I happen to love fantasy settings and can understand why they’re so popular amongst mmo developers. They’re recognizable, yet flexible, and they have a logistical concreteness that is easy for people to wrap their heads around. If you set an mmo in modern day, your audience may wonder why they can’t go everywhere in the known world. Sci-Fi settings are difficult in that they often involve the nearly limitless expanse of space. With those types of settings, you need to set up certain boundaries. You can only go to Seoul, New York, and London and only one part of that massive planet is available to you. A fantasy setting is usually just one world or a continent. It’s concrete and compact, but often easier for the audience and the developer to work with.

Anyways, true this could be another fantasy mmo, but I’m looking forward to the different control scheme it could offer. Rather than the same point and click that plagues so mnay RPG’s, Oblivion and its other elder scrolls predecessors use a first person control scheme that has a lot of potential in an mmo. I’d love to actually snipe an enemy with a bow from afar rather than just clicking a button. True darkfall has this already, but that’s a hardcore game and a more independent one at that. Bethesda could really create something cool if they made an accessible fantasy mmo with fps controls.

crap. I was one commenter off! That was meant for Toucan

I don't see the Elder Scrolls engine working very well for an MMO. Not without some very heavy modification, at least.

Zenimax are using Hero-Engine for their unnamed MMO, same engine as TOR

"ZeniMax Online selected HeroEngine because we determined it will serve our needs best. That fact that we can get up and running with meaningful art and content in the near term makes the HeroEngine a perfect fit for us."
Matt Firor,
President of ZeniMax Online Studios

from
http://www.heroengine.com/press-releases