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Since opening its doors in August of 2007, we haven’t been able to say much about happenings at ZeniMax Online Studios – until today. Announced just minutes ago, Game Informer’s June 2012 cover story is… The Elder Scrolls Online!

The magazine will be available to subscribers early next week and should arrive at GameStop stores shortly after that. You’ll also want to keep your eyes on GameInformer.com/ElderScrollsOnline. Today they put up the magazine cover, and you can expect more updates throughout the month.

To keep up on the latest news for the game, check out our official Twitter and Facebook accounts for the game, and also visit the game’s discussion forums.



Long rumored and much anticipated, The Elder Scrolls Online is finally being unveiled in the June issue of Game Informer. In this month's cover story we journey across the entire land of Tamriel, from Elsweyr to Skyrim and everywhere in between.

Developed by the team at Zenimax Online Studios, The Elder Scrolls Online merges the unmatched exploration of rich worlds that the franchise is known for with the scale and social aspects of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Players will discover an entirely new chapter of Elder Scrolls history in this ambitious world, set a millennium* before the events of Skyrim as the daedric prince Molag Bal tries to pull all of Tamriel into his demonic realm.

"It will be extremely rewarding finally to unveil what we have been developing the last several years," said game director and MMO veteran Matt Firor, whose previous work includes Mythic's well-received Dark Age of Camelot. "The entire team is committed to creating the best MMO ever made – and one that is worthy of The Elder Scrolls franchise."

An in-depth look at everything from solo questing to public dungeons awaits in our enormous June cover story – as well as a peek at the player-driven PvP conflict that pits the three player factions against each other in open-world warfare over the province of Cyrodiil and the Emperor's throne itself.

Come back tomorrow morning for a brief teaser trailer from Zenimax Online and Bethesda Softworks, and later on in the afternoon for the first screenshot of the game. Over the course of the month, be sure to visit our Elder Scrolls Online hub, which will feature new exclusive content multiple times each week. You'll meet the three player factions, see video interviews with the creative leads, and much more.

The Elder Scrolls Online is scheduled to come out in 2013 for both PC and Macintosh.

Click the images below for the full-size renderings of the cover, and continue on to find out what other surprises are in the issue and when it will arrive:





The Elder Scrolls Online
First Screen And Details On Elders Scrolls Online



One picture may be worth a thousand words, but even that isn’t enough to convey the breadth of ZeniMax’s new MMO.

Yesterday you got a glimpse of Game Informer’s June cover story, Elder Scrolls Online. Today, we give you an exclusive first look at what the game will look like in action.

What’s going on here?
In this image, you can see a couple player characters battling some Storm Atronachs. Storm Atronach are a species of daedra (divine creatures that come from magical dimensions) that are constructed from stone and held together by magic. The most powerful of all the atronachs, Storm Atronach are immune to normal weapons and shock attacks, are resistant to poisons, and can reflect spells back at their caster.

Is that all?
Behind the battle is a series of daedric ruins. These great towers were built long ago by an ancient race of people, but they’re not the only landmarks players will discover throughout their journey. As players travel through Skyrim, Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and the rest of Tamriel they will encounter various dwarven ruins, ancient nordic tombs, decayed dwemer buildings, and many other ancient locales, some of which players may have discovered in previous Elder Scrolls games.

I still want more!
We know you do, but that’s all for today. If you missed it, Elder Scrolls Online’s first teaser trailer released earlier today, and check back next week for more exclusive Elder Scrolls content.

The Challenge Of Elder Scrolls Online: An Interview With The Creative Director

Paul Sage is working on his dream project. As a rabid fan of the Elder Scrolls series, Paul finally has a chance to help craft the land of Tamriel. The only downside is that every other fan of the series is eager to critique his work. Game Informer's Adam Biessener sat down with Paul Sage to talk about his past, how he plans to convert the Elder Scrolls that everybody knows and loves into an MMO, and how he plans on luring fans of the series into the competitive world of player versus player. To learn more about Paul's past MMO experience and how he got his start at Origin Systems working on the Ultima franchise, check out our bonus video here.

The Origins Of The Elder Scrolls Online

Matt Firor has spent twenty years in the game industry thinking about and creating online games. Once a leading voice at Mythic Entertainment and a producer on the beloved MMO Dark Age of Camelot, Firor left that studio and began the monumental task of taking The Elder Scrolls series online. With Oblivion as a rough starting point, there were years of head-scratching and team-building. Check out the video below to learn how the game began, Bethesda Game Studio's and Todd Howard's involvement, and how the team is attempting to the make the MMO a comfortable transition for fans of the series.



Zenimax Online faces the difficult task of appeasing several different sets of expectations from gamers who come from different games and genres. Read on for how The Elder Scrolls Online aims to appeal to several different fanbases.

~The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim~

Seeing more of the world. Haven’t you ever been curious what the Argonian homeland looks like, or what riding through Daggerfall in a game with a modern graphics engine would look like? ESO includes sections of every province in Tamriel, so you can explore many of the locations you’ve only read about in books until now.
Lore. The Elder Scrolls franchise has an enormous body of backstory, and ESO is blowing it out even further. Zenimax Online is working hand-in-hand with the loremasters at Bethesda Game Studios to flesh out Tamriel’s Second Era, so lore nuts should have plenty to digest.
Finding adventure wherever you wander. Isn’t that what Elder Scrolls is all about? The Mage Guild’s gameplay revolves around finding ancient texts and bits of lore and runs throughout the entire game. Unmarked dungeons, ruins, caves, and other adventure-filled areas dot the landscape, so wandering through the Black Marsh isn’t a matter of grinding giant bugs for experience as it is a hunt for lost artifacts of ancient Argonian civilization, even though no NPC has given you a specific task to do so.
Touchstones. Daedric princes, birthsigns, guilds, and many more elements that players strongly associate with the franchise are all integral parts of the game. Some things, like player housing, aren’t making the transition to an MMO because of the constraints inherent to an online game, but Zenimax Online is including everything that makes sense.

~World of Warcraft~

Working with other players. While WoW’s world design and game rules expect you to fly solo outside of designated elite quests and group dungeons, Zenimax Online is going out of its way to make sure helping someone else out always benefits everyone. For instance, there’s no “tagging” and so helping a random stranger kill a monster results in both of you getting full credit.
That old BRD feeling. Blackrock Depths is often mentioned as a favorite dungeon of old-school WoW players for the sense of exploring a huge, hostile city instead of fighting through a series of corridors. ESO’s public dungeons, unless Zenimax Online badly botches the design, should recreate some of what made BRD special...but hopefully without the painful process of finding a group that wants to accomplish the same subset of goals that you’re looking to do.
Non-instanced PvP warfare. Remember the good old days of open warfare in the Hillsbrad Foothills as huge mobs of players fought over Tarren Mill and Southshore? Expand that to the entire province of Cyrodiil. Take out the server-crashing lag, since the engine can handle up to 200 players onscreen and Zenimax Online has still-under-wraps plans to divert excess population. Forget about lowbie ganking, since everyone’s stats are automatically boosted to level-cap status in Cyrodiil. Oh, and there are things to fight over besides murdering helpless questgivers. Like, for instance, keeps whose walls you can bash down with trebuchets.
Familiar but innovative combat. ESO has lock-on targeting and a hotbar, but it shakes up quite a bit within that framework. Limiting the number of available skills to a handful (currently six, but that number could change) but making each ability awesome sounds great. The addition of stamina for blocking, sprinting, interrupting, and disable-breaking should dramatically increase the moment-to-moment depth of combat.

~Star Wars: The Old Republic~

More fully voiced story. Does anyone want to go back to walls of text after Bioware showed the world how it’s done with Star Wars’ dialogue and story? No, no we do not. And we won’t have to in order to play ESO with its full voice acting.
Working with other players (see WoW entry, above). Outside of flashpoints, cooperating with other players in SW:TOR is extremely limited in scope. That hopefully won’t be the case in ESO.
Dynamic, large-group combat. SW:TOR did a great job of throwing different types of encounters at players even in its solo content, and ESO is following suit. The baseline solo encounter design has players taking on three enemies at a time, and they work together to bring you down by combining skills like lighting oil patches on fire.

~Rift~

Public content. Rifts are amazing, and Zenimax Online hopes to recreate the sense of working together with random strangers with the Fighters Guild content (destroying Molag Bal’s randomly appearing dark anchors) as well as public dungeons.
Polish and technical competence. Remember when Rift came out, and we were all blown away at how a team of veteran developers with a whole lot of money behind them could put out an MMO that was solid at launch? Well, ESO has a similar situation – game director Matt Firor was heavily involved with Dark Age of Camelot, creative director Paul Sage worked on Ultima Online among others, and team members at Zenimax Online across all disciplines can boast similar credentials. Anything less than a Rift-like level of stability and polish at launch will be a huge disappointment for ESO.

These are just a few elements of The Elder Scrolls Online that should appeal to the fanbases of various games. Fans of the franchise have a lot of questions yet to be answered, like how the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood will work in an MMO setting and how Zenimax Online is going to approximate the rich interactions with objects in the world that we’ve gotten used to since Morrowind. Nonetheless, writing off ESO as “just another MMO” or “WoW with daedra” is doing this ambitious project a grave disservice.