The Elder Scrolls Online

thats why all of us kept saying you really gotta try the game for a while, videos and SS's cant tell you if the game is for you or not. if you have played any MMO for the past few years for more than a month, its hard to see how TESO can keep you logged in for more than an hour or two. It just feels like a soul-less, boring game.

I just can't stay logged in for more than an hour without alt-f4'ing out of boredom (if I dont crash first), and even with games like Rift, TERA, FFXIV, LOTRo that I quit after a while, during the betas there was just something about those games that made me wanna put in 4-5 hour sessions. Nothing like that is there in TESO, in fact its the exact opposite, and its nothing you can really "convince" someone else without them actually trying to get to level 10 themselves. I think for me personally its the combat, in the other games even when they were the same shit questing (TERA, FFXIV) the combat was really fun and solid enough that I could spend hours just fighting shit. I'd rather play some shitty web flash game than do combat in TESO.

Yeah the game just isn't very good. Especially when you consider the fact that they want you to subscribe to it, for which there's seriously zero justification. It's barely an MMO, it's like a hybrid SP/online game. It's less of an MMO than GW2 in my opinion.

If they changed their business model I'd reconsider, but there's no fucking way box + sub is justified for this heap.

ThisForbes articlesums it up for me.

Here's a small excerpt...

The fact is, nearly no games are worth that price. $240 to play one game over the course of one year is an outdated model that only works for a very, very select few well-established MMOs. An Elder Scrolls MMO exactly as TESO appears would probably have been all the rage five, six or seven years ago, but now? It feels instantly outdated, as does its pricing model. It's even weirder to think it's being applied to a console game, as those sort of players have never had to deal with any such game requiring an online subscription on top of what they already pay for Xbox Live or PS Plus.

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bayr_sl said:

Yeah the game just isn't very good. Especially when you consider the fact that they want you to subscribe to it, for which there's seriously zero justification. It's barely an MMO, it's like a hybrid SP/online game. It's less of an MMO than GW2 in my opinion.

If they changed their business model I'd reconsider, but there's no fucking way box + sub is justified for this heap.

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I disagree. I think the content is nice, the PVP has great potential, and I'm personally having a really good time playing it. It plays very much like an Elder Scrolls game. The quest dungeons are not instanced which means you are always playing with other people. The chests, crafting, and random easter eggs in areas are nice. The world is also huge.

1-5 was a snoozer. 5-8 got better. 10+ the game is more fun and I've put in a bunch of hours. I actually want to play more. Considering I can't even play two days for my free week of WOW, I'm impressed. I have no idea if this will last long term but there are a lot of good design systems in place, and the game looks great. After playing Wildstar with it's stylized graphics that I personally loathe, I love the look and feel of this game.

The quests are really good and done in Elder Scrolls style. I'm not quite sure what the hate for them really comes from, unless people want to sit in a camp EQ style and grind for hours and hours. That really doesn't interest me. I can grind on critters, but likewise that isn't my thing.

The combat is ok. It's not great, but it's playable. I like oldschool MMO combat. I'm not a fan of action or dodge combat. This at least doesn't give me carpal tunnel. I wasn't a fan of Skyrim's combat, either, and this is better than that.

The Skill system is really open ended in that one can do any combination of things within their class with weapons and armor.

The PVP right now is zerg city, but the system is really cool. I'm holding out hope that it'll be more fun than the other crap PVP/WVW games out there, but it's hard to say at level 12.

The game definitely takes some time to pickup. I played a good amount of FF14 in beta and didn't preorder it. I'm sitting on the fence with this guy, as it is really rough playing, but if they can polish it I think it'll have a good solid audience.

What the game didn't do is go really sandbox open world, Asherons Call 2 style, but I'm not sure the audience is there for that.

Better a beta key than $60. Which I never would have even considered spending anyway. But I tried it again all yesterday morning. By the time I mercifully crashed I was so bored that I didn't feel like doing anything else the rest of the day.

I can't think of any other MMO where the combat was both so trivial and useless past the tutorial, at least not before years of expansions broke the original game. Where monsters in small groups pose absolutely no threat at all. Where you have to actively work hard to get enough things aggro on you at once to even get hurt, which costs you nothing because you regen it back immediately. Where fighting anything at all seems like a waste of five seconds of your time as you sprint/regen/sprint/regen to the quest marker. This is why bear ass quests exists - so you have a goddamn reason to do something other than run to the thing and click G. (wasd is for peasants)

Here's the thing - Elder Scrolls games start out really great and then get boring later on. In the beginning, the world is dangerous and wide open. There are lots of ways to advance your character and there are quests and POIs pulling your attention every which way. By the end, you've seen all the patterns and you are a walking god and nothing is a threat. You're bored of the game and you are just following the linear main quest to get it over with.

ESO starts out the other way around. Nothing is a threat and you are just walking from A to B to C hewing through trash to get to the next story bit. This is an absolutely horrible way to start a game, any game. Death should be around every corner at this stage. You should want to become more powerful - to get abilities and armor. At level 9, I may as well fight naked. I'm using the starting two hander still. Who gives a shit about gear when everything dies in two swings?

The initial escape-from-prison trope area could stay as it is but the island and then your racial starting area should not be this dumbed down. Vanilla wow was PYITA hardcore compared to this.

It's sub is the least of its problems. Especially when the majority of people who play a f2p game they spend way more the $240 the first year and $180 the years after. I do agree about the console part though because there hasn't been a precedent set yet and who knows how that's going to go over.

Cinge_sl said:

It's sub is the least of its problems. Especially when the majority of people who play a f2p game they spend way more the $240 the first year and $180 the years after. I do agree about the console part though because there hasn't been a precedent set yet and who knows how that's going to go over.

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It's not the sub. It's the cost of the box plus the sub that becomes a problem. It becomes a problem because it's not an amazing game, just an average one. Because of that alone, the initial price tag + sub will scare people off. Outside of folks on this forum, how many millions of people are going to spend that much on what is universally agreed upon is, at best, an average game? If it were just F2P or just $15/mo or just the $60 box, it would be looking more attractive to the masses. And the masses is what you need in order for a AAA mmo to survive.

Considering you get a first month with the box, $60 for the box +30 days is normal for many millions and perfectly normal for console gamers. Sub after those 30 days is a different story.

Cinge_sl said:

Considering you get a first month with the box, $60 for the box +30 days is normal for many millions and perfectly normal for console gamers. Sub after those 30 days is a different story.

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For a good game sure but we're still talking about The Elder Scrolls Online. If the press was on board with this, like SWTOR, I would expect that. I just don't see it happening with this game with this much of a negative vibe so close to release.

Brahma_sl said:

Ya. They just invented the single player MMO. In no way whatsoever do they even make an attempt to have you interact with other players.

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FYI each zone has a public dungeon, a group dungeon, multiple dark anchors, and multiple open world bosses (skull and crossbone on map) each requiring 2-4 people in order to complete. The personal quests are all designed to be soloable. It seems to me that is the basic MMO design model since WoW.

Devs for this game new to PC gaming?
How can they not have mapping keys for Turn left and Turn right? There are a ton of other things I am noticing that just seem odd and silly. Camera look is set at max and still thinking its not fast enough.

Who creates a game like this? These are basic control setups, feel like I am playing COH all over again with limited mapping keys or missing mapping functions or hardcoded unmappable controls and funky camera settings but way way worse.

Friend was telling me it works great on PS3 controller for his PC and that I should seek into that. I explained to him I was beta'ing on the PC version, not wanting to test on console! If I wanted to use the PS3 crap I would test on the PS3 not PC with input equipment from another source like console. I like my mouse and KB, thank you! If I wanted to start using other equipment on my PC to make things better maybe I should dig out an old light-bright from my kids to see if it added better function to the fighting setup.

Was Skyrim like this? I did not buy it since it was sooo console heavy from what i had heard in many reviews? I avoided it like the plague, didnt want to buy it till it was cheap enough on the off chance it was something like this crap!

Only thing this has better that Defiance is that it offers 1st/3rd person and you can zoom the camera in/out instead of it being hardcorded to your toons's ass in the worst way as to not see anything to your left.


Lets be honest, they picked up the devs that are envolved with the "State of Decay" game didnt they? You know the game that didnt have any PC controls to it when they release it on steam (PC gaming).

So I got into Cyro three times this morning for about 25 minutes out of the 3 hours I spent trying. Maybe 2 minutes of the 25 was actual fighting, the rest was spent running from spawn points to fights. The rest of the 3 hours was spent looking at loading screens or the login-queue. Four hard-crashes and rest were perma-loads that had to be alt-f4'd and restarted. My three times in were ended by two crashes (after everyone froze running in place) and a perma-load when trying to respawn. From what I can tell in the time I played, melee is pretty useless in the zerging- ranged attacks were king. But that's not exactly a strong sample size. There weren't tons and tons of people/models on the screen to cause the crashing either. Maybe 10-25 on each side and some siege weapons/NPCs. Watching the keep npcs constantly running out after being hit by ballista, then leashing and running back wasn't too impressive. When I died, it was usually to a range attack I was long out of sight/range from- everything seemed way laggier than the PVE portions- I'm not sure how you're supposed to dodge/block/interrupt anything in PVP.

The chat/grouping system was a mess too. Several second delay on messages going through. Two+ minute delay for group invites to show up. Similar response time after accepting one. And I wasn't the only one- everyone trying to group was complaining about the same problems. I know it's a "stress test" but the campaigns are supposed to be number-limited already, hence the queues. And the battles I saw weren't exactly huge sprawling things you'd expect to be bringing the zone to its knees. I haven't played the game in a long time, but the Cyro mess really made me respect the Planetside 2 engine a little more. Even with the culling issues early PS2 battles were much bigger, had combined arms other than just siege weapons and actually used projectiles rather than soft-targeting.

Rescorla_sl said:

FYI each zone has a public dungeon, a group dungeon, multiple dark anchors, and multiple open world bosses (skull and crossbone on map) each requiring 2-4 people in order to complete. The personal quests are all designed to be soloable. It seems to me that is the basic MMO design model since WoW.

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Yeah I did one of those dark anchors , it was crap. Killed maybe 10-15 mobs, that spawned 1 or 2 at a time,mobs you saw in the tutorial(astrochs) and then it was over(no boss, no loot, no exp, nothing). One person could of solo'd it.

Went to about 3 or 4 of the Skull and crossbones and nothing was ever there.

My god, people act like a sub is FOREVER. Once you sign, you are locked in for LIFE! Look at how much it costs you ever year, if you play this one game for an entire fucking year! Like if you cancel all your shit gets deleted. And they have the gall to bring up consoles, in the age of $15 DLC on fucking launch day, and every two or three months thereafter until the sequel comes out.

I guess they just don't want to be insulting by saying what they really mean. That little Timmy will have a hard time convincing his parents to give up their credit card so he can play a game. Because no adult gamer gives a flying fuck about a $15 subscription fee. Not when we've seen the horrors of the f2p dogshit alternative (great if you want to tool around in a game for an hour or so every other weekend. Absolutely Fuck You if you want to actually PLAY THE GAME. Why do these fucking idiots keep advocating this shit? Obviously because they've never spent more than 30 minutes playing one. They just think it sounds good. AAA + f2p = paywall EVERYWHERE)

Also never mind that the premium box price of games has stayed the same for 20 years yet they now cost more to make than the ENTIRE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY. Adjusted for inflation, here's what $120+ used to get you:



At worst, what a sub does is gives us an unreasonable expectation of entertainment value. I'm paying for this every month, so I should get at LEAST 500 hours out of it. You can buy a $60 game and beat it in five hours and put it away until the 90 minute $15 DLC comes out but somehow having that subscription clock ticking makes you feel like you need to burn yourself out playing this one game for 18 hours a day. But that's our own fault.

The main downside of a subscription model is you feel like you should only sub to one game at a time. If you're subscribed to two or more games, playing one feels like you are wasting the money spent on the other. And then there's the WoW problem. "I'm bored of WoW, so I'm playing this other game but WoW does every single thing better. Plus, people keep telling me to 'go back to WoW, fag' and it is starting to sound like a good idea" But ESO doesn't have to face this issue on consoles.

Cinge_sl said:

It's sub is the least of its problems. Especially when the majority of people who play a f2p game they spend way more the $240 the first year and $180 the years after. I do agree about the console part though because there hasn't been a precedent set yet and who knows how that's going to go over.

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How did FF11 do on consoles? I'm actually tempted to wait and nab this on PS4 <whenever I buy one>. I can see it playing just as well there since the build really is slanted a bit towards the console world, just like Skyrim was, just without mods, the main reason people buy Elder Scrolls games on PCs....

Cinge_sl said:

You sure? I swore I remember only being able to get to like 30/35 or something during that week.

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yes, maybe you are rembering the Stress Test that was a couple of months earlier?
they also had a keymaster outside Onyxias Lair because the quest line wasn't in yet (or finished) so you could technically even raid, PvP was limited to the usual gankings and TM - SS back and forth though

Gecko_sl said:

The Skill system is really open ended in that one can do any combination of things within their class with weapons and armor.

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I wouldn't call having soft caps on stats open ended.

Bondurant_sl said:

I wouldn't call having soft caps on stats open ended.

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Not sure what you mean here... The fact any armor and weapons are available to any classes was my point.. Am I missing something here?

Gecko_sl said:

Not sure what you mean here... The fact any armor and weapons are available to any classes was my point.. Am I missing something here?

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You said skill system is open ended, I'd like to disagree :

Gecko_sl said:

Not sure what you mean here... The fact any armor and weapons are available to any classes was my point.. Am I missing something here?

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I thought this was cool, but as a healer/caster I pretty much have to use light armor, since it has all the magicka bonuses and stats. If I was a rogue/archer I would be pretty much forced to use the medium armor, again because of the bonuses, same with tanks and heavy.

Dunno maybe later you can get heavy with magicka/caster stats but everything I saw it was tank based.