The Elder Scrolls Online

[Miasma]

Joe has a lot of anger to share, and costume changes.

[Sir T]

If you want a bit of a mind fuck You can look at this

And here's him out of character talking about what he really thinks

[Signe]

I like Francis.  He makes me laugh like an idiot.  Anyway, I pretty much agree with everything he said.  I was hoping the game would be wonderful or, at least, good.  It really was just okay.  During beta it was good fun but I think that was mainly because it was new.  Playing it like it's a single player game is fine, but not for a game with a sub.  Srsly, you can just play a single player game and get ALL the content, not just a bit of the content.  There's so many things missing and broken in ESO that if I'd known, I don't think I would have backed it at all.  I'm sad about it, too.

[Paelos]

I haven't heard any sub numbers yet, or press releases from ESO. I believe the free time is over now, right?

[01101010]

I like Francis.  He makes me laugh like an idiot.  Anyway, I pretty much agree with everything he said.  I was hoping the game would be wonderful or, at least, good.  It really was just okay.  During beta it was good fun but I think that was mainly because it was new.  Playing it like it's a single player game is fine, but not for a game with a sub.  Srsly, you can just play a single player game and get ALL the content, not just a bit of the content.  There's so many things missing and broken in ESO that if I'd known, I don't think I would have backed it at all.  I'm sad about it, too.

Completely opposite. I understand Francis is a caricature of the internet basement dweller, but putting a voice and face on the idea of that just makes me hate the guy. The man behind the character I actually like and I can watch the second vid - the first one I couldn't make it thru the first 20 seconds.

[Miasma]

I haven't heard any sub numbers yet, or press releases from ESO. I believe the free time is over now, right?

They gave everyone five free days so it has the rest of this week I guess.  I doubt you will be hearing anything about sub numbers.

[Lucas]

Yeah, if there is decent retention, they might wait 'til the end of May to release some positive press, when Wildstar approaches release to counter it....Or they'll "forever hold their peace" 

[Signe]

I like Francis.  He makes me laugh like an idiot.  Anyway, I pretty much agree with everything he said.  I was hoping the game would be wonderful or, at least, good.  It really was just okay.  During beta it was good fun but I think that was mainly because it was new.  Playing it like it's a single player game is fine, but not for a game with a sub.  Srsly, you can just play a single player game and get ALL the content, not just a bit of the content.  There's so many things missing and broken in ESO that if I'd known, I don't think I would have backed it at all.  I'm sad about it, too.

Completely opposite. I understand Francis is a caricature of the internet basement dweller, but putting a voice and face on the idea of that just makes me hate the guy. The man behind the character I actually like and I can watch the second vid - the first one I couldn't make it thru the first 20 seconds.

This one wasn't very good, I agree, but I saw the open the servers one and it was hysterical.  It was so like the forums and WoW chat only personified.  I had no idea he did this with all games.  At first, with the WoW one, I thought he was serious.  Maybe it's more funny when you think he really is a internet basement dweller.

[Stormwaltz]

When he says he considers the current feature set of WoW "the baseline for an MMO," what I hear him saying is that he requires his MMGs to have a decade of development and iteration, a team measured in the hundreds, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into them.

I understand his basic point, but I don't think it's a reasonable expectation. Not in an age when players have been brainwashed into the entitlement mentality of F2P, and we are all well-acquainted with the downsides of Napoleonic budgeting.

EDIT: I mean, FFS, the whole issue with ESO is that the design tries to do everything WoW did, plus its own unique stuff, and in the end, it sounds like they were only able to muster enough focus to polish up the PvP endgame - which was the part they'd worked on the longest. It's too little butter scraped over too much bread.

[HaemishM]

He's got a point though. It may not be fair to developers but the feature sets he's talking about (raid finder, battlegrounds, etc.) are all user-friendly features that you don't much think about until you get in a game that doesn't have them yet needs them. Then you think, "Why am I paying for this game without an Auction House when I could be playing WoW?" It's like quest journals, auto-saves, in-game maps and minimaps in single-player RPG's. It was ok not to have them until somebody had them and then you got dinged if you didn't have them.

WoW IS the baseline because if you are asking for a $15 a month subscription, you are instantly competing against WoW. Just like WoW was competing against EQ1 with its multiple expansions and five years' worth of developed content.

[Nebu]

The Secret World and GW2 set new standards for me with regard to MMO gameplay that left ESO feeling rather poorly done and uninteresting.  Then again, I lost interest in Elder Scrolls after Morrowind when they started messing with the combat system.  Having said that, I think the guy in the video may have unrealistic expectations with regard to MMO release, whiel still making a few good points about the state of ESO.  I felt the same way by the second time I reached level 12.  It never felt like things were going to get better.  Even the illusion of improvement by endgame is enough to keep me playing... I'm the guy that plays every trash MMO out there and this is usually the reason.   

[Goreschach]

When he says he considers the current feature set of WoW "the baseline for an MMO," what I hear him saying is that he requires his MMGs to have a decade of development and iteration, a team measured in the hundreds, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into them.

I understand his basic point, but I don't think it's a reasonable expectation. Not in an age when players have been brainwashed into the entitlement mentality of F2P, and we are all well-acquainted with the downsides of Napoleonic budgeting.

Reasonable expectations my ass. This is idiotic. The players aren't here to cuddlefuck you. They're here to play the best game they can find. If you can't keep pace with the people at the front of the pack, then that's your problem, not theirs.

[Stormwaltz]

If you can't keep pace with the people at the front of the pack, then that's your problem, not theirs.

You will never, never, never, never, never be able to compete with a game that has been in continuous development for 13 years, by a team of hundreds, funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from the original game, monthly subscriptions from millions of players, and four boxed expansions.

If you seriously expect an MMG at its launch to be comparable with WoW in its current state, with all those years and resources behind it...

Then I seriously don't expect to hear any further complaints about WoW stifling the industry, about WoW-clones, or about paying subscriptions. Because you're all getting what you're willing to pay for.

EDITS: lots of grammar errors because it's late

[Goreschach]

[Stormwaltz]

Welp, that makes two of us.

Here's to another decade of WoW!

[Falconeer]

TESO definitely has some qualities, things that can't be found in any other MMORPG. Sadly, what everyone is saying is absolutely true: a lack of quality of life items that is hard to swallow these days and that in my opinion cannot be justified with "less than 13 years of development". It should just be there.

What killed it prematurely for me though isn't even that though. It's the combat. Supposedly action-y, it takes more than just some vague aiming now to make it interesting. This would have been awesome four years ago, but after all the TERAs, Age of Conan, The Secret World, Neverwinter and the likes this is not new anymore and isn't enough to make the repetitive act of combat bearable in the long run. It takes animations, sounds, visuals, particles, effects, and lots more hidden details like timing, pace, weight, oomph, things that make it just fun to bash things over and over as opposed to mindnumbingly boring.

As I stated many times now, TERA's combat ruined most MMORPGs for me as they now all feel old, stiff, obsolete and unsatisfying in that department. But what totally murdered my will to play TESO is the fact that I was playing Dark Souls 2 at the same time. And when you play THAT combat, you simply can't stomach TESO's pathetic sword-flailing. If it weren't for the hard comparison with Dark Souls I would have probably played this a couple of weeks more. To be able to entertain me beyond that? I am not sure, maybe it's not even possible, maybe it's not TESO's fault, maybe I'm just over long time MMORPG commitment. There's too many good games out these days to stick to just one huge timesink.

[KallDrexx]

If you can't keep pace with the people at the front of the pack, then that's your problem, not theirs.

You will never, never, never, never, never be able to compete with a game that has been in continuous development for 13 years, by a team of hundreds, funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from the original game, monthly subscriptions from millions of players, and four boxed expansions.

If you seriously expect an MMG at its launch to be comparable with WoW in its current state, with all those years and resources behind it...

Then I seriously don't expect to hear any further complaints about WoW stifling the industry, about WoW-clones, or about paying subscriptions. Because you're all getting what you're willing to pay for.

EDITS: lots of grammar errors because it's late

I don't think the issue is players comparing it to Wow, I think the problem is that most MMO devs have not realized that in order to compete with WoW you can't try to copy wow.  You need to pick a few significant core ideas and execute those well.  The problem is MMO developers seem to try and be everything and end up doing nothing well.

[apocrypha]

What I got from the guy-who-plays-Francis's video was that he was saying that there's a basic set of minimum functionality you need to have at launch in an MMO, and that baseline is set by WoW.

I.e., working chat, grouping tools (e.g. dungeon finder), adequate inventory & storage, working guild tools, effective hack/bot prevention, serviceable customer service, questing system, crafting system, etc. etc. Edit the list according to the feature set your game launches with. If it ain't working it shouldn't be there.

Sure, you're not going to have 10 years worth of content like WoW but if your basic game and interface don't work at least as well as WoW in the key areas then why are you even bothering? And I agree with that entirely. I'm not playing WoW now but I have zero interest in playing another MMO that tries to copy WoW but doesn't do it as well as WoW does. What's the point?

[satael]

TESO left me feeling that it would have been so much better as a single player game.
Alot of the bugs (that I encountered) wouldn't have existed and they could have easily made the (non-mmo) combat better. Also the quests/plot could have been great if it had been made for a single player game.

[Paelos]

TESO is a complete waste of time and resources that could have given us Elder Scrolls 6: Hammerfell, or whatever region they decided.

Instead they dumped all this effort into a produce that is painfully average and offers nothing to the MMO genre.

[Falconeer]

I don't think any Bethesda resources went into TESO though.

[Soulflame]

Only the goodwill of the Elder Scrolls name.

[Nebu]

Only the goodwill of the Elder Scrolls name.

Which got tarnished by the release of this garbage. 

[Soulflame]

I completely agree.

[Count Nerfedalot]

WoW did not succeed by innovating OR by cloning the market leader with one or two new innovations. It succeeded by taking the best (or at least good and proven workable) ideas from all of its competitors, working very very hard over many iterations to integrate them into a seamless and well-functioning whole, and integrating that with a very well designed and thoroughly fleshed out world, and polishing all that till it all WORKED (except for launch scale issues, but even that they handled better than any of their competition at the time). AND their ace in the hole was providing an open extensible UI which made it possible for the users to fill in the vast majority of the gaps they'd overlooked. And underneath it all they had high-quality, robust, well-designed software and systems, while on top of it all they had high-quality, well-designed, unified theme presentation from art style and color palette to audio and animations and etc. And yes it had all of the must-have bullet point features of the time, and that list is much longer now, BUT (almost) all of those features WORKED and fit well with all the other moving parts. It was a huge, expensive undertaking requiring an army of top-notch skilled professionals at every single level and role.  And it changed the marketplace for a generation at least.

NOBODY has since done all those things, much less one-upped it, and thus there have been NO equivalent successes.

I really think the problem is not so much how much money it takes, as how much skill and effort and time it takes to do absolutely every single piece right, from dungeon design and class balance and art direction to database design and network code and client functionality.  Almost every single "failure" in mmos or software in general can be laid at the feet of bad management decisions shorting some critical aspect of design and/or making (or having externally imposed) critcally flawed design choices.

/bitter_software_engineer_rant_mode_off

[Paelos]

I don't think any Bethesda resources went into TESO though.

Zenimax Online studios is funded as a subsidiary by Zenimax Media. They own Bethesda as well. So while Bethesda didn't provide resources directly to ESO, the parent company shifted resources to ESO that easily could have gone to Bethesda.

[Merusk]

I really think the problem is not so much how much money it takes, as how much skill and effort and time it takes to do absolutely every single piece right, from dungeon design and class balance and art direction to database design and network code and client functionality.  Almost every single "failure" in mmos or software in general can be laid at the feet of bad management decisions shorting some critical aspect of design and/or making (or having externally imposed) critcally flawed design choices.

/bitter_software_engineer_rant_mode_off

You have fully hit the nail on the head here.  Blizzard has always been derp-delay of game companies, but based on what I'd heard over the years they still had the most unified and disciplined business model.  Yeah, it's not an enterprise software or banking company level of discipline, but it's miles beyond the "hey we're a frat house of 20-something geeks" mentality of almost every other game developer out there.

[Wizgar]

You will never, never, never, never, never be able to compete with a game that has been in continuous development for 13 years, by a team of hundreds, funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from the original game, monthly subscriptions from millions of players, and four boxed expansions.

The advantages of entrenchment didn't seem to help every other shitty obsolete old MMO that got buried. If you're not willing to do anything drastically new and can't execute the old stuff even as well as it's already been done, then you deserve to fail.

[Samprimary]

Almost every single "failure" in mmos or software in general can be laid at the feet of bad management decisions shorting some critical aspect of design and/or making (or having externally imposed) critcally flawed design choices.

don't understand why failure is in quotes; it's legitimately failure, as far as I can see.

and the torturous part about it is that those critically flawed design choices and bad management/developer decisions often times have, within a scant few months of game development time, put the project on a trajectory which becomes terminally unalterable within a surprisingly short time. I'm sure that in a lot of projects like these, devs are talking frankly amongst themselves about how the product will never work, but they are usually colluding to keep this fact unspoken, even to the rest of the rank and file working on the project.

I seriously bet that most MMO's, when they're just halfway done, have secretly been written off by management as a loss, but they keep mum about it to get as much back in returns as they possibly can.

[Paelos]

You have fully hit the nail on the head here.  Blizzard has always been derp-delay of game companies, but based on what I'd heard over the years they still had the most unified and disciplined business model.  Yeah, it's not an enterprise software or banking company level of discipline, but it's miles beyond the "hey we're a frat house of 20-something geeks" mentality of almost every other game developer out there.

Most game developers don't think they have to run their business as a business. Then, they end up failing because shit didn't get done.

[Paelos]

I seriously bet that most MMO's, when they're just halfway done, have secretly been written off by management as a loss, but they keep mum about it to get as much back in returns as they possibly can.

We knew this project was doomed 18 months out. I guarantee management knew it too.

[apocrypha]

I'm tired of hearing companies say they're working on a "AAA" title. At best they'll release a "B" quality game.

2nd post of the thread, 6 years ago.

[Nija]

TESO definitely has some qualities, things that can't be found in any other MMORPG.

I'm actually interested to hear what you think those qualities are. What does TESO do better than any other MMO, past or present?

I'm also right there with you on the Dark Souls ticket. I was playing the original DS (late, I think) shortly after Skyrim came out. I put in a good 80 hours of Skyrim and was looking forward to replaying, but actual melee combat in DS made Skyrim (and every other Elder Scrolls game) look really, really bad. Couldn't go back to Skyrim after that. Still can't. Way too simple.

[Senses]

Dark Souls is awesome, but, I expect the same result if they announce they are working on a AAA Massively Multiplayer Dark Souls 3.

[Simond]

TESO left me feeling that it would have been so much better as a single player game.
Alot of the bugs (that I encountered) wouldn't have existed and they could have easily made the (non-mmo) combat better. Also the quests/plot could have been great if it had been made for a single player game.

TESO is a complete waste of time and resources that could have given us Elder Scrolls 6: Hammerfell, or whatever region they decided.

Instead they dumped all this effort into a produce that is painfully average and offers nothing to the MMO genre.

ctrl-f TESO ctrl-h SWTOR.