what happened to multiplayer?

[Mexicutioner]

I remember hearing along time ago that they were going for a server based multiplayer when making this game? What happened to that?

[Micknator]

There were never talks about multiplayer I believe.

[Lynx]

donotwant.jpg

Would totally ruin Elder Scrolls.

[ANTH]

I don't really want to be in a major discussion about no multi player because I know there isnt going to be one, but I so wish it was at least a two player co-op.

Doubling creatures health and syncing drops, quest etc is so hard for them? I have never and probably will never understand why its never implemented.

[Micknator]

I don't really want to be in a major discussion about no multi player because I know there isnt going to be one, but I so wish it was at least a two player co-op.

Doubling creatures health and syncing drops, quest etc is so hard for them? I have never and probably will never understand why its never implemented.

A la Hunted: The Demon's Forge?

[ANTH]

A la Hunted: The Demon's Forge?

What about it?

[Baresark]

I am personally glad there is no MP. They create these whole huge fascinating worlds, and having other players would just completely destroy my immersion into the game world. These games have historically been uber immersive. I would say that they would be betraying the audience of people who have previously purchased and loved the previous ES games.

[MrBigglesworth8]

I dont think Dragonpwner12 trying to sell me stuff would improve my TES experience to be honest.

[shibby191]

There was never going to be multiplayer and it was never even a thought. Elders Scrolls games are single player massive 300+ hour games. Look elsewhere for the hundreds of MP games, leave our rare SP games alone. :)

[rupok2]

please keep that mp bull♥♥♥♥ out of games like this, mp development ruins sp or conflicts with how good an sp an be. go play other mp or coop games if u want that.

[ClayMeow]

There have been rumors of a Bethesda MMO, but MP was never planned for Skyrim, maybe you got the two mixed up.

[MadMage86]

Honestly, the only reason I never really played Oblivion much was the lack of multiplayer co-op.

I'm actually really disappointed to see they have no plans for multiplayer.

[Ticladesign]

There was a topic about Multiplayer in the Official Skyrim forums a while ago.

Off course immediately populated by the Multiplayer hateclub that pretty much accused all the MP fans of being MMO low-lifes, and so on. Was a rather boring topic, as i've seen this spectacle before on the official Dragon Age forums.

Personally i'm a Neverwinter Nights Multiplayer fan, and still see that approach to Multiplayer (co-op, and host your own modules on your own decitated server) to be the best for a RPG. As opposed to the Industry's common approach to make a MMO (moneymilking) out of every game that has Multiplayer.

NWN might have been the end of an era (as it now seems) and therefore I sadly have to say

It doesnt seem like there's a Multiplayer RPG anymore without "MMO" on the front of it.

Bethesda officially stated in that forum thread they would not do Multiplayer so they could give the best possible Singleplayer experience. Which.. is a copy-paste response to what Bioware said on the Dragon Age forums.

C'est la vie. But it would have been fun. Neverwinter Nights showed it can be alot of fun. Where have those days gone?

[captain_video]

Neverwinter Nights showed it can be alot of fun. Where have those days gone?

They haven't gone anywhere. A lot of people still play NWN.

[Atomic Hamster]

God can you imagine? Call of Elder Scrolls...

Unlocking things all over the place and bunny hopping Khajit. No, no, no and no!

[Micknator]

What about it?

Hunted has 2-player co-op if I'm not mistaken. I haven't played it (the reviews weren't too good, so I skipped it), but it's from what I've heard/seen.

[sebe]

if it did have an option of MP you have an option of NOT playing MP.. just because it's there no one if forcing you to play online. it would be a good feature to have to extend playability..

it isn't like Beth games have great single player story anyway, they're terrible at it..

[samfisherand]

There is a mod though for Oblivion that enabled multiplayer... Or was that Vice City.

[Siannah]

if it did have an option of MP you have an option of NOT playing MP.. just because it's there no one if forcing you to play online. it would be a good feature to have to extend playability..

There's plenty of MP games out there, but pure singleplayer games dying out more and more. Please be so gentle to look somewhere else for your MP needs.

No, nobody's forcing me to play MP. But more publishers feel like to force me online just to play singleplayer, for the integrity of their MP part - see Blizzard's Diablo 3.
Also MP brings a lot more on the table where you can possible botch a game - char or item balance, griefing, cheating, netcode...

Last but not least - the single most important thing why no MP: it botches modding as all sides would have to have the same mods installed / activated.
And without a shadow of a doubt modding was and is it, what extended playability for Morrowind and Oblivion. No MP would have achieved, what modding did for the TES games.

[Butr0sButr0s]

I'd like to see mutiplayer, but in the form of a community created MOD, not something officially created by Bethesda. That way if a couple friends just want to run around and try it out the option is there, but you don't have to worry about programming staff being taken away from single player, nor balance/onlinealways issues.

[ClayMeow]

God can you imagine? Call of Elder Scrolls...

Unlocking things all over the place and bunny hopping Khajit. No, no, no and no!Unlocking things and bunny hopping Khajits? We already had that - it's called Morrowind and Oblivion. 90% of people hopped around to boost their jump skill.

Hunted has 2-player co-op if I'm not mistaken. I haven't played it (the reviews weren't too good, so I skipped it), but it's from what I've heard/seen.From what I've read, Hunted is a very bad example of what should be done in the TES series. Basically, the game was built around co-op and pretty much sucks as a SP game.

if it did have an option of MP you have an option of NOT playing MP.. just because it's there no one if forcing you to play online. it would be a good feature to have to extend playability..

it isn't like Beth games have great single player story anyway, they're terrible at it..MP would do little to extend playability. You already have 100+ hours in the TES games if you want, and then the modding extends that further. If extending playability is your argument in favor of MP, then you have none.

That being said, I wouldn't be opposed to voluntarily co-op, but I understand the hatred toward it. In order for co-op to be done right, Bethesda would have to focus efforts on that, taking away its efforts from full game. You can't simply have "ask a friend to join you whenever you want" because that would just suck. You'd have to increase the number of enemies, probably increase their HP, figure out how you want to handle dialog/questing choices. It's not so simple to just say "add it". When devs act that way, that's when games fail.

[ANTH]

Hunted has 2-player co-op if I'm not mistaken. I haven't played it (the reviews weren't too good, so I skipped it), but it's from what I've heard/seen.

Yeah ive played it, not a bad game not a good game. Just don't see what its got to do with this, the games are not even alike.

I mean if that was the cause I will just start naming random great co-op games left for dead, double dragon, borderlands etc etc


Last but not least - the single most important thing why no MP: it botches modding as all sides would have to have the same mods installed / activated.

Operation flashpoint, Armed assault series again nothing like Morrowind series but a really good example of co-op play with mods. In fact I would say it makes the games lifespan a hell of a lot better.

[stupreme]

The only thing that would be cool in skyrim(concerning multiplayer) is if you could invite one of your friends to join in the world and take over a character,just to tag along..maybe help out in a fight or go hunting together, as long as they could not have any impact on the game quests,i think that would be ok...I think bioware should do this in me3 as well..so you could invite a friend to take over garus or wrex maybe,,that would be cool..

[Siannah]

Operation flashpoint, Armed assault series again nothing like Morrowind series but a really good example of co-op play with mods. In fact I would say it makes the games lifespan a hell of a lot better.

Possible, can't compare as I don't own OF.
However, seeing as there are over 23k mods for Oblivion available and each month more new mods come out for it then for most other new games (with F3 and F:NV being the exception) - it simply isn't needed. It's far from dead.

And again, you don't just slap on MP to a game, even less to one with so much different content / possible approaches / modding options / classes like that. You would have to take care of possible balancing / netcode / questing / story / modding / NPC dialog problems - this isn't a small or simple feat you keep asking for.

... and yet again: we don't need to MP or MMO every freakin' game.

[Flashmason]

The elder scrolls series - thank god - will never have multiplayer. There are many other games for that, and to be honest, even the best multiplayer games are very watered down as a result. With all the content in the elder scrolls its best kept as a single player because thats what the large majority of the fans and creators want with it

[Omocho]

Skyrim would have some fantastic multiplayer. I don't see why -anyone- would be so against a feature you could completely ignore. You're just an idiot if you actually would hate for it to be included when you don't have to use it. Would be fun as hell to amp up the difficulty and take on a dragon or a tough ♥♥♥ quest with a few buddies.

But sadly, these games will never be blessed with multiplayer. Forever alone, and all that.

This thread makes me think most of Skyrim's playerbase has no friends.
That's kind of depressing.

[shibby191]

Skyrim would have some fantastic multiplayer. I don't see why -anyone- would be so against a feature you could completely ignore. You're just an idiot if you actually would hate for it to be included when you don't have to use it. Would be fun as hell to amp up the difficulty and take on a dragon or a tough ♥♥♥ quest with a few buddies.

But sadly, these games will never be blessed with multiplayer. Forever alone, and all that.

The main reason people are against MP is because it takes away resources to develop a good SP game. There are literaly dozens and dozens of games that are perfect examples of this. MP ruined what could have been a much better game because so much development time is spent on making MP work. Elders Scrolls games have always been a SP work of art. Above someone posted that MP would increase Skyrim's replayability. That is totally false as anyone here can tell you that the core fans of the game play hundreds and hundreds of hours on several playthrus. No MP needed for that.

This thread makes me think most of Skyrim's playerbase has no friends.
That's kind of depressing.

What does having friends have anything to do with gaming? I HATE and I mean HATE MP games for the most part. Like I want to play a game and have some 12 yr old running around yelling at everyone. Plus the fact that very few of my "real life" friends actually game and those that do are into the Xbox shooters which I personally don't enjoy and aren't good at. When I get together with my friends we're actually going out as in to the bar to watch a couple football games. :)

[Ticladesign]

Many of the posts above me are proof of my "end of an era" theory on NWN. It's a game type not being remembered by most forum posters. Whenever Multiplayer (for Skyrim, or Dragon Age) is concerned, we usually get these comments that link it to how MP is in Shooter games ( "and have some 12 yr old running around yelling at everyone" ) while NWN's Multiplayer has proven to be very sucsessfull for the RPG gerne.

The sole reason it's not even mentioned anymore as a valid option for future games marks the end of an era. Many, among myself off course still play it. (but it's either not fitting in today's business models, or the industry has had a good jolt of amnesia)

Given The Elder scroll's history of custom content, it would have been a nice feature - to allow community modules to be possible for MP (that's the NWN approach) But I know it wont happen.

This strange arguement - MP takes resources away from SP, please tell me which games have proven to be failures because of it? I dont think I can remember one.

[Eat_the_Path]

Multiplayer is why we can't have nice things.

[JKflipflop]

Many of the posts above me are proof of my "end of an era" theory on NWN. It's a game type not being remembered by most forum posters. Whenever Multiplayer (for Skyrim, or Dragon Age) is concerned, we usually get these comments that link it to how MP is in Shooter games ( "and have some 12 yr old running around yelling at everyone" ) while NWN's Multiplayer has proven to be very sucsessfull for the RPG gerne.

The sole reason it's not even mentioned anymore as a valid option for future games marks the end of an era. Many, among myself off course still play it. (but it's either not fitting in today's business models, or the industry has had a good jolt of amnesia)

Given The Elder scroll's history of custom content, it would have been a nice feature - to allow community modules to be possible for MP (that's the NWN approach) But I know it wont happen.

This strange arguement - MP takes resources away from SP, please tell me which games have proven to be failures because of it? I dont think I can remember one.

I agree. 2 player Oblivion / Skyrim would be the greatest thing ever. My friends and I are always talking about how we wish we could all bring our characters into the same world. Saint's Row 2's co-op is the perfect example of what I would like to see.

And the whole "it takes too many resources away" argument is total crap. At one point there was an Oblivion Online mod that was created by a single guy. It came out 2 years after the game did. So you're telling me that it would take Bethesda - who have carnal knowledge of the game's source code - such a momumental amount of effort to do this that it would wreck the rest of the game? I think not.

If you don't like it, then don't turn your game to co-op. Play it in your little single player anti-social trogosphere exactly as you would now. For the rest of us that have friends, let us play together. NOT AN MMO. . . just 2 or maybe 4 player co-op at the most.

[Vasir]

That mod you're referring to is really buggy and doesn't work well.
Have you ever programmed a game before? I can tell you have not.

As stated above, they would have to change more than just allowing a socket plugin that will move a character. Coding for multiplayer is A LOT more difficult than a single player game, and Bethesda really shines in the singleplayer programming. I'm not saying a big company would find it too hard but yes it would be a lot harder, and debugging for such radiant and dynamic content would be extremely hard for more than one person. And as we can tell from the previous Bethesda games, debugging probably isn't a strong point...

Really, the only two arguments I see in this thread is "it would take resources away" and "It would not, and this game (insert title here) is proof!" No, that's not proof. Sure, it works for Never Winter Nights (a great game in it's own right) and I believe it would work for Saints row 2, though I've never played it online.

As for the "extending play time", possibly, though unlikely. Not only would every players mods be conflicting (unless they only had access to the mods the server was running) but the game itself will give most people 300 + hours.

Now, I'm not saying multiplayer is a bad idea, it's just not.. ideal, I suppose. If you haven't played Demons Souls for Ps3, I'll explain what I'm talking about.
As you play a level you can see other players ghosts, you can see where they are going if they are close by. You can cross worlds to pvp with a black stone (I think that's the name, anyways.)
I think PVP would work / ghost images, like Demons souls, and leaving messages or being able to talk would be fun, but if it was a server like an MMO it would be terrible unless you changed the core of TES (or at least allow NPC's to respawn). Otherwise, everyone would be dead.

if it was an invite system, then it would just take one wrong invite to screw up your game, which no one would want.

[Baresark]

The Demon's Souls example is prime. That game honestly had an amazing multiplayer model, well, one that is a great foundation anyway.

[alehm]

I remember hearing along time ago that they were going for a server based multiplayer when making this game? What happened to that?

You woke up and then since confused a dream with an actual event in reality.