My first impressions

Creslin321

So I had the chance to play the ESO beta for a day and just wanted to air what I felt the game did right/wrong and see what you guys though as well.  Anyway....

 

THE POSITIVE:

1.  The class system: 

I really like the class system in ESO because well...it kind of doesn't exist.  I mean, there are classes sure, but they don't really limit what you can do at all.  Since you get your skills from weapons, guilds, armor, as well as your class, and your class doesn't prohibit you from using anything, you are free to be a sorceror with a two handed sword or a dragon knight that uses spells he learned in the mage's guild.

This is really refreshing when compared to the very limiting classes in most RPGs.

 

2.  The quests:

Okay normally I hate quests in MMORPGs with a passion, they are typically so boring.  Kill 10 rats, deliver this letter, read this block of inane text etc...

However so far in ESO (playing Dominion) the quests are actually good!  Sure, they boil down to you doing the same stuff as normal like killing monsters, talking to NPCs...but what makes them great is they are presented extremely well and the world gives them a lot of context.  For example, there is one quests where you have to save an entire village that was turned to stone.  There is another where you have break a curse that is corrupting the spirits of the dead.

The quests make the leveling process much more interesting.

 

3.  The world:

The world, at least from what I've seen on the Summerset isles is beautiful.  The buildings are all stylized for the culture they represent, and the game does a good job of immersing you in the world by having lots of NPCs in the major cities doing their normal day's work.  You can also talk to tons of NPCs just to immerse yourself more and learn more about the world.

 

4.  The combat:

So the combat in this game isn't "amazing" but I'm listing it as a positive because I think it's much better than most MMO combat.  It's actually based on collision (it seems) and you can dodge and active parry attacks.

I've won/lost some fights simply because I screwed up one move, it definitely keeps you on your toes.

 

THE NEGATIVE:

1.  The other players get in the way:

Soooo this is probably one of my biggest gripes with the game.  ESO features your typical "you are the chosen one" story...which I can tolerate.  The problem is that the presence of other players tends to break your immersion into the, typically well-written, quests way more than it enhances it.

For example, you will often receive a quest to kill a "boss" at the end of a really immersive quest chain.  But when you arrive at the final confrontation, instead of seeing a really menacing big bad...you see a MOB that spawns every 15 seconds getting constantly curb stomped by 10 players.  And you wind up having to go through 4 spawns or so until you do enough damage to register the kill before the big bad dies.

This is just silly.  And in retrospect, I really think this game would have done much better as a coop RPG.  Something like GW1 or Dark Souls (but a little more user friendly), where you can summon another player for help when you need it.  I think that SotA is another game that is embracing this whole coop RPG philosophy...there is no need to just tack on MMORPG features when a game doesn't need them.

 

2.  Exploration is really discouraged:

In ESO, it's not really advisable to just wander around the world and explore.  For one, most areas are for a specific level and if you are underleveled you get get owned...this is pretty typical of MMORPGs though.

But secondly, it seems that just about every area is tied to a specific quest chain.  And if you find the area but don't have the quest, you are basically wasting your time.  The game has a specific way it wants you to do things, and unless you want to essentially waste your time, you better "explore" the way the game wants you to.

This really frustrated me and made me appreciate the more open design of GW2 a lot more.  I hate not being able to do what I want in an MMORPG, and this game is pretty guilty of that.

Once again, I feel like this kind of design was done to adhere more to the "typical quest-hub" MMORPG model.  In Skyrim, you were pretty free to explore wherever you wanted, but not in ESO.

 

SUMMARY:

So to sum up, I think that ESO has a lot going for it as an RPG, but it's really crippled by the fact that it's an MMORPG.  I really wish they had made this an RPG with coop features instead...I think that would have been much more fun.  Fact is, I really don't see any point of having MMORPG features in the open world of this game, it just seems to detract from the immersion.  I don't see why they couldn't have multiplayer dungeons, but a single player with optional coop open world.