People have been asking if there is ever going to be a multi-player component to the Elder Scrolls series for years. Back in Morrowind there was a dude you could find who would even tell you lies about it if you were intrepid enough to find him. It seemed like all this desire fell on deaf ears, however, as time after time there was no multi-player. Well Bethesda wasn’t just ignoring your dreams so they could sleep soundly on a pillow made of your tears. For the past five years Zenimax online has been working on an Elder Scrolls MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) that looks like it is going to deliver all the goods people have been clamoring for.

While I have always been content with the massive amount of content the series offers and have had very little desire to have other people mess it all up for me, you have to admit that the move is kind of a no-brainer. The structure and content of the series feel a lot like MMORPGs anyway as you have tons on interaction, story and a whole world in which to do whatever you want. From what I saw in the 30 minute theater demo of the game, it looks like Zenimax has used this natural inclination to their advantage to deliver an online experience that is fairly similar to the single player games.

The similarity begins with the look and feel of the world. The environments, architecture, character design, armor design, weapons, monsters, and pretty much everything else looks the way they did in the previous games. Luckily, it looks like the Skyrim polish so it doesn’t look muddled like Morrowind and characters don’t look like they have been kicked in the face by a horse like in Oblivion. The visual aesthetics are so series consistent that it could be confused with someone playing in third person mode to  a casual observer. Unlike the third person view from the single player games, the third person here (the only option) actually looks like a person walking over the environment rather than someone with waddling legs floating. I want to make clear, I deeply love the Elder Scrolls Series but come on, we are at game five and we can’t make this look better? Anyway, Elder Scrolls Online gets it right and the character runs around the environment like he or she is actually meant to be there.

Another similarity, and this is a big deal, is the story. Storytelling in Elder Scrolls is arguably the most important aspect of the game. The exploration, combat and collecting would mean much less if it didn’t tie into a compelling story. That isn’t to say that the investment has to be the main storyline either. Faction and side quests each have their own stories and interacting with characters throughout the world will open up a metric ton of storytelling. The history and lore of the games is massive to a point of intimidation that would turn new players off if it weren’t implemented so well (especially in Skyrim where you are give more direction than, say, Morrowind where you just had to sort it out yourself) and it looks like those aspects of the game will be just as rich in ES:O.

According to the team members who spoke at E3, the team as a whole are big fans of the lore of the Elder Scrolls and have used their enthusiasm and knowledge of it to craft a story that fits in with the rest of the series and keeps the player invested. The main quest takes place 1000 years before the events in Skyrim and involves your character’s soul being stolen by Deadric Price Morag Bol (who gives you a really sweet mace in Skyrim if you don’t mind beating a decent man to death with it first) and follows your quest to get your soul back. This also allows for why you can get resurrected all the time.

The faction set up follows lore and story as well. The world is broken up according to the factions holding it and that sometimes makes strange bedfellows as races that might not get along so well have to work together out of geographic necessity. The breakdown of factions is like this: Ebonheart Pact is made up of Nords, Dark Elves and Argonians. The Daggerfell covenant is Bretons, Redguards and Orcs. The Aldmeri Dominion are High Elves, Wood Elves and Khajiit. These factions are all vying for the throne of the Emperor of Tamriel.

How this is achieved from a game play standpoint is up to the player. If the player wants to go through this thing like a single player Elder Scrolls game then that is a viable option. If you want to play with others then that is wide open for you as well. The game will support 200 player pvp as well as a variety of different sort of dungeons. These function a lot like they do in the single player series as a dwarven ruin is going to have unique strategies, design and enemies over a daedric temple or some other sort of dungeon. These are also broken down into dungeons that a single player can tackle all the way through to larger raid style dungeons. The dungeons are also not so class centric as you won’t necessarily need to have the sort of delineated roles that WoW demands. So if you go into the dungeon without enough tanks or healers you aren’t going to run into as much of an issue as you would in another game.

Keeping in the spirit of an open world with lots of choice, the quest structure is dynamic as well with events that will pop up on the map and side quests that emerge and can boost main quest lines. The example they showed in the demo found the player trying to deal with a ghost problem plaguing a village with a werewolf really screwing things up for everyone. You have to figure out how to stop it and you can do that straight forward or you can do a sidequest that takes you back in time to find out how to kill the werewolf. In the past you have the option to change events and if you do, it affects the present in a positive way that makes everything much easier to deal with as well as changing the look of the environment. The team assured us that this is a persistent theme through out the game where choice matters and things done in the game have meaning beyond that one quest or quest line.

The quests themselves are not just drops in the bucket and, much like in the single player game, they branch and expand as you work on them. The team said an average quest length is between 30 and 45 minutes but that varies depending on what the particular plot or content is for that quest.

From a technical standpoint, the combat is a bit different from the single player series by nature of the medium with the one to one attacks of the first person single player games is a bit challenging for latency but it eschews the World of Warcraft standard of dialing moves and dealing with cool down phases.  There are short cut buttons that look a lot like what you would find in WoW but they are not for just activating as the game follows an active/reactive model. You block when you hit block and can charge your weapons for stronger attacks. Additionally, the UI has been cleaned up to keep health, magicka and stamina bars out of the way until you need to see them to add to the visceral feel of combat. The game also gives you finesse which builds up the better you do in fights and ultimately gives the player combat bonuses. This helps add some depth to the combat above and beyond the strategies you get in standard MMOs.

As an Elder Scrolls fan it is almost impossible not to get excited not because this is an MMORPG but just because it is more Elder Scrolls content. It remains to be seen if the final game delivers on the promises made but honestly I have yet to be disappointed by the series so I am very hopeful. The fact that the team said the game will run on five year old computers as well as laptops makes me even more giddy as my laptop typically laughs at me when I try to play games on it. The game will be releasing in 2o13 on PC and Mac.