You’ve probably been worried that Zenimax are going to wuss out of giving you the full tools when it comes to character creation. Sure, they’ll let you pick a race and gender, dress your hair up into a spiky mohawk and dye it pink but will they let you use apostrophes and spaces in your name?
Yes, yes they will.
You’re free to name your characters Matt of the Bloated Buttocks or Lord Tim of Editorium if you should so wish.
In a recent developer AMA, Zenimax explained that “You can use more than one space in your character name. In fact, the current limit is a maximum of four hyphens, apostrophes, or spaces in total, so you can come up with all kinds of names, like Nh’yen the Ter-Grol. This should be especially convenient for players who want lore-based names for their Argonian or Khajiit!”
That is the single most exciting feature of Elder Scrolls Online. That’s not me slating the game (well, maybe a little) but it’s had me sign up for a beta. Think of the screenshot opportunities if you can get your friends together to have a themed guild. I want an army of ‘XXX of the Loose Bowel’.
Speaking of guilds, Zenimax also revealed that there will be a “soft cap to limit the number of participants from one alliance.” This means that there’s a little wiggle room “for overflow that will allow you to join your friends or guild members in an otherwise full campaign, but eventually there is a hard limit to that.”
They also stated that the official guilds in the game, like the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild, will be open to all characters from the three different alliances to join. “Neither of these guilds take sides in the ongoing conflict in Cyrodiil. They prefer to focus their resources towards solving problems that are, in their eyes, more important, such as fighting Daedra and recovering lore on the brink of destruction.”
They also explained how the keeps will begin life when the game launches. Keeps are locations that can be captured by the games three alliances but “In the beginning, all of Cyrodiil is divided into three equal parts controlled by the alliances. Depending on the area the various keeps, mines, farms, and other objectives are in, they’ll be guarded by troops of the corresponding alliance.”
If you want to be keyed up on all the developments of the Elder Scrolls Online then you best have a look over the rest of the AMA.