In the past few months we heard all sorts of rumors about a MMORPG based in the world of The Elder Scrolls, and finally Bethesda decided to come out in the open with an official announcement: The Elder Scrolls Online is real and will be released next year on PC and Mac.

The game will be set about a thousand year before The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as the daedric prince Molag Bal tries conquer  all of Tamriel and subjugate the land under his cruel rule.

Some immediately theorized that such an ancient setting would place the game in the era when the misterious Dwemer were still present on Tamriel, but that's most probably a wrong assumption. Skyrim takes place in the year 201 of the Fourth Era, while the Dwemer disappeared from the land in the year 668 of the First Era.

Considering that The Elder Scrolls Online will be set a millennia before Skyrim, the mysterious disappearance of the Dwemer will still predate the MMORPG by about 2781 years. Yeah, they've been gone a long time.

Very little is known about the game itself so far: solo questing will be supported, but there also will be public dungeons and three-faction large-scale PvP centered around the province of Cyrodiil and the conflict for the Emperor's throne.

We may as well call The Elder Scrolls Online's PvP with the more appropriate and well loved acronym RvR (Bethesda actually can't, considering that the Trademark for "Realm Vs. Realm" has been registered by Mythic Entertainment and is now owned by Electronic Arts), because the man at the helm of the game is Matt Frior.

Younger MMORPG players may not be familiar with the name, but Firor was the producer and one of the main minds behind Dark Age of Camelot and its first two expansions. Personally I consider DAoC, especially in its earlier incarnations, the best PvP MMORPG ever created (and I'm quite sure I'm not alone in this), so MMORPG players that like Faction Vs. Faction PvP are very possibly in for a treat.

Further information about the game will be included in the June issue of Game Informer.