And as far as your weak hater comment goes , Your wrong again , As there is alot i do like about ESO and have played/play it alot , and as noted in my history if you care enough to see how wrong you are its all there..
I enjoy the exploration , the crafting i even enjoy the Trade guilds and wandering around fishing, also Cyrodil can be fun while ignoring its broken lore ..
Yes , it is possible to enjoy a game and still recognize its shortcomings. But calling someone a Hater as soon as they point out your internet girlfriends flaws is weak and transparent..
And as far as your weak hater comment goes , Your wrong again , As there is alot i do like about ESO and have played/play it alot , and as noted in my history if you care enough to see how wrong you are its all there..
I enjoy the exploration , the crafting i even enjoy the Trade guilds and wandering around fishing, also Cyrodil can be fun while ignoring its broken lore ..
Yes , it is possible to enjoy a game and still recognize its shortcomings. But calling someone a Hater as soon as they point out your internet girlfriends flaws is weak and transparent..
Dude... give your head a shake. There is no one in these forums more critical of ESO's real shortcomings than I am.
I have slagged them mercilessly for their loot crates, their inconvenient by design implementation of both furniture and jewelry crafting, their silly semantics games with "chapters" to hide the fact they were simply making a change to their sub model from "all DLC inclusive" to "most DLC inclusive except one per year," their butt ugly, crown crate exclusive, semi-transparent and puke green mounts that pollute the visuals, their extreme over emphasis on new "content" that can be easily monetized such as all the extra motif pages... I could and have gone on.
But if you actually had been paying attention while you played, you would know that 1T was simply the end of a years long process where they were distancing themselves from the alliance-separated vanilla ESO,
It started with Craglorn in 2014 when they created the first all alliance integrated zone and followed that up with every DLC. They also removed the alliance separation from group finder formed groups long before 1T, and it finally culminated with the appropriately named One Tamriel update when they removed all alliance barriers from PVE.
I have been paying enough attention to know that 1) many saw the total removal of PVE alliance separation as a victory considering how many were against it in the first place and 2) it was a huge boon for the game and attracted many more new players than any single thing they have done.
You're just dead wrong about 1T being the cause of any lore inconsistency. Most people who care about lore would see it 180 degrees the other way.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Making everything the same does not fix lore it just neuters it ......
And then you should also understand that others see shortcomings in many other aspects of the IP and implementations , or do only your views of shortcomings matter .. As i said it IMO the LOre is Broken and many feel this way , to me the loot boxes dont mean shit to me , niether does there monetization .. Just dont care .. That does not make it any less of a shortcoming to you does it ..
I dont tell you the concerns you have are not relevant as they are relevant to you as others concerns are relevant to them ..
But we can agree on is that it is a solid game , that does alot right and some wrong depending on each persons perspective ..
But there's a learning curve, as the game does some unorthodox things. I'd never seen anything like the game's stamina/magicka split, and their skill point system is certainly unusual. Having a learning curve isn't necessarily bad, as innovative game mechanics will usually cause one. The problem is that Zenimax doesn't seem to care to do anything to smooth that learning curve. That can't possibly be good for player retention. Most players won't spend several hours reading up on a game before trying it; if I hadn't done so, I'd probably have quit in frustration by now. Now that the game has been out for more than four years, maybe they should find time to make the new player experience a little friendlier.
????? Never played any ES game before?
That is correct. I had never played any Elder Scrolls game before. One hopes that the target audience for a game is not merely some subset of people who played a previous game in the series. FFXIV was the first Final Fantasy game that I had played since playing the original for a fraction of a day, and they managed not to assume that I was familiar with the previous thirteen installments in the line.
Is ESO considered an elder scrolls game? If it is it's the worst of the lot except for Arena.
Well, it is considered an Elder Scrolls game. It might not exactly play like Morrowind/Oblvion/Skyrim but it is as much an Elder Scrolls game as any other as far as it's world.
And I think ESO is better than all of them except Morrowind. IMO.
The people who "own" the Elder Scrolls lore say that this is an Elder Scrolls game. End.
Did they "shoe horn" some lore into creating a 3 faction PvP system? Maybe - but flashbacks in the previous ES games have described conflicts. So whay shouldn't there be conflict at this time? At the end of the day though gameplay > lore considerations and they wanted - reasonably - to go 3 faction PvP.
Outside of gameplay however there is no reason why they shouldn't consider past lore.
That said when they were designing the game they certainly said they did. Specifically the "Bethseda" custodians of the lore were involved and we were told that it was all "OK".
And for me it is "familiar" enough - but like Iselin I just play the game. To give some examples however the first day I logged in I heard a noise and I knew that somewhere close an anchor had dropped. When I first visited Riften it had been some years but I "knew" my way around. The herbs / flowers were familiar. The werewolf city retake quest was basically identical (and I was OK with that). Shards, draugr, Imperials, trolls, the Morrowind geography, the thguilds, the interface, the deities and so much more. There is absolutely no doubt that ESO is an Elder Scrolls game.
And going forward a future chapter will almost certainly add some / all of the Skyrim geography that is missing. From a business perspective this is clear cut and maybe one of the reasons they updated Skyrim's graphics. (Flashbacks for dragons maybe or time rifts?)
And at that point ......
If ESO isn't already the definitive ES game as far as lore goes - having already brought together almost all of the previous games - at that point it will be the bible of what is and isn't ES. And maybe some of the differences are because tweaks were needed.
Just to reiterate though if there is stuff they can do to keep things consistent they should. As long as it fits the gameplay - which should come first - is easy and doesn't add undue cost. If they could and don't that would be "lazy". What they have done so far though looks fine to me.
The people who "own" the Elder Scrolls lore say that this is an Elder Scrolls game. End.
Did they "shoe horn" some lore into creating a 3 faction PvP system? Maybe - but flashbacks in the previous ES games have described conflicts. So whay shouldn't there be conflict at this time? At the end of the day though gameplay > lore considerations and they wanted - reasonably - to go 3 faction PvP.
Outside of gameplay however there is no reason why they shouldn't consider past lore.
That said when they were designing the game they certainly said they did. Specifically the "Bethseda" custodians of the lore were involved and we were told that it was all "OK".
And for me it is "familiar" enough - but like Iselin I just play the game. To give some examples however the first day I logged in I heard a noise and I knew that somewhere close an anchor had dropped. When I first visited Riften it had been some years but I "knew" my way around. The herbs / flowers were familiar. The werewolf city retake quest was basically identical (and I was OK with that). Shards, draugr, Imperials, trolls, the Morrowind geography, the thguilds, the interface, the deities and so much more. There is absolutely no doubt that ESO is an Elder Scrolls game.
And going forward a future chapter will almost certainly add some / all of the Skyrim geography that is missing. From a business perspective this is clear cut and maybe one of the reasons they updated Skyrim's graphics. (Flashbacks for dragons maybe or time rifts?)
And at that point ......
If ESO isn't already the definitive ES game as far as lore goes - having already brought together almost all of the previous games - at that point it will be the bible of what is and isn't ES. And maybe some of the differences are because tweaks were needed.
Just to reiterate though if there is stuff they can do to keep things consistent they should. As long as it fits the gameplay - which should come first - is easy and doesn't add undue cost. If they could and don't that would be "lazy". What they have done so far though looks fine to me.
I believe ESO is set before any of the single-player games, which would mean it is not possible to have "shoehorned" lore. It would the true story.
Did they "shoe horn" some lore into creating a 3 faction PvP system? Maybe - but flashbacks in the previous ES games have described conflicts. So whay shouldn't there be conflict at this time? At the end of the day though gameplay > lore considerations and they wanted - reasonably - to go 3 faction PvP.
Just for the record, the 3 alliance separation never bothered me at all. If anything, for this purpose, I wish they had gone with total separation (without Caldwell's Silver and Gold) and traditional small servers.
In DAoC we built community by PvPing and PvEing with the same people day in and day out and the other realms were strangers... they were "others." That's why PvE and PvP in that game felt like they were more intimately linked.
But in the early days of ESO the lore "scholars" were going nuts over that separation in ESO being a lore sacrilege. There were tons and tons of those posts here in these forums back in late 2013 and early 2014.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I don't understand this thread... Purchasing Summerset gets you the entire game minus the smaller DLC.
Purchasing the standard gives you the base game and not Morrowind or Summerset I do believe.
ESO Plus gives you the smaller DLC and Orsinium. Morrowind may be included in that now I'm not sure.
Everything is user error it seems.
Purchasing the standard edition and also ESO Plus gives you the base game and several DLC game packs, including Morrowind but not Summerset. The problem is that their site promised that ESO Plus gets you access to all of the DLC game packs. It doesn't quite explicitly state that you get Summerset, too, but it does very strongly imply it if you don't already know from other sources that it doesn't. Maybe a veteran player would know that, but someone new to the game probably wouldn't, and people buying the game for the first time are by definition the latter.
That's not user error. That's false advertising. There is a difference.
The false advertising is only one of the reasons that the game gave me a bad first impression. That the new player experience is so egregiously awful in a lot of different ways is why I created this thread. The nearest comparison that I can think of where another MMORPG just dumped me into the game world with no guidance on what to do was Trove, and even that was due to an outright bug where high game window resolutions make nearly all text vanish--including the tutorial text that would have explained what to do. With ESO, the lack of a tutorial seems to be intentional.
The information as to what is which is readily available and located under the large, bolded links DLC/UPDATES and JOIN ESO PLUS on their site.
Further, game content comes in two forms, DLCs and Chapters, as noted on the DLC/Updates page. DLCs are by default included in ESO Plus. Chapters are not, by default. This is likely because chapters are much larger additions to the game in terms of scope and content.
Originally Morrowind also required separate purchase. It may be that as new chapters are released, older ones will be absorbed into the base package. Time will tell in that regard.
In any case. this isn't a case of false advertising, but of absent or inadequate comprehension on your part.
I don't understand this thread... Purchasing Summerset gets you the entire game minus the smaller DLC.
Purchasing the standard gives you the base game and not Morrowind or Summerset I do believe.
ESO Plus gives you the smaller DLC and Orsinium. Morrowind may be included in that now I'm not sure.
Everything is user error it seems.
Purchasing the standard edition and also ESO Plus gives you the base game and several DLC game packs, including Morrowind but not Summerset. The problem is that their site promised that ESO Plus gets you access to all of the DLC game packs. It doesn't quite explicitly state that you get Summerset, too, but it does very strongly imply it if you don't already know from other sources that it doesn't. Maybe a veteran player would know that, but someone new to the game probably wouldn't, and people buying the game for the first time are by definition the latter.
That's not user error. That's false advertising. There is a difference.
The false advertising is only one of the reasons that the game gave me a bad first impression. That the new player experience is so egregiously awful in a lot of different ways is why I created this thread. The nearest comparison that I can think of where another MMORPG just dumped me into the game world with no guidance on what to do was Trove, and even that was due to an outright bug where high game window resolutions make nearly all text vanish--including the tutorial text that would have explained what to do. With ESO, the lack of a tutorial seems to be intentional.
The information as to what is which is readily available and located under the large, bolded links DLC/UPDATES and JOIN ESO PLUS on their site.
Further, game content comes in two forms, DLCs and Chapters, as noted on the DLC/Updates page. DLCs are by default included in ESO Plus. Chapters are not, by default. This is likely because chapters are much larger additions to the game in terms of scope and content.
Originally Morrowind also required separate purchase. It may be that as new chapters are released, older ones will be absorbed into the base package. Time will tell in that regard.
In any case. this isn't a case of false advertising, but of absent or inadequate comprehension on your part.
Insisting that some downloadable game packs of content are officially DLC game packs and some are not is an assault upon the proposition that words have meaning in themselves rather than being infinitely malleable to mean whatever the speaker chooses. Especially when the page you site lists Morrowind as a "Chapter", but elsewhere the same site calls it a DLC game pack:
I could understand how people who have played the game for a long time and were long conversant what is included or not would already know. But I don't understand how such people could regard it as anything less than intentionally misleading to new players on the part of Zenimax to word it that way.
People who have expertise in some area and are generally around other people who share that expertise in the same area sometimes assume that everyone in the world must share that expertise. That's often a mistake, and I think there's a whole lot of it going on in this thread.
For example, in some contexts, I would be able to talk about the chromatic number of a graph and assume that everyone knows what I'm talking about. Leave the community with the relevant expertise and post on a place like this and it would take a considerable explanation of what a graph is before it would be reasonable to expect more than a tiny handful of people to understand.
I don't understand this thread... Purchasing Summerset gets you the entire game minus the smaller DLC.
Purchasing the standard gives you the base game and not Morrowind or Summerset I do believe.
ESO Plus gives you the smaller DLC and Orsinium. Morrowind may be included in that now I'm not sure.
Everything is user error it seems.
Purchasing the standard edition and also ESO Plus gives you the base game and several DLC game packs, including Morrowind but not Summerset. The problem is that their site promised that ESO Plus gets you access to all of the DLC game packs. It doesn't quite explicitly state that you get Summerset, too, but it does very strongly imply it if you don't already know from other sources that it doesn't. Maybe a veteran player would know that, but someone new to the game probably wouldn't, and people buying the game for the first time are by definition the latter.
That's not user error. That's false advertising. There is a difference.
The false advertising is only one of the reasons that the game gave me a bad first impression. That the new player experience is so egregiously awful in a lot of different ways is why I created this thread. The nearest comparison that I can think of where another MMORPG just dumped me into the game world with no guidance on what to do was Trove, and even that was due to an outright bug where high game window resolutions make nearly all text vanish--including the tutorial text that would have explained what to do. With ESO, the lack of a tutorial seems to be intentional.
The information as to what is which is readily available and located under the large, bolded links DLC/UPDATES and JOIN ESO PLUS on their site.
Further, game content comes in two forms, DLCs and Chapters, as noted on the DLC/Updates page. DLCs are by default included in ESO Plus. Chapters are not, by default. This is likely because chapters are much larger additions to the game in terms of scope and content.
Originally Morrowind also required separate purchase. It may be that as new chapters are released, older ones will be absorbed into the base package. Time will tell in that regard.
In any case. this isn't a case of false advertising, but of absent or inadequate comprehension on your part.
Insisting that some downloadable game packs of content are officially DLC game packs and some are not is an assault upon the proposition that words have meaning in themselves rather than being infinitely malleable to mean whatever the speaker chooses. Especially when the page you site lists Morrowind as a "Chapter", but elsewhere the same site calls it a DLC game pack:
I could understand how people who have played the game for a long time and were long conversant what is included or not would already know. But I don't understand how such people could regard it as anything less than intentionally misleading to new players on the part of Zenimax to word it that way.
People who have expertise in some area and are generally around other people who share that expertise in the same area sometimes assume that everyone in the world must share that expertise. That's often a mistake, and I think there's a whole lot of it going on in this thread.
For example, in some contexts, I would be able to talk about the chromatic number of a graph and assume that everyone knows what I'm talking about. Leave the community with the relevant expertise and post on a place like this and it would take a considerable explanation of what a graph is before it would be reasonable to expect more than a tiny handful of people to understand.
Theyre not giving the newest shit away for free. No.
I don't understand this thread... Purchasing Summerset gets you the entire game minus the smaller DLC.
Purchasing the standard gives you the base game and not Morrowind or Summerset I do believe.
ESO Plus gives you the smaller DLC and Orsinium. Morrowind may be included in that now I'm not sure.
Everything is user error it seems.
Purchasing the standard edition and also ESO Plus gives you the base game and several DLC game packs, including Morrowind but not Summerset. The problem is that their site promised that ESO Plus gets you access to all of the DLC game packs. It doesn't quite explicitly state that you get Summerset, too, but it does very strongly imply it if you don't already know from other sources that it doesn't. Maybe a veteran player would know that, but someone new to the game probably wouldn't, and people buying the game for the first time are by definition the latter.
That's not user error. That's false advertising. There is a difference.
The false advertising is only one of the reasons that the game gave me a bad first impression. That the new player experience is so egregiously awful in a lot of different ways is why I created this thread. The nearest comparison that I can think of where another MMORPG just dumped me into the game world with no guidance on what to do was Trove, and even that was due to an outright bug where high game window resolutions make nearly all text vanish--including the tutorial text that would have explained what to do. With ESO, the lack of a tutorial seems to be intentional.
The information as to what is which is readily available and located under the large, bolded links DLC/UPDATES and JOIN ESO PLUS on their site.
Further, game content comes in two forms, DLCs and Chapters, as noted on the DLC/Updates page. DLCs are by default included in ESO Plus. Chapters are not, by default. This is likely because chapters are much larger additions to the game in terms of scope and content.
Originally Morrowind also required separate purchase. It may be that as new chapters are released, older ones will be absorbed into the base package. Time will tell in that regard.
In any case. this isn't a case of false advertising, but of absent or inadequate comprehension on your part.
Insisting that some downloadable game packs of content are officially DLC game packs and some are not is an assault upon the proposition that words have meaning in themselves rather than being infinitely malleable to mean whatever the speaker chooses. Especially when the page you site lists Morrowind as a "Chapter", but elsewhere the same site calls it a DLC game pack:
I could understand how people who have played the game for a long time and were long conversant what is included or not would already know. But I don't understand how such people could regard it as anything less than intentionally misleading to new players on the part of Zenimax to word it that way.
People who have expertise in some area and are generally around other people who share that expertise in the same area sometimes assume that everyone in the world must share that expertise. That's often a mistake, and I think there's a whole lot of it going on in this thread.
For example, in some contexts, I would be able to talk about the chromatic number of a graph and assume that everyone knows what I'm talking about. Leave the community with the relevant expertise and post on a place like this and it would take a considerable explanation of what a graph is before it would be reasonable to expect more than a tiny handful of people to understand.
Theyre not giving the newest shit away for free. No.
Because a one-time payment of $20 up front plus $15/month is "free"? I don't think that word means what you seem to think it means.
The information as to what is which is readily available and located under the large, bolded links DLC/UPDATES and JOIN ESO PLUS on their site.
Further, game content comes in two forms, DLCs and Chapters, as noted on the DLC/Updates page. DLCs are by default included in ESO Plus. Chapters are not, by default. This is likely because chapters are much larger additions to the game in terms of scope and content.
Originally Morrowind also required separate purchase. It may be that as new chapters are released, older ones will be absorbed into the base package. Time will tell in that regard.
In any case. this isn't a case of false advertising, but of absent or inadequate comprehension on your part.
Quizzical discovered this but - he is right when he says that it isn't "obvious".
In the list of "features" that ESO Plus offers it would be very, very simple for them to add: note additional purchase needed for "chapters". Very easy indeed.
Like Iselin I also said that excluding chapters diminished the value of ESO PLus. I suspect they did it because they believed that some people were subbing for 1 month, running through the new content and then leaving. Be that as it may there is an element of obfucation. (Which means: make it less clear btw in case anyone accused be of obfuscation!)
And as @Iselin says the number of "editions" available adds additional confusion - he said 3 or 4 if you count a collectors edition. What he didn't mention is that you can still buy most of the previous retail editions - original, One Tamriel, Gold ..... not counting collectors editions.
For the record I have always considered ESO Plus to be little more than signing up for 1500 crowns a month.
For people thinking of trying the gane but who are unsure my suggestion would be:
Buy a "cheap" edition. Any version will do although some offer better value but only if you decide to stick around. Any version though will provide months and months of PvE quests - some of which is very, very well done - and access to the RvRvR (PvP) campaign. And as Iselin says you can always ask on the forums if unsure what the differences between versions are. Oh and use a proper vendor - there is a list stickied or use Amazon etc. Online registration with a new game code is required.
You will be able to get any content you are missing if you so desire.
Ignore ESO Plus on day 1. You can akways add it later if you decide you want the perks - and playing the game will allow you to get a feel for what they are. In the great scheme though - not needed.
If it's so common in MMORPGs, then list another one that does it. A lot of games have a mana pool, or something to that effect by a different name. Having two separate mana-like pools and expecting characters to largely specialize in one or the other is not something I had seen before in an MMORPG.
Similarly, a lot of MMORPGs have skill points of some sort, but most commonly they're allocated within skill trees for your class, or within some universal set of skills. I hadn't previously seen an MMORPG where skill points are shared with armor skills or weapon skills. Sharing them with crafting skills is also unusual, though Anarchy Online did that, too.
I'm not saying those things are bad. I didn't get far enough into the game to have an informed opinion. But I am saying that it would be nice if the game offered a bit of explanation. It's one thing to read on a web site that some mechanic exists, but it's quite another to see it play out in the game. The total amount of tutorial explanation that I saw in the few hours that I played likely wouldn't fill a 3x5 index card, and that's pathetic.
Please don't take the question condescendingly, it's genuinely not meant that way, although in text, I'm afraid it'll come off that way. It's an honest question, that I'm curious about.
Considering the vast amount of people who do play the game, how do you suppose they figured it out and got comfortable? Do you feel they just had a larger threshold for frustration? How did they overcome the "pathetic" tutorial experience that you had?
To explain what I'm driving at, is that I've found games that I felt required me to spend hours watching video's, doing a ton of reading outside the game in order to enjoy. Even on top of tutorials, it required a lot of time spent learning the nuances of the game. There are games where I was able to dive in an play, and figure out all the basics, and learn the nuances as I went. However some of the things you are describing don't seem to be "nuances" rather, fundamental parts of the game, that frankly, you are one of the first people I'm seeing say they were unable to understand.
(And for the record...yeah...they should be infinitely clearer about what each package encompasses. When I came back to the game in the Spring for the first time post launch, I had to read very closely what each option really had. So I don't totally disagree with your premise.)
But I am saying that I think they made a pretty severe blunder by not having a tutorial.
There is a tutorial.
It kinda, sorta has a tutorial, but there isn't much there. There are a handful of tooltips and an NPC who insults you for not knowing how to fight, then tells you to press some mouse buttons and doesn't care if you press the wrong ones. There's a quest that encompasses the "tutorial", but doesn't really explain how to do it. And that's it.
Actually, there are a lot of NPCs near the start of ESO who insult you for not already knowing all about the game and the world before you start. Maybe that's what the forum posters here are taking their queues from.
For comparison, let's consider another game that I recently tried for the first time: Star Trek Online. I ended up quitting before long, largely because both ground combat and space combat were so clunky, which surprised me because both Champions Online and Neverwinter demonstrate that Cryptic knows how to make far better combat than they implemented in STO. But it means that I went through the STO tutorial recently enough to remember it.
STO does some of its tutorial piecemeal. Here's your first ground combat, so we'll give you the ground combat tutorial. The space combat tutorial can wait for your first space combat. Tutorials for features that you can't access for several levels show up when you can first access them, and so forth.
But when STO does a tutorial to introduce some game mechanic, they explain it. Sometimes it's a sequence of ten or so text bubbles with a sentence or two explaining what is going on. Some say to click on this button to bring up some menu, and the next says to click on a particular button on the menu to do something. They explain what the feature is and how to use it, and give you practice in using it in a simple test case.
Depending on which feature you pick, STO's tutorial for a single feature might well be more expansive than ESO's tutorial for the entire game, at least if you exclude from the skill point recommendations.
Of course people could have figured out how to play STO if the game didn't have a tutorial. But it's better to give new players a two minute explanation of some feature that lets the player see it in action than to let the player flail around for ten minutes before figuring out what to do. Or worse, letting the player stumble across the feature a month later after not previously being aware that it was part of the game and he should have been using it since the start.
That's the point of a tutorial: help the new player to understand some key mechanic in two minutes rather than ten. STO does that, as do a lot of other games. ESO doesn't bother. Yes, the new player can figure it out in ten minutes. But it's a terrible way to introduce people to a game. Reverse-engineering how the game works shouldn't accidentally be part of the game. (Intentionally asking players to reverse-engineer it, along the lines of A Tale in the Desert, is a different matter, but makes for a very niche game.)
If it's so common in MMORPGs, then list another one that does it. A lot of games have a mana pool, or something to that effect by a different name. Having two separate mana-like pools and expecting characters to largely specialize in one or the other is not something I had seen before in an MMORPG.
Similarly, a lot of MMORPGs have skill points of some sort, but most commonly they're allocated within skill trees for your class, or within some universal set of skills. I hadn't previously seen an MMORPG where skill points are shared with armor skills or weapon skills. Sharing them with crafting skills is also unusual, though Anarchy Online did that, too.
I'm not saying those things are bad. I didn't get far enough into the game to have an informed opinion. But I am saying that it would be nice if the game offered a bit of explanation. It's one thing to read on a web site that some mechanic exists, but it's quite another to see it play out in the game. The total amount of tutorial explanation that I saw in the few hours that I played likely wouldn't fill a 3x5 index card, and that's pathetic.
Please don't take the question condescendingly, it's genuinely not meant that way, although in text, I'm afraid it'll come off that way. It's an honest question, that I'm curious about.
Considering the vast amount of people who do play the game, how do you suppose they figured it out and got comfortable? Do you feel they just had a larger threshold for frustration? How did they overcome the "pathetic" tutorial experience that you had?
To explain what I'm driving at, is that I've found games that I felt required me to spend hours watching video's, doing a ton of reading outside the game in order to enjoy. Even on top of tutorials, it required a lot of time spent learning the nuances of the game. There are games where I was able to dive in an play, and figure out all the basics, and learn the nuances as I went. However some of the things you are describing don't seem to be "nuances" rather, fundamental parts of the game, that frankly, you are one of the first people I'm seeing say they were unable to understand.
(And for the record...yeah...they should be infinitely clearer about what each package encompasses. When I came back to the game in the Spring for the first time post launch, I had to read very closely what each option really had. So I don't totally disagree with your premise.)
But I am saying that I think they made a pretty severe blunder by not having a tutorial.
There is a tutorial.
It kinda, sorta has a tutorial, but there isn't much there. There are a handful of tooltips and an NPC who insults you for not knowing how to fight, then tells you to press some mouse buttons and doesn't care if you press the wrong ones. There's a quest that encompasses the "tutorial", but doesn't really explain how to do it. And that's it.
Actually, there are a lot of NPCs near the start of ESO who insult you for not already knowing all about the game and the world before you start. Maybe that's what the forum posters here are taking their queues from.
For comparison, let's consider another game that I recently tried for the first time: Star Trek Online. I ended up quitting before long, largely because both ground combat and space combat were so clunky, which surprised me because both Champions Online and Neverwinter demonstrate that Cryptic knows how to make far better combat than they implemented in STO. But it means that I went through the STO tutorial recently enough to remember it.
STO does some of its tutorial piecemeal. Here's your first ground combat, so we'll give you the ground combat tutorial. The space combat tutorial can wait for your first space combat. Tutorials for features that you can't access for several levels show up when you can first access them, and so forth.
But when STO does a tutorial to introduce some game mechanic, they explain it. Sometimes it's a sequence of ten or so text bubbles with a sentence or two explaining what is going on. Some say to click on this button to bring up some menu, and the next says to click on a particular button on the menu to do something. They explain what the feature is and how to use it, and give you practice in using it in a simple test case.
Depending on which feature you pick, STO's tutorial for a single feature might well be more expansive than ESO's tutorial for the entire game, at least if you exclude from the skill point recommendations.
Of course people could have figured out how to play STO if the game didn't have a tutorial. But it's better to give new players a two minute explanation of some feature that lets the player see it in action than to let the player flail around for ten minutes before figuring out what to do. Or worse, letting the player stumble across the feature a month later after not previously being aware that it was part of the game and he should have been using it since the start.
That's the point of a tutorial: help the new player to understand some key mechanic in two minutes rather than ten. STO does that, as do a lot of other games. ESO doesn't bother. Yes, the new player can figure it out in ten minutes. But it's a terrible way to introduce people to a game. Reverse-engineering how the game works shouldn't accidentally be part of the game. (Intentionally asking players to reverse-engineer it, along the lines of A Tale in the Desert, is a different matter, but makes for a very niche game.)
Pretty sure you're the exception rather than the rule. Which makes it a personal problem.
If it's so common in MMORPGs, then list another one that does it. A lot of games have a mana pool, or something to that effect by a different name. Having two separate mana-like pools and expecting characters to largely specialize in one or the other is not something I had seen before in an MMORPG.
Similarly, a lot of MMORPGs have skill points of some sort, but most commonly they're allocated within skill trees for your class, or within some universal set of skills. I hadn't previously seen an MMORPG where skill points are shared with armor skills or weapon skills. Sharing them with crafting skills is also unusual, though Anarchy Online did that, too.
I'm not saying those things are bad. I didn't get far enough into the game to have an informed opinion. But I am saying that it would be nice if the game offered a bit of explanation. It's one thing to read on a web site that some mechanic exists, but it's quite another to see it play out in the game. The total amount of tutorial explanation that I saw in the few hours that I played likely wouldn't fill a 3x5 index card, and that's pathetic.
Please don't take the question condescendingly, it's genuinely not meant that way, although in text, I'm afraid it'll come off that way. It's an honest question, that I'm curious about.
Considering the vast amount of people who do play the game, how do you suppose they figured it out and got comfortable? Do you feel they just had a larger threshold for frustration? How did they overcome the "pathetic" tutorial experience that you had?
To explain what I'm driving at, is that I've found games that I felt required me to spend hours watching video's, doing a ton of reading outside the game in order to enjoy. Even on top of tutorials, it required a lot of time spent learning the nuances of the game. There are games where I was able to dive in an play, and figure out all the basics, and learn the nuances as I went. However some of the things you are describing don't seem to be "nuances" rather, fundamental parts of the game, that frankly, you are one of the first people I'm seeing say they were unable to understand.
(And for the record...yeah...they should be infinitely clearer about what each package encompasses. When I came back to the game in the Spring for the first time post launch, I had to read very closely what each option really had. So I don't totally disagree with your premise.)
But I am saying that I think they made a pretty severe blunder by not having a tutorial.
There is a tutorial.
It kinda, sorta has a tutorial, but there isn't much there. There are a handful of tooltips and an NPC who insults you for not knowing how to fight, then tells you to press some mouse buttons and doesn't care if you press the wrong ones. There's a quest that encompasses the "tutorial", but doesn't really explain how to do it. And that's it.
Actually, there are a lot of NPCs near the start of ESO who insult you for not already knowing all about the game and the world before you start. Maybe that's what the forum posters here are taking their queues from.
For comparison, let's consider another game that I recently tried for the first time: Star Trek Online. I ended up quitting before long, largely because both ground combat and space combat were so clunky, which surprised me because both Champions Online and Neverwinter demonstrate that Cryptic knows how to make far better combat than they implemented in STO. But it means that I went through the STO tutorial recently enough to remember it.
STO does some of its tutorial piecemeal. Here's your first ground combat, so we'll give you the ground combat tutorial. The space combat tutorial can wait for your first space combat. Tutorials for features that you can't access for several levels show up when you can first access them, and so forth.
But when STO does a tutorial to introduce some game mechanic, they explain it. Sometimes it's a sequence of ten or so text bubbles with a sentence or two explaining what is going on. Some say to click on this button to bring up some menu, and the next says to click on a particular button on the menu to do something. They explain what the feature is and how to use it, and give you practice in using it in a simple test case.
Depending on which feature you pick, STO's tutorial for a single feature might well be more expansive than ESO's tutorial for the entire game, at least if you exclude from the skill point recommendations.
Of course people could have figured out how to play STO if the game didn't have a tutorial. But it's better to give new players a two minute explanation of some feature that lets the player see it in action than to let the player flail around for ten minutes before figuring out what to do. Or worse, letting the player stumble across the feature a month later after not previously being aware that it was part of the game and he should have been using it since the start.
That's the point of a tutorial: help the new player to understand some key mechanic in two minutes rather than ten. STO does that, as do a lot of other games. ESO doesn't bother. Yes, the new player can figure it out in ten minutes. But it's a terrible way to introduce people to a game. Reverse-engineering how the game works shouldn't accidentally be part of the game. (Intentionally asking players to reverse-engineer it, along the lines of A Tale in the Desert, is a different matter, but makes for a very niche game.)
Pretty sure you're the exception rather than the rule. Which makes it a personal problem.
I'm pretty sure that ESO is the exception rather than the rule. If I'm the only one who cares about a tutorial, then why do most games bother to include one?
That the tutorial is lacking to the extent of being nearly missing isn't my main complaint about the game. But I found it remarkable, and so I remarked upon it.
If it's so common in MMORPGs, then list another one that does it. A lot of games have a mana pool, or something to that effect by a different name. Having two separate mana-like pools and expecting characters to largely specialize in one or the other is not something I had seen before in an MMORPG.
Similarly, a lot of MMORPGs have skill points of some sort, but most commonly they're allocated within skill trees for your class, or within some universal set of skills. I hadn't previously seen an MMORPG where skill points are shared with armor skills or weapon skills. Sharing them with crafting skills is also unusual, though Anarchy Online did that, too.
I'm not saying those things are bad. I didn't get far enough into the game to have an informed opinion. But I am saying that it would be nice if the game offered a bit of explanation. It's one thing to read on a web site that some mechanic exists, but it's quite another to see it play out in the game. The total amount of tutorial explanation that I saw in the few hours that I played likely wouldn't fill a 3x5 index card, and that's pathetic.
Please don't take the question condescendingly, it's genuinely not meant that way, although in text, I'm afraid it'll come off that way. It's an honest question, that I'm curious about.
Considering the vast amount of people who do play the game, how do you suppose they figured it out and got comfortable? Do you feel they just had a larger threshold for frustration? How did they overcome the "pathetic" tutorial experience that you had?
To explain what I'm driving at, is that I've found games that I felt required me to spend hours watching video's, doing a ton of reading outside the game in order to enjoy. Even on top of tutorials, it required a lot of time spent learning the nuances of the game. There are games where I was able to dive in an play, and figure out all the basics, and learn the nuances as I went. However some of the things you are describing don't seem to be "nuances" rather, fundamental parts of the game, that frankly, you are one of the first people I'm seeing say they were unable to understand.
(And for the record...yeah...they should be infinitely clearer about what each package encompasses. When I came back to the game in the Spring for the first time post launch, I had to read very closely what each option really had. So I don't totally disagree with your premise.)
But I am saying that I think they made a pretty severe blunder by not having a tutorial.
There is a tutorial.
It kinda, sorta has a tutorial, but there isn't much there. There are a handful of tooltips and an NPC who insults you for not knowing how to fight, then tells you to press some mouse buttons and doesn't care if you press the wrong ones. There's a quest that encompasses the "tutorial", but doesn't really explain how to do it. And that's it.
Actually, there are a lot of NPCs near the start of ESO who insult you for not already knowing all about the game and the world before you start. Maybe that's what the forum posters here are taking their queues from.
For comparison, let's consider another game that I recently tried for the first time: Star Trek Online. I ended up quitting before long, largely because both ground combat and space combat were so clunky, which surprised me because both Champions Online and Neverwinter demonstrate that Cryptic knows how to make far better combat than they implemented in STO. But it means that I went through the STO tutorial recently enough to remember it.
STO does some of its tutorial piecemeal. Here's your first ground combat, so we'll give you the ground combat tutorial. The space combat tutorial can wait for your first space combat. Tutorials for features that you can't access for several levels show up when you can first access them, and so forth.
But when STO does a tutorial to introduce some game mechanic, they explain it. Sometimes it's a sequence of ten or so text bubbles with a sentence or two explaining what is going on. Some say to click on this button to bring up some menu, and the next says to click on a particular button on the menu to do something. They explain what the feature is and how to use it, and give you practice in using it in a simple test case.
Depending on which feature you pick, STO's tutorial for a single feature might well be more expansive than ESO's tutorial for the entire game, at least if you exclude from the skill point recommendations.
Of course people could have figured out how to play STO if the game didn't have a tutorial. But it's better to give new players a two minute explanation of some feature that lets the player see it in action than to let the player flail around for ten minutes before figuring out what to do. Or worse, letting the player stumble across the feature a month later after not previously being aware that it was part of the game and he should have been using it since the start.
That's the point of a tutorial: help the new player to understand some key mechanic in two minutes rather than ten. STO does that, as do a lot of other games. ESO doesn't bother. Yes, the new player can figure it out in ten minutes. But it's a terrible way to introduce people to a game. Reverse-engineering how the game works shouldn't accidentally be part of the game. (Intentionally asking players to reverse-engineer it, along the lines of A Tale in the Desert, is a different matter, but makes for a very niche game.)
I can only assume that you are trolling us, well played sir.
Looking all the comments makes me wonder if I should really get the game xD But I'm a big fan of MMORPGs and hopefully this won't let me down and ended up posting another comment here xD
Looking all the comments makes me wonder if I should really get the game xD But I'm a big fan of MMORPGs and hopefully this won't let me down and ended up posting another comment here xD
Its a solid game , if you've never played it , you should have a good time with , It does have some problems , but all of these games do .. Depends on the person
And as far as your weak hater comment goes , Your wrong again , As there is alot i do like about ESO and have played/play it alot , and as noted in my history if you care enough to see how wrong you are its all there..
I enjoy the exploration , the crafting i even enjoy the Trade guilds and wandering around fishing, also Cyrodil can be fun while ignoring its broken lore ..
Yes , it is possible to enjoy a game and still recognize its shortcomings. But calling someone a Hater as soon as they point out your internet girlfriends flaws is weak and transparent..
Dude... give your head a shake. There is no one in these forums more critical of ESO's real shortcomings than I am.
I have slagged them mercilessly for their loot crates, their inconvenient by design implementation of both furniture and jewelry crafting, their silly semantics games with "chapters" to hide the fact they were simply making a change to their sub model from "all DLC inclusive" to "most DLC inclusive except one per year," their butt ugly, crown crate exclusive, semi-transparent and puke green mounts that pollute the visuals, their extreme over emphasis on new "content" that can be easily monetized such as all the extra motif pages... I could and have gone on.
But if you actually had been paying attention while you played, you would know that 1T was simply the end of a years long process where they were distancing themselves from the alliance-separated vanilla ESO,
It started with Craglorn in 2014 when they created the first all alliance integrated zone and followed that up with every DLC. They also removed the alliance separation from group finder formed groups long before 1T, and it finally culminated with the appropriately named One Tamriel update when they removed all alliance barriers from PVE.
I have been paying enough attention to know that 1) many saw the total removal of PVE alliance separation as a victory considering how many were against it in the first place and 2) it was a huge boon for the game and attracted many more new players than any single thing they have done.
You're just dead wrong about 1T being the cause of any lore inconsistency. Most people who care about lore would see it 180 degrees the other way.
An i never said T1 was the soul reason for this Lore discrepancies ,(there were lore problems all along from launch to present) It was the final straw as " you " show above ..... (the progression that got us here) And the final straw for me .. Hence "since T1"
Yes they were erasing the lines since 14 .. then with T1 the erased the final lines making everything grey ...
This is terrible for an ES game imo , the world is supposed to harsh and violent not a walk thru the park it has become ..
And yes T1 did help ESO pop as they made the game complete easy casual mode with the finalization of T1 , by erasing all the lines and trivializing all the factions to nothing .. and by scaling there game making 93% of the content soloable... There is no feeling of danger at all no risks and gear is to easily atainable and handed out like trick or treats ..
All that being said i still like ESO for many reasons .. Exploration/Crafting/Trading /Builds/Cyrodil/Fishing ... altho the ranged combat also bugs me a bit ...Would be nice to have some Overland challenge , its really bad ..
With all respect due, and all respect I have for you from other threads, notably in the "Hardware" forum... can I ask you a personal question ?
Have you fallen on your head recently ?
Are you claiming that ESO should not have a tutorial akin to what I described in STO? Or are you claiming that it already does? Because as of five days ago when I created a new account, it didn't present me with anything resembling a decent tutorial.
Assuming that you mean that it already has such a tutorial, there are several possibilities that I see:
1) The tutorial simply broke. Maybe if at one point, you zig when the tutorial expected you to zag, you miss some gate that the tutorial expected you to pass through, and then it doesn't do the rest of the tutorial until you pass through that gate. If I did that after five minutes of gameplay (excluding messing with keybinds, which always takes a long time for me), then that would explain why it looked like there wasn't a tutorial. In that case, the tutorial is simply fragile and buggy--and being able to easily disable the tutorial by accident would be a pretty severe bug.
2) There's a bug that gutted the tutorial, such as by making it be drawn behind the main game display or having the text appear off of the screen entirely. Don't dismiss this as impossible. I've had exactly that sort of problem with Trove. In Trove, at least when I played it, if you made the game window at least about 9 million pixels in size, it made nearly all in-game text vanish. That included almost the entire tutorial. So I played through the tutorial with nearly all of the text missing, and thus found the tutorial to be rather lacking. A lot of game developers don't test their game at the 4320x2560 resolution that I play at, and it's possible to break a lot of things if you're sloppy with how you scale the resolution.
3) The game used to have a tutorial, but it has since been removed. That would be a really stupid thing to do, of course. But expansions deprecate a lot of content all the time. You wouldn't think that an expansion would strip out a tutorial, but if you didn't already know otherwise, neither would you think that "Full access to all DLC game packs" meant "access to some but not all of the DLC released since launch". And if an expansion made a lot of things stated in the original tutorial now wrong, they may not want to leave the tutorial in place unchanged.
4) The game has a tutorial, but new players don't start there anymore. As it stands now, a new player who buys the game today will start in Morrowind, unless he also buys Summerset before creating his first character. That is not optional; the game never gave me a choice of where to start, nor of whether to do or skip a tutorial. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case at launch, as Morrowind wasn't yet part of the game. If the tutorial is located at an old starting point for a new character halfway across the game world from where you actually start now, then for all practical purposes, the tutorial is useless because new players will never find it on their own before they no longer need it.
5) The game has a tutorial, but it doesn't start until you're far into the game. Plenty of games have tutorial chunks to introduce additional features far into the game. Games that do that pretty much always feed you some major chunks of tutorial right at the start, though. ESO pretty flagrantly didn't do that for me, as I couldn't find any major tutorial components in my first three hours or so of playing, and I was actively looking. I didn't get nearly as far in those three hours as a veteran player would upon starting a new character, of course. A lot of it was spent tinkering with keybinds, trying to figure out which controls mattered and which didn't, as I can't map everything to a gamepad. A lot was also spent running around trying to figure out what to do and trying not to miss anything important.
But I am completely serious when I say that, upon creating a new account last Saturday and playing for about three hours, I wasn't able to find anything that you could reasonably call a tutorial for the game. And I am also completely serious when I say that I think that is a pretty severe blunder in the design of a game. There should be a tutorial available to new players, and it shouldn't be presented immediately and right in your face so as to not possible to accidentally miss it.
The tutorial in ESO is not useless but it could definitely be better.
It does teach you the basics like walking, running, the map, light attacks, heavy attacks, blocking and bashing interrupts, and the game does have other tutorial text when you do some things for the first time... like your first mundus stone, your first skyshard, your first public dungeon, your first visit to a riding trainer, etc. But the whole thing is based on exploration and discovery: it does not send you to that first mundus stone and only the original vanilla tutorial in the Coldharbour prison plops a skyshard in front of you within the tutorial - the Morrowind and Summerset tutorials do not. Both, mundus stones and skyshards are hugely important parts of the game and character building.
Likewise the guilds... mages, fighters and undaunted are things you should join early since the activities that advance it won't credit the advancement until you do and skills in those lines are part of just about every single build. The game should more clearly direct you to them instead of letting you stumble onto them as you explore.
And speaking of Mundus stones... neither Vanderfell nor Summerset have any and yet the game leads you to believe that if you own those chapters those are the areas you should be questing in right after the tutorial.
More egregious is the use of combat pets for the two classes, Wardens and Sorcerers, that have them available. I bet you anything that the vast majority of people in this forum that play the game don't even know that you can send the pet to attack something before you engage it by holding "Y" and left clicking on the target and recall them into passive mode by "Y" + right clicking. The game just never tells you that at any time. Most people find out about it through forums and wikis.
And still on the subject of pets... seeing their health bar is off by default and you need to turn it on by first turning on "nameplates" which is also off by default, and then somehow just knowing that in this game combat pets fall under the "friendly NPC" category and then turn that health bar visibility on in that sub menu.
Quiz may be going off the deep end a bit but he is definitely not totally off the mark.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
It does teach you the basics like walking, running, the map, light attacks, heavy attacks, blocking and bashing interrupts, and the game does have other tutorial text when you do some things for the first time... like your first mundus stone, your first skyshard, your first public dungeon, your first visit to a riding trainer, etc. But the whole thing is based on exploration and discovery: it does not send you to that first mundus stone and only the original vanilla tutorial in the Coldharbour prison plops a skyshard in front of you within the tutorial - the Morrowind and Summerset tutorials do not. Both, mundus stones and skyshards are hugely important parts of the game and character building.
I did not find any explanation of walking, running, or the map, at least beyond having them listed on the keybinds menu. Knowing about quest markers on the map is hugely important, and I found it by accident without the tutorial explaining it and well after it really should have. There were brief mentions of light and heavy attacks, and either blocking, interrupts, or dodging, but not necessarily all three.
It started me out having been captured by Dark Elf slavers and trying to break free. The quest was called Broken Bonds. There were a handful of tutorial quest tooltips over the course of that quest, but everything that could really be called tutorial about it could readily fit on a single 3"x5" index card. After that, it drops you off in the main game world, in a small town where, as best as I could tell, the only quest was Divine Conundrum. I did that quest to completion, but there was nothing remotely tutorial about it at all, and it wouldn't have been out of place as a level 20 or 40 quest, at least in a game where level 20 or 40 quests are supposed to be easy.
It does teach you the basics like walking, running, the map, light attacks, heavy attacks, blocking and bashing interrupts, and the game does have other tutorial text when you do some things for the first time... like your first mundus stone, your first skyshard, your first public dungeon, your first visit to a riding trainer, etc. But the whole thing is based on exploration and discovery: it does not send you to that first mundus stone and only the original vanilla tutorial in the Coldharbour prison plops a skyshard in front of you within the tutorial - the Morrowind and Summerset tutorials do not. Both, mundus stones and skyshards are hugely important parts of the game and character building.
I did not find any explanation of walking, running, or the map, at least beyond having them listed on the keybinds menu. Knowing about quest markers on the map is hugely important, and I found it by accident without the tutorial explaining it and well after it really should have. There were brief mentions of light and heavy attacks, and either blocking, interrupts, or dodging, but not necessarily all three.
It started me out having been captured by Dark Elf slavers and trying to break free. The quest was called Broken Bonds. There were a handful of tutorial quest tooltips over the course of that quest, but everything that could really be called tutorial about it could readily fit on a single 3"x5" index card. After that, it drops you off in the main game world, in a small town where, as best as I could tell, the only quest was Divine Conundrum. I did that quest to completion, but there was nothing remotely tutorial about it at all, and it wouldn't have been out of place as a level 20 or 40 quest, at least in a game where level 20 or 40 quests are supposed to be easy.
You did the Vvanderfell tutorial which is one of the new ones but you did it on a game pad so I have no idea what that shows or doesn't since I've ever only done it using M&KB.
For me it showed just looking around and interacting with an object on the ship, the basic WASD movement is at the bottom of the screen as you regain consciousness, the block, bash interrupt and heavy attack happen in your bare knuckle fight with Naryu. The "M" for map pops up as soon as you leave that first hut, "I" for equipping items happens as soon as you find your first weapon, etc. But like I said IDK what they showed you or didn't when using a game pad.
I already said earlier in this thread that showcasing their new area by plopping you in either Vvanderfell or Summerset right after the tutorial is misguided and doesn't do new players any favors since they are not noob-friendly zones.
The game as designed originally sent you to one of your Alliance starter islands after the original tutorial and those are well designed to continue the early levels learning experience. That is still there and is the best way to start the game but of course, someone other than ZOS needs to tell you that before you'd know it.
Many, many people have suggested to them that the game should give you an option of which tutorial you want to do when you create a character and heavily recommend that original Coldharbour prison tutorial for new players.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
First impression of the game was ruined by all the people screaming for Skyrim Online... so to appease that vocal minority you now get dumped in a city with no idea what's going on... because apparently that makes it feel more 'open'. This was the player's fault.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Comments
I have slagged them mercilessly for their loot crates, their inconvenient by design implementation of both furniture and jewelry crafting, their silly semantics games with "chapters" to hide the fact they were simply making a change to their sub model from "all DLC inclusive" to "most DLC inclusive except one per year," their butt ugly, crown crate exclusive, semi-transparent and puke green mounts that pollute the visuals, their extreme over emphasis on new "content" that can be easily monetized such as all the extra motif pages... I could and have gone on.
But if you actually had been paying attention while you played, you would know that 1T was simply the end of a years long process where they were distancing themselves from the alliance-separated vanilla ESO,
It started with Craglorn in 2014 when they created the first all alliance integrated zone and followed that up with every DLC. They also removed the alliance separation from group finder formed groups long before 1T, and it finally culminated with the appropriately named One Tamriel update when they removed all alliance barriers from PVE.
I have been paying enough attention to know that 1) many saw the total removal of PVE alliance separation as a victory considering how many were against it in the first place and 2) it was a huge boon for the game and attracted many more new players than any single thing they have done.
You're just dead wrong about 1T being the cause of any lore inconsistency. Most people who care about lore would see it 180 degrees the other way.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Did they "shoe horn" some lore into creating a 3 faction PvP system? Maybe - but flashbacks in the previous ES games have described conflicts. So whay shouldn't there be conflict at this time? At the end of the day though gameplay > lore considerations and they wanted - reasonably - to go 3 faction PvP.
Outside of gameplay however there is no reason why they shouldn't consider past lore.
That said when they were designing the game they certainly said they did. Specifically the "Bethseda" custodians of the lore were involved and we were told that it was all "OK".
And for me it is "familiar" enough - but like Iselin I just play the game. To give some examples however the first day I logged in I heard a noise and I knew that somewhere close an anchor had dropped. When I first visited Riften it had been some years but I "knew" my way around. The herbs / flowers were familiar. The werewolf city retake quest was basically identical (and I was OK with that). Shards, draugr, Imperials, trolls, the Morrowind geography, the thguilds, the interface, the deities and so much more. There is absolutely no doubt that ESO is an Elder Scrolls game.
And going forward a future chapter will almost certainly add some / all of the Skyrim geography that is missing. From a business perspective this is clear cut and maybe one of the reasons they updated Skyrim's graphics. (Flashbacks for dragons maybe or time rifts?)
And at that point ......
If ESO isn't already the definitive ES game as far as lore goes - having already brought together almost all of the previous games - at that point it will be the bible of what is and isn't ES. And maybe some of the differences are because tweaks were needed.
Just to reiterate though if there is stuff they can do to keep things consistent they should. As long as it fits the gameplay - which should come first - is easy and doesn't add undue cost. If they could and don't that would be "lazy". What they have done so far though looks fine to me.
I believe ESO is set before any of the single-player games, which would mean it is not possible to have "shoehorned" lore. It would the true story.
In DAoC we built community by PvPing and PvEing with the same people day in and day out and the other realms were strangers... they were "others." That's why PvE and PvP in that game felt like they were more intimately linked.
But in the early days of ESO the lore "scholars" were going nuts over that separation in ESO being a lore sacrilege. There were tons and tons of those posts here in these forums back in late 2013 and early 2014.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
In any case. this isn't a case of false advertising, but of absent or inadequate comprehension on your part.
https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/crownstore/category/1
I could understand how people who have played the game for a long time and were long conversant what is included or not would already know. But I don't understand how such people could regard it as anything less than intentionally misleading to new players on the part of Zenimax to word it that way.
People who have expertise in some area and are generally around other people who share that expertise in the same area sometimes assume that everyone in the world must share that expertise. That's often a mistake, and I think there's a whole lot of it going on in this thread.
For example, in some contexts, I would be able to talk about the chromatic number of a graph and assume that everyone knows what I'm talking about. Leave the community with the relevant expertise and post on a place like this and it would take a considerable explanation of what a graph is before it would be reasonable to expect more than a tiny handful of people to understand.
I've got the straight edge.
In the list of "features" that ESO Plus offers it would be very, very simple for them to add: note additional purchase needed for "chapters". Very easy indeed.
Like Iselin I also said that excluding chapters diminished the value of ESO PLus. I suspect they did it because they believed that some people were subbing for 1 month, running through the new content and then leaving. Be that as it may there is an element of obfucation. (Which means: make it less clear btw in case anyone accused be of obfuscation!)
And as @Iselin says the number of "editions" available adds additional confusion - he said 3 or 4 if you count a collectors edition. What he didn't mention is that you can still buy most of the previous retail editions - original, One Tamriel, Gold ..... not counting collectors editions.
For the record I have always considered ESO Plus to be little more than signing up for 1500 crowns a month.
For people thinking of trying the gane but who are unsure my suggestion would be:
Buy a "cheap" edition. Any version will do although some offer better value but only if you decide to stick around. Any version though will provide months and months of PvE quests - some of which is very, very well done - and access to the RvRvR (PvP) campaign. And as Iselin says you can always ask on the forums if unsure what the differences between versions are. Oh and use a proper vendor - there is a list stickied or use Amazon etc. Online registration with a new game code is required.
You will be able to get any content you are missing if you so desire.
Ignore ESO Plus on day 1. You can akways add it later if you decide you want the perks - and playing the game will allow you to get a feel for what they are. In the great scheme though - not needed.
Actually, there are a lot of NPCs near the start of ESO who insult you for not already knowing all about the game and the world before you start. Maybe that's what the forum posters here are taking their queues from.
For comparison, let's consider another game that I recently tried for the first time: Star Trek Online. I ended up quitting before long, largely because both ground combat and space combat were so clunky, which surprised me because both Champions Online and Neverwinter demonstrate that Cryptic knows how to make far better combat than they implemented in STO. But it means that I went through the STO tutorial recently enough to remember it.
STO does some of its tutorial piecemeal. Here's your first ground combat, so we'll give you the ground combat tutorial. The space combat tutorial can wait for your first space combat. Tutorials for features that you can't access for several levels show up when you can first access them, and so forth.
But when STO does a tutorial to introduce some game mechanic, they explain it. Sometimes it's a sequence of ten or so text bubbles with a sentence or two explaining what is going on. Some say to click on this button to bring up some menu, and the next says to click on a particular button on the menu to do something. They explain what the feature is and how to use it, and give you practice in using it in a simple test case.
Depending on which feature you pick, STO's tutorial for a single feature might well be more expansive than ESO's tutorial for the entire game, at least if you exclude from the skill point recommendations.
Of course people could have figured out how to play STO if the game didn't have a tutorial. But it's better to give new players a two minute explanation of some feature that lets the player see it in action than to let the player flail around for ten minutes before figuring out what to do. Or worse, letting the player stumble across the feature a month later after not previously being aware that it was part of the game and he should have been using it since the start.
That's the point of a tutorial: help the new player to understand some key mechanic in two minutes rather than ten. STO does that, as do a lot of other games. ESO doesn't bother. Yes, the new player can figure it out in ten minutes. But it's a terrible way to introduce people to a game. Reverse-engineering how the game works shouldn't accidentally be part of the game. (Intentionally asking players to reverse-engineer it, along the lines of A Tale in the Desert, is a different matter, but makes for a very niche game.)
That the tutorial is lacking to the extent of being nearly missing isn't my main complaint about the game. But I found it remarkable, and so I remarked upon it.
I can only assume that you are trolling us, well played sir.
Assuming that you mean that it already has such a tutorial, there are several possibilities that I see:
1) The tutorial simply broke. Maybe if at one point, you zig when the tutorial expected you to zag, you miss some gate that the tutorial expected you to pass through, and then it doesn't do the rest of the tutorial until you pass through that gate. If I did that after five minutes of gameplay (excluding messing with keybinds, which always takes a long time for me), then that would explain why it looked like there wasn't a tutorial. In that case, the tutorial is simply fragile and buggy--and being able to easily disable the tutorial by accident would be a pretty severe bug.
2) There's a bug that gutted the tutorial, such as by making it be drawn behind the main game display or having the text appear off of the screen entirely. Don't dismiss this as impossible. I've had exactly that sort of problem with Trove. In Trove, at least when I played it, if you made the game window at least about 9 million pixels in size, it made nearly all in-game text vanish. That included almost the entire tutorial. So I played through the tutorial with nearly all of the text missing, and thus found the tutorial to be rather lacking. A lot of game developers don't test their game at the 4320x2560 resolution that I play at, and it's possible to break a lot of things if you're sloppy with how you scale the resolution.
3) The game used to have a tutorial, but it has since been removed. That would be a really stupid thing to do, of course. But expansions deprecate a lot of content all the time. You wouldn't think that an expansion would strip out a tutorial, but if you didn't already know otherwise, neither would you think that "Full access to all DLC game packs" meant "access to some but not all of the DLC released since launch". And if an expansion made a lot of things stated in the original tutorial now wrong, they may not want to leave the tutorial in place unchanged.
4) The game has a tutorial, but new players don't start there anymore. As it stands now, a new player who buys the game today will start in Morrowind, unless he also buys Summerset before creating his first character. That is not optional; the game never gave me a choice of where to start, nor of whether to do or skip a tutorial. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case at launch, as Morrowind wasn't yet part of the game. If the tutorial is located at an old starting point for a new character halfway across the game world from where you actually start now, then for all practical purposes, the tutorial is useless because new players will never find it on their own before they no longer need it.
5) The game has a tutorial, but it doesn't start until you're far into the game. Plenty of games have tutorial chunks to introduce additional features far into the game. Games that do that pretty much always feed you some major chunks of tutorial right at the start, though. ESO pretty flagrantly didn't do that for me, as I couldn't find any major tutorial components in my first three hours or so of playing, and I was actively looking. I didn't get nearly as far in those three hours as a veteran player would upon starting a new character, of course. A lot of it was spent tinkering with keybinds, trying to figure out which controls mattered and which didn't, as I can't map everything to a gamepad. A lot was also spent running around trying to figure out what to do and trying not to miss anything important.
But I am completely serious when I say that, upon creating a new account last Saturday and playing for about three hours, I wasn't able to find anything that you could reasonably call a tutorial for the game. And I am also completely serious when I say that I think that is a pretty severe blunder in the design of a game. There should be a tutorial available to new players, and it shouldn't be presented immediately and right in your face so as to not possible to accidentally miss it.
It does teach you the basics like walking, running, the map, light attacks, heavy attacks, blocking and bashing interrupts, and the game does have other tutorial text when you do some things for the first time... like your first mundus stone, your first skyshard, your first public dungeon, your first visit to a riding trainer, etc. But the whole thing is based on exploration and discovery: it does not send you to that first mundus stone and only the original vanilla tutorial in the Coldharbour prison plops a skyshard in front of you within the tutorial - the Morrowind and Summerset tutorials do not. Both, mundus stones and skyshards are hugely important parts of the game and character building.
Likewise the guilds... mages, fighters and undaunted are things you should join early since the activities that advance it won't credit the advancement until you do and skills in those lines are part of just about every single build. The game should more clearly direct you to them instead of letting you stumble onto them as you explore.
And speaking of Mundus stones... neither Vanderfell nor Summerset have any and yet the game leads you to believe that if you own those chapters those are the areas you should be questing in right after the tutorial.
More egregious is the use of combat pets for the two classes, Wardens and Sorcerers, that have them available. I bet you anything that the vast majority of people in this forum that play the game don't even know that you can send the pet to attack something before you engage it by holding "Y" and left clicking on the target and recall them into passive mode by "Y" + right clicking. The game just never tells you that at any time. Most people find out about it through forums and wikis.
And still on the subject of pets... seeing their health bar is off by default and you need to turn it on by first turning on "nameplates" which is also off by default, and then somehow just knowing that in this game combat pets fall under the "friendly NPC" category and then turn that health bar visibility on in that sub menu.
Quiz may be going off the deep end a bit but he is definitely not totally off the mark.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
It started me out having been captured by Dark Elf slavers and trying to break free. The quest was called Broken Bonds. There were a handful of tutorial quest tooltips over the course of that quest, but everything that could really be called tutorial about it could readily fit on a single 3"x5" index card. After that, it drops you off in the main game world, in a small town where, as best as I could tell, the only quest was Divine Conundrum. I did that quest to completion, but there was nothing remotely tutorial about it at all, and it wouldn't have been out of place as a level 20 or 40 quest, at least in a game where level 20 or 40 quests are supposed to be easy.
For me it showed just looking around and interacting with an object on the ship, the basic WASD movement is at the bottom of the screen as you regain consciousness, the block, bash interrupt and heavy attack happen in your bare knuckle fight with Naryu. The "M" for map pops up as soon as you leave that first hut, "I" for equipping items happens as soon as you find your first weapon, etc. But like I said IDK what they showed you or didn't when using a game pad.
I already said earlier in this thread that showcasing their new area by plopping you in either Vvanderfell or Summerset right after the tutorial is misguided and doesn't do new players any favors since they are not noob-friendly zones.
The game as designed originally sent you to one of your Alliance starter islands after the original tutorial and those are well designed to continue the early levels learning experience. That is still there and is the best way to start the game but of course, someone other than ZOS needs to tell you that before you'd know it.
Many, many people have suggested to them that the game should give you an option of which tutorial you want to do when you create a character and heavily recommend that original Coldharbour prison tutorial for new players.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED