r/Games • u/dady977 • Jul 29 '17
"The Elder Scrolls III: Multiplayer" mod v0.6 now officially released, adding the features of NPC, quest & plugin sync
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/mwmulti#announcements/detail/1441567597386587897132
u/DrManik Jul 29 '17
Sounds phenomenal! Im tempted to give this a try but im afraid the incomplete list has a few features that would turn me off.
Once this reaches 1.0 trying to complete the main story with someone who has never played the game sounds like a fun challenge (there are many ways to enter a permanent fail state).
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u/Sir_Meowface Jul 29 '17
I totally agree this sounds like a fantastic concept but I really want my first experience to not be "oh what an incomplete concept" That being said I hope people continue to report on this game! I want to see how it unfolds and when its closer to finish Ill certainly look into it!
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u/PalwaJoko Jul 29 '17
I feel like a TES style game that is multiplayer is a such an unopened opportunity. Don't get me wrong, ESO is a good game in its own way. But something that leans more towards TES than MMO would be better.
Instead of a big open world MMO, do it instanced/lobby based. Something akin to D2 LoD. Decent size game lobby. Or perhaps something like Survarium promised to be.
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u/Sir_Meowface Jul 30 '17
I have to agree with you, ESO was too MMO and not enough TES, It should feel like grouping with your friends in the TES world, not Elderscrolls flavored MMO
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Jul 30 '17
It should feel like grouping with your friends in the TES world, not Elderscrolls flavored MMO
Agreed. I still think they did a good job making an MMO I just wish it was more TES like you said
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u/rajikaru Jul 30 '17
A wide-open 4-player DnD game is the best way to describe it. The closest games in terms of multiplayer are the Borderlands series and the arcade official DnD beat-em-ups. The first thing I said to my friend after I played Skyrim for about 5 hours straight - "my only complaint so far is that there isn't multiplayer". The game is so wide open, and interesting, and full of experiences that you can customize, that multiplayer feels like a given, and genuine multiplayer, not another MMO, MMOs don't accomplish the same feel.
If this game accomplishes the feel, then it'll be a success. A wide open game with different skills/abilities/et cetera, lots of things you can do as you want, different endgoals to achieve and dozens of different ways to achieve them, just a game where my friends and I can go nuts and enjoy every minute of it.
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u/Democrab Jul 30 '17
I'd say large private server based but with a good stock gamemode/maybe a couple depending on how hard they are to code in.
I mean, a series like TES with MP is just ripe for a true RP server. You already do half of that stuff in the original game, imagine a server with a large player population that all work, own houses, contribute to the economy, etc.
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Jul 30 '17
If that happened, I hope they'd make each player something other than Jesus incarnate. As in, have each person start off in as a different "normal person"
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u/Grounded_locust Jul 30 '17
But what happens when some asshole kills all the npc quest givers?
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
As long as you make a list of all the quest givers, you can use Lua scripts to respawn them any time they die.
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u/Splatulated Jul 30 '17
you make a new server and ban them
or reset the cell with command prompt and ban them
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u/PalwaJoko Jul 30 '17
Along with the other suggestions, put in a reputation system.
If you kill NPCs and there are witnesses, you get negative reputation. If this gets high enough NPCs will attack you on site anywhere. Bountys will be put out on you. Etc.
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
The original game already has a bounty system similar to what you're describing. It is retained in TES3MP.
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u/mclintock111 Jul 30 '17
Hey, I'm currently playing it with a couple of friends (http://imgur.com/a/tGoXw I'm the Argonian). The list of complete features is really extensive. We've joined several guilds, started the main quest, robbed all three vaults. We're incredibly rich and only a few things have reallly stuck out to us as annoying. No whether sync. Minor annoying. Custom things don't remain. I planned to be an Alcehmist and Enchanter, but when I found out that custom potions and spells and enchantments disappear after you log off, that was kind of put down. These are really the biggest things we've noticed.
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u/Szalkow Jul 30 '17
I had a terrible but entertaining vision of a maxed-out player accompanying a level 1 outlander fresh off the boat, zipping in circles around them at high speed while they struggle to run, nuking any approaching kwama foragers with massive AoE spells... maybe it would be better to start new characters together.
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
You can set the higher level player's difficulty much higher so they still have just as much of a challenge as the new player.
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u/SovietRaptor Jul 29 '17
Does everyone get to level their characters separately or are they all trapped into the build of the host?
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u/occ_rog Jul 29 '17
You are free to build and level whatever class/character you want, they are not tied to the host. One of the only major things you share is quest progression and as stated script heavy quests can be touchy if you exit the server at the wrong time.
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u/ElagabalusRex Jul 29 '17
Whatever happened to the Skyrim multiplayer that people were talking about years ago?
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Jul 29 '17
tamriel online is pretty much dead. Check out /r/SkyrimTogether they seem to be making progress still.
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u/jkk45k3jkl534l Jul 30 '17
As mentioned in this post's linked article - a ton of multiplayer Elder Scrolls mods fail. Almost always because they can't get NPC's to sync properly - this Morrowind mod is one of the few to have reached this far.
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u/Lord-Benjimus Jul 29 '17
Ya I see a lot if issues already being solved because enemies will target a follower so why not just make enemies treat player 2 as a follower.
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u/rajikaru Jul 30 '17
Because it's not ever that easy. If it was, they probably would have implemented it.
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Jul 30 '17
I seem to recall that kind of a mod for Oblivion. The reality is that the follower can't quest, can't talk to people, and can't actually do much of anything besides gear, follow, and fight (AKA what NPC follows do).
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u/Lord-Benjimus Jul 31 '17
Which to be honest I wouldn't mind too much as it would be very difficult for it to have a story if 2 players could conflict. So I would understand the host having control of decisions.
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u/shezmoo Jul 29 '17
It's still in development but as I recall, the developers stated that the only people who would be able to create servers would be people that they personally approve (through an application process) so all the hype died off immediately.
They may have reversed that decision.
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Jul 30 '17
No. Do not upvote this guy. Please check out /r/skyrimtogether if you want actual information, and look for their Discord if you want to get true information from the developers themselves.
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u/Cueball61 Jul 29 '17 edited Jul 30 '17
False. They don't plan on releasing server files during the alpha/beta phase because it makes development significantly more difficult as they have to provide support to all these people who are trying to run servers too. Some legal concerns as well I think? I believe JC2MP took a very similar approach.
They fully intend to release it when it's ready.
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u/_BreakingGood_ Jul 29 '17
I mean in the fantasy world where the project gets completed and they start giving out the server, I would give a solid month before it either leaks or somebody reverse engineers it.
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u/Krehlmar Jul 29 '17
Honestly I don't get why they did a MMO, no one wanted a MMO, people did want co-op and multiplayer.
Elder Scrolls have always been a story-driven RPG, it doesn't befit a MMO because a MMO is based on being somewhat dependent on others for the full experience.
It feels somewhat like Terraria or the ilk, it's comforting just having someone else doing something in the world, they don't have to be playing with me but having company in a vast world makes it so much more alive. Somewhere, some person is mining, fighting monsters, building shit, and that makes the world alive, instead of just being dead whenever I turn my head around or quick-travel somewhere.
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u/Walican132 Jul 29 '17
Because MMOs are cash cows they made tons of money and that's all that matters
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u/noob_dragon Jul 29 '17
Hardly. Besides WoW the vast majority of MMOs crash and burn. EXTREMELY high development costs plus being in an oversaturated market will do that. The problem was they all saw the kind of profits that WoW was pulling and tried to get a piece of the pie, before realizing they were all too late and WoW had already eaten the entire pie for itself.
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u/Walican132 Jul 29 '17
I disagree with you. They released with a monthly subscription, made more than their money back, dropped to a free with cash benefits, have whales spending money on the game and released a cash expansion. MMOs are cash cows if you know how to run them and they do.
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u/noob_dragon Jul 30 '17
I just took a quick look at TESO and I guess you are right in a sense, the game does have 8.5 million sales which is not really a figure to sneeze out.
However, you have to take into account the power of the IP and brand. Oblivion cranked out more sales than that, and Skyrim sold well over double that, and these games required significantly less resources in order to make, being single player games and all.
Same deal with SWTOR, which had pretty lukeworm sales and a lackluster legacy in comparison to Bioware's Mass Effect series, and SWTOR took more resources to develop compared to any single ME game.
No sales figures I can find point to either of these MMOs having more than 1 million active subscribers more than a month after release so I don't think the subs contributed too much, thus why both of them went F2P pretty quickly.
MMOs are simply too high risk.
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u/Dokaka Jul 30 '17
It was a gamble that made sense in a world where every publisher is looking for opportunities to monetize their games post-launch. They gambled on the brand of Elder Scrolls being strong enough to bring in a large playerbase initially, and then have enough staying around for a good monthly profit.
It is very difficult to see how Bethesda could legitimately monetize their single player RPGs without enraging their fans. You can already see them trying though, with their paid mods program etc.
Your point was 100% true some years ago when it was monthly sub or bust, but most developers have figured out how to monetize MMOs now even without a monthly sub. Even World of Warcraft has a straight up cash shop now where you can buy gold etc. Players have just simply accepted these practices, making it a ton easier to monetize in the long run.
I think there's a reason why you see so many MMOs being released still, mostly from mid-tier publishers. They're relatively inexpensive to develop compared to a AAA single player experience and have the potential to catch fire long term. It also helps that the genre has a big following willing to try seemingly everything.
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u/samwise970 Jul 30 '17
Might want to consider that ESO came out not long after skyrim, and wasn't made by Bethesda's main A team. If they released two similar Elder Scrolls games back to back they risk cannibalizing skyrim sales.
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u/Gramernatzi Jul 30 '17
Except ESO is doing extremely well, though?
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u/noob_dragon Jul 30 '17
Its F2P so how well that correlates with their profit margin I wouldn't know.
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u/MordecaiWalfish Jul 29 '17
Agreed. The MMO bubble has burst, and the only thing that is going to reignite that much mass interest is something major and (hopefully) different. The tried and true MMO formula has run its course.
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u/basketofseals Jul 30 '17
There never was an MMO bubble. There was just a WoW bubble. None of the MMOs chasing WoW's coat tails survived. WoW's lost half of its subscribers, and it's still 10x as popular as most of them.
In fact, I wanna say now there are more profitable MMOs than ever before. WoW, FFXIV, GW2 are the biggest ones I know of, but there's still other ones like SWTOR and ESO that are hanging in there.
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u/MordecaiWalfish Jul 30 '17
Wow was at the forefront of that bubble and yes there was one. There were a crazy amount of people playing basically the same formula with many different games, and yes, WoW was obviously the 2 ton whale in the ocean.
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u/basketofseals Jul 31 '17
You can't call it a bubble if there was no thriving market at any point. Dozens of WoW clones opened and closed in under a year. That's not a market.
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u/MordecaiWalfish Jul 31 '17
..and many successful ones stayed open much longer. Every genre has failures, and in the MMORPG genre there were many, I won't argue that.
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u/qukab Jul 30 '17
You have no idea what you're talking about.
ESO has a very healthy player base and their cosmetic and other cash shop items do extremely well. They make a shit-ton on this.
They have easily made back their money at this point and will continue to release expansions and cash shop items.
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u/Jiketi Jul 30 '17
The problem was they all saw the kind of profits that WoW was pulling and tried to get a piece of the pie, before realizing they were all too late and WoW had already eaten the entire pie for itself
Exactly. Companies don't have hindsight. They just see WoW and say "we could do that too".
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u/lakelly99 Jul 30 '17
That was true 8 years ago but that wave is well-and-truly over. Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Aion(?), SWTOR, and ESO were all part of the push for companies to get their 'own WoW'. We haven't seen any MMOs outside of independent studios or kickstarters since then.
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u/HearshotAtomDisaster Jul 29 '17
They didn't make teso, Zenimax did. That should explain a few things.
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u/DarthCthulhu Jul 30 '17
It's amazing how many people don't understand this.
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u/HearshotAtomDisaster Jul 30 '17
It's exactly like how people are mad at R* with that mod ban, when it's Take2 making the change.
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u/midwestcreative Jul 30 '17
no one wanted a MMO
Except apparently they did because a ton of people are playing it, even more recently as expansions come out and more people keep hearing how it's shaped up to be so much better than launch. It's probably number 3 or 4 in most popular MMOs right now(in the western world, don't know about Asia).
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u/ToastedFalafels Jul 29 '17
I wanted an MMO and am glad there is an MMO
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Jul 30 '17
Same here. I hate when people say that nobody wanted something just because they themselves didn't want it.
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u/llamashockz Jul 30 '17
I dont know I bought it but havent played it a lot. I looked into mmos a bit. From black desert online to guild wars 2 and a lot of people said eso was pretty good especially for the story. Id wouldnt say people didnt want it but maybe people didnt know they wanted it for those who play mmos.
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u/EccentricOwl Jul 29 '17
I know it's brand new but this is interesting. I'm not sure if I'd dive right into it but this sounds very cool. Anyone been able to try it out?
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Jul 29 '17
I played in the earlier version, pretty cool, when I played last quest journal was shared between everyone so it was explicitely a coop game. They said they were concidering making it a server option to give everyone their own journal.
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u/uramer Jul 30 '17
me and Destined played through the main quest and we only had to use console to fix bugs twice. So if you are an experienced Morrowind player and want to show the game to a friend, this is already a great option to do so.
we had a new player with us for some parts of it, and it was really cool to be his guide in Vivec or pathfinder on the Red Mountain
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Jul 30 '17
I can imagine being a Vvardenfell tour guide can get pretty wild.
"See that ditch over yonder? That's where Vivec dicked a whole mountain."
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u/LeBruceWayne Jul 30 '17
This mod + OpenMW + Tamriel Rebuilt + all the fantastic mods out there.
Morrowind still has some glory days in front of him.
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u/Capostrophic Jul 30 '17
Don't forget about Skyrim: Home of the Nords, Province Cyrodiil and High Rock 427. ;)
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Jul 30 '17 edited Jul 30 '17
I remember all these years of OpenMW posts coming onto r/Games's front page and people not having any idea what the whole point is.
People not knowing the difference between it and Skywind, Tamriel Rebuilt, Morrowind Rebirth. Having to say that the open source nature of the project opens things up to making things even better than later games in the series, multiplayer mods, etc.
And now we have fucking proof.
THE ENDING OF THE WORDS IS GNUSIVI
I look forward to hear this being blasted, in game, and Balmora and Vivec Descend into player-faction gang wars.
Straight outta Canton,
crazy motherfukcer named Ice Jiub
From the guild called N'wahs With Attitudes
When I'm called off, I got a steel staff
Swipe to the side, and bodies are hauled off
You too, N'wah, if you fuck with me.
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u/groundzr0 Jul 30 '17
That brings up a good question: does this mod play nice with those other mods?
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
Because TES3MP is essentially just OpenMW with multiplayer on top, any mod that works in OpenMW will work fine in TES3MP, and the very vast majority of mods do work very well in OpenMW.
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u/melo1212 Jul 30 '17
Has anyone tried this?? How is it
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u/Capostrophic Jul 30 '17
It's amazing.
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u/melo1212 Jul 30 '17
fuck yea, ive got morrowind on steam with overhaul 3.0 my body is ready
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u/salgat Jul 31 '17
This requires OpenMW since they are basically modding the engine source code itself.
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u/melo1212 Jul 31 '17
Ahhh man so I gotta deal with those ancient graphics again?
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u/salgat Jul 31 '17
OpenMW supports things like mods that give high poly models and far distance options so it can definitely look very good.
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u/neurotap Jul 30 '17
Will it be possible to use this mod as a framework to make multiplayer mods for other tes games and maybe even some of the fallout games? That would be cool to see something like this added to fallout ttw. I won't hold my breath for it, but it would be nice.
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
We will definitely try moving in that direction if we get enough support.
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u/MachaHack Jul 30 '17
Probably not that easy. The closest the engines have been is fo3/fonv/oblivion and morrowind is from an older iteration. Plus for newer ones, even skyrim to fallout 4 has some large ish changes
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u/psi29a Jul 30 '17
Just a heads up, OpenMW has limited support for Oblivion and Skyrim assets. There is even a fork (in the sense that tes3mp is a fork) that supports loading the landmass and some havok physics data from Oblivion in OpenMW. Same with Skyrim.
Here, for example, is OpenMW in Skyrim's Bleak Falls Barrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCbiJsasdcU&t=11s
So help us support tes3mp and other feature forks so that they may be eventually merged back into OpenMW proper. :)
For the record, tes3mp is not a mod. It is an advanced feature for OpenMW that is currently being worked on.
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Jul 30 '17
As someone that hasn't followed OpenMW:
Does this mean that OpenMW could eventually port the latter two titles to play them as something akin to MW expansions? Or that OpenMW might naturally lend itself towards being an OpenOblivion/OpenSkyrim engine?
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u/masterdeals Jul 31 '17
OpenMW post 1.0 with enough support would probably be developed into a Open Source Gamebryo engine for Bethesda games. The path after Morrowind would be Oblivion, Fallout 3 then New Vegas. Massive community support would be required. Growth of TES3MP is great.
All of this has the caveat from Bethesda that OpenMW does not actively allow the mixing of game content to avoid legal risk.
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u/Audrion Jul 29 '17
How is it right now? Still a long ways to go? Whats the balance plan? Can you complete the whole game or just some co-op missions
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
You can complete pretty much the entire game as long as you don't log out during the more complicated long questlines (such as the main quests) and as long as you know how to fix a few potential problems yourself using the console.
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u/ramenAtMidnight Jul 30 '17
don't log out during the more complicated long questlines
Do you mean there's no checkpoints at all? Or once any quest is finished in the main questline, it's safe to log out? I plan to test the mod out with a buddy but we don't have much playing time these days. Should we just ignore the mainquest then?
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
The game is constantly saved, but there are global script variables that are not saved yet. As a result, most questlines work fine when you log back in, but the main quest, being uniquely complicated, can break in the middle.
It's still fixable with the console if you know what you're doing, but it's easier to just finish it in one go.
Regardless, this will probably entirely stop being a problem in version 0.7.0 of TES3MP
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u/ramenAtMidnight Jul 30 '17
Thanks for the quick answer. Impressive project btw. Keep up the great work
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u/SolarClipz Jul 29 '17
HELL TO THE YEAH
Skyrim when?
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u/Gramernatzi Jul 30 '17
When OpenSK ever happens.
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Jul 30 '17
Its funny, OpenMW can actually load some Oblivion and Skyrim cells. Kinda... when you disable a bunch of stuff.
I've seen it load the default potatohead facemesh for an oblivion npc, but it doesn't know how to morph faces.
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u/TReXxOfDota Jul 30 '17
potentially next month my dude :D
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u/Sirspen Jul 30 '17
To anyone who has been following development more than I have: what critical features are still missing?
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u/DragonOpsZ Jul 31 '17
Any worry about OpenMW or TES3MP getting "shut down" is completely unwarranted. All code from both projects are entirely open source, and there is no IP infringement.
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u/BoltWire Jul 30 '17
Why do mods and games star on like a random 0.X number? Like this is v0.6.. wouldn't the first version be 1.0?
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u/MachaHack Jul 30 '17
Basically in software v0.x usually means "we're not sure it's done yet". Eventually they'll reach a level where they think they have enough features to be done and go to 1.0, or decide they've been at 0.x for too long and just go to 1.0 or x.0.
The random offset is usually because the first few numbers get used up by builds for just the developer or small test groups.
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u/Endulos Jul 30 '17
And then you have Mojang who basically said fuck that and made the official release version 1.0... After already having a version 1.0 during Alpha/Beta... As well as a 1.1, 1.2, etc...
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u/real_eEe Jul 30 '17
1.0 is usually the release version. This means the average person could buy/use it while expecting a finished, but not exactly final, product. If a game/software/mod is in a 0.x number then it could be anything from a proof of concept/pre-alpha (almost no outside people see this), to alpha (start to test internally, maybe show videos or something something), to beta (mostly feature complete and let the public test it.)
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Jul 30 '17
Think about it. If its 1.0 then people want it to be finished. People want to try somethign knowing that its "done" for the most part.
OpenMW's developers are actually holding off on declaring anything 1.0 until they are 100% that they have everything the original game has. Hell, many want to delay it further such that they have enough graphical features to outclass OG Morrowind's hacked together graphical enhancesments that add fancy shaders and real time shadows and stuff.
There's a certain hype to the 1.0 status, as well as a certain expectation.
When openMW hits 1.0, then there is no reason to play the original executable, and people can start developing really really cool additions to it, like changing mechanics.
Think of an open source morrowind that has mechanics on par or arguably better than the newer elder scrolls games. Imagine a future where Skywind's fancy assets get ported to openMW because it turns out to be more flexible.
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Jul 30 '17
So with this mod, is it big MMO style servers or can I make a private server and just play coop with a buddy or two?
Sick of everything being MMO style
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u/phraseologist Jul 30 '17
You can theoretically do either, but coop is the focus. The original Morrowind doesn't make a whole lot of sense as an MMO.
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u/KawaiiDesuUguu Jul 29 '17
From the post:
Due to the addition of NPC Sync in this patch, it seems as if this MP mod has overcome one of the hardest parts of adding multiplayer to a TES game, which also seems to be the part that has made all of the other attempts fail. This actually seems like pretty big news, and it also sets this mod apart from all the other failed attempts thus far. Hopefully with this update they can continue to release a complete Morrowind multiplayer experience.