-Originally Posted 2015-03-18 By Agent 5hadow-
Today was the first full day of Tamriel Unlimited going live. Tamriel Unlimited is of course the conversion of Elder Scrolls Online to the new hybrid free to play model for this 1 year old MMO. Zenimax Online Studios has had some major updates and changes to ESO over the last year, many of which have been feedback from the community, and has improved the game from its rough launch. They just released update 1.6 this month to prepare for the release of Tamriel Unlimited.
According to superdata, ESO has around 1.2 million active players. They have a steady sub base of 772,000 subs. So according to those numbers ESO has been successful but not the juggernaut that WOW or EQ has been in the past or present. These numbers were tallied before ESO’s launch on Valve’s Steam Network. Those are also based on physical copy sales and mathy thingy stuff that help smart people guess at digital sales since for some reason no one likes to track digital copies accurately.
I personally have been a subscriber since day 1. I really enjoyed ESO from launch and I did have some gripes, like the auto aiming and lack of range for my ranger and lack of a party system that keeps people together for quests and conversations (which Bioware nailed in Star Wars, the Old Republic, aka SWTOR), but overall I loved the way they transferred, as much as they could, the feeling of the Elder Scrolls games into an MMO space. Granted because of the fact it’s an MMO they had to make sacrifices like the auto aiming bows and spells. The most recent patch added the new bounty and justice systems which make it more like the past games in the series where you can kill who you want and rob who you want but if caught can cause major problems. They eventually want to add a player bounty system so players can hunt player criminals down.
I personally have been a subscriber since day 1. I really enjoyed ESO from launch and I did have some gripes, like the auto aiming and lack of range for my ranger and lack of a party system that keeps people together for quests and conversations (which Bioware nailed in Star Wars, the Old Republic, aka SWTOR), but overall I loved the way they transferred, as much as they could, the feeling of the Elder Scrolls games into an MMO space. Granted because of the fact it’s an MMO they had to make sacrifices like the auto aiming bows and spells. The most recent patch added the new bounty and justice systems which make it more like the past games in the series where you can kill who you want and rob who you want but if caught can cause major problems. They eventually want to add a player bounty system so players can hunt player criminals down.
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Today I went in to see what the new crown store was like. They do have the vanity stuff like a freaking awesome black tiger that is as big as a horse that will follow you around but not attack. They have some new mounts like a two legged lizard, called guar in the game, and a fire horse that is black with flames coming off his eyes and feet. They did have some consumables which could help out early players but overall nothing that could be considered pay to win. I do think this is a smart move on Zenimax Online Studios part. If they can’t pull the subs they need to keep the game afloat then this is the way to do it. SWTOR found greater success after going F2P in 2012 than during its sub base. They are the 4th highest revenue earning MMO on the market right now according to Engadget last year. So going free to play isn’t really a bad thing. We also have the console launch to look forward to in June. See you in Tamriel Agents!
