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Bad first impressions
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,348
I had a look at ESO around when it launched. At the time, the web site basically said, here's how to buy the game, but we're not going to tell you anything about it. It had scarcely more than some of those game sites that make you wonder if it's a scam to try to get your personal information and there isn't an actual game. So I ignored it.
So I checked back recently and their web site was much more fleshed out. So are the fan sites. It looks like fextralife is the main wiki for the game, though it's not always easy to tell, as so many sites are inclined to create a wiki, make about ten pages for it, and quit, and search engines can't necessarily filter that garbage out. I spent several hours looking through it and thought it looked like the game could be pretty good. So I tried it.
The ESO Plus subscription advertises "Full access to all DLC game packs". That's a direct copy and paste from the site, and the bolded text is bold on their web site, not my own emphasis. There is fine print that explains, "Access to DLC game packs available in the Crown Store and character progression bonuses available for the duration of membership. Any progress made using the progression bonuses during the time of membership will remain." So I assumed that if I buy the game and subscribe, I get access to all of the content.
Wrong. Apparently ESO Plus gives you access to some content and not others. The game is constantly nagging me to pay another $30 to buy Summerset, because that isn't included with a subscription, nor with the base game. It started the first time I logged in, before I even got to character creation. If their goal was to make people who just bought the game feel scammed even before reaching character creation, then mission accomplished. This is the stuff that class action lawsuits are made of.
You know how a lot of games have some EULA with many pages worth of legalese that you're supposed to ignore and click "I agree"? ESO has about four or five separate ones, and you have to scroll down and then click to agree separately to each of them. I don't recall ever seeing any other software or service with more than two.
The game also takes a very long time to load. Now, a lot of games take a while to load. But ESO takes a long time to load the login screen. Then you log in and it takes a long time to get you to the character choice screen. Then you choose your character and it takes a long time to load the game world itself. I can understand taking a long time at one stage of loading, but not three. That's just sloppy design.
Eventually, I made it into the game. You know how some games have some weird key combination to make the UI vanish so that you can take a screenshot? ESO apparently decided that the entire game should be like that. You just have to know ahead of time which key combinations do what and then maybe eventually you can play.
Now, it is possible to dig through the settings and make a UI appear. You can have health bars and skill bars and numbers and so forth, so that you can tell what's going on in the underlying mechanics, and not just, I hit that mob and have no idea how much effect it had. It's just not there by default for some inexplicable reason.
Or at least, you can make a lot of stuff appear. I haven't yet figured out how to make the top bar not disappear most of the time. I haven't figured out how to get a mini-map. It took me a long time to figure out that you could open a map and it would tell you where to go, but it's a nuisance to have to cover up the normal game in order to see where to go, rather than having to wander around the zone aimlessly hoping to stumble across what a quest asked me to find. I also haven't figured out how to turn off the voice overs, as I have no idea why someone thought it was a good idea to have NPCs read the quest text to you very slowly and in small chunks.
And I still have no idea how I'm supposed to find quests. I've found a couple by stumbling across an NPC who offered a quest. But while a lot of games have quest markers, it sure looks like ESO doesn't. It has quest hubs, to be sure. Maybe there's some way to make some UI stuff appear so that you can find all of the quests in a minute, rather than spending ten minutes fishing through the wiki, or half an hour wandering around clicking on things until I've found most of the quests but missed a couple.
But perhaps the fundamental reason why I'm lost is that the game simply doesn't have a tutorial. It has a handful of tooltips that say to press this or that key to do something. Most of the tooltips are wrong because they don't realize that I'm using a gamepad so I've had to remap controls, but at least they say what functionality I'm supposed to find, and then I can go searching through the keybinds to figure out what I need. And there aren't very many of those tooltips, either. There are certainly fewer than a lot of other games would have even if you completely excluded the game's tutorial from the tooltip count.
So thus far, I've played for about three hours. Probably less than ten minutes of that was in combat. Most of the rest was running back and forth trying to figure out what to do. That would be a fine ratio for a game like Uncharted Waters Online that isn't primarily about combat. But from the wiki, it sure looks like ESO is supposed to be a mostly combat game, as the main non-combat activities are there to either make you better at combat or lead to combat.
It's still plausible that the game might be pretty good. I haven't found anything to contradict the things that looked potentially good on the game's site and wiki. My main concern before trying the game was that the controls could be awkward, and that seems to be fine. Most games are awkward at first because I use a gamepad, and it takes a while to figure out which controls matter for the game and which don't and map the gamepad appropriately. ESO seems to be better than average in this regard.
But there's a learning curve, as the game does some unorthodox things. I'd never seen anything like the game's stamina/magicka split, and their skill point system is certainly unusual. Having a learning curve isn't necessarily bad, as innovative game mechanics will usually cause one. The problem is that Zenimax doesn't seem to care to do anything to smooth that learning curve. That can't possibly be good for player retention. Most players won't spend several hours reading up on a game before trying it; if I hadn't done so, I'd probably have quit in frustration by now. Now that the game has been out for more than four years, maybe they should find time to make the new player experience a little friendlier.
So I checked back recently and their web site was much more fleshed out. So are the fan sites. It looks like fextralife is the main wiki for the game, though it's not always easy to tell, as so many sites are inclined to create a wiki, make about ten pages for it, and quit, and search engines can't necessarily filter that garbage out. I spent several hours looking through it and thought it looked like the game could be pretty good. So I tried it.
The ESO Plus subscription advertises "Full access to all DLC game packs". That's a direct copy and paste from the site, and the bolded text is bold on their web site, not my own emphasis. There is fine print that explains, "Access to DLC game packs available in the Crown Store and character progression bonuses available for the duration of membership. Any progress made using the progression bonuses during the time of membership will remain." So I assumed that if I buy the game and subscribe, I get access to all of the content.
Wrong. Apparently ESO Plus gives you access to some content and not others. The game is constantly nagging me to pay another $30 to buy Summerset, because that isn't included with a subscription, nor with the base game. It started the first time I logged in, before I even got to character creation. If their goal was to make people who just bought the game feel scammed even before reaching character creation, then mission accomplished. This is the stuff that class action lawsuits are made of.
You know how a lot of games have some EULA with many pages worth of legalese that you're supposed to ignore and click "I agree"? ESO has about four or five separate ones, and you have to scroll down and then click to agree separately to each of them. I don't recall ever seeing any other software or service with more than two.
The game also takes a very long time to load. Now, a lot of games take a while to load. But ESO takes a long time to load the login screen. Then you log in and it takes a long time to get you to the character choice screen. Then you choose your character and it takes a long time to load the game world itself. I can understand taking a long time at one stage of loading, but not three. That's just sloppy design.
Eventually, I made it into the game. You know how some games have some weird key combination to make the UI vanish so that you can take a screenshot? ESO apparently decided that the entire game should be like that. You just have to know ahead of time which key combinations do what and then maybe eventually you can play.
Now, it is possible to dig through the settings and make a UI appear. You can have health bars and skill bars and numbers and so forth, so that you can tell what's going on in the underlying mechanics, and not just, I hit that mob and have no idea how much effect it had. It's just not there by default for some inexplicable reason.
Or at least, you can make a lot of stuff appear. I haven't yet figured out how to make the top bar not disappear most of the time. I haven't figured out how to get a mini-map. It took me a long time to figure out that you could open a map and it would tell you where to go, but it's a nuisance to have to cover up the normal game in order to see where to go, rather than having to wander around the zone aimlessly hoping to stumble across what a quest asked me to find. I also haven't figured out how to turn off the voice overs, as I have no idea why someone thought it was a good idea to have NPCs read the quest text to you very slowly and in small chunks.
And I still have no idea how I'm supposed to find quests. I've found a couple by stumbling across an NPC who offered a quest. But while a lot of games have quest markers, it sure looks like ESO doesn't. It has quest hubs, to be sure. Maybe there's some way to make some UI stuff appear so that you can find all of the quests in a minute, rather than spending ten minutes fishing through the wiki, or half an hour wandering around clicking on things until I've found most of the quests but missed a couple.
But perhaps the fundamental reason why I'm lost is that the game simply doesn't have a tutorial. It has a handful of tooltips that say to press this or that key to do something. Most of the tooltips are wrong because they don't realize that I'm using a gamepad so I've had to remap controls, but at least they say what functionality I'm supposed to find, and then I can go searching through the keybinds to figure out what I need. And there aren't very many of those tooltips, either. There are certainly fewer than a lot of other games would have even if you completely excluded the game's tutorial from the tooltip count.
So thus far, I've played for about three hours. Probably less than ten minutes of that was in combat. Most of the rest was running back and forth trying to figure out what to do. That would be a fine ratio for a game like Uncharted Waters Online that isn't primarily about combat. But from the wiki, it sure looks like ESO is supposed to be a mostly combat game, as the main non-combat activities are there to either make you better at combat or lead to combat.
It's still plausible that the game might be pretty good. I haven't found anything to contradict the things that looked potentially good on the game's site and wiki. My main concern before trying the game was that the controls could be awkward, and that seems to be fine. Most games are awkward at first because I use a gamepad, and it takes a while to figure out which controls matter for the game and which don't and map the gamepad appropriately. ESO seems to be better than average in this regard.
But there's a learning curve, as the game does some unorthodox things. I'd never seen anything like the game's stamina/magicka split, and their skill point system is certainly unusual. Having a learning curve isn't necessarily bad, as innovative game mechanics will usually cause one. The problem is that Zenimax doesn't seem to care to do anything to smooth that learning curve. That can't possibly be good for player retention. Most players won't spend several hours reading up on a game before trying it; if I hadn't done so, I'd probably have quit in frustration by now. Now that the game has been out for more than four years, maybe they should find time to make the new player experience a little friendlier.
![[Deleted User]](http://wa.vanillicon.com/v2/abf141313932718b9633051232aded14.svg)
and 4 others.
Comments
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
This happened a year and half ago when they added Morrowind. They decided that the all inclusive ESO+ was too good of a deal so they called Morrowind a "Chapter" to differentiate it from the other DLC that are included and charged everyone extra for it.
They then institutionalized that system and made it a yearly thing and along came Summerset this year while they simultaneously demoted last year's Morrowind to included DLC status.
There were some of us that were very pissed off by that change of monetization model that was hidden behind all the "We're going to Morrowind. Ain't that just so cool!" hype. But boy was I ever loudly shouted down by many here (including some staff) when I pointed that out.
Everything else you talk about is just beginner growing pains - and you're right, ESO's new player experience is very lacking despite some efforts last year to include new things like level-up advisors - but if you're going to enjoy ESO it'll be because you can ignore some of their institutional obnoxiousness about monetization - something they just recently doubled down when they decided to use the new daily log-in rewards as an excuse to splash nearly full-screen ads at you every day. And those ads don't discriminate: you'll see them whether you have the bare bones game or sub or already own the content they're pushing. But there is an ad-on that makes those ads disappear.
Here... save yourself some googling and look at a beginner guide by someone who knows the game well and what he's talking about:
https://alcasthq.com/eso-new-player-beginner-guide/
And this add on manager will let you customize your UI and other things easily with no fuss:
https://www.minion.gg/
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
You mention UI mods. Are they going the Vanilla WoW approach of, the base UI doesn't work, and you'll have to find mods to fix it?
Now you start out sitting in a chair where you're about to be shipwrecked by Dark Elf slavers. It took me several minutes to figure out that I was supposed to get up out of the chair and move, as the lack of a UI made me think it was a loading screen. You do one quest to get off of the island and then it drops you into Vvardenfell in a small town that, as best as I can tell, only has one quest to offer you.
My complaint is not about the business model in itself so much as the false advertising. They advertise that if you buy ESO Plus, you get all of the content. Then after you buy it, they say no, you don't actually get all of the content. You have to pay more to get the rest of the content. That's got to be illegal. If it isn't, it certainly should be. Do we need to complain to the FTC about this?
Leaving aside the merits (or lack thereof) of that decision, the vanilla tutorial is still the best way to start the game because it leads you by the hand and drops you in one of the smaller original starter islands post-tutorial.
The best thing you can do is go to that first wayshrine you run into in Vvardenfell and port over to your chosen alliance's starter city:
- Daggerfall in the Glenumbra Zone for the Daggerfall Covenant
- Vulkhel Guard in the Auridon Zone for Aldmeri Dominion
- Davon’s Watch in the Stonefalls Zone for Ebonheart Pact
As soon as you get there you will be approached by someone talking about a benefactor. Follow that quest and this will lead to the original tutorial that will in turn lead to the starter island for your alliance.Those starter areas have more and easier to follow traditional themepark breadcrumbs.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
As far as quests. The black upside down triangles above people's heads show you who has a quest to give. The triangles also show up on your compass. When you complete or track a quest the triangle turns white.
I've got the straight edge.
Personally I have too much self respect to play along with their bullshit. What they have in fact done is carved out one of the 4 yearly DLC as not included with the sub and charge extra for it. They should have the balls to clearly reflect that in their ads instead of relying on the "chapter" semantics to surprise you after the fact... as clearly happened to you.
But hey, someone got mad at me here just a couple of months ago when I called Summerset a DLC. The power is in that Kool-Aid
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I've just submitted a support ticket on their site:
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If they do either one of those things, I'll be satisfied. And if they don't, then I have to decide whether to just deal with it or to go the credit card chargeback and FTC complaint route. I've had my current credit card for more than 11 years and only done one chargeback in that time. I've never done a chargeback for computer games. But then, I don't regard "the game isn't as fun as I hoped" as being valid grounds for a chargeback.
Part of the problem is that, if they'll violate one promise on what you get, what stops them from doing so again in the future? They said that it costs $35 to get X, and then after I paid $35, they said, no, you have to pay an additional $30 to get X. If I paid an additional $30, I have little confidence that they'd then deliver what they promised after they didn't for the original $35.
There are plenty of scams that ask for you to pay ever escalating amounts of money for what they promise will eventually give you what you wanted. The hope of the scammers is that, after you've already paid some amount, you'll be so unwilling to write that off as a loss that you'll keep paying more in hopes of eventually getting what you wanted. If the game isn't a scam, they sure seem to be trying awfully hard to package it like one.
For what it's worth, if they check my account, I'm right near a jewelery station, the error message I mentioned is real, and I really did log off within minutes of seeing that error message. While I had some inkling earlier that Summerset might not be enabled as promised, that was the first conclusive proof I had that it wasn't. I have not logged into the game since then.
Right about now, I'm very glad that I didn't buy the game through Steam. A chargeback generally means an account ban. If my Steam account gets banned, then I lose access to other games, too. I had never done business with Zenimax before, so they have nothing else to ban me from. Even so, it's likely that Steam would have refunded my money even if Zenimax refused.
Or who knows? Maybe they'll decide that $35 plus the potential for future purchases is more than $0 and decide to honor the promise on their web site and enable Summerset on my account. I'll know that they won't do that for future purchases, but if I know the terms of the sale ahead of time, it's not scam.
Just out of curiosity, where did you buy it?
I ask because I just took a look at their official store page which I haven't looked at in a while (https://account.elderscrollsonline.com/store) and I see different editions, a couple of them called "Summerset" editions and one called Standard
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I've got the straight edge.
Purchasing the standard gives you the base game and not Morrowind or Summerset I do believe.
ESO Plus gives you the smaller DLC and Orsinium. Morrowind may be included in that now I'm not sure.
Everything is user error it seems.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
My understanding from reading their site was that it was a model akin to Wizard 101. You can either buy content piecemeal and retain access forever, or you could subscribe and get access to all of the content for the duration of their subscription, then lose access to all of the DLC game packs if you cancel your subscription. That's why it would make sense to have options that give more DLC than the standard edition: for people who weren't going to subscribe. Note the difference between the Summerset edition and the "Elder Scrolls Online Collection": the latter includes more DLC game packs than the former.
I think that their attempted fig leaf of legality is that in some but not all of the places that they say "all DLC game packs", they specify "in the crown store". Apparently Summerset isn't in the crown store. But someone who has never played the game wouldn't know the complete list of DLC packs. Even if he looked at the crown store and saw the DLC packs listed, he probably wouldn't know that some of the DLC packs aren't there. That is at best an arcane technicality, and I don't think anyone could argue with a straight face that they weren't trying to very strongly imply that you get all DLC game packs period--something that they knew to be completely false.
I did several hours of reading up on the game before making the purchase. It's one thing to chastise people for not doing their due diligence before buying a game. But the phrasing "due diligence" surely means that there is some notion of undue diligence, and that's what it would have taken to figure out that they meant that you get some DLC, but not Summerset.
If they had explicitly said that ESO Plus doesn't give you Summerset, I would have no problem with it. I would likewise have no problem with it if a game charged $100/month to play, so long as it was clearly labeled. I'd probably just look at the price tag and pass. But I don't like being lied to.
That was a major factor in why I canceled Comcast several years ago: the Comcast representative told me to my face that after the introductory offer was over, the price would only go up by something like $5/month. The contract said it was more like $30/month. I saw that in the contract before signing it, and it was clearly stated in the fine print, which is more than you can say for the ESO Plus debacle. But I still didn't like being lied to, and it was a consideration when I switched ISPs after the introductory rate was over.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
That's not user error. That's false advertising. There is a difference.
The false advertising is only one of the reasons that the game gave me a bad first impression. That the new player experience is so egregiously awful in a lot of different ways is why I created this thread. The nearest comparison that I can think of where another MMORPG just dumped me into the game world with no guidance on what to do was Trove, and even that was due to an outright bug where high game window resolutions make nearly all text vanish--including the tutorial text that would have explained what to do. With ESO, the lack of a tutorial seems to be intentional.
I've got the straight edge.
Those of us who have been following the bouncing ball all along have heard all their prevarications and know how they use the term "chapter" and why it's not included in the crown store (so that we can't use our accumulation of 1500 crowns per month from ESO+ to get it without coughing up additional new money) but for someone who isn't up to date with ZOS speak they should explicitly state what parts of the game are excluded from ESO+.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED