I've never been a massive role player myself, but recently my 7 year old niece has been obsessed with Frozen.. she tells me when she becomes 18 she is going to change her name to Elsa Icepowers. In any of the games she plays at the moment her characters always have as much to do with Frozen as possible, like she'll play anything with frost magic.

So I was wondering, is there any inspiration about the sort of characters you'd like to role play as in ESO yourself ? Have you loosely or directly based your characters off of other games, movies, characters, pop culture in general or other sources?

Personally I'd love to be a flesh atronach (if thats even what it was) like what was in the cinematic trailer for ESO, those things were grotesque and deformed but I couldn't even look away. I'd just roll around smashing stuff and making appropriate groans and stuff (I'm not very creative).

I'll often take names from some things, although I have an original name I created that I use from time to time.

But I often stick to a handful of names......Honn itself is abbreviated.

I won't state the names I use, as there is nothing worse than starting up a game only to find some git has taken your name. It doesn't happen with me much (thank god), but I have seen enough copy cats of my names to know they would likely be nicked.

Yeah that's so true, personally I'm gonna be trying for Gorgeous when it comes to naming my male altmer but I'm thinking my lucks probably run out on that one

EDIT: Gorgeous would also be a pretty good Flesh Atronach name!

I have always loved roleplaying lizard/dragon characters. And if there's an option to make the character fat then I'll make him fat because it makes the character more funny.

Inspiration...I guess I could mention Sir Loungelot from Blazing Dragons cartoon. A funny character.

There's no chat bubbles, so I more than likely won't even be attempting role-playing in TESO. Have you ever tried to role-play without chat bubbles? It's a nightmare. Having to remain fixed on a chat box instead of the scene. Having to match whose talking in the chat box to where they are in the game. It's pretty miserable. ZO seems to be targeting certain gamers' play types and totally ignoring others.

Yeah I did notice that and it was a lot harder to match a name to someone in my dungeon party! I think it should be at least an option in the interface maybe, I can see how in an MMO where you have to be accurate with your aiming, it would get hard to manage chat bubbles in the middle of the screen though

What if ZOS introduced a chat system between players that is similar to the system used when a plyer interacts with an NPC? I think that would be cool and it would be something different than chat bubbles. Imagine a group of 4 chatting and 4 way split screen so everyone can see the other person's character. That would also be cool.

But what happens when it's 40 people?

I try to make as few obvious references to things outside the lore as possible, and I find such references that are too obvious to be distracting and annoying.

I imagine all serious role-players will be downloading the first/best speech bubble mod as soon as it's available.

All of my characters have a concept and a little backstory up in my head. I don't necessarily roleplay them, but when I'm creating them I keep that concept in mind (and it is often informed by creation options). Additionally, as armour presents itself and aesthetic decisions have to be made, I keep the concept in mind. It can even inform what kind of gameplay I go for, focusing on what "feels" right for that particular character.

Personally, I cannot understand the mindset of anyone who do any less. A friend of mind tried to name their randomly generated character (a female Blood Elf Mage) in WoW "Leoric." It was taken. He went with "Leorictwo." His gear was cobbled together - statistically fine, but abhorrent to look at. He changed specs as the mood took him. He used whatever title he obtained most recently. There was just no personality to his character. I don't know how anyone can play like that.

Me too.


The name made me cringe.

It's all about layers though. Games have lots of layers and people enjoy different ones. Your friend is oblivious to this layer but enjoying others. Takes all sorts.