SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Not worried. ESO and the Elder Scrolls IP prints money. Worst case is downsizing but the game will live on as long as they are bringing in new players. ES6 and future Elder Scrolls games will create new interest in ESO.

Bringing in new players has been the big problem since ESOs launch hence the seasonal $5 steam sales to get people to try the game. If we're honest that is the biggest foe for any long running MMO - retaining current players while getting new players to replace lapsed players. Throw in the fact that MS is a publicly traded company they don't just want maintaining player numbers they want quarterly growth. When TES6 drops there will also be a player exodus, at least temporarily as people stop playing ESO to play the new TES game for a few hundred hours.

This departure may not be bad news, maybe the replacement will actually listen to the PTS forums; especially if a couple of other problematic devs who were antagonistic towards to community sail off to new shores afterwards.

Maybe they should take a page out of Larian Studio's book. Have gamer developers make games that gamers want to play.

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

People come and people go. I remember how sad and worried people were when we lost Paul Sage (and his crazy shirts), Nick Konkle, Lawrence Schick, and several others early on in game. Rumors abounded. But the game continued to thrive and get better, I have no input as to the layoffs and the canceled new game. I just worry about ESO.

The game actively got worse when we lost Nick Konkle, only after a decade did we see some form of his baby, Spellcrafting.

Man, do I miss the guy. He was so passionate about the game.

Elsonso wrote: »

I think ESO will be fine for the time being. It is a successful game, seems to be making money, and the IP is a golden goose.

My concern is for the ZOS people who worked on ESO and went off to work on what we now know was an MMO code named "Blackbird".

It was never obvious that elder scrolls mmo could work in any way. It isn’t such a golden goose IP for multiplayer games.
That it got popular at all is a testament to the developers that made decisions at the right moments after initial release.

Back then everyone just wanted Skyrim coop game. MMO was met with suspicion by the fans of IP and not at all enthusiastic. Devs had to put lots of work to convince people that it is a good idea.

It’s more of a game that succeeded against the wind more than it was bound to be a success. Nothing about its conception was easy, peddling it to IP fans in particular was a tough nut to crack.

If someone said solo quest content focus game can be top 3 mmo for a decade 12 years ago you would just think they are silly. So it’s zos who have carved this path that wasn’t there before at all.

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Not worried. ESO and the Elder Scrolls IP prints money. Worst case is downsizing but the game will live on as long as they are bringing in new players. ES6 and future Elder Scrolls games will create new interest in ESO.

Yes, when ES6 lands in 2043, I'm sure it will be the hit that Starfield should have been.

You're being sarcastic, but knowing how gamers seem to gobble up nearly every new release, including the buggiest slopfests of games - ES6 will probably be a hit. Despite whatever bugs it will ship with or how light on content it will be. Plus people will have been starved of Elder Scrolls for years by then.

I think that most of the senior staff is still there and hopefully will be there for the foreseeable future, but in truth I'm also worried, because like another comment said, it's evident they lowered the budget for the game this year, and while I get that ESO is an old, and they probably put their investments into other projects, it's not good news for the health of the game, and it could signal the start of a decline.

Feels like the age of the mmo is truely dead. Little investment, few good games and weak concepts.

licenturion wrote: »

LadyGP wrote: »

Bascially.... we will never know the "why" unless things come out on social media.

One of the employees posted this on Linkedin:

Today, our project at Zenimax Online Studios got cancelled. We'd been working on a new engine + MMO, fully deployed in Azure for some time now, and the project was heading in a great direction and we were finding the fun!
I’m truly proud of the work my team put into modernizing our build system, compiler toolchain, full cloud infrastructure, and the direction we were headed into full production.
I suspect I'll also be looking for work soon if you want a highly vocal senior engineer, as my slack access was removed.

So that is 7 years and the game isn’t even in full production stage yet. Just the toolkits. No wonder it got cancelled. So the new MMO wasn’t going to run on a buffed ESO engine.

Given that they built a new studio and an MMO in 7 years for ESO, I was expecting to hear about it in 2025-2026.

The ESO engine was built for ESO. It might have been a starting point for this "blackbird" engine, though. My hope was that the updated tech, aka"toolkits" (modernized build system, compiler, etc), would find a home back with ESO as time progressed.

Maybe it still will. Microsoft/XBox/ZOS has years of development into all of that. Shame to just delete the Git repo, so to speak.

I am also hoping that they were able to keep some of their talent so they can be used on ESO.

Finedaible wrote: »

Wasn't Leamon Tuttle on that cancelled project? I would hope they had the smarts to bring him back to ESO as a writer.

I heard a number of people moved over to the new project from ESO. It makes sense, since many of them had skills that were well suited for creating a new game. Now, I wonder...

Radiate77 wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

People come and people go. I remember how sad and worried people were when we lost Paul Sage (and his crazy shirts), Nick Konkle, Lawrence Schick, and several others early on in game. Rumors abounded. But the game continued to thrive and get better, I have no input as to the layoffs and the canceled new game. I just worry about ESO.

The game actively got worse when we lost Nick Konkle, only after a decade did we see some form of his baby, Spellcrafting.

Man, do I miss the guy. He was so passionate about the game.

This right here, and after they lost Schick and then Tuttle, the writing started going downhill in my opinion.

I wonder if Matt's departure is related to the microsoft layoffs.

I wonder if Pete Hines knew something or if the microsoft became imposing.

Familiar faces leaving the game studio or taking some other job within the studio is perfectly normal. Some games under development got cancelled by mother company Microsoft because of reasons unknown to us, these things also happen all the time.

I am not concerned about ESO or its future, all the recent developments seem to point out that ESO is moving forward and gaining new attention and perhaps even growing. If anything, ESO might even gain some more focus from the game studio now after other mmo project got shut down. Protect the precious child. Who knows. ESO might even gain some new funding because it is already a profit maker and a BIG title.

I remember people calling out that "Wow is a dead game" "mmorpg is a dead genre".. I remember hearing all that BS over 10 years ago. And how is Wow doing? After some minor setbacks and few bad expansions it managed to gain some fresh attention with the latest expansion and is doing just fine. Even after so many familiar Dev. faces left Blizzard and Wow long time ago. No one is irreplaceable. "Times change" as Garrosh Hellscream put it, but the world keeps on spinning. Mmorpg is far too loved genre that it would ever completely wither away and I doubt these big names we now have are ready to quit the fun just yet. Not for a long time. I am 100% sure we will see at least another 10 active years for ESO and in that time there will 100% surely rise up some new big thing to which we can move on. Just as I moved on from Wow to ESO, even Wow is still there and going strong.

Adaarye wrote: »

Maybe they should take a page out of Larian Studio's book. Have gamer developers make games that gamers want to play.

God bless the no shareholder model

Microsoft is heavily investing in AI (as are lots of tech companies).

IMHO Microsoft is looking at AI to be the core of development in the next couple of years. AI will become the primary developer of the Windows operating system, all of Microsoft software, along with peripheral designs and Marketing strategies.

Vaqual wrote: »

I obviously don't know their reasons, but it seems more than sensible to me to scrap the new IP. New MMOs just aren't what keep high player engagement, "ripened" MMOs do. Diluting their own customer base for a couple launch sales probably won't cover the losses that a slowed development on two fronts would incur. If the innovation is not great enough it just won't have enough pull over the cost sunk in other games for a lot of customers. And the new game shine tends to wear off rather quickly.
Bioware could have had a smooth gig with SWTOR, but that was apparently not good enough. Hell, I even think Funcom would be better off reviving its older games rather than making that Dune game, but at least there is a market for that IP. I don't know if this is necessarily the consequence of this cancellation, but doubling down on ESO seems to be the smart move. I don't really need any more MMOs with arrested development in my collection.

It was a terrible decision to build a new MMO in parallel with ESO. Even if it was a better game, ESO has critical mass and I don't see people transitioning to a new game.

When has that ever worked? Its rare enough to have a successful game, but continuing the success in a new franchise, most unlikely.

Now the real shame is what could have been if they didn't devide their attention. If its the same genre, they might be able to incorporate some of the resources.

Now that the other game is gone. PLEASE get back to basics and focus on balancing classes. Get rid of subclassing. Get rid of arcanist beam. Develop another DLC class to sell. Build more full feature zones.