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The Elder Scrolls Online goes free to play


Wiesty
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http://www.pcgamer.com/the-elder-scrolls-online-drops-subscription/

Anyone else play or have played this game? I subscribed from day 1 of launch, but found myself unsubscribed after a few months. It was hard to justify 15 bones a month for a lacklustre game. Don't get me wrong, the game has A LOT of plus's, but too many negatives I think. I recently resubscribed for a month to check it out again and it seemed like the player population had already died....This is a bit bittersweet as I was both fearing and wishing for free to play. Hopefully this revitalises the game and doesn't turn it into just another "F2P MMO" like the millions of other titles that exist out there.

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The game has recieved a considerable amount of new content and features since it launched last year. Apart from the usual stuff like high level zones and dungeons, there's also the the armor dye system. Basically every gear piece you wear (apart from weapons) has 3 different color slots you can customize to your choosing. You earn new colors to use via all sorts of achievements in the game.

Patch 1.6 will probably hit some time next month and includes a lot of new stuff. For instance the crime and justice system will be implemented allowing you to steal from or murder NPCs which will work just like the single player games with guards and all. There's a new skill line with abilities and passives related to this system as well. It will all be expanded upon in the future allowing players to also be guards and hunt down criminal players so there's a social PvP element to it as well.

Apart from that there's also the champion system which is a new separate form of progression similar to the perk points in Skyrim. Any champion points you earn in the game will be account-wide so you can spend them on any character you wish no matter their level. They're also overhauling all the character animations and making general improvements to how the combat works and feels. There's more stuff slated beyond 1.6 like a spellcrafting system like you had in Morrowind and Oblivion. They showed some of how this is planned to work in QuakeCon last year.

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It's not free to play. The client still costs money. It's the subscription fee that's going away. This is replaced by either subscribing for access to any and all upcoming DLC content, or choosing a one time upfront payment for separate DLC packs.

THIS. This is what pulls me back from any actual MMORPG. I used to love when you can just download the game and play without TOO MUCH pay 2 win.

IMHO Ultima Online is still the best MMO. It's engine is just so outdated, but its mechanics and game play were so great. Completely open world, custom player housing, etc. It was every man for themselves and it worked so well. That is of course until EA ruined it...

+1 To this good sir.

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  • 2 weeks later...

It's a decent enough and very competent game and reviews largely reflected that. The vitrol largely comes from the type of people who already made up their minds from the start. Performance wise the game seems to have sustained a couple of hundred thousand players and has evidently fared considerably better than Wildstar which had a lot less going against it.

They probably knew the subscription model wasn't gonna last before the game was finished. These kinds of things take years to create. The studio and project were started in 2007 when the MMO market looked very different, and you don't just fundamentally change something like that on a dime. Instead of just delaying it further to retool the business model they probably just went with the initial subscription plan for the first year to captialize as much as they can from the diehards willing to pay monthly first.

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