The Elder Scrolls Online

[Riggswolfe]

I can't add much new here. I played the first couple of beta weekends I got invited too. Much like Lantyssa, I couldn't get out of the tutorial area the first time because it was bugged. The second time I wandered around a very drab and ugly starting city for a bit then got bored and logged out. The last few beta invites I got? They sat in my inbox and I didn't bother to give it another shot.

The game is just...boring and drab. The graphics are pretty good but they went with a shitty color scheme that is all browns and greys, at least for the parts I played. The quests are boring. The combat is boring. The leveling up is boring.

Seriously, I'm usually one of those people that gives a new game a shot but TESO? No preorder from me. I might play it in a few months when it is FTP and hopefully they've patched some fun in but I doubt it.

My prediction: Maintenance mode in a year. Tops.

[MediumHigh]

Angry Joe gushes over PVP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I82pz60iGL0

[Ginaz]

Angry Joe gushes over PVP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I82pz60iGL0

I've been seeing that a lot.  The pvp types seem to have fallen in love with ESO and proclaimed it as the new hotness.

[LC]

Angry Joe gushes over PVP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I82pz60iGL0

I've been seeing that a lot.  The pvp types seem to have fallen in love with ESO and proclaimed it as the new hotness.

I'm a PvP type. I hated everything about the game's combat and that ruined any enjoyment gained from PvP.

[Simond]

The game is nothing revolutionary or amazing but it doesn't deserve the drubbing it's getting here either.

That's basically how I feel too. I imagine I'll play for the usual 1-3 months, and get my money's worth. It's no GW2 or EQN, but it should be a fun diversion.

Yeah, no, this shit doesn't fly any more. There are far too many decent free-to-play MMOs out there nowadays to go "Welp, another shitty sub-par WoW-clone. Time to throw sixty bucks at it for a couple of weeks' gameplay" unless you are some sort of fucking idiot.

Go play SWTOR or Rift or LOTRO or whatever the Korean flavour-of-the-month is or EQ2, or even Runescape. Hell, even WoW has 1 - 20 as a free play now.

[Lantyssa]

Just saying that bethsedia was not exactly unknown for colossal screw ups even in its "golden age."

Bioware Austin.  Zenimax Online, not Bethesda.

They still shouldn't have thrown out the lessons of nearly half a dozen games in the series they're taking the name from in addition to every MMO before them.

[Numtini]

I never even made it out of the tutorial section. It just oozed dull from every pore.

Unfortunately, my guild in Rift seem to be the only people on the planet excited about it and plan to move, leaving me in the lurch after a month of grinding to get up to raiding levels.

[satael]

Just saying that bethsedia was not exactly unknown for colossal screw ups even in its "golden age."

Bioware Austin.  Zenimax Online, not Bethesda.

They still shouldn't have thrown out the lessons of nearly half a dozen games in the series they're taking the name from in addition to every MMO before them.

They could be ready to turn the game into f2p as soon as the subs fall below a certain level and just hoping to get a few months of sub fees from the people who want to play at the launch. It might actually make sense to intentionally have a  "subs at launch, b2p in x months"-plan already waiting to be implemented (with support for a cash shop and stuff to put there)

[Tannhauser]

I never even made it out of the tutorial section. It just oozed dull from every pore.

Unfortunately, my guild in Rift seem to be the only people on the planet excited about it and plan to move, leaving me in the lurch after a month of grinding to get up to raiding levels.

Well, if they have been playing Rift this long, they must love dull ooze. 

It was endearing to hear all the folks on the chat channel passionately defending it as the answer to their prayers .

[palmer_eldritch]

Angry Joe gushes over PVP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I82pz60iGL0

I've been seeing that a lot.  The pvp types seem to have fallen in love with ESO and proclaimed it as the new hotness.

That seige game does look like fun.

Does the game have any open world PvP servers?

[Samprimary]

Elder Scrolls Online is a free to play MMO released in 2009. It was an okay offering for the time. It's really dated by now and it had a really rough start with its initial combat and skill system, which desperately needed a few serious revamps. It felt a little rushed and unpolished, and needed a lot of love to get out of its initial drudgery into a good spot but I guess that's what's to be expected with such a small development timeframe.

OH WAIT. That's only what the game FELT like. It was actually released in 2014, had been in development for seven years, and was a full box price game requiring a $15 monthly subscription fee.

So it was a flat fucking disaster, obviously.

___


What else is there to say about Elder Scrolls Online? I don't know. It is really insanely easy to cover the basics:

1. Don't buy it.
2. Don't play it.

It is bad in (by now) terribly mundane ways for an MMO to be bad. It's typically and unsurprisingly bad. But I say it is surprisingly bad because I feel like I have to. I had to think of why I felt this way, and I think I came up with the answer: it's because I have nothing else tangible to work with. Me feeling the surprise of "uh, wow, this game won't work" is the only real feeling I can pluck out of the void of having played ESO. That's the most passionate idea of emotion I had throughout the entire length of time I was playing.

Specifically, that I felt surprised by how nonsurprising it was. Everything else was complete ennui.

I only pushed through the game hoping to see new parts of the world, nothing else interested me. Eventually the time and effort investment to move between zones eclipsed my interest thresholds. It was somewhere around when I was hanging out in some big boring city somewhere whateverrrr.

I could not tell you much about my class. There's, like, four of them. They are indistinctly inconsequential in a consequentially inconsequential way, which is annoying both to wrap your head around or to experience in-game. Their consequence is that yes, you are distinctly forced to be a class, that you are sort of forced to build the rest of your character's skill improvement and item use around, more or less.

At least at the time I played it, it had so many glaring issues that you can't have if you want to have an operable, profitable MMO. It's possible they did a complete 180 in terms of that and got their shit hashed out sufficiently since I played, but that's not something I'm going to bet a full price box game purchase on, and I don't think anyone else should either.

____


It feels and plays with a sort of spongy, frustrating unresponsiveness. The animations are janky and weird and there's no sense of physics with the weapons, if that makes sense. You'll have a giant two handed hammer and your character will be swinging it like it's a foam noodle.

Which I guess doesn't matter, because (at least when I was playing) the combat was so terrible that you're not really swinging your foam noodle hammer as much as you are using your mouse to put in buy orders for a future swing that a broker will put in for you and try to get back to you by the end of business day. And I guess THAT doesn't even really matter, because the combat system is just terrible in general. You just end up sort of halfheartedly mashing attacks and skills that minimally annoy you. I was more minimally annoyed by <ROGUE CLASS> than I was by <MAGE CLASS>. I guess.

If I had gotten to endgame bosses or challenges in this game which required efficient and calculated use of my skillset (and not let me get away with just mashing some buttons) I would have considered the exercise akin to its own discrete circle of hell. I never want to have to research my ESO rotations and priority lists because ughh. But that's irrelevant, because I dropped out well before I ever got to anything like that, and most everyone else will too. And I will never be compelled to experience this.


___

Elder Scrolls Online's combat system is great if you enjoy the experience of spamming attacks and generally dealing with combat so relentlessly unresponsive that you end up feeling like you are trying to throw punches underwater. You're yelling at your fist. Go faster, fist! you yell at it. But it can't go faster through water, uggh it's so annoying, so you uninstall the water from your backyard pool and write a nasty review about the pool. Like this. The moral of the story is, don't play Elder Scrolls Online, seriously.

___


The game just feels so dated. It just feels older to me than if I were playing another MMO released half a decade ago. There were some good elements to the game throughout which don't matter because don't play Elder Scrolls Online. There's a few little innovations or positive quirks here and there and some little things which stood out as favorable contributions to the overall quality of the game which don't matter because don't play Elder Scrolls Online. The game is obviously not all bad, you could say plenty of good things about many of its elements, but none of them elevate the game to a level where it is worth actually purchasing to play. I could hedge my assessment with categorically worthless pablum like "Some people will definitely still like Elder Scrolls Online" or "The character creation was kind of fun!" or "I think the PvP was kind of like that other PvP I liked in that much older game!" or "Many elements of this game would have been really good if they had just been implemented better" or "I enjoyed the music at times" or "Some areas were very visually interesting" or "This game would have been good if it were good." But don't play Elder Scrolls Online.

[Paelos]

Yes. As long as you comform to that IP well. I guess TESO does have that in its favor.

Holy shit TESO does that? Instantiated dungeons free of the Blackburrow/Crushbone problem of other people was a selling point in freakin' City of Heroes.

Perhaps it does it because if you want to play TES game without other people in your dungeons, they've made a few of these already

Oh awesome, the "go play something else" defense.

No, see, the genre outgrew the idea that dungeons are public space not because it was innovative to try something new, but because the technology progressed to a point that it could solve a fundamental user experience problem. Public space dungeons resulted in exactly the situation people have in TESO, where a dungeon is already cleared and the major mobs perpetually camped. Good luck to anyone who doesn't have friends in whatever meta-game guild is camping that area until they outgrow it, or the dozens of huddled masses who have no idea what's going on except to kill anything that moves.

Have you heard of "DKP"? That was invented by the players specifically to solve for this problem.

Bad idea is bad. Bad idea is worse when it was devolved out of the expected MMO experience a freakin' decade ago. A bad idea reemerging in a 2014 MMO is theoretically new and innovative except it is still a fundamentally bad idea in every way except being "new" to the mythical new set of players coming to their first MMO ever, at a time when MMOs are no more new than they are experimental.

Yeah unfortunately we're all advancing to the point where we're not targetted by this kind of game, because I believe developers believe they can inflict similar pains we're tired of on a new generation of gamers. I'm not sure they are right, but they will try.

[Modern Angel]

I kind of liked it.

It's not spectacular. The world isn't going to be set alight by this game. I suspect it's going to get bad reviews. And yet...

The main thing is I'm a sucker for the world. The prospect of exploring it is absolute catnip to me, even if it's gated by levels and such. I like the graphics. I like the art style. I don't think the color choices are particularly bad, though a few places the metal textures glow with a weird plastic quality. The voice acting is mostly really good, maybe the best I can recall in an Elder Scrolls game, and I think it's frankly better more often than SWTOR's.

Combat is a mixed bag. I agree that it's clunky. I don't know how to fix it. I actually really like character creation and the classes, though. It's Elder Scrolls with individual doodad abilities when you slowly skill up. Nothing about it feels not TES, other than the fact that you do get abilities 1-5 as hot key abilities. That's totally okay with me.

Some of the questing is good, with some puzzle quests and such. Some is dogshit, with collect ten bear asses quests. At this point, I don't think that mixed bag is going to change appreciably.

There are some very bad things, though. The lack of an AH is absolutely baffling to me. You launch with an AH, period. Crafting is godawful, requiring massive amounts of mats to level up.

The big one, though, is the faction gating. That's going to be a fucking disastrous decision. Because you cannot group cross faction and factions are only three races apiece. That's going to split guilds and friends up in balkanization we haven't seen before. It's one thing when your friends choose Faction A and Faction A has five races, minimum, allowing you to find something cool. Here we have three races per. Race choice during chargen is such a big part of how most people play TES. To say "your Breton which you've been playing for 15 years cannot play with your Dark Elf buddies, ever" is just inexcusable.

It's compounded by the fact that the most iconic locations/races (Dark Elves, Nords, Skyrim, and Morrowind) are grouped into one faction. The Ebonheart group are going to be absurdly overpopulated compared to the others. Already in beta, I bopped over to the High Elf/Wood Elf/Khaijit side during prime time this last beta weekend and it was a ghost town. Just an absolutely terrible decision.

Will I buy it? Probably. I'm leaving myself some wiggle room. I did actually enjoy my time there but the slow pace of leveling has me a little nervous that I'll get to see everything I want to see. The buy-in cost is pretty steep for this day and age.

[Threash]

I don't think the sides with the two kinds of elves and the cat people is going to have a population problem.  The side that is just humans, black humans and orcs is going to be completely desolated.

[Nebu]

The biggest issue I see with this game has already been mentioned.  The game is seemingly built for a first person combat perspective, but the mechanics of combat (ground effects, etc) punish you for using this perspective.  The are other issues, but many of them come from the feeling of been-there-done-that.  I can see someone loving the ES world enjoying this game, but the shine won't last long without some serious miracle patches after release.

[tmp]

Oh awesome, the "go play something else" defense.

No, see, the genre outgrew the idea that dungeons are public space not because it was innovative to try something new, but because the technology progressed to a point that it could solve a fundamental user experience problem.

whoosh.

The MMO genre outgrew the idea. Or rather, people who played this in x games over y years got fed up with it. Meantime, we are talking about multiplayer version of the single-player RPG series. You know, the one where the players did nothing for y years but spent their time in dungeons solo. For them, having other players in multiplayer elder scrolls game may be actually novel and refreshing. Not in the least because likely half of the current MMO players never got to experience the non-instanced MMO dungeons, coming to the genre post-WoW.

edit: and really, the concept of having smaller areas shared with few players as opposed to having bigger areas shared with a lot of players it's due to "technology progress"? When we had the latter way longer than we had the former?

[Modern Angel]

I don't think the sides with the two kinds of elves and the cat people is going to have a population problem.  The side that is just humans, black humans and orcs is going to be completely desolated.

I think you're going to be surprised. Elf people are going to go Dark Elves over the others. People who remember Morrowind (and there are so many more of these than you think) fondly are going to go Dark Elves. Toss in the ability to adventure through Skyrim and weird fantasy Morrowind and it's going to be nuts.

After bopping around all three factions across four betas to gauge things, the Orcs/Redguard/Breton side was surprisingly well represented, maybe because Daggerfall still has some name value. I dunno. But the Akavir Compact (is that what they're called?) were consistently underpopulated compared to the other two.

[Tyrnan]

The big one, though, is the faction gating. That's going to be a fucking disastrous decision. Because you cannot group cross faction and factions are only three races apiece. That's going to split guilds and friends up in balkanization we haven't seen before. It's one thing when your friends choose Faction A and Faction A has five races, minimum, allowing you to find something cool. Here we have three races per. Race choice during chargen is such a big part of how most people play TES. To say "your Breton which you've been playing for 15 years cannot play with your Dark Elf buddies, ever" is just inexcusable.

Doesn't the standard (non-imperial) pre-order remove those restrictions?  Maybe they're banking on it annoying people enough that it will force them to pre-order.

The biggest issue I see with this game has already been mentioned.  The game is seemingly built for a first person combat perspective, but the mechanics of combat (ground effects, etc) punish you for using this perspective.  The are other issues, but many of them come from the feeling of been-there-done-that.  I can see someone loving the ES world enjoying this game, but the shine won't last long without some serious miracle patches after release.

I thought I read somewhere that first-person wasn't originally in the game and was only added sometime during alpha/closed beta based on player feedback.  I had issues playing my Dragonknight (or whatever it was called) in first-person because I couldn't tell when my self buffs wore off, while it was immediately obvious if you were in third-person mode.

[sam, an eggplant]

the genre outgrew the idea that dungeons are public space not because it was innovative to try something new, but because the technology progressed to a point that it could solve a fundamental user experience problem.

Your premise is correct, but the conclusion is not necessarily true. I expect the public dungeons to be crowded as hell upon initial release, and that will provide exactly the poor gameplay you're talking about. But, as long as public dungeons aren't endgame content, that will cease to be a problem after the initial rush.

Then again, even for leveling only content, where you're supposed to happen across the dungeon and group up with 1-2 others, wouldn't instancing be better?

Yeah, no, this shit doesn't fly any more. There are far too many decent free-to-play MMOs out there nowadays to go "Welp, another shitty sub-par WoW-clone. Time to throw sixty bucks at it for a couple of weeks' gameplay" unless you are some sort of fucking idiot.

Hey, fuck you too.

[Hoax]

The core issue is they tried to split the difference between two games and ended up with something that will please neither camp. It cuts corners on both the MMO and Bethesda sandbox side that will annoy people who come for either of those experiences.

If I had to pick out just one thing that just felt completely awful, though, it was having to share quest 'dungeon' areas with other players. Example: someone asked me to go to the bottom of a family crypt and get something. I ran down to the item, got it, came back, without ever seeing a single monster - the place was packed with other players killing things more or less instantly when they spawned. When I got back to turn it in, the guy had a bunch of crap to say about the stuff I was supposed to fight down there. That feels awful. Those sorts of quests very badly need something akin to SWTOR's micro instancing, but I gather it's something of a design goal to never instance, so blech.

This was exactly what SWTOR was like for me when I tried it post f2p. Everything that wasn't a special class instance was the Blackburrow experience dialed to 11 because you had to be there because the story demanded it.

Elder Scrolls Online is a free to play MMO released in 2009. It was an okay offering for the time.

Amazing post Sam, thank you for that.

[Venkman]

the genre outgrew the idea that dungeons are public space not because it was innovative to try something new, but because the technology progressed to a point that it could solve a fundamental user experience problem.

Your premise is correct, but the conclusion is not necessarily true. I expect the public dungeons to be crowded as hell upon initial release, and that will provide exactly the poor gameplay you're talking about. But, as long as public dungeons aren't endgame content, that will cease to be a problem after the initial rush.

Then again, even for leveling only content, where you're supposed to happen across the dungeon and group up with 1-2 others, wouldn't instancing be better?

For people who play, I hope you're right.

However, the other side of the problem is needing other people when the dungeon is no longer doable along. Instantiated content didn't just remove the hell of other people. It coincided with the experiment in scaling the content to the number and configuration of the group that joined the instance. Before that, if there weren't PLers kicking around Crushbone or Blackburrow, you weren't getting out of the entry tunnel in the level range you were sent there.

Granted, you weren't completely cockblocked from continuing the game, just needed to find a new place to grind. The whole idea of quest-based advancement came way later (DAoC dabbled, CoH did it better, eventually WoW got it right in general ways).

Back to TESO: once people outgrow the dungeons, can they still do it? Or will it be group required (again, not a bad thing if you have a dedicated guild/group). Not all old ideas are bad by default. For example, we spent almost a decade of MMOs bragging about seamless transitions between zones as a selling point, and yet that's never really a critique anyone lodges at GW2 nor most of WoW.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Oh awesome, the "go play something else" defense.

No, see, the genre outgrew the idea that dungeons are public space not because it was innovative to try something new, but because the technology progressed to a point that it could solve a fundamental user experience problem.

whoosh.

The MMO genre outgrew the idea. Or rather, people who played this in x games over y years got fed up with it. Meantime, we are talking about multiplayer version of the single-player RPG series. You know, the one where the players did nothing for y years but spent their time in dungeons solo. For them, having other players in multiplayer elder scrolls game may be actually novel and refreshing. Not in the least because likely half of the current MMO players never got to experience the non-instanced MMO dungeons, coming to the genre post-WoW.

edit: and really, the concept of having smaller areas shared with few players as opposed to having bigger areas shared with a lot of players it's due to "technology progress"? When we had the latter way longer than we had the former?

You're an idiot.  Just because console and solo pc players might be new to an idea doesn't suddenly make it a good one.

[sam, an eggplant]

However, the other side of the problem is needing other people when the dungeon is no longer doable along. Instantiated content didn't just remove the hell of other people. It coincided with the experiment in scaling the content to the number and configuration of the group that joined the instance. Before that, if there weren't PLers kicking around Crushbone or Blackburrow, you weren't getting out of the entry tunnel in the level range you were sent there.

Yeah. The devs call these public dungeons "friction areas" designed to get players to interact with each other, to remove the massively single-player feel of many other recent MMOs. A laudable goal. But if nobody's around, what are you supposed to do? You can come back and solo once you outlevel the area, but other than just seeing the content, why would you? The rewards won't be worthwhile.

[tmp]

You're an idiot.  Just because console and solo pc players might be new to an idea doesn't suddenly make it a good one.

If anyone actually said it's a good idea, you'd have a point.

Since that didn't happen and it's very much a strawman, the irony of you calling me an idiot over it is staggering.

[Senses]

Hearing that the pvp in this game is "fun" to me is a bit of a red flag tbh.  I remember how fun pvp was in Warhammer beta because everyone was actually participating in it.  Once live opened though, the focus was on getting gear and getting max level and all those great lower level pvp moments stopped happening.  Still, I plan on playing wait and see because there really is room in the market for a game that can somehow do pvp right no matter what their actual intention was.

[Venkman]

Oh awesome, the "go play something else" defense.

No, see, the genre outgrew the idea that dungeons are public space not because it was innovative to try something new, but because the technology progressed to a point that it could solve a fundamental user experience problem.

whoosh.

The MMO genre outgrew the idea. Or rather, people who played this in x games over y years got fed up with it. Meantime, we are talking about multiplayer version of the single-player RPG series. You know, the one where the players did nothing for y years but spent their time in dungeons solo. For them, having other players in multiplayer elder scrolls game may be actually novel and refreshing. Not in the least because likely half of the current MMO players never got to experience the non-instanced MMO dungeons, coming to the genre post-WoW.

You're arguing that old ideas we've long since forgotten are worth doing because new players haven't experienced the same pain we did over a decade ago (and maybe with a sense they'll turn out differently, liking different things or something).

On that merit alone, we have no common ground in this debate.

[Aza]

Not to poopoo the internet though I see lots of holistic assumptions about this game being made from people not playing beyond the tutorial levels. Which is fine, but I'm always amazed by how much is then written about an opinion that is strictly made up of limited knowledge. This game has MMO staples (types of group content, pvp, and solo play), which seems, by many, to be strictly interpreted as a bad thing. MMOs have become pretty established as a genre, but I think people are expecting something revolutionary where it doesn't really make sense (GW2 made some bold combat choices, which ended up making the game's pve extremely shallow, for example).

I hope MMOs continue to improve through iteration, and I think TESO has taken some interestingly (for good or bad no one can tell at this point; eg. combat and story presentation) exploratory steps.

Here is another pretty good video that shows the type of content, story, group, and exploration that is encountered outside of the lowb zones. I'd recommend the watch if anyone wants to learn more about the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiqDFg5SKZY

[Megrim]

Not to poopoo the internet though I see lots of holistic assumptions about this game being made from people not playing beyond the tutorial levels. Which is fine, but I'm always amazed by how much is then written about an opinion that is strictly made up of limited knowledge. This game has MMO staples (types of group content, pvp, and solo play), which seems, by many, to be strictly interpreted as a bad thing. MMOs have become pretty established as a genre, but I think people are expecting something revolutionary where it doesn't really make sense (GW2 made some bold combat choices, which ended up making the game's pve extremely shallow, for example).

I hope MMOs continue to improve through iteration, and I think TESO has taken some interestingly (for good or bad no one can tell at this point; eg. combat and story presentation) exploratory steps.

Here is another pretty good video that shows the type of content, story, group, and exploration that is encountered outside of the lowb zones. I'd recommend the watch if anyone wants to learn more about the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiqDFg5SKZY

I am newb to battlefields. I log into game, click around, select engineer class because I like the sound of it.

I have a gun that goes brrt brrt, a pistol that goes pew pew, and a rocket lawnchair that goes whoosh. I start a game, and within 30 seconds, I brrt brrt two guys, pew pew another one, and whoosh a scary loud tank, blowing it up and fragging two more level gorillion nerds.

I'm now 5-0, and capping a control point. I'm having fun! This is awesome!




"B-b-buht the game gets better after you do the tutorial" isn't actually a thing. Hasn't been for a more than a decade.

[sam, an eggplant]

"B-b-buht the game gets better after you do the tutorial" isn't actually a thing. Hasn't been for a more than a decade.

I love the snark and all but that's silly talk. Of course it's a thing. Happens all the time. It's just poor design because it doesn't bode well for commercial success. The first couple hours are critical to get players hooked. How many games have you started, then never returned? How many times have you clicked "delete local content" in Steam on a game you played for one night?

It's not the kiss of death, particularly in a MMO, because there are often multiple factors incenting players to return. Of course there's post purchase rationalization; you spent $60 and if the game is crap you made a poor decision, so you try to like it. There's also the community, your guild or group of friends may be trying the game en masse. ESO expands an existing IP, and Skyrim sold like crack to schoolkids, so those people will give it a chance too.

[Paelos]

Not to poopoo the internet though I see lots of holistic assumptions about this game being made from people not playing beyond the tutorial levels. Which is fine, but I'm always amazed by how much is then written about an opinion that is strictly made up of limited knowledge.

WoW was fun in the first 3 hours. In fact, it was so much more fun than what came before it, that people couldn't shut up about it.

SWTOR was fun in the first 3 hours. You had stories and cool areas, and you were generally engaged in what was going on.

WAR was even fun in the first 3 hours. I don't remember exactly why it was, but it was.

Every MMO tends to get less fun and more grindy at the end of the game. If you can't even get the first 3 hours right? WTF are you doing that makes me assume you're bucking the trend to get interesting later in a genre known for uninteresting later content?

No sale.

[sam, an eggplant]

ESO's first couple hours aren't complete dogshit. If you haven't burned out on previous MMOs, you may even find it compelling. It's a less polished, and OK, "fun" experience than WoW's cataclysm-era newbie areas, certainly, but superior to recent MMOs like Rift, and comparable to TOR, FFXIV, and Wildstar.

[Ghambit]

I do believe that video will have the opposite effect Aza was intending.    But, it fully illustrates what I would've said; there's just not much "to" the game.  It's a rather simple, casual experience in a drab landscape.  Kinda reminds me of "Two Worlds 2" actually, which I hated.

The PvP is a decent touch; but as said prior, it has no real stickiness aside from earning the right to fight Molag Bal for your Alliance.  And there's no real player/guild investment in it (from what I know of it), unlike games like AoC or Eve, or even Wildstar's warplots.

Many speak of having fun for a month or so and being happy with that.  I'd say you're kidding yourselves unless you're a consoleer or MMO-newb.  The game has few distractions from the baseline whack-a-mole.  You have the patience to do that for 50 lvls, god help you.  Myself, I need other more robust features to take the sting off the typical combat grind. (like in-depth storyline, guild features, housing, robust crafting, rep. grinds, etc.)

[Nebu]

Many speak of having fun for a month or so and being happy with that.  I'd say you're kidding yourselves unless you're a consoleer or MMO-newb.

I'm normally one of those people that will buy an MMO for the free month and feel like a got a reasonable value.  With ESO, I'm not so sure anymore.  I may actually pass on this one and wait for Wildstar.

[Ghambit]

Could play both w/o fear of overlap, considering ESO is not the type of MMO that'll hinder gametime in another space.  For all the negative, it does have a very pop-in/out feel to it.

[Threash]

Could play both w/o fear of overlap, considering ESO is not the type of MMO that'll hinder gametime in another space.  For all the negative, it does have a very pop-in/out feel to it.

Cept for you know, sub.