It's gonna be shit.
TES is all about the freedom to do anything and become the master of everything, neither of which would work in an online environment.
Not really. Lots of people you can't kill in Skyrim. It'll be no different. The only real difference will be that people respawn.
So killing them won't make any fucking difference.
All I'm saying is, remove the two trump cards the series has and you're left with a shallow game with sub-par gameplay.
The only difference I've seen in Skyrim with killing people is not having access to some quests. Or having to bypass one part of a quest chain.
Also, there's new technology called phasing which is becoming very popular. Essentially, you see only what you're supposed to see and not necessarily what others see. WoW does this a lot now.
DCUO uses phasing, which so far is interesting. It totally removed the need for separate servers to house the hundreds of thousands of characters and just throws you in the most appropriate server each time you phase to a new area, and uses some fancy algorithm to (theoretically) place you in a phase along with your friends and people you often play with. I believe Dungeons & Dragons online uses phasing as well. I like this method of organizing MMOs.
That said, I don't think an Elder Scrolls MMO would do well. They've done so well making the "class" system organic and although easy to break, they have to basically ignore everything about that and restrict players to being pidgeonholed into a handful of different classes to make things fair for everyone. Otherwise they just release a griefer's heaven. As such, there's no way that it will be anything more than "Generic Fantasy MMO #3923045687." Just because it will share Elder Scrolls lore doesn't make it an Elder Scrolls game. I'm fine with Bethesda making an MMO, that's totally their prerogative. But please don't rape a perfectly good franchise with a subpar MMO. Even with a decent MMO, because it's still an MMO. (Yeah, I realize I
just promoted an MMO by talking about DCUO, but it still suffers from some of the problems I dislike about MMOs and I by far do not claim it to be perfect. It's also still an MMO and I'm mostly just playing it because I'm out of work and have nothing more interesting to do.)
Aside from absurd amounts of forced grinding, most MMOs suffer from one major problem that I usually just cannot ignore, which is how pointless "boss" encounters are. In a singleplayer game, a good boss marks the climax of a particular section of game, but it kind of loses its impact when both you have hundreds of people queuing up to kill the same boss over and over and makes me really question why I should bother.
But really, I guess the point of MMOs in general is to try to introduce a social aspect to gaming. There's been some good attempts I'll admit, but so far I have to pass on most of them. Biggest thing I like about DCUO is how combat actually takes some action and skill on the player's part aside from just locking onto a monster, hitting auto-attack and waiting for it to die. If this Elder Scrolls game has any kind of decent gameplay I might check it out if they ever have a trial, but I would never pay a monthly fee for a game no matter how fucking good it is.