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On January 14 2014 00:50 DannyJ wrote:
I must admit, this wasnt as abysmal as people online are making it out to be, but it certainly didn't knock my socks off either. Overall I found it all pretty lackluster over the 2 days , although that's obviously an unfair amount of time to judge an MMO. I haven't completely buried it yet like it seems a lot have.
Agreed. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't grip me either like a good game should do either. Sure I only played it for a few hours during laggy hours, but what good story/game/book/movie doesn't have somekind of hook at the beginning?
I haven't written it off either, but they do have some work to do.
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On January 13 2014 11:58 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 13 2014 11:46 Hollow wrote:
Hmmm... I had some frustrating thing happen to me twice so far. I'm done playing because this is just dumb. I'm questing and following the objectives, and at some point I interact with one (this last one was a door inside the palace), and suddenly I'm being brought back to the character select screen instead of staying in game and progressing. So I click 'play' again on my character, and I'm suddenly all the way back to ~5 mins ago, having to do everything again. Is this some bug that's happened to others? Its called lag and disconnect. Remember your playing a stress test. The server is supposed to break during it.
But why would it bring me back so far behind if that's what it is? I also don't see people saying in chat "I've been disconnected" after it has happened. Felt like a bug to me. It happens just as it has finished interacting with something. You expect to enter a new environment as a result of the interaction completing, but instead it's the character screen that pops up.
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On January 14 2014 01:14 Hollow wrote:Show nested quote +On January 13 2014 11:58 Gorsameth wrote:On January 13 2014 11:46 Hollow wrote:
Hmmm... I had some frustrating thing happen to me twice so far. I'm done playing because this is just dumb. I'm questing and following the objectives, and at some point I interact with one (this last one was a door inside the palace), and suddenly I'm being brought back to the character select screen instead of staying in game and progressing. So I click 'play' again on my character, and I'm suddenly all the way back to ~5 mins ago, having to do everything again. Is this some bug that's happened to others? Its called lag and disconnect. Remember your playing a stress test. The server is supposed to break during it. But why would it bring me back so far behind if that's what it is? I also don't see people saying in chat "I've been disconnected" after it has happened. Felt like a bug to me. It happens just as it has finished interacting with something. You expect to enter a new environment as a result of the interaction completing, but instead it's the character screen that pops up.
Happened to me once right as I was loading to leave the beginning island. Got warped back 5-10 min. Pretty sure it was a server reset tho, as it happened to a friend of mine too and he was still in game.
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On January 14 2014 01:14 Hollow wrote:Show nested quote +On January 13 2014 11:58 Gorsameth wrote:On January 13 2014 11:46 Hollow wrote:
Hmmm... I had some frustrating thing happen to me twice so far. I'm done playing because this is just dumb. I'm questing and following the objectives, and at some point I interact with one (this last one was a door inside the palace), and suddenly I'm being brought back to the character select screen instead of staying in game and progressing. So I click 'play' again on my character, and I'm suddenly all the way back to ~5 mins ago, having to do everything again. Is this some bug that's happened to others? Its called lag and disconnect. Remember your playing a stress test. The server is supposed to break during it. But why would it bring me back so far behind if that's what it is? I also don't see people saying in chat "I've been disconnected" after it has happened. Felt like a bug to me. It happens just as it has finished interacting with something. You expect to enter a new environment as a result of the interaction completing, but instead it's the character screen that pops up.
It's just a server rollback. I remember a couple of those happening in WoW. It's a server stresstest weekend - totally expected that they should be trying this kind of thing.
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After this weekend, what is everyone's thoughts? I didn't bother to play much, as I found the start very boring, and I knew my character will get deleted anyways. But those who played a bit, what do you think?
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On January 14 2014 01:34 Arnstein wrote:
After this weekend, what is everyone's thoughts? I didn't bother to play much, as I found the start very boring, and I knew my character will get deleted anyways. But those who played a bit, what do you think?
I enjoy the game and the TES-ness of it enough but it's extremely hard to justify a 15 dollar subscription on top of a (what I assume to be) 60 dollar price tag
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On January 14 2014 01:34 Arnstein wrote:
After this weekend, what is everyone's thoughts? I didn't bother to play much, as I found the start very boring, and I knew my character will get deleted anyways. But those who played a bit, what do you think?
Enjoyed it, game is beautiful and it was good fun. Combat is all right, quests aren't "go kill 5 boars" and the storyline is decent so far. I only made it to level 10 ( but played a few chars) but I didnt get bored at all. The start is a bit boring it's true, and going through it on 3 of my chars was a bit of a pain in the ass, but it's quick enough when you know what to do.
Overall I had a good time. My only concern was that it was maybe too crowded, maybe they should lower the number of character per instance of the server (or whatever you call that, this megaserver thingy is too complicated for me haha). I gues that it will get better a few days after release tho.
Oh and I woke up today with the need to play the game only to remember I couldn't. It's been a while I've felt that urge to play 
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There are kill 4-6 enemies and loot them quests in almost any area.
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On January 14 2014 02:03 Nos- wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2014 01:34 Arnstein wrote:
After this weekend, what is everyone's thoughts? I didn't bother to play much, as I found the start very boring, and I knew my character will get deleted anyways. But those who played a bit, what do you think? I enjoy the game and the TES-ness of it enough but it's extremely hard to justify a 15 dollar subscription on top of a (what I assume to be) 60 dollar price tag
Exactly my thoughts. I might buy it for 40,- € or something, but I can't see me paying a sub for this game.
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Well, I played only for a couple of hours but it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. Bethesda is legendary for terrible QA so I'm expecting a ton of bugs when it goes live. The combat, frequent instancing and phasing reminds me of DDO (in a good way). If it was buy to play I could see myself playing it but I'm not going to pay for a subscription, there are just way too many better games for even lower price than 15 dollars.
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On January 14 2014 01:14 Hollow wrote:Show nested quote +On January 13 2014 11:58 Gorsameth wrote:On January 13 2014 11:46 Hollow wrote:
Hmmm... I had some frustrating thing happen to me twice so far. I'm done playing because this is just dumb. I'm questing and following the objectives, and at some point I interact with one (this last one was a door inside the palace), and suddenly I'm being brought back to the character select screen instead of staying in game and progressing. So I click 'play' again on my character, and I'm suddenly all the way back to ~5 mins ago, having to do everything again. Is this some bug that's happened to others? Its called lag and disconnect. Remember your playing a stress test. The server is supposed to break during it. But why would it bring me back so far behind if that's what it is? I also don't see people saying in chat "I've been disconnected" after it has happened. Felt like a bug to me. It happens just as it has finished interacting with something. You expect to enter a new environment as a result of the interaction completing, but instead it's the character screen that pops up.
A *stress-test* , as was this weekend, is made to see how the servers react when under full or over-capacity. When it crashes, there is a (small, normally) rollback as they are not saved in real time. This stress test was probably to see if they can shorten that time (ie save more often), and test everything and their procedures. Do you even know why you signed up ??... This is why beta threads sometimes annoy me, beta != demo ! It's more like a gigantic Q&A and crash test, and usually not very representative of the state of the finished game, including mechanics...
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I'm not a mmorpg guy anyway so it's not a big surprise i didn't like this one either. It's just that the thought of an elder scrolls mmo has been tantalizing for more than ten years now. I was very worried how this would turn out and the few hours i spent gave me a horrible image of the game.
-All the races look the same except the beasts.
-The animations are downright awful. Either they're going for a somewhat cartoony style which is a disastrous decision in that case, or they are just plain bad. I have done some 3d games and our artists, who are unpaid amateurs, do animations very much better.
-Skill system is kinda meh in itself. Looking through my class' skills, as a nightblade, i didn't see any single one that seemed fun or exciting in any way.
-Graphics in start area was nice. Coming out of there, it looks silly. The textures are shit, and not for the resolution, they're just plain wrong. Everything looks plastic.
-Start area. I fucking hate that shit. please dump me somewhere in the world, don't tell me what to do, don't put the future of the world on my puny level one shoulders and for fucks sake don't let me kill daedra the first thing i do.
-Classes. So i guess you start as a super epic powerful DRAGON KNIGHT WOOO, who can fight his way through a plane of oblivion, but i have no gear and no skills, since im level one. It doesn't make sense. It's an rpg, it has to make sense.
-The prophet invoking akatosh from coldharbour. It's a complete lorebreaker and doesn't contribute anything. It doesn't work that way in mundus/nirn/elder scrolls universe.
Sure it might get better later in the game, but i can't get through a wall of turnoffs. I guess i'm not exactly disappointed, but it still saddens me. I really really really want "the elder scrolls mmo" of my dreams of the last decade to be the wickedest, badassiest game ever made, i've even been doing quite some work in building systems for such a game myself, but this is not good enough and i honestly think it's simply shameful for the series to continue (or even end, it's a possibility) in this lackluster way. the entire elder scrolls series has had an impending feeling of greatness, bugridden and imperfect as they are, and compared to this, ESO is nothing short of unworthy.
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ALL they had to do was make a good combat system. That is literally all they had to fucking do. Then you just start porting over Morrowind / oblivion / skyrim as expansions (starting with one of them) and add some group content like large scale dungeons / monsters and a pvp area. (+ scaling dungeons ofc.)
but nope.
I cant tell you how much fucking money these dudes would make just from porting over the 3 games to an MMO and letting players run riot with a decent combat system and some generic group content.
200 million or something was it? the above is easily possible with half that.
It really grates me to think they could port over the majority of these games, change a few things for group content, add some group content and then make a decent combat/levelling system and literally have the. best. game. ever. made. and all they come up with is this :<
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I heard a bunch of people in the game say that this game "has the spirit of a TES game down".
Completely disagree with that.
I only played Morrowind and onward, but in all three of those games there were two things that separated them from the rest:
1: Everybody is killable. Played completely straight in Morrowind, less so in Oblivion and Skyrim (for some reason I don't understand)
2: Just about every small object in the game is manipulatable. If someone is wearing armor, you can get it from him and put it anywhere else in the world you want to. Oblivion even started with your character having to shoot a bucket with an arrow, just so that you would see the cool Havok physics engine in action.
3: You could go just about anywhere in the world at any time, and often you were also encouraged to do just that. Again played completely straight in Morrowind and less so in Oblivion and Skyrim.
None of these hold for ESO. You cannot kill NPCs or other players. Only very few objects in the world are manipulatable. I didn't test if there was anything actually preventing you from moving freely around in the world, but it wouldn't work out for you if you did.
Some might also say that heavy character customization is a TES core trait but since Morrowind it hasn't been. Another thing people might mention is modding, but it's silly to expect extensive modding capabilities in an MMO.
That it doesn't feel like a TES game doesn't mean that it's necessarily a bad game, it just means that it really isn't what I think fans of the series could have hoped for in a TES MMO. It feels a lot more like WoW in Tamriel than it feels like a TES MMO.
I like what Michael Kirkbride (some guy who did awesome work on Morrowind) said in a recent reddit MMA:
Tamriel never belonged to Bethesda. It was the other way around.
but that's just not what's happening here. Instead of adapting the series to people's common conception of MMOs, they should have tried and see what the MMO genre would look like if it was heavily TES influenced. That way they would not have ended up with WoW - Now with Argonians.
Combat seems like most other games, it quickly gets repetitive. There are a few new spins to it but nothing groundbreaking. I only tried one instance (Fungal Grotto) in a four man group. It seemed a lot like most WoW instances, you grind through some mobs and then you get to a boss and you have to put your serious face on. I have no idea if there even was threat management or anything like that, the strategy was mostly "nuke the bad guy". Some bosses had AoE attacks and before they executed these, the ground would become red in the area. I think they could have been a lot more imaginative with how they show that you shouldn't stand in an area, fire or lightning or whatever but not some anti-immersive red circle/box.
The part of the story/quests I did seemed a lacklustre too. The main questline wasn't developed much, the other main questline where you had to try and fend off an invasion was alright, the sidequests were bland. There were actually two "Fetch my Guars" quests even though one was more than enough. Miles away from the story/quest quality of Morrowind, and also not up to par with Oblivion and Skyrim but not bad either. Just bland.
The coolest thing in the game is that some of your actions actually have effects that are only visible to you even though you're in the same world as everybody else. I'm not entirely sure how they do this but it seems like even though two people are in the same place, they don't actually see the same thing. Like the Ebonheart Pact starting area, you would either see a peaceful village or a village under attack depending on where you were in a questline. I wish they had explored this more fully, especially in relation to the three core TES game trends I mentioned above.
All in all, judging from the beta, this game is not a great game. It's not a bad game though, the exonerating factors being the interesting "multiple views" and the Elder Scrolls universe simply being interesting. It might be an okay game come April, but if they just fix the bugs and finish the content, I imagine it will be a dull experience.
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On January 14 2014 04:40 prplhz wrote:
I I didn't test if there was anything actually preventing you from moving freely around in the world, but it wouldn't work out for you if you did.
I tried to climb to the top of the vulcano but some invisible walls prevented my climbing.
[edit: Quick reminder: There are invisible walls in Skyrim as well.]
Nice write-up @prplhz, I agree in all your points.
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imo I think its a shame they are making it an MMO. TES has always been about freedom to do whatever and deep immersion in the world. MMOs with their grinding, raiding and such are the antithesis to that.
To the guys who have tried it out, does it still have the open world TES feel to it that say... Morrowind had?
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Of course it's not Morrowind. Or Oblivion, or Skyrim. Or, for that matter, Daggerfall.
The next proper TES game is on the way, developed by actual Bethesda. This is a fun add-on to the universe.
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On January 14 2014 05:12 Yoav wrote:
Of course it's not Morrowind. Or Oblivion, or Skyrim. Or, for that matter, Daggerfall.
The next proper TES game is on the way, developed by actual Bethesda. This is a fun add-on to the universe.
A fun, 200 millions dollars ruin, add-on to the universe.
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So what did you guys really expect? Of course you can't pick up every item, people would just start hoarding things. Player killing would be fun for about 5 seconds before some no-life starts ganking entire cities. Ever played Everquest? There was NPC killing in that game but it just created problems. Of course the combat is clunky, there are thousands playing on each server so lag is a huge problem, not to mention that combat hasn't ever been that fantastic in any elder scrolls game - if you just copy+pasted Oblivion combat it would be so insanely broken there could be no end-game, which is a cardinal sin in the MMO space. Graphics are always a step down in an MMO that's nothing new.
I do agree with some things tho: Having to do meaningless quests (complete with the "!" overhead that has plagued MMOs, casuals need their hand held) to level and not being able to explore freely beyond a few minor things is disappointing. Pigeon-holing players into the exp grind sucks also. The story was more interesting in the real Elder Scrolls games because the player truly was the main focus of the story, which can't be the case in an MMO. The controls are shittily designed for consoles, which sucks.
Bottom line it's an MMO first and an Elder Scrolls game second. If you don't like MMOs you're not gonna like this one.
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There's just too much "square peg into a round hole" going on by trying to fit an Elder Scrolls experience into a traditional MMO experience. I think people are generally tiring of the traditional MMO experience anyways, which is unfortunate because this was a great chance to innovate with an exciting IP known for giving the player tons of freedom. Bottom line, I don't think Elder Scrolls fans or MMO fans are going to enjoy this game very much, certainly not at a $60 + $15/month price point.
And the game might be entirely voice acted (actually I heard quite a bit of text-to-speech but I'm assuming that's temporary), but most of it suuuuuucks and/or the writing is terrible. Some of the quest stories were interesting, but most were super boring and even if I didn't get a "kill 5 wolves" quest I did get a few "collect 5 wolf pelt" quests and "go talk to this guy and come back" quests. They should have had a QA pass where the only intention was to eliminate quests that they wouldn't put into a traditional Elder Scrolls game.
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EPT
