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

[Nurb]

That pretty much nails it. I was in beta and just couldn't enjoy it. It split the userbase right down the middle because it pounded TES franchise in to a standard MMO mold with the standard classes, standard faction crap, and standard questing.

It's made for people who just play MMOs for a while and jump to the next one, but it fools Elder Scrolls fans into thinking it was for them even though no fans wanted an MMO.

Most conversations I witnessed went like this during my time in late beta:

"This is stupid, Why can't I pick a faction and play style in-game like in the regular ES games?"

"Because this is an MMO, if you want to play skyrim, go play skyrim!"

 

[LordMonty]

I've played the ESO beta and got bored, so yea it is a bit rubbish... heard its getting better... thought of a monty python sketch... might buy it when it drops in price.

To broadly give my opinion on MMOs I'm playing three at the moment. (abriviating names because its late and gives you something to google). Why I feel like sharing this is probally sleep deprivation based.

Sto - good free to play if you don't mind lots of little boxes in space(lock boxes to be clear and either buy keys, ignore them or sell them on the AH), played since beta, stopped after beta because it sucked but its got better and makes that lifetime sub feel less of a waste now.

TSW - good horror game and good sales model with buying chunks of content as they're made and then 'other vanity stuff' better story telling than most any mmo, your a bee its not offensive that you just one of the chosen ones and save this world from the 'Cthulu like' bad dudes.

WoW - You all know it and love/hate it, I play it as it is simply the best subscription game out there(and no sod off EVE I don't like spread sheets, although I have tried to like you, you just break my mind and soul) Ten bloody years of this game are finally getting to me but damn it all I still play... loyalty, addiction, a blind sense that i've invested too much to let it go? hell knows! Yahzee may be right... we all just come crawling back and Blizzard know it... damn they're dark dark souls.

Also played - EVE(meh as above), AoC(was broken for too long and the tatoo for all at the start with balls chosen one story telling sucked), Warhammer Online(Fun then meh too much pvp, at least the collector's gave me a nice GW orc figure), SW.Gal(never seen a game so soundly murdered by its own devs I dabbled and fled), SWOR(kept moving the goal posts for pvp/pve balance early on then chose the worst free to play model active today so hell no) and Neverwinter(um I do play this once a month maybe... worse character creator than STO which Cryptic also make, average story telling and passable game play, just a bit of a flat game try it if your bored). Could be others but meh brain tired.

To sumerise, story actually matters to MMOs, 'chosen one' stories will always cause an issue, yup some people want the pvp or 'end game' pve and god help you that needs balance, abundance and support. Not every game needs to be everything. TSW has a pvp thing that kinda sits in the middle of a cool story like a troll, sto has no real pvp as its become impossible for new plays to casually take it up without a training weekend and hefty training book on ship building, WoW is... convaluted maybe? it has it all but people cannot do it all for there is just not enough hours in the day to live a real adult life and be a top end raider, top end pvper and otherwise 100% completist without a lot of money to fund your needed free time. I love MMOs, but I also hate them going to try Wildstar but it looks and feels like a very very good wow clone so in many ways I am already not pleased. Goodnight all, rant over.

P.S Good review btw Yahtzee, sorry for the very british rant, its getting late here in little old England.

 

[DirgeNovak]

WHY MMO indeed. It just looks boring as hell. I'll stick to FFXIV, thanks.

 

[Sotanaht]

Not to defend the pile of shit in question here, but people have been begging for Elder Scrolls multiplayer since at least as far back as Morrowind. There have been a few mod projects aimed at making this possible, though none found much if any success.

 

[Matt K]

What I find more telling is that more people here are defending WoW from the Kungfu Panda joke then ESO itself (loved the riff on ELO btw). Not surprised though, looked kind of crappy the bit of beta I did bother playing.

 

[Adventurer2626]

Okay here's a thought that has not and will never enter the minds of production managers: people don't actually want MMOs! They want big epic worlds that they can solo or share with a small group of friends or some sort of matchmaking lobby (trade hubs I'm looking at you) where they can make some friends (read as: mercenaries to split loot with). They don't want to run into adventuring blokes every two seconds but still have the option to group when they feel like. I really think they should just mod Skyrim to have a Diablo II style multiplayer session system. I think that's A LOT closer to what people are actually looking for from games like this. The port to the Mu-more-puh-guh just, as Yahtzee put it, stretches resources and Dev time so far you can see every individual bit used to comprise the universe if you look hard enough. No matter how interesting the individual building blocks the interstitial space will always feel like...space?

Edt: Brief caveat. The only saving grace I've seen is the PvP system. There is definitely something cool with the 3 sided faction on faction siege bits but that's not a mechanic unique to ESO. It could be in any MMO that cookie cuttered the lore to accommodate it. If there would be a competent way to include that in my suggestion I would be all for it but I'd rather just stick with the above.

 

[LadyMint]

The only thing I ever really wanted added to an Elder Scrolls game was the ability to play with a friend. Maybe two. I know many others have said this, and I can only wonder why they couldn't have just added a "Join Game" option to some future chapter in the series. I didn't mind ESO when I played it in Beta, but frankly it is annoying to keep running into that textbook attempt to paint you as the lone savior of Area A while twenty other players come skipping down the corner to complete the same set of quests. At least if you have a small group of friends, it's easy to imagine yourself as that one crew of adventurers who everyone's heard about and wants to hire.

 

[Alexei F. Karamazov]

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 it's cliche!

But really though, it's because it's easy. The vast majority of people want to feel at least somewhat heroic, to be the white knight or Superman they might not be in real life, and saying "You are the only one who can save us!" is a rather appealing, albeit extremely cliche, way to motivate people by stimulating that desire. Such pretense was completely dropped in Oblivion, mocked in Morrowind, and brought back for Skyrim, which broke sales records. Though I'll admit that trend doesn't completely explain the use of the "destiny" plot for ESO, it's an interesting trend nonetheless.

On a completely unrelated note, I approve of your avatar.

 

[Voulan]

I have to admit, even though I absolutely love the Elder Scrolls series I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of co-op mode in the main games.

But while I enjoyed the TESO Beta, it didn't quite fit the bill. It is a decent enough game, but it lost all its complexity to make up for the massive number of people running around. And I couldn't stand walking into the boss arena just as other players kill it so that my quest updates and I miss out on actually doing anything.

I mean, at the least give us some more complex followers that we can take along. The ones you can pick up in the DLC for Skyrim was a step in the right direction, since they like to comment on all the different areas you're going through.

 

[ImBigBob]

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 it's cliche!

But really though, it's because it's easy. The vast majority of people want to feel at least somewhat heroic, to be the white knight or Superman they might not be in real life, and saying "You are the only one who can save us!" is a rather appealing, albeit extremely cliche, way to motivate people by stimulating that desire. Such pretense was completely dropped in Oblivion, mocked in Morrowind, and brought back for Skyrim, which broke sales records. Though I'll admit that trend doesn't completely explain the use of the "destiny" plot for ESO, it's an interesting trend nonetheless.

On a completely unrelated note, I approve of your avatar.

Thanks. Fire Emblem is kind of a big game for me [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/10510-The-Girl-Who-Died].

I doubt the storyline alone broke sales records. I couldn't get into Oblivion because of how you had to pick your class and skill before you even knew your playstyle in the game, and Skyrim fixed that problem with ease. The "destiny" bit had more to do with the gameplay, like the fact that you're the only one shouting skeletons to death. But at least there's context to it; in an MMO, you call bullshit as soon as they say it, because you KNOW you're not the chosen one. You're just some person going adventuring, and that's how it should be.

 

[Addison Wilson]

I knew this game was bad when I played it during the first open beta. Sneak is useless since the game forces you out of crouch the second you get into combat. Archery is useless since the mobs just run at you AND they chain, so you can't run too far away or they reset. Furthermore, the game does not actually use projectiles, if you fire and arrow at a target and then move your mouse away while the "arrow," is in flight, nothing happens. The game just plays an animation, it does not actually create a projectile in memory. The combination of the two makes stealth archery (how I play in EVERY Elder Scrolls game ever) completely useless.

I will keep my EvE Online thank you very much. $15 for another WoW clone, no thank you. I stopped playing grind MMOs 4 years ago, not going to start another one now.

 

[Senare]

...

Still I've never really understood the point of TESO. Yes I do like the idea of being able to see some friends when I'm walking about in Cyrodiil but in truth always having to see them would be a pain in the arse. I guess I'll give this one a miss, and wait until I can return to Cyrodiil for two missions in TES VI: Valenwood or the Khajit place. Oblivion is almost painted in a positive light in this video which is a bit odd, but I guess time and TESO have improved Oblivion in one's graces.

In their defense at some point one guy said to his friend "Hey I wish Elder scrolls were two player." MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Sounds exactly what I thought it would be, but I haven't enjoyed an elder scrolls game since Morrowind so either way this one was definitely off my list.

Yes, sharing the world with some other players feels like something even I would like to try. But I wonder if it is warranted making it into an MMO if the goal is to just share it with a few other players. Why not just add a small-scale, opt-in cooperative multiplayer feature? I feel that this would also go a long way towards making the architecture less static. Or is there really a considerable demand for a large-scale multiplayer TES experience?

EDIT: Upon further reading it seems a lot of other posts already echo my concern here. So if we want take the discussion in a fresh direction we can concentrate on the underscored part.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

is there some sort of neurotoxin in all the money these AAA devs receive that make them take stupid, stupid, stupid decisions? bethesda was one of the more decent devs this gen

also yathzee you missed a golden pun opportunity


"MMO players, MMO problems"

eh? eehhhh?

 

[CloudKiller]

Yeah basically saw this coming after playing an hour or 2 of beta. You wants an Elder Scrolls game that you can't mod? Luckily I think the mmo market is going to get a good shake up after Wildstar releases. It's got the best cooperative pve content i've seen in years with 5 man dungeon bosses that could be Raid bosses in other mmo's.

 

[Darth_Payn]

I think the funniest visual gag was the telephone with giant boots kicking the game's ass. Why did Yahtzee single out Old Republic for his MMORPG examples? People still play it, right?

 

[Belaam]

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?

This. been doing it since Ultimata Online, EQ, WoW, CoH, and so on and so on. Shelling out $15 a month for 6 months isn't exactly the end of the world. If it is, you probably don't have a computer that can play these when they come out anyway. ESO has some definite problems, but it's fun and it will remain fun at least through the summer. MMOs always have bugs and exploits and generally get the biggest cleaned up before too long. But this one will be fun for a while. Certainly will be worth a couple of fast food runs a month for a while... At which point I will hop back on to GW2 for a bit to see what zones they have destroyed/added until the next interesting MMO comes along. When was that Firefly release date again?

 

[Killclaw Kilrathi]

I have to admit I really like ESO. A lot of what Yahtzee says here is perfectly valid, but he didn't touch on the fact that you can pretty much build whatever kind of class you want and how there are no weapon or armour restrictions. Fighters can run around in robes and rogue types can sneak around in full plate. As far as MMOs go there's plenty of freedom.

All that said, I think its main flaw is that it's too expensive for what it is. It would work better as free to play, which is probably where it will be in a year or two.

But if you can get around the price, I'd say give it a go. It might seem a bit painful at first, but once you're used to the gameplay you might find you really like it. So yeah, ESO is pretty much like anal sex.

 

[Nowhere Man]

All this ESO hype has gotten me back into Skyrim. I've been playing it quite a bit again and I have it modded with all kinds of extra quests, followers and NPCs. It's so satisfying that I really don't have any kind of desire to invest my time or money into another generic time sink MMO.

 

[drschplatt]

He's 100% correct about the game. It's so disappointing, it's just a badly made online 1 player game. Group content is so painfully broken I and most of my guild have given up on trying to group in the game.

 

[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.

And what exactly was remotely 'Kung Fu' about the Pandaren Brewmaster? The coat, hat and the staff are all that come to mind.

His abilities were "Drunken Brawler", "Drunken Haze", "Breath of Fire" and "Storm, Earth and Fire". Not much of that suggests 'Kung Fu', more like 'vague smattering of Asian stereotypes inexplicably blended with alcohol', which really just goes to show that it was one of Blizzard's more poorly executed April Fool's Jokes.

OT: Consider me entirely un-surprised that it suffers from all the usual MMO bugbears. I think the last line sums it up perfectly.

Yeah, who am I kidding. The Pandarens in WoW have an entirely different move set more closer to Kung Fu and they're even bouncy.

I love the movie. Awaiting Kung Fu Panda 3, Hellboy 3, Half Life 3 and Prey 2.