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You can see how making a massively multiplayer version of a popular single-player role-playing game would look like a no-brainer to a publishing executive. The gameplay will be broadly portable and, if your game series is as long-running and voluble as Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls, the world and the lore have already been mapped and written.The reality is very different, as EA discovered to its incalculable cost with BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic. The single-player storytelling style your audience has come to expect clashes both practically and philosophically with an environment teeming with other players, creating a buzz of dissonance that refuses to go away. Too much effort is expended on things that don't play to the strengths of an MMO, like all-star voice acting casts and plot-heavy quest lines that can't be shared, and the sheer quantity of content needed starts to erode quality. (It's telling that the world's most popular MMORPG is based, not on an RPG at all, but a strategy game, Warcraft: a world of hundreds of tiny warriors scurrying about, little cogs in a grand plan, participators but not protagonists.)
The Elder Scrolls Online suffers from all of these problems and the result is a tepid and dull interpretation of Bethesda's straight-faced fantasy universe, stretched so thin you can see right through it to the cold machine running underneath. It's a shame, because ZeniMax Online Studios, the team put together in 2007 by Bethesda's parent company to make this game, has got a lot of the MMO basics right, if not all. ESO boasts a superb character-building system, impressive networking tech (when it works), solid combat, fun dungeons and player-versus-player warfare, and it at least appears to have plenty of endgame content to keep players hooked and paying its mandatory subscription fee.
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