Me and my mate always go on about the idea of a game that takes all the positives of Oblivion (where do you start) and the MMORPG nature of WoW, and with it the socialising etc.

Would be pretty cool to not feel that immense sense of loneliness when playing Oblivion and instead come across some other player from somewhere in Norway who just by chance is on his way to the Imperial City... and then slapping him in the face with some mad hand to hand skillz

I have felt the same way about Morrowind and Oblivion. I think it would be great to be able to play the same worlds with a small number of people...say 8 or 10. Wouldn't want it over crowded. Have a set up similar to Battlenet where you can make small capacity games.

RUBBISH!
Oblivion is the finest single player RPG around, great time waster without having to worry about outlevelling people, or etiquette or lootwhoring, or killstealing. The formula works so well as SP....why change it?
The MMO market is saturated to the point of bursting, and as yet nothing has toppled WoW.

Look at it this way as well....if Bethesda is concentrating on running Eldar Scrolls MMO, then who is developing Fallout 4

I wasn't thinking of making it an MMO, more of just a LAN based (2-10 people or so). That way you could travel around with some friends.

I agree with it being great as it is. It really is a great single player game, but the world is so huge that it almost seems like a waste just for one person...or at the very least some NPC that move around intelligently and act like a player character.

Dafonz, Battlenet is Blizzards server farm that hosts Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo III, Starcraft, etc games. Free to play on battlenet as long as you have legit copies of the forementioned software.

I've been a long-time player of both massive single-player RPGs and MMOs, nearly a decade before the games you mentioned came out; I'm one of the priveleged few who own one of the rare copies of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (which was >1,000 times the size of Morrowind and Oblivion combined) and also a long-time player of Ultima Online, the first true MMORPG that wasn't merely either a multiplayer RPG or a graphical MUD.

Really, it seems like a decent idea some of the time, but it could get annoying. It's really just a matter of finding the right game and server. In that case, on some Ultima Online shards (servers) you can, in fact, wander around in a huge world for a while and only occasionally run into other players; most towns are far more desolate than the most popular ones, (like Britain or Luna) so it's about the only MMO where, in spite of not using any form of instancing, (aside, of course, from having separate servers entirely) whether you play alongside others is optional, and the game was designed intentionally to be that way.