Watch 20 minutes of The Elder Scrolls Online gameplay

QuakeCon 2013 wasn’t just a gathering of gamers eager to listen to John Carmack talk about next-gen consoles or discussions about what’s happening with Doom 4development. id Software’s parent company Zenimax used the event to show off the first MMO in The Elder Scrolls series of games, entitled The Elder Scrolls Online.

As well as letting gamers play the game in its booth, Zenimax Online Studios gave a presentation along with 20 minutes of live gameplay so we could all get a look at how the game is shaping up. If you want to get right to the gameplay jump to the 4m 20s mark below:

The video shows off a number of aspects of the game, starting with both first-person and third-person camera views. The controls are very similar to an FPS, and it’s nice to hear that as well as being able to dual wield weapons and use ranged attacks, the weapons and armor available to your character are not limited by type. The game is also meant to ship with a fully-voiced cast of NPC, which is no small undertaking.

Those of you bored with how much time you spend traveling around in other MMOs will be pleased to hear about the teleportation system. Every way shrine you discover on your travels gets logged and you can instantly teleport back to it in the future. The same is true of groups. If you join a group who is fighting on the other side of the world, you get to teleport to a safe location near them, making the gameplay much more immediate.

We also get to see an extended section of group combat through a dungeon, which shows off how good the game looks as well as how open and flexible the combat system is. The enemy AI also looks to be quite advanced. They fight in a range of ways and have their own healers just to make defeating them that much more difficult. It will certainly add a nice dose of strategy to any hostile situation.

There’s very few online games that have the potential to be as big asWorld of Warcraft, but I think The Elder Scrolls Online is one of them. That’s due in no small part to just how popular the non-MMOElder Scrolls games are already, combined with the fact the gameplay will remain pretty similar. By July of last year Skyrim had sold over 10 million copies, so what’s to stop The Elder Scrolls Onlinematching that, at least initially? Even half of that total subscribing to the online game would be a massive success.