Opinions about the game Elder Scrolls Online?

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zedd
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Opinions about the game Elder Scrolls Online?

Post by zedd »

Hello,
I have been looking at videos in youtube about the game (ESO), and I am curious about it. But since there is no free trial period to try it I am hesitating in buying (game cost + monthly fee). I was wondering if anyone in these forums has experience with it.

Thank you
boballab
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Re: Opinions about the game Elder Scrolls Online?

Post by boballab »

zedd wrote:Hello,
I have been looking at videos in youtube about the game (ESO), and I am curious about it. But since there is no free trial period to try it I am hesitating in buying (game cost + monthly fee). I was wondering if anyone in these forums has experience with it.

Thank you
I personally have not played it, however I do play another game with a few that have and from what they said the game is a dud. The map is way to big for the population they have with little ability to get around the map quickly and the PvP is basically Guild Wars 2 World vs World PvP. Also the way they do quests and dungeons causes problems with grouping up since prior decisions on your part while solo effect what NPC's you can see and interact with later on and thus you and your group mates have different objectives in a dungeon. Here is how one review put it:
Every modern Elder Scrolls game has had a moment near the beginning where you step out into a new landscape and think I've never been somewhere like this before. In Morrowind it hit as you left Seyda Neen and realised that the road ahead went in two directions, and that you could follow either of them, and that each direction would take you on an entirely different journey through the world. In Oblivion it occurred when you escaped out onto the edge of Lake Rumare and saw the hills rise ahead of you along the road to Bruma. In Skyrim you emerged onto a mountainside with the Throat of the World on one side, the valley of Falkreath on the other, and a dragon in the skies above.

I have spent thirty hours playing The Elder Scrolls Online and I'm still waiting for that moment. I'm waiting for anything like that moment. I'm waiting for the point when this MMO sits up and makes a claim to be anything but familiar. This isn't simply about whether The Elder Scrolls Online works as an Elder Scrolls game in its own right—it doesn't, let's put paid to that notion now—but whether it can justify being one of the most expensive games on PC. Those 'stepping into the light' moments weren't just about showing off fancy new tech; they were a promise. You are going to have an adventure. This is going to be worth your time. It does not seem unjust or unrealistic to hold The Elder Scrolls Online to account along similar lines.

...

One of The Elder Scrolls Online's biggest weaknesses as an MMO is that it often becomes a worse game when large numbers of players are involved in the same activity. While questing in the High Rock area of Stormhaven I was directed to a monastery that was under attack by bandits. I was given two quests: put out six fires, and deliver healing to four injured monks. Credit for completing these objectives is only granted to the player that performs them, which means that I was put in indirect competition with every other player in the area—and given the linear nature of the game's zone, that means a lot of other people.

The monastery might have been on fire, but there weren't enough fires for everybody: which meant hanging around waiting for fires to respawn so that I could get the credit for putting them out. Badly-designed quests like this one are common, and even when your objective is more deftly constructed you are always aware of the conga-line of players waiting to do the exact same thing that you are doing. This takes the game to some strange places: I'll never forget the time I traveled back in time in the guise of an ancient warrior only to find a room full of doppelgangers jumping about, dancing, and waiting for a boss to spawn. Immersive it isn't.

...

That's the experience of leveling in The Elder Scrolls Online, then: you pick up prescriptive tasks from lifeless characters and join the queue to perform them with dozens of other players. There are treasures to discover and the odd optional cave to explore if you wander off, but the things you'll see and the rewards you'll uncover don't really match up to the effort. The crafting system is well thought-out and expansive, but the abundance of materials and lack of a formal trading system means that there isn't much of an economy to participate in. At its best, this is a decent iteration on a very familiar RPG format. At its worst, it's boring.

...

here's no game that I'd be happy recommending on the basis that it's at best 'okay' for thirty-plus hours. 'Okay' isn't good enough when you're facing down this much of a premium, and I can't imagine paying a monthly fee to visit somewhere I've been many times before.
http://www.pcgamer.com/review/the-elder ... ne-review/
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ettoren
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Re: Opinions about the game Elder Scrolls Online?

Post by ettoren »

If you're looking to delve into Graphical online gaming I would reccomend Rift It orignally launched as a Subscription model but has since moved to a Free to Play with a cash store. The game is entirely playable without spending any money on it. The cash shop only holds Quality of life products, some additional souls (sub classes), mounts and cosmetics. When I get the itch to play a graphical that's High Fantasy this is my go to. I would also recommend Star Wars: The Old Republic if you are more into the SciFi. It is also a Free to play and is playable without paying Cash for anything but you'll end up spending something on it as some of the restrictions placed on Free accounts is exceedingly restrictive and can be alleviated via the cash shop.

If you are looking for a MUD (text based Role playing) style game I highly recommend DragonRealms This is by far my favorite game I have ever played. I've been playing it off and on for 17 years now and I still have not reached the level cap. It is a skill based game in that if you want to get better at a skill you need to go out and use it. Levels are gained by achieving ranks in certain skills that are dictated by your Guild (class). Dragonrealms is a Role playing game. Roleplaying is expected and Out of Character behavior can be punished. There is an active set of Game Masters that oversee the game and Live events do happen quite frequently. The first month is Free. You get 1 (one) character for $14.95 and you can add additional characters for $2.50 per month. If you want many additional characters you can go with the Premium account option that will give you 16 character slots and also has additional benifits in and our of game.

Both of the above links for DR and Rift are Referral links. the Direct links are http://www.riftgame.com and http://www.dragonrealms.net. Please use the referral links!

I am actively playing Dragonrealms and Rift. If you choose to play either (or both!) of these I am more than happy to group up and/or help out with what I can. Just send me a PM with your character name and what server you're on for Rift or just your character name for DR. This offer of assistance and grouping is open to all and Sundry. The more folks I can get into game the better!
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Re: Opinions about the game Elder Scrolls Online?

Post by Bester »

I've been big into MMORPG's before, and was in raiding guilds in both EQ (Guild Leader) and WoW (Guild Officer/Raid Leader). I played ESO from release until the mid-May. Ultimately, my opinion comes down to a few quibbles and a few design choices.

The economy is lackluster at best. All trading happens either in guild stores or as part of the zone chat (there is no trade chat channel, which meant that everyone had to deal with effusive amounts of chat spam). The guild store is extremely limited as it only spans one of the 5 guilds you can be in at a time, and since all of those guilds have a max membership of 500 you have a maximum audience of 2500 (probably much less). Also, things on the guild store has a high premium for use. Zone chat selling is, as always, annoying, obnoxious, time-intensive, and generally a pain in the ass. Add in the commonality of most things and the horrible searching UI functions (GUI Mods can help to some extent, but is limited and with how frequent the updates are mods are frequently at least partially broken). Since drops are so frequent and you know exactly where to go to farm things there is also very little need to upgrade beyond what drops you end up getting. The biggest sellers are crafting materials as everyone is trying to level up crafting, but since the market for crafted items is very thin there will eventually be a glut and that single bubble of the economy will resoundingly pop. It may have already happened in the month since I last played.

I liked the idea of the 'phased' zones. Basically the idea is that each zone instance is filled as it normally would be up to the instance max, but everyone would see different things depending on what quests you had completed and how far you had progressed in other quests. As you progressed through a quest the quest giver and NPC's might move to different spots, and mobs might spawn (or despawn at the end of a quest) or go neutral so that they won't attack you. It is a fairly cool idea, but in this case it needed a lot more work. Grouping is difficult unless group members were at the exact same stages in all the quests that might affect a specific area. There are a lot of bugs with it, and it isn't uncommon to have to abandon quests and restart them from scratch because something didn't spawn like it was supposed to. Basically interesting idea with poor execution.

In general, a lot of the functionality in the game is poorly constructed. Even beyond the guild stores which are utterly useless in their vanilla form, things like the LFG menu are highly broken. Getting into the group dungeon generally required a few tries before everything worked correctly, and it wasn't uncommon for things to get borked to the point that you had to retry. A lot of the functionality in the game was similar. Speaking generally, there was a lot of post-release tinkering with...well, everything. I'm used to a certain amount of tinkering in MMORPG's as they are always a work in progress, but it seemed to be wildly escalated in ESO. Everything from ability balancing (which takes the place of classes, since there aren't really classes in ESO) to knee-jerk reactions to bugs and the endless gold spammers (which were in rare form in this game). A lot of the tone and messages from the developers seemed to be sending mixed-messages, as though the management of the game was still debating about which direction to go in certain areas. All in all, I didn't have much confidence in the devs and their intentions; the knee-jerk reactions with no warning and no consistency left me with a sour taste in my mouth (though I never got hit directly or did anything that should get nerfed or penalized).

I did like the skilling system as it allowed flexibility to create a character unique to your play-style. It gives a reward for being that anal guy that goes around and collects all the sky shards and books and whatnot. The main complaint I had against this was that you could only have 5 abilities up at a time, which was a pretty strict limitation. It also left a lot to be desired when you got people that had primarily been soloing into groups with relatively challenging content, particularly when it involved skills that soloers wouldn't typically user (healing spells, tanking abilities, aggro skills, etc). That said, this is true in most MMORPG's so I can't single out ESO for this.

Quests tended to be fairly bland, and while they weren't bad to begin with by the time you got through all the zones in a faction, let alone all three factions, the idea of a quest is enough to make you sob quietly in the corner. Leveling in general seemed pretty slow to me in comparison to anything since the old EQ days. I lot of WoW'ers were gnashing their teeth about how slow it is, though that didn't bother me so much. The zones quickly become old, and after a while you can spot the copy and pasted architecture in most of the dungeons and instances.

Crafting was executed pretty well, but the fact is some of the design decisions meant that crafting is going to be a dead end. By the time you get a crafting skill up to high levels you will have invested fairly staggering amounts of time and money into it, especially since crafting materials are the only part of the economy that was really 'working' during the time that I played. Basically you got crafting experience from not only assembling, but also disassembling things (from which you would get a small portion of the crafting materials that went into it). If you disassemble something that you made only get a small portion of the regular deconstruction xp, which lends to people trading crafted items for deconstruction xp. Selling deconstruction fodder was the only crafted items I was ever able to sell, and while I heard that there was a small market for crafting at the highest levels it was quickly getting glutted. I doubt that there is a reasonable chance the make back even a small portion of the investment into your crafting skills now.

The storyline was moderately interesting if condensed, but there was soooooo much filler from stretching it out to encompass a game world with three factions. The result was a bland abomination that I doubt anyone could read through without spats of laughter at the horribly and unintentionally ludicrous portions and boredom at most of the rest. The ES universe has always been very inconsistent with plots and stories, with some (Thieves and Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion for instance) being very good diamonds in the rough, and most being mediocre or forgettable. In ESO, it is all bland and so overworked that it is horrible. In most MMORPG's they section everything off and have different writers putting together different quests so, while not ideal, there is a certain freshness to them. Here, they tried to pay so much attention to detail and interconnect everything so that there is nothing to stand out, only endless amounts of exposition and back-story in monotone. Even the standout portions (namely Razum-dar and Sheograth) are average by ES standards. To sum it up, don't play ESO for the story unless you are a true masochist.

As the post above remarks, the game is extremely linear as well. There is no room to really just explore for the fun of seeing what's in the corner of the area. That was always one of ESO's greatest disappointments.

As far as I can tell there is no intention for raid content, just some loose "Adventure Zones" for multi-party groups to grind in. I'm not one for PVP, so I can't speak to it, but no one I talked to seemed particularly excited about the PVP.

To me, the most damning thing was how they handled the guilds. Every player was able to join 5 guilds, and each guild was able to have 500 members. Most guilds spam recruited to get as close to 500 members as possible as there are guild benefits for hitting certain numbers of members (like the guild bank and store). As in all, this left most guilds full of strangers that never interacted, and since you were in the midst of so many members in so many guilds there wasn't one that you could psychologically attach to. As a result most guild chats were either utterly silent or full of spam. To me, MMORPG's are about the camaraderie that forms in guilds and grouping together to advance the guild through challenging content. I couldn't have even told you who any of the officers were in any of the guilds in ESO. There was no sense of attachment to the guilds, and so ultimately I couldn't pull myself into the game as much as I desperately wanted to be able to.

All in all, I really wanted to like this game and become invested in it, but at the end of the day I can only look at ESO as a disappointment. I wouldn't recommend it for any type of MMORPG player. There isn't any effective raiding, PVP (from what others told me) was lackluster and zerglike, leveling and questing is tedious and unrewarding, crafting is a dead end, and the social interaction was discouraged by design decisions. Except for the swath of incredibly granular backstory (which I'm not sure was internally consistant) for ES fanatics, there is nothing good that I could take away from my almost two months in the game.

Just my two cents.
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zedd
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Re: Opinions about the game Elder Scrolls Online?

Post by zedd »

Thank you all for your feedbacks. They were greatly appreciated.

Regards
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