The Elder Scrolls Online

[Falconeer]

WoW's methods to me aren't the standard because the reality is, not a single studio has completely been able to re-produce what Blizz did.   Every design (even EQ2) has been ever-so-slightly different,

Point of order: EQ2 released months 3 weeks prior to WoW

Fixed it for you.

[Ghambit]

WoW's methods to me aren't the standard because the reality is, not a single studio has completely been able to re-produce what Blizz did.   Every design (even EQ2) has been ever-so-slightly different,

Point of order: EQ2 released months 3 weeks prior to WoW

Fixed it for you.

Do you guys honestly think that release date (of which I obviously knew already) really makes any difference in my initial statement?

[Sir T]

WoW does have something I can't think of in any other similar MMO - it's just pleasurable to be logged in and doing stuff most of the time.  I can't really explain it.  I think most people have been referring to this as "polish" but it isn't just that.  The game is very crisp, things "just work," etc.  I used to log into WoW when I was playing just to idle in a city even if I didn't really want to "play" because it was just nice to be there.  I think I had that feeling more in WoW than any other MMO before or after - even the ones I played for comparable amounts of time like EVE.

I haven't played WoW in about three years, but just typing this out actually makes me feel slightly compelled to resub just to run around Ironforge again.  I'm not going to, but there sure as hell isn't any other MMO that makes me feel that way.

I know what you mean. Its the Blizzard effect. Things are just so and familiar and "its blizzard". Same as Diablo II. I played it for hours even though I recognized it wasn't actually that great a game all things considered. The story utterly sucked with the exception of Tyriel awesome, and the fighting was the same thing over and over; splattering tons of pointless no threat mobs that just got easier and easier to kill as they patched the game and power creep set in. Still loved playing my lightning Sorceress even if it was "walk into a room and everything in it instantly dropped dead," and it had decent loot generation.

Dunno what it is to be honest.

[KallDrexx]

This whole discussion perfectly summarizes why most self proclaimed game designers are absolutely terrible.  Making a good game is less about the tangible gameplay features themselves and is more about the synergy of everything put together.  Story, sounds, environment, pacing, direction, cohesiveness, socialness, etc...
 
These are all things that (even as someone who didn't enjoy it) WoW did right and the reasons no major MMO has really been able to copy it.  This is true even outside of the MMO space (why I have 40+ hours logged on BL2 *so far* but only played Hellgate for 10 at most, why Fury was a terrible failure, why everyone likes D2 much better than D3, etc...). 

[Lantyssa]

This whole discussion perfectly summarizes why most self proclaimed game designers are absolutely terrible.  Making a good game is less about the tangible gameplay features themselves and is more about the synergy of everything put together.  Story, sounds, environment, pacing, direction, cohesiveness, socialness, etc...

Yep.

Tangle features are important, but they have to blend together into a whole, not feel like add-ons.

[Merusk]

This whole discussion perfectly summarizes why most self proclaimed game designers are absolutely terrible.  Making a good game is less about the tangible gameplay features themselves and is more about the synergy of everything put together.  Story, sounds, environment, pacing, direction, cohesiveness, socialness, etc...
 
These are all things that (even as someone who didn't enjoy it) WoW did right and the reasons no major MMO has really been able to copy it.  This is true even outside of the MMO space (why I have 40+ hours logged on BL2 *so far* but only played Hellgate for 10 at most, why Fury was a terrible failure, why everyone likes D2 much better than D3, etc...). 

Yeah I had a whole post about this I was going to do this morning in response to Gambit, but decided "Fuck it."

It's been 10 years, people want to continue to believe it's just "LOL BLIZZARD FANS" and not a more quantitative and tangible design gestalt, let 'em.  The Parthenon was a building but not all buildings are The Parthenon and some people can't see the distinction.

GW2 has come closest (for me) since then, but so many have treated things like a checklist and wondered why the checklist didn't = success. 

[Senses]

Which comes back to polish.  Too many games save the cohesion for the first big patch.  They hold back on a well tuned UI or release a crappy chat system as a placeholder.  WoW truly felt next generation in comparison to Everquest, Diablo, DAOC and Ultima Online because it held your hand in a way they never had and directed you to the fun.  Gone were the days of trying to figure things out on your own, and people liked it.  But that formula only won that era.  You could repeat everything they did back then exactly and get zero back now. 

[Threash]

Because WoW was a clear step up from what had come before, we've had nothing but sideway steps mixed in with horrendous steps down since then.  You are not going to succeed like WoW unless your game is a clear step up, the only game that might even be attempting that at this point is EQN.  Putting your hopes on SOE is the first step to disappointment though.

[Malakili]

Because WoW was a clear step up from what had come before

This is also quite important.  When it comes to games in which people are putting in 1000s of hours, it takes a hell of a lot to get you to decide to put that into a new one.  I realize we are in an age where playing an MMO for 2 months and being "done" is normal, but I'm not particularly interested in doing so - and it isn't really a long term plan for an MMO.  Anyway, the point is, I'm not going to abandon 1000 hours of play across X numbers of characters to go play a relatively similar quality game, even a bit better one.  It's got to be a clearly better choice.

[Der Helm]

What is this thread about again ?

[Goreschach]

What is this thread about again ?

Something more productive than talking about TESO.

[rk47]

What is this thread about again ?

Realizing that MMO is not advancing forward but continue to watch the Blizzard toilet, emulating it, fascinated by the brown material swirling before being sucked down into that bottomless hole.

[Sir T]

The "I can go back to the game where I have an established character and I've done with my grinding" is a pretty powerful draw it must be said, even for a game that's probably better than WOW. Why stick with this and put all the efforts into leveling and gearing up when you still have your kick ass character back in blizzardville.  That's one of the reasons I gave away my Eve Online character, as the whole thing of having a powerful character was always something in the back of my mind as a reason to go back to EVE even though I saw through all the bullshit in that game.

[UnSub]

What is this thread about again ?

History repeating.

[Signe]

What is this thread about again ?

History repeating.

You sang that in your best Shirley Bassey voice whilst driving around in your S-type, right?

[sam, an eggplant]

The "I can go back to the game where I have an established character and I've done with my grinding" is a pretty powerful draw it must be said, even for a game that's probably better than WOW. Why stick with this and put all the efforts into leveling and gearing up when you still have your kick ass character back in blizzardville. 

Err, that gameplay is supposed to be fun. If you don't enjoy it you shouldn't feel compelled to play.

The obvious response is "the real game starts at max level" but does it, really? Did you have more fun leveling your first character or doing endgame stuff in WoW?

Personally, I feel the WoW leveling experience compares well against any great game from the past 10 years. You log in every day and explore new areas, finish quests, see the story, all for the very first time, all with persistent advancement holding out a carrot. That's compelling stuff. It all falls to pieces when you hit maximum level, which coincidentally is when I stop playing.

[Nebu]

Personally, I feel the WoW leveling experience compares well against any great game from the past 10 years. You log in every day and explore new areas, finish quests, see the story, all for the very first time, all with persistent advancement holding out a carrot. That's compelling stuff. It all falls to pieces when you hit maximum level, which coincidentally is when I stop playing.

It's funny... GW2 has captured most of this and presented it in a much better way.  Still, I find myself looking upon WoW more fondly than GW2.  This nostalgia shit is a powerful drug. 

[Draegan]

The "I can go back to the game where I have an established character and I've done with my grinding" is a pretty powerful draw it must be said, even for a game that's probably better than WOW. Why stick with this and put all the efforts into leveling and gearing up when you still have your kick ass character back in blizzardville. 

Err, that gameplay is supposed to be fun. If you don't enjoy it you shouldn't feel compelled to play.

The obvious response is "the real game starts at max level" but does it, really? Did you have more fun leveling your first character or doing endgame stuff in WoW?

Personally, I feel the WoW leveling experience compares well against any great game from the past 10 years. You log in every day and explore new areas, finish quests, see the story, all for the very first time, all with persistent advancement holding out a carrot. That's compelling stuff. It all falls to pieces when you hit maximum level, which coincidentally is when I stop playing.

I would agree only with the caveat that it only worked for me in Vanilla. After it just become routine and trivial (leveling, questing and "exploring"), it was just too procedural.

[Ingmar]

Personally, I feel the WoW leveling experience compares well against any great game from the past 10 years. You log in every day and explore new areas, finish quests, see the story, all for the very first time, all with persistent advancement holding out a carrot. That's compelling stuff. It all falls to pieces when you hit maximum level, which coincidentally is when I stop playing.

It's funny... GW2 has captured most of this and presented it in a much better way.  Still, I find myself looking upon WoW more fondly than GW2.  This nostalgia shit is a powerful drug. 

Not for me. The lack of narrative framing for the heart 'quests' and the fact that everything else you do you're likely to wander in halfway and not know why you're doing what you're doing because you missed the NPC firing the event off, etc., sucks out a lot of the appeal for me. I think PQs have their place but when you use them for all the content in your game it ends up being not much better than camping the fin tree or redcaps in DAOC, especially when the 'efficient' thing to do is run the same event chain over and over and over.

[Stormwaltz]

Not for me. The lack of narrative framing for the heart 'quests' and the fact that everything else you do you're likely to wander in halfway and not know why you're doing what you're doing because you missed the NPC firing the event off, etc., sucks out a lot of the appeal for me.

This was my opinion as well. GW2 was great at constantly giving me something interesting to do and showing me pretty things to gawk at. It was terribly, terribly poor at providing context for what was going on. I wandered around aimlessly, lost in a trailer for a Michael Bay movie. And don't get me started on the mealy-mouthed hero-isms that drooled from "my" character's mouth in any cutscene...

When I quit the game all I could really tell you about its story was that Dragons destroyed the world, and we used to hate the Charr but now we hate the Centaurs. Beyond that, "things happened" and I rarely knew why or what the theoretical effects of my actions were. I'm not going to pretend that any current MMORPG is doing anything amazing, but to me GW2 felt like a big step back for storytelling in this genre.

[Sjofn]

It can pretty cool when you ARE there at the start of an event in GW2, but that's pretty rare. And now that the player populations are spread out more, you do finally get to see what happens when you fail events. I won't lie, I enjoy liberating towns that had their event fail because no one was there.  

The storytelling does mostly suck (I like the early personal story shit that depends on the background stuff you picked well enough, once the orders get involved it turns into Paint By Numbers time), but the fact I can go back to a zone I've technically outleveled and still gain something beyond a personal sense of "I went here" is pretty huge for me. I never go do zones just to do them in games like WoW. If it's grey, it might as well not exist. Nothing turns grey in GW2, and that is one of its biggest strengths imo.

[Nebu]

What I meant to say about GW2 was that they got rid of most of the things I hated in WoW.  No taking of spawns (everyone can tag them), no racing for nodes, and a spirit of cooperativity (xp for rezzes, etc). 

I agree that quests, story, and dungeon mechanics were far superior in WoW.  I just wish they wouldn't have dumbed it down so much.   

[sam, an eggplant]

Leveling your first character in GW2 is an amazing experience if your tastes skew towards explorer, rather than achiever. I'm also continually amazed by the sheer quantity and quality of one-off art arenanet created for that game. They add new content every 2-3 weeks, too.

For an achiever, nothing can touch that first WoW character. Tons of exploration in WoW too, but it doesn't have that feeling of an unending vista like GW2.

[Senses]

The horrible dungeon design in GW2 was most definitely the nail in the coffin for me.  I could go further and blame the lack of trinity as the problem, but if they had simply found something to replace it with it might have been okay.  But no, lets have all the same dungeon mechanics that every other game has and just let people kite things around and die repeatedly so that no one has to be arsed to tank or heal.  Can't dodge red circles? NP, we will just keep ressing each other till the boss dies of boredom.

[Ingmar]

They add new content every 2-3 weeks, too.

And then they remove it, which I find really frustrating.

[Sjofn]

The horrible dungeon design in GW2 was most definitely the nail in the coffin for me.  I could go further and blame the lack of trinity as the problem, but if they had simply found something to replace it with it might have been okay.  But no, lets have all the same dungeon mechanics that every other game has and just let people kite things around and die repeatedly so that no one has to be arsed to tank or heal.  Can't dodge red circles? NP, we will just keep ressing each other till the boss dies of boredom.

I've still yet to do a dungeon in GW2, because everyone I know fucking hates them. I don't have a problem with a trinity (no doubt in part because I enjoy all three aspects of the tank/heal/deepz one), so I will totally blame the lack of trinity as the problem if you don't want to.    But when there aren't really any roles, it seems really weird to go with encounter design that sort of depended on those roles to exist in order to not be total shit.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I LOOOOOOVED GW2 for the first three zones but at one point it just got too repetitive.  The exploration I loved was still there but nothing felt distinct enough to keep my attention, maybe the combat started wearing thin or mob design, I honestly can't say but I was hooked on the game hard but then just as quickly lost it.

[Nebu]

I've still yet to do a dungeon in GW2, because everyone I know fucking hates them.

They're terrible.  Nothing but crack monkey, circle strafe ability spamfests.   GW2 is all about exploration and WvW.  There's no point in playing it for any other reason. 

[rk47]

But when there aren't really any roles, it seems really weird to go with encounter design that sort of depended on those roles to exist in order to not be total shit.

Yep.

[Wasted]

The exploration in GW2 was an achievers idea of what exploration should be.  I got pretty tired early on of the game telling me where all the poi and vista's where and turning it into another list to fill.

[rk47]

I duno man, GW2 seems OK as a casual MMO. But when they go hardcore - they went full retard. It was very, very unhealthy.
I did enjoy the jaunt to lvl 40 but past that, I see no point in continuing.
The only reason why I stuck to max level and explored the dungeons a bit is to kit myself up and do some WvW.
Conclusion: It wasn't worth it. The WvW bored me quickly and hours of trading objectives and zerging wasn't that interesting compared to just booting up a quick team FPS.

PVE-wise, the dungeon runs with regular crew was very quick and dirty - but I recall my first experience with randoms being so utterly negative it turned me off completely. The only thing that kept me around was the guild and having a regular crew. Once they quit, I found very little reason to stick around as well. Also when they introduced that pocket dimensional dungeon with varying level of 'attunements' I decided it's time to gtfo and uninstall this 30gb monster.

[Rasix]

I've still yet to do a dungeon in GW2, because everyone I know fucking hates them.

They're terrible.  Nothing but crack monkey, circle strafe ability spamfests.  

And fractals are this to the power of 100 with more annoying shit included.  It's a hard mode pve'rs wet dream.

Game's fun to fuck around in.  Season 1 has burned me out a bit on WvW, so I'm doing the dumb holiday stuff (this Winter's Day one is bad and they should feel bad for putting it in.  2 5mans, a really annoying jumping puzzle, and some sort of bell ringing nonsense), and the end of the tower of nightmares (sloppy and bad as well).   The 5 man's... people won't want to group for this gimmicky shit for long.  Why not just have it scale?  YOU HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY, WE'VE SEEN IT.

[Teleku]

I've still yet to do a dungeon in GW2, because everyone I know fucking hates them.

They're terrible.  Nothing but crack monkey, circle strafe ability spamfests.   GW2 is all about exploration and WvW.  There's no point in playing it for any other reason. 

And the exploration........bleh.  This coming as a person who very much is in the exploration archtype.  The world was just too bland.  I mean, it looked pretty enough when you very first entered it, and finding the little hidden things as a challenge was really neat (even if half of them involved jumping puzzles with mmo controls....).  But evertyhing just looked the god damned same after awhile.  It got really bland very quickly.  Nothing had the sort of specialied character or pop that WoW, or even EQ, zones had.  I wish somebody would steal the exploration mechanices from them, but put it into a much better world with more hand crafted unique zones.

Becaause of this and the fact that the gameplay itself got kind of boring/grindy quick, I never even made it to the WvW.  It was yet another game I didn't even make it past 'the free month'.   

[Modern Angel]

I actually really like GW2 dungeons, at least now, after the retuning of most of them. I don't like being forced to do the Story version before the Explorable. That's lame. And a couple are still a bit much. But mostly I enjoyed them.

GW2 hits a very nice spot for me. I can drop in and out of new content. If I like it, I'm there. If it's lame, I'm not. It's nice.

ACTUAL TESO NEWS: PC release date of April 4th.

[Falconeer]

Yes, April 4th.

PS4 and XBOXONE two months later, in June.




A new video, and a message by Firor.

Greetings everyone. As we are approaching the end of 2013 and heading into our launch year, I thought I’d take a moment to thank you, our community, for your continued support. I’d also like to give you an update on the game’s development and our launch plans for 2014.

First, thanks to everyone involved in the ESO community: those we met at trade shows, those of you on social media, and those that have had a chance to play the game and provided invaluable feedback through beta testing. I personally am humbled by the intense feelings of excitement expressed to us by the community at large. At shows like PAX East, PAX Prime, Gamescom, Eurogamer Expo, Paris Games Week, etc. – we always had three to four hour lines to play ESO. We know those wait times weren’t easy, and the great patience and enthusiastic reception you showed was remarkable. Everyone here at ZeniMax Online appreciates each and every one of you and your fantastic support of the game.

Game development is coming along very well. We completed major systems development, and are focusing on making this the Elder Scrolls game you expect: polishing the hundreds and hundreds of hours of content, making combat even more fun and responsive, fixing quest issues, and much, much more. In fact, we plan on spending the next few months before launch reacting to the latest feedback from internal and external testers and gameplay data we have collected.

As some of you know, we’ve been in beta testing for about a year now, leading up to our most recent test in late November where we had over 300,000 people in the game over a 48 hour period. We’ve had approximately 4 million people sign up for beta and that number continues to grow. We hope that just about every one of you who have signed up for beta will get an invitation to play sometime between now and the weeks before launch. These tests are very important, not only for gameplay feedback, but also to test our infrastructure. Beta tests can sometimes be a little rough when we are testing some systems for the first time with large numbers of players. So thank you to all who have participated for your understanding and support. It is very much appreciated.

Worldwide demand for The Elder Scrolls Online is extraordinarily high. This means we need to do a staggered rollout of the different versions of the game to spread out the initial service load and ensure an enjoyable, smooth gameplay experience. It is not only a game we are launching – it is a large online service as well, and our number one priority is to ensure a trouble-free, stable rollout for everyone.

We long ago promised that as soon as a version of the game is ready, we will launch it. So we’re happy to announce that the game will launch worldwide for PC and Mac players on Friday, April 4, 2014, while PlayStation 4 and Xbox One fans will see the game arriving on consoles in June 2014.

Again, thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm over the past year. We are very proud of this game and excited to share it with you. We can’t wait to see you in the game in 2014!  —Matt