hoboville

To be honest, an MMO would have to compete in a large, large market. This would be a mistake, especially with World of Warcraft being so dominant. Likewise, an MMO would void any possibility of custom player made content that has become a staple of both Oblivion and Morrowind. Additionally, the fun "exploits" and general silly ways of being able to level would not be very enjoyable in an MMO, or would be tuned in such a way that leveling would be difficult. Being able to master all skills would be impossible, and the game would *have* to "broken down" (I mean that in both senses of the phrase) to the typical class-based system. The heroic effect of Elder Scrolls (i.e. I'm Nerevar returned, foo! the savior of Cyrodill stands before you, bubba!) would be lost if a player were just another "face in the crowd". There are alternative frameworks for multiplayer gaming that ought to be considered! Diablo II maintained a "realm" based psuedo-MMO where your character was only allowed to play the base content (hosted by The Company), but was mostly hack-free. There was an Open multiplayer where players could do whatever they wanted, and there was single player where you could do as you wished. Neverwinter Nights and Dungeon Seige allowed for Multiplayer with the addition of custom content and game hosting provided by The Company, but with players in charge (I like this model the best). The players may have even hosted the games themselves, but I'm not sure. I would think that leaving the mutiplayer in the hands of the players, but with anti-hack / cheat controls (Neverwinter had an "allow only legitimate characters" function). There might be some problems with players' custom items not transfering to other servers, especially where textures and models are concerned. This might lead to the "Garry's Mod" effect where many different servers use many different mods which the players have access to, in addition to the base content. Likewise, players would need certain mods to join some games...a potential headache... Most importantly though, the Elder Scrolls game is about the Hero , and his journey from mere prisoner to Lord and Champion, it also focuses on letting the player do what he wants. Invariably, any MMO would destroy this idea and lead to a linear game.