The Gaming Den

Anyone playing it? Is it any good?

I played the beta. For a very brief time period it felt as good as when I played WoW for the first time. But that feeling fell off a lot faster.

It honestly feels nothing like an Elder Scrolls game to me.

No Todd Howard = no buy.

Somebody who will remain namelessly frowned upon made me get this damn game so I could play it with them.

The pricing is a ludicrous rip off. The game is buggy and hum drum dated typically boring MMO bullshit ever so lightly flavored with the lamest tidbits of Elder Scrolls lore wank.

There is nothing good about this game. There is no audience for it, it's a shitty MMO and it's a shitty Elder Scrolls game, there is no middle ground compromise other than even more shit.

It will be Free To Play in about five minutes time (despite launching with some of the highest initial purchase AND highest monthly subscriptions on the market) and the whole thing is a cynical transparent money grab (over) promoted with rather blatantly obvious bullshit game play free trailers.

I still can't for the life of me imagine why they didn't instead attempt a fairly typical single player elder scrolls game with an online multiplayer set up more like Borderlands for small co-op multiplayer adventuring parties of friends. It's what the Elder Scrolls community wanted and would have buried them in both cash and critical acclaim.

Apparently they only wanted to be buried in the cash. And bad user reviews.

Is it doing well though? How does it compare (game mechanics wise) with WoW and FFXIV?

OgreBattle wrote:Is it doing well though? How does it compare (game mechanics wise) with WoW and FFXIV?

I don't care and I don't care. But I'd estimate "very well on brand alone for the next five minutes and no longer" followed by "MMO fans seem to have been critical in that regard and it is full of stingy drops, bugs and sheer bullshit".

Mind elaborating a hint more, PL, or shooting me a link to a review you feel is pretty accurate? I'd just like a bit more info on your complaints.

Ikeren wrote:Mind elaborating a hint more, PL, or shooting me a link to a review you feel is pretty accurate? I'd just like a bit more info on your complaints.

Well, the metacritic user scores tell the usual story of a big budget game gone horribly awry - you have a fuckton of green, a fuckton of red, and a dab of yellow. A startingly large percentage of the green are single-review accounts that have given it a 10 and ludicrously overwhelming and quite vague praise that might as well read "bought ESO, cured my cancer, married a supermodel, won the lottery." So... yeah. The response from actual users seems to be that it's ass.

I've heard weak praise of the hold-points-on-a-map faction war PvP (as in, "it's a not awful but slightly worse version of things other games have done"), but this is a "grind your way to victory" style MMO and trying to play the game through its PvP just means throwing yourself at people who are max level and have cooler things than you do, so you can't even do that properly until you've suffered your way through. So no, it's just your usual fuggin' MMO. Grind away! Watch numbers go up! It will be fun eventually! GIVE US MONEY!

As someone who spent a lot of time playing Wow, let me elabortely slightly.

If it perfectly fine to say that it is an MMO with grind, and your numbers go up. That already can be bad enough. But there are different kinds of grinding, and even if your numbers go up, you are also getting new abilities and those could be interesting.

WoW had a lot of stuff like that. The grinds where actually fun in a weird addictive perverse way. I enjoyed running around Barren collecting quests. I enjoyed unlocking another neat ability as a Priest or Shaman.

This is not that. Literally the most interesting thing you can do is a like a 1sec snare. Because it at least occasionally is the right or wrong thing to do. But basically, all your abilities do some damage, or heal some, and you just spam all of them when they are off cooldown until you run out of mana, and coincidentally at the time everything is dead. Occasionally you have rider stun abilities, but that is basically just damage reduction the same as your heal abilities, because it always works on the target and all the effects are really short duration.

Like even class with two snares shouldn't bother kiting, because who gives a fuck, they will still catch you nearly instantly.

I briefly played the Beta, though I was more interested in shennagans than the game. From what I could gleam though, one of its biggest failings is trying to make a single-player-esque story...in a Multiplayer world. The odd notion of you being "chosen", yet...there are literally dozens of players next to you doing the same thing, breaks suspension of disbelief CONSTANTLY. They easily could've went with a story of given players being the population of Tamriel, motive? GET YOUR DAMN SOUL BACK, AND PREVENT YOUR HOMELAND FROM TKO. That alone is motive enough, been easy, and made sense within the world, but no...like probably lot of their choices, they have to crib off of WoW, Guild Wars 2, and Skyrim for ideas.

As PL said, they're using some of the lamest references for Lore. Wanting more to use inspirations from Oblivion/Skyrim (especially in terms of visual design), opposed to harkening from the past, or capitalize on Morrowind's juicy bits (though there is Dreugh sea-god being Mehrunes from Vivec sermons).

Main story wise, it begins with already two DM "special snowflake" characters that seem infuriating. The "half-Giant" super warrior ye can probably never be, and "super wizard w/amnesia" involved in making you feel irrelevant. Coldharbour gets kinda made to look bit generic, considering it's supposed to be super-terrible version of Tamriel, but whatever make it more like WoW's DeathKnight land. Hell, it even throws you into Skyrim, in case ye didn't think they were cashing in for familiarity there.

Most of all my concerns, I'm afraid it'll ruin the lore of the series. Much like the latest Stars Wars MMO apparently trashed all the good the KOTOR games did. It'll suck much when/if the wiki gets descriptions changed due to some trashy MMO making everything all bland. In the end though, I'd play it if it was subscriptionless, and I didn't have to buy the game (that, or on sale for really cheap). Even then, it'd be more about just exploring a life in the world, with maybe doing the mainquest to beat off Molag Bal because that "could" be cool.

Oh and by the way, you can't explore ALL of Tamriel with a single character, ONLY what's in his faction. So either ye make multiple characters, or enjoy couple long grinds to NG+ your way through each storyline.

I also played beta for quit sometime. But I go for dota.

In b4 link in sig to kitchens?

I guess everyone else had better experiences with the beta than I did. Skipping over all the bugs or whatever, and pretty much word for word of what Kaelik said, it was just all so uninteresting and cluttered. Bosses were dead before I could get a chance to kill them. The lore they used never really grabbed my attention. Whatever fun people got out of it I must have missed. I guess that the bugs and stuff probably soured the whole experience for me but I honestly never got any enjoyment from playing it.

Literally the only reason I have ever played an Elder Scrolls game was for the mods.

Does Online have mods? I'm going to guess no.

From my memory of Oblivion, the leveling system is bland and unrewarding, the skill system is bland and unrewarding, the spell system is bland and mostly unrewarding except if you're really low level with max Destruction and get to make "-100 HP for 1 second at range" and kill everything in one shot, the equipment is boring and frustrating...

EDIT: Oh, I guess making "+MAX Jump, +MAX Feather, +MAX (I forget what else)" and climbing the walls of the Imperial City is also fun.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:From my memory of Oblivion, the leveling system is bland and unrewarding, the skill system is bland and unrewarding, the spell system is bland and mostly unrewarding

Yeah, ESO literally isn't an Elder Scrolls game when it comes to your character.

The leveling is Xp gives you levels and levels give you abilities and stats at predetermined rate. Nothing like Elder Scrolls, 100% like every other MMO.

The abilities are just stuff you get from leveling up, and there are no skills of any kind.

The spells are just abilities you get from leveling up, and there are no custom spell making or even spells that look even remotely like the interesting things you could do with spellmaking. They are all just "some damage" or "a buff to HP" and nothing else.

Can I put a bucket on a shop keepers head and steal everything?

Can I murder people and get into a fight with the town guard?

OgreBattle wrote:Can I put a bucket on a shop keepers head and steal everything?

Can I murder people and get into a fight with the town guard?

No and No.

Kaelik wrote:

RadiantPhoenix wrote:From my memory of Oblivion, the leveling system is bland and unrewarding, the skill system is bland and unrewarding, the spell system is bland and mostly unrewarding

Yeah, ESO literally isn't an Elder Scrolls game when it comes to your character.

The leveling is Xp gives you levels and levels give you abilities and stats at predetermined rate. Nothing like ESO, 100% like every other MMO.

The abilities are just stuff you get from leveling up, and there are no skills of any kind.

The spells are just abilities you get from leveling up, and there are no custom spell making or even spells that look even remotely like the interesting things you could do with spellmaking. They are all just "some damage" or "a buff to HP" and nothing else.

Am I correct in assuming the first ESO is "Elder Scrolls Online" and the second is "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion"?

Yeah, that, I edited to make it make more sense. Didn't even notice that honestly.