The Elder Scrolls Online may not have ever seen the light of day on anything other than a Mac and PC had it not been for SCEA's vice president of publisher and developer relations, Adam Boyes. The golden boy of Sony managed to convince Bethesda that the home consoles were very viable options for an Elder Scrolls MMO.
PlayStation LifeStyle grabbed the quote from Game Informer, where Boyes talks about what he went through to convince Bethesda to put one of the more highly anticipated games coming out in 2014 on next-gen consoles, sans the Wii U, saying...
“Bethesda… cooking up the whole The Elder Scrolls Online deal – that game was never planned to come to consoles and we just kind of kept sitting with them and being like, ‘Why not? PS4′s…’”
...Strong enough to hand most PC games? Has an excellent line-up of indie titles and free-to-play games to play when the servers for Elder Scrolls Online are inevitably overcrowded and forces people to have to wait at the login screen before playing? Doesn't require a paywall to play online games? Has many of the draconian patch fees waived? The list just kind of goes on.
Boyes also goes on to say that...
As we’re sort of disclosing the team and telling them more about the details, I’m like, ‘There’s no reason – I love MMOs and I love The Elder Scrolls.’ So I was like, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ They’re like, ‘We’re not planning it.’ I’m like, ‘Well, what if we built a plan that we could do that?’Getting that, knowing that a game’s coming to console that was never going to come to consoles, that’s the kind of stuff that is like, “yes!”, you know, hugely awesome.
So there you go, Xbox fanboys can thank Sony's Adam Boyes for bringing Elder Scrolls Online to Microsoft's console, because without him it probably never would have been. Isn't that amazing?
If it were up to Microsoft they probably never would have batted an eye at Bethesda unless they came to them and said “Hey, we want to put an MMO behind Xbox Live and have an Xbox Live Marketplace cash shop and add a monthly subscription fee on top of that”, then maybe Microsoft would say “OK”. Otherwise, if you aren't finding ways to gorge gamers of every cent to their name until they're as financially thin as your standard anorexic supermodel, then they don't care.
Many other MMOs were curb-stomped into the blacklist on the Xbox 360 because of that very same scenario mentioned above – they had to be behind the Xbox Live Gold paywall, the cash shop had to tie-in with Xbox Live somehow and they couldn't be free-to-play, which is what prevented some games like Secret World and Mabinogi and other Nexon games from appearing on the Xbox 360. Only recently did Microsoft ease up on the walled-garden fascism when they let Wargaming's World of Tanks onto the Xbox 360... still behind the Xbox Live Gold paywall, nevertheless.
Whether or not Elder Scrolls Online will be any good is a discussion for another time, along with whether or not anyone would be stupid enough to pay monthly for a sub-par game. But anyway, it's at least good that console gamers will be exposed to more games thanks to Sony's Adam Boyes.
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