Zero Punctuation: The Elder Scrolls Online - We Can MMO Too

[SecondPrize]

Well, it turns out an MMO from an IP is different than the single player games in that IP. Who saw that one coming?

 

[Madd the Sane]

Ah yes, the sequel for Torchlight was going to be an MMO. Then the developers dissevered that doing of so was actually really hard?
So they went with two-player co-op instead to work on their net code knowledge.

 

[Sticky]

Can we also talk about the other reasons you shouldn't support the Elder Scrolls MMO? Such as, you know

Banning users who fall victim to exploits, banning users to are given duplicated items without any way to understand they are duplicated, banning users who fall out of the world, making the only way to unsubscribe being to be logged in which you can't do once you're banned.

All that fun stuff that comes along with handing your credit card info to a company that promises to drain it every month.

 

[geldonyetich]

Daggerfall would have been a far better base for Elder Scrolls Online... you know, once you add a whole overland factor that wasn't really there before. Procedurally generated spawling cities teeming with NPCs (by today's standards it'd look something like taking a walk through a city in Assassin's Creed). So much prime fantasy real-estate that it's actually not too likely you'll trip over 50 other players trying to do the same quest. A lingering potential of virtual-worldly awesome that comes from working for major guilds and buying buildings in the cities. Ect - Daggerfall was a far better start at being a virtual world.

Instead, they went the "Theme Park" route, on the back of an "action MMORPG" mechanic that is really quite floaty, so Elder Scrolls Online is basically Age Of Conan except for two major differences:

• 1. Elder Scrolls Online has a fresh coat of Elder Scrolls-like ambiance slathered over everything.
  
  2. Age of Conan was made by Funcom, a company that had MMORPG-creating experience already, and was actually quite good even though it did have some release-day woes that hung around for a few... years.

So play Age Of Conan, instead. It's better in every way except for the lack of Elder Scrolls-related props to please Elder Scrolls fanboys.

Dammit, again: you could have made Daggerfall Online. The Theme Park approach to MMORPGs is dead, and World of Warcraft is the Cerberus that guards the gate to its underworld.

Sorry, I shouldn't yell at you guys. You probably feel bad enough about that $200M bill you're never going to pay back.

 

[maximara]

Pretty good criticism by yahtzee anyone who wants a longer more in depth review should check out Angry Joe's review of ESO. Needless to say it has a lot of basic problems an MMO shouldn't have today.

Good grief, that makes WoW back when it first launched look sane. How on earth do you mess up the the basic concept of MMO in an MMO? Even Cata WoW which had you on rails through many of its zones wasn't this bad.

 

[Thanatos2k]

I've never played an MMO before, but even I have to ask why the hell you'd do the whole "destiny" thing when you're not even the only player in the world.

Because modern MMOs have attempted to compete with WoW by focusing far more strongly on the single-player plot aspect, hoping to gain an edge over WoW's almost explicitly autonomous storyline, and evoke the same kind of response people have to a game like Skyrim or KOTOR.

And it fails, because while the same people who play MMOs probably also play KOTOR, if I want to play KOTOR I'm going to go play KOTOR.

Well the real problem with that approach, especially with TOR, is that once you experience the story....you're done.

That is completely antithetical to MMO design which must cause players to want to play forever.

I got my character to 60 in TOR, finished the story, finished all the dungeons (saw all story in the game), and then quit. Why keep playing? The crappy PvP? Make an alt to see a slightly different story but where 95% of the game was still the same?

 

[elvor0]

Thing is when I saw the pandaren back in WC3 I didn't really expect them to come from China. Which is what pandaria reminds me off. Therefore the kung fu panda reference. Man do people get riled up about it. I'm surprised that he didn't mention the atrocious box price and the fact that you need to buy the special edition for one the races or something.

Having an Asian themed panda in Warcraft 3 in no way protects Bizzard from accusations of ripping off Kung Fu Panda. Warcraft 3 came before Kung Fu Panda, so it cant be cant be "inspired" by the movie but Mists of Pandaria came AFTER the movie and doesn't get to shield itself with some made-up gradfather clause.

But Pandas are /from/ China, and Chen spoke with a faux chinese accent, and wears a stereotypical Chinese hat and Kung Fu Garb, and practices Drunken Fist fighting, which is from China. The signs were all there!

And there's this Warcraft 3 page: http://classic.battle.net/war3/pandaren/

Where it quite clearly describes Pandaria as being akin to a mashup of Fudal Japan and the Chinese monks. As well as the stuff in the Tabletop RPGs.. Now granted I'm not expecting barely anyone to have actually played those, but everything in Warcraft 3 alone supports it being a Chinese/Japanese mashup.

 

[Grimh]

Man, this one made me laugh quite heartily. Good show.

Also Pandaren were a thing before Kung Fu Pa-eeeh fuck it who cares.

 

[synobal]

Pretty good criticism by yahtzee anyone who wants a longer more in depth review should check out Angry Joe's review of ESO. Needless to say it has a lot of basic problems an MMO shouldn't have today.

Good grief, that makes WoW back when it first launched look sane. How on earth do you mess up the the basic concept of MMO in an MMO? Even Cata WoW which had you on rails through many of its zones wasn't this bad.

The whole game felt like a cash grab to me when I got in on the beta. I ended up not even playing it regularly during the beta. I'm not surprised it was as bad as it was at launch. I hate sounding cynical saying they always intended it to go F2P but part of me suspects it really was.

 

[t850terminator]

Right now, IMO, the only MMOs I've seen still standing up to WoW is LOTRO and Planetside 2...
Planetside 2 is a MMOFPS so doesn't really have to stand toe-to-toe with WoW,a MMORPG, and its fun...and jetpacks.
And LOTRO is practically like WoW, but LotR as a franchise has alot of fans....
I wonder how TERA, and Rift are doing...
and I'm really curious about the new upcoming Everquest...

 

[Olas]

It seems awfully pointless and counterintuitive to have a game where you share the world with other players and then try and make every individual player feel like the one special hero.

 

[Evonisia]

Ugh, I got bored of Kung Fu Panda jokes about Mists of Pandaria, oh wait I never found them funny. Granted if anybody has actually played the thing they'd realise that the Pandaren are much more than that and it has a rather grim tone, albeit poorly written.

I think people who hear this joke and immediately jump to the defense of "Pandaren were in WoW before Kung Fu Panda, so stop making this joke! ;_;" are missing the entire point of the joke in the first place.

Yes, Pandaren existed in the WoW universe before Kung Fu Panda. And the concepts of anime school girls with psychic powers, bear cavalry, and trained attack dolphins all existed before C&C Red Alert came along, but I don't recall anyone getting too terribly defense about how stupid all of those things are.

The Pandaren expansion exists as a means to capitalize on the rise of anthropomorphic animals in popular media, especially in the Chinese market where players eat that shit up. Their nature as masters of martial arts is probably coincidental, fair enough, but they wouldn't have been added to WoW at all if such creatures weren't becoming more and more popular. A lot more recent MMOs released tend to feature at least one furry character race to play as for pretty much the same reason.

In other words: Just because your game is older doesn't mean it's not trying to capitalize on more recent trends. And since it's such a bizarre shift from what people are used to hearing about when they hear about WoW (they're used to hearing D&D-esque terms in reference to WoW, i.e. liches and dragons and such), they're naturally going to crack jokes about it. You need to stop getting defense, and focus on getting a sense of humor instead. 'cuz honestly, Kung Fu Panda jokes are pretty tame. You could do a lot worse, and in fact, many other MMOs do. Learn to roll with it.

Yeah that's silly, but I don't jump to the WC3 defence. I didn't find it funny when I first heard it, and to hear it constantly during the hype, constantly when it came out, and then occasionally throughout 2013 it's just honestly drained me. Yahtzee's just reminded me of how much I find it boring. It's much like how everyone got sick of the Cake being a Lie.

I can hardly think that Mists of Pandaria was trying to capitalise on that trend when the series has already had Cows, Space Goats and Werewolves before this, not even including the Druid forms.

 

[Atmos Duality]

So, same shit different brand?
That's a rhetorical question: I knew TES Online would be mediocre rubbish at best, years before it ever came to be.

Because the whims of MMO design demands some method of monopolizing the player's time, and not in a fun way.
So out with all the single player liberties, in with the epic grind for Bigger Numbers.

 

[Lunar Templar]

Can't 'go back to the game I've spent the most time on' those [**********string of expletives deleted***********] at NCsoft killed it for no god damn reason other they 'they didn't want to deal with it any more'.

No I'm not still, positively livid, about CoH's death, why do you ask?

As for ESO, not really interested, and I find it unsurprising its only 'meh', I'll wait for it to go F2P like the almost all do before trying it.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Yes I hate this trend of turning everything into an MMO.

 

[Malbourne]

IMO, it should have been built from the ground up with an interest in the world's lore and how a whole bunch of players could enmesh themselves in Tamriel. Maybe the developers assumed it would go without saying that the players were free to run about knocking over skeletons without regards to the story? Whatever the reason, ESO doesn't seem like a game that pulls off the player-centric feel of the single-player titles. The transition would have been much more fluid if they hadn't altered different mechanics for the sake of the MMO formula, too, like the arbitrary faction arrangement.

 

[IrisNetwork]

Pandaren Brewmaster disproves your claims of Pandaria being a movie knock off. He was in Warcraft since Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne (2003). Kung Fu Panda (2008). SEE! Kung Fu Panda is a Warcraft 3 knock off.

Anyway, didn't a ton of TES players asked for this? At least thats what I remember when it was announced.

Try Just Cause 2's MMO mod thing. Way more FUN!

 

[delroland]

It's been said, but to reiterate, WoW didn't rip off "Kung Fu Panda". Pandaren monks were part of "Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne" which had come out five years before "Kung Fu Panda".

 

[Necris Omega]

Yeah... the Pandaren = Kung Fu Panda joke? That was such a low hanging fruit that it doesn't even qualify as fruit - it's more like a potato, the kind that's plagued with fungus and prompts the mass exodus of Ireland to the opposite hemisphere. It doesn't matter so much that it was entirely wrong, what's wrong was that it was entirely lame. Sure, not every joke can be a hit, but that was so devoid of wit it made the rest of the review seem dimmer just for containing it.

I don't ask that you have an encyclopedic knowledge on the games you review - I don't come for that. I come for the fast talking speedboat of hilarious entertainment. That, however, was more like dipping your arse in off the side of a dingy and farting like the fate of the world rested in it hearing the vast wisdom of your colon.

 

[gamegod25]

Let's face it the ES world is a pretty generic medieval fantasy setting, and in a genre full of generic medieval fantasy games it just raises the question of "why mmo" even more. It doesn't bring anything new in terms of gameplay so it's just another bland mmo experience that most gamers will get bored of pretty quickly.