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[Jace]

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.

[Vic Van Meter]

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.

[Morwen Lagann]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

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.

[Morwen Lagann]

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.

[Esna Pitoojee]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

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 ?

[Jace]

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

[Morwen Lagann]

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 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.

[Morwen Lagann]

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.

[Victoria Stecker]

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.

[Morwen Lagann]

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.

[Utsukushi Shi]

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.

[Vincent Pryce]

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.

[Esna Pitoojee]

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.