ESO Review (long)

Let me start off with a disclaimer – I love ESO, and I will do everything in my power to remain objective in my review, but I just wanted people to know where I stand (aka borderline fanboy).

Visuals

The game is gorgeous and meticulously crafted. Whoever was on the team that built the environment, they get a million merit points.  But there are two points that I want to talk about specifically related to visuals:

1. Character models & animations – While the facial options are vast and people look unique, most of the body frame animations are pretty poorly done. I’m not talking about all animations, some are quite excellent. Running is hideous, swinging a 2h weapon is bad; some good ones include drawing and shooting a bow, staff pound (wall of elements cast animation). I won’t go through every animation, but most of the basic left click animations are at the bottom.
2. Scope – If they did anything to the highest level of excellence, it’s scope. That feeling of immersion, journey and epicness, ZOS nailed it. Dungeons are atmospheric, weather effects are spot on, and the ambient sounds are vibrant and lush.  And just riding through the world is an experience unto itself, one that I have never had paralleled in another MMO.

Combat

The meat and potatoes of most video games and ESO, of course, has good and bad, so I’ll try to be as thorough as possible.

• The flexible class system is a rare joy in MMO’s and ESO’s is one of the best iterations. You can build just about anything you want and can find a great deal of depth in character building. At the same time, it’s easy to learn, not all deep and complex system require months of reading, anyone can plop some skills and head out adventuring, but the more you play the more synergies you see. Not only between the skills on your bar(s), but also between your abilities within a group.
• The active combat is a double-edged sword here. It’s both wonderful and liberating, but can also be very demanding depending on the difficulty of a fight. Again, it’s the simplicity that let’s people get into it, but the better you become, the more you see that the skill cap is quite high. It’s one thing to dodge an attack, it’s another to dodge one attack, interrupt a different mob, cast a spell and immediately block a heavy attack while moving and managing resources. The action chains that you can pull together are insane, I’m getting better, but really good players can be all over the place controlling the fight like a boss.
• Weapon swapping leaves a little to be desired, I love that we can do it and I love that it works . . . I just wish it worked a little bit better. GW2 has really phenomenal weapon swapping, it’s like butter and it’s on demand. ESO won’t let you weapon swap in the middle of certain abilities/actions. I’d prefer it to override what I’m doing if that’s what it has to do as an ability that might save my life could be on my second bar. Or, more commonly, I want to recast a buff on myself so I’ll weapon swap cast it and then weapon swap, but it’s just not as quick and smooth as I would like.

Groups/Dungeons

ESO is a great game to play with other people, BUT you have to be consistent and careful as you play due to heavy phasing. This decision has been a challenge for group oriented players on different schedules. Get too far ahead and you’re in a different phase, so either stick together and play at the same times and make alts for solo play, or just stick to solo’ing / asking random people to group for temporary questing.

There’s a few different types of dungeons in ESO

Solo – Arguably some of the most challenging fights as they’re tuned for what they are not for whatever skills you have on your bars. Some of these fights will make you work for it, and winning a tough fight feels oh-so satisfying. Once in a while you see a guildie just rage in gchat as they have died 23 times on a solo boss, and no one can help them beyond giving advice. If it’s a player skill issue, it means its time to get better. I kind of like that this type of barrier exists, forcing players to learn to play.

Public Dungeons/Dark Anchors – As with anything that includes the general public, your experience can be good or bad. It is launch, and for that reason you have people who have heard that it’s super effective to camp boss spawns for exp and loot (it isn’t). So they stand there spamming to kill the boss repeatedly.  Alternatively, if you’ve had the pleasure of being in a sparsely populated public dungeon or dark anchor, you will see camaraderie and some good fights. A dark anchor with 4-8 people is a very very different experience from a dark anchor with 20 people.

Group Dungeons – Boss mechanics vary and most are tuned quite highly, if you’ve gone through a dungeon with players who are learning or aren’t very capable, you will die. You may die a lot. And quite possibly, you may not be able to proceed because of that person(s). Also of note, you might see people talking about chests scattered throughout dungeons and people wrongfully stating that they are the source of dungeon loot. They are not. Bosses typically drop good loot and trash mobs often do as well.

General

• ESO does not hold your hand. In an age where every game you come across just let’s you know how to do everything it has been a learning curve for many people (as evidenced by zone chat). I wonder how many people don’t know about the group finder, because there’s nothing that tells you about it. You have to go menu spelunking. It’s kind of old school in this regard, as you’re left to your own devices to figure stuff out.
• Phasing as mentioned earlier, can be a headache, but it brings an evolving world of your making to life. Choices you make during quests can change what happens, sometimes you choose to kill someone and they die, quest ends, you get your reward. But if you let them live, then there might be an alternative resolution that requires additional steps before you complete the quest and leaves your phase in a different state. Great for alts, make new choices!
• Bugs – Yes, there are bugs. We’d all be hard pressed to find a perfect game, I do find it difficult to look at ESO and claim it to be much better or worse than most MMO launches. If anything, it’s above average and certainly not a catastrophe. I mean, you have people approaching 200 hours played in the first 2 weeks of this game’s life. People tend to fixate on negatives but completely dismiss all the uptime that it’s working. I’m not a developer, but what little I know about large scale software projects and from every other MMO release I’ve been a part of, having the uptime that they’ve had on a new game can’t be easy.

General Elder Scrollsieness – So one of the big points of contention when this game was being made was will it be ES or will it be MMO? For a lot of people, it seems they were expecting a co-op single player game with maybe shared cities or something and the full ES experience. I’d say that ZOS got as close to the ES experience as you can get while still creating a persistent shared world. While you can’t realistically go to the next zone and engage the mobs at a lower level, each zone is sufficiently large enough to provide you with multiple ES experiences as you progress.

What I’m saying is that if you play through Auridon, it feels as if you’ve just played an Elder Scrolls game, albeit a slightly shorter one (probably 20-30 hours) but you get the whole experience. It’s very well crafted and you can roam the zone that you’re level appropriate for giving it a very open single player ES feeling. It when you look at the game as a whole that you see the MMO influence, the zones are separated, whereas a single player ES game would have them all available the whole time (although, no ES game has been this large – again, dat scope).

Housing is missing. I’m sure this is on their list of “things to do” and I’m sure us ES players will greatly appreciate housing. It’s an evergreen addition and will provide us with a great deal of content. It would also be a great way to reuse lower level zones by making crafters able to make decorations/furniture using various materials.

You can’t pick up EVERYTHING. So this was a point I heard during beta that it’s not real ES because you can’t pick up everything that isn’t nailed down. That’s just something that people have to accept in a multiplayer game. Think about it, some people hit level 50 in one day. Now think about what you’re asking, letting people pick up anything. Guess what? Those people who are ahead of you will have already picked everything up before you get there. You can have it respawn, but I’m pretty sure system resources are better spent on gaming performance then on generating tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of new items constantly. And lest we forget, people are already unable to help themselves from collecting everything that’s currently available to pick up. Half these people would have a full bank and inventory before they left the first building.

NPC’s with real-time lives. I would like to have seen this, or a least to a certain degree. This does give me the MMO feeling instead of the ES feeling, I understand the decision, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have liked to have seen an effort. Quest NPC’s that go to sleep or engage in conversations basically create a thousand points of failure for possible bugs. Simply because people are constantly trying to talk to them and their script would break as they’re supposed to be doing X, Y, or Z at any given time.

Longevity

One of the big issues in MMO’s is the one of longevity. Is there enough “content” and what is there to do at “end game”. ESO faces an uphill battle here. Not because it’s thin on content. No, it’s extremely content rich. But because we (mmo players) have been told over and over and over that questing is filler and is not “content”. Anyone approaching ESO with this mentality will be asking where the content is.

50+ and 50++ zones are end game. There is no other way to say it, and people need to understand that standing in town waiting to run the same dungeon/raid for the 30^th time hoping that you’ll get codpiece of +10 stamina is not the only form of end game. In ESO, once you level cap, your PvE experience continues with the other faction’s zones veteran dungeons and pvp, and soon adventure zones will be available too. So many people keep asking for a world to play in instead of lobbies. ESO has given us a world, a rich and lustrous world, do not miss the forest for the trees.