I don't know. I get a fair amount of fear out of playing ESO. But then I do a lot of things that a lot of people don't. Like I actually go out and quest in enemy territory. I also do a lot of scouting which can put you way out there all by yourself or with one other friend, and at those moments, after you have hidden and ducked and snuck halfway across the map, the fear of crossing a road or attacking what you "think" is a player that is, like you, out there by their self becomes almost palpable.
The closer you get to your objective the more palpable it becomes too. And anyone who knows what I am talking about will tell you, you will literally JUMP when you are in sneak mode and not paying attention and someone comes breaking over the hill right next to you.
I know it doesn't amount to the same things as losing a starship but it's still a lot more than the usual zerg.
With this game and to be fair with all Fantasy MMOs.
It's FEAR.
What about all the players who don't like "fear" and are enjoying the game because of "no fear"?
It's like saying "I've figured out what's wrong with Dark Souls... you die a lot".
"But what about the people who want to die a lot if they make a stupid mistake?"
I personally would prefer a harsh death penalty but "there it is".
Sovrath sums it up nicely as usual
There has been a sharp trend over the last 15 years of MMOs away from any kind of meaningful death penalty. I think the modern MMO player in general does not want the fear or the pain of death. In turn this has led to bland gaming experiences where we simply do not care about death. Hell, in ESO and other games that preceded it people die on purpose (e.g. jumping off a cliff) so they can travel somewhere faster.
I prefer harsher death penalties too. Yes it irritates me to die, but it makes you respect the content and think about what you're doing. You don't just rush in blindly to see if you can solo the boss because it doesn't matter. I miss the feeling of early days EQ2, or Vanguard (or even EQ, even though that death penalty was too severe) where you never did anything lightly.
I think the OP is right . I'm enjoying the game a lot but it lacks that fear factor . I think thats what I liked about WoW in its early days when there was extensive world pvp . You didn't know if there was someone lying in wait to attack you from the opposing faction when you were questing . It doesn't seem to exist in any games anymore ( apart from EVE I guess ) which is a shame because I would kill for a decent faction based mmo with that sort of pvp . I know theres Cyrodil but thats safely cornered off like the Ettenmoors in lotro . I have kind of given up on having that sort of game again . For me a games longevity is very much tied up with its pvp at the moment I'm enjoying leveling up and wandering around the world of the Elder Scrolls online but I suspect in three-six months I will have moved on again .
Why are you or anyone suprised that ESO is like this it's kiddy feed and user friendly. This is what all the hypers and fan boys want.No point complaining about it now lol. The new shinny mist is starting to clear and the die hards are slowly realising what kind of mmo they have been championing. Also EVE is not the only game that gives you that feeling Age Of Wulin/Wushu has it in abundance.
Originally posted by greatskys I think the OP is right . I'm enjoying the game a lot but it lacks that fear factor . I think thats what I liked about WoW in its early days when there was extensive world pvp . You didn't know if there was someone lying in wait to attack you from the opposing faction when you were questing . It doesn't seem to exist in any games anymore ( apart from EVE I guess ) which is a shame because I would kill for a decent faction based mmo with that sort of pvp . I know theres Cyrodil but thats safely cornered off like the Ettenmoors in lotro . I have kind of given up on having that sort of game again . For me a games longevity is very much tied up with its pvp at the moment I'm enjoying leveling up and wandering around the world of the Elder Scrolls online but I suspect in three-six months I will have moved on again .
Why are you or anyone suprised that ESO is like this it's kiddy feed and user friendly. This is what all the hypers and fan boys want.No point complaining about it now lol. The new shinny mist is starting to clear and the die hards are slowly realising what kind of mmo they have been championing. Also EVE is not the only game that gives you that feeling Age Of Wulin/Wushu has it in abundance.
+1 on the AOW statement.
But I honestly don't think that it's fair to really pigeon hole this game into a "no fear" category.
I mean, it's not like you don't almost have to tie a kid to a chair and beat him before he will ever play one of these games without trying to exploit the hell of out it. So how can you ever really give anyone the "fear" concept when the moment that they figure out that they can get around it they will, or the moment that they figure out that they CAN'T get around it, they quit.
ESO doesn't control the way the maps go up in Cyrodill, but let one guild become huge enough to actually take and hold some land and watch the mass exodus of players begin to spend themselves broke transferring to another server instead of even attempting to do the same thing and fight back.
That's not the games fault though. That's the fault of the weak and the stupid.
Of course, if you ask them they will say to you, "Who in their right mind wants to waste all that time just to lose anyway?" But then, as Brad Pitt said in the beginning of Troy, "That is why no one will ever remember their names."
Too many games though have been great in concept but executed poorly by the special little "hold the pickles" snowflakes that populate the MMORPG demographic. Nothing you can really do about it either.
AOW has whole cities that could be held, taxed, supported, conquered, and regained and yet everyone in that game walks around like they are Quai Chang Cain or The old man with the grey beard. Solo superstar, I don't need anyone. So likewise ESO has guilds chock full of people from all the different factions, and I don't just mean place of origin, I mean literally ALLIED with the other faction. Why? Not because the game sucks but because they were given the choice and they chose not to even try to stand by any concept of integrity.
"Oh that's too hard! What if I want to make a player in all of the different factions?" It's the weakest crap I ever heard, but it is rampant. And yet everyone and their brother wants to call themselves a pvper, or a roleplayer or even a PVE'er when the name of the game is RvR War with a PVE background.
I mean they even went so far as to allow people to make whatever race they wanted to in whatever faction they wanted to and you STILL have Ebonhearts in Daggerfall guilds, Aldemri in Ebonheart guilds, yadda, yadda, yadda because in the end people are just lame.
So in this case I would say, don't hate the game, hate the player. Cause there are some weak, weaksauced, winnie the bish, bishes in that game right now.
It doesn't take putting the fear of god into a game to make it fun, it just takes giving a crap about how the game is actually supposed to work, and most people never do.
I my experience that sense of fear quickly goes away and become annoyance. I played a lot of video games and there are a few genres that do the whole fear thing. Horror and survival games make you feel like your character is vulnerable and that the beast hunting them are powerful. But after playing amnesia and slender etc. I realized that these types of games get old very fast. At first you are so filled with terror you panic, but after being killed a few times you realize it aint so bad. Then the creatures that scared you become mere annoyances.
It's the same thing with EVE and other MMOs. At first you are scared shittless, then it just becomes the norm. I played EVE for years and died at least once every week, I just didn't care that much, everything is disposable and there is nothing that you can't buy. Some people suicide to take a shortcut back to base....
The only thing I am afraid of is your terrible grammar and spelling, to be frank. It makes me weep for the English language.
However I don't think any sane man can fear an imaginary and virtual experience, it's....just that....This shit isn't real, you aren't going to die. It's just a pointless, meaningless, worthless character and you can always make more of them. Unless it costs real world money to make a character, and in that case just....don't play. That's my view on permadeath, or punishment, in video games....they can never actually bother or effect me, because it's a video game.
.....And I'm a mature adult that doesn't let virtual interaction hurt my feels.
--Custom Rig: Pyraxis--- NZXT Phantom 410 Case Intel Core i5-4690 Processor - Quad Core, 6MB Smart Cache, 3.5GHz Asus Sabertooth Z87 Motherboard Asus GeForce GTX 760 Video Card - 2GB GDDR5, PCI-Express 3.0 Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 16GB
The only thing I am afraid of is your terrible grammar and spelling, to be frank. It makes me weep for the English language.
However I don't think any sane man can fear an imaginary and virtual experience, it's....just that....This shit isn't real, you aren't going to die. It's just a pointless, meaningless, worthless character and you can always make more of them. Unless it costs real world money to make a character, and in that case just....don't play. That's my view on permadeath, or punishment, in video games....they can never actually bother or effect me, because it's a video game.
.....And I'm a mature adult that doesn't let virtual interaction hurt my feels.
That's horrible Swedish you are typing there. It makes me weep for the Swedish language. Not everyone is a native speaker of English so way to go being a "mature adult".
There are different kinds of fear though, you have fear for your life and you have fear for losing something you have built. As well as other fears, saying that there can't be fear in a virtual world is just plain wrong. You are clearly not the defintion of sane and thus your points are nothing more than how YOU feel about virtual fear.
Sorry about my poor English. I'm not native to the language.
That's horrible Swedish you are typing there. It makes me weep for the Swedish language. Not everyone is a native speaker of English so way to go being a "mature adult".
There are different kinds of fear though, you have fear for your life and you have fear for losing something you have built. As well as other fears, saying that there can't be fear in a virtual world is just plain wrong. You are clearly not the defintion of sane and thus your points are nothing more than how YOU feel about virtual fear.
Sorry about my poor English. I'm not native to the language.
Definition*
Otherwise you did quite well.
There are many types of fear, but I won't fear losing a virtual thing even if I put much time in it...Especially if it's a virtual thing in an MMO where there is little originality and everything is a copy or produced en-masse by a template. You can just spend an equal amount of time to reproduce the same character, if you so choose. I wouldn't choose to do so, I wouldn't be afraid of loss however. I'd just stop paying and move on to something more worth my time. Like a single player game with a save feature and modular capabilities. In this case, since ESO plays exactly like a single player RPG with no encouragement for community building...I'd just go play Morrowind or Daggerfall.
It'd be less fear if permadeath were employed for me, and just annoyance and a waste of time in the long run. Everyone is going to fail a random number generator roll eventually. And I'm probably not the only one who'd approach this solution with apathy and lack of fucks given. Fear is the worst deterrent ever because we don't all fear the same things and people react differently.
--Custom Rig: Pyraxis--- NZXT Phantom 410 Case Intel Core i5-4690 Processor - Quad Core, 6MB Smart Cache, 3.5GHz Asus Sabertooth Z87 Motherboard Asus GeForce GTX 760 Video Card - 2GB GDDR5, PCI-Express 3.0 Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 16GB
The topic of permadeath or increased consequence is one that comes up from time to time. The idea is nice, but in practice it just doesn't work.
Someone used Mario as an example, but you're talking about a game that takes 15 minutes to complete. The Internet introduces a few elements that are, sometimes, determining factors in your death.
1) Lag - There's nothing better to get a community fired up whenever permadeath is involved. Same goes for heavy consequence.
2) Servers - Oh what's that? You were in the middle of the fight and you lost connection with the server? Ok, well don't worry, while you're not connected you're currently dead.
3) Cheaters be Cheatin' - The only people who don't care if their player is killed? Botters. In fact, it's probably already scripted to create a new toon. Case in point, Darkfall Unholy Wars.
4) Decreased difficulty of content - Any permadeath game I've ever played has not encouraged players to take risks, but just get really, really OP. Like the old FF games, just level up to 99 and you can kill anything really easy. The balance of risk-reward is such that nobody is ever willing to take a risk.
Oh, and while I mention permadeath specifically, these still apply to any sort of hefty death penalty mechanic. As far as ESO goes, I think that repair costs alone are a pretty good penalty. Reminds me a bit of WoW in the old days when I could afford to repair, lol. It wasn't like, "Well I guess I'll just go mine one node of ore and sell it, that should get me enough money."
In ESO, the repair costs are so much that people say not to even bother repairing. This is totally true! However, when you get to max level and have decent gear, you may not want to just craft up something new, you might want that gear you've invested lots of money into already. Are repair costs enough?
As far as EVE goes........... Meh, I'm not REALLY buying the consequences are THAT high. It definitely sucks to lose a ship, but when I was playing I had like 3 or 4 ships. I can't imagine how many ships SERIOUS players have that are really good. Those who do have really cool ships probably don't take them into a war and risk losing them. Not unless they have the money to replace them. How does ship replacement costs compare? Not sure, maybe someone who plays ESO can comment on repair costs at high level. At my level it's retarded, so not sure what it's like at higher levels. And do you avoid repair costs at higher levels as well? Or simply replace? What does REALLY good gear cost to replace or repair in ESO and how long does it take to farm that gold?
With this game and to be fair with all Fantasy MMOs.
It's FEAR.
Oddly enough Skyrim lacked much of any death penalty and yet did just fine.
I would honestly worry about someone who had an actual real fear to losing something or "dying" in an MMO. Displeasure? Annoyance? Even anger? Depending on circumstance I could understand those, but fear?
Originally posted by oldboygamer I suppose the extremes were the early games like UO and EQ. In UO if you died your body slowly decayed, other players could take things off your corpse after a while, and if you didn't get to your corpse in time literally everything you had on you at the time had decayed away, meanwhile you had to run around as a ghost trying to get resurrected by an npc priest or player before running back to your corpse.
That was an extreme?
I always thought the mmo's that when you died, that's IT were the extreme. UO's version was just the 'oh shit, you b'strd' version ;-) With free exercise lol
With this game and to be fair with all Fantasy MMOs.
It's FEAR.
Your not afraid of dying. In the two MMOs I like best EVE and Secret World there is an element of fear. In EVE if your ship gets blown up you loose it.
In Secret world you don't loose anything when you die but the whole world is right out of H.P Lovecraft, ( He's the guy that screwed up Clive Barker ) It's scary as hell If you recogonize the Genre.
In real life if you get attacked by a five foot wasp and stung you are gonna look like hell, if you survive. Giant swollen deformed limbs filled with pus, gross things like that. If a zombie pukes on you your gonna get sick, septis alone could kill you. If you die someone is gonna loot your corpse. ( I can almost feel you smiling at that ) Hell i would loot you too. Fear will lead to other players playing dirty tricks on you which can backfire as well. PVE doesn't have to be boring.
But if you kill something say for instance in some lucky way you actually manage to kill a bear solo you should be rewarded your loot should include A) A big damn bearskin. 400 pounds of bear meat , sinew, bones, organs, claws and teeth C) Arrows ( if you used em ) D) experience points enough to make it worth while. E) skill points for the weapons you used F) experience for butchering and processing the meat G) everything else That would be rellevant to the encounter.
That's the key I believe that all fantasy MMOs miss. it's dangerous as hell swinging a sword a something. No sane person would do it. But if your crazy enough to do it. you benefit greatly from the single encounter and take a long time to recover. And if you die.....
your dead.
But I suppose if they could do it and make money they would have already. /facepalm
NVM I don't have a clue.....
And yet people would say ESO is like oldschool EQ1. Not that i am crazy about harsh death penalities but the whole idea of trying to sell ESO as oldschool make me chuckle.
Comments
I don't know. I get a fair amount of fear out of playing ESO. But then I do a lot of things that a lot of people don't. Like I actually go out and quest in enemy territory. I also do a lot of scouting which can put you way out there all by yourself or with one other friend, and at those moments, after you have hidden and ducked and snuck halfway across the map, the fear of crossing a road or attacking what you "think" is a player that is, like you, out there by their self becomes almost palpable.
The closer you get to your objective the more palpable it becomes too. And anyone who knows what I am talking about will tell you, you will literally JUMP when you are in sneak mode and not paying attention and someone comes breaking over the hill right next to you.
I know it doesn't amount to the same things as losing a starship but it's still a lot more than the usual zerg.
Sovrath sums it up nicely as usual
There has been a sharp trend over the last 15 years of MMOs away from any kind of meaningful death penalty. I think the modern MMO player in general does not want the fear or the pain of death. In turn this has led to bland gaming experiences where we simply do not care about death. Hell, in ESO and other games that preceded it people die on purpose (e.g. jumping off a cliff) so they can travel somewhere faster.
I prefer harsher death penalties too. Yes it irritates me to die, but it makes you respect the content and think about what you're doing. You don't just rush in blindly to see if you can solo the boss because it doesn't matter. I miss the feeling of early days EQ2, or Vanguard (or even EQ, even though that death penalty was too severe) where you never did anything lightly.
Why are you or anyone suprised that ESO is like this it's kiddy feed and user friendly. This is what all the hypers and fan boys want.No point complaining about it now lol. The new shinny mist is starting to clear and the die hards are slowly realising what kind of mmo they have been championing. Also EVE is not the only game that gives you that feeling Age Of Wulin/Wushu has it in abundance.+1 on the AOW statement.
But I honestly don't think that it's fair to really pigeon hole this game into a "no fear" category.
I mean, it's not like you don't almost have to tie a kid to a chair and beat him before he will ever play one of these games without trying to exploit the hell of out it. So how can you ever really give anyone the "fear" concept when the moment that they figure out that they can get around it they will, or the moment that they figure out that they CAN'T get around it, they quit.
ESO doesn't control the way the maps go up in Cyrodill, but let one guild become huge enough to actually take and hold some land and watch the mass exodus of players begin to spend themselves broke transferring to another server instead of even attempting to do the same thing and fight back.
That's not the games fault though. That's the fault of the weak and the stupid.
Of course, if you ask them they will say to you, "Who in their right mind wants to waste all that time just to lose anyway?" But then, as Brad Pitt said in the beginning of Troy, "That is why no one will ever remember their names."
Too many games though have been great in concept but executed poorly by the special little "hold the pickles" snowflakes that populate the MMORPG demographic. Nothing you can really do about it either.
AOW has whole cities that could be held, taxed, supported, conquered, and regained and yet everyone in that game walks around like they are Quai Chang Cain or The old man with the grey beard. Solo superstar, I don't need anyone. So likewise ESO has guilds chock full of people from all the different factions, and I don't just mean place of origin, I mean literally ALLIED with the other faction. Why? Not because the game sucks but because they were given the choice and they chose not to even try to stand by any concept of integrity.
"Oh that's too hard! What if I want to make a player in all of the different factions?" It's the weakest crap I ever heard, but it is rampant. And yet everyone and their brother wants to call themselves a pvper, or a roleplayer or even a PVE'er when the name of the game is RvR War with a PVE background.
I mean they even went so far as to allow people to make whatever race they wanted to in whatever faction they wanted to and you STILL have Ebonhearts in Daggerfall guilds, Aldemri in Ebonheart guilds, yadda, yadda, yadda because in the end people are just lame.
So in this case I would say, don't hate the game, hate the player. Cause there are some weak, weaksauced, winnie the bish, bishes in that game right now.
It doesn't take putting the fear of god into a game to make it fun, it just takes giving a crap about how the game is actually supposed to work, and most people never do.
I my experience that sense of fear quickly goes away and become annoyance. I played a lot of video games and there are a few genres that do the whole fear thing. Horror and survival games make you feel like your character is vulnerable and that the beast hunting them are powerful. But after playing amnesia and slender etc. I realized that these types of games get old very fast. At first you are so filled with terror you panic, but after being killed a few times you realize it aint so bad. Then the creatures that scared you become mere annoyances.
It's the same thing with EVE and other MMOs. At first you are scared shittless, then it just becomes the norm. I played EVE for years and died at least once every week, I just didn't care that much, everything is disposable and there is nothing that you can't buy. Some people suicide to take a shortcut back to base....
The only thing I am afraid of is your terrible grammar and spelling, to be frank. It makes me weep for the English language.
However I don't think any sane man can fear an imaginary and virtual experience, it's....just that....This shit isn't real, you aren't going to die. It's just a pointless, meaningless, worthless character and you can always make more of them. Unless it costs real world money to make a character, and in that case just....don't play. That's my view on permadeath, or punishment, in video games....they can never actually bother or effect me, because it's a video game.
.....And I'm a mature adult that doesn't let virtual interaction hurt my feels.
--Custom Rig: Pyraxis---
NZXT Phantom 410 Case
Intel Core i5-4690 Processor - Quad Core, 6MB Smart Cache, 3.5GHz
Asus Sabertooth Z87 Motherboard
Asus GeForce GTX 760 Video Card - 2GB GDDR5, PCI-Express 3.0
Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 16GB
That's horrible Swedish you are typing there. It makes me weep for the Swedish language. Not everyone is a native speaker of English so way to go being a "mature adult".
There are different kinds of fear though, you have fear for your life and you have fear for losing something you have built. As well as other fears, saying that there can't be fear in a virtual world is just plain wrong. You are clearly not the defintion of sane and thus your points are nothing more than how YOU feel about virtual fear.
Sorry about my poor English. I'm not native to the language.
Definition*
Otherwise you did quite well.
There are many types of fear, but I won't fear losing a virtual thing even if I put much time in it...Especially if it's a virtual thing in an MMO where there is little originality and everything is a copy or produced en-masse by a template. You can just spend an equal amount of time to reproduce the same character, if you so choose. I wouldn't choose to do so, I wouldn't be afraid of loss however. I'd just stop paying and move on to something more worth my time. Like a single player game with a save feature and modular capabilities. In this case, since ESO plays exactly like a single player RPG with no encouragement for community building...I'd just go play Morrowind or Daggerfall.
It'd be less fear if permadeath were employed for me, and just annoyance and a waste of time in the long run. Everyone is going to fail a random number generator roll eventually. And I'm probably not the only one who'd approach this solution with apathy and lack of fucks given. Fear is the worst deterrent ever because we don't all fear the same things and people react differently.
--Custom Rig: Pyraxis---
NZXT Phantom 410 Case
Intel Core i5-4690 Processor - Quad Core, 6MB Smart Cache, 3.5GHz
Asus Sabertooth Z87 Motherboard
Asus GeForce GTX 760 Video Card - 2GB GDDR5, PCI-Express 3.0
Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 16GB
The topic of permadeath or increased consequence is one that comes up from time to time. The idea is nice, but in practice it just doesn't work.
Someone used Mario as an example, but you're talking about a game that takes 15 minutes to complete. The Internet introduces a few elements that are, sometimes, determining factors in your death.
1) Lag - There's nothing better to get a community fired up whenever permadeath is involved. Same goes for heavy consequence.
2) Servers - Oh what's that? You were in the middle of the fight and you lost connection with the server? Ok, well don't worry, while you're not connected you're currently dead.
3) Cheaters be Cheatin' - The only people who don't care if their player is killed? Botters. In fact, it's probably already scripted to create a new toon. Case in point, Darkfall Unholy Wars.
4) Decreased difficulty of content - Any permadeath game I've ever played has not encouraged players to take risks, but just get really, really OP. Like the old FF games, just level up to 99 and you can kill anything really easy. The balance of risk-reward is such that nobody is ever willing to take a risk.
Oh, and while I mention permadeath specifically, these still apply to any sort of hefty death penalty mechanic. As far as ESO goes, I think that repair costs alone are a pretty good penalty. Reminds me a bit of WoW in the old days when I could afford to repair, lol. It wasn't like, "Well I guess I'll just go mine one node of ore and sell it, that should get me enough money."
In ESO, the repair costs are so much that people say not to even bother repairing. This is totally true! However, when you get to max level and have decent gear, you may not want to just craft up something new, you might want that gear you've invested lots of money into already. Are repair costs enough?
As far as EVE goes........... Meh, I'm not REALLY buying the consequences are THAT high. It definitely sucks to lose a ship, but when I was playing I had like 3 or 4 ships. I can't imagine how many ships SERIOUS players have that are really good. Those who do have really cool ships probably don't take them into a war and risk losing them. Not unless they have the money to replace them. How does ship replacement costs compare? Not sure, maybe someone who plays ESO can comment on repair costs at high level. At my level it's retarded, so not sure what it's like at higher levels. And do you avoid repair costs at higher levels as well? Or simply replace? What does REALLY good gear cost to replace or repair in ESO and how long does it take to farm that gold?
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Clearly the original poster hasn't had to pay an armor repair bill yet.
Oddly enough Skyrim lacked much of any death penalty and yet did just fine.
I would honestly worry about someone who had an actual real fear to losing something or "dying" in an MMO. Displeasure? Annoyance? Even anger? Depending on circumstance I could understand those, but fear?
Whatever for?
That was an extreme?
I always thought the mmo's that when you died, that's IT were the extreme. UO's version was just the 'oh shit, you b'strd' version ;-) With free exercise lol
And yet people would say ESO is like oldschool EQ1. Not that i am crazy about harsh death penalities but the whole idea of trying to sell ESO as oldschool make me chuckle.