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How Elder Scrolls Online Has Totally Changed
Mikeha
Member EpicPosts: 9,196
The new One Tamriel update really opens up the world. Game Director Matt Firor shows us around.
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Also Free Updates have always been what I like in mmos.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I just don't understand why games keep taking away elements that make games MMO and RPGish.
You know this was something that I also thought about when I saw the video.
"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
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Game isn't bad and it wasn't that bad at beginning but there are few things to complain too.....
About Toon Progression that is not True effective build is effective mix maxed toon is Required for Dungeons
Also ESO will never move even one step to be like Morrowind or Skyrim or Oblivion
Still best MMORPG on the market By the way around 30 min ago some folks married in Stormhaven at Shrine of Stendarr inside Wayrest.
Why no one mention auction finding a particular set is extremely hard and CP requirement make finding the piece even harder .
Instead of looking at it like all monsters are similar you can look at it like " I can play in my favorite zones now and progress ". Often times when I have played MMORPGs I have hated leaving certain areas behind because I enjoyed them so much. Now I dont have to.
But One Tamriel doesn't really touch the PVP aspect at all: At character creation you still pick one of the three alliances as always and that's the alliance that character will fight for if and when he ever goes to Cyrodiil.
But for PvE purposes the only thing that alliance choice does now is that it determines which of the three starter islands you land on when you jump out of Coldharbour in the tutorial. The change is that you can even skip that starter island and go anywhere you want.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
It's a trade off but IMO the positives of being able to go anywhere you feel like going outweigh the few negatives.
You also hear a lot of people complaining about losing a sense of progression but all I can say about that is that these must be game theorists instead of players because the progression is alive and well. ESO can get rid of mob levels and still give you a sense of progression because it has always been about using and training skill lines instead of just leveling. Other than some key levels that unlock something significant (like level 10 for dungeons and PVP and level 50 to unlock champion points) leveling in ESO has always been a pretty trivial thing compared to the much more important unlocking specific skills in whatever skill lines you happen to be training.
Those better skill unlocks are still what the game is all about and what gives you that sense of progression and being more capable.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
To get to the point a couple of months ago I decided to give ESO a second look. Reinstalled , did a complete character and bank wipe. Now I have a 49 Sorc, a 38 Templar, and a half dozen lvl 5 -6 mules. Due to a incapacitating injury I have way way wayyyy too much time to fill for the next few weeks. ESO and lots of adult beverages combined with some herbal aroma therapy helps
I was enjoying the game pre patch but the lack of freedom to go anywhere at any level as I did in ED was starting to show. Update 12 cured that fast. I have hated the concentric rings of similar leveled mobs combined with a cookie crumb trail to follow for a few years now. It is a lazy fix and appeals to lazy people in my opinion. Now in ESO I have to decide where to go and what to do. Now considering the amount of content in this game, even with all my spare time I will never "do it all"
a wise friend of mine once observed that all MMO's have a grind the trick is making the grind entertaining. Trust me there are lots of things to grind in this game. Just ground out the matchmaker achievement for a neat green dye color, now working on a achievement that has a yellow dye to add to the palette. I figure that will take anywhere between 6 hours to 3 days depending on what distractions my ADD ass becomes fascinated with. It is pretty easy to get sidetracked if one is not careful
A bit of background. I played ESO during last part of beta and a templer to 15 at release and hated the game. I wanted Skyrim Online and this was not it., it still isn't but it is getting closer. I still have a hard time seeing others doing the same quests I am but so be it. Phasing takes care of a lot of it. Fast forward to a month or so back when I broke my ankle and am facing several months with lots of time to fill. I was playing Elite Dangerous and enjoying but the joystick was giving my tendinitis a fit. Yes it sucks getting old but wtf it beats the alternative.
I miss DAoC
I have not seen the new updates but was in ESO from launch. My assumption from what has been said is levelling is much the same as it was. It is just a matter of where you can now do it.
This must make the game seem more open world, even though you are zoning you can go where you like. But for lore this sounds a mockery, once again the RPG side of MMORPG is given a kick in the nuts.
As I talked about in "Where have all the Roleplayers gone" MMOs give scant regard to roleplaying on any level or of any kind. ESO was quite lore focused when it began, there were inconsistences, but nothing that bothered me. This makes the idea that there is a war between factions occurring outside of Cyrodiil hard to believe.
NPC's in the zone will be telling you how they are at war with this or that people. You will be doing the adventures with peoples of the supposedly opposing faction helping to bring down their own race, tribe, etc.
This did happen somewhat at launch, as players in a guild would start in the location their guild had chosen, not their race location. But hardly that much at all, maybe 10% of the players you would see looked out of place. Now it will look a total mash up.
This is an example, as if we need another one, of how good design for lore and the background of the world being played in ends up second fiddle to easymode 'one design fits all' MMO template.
There's still a lot to fix in ESO in order to make it Elder Scrolls. Then again, I overhaul modded the hell out of my Elder Scrolls to make sure that Bandits wouldn't be walking around in Daedric gear, wolves wouldn't have a prayers chance to kill a heavy armored foe, and headshots would be instakill without a heavy helmet. So I suppose my Elder Scrolls experience wasn't technically Elder Scrolls anyway.
Still, I can't quite get myself to play ESO. Maybe have a few more facial sliders. Or maybe remove the nonsensical level requirement for equipment. Or maybe have full item drop and destruction - pets permanently die - characters have bad lingering results from resurrection. Or maybe if our characters had to eat, drink, and sleep. Or maybe if they made it so that fights felt more like Oblivion and less like an overhead life bar sponge fest.
Sure, it's more "consistent" to keep the lore intact, but it's not as fun or "open" for the players. And if we're being honest, not a whole lot of people care about the lore *that* much. Those who do can get their fill from the single-player games, where they're the lone hero in the world.
At the end of the day, the players in ESO - many of them, anyway, want to be able to explore all of Tamriel. I found it more annoying, personally, the way they had it before, with the arbitrary restriction of "you can't enter other factions' areas 'til you finish your own, and you'll only see players from your own faction while there." That was incredibly forced and contrived and I thought it was ridiculous from the moment they announced it way back when. I find it much easier to accept that we're rivals over an area of land, but don't get into the fray when elsewhere in the world.
In a single-player game, they can maintain that sense of consistency in lore and such, because it's only the player on their own. In a MMORPG, where thousands of people are playing, they want to be able to interact and see each other and group up. It's a largely social experience. Placing that above maintaining "strict adherence to Lore" is the right way to go. In most cases, something that adds to gameplay should always win out. Certainly, opening up all areas to all players adds to the gameplay in a huge way in ESO.
The mobs in the group delves and public dungeons are no pushovers either ....
Maybe you are finding it strenuous exactly because whilst your characters are the same "level" as the mobs its precisely because they don't yet have the skills yet. Maybe. The other possibility is that new characters have never had it easy in ESO - or ES games in general for that matter.
If you stick at it you do get more powerful. Each CP upgrade is tiny - but they mount up. You unlock and develop a wider range of skills. And eventually you will start to get better gear.
In Morrowwind, there were simply places you could not go. You'd walk into a cave on the inner island and you were insta-snuffed by something.
In Oblivion, everything scaled so if you went into caves and went exploring at first, the first couple of Oblivion gates were terrible to have to fight through.
In this kind of game, doesn't that work against you? How is this bunny rabbit not dying on the first hit kind of working against you. Seems like it takes all your advantage (sometimes, wasn't it nice in WoW to go back into a dungeon you needed 5-10 people for and solo it?). I'm torn but reading you guys, it seems there's a mix of these feelings as well.
It has been a while since I played, you have reminded me that you spent the latter two thirds of your levelling experience fighting for those you never would anyway! It was only in the first third of the MMO that the players you saw made any sense. So in many ways the new system is not that much worse in that regard than the old.
But I will say, the old system occurred because there was not enough zones, content etc to get you to top level in your own faction. Now it is fair to say that to provide that might have been beyond what is possible on todays AAA budget. But the answer as always is to give lore a kicking.
I agree with you game design has to put gaming before lore, but if you do that always in MMOs and over the years it has become always, then the lore is irrelevant.
Remember in the run up to launch and I am sure even now great fanfare is being made about the Elder Scrolls background. That's why I think this is important, not just for roleplayers, we were promised a world not just a game.
I have a character that leveled from level 10-50 doing nothing but PvP in Cyrodiil's <50 campaign fighting for the AD. That's also a choice that is totally lore consistent. Even more so since the 3 PvP guilds I belong to are AD-only by choice.
But you're right, you can be just as lore-inconsistent as you want to be now - including never setting foot inside Cyrodiil despite that being a huge part of the story that is echoed all throughout many of the PvE story lines.
But never going to Cyrodiil is not a new choice and the vast majority of the player base opted not to a long time ago. This is also the same majority that One Tamriel is aimed at: those who have never cared about the PvP and for whom the 3-faction separation in PvE was just a bother...lore be damned.
ESO was designed originally to be very DAoC-like with its 3-faction war a core lore element. Even mechanically ti was obviously designed with Cyrodiil as the main "end game" content with the bulk of the PvE post-50 content feeling decidedly tacked-on as just doing the other two alliance's story lines. They didn't even add the first legitimate post 50 zone, Craglorn, until several months after launch.
The problem was that it has only ever been a minority of us who actually liked that design and played the game as intended. The PvE-only or PvE-mostly crowd has always been the majority. If you look carefully at what has been added to the game and all of the core changes including this one, it becomes obvious that they have been progressively refocusing the game to cater to their real core audience. The current possibility of lore inconsistency is a legacy issue.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Now everything is 160 but whilst things have changed in some ways they haven't. Your reference to Oblivion - yep when you start out it will still be hard. And later there will be stuff that you can return to and solo. Other stuff though ..... I think one of the nice things about this update is that e.g. world bosses and dolmans that were previously trivial for high level characters are much tougher. And the game is much more vibrant as a result.