Can the game have both online and offline mode?

akl77

Offline mode base game with PVEs would be nice, so you can play if you don't have internet connection or just want to do PVE contents for the time being, or to stop lag and crashes due to high traffic.

Rosveen

No. The cheating would be ridiculous. The only way to do it would be to create two completely separete versions that never interact with each other - but that's a pointless waste of resources. It'd be nice to get something like this when the servers inevitably shut down, though.

akl77

Rosveen wrote: »

No. The cheating would be ridiculous. The only way to do it would be to create two completely separete versions that never interact with each other - but that's a pointless waste of resources. It'd be nice to get something like this when the servers inevitably shut down, though.

But dark souls and bloodborn can play either online or offline.
When you feel like group content or PVP, go online mode.

Rhoric

This is a MMO therefor there is no offline mode and never can be. In my 17 years of MMO gaming I have never heard of a MMO having a offline mode.

KingYogi415

You must be new to MMO's

akl77

Not new, I played mmo on PC earlier days. I just don't want the game to shut down and disappear, so if there's an offline mode it can be kept forever like skyrim.

Rygonix

It wouldn't be the same. This game thrives too much on player interaction. I get what you want, but, as another player that has played MMO's on PC in the earlier times and literally seen multiple MMO's I've invested years and even more memories into just vanish forever along with their defunct host companies I've come to learn the risk of sinking too much personally into games like this.

MMO's just by nature don't have longevity that is guaranteed like a purely single player game, it's by the very nature of the beast.

Cadbury

Can't tell if trolling or not...

This isn't a single player RPG (In before "huhuh it plays like one).

itehache

Dark souls and Bloodborn are not MMOs. MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online.

I get what you mean though, you like questing around and just mind your own business. Just imagine other players are other travelers and aventurers that, like you, are just exploring the world. Or play Skyrim / Oblivion etc.

Alchemical

Rygonix wrote: »

It wouldn't be the same. This game thrives too much on player interaction.

I'd disagree. Playing PS4-EU near console launch I very rarely saw other players. It was like playing all by myself in a single player game. It didn't diminish my enjoyment of most of the game at all. The PVP was a bit flaccid, but that was the only part that really needed other players, and that was just by nature.

Since I moved to PC-NA it's a hundred times more populated, but that brings just as much ill as good. Like I'm extremely annoyed by how crowded Dark Brotherhood quests are. Other players completely ruin that entire DLC for me. There are however more of them to murder in Cyrodil, so it all balances out I guess.

akl77

I only ever see advantages of online when grouping for dungeons, trials, PVP, group contents, guild events, dual.
Walking around or solo delves or farming nodes I don't see the advantages of being online seeing other players.
This is why dark souls and bloodborn have the summoning system, grouping only when you want to.
This allows playing when there's no internet or when server is down.

Darth_Trumpious

akl77 wrote: »

Rosveen wrote: »

No. The cheating would be ridiculous. The only way to do it would be to create two completely separete versions that never interact with each other - but that's a pointless waste of resources. It'd be nice to get something like this when the servers inevitably shut down, though.

But dark souls and bloodborn can play either online or offline.
When you feel like group content or PVP, go online mode.

And that's exactly the reason why people hack their savedata in offline mode and then rekt / troll other players in PVP / online mode. If you don't believe, go play dark souls on PC version.

dday3six

akl77 wrote: »

Rosveen wrote: »

No. The cheating would be ridiculous. The only way to do it would be to create two completely separete versions that never interact with each other - but that's a pointless waste of resources. It'd be nice to get something like this when the servers inevitably shut down, though.

But dark souls and bloodborn can play either online or offline.
When you feel like group content or PVP, go online mode.

And both of those games are rife with hacks. They're much more common on PC, but it can happen on console too. Also if I am in another player's game for either of those titles I can only have a limited effect on their game world.

ESO stores all data server side. The only data users have direct access to be saved on their machines is option preferencs. In an offline mode the game data would need to be saved on the user's machine. This gives them direct access to it, which means that they can easily edit it.

The only way this could work would be if there was no going back. Once you took your game into offline mode it would have to remain there, cut off from ever rejoining the online game.

Blacksmoke

This is a MMO..

Rygonix

Alchemical wrote: »

Rygonix wrote: »

It wouldn't be the same. This game thrives too much on player interaction.

I'd disagree. Playing PS4-EU near console launch I very rarely saw other players. It was like playing all by myself in a single player game. It didn't diminish my enjoyment of most of the game at all. The PVP was a bit flaccid, but that was the only part that really needed other players, and that was just by nature.

Since I moved to PC-NA it's a hundred times more populated, but that brings just as much ill as good. Like I'm extremely annoyed by how crowded Dark Brotherhood quests are. Other players completely ruin that entire DLC for me. There are however more of them to murder in Cyrodil, so it all balances out I guess.

The point I was trying to get at was there would be a lot that needs to be changed, both technically and structurally for this to be feasible. Without player involvement a lot of the things that seem fleshed out will be revealed to be a lot more hollow in reality as compared to a game that was built from the ground up without massive numbers of players supporting and competing with one another in mind.

LadyNalcarya

akl77 wrote: »

Rosveen wrote: »

No. The cheating would be ridiculous. The only way to do it would be to create two completely separete versions that never interact with each other - but that's a pointless waste of resources. It'd be nice to get something like this when the servers inevitably shut down, though.

But dark souls and bloodborn can play either online or offline.
When you feel like group content or PVP, go online mode.

Those are single-player games with optional co-op and pvp, and this is a fundamental difference.
Also, there's a LOT of cheaters in pc versions of Dark Souls. If you thought that ZOS is too kind to cheaters and exploiters, I can tell you that ESO cheating is nothing compared to Dark Souls cheating. Invading someone's game and killing their npcs? Yeah ofc. Permanently changing their stats? That can happen, too. And funnily, those actions might also get the victims banned because the changes take place in their game world. Isnt that wonderful?
Oh, and dont forget that there's no such thing as economy in Dark Souls. So you can for example backup your save, drop some valuable items to your friend, quit the game, reload the save... Profit: you have 2 copies of said item.
Dont get me wrong, DS are really awesome games. But they're single player games, and mmos require different approach.
And yeah, I also love replaying old games from time to time. And yes, it will be sad when they decide to shut down the servers. But these days same exact thing might happen even to single-player games, with all those anti-piracy systems like Denuvo, as they require online verification,and when there's no servers, you wont be able to play them.

Majeure

Hence, if one wishes to truly own a game these days, they must pirate it.

Sad times we live in.

And that's not really an option when it comes to MMOs, unless it has community developed private servers. But unless their solution can be self-hosted, you will just have to trust another party, one that's even less reliable to stay in action.

sdtlc

how about you wait for TES 6?

Dracindo

For those who are calling OP a skeever on skooma, I understand where OP is coming from:

I came from Skyrim and wanted to play the next game as well. The multiplayer part is nice, but an environment for myself, where I can do what I want without needing to play the meta-characters because of other players doing the same and killing me or a group dungeon where I get blamed for if it fails horribly. Just a SP world where I can hire companions if I can't do something alone, and where more random events occured while sightseeing.

I don't really want an offline mode, where I can make progress when the servers are down or I don't want people stealing my farms. I would want a singleplayer world on my PC, completely loose from the online game. It's not a character, it's a save file.

The question is as good as "I want to play skyrim with a friend", but that's my opinion.
That being said, there is no offline mode.

TheValar85

well the game can be palyed in offline mod. even WoW can be played offline if you have the tools to do it.

so that statement is that mmos cannot be played offline is a clear bs. If ESO comes to an end (lets hope not going to happen for at least 100 year) ZOS cana ctualy develope an offline patch for the game. how every it will take alot of time, and teh data will be huge. so if i can make my counting the gigabyte of data will eb around more then 500gb and lets face it an almost half terra byte game is a bit large xD. but you are all wrong if you think an MMO canot be ported to an offline mode, with lan funcions. the cheating is not an excuse, considering if you want to play online with your guild mates, everything is stored on the ZOS server. so no harm will be coused by the online gaming community. becasue offline and online stuffs will be separated anyway. so the cheating complains is just not an option come up with against to have an offline support mode of this game.

boombazookajd

eh never mind

zaria

TheValar85 wrote: »

well the game can be palyed in offline mod. even WoW can be played offline if you have the tools to do it.

so that statement is that mmos cannot be played offline is a clear bs. If ESO comes to an end (lets hope not going to happen for at least 100 year) ZOS cana ctualy develope an offline patch for the game. how every it will take alot of time, and teh data will be huge. so if i can make my counting the gigabyte of data will eb around more then 500gb and lets face it an almost half terra byte game is a bit large xD. but you are all wrong if you think an MMO canot be ported to an offline mode, with lan funcions. the cheating is not an excuse, considering if you want to play online with your guild mates, everything is stored on the ZOS server. so no harm will be coused by the online gaming community. becasue offline and online stuffs will be separated anyway. so the cheating complains is just not an option come up with against to have an offline support mode of this game.

An offline MMO would in practice be that you had an private server on you pc.
Some survival games like Conan exile come with this option as its an persistent world.

As for ESO getting shut down, its an decade ahead minimum. Popular MMO tend to stay up far longer than an decade.

The only ones who shut down early if flops or if company don't own IP like in SW:G. Korean MMO tend to be owned by companies running multiple MMO and are faster to shut them down than western companies.

That happens is that number of players and income drops so low its not economical making new content.
Game enter an maintenance mode who don't cost much to run. Now ESO would still has an value as an single player game even if outdated by then, at this time you would be very sick of it

GreenhaloX

This is still a single player game. All the other toons running around, they're all just NPCs to me.

DeadlyPhoenix

Warning! Long post ahead! Read at your own risk! Also I apologize as I am on mobile so there may be some errors.

Believe it or not there is actually a way to have an offline mode on any MMO without fear of hackers ruining the online mode. I will be keeping it relevant to ESO though. However I will go ahead and say that the chances of this happening with ESO (in any form, mine or another) are slim to none. I'll get into that at a later time though. Basically just boils down to time, money, demand, personnel, engine, that sort of thing. More money than anything, it would be expensive to create and update.

First I will cover how your characters would transfer between the two. When switching from online to offline mode you instantly have access to your characters and everything you've ever earned. When you switch from offline to online your character must pass a "check" to make sure all the values, from CP to XP and skills/passives, are within normal game parameters.

When you take a character offline, you have a chance of being locked out of the character until ZOS has a chance to review it if the automatic check of the logs happens to fail any of the parameters that are set. No telling how long the check would take and thats irrelevant at this point. If you dont want to wait that long, then you're free to continue on with your character but only with the things you had the last time you were online, deleting your progress in the offline mode completely.

Basically when you're in offline mode your game will save every 5 minutes automatically with no way to turn it off. It will also save when doing special things such as leveling up, traveling and loading. Every time the game saves it will save a log of your character at that exact moment; including all skills, gold, CP, Tel Var, etc. Again, the save feature might take a while, it might need spaced out, who knows, it's irrelevant at this point. Just assume technical issue things such as that are irrelevant from here on out. However it being basically just a text lot of values it really shouldn't take much memory.

The log would save literally everything from the amount of skill and stat points you have, to CP and gold. Anything a player would want to alter. There could even be seperate logs created that are check when going online, depending on what you're doing. Explained a bit later with crafting.

Now I know what you're thinking. In offline mode one can simply hack values for XP and gold so you could become max CP (including unusable CP) and a multibillionaire in a matter of seconds. However, with this there is a cap to how much XP you can gain in a given time frame, say 20k XP every 2 minutes and 10-15k gold every hour. This way no matter if they're hacking or not they can only gain so much XP and gold per hour and when they go back to online mode it will check the logs to see that everything is legit. There is also a set amount overall that you can gain per week/month while you're in offline mode. This will be significantly lower than your possible earnings online just for the sake of keeping things fair. I don't know a good number for XP but I would say maybe 50k max per day and 500k gold per month. This method would apply to Tel Var stones as well, though you would gain them at a significantly lower rate with a much lower cap since there is no risk other than death by NPC. These numbers are obviously up to ZOS and what they think would be fair.

Next on the list is group content. There is none, to an extent. You will have access to all DLCs and chapters that you have purchased, however trials will be completely blocked, veteran DLC dungeons are blocked, base game veteran dungeons the HM is blocked, content requiring two or more players to pass mechanics are blocked, Cyrodiil PvP objectives such as keeps and scrolls are locked with no gains to alliance points being possible other than from the daily quests in places like Bruma. So basically only PvE and skyshards. Again, a very small cap on how much AP you can gain each day and once you unlock rank 10 in the assault and support skill lines, you stop gaining AP completely.

Well what about crafting? Research times are once again put through a check to make sure the amount of days correspond with the amount of time it would take to research the given traits. It would also check the passives that reduce research time.

Master writs would also be capped and monitored heavily and anytime you get one, complete one, craft something, etc, it will create a new crafting log that must pass a check when going back online. Same as researching or even upgrading. Probably though you would only save a log on deconstructing when you close the menu so you dont lag horribly deconstructing 100 items.

Anyway. I would love to expand on this but I'm tired and tired of typing haha... You get the point though, basically everything must pass a check. I will probably expand on this tomorrow.

There is a lot more I have to cover and I have ideas for everything, including gear, resources, upgrade materials, farming, etc. Depending on feedback though I may not waste my time fully explaining since it's a lot to read and write, with almost no possibility of it actually happening.

Saturnana

The short and simple answer is no.
ESO is an MMORPG - Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game
The name kinda gives it away.

Edit: I'm not saying it wouldn't be technically possible for an MMO to have/introduce an offline mode. I'm just saying that as far as I'm concerned, it would completely undermine the core business of an online game and go against the very reason of choosing to develop an MMO over a single-player RPG.

Knowledge

Maybe there can just be another game called Elder Scrolls Offline.

rustic_potato

You want an offline MMO? LOL. The amount of resources that would have to be invested in the development of such a feature would make it not worth it and I would rather have ZOS not spend resources anywhere other than fixing the game and releasing new content rather than waste dev resources for some special snowflakes.

Bhaal5

Isnt offline mode call "skyrim"? This is a mmo, sold as a mmo, please leave the solo [snip] to solo games, bethedsa has a whole range of "offline" elder scrolls games.

[Edited for bypassing the profanity filter]

mocap

they could add some kind of an old Veteran "hide all newbies" mode, so you can see only CP or even CP 160+ players. Or even solo mode like in Path of Exile. But not offline, too much client-server data transfers. Impossible.

TheTwistedRune

Rhoric wrote: »

This is a MMO therefor there is no offline mode and never can be. In my 17 years of MMO gaming I have never heard of a MMO having a offline mode.

LOL. So I am guessing that you and none of your 13 agrees have heard of ULTIMA Shroud of the Avatar then.......

Imhotep71

Um Skyrim? This is an MMO so no there does not need to be an offline mode