Yes I will admit that PoE is a very good F2P model. Along with Gw2. But they are the exception now, not the norm. But to get back on track to the thread topic, yes I believe ESO will succeed. I also believe it will reinvent the success of the subscription fee. Time will tell.

EQN: First of all EQN is not coming out in 2014, it not matter what they claim. EQN is nowhere near ready. It will come out 2015 if not later. Also, EQN seems to be more of a Sandbox game instead of a progression game like ESO, WoW and Wildstar, so it targeted to a different market.

Wildstar: Wildstar actually looks good overall. It will have a lot more fluff than ESO at release (housing, player constructions, guild Warplots etc.). Combat is supposed to be much better and more action oriented (think of League of Legends). A lot of people I have talked to are put off by Carbine's decision focus endgame PvE on 40 man Raiding. Noone wants to do that again. The only people who want to do 40-man Raiding are those who never seriously did it. The rest of us remember how it took 2 hours of preparation to do just 1 hour of Raiding, not to mention that 40 mans where always easymode (cant be too hard when you have 40 people, many of which not hardcoe, to make mistakes). Personally, just the mention of 40 man raiding made me to not want to touch Wildstar with a 50 feet pole.

WoW: Warlords of Draenor: This new Blizzard expansion actually looks good. Greg Street "Ghostcrawler" is no longer the lead developer (he now joined Riot). For those that remember Ghostcrawler was in charge of the disastrous expansion of Cata and Pandaria. He was the man behind such boring mechanics as focusing PvE on grinding Dailies, nerfing Heroic Dungeons into a joke, and other super boring (but mechanically sound) concepts. Without Ghostcrawler WoD looks good. They are bringing back heroic dungeons, they are going to include cool housing concepts, they will include a large persistent PvP zone (kinda of like Cyrodill, but smaller I bet), introducing flex raiding to normal and heroic modes (no more having to be left out of raiding, anyone can Raid now) and introducing a 20 man hardcoe raid mode. WoD actually looks really good, but I think that everyone by now is tired of WoW and is looking for something different. 9 years of WoW was enough.

ESO: I think the long term success of ESO will depend on the mysterious Adventure Zones. Three to four months from release you will NOT be doing questing anymore, you will either be doing PvP (and there are a lot of good PvP games out there for free) and/or Adventure Zones. So ultimate it falls on Adventure Zones to keep people paying a subscription in the long term. The fact that we have heard NOTHING about what Adventure Zones are, implies that ZOS is not taking the Adventure Zones seriously, which also implies that they are digging they own graves.

P.S. People who support F2P games have never played a good P2P game in the long term. Those of us who have, know there is no comparison between a good P2P like WoW and any F2P game. The quality is just too different. The only reason WoW is able to be of such high quality is because of the P2P. There is only one good F2P game and that's PoE, but they don't have WoW's updates or graphics so their costs are much lower. PoE is just a different type of game for a different audience.

Elder Scrolls will succeed where others did as well. Not more than that is needed.

I hope TESO is a wonderful game, I've loved TES since Morrowind launched. I just feel like it's much easier in today's market to be the exception with a f2p model, than it is to be the exception with a p2p one.

I looked up the description of the word http://www.tentonhammer.com/features/opinions/sandbox-mmos-vs-theme-park-mmos when talked about mmos. I got a pretty good picture in that text.

In my op a themepark mmo is a well founded game with great developement and a sandbox mmo is a low budget monetizing game, with only goal is to draw many buyers for short time.

Themepark have a great story to the world why it exists ,how the people in it are connected and why the different races do what they do example why there are 3 alliances.

I can't see how a themepark game can ever fail against a sandbox.

Themeparked games have the material to bind players for a longer time, thus gaining more money to further develop the game experience for its players.

And just because there is a story doesn't mean you have to blindly follow it troughout the game only clicking next on every quest, that is just poor imagination by the player.

That is how I percieved the difference of theme and sand mmo.

Actually looking back even a year eso have always been ahead of wildstar on mmorpg.com.

Here comes the "Cash shop" line and the repute to follow. It was mentioned in 1 interview and at the same time he stated it would not be for op gear, but for namechanges and stuff like that, but people tend to only hear without listening to what is said. Later the name cash shop were denounced and it would probably be something hosted on their website.

I think Wildstar might do better than ESO when it comes to numbers. Its a reskinned version of WoW and appeals to a bigger crowd.

I also think ESO will do better on the long run, being different from every other MMO it will find a niche of players (small of big, i dont know) willing to play for a much longer time.

It will also capture some (but not all) of the single player ES fans.

I believe ESO will be more than just a little successful. Elder Scrolls has had followers for 20 years now and Bethesda has been in the gaming business for almost as long making award winning games. Also, ESO has been in production for over 7 years so I'm sure there will be plenty of content.

Oh, and I've played it and it RAWKS! =D

I think ESO will do alright. Like it was said above Wild Star does not seem to have much marketing being done, at least not here in the U.S. Honestly i have not played Wild Star but the biggest turn off is the art style, it looks like a game you would find in the bottom of a cereal box. However apparently there was a poll taken in late 2013 that had Wild Star being rated as potentially more successful over ESO by 25% of the voters, so there is that. As far as competing with WoW I think it wont be a WoW killer, but i do believe it could be a major success despite WoW.

being popular and cretive =/= fun you know if were to chose an mmo just for the sake of popularity we would all be playing wow and there would be no new mmos JUST wow.

and it is not even fun. specially after the panda expansion hat actually [censored] the ENTIRE warcraft history and lore.

that being said i am really happy that TESO is based on a priod of history BEFORE TES cuz even if i turns out to be really bad(i doubt it will) it will not ruin an entire lore.

I wish the developer's at zenimax had the same confidence fans did in the game. The fact that the NDA is still up is silly. Wildstar on the other hand which does not even have a release date have already NDA on 1-15 lifted, and 1-25 (max level 50)is going to be lifted next week. Wildstar fansites are constantly streaming the game. and hell even the developers are apprearing on fansite twitch channels to talk about the game. What zenimax is doing wrong is they are treating it as a single player game and underestimating the value of fan input for an MMO. You would be suprised how seriously the wildstar developer carbine is taking community input compared to zenimax. Wow did take in a lot of community feedback when they launched and is one of the keys to its success, though after they got extremely successful that kind of went down the drain.

LOL ^

Wildstar appeals to one single audience: WoW players

When (and if) they fail to capture the WoW audience, the game will fall quite considerably.

TESO will do great

I already listed GW2. Now as I understand Planetside 2 is pretty much PvP only and LOL is not an MMO, this makes the games far cheaper to run, LOL mostly as it don't need servers for more than connecting players and checking that they don't cheat.

Shooters are always B2P, on consoles the server costs are included in the PSN+ subscription.

I have been playing Wildstar beta, but this is so different from ESO... I think this is for another audience... Wildstar is a nice game, has his pros and cons, but its ambiance is too cartoon for me, I am done about this cartoon MMO style. The combat s very nice tough.

So yes, I think ESO will rules !!!

It hasn't always been ahead. It's an average count of hits. If, for example The secret world managed to accrue 3 million unique hits in a day it would then lead the chart in all categories. As it would then have the largest number of hits in total within the 12 month period and all the others.

You can also see when titles began accruing less hits due to launch etc.

There's no such thing as an "objective opinion."

My opinion (or guess, really) is the game will succeed for a reasonable definition of success - i.e., it will have enough revenue to remain online and continue to have content produced for quite a while.

How will it stand up to 2014 MMOs? There's really no way to know yet, and to be honest, I'm only really following one other title in production.

Will it go free-to-play? I'm guessing it will once the subscription numbers plateau - but I personally don't see F2P in itself as a bad thing, depending on how it's implemented. A straightforward (dare I say "honest") hybrid model can avoid many of the feared evils of F2P, while still capturing a good chunk of extra "a la carte" revenue.

ESO will probably do moderately well.

Only time will tell if it succeeds in 2015 as well.

GW2 isn't Free to play... LOL and PoE aren't MMO's and only PoE offers truly Free to play imo planet side sells power so cant be counted as a good free to play lol

There will be too much competition to pick one mmo. I can't picture ordinary people subscribing to 3-4 mmos over the course of the year. It's more likely that player will mmo-hop from one to the other to see if an mmo is worth playing long term because no one has the amount of time to devote to leveling characters and getting into serious endgame pve or pvp in more than one or two mmos simultaneously. If the suits are smart, they'll try to lock in ESO subscribers with 3-, 6-, or annual subscription plans. But beware of those one payment, lifetime subscriptions. I think the last company that offered this type of plan was Funcom for TSW.

Yeah it really really is.

Having played Wildstar, it feels pretty much exactly like WoW, which some people maybe looking for, it seems a hardcoe version for the hardcoe raiding crowd, certainly not for me, (and those graphics, yuck!).

I think TESO will do pretty well, it has a good combination of MMO and TES, and if the developers stay true to their word, it'll have plenty of things to do for years to come.

Exactly how are we supposed to know this? Do you think we have precognitive powers?

PWE for Neverwinter also had lifetime I think?

I think ESO will do good to give a few payment plans, and also, graphics are so awesome on ultra. I found the videos from the press to be a bit lowish, as if they played on medium settings. Could also be the way it was streamed ofcourse.

It is hard for me to compare one game to another, but there are a few things I can say on this.
First, TES has some of the most die hard fans out there. It is going to start with one of the strongest player bases, if not the strongest, of any released in the near future.
ESO, in my opinion, looks prepared to deliever the freedom of character customization that TES players love in TES games. I think this will be a winning strong point.
ESO has a lot to offer. If you look at vanilla releases, including WoW, you'll find that ESO comes very full featured. A problem is (and this has been a problem with almost every MMO release since WoW) that most MMO players either have at one time or do play WoW, and when it comes to the amount of content, this is what they expect. IMO, this is highly unrealist to expect, because WoW is no longer vanilla, and has not been for a very long time.
In short, it will do great if people keep expectations realist, enjoy the game for the vanilla release that it is, and stop complaing about the sub (which IMO is completely fair).