The Elder Scrolls Online - How Factions and PVP will work

Hey folks,

I stumbled upon this merry little >article< over on the Elder Scrolls Online page. Interesting. Very interesting.

I have been thinking for a while - well, when I say me I mean we, and by we I mean my wife and I... I digress. We have been thinking for a while about how TESO will work with regards to factions. My thoughts lay in the friction between the Aldmeri Dominion and The Empire, since there is a running theme across TES games.

I am 1/3 to a half right... I decided to chase this up.

Conveniently, since I last looked around for such information - there is a wiki page for it >here<. As you can see, Tamriel has been split into 3 factions, with Cyrodil behaving as a neutral party. The Dagerfall Covenant that will comprise of Breton's Orc's and Redguard, the Ebonheart Pact that will consist of the Argonians, Dunmer and Nords and the Aldmeri Domiion that will consist of the rest of the elves and some kittycats. (Altme, Bosmer and Khajit.)

If there is a particular race you wish to play, it appears you need to go pick a faction. I predict a bias weighted towards the Ebonheart Pact considering the success of Skyrim, but I digress.

The Imperials are not playable, although I suspect that will be something for an expansion to focus on (cunning!) but they are likely to act as quest givers and peace keepers for the most part.

Anyway, read the article linked to the TESO page - I wont go over all the points here, but I will say this: Siege engines, Castle Sieges and Stealth... Oh my!

Courtesy of Pixelvault.Tk

Reminds me of an old Elder Scrolls Joke I came up with... Mer-Kin... Elf folk... Merkins (Not safe for work)... Pubic wigs... Hahahahaha.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

With this game looming over our heads and the hype surrounding it, I thought I would look into it a bit more. I have loved TES games since Morrowind first came out - back then I didn't even have a computer or graphics card powerful enough to run the game beyond the most basic effects.

On the site - http://www.elderscrolls.com/ - there has been a new video put up since I was last on there - a making of clip, that will be included in a making of DVD in the collectors edition.

Ultimate dragon fighting game
Ultimate warrior game
Ultimate mage game
Ultimate thief game
Ultimate assassin game.

Yep - they have a lot of ground to cover! I thought they done quite well in Oblivion. I am hoping that the engine etc has been knocked up a notch since then, since looking at Oblivion now it looks sadly dated. The good news is that from the clips - it does look like it has changed! Maybe not as much as I was hoping for, but maybe having a new computer Ill be able to run everything to its full potential anyway ^.^

Im looking forward to being able to just explore a huge open game world again. How thorough should I be? Who knows! I would like to finish this one - since I didn't actually finish Morrowind. I think I got half-way up the mountain at the end then formated my PC or something... fun times!

I shall certainly detail in here what I get up to in it anyway, once I get round to buying it...

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - articles

Christian Heilmann (@codepo8 on twitter) who works at Mozilla here in the UK, and who is a huge advocate of HTML5 in web development linked the updated Elder Scrolls website as being written in HTML 5, so I went for a browse. I have been a huge fan of the Elder Scrolls series ever since I stumbled across Morrowind back in  2002, so I took a long look at the eyecandy provided on this site - and actually found a number of very interesting articles - articles that are very interesting if you are interested in game development.

Having a browse on the TES site, the following articles relating to the development of TES IV, Oblivion caught my eye:

Game Audio. Focusing on audio immersion and voice acting.
Graphics Design in-game. Deceptively titled, this article goes into details of how they generate in-game terrain, scenery and sprites.

Im looking forward to Skyrim :) - though i have a backlog of games to work on. Dragon Age 2 and The Witcher 2 being the most prevalent. But what can I say. Vikings v Dragons sounds like its gonna be AwesomeSauce!

-V