The NDA is now over and the content of Elder Scrolls Online can be discussed. I have played some 50 hours in Beta and have five characters level 8 or less, so *yes* I like to explore, and *yes* I do crafting and many quest off the beaten track, and *no* I am not into power-leveling at all.
Nevertheless, I find getting immersed in ESO really hard.
The primary reason for this is that that all of the dungeons I’ve seen so far are public, and you can’t get immersed in a dungeon where twenty other players are racing all over the place. There is no sense of coming across a long-forgotten ruin, there is no sense of finding a hidden stronghold and most importantly, is no sense of *danger*. You can’t even sensibly stealth through a dungeon because four people will race by you and kill the guy you are stalking before you get a shot off. And it gets worse. In one situation you take on the role of a long-dead Orc warrior, and at the climax of that mini scene you engage a mini boss … but there are other players, identically cloned of that ancient Orc, fighting him too. As such the scene loses its intensity and becomes comical. And that is not through intent but because of the interaction between players that was not taken into account.
Dungeons should be instanced so you *can* become immersed in the created space, but so far they are not and as such have the ongoing chaos of train depots. And even if the dungeons were instanced, there are many, many quests done out in the open where a horde of people running around simply makes a ruin of any storyline and any engagement with it.
In other words, the implementation in ESO undermines player immersion and that’s a problem.
Another problem I have with ESO is the map, the compass and the quest tracker. This system is the basic activity coordination system and, frankly, I am forever getting lost, going in the wrong direction and following the quest markers that don’t belong to the quest I am working on. There is no minimap so I am forever stopping and bringing up the full map … but not everything is on it anyway. Some markers are simply left off. A beta bug? Perhaps, but it typifies the lack of concern over information. The compass is other example where you can’t tell the markers of one quest from that of the others. A simple coloration scheme would fix that where the markers on the compass are matched to quest colors, but a common black and white is how the develops designed it and is a reflection of their disregard for information and separating information from noise. And quest tracker tracks only one quest at a time anyway.
I bring these issues up, not as a full review of the game because there are many positive things that I have not mentioned, but rather to point out that this game is nothing like a single player Elder Scrolls game in terms of immersion, and it *cannot* be. It uses some of the same mechanics but in a public space the nature of those mechanisms changes radically. And anybody who plays this game has to expect that.
Comments
The NDA is now over and the content of Elder Scrolls Online can be discussed. I have played some 50 hours in Beta and have five characters level 8 or less, so *yes* I like to explore, and *yes* I do crafting and many quest off the beaten track, and *no* I am not into power-leveling at all.
Nevertheless, I find getting immersed in ESO really hard.
The primary reason for this is that that all of the dungeons I’ve seen so far are public, and you can’t get immersed in a dungeon where twenty other players are racing all over the place. There is no sense of coming across a long-forgotten ruin, there is no sense of finding a hidden stronghold and most importantly, is no sense of *danger*. You can’t even sensibly stealth through a dungeon because four people will race by you and kill the guy you are stalking before you get a shot off. And it gets worse. In one situation you take on the role of a long-dead Orc warrior, and at the climax of that mini scene you engage a mini boss … but there are other players, identically cloned of that ancient Orc, fighting him too. As such the scene loses its intensity and becomes comical. And that is not through intent but because of the interaction between players that was not taken into account.
Dungeons should be instanced so you *can* become immersed in the created space, but so far they are not and as such have the ongoing chaos of train depots. And even if the dungeons were instanced, there are many, many quests done out in the open where a horde of people running around simply makes a ruin of any storyline and any engagement with it.
In other words, the implementation in ESO undermines player immersion and that’s a problem.
Another problem I have with ESO is the map, the compass and the quest tracker. This system is the basic activity coordination system and, frankly, I am forever getting lost, going in the wrong direction and following the quest markers that don’t belong to the quest I am working on. There is no minimap so I am forever stopping and bringing up the full map … but not everything is on it anyway. Some markers are simply left off. A beta bug? Perhaps, but it typifies the lack of concern over information. The compass is other example where you can’t tell the markers of one quest from that of the others. A simple coloration scheme would fix that where the markers on the compass are matched to quest colors, but a common black and white is how the develops designed it and is a reflection of their disregard for information and separating information from noise. And quest tracker tracks only one quest at a time anyway.
I bring these issues up, not as a full review of the game because there are many positive things that I have not mentioned, but rather to point out that this game is nothing like a single player Elder Scrolls game in terms of immersion, and it *cannot* be. It uses some of the same mechanics but in a public space the nature of those mechanisms changes radically. And anybody who plays this game has to expect that.