Elder Scrolls Online: DLC Unlimited

No doubt you have heard that on March 17 ESO is going buy to play. Console launch is scheduled June 9th. Game is also changing name to Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited. I am happy that they are switching so fast. Some may argue this was their intention all along but that is a story for another time. Whatever the case may be it is good that conversion is going to happen so early in game's lifecycle. The older MMO gets the harder it is to convert it to F2P/B2P. Game will have cash shop and paid DLCs. People who still want to subscribe will be able to do so. It all looks pretty much like the model used by The Secret World. However the devil is in the details and we have yet to see how Zenimax Online will implement buy to play.
   

Subs are here to stay

Some may argue that 2014 was last year that business executives in MMO industry thought they can launch successful game with subscription. We had two high profile releases: ESO and Wildstar. Both games launched with sub and after few months fizzled. There have been rumors about Elder Scrolls going F2P/B2P for quite some time. Many expect this to happen when game launches on consoles. Wildstar with huge layoffs and population under million is not doing better than ESO. Suits at NCsoft are certainly analyzing pros and cons of conversion. What about other publishers? Do they look at these two games and draw conclusions? Of course they do. However lesson they learn here is different from what you may think.

2015 Predictions

If you're fan of MMOs like me chances are good that 2014 was for you a year of disappointment. Every big game that launched had either serious design flaws (Wildstar) or was released without proper testing (ArcheAge) or both (The Elder Scrolls Online). In 2015 we will get no major release and maybe alpha access to 2 MMOs, see below for details. There are few expansions worth checking out. Some already announced and some expected - I'm looking at you Guild Wars 2. To summarize 2015 will not be as interesting as 2014 but there are still few things to watch out for.

(not so) Elite: (but very) Dangerous

I never was much interested in space sims. They were popular few years before i started playing video games. The same can be told about other kinds of simulators. Simply not my thing. This is why I was surprised just how much time I have sunk into Elite: Dangerous. Gaming sessions planned for two hours lasted six. I have bought the game last week and to my surprise it turned out to be incredibly addicting. Just before logging out you hear that little voice in your head whispering "just one more mission"... and you end up playing for next few hours. This is why i put together this post in hope that after reading you will give this game a chance.

Introduction

Most people don't like to read these days. We can complain about this as long as we want. It won't change anything. To get your point across yo need to compress it into few bite sized paragraphs. So why write a blog? I'm not going to write one. At least not a typical blog. "Ironsquid writes" is going to be an extension of my Twitter: @Ironsquid_says, where I usually cover news about MMOs and RPGs. Blog will allow me to write my opinions on game related topics without having to split them into multiple tweets. Every post will consist of short introduction and bullet-point list of my thoughts on discussed topic.