I’ve been somewhat of a fan of the Elder Scroll Series (through I was disappointed by Skyrim, sadly…felt it was a bit plastic and lacked a bit in gameplay), and I’m somewhat curious to hear if anybody on the SDMB is looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online. To be honest it seems like after the announcement that it was going to be $60 upfront, $15/mo p2p a lot of the buzz about it has died, and the pushback for launch date to April 2014 hasn’t helped much either.
Full disclosure, so to speak: I have been a beta tester for the game. I can’t answer many questions because of the NDA but I can talk about a few very general basics.
I don’t know. For the sake of the people working hard on it, I hope someone plays it but everything I have read about it makes it seem that it takes everything that made the game play of the Elder Scrolls unique and turns it into every other MMO leaving only the setting which was always just kind of Generic Fantasy to begin with.
I played a little bit of the beta. It felt like Skyrim with a bunch more people running around which, frankly, took me out of the game. I’ve played a lot of MMORPGs but something about exploring a crypt in Skyrim when someone dashes in front of you bunny hopping around and randomly launching fire bolts put me off more than the same thing happening in other games. I guess just because it looks so Skyrim-y that my mind had different expectations.
Well without breaking the NDA too much (I actually had to agree to two of them because I got invited to a “special” beta that I had to eventually drop because working 60 hour weeks, holding together a family, and seeing medical help on a regular basis didn’t leave much time for it): Quimby, I’ve gotta agree with you. ESO continues the dumbing-down of gameplay that I think started with Skyrim. I don’t think I was alone in the beta players in thinking that. And ES lore is pretty much out the window.
It seemed to me, even before I started playing it, that ESO was going to have a really hard time finding an audience. Like MMOs? ESO would have to be several cuts above WoW, Guild Wars 2, and all the other MMOs currently out there especially considering unlike many of them it’s going to be p2p. Like Elder Scrolls? Well then you probably like single-player RPGs and MMOs aren’t your bag. How many people are really out there thinking, “Gee, I like Elder Scrolls, but I wish I could play it with about 1,000 strangers who are all trying to grab the same quest/resource/mob/item that I’m trying to get”?
Don’t get me wrong, if this were “Generic WoW-like MMO” it would actually be a good, probably a great MMO. There are some genuinely unique and breathtaking moments in the game. But there’s also a large amount of time-suck questing, and certain parts of the game feel severely underdeveloped considering it’s so close to launch date. I have, though, a strong feeling that ESO will fail badly, and I hope that doesn’t affect any plans for Elder Scrolls VI.
I’ve been on the fence. Elder scrolls best feature is the immersive solo experience. The atmosphere really does feel like you are a once in a generation explorer traveling paths in dungeons untouched for centuries, discovering long forgotten secrets of power. The thought of a never ending parade of heroes spamming for group scares me.
The entire draw of the Elder Scrolls franchise, for me, is “MMO sized world in a single player game.” “MMO sized world in an MMO game,” isn’t particularly interesting to me.
I read news about from time to time, but it doesn’t interest me. What does ESO do to make me want to play it? There’s many other fantasy MMOs out there, and the Elder Scrolls theme doesn’t do anything for me. Game play doesn’t seem to be especially compelling.
I’ll certainly keep reading about it, so I could always try it, but currently I’m not going to.
There’s other upcoming MMOs that have peaked my interest, but I won’t hijack this thread.
Ugh. Yeah, i hadn’t thought of that. If they don’t “instance” the indoor questing areas, and I have to compete with a bunch of players for the same quest, it’s going to get disappointing fast.
The thing I liked about the Elder Scrolls system was that you could just work/use the skills you were interested in using (the older games let you make a user-defined class, Skyrim is classless ), instead of being restricted to certain skills, weapons, or armor based on your class choice. I hope they keep this open skill approach.
Guild Wars 2 was good, because the competition against the other players was minimized, essentially. (Even each resource node, for example, was “instanced” to each client/player! No ore or chest stealing!) The only beef I have with GW2 is that the player must react dynamically during the mobs special/power attacks, and I have just enough lag that I can’t get off a dodge in time.
Star Wars: the Old Republic has a mixture of instanced and non-instanced quests and encounter areas, and yeah, when the area is crowded, it’s a chore to play.
For Star Trek Online, most of the quests are instanced, so I don’t have to compete with the other players to get them done.
This is not NDA breaking because they just released a video about it: They do, sort of. You do pick a class and you do have skills related to your class that other classes can’t get, but you also pick your weapon and your armor and there are skills associated with those also that are the same for everyone. Also there are plenty of other skill lines you can get for all characters from things like joining the fighters/mages/assassins guilds or becoming a werewolf/vampire. So it is a class based system that also keeps the open skills approach of the single player games. Frankly it is the best (maybe only good) part of the game. Edit: This video.
I played in one of the weekend stress test betas. I hated the combat interface so much that I stopped after a half hour. Really, I’ve played MMORPGs since EverQuest launched. Recently, I had been alternating between The Secret World, SWTOR, and Neverwinter for the longest time. I know how to fight in a game. If I die during my first combat in the tutorial section of ESO, that’s almost a guarantee that I will find the game painful to play.
I’ve been playing Rift for a while now as a single-player game in an MMO world, and it works pretty well for that. I see the occasional player running around questing, but the world’s big enough that it is rarely an issue. I like to think it’s possible for ESO to turn out the same way, but I’m afraid it’ll end up like SW:TOR for its first few months, with people swarming all over the place like a bunch of kids on recess. It might end up being as fun as I find Rift once the furor dies down, but I don’t know that I’d want to pay to play for long enough to find out, particularly since Rift is free…
As I tend toward the thiefy/assassin/archer type, having to quest against 1000 bunnyhoppers will just piss me off. I’m out. Just give me another single player game that actually lets Khajiits benefit from being unarmed.
Well I wouldn’t completely write it off, even after my negative review of it. I have to say there were a number of things in ESO that suggest to me that eventually the game could be hammered into shape. DigitalC’s mention of the class system is one thing which might develop into something quite good; the one thing I found was that it did cut down on endless harping that “there is only one good way to play each class”, something that killed WoW for me. The crafting system is intriguing and rewarding for those who are willing to put some effort and thought into it (and crafted gear is actually worth making). And one thing about the Elder Scrolls games that did make it into ESO is the possibility of interesting rewards for those who decide to venture off the beaten path (I won’t spoil that any further).
I think WoW’s best era came a year or two after its launch, and that might be the case with ESO. The flaws in the game are too deep right now to be fixed by the April launch, but after having talked to some of the devs in chat I get the sense that they realize this to some extent and are determined to fix them. That’s probably not what Zenimax wants to hear, but it’s the truth as I see it.
I thought I posted this, but the freaking hamsters must have eaten it.
This is me exactly. I play Elder Scrolls to get *away *from people in the real world, not to deal with them in another form. All I’m hearing about ESO makes me wish they’d do a Tamriel-encompassing game for single players. I’d love to see what the Summurset Isles and the Alik’r Desert are like in the new graphics.
I’ve been (loosely) following this for a while now, and I can’t say I like what I’ve seen, but then, I have little interest in MMOs generally. I’m a long-time veteran of the series, and while I know that this isn’t being developed by the same team assigned to the core game, and so we shouldn’t have to worry about this taking focus from that, well, just look at Warcraft 4. I think if anything, the higher importance of the lore on the feel of the world makes it even more dangerous, an opinion I’ve held ever since I saw Bethesda’s press release detailing the world setting ESO will have and winced so hard I pulled a muscle in my face.
), instead of being restricted to certain skills, weapons, or armor based on your class choice. I hope they keep this open skill approach.