shintakie10 said:
I think this is some of the only good press I've seen come out for ESO.
Nearly every person I've talked to who has gotten a beta invite generally responds to the question of how is it with a resounding "Meh."
To be fair, some of us that do Beta take the NDA portion of things fairly seriously. I do occasionally let some things drop, but for the most part I wait until closer to release or until we see a lot of other leaks, then I usually come out and explain that I was a tester (and honestly I do betas for a staggering number of things it seems) and what my impressions were.
To be honest with you, the ESO Beta has not been the best conducted affair I've ever run into. It's following the now fairly typical format of only being up at very specific times for very specific purposes, asking testers to pretty much plan their lives around it. Generally not a big deal since I don't have much of a life anymore, but it can be annoying when responsibilities like taking my father to the doctor or whatever come up since missing the window might knock me out for a week or so and you know... priorities. What's more their testing has generally been things like "let's overload the character logins to see what happens" so your "beta testing" in that two hour window is sitting there trying to login to the game, which would be fine (it has to be done) but made incredibly frustrating when they don't mention this bit. On one test they annoyed so many people I guess that they told us all we were getting a free static monkey pet when the game is finally released. Another time I left the tutorial area and saw like 50 people crammed into the starting arrival house/hut and nobody could open the door, apparently it seems the devs were trying to see how many models they could cram into that area.... very little in the way of respect, coordination, or information. On some levels I'm surprised they having gone the Inexile route of asking people to pay $10 for the honor of being their beta testers and guinea pigs.
As a result I am in no way shocked to hear it said that the reaction of a lot of beta testers has been "meh" truthfully I've expected a lot more overt fire breathing hostility.
The game itself is decent, but not without problems. It's pretty much a clone of "Neverwinter" in terms of what they are trying to do with the combat and style of skill usage as far as needing to aim a crosshair, and use buttons to swing your weapon, aim a shield, and having your special moves on hot keys, albeit they are doing it with a somewhat more realistic "low fantasy" vibe similar to the art you've seen in other Elder Scrolls games. It has the potential to be a big MMO but that's largely going to come down to the endgame, which they are keeping really close to their chest, and that's NOT a good thing given that they plan to release in a little under two months. What's more with this being the first set of tests where they aren't wiping characters I can't see very much testing in terms of progression and how the endgame will play in practice.
As The Escapist points out they seem to be banking on a 3 faction PVP endgame to sustain it. If that's the case, you can pretty much expect ESO to be a high quality "Dead Man Walking" much like Shamus predicts. Especially seeing as the competition, games like "Wildstar" have made a much bigger deal about their endgames not just involving PVP, but also bringing back things like "real" raiding including 40 man raids and the like, the kind of stuff that got hardcore players invested and kept them early on with WoW and the like. That said I am hoping that contrary to the usual pattern Bethesda has something ready to surprise us. Right now it seems they are banking on the players creating their own endgame through endless PVP, hoping that something like "Dark Age Of Camelot" can be achieved. While DAOC was inspirational I do not think triple realm warfare is going to sustain a game for long, especially seeing as the needs of an MMO prevent much from being achieved, if one faction is allowed to dominate for the long term nowadays the people on the losing sides are liable to just leave for other games (or servers where the faction they want to play is winning), if the game itself is set up to force a restoration of balance... well even that becomes pointless. At the best things will keep going until people have achieved the PVP gear/titles they want and realize there isn't much else to do and leave. What's more with all the options out there your not likely to see people who aren't into PVP/solo players/duoers paying a monthly subscription fee simply so they can have the honor of being curbstomped thousands of times.
In short it's not really a "WoW" clone it's following the pseudo-action/RPG niche of Neverwinter and a few others, which isn't quite as overfilled. It also has some really good ideas, and will definatly keep people occupied for a few months with what is there. As far as a lasting MMO success story, it has the potential, but it remains to be seen if it will fill it fast enough, and/or how it's going to fare against it's upcoming competition from Wildstar which unlike most MMOS has been seriously hyping it's endgame and long term potential (which you rarely see), and of course "Everquest Next" which despite the failure of EQ2, seems like it also has some serious potential, and at the very least seems to be blowing everyone else away in the technology department. If EQ: Next is putting half as much work into their endgame as they are into their graphics and technology system, pretty much all of the current games are doomed, but again EQ:NExt is still in the hype phase, and all games look awesome at that point, so you know... the odds are still greatly in favor of it being another refried SOE turd.
I could give more specifics, but I don't want to say much more, I'm largely just elaborating on things that are already out there from other sources. Races, classes, specific abilities and gameplay, what little I know about crafting, etc... that's all pretty much under wraps.
