The Elder Scrolls Online

[Paelos]

ESO's first couple hours aren't complete dogshit.

No, the game works. It's not dogshit. It's just not fun.

The thing about "burnout" now is that you're releasing a game into that market where WoW is a thing. To ignore it is ridiculous. If you don't bring something new to the table other than a setting? The game is proper fucked.

[Aza]

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.)

I'm glad you brought this up. I'm not trying to sell this game on anyone, and I'm glad you are able to make a decision on the game based on information about what the game offers. It's long-winded discussion using broadly generic of terms how the game 'feels', 'is generic', is 'rehash', is what drives me batty.

To what others are driving home: there is something to be said for a game wanting to make sure it makes a good first impression, and this game definitely fails spectacularly at that (It's hard to think of a worse MMO starter area experience than the prison, even).

What I'm in for: I want to play MMOs that have a good group experience for pvp and pve with solid solo elements (story, exploration,  and strategic combat challenges). I think this game can deliver those. If all is well I'll be done with the game in about 2 months time, like the typical MMO these days. I find if I stay longer than that there is something wrong with me (buying into the max level grind and repeating too much content for wasting time purposes  ).

[Nebu]

I spent 4 solid weekends in the beta.  I'm actually surprised that I didn't run into any of you.  What I got from those weekends was that the game was very bland and had no 'stick' to it at all.  I never felt compelled to do anything... which you really need in an MMO.  Something should drive you to that next quest or that next area.  In ESO, it just seemed like working in a factory.  Grab a quest, finish the objective, and more on to the next.  

ESO is like chain restaurant food.  You'll never rave about it, but it can fill the void when you're hungry and don't feel like cooking.  If I play ESO, it will be because I didn't have anything else that I felt like playing or some friends dragged me along.  Dare I say that ESO is the Denny's of MMOs.  You don't go to Denny's, you end up there.

[Threash]

I fucking love Denny's.

[Khaldun]

Somebody put samprimary's assessment on the front page, stat. Really nicely laid out.

[Nebu]

Somebody put samprimary's assessment on the front page, stat. Really nicely laid out.

^^ This.  Sam really hit every one of my feelings on this game.

[Nija]

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.

"If you haven't played any other games you might like it only because you don't know how bad it is compared to everything else!"

[tmp]

If you don't bring something new to the table other than a setting? The game is proper fucked.

The thing is, there's like literally three 'new things' over entire development of the genre

initial iteration "what the fuck do i do now"
quest-oriented "here's what you do now" (WoW)
now with public quests (WAR i think? perhaps that's why WAR too felt vaguely fun for you)

Innovation is rare. Like, once per few years rare. it's not even MMO thing, it's not like there isn't million shooters, beat'em-ups, RTS and whatevers else, all with the same mechanics being released every year, too, until once-twice per decade or so someone has an idea to bolt on something more.

[Ingmar]

considering ESO is not the type of MMO that'll hinder gametime in another space. 

Can someone translate this out of timecube into English for me? Because as a person who only operates on one plane, and has only so many hours to play games, any game I play hinders my game time in other games. That's kind of how time WORKS.

[MediumHigh]

If you don't bring something new to the table other than a setting? The game is proper fucked.

The thing is, there's like literally three 'new things' over entire development of the genre

initial iteration "what the fuck do i do now"
quest-oriented "here's what you do now" (WoW)
now with public quests (WAR i think? perhaps that's why WAR too felt vaguely fun for you)

Innovation is rare. Like, once per few years rare. it's not even MMO thing, it's not like there isn't million shooters, beat'em-ups, RTS and whatevers else, all with the same mechanics being released every year, too, until once-twice per decade or so someone has an idea to bolt on something more.

Except all those games aren't graphical chat rooms with a paid subscription for the privilege of a persistent avatar. We can swallow iterations of the same old shit because at worst their fun. At worst. With no other financial, time, or social commitment the first 5 minutes is either really fun or not worth your time.

[Ghambit]

considering ESO is not the type of MMO that'll hinder gametime in another space. 

Can someone translate this out of timecube into English for me? Because as a person who only operates on one plane, and has only so many hours to play games, any game I play hinders my game time in other games. That's kind of how time WORKS.

It's not the type of game that singularly eats your life.  Pop in/out.  Uncomplicated.  A 'filler game' essentially.  Perhaps a sidedish.  Of course you knew that, but we can talk about spacetime, relativistic thought, and multi-tasking theorem too if ya' want.   

[satael]

If you don't bring something new to the table other than a setting? The game is proper fucked.

The thing is, there's like literally three 'new things' over entire development of the genre

initial iteration "what the fuck do i do now"
quest-oriented "here's what you do now" (WoW)
now with public quests (WAR i think? perhaps that's why WAR too felt vaguely fun for you)

Innovation is rare. Like, once per few years rare. it's not even MMO thing, it's not like there isn't million shooters, beat'em-ups, RTS and whatevers else, all with the same mechanics being released every year, too, until once-twice per decade or so someone has an idea to bolt on something more.

Except all those games aren't graphical chat rooms with a paid subscription for the privilege of a persistent avatar. We can swallow iterations of the same old shit because at worst their fun. At worst. With no other financial, time, or social commitment the first 5 minutes is either really fun or not worth your time.

I guess we differ there. In the first 5 minutes of a game like Crusader Kings 2 are not really "fun" but I think it's one of the greatest games around (this is not an endorsement for ESO but rather to disagree on the idea that first 5 minutes is enough to determine if the game is good or not).

[Samprimary]

One of the more important things to remember is that you have to think of MMO's as an investment when you buy into them, in the sense that they are promising you a continuously evolving world, storyline, shit to do, community to care about (and to give your achievements context and some sort of social importance). As it stands, ESO seems like a really bad investment. Even if you're enjoying the beta experience as an individual, the game crashing and burning is outside of your control and if this thing's gonna pump and dump to f2p after it starts ghost towning, maybe just .. wait for that instead.

[satael]

One of the more important things to remember is that you have to think of MMO's as an investment when you buy into them, in the sense that they are promising you a continuously evolving world, storyline, shit to do, community to care about (and to give your achievements context and some sort of social importance). As it stands, ESO seems like a really bad investment. Even if you're enjoying the beta experience as an individual, the game crashing and burning is outside of your control and if this thing's gonna pump and dump to f2p after it starts ghost towning, maybe just .. wait for that instead.

If you think of games as investment then any single player game is far better to buy atleast a year after its release once it's patched and on sale. Unfortunately for MMOs the launch is the time when there are more players around and while things get patched later (and the game usually becomes cheaper) the newbie experience might resemble a barren wasteland.

[Falconeer]

"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 am in no way trying to defend TESO. Over many beta test sessions I only made it to level 7. It is quite unbearable. I really wanted to at least get to ten to try the PvP and I simply couldn't force myself to do it. This never happened to me before, not to this extent at least.

But at the same time I want to state once again that I had the same identical experience with Wildstar. Lots of people are head over heels about it but I challenge them to show me where the first 7 (or the first two hours) of Wildstar are in any way less boring or better designed than TESO.

Obviously personal taste plays a big role, so it's more than OK for people to just click with a kind of presentation and merrily slog through the n-th repetition of the first ten levels of WoW, but I wish more people were open to admit that fun and boring are often just a result of the right combination of lights and sounds, more than actual good or bad game design. The whole idea of "if this doesn't hook me in the first 5 minutes, then it's not going to" in a time with so many similar offers is a testament to this, and how we need for something intangible to tickle our pleasure centres and release bliss in our system or we are not gonna bother. Think about comics and how many times you rejected one because the first few pages, if not the cover, sucked for you.

I think the problem with TESO, on top of apparently being devoid of enough innovation to justify a replay for old players like us, is that its presentation -for some reason- is less than hot. It can be OK, sure, but it is so NOT exciting that you'd have to fool yourself to go on a second date with it/her/him. And you know you can easily find better things to do that night.

Wildstar is pretty much the same in the first 7 minutes/7 levels, but at least it presents itself as a cuter date to some. That alone will almost certainly win it more followers.

About the kiss of death, I honestly think it's the subscription model. Fuck that.

[Maledict]

I would have to disagree re ESO opening sections.

They absolutely are dogshit. Easily the worse tutorial / beginner experience I've played in an MMO in years, and I even played the original EQ2 starter island. It's beyond bland, it's confusing, and worse of all it routinely *breaks* leaving the player stuck in the tutorial with no way to progress. Wildstar has the same flaws but at least it doesn't break and is a lot more colourful.

Vanilla launch starting areas for WoW were better.

[Modern Angel]

Oh yes, those first few levels. Whoever made them should be fired immediately. It's not that they're bad in a way the rest of the game isn't so much as it is that they're the anti-Elder Scrolls. Puzzle quests and interesting nooks of story? All after the first area. Put every faction on a small island, making the world immediately feel constrained? Holy shit, yes, and this is the worst part. I remember the feeling you get in every TES game when you escape the prison and you're suddenly thrust into this huge world. I love that feeling; just a sudden burst of sunlight and woosh, you're there in this big place which is yours to tackle.

TESO it's just, yeah, here's a tiny island. And it definitely feels tiny. All three factions. I can't believe they did it like that, particularly since the experience really is better once you get to the actual continent.

[Threash]

"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 am in no way trying to defend TESO. Over many beta test sessions I only made it to level 7. It is quite unbearable. I really wanted to at least get to ten to try the PvP and I simply couldn't force myself to do it. This never happened to me before, not to this extent at least.

But at the same time I want to state once again that I had the same identical experience with Wildstar. Lots of people are head over heels about it but I challenge them to show me where the first 7 (or the first two hours) of Wildstar are in any way less boring or better designed than TESO.

Obviously personal taste plays a big role, so it's more than OK for people to just click with a kind of presentation and merrily slog through the n-th repetition of the first ten levels of WoW, but I wish more people were open to admit that fun and boring are often just a result of the right combination of lights and sounds, more than actual good or bad game design. The whole idea of "if this doesn't hook me in the first 5 minutes, then it's not going to" in a time with so many similar offers is a testament to this, and how we need for something intangible to tickle our pleasure centres and release bliss in our system or we are not gonna bother. Think about comics and how many times you rejected one because the first few pages, if not the cover, sucked for you.

I think the problem with TESO, on top of apparently being devoid of enough innovation to justify a replay for old players like us, is that its presentation -for some reason- is less than hot. It can be OK, sure, but it is so NOT exciting that you'd have to fool yourself to go on a second date with it/her/him. And you know you can easily find better things to do that night.

Wildstar is pretty much the same in the first 7 minutes/7 levels, but at least it presents itself as a cuter date to some. That alone will almost certainly win it more followers.

About the kiss of death, I honestly think it's the subscription model. Fuck that.

I totally agree with this, and actually at least with TESO i had something to look forward too if i managed to level to 10.

[Falconeer]

If you feel like reading, here's someone trying to point out the hidden qualities of TESO.

They mention treasure maps, lost dungeons, unique crafting stations and the likes.

I’ve read comments about how ESO is still an on-rails themepark, but really, try actually running around the world.

[...]

It’s not often I want to fall back on telling someone they are “playing the game wrong”, but I do feel that the prevailing opinion that exploration in ESO is pointless is more than a bit inaccurate. There is simply a lot to explore and discover in the game and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

[Maledict]

I think the thing about ESO that annoys me the most isn't the game, its the fans who don't appear to have played an MMO since 2007 or so. constantly harping on about amazing things that ESO that no-one else ahs done, such as :

Exploring! (GW2)
Puzzles! (RIFT)
Action based combat (too many to list)

A *lot* of the people praising ESO on the forums I read appear to be comparing it to a vanilla WoW that vanished years ago. I think their heads would drop off if they actually played an MMO released in the last 5 years - or even WoW in it's current state,

[Samprimary]

One of the more important things to remember is that you have to think of MMO's as an investment when you buy into them, in the sense that they are promising you a continuously evolving world, storyline, shit to do, community to care about (and to give your achievements context and some sort of social importance). As it stands, ESO seems like a really bad investment. Even if you're enjoying the beta experience as an individual, the game crashing and burning is outside of your control and if this thing's gonna pump and dump to f2p after it starts ghost towning, maybe just .. wait for that instead.

If you think of games as investment then any single player game is far better to buy atleast a year after its release once it's patched and on sale. Unfortunately for MMOs the launch is the time when there are more players around and while things get patched later (and the game usually becomes cheaper) the newbie experience might resemble a barren wasteland.

games in general i would apply the model less to, it's just that a large amount of the quality of the experience of an mmo is at the mercy of population maintenance. if the game makes it as planned, the content keeps flowing. if the game ghosts out, it's a downhill all the way thing.

[Modern Angel]

If you feel like reading, here's someone trying to point out the hidden qualities of TESO.

They mention treasure maps, lost dungeons, unique crafting stations and the likes.

I’ve read comments about how ESO is still an on-rails themepark, but really, try actually running around the world.

[...]

It’s not often I want to fall back on telling someone they are “playing the game wrong”, but I do feel that the prevailing opinion that exploration in ESO is pointless is more than a bit inaccurate. There is simply a lot to explore and discover in the game and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

This guy has it right. Between marketing and early experience design, they've done an amazing job of making the interesting stuff completely invisible. I'm not saying "everyone should like TESO" but I am saying that I've never seen anything quite like the rotten job they've done making sure people hate the game.

[Lantyssa]

considering ESO is not the type of MMO that'll hinder gametime in another space. 

Can someone translate this out of timecube into English for me? Because as a person who only operates on one plane, and has only so many hours to play games, any game I play hinders my game time in other games. That's kind of how time WORKS.

You won't be playing it much, so all that time you're not playing can be spent on other games.

Unfortunately, that's at odds with a subscription.  Easier to not spend the money and not pay to not play.

[sam, an eggplant]

The problem is that the only view most people have of the game came from stress tests limited to a single weekend at a time, usually forcing players to start over from level 1, and level capped to 15. So unless you were able to play the entire weekend, you never actually got out of the newbie areas. So everybody judged the game based upon the intro, leading to a shitstorm of negative opinion.

None of that excuses the fact that the intro isn't compelling, but like I said earlier, it's no worse than rift, LOTRO, TOR, FFXIV, or Wildstar. From what I've seen in streams, Wildstar's newbie experience is the same sort of soul-crushing on-rails dreary experience, just a bit more colorful, with less story, and Wildstar's "zaniness".

[Maledict]

It's absolutely worse than those. For one thing, none of them had a game breaking bug in it that prevented me from progressing three times in a row (Literally - nothing you can do, no way to progress. Logging in and out did nothing, neither did resetting the quest).

[Falconeer]

What bothered me about the first few levels of TESO is that I didn't particularly like the intro area ("You are dead") so I waited for the next one and while it looked interesting at first, it turned out quite dull pretty soon. So I struggled to get to the next one, and once again, meh, lots of yawning. At this point I was just level 7 but I've already seen three areas and while I certainly was a bit biased against it, I really couldn't get the slightest bit of immersion. The areas -all the three of them- felt small and artificial, NPCs static and interesting as windup dolls, and so did the dungeons. I know for a fact it takes more than it did 10 years ago for these games to impress me, but daaaaaaaaamn this totally feels like post-Tortage Age of Conan (which I loved) but 6 years too late.

Seriously, no matter what "The Majority" thinks of EQ2, I loved it at launch, its areas were large and explorable and not stupidly hub-based. There were lots of "secrets" and lore findings to uncover, to the point that -laugh all you want- at the time I thought it felt like Morrowind online. It's crazy that ten years later we finally get an ESO mmorpg and it feels more on rails than EQ2 did.

I am all for finding that immersive, explorable content a few have been mentioning here and there, but assuming it really exists Zenimax is making it so difficult this time I might not make it.

[Falconeer]

It's absolutely worse than those. For one thing, none of them had a game breaking bug in it that prevented me from progressing three times in a row (Literally - nothing you can do, no way to progress. Logging in and out did nothing, neither did resetting the quest).

Not to bash your opinion, but I don' tthink you can judge upcoming MMORPGs based on the bugs you find in the beta test. Good for you that you didn't get gamebreaking bugs in Wildstar, cause I did. Still my disliking of the game isn't based on that.

At the same time, I am sorry you got a gamebreaking bug in TESO, cause I didn't. Still, my disliking of the game isn't based on that.

[Rasix]

The nature and severity of the bugs you encounter in a beta should be something you take into consideration.  I don't believe in miracle patches, and if you find something absolutely game breaking that slipped past unit testing and internal QA, I'd have a worse opinion of the game. 

Every game that I've beta tested that was a buggy piece of shit in beta ended up being a buggy piece of shit at launch.   

[Paelos]

Exactly, betas aren't about fixing anything large anymore. It's about marketing, finding annoying things, stress testing, and tweaking systems.

If it's a large problem in a beta (like combat is in this game), it's way too late.

[Falconeer]

All I am saying is that he found a bug, I didn't. Or -reverse- I found a bug in Wildstar, someone else didn't. Cool/Uncool. Moving on. Content and design are common elements we can all discuss, but personal experience with bugs -moreso in a beta- are kind of irrelevant to the discussion about how fun or not this game will be. There's so much worth hating in this game that lingering on bugs seems to indicate everything else is actually OK.

[HaemishM]

NDA is lifted? Ok, then.

Boring looking game is boring. BORING. It plays a little like Skyrim mechanically except it's just DEAD BORING - partly because it's somehow not as pretty or involving as Skyrim and partly because there's all this MMOG level shit story questing stuff thrown on top of it. It plays like every fucking other MMOG I've played for the last decade and nothing it tried to sell me in the first hour I played felt in the least bit different from anything else I've played since the release of WoW.

It's not a bad game. Had it released in 2003, I might have given a shit. But we've DONE this. We've done this ad nauseum. For all its flaws (and there were many) Secret World was a better game than this because at least character creation/progression and the setting were somewhat unique amongst MMOG's. This? It's not even "Skyrim with other players." It's DAoC/WoW with Skyrim veneer.

[murdoc]

Haem hits exactly how I felt. It's just really bland and BORING. It's not a bad game really, just very bland.

[Ghambit]

DaoC/WoW is a real stretch. There is no /WoW element at all really. 

[HaemishM]

Well, there's a quest log and minimap. 

[Megrim]

"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 am in no way trying to defend TESO. Over many beta test sessions I only made it to level 7. It is quite unbearable. I really wanted to at least get to ten to try the PvP and I simply couldn't force myself to do it. This never happened to me before, not to this extent at least.

But at the same time I want to state once again that I had the same identical experience with Wildstar. Lots of people are head over heels about it but I challenge them to show me where the first 7 (or the first two hours) of Wildstar are in any way less boring or better designed than TESO.

Obviously personal taste plays a big role, so it's more than OK for people to just click with a kind of presentation and merrily slog through the n-th repetition of the first ten levels of WoW, but I wish more people were open to admit that fun and boring are often just a result of the right combination of lights and sounds, more than actual good or bad game design. The whole idea of "if this doesn't hook me in the first 5 minutes, then it's not going to" in a time with so many similar offers is a testament to this, and how we need for something intangible to tickle our pleasure centres and release bliss in our system or we are not gonna bother. Think about comics and how many times you rejected one because the first few pages, if not the cover, sucked for you.

I think the problem with TESO, on top of apparently being devoid of enough innovation to justify a replay for old players like us, is that its presentation -for some reason- is less than hot. It can be OK, sure, but it is so NOT exciting that you'd have to fool yourself to go on a second date with it/her/him. And you know you can easily find better things to do that night.

Wildstar is pretty much the same in the first 7 minutes/7 levels, but at least it presents itself as a cuter date to some. That alone will almost certainly win it more followers.

About the kiss of death, I honestly think it's the subscription model. Fuck that.

It sure sounds like you are trying to defend it. The, uh, constant passive-aggressive comparisons with Wildstar aren't exactly helping either.

We can wax all poetical about the definition of 'fun' and be philosophical about the 'wholistic game experience' or some shit, but at the end of the day what we have, is shovelware (if not physically, it is most certainly so intellectually). Worse still, people who've been around this circus for longer than a decade now (seriously, think about this), are still somehow unable to step back and be critical.

I mean, I was annoyed when I found out that BF4 servers are run at 10 tickrate (CS:GO runs at 100, for example) and this is because the devs thought that having "Levolution" and "server-constant water referencing" are more important than crisp rego for their players, and that higher tickrates would mean greater server loads - which EA rents out - so we can't have that, noooo. Yet people look at TESO and go "well the combat is floaty and shit, and the dungeons are retarded, and the graphics are soulless and the lore butchery would make Jack the Ripper break down, but if you squint really hard..."