and Story Focused.
These things CANNOT happen in an MMO.
Freedom gets restricted due to other player characters, factions, alliances, guilds, grinding, raids. These things do not encourage freedom, they set boundaries. Grinding especially, since we all know certain parts of maps are going to have higher level monster than others. So you can't explore freely since you will run into high level monsters.
So, already with the grinding and level designated areas we have also eliminated the Exploration.
Story focus and MMOs are never a combination. Since the game would need to be accessible to new players and individual stories for each character is pretty impossible (I think that Bioware Star Wars game tried something like that. Don't know how that was). If you have a server wide story progression new players will become lost and have no idea what is happening, and everyone, no matter their level will also progress at the same time (bit like WoW expansions, like Cataclysm). It's just not something I can see happening.

Sorry, but with this being marketed towards Skyrim player, this will only sour the memories those players have of Skyrim. TES is a completely different beast, and as it looks to me, a bit of a mess. A failed chimera. Something like Jeff Goldblum's Fly. Begging to be killed.

I disagree with much of what you've said here. I've been following the development of this game pretty closely and a lot of your concerns are unwarranted. This game FEELS a lot more like skyrim than WoW. Although I'll grant you that you dont have the unlimited freedom to go wherever you want like in Skyrim, the devs still focus very heavily on explorations. The leveled zones are massive and have tons of cool stuff hidden around that you have to search for. Resources for crafting spawn semi-randomly around the world and many are hidden well if you're not exploring enough. Skyshards give incentives to explore as well as they contribute to leveling up your skills. Classes aren't so much restrictions as starting points and you can build EXTREMELY diverse characters from the same classes.

Also the story seems pretty interesting so far with some really cool characters. Razum Dar is already one of my all time favorite elder scrolls characters (I even remembered his name which is a first for an elder scrolls game!)

As long as you can get past the fact that others will be playing the same or similar stories as you, the story is quite good and well written and voiced.

Well that was an 8 minute steaming pile of ****. Neat you can make a pretty trailer, but you can't show any gameplay, and what you do show is so generic that outside of the capital city there is no way that you would know that was a TES game. Seriously a portal from the sky, wouldn't the obvious choice be an Oblivion gate?

This is a disaster waiting to happen. I can see the desire to make a TES MMO, there is a rich lore available to draw from that could make a compelling world, but this doesn't show me anything like that. Right now all I see is another MMO entering the market with a big name behind it. Maybe we'll see the quest and story driven game that is true to the series that we have seen over the years, but I seriously doubt it at this point. Providing a "pretty" trailer that shows nothing actually in the game is desperation and hope that they can appeal to the general audience, rather than the people that have enjoyed the TES games.

Not to mention it's going to be $15 a month.

Thos portals from the sky are called Dark Anchors and they play a MAJOR role in the Elder Scrolls Online. The main conflict of the game is that Molag Bal is trying to pull Tamriel into his Oblivion plane which is called Coldharbour. A major gameplay challenge is to find these dark anchors which spawn dynamically in the world and destroy them to prevent this from happening.

I wouldnt be too worried about the story and legacy of the Elder Scrolls being ruined here. I've dabbled with the closed beta and the game is VERY quest and story driven. I don't remember getting a single quest to "kill 5 rats" or "obtain 5 hides" for no reason. Every single quest was like playing through a short story.

Every single quest I played was story driven and it felt like my quests actually had some kind of meaning to them. And there were LOTS of quests.

 

[Sight Unseen]

Another thing I'm curious about is the level of detail on the character models. Will we finally get some nice character models instead of the rather unrefined looking character models we have now? I mean, no doubt someone at Zenimax Online is making the things, why remove polygons when there are going to be PCs that can handle it in a couple year's time? (This is just a general gripe of mine with modeling for games: for you see, a lot of stuff is modeled in the original higher polygon count version that doesn't make it to the final model or only does so on the texture, which makes games age worse in my opinion).

They have a trailer for the character creation tool. Honestly I think TES:O is one of the prettiest MMOs that I've seen to date. In some respects I think its even prettier than Skyrim because of the art style even if it isn't quite as graphically intensive.


Here you are.

 

[DaxStrife]

Big action spectacles do nothing for me if I have no investment in the characters involved or even a clue what their motivations are.
Also, the trailer kind of undermines their core gameplay focus:"Hey, we're in the middle of this war, but now all these daedra and bad people are taking advantage of our weakened state! We need to unite our forces to stop everyone from getting wiped out!"
Probably the wrong narrative when one of your game's big features is 3-way-faction PvP.