The Elder Scrolls Online gets previewed

There's a lot of cool stuff coming out of E3 this year (isn't there always?), but we were really excited to get our hands on a little bit more information about The Elder Scrolls Online. ZeniMax made good on that, but the new teaser gives more questions than it answers. GameTrailer's interview with Game Director Paul Sage, on the other hand, should whet your appetite a bit.

First off, we've got a teaser trailer, which has some fancy animation and... stuff. We'll let that speak for itself.

The real show, though, is GameTrailer's interview with Paul Sage – and it's way more than an interview. Screenshots of The Elder Scrolls Online (which we gratuitously published) leaked soon after the game was announced, but Sage showed off the first actual gameplay footage that we've seen. We also learned that Redguards are not Nedic men. Yep.

The Elder Scrolls Online has been getting a decidedly mixed reception from the Elder Scrolls community, to say the least, and overall there's been a pretty strong undercurrent opposed to to any attempts to adapt the series into an MMO for some time. So what, aside from the obvious (moneyz), drove Paul and the rest of the team to do just that?

“A lot of people, including myself,” Sage explains, “were saying: 'I wanna play this with other people, I wanna play this online... It's just a matter of making a great game.” While the idea of playing The Elder Scrolls with other people sounds pretty attractive, there's still a lot of skepticism as to whether or not an MMO can really capture the freedom and exploration that defines the series.

Sage, of course, thinks that it can. “You play the game you want to play,” he smiles. He says that the world actually changes based not only on what developers create, but on what players do. How that will be accomplished on such a large scale remains to be seen, and we'll have to wait until the game launches sometime next year to find out.

Graphically, The Elder Scrolls Online looks attractive. If you're used to Skyrim, it looks like it's definitely going to be a step down, but that's no surprise. Design wise, thinks are a bit of a departure as well, opting for a more cartoony look, but the environments are still instantly recognizable to anyone who's followed the series for very long. Paul gives us a glimpse of locations like Daggerfall, Skyrim and Dwemer ruins in the interview, and it all looks pretty awesome.

Really though, we'll just shut up now and let you check out the interview for yourself. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.