The Elder Scrolls Online will not be free-to-play as many had hoped. It will take the monthly subscription route and charge users $14.99 a month for the ability to wander through the MMO’s landscape. ZeniMax general manager Matt Firor had this to say about their decision to go with a monthly charge:

“Going with any other model meant that we would have to make sacrifices and changes we weren’t willing to make.We’ll talk about further discounts, etc. later, but for now, we are very happy to finally announce our model. It’s very simple – you pay once per month after the first 30 days and the entire game is available to you.”

I was genuinely excited when it was announced that The Elder Scrolls Online would be making its way to consoles. I thought that would mean a free-to-play game with microtransactions that would be easy for console gamers to deal with. Now that it is going to a monthly charge I will just have to pop in my copy of Skyrim…from 2011…that I can still find quests and missions I have not completed yet, even after 100+ hours in the game.