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General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Morwen Lagann on 03 May 2012, 10:32

Title: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 03 May 2012, 10:32
They already disappeared off the face of the cluster when Skyrim came out. If this (http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/03/june-cover-revealed-the-elder-scrolls-online.aspx) is actually released and does well, they'll never come back. :lol:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: kalaratiri on 03 May 2012, 11:12
I can hear Ava's cries of joy from here. She's been wanting one of these for a while  :)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vikarion on 03 May 2012, 20:29
Probably not for me. I play the Elder Scrolls for some quality no-other-people + fun exploring time, not for the chance to gang up and do multiplayer. I have plenty of games for that, including Eve.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mathra Hiede on 03 May 2012, 20:36
Probably not for me. I play the Elder Scrolls for some quality no-other-people + fun exploring time, not for the chance to gang up and do multiplayer. I have plenty of games for that, including Eve.

Agreed - looking forward to it none the less, to see if its in anyway unique and not TES mod for WOW :s
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Katrina Oniseki on 03 May 2012, 21:41
This makes me so angry in so many ways.

MMOs are the complete opposite of what made Elder Scrolls games so great. I won't even bother arguing with anyone here about why that is.

It doesn't matter anyways, because you can now say goodbye to Elder Scrolls VI. Skyrim was the last single player game for Elder Scrolls. Why bother making more single player blockbusters when you can add another shitty expansion to what will probably be another worthless MMO.

It should be noted that all of the Elder Scrolls games have been released with game breaking bugs and stability issues. The MMO will be no different.

My prediction?

It'll be released with your typical subscription fee, then bomb, then go free-to-play. I can only hope this happens in a short time so they can go back to making SP games.

Enough of this MMO crap. BRING BACK REAL RPGs!
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ghost Hunter on 03 May 2012, 22:30
Honestly I lost interest when Molag Bal was the main Daedric enemy.

That particular Daedra is based on things that rub me really bad.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mizhara on 04 May 2012, 05:35
... a Nation RPer objects to the domination and enslavement of mortals?

Notsureifsrs.jpeg
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Desiderya on 04 May 2012, 07:10
I would kill to play a game like Skyrim in a small-scale co-op mode (2-4) akin to Borderlands. Imho that's the best of both worlds, typical Elder Scrolls gameplay and playing it with friends. But as an mmo... I don't know. It depends on how many contemporary MMO game mechanics they have to squeeze into the game, i.e. classes, 'grind' and linear progression.
Therefore I hope they're not simply going to cook up a standard MMO with the TES setting + the one defining feature ( hello SW:TOR ).
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vieve on 04 May 2012, 07:27
My only question about this is:  can I play a Dark Elf sniper with a Soul Trapping bow?


(j/k, I probably won't play it.)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 04 May 2012, 07:53
I have no faith in this game being balanced and at all engaging, it'll be heaven for min/maxers though.

Bethesda have never shown their ability to create a balanced game, gorgeous great big open scale enviroments sure. But the only reason they're fun to the individual is you can play how you like.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mizhara on 04 May 2012, 08:40
Pretty much true. I can't think of a single Bethesda game (except Brink I suppose, but I think Splash Damage did the actual development there, yeah?) where you couldn't completely break the game and become completely overpowered.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ghost Hunter on 04 May 2012, 14:00
... a Nation RPer objects to the domination and enslavement of mortals?

Notsureifsrs.jpeg

(http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/7761/1324072362516.jpg)

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 04 May 2012, 19:09
Mmh. Yeah, Molag Bal is, more than most, viscerally E-ville. His quest in "Oblivion" involved corrupting a retired paladin. His quest in Skyrim involves beating a defenseless, trapped (if irascible) old man to death with a rusted mace. He's got an impressive record of leaving me feeling dirty on the basis of wholly fictional acts.

I don't think I'll be taking part in TES Online, though; for me, much of the fun of the series is the permanent impact you can leave on your surroundings.

Actually assassinating, for instance, named, unique NPCs who have an existence outside of the quest line is sort of anathema to an MMO, which must necessarily have either a persistent or persistent-ish world (lest some merry psychopath depopulate all the NPCs).

Also, TES has always treated death as permanent, the only exception being ... um, dealings with Molag Bal.

Oh, dear. Well, that's one way to explain a respawn mechanic.

Ah-- there are also acts of the gods, ala Knights of the Nine, but that's ... less ... common? I think?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Random Sentience on 04 May 2012, 21:42
http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_online/b/pc/archive/2012/05/04/first-screen-and-details-surrounding-elders-scrolls-online.aspx

I think I will skip this. I have grown to dislike the "Fantasy MMO" genre, and this looks to be more of the same.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: lallara zhuul on 05 May 2012, 05:14
These news make me a sad panda.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Louella Dougans on 05 May 2012, 07:36
Honestly I lost interest when Molag Bal was the main Daedric enemy.

That particular Daedra is based on things that rub me really bad.

can you expand on this ?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Seriphyn on 05 May 2012, 08:04
http://imgur.com/a/fO9Ty#0

Scans from GameInformer, pages of first look details regarding lots of mechanics. Haven't read it myself. Only interested if it has a proper combat system like TERA
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Davlos on 05 May 2012, 08:52
Yawn. Not interested.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: hellgremlin on 06 May 2012, 06:19
No diseases. Interest killed. Wanted to RP a corprus zombie and encourage people to eat my corprus weepings.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Nmaro Makari on 06 May 2012, 10:40
It will probably end up as a WoW with better graphics.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ghost Hunter on 06 May 2012, 15:12
Honestly I lost interest when Molag Bal was the main Daedric enemy.

That particular Daedra is based on things that rub me really bad.

can you expand on this ?

Aria brings up some good points with his shrine quests during the main games. My central grievance with him, however, is how prominent rape and sexual domination is used in his canon lore. You rarely see mention of it in the games, but if you dig around in TES lore (particularly the origin story book detailing how Vampires came into existence, from Oblivion's The Vile Lair DLC) he is unashamedly based on that. King of Rape is even one of his Daedric titles, to drive the point home.

To market someone like that as the main villain of a major game title would require massive censoring and toning down of his true nature. While I am all too happy to have that aspect of his character striped away and forgotten, it would make the game lore inconsistent with itself - something TES steadfastly avoids doing. I can simply find nothing interesting about Molag Bal, his very premise is based on something I finid repulsive at a fundamental level. He is a boring villain and a bad choice, and will only create more problems for the MMO I think.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Bacchanalian on 06 May 2012, 15:37
Doesn't the fact that his very premise is abhorrent make him an effective villain?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mizhara on 06 May 2012, 15:42
And for that matter, he's pretty much a perfect Sansha equivalent, so I don't see the consistency here. Well, except that Molag Bal is less of a douche.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: BloodBird on 06 May 2012, 15:42
Doesn't the fact that his very premise is abhorrent make him an effective villain?

I do believe Ghost's idea here is that he won't be a 'cool enemy' villain, he will be a 'tasteless sex-offender' villain.

This can work against it's purpose, as it was.

As for this game, I like the Elder scrolls games because of their epic solo-play adventure. Sure I'd love a small 5-man team co-op through the land, working together for the common goal, but an MMO kills the mood and winning nature of the setting. It just don't fit.

Nor do I have the time to try it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ghost Hunter on 06 May 2012, 15:50
Doesn't the fact that his very premise is abhorrent make him an effective villain?

This statement could go in a lot of ways, so I'll try to go for the academic one.

It makes him an effective villain in so far as getting people to despise him and maybe motivated to stop him. It makes him a boring villain when his moral gimmick is so utterly repugnant there is zero room for expanding it. You can't make rape interesting, be it the sexual or metaphorical (mind rape) kind. The only recourse I can see is to completely ignore that core facet of his identity and try to move into the more ambiguous fields (governmental domination, cultural domination, etc).

Effective villain depends on what you want to do, I think. He is effective if the idea is to get a villain no one wants to sympathize with or like in any way. He is two dimensional and frail if you want to do anything else.

Doesn't the fact that his very premise is abhorrent make him an effective villain?

I do believe Ghost's idea here is that he won't be a 'cool enemy' villain, he will be a 'tasteless sex-offender' villain.

This can work against it's purpose, as it was.

Something like this, yes.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ulphus on 06 May 2012, 17:11
I used to play a lot of Runequest.
There are bad-guys in Runequest like the trolls. The trolls are creatures of darkness, and will eat pretty much anything, and are often at odds with various human cultures, but they're not monolithic, they have internal disagreements, they can be enemies in general and friends in specific.

Broo are the rape monsters. They breed by raping anything that moves (literally, sheep, dogs, cows, horses, people...) and depositing a chest-burster which eventually eats its way out and quite often has some sort of disease or chaotic feature. They are enemies in general and specific. Player characters can kill them without moral qualm, it is never a bad thing to kill a broo (except possibly as a trigger for revenge attacks by others, but being chaotic they don't work together that well).

Trolls are interesting adversaries. Understandable (in an alien sort of way), with motivations of their own. They can be negotiated with and in certain situations can be allies or even friends (to some players. Player races are generally not monolithic either, and it was funny to find half the party prepared to work with trolls and the other half really not).

Broo are really boring. There is no opportunity for players to negotiate or ally with them, short of selling your soul to chaotic, evil and untrustworthy gods.

Applied to Elder scrolls, what this means is I agree with Ghost completely about how interesting a game will be where the major adversary is Molag Bal. In the Skyrim encounter I didn't really know who Molag Bal was the first time, and once I'd played through I avoided it from then on. Boring, tasteless, and not followed through properly. You get no downside to the deal you make with him. The mace isn't corrupting you (as far as I can tell). It's basically power with no drawbacks (other than being weak compared with other magic items).



Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ava Starfire on 07 May 2012, 04:20
Wow. Kala is right... I squee'ed!

Yeah, I will play it. Hopefully I will love it. I will certainly try it.

Not sure why so many people are all like *hipster, yawn, no thx* but ok I guess?

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 07 May 2012, 04:53
Not sure for everyone, but I have never really enjoyed the Elder Scrolls myself. Funnily enough I don't like open worlds solo RPGs, I often believe it belongs to MMOs, so maybe it could actually be interesting here. Will have to read more about it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arnulf Ogunkoya on 07 May 2012, 05:21
I used to play a lot of Runequest.
There are bad-guys in Runequest like the trolls. The trolls are creatures of darkness, and will eat pretty much anything, and are often at odds with various human cultures, but they're not monolithic, they have internal disagreements, they can be enemies in general and friends in specific.

Broo are the rape monsters. They breed by raping anything that moves (literally, sheep, dogs, cows, horses, people...) and depositing a chest-burster which eventually eats its way out and quite often has some sort of disease or chaotic feature. They are enemies in general and specific. Player characters can kill them without moral qualm, it is never a bad thing to kill a broo (except possibly as a trigger for revenge attacks by others, but being chaotic they don't work together that well).

Can't comment on Skyrim as i suspect my current kit can't run it. My flatmate has a copy & likes it however.

But as regards Broo (who to a Warhammer player would look like standard chaos beastmen). Ever heard of the healer of the waste? This is a Broo that joins the head taking cult and gets "corrupted" by exposure to the spirit of a dead healer priestess. It renounces violence, changes cults and becomes a wandering healer.

So even Broo have a bit of complexity in RQ canon. Of course the irony is most people from that god ridden setting see things in very good and evil, no compromise ways.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Seriphyn on 07 May 2012, 05:25
Not sure why so many people are all like *hipster, yawn, no thx* but ok I guess?

I think the issue is that it looks like any other MMO right now, especially if they go with the auto-attack point-and-click stuff. I was expecting it to be the same as vanilla TES, first-person and all that, which would be extremely innovative.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Myyona on 07 May 2012, 06:48
I have never played an Elder Scrolls game...

Seriously, Fantasy is without a doubt my least favorite setting. :ugh:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 07 May 2012, 13:20
The mace isn't corrupting you (as far as I can tell). It's basically power with no drawbacks (other than being weak compared with other magic items).

In general, I agree that the various daedric artifacts come with too few strings attached. However ...

(1) Generally, the daedric gods gift you with their artifacts because you've already demonstrated your suitability for their purpose.

Case in point, Molag Bal: by the time you've got the full-fledged mace, you've (a) tracked down and freed a minion of M.B.'s rival; (b) deceived or dared said minion into returning to Markarth to resume his desecration of M.B.'s shrine, knowing full well it's a trap; and, (c) beaten a helpless old man to death with a rusty mace. Twice.

You don't get the mace so that it can corrupt you; you get the mace because you are corrupt.

(2) The idea of the daedric princes givin' you their stuff is not so much, seemingly, that they expect you to consistently serve their will (though some certainly act like it-- I'm looking at you, Meridia). It's that when you use their stuff, you are working their will. Use the Mace of Molag Bal with a soul gem equipped, and you are first weakening your enemies, then crushing them utterly and stealing their souls. M.B. doesn't give a damn who you beat, so long as you're using the mace to do it ...

... and even if you never do, eventually someone else will acquire it.

Similarly, you are working Azura's will each time you use her star (or thumbing your nose at her and her relatively benevolent intentions each time you use the Black Star to trap a human soul); you are stealing dreams for Namira every time you use the Skull of Corruption to, well, steal dreams; and you are harvesting souls for Mehrunes Dagon each time the Razor insta-kills someone (that's how it works-- slurp! "Your soul is mine").

You are praising Boethia's name (and mocking all notions of honor) by trotting around in the Ebony Mail, spreading chaos for Sheogorath by wielding the Wabbajack, giving one of Sanguine's minions a bloody night out on the town by using the Sanguine Rose, praising Namira with every nibble you take from a corpse using her Ring, enforcing Peryite's order by wielding Spellbreaker, and giving glory to Malacath with every skull Volendrung staves in. The Oghma Infinium vanishes from your hands once used, spreading Hermaeus Mora's Lovecraftian influence elsewhere in the world, while the grant of knowledge it gives remains behind in your mind, a testament to his power. If you use Dawnbreaker for its sole useful purpose at all, you are serving Meridia's will by hunting the undead.

About the only daedra who seems to care at all who you use her artifact on is Mephala, and that's because treachery is needed to strengthen her Ebony Blade. Once you've killed ten of your nearest and dearest, she could care less.

Every daedric prince bestows power on the dragonborn in the hope that it will be used. That is the only motivation necessary; with the exception of Azura and Meridia, none of them gives a damn who you use that power on. Callous disregard for life is a hallmark of the daedra. I only wish that it were more consistently desirable to use the power they offer (the artifacts should be either more powerful or more consistently unique).

Yes, I'm an enormous TES fan. Yes, I think I'll be giving this one a pass, because it seems like so much of what I love from TES is flatly impossible in an MMO.




I have never played an Elder Scrolls game...

Seriously, Fantasy is without a doubt my least favorite setting. :ugh:

TES is much more interesting, as a setting, than most fantasy. For one, it virtually bleeds moral ambiguity. The same person who saves the world is very often, in many, many ways, a Very Bad Person.

As per Morrowind (by way of the Bloodmoon expansion), imagine the second coming of the Messiah as ... um. A werewolf. Who eats people on a nightly basis.

That said, if you can't stand the sight of swords, fireballs, and pointy ears, best steer clear.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ulphus on 07 May 2012, 14:16
But as regards Broo (who to a Warhammer player would look like standard chaos beastmen). Ever heard of the healer of the waste? This is a Broo that joins the head taking cult and gets "corrupted" by exposure to the spirit of a dead healer priestess. It renounces violence, changes cults and becomes a wandering healer.

So even Broo have a bit of complexity in RQ canon.

For the sake of not having an extra page, I decided not to mention the healer of the waste...

Of course the irony is most people from that god ridden setting see things in very good and evil, no compromise ways.

Interesting. I wouldn't have said that, but then most of my games were Orlanthi based.

I have often wondered if it was a sign that I was growing up that I switched from mostly playing Humakti characters to not finding them interesting any more. Heroquest particularly made them much more crazy loopies than they'd originally been in RQ, and the Orlanthi (and the extreme number of sub-cults) became a much more human religion for all it's drawbacks.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vikarion on 07 May 2012, 21:54
The mace isn't corrupting you (as far as I can tell). It's basically power with no drawbacks (other than being weak compared with other magic items).

In general, I agree that the various daedric artifacts come with too few strings attached. However ...

(1) Generally, the daedric gods gift you with their artifacts because you've already demonstrated your suitability for their purpose.

Case in point, Molag Bal: by the time you've got the full-fledged mace, you've (a) tracked down and freed a minion of M.B.'s rival; (b) deceived or dared said minion into returning to Markarth to resume his desecration of M.B.'s shrine, knowing full well it's a trap; and, (c) beaten a helpless old man to death with a rusty mace. Twice.

I beg to differ. When I kill one evil Daedric worshipper in order to get a mace which I will use to kill other Daedric worshippers, that's not corruption, that's Good being devious.

Or it would be if I actually used the mace. In reality the mace just gets tossed into my house with all the other shiny junk that I just have to have but will never use because Spells are Pretty.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 08 May 2012, 08:39
Vikarion, that's not an execution scene. It's torturing an old man to death, then breaking him, then doing it again just for Molag Bal's satisfaction.

"Good being devious," in that scenario, is being awfully morally flexible-- and, by your own statement, you don't use the resulting power, which means that good isn't being devious; good is indulging in pointless cruelty.

At that point, it seems difficult to justify calling it "good."

I think the "good" option there is to walk away and leave the quest permanently unfinished, and that's whether you use the mace after or not. Otherwise, you're doing the will of one of the most unambiguously evil beings in TES lore, and I don't think you get to say, "I serve Satan, but it's for a good cause."
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mathra Hiede on 08 May 2012, 18:40
Vikarion, that's not an execution scene. It's torturing an old man to death, then breaking him, then doing it again just for Molag Bal's satisfaction.

"Good being devious," in that scenario, is being awfully morally flexible-- and, by your own statement, you don't use the resulting power, which means that good isn't being devious; good is indulging in pointless cruelty.

At that point, it seems difficult to justify calling it "good."

I think the "good" option there is to walk away and leave the quest permanently unfinished, and that's whether you use the mace after or not. Otherwise, you're doing the will of one of the most unambiguously evil beings in TES lore, and I don't think you get to say, "I serve Satan, but it's for a good cause."

I serve the blood raiders but I do it to protect the Empire.
Yeah, I see your point and agree.

Dislike molag as main protagonist, and also in the documents Seri listed there is also reference to the players soul ALL READY BEING OWNED BY HIM to explain re-incarnation.
Yeah-no.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: hellgremlin on 08 May 2012, 21:23
What's wrong with you losers? Molag Bal is fucking awesome.

Do you know what my favorite part of Skyrim was? Beating that old bastard! Oh, oh, oh, and don't get me started on the delicious cruelty of beating him to death, then getting to resurrect him while fully aware that I just beat him to death, and GETTING TO BEAT HIM TO DEATH AGAIN!

Oh man. But the story doesn't stop there. You'd think it did, because I just beat this helpless STUPID geezer to death twice. Get this. Molag, my nigga that he is, RESURRECTS THE GUY I JUST BEAT TO DEATH TWICE FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF ME BEATING HIM AGAIN! JUST TO HEAR HIM SCREAMING! I haven't seen cruelty this well-simulated since Serbian Mass-Grave Stomper IV. I can't fucking WAIT to see who Molag Bal makes me torture next!
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: hellgremlin on 08 May 2012, 21:24
(the above post was intended to illustrate the target audience of a Molag Bal quest)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vikarion on 08 May 2012, 22:04
Vikarion, that's not an execution scene. It's torturing an old man to death, then breaking him, then doing it again just for Molag Bal's satisfaction.

"Good being devious," in that scenario, is being awfully morally flexible-- and, by your own statement, you don't use the resulting power, which means that good isn't being devious; good is indulging in pointless cruelty.

At that point, it seems difficult to justify calling it "good."

I think the "good" option there is to walk away and leave the quest permanently unfinished, and that's whether you use the mace after or not. Otherwise, you're doing the will of one of the most unambiguously evil beings in TES lore, and I don't think you get to say, "I serve Satan, but it's for a good cause."

Joke. A joke. I was joking.  :eek:

But yes, I largely agree. The thing is, in a pantheon which includes the Mehrunes Dagon (Lord of Destruction, who pursues the destruction of mortals precisely because they stay dead), Mephala (who just loves you killing those who trust you most), and Vaermina (whose realm is eternal nightmare), Molag Bal doesn't really seem all that exceptional. In fact, he doesn't even seem all that dangerous, compared with, say, the actual pure mind-destroying capabilities of Vaermina or the unseen assassins of Mephala. Also, let's not forget the soul-devouring world dragon, and, worst of all, Sithis. Apparently Sithis is the sort of thing that Lovecraftian monsters have nightmares about.

So, when I'm busily destroying villages for Mephala, luring priests to the dens of cannibals for Namira, and delivering souls to the void of Sithis, Molag Bal just doesn't stick out that much. Sure, for that priest, beating him to death was probably a big deal, but for my character, that was (a boring) Tuesday. 
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 08 May 2012, 22:05
... Not sure it's quite the intended audience, but ... yeah.

I do have to say that I appreciate the degree to which they've made a point about how the daedra embody essentially uncaring forces of nature that are consequently inimical to humanity. The concept of "control" does not give a damn whether you are happy about being controlled, the concept of "rebellion" does not give a damn whether you would rather live in peace with man and mer, and the concept of "intrigue" doesn't much care who you betray, so long as you get some betraying done.

I do, personally, tend to play fairly evil, or at least morally indifferent, characters, and I did get the Oblivion Walker trophy on general principle, but I have to say that Molag Bal's quest in particular made me feel like I'd been soaking my brain in sewage. I do kind of approve of making the others more twitch-inducing, but that one ... yeah, M.B. didn't really need to get any worse.

Edit:

Vikarion, please to remember that sardonic tone does not flow naturally through text, and also that people can sometimes be, um, very funny, without joking.

It is advisable to follow this type of joke with a truly over-the-top statement. See Istvaan's line about "Serbian Mass-Grave Stomper IV" for an example.

Also, thank you for explaining. You kind of had me worried.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vikarion on 08 May 2012, 22:16
Crud.

I was writing more, submitted too soon, sorry Aria.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 08 May 2012, 23:01
... and, worst of all, Sithis. Apparently Sithis is the sort of thing that Lovecraftian monsters have nightmares about.

Huh-- that's interesting. Sithis actually strikes me as significantly less evil than the daedra.

Daedric princes are, with rare exceptions, purely incapable of feeling any true regard for those who serve them. This is simply their nature; humans are pretty much just animals to them.

Sithis, on the other hand, seems to genuinely care about at least one mortal: Cicero, who, while not fit to be Listener, has served the Night Mother long and well. The hint to this effect comes from the "Spectral Assassin," (who was Lucien Lachance in Oblivion). When you are sent to slay Cicero, this is his comment: "I will kill this Jester if you so wish, but there is a disturbance in the void, this is not what our dread father desires."

While Sithis is capable of making an excellent villain, and has done so in the past (Morrowind), he also strikes me as more coherent, as an entity, less ... inhumanly elemental, less narrow, I suppose ... than the daedric princes.

Sithis, after all, stands for a perspective that a human can comprehend and sympathize with: all things must eventually end. Attempts to maintain existence in static perpetuity are offensive. Sithis is the void from which all comes and to which all must return, but also the chaos of change and metamorphosis. And death, of course-- for change to occur, what is, now, must end.

You could do worse, as divinities go. I could actually see worshiping that. Certainly, he's a viable alternative to the Nine, who can be seen as selfish beings whose primary concern is the protection of their own unnaturally-extended existences.

Go to the sharmat Dagoth Ur as a friend.  :D
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vikarion on 08 May 2012, 23:30
... and, worst of all, Sithis. Apparently Sithis is the sort of thing that Lovecraftian monsters have nightmares about.

Huh-- that's interesting. Sithis actually strikes me as significantly less evil than the daedra.

Daedric princes are, with rare exceptions, purely incapable of feeling any true regard for those who serve them. This is simply their nature; humans are pretty much just animals to them.

Sithis, on the other hand, seems to genuinely care about at least one mortal: Cicero, who, while not fit to be Listener, has served the Night Mother long and well. The hint to this effect comes from the "Spectral Assassin," (who was Lucien Lachance in Oblivion). When you are sent to slay Cicero, this is his comment: "I will kill this Jester if you so wish, but there is a disturbance in the void, this is not what our dread father desires."

While Sithis is capable of making an excellent villain, and has done so in the past (Morrowind), he also strikes me as more coherent, as an entity, less ... inhumanly elemental, less narrow, I suppose ... than the daedric princes.

Sithis, after all, stands for a perspective that a human can comprehend and sympathize with: all things must eventually end. Attempts to maintain existence in static perpetuity are offensive. Sithis is the void from which all comes and to which all must return, but also the chaos of change and metamorphosis. And death, of course-- for change to occur, what is, now, must end.

You could do worse, as divinities go. I could actually see worshiping that. Certainly, he's a viable alternative to the Nine, who can be seen as selfish beings whose primary concern is the protection of their own unnaturally-extended existences.

Go to the sharmat Dagoth Ur as a friend.  :D

Hmm, I hadn't thought of it in that manner. But, to me, part of the threat of Sithis is that it is both malevolent and unrecognizable. From the in-game literature and characters, it seems pretty obvious that Sithis is responsible for the creation of everything, but also holds eternal malice towards it - in short, Sithis is the progenitor of formless chaos, and desires only possibility, not actuality. It seems understandable, then, that the Dark Brotherhood seems to possess a bit of soul-searing insanity lurking around the edges. It's the idea not of simple nothingness, but of the screaming Void, an abyss of nothingness with an awareness of its existence as such.

Of course, there's another interpretation. Suppose the Altmer are right about Lorkan, but wrong about Sithis? Perhaps Sithis isn't trying to destroy that which is for the sake of the formless void, but rather to rescue the stranded souls of men and mer trapped in the material plane. The void, then, might not be terrible, but freedom from the prison of Lorkan.

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 08 May 2012, 23:55
Depends on how you look at it, really.

Sithis is an erosive force; there's no doubt of that. Given the chance to destroy the world, he would surely take it. See, again, Morrowind.

However, Sithis is not merely an embodiment, like the daedric princes-- he is the force of chaos itself. Without his influence, there is no death, no metamorphosis, no change. I don't know what your feelings are on the matter, but that sounds to me very much like hell. Eternal, unchanging existence?

Glagh. No thanks.

Give water the chance to run downhill, and it will surely do so. Give fire the chance to run wild through your house, and it will surely do so. Were Sithis to cease trying to return the universe to the void, he would not be Sithis, and the results would not be pretty.

On the subject of soul-searing insanity: the Dark Brotherhood is populated, appropriately, with sociopaths. This was so in Oblivion, and is the case again in Skyrim. They don't seem to suffer any more from serving Sithis than they do from being the sorts of people who catch the Brotherhood's interest in the first place.

Compare to necromancers, who genuinely do encounter soul-searing forces on a regular basis: black soul gems. Canonically (this is covered in Oblivion), not only is trapping a "black," that is (for those of you unfamiliar with TES), sapient mortal, soul for use in enchanting an atrocity, but the black soul gem also traps tiny bits of soul from anybody who handles it. You can see the results all over any necromancer's lair in the game.

The Dark Brotherhood may be vicious, amoral, and way too cheerful about cold-blooded murder, but for serious sick motherfucker-ness, you can't beat a necromancer. Even the, er, conjurer at the College of Winterhold seems a bit, ah, dodgy. Not to mention a little hollow around the eyes.

Seems you're better off as a well-adjusted monster than as a spiritually acid-etched wretch-- and everybody around you is better off, too.

Edit:

... including the people you kill, necromancers being necromancers.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 10 May 2012, 15:10
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/04/a-lot-of-tamriel-estate-the-elder-scrolls-online/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RockPaperShotgun+%28Rock%2C+Paper%2C+Shotgun%29&utm_content=Google+Reader (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/04/a-lot-of-tamriel-estate-the-elder-scrolls-online/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RockPaperShotgun+%28Rock%2C+Paper%2C+Shotgun%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=472749 (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=472749)

I know it's early days, but from the sounds of it, it's going to be disappoint. (for me, anyways)

Quote
"It needs to be comfortable for people who are coming in from a typical massively multiplayer game that has the same control mechanisms, but it also has to appeal to Skyrim players."

Quote
"Recreateing the freedom Elder Scrolls players expect within the World of Warcraft-style mechanics Zenimax Online is using for this MMO would be impossible without changing the way that players interact with the world.

:/


Quote
You destroy dark anchors to gain reputation with the Fighter's Guild. They are large hooks that fall from the sky pseudorandomly and have Daedric guardians next to them. They are easier to kill with a group, and once destroyed, everyone who participated gets a reputation boost with the Fighter's Guild, and eventually nets you rewards like new skills and abilities.

...waaah?

(http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRo3FBMoLOxzxqEHo2ReNFwZ7i8JkhHJ-VFjCUhV8TplpkLbH_F4cPu8qGY)

but. y'know, hooks.  :s
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ulphus on 10 May 2012, 15:17
Sounds like someone read about "plot hooks" and took them literally...
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Random Sentience on 11 May 2012, 07:41
Quote
"It needs to be comfortable for people who are coming in from a typical massively multiplayer game that has the same control mechanisms, but it also has to appeal to Skyrim players."

Quote
"Recreateing the freedom Elder Scrolls players expect within the World of Warcraft-style mechanics Zenimax Online is using for this MMO would be impossible without changing the way that players interact with the world.
Yup.

I'll be skipping this installment.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ursa Dropsus on 11 May 2012, 17:34
It's funny how Bethesda basically started with pure, undiluted awesome (Daggerfall wasn't technically the start of TES, but hey) and have just watered it down more and more over the years. It's like game development in reverse. Yeah, pretty dire.

Saw a few of the Content Developers I worked with at CCP go over to Zenimax Online. I can't say these were my favorite people. They always seemed to dislike the idea of taking the IP seriously; things like researching (and respecting) prior content and integrating it into the new were seen as unnecessary and excessive. It doesn't bode well for the MMO's IP to have them around, sadly. I'm sure that writing generic, fantasy content which ignores the last decade worth of IP development will be the perfect job for them, though.

I may be a little bitter today.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ava Starfire on 11 May 2012, 19:43
It's funny how Bethesda basically started with pure, undiluted awesome (Daggerfall wasn't technically the start of TES, but hey) and have just watered it down more and more over the years. It's like game development in reverse. Yeah, pretty dire.

Saw a few of the Content Developers I worked with at CCP go over to Zenimax Online. I can't say these were my favorite people. They always seemed to dislike the idea of taking the IP seriously; things like researching (and respecting) prior content and integrating it into the new were seen as unnecessary and excessive. It doesn't bode well for the MMO's IP to have them around, sadly. I'm sure that writing generic, fantasy content which ignores the last decade worth of IP development will be the perfect job for them, though.

I may be a little bitter today.

=(

Feel better... I hope it isnt a crummy game, too. I like TES =(

Am sad now. Gonna go pod someone.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Matariki Rain on 12 May 2012, 08:17
Am sad now. Gonna go pod someone.

Did it cheer you up?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Myyona on 12 May 2012, 09:37
They always seemed to dislike the idea of taking the IP seriously; things like researching (and respecting) prior content and integrating it into the new were seen as unnecessary and excessive.
/me :rage:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 13 May 2012, 09:00
Quote
It's funny how Bethesda basically started with pure, undiluted awesome (Daggerfall wasn't technically the start of TES, but hey) and have just watered it down more and more over the years. It's like game development in reverse. Yeah, pretty dire.

Despite enjoying the subsequent games, particularly Morrowind, I feel the same way.  I pretty much echoed that on another forum:

"Daggerfall was a staggeringly ambitious game in terms of scope. What they attempted was ambitious for then (1996?) and it would still be ambitious now. I can’t help but think that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim are results of Bethesda learning what they could not do and scaling down accordingly.

[...]

Daggerfall was flawed genius in my mind, a diamond in the rough. Morrowind had soul as the game world lived and breathed. Oblivion was more of a technical accomplishment but seemed lacking in some of the elements that made the previous games special – the plot seemed under developed and obvious. And Skyrim…Well the addition of crafting is nice. And the dragons are cool, if abundant. The setting is credible. And they’ve finally made non-fugly characters. But…

Like Oblivion, it seems like as much as it’s gaining in technical excellence; shinier graphics etc, as the series progresses it’s losing its soul. Events don’t seem happenstance or random and nothing seems particularly dangerous once you reach a certain point. I’m not learning how to do things or learning things about people, as everything is told to me directly. This is a disenchanting machine doohickey, you use it to disenchant. I don’t need to ask around to find someone, their location will already be marked on my map. Etc. Everything is sign-posted and…I suppose that makes it feel slightly artificial. I don’t have to work or think to achieve my goals, and I’m not anticipating encountering anything I haven’t before, or a situation where I won’t know what to do. (Except puzzles. But I hate puzzles so that doesn’t count).

Anyway. I love the elder scrolls. I’ve poured hours into Oblivion and I do really enjoy Skyrim. It has tons of good points; is very involving and immersive, and is just about the only game I’m interested in at the moment. But it’s almost like as the technology increases, the size of the world decreases and the scope of the imagination, ambition and detail does as well."

(erm, just with more words >.>)



Quote
Saw a few of the Content Developers I worked with at CCP go over to Zenimax Online. I can't say these were my favorite people. They always seemed to dislike the idea of taking the IP seriously; things like researching (and respecting) prior content and integrating it into the new were seen as unnecessary and excessive. It doesn't bode well for the MMO's IP to have them around, sadly. I'm sure that writing generic, fantasy content which ignores the last decade worth of IP development will be the perfect job for them, though.

I may be a little bitter today.

Imph.  In a way, that's actually more disturbing than the WoW-mechanics-level-cap stuff - though I'm unsurprised as from the list of stuff I posted many things seemed shoe-horned on for convenience rather than well-thought through. Such as the 3 main factions  :s





Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 13 May 2012, 23:22
Ursa, Kala:

I think you folks may be putting a little bit of nostalgic gloss on Daggerfall. The scope was indeed vast, but as "diamonds in the rough" go, that one was pretty damn rough.

Where to begin....

How about with elevators you had to continually jump up and down on so they wouldn't leave you behind if the game paused to load in mid-ascent? Stairs you could fall straight through?

Worse, randomly-generated dungeons that could not be completed due to a broken "teleport" key, requiring you to exit one area via bug, levitate over to the other, isolated part of the dungeon, reenter via the same bug, acquire whatever you'd been sent for, and then teleport back?

Bethesda is famous for releasing massive works that are utterly crawling with bugs, and Daggerfall was certainly the case in point for years, but it's not as though bugs were all that was wrong. What about a character generator so very free-form that you could (and I did) create characters who could throw mega-powerful fireballs at their own toes, rapid-fire, powpowpow, and not only survive without a scratch but reabsorb all the magic while everybody around them perished?

What about an entire population of female townspeople ostentatiously drawn to appeal to the kind of pimple-pocked zombie who goes around groaning, "Boobs ..."? A Dark Brotherhood indistinguishable from the fighter's guild? A curse of lycanthropy that made you a decent werewolf if and only if you specialized in hand to hand? Arrows that were dependable only if fired at creatures that were on exactly the same vertical plane as you were?

Ten thousand identical liches to lay to rest? Old women in dire need of sleep mysteriously overlaid with town guards? Stores you could casually bust into with half-decent Lockpick, filled to the brim with ebony and daedric, whose shelves you could merrily offload into your cart, come back the next day and re-sell to the same merchant you robbed, then go do a quest, come back, and do it all again? A Sneak skill that fooled no one whose back wasn't to you-- with or without walls in the way? Ancient vampires that spawned at char lvl. 1, and could, would, and did insta-cast their entire spellbooks, reducing the player character to a pile of digital innards quivering on the dungeon floor?

More bugs, of a subtler but more devastating sort: a short (if intriguing), level-dependent main quest that broke half-- nay, ALL the time? Do you have any idea how many hours I poured into that game without ever being able to finish the half of the quest that didn't involve laying Lysandus to rest? And I only managed to lay him to rest once, for all eight or nine characters I raised to nigh-godly heights-- again, because the quests didn't activate....

I loved Daggerfall, in spite of all this, and I still want my gold pieces that actually have weight, my bank accounts, my letters of credit, my cart full of loot, and my skill-dependent guilds (last seen in Morrowind; reward for return, no questions asked). I definitely want my stupid ass to sink like a bag of gold ingots if I step into deep water in full ebony plate without bothering to purchase a Buoyancy spell. Seriously: daedric boots should work like concrete galoshes. Sleeping with the slaughterfish is an appropriate conclusion to going in swimming in 80 pounds of armor.

That, I miss. I also miss Morrowind's detailed storytelling (but not the lousy balancing of, for instance, Solstheim and Vardenfell) and interestingly alien setting, but I don't miss missing when I'd clearly scored a hit, or all the NPCs who never went to sleep. Nor do I miss nerfed-to-uselessness magic....

In the end, Oblivion and Skyrim are both simultaneously narrower than their predecessors and closer to living, breathing worlds. Being able to bust into a home and strip the shelves of belongings, fearing all the while that the owner is going to wake up and catch you in the act, is a world away from Daggerfall's ridiculously-profitable thievery. Stalking and killing a mark in a nigh-living city full of far more than buxom sprites may seem like a "technical" achievement, but from a stealth-game lover's perspective, it's an achievement that makes the difference between "assassinating" a lich with bad AI at the end of yet another dungeon crawl and neatly plucking one hapless townsperson out from under the watchful eyes of all the sheepdogs the count/jarl can hire.

And no, the Morag Tong in Morrowind wasn't a patch on that-- especially with those "writs of execution" that you could freely apply to any random citizen you pleased, whether s/he was your target or not.

Looking back, I have a few regrets (Bethesda, fix teh swimming, plz), but not bloody many. I like realistic bow-fire (Daggerfall-pfft; Morrwind-meh; Oblivion-decent; Skyrim-brilliant), solid stealth mechanics (ditto, on all counts), and worlds as "real" as they can be made.

Skyrim's not close to perfect, but it's a sight closer than Daggerfall. ... Minus the zero-mass gold and the "everybody swims like a naked Argonian" thing, of course. I feel little nostalgia for a nifty, yet irreparably broken, past.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kyoko Sakoda on 13 May 2012, 23:26
I'll just leave this here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALbQQzePzt4)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 14 May 2012, 05:35
Quote
I think you folks may be putting a little bit of nostalgic gloss on Daggerfall. The scope was indeed vast, but as "diamonds in the rough" go, that one was pretty damn rough.

Where to begin....

I am very nostalgic for Daggerfall, but there's a reason for that  :P And yeah, I don't disagree, it was pretty damn rough.  In fact, at times, it took sheer bloody minded determination to keep reloading and playing through all the goddamned bugs which did make it virtually unplayable. Yet, I did, in spite of that - and I don't have much patience.  I can't think of a single other game I would have put up with all that bullshit for.

So yes, in terms of technical achievement, both in terms of graphics and in terms of not being buggy peices of crap, the games have improved vastly.  I'm not trying to undermine that, but the things I'm talking about are more abstract...

It's great that in Morrowind everything was drawn and not procedurally generated - but there was nothing like a Daggerfall dungeon in terms of some deep dark pit that you could get lost and killed in, and which monsters behind corners or coming out of doors would genuinely scare me.

The sense of risk (like the random spawn when you sleep) and perhaps the lack of help you recieved, contributed to the feeling of randomness and serendipity...is what I really miss.  I mean, summoning a daedra when you know nothing is kinda hard...iirc it needs to be on the right day.  It took years of playing before I ever stumbled across a witches covern, or found a witch randomly in a dungeon. You can't just show up at their shrine and get a quest from them.  It also took years before I ever saw a Daedra Lord mob - I don't know that they're particularly rare, it's just the way it seemed to go.

You can certainly argue the procedurally generated stuff and towns that looked the same, and all npcs (apart from main quest ones) having the same kind of shpiel felt shallow and empty...But I'm not entirely sure it's that simple.  Having all those people milling about as a faceless crowd actually felt more real to me in some respects.  Certainly more real than having the same little girl telling me she likes selling vegetables for the millionth time as I walk by.

When I first read the Daggerfall manual there was a letter at the front that was something of a revelation to me at the time, explaining that their goal was freedom of choice for the player.  You have so much choice when you make a character, so many different skills (granted, some of which are useless, but I like that too tbh) and I kind of feel that's narrowed as the series has gone on.  Not really because it's lost throwaway skills like learning dragonish, or climbing that would often bug out - it's what I mean about it being ambitious I suppose.  Subsequent games feel considerably less ambituous as they've gone along...

...In Oblivion, Skyrim and (and now apparently this mmo) everything is trying so hard to be 'epic' and cast you in the hero role...the main quests feel far more obstrusive, with Oblivion gates opening and dragons flying about...

I suppose ultimately I feel, yes, Daggerfall was so ambitious in scope and imagination but ultimately limited (or crippled, depending on your view) by practical, technical things - such as bugs.  So we get to the point where we have better technology and can do things better, so this should enable us to extend the scopes of our imagination accordingly as the limits of what we can do technologically lessen.  But it seems like - since Daggerfall - there's been less ambition and scope instead of more, and things have simplified or streamlined and just got...easier and more predictable.

(and don't get me wrong, the Elder Scrolls series are still great compared to most games, it just seems like a general trend to me)

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Desiderya on 14 May 2012, 06:12
Well, regarding Daggerfall I kind of share the feeling.
So, quote time, again. This one haunts me all the time, for being so appropriate. :(

Quote from: A. Huxley - Brave New World
"Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 14 May 2012, 06:24
Thread's moved on somewhat but to go back to the "Why people so bleh on it" it's not hipster for me.

My issue is Bethesda make amazing single player sandboxes that work regardless of your style of play, if you want to grind out a min/max powergamer spec and then annihilate ALL THE THINGS you can do. If you want to hack and slash out the storyline, you can do. If you want to be a rogue/mage/wizard jack of all trades, you can do. If you want to just nick a horse and spend days exploring everything, you can do.


The mainstream MMO does not allow for half of those, and only really rewards one. This reminds me of my concerns with Bioware and ToR, they can make an amazing single player game and are great at telling a story and making you THE HERO. But they couldn't incorporate it well into a MP scenario.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mizhara on 14 May 2012, 07:25
Thread's moved on somewhat but to go back to the "Why people so bleh on it" it's not hipster for me.

My issue is Bethesda make amazing single player sandboxes that work regardless of your style of play, if you want to grind out a min/max powergamer spec and then annihilate ALL THE THINGS you can do. If you want to hack and slash out the storyline, you can do. If you want to be a rogue/mage/wizard jack of all trades, you can do. If you want to just nick a horse and spend days exploring everything, you can do.


The mainstream MMO does not allow for half of those, and only really rewards one. This reminds me of my concerns with Bioware and ToR, they can make an amazing single player game and are great at telling a story and making you THE HERO. But they couldn't incorporate it well into a MP scenario.

This. Just like SWTOR turned out, this game's RPG bits will suffer because of the MMO bits, and vice versa. Personally, I haven't even bothered giving thought to whether or not I want to play it. Right now, I don't even have time in my day to day life to set skills training.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Aria Jenneth on 14 May 2012, 11:00
On Daggerfall:

Eh-- there was indeed something to be said for the truly random dungeons that were often unnavigable without either a high Climb or Levitate. Never mind that it made certain types of character nigh-unplayable until you loaded them down with navigation-friendly magic items.

On "epic": Daggerfall apparently concluded with the Warp in the West, which was pretty damned epic. Arena, Daggerfall's predecessor, was arguably the most epic of the games to date, dealing as it did with Jagar Tharn and the Imperial Simulacrum. I'd argue that the whole series has been, actually, pretty damn epic, especially at the high-level end. Oblivion and Skyrim do drop it in your lap a bit more, though (although both also allow you to duck it by declining to follow the main quest right off the bat).

I do miss Daggerfall's scale....

How to put it?

Daggerfall felt like a full-scale nation, but only a sketch of one, with few faces standing out from the randomly-generated crowd (I remember Gortwog and company fondly).

Morrowind, in some ways, hit a sweet spot: it felt like a modestly-sized region with its own alien culture, traditions, etc., and it portrayed its alien setting beautifully. Daggerfall's random dungeons may have produced a higher "eep" factor, but it never gave me a tenth of the immersion or sense of awe and dread I felt climbing past the Ghost Fence to face Dagoth Ur.

Oblivion was a massive improvement in mechanics (without even touching graphics), but felt less like a nation than a small region, much like Vardenfell in Morrowind-- only less-populated, with small villages pretending to be major cities. Skyrim suffers this same malady. The small, highly-developed population serves as an abstraction for an implied larger, unseen one (surely, bandits and necromancers don't actually outnumber the general population?). The culture is better-portrayed in Skyrim.

I still find it extremely difficult to go back. I like my arcing arrows and decent AI.

Now, if Bethesda felt like remaking Morrowind using Skyrim's mechanics....



On the MMO:

If their mechanics resemble WoW ... nope. Not even a little bit interested (though there is some appeal to sneak-attacking hostile PCs with poison-tipped arrows of godawfulness, I'm sure that won't be even a quarter as deadly as it sounds. Balance issues, and that).
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Wanoah on 14 May 2012, 17:44
Now, if Bethesda felt like remaking Morrowind using Skyrim's mechanics....

Yes! :)

Game development is obviously all about the compromises, especially the technological restrictions in force at the time. I'd very much like to see old material revisited with the benefit of better hardware. In many ways early 3D is more unplayable than older games, and some straight remakes without 'streamlining' or 'making more accessible' or 'broadening the appeal' or any of the other weaselly euphemistic terms for 'making the game dumber than a sack of rocks' that abound these days would be so very welcome.

As for this TESO thing, well, in the early 2000s, I would have been intrigued by the possibilities of an Elder Scrolls MMO. Excited, even. Because the scope for interesting shit to occur is immense. Just think on what it could have been...

These days, though, if I hear 'MMO' then I think turgid by-the-numbers WoW clone. BORING. And you know what? That always proves to be the case. Sure, millions of people have subscribed for WoW, but it's still a fucking awful game. Millions of people can be wrong and they often are. Wisdom of the crowd my fucking arse. Just look to the glorious world of television and the terrible terrible lowest common denominator shit that people watch, and all those terrible terrible newspapers that survive by pandering to that same audience. WoW is Big Brother and The X Factor combined and it has probably killed the MMO genre completely. I hope all of you that played it feel dirty and ashamed for what you have done.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vikarion on 14 May 2012, 20:26
I can't really sign on with the more nostalgic view. While I didn't play Daggerfall, I did play the heck out of Morrowind, and while Morrowind was brilliant, it was also remarkably stupid at times. If I may be permitted only one instance, I remember that one of the main quest objectives was to escort a helpless (but extremely aggressive) Dunmer maid across a good third of the province, and not the safe third at that. By the time I got her (she also apparently suffered from some sort of condition that reduced her Speed attribute) to her prospective husband, I was less inclined to be the Nerevarine, and a bit more inclined towards a continent-sized genocide.

I also don't miss the Speed attribute from either Oblivion or Morrowind. Whose idea it was to have an attribute that is leveled up fairly slowly and is quite literally maddening to be without is beyond me. It's like having an attribute for fun, that you can only level up by punching yourself in the groin.

Perhaps I overstate the case, but I think not. Yet, there are more things I like about Oblivion and Skyrim, and I haven't lost the things from Morrowind I enjoyed. I loved, incidentally, the Oblivion gates - the first time I ran through one and found myself in an alien landscape, I quite literally stopped simply to drink it in. And I like Skyrim's dungeon's more than any previous game's: they are far less uniform and much more interesting.

Oh, and magic. Yeah, it's nice to not have to carry around a Daikatana if I want to kill anyone, it really is. I've always favored mages (preferably mages with heavy armor and a longsword, admittedly), and both Oblivion and Skyrim let me enjoy this to the, as it were, hilt.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Creep on 15 May 2012, 09:06
I was less inclined to be the Nerevarine, and a bit more inclined towards a continent-sized genocide.
Wait, you mean the devs didn't intend for all the games to end this way?

...I think I've been playing TES wrong.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 15 May 2012, 09:15
For those who took the title of the thread seriously... you've been trolled, just saying. :P

Single-player series rarely transition well into MMO format. That's kind of a given. >_>
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 15 May 2012, 10:40
These days, though, if I hear 'MMO' then I think turgid by-the-numbers WoW clone. BORING. And you know what? That always proves to be the case. Sure, millions of people have subscribed for WoW, but it's still a fucking awful game. Millions of people can be wrong and they often are. Wisdom of the crowd my fucking arse. Just look to the glorious world of television and the terrible terrible lowest common denominator shit that people watch, and all those terrible terrible newspapers that survive by pandering to that same audience. WoW is Big Brother and The X Factor combined and it has probably killed the MMO genre completely. I hope all of you that played it feel dirty and ashamed for what you have done.

Out of curiosity did you ever at any point play WoW for more than a week? The game is a far cry from where it started, and the original game was brilliant. Hell the first expansion was also brilliant.

After that it started to suffer from the current gaming culture this generation seems to have brought along, with instant gratification demands where everyone can be a special snowflake because they bought the game, and if it's too hard it should be made easier, not that they should get better.

Creativity and clever use of mechanics (not exploiting but just being original with things) was removed for bland homogenisation. Players were no longer rewarded for being smarter or better because "That's just not fair." That's not a WoW exclusive issue, far from.

What WoW brought to the table was an easy to use and easy to understand UI and combat system, the concept of easy to learn/difficult to master. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, the problem is people are too lazy to develop beyond it when making their own games, not WoW's fault.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Valadeus on 15 May 2012, 11:06
These days, though, if I hear 'MMO' then I think turgid by-the-numbers WoW clone. BORING. And you know what? That always proves to be the case. Sure, millions of people have subscribed for WoW, but it's still a fucking awful game. Millions of people can be wrong and they often are. Wisdom of the crowd my fucking arse. Just look to the glorious world of television and the terrible terrible lowest common denominator shit that people watch, and all those terrible terrible newspapers that survive by pandering to that same audience. WoW is Big Brother and The X Factor combined and it has probably killed the MMO genre completely. I hope all of you that played it feel dirty and ashamed for what you have done.

Out of curiosity did you ever at any point play WoW for more than a week? The game is a far cry from where it started, and the original game was brilliant. Hell the first expansion was also brilliant.

After that it started to suffer from the current gaming culture this generation seems to have brought along, with instant gratification demands where everyone can be a special snowflake because they bought the game, and if it's too hard it should be made easier, not that they should get better.

Creativity and clever use of mechanics (not exploiting but just being original with things) was removed for bland homogenisation. Players were no longer rewarded for being smarter or better because "That's just not fair." That's not a WoW exclusive issue, far from.

What WoW brought to the table was an easy to use and easy to understand UI and combat system, the concept of easy to learn/difficult to master. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, the problem is people are too lazy to develop beyond it when making their own games, not WoW's fault.

This is perhaps one of the most accurate assessments of World of Warcraft I've ever read.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Wanoah on 15 May 2012, 12:37
These days, though, if I hear 'MMO' then I think turgid by-the-numbers WoW clone. BORING. And you know what? That always proves to be the case. Sure, millions of people have subscribed for WoW, but it's still a fucking awful game. Millions of people can be wrong and they often are. Wisdom of the crowd my fucking arse. Just look to the glorious world of television and the terrible terrible lowest common denominator shit that people watch, and all those terrible terrible newspapers that survive by pandering to that same audience. WoW is Big Brother and The X Factor combined and it has probably killed the MMO genre completely. I hope all of you that played it feel dirty and ashamed for what you have done.

Out of curiosity did you ever at any point play WoW for more than a week?

No, I hated it on sight. From the very first screenshot up to watching my gf play it recently via many many thousands of words written and spoken about it. I did, however, play LOTRO for a bit...which was WoW in Middle Earth so far as I can tell. I don't think you need to torture yourself by playing the damn thing to be able to see its systems and it concepts writ large on every major MMO project. Its success has blighted what had started to look like a very exciting gaming experience with games like UO and Eve blazing a trail that no one has followed.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 15 May 2012, 12:47
These days, though, if I hear 'MMO' then I think turgid by-the-numbers WoW clone. BORING. And you know what? That always proves to be the case. Sure, millions of people have subscribed for WoW, but it's still a fucking awful game. Millions of people can be wrong and they often are. Wisdom of the crowd my fucking arse. Just look to the glorious world of television and the terrible terrible lowest common denominator shit that people watch, and all those terrible terrible newspapers that survive by pandering to that same audience. WoW is Big Brother and The X Factor combined and it has probably killed the MMO genre completely. I hope all of you that played it feel dirty and ashamed for what you have done.

Out of curiosity did you ever at any point play WoW for more than a week?

No

All I needed to know there really.

Though I should note, WoW wasn't the first game to have it's style of concept, infact WoW is a huge rip off from Everquest, it just does it better and has evolved. The UI is easily the best UI in any MMO game, EVE's has improved vastly in the last 6 months but it's still way behind.

The formula was already there to be copied, WoW is technically itself a "WoW-type" clone.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Repentence Tyrathlion on 15 May 2012, 13:02
Quote
The UI is easily the best UI in any MMO game, EVE's has improved vastly in the last 6 months but it's still way behind.

Shite chat system, though.  Don't know why everyone persists in copying it.  I kind of got used to it in my forays, and more recently while playing TOR, but I'm still not a fan.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 15 May 2012, 13:14
Quote
The UI is easily the best UI in any MMO game, EVE's has improved vastly in the last 6 months but it's still way behind.

Shite chat system, though.  Don't know why everyone persists in copying it.  I kind of got used to it in my forays, and more recently while playing TOR, but I'm still not a fan.

Because the LUA coding allows you to mod the living hell out of it. The only drawback is the 10 public channel limit.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 15 May 2012, 13:29
Quote
The UI is easily the best UI in any MMO game, EVE's has improved vastly in the last 6 months but it's still way behind.

Shite chat system, though.  Don't know why everyone persists in copying it.  I kind of got used to it in my forays, and more recently while playing TOR, but I'm still not a fan.

Because the LUA coding allows you to mod the living hell out of it. The only drawback is the 10 public channel limit.

As someone who used to write plugins in this language for another online game (not WoW), this is a particularly annoying habit people have picked up for some stupid reason: it is "Lua (http://www.lua.org/)", not "LUA". A proper noun, not an acronym (http://www.lua.org/about.html) (scroll down).

Get it right, please.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 15 May 2012, 13:52
Quote
The UI is easily the best UI in any MMO game, EVE's has improved vastly in the last 6 months but it's still way behind.

Shite chat system, though.  Don't know why everyone persists in copying it.  I kind of got used to it in my forays, and more recently while playing TOR, but I'm still not a fan.

Because the LUA coding allows you to mod the living hell out of it. The only drawback is the 10 public channel limit.

As someone who used to write plugins in this language for another online game (not WoW), this is a particularly annoying habit people have picked up for some stupid reason: it is "Lua (http://www.lua.org/)", not "LUA". A proper noun, not an acronym (http://www.lua.org/about.html) (scroll down).

Get it right, please.

Probably because it's ALLCAPS in WoW.

But hey, the more you know...
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Wanoah on 15 May 2012, 14:33
These days, though, if I hear 'MMO' then I think turgid by-the-numbers WoW clone. BORING. And you know what? That always proves to be the case. Sure, millions of people have subscribed for WoW, but it's still a fucking awful game. Millions of people can be wrong and they often are. Wisdom of the crowd my fucking arse. Just look to the glorious world of television and the terrible terrible lowest common denominator shit that people watch, and all those terrible terrible newspapers that survive by pandering to that same audience. WoW is Big Brother and The X Factor combined and it has probably killed the MMO genre completely. I hope all of you that played it feel dirty and ashamed for what you have done.

Out of curiosity did you ever at any point play WoW for more than a week?

No

All I needed to know there really.


Because not having direct personal experience of something automatically invalidates an opinion, right?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 15 May 2012, 15:03
These days, though, if I hear 'MMO' then I think turgid by-the-numbers WoW clone. BORING. And you know what? That always proves to be the case. Sure, millions of people have subscribed for WoW, but it's still a fucking awful game. Millions of people can be wrong and they often are. Wisdom of the crowd my fucking arse. Just look to the glorious world of television and the terrible terrible lowest common denominator shit that people watch, and all those terrible terrible newspapers that survive by pandering to that same audience. WoW is Big Brother and The X Factor combined and it has probably killed the MMO genre completely. I hope all of you that played it feel dirty and ashamed for what you have done.

Out of curiosity did you ever at any point play WoW for more than a week?

No

All I needed to know there really.


Because not having direct personal experience of something automatically invalidates an opinion, right?

Never said it invalidated it. I just wanted to know what your direct personal experience actually was.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 15 May 2012, 16:11
Quote
All I needed to know there really.

Though I should note, WoW wasn't the first game to have it's style of concept, infact WoW is a huge rip off from Everquest, it just does it better and has evolved. The UI is easily the best UI in any MMO game, EVE's has improved vastly in the last 6 months but it's still way behind.

The formula was already there to be copied, WoW is technically itself a "WoW-type" clone.

I've played it on and off for years - since release - and I don't entirely disagree with him (maybe not the extent of the vitriol  :P)  It wasn't an awful game - it was a very addictive and enjoyable game.  But it probably has killed MMOs in a creative sense by virtue of its success.  And yes, the two first major MMOGs that I know of were Everquest and Ultima Online.  WoW went the Everquest route and very few subsequent MMOs went the Ultima Online route (EVE was one. Not saying EVE is a 'UO clone' obviously, but very similar outlook. IIRC TomB cited it as an inspiration/influence in a devblog).   

So since almost the dawn of time (1997!) we've had the concept of a sandbox MMO in Ultima Online.  We've had player killing, player thievery, and home (and boat!) ownership.  We've had no levels, but a set of chosen skills to increase.  We've had death that equates with loss. 

So it does boggles me slightly that similar ideas are apparently too groundbreaking, controversal or difficult for game developers to manage in 2012.  It's not like there wasn't precedent.  Many of the things people are disappointed won't make it into the elder scrolls MMO or that 'don't translate into MMOs' were already done in one of the first MMOs.  Seems a tad ironic. (Like raaiiiin)

WoW's staggering mainstream success was a game changer. Most MMOs seem to go the 'WoW-clone' route (some really do justify the term 'WoW-clone' rather than simply the same ethos, as it just seems like a changed skin - all the WoW elements are there, to the point that nowadays they are not associated with World of Warcraft, but simply MMOs.  Particularly when the next (current?) generation of MMOG players has never encountered another way of doing things...) 

I don't hate WoW.  It's very on and off for me, and I'll burn out on what ultimately feels like a shallow experience.  It is very very good at what it does and yes, it's extraordinarily polished.  What I do hate, is that game developers are now simply repeating the formula ad naseum; at times an unabashed copy and paste. It's perfectly understandable from a financial perspective: WoW was successful, try and replicate that success.  It's inexcusable from a creative standpoint.  We already have WoW; you're probably not going to improve on it in any meaningful way.  Be brave and do something else.


---

(as an aside that has very little to do with the conversation, but just occured to me...the lexicon tends to be absorbed into the ether. f.ex 'raids' and 'end-game content' and 'level-cap' are all familiar MMO lexicon now, not just WoW terms.  They are things expected and assumed to be in MMOs - I have seen people be absolutely flummoxed in the eve-o forums after inquiring about the game using these terms.  Then the thought occured about how EVE is on one server rather than 'sharding' and how the term 'sharding' for splitting the game into servers/worlds is so commonplace now and remembered that the term originated in UO...The world was a crystal or somesuch, which was broken into 'shards'. Hence servers ^^...oh...but there's also 'database sharding'...anyone know if that term predates UO?http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/ (http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/)interesting!! um. to me.)

---

(as a further aside: I wonder what A World Without WoW would've been like.  I wonder if I am genuinely overstating its influence on the MMO market.  Without the WoW model saturating MMOdom, would games have been more experimental and varied - but perhaps more underground or niche?  Or would something similar to WoW have simply filled the vaccuum and become hugely popular? Has WoW created a culture or did the culture create WoW? IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WILL COME. @_@ Eh. Probably a bit of chicken and a bit of egg.)

---

(er. further aside. WoW is SO simple, basic and easy to grasp that I set my parents up on PCs to play it and see what happened. Disaster. They couldn't grasp how the game worked at all. Things like moving the mouse for the camera and the keyboard for movement AT THE SAME TIME confounded them. They kept running into (literal) walls or staring up at the sky  :| my mother became very stressed out with having to perform simultaneous tasks and said "you do this to relax???" In retrospect, unlike most of the population, they may have actually found EVE easier  :D  Though I also agree that the chat system in WoW is poor - especially after EVE, which spoilt meh)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 15 May 2012, 16:42
There's also the buggery that whenever anyone does something new, Blizzard steals it and adds it to WoW anyway  :bash:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mathra Hiede on 15 May 2012, 17:29
There's also the buggery that whenever anyone does something new, Blizzard steals it and adds it to WoW anyway  :bash:
Pity they didn't add permanent item loss to it from EVE then >_>

Now THAT would be hilarious.
PvP with consequences!? In my cheesy-easy-MMO... I do enjoy the thought of that.

Also for the record I have played WoW untill end-game, my cousin dragged me into it during a lul in my earlier EVE career - never have I felt so bitter about achieving something, I mean it was so easy that I, a relative noob to the game, on release of Cataclysm was 3rd in guild to hit 85.... for something I did as a casual time-killer between EVE.

:insert rage here:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 15 May 2012, 17:43
There's also the buggery that whenever anyone does something new, Blizzard steals it and adds it to WoW anyway  :bash:
Pity they didn't add permanent item loss to it from EVE then >_>

There was a very short time back in ye olde pvp ranking system where you couldn't use the gear if you lost the rank.

Which meant the poor bastards who spent their entire time grinding to the top rank for weapons had to no-life just to continue to use them.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Repentence Tyrathlion on 16 May 2012, 09:48
There's also the buggery that whenever anyone does something new, Blizzard steals it and adds it to WoW anyway  :bash:
Pity they didn't add permanent item loss to it from EVE then >_>

Now THAT would be hilarious.
PvP with consequences!? In my cheesy-easy-MMO... I do enjoy the thought of that.

Also for the record I have played WoW untill end-game, my cousin dragged me into it during a lul in my earlier EVE career - never have I felt so bitter about achieving something, I mean it was so easy that I, a relative noob to the game, on release of Cataclysm was 3rd in guild to hit 85.... for something I did as a casual time-killer between EVE.

:insert rage here:

There's a good reason why WoW is shedding subscribers fast.  My theory, given TOR's massive early subscription burst, is that unless this new WoW expansion does something drastic, Blizzard will lose out to EA.

It's a fair accusation that TOR is a WoW-clone.  It's also true that WoW is dated in more ways than one; in terms of flashiness, mechanics and wider native fanbase, TOR is a game with far more potential.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 16 May 2012, 10:07
TOR has also lost close to (if not over) 400k subscribers in the last couple months.

I wouldn't stick too much faith into EA either.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Repentence Tyrathlion on 16 May 2012, 10:22
Eh.  I have little fondness for either company.  I suppose I keep waiting for WoW's wasting disease to kill it off.  Cataclysm did make it haemorrhage subscriptions.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Mizhara on 16 May 2012, 10:43
If any game will break WoW it won't be SWTOR. That game was a massive disappointment. Guild Wars 2 might take a chunk out of WoW, who knows? Will just have to see, won't we?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 16 May 2012, 11:02
The only thing likely to kill WoW is WoW itself.

Making more expansions like Cataclysm will speed it's demise. 1.8 mil subs lost in it's only full year?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Valadeus on 16 May 2012, 11:40
The only thing likely to kill WoW is WoW itself.

Making more expansions like Cataclysm will speed it's demise. 1.8 mil subs lost in it's only full year?

The community of WoW will be a major player in the game's eventual downfall but yes, WoW will be its own end.

I don't suspect that Mists of Pandaria will be its last expansion, as many people seem pretty excited about what it has to offer. But I do think it won't hold people's interest for very long as it's only increasing by 5 levels (again) and still maintains the end-game grind that many people are beginning to hate.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Caellach Marellus on 16 May 2012, 12:13
They've given it new reasons to leave the city at least. Also LFR seemed to inspire more interest in the modern "I WANT IT NOW" generation.

And well, there's always the Pokemon sidegame, and goldfarming for the Black Market Auction House  :bash:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Random Sentience on 16 May 2012, 13:31
TOR has also lost close to (if not over) 400k subscribers in the last couple months.

I wouldn't stick too much faith into EA either.
Of course, they spin it to "We lost 400k subscribers, but our number of accounts are higher than they were two months ago, and our subscribers are about the same as they were shortly after launch."

EA's PR department should be running election campaigns. :P
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kohiko Sun on 19 May 2012, 11:52
They count unpaid trials in their subscription numbers, too. (And already sent me an email offer for a free month to come back and see the changes of patch 1.2.)


Someone please wake me up when I can play GW2 for more than a weekend a month. <3 my human guardian I've been playing in the beta.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Seriphyn on 08 Nov 2012, 12:39
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8AkiQBc2moY#!

9 minute video expounding on details. Will have actual combat like TERA, no GW2-style autoattack. Cautiously optimistic, I loved TERA's combat which was far superior to any other major MMO on the market, but everything else about the game was generic.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: lallara zhuul on 09 Nov 2012, 18:41
New trailer thingie for the MMO.

Looks like it lacks the feel of the Elder Scroll series.

Visually and thematically.

How the hell can they screw up things that royally.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Khloe on 09 Nov 2012, 21:50
This game is going to have to bring something special to the table in terms of gameplay to really tempt me back into the MMO world.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Katrina Oniseki on 09 Nov 2012, 23:25
New trailer thingie for the MMO.

Looks like it lacks the feel of the Elder Scroll series.

Visually and thematically.

How the hell can they screw up things that royally.

The developers of ESO are not the same developers of Skyrim.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Louella Dougans on 10 Nov 2012, 02:53
How the hell can they screw up things that royally.

They always seemed to dislike the idea of taking the IP seriously; things like researching (and respecting) prior content and integrating it into the new were seen as unnecessary and excessive.

Because of that ?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: lallara zhuul on 10 Nov 2012, 04:39
That's just bad business.

If you're going to poach an IP for fans, then staying true to the IP would be the most obvious thing to do.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Druur Monakh on 10 Nov 2012, 04:44
I watched the video, trying to like it, and for Explorers it might be a nice game no matter what. But for me, this one line killed it for me:

"Once you hit level 50, the game really opens up."

If you're mostly a PvE player, you prefer the game to open up right away, since you won't participating in the "endgame" content anyway.

If you're an endgame raider, or "PvP"er, you'll grind through the 50 levels as fast as possible, to get to the good stuff.

Either way, the 50-levels-before-game will be a waste because neither target group will want it.

(I'm not good at getting my point across, but since this is the best I could condense it to, I'm going to stick with it)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Seriphyn on 10 Nov 2012, 12:39
"Once you hit level 50, the game really opens up."

Yeah I hate that sort of bullshit in MMOs. Why isn't the game open from the FIRST level? I'm not paying for a grindfest, I'm paying for a massive world inhabited by thousands.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: BloodBird on 11 Nov 2012, 10:34
"Once you hit level 50, the game really opens up."

Yeah I hate that sort of bullshit in MMOs. Why isn't the game open from the FIRST level? I'm not paying for a grindfest, I'm paying for a massive world inhabited by thousands.

One of the things that makes EVE superior; There are no wasted 'stages'.

You wanna explore? go right ahead, probing skills are easy to get, hard to master.

Wanna PVP? you can tackle and be useful form day 1, from there it's all improvements.

Wanna do industry? No problem, pick what you want to do specifically, and aim for that. Mining for instance is daoble form day 1 with only effectiveness and diversity building as time goes.

Wanna do marke - fuck it, you know how this goes.

WoW, TOR, LII, TERA, AEON and many, many other level-based MMO's had and have the problem with levels - some will be higher than others and some content will not be available or viable until you get a specific level or stage. WoW raiding is for end-game gear and level cap, LII PVP has you seriously out-matched by higher level players in guild conflicts and such, and so on.

Games like GW2 and PS2 did it right. PS2 by being a F2P MMO-FPS where 'experience' earns certificates that buy weapons, upgrades and so on that increase your effectiveness, but a battle-rank 1 no-upgrades noob can still be useful in anything they want to do, save perhaps player-skill intensive things like fighter craft piloting. Guild Wars 2 buffs/nerfs levels on players depending on what zone your in or if your doing PVP or anything, so even a max-level toon can help his new lvl1 noob friend out without having to roll a new toon to not be overpowered. I love that aspect of that game.


As far as I can tell so far, this MMO will be a cut-and-dry 'standard' MMO with all the faults available and little innovation, skimping even on the Elder Scrolls feel. Massive disappointment. I guess however it remains to be seen how this pans out, it's very early in the game's development still, isn't it?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: ArtOfLight on 16 Nov 2012, 07:43
This makes me so angry in so many ways.

I'm sorry it makes you angry. I've been watching this game for a while and I must say that I have a very positive outlook toward it which I didn't have when I first heard the announcement.

It doesn't matter anyways, because you can now say goodbye to Elder Scrolls VI. Skyrim was the last single player game for Elder Scrolls. Why bother making more single player blockbusters when you can add another shitty expansion to what will probably be another worthless MMO.

This is verifiably false though, sorry. ESO is being developed by ZeniMax Online Studios in tandem with Bethesda as a lore and concept advisor. Bethesda is not involved in the game otherwise and has announced, quite clearly, that they will continue to produce single player Elder Scrolls games.

It should be noted that all of the Elder Scrolls games have been released with game breaking bugs and stability issues. The MMO will be no different.

I suspect it will be, as the team doing the balancing and bug tracking is not Bethesda's team and the balance and bug-tracking of an MMO is infinitely more important than a game in which you can overcome most bugs by the console and it only affects a single player. I suspect a much higher priority will be placed on bug-squishing.

Enough of this MMO crap. BRING BACK REAL RPGs!

On this we are in solid agreement. Though, I confess that myself and a small group of friends are creating a dedicated roleplaying group for the game.

It seriously is worth looking into and making an educated decision about.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: ArtOfLight on 16 Nov 2012, 07:51
That's just bad business.

If you're going to poach an IP for fans, then staying true to the IP would be the most obvious thing to do.

They actually are remaining relatively close to the IP. The timeline is set 1000 years before Skyrim, which is 200 years before Tiber Septim (Talos) and the dawn of the Third Era.

The factions at war over Cyrodiil are actual factions that existed during the time based on the lore write-up. The stylized characters may not look as "real" and detailed as they do in the single player games but that's because it's impossible to do so and still expect the servers and individual computers to render multiple characters in anything resembling real time. They have to be a little bit stylized to allow for multiple characters on screen at once, especially since they're aiming to have 200+ characters on screen in massive wars.

As far as the lore goes, they're actually following it quite well. The world may look a little bit more stylized but the landscaping is as similar to it as you could expect under the circumstances.

Are they doing everything perfectly? Of course not, but at least they're doing better than they could be doing.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Tiberious Thessalonia on 16 Nov 2012, 08:07
One issue me and my friends are seeing is that it rather looks like they are shoehorning groups together in order to get to their "Three factions, three races per faction" idea, such that I am not sure how they are going to handle it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Victoria Stecker on 16 Nov 2012, 08:23
They have to be a little bit stylized to allow for multiple characters on screen at once, especially since they're aiming to have 200+ characters on screen in massive wars.

That sounds a lot like Planetside with magic and swords. I can't really see them keeping it true to tES gameplay and managing to balance it without it coming out like a number of other recent MMOs.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: ArtOfLight on 16 Nov 2012, 08:35
One issue me and my friends are seeing is that it rather looks like they are shoehorning groups together in order to get to their "Three factions, three races per faction" idea, such that I am not sure how they are going to handle it.

I have similar concerns, but (to be fair) the groups they're putting together do share regional harmony with one another on the provincial maps and the reasons they have them banding together are at least believable from an RP perspective. Not perfect, I guess, but believable enough to be workable.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ilsenae Alexandros on 20 Nov 2012, 08:21
I watched the video, trying to like it, and for Explorers it might be a nice game no matter what. But for me, this one line killed it for me:

"Once you hit level 50, the game really opens up."

If you're mostly a PvE player, you prefer the game to open up right away, since you won't participating in the "endgame" content anyway.

If you're an endgame raider, or "PvP"er, you'll grind through the 50 levels as fast as possible, to get to the good stuff.

Either way, the 50-levels-before-game will be a waste because neither target group will want it.

(I'm not good at getting my point across, but since this is the best I could condense it to, I'm going to stick with it)

"Opens up at 50" is kind of integral to an MMORPG, or really any RPG that relies on character levels or stratified difficulty. End-game content is how you keep subscribers. This is one of the reasons Bioware's The Old Republic failed: once your character reached the max level, the story ended. You must have continuing content after the level climb.

The reason EVE doesn't have this problem is because of its sandbox nature, and the way skills serve as a gatekeeper to higher strata of difficulty. Content is spread out horizontally, not vertically along level tiers.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ilsenae Alexandros on 20 Nov 2012, 08:25
New trailer thingie for the MMO.

Looks like it lacks the feel of the Elder Scroll series.

Visually and thematically.

How the hell can they screw up things that royally.

I really don't know how you can come to this conclusion.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 20 Nov 2012, 13:37
New trailer thingie for the MMO.

Looks like it lacks the feel of the Elder Scroll series.

Visually and thematically.

How the hell can they screw up things that royally.

I really don't know how you can come to this conclusion.

I wouldn't be so radical myself but I thought something in the lines of "doesn't look elder-scrollish" a lot on some visuals. Color saturated (bad) FX, amongst other visuals that makes me think their artistic direction might not be totally faithful toward the original series... Looks very "standard MMO-ish" to me. Not surprising since it is another studio that is in charge and not Bethesda, right ?

It lacks definitly something imo, but to the point of saying that they are screwing things royally, well, i'm not that into the licence to begin with so I couldnt tell. But the video game artist in me is not really impressed for now.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Druur Monakh on 21 Nov 2012, 01:10
I watched the video, trying to like it, and for Explorers it might be a nice game no matter what. But for me, this one line killed it for me:

"Once you hit level 50, the game really opens up."

 ...

"Opens up at 50" is kind of integral to an MMORPG, or really any RPG that relies on character levels or stratified difficulty. End-game content is how you keep subscribers.

Oh, I know that - and that's one reason why I haven't played any of them ever since MUDs lost their appeal.

One exception: I did try LotRO last year, so that I could at least have some first-hand experience of modern style MMORPGs in addition to EVE (and I wanted to see the Argonath), but I got bored after about six hours and haven't started it since.

I'd still like to see the Argonath, though.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Desiderya on 21 Nov 2012, 04:31
The absolute realization that everything you've worked for at [Current Max Level] will be worthless within a couple of hours into the next expansion with an increased levelcap has kinda ruined my enjoyment of the typical modern "Max level, then ENDGAME, OH SWEET JESUS; WE HAVE ENDGAME!"-MMO. But hey, there'll be another set of challenges (industry for "hamster wheel") so that you can be as good as you were prior to the expansion.  :s

Therefore that little sentence "once you reach level 50 the game opens up" is a warning flag for me.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: ArtOfLight on 21 Nov 2012, 06:44
The absolute realization that everything you've worked for at [Current Max Level] will be worthless within a couple of hours into the next expansion with an increased levelcap has kinda ruined my enjoyment of the typical modern "Max level, then ENDGAME, OH SWEET JESUS; WE HAVE ENDGAME!"-MMO. But hey, there'll be another set of challenges (industry for "hamster wheel") so that you can be as good as you were prior to the expansion.  :s

Therefore that little sentence "once you reach level 50 the game opens up" is a warning flag for me.

A valid concern, but if the game progresses as everything I've read and seen seems to suggest it will progress, there's very little (if any) grind in ESO. What the director is talking about is certain more difficult areas of the game are locked until you reach a high enough level to be able to actually get through them (hero dungeons, so to speak). From what I've seen, this essentially means that places you've been before (because it's an open world that you can explore at any level) will have changed by that point to be more challenging for higher level characters, like a second instance of an already explored area.

I am extremely averse to grinds and chores while playing a game, but I'm pretty optimistic that this game won't have it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: ArtOfLight on 21 Nov 2012, 06:48
I wouldn't be so radical myself but I thought something in the lines of "doesn't look elder-scrollish" a lot on some visuals. Color saturated (bad) FX, amongst other visuals that makes me think their artistic direction might not be totally faithful toward the original series... Looks very "standard MMO-ish" to me. Not surprising since it is another studio that is in charge and not Bethesda, right ?

It lacks definitly something imo, but to the point of saying that they are screwing things royally, well, i'm not that into the licence to begin with so I couldnt tell. But the video game artist in me is not really impressed for now.

The models are necessarily a little more stylized because more of them have to fit on the screen at one time. In the single player games, more attention to detail and sharper textures and graphics can be put into the game because the game is only rendering one dynamic character: the player character. In an MMO, the engine will need to render multiple dynamic characters (up to 200 is their goal), so the characters will have to be slightly less detailed and sharp.

Also, keep in mind that the game is still in its pre-alpha phase, so much of what you see is likely to be sharpened out, shaped up and refined before the game is actually released.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 21 Nov 2012, 07:33
The absolute realization that everything you've worked for at [Current Max Level] will be worthless within a couple of hours into the next expansion with an increased levelcap has kinda ruined my enjoyment of the typical modern "Max level, then ENDGAME, OH SWEET JESUS; WE HAVE ENDGAME!"-MMO. But hey, there'll be another set of challenges (industry for "hamster wheel") so that you can be as good as you were prior to the expansion.  :s

Therefore that little sentence "once you reach level 50 the game opens up" is a warning flag for me.

A valid concern, but if the game progresses as everything I've read and seen seems to suggest it will progress, there's very little (if any) grind in ESO. What the director is talking about is certain more difficult areas of the game are locked until you reach a high enough level to be able to actually get through them (hero dungeons, so to speak). From what I've seen, this essentially means that places you've been before (because it's an open world that you can explore at any level) will have changed by that point to be more challenging for higher level characters, like a second instance of an already explored area.

I am extremely averse to grinds and chores while playing a game, but I'm pretty optimistic that this game won't have it.

How do you progress in this game ?

I wouldn't be so radical myself but I thought something in the lines of "doesn't look elder-scrollish" a lot on some visuals. Color saturated (bad) FX, amongst other visuals that makes me think their artistic direction might not be totally faithful toward the original series... Looks very "standard MMO-ish" to me. Not surprising since it is another studio that is in charge and not Bethesda, right ?

It lacks definitly something imo, but to the point of saying that they are screwing things royally, well, i'm not that into the licence to begin with so I couldnt tell. But the video game artist in me is not really impressed for now.

The models are necessarily a little more stylized because more of them have to fit on the screen at one time. In the single player games, more attention to detail and sharper textures and graphics can be put into the game because the game is only rendering one dynamic character: the player character. In an MMO, the engine will need to render multiple dynamic characters (up to 200 is their goal), so the characters will have to be slightly less detailed and sharp.

Also, keep in mind that the game is still in its pre-alpha phase, so much of what you see is likely to be sharpened out, shaped up and refined before the game is actually released.

I am not sure what you call a "dynamic character". As long as the character has animation and real time visual generation, the fact that it is a NPC or a PC changes almost nothing in terms of graphic calculations. You will still have that number of triangles and that texture resolution to draw.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Wanoah on 21 Nov 2012, 14:35
Let's be brutally honest here. The Elder Scrolls Online will spread its wobbly cheeks and shit all over anything that anyone ever liked about the games. It will be bereft of anything even remotely approaching a redeeming feature.

The only way it can possibly result in a positive outcome is if it fails so dramatically that it takes down the developers and publishers in a blaze of bitter recriminations and finger pointing. Maybe then the cycle of abuse that MMOs represent will finally be broken. Then we just need someone to somehow excise the cancer of Call of Honor XXIV from gaming's nether regions so we can all go walking off into the sunset hand-in-hand and singing songs of love.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 21 Nov 2012, 16:37
The only way it can possibly result in a positive outcome is if it fails so dramatically that it takes down the developers and publishers in a blaze of bitter recriminations and finger pointing. Maybe then the cycle of abuse that MMOs represent will finally be broken.

Let's be brutally honest here. Did it work  even with the SWTOR example ?  :P
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: ArtOfLight on 22 Nov 2012, 14:06
Let's be brutally honest here. The Elder Scrolls Online will spread its wobbly cheeks and shit all over anything that anyone ever liked about the games. It will be bereft of anything even remotely approaching a redeeming feature.

The only way it can possibly result in a positive outcome is if it fails so dramatically that it takes down the developers and publishers in a blaze of bitter recriminations and finger pointing. Maybe then the cycle of abuse that MMOs represent will finally be broken. Then we just need someone to somehow excise the cancer of Call of Honor XXIV from gaming's nether regions so we can all go walking off into the sunset hand-in-hand and singing songs of love.

I respectfully disagree. Only time will tell, further deliberation would be pointless.

Lyn,

Ignoring my use of the term "dynamic" character (since it really doesn't serve a purpose in the long run), the base point is that the Elder Scrolls single player games don't render more than a few persons on the screen at any given time.

 I think the most I've seen without someone actually leading a large group of people to a single location is between 15 and 20 and that's within villages and towns.

You also have to account for the number and size of areas loaded on the computer at one time. In a single player game, the player's computer is both server and client. All maps, AI, treasure tables, NPCs, PCs, saved games, character information, etc is saved on the computer. All rendering and calculating is done by that same computer. Because of this, a single player computer can load areas in localized maps called "instances." (Nearly any time you see a loading screen, a new "instance" is being loaded). The computer doesn't have to keep the world map running while the player is exploring ruins, it can save the state of the world map and load only the instance into memory and video memory. This frees up more memory and allows the computer to render more in-depth textures, effects and animations.

In an MMO, on the other hand, the server and client are separate computers. The server must have all instances available and open at all times for anyone visiting them (some instances can avoid being loaded if no one is in them but will load on demand), this places a significant load on the server computer. Likewise, all input commands must pass through the server before the game processes them, further placing demands on the server computer. The client only deals with client-side video rendering and communicating between the server and itself.

The result of this type of set up is that the polygon count of all objects and the resolution of textures must be reduced to a significantly lower base sample so that the server can render and calculate many more objects and textures at all times.

I'm sure we could discuss it in much greater detail as much more goes on than this, but the point is that everything is slightly less detailed because of demand, not because of choice.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 22 Nov 2012, 16:08
To begin with I want to say that I agree with you on the fact that MMOs often require less detailed 3D objects since sceneries are often wider but especially since they might have to bring on screen a lot mor potential characters (on open worlds mostly, the rest is mostly like any standard solo RPG).

However I think you might be confusing several different things, which is what I will call roughly hard computing, graphic computing time, and data computing.

- Hard computing is used to compute everything tied to the core engine of a game, like the physics, the gameplay, etc. The CPU is involved.

- Graphic computing time, the most hungry on a video game of that caliber, concerns everything tied to the visuals (directX, 3D objects, shaders, post process, the graphic engine, etc). The GPU is involved.

- Data computing mostly is about keeping tables of data and keeping tabs on all the info and variables the game might need (like the character info, spatial position, its inventory, whatever). It is totally insignificant in comparison of the rest : nothing involves big calculations of any kind, just a lot of transfers of data and adressing. It mostly involves bandwith.



Now, graphic computing is still 100% done by the client in any MMO, nothing changes compared to any solo game. It's the same. In a MMO it is not the server that calculates what is put on your screen for you, it's your computer.

Hard computing is done on both sides. What is server side mostly concerns the coordination and the processing of... data.

Now then, the amount of data of a solo game is very small. In a MMO of course, it can be quite huge (as all eve players have experienced). What makes the servers "lag" is not the power required to make the graphics run (that is client side), but the sheer processing power to process all the data sent by thousands of players and then send it back to them with the results, and also the bandwith it requires for so many transactions.

It is also a key point in the difference between a client computer and a server. The former has one or  two CPUs, and a GPU big enough to display the game. The latter has dozens of CPUs, huge amounts of memory, and a very different base architecture that allows it to process thousands of different things at the same time, this coupled with huge bandwith to send it back to the users, but I don't even know if they have a single graphic processor.

So no, a server does not compute objects and textures, but a lot of data. When too much data has to be processed, then we end up in situations like in Eve when everything becomes a lagfest and the server eventually crashes, overloaded, while our computers are awaiting eagerly for the answers to the requests they sent 10 min ago.

If you lag only because of :graphics: then your computer is to blame. This is why they often try in MMO to use lower quality models to be able to sustain extreme situations, as you say, where hundred of characters have to be displayed at the same time by the client.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Shiori on 29 Jan 2014, 15:42
Let's be brutally honest here. The Elder Scrolls Online will spread its wobbly cheeks and shit all over anything that anyone ever liked about the games. It will be bereft of anything even remotely approaching a redeeming feature.
Quite. The latest trailers and information make it out to be less "The Elder Scrolls Online" and more "Every Goddamned MMO Ever Except We Say 'Mudcrabs' Sometimes."
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Shiki on 29 Jan 2014, 16:44
No personal knowledge on my part, but I have a co-worker who took part in the latest CBT and he described the game as essentially being an empire-building game. He said a lot of it had to do with territory control and resource management, and I got the impression it functioned, at least in a fundamental way, similar to Sov space in EVE. I asked him if he felt that the mechanics punished solo play, which he affirmed, adding that it felt like a game where whoever brings the most players wins.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 29 Jan 2014, 17:18
From what I have heard, people that have tried RvR are pretty unanimous : it is really great.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 29 Jan 2014, 18:10
 :roll:

Well, I'll give it some time after it comes out to even out a bit.  I had some hopes, at least.  MMORPGs are such a great concept, they're just so hard to put into practice.  I'm starting to think that developers are just running out of good content ideas, so it's easier to build and balance a PVP-centric game and let your player base essentially create your challenging content for you.  There was a time they made games ridiculously difficult and made you learn to overcome the game, rather than just fearing that your grind would be interrupted by the other players.

Whatever happened to the concept of giving us a challenge so great that only with your four mightiest friends could you conquer it?  Maybe I'm just getting ancient, but I kind of feel like PVE content in new RPGs is being made too easy and RVR PVP is being pushed as a viable alternative.  For God's sakes, if I wanted my content to be player generated, I'd go back to running my own freestyle RPs.  That's what I pay companies for, to make me an interesting game and to keep putting new, interesting stuff all the time to make it worth the subscription cost.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 30 Jan 2014, 00:56
I was informed it costs 20$ more to play an Imperial.

Wat.

Yehno.  Not playing it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Elmund Egivand on 30 Jan 2014, 05:02
Goddamned necromancers!
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 30 Jan 2014, 08:59
Goddamned necromancers!

Fo reals.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 30 Jan 2014, 09:19
I was informed it costs 20$ more to play an Imperial.

Wat.

Yehno.  Not playing it.

There's a lot of other stuff that goes with that, like being able to place the Imperial characters in whichever of the 3 alliances you choose (whereas you're effectively race-locked with all the other options), but you're right, $20 seems a little silly.

I'll probably try it for a month when it comes out. If I like it I might stick with it. If I don't, I'll just wait for TES6.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 30 Jan 2014, 14:15
I have heard positive things about the game. Some of its aspects (skill system notably, or housing iirc) reminds me a bit of SWG. Well I don't expect it to broke all the conventions and do something exceptional, but it seems to aim for a better quality than I originally hoped for.

Though it seems like all other MMOs still.


:roll:

Well, I'll give it some time after it comes out to even out a bit.  I had some hopes, at least.  MMORPGs are such a great concept, they're just so hard to put into practice.  I'm starting to think that developers are just running out of good content ideas, so it's easier to build and balance a PVP-centric game and let your player base essentially create your challenging content for you.  There was a time they made games ridiculously difficult and made you learn to overcome the game, rather than just fearing that your grind would be interrupted by the other players.

Whatever happened to the concept of giving us a challenge so great that only with your four mightiest friends could you conquer it?  Maybe I'm just getting ancient, but I kind of feel like PVE content in new RPGs is being made too easy and RVR PVP is being pushed as a viable alternative.  For God's sakes, if I wanted my content to be player generated, I'd go back to running my own freestyle RPs.  That's what I pay companies for, to make me an interesting game and to keep putting new, interesting stuff all the time to make it worth the subscription cost.

It's a question of time. Video game has become more and more casual and stopped by a niche thing with only hardcore gamers, so it's pretty normal that it comes that way eventually.

Also, one thing that too easy content made me notice in MMOs is that the game difficulty of former titles was actually just hiding how bland and stupid most classic mechanisms are (farming, raiding, etc). Now that it's too easy, it becomes even more obvious.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 30 Jan 2014, 18:00
Well, I have played some other MMOs in my time.  Everquest was one of them, but in terms of difficulty, I'd say Final Fantasy XI was the hardest in terms of just how difficult the game was.  WoW raiding was always a little more casual than that, and has gotten at least somewhat more difficult since the end of rotations and the last expansion's newer boss mechanics.  Really, though, I think the problem isn't that games are more casual now, it's that making a PVE game is harder.

I mean, what kind of effort would CCP have to put into story and game development if players weren't essentially making most of the news themselves?  Making a game that is hard in and of itself means coming up with a decent difficulty curve, making sure there is always the chance of something happening that you can't predict, putting you in danger of losing with every mistake, and making sure you have nobody but yourself to blame if the environment kills you.  It's a little easier to just say you can make money killing each other and letting the players take that role themselves.  Then, all you have to do is balance things correctly and the players essentially entertain themselves.

I think that's why so many of the world's biggest releases now are FPS games with short, easy, crap story modes meant to advertise their own particular PVP modes.  It's just a lot easier to make a hard PVP game than a hard PVE game because you don't have to program a PVP game to be hard; difficulty curves are just self-fulfilling prophecies when your only real competition is another player.

Not even just as a gamer that likes challenging games instead of another flavor of Battlefield, I think the reason this trend is so annoying to me is because MMORPGs would be the perfect setting for really, intensely difficult games.  I mean, if you set up some challenge that someone can't complete alone, you don't have to invite your friends over or LAN up.  The other people are right there!  I guess I wish the thrill I got out of Monster Hunter, PSO, Ikaruga, and the like was built into a game where I could group up with other people.  I know that if CAPCOM released an honest to God Monster Hunter MMO that wasn't just sending you out into a piecemeal world with a ticking clock and instead sent you out into a massive ecosystem in which you could very easily find yourself to be food, I wouldn't be anywhere else.

I guess I'm tired of MMOs that play like movies or sandboxes, I want to play an MMORPG where the actual game kicks my ass.  That hasn't happened yet.  I'm tired of developers treating PVP like it's novel; I got tired of it in Quake LAN parties long before I played my first MMO.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 31 Jan 2014, 03:35
I think asking what we individually want out of MMOs and trying to break it down is interesting.

Quote
For God's sakes, if I wanted my content to be player generated, I'd go back to running my own freestyle RPs.  That's what I pay companies for, to make me an interesting game and to keep putting new, interesting stuff all the time to make it worth the subscription cost.

Quote
I mean, what kind of effort would CCP have to put into story and game development if players weren't essentially making most of the news themselves?

Yes and no.  While yes, I want an interesting game with new, interesting stuff put in, I also (very, very much) want both player generated content and the ability and available tools to create said content.  I want player generated content to be a major part of the games ethos - the impetus on the players to have their own adventures and define their own experiences, rather than being led through a narrow (however cleverly designed) linear rat-race.

That's just personal preference, mind...

And while I know how useful backstory and canon is to rpers, I have to wonder if players were entirely reliant on CCP to make the news if they would cease to make it themselves.  It seems to be a somewhat delicate balance.


Quote
I guess I'm tired of MMOs that play like movies or sandboxes, I want to play an MMORPG where the actual game kicks my ass.  That hasn't happened yet.  I'm tired of developers treating PVP like it's novel; I got tired of it in Quake LAN parties long before I played my first MMO.

I'm tired of MMOs too, but for different reasons.  I'm less concerned about difficulty and more concerned about having a layered experience.  The amount of layers I want hasn't happened yet -.-  But I suppose a mixture between EVE/UO and ATITD (which have all gone in the right direction, as far as I'm concerned) with other elements also. More variety, less emphasis on a hero figure (or thousands of them). I explained it to a friend (while ranting) as wanting to sell vegetables.  Or throw them at people I didn't like. Which is not to represent a niche interest in grocery produce ("my cabbages!")  but for the freedom and dynamism to do so if I wished.  (and yes, I know you can technically grow vegetables and sell them in MMOs, such as LOTRO, but not technically what I mean)...

I mean, take Skyrim (bear with me).  You know there's some woman who talks about how she wants to own the inn - that's her goal and...I forget the exact dialogue - but I want to be her.  And the little girl who talks endlessly about selling vegetables? Her too. (I want to be a fucking npc, basically, just not static) But no.  I mean the ability to set and achieve your own changeable goals within the world (however mundane) and for that to have an effect on the world itself (however small).

And PVP isn't novel, no...but when you can just get up and doing it all over again with no real or lasting penalty (such as Quake or UT, or many MMOs) then it's also fairly meaningless to me without loss. In a sense, I think PVP with loss is fairly novel as is the freedom to (negatively?) impact another player by stealing their stuff. Otherwise, it's a competition, but if the stakes aren't high then I'm easy come, easy go.  I enjoy kicking my friends arses, sure.  There is a fun factor, and games are supposed to be fun but...

If I'm honest, I want more than that. I want some kind of depth to the experience I'm having (if I'm going to pour hours into it) and MMOs, as much as anything, are about creating a living breathing world and populating it with people who will then interact with eachother.  Seems to me there is so much untapped potential in that concept that to continually churn out grind-fests is tantamount to criminal  :evil:




edit: for full disclosure, this is a vague and nebulous ideal of MMO-dom I've had in my head for years, spawned while playing Daggerfall and Morrowind and thinking about how awesome it would be if they were MMOs; these sprawling worlds (especially Daggerfall) populated by real, unpredictable people, just milling around doing their own thing, same as me.  As such an Elder Scrolls MMO that doesn't live up to that (possibly entirely unobtainable ideal) is going to stick in my craw. You've betrayed me, TES.  :|
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 31 Jan 2014, 08:32
All of which I get, these are personal preferences after all.  I think one of the problems is that there is both loss, but not really enough.  While you may lose ships fighting CONCORD and run down your security tally, that's not the same as real bandits that had to live outside civilization and be worried every second that they'd be discovered.

In that vein, I think the idea is that if you want to throw vegetables at people and incur loss, those two things would mean your vegetable character would get fined and thrown out of a market for disturbing the peace.  That sort of thing isn't common in video games.  EVE, for better or worse, is essentially mandating a certain kind of playstyle even though they aren't doing it directly.  All the endgame combat stuff is out in null or in the warzone, to get to those places you've entered FFAPVP, the penalties for engaging in that are relatively light compared to what you'd think would happen in your country if an outlaw suddenly decided to start killing people in the countryside and stealing their things.

It just means you sort of come up with a certain kind of play that doesn't usually involve vegetables.  Unfortunately, I'm not in any better boat.  I've always loved survival type games.  I think the closest game that flirted with awesomeness for me was Monster Hunter (I suppose I shouldn't assume everyone's played it, so if you haven't, go try whatever of them is available in your region).  I played a lot of it on the PS2, but it wasn't really well known in America until the PSP versions.

It wouldn't even count as an MMO, it's sort of a group RPG where you take missions, get dumped into world of little interconnected zones and have a set time limit to finish the objective.  It's a bit more like Phantasy Star Online than a real MMO.  But the elements of it always made me drool with what could be.  Having to not only fight dragons so large you couldn't dream of fighting them alone, but with weapons that actually felt big enough for the job.  Being able to kill and cook your own food before you essentially ran out of stamina and failed.  Having almost all of your stats built up with pieces of the things you were killing and not giving you any other way to collect those items, but also having a ranking system that limits your access until you prove your worth.  Being able to set traps and ambushes as well as sometimes being ambushed by the thing you were trying to kill.

Trust me, every time they announce a "Monster Hunter Online" and it turns out to essentially be another Monster Hunter without a huge, persistent world and a giant ecosystem you are both hunter and hunted in, I wonder whether I should have gone into game design.  Biggest waste of potential for an MMO on the planet, in my opinion.  If they ever did that well, none of you would ever see me again unless you also subscribed.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 31 Jan 2014, 11:39
Quote
In that vein, I think the idea is that if you want to throw vegetables at people and incur loss, those two things would mean your vegetable character would get fined and thrown out of a market for disturbing the peace.

Yes, this.  The virtual society and rules governing it don't have to tolerate my untoward vegetable throwing, but I should be able to do it before being carted off  :P
(though the vegetables was just an example. don't fixate too much on the vegetables  ;) I can live without them)

I suppose it's about there being room for a variety of play-styles and a lot of flexibility - and your actions should have consequences, yes.  I want dynamicism, dammit. (one of the reasons I liked ATITD was the player-made law system and society building aspects to it.  I disliked the lack of murdering and thieving, though >.> give me the freedom to be hateful plz.)


Quote
Trust me, every time they announce a "Monster Hunter Online" and it turns out to essentially be another Monster Hunter without a huge, persistent world and a giant ecosystem you are both hunter and hunted in, I wonder whether I should have gone into game design.  Biggest waste of potential for an MMO on the planet, in my opinion.  If they ever did that well, none of you would ever see me again unless you also subscribed.

I felt the same way about an elder scrolls MMO.  Just with the npc guild leaders, vendors etc being players.  As well as other adventurers, bandits - maybe even monsters in terms of vampires and werewolves. I don't think I want any npcs, actually, apart from mobs.  If there need to be story driven characters, they should be acted rather than scripted so they can respond to what's going on. (and killable).

(I guess I associated TES with this MMO as it gave me the most freedom/scope I'd ever experienced from single player game - I'd just wrongly assumed that would only increase exponentially if populated by other people in a persistent dynamic world.)

Maybe it's good that we don't get our ideal MMO, though.  I know I'd take escapism way too far if there was somewhere I really wanted to escape to.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Graelyn on 31 Jan 2014, 14:13
Please keep in mind, the only mechanics allowed in MMOs are ones that can't be (easily) 'gooned up'.

There's a million awesome ideas and implementations that game designers know from experience that they have to completely avoid due to the simple fact that a sizable chunk of any gaming population is only there to try to cause grief. The modern MMO marketplace has to consider that griefing isn't just the purvue of lone frustrated virgins anymore; efforts to break games and drain the fun out of any environment have become massive undertakings by clever and motivated organizations.

If MMO mechanics seem repetitive and stale, it's because they're all coated in protective plastic from the ground up.

The statement 'this is why we can't have nice things' has no clearer home than the MMO format. Anyone who plays EVE should already know deep down how true this is.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 31 Jan 2014, 14:48
You know why I never played an Elder Scroll of my whole life ? Because they look like MMOs and not solo games. What should I do when playing an Elder Scroll ? What is the point to play alone in an open world like this ? I understand why people usually enjoy them so much ; they can play their own little stories. But I don't see the point. Better to do it with other people...

That's mostly why I prefer when my solo games are linear in terms of story. The more they are, the more the story in on rails, the more enjoyable it is to me. Coupled to the fact that the more dynamic a story is, the more it loses in terms of quality and narrative.

Well, I have played some other MMOs in my time.  Everquest was one of them, but in terms of difficulty, I'd say Final Fantasy XI was the hardest in terms of just how difficult the game was.  WoW raiding was always a little more casual than that, and has gotten at least somewhat more difficult since the end of rotations and the last expansion's newer boss mechanics.  Really, though, I think the problem isn't that games are more casual now, it's that making a PVE game is harder.

But most games are more casual. The population has changed. Gamers too.

You just have to take almost any title 20 years ago and compare it with games of today. Sometimes I don't even understand how we were able to take all that cruelty  :lol:

But anyway, gaming used more to be about the challenge (I beat the game finally !) and less about pure entertainment (You press a button and it's awesome ! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV97ozaD4vs)). It is however starting to balance itself out with the new emergence of indie games everywhere.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 01 Feb 2014, 05:56
Edit: Yup +1 to Lyn and my expanded view on that -

I pointed this out elsewhere, but games in general have switched from bachelor-makers and places where only the unemployed can stay afloat or excel without throwing the controller/keyboards in frustration or surrender. 

In other words, you find less and less elements in games that require so much of a player's time and intelligence/problem solving skill/effort to "win", or more specifically to *not lose* that the player has time for *nothing else in life*, and more and more of something where someone can log in for a few hours, still have fun (with fun defined as 'success'/winning), and have the ability to log out without devoting a PhD level of mental effort into it.

The genre has gone more from skill builder (a 'game' after all is usually an emulation of a real life scenario, intended as a skill builder, if you take the basic "why do  humans play?" question) to entertainment and escapism, and this is likely due to the demographics of people that exist with the hardware to run such games, and therefore the potential market of people to buy it and make the developers some cash.  Not to say devs are greedy, simply to say that the bills need paying, and one needs to cater to their potential customer bases.

Therefore if you want to get the money to pay the bills as a developer, it in a sense requires one make games, essentially, "not that hard" in comparison to how they used to be. 

The subculture of people who game has expanded from a very small number of people with PC and console platforms (when once upon as time it was the more intelligent 'geeky' introvert types who bought a new PC before they bought their new car)  to a more mainstream slice of the population (and by slice, now a large number of the population of the 'first world' types buying PCs and playing games and plenty more of the 'second world' types who can get access to them via internet cafe's and the like.)  It's not just the people who are interested in computer science buying computers.  It's everyone.  Everyone. Ev-ree-one.

In other words, gaming is no longer the realm of the intelligent introvert looking for a manufactured challenge at home.  It is now also the realm of the everyone else, like the people who used to beat up said introverts on their way to football practice.

I'd dare even call more than people who just own Wii's "causal gamers" and say the true % of "casual gamers" is much higher and *actually less casual* than it's defined as by market deifnitions or even "today's gamers".  *shakes cane from under her crocheted blanket on the front porch rocker*

It used to be that a "casual gamer" was just someone who just wasn't playing games all day every day and wasn't totally invested in the concepts of numbercrunching or twinking, or even in the RP example, endlessly worldbuilding and fanfictioning and etc.  A casual Asheron's Call player was someone who when faced with the choice of make a four hour run for their corpse or log out for work, would log out for work and take the loss of gear.  Once upon a time, playing "casually" was defined as "real life first".  In the mid 2000's in the EQ2 world, you were playing EQ2 'casually' if you were on less than 10 hours a week and not raiding. 

But hey.  Sony still wanted your 15 dollars a month, yeah?  Easier than making me somehow magically willing to play the 15+ hours a week, using up all of my free time after work and around family to get that extra +4 on some random stat from a piece of gear that dropped from Tarinax, is to make the *game* less strenuous to succeed at, and make that +4 just easier to get in general. 

In other words, the difficulty of games, or at least the difficulty "for median levels of game success", have been set to the lowest common denominators of the target market (which consists of *every* person in 18-24 and 25-34 in owning the hardware capable of running my program, not just the omgsuperleetgamer ones).  As people played MMOS, statistics were generated.  Every game from that point on is shaped by those statistics.  Simply put that means games get easier because more people in the target marker play easy games than hard ones.

Go broader.  Why have games moved from a subscription mdoel to a F2P/microtransaction model, or a F2P/bouns to Sub model?  Wasn't just the moneyrape - that was figured out and that's why everyone else quickly bandwagonned onto it and games themselves got worse and worse with what cost extra.  In my mind part of this is because over the years as us "Oh my goodness what's this? an IBM compatable 8088?" grew up, had kids of our own, and got them new computers for their 13th birthdays, the age demographic of gamers dropped to a bunch of kids with no credit cards (15-18) but an ability to pick up a game timecard at their local retailer, and so now not only do they have the opportunity to keep this kid entertained by something that will likely have to not be a punishing gauntlet of cruelty in pixels, they also have the frazzled parents of said kids, who don't have time to devote to a game that requires brainpower and more hours per day to level in than working their jobs and raising their children.

So when you ead articles about 'people catering to the casual gamer' and going "Oh no we'd never" -- what crap.  They already have, and have been, for years.  in my mind WoW was one of the first culprits of this - as much of a pedestal as it's put on as a "perfect" model, it was the first game I'm aware of anyway that put a question mark over the head of a quest NPC so the player knew to talk to this fucker instead of talking to everyone in town to figure out who was useful and who wasn't.  It purposely made the spec requirements low so not just top of the line PC's but also "that machine you bought your son for Christmas" could also run it.  The list goes on - widening of the possible market and catering to the lowest common denominators in it.


Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 01 Feb 2014, 07:37
One more aspect I don't think people have mentioned yet (while hitting everything else right on the head), is the progress in graphics and making games "pretty" and "cool". Before, you had to entertain people through difficulty because that's all you had - the sheer immersion and beauty of games was very limited. Now, newer games like the Tomb Raider reboot are almost like watching a movie. Games are sold partly as an "experience" instead of necessarily a "challenge", because they are able to make games like that. For newer gamers, making a game like that difficult would actually get backlash because the frustration would "ruin the experience" and the adventure.

This is also why so many indie games are where to find difficulty again - they don't have the budget or ability to make pretty games, so they have to go back to being difficult or unusual to get an audience.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 01 Feb 2014, 08:43
Quote
What is the point to play alone in an open world like this ?

Good question.  And I feel the same way when people say they deliberately solo play in MMOs (but why? there are single player games for that!) 

I guess for me, I played Daggerfall (and to a lesser extent Ultima Underworld) before my first MMO (Ultima Online) and it was the first time I got a sense games could offer more depth of experience than I had previously encountered.  It's hard to quantify exactly why.  I appreciated the freedom and - despite the many flaws - it felt more immersive and in some way credible.  I guess I enjoyed the feeling that I was actively partaking in my own gameplay, somewhere between reading a story and writing my own.

I'm also a fan of more linear rpgs (such as Baldurs Gate and Final Fantasy) and other styles and genres.  But that changed my outlook at a formative time, I think, and redefined my ideas of what a game could be.

In retrospect, now I am older and more cynical, Other People in My Elder Scrolls may well have entirely ruined my experiences rather than enriched them - breaking my immersion by spewing their stupid shit and having retarded names like Bl4d3_M4ST3R -.-;;

(I think the 'playerbase' in MMOs may have both utopian and dystopian potential, depending on how idealistic or cynical I feel at the time)

Quote
Games are sold partly as an "experience" instead of necessarily a "challenge", because they are able to make games like that.

I completely agree with you that the emphasis has been on the "ooh shiny!" in getting things to look increasingly photorealistic - which isn't necessarily bad, but other aspects don't seem to have developed alongside the aesthetic loveliness.  I wouldn't form a dichotomy between 'good' high end graphics and "an experience" vs 'bad' basic graphics and "a challenge", though.  While I completely agree that games used to be harder in general (the original UFO!) and indie games are far more innovative and interesting than most AAA titles, it's certainly possible to have a game that looks like dogshit but is easy to play, and one that looks amazing and is hard as hell.  Additionally, I have played games that were visually appealing but just seemed like a pretty cardboard set - empty and soulless - and not offered me an 'experience' or any immersion to speak of.

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 01 Feb 2014, 14:16
Edit: Yup +1 to Lyn and my expanded view on that -... (truncated)

Sort of this, but also sort of not.  First of all, I wouldn't also associate 'time' with 'hard', though to be fair it is sort of the standard MMOs have been held to.  I remember killing time by playing Minesweeper on expert mode.  It was hard, but it didn't take long to play.  It might be that MMORPGs kind of fell into an old RPG trap by saying that, if something takes 60 hours of playing to beat, it's a hard game.  That's really not true, grinding isn't hard as much as a way to make sure you don't have everything in a game within a few dedicated hours by simply not having a life.

Having said that, I've worked steadily (minus a pair of layoffs last year) since I was 16 and worked full time through college.  My game time became less copious, but I still found time to play.  Maybe that's the answer to the problem, to just have better tools to log off and on and to make games simply difficult to play?  Using the example of Monster Hunter from earlier (now that I've said it, it'll be hard for me to not talk about it), I can imagine a vast open world that it would be very simple to walk out into and pull a Les Stroud, surviving out in the wilderness by your wits, preparation, and whatever you brought with you.  I can also imagine being able to get a mission from a town and that mission having a strict time limit.  When you need to hide to run and take care of something, have a way to take a few minutes to hide yourself and if you need to log out, have a way to make camp.

Honestly, that's one of the things I think EVE does right in their mission structure.  I like the idea that, yes, if I don't have time to do a mission, I still get a reward, but if I have the time and I book it to finish up, I get extra.  That's a good way to both be flexible with people's schedules but give you something of a challenge to work on.

I think the thing missing from most MMOs is the element forcing you to work together.  Usually, I think devs have fallen into the habit of making every encounter with another player a sort of PVP experience that you should be worried about.  That doesn't necessarily encourage you to try and help random passerby out and make friends (one of the things I think EVE doesn't do very well on a fundamental level).  In essence, I think one of the things that might make an MMO a more rewarding experience than a single player game is if players are encouraged to help each other and be polite while they do it.  The focus on being able to solo play a game (thus meaning you can be a complete dick) and PVP (meaning you can dick someone over without necessarily being rude) in modern games does make it a lot harder to get the potential out of an MMO.

I made all my friends here, I never met any in the game world.  Even most of my friends that I've met here I can't play in-game with because of its very competitive nature.  I think that might be something Graelyn was touching on, as well, because devs have a raging hard on for faction-based in-game political systems.  Which means you can't possibly win.  You can only succeed on a very temporary level.  You will never defeat the Grand Empire of Evilbastardstahn because there are players in that faction who you can't just remove from the game.  It makes your game insanely inflexible.  It makes PVP between those factions a complete joke because it's just an arena: you can't ever win or lose the battle.

I'm not saying PVP is always a bad thing or that those kinds of games don't have their place, but seriously, EVERY MMORPG GAME has this bullshit.  You could solve that problem by having it go one way or the other, either having power be so loosely fragmented that every little individual town is like its own nation and to be so spread out that they don't have much to do with each other, or by having one giant government that handles everything in its area and sends you out to handle other issues.

Moreso, I think sometimes people don't know that it's just fun to break even sometimes.  Maybe games, because it's how games have always been, are too process-oriented.  Maybe we just need to have longer-term quest goals or to make exploration, discovery, and randomness more of a driver of game experience than the task-reward cycle. Maybe it would be nice to have a world so huge that, to get to where you need to go to kill something, you have to trek for two full days and survive all the perils of just getting there.

That's another thing!  Why is travel so damn easy and turns games into a connect-the-dots story?  Why can't 'getting there' be just as interesting and you can get sidetracked for days or weeks doing something because you happened to see something on the side of the road?

... I should probably stop.  I could bitch about this kind of thing for hours.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 01 Feb 2014, 15:41
It's rather funny the way people will spontaneously help each other. Having tried a few beta / early access MMOs, it is often amazing how people will help each other in some kind of synergy as they discover the game together. It is especially true at the release of MMOs, and then, routine takes place and all of this starts to drop progressively into oblivion.

Maybe that's due to routines and nothing left to discover (but rather guides to follow and you will be fine), or maybe that's just the population switching to dedicated, dynamic and enthusiastic players to another kind of consumers... Or maybe both, or maybe none...

Also Vic, there is already a non faction pvp system in Eve, it's nullsec... Its kindof similar to your concept of smaller towns/factions. They used to wipe each other out pretty often in the past. Now, it's more stale....
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 01 Feb 2014, 21:07
It's rather funny the way people will spontaneously help each other. Having tried a few beta / early access MMOs, it is often amazing how people will help each other in some kind of synergy as they discover the game together. It is especially true at the release of MMOs, and then, routine takes place and all of this starts to drop progressively into oblivion.

Maybe that's due to routines and nothing left to discover (but rather guides to follow and you will be fine), or maybe that's just the population switching to dedicated, dynamic and enthusiastic players to another kind of consumers... Or maybe both, or maybe none...

Also Vic, there is already a non faction pvp system in Eve, it's nullsec... Its kindof similar to your concept of smaller towns/factions. They used to wipe each other out pretty often in the past. Now, it's more stale....

Maybe I just don't remember it to be different.  It seems like it's become organized into factions, as you'd probably figure it probably would.

I think the problem is the prevalence of PVP in modern games not as an option, but as essentially a content mechanic.  I know all the action happens in nullsec, but it happens specifically because of the players.  I think that's fine for some people if that's their preference, but for me, it really removes the concept of the game from the game.  That's sort of a feature of the modern scene, I think because PVE content these days is usually pretty boring.  It's too hard to develop stuff that's always new, always exciting, and always challenging enough to keep a player's interest.  It can and has been done, but the modern devs just can't seem to pull it off anymore.  The only way to get more life out of the game is to engage everyone against each other.

You sometimes see flashes of what the MMORPG genre is capable of, but the next time you have to "kill ten crabs" or, in EVE's case, "do what the corp boss needs you to do" you sort of lose it.  Instead of being happy to see someone else in-game, pretty much all MMOs make sure I don't care or don't want to see them.  Which kind of, for me, ruins the whole point of wanting to hang around in a game where other people are visibly hanging around.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 02 Feb 2014, 04:16
Nullsec used to be more dynamic yes. When I was in Providence, Bob was the 'big meanie' trying to conquer the world and managed at its peak to control over 1/3 of the whole nullsec. From Deklein to Feythabolis. Providence was the next in line and we got bogged down into a war on several fronts where Bob was also fighting elsewhere against AAA, Goons, etc. Red Alliance was next after that, but Bob failed before, and retreated back to Delve and Fountain after a really immersive and nice vid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1yS6iZWBiA). It was also the same in the North a bit before, with Triumvirate that got a big threat for a while, then collapsed. The only regions where it has never really moved is in the east. Besides the collapse of Red Alliance (that became Solar Fleet iirc), not much to see. Different mindset. Which makes me say that the mindset of players also plays a big part (cf Serenity on the chinese server, I heard they are a lot less into fighting and a lot more into cooperative building).

Dominion really turned the tide. It changed system upkeep and by its very nature prevents such scenarii to happen again. Somebody more knowledgeable than me will probably correct me since I left null well before that, but well. Dominion was supposed to allow smaller alliances to get into null as their own, but it failed and renters are still the norm. It also helped to create Coalitions to balance all of this out.

You have already seen pve content that does not become boring and stale after a few runs ? Either it's scripted and demands a lot of effort from devs to be designed every month / year to provide an interesting hook, either it's procedural and becomes by its own very nature, predictable, and always the same. Even incursions and sleepers is beaten to death after a few runs. And I still admire these pve high end mechanisms for what they are, but that's it. It's pve, it becomes boring pretty fast to me since it's always the same again and again. It's just farm in the end. And I loathe farming.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 02 Feb 2014, 09:16
Nullsec used to be more dynamic yes. When I was in Providence, Bob was the 'big meanie' trying to conquer the world and managed at its peak to control over 1/3 of the whole nullsec. From Deklein to Feythabolis. Providence was the next in line and we got bogged down into a war on several fronts where Bob was also fighting elsewhere against AAA, Goons, etc. Red Alliance was next after that, but Bob failed before, and retreated back to Delve and Fountain after a really immersive and nice vid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1yS6iZWBiA). It was also the same in the North a bit before, with Triumvirate that got a big threat for a while, then collapsed. The only regions where it has never really moved is in the east. Besides the collapse of Red Alliance (that became Solar Fleet iirc), not much to see. Different mindset. Which makes me say that the mindset of players also plays a big part (cf Serenity on the chinese server, I heard they are a lot less into fighting and a lot more into cooperative building).

Dominion really turned the tide. It changed system upkeep and by its very nature prevents such scenarii to happen again. Somebody more knowledgeable than me will probably correct me since I left null well before that, but well. Dominion was supposed to allow smaller alliances to get into null as their own, but it failed and renters are still the norm. It also helped to create Coalitions to balance all of this out.

You have already seen pve content that does not become boring and stale after a few runs ? Either it's scripted and demands a lot of effort from devs to be designed every month / year to provide an interesting hook, either it's procedural and becomes by its own very nature, predictable, and always the same. Even incursions and sleepers is beaten to death after a few runs. And I still admire these pve high end mechanisms for what they are, but that's it. It's pve, it becomes boring pretty fast to me since it's always the same again and again. It's just farm in the end. And I loathe farming.

Not in EVE, but there are PVE games out there that don't get boring no matter how many times I play.  I could still throw my Monster Hunter game into a PS2 and solo wyverns (servers dropped years ago) and be just as thrilled as the first day I started.

Why that is is probably the nature of the fighting.  Your common everyday Rathalos had a set of a few attacks, not more than your average raid boss in WoW.  I think the reason that, after the hundredth time killing the same WoW boss and after the hundredth time killing the Kutku I'm still entertained by the latter, is because it's so intimately based on your reaction time.  Situations change so rapidly and you needed some pretty extensive gear to turn that fight into a complete cakewalk.

Maybe modern MMOs are worried about alienating their fanbases if they make the games difficult, put in moving challenges that you can't kill on your own, and the like.  In the end, we may initially hate games that are difficult just to survive in, but I've always thought the potential benefit to an MMORPG is to make it almost impossible to survive on your own and to make it worth your while to work together with complete strangers.  It's a way to make friends in the game world and, in a way, turn what was once a rather lonely pastime into a social experience.

WoW makes friends a lot more disposable these days because the game world is eminently survivable solo and if I didn't RP in EVE I couldn't think of a reason to trust or talk to anyone besides my brother.  That's sort of the litany of choices right now in MMORPG-land.  Do I want my games easy or do I want to play another PVP game with ?  Neither is very appealing to me, but the damnable fact is that I think it doesn't have to be this way.  Devs just get into ruts and end up making twinklier versions of the same games.

Maybe it's the architecture background that makes me kind of pissed.  Games have been essentially becoming more like movies these days, but MMOs aren't best served with that approach.  They're essentially games that can be dwelled within.  I suppose I shouldn't feel like I should be designing game worlds instead of health care facilities, but sometimes I just feel like slapping myself from a design perspective.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 02 Feb 2014, 10:04
I do not find hardcore difficulty really appealing. To me it just feels like hassle, plain and simple. I don't mind something challenging, but that's something else.

Brutal difficulty is not the answer to me. Make cooperation needed, no need for much more. Well, reading you, as much as I share the same concerns about the blandness of most MMOs, I wouldn't like to play a game you designed.  :lol:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 02 Feb 2014, 10:59
Once upon a time there was a hard MMO and this gamer lady said to her boyfriend, "I never in my life thought I would ever need to say this...  the fuckin' guild or me."

Those types of 'bachelor-makers' should be avoided - not just games that take time, but ones that cause undue stress to the player making them snappy fucking assholes who take it out on others.

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vincent Pryce on 02 Feb 2014, 12:24
Once upon a time there was a hard MMO and this gamer lady said to her boyfriend, "I never in my life thought I would ever need to say this...  the fuckin' guild or me."

Those types of 'bachelor-makers' should be avoided - not just games that take time, but ones that cause undue stress to the player making them snappy fucking assholes who take it out on others.

You mean like EVE?  :lol:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 02 Feb 2014, 13:06
Once upon a time there was a hard MMO and this gamer lady said to her boyfriend, "I never in my life thought I would ever need to say this...  the fuckin' guild or me."

Those types of 'bachelor-makers' should be avoided - not just games that take time, but ones that cause undue stress to the player making them snappy fucking assholes who take it out on others.

You mean like EVE?  :lol:

Not sure, I met the man I married in Otou. ;)

Maybe it's different for major FCs though.  Not sure.  He is just a small gang warfare ex-pirate.

 Mainly I mean the stuff like you have to be online at X o'clock no matter what -- and not just the folks in null, but *everyone*, every player has lockout timers and raid timers and etc., not just people like here with millions/billions in assets in places, and in game dynamics where "helping guildies" can eat hours and hours of your day. That sort of behavior just doesn't happen often in EVE - likely because of the social dynamic.

I got real fucking tired of my ex not coming to bed for 4-5,6 hours nearly every frickin night cause he was on corpse runs for people in his monarchy (Asheron's Call).  He got the ultimatum.

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 02 Feb 2014, 13:55
There's a reason Verone was heavily against 'alarm clock' ops whenever possible as far as folks in Veto went.

I only know of two such ops put on by the corp (big moves excluded) in the time I've known people who were in it, and I was there for both of them. I got lucky and was still in school at the time and could bend my schedule like that to accomodate. Not everyone else was.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Katrina Oniseki on 02 Feb 2014, 14:17
Once upon a time there was a hard MMO and this gamer lady said to her boyfriend, "I never in my life thought I would ever need to say this...  the fuckin' guild or me."

Those types of 'bachelor-makers' should be avoided - not just games that take time, but ones that cause undue stress to the player making them snappy fucking assholes who take it out on others.

Blame the personality, not the game.  The inability to make effective and reasonable lifestyle choices is not the fault of the video game. It is the fault of the player playing the video game. Games don't turn people into snappy assholes or keep them away from their wives and children.

Unstable and addictive personalities that have difficulty prioritizing what is most important in life do.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 02 Feb 2014, 14:43
Though it is still kind of sad that a game asks for that if you want to accomplish certain things.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vincent Pryce on 02 Feb 2014, 16:24
Once upon a time there was a hard MMO and this gamer lady said to her boyfriend, "I never in my life thought I would ever need to say this...  the fuckin' guild or me."

Those types of 'bachelor-makers' should be avoided - not just games that take time, but ones that cause undue stress to the player making them snappy fucking assholes who take it out on others.

Blame the personality, not the game.  The inability to make effective and reasonable lifestyle choices is not the fault of the video game. It is the fault of the player playing the video game. Games don't turn people into snappy assholes or keep them away from their wives and children.

Unstable and addictive personalities that have difficulty prioritizing what is most important in life do.

+1
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 02 Feb 2014, 21:23
Once upon a time there was a hard MMO and this gamer lady said to her boyfriend, "I never in my life thought I would ever need to say this...  the fuckin' guild or me."

Those types of 'bachelor-makers' should be avoided - not just games that take time, but ones that cause undue stress to the player making them snappy fucking assholes who take it out on others.

You mean like EVE?  :lol:

Not sure, I met the man I married in Otou. ;)

Maybe it's different for major FCs though.  Not sure.  He is just a small gang warfare ex-pirate.

 Mainly I mean the stuff like you have to be online at X o'clock no matter what -- and not just the folks in null, but *everyone*, every player has lockout timers and raid timers and etc., not just people like here with millions/billions in assets in places, and in game dynamics where "helping guildies" can eat hours and hours of your day. That sort of behavior just doesn't happen often in EVE - likely because of the social dynamic.

I got real fucking tired of my ex not coming to bed for 4-5,6 hours nearly every frickin night cause he was on corpse runs for people in his monarchy (Asheron's Call).  He got the ultimatum.
.

Raids?  Lockout timers?  I got into WoW because I was in school and switched to an EASIER game.  FFXI and its three-hour long bosses where you had to time your skillchain to within a second made 40 man raiding in vanilla WoW a vacation.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Desiderya on 02 Feb 2014, 22:41
Though it is still kind of sad that a game asks for that if you want to accomplish certain things.
Maybe stop wanting to accomplish certain things if the necessary investment is too high?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Shiki on 02 Feb 2014, 22:50
Maybe stop wanting to accomplish certain things if the necessary investment is too high?

Can confirm this happens to me in every MMO I try: a laundry list of content I will never experience.

I guess this is where roleplaying usually saves the day.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Desiderya on 03 Feb 2014, 02:29
Often that content is: I will never see raid x, which takes 4 hours,  because I can't/won't play 4 hours straight in my evenings. Circular.
Often people want the same gear, despite only needing top tier stuff for... top tier stuff. It's about managing what you want, I guess.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 10:08
Often that content is: I will never see raid x, which takes 4 hours,  because I can't/won't play 4 hours straight in my evenings. Circular.
Often people want the same gear, despite only needing top tier stuff for... top tier stuff. It's about managing what you want, I guess.

Cake. And sprinkles. And missiles that leave a trail of glitter. These are my wants, and I find them very well managed tyvm.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 03 Feb 2014, 13:38
Though it is still kind of sad that a game asks for that if you want to accomplish certain things.
Maybe stop wanting to accomplish certain things if the necessary investment is too high?

Maybe. Though asking players to remain completely alert and at disposal at any hour smells heavily of weird game design imo. But heh, that's an interesting experiment.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 03 Feb 2014, 14:10
Of course you can blame it all on addictive personalities.  (He wasn't my ex because I lost the decision making process, for reference.  He actually quit doing it once I demanded it).  Anyone can blame anything on anything.

EVE works basically the same way though, if you want supershiny you  need the ability/time to invest.  Some games have worse "alarm clocks" than others - Eastern MMOs are famous for them Rising Force was a bit insane with Chip War every 8 hours.. the logical reason is this way every time zone can participate in a chip war.  That's not how it works out once you combine humans into the programming.  Some games don't bother with it and do end up, to gamers "too easy", or not much of a game at all.  Different than balancing enjoyment with challenge and advancement in say, a tabletop GMing sort of way, computer games have profit margin stuffed into the calculation also.  Guess which one wins in importance.

And that's the deal, really.  People are as much a part of an MMO as the code, with all of their individual eccentricies and their common behaviors.  So when you look at something in a code and say "the player  should be more responisble" -- the coder made an opportunity specifically for a player to not be responsible because they added what translates as digital cocaine in ther hopes the subs would keep rolling in (and its well known what success does in the pleasure centers of people's brains -- game designers use gimmicks like that specifically for player retention, etc.  It's a formula that I wish I could find the paper that was written on it, but "fun" isn't even one of the variables.)

Being angry about the a viewpoint on the truth and throwing excuses is like being pissed at a friend for becoming an alcoholic when you always met him in the bar. ;)  (edit: specially when we're all sitting in here bitching about the taste and price of liquor these days)

MMOs are designed: to get X dollars a month subscriptions, or get people to spend X dollars a month the cash shop.  The fun part is almost optional.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 14:24
It functions much in the same way that other forms of entertainment do - it's not unique to video games. Recall the obsession over "what's going on, zomg can't wait for next week" when Lost was a big deal on television. It is the same thing, just not quite as perfected as MMOs.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 03 Feb 2014, 14:30
Likely, as a "perfect result" isn't someone losing their job and no longer seeing their real life friend for an episode of Lost, which was pretty common back in EQ1 days.  (i knew at least three people who called out of work enough times to lose their jobs for raids etc, or were too tired after raids, etc.) 

I was in the gaming subcommunity (ie going to gaming conventions to play tabletop games, etc) - those are nearly gone now as well, all the people who would go to them play MMOs instead. Bad? Good?  Winning losing different, I don't know how I'd define it.

As I can't even think how to define normal in a situation so in flux, perfection would be even harder to define, yup.

Unsurprisingly, I've never even seen a single episode of Lost. ;)

 
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 14:39
I never got into it either, but I certainly was surrounded by enough people who's speaking moments were inordinately possessed by the show to realize the effect it had on them. But this goes for people I've known who have fallen into the rabbit hole of certain reality shows, as well.

And obviously, "perfected" was a hyperbolic term. I was just meaning to relay that shows (currently) have limited feedback potential (either in interaction with the show being limited to once a week, or the viewer being primarily passive) and thus probably don't reach the level of potential obsessiveness of MMOs. But the principles the writers/producers try to facilitate in the creation of their show is the same. This is also where you see similarities between shows that went on way too long by creating more and more unknowns to try to keep the audience "hooked," and MMOs that reach their sale-by date of interesting content.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 03 Feb 2014, 14:47
Quote
People are as much a part of an MMO as the code

Very much this (for better or worse).
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 03 Feb 2014, 14:47
Or in the case of F2P's, content that specifically prey's on natural weaknesses or possibly real addictions - they call all those silly things in the cash shop "gamble boxes" for a reason. ;)  And a young kid playing a F2P game is suddenly allowed access to the mental equivalent of a casino site.  That there may be laws against gambling in that kid's location or what kind of effect it might have on them as they grow up isn't even cared about of course.

Because buying a card at the store that turns into special "game money" (opposed to the stuff dropped by monsters) somehow makes it all okay :)


Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 14:55
All of this is why I think we will see further merging between entertainment methods. While the Defiance MMO is a failure, I think that concept will be developed on in the future. Combine that with games like Heavy Rain, the possibilities for MMO-style entertainment spreading to other mediums is fairly open-ended.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Arista Shahni on 03 Feb 2014, 14:56
I know for a fact they mad a chance with the Defiance thing, cause for the first time ever, my friend Michelle installed an MMO.

She had to give up on it though.  She couldn't figure out how to make her character move.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 15:00
My impression is that it is one of those "right concept, wrong people" situations. I enjoy the show despite it's, well, yeah. Issues. But I never tried the game.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 03 Feb 2014, 15:15
Again, though, time consuming does not equal hard.  Plenty of games have been hard but aren't necessarily long, plenty of very long games are very easy (and yes, I'm looking at you, most recent Final Fantasy games!)  To be fair, I don't think MMO developers got that memo, or at least they haven't been doing it that way for a long time.  I don't necessarily need something to take a long time, in fact that might hurt me considering my job and the need to go back to grad school.  But I don't want the game to be a relatively easy chore to carry out so I can get a trophy.

I want the game to be trying its levelheaded best to stop and kill me.  Too often, I feel like modern games are playing teeball with us the whole way through so that we don't get frustrated.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 15:24
Right, but as Arista said, the purpose of making it long but easy is to keep subs going. If a game is short but difficult, it makes less money - either because you finished and are done, or because people get frustrated and leave.

This is also part of the reason why games like Eve have the mind-numbing anti-carebear attitudes - people feel the only relative difficulty comes from PvP, and everyone else are wimps by accepting the status quo of easy gameplay.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 03 Feb 2014, 15:59
Right, but as Arista said, the purpose of making it long but easy is to keep subs going. If a game is short but difficult, it makes less money - either because you finished and are done, or because people get frustrated and leave.

This is also part of the reason why games like Eve have the mind-numbing anti-carebear attitudes - people feel the only relative difficulty comes from PvP, and everyone else are wimps by accepting the status quo of easy gameplay.

I guess if I hadn't played so much FFXI, I'd agree.  That game was both ridiculously long and hard, yet kept subs going forever.  I think maybe because so much of the playerbase was Asian, and that market goes for the long and hard route.  I don't think there's anything stopping game developers from being able to make a game relatively difficult but also flexible with people's time, while still being deep enough to keep people interested for a long time except their own lack of creativity.

Probably the answer lies in a flexible environment, something you have to constantly struggle against and that can change over time.  Where the player is actually less important and is part of a working ecosystem where he is both hunter and hunted.  Then, you won't know what's coming from day to day as you move towards the end, only that even surviving is a success as you slowly work your way through the game content.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 16:08
Then, you won't know what's coming from day to day as you move towards the end, only that even surviving is a success as you slowly work your way through the game content.

I think this is the main concern regarding the current playerbase. Today's gamer doesn't want to just survive, they want something to brag about. They want the trophy, the gear, the killboard. Making things difficult reduces the amount of those things they can get as well as the frequency at which they get them.

This is why, in my experience, MMOs are continually heading more and more towards a PvP-oriented outlook when thinking of difficulty. Other players provide the difficulty, thus allowing gamers to continually achieve more and more on their own time in an easy and predictable manner to fulfill subscriptions, while relegating the "hardcore" gamers to PvP. So when someone can't achieve the bragging rights they want in PvP, they can always head on back to PvE and achieve something anyway.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 03 Feb 2014, 17:04
Then, you won't know what's coming from day to day as you move towards the end, only that even surviving is a success as you slowly work your way through the game content.

I think this is the main concern regarding the current playerbase. Today's gamer doesn't want to just survive, they want something to brag about. They want the trophy, the gear, the killboard. Making things difficult reduces the amount of those things they can get as well as the frequency at which they get them.

This is why, in my experience, MMOs are continually heading more and more towards a PvP-oriented outlook when thinking of difficulty. Other players provide the difficulty, thus allowing gamers to continually achieve more and more on their own time in an easy and predictable manner to fulfill subscriptions, while relegating the "hardcore" gamers to PvP. So when someone can't achieve the bragging rights they want in PvP, they can always head on back to PvE and achieve something anyway.

You don't see that as a complete cop-out, though?  It used to be that developers could make games both difficult and addictive, now the choice is to not make the basic game entertaining or challenging, just outsource the difficulty curve to the players?  If all the content is generated by the players, as in EVE, what exactly are we paying CCP a subscription to provide us monthly?  It can't take more than a few dollars a player to run a server and the expansions they give us aren't exactly packed with new content.

In the end, I think that's what kind of irks me about that model.  We're paying regular fees to play games that the developers are essentially counting on us to keep each other engaged in.  I don't think we should go to a FTP system, I just think developers should go to work everyday and earn their money.  I paid to play an ever-evolving game to conquer with complete strangers, not to be given some ships and say, "Now go play, we're going to watch TV and think about buying you a new matchbox car."
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 21:35
Well, Eve has never been about conquering. It is a "now go play" game. That being said, I do absolutely agree that more content should be developed and released. You'll get no argument from me there, I 100% agree that CCP should be releasing more content each year - and not even just expansions, but world news, etc. I mean, even the number of clothing that is in-game but not in-game is a good indicator. Everyone said, oh, it will be a Christmas present. Well, how many years have gone by without being able to actually use that stuff? Obviously clothing isn't very important in the grand scheme of things to non-RPers, but it is a nice microcosm of some issues.

But as far as difficulty and the rest of it, that's the price gamers pay for gaming going "mainstream". We can't argue that we aren't the geeks in the basement anymore then complain when the games start catering to a wide non-gamer audience.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 03 Feb 2014, 23:17
Well, Eve has never been about conquering. It is a "now go play" game. That being said, I do absolutely agree that more content should be developed and released. You'll get no argument from me there, I 100% agree that CCP should be releasing more content each year - and not even just expansions, but world news, etc. I mean, even the number of clothing that is in-game but not in-game is a good indicator. Everyone said, oh, it will be a Christmas present. Well, how many years have gone by without being able to actually use that stuff? Obviously clothing isn't very important in the grand scheme of things to non-RPers, but it is a nice microcosm of some issues.

But as far as difficulty and the rest of it, that's the price gamers pay for gaming going "mainstream". We can't argue that we aren't the geeks in the basement anymore then complain when the games start catering to a wide non-gamer audience.

I kind of miss being in my basement sometimes.  The wife's a geek, my friends are geeks, my family is made up primarily of geeks, all the mainstreamification of games has done is given us a lot more to bitch about.

I guess CCP could use some focus.  It is kind of funny that you spend so much time customizing this character, then you snap a still shot and that's what you have.  They want us to walk around the stations and see each other, but they never got around to figuring out how it would work.  As such, all the customization in the face, the costumes, the colors, you can't even see it in-game.  On the same token, the ships we actually do see are fairly similar.  I was kind of surprised to see an expansion come out that added just three ships, especially considering they don't have to change color or style.

But maybe the bigger reason they don't add much is the way they've set up their setting and the gameplay.  EVE space is fairly empty and EVE ships essentially fly themselves.  Since we don't ever get to visit the planets and space isn't hurtling asteroids and comets our way or forcing us to manage oxygen or fuel, there's just not much there to expand on.  It's trite but true: for the most part space is an empty place without much to do in and of itself.  Most Sci-Fi games involving space have a lot going on inside ships or on planets, moons, and space stations.  EVE is very much focused on the ship-to-ship interaction, which is limited to shooting at each other or not shooting at each other.

Maybe they just can't think of much to actually do.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Feb 2014, 23:31
I kind of miss being in my basement sometimes.  The wife's a geek, my friends are geeks, my family is made up primarily of geeks, all the mainstreamification of games has done is given us a lot more to bitch about.

I guess CCP could use some focus.  It is kind of funny that you spend so much time customizing this character, then you snap a still shot and that's what you have.  They want us to walk around the stations and see each other, but they never got around to figuring out how it would work.  As such, all the customization in the face, the costumes, the colors, you can't even see it in-game.  On the same token, the ships we actually do see are fairly similar.  I was kind of surprised to see an expansion come out that added just three ships, especially considering they don't have to change color or style.

But maybe the bigger reason they don't add much is the way they've set up their setting and the gameplay.  EVE space is fairly empty and EVE ships essentially fly themselves.  Since we don't ever get to visit the planets and space isn't hurtling asteroids and comets our way or forcing us to manage oxygen or fuel, there's just not much there to expand on.  It's trite but true: for the most part space is an empty place without much to do in and of itself.  Most Sci-Fi games involving space have a lot going on inside ships or on planets, moons, and space stations.  EVE is very much focused on the ship-to-ship interaction, which is limited to shooting at each other or not shooting at each other.

Maybe they just can't think of much to actually do.

I do agree that something like station-walking would have been a great thing if done right, but we've been told over and over that it is indefinitely on hold.

And honestly, I really don't have an issue with the game setting. My primary frustration is the lack of new lore, new news (lul), etc. And CCP trying to make null a larger focus. I will never care about null, and if CCP starts trying to force our characters to care about null through news and lore, that will be the end of it for me. I think if they put all their eggs in that basket, it will be a hiatus I'd never be able to return from.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vic Van Meter on 04 Feb 2014, 07:49
I kind of miss being in my basement sometimes.  The wife's a geek, my friends are geeks, my family is made up primarily of geeks, all the mainstreamification of games has done is given us a lot more to bitch about.

I guess CCP could use some focus.  It is kind of funny that you spend so much time customizing this character, then you snap a still shot and that's what you have.  They want us to walk around the stations and see each other, but they never got around to figuring out how it would work.  As such, all the customization in the face, the costumes, the colors, you can't even see it in-game.  On the same token, the ships we actually do see are fairly similar.  I was kind of surprised to see an expansion come out that added just three ships, especially considering they don't have to change color or style.

But maybe the bigger reason they don't add much is the way they've set up their setting and the gameplay.  EVE space is fairly empty and EVE ships essentially fly themselves.  Since we don't ever get to visit the planets and space isn't hurtling asteroids and comets our way or forcing us to manage oxygen or fuel, there's just not much there to expand on.  It's trite but true: for the most part space is an empty place without much to do in and of itself.  Most Sci-Fi games involving space have a lot going on inside ships or on planets, moons, and space stations.  EVE is very much focused on the ship-to-ship interaction, which is limited to shooting at each other or not shooting at each other.

Maybe they just can't think of much to actually do.

I do agree that something like station-walking would have been a great thing if done right, but we've been told over and over that it is indefinitely on hold.

And honestly, I really don't have an issue with the game setting. My primary frustration is the lack of new lore, new news (lul), etc. And CCP trying to make null a larger focus. I will never care about null, and if CCP starts trying to force our characters to care about null through news and lore, that will be the end of it for me. I think if they put all their eggs in that basket, it will be a hiatus I'd never be able to return from.

On the station-front, I think CCP kind of shot themselves in the foot with the detail and level of customization.  I know it takes the engine forever to load up just the CQ, so God only knows how it would handle fifty of our characters in a bigger room.

CCP seems to have a habit of having a great idea, then having it run out of their hands in practice.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 04 Feb 2014, 08:11
CCP seems to have a habit of having a great idea, then having it run out of their hands in practice.

I was having a conversation with folks on Twitter about this yesterday. Someone was guessing that the countdown timer on the Community website was for a new live event - and seemed to me to be genuinely expecting it to be that. I pointed out that that's the last thing CCP wants to do, because they have a shitty track record with regards to expectation management.

What live events in the last year or two have they put on, that after all their hype, did not turn out to be a major let-down in various regards?

Caldari Prime left a lot to be desired despite all the hype. The Ghost Site event was also clearly a pile of shit that did not live up to anyone's expectations, and the devblog reaction of CCP sticking their heads in the sand and pretending they didn't completely fuck up and that we, the players, were totally wrong and ignorant and had no idea how beautiful the totality of the Master Plan is, did much to reinforce the opinion that CCP has no fucking clue what it's doing with such things.

The first time I've seen CCP take a mature and appropriate response to the issue of expectation management was at Fanfest last year, and it was not by anyone working on EVE - it was the staff working on WoD, when they showed off the little gameplay video they'd put together. They explicitly went out of their way to say, no cameras, no video, this does not leave this room because we don't want people to get riled up about something we may throw away in two weeks because we feel a different direction is better. The folks at CCP working on EVE have a lot of trouble with that.

First people went "wait, what? events are good! y u h8 events!". It took a fair amount of explaining that, in fact, no, I was not advocating CCP stop running live events. More events are good. Hyping up shit well past the point CCP is capable of delivering is bad. (It took bringing up DUST as an example to get the argument acknowledged, in fact.)

I don't mind CCP hyping up things it can actually deliver on, but after the last several years I've got no reason whatsoever to consider CCP's hype to be trustworthy. And considering live events and the PF and RP are near-and-dear and a large part of the reason I still play this game, the last place I want to see CCP practicing successful expectation management with marketing's hype machine is my metaphorical bed in EVE.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 04 Feb 2014, 14:42
Actually Vic, you have to understand eve History to understand precisely why things like Walking in Station, or boarding of space stations in wormholes, atmospheric travel (that shit is from 2005 old, so their pretty visions and dreams are nothing new atall) and that kind of things, never happen, even in their smallest, most mundane form.

There is their inconsistency at project management, for one. I should know, it's the same where I work lol. It can be a damn mess at times, even with the best plannings and infrastructure. The reason is that people can be extremely fickle. Especially the ones in managerial positions. Also, internal communication. It's one of the main minefields to overcome.

There there is the community. You have seen how they can become when failures like Incarna do not deliver. They don't care about pretty graphics, they don't care about space barbie, they don't care about content. They care about their ships. They told it themselves : this is a game about internet spaceships ! Now nobody complains much. They get their rebalance focus, they are kept feed and happy. That's the kind of audience they make the game for, and it is only logical to do it. They make us dream every year with vids like Eve A Future Vision, but eventually it's just that, a show off.

Then you have actual R&D projects like Walking in Station managed by Torfifrans that got promising. Even before Incarna got out, a lot of people were already claiming "I Don't Fucking Care about your space barbie thingy, I just want internet spaceships !". It was already a keg of explosives way before.

Not that people do not give two shits at all, they will be happy if something new and daring and awesome is released, but they will also be much more happier if you just take care of their little space ships in their little corner of space.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 04 Feb 2014, 14:44
Basically, because of the player response to Incarna, we're never going to get WiS unless CCP diverts a team of people to work on it in secret, and never tells the playerbase about it until it's too late to remove it from the expans---oh. Wait. :|
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Esna Pitoojee on 03 Mar 2014, 01:54
So, I just played the beta event for this weekend, and will give some of my thoughts on the game in its current state and what I'd hope to see improved by launchdate.

DISCLAIMER I: I am nursing along a near-4-year-old computer that was no speed demon in its youth; as such, even with all graphics settings on minimum my hardware was a limiting factor in and of itself.

DISCLAIMER II: I only got to play for maybe 8 hours altogether; between the download (29 gigabytes!) taking ages to go through and a server crash on Saturday night, I didn't progress nearly as far as I wanted.

So, with that said, let me dive in. I created a High Elf "Dragon Knight" (spellcaster-ey type). The Tank-DPS-Heals trinity exists, with certain classes and races getting bonuses to certain armor and weapon types, but is by no means enforced: It is entirely possible to work against bonuses, so long as you don't mind missing the effects.

The Good:

- Audio. Audio is freaking glorious. All NPC interactions are actually audio, as would be expected in a TES game. More importantly, because of some of the visual difficulties (see below) audio provides very important clues regarding the presence of hostile creatures.

- UI is fairly intuitive, although if you come from other MMOs you may have to get used to having to use hotkeys for EVERYTHING in combat. One upgrade from TES games is the ability to store up to 5 skills at once ready for use, with another item hot-key slot offering the ability to que up 8 items for rapid access (similar to Oblivion's rapid-access wheel). Tabbing through available quests to view objectives is also nice and easy, accomplished through another hotkey - and of course the classic TES navigation compass is there at the top for viewing objectives and nearby sites.

- Movement is everything you'd expect out of a TES game. It's perfectly possible to vault low walls, leap from bridges or second-floor balconies, take shortcuts both up and down slopes, and generally parkour your way around the map.

- Crafting could use a 'craft all' button but is otherwise very nice and smooth. One thing I like is that you do not appear to be tied to levelling one or two professions on each character; it seems to be entirely possible to level up everything on one face, should you choose. Materials are not terribly rare; even with only 8 hours to play, I was able to gather up enough materials start cranking out alchemy and cooking products, with enchanting - which seems to use an almost Dragonshout-like system of combining multiple runes you gather - coming in a close third. Based on zone chat, material rarity for some crafting lines was an issue - but this seems like a fairly easy thing to fix. One thing I did like is - to encourage trade between players - certain materials are racelocked for usage but not for gathering.

The bad: Before I go on, I will say this: Yes, the 'bad' list is long. No, I am not bashing everything in the game; betas are meant to find these issues and fix them. Much like how I encountered many issues in the Guild Wars 2 beta that were gone by launch, I fully expect many of these to be resolved by ESO's launch.

- The lighting. Oh dear sweet lord the lighting. This was the issue that stood out the most: Even with contrast cranked all the way up, in any low-light situation - at night, in a dungeon, in the story-critical zone of Coldharbour - seeing objects in the game became incredibly difficult. I don't just mean you might miss the small detail you were looking for in a quest, I mean you'd miss entire buildings until you ran facefirst into the wall. Finding your way to the building's door? Better start casting AoEs on the ground and looking for the steps up. Inexplicably there are no carryable torches to be found, and fixed light sources cast tiny pools of light only a few feet from their location. This is to me an inexcusable issue that really needs to be fixed: Anything which makes gameplay difficult-near-impossible for >25% of the ingame time is a problem that needs fixing, ASAP.

- Lack of an 'MMO' feeling. This is my second biggest gripe: Much like what I've heard of The Old Republic, I couldn't say that I felt that included in a larger player group. Rather, it felt more like a single-player TES game with an occasional ally hopping along for the ride. Part of this was the difficulty (or lack thereof): I could work my way through the world alone without much trouble, including mob-infested dungeons and bosses. Two people were more than enough to easily handle the ruins/bandit hideouts/etc the game sent us to, and with 4 people at one point we were simply flattening everything in sight. I'm told that enemies are supposed to scale in difficulty to player participation somehow, but if that was so I didn't see it.

- I experienced some trouble with objects not rendering immediately. Most MMOs, of course, have some kind of a render distance limit; what made this an issue in ESO was how close I got before some things finally rendered. More than once I saw fences appearing on either side of my character or trees popping into existence a few feet ahead of him; at one point I stood in the location of a camp for a full five minutes before the camp decided to render.  While this may have been an issue with my sub-par computer, I don't necessarily think it was: Distance before rendering was highly inconsistent, with some objects appearing normally in the distance while others - as mentioned above - didn't appear until I'd been standing around a bit.

- Quests and objectives are... halfway good. There is no fast travel system, of course - not to the precision that other TES games have had, anyway - so you will find yourself running from objective to objective a lot. The presumption on the developer's part seems to have been that players would load up on 3-4 quests at once, then make their way across the map taking each objective as they found them rather than focusing on a single quest at a time. In practice, this sometimes works - but often you'll be left with one or two quests uncompleted whose objectives are far and widespread. There was definitely a feeling of "run for five minutes, kill a few things, run some more..."

- Item collection is another finicky thing. As you would expect for a TES game, many minor crafting items are within boxes/crates/bags/etc. What gets annoying in ESO is the sheer number of these things you have to search: An encampment can have a dozen containers... though some may already be empty. Another minor quibble I have is how said containers are placed: As there is no pick-pocketing/thieving component, any container you can open is fair game to take from. It feels weird - especially for a TES game - when you just stroll into someone's home and start rifling through their stuff and taking whatever you can find.

- Minor assorted quibbles:
     + Merchants are not well-marked, requiring you to look at them for a moment or two before the game tells you what they are. Finding them in the first place can be annoying.
     + Particle effects - especially smoke - seriously dropped my framerate. As mentioned above, my computer is hardly new or sprightly. This may be purely an issue on my end.
     + Dodging mechanics are tricky at best. Half the time they didn't seem to do anything.
     + Dislike lockpicking in TES games? Now try lockpicking... with lag!


CONCLUSION:

ESO is not a bad game. There's definitely serious room for improvement, but that's what betas are for. That said, I cannot see myself paying a monthly fee for this game... perhaps not even an initial purchase cost. It's simply not that eye-catching, pulse-inducing, interest-snatching of a game. Admittedly I didn't get far, but I didn't feel like I was expanding my skills or experiences for what progress I did make.

Thoughts/comments/questions? If anyone has any, I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 03 Mar 2014, 07:37
Still the possibility to play an imperial with the collector, or to play any race in any faction with pre order ? Both at the same time with preorder + collector combo ?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 03 Mar 2014, 07:56
Lovely, much appreciate the firsthand experience. If you continue to play, more updates/impressions would be nice.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 03 Mar 2014, 08:17
I only got to play for a couple hours this weekend (a little Friday night, and 2-3 last night) due to the New Eden Open, but I'm going to echo what Esna said for most stuff.

- Audio. Audio is freaking glorious. All NPC interactions are actually audio, as would be expected in a TES game. More importantly, because of some of the visual difficulties (see below) audio provides very important clues regarding the presence of hostile creatures.

- UI is fairly intuitive, although if you come from other MMOs you may have to get used to having to use hotkeys for EVERYTHING in combat. One upgrade from TES games is the ability to store up to 5 skills at once ready for use, with another item hot-key slot offering the ability to que up 8 items for rapid access (similar to Oblivion's rapid-access wheel). Tabbing through available quests to view objectives is also nice and easy, accomplished through another hotkey - and of course the classic TES navigation compass is there at the top for viewing objectives and nearby sites.

- Movement is everything you'd expect out of a TES game. It's perfectly possible to vault low walls, leap from bridges or second-floor balconies, take shortcuts both up and down slopes, and generally parkour your way around the map.

All of this, really. The voice acting is amazing. I watched the voice cast video so I already knew who I was going to hear, but I still let out quite a squee when I found John Cleese's character with the pot on his head.

I never got far enough to really look at crafting.

- Crafting could use a 'craft all' button but is otherwise very nice and smooth. One thing I like is that you do not appear to be tied to levelling one or two professions on each character; it seems to be entirely possible to level up everything on one face, should you choose. Materials are not terribly rare; even with only 8 hours to play, I was able to gather up enough materials start cranking out alchemy and cooking products, with enchanting - which seems to use an almost Dragonshout-like system of combining multiple runes you gather - coming in a close third. Based on zone chat, material rarity for some crafting lines was an issue - but this seems like a fairly easy thing to fix. One thing I did like is - to encourage trade between players - certain materials are racelocked for usage but not for gathering.

Did not know this. This is cool - I actually like this kind of race-locking.

- The lighting. Oh dear sweet lord the lighting. This was the issue that stood out the most: Even with contrast cranked all the way up, in any low-light situation - at night, in a dungeon, in the story-critical zone of Coldharbour - seeing objects in the game became incredibly difficult. I don't just mean you might miss the small detail you were looking for in a quest, I mean you'd miss entire buildings until you ran facefirst into the wall. Finding your way to the building's door? Better start casting AoEs on the ground and looking for the steps up. Inexplicably there are no carryable torches to be found, and fixed light sources cast tiny pools of light only a few feet from their location. This is to me an inexcusable issue that really needs to be fixed: Anything which makes gameplay difficult-near-impossible for >25% of the ingame time is a problem that needs fixing, ASAP.

This I suspect is more due to your machine. I didn't get to play as long as you did but I certainly did not see any issues with lighting, at all, in Coldharbour or anywhere else even remotely dark.

- Lack of an 'MMO' feeling. This is my second biggest gripe: Much like what I've heard of The Old Republic, I couldn't say that I felt that included in a larger player group. Rather, it felt more like a single-player TES game with an occasional ally hopping along for the ride. Part of this was the difficulty (or lack thereof): I could work my way through the world alone without much trouble, including mob-infested dungeons and bosses. Two people were more than enough to easily handle the ruins/bandit hideouts/etc the game sent us to, and with 4 people at one point we were simply flattening everything in sight. I'm told that enemies are supposed to scale in difficulty to player participation somehow, but if that was so I didn't see it.

I sort of saw this too, but I also didn't seriously get to play until late Sunday evening, so I wager most people had already powered themselves through the lower levels and were elsewhere in the game. I did encounter a fair number of people in one or two quest areas, though.

- I experienced some trouble with objects not rendering immediately. Most MMOs, of course, have some kind of a render distance limit; what made this an issue in ESO was how close I got before some things finally rendered. More than once I saw fences appearing on either side of my character or trees popping into existence a few feet ahead of him; at one point I stood in the location of a camp for a full five minutes before the camp decided to render.  While this may have been an issue with my sub-par computer, I don't necessarily think it was: Distance before rendering was highly inconsistent, with some objects appearing normally in the distance while others - as mentioned above - didn't appear until I'd been standing around a bit.

Without knowing exactly how this works in games, I might blame this on memory and/or computer speed - the stuff in the distance might already have been in memory, where stuff popping up close might not have been. Did you try tweaking LOD settings?

- Quests and objectives are... halfway good. There is no fast travel system, of course - not to the precision that other TES games have had, anyway - so you will find yourself running from objective to objective a lot. The presumption on the developer's part seems to have been that players would load up on 3-4 quests at once, then make their way across the map taking each objective as they found them rather than focusing on a single quest at a time. In practice, this sometimes works - but often you'll be left with one or two quests uncompleted whose objectives are far and widespread. There was definitely a feeling of "run for five minutes, kill a few things, run some more..."

Agreed, for what time I spent playing. I ended up getting stuck on a quest early on (just after being dumped out of Coldharbour on your head near a Khajit island) where the NPC companion for the quest went through two rooms of the temple, then stopped at the doorway and wouldn't move afterward, so when she wouldn't disenchant a bunch of bone-piles to disrupt some summoning ritual, I couldn't progress to the next part. It was late though, so I didn't really get to try dropping the quest and picking it back up.

- Item collection is another finicky thing. As you would expect for a TES game, many minor crafting items are within boxes/crates/bags/etc. What gets annoying in ESO is the sheer number of these things you have to search: An encampment can have a dozen containers... though some may already be empty. Another minor quibble I have is how said containers are placed: As there is no pick-pocketing/thieving component, any container you can open is fair game to take from. It feels weird - especially for a TES game - when you just stroll into someone's home and start rifling through their stuff and taking whatever you can find.

- Minor assorted quibbles:
     + Merchants are not well-marked, requiring you to look at them for a moment or two before the game tells you what they are. Finding them in the first place can be annoying.
     + Particle effects - especially smoke - seriously dropped my framerate. As mentioned above, my computer is hardly new or sprightly. This may be purely an issue on my end.
     + Dodging mechanics are tricky at best. Half the time they didn't seem to do anything.
     + Dislike lockpicking in TES games? Now try lockpicking... with lag!

Container-opening in an area where other players are located is also a little weird. Agreed on merchants not being very well-marked, and the questionable effectiveness of dodging mechanics. Didn't really have any issues w/ particle effects, and never got around to lockpicking, so I can't comment there.

My personal quibble: You can't see what keys do what, before you finish creating your character. So you can't take screenshots from the character creator. Not cool - I had to fudge around with the win7 Snipping Tool. I'll post screenshots to an imgur gallery (http://imgur.com/a/KNZdG#0) as I take them; there's only two pictures in there right now (both from the CC) but that'll change.

ESO is not a bad game. There's definitely serious room for improvement, but that's what betas are for. That said, I cannot see myself paying a monthly fee for this game... perhaps not even an initial purchase cost. It's simply not that eye-catching, pulse-inducing, interest-snatching of a game. Admittedly I didn't get far, but I didn't feel like I was expanding my skills or experiences for what progress I did make.

This is about the sum of my experiences thus far, but considering I only got maybe a grand total of 3-4 hours played thanks to the fifty zillion other things on my plate, I'm not going to count the game out just yet - I had fun in the few hours I did play.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 03 Mar 2014, 08:20
Still the possibility to play an imperial with the collector, or to play any race in any faction with pre order ? Both at the same time with preorder + collector combo ?

If this is still happening, it wasn't enabled in the beta this weekend- the Imperial wasn't an option in the CC. Or rather, it was listed but couldn't be selected.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Victoria Stecker on 03 Mar 2014, 08:51
The thing I'm hearing good stuff about elsewhere (read: FHC) is that the large-scale PVP is the thing the game does best. Anyone had any experience with that?

tbh, I don't think I have enough time to dedicate to an MMO to justifiy the cost.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 03 Mar 2014, 09:15
I think most of that is probably closed off to the people who are only able to get in a handful of hours instead of playing all day every day of the weekend, but I could be wrong.

Which is my primary issue with the way the beta is structured: I get the idea of wanting to do stress tests over weekends when people are available and have free time, but only having the servers up for those days and having them offline all others is just a bad idea imo.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Utsukushi Shi on 03 Mar 2014, 10:18
I found that ultimately the game felt like yet another WoW clone with a limited Elder Scrolls skin. CC and the classes were uninspired.  It lacked the physics elements I loved from other TES games (not terribly surprising given it being an mmo). I never got to any pvp though so maybe that's the bee's knees.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vincent Pryce on 03 Mar 2014, 11:28
I was left unimpressed by it's gameplay. The lore has already been butchered from what I hear. Didn't get to pvp.

I'm sure some will like it, but the game leaves me cold. Then again, TES series has been going downhill after Morrowind, though Skyrim had it's good moments.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Esna Pitoojee on 03 Mar 2014, 12:56
Still the possibility to play an imperial with the collector, or to play any race in any faction with pre order ? Both at the same time with preorder + collector combo ?

This is still the case, yes.

Lovely, much appreciate the firsthand experience. If you continue to play, more updates/impressions would be nice.

In case it wasn't clear - the beta event was only Friday-Saturday-Sunday; after that the servers closed again.

The thing I'm hearing good stuff about elsewhere (read: FHC) is that the large-scale PVP is the thing the game does best. Anyone had any experience with that? 

PvP is, I believe, level-locked and I was not able to level up far enough to get access to it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Desiderya on 03 Mar 2014, 13:30
Had a quick stint there this weekend, only around 4 -5 hours or so over three days, so not a terribly deep insight.
It's what it says on the box. Elder Scrolls Online. The character generation is very well made, and so far my favorite in contemporary MMOs. Everything seemed to be well-made but not outrageously inspiring, there were some odd bugs (hello stuck-in-crafting-station! How have you been since Skyrim?), movement and slaughtering was feeling nice for an MMO, with archery being even shittier than in Skyrim. The voice acting was indeed well, and the score was both familiar and really, really well-made. All in all I was enjoying playing with a friend, but everyone outside my group of two seemed to be out of place. This was of course cluttered in the early areas, but while I'd literally kill for the opportunity to play TES with friends I'm still not sold on the MMO concept in this time, as the world will always seem too small to support even its NPCs, let alone multiple superheroes. At least it felt that way when comparing the map with the two little starting islands I've played.

This is the same for basically every landscape MMO at the moment, but the focus on exploration might not work with too many people around. Also I hate sitting in the palace gardens, chillaxing with my mead and boytoys and seeing the goblin infested mine in (long)bow range.


In other words: I've seen a lot worse.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Esna Pitoojee on 24 Mar 2014, 23:04
I was on for the last beta weekend; unfortunately, that finished the day Backstage decided to kerplooie. Will post my further impressions and some screenshots tomorrow.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Rin Kaelestria on 29 Mar 2014, 11:41
Out of curiousity, is there anyone here who's going to play this game?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 29 Mar 2014, 12:04
I am... mostly to play with friends rather than because interested by the game itself tbh. On the EU server though.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Samira Kernher on 29 Mar 2014, 13:00
Nope. Have heard nothing but bad about it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 29 Mar 2014, 19:26
Nope. Have heard nothing but bad about it.

Really? Like what? Only negative things I've heard have been distances from towns to certain mission areas and some people not liking the bow mechanics.

Edit: I mean ESO-specific issues. The standard landscape MMO criticisms mostly seem to apply, from what I hear. I plan on checking it out, but not sure if my crappy internet will give me playable latency. Might have to wait until I get new internet, which hopefully will be soon.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Vincent Pryce on 30 Mar 2014, 04:04
Nope. Have heard nothing but bad about it.

Really? Like what?

Combat feels... Very meh. Most of the time you feel like an impotent duck flailing on the sea against space monkeys. It's just not that fun and lacks depth. Only indicator that anything is really happening are the red bars going slowly down. All in all movement felt sluggish and clunky.

Only time you can even interract with the opposing sides is instanced to pvp and only to pvp. This means when doing PVE content you do not see hear or interract with the other factions in any way, not even in zones that share questing content.

All that considered it just feels incredibly generic. It brings nothing new to the table so far. I can't even say it's a nice experience for the fans of the series when the lore has gotten CCP'd.

Like said earlier, I'm sure some will like it. The character creator is really nice and the voice acting at the start have some nice talent to it. SOme have said the game turns fun at endgame. Couldn't say, the beta time nor my interest lasted that long.

I was just extremely disappointed by the experience.

I'll probably give it a go again after it goes free-to-play, but I'm not gonna pay a dime for this travesty.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 30 Mar 2014, 04:30
Nope. Have heard nothing but bad about it.

Really? Like what?

Combat feels... Very meh. Most of the time you feel like an impotent duck flailing on the sea against space monkeys. It's just not that fun and lacks depth. Only indicator that anything is really happening are the red bars going slowly down. All in all movement felt sluggish and clunky.

Only time you can even interract with the opposing sides is instanced to pvp and only to pvp. This means when doing PVE content you do not see hear or interract with the other factions in any way, not even in zones that share questing content.

All that considered it just feels incredibly generic. It brings nothing new to the table so far. I can't even say it's a nice experience for the fans of the series when the lore has gotten CCP'd.

Like said earlier, I'm sure some will like it. The character creator is really nice and the voice acting at the start have some nice talent to it. SOme have said the game turns fun at endgame. Couldn't say, the beta time nor my interest lasted that long.

I was just extremely disappointed by the experience.

I'll probably give it a go again after it goes free-to-play, but I'm not gonna pay a dime for this travesty.

Yeah that's what I fear too...

Also, on the point that only the pvp area makes you interact with other factions while the rest of the zones are reserved for pve farming, which reminds me a lot of swtor sheer stupidity, I heard that they planned for inter factional guilds ? How does that fit into the equation ?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: kalaratiri on 30 Mar 2014, 12:27
WELCOME TO ESO

(http://i.imgur.com/xGDEF2Y.jpg)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 30 Mar 2014, 12:32
Nice. I didn't really think through the Early Access thing. Bought and started my download too late, it probably won't finish until most of Early Access is already done if not completely done.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Makoto Priano on 01 Apr 2014, 10:08
Bought in, and I'll try to give it a go these next few evenings. From what I'm hearing, though, it's a very conventional MMO dressed up in Elder Scrolls fluff.

If they'd just, y'know, found a way to do multiplayer Skyrim...
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ember Vykos on 01 Apr 2014, 12:20
If it had controller support it'd be awesome. Still debating it though. I played the betas and liked it enough, but not enough to really commit just yet. EVE has really spoiled me and I hate grinding, but ESO didn't seem that bad in that regard. Granted I never really got very far or even level up due to lack of playtime during the beta.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Samira Kernher on 01 Apr 2014, 19:41
Bought in, and I'll try to give it a go these next few evenings. From what I'm hearing, though, it's a very conventional MMO dressed up in Elder Scrolls fluff.

If they'd just, y'know, found a way to do multiplayer Skyrim...

This is why I'm not getting it.

Elder Scrolls has always had rather bland lore. The universe isn't that great. It was the exploration and freeform sandbox-ness of it that made it a good franchise.

With ESO, they decided to make a stock WoW-clone instead of adhering to the franchise's strengths. Ergo, no point in playing.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Gwen Ikiryo on 01 Apr 2014, 22:32
Elder Scrolls has always had rather bland lore. The universe isn't that great.

I'll forever hate Oblivion for making people believe this!

I actually don't really dislike the game - It's a bit WoWesque, but the developers have made a lot of efforts to make it feel more immersive and less like a typical MMO. Changing the combat system pretty much completely, minimizing the interface...

The only thing really wrong with it is the bugs. Atleast three times today, I've run into a crate or something at the wrong angle and been catapaulted into outer space while the pseudo-physics engine loses it's mind. Not to mention the amount of quests that have missing NPCs and are unfinishable.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Rin Kaelestria on 02 Apr 2014, 12:23
I'm not someone who's really been following along game after game with The Elder Scrolls series. I'll admit, my first experience with one was Skyrim, and I enjoyed that. That game made me look a bit more into the lore behind TES, and from what I've seen, the lore isn't bland, imo. Even considered looking into getting Morrowind for my laptop, if I can still find it out there.

But I do realize it's not everyone's cup of tea, so to each their own on if they like or do not like the game/lore.

As for myself, I'm taking a break from EVE regardless. Playing ESO while I'm on that break was a side thought. It's enjoyable enough, though just wish character creation wasn't done in a dark room where it's harder to see some details.  :lol:  Btw, if anyone's on the NA server, say something. Be more then happy to give you a shout in game.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 02 Apr 2014, 13:33
Some personal feedback on the character creation (the only thing I have played with intensively) :

It's a good character creator overall, but I was a bit disappointed eventually.

+ The options : probably more or less as many as in Eve. If not more, like the size of the hands/feets, and most importantly, the size of the character itself, which lacks in Eve. So you can customize pretty much every bit and element of the body, mostly in size (coming back to that later on). There are a lot of classic options, like the positioning of eyebrows, eyes, mouth, their size, etc. In terms of morphology, it's rather good with a decent amount of sliders.

- A big issue tied to that is that most of those sliders are actually modifying the size of the body parts. But there is absolutely no control on their shape or type themselves : for example, there is only one eye shape, one mouth shape, etc. Which is extremely disappointing and make every character look the same, even if you can customize their position and size.

+ Skewed parameters for eyebrows is an awesome feature. It helps make a face look asymmetrical, because symmetrical faces are unnatural and just can't be found in reality, except after heavy surgery. Also, the asymmetry in some of the features themselves, like on some eyebrows and the likes, is very appreciated. It makes character look more realistic and adds an appreciable rugged aspect to them.

+ The details are quite good, and the quality of the textures used is rather good. Well, at least for male characters, female characters looking completely bland in comparison.

- Like in Eve though, the graphic quality in the char creator is good (maybe not totally as good as Eve but close enough), but the actual result ingame is totally dumbed down, which is rather frustrating and misleading. At least in Eve the actual character portrait uses the high quality of the creator itself (server side, which is even better), and the ingame result was still ok. From my experience, the downgrade between the character creator and the ingame result in TESO is rather huge at times. Maybe it was just the rendering from the starting level though (I have yet to get past that xD).

+ Their triangle shaped sliders for the global anatomy (athletic, soft/plump, and skinny) is interesting and allows you to find a mix between all of those features. It offers a decent range of scales (but could have gone further on the big fat asses, like Eve that was too shy on that too).

- However it means that you can't set them up independently. It's a shame, it would have allowed even more differences between characters. Like being able to make a huge, obese character that is still muscular for example.

- On the bad sides, their main triangle shaped slider for the face follows the same principle between angular/soft/heroic (whatever heroic means...), but the differences are not so huge. Every portrait looks the same, even when changing all the sliders for all the face bits like the nose, eyes, etc, since you can't also change their shape and type.

- Even worse, the haircut options are totally limited with very FEW of them available, male or female, which doesn't help to differentiate characters. Considering that more than 20-30% of them are stupid classic mohawks (what the hell do all MMO have with mohawks ? It's easy to make, that's it ?). Not that I dislike mohawks, it can be fun, but having them making more than a quarter of the available haircuts is rather baffling.

----- Where the hell did they learn anatomy ? I mean, their male arms are very good, their male torsos not bad too, but wtf happened with the legs ? Legs are completely bizarre and unnatural. Double the effect on female bodies, which are completely bland and flabby/spineless. Add to that legs that do not seem to belong to the main curves of the body, where said curves are even detectable at all. Female bodies are awful and just look like cheap meatbags.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Katrina Oniseki on 02 Apr 2014, 13:34
Elder Scrolls has always had rather bland lore. The universe isn't that great.

I choose option E, "Strongly Disagree".

Elder Scrolls has always had incredible lore. If you take the time to read the books in the games, you'll find a complex web of interconnected events all affecting each other. If you want a good starting location for book reading, start with the series "2920 The Last Year of the First Era". The first book is called Morning Star. The order of books is the order of months, so follow that format until you get to book 12, Evening Star. It follows several characters through their travels across an entire year of history.

Also try reading the shorter book series in the following order, as they are not named in a way that suggests they are a series (though the first page of each book will advise you to read the previous volumes); Beggar, Thief, Warrior, and King.

I'll give you the assumption that you didn't start Elder Scrolls at Oblivion as Gwen suggested. I assume you're from Daggerfall or Morrowind (the two best), but if not... Oblivion was widely panned by many fans for being too stereotypical 'medieval' in nature. The reason is that for whatever reason Bethesda completely retconned and changed Cyrodiil from thick humid jungles to a temperate paradise. They added an ingame book to try and handwave the discrepancy as something that happened somewhere in 2E, maybe. There's no Bethesda meme smiley, so we'll just blame CCP for this one too:  :psyccp:

Anyways, there's the relationships between the Aedra, Daedra, mortals, the celestials, and now dragons too. There's the multiple political upheavals that, while each game only covers a certain province, are happening all the time everywhere. The ancient strife between the Dunmer and their enemies such as Norn, Dwemer, Argonians, and Imperials. There's the recent machinations of the Aldmeri Dominion. There's the races of Akavir and their influences to be seen all over the place. There's the constant interference of extra-planar beings (such as Aedra and Daedra). There's you're standard vampires and giant rats and stuff, sure... but there's more to it than that.

Even the Orcs take a page from Tolkien in how they are literally corrupted elves. The Orismer, corrupted by Malacath, turned hideous and aggressive, regressed to a tribal society. There's the Khajiit and their moon worship, and the various problems and intracacies that stem from that. Hell, the Khajiit are literally born differently based on what moon they are born under! From the same mother, a Khajiit's sibling can be completely different because he/she was born under different moons. There's always ancient and dead races, leaving clues and mysteries that later turn to define the nature of events. There's prophecy and destiny intertwined ingeniusly.

The Elder Scrolls has incredible lore. I'm sure if you squint your eyes and turn the corners of your lips down real far you can find flaw with anything, any game. But if you priase EVE for shades of gray, you should be praising TES... because TES arguably does an even better job at it than EVE.

I don't know, honestly, how you could find TES lore to be bland. Is it the swords and sorcery that turns you off? Is it the way the lore is presented in the games, hidden in dusty books and cryptic references placed throughout the story and world instead of in-your-face with news articles and live events? Is it the games themselves and the environments that don't capture your imagination?

I really just don't get why you'd call it bland.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 02 Apr 2014, 13:40
Considering that I am a pure neophyte in ESO lore since I have never bothered to play one of their games that do not fit my definition of single/solo play, and am starting to play this one with friends, I was trying to find what define exactly the 3 main factions and their political beliefs, ideologies, culture, etc. I mean, what makes them special and what they are, not just "hello, i'm the green team, you are the blue team, and the other one here is the yellow team".

When I say Amarr, there is immediately a lot of things and ideas that come with it instantly. When I say gallente, same.

But when I say Aldmeri, Daggerfall, or Ebonheart, it just tells me that one is yellow, the other blue, and the last one green...

Does someone have something better than the brief, blank description they have on their main site ?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Dessau on 02 Apr 2014, 14:29
Well, have fun on Nirn, you guys.

(http://i.imgur.com/qkfZa.gif)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 02 Apr 2014, 17:40
Quote
WELCOME TO ESO

Ouch.  It looks even worse than I feared.

Quote
Elder Scrolls has always had rather bland lore. The universe isn't that great.

Can't agree there.  Very detailed, and enjoyed how the lore interacted with the game world in Daggerfall (such as particular festivals and dates being important for summoning daedra).

Quote
But when I say Aldmeri, Daggerfall, or Ebonheart, it just tells me that one is yellow, the other blue, and the last one green...

Does someone have something better than the brief, blank description they have on their main site ?

Worth scrolling around here for lore - preferably outside of the ESO stuff as well  :s:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Daggerfall_Covenant (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Daggerfall_Covenant)

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Aldmeri_Dominion (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Aldmeri_Dominion)

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Ebonheart_Pact (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Ebonheart_Pact)


Edit: my links were somewhat shonky, and I feel a bit snarky about this three faction business. "It was a creation of unlikely allies, who had long histories of strife between them, but united for mutual defense..." to make things convenient for faction pvp.  :s
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 02 Apr 2014, 18:04
Oh, also -
Quote
Even considered looking into getting Morrowind for my laptop, if I can still find it out there.

DO EET  :D

Also keep an eye out for Skywind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJwpaVwOaHM (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJwpaVwOaHM)

Do want.  So very, very much.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Charles Cambridge Schmidt on 02 Apr 2014, 18:58
Elder Scrolls has always had rather bland lore. The universe isn't that great. It was the exploration and freeform sandbox-ness of it that made it a good franchise.

I don't agree with the former, but the latter is definitely a hard truth. The lore behind the Scrolls series was occasionally a more subtle flavor, with you as a player having to often times immerse yourself in the books and dozens of other things. Kat put it all quite nicely and into a tasty block of text, so I'm not going to make like a broken record. I feel like Skyrim really dropped the ball on the lore, and - dare I say - casualized the more "you're in over your head" scenario. When it gets to the point where staring straight at an Elder Scroll causes you to blink a few times and be done with it, then the lore's already broken. Speaking of, I'm not sure if this is even true, but I hope it really isn't an actual quote:
[spoiler](http://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1375/68/1375681231751.jpg)[/spoiler]

One of my many gripes with TESO is how a huge amount of in-game canon bible-tastic super-not-changed-since-the-start stuff is being thrown out the window simply because whatever. In addition to an already clunky combat system and unsatisfying and unimpressive questing, it's turning into
a stock WoW-clone instead of adhering to the franchise's strengths. Ergo, no point in playing.

That being said, my personal favorite book in the entirety of the Elder Scrolls series is http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Daedra (http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Daedra).
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Gwen Ikiryo on 02 Apr 2014, 21:37
Considering that I am a pure neophyte in ESO lore since I have never bothered to play one of their games that do not fit my definition of single/solo play, and am starting to play this one with friends, I was trying to find what define exactly the 3 main factions and their political beliefs, ideologies, culture, etc. I mean, what makes them special and what they are, not just "hello, i'm the green team, you are the blue team, and the other one here is the yellow team".

When I say Amarr, there is immediately a lot of things and ideas that come with it instantly. When I say gallente, same.

But when I say Aldmeri, Daggerfall, or Ebonheart, it just tells me that one is yellow, the other blue, and the last one green...

Does someone have something better than the brief, blank description they have on their main site ?

To the games credit, there's a little bit more to the stuff that defines the factions then just the stuff in plain sight on the wiki.

It's hard to explain in a way that won't seem a long-winded, but the conflict between the Daggerfall Covenant and the Aldmeri Dominion, which are both extremely Man-centric and Mer(Elf)-centric alliances respectively, goes all the way back to the creation of the mundane world, where the primeval spirits that would eventually become the mortal races were essentially tricked into diminishing themselves and being shackled to creation against their will. Some percieved this as a curse and despised the fact that they were "trapped" and burdened with finite lifespans, while others thought it was a blessing that gave their existances meaning where they previously had none. Those two groups became the Mer and Men respectively.

This fundemental different reaction to life as a whole - One embracing it, and the other viewing it as a test at best and something to be hated at worst, persists to this day in a fashion, being the basis for a bunch of religious and cultural divides. Since Nirn is a weird reality where the ideas people have can literally change the universe, both are profoundly uncomfortable about being put in a state of submission to the other. But since there's sort of a historical precedent and literal celestial mandate in the form of the Empire for one individual to rule over everything (and both having been subject to said rule at points in the past), they both want to make sure it's not them.

The Ebonhart pact is a little bit different, in that it's members don't really like eachother or really want to rule at all. They just want to destroy the idea of the Empire completely, so they can continue being isolationist for various reasons (keeping slaves and the faith of the Tribunal in the Dunmers case, continue being subservient to weird hive mind tree gods in the Argonians).

Though that's far from all there is to it! Elder Scrolls lore is extremely complex and often abstract in a way that EVE, which is a very literal this-is-how-it-is-and-that's-all-there-is-to-it setting, doesn't really try to be. So approaching the two with the same mindset probably won't work.

That said, I won't deny there's a bit of contrivance on the part of the developers to make the three factions, but from playing the game for a while and reading all the lore books, I'd still hardly call them shallow.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 02 Apr 2014, 22:02
If you've got a few hours to waste, ShoddyCast is doing a large series of youtube videos about different bits and bobs of the Elder Scrolls lore.

Season 1 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7pGJQV-jlzCPBUy9uAXQUXZ4UBaDLKS5) - Season 2 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7pGJQV-jlzB-qocScD0wPA5twwi1IM5p)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 03 Apr 2014, 02:15
Quote
It's hard to explain in a way that won't seem a long-winded, but the conflict between the Daggerfall Covenant and the Aldmeri Dominion, which are both extremely Man-centric and Mer(Elf)-centric alliances respectively, goes all the way back to the creation of the mundane world, where the primeval spirits that would eventually become the mortal races were essentially tricked into diminishing themselves and being shackled to creation against their will. Some percieved this as a curse and despised the fact that they were "trapped" and burdened with finite lifespans, while others thought it was a blessing that gave their existances meaning where they previously had none. Those two groups became the Mer and Men respectively.

This fundemental different reaction to life as a whole - One embracing it, and the other viewing it as a test at best and something to be hated at worst, persists to this day in a fashion, being the basis for a bunch of religious and cultural divides. Since Nirn is a weird reality where the ideas people have can literally change the universe, both are profoundly uncomfortable about being put in a state of submission to the other. But since there's sort of a historical precedent and literal celestial mandate in the form of the Empire for one individual to rule over everything (and both having been subject to said rule at points in the past), they both want to make sure it's not them.

The Ebonhart pact is a little bit different, in that it's members don't really like eachother or really want to rule at all. They just want to destroy the idea of the Empire completely, so they can continue being isolationist for various reasons (keeping slaves and the faith of the Tribunal in the Dunmers case, continue being subservient to weird hive mind tree gods in the Argonians).

The Daggerfall Covenant kinda makes sense, given they're all in the same kind of area (I seem to remember Orsinium wedged in the Illiac bay somewhere) but I struggle to see much common ground between the high elves and the Khajiit - with such incredibly disparate cultures, and re: the Dunmer's case and keeping slaves...they want to enslave the Argonians!  I know it's set in a much earlier time period, but sheesh. And they're all neatly three each? Brr.

From the wiki (emphasis mine):

Quote
In an unprecedented show of cooperation between races with a great deal of historical enmity, Jorunn and Almalexia worked together to encircle Dir-Kamal's forces in Stonefalls.[4] It was a close-fought engagement until the surprise arrival of Argonian reinforcements, who helped drive the invaders back into the sea, ending their threat to Tamriel.[2].

Quote
As a soldier of Skyrim, he was there when the Nords pursued the invaders into Stonefalls. He told me of an army on the brink of ruin, marching ever further into foreign territory, hungry and nearly broken, until the Dunmer brought in Argonian troops to aid the Nords.
No one expected this. I still cannot believe it. The Dunmer once held the Argonians as slaves, yet on that day, the Argonians' arrival changed the course of history. From the jungles they came, adorned with blood and mud. Akaviri fell beneath their claws, as well as the swords and spells of their Nord and Dunmeri allies. An alliance was forged that day and has never faltered since.

Quote
In the midst of such chaos, what choice do we have? Our alliance with the Dunmer and Argonians has stood for a decade. I have fought beside our allies in battle. And when I return home, I tell my children proud tales of victory over our foes, fighting with Dunmer and Argonians beside me.
The Pact never ceases to surprise me. I have spoken at great length with Argonian mystics, marveling at their view of the world. I have walked into the caves of Dunmeri priests, staring at shadows as they tell me tales of their gods.

Quote
Though we Nords of Western Skyrim, Your Majesty, were fortunate to escape involvement in the recent Akaviri invasion of Tamriel, it is nonetheless important that we try to understand this strange affair, especially as it has led our estranged kindred in Eastern Skyrim into a bizarre and ill-advised alliance with our ancient enemies, the treacherous Dark Elves of Morrowind.

Bizarre, ill-advised, surprising, unprecedented - I still cannot believe it. 
Le grumble. Even the npcs don't sound convinced.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Gwen Ikiryo on 03 Apr 2014, 02:39
The Ebonhart pact is pretty much the most contrived alliance, yeah. But I don't see why Khajit don't make sense - They're Mer as well, if... Weird ones, with ultimately a belief system that leans in the same direction as the Aldmer. They were in the second the third dominions, as well.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 03 Apr 2014, 05:05
Ok, thanks... That divide between men and mer sounds interesting.

Still feel a LOT contrived to me, or more exactly, rather vague and undefined. Those alliances just seem to be there, and that's it. They are just standing there without real basis. It all feels completely ephemeral.  I'm not really asking for a complete series of wiki articles like the eve wiki ones, but a few key sentences and definitions of the core beliefs and the history of each faction could be appreciated.

Well, maybe I will learn more while progressing into the game I believe...
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Gwen Ikiryo on 03 Apr 2014, 06:35
Ok, thanks... That divide between men and mer sounds interesting.

Still feel a LOT contrived to me, or more exactly, rather vague and undefined. Those alliances just seem to be there, and that's it. They are just standing there without real basis. It all feels completely ephemeral.  I'm not really asking for a complete series of wiki articles like the eve wiki ones, but a few key sentences and definitions of the core beliefs and the history of each faction could be appreciated.

Well, maybe I will learn more while progressing into the game I believe...

Well, the problem with that is that the factions, while they are (in extremely rough terms) each based around a rough set of ideals and goals, are ultimately invented just for the MMO. The real depth is the between the differences of the member states, not the alliances. For instance, I could give you a million reasons why, say, High Rock (Bretons) hates the hell out of Skyrim (Nords) in both idealogical and historical terms... But, not so much for why the "Daggerfall Covenant" hates the "Ebonhart Pact", if you understand.

You could basically sum the whole conflict up with "Aldmer hate Empire being ruled by humans who keep failing in their duties to safeguard the world from Daedra and decide to take over, form Aldmeri Dominion, Bretons terrified of Aldmer enslaving them again if this happens, form Daggerfall Covenant, Dunmer afraid of any new continent-spanning power and want to smother them both in their cribs, form Ebonheart Pact" as I understand it, though. It's a reactionary conflict.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Tiberious Thessalonia on 03 Apr 2014, 07:04
Bought in, and I'll try to give it a go these next few evenings. From what I'm hearing, though, it's a very conventional MMO dressed up in Elder Scrolls fluff.

If they'd just, y'know, found a way to do multiplayer Skyrim...

This is why I'm not getting it.

Elder Scrolls has always had rather bland lore. The universe isn't that great. It was the exploration and freeform sandbox-ness of it that made it a good franchise.

With ESO, they decided to make a stock WoW-clone instead of adhering to the franchise's strengths. Ergo, no point in playing.

Wait what
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 03 Apr 2014, 07:32
Bought in, and I'll try to give it a go these next few evenings. From what I'm hearing, though, it's a very conventional MMO dressed up in Elder Scrolls fluff.

If they'd just, y'know, found a way to do multiplayer Skyrim...

This is why I'm not getting it.

Elder Scrolls has always had rather bland lore. The universe isn't that great. It was the exploration and freeform sandbox-ness of it that made it a good franchise.

With ESO, they decided to make a stock WoW-clone instead of adhering to the franchise's strengths. Ergo, no point in playing.

Wait what

I was waiting for this response. :lol:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 03 Apr 2014, 10:37
Quote
But I don't see why Khajit don't make sense - They're Mer as well, if... Weird ones, with ultimately a belief system that leans in the same direction as the Aldmer. They were in the second the third dominions, as well.

Ultimately, I guess because there's a definite sense of them being drifters, outcasts and looked down upon by other races in the other games:

Quote
These skills, combined with the general tendency of humans and mer to look down on Khajiit and "beasts", leads many Khajiit outside of their home province to become bandits or professional thieves and assassins.

...and I always got the impression that High Elves were particularly snobby. 
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Rin Kaelestria on 03 Apr 2014, 11:25
Without revealing too much of the begining storyline for the Aldermi Dominion, you do get a chance to speak to the Queen herself and even ask her questions. When asked why she formed the dominion, she said that in her travels of Tameriel, she saw the troubles that plagued the land. Basically, she wants to fix that, but admits that the Altmer alone are too few in number to accomplish the task at hand. Though negotiations with the Bosmer and Khajiit, the Dominion was formed. Through her words and actions, you also get that she feels the other two races in the Dominion alliance are on equal grounds as the Altmer.

Her way of thought hasn't settled well with quite a few people. There are Altmer who cling to the supremacy of the Altmer race, and it has caused problems for her rule. From these people, I can sense the begining of what makes up the Aldmeri Dominion in the fourth era (Skyrim) that we all come to hate.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Silas Vitalia on 03 Apr 2014, 18:00
Not my particular set of fiction tropes, but hope some of you are having fun!

Does the game offer much in the way of things to do if you don't do any of the quests or storyline? Like in EVE you don't have to do any missions and can play for years?


You know....

Somewhere out there, I feel like there's room for an Eve / Day Z / Rust /Dark Souls  style fantasy MMO, unmatched in its brutality and willingness to let you seize all you can.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQ6335puOc
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 04 Apr 2014, 01:53
Not my particular set of fiction tropes, but hope some of you are having fun!

Does the game offer much in the way of things to do if you don't do any of the quests or storyline? Like in EVE you don't have to do any missions and can play for years?


You know....

Somewhere out there, I feel like there's room for an Eve / Day Z / Rust /Dark Souls  style fantasy MMO, unmatched in its brutality and willingness to let you seize all you can.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQ6335puOc

Not really as far as I know. It's a pretty standard MMO with an ES flavour on exploration and skilling system. Like in Swtor you can more or less bypass all the questing system with pvp I guess, but some basic quests will have to be made to obtain the proper skills I think. The quests stories seem rather nice though, not tested much of them yet. Better than the shit we were served on swtor anyway, hands down.

I have to admit that ES is not necessarily my type of setting (I always say, let the elves and trolls and dwarves to Tolkien and do something new), but there is a certain atmosphere that is at least nice/ethereal. Well, from what I have seen until now, which doesn't mean much yet (I have started to watch Morlag Bal vids linked above...).

The lore looks completely bland from the outside, but it totally trumps that once you got to discover it at least a bit. Still not my favoured type of setting, too much magic for the sake of magic (want to see a true master piece of fantasy ? go play something like FFX and see why magic has a totally different meaning in that kind of settings), but it seems pretty good so far.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 04 Apr 2014, 02:25
Some more personal feedback on the skill system...

Well, TESO seems to be the conventional MMO that still tries to achieve its own flavour and endemic little bits of particular gameplay, like exploration, etc. And while it is certainly far from being ground breaking and gets a lot of its inspirations from either ES games or other past MMOs, it seems to do it decently, but not enough.

TESO seems to have made the choice to put the emphasis on freedom for the player to customize his skills and character the way he wants, a bit like it was possible in SWG, and TSW. The only thing that you seem to have to do is to choose a race and a class, and then it's mostly up to you which skills and stuff you will learn and attach to your character.

Before continuing, for those that have not played SWG (pre NGE) and TSW, here is a gross summary of what skilling is in both :

- SWG had something like 32 professions, including the crafting and social ones, maybe around a dozen of those, and those were one of the main strength of the game, which was very sandbox like. Entertaining and recustomization professions were a strong feature of the game that really bolstered player interaction and social places (like cantinas), with people selling their services and the likes. Anyway, you could choose each time a basic profession that opened the door to many other advanced professions. Once you had gathered all the skill branches of the basic one, you could then start to unlock the advance one of your choice. It was only possible for example to get xp in pistols by using pistols, of course, or in surgery by healing. It was more or less possible to have 2 advanced professions unlocked before running out of skillpoints to spend. Which meant that you could have 2 main combat professions, or 2 social/craft ones, or some kind of hybrid between both. It was possible to change your build any time you wanted, but it was no skill respec like we know these days, meaning that you just erased your skillpoints attribution and started grinding another profession from scratch. But you could change everything at will and make your character something else, thus why you could only have one character per server, unless paying other accounts.

- TSW has around 250 skills that you can learn/unlock, placed on a skill wheel, all tied to a weapon (9 of those). You have to unlock first the core basic skills of a specific weapon before accessing the advanced ones on the outer wheel. You have absolutely zero skillpoints to allocate in the unlocked skills. All the skills you unlock with xp are free to use (either passives or actives), but depending on the weapon you use (you can use 2 at the same time), only the active skills related to said weapons are usable. For passives though, they could be used at any time. And, to limit that a bit more, you havd to choose 6 active skills to add in your hotbar (including one ultimate), and 6 passive skills in the second hotbar (including one ultimate). Only those skills were considered activated and usable, so it was a bit like doing one's own deck of skills. It is probably the most intriguing and free concept of skill system that I have had the occasion to use tbh. And it was rather deep with all those skills and the synergies between each of them to be done (every skill, active or passive, was doing a specific kind of effect, or taking its power from some kind of effect, and combining skills between the links and combos they could provide between them was an interesting exercise in theorycrafting, with absolutely no shame compared to eve).

Well now, that said, TESO uses a kindof similar system, but a bit more messy. You have to choose a race and a class when creating the character, and those will not be subject to change once selected, so choose well... More on that later.

In fact, everything or every item has an associated skilltree. Your class has a main skilltree with 3 specializations with passives and actives, your race has a little skilltree of a few passives, same for your armour, and your weapon has a skilltree with actives and passives. It's interesting because like in SWG, depending on the skills and items you use, you will gain xp in those particular skills and items to spend.

Then you have a little hotbar to fill ala TSW, with 5 active skills to add, and an ultimate. You can then unlock a second hotbar with a second weapon, but unlike TSW you can't use both weapons at the same time in combat, it's just to quickly be able to switch between 2 "decks" of skills. For passives, as long as you unlock them, they are permanently applying, but most of them just boost a specific set of skills or weapons.

Well, all in all, I find this system interesting because it breaks the monotony of wow like predefined systems where you only have to choose a class, and then a few specializations, with the rest being already optimized and calculated for you. Here you have more freedom to do what you want.

The main issue I find with this system is that unlike TSW and SWG where you could really do what you want, here you still have to choose a damn class and a race with specific bonuses. Well, at least, I can understand it for the race since it's rather minor, but for the class, it's something like 25% of your accessible skills. And once done, you can't change it, which can become a nightmare. Want to do a high elve ? And being a brute instead of a wizard ? Well, too bad for you, they have little bonuses for wizardry. Chose a templar because it looked cool, but find yourself disappointed with the skills it brings later on ? Well, you can start a new character from scratch dude.

The problem is that like TSW, this game does not offer any counsel or advice on what to do, or how the system really works. Once you get into the game, and start randomly unlocking stuff, and even before when choosing your class and race, you only get served a tiny cryptic and vague description. You don't really know what you will be getting eventually, so either you do it blindly, or you do your research on the internet before. At least in TSW, the basic skills were unlocked very fast and more importantly, the devs were conscious of the obscure side of their system with hundred of skills to read, so they provided pre made templates to follow (archetypes). Here, there is none of this. There are a lot less skills yeah (and that's not necessarily a good thing), but the first impression is just that the system is damn obscure and messy, because nothing is explained. You have to do your own research. It is the main issue plaguing such systems, where devs do not seem to know how to introduce players to it. Everytime I play with friends to such games (TSW, PoE, or here TESO), I ALWAYS have at least one that will just choose shitty skills combinations or do whatever he wants without thinking of the coherence of his build, and find himself with a dumb gameplay, or a dumbed down character. And then being disgusted of the game because the system "sucks". Well no, it sucks because you didn't bother to learn how the system works, dude.

And your class being locked really sucks, if you want to switch for another one. After all, it's just another set of skill trees, it's not like you were going to change your race or your face or whatever... Why locking the class when your system basically relies on a free customizable skill system ? It's like shooting oneself in the foot.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ollie on 04 Apr 2014, 05:43
WELCOME TO ESO

(http://i.imgur.com/xGDEF2Y.jpg)

Your quest log says you're looking into back-alley murders. My bet is that wasn't what you had in mind when you asked all your suspects to "get in a lineup".  :bash:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Tiberious Thessalonia on 04 Apr 2014, 07:40
WELCOME TO ESO

(http://i.imgur.com/xGDEF2Y.jpg)

Your quest log says you're looking into back-alley murders. My bet is that wasn't what you had in mind when you asked all your suspects to "get in a lineup".  :bash:

Says you.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 04 Apr 2014, 07:48
You know how you keep going on and on and on about how we never go up to the Cloud District, Nazeem?

This shit is why.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: kalaratiri on 07 Apr 2014, 09:54
(http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-SgspgPN/0/1050x10000/i-SgspgPN-1050x10000.jpg)

Penny Arcade ♥
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 08 Apr 2014, 10:55
Couple of opposing viewpoints on the game here, which I found interesting for comparison.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/07/impressions-the-elder-scrolls-online/ (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/07/impressions-the-elder-scrolls-online/)

(and the less critical) http://www.computerandvideogames.com/457725/the-elder-scrolls-online-pc-launch-review/ (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/457725/the-elder-scrolls-online-pc-launch-review/)

Here's the bits they seem to disagree on specifically:

Exploration

Quote
You know how in Skyrim or Oblivion you could be happily wandering along and find yourself distracted by quest-laden NPCs running up to you or the sight of age old ruins promising treasure cropping up on the horizon? Well that's exactly what you can expect here. Zenimax seems hugely concerned with rewarding exploration, to the point where it's easy to forget what you were doing before said distractions reared up.

vs

Quote
It just feels so restricted. There may be a huge world out there, yes. But the in-game map does not make it feel like it. If you are in a town, the map will give you a small, enclosed view of where you are. You can select another map to check out other destinations. But nothing on these other maps is labelled or hinted at. There is just a chunk of world, criss-crossed with uniformly pale roads and peppered with samey circular ruins, none of which have any real intrigue about them. If the game wanted to create a sense of adventurous exploration, it fails the moment it does not give you the desire to tramp off in the direction of a mysteriously-named cove, or a creepy-looking swamp.[...] It is not much to ask of a series famed for its exploration to erect a visible, reachable mountain in the distance, or a vast forest, or an eerie, dried-up riverbed. Something (anything!) to peer at and say: That looks cool, let’s go there.


Story

Quote
It's with a near constant stream of well-told, sharply written and pleasingly winding stories that TESO will sell you on its world. From compact, tightly woven narratives that take you minutes to resolve, all the way to multi-threaded epic yarns spread across entire zones and involving huge casts of recurring characters. [...]  Tamriel provides a seemingly endless collection of tales that you can tap into and share.

vs

Quote
Even in Elder Scrolls terms (a series not exactly famed for its abundance of personable characters), the stories told here are mind-numbing. When they are not as dull as old boots they are clichéd and full of ‘twists’. The person you are looking for has been mysteriously murdered. The family member you are saving from the fire/baddies/curse is the one responsible for the fire/baddies/curse in the first place. On and on these plots reappear, seemingly without end. There are only so many times you can end up in a jail cell before you begin to gnash your teeth with as much madness as an actual prisoner. This (along with the deeply uninspired puzzle elements often included) makes a lot of the missions just as shallow as any fetch quest. The whole experience is drier than a bowl of un-milked muesli.


Combat


Quote
Compared with many MMOs, combat here feels more physical, with hits landing with an easily readable series of thwacks and grunts. Essentially you attack and defend through mouse clicks, just like you would a traditional Elder Scrolls game, though now you have access to six extra abilities at any set time.

Exchanging blows with foes is more active an experience than many MMOs, too. Area-of-effect attacks are projected onto the ground via throbbing red circles, cones and rectangles. Double tap a movement key and you can roll out of the way of incoming blows.

vs

Quote
Teamwork meant that my pal could take the heat off me as the tank but – beyond some buffing, dodging and basic counter-attacks – I found the combat to be a soulless barrage of button-tapping. A kind of dispassionate finger-twitch you develop in an effort to make enemy health bars drop faster. Despite the attempt to make the combat more physical (for example, with liberal use of area of effect attacks and blockable power strikes) you quickly revert to the standard brainlessness of cycling through the number keys until you find the combination of attacks that kills things fastest. I actually started to avoid fights, not because the enemies were too powerful or too numerous. Simply because it was so tedious. In a game were large chunks of your XP is supposed to come from slashing up millions of enemy mobs, this is not a good sign.

Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 08 Apr 2014, 13:03
Having played it a bit more, both views seem reasonable to me, but too an extreme. I fell in between for all most of the time in my appreciation.

For exploration, well, I never played a solo ES before... But this MMO managed to make me explore willingly a bit more. Not that much though. I tend to do it regularly on most MMOs to see what's there, or more exactly, what could be there when the sight of it doesn't have any appeal. So yeah, some hidden stuff here and there to be found, definitely more than on your average bland MMO, but that's it.

Story wise, it's decent, really. A lot better than the bullshit, cliché, pubescent stories that you got served on swtor. Compared to most MMOs (where the level is abyssal on that point anyway), TESO is only second to TSW imo. A lot behind TSW though. The stories are interesting in TESO, and what makes it the most endearing is its atmosphere, but compared to TSW, the quality of writing plays on a very different level, sadly.

Combat, well, that's probably the point where i'm the less impressed. Everything feels dumbed down. I like their mechanic of attacking / parrying. But you barely use it since you spamm specials and abilities, like on any MMOs. And most of those do not seem so different from each other, without much synergy. Most of the system is easy to understand once you have started leveling and unlocking skills, but it's very hard for me to see for now what makes a combo of skill efficient or not. There is no real true synergy of various effects, and not much effects to begin with, behind. It's mostly dps, dot, heal... And the combat overall feels very fast repeating and boring as hell. Not even better visually than TSW, which was not very beautiful. And it's too easy. You spend your time oneshotting most mobs, with some bosses incredibly tedious to compensate... Not really designed for multiplayer gameplay...


Overall, while not totally enthralled by it, I have to admit that at least it made me play and kept me for now, as a decent casual entertainment.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 08 Apr 2014, 13:10
If you're enjoying the exploration in ESO, Lyn, you probably should pick up Skyrim and play around with that. It's not that expensive anymore.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 08 Apr 2014, 14:47
Actually, that's something I don't like in ESO. I feel constrained to explore because otherwise I wouldn't get those bonuses and rewards. It's extremely irritating to have that at the back of my mind and it loses really fast the enjoyment factor.

When I do it on other MMOs, it's mostly willingly because it's beautiful, not because I want to search every corner and turn back every stone to find if I haven't missed anything...  :bash:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 09 Apr 2014, 15:06
Quote
Having played it a bit more, both views seem reasonable to me, but too an extreme. I fell in between for all most of the time in my appreciation.

Hm, yeah.  The enviable middle ground  :)

I think some of the differences (as well as being different people) come in with what you compare it to...  Other MMOs or other elder scrolls games. 

Quote
Actually, that's something I don't like in ESO. I feel constrained to explore because otherwise I wouldn't get those bonuses and rewards. It's extremely irritating to have that at the back of my mind and it loses really fast the enjoyment factor.

When I do it on other MMOs, it's mostly willingly because it's beautiful, not because I want to search every corner and turn back every stone to find if I haven't missed anything...  :bash:

Oddly enough, I'm the opposite.  Well...I didn't in UO, or in EVE, but in a lot of MMOs I've played it's almost a frantic go-here-get-this-click-that-unlock next doodah-DING I GET A HORSE-go here.  I know it's part of the psychology of the linear quest lines (do this, get reward!) as well as the intrinsic materialism (NEW SHINY THING GOOD!) but also I think on some level there's an element of competitiveness.  Everyone rushing around doing the same sort of thing...Like I shouldn't fall behind or something. I'm not even sure  :|

In the elder scrolls games I stopped to sniff the flowers more.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 09 Apr 2014, 16:18
But that's the damn issue, I don't even stop to sniff the damn flowers, I am literally freaking out because I might miss that shitty glowing stone that is hidden in the most incongruous places. I'm not actually exploring, i'm just playing hide and seek all the time. I'm not happily taking the time to enjoy the environment, and that's the damn irony here. :/

You don't make players enjoy exploring by hiding shinies for them to look for. If they like exploring, they will do it naturally if your landscape is nice.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Kala on 10 Apr 2014, 09:53
Ah, ok.  Misread what you said a bit there (thought you meant you that's how you reacted in single player games compared to MMOs, not ESO compared to other MMOs - even though you said so quite clearly  :oops:)

But yeah...agreed, hiding shinies is putting the motivation to explore in the wrong place.  I think pace is definitely also an issue.  A lot of MMOs feel absolutely frantic to me. Which is part of the hook, but doesn't lend itself to just...looking around at stuff.

I explored the shiiiiet out of Ultima Online and there was very little reward/incentive for that other than my own interest  :P In fact, there was mostly death  :mad: But you sorta had to just...go find something to do yourself.

People commented in that ESO review I linked that it's silly to complain that areas are gated, as it's a MMO and MMOs have to do that, as mobs can't scale up to your level as they could in a single player game.

UO didn't do that.  You could go all over the land and sea, and sometimes there'd be things you could handle in the wilderness - sometimes not.  Sometimes you might find a dungeon you could cope with, other times you'd walk in, find a load of dragons and liches, turn round and run out again (because no).  If you happened along something that you couldn't cope with at your level of skills, hard cheese. You'll die, likely lose your stuff and learn to run away next time.

Sometimes I feel like a little old person.  IT WAS BETTER IN THE OLD DAYS.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 10 Apr 2014, 13:02
Quite so.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ollie on 13 Apr 2014, 00:16
When I (explore) on other MMOs, it's mostly willingly because it's beautiful, not because I want to search every corner and turn back every stone to find if I haven't missed anything...  :bash:

This is one of the best things about Skyrim (and most of the post-2000 ES games), in my experience. You're on your way somewhere to kill 10 rats/fetch a sword/blahblahblah and you see something that makes you go 'Screw this dull quest stuff, I want to go there' and you do and suddenly you're unable to account for exactly what you've been doing in the game for the last two hours.

While it probably sounds cliche, there's no reward in that except the immersive experience itself.

If ESO managed that, I'd be purchasing and subscribing, but to me it sounds more like just another theme park with a bunch of signs indicating which height you have to be to participate in the various rides?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 13 Apr 2014, 03:01
Skyrim and other ES are themeparks too. That's their very definition, you enter the game (the park) and you then have access to a lot of quests and stuff (theme attractions, carousels, etc) scattered everywhere, just like it is in a themepark. Just with less restraints and corridors and more freedom to go wherever you like.

The problem I see starts with "screw this dull quest". Why bothering developing dull quests in the first place ? It's one of the main things with western RPGs, you always have a shitload of so called "secondary quests", where the story most often tastes like shit and is indeed dull as hell, just for the sake of adding more content because they can't fill their game lifespan quota with their main story to begin with. Secondary quests always feel like either "kill 10 rabbits" or when they are more advanced, like they were not deemed good enough to be part of the main story. If they suck so bad, why putting them nevertheless in the first place ?

(http://porkanagem.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/jackie-chan-meme-why.jpg)

Granted, I have heard that in Skyrim for example, some secondary storylines like the brotherhood of darkness are actually even better than the main storyline.

Oh well, in the ES games (which are really good games I think for those who like) you have 2 mentalities. I have friends that love it because their reasoning is not the one of an achiever. They explore stuff that seems interesting and if they find a goodie somewhere in there, it makes them happy with that little bonus they discovered. To me it has the exact opposite effect. I just have to know that there is stuff to be missed that exploration suddenly turns into a nightmare that usually make me stop playing pretty fast if I have to turn every stone to find the stuff I might miss. And i'm not speaking about useless goodies, i'm speaking about lore, stories, or important leveling items, whatever.  vOv
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Matariki Rain on 15 Apr 2014, 04:07
ESO is being kinda fun so far. :)

Weird thing: my primary conditioning is to go all High RP on it, but I'm sufficiently worn out with RP and second-job-you-pay-for gaming that I'm happy just absorbing the lore and wandering the world. (The good stuff is off the paths or on the bookshelves. To understand my idea of "good stuff" remember that I appreciated Dear Esther.)

There's some very pleasant voice acting and some pleasing character writing. I'm not sure whether I'll find myself an end-game that'll be satisfying longer term but... I'm in no hurry.

If any of you can recommend lore resources which explain more about the social units and typical life paths of people from the various species/races, I'd appreciate pointers. More info like that in Katrina's post two pages back (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=3219.msg96426#msg96426) is the sort of thing that I'll lap up. :)

(Edit: Why, yes, I'm an Elder scrolls newbie. Ulf's given months of his life to the franchise, but still can't answer my questions about things like where little Orcs come from if the chief is the only man allowed to take wives. Does a chief take lots of wives and maintain a small clan of close family, or do the non-chiefly folk somehow manage to reproduce without marriage? Questions like that one still exercise my mind. Gently.)
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 15 Apr 2014, 04:19
From what I have seen for now, ES is one of the most irrational universe I have seen that doesn't really bother explaining that kind of things, as long as it serves their storytelling...
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Gwen Ikiryo on 15 Apr 2014, 04:27
There's a bunch of good guides to all the playable races on teso-rp, their backstage analogue, if I remember. With sources and stuff. That might be a decent place to start.

That being said, Elder Scrolls is such a stupidly massive universe where so much of the information about the world is framed through a subjective lens, that it's probably impossible to just learn the whole setting. That's not the best way to approach it.

And yes, the chief takes a lot of wives.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Matariki Rain on 15 Apr 2014, 05:17
I'm currently enjoying http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Rin Kaelestria on 15 Apr 2014, 09:39
I've been using a different wiki for the TES lore. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page) Mostly the same stuff, but there's been some things in the past here and there that one wiki has that the other one doesn't. Course, this was back when I was using it for Skyrim purposes. <_<
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Dessau on 18 Apr 2014, 07:42
So, uh... I heard Zenimax pulled a SquareEnix and let a monumental exploit slide into the initial release version of the game. In addition, they will possibly have to pull a SEGA and rollback the servers.

Confirm/Deny?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Rin Kaelestria on 18 Apr 2014, 11:36
Exploits happen in every MMO, that's a given. Though one that helps someone make gold so easily could explain why the Gold Sellers showed up so soon in ESO.  :P  As for a roll back, haven't heard anything about one possibly happening.

What I DO know, is that there's a major bug with the in game bank shared between your characters. Items disappearing from it, your gold stored in there also disappearing, and your bank expansions that you bought with the in game currency no longer there, either. This by far is the most disapointing one that seems to ruin the game so some, and one they haven't found out a solution to rectify it. It's hit a lot of people (myself included, lost about 6-8k gold), too. Frustrating to go put something in your bank only to find your money gone.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ibrahim Tash-Murkon on 18 Apr 2014, 15:31
Exploits happen in every MMO, that's a given. Though one that helps someone make gold so easily could explain why the Gold Sellers showed up so soon in ESO.  :P  As for a roll back, haven't heard anything about one possibly happening.

What I DO know, is that there's a major bug with the in game bank shared between your characters. Items disappearing from it, your gold stored in there also disappearing, and your bank expansions that you bought with the in game currency no longer there, either. This by far is the most disapointing one that seems to ruin the game so some, and one they haven't found out a solution to rectify it. It's hit a lot of people (myself included, lost about 6-8k gold), too. Frustrating to go put something in your bank only to find your money gone.

I don't think my character banks have been affected but I'm pretty sure my guild bank has been eating items and now when I try and access it the loading never stops. Very, very frustrating indeed.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 18 Apr 2014, 16:01
The exploit I heard about was one that involved duplicating items that was present in beta.

Like Rin, I haven't heard anything about server wipes/rollbacks/whatever, but I've also yet to pick up the game 'for real' since the betas so all I have to go on is people making mentions of it on places like twitter or here. Couldn't justify the purchase right away.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Ibrahim Tash-Murkon on 18 Apr 2014, 17:16
Oh, it seems that the Guild Bank isn't a problem exactly but that Zenimax shut it down earlier as part of a response to the dupping exploit (which was apparently known about during the beta). Their handling of this is hardly inspirational.  :ugh:
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Dessau on 18 Apr 2014, 19:34
Exploits happen in every MMO, that's a given.

Apologies, by 'letting it slide' I meant that they had done as SE had; offer no fix for a well-documented bug in CBT/OBT, and launch the game with bug intact. In Zenimax's case it seems that the duping has now been patched, so it's likely a fix has been in the works for weeks, but the market is still flooded with fraudulent rare items and currency, much as FF14 was.

I don't know if SE ever addressed their security vulnerability.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Nissui on 17 Mar 2015, 11:31
Quick side note in case this wasn't posted elsewhere.

ESO is B2P as of today. Not sure if there is any interest in this game anymore, but there you have it.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Louella Dougans on 17 Mar 2015, 12:49
Quick side note in case this wasn't posted elsewhere.

ESO is B2P as of today. Not sure if there is any interest in this game anymore, but there you have it.

what does B2P mean ?
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Nissui on 17 Mar 2015, 13:01
Buy-to-play, a la Guild Wars. Pay for game client once, no sub fees.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Lyn Farel on 17 Mar 2015, 14:08
No one definitely saw that coming.  :P
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Rin Kaelestria on 17 Mar 2015, 14:19
Subbed for one month on launch last year, haven't bothered with it after that month. But with my account activated as of today, I'll probably hop on a bit. So, I may be game. :P
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 17 Mar 2015, 19:25
What it sounds like to me is that it's a little bit of a weird system.

Subscription players get some amount of currency each month as a stipend (similar to STO + Zen), and full access to any "DLC" zones that are added as part of expansions or w/e. If their sub lapses, they lose access to all of those zones.

B2P players get access to the primary zones, then have to pay to get access to the new zones. Apparently that access is permanent once paid for but it's a little weird when contrasted with the subscription system, to me.

Might pick it up again when I get home though.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Nissui on 17 Mar 2015, 20:33
What it sounds like to me is that it's a little bit of a weird system.

Subscription players get some amount of currency each month as a stipend (similar to STO + Zen), and full access to any "DLC" zones that are added as part of expansions or w/e. If their sub lapses, they lose access to all of those zones.

B2P players get access to the primary zones, then have to pay to get access to the new zones. Apparently that access is permanent once paid for but it's a little weird when contrasted with the subscription system, to me.

Might pick it up again when I get home though.

That does sound weird. I feel like if I was subbed, I'd just let it drop once, then pay once and be done with it. Until the next expansion anyway.

Hopefully that shit ain't full price like Blizzard do.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Morwen Lagann on 17 Mar 2015, 20:43
Talking to Turelus atm, the only real reasons to be subscribed are:
- Monthly Crown stipend
- 10% bonus to XP gained
- research is done like EVE skills in real time, and has a 10% reduction in time if you are subscribed

So right now, not being subbed is better if none of those matter to you.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jennifer Starfall on 18 Mar 2015, 05:47
Their sub model sounds a lot like the model Turbine uses for DDO and LotRO.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Utari Onzo on 18 Mar 2015, 15:31
BRB, biomassing all my eve toons to play ES:O now its B2P

Jumping on the bandwagon late as always, me :''(
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Rin Kaelestria on 18 Mar 2015, 18:41
BRB, biomassing all my eve toons to play ES:O now its B2P

Jumping on the bandwagon late as always, me :''(

That's a bit hastey. >_>   And don't feel bad. It's not much of a bandwagon to hop onto in the first place.  :P
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Katrina Oniseki on 19 Mar 2015, 10:21
More like a rickshaw.
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Graelyn on 20 Mar 2015, 06:00
I hopped onto a rickshaw once. Had to pay for a new one.  :|
Title: Re: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community...
Post by: Jace on 15 Apr 2015, 19:08
I'll be playing ESO again soon now that it has no sub. I enjoyed the game except for the lack of endgame. If I am subbing a regular-style MMO, there better be a decent progression. That didn't exist for ESO. But without a sub, just running around with friends bullshitting and RPing is good enough. I'll be done with graduate school in a month, so I should have buttloads more time to play games. Woot.