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Disappointed
syntax42
Member UncommonPosts: 1,385
Elder Scrolls games have traditionally been about freedom. Choose where you want to go, what quest you want to do, and what kind of build you want to use. They got the build variety right, but the questing and travel restrictions make the game feel too little like Elder Scrolls and too much like a theme park game.
On top of that, the freedom to choose how to reach the level cap isn't there. You either have to complete every single quest in the game, or grind until your eyes bleed. What if I don't want to save Jimbob from the cultists? Too bad, you have to, or you grind on mobs to make up the missed XP. The quests get repetitive after the first two zones and I just lose interest in playing too quickly. Grinding on mobs to level is faster if you can find a camp with decent spawns that isn't already being farmed by the gold farmers or botters.
Did I mention there are bots going 24/7 in this game? It isn't hard to spot them. Go into any dungeon and there are typically 4 bots camping the boss spawn. I'm tired of reporting them. Their numbers aren't decreasing. ESO GMs need to take a more active role in preventing botting. If I can spot the bots, why can't they?
The spam has been ridiculous from day one. One person can halfway pay attention to chat and easily ban all of the spammers. It isn't like there are 20 servers to monitor. They would only need to watch the three starting zones.
This is what happens when you try to take a single-player franchise and don't take the time to properly develop it into a MMO. Want to play with your friends? Too bad. They are likely on a different quest than you are, so it would be pointless to group up. Want to do a dungeon with them? No, you don't. The dungeons are worth doing once, and that's it. The XP was nerfed a long time ago and the loot isn't impressive.
How would I change it? I would make everything you do worth more XP. Crafting, exploring, dungeons, and helping your friends complete quests should offer enough XP that players can skip half of the zones if they want to. The stories should be there for exploration, which is what Elder Scrolls is all about. We shouldn't be forced to experience the stories.
Comments
I see nothing but freedom, I'm level 50 provisioner and 50 alchemy already at low levels, leveled up to 8 by adventuring out chests in the game world which gave xp and items. I don't see why you feel so trapped, are you sure you are not just trying to play it linear? If you skipped the starter islands, that might be why your having a hard time running out of quests, I have never ran out of quests yet, becaue I DID adventure and get xp from chests, ect. I'm already outgrown the starter islands and I haven't even scratched the amount of quests in it yet.
Tell me this is not Elder Scrolls Online... (sometimes we need a reminder of what Elder Scrolls is)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWcHEBJ0wmY <- Gamespot review in the days the used to do good reviews.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbgpNvcj-zw <- Gamespot when they used to do good reviews, an inside look into a reviewrs head, and actually took some time to do it... watch for yourself. This guy here is a real reviewer and he shows what elders scrolls is in the glory that its suppose to be shown in.. A+ Reviewer here. wish he was around to do ESO review instead of some lack of patcient kid who wanted a sandbox.
If you want the freedom of a sandbox go play Dayz or Rust. If you want Elder Scrolls, play ESO!
The most used counter you will get to what you wrote is, "This ain't Skyrim online". Well, no it isn't. Nor is it Morrowind online or Oblivion online. However, imagine if it was. This game would be in a better place if it was. What if people actually could say, "This IS Skyrim online, or Morrowind online, or Oblivion online!" ?
Makes me wonder if Bethesda will try to make a Doom MMO next.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
In my leveling experience from 1-25, I saw one bugged quest on Ebonheart Pact side, which I was able to complete the next day. All of the skills I used seemed to work as advertised. I know there were likely a few bugged skills for Nightblades and Sorcerers, but they didn't seem to be show-stoppers.
I wouldn't call the game "broken". I would say they forgot to make it fun and they forgot to make it a MMO. Instead, the game does little to reward players for completing challenging content and does nothing to encourage grouping with other players. That leaves the game in a state of just another single-player online game.
Elder Scrolls game always had ton of bugs in quests, and you cant even stand the few that are in ESO?? Reeally??!?!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXpLOVKpVjA <- bugs of skyrim video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpIYe_I5sE <- bugs of Oblivion, anything look familiar here?
The more features you add to a game the more bugs you are going to get, ESO has added more features to a game then most MMO's have never seen in the last 10 years.
This is largely the problem I have. The appeal of Skyrim and Oblivion was that if you could see it, you could explore it almost as soon as the game gave you full control over your character. You didn't feel forced to traverse every inch of the game's landscape scrounging for enough quests to level up your character so that you could run to the next area. You went where you wanted, completing which quests you wanted not because you had to but because you wanted to.
The greatest sin of ESO is how it makes exploration utterly mandatory by punishing players for not completely nearly every quest or dungeon in a given area. There simply aren't enough quests or opportunities to gain XP when following the main leveling path through each zone, and you either quickly fall behind the game's steep leveling curve, or you run around aimlessly looking for quests or dungeons you missed so that you can get enough XP to match the quests in your journal.
This is exactly why they should have started everyone on the Starter Islands, but it was the people who complained that it wasn't freedom enough to start on massive sized islands, they wanted access to the whole world immediately, so they never had enough time to develop around the main starting cities. So you ran out of quests when really you missed 75% of 1-15 content from skipping starter islands.
This is why there is open beta, you should of seen all this within 10 min of beta and saved your money like me.
I had to relog a lot to get a different phase with working content, not only quest bugs. Actually i also found only a few bugged quests but a huge deal of the game needs work and rework. Outside of Cyrodiil which i didnt play, everything that Angry Joe pointed out on his video was a huge deal for me because i experienced it every time i played.
Other players ruining my quest progression by triggering quests first, finishing quests when i just entered a public dungeon, house or a small area (wtf?), completely preventing me from seeing the actual quest in progress. So i had to relog to get a phase with luckily noone there so i can go through my quest. Both bots and groups of players in public dungeons ramming quest mobs and mini bosses, preventing one from getting loot. People ruining stealthy gameplay. Treasure chests fiasco inside and outside of dungeons. The obviously broken grouping system. I remember doing an instanced dungeon where i had to travel to a party member to see it but then i stopped seeing the other member. He traveled to me and then he stopped seeing the forth guy and so on. We had to phase out of the dungeon and regroup and enter all at the same time..... thats not working as it should. Etc, etc, etc.
The list goes on. Some things are bugged, like every mmo, but most things just are very badly implemented and that is the deal breaker. The way they did a lot of things just dont work well in an mmo.
What do the starter islands have to do with not getting enough XP to keep up with content? All it would take is some number adjustments to make the quests reward more XP. The starter islands were removed for good reason: they restricted players to a tiny zone. Unfortunately, the entire game is full of restrictions which take away from the feeling of playing an Elder Scrolls game.
That has little to do with the real issue. You'll experience this at some point regardless of whether or not you do the starter island.
The problem with skipping the starter island was that it was implemented poorly. If you weren't paying attention, you probably wouldn't even know the starter islands were there as you don't even start on them. Skipping the islands shouldn't have even been an option until they were completed the first time and even then, it's Cold Harbor that should've been skippable not the alliance-specific starter zones.
They had that at first, PVP could level up in PVP, dungeoneers could level up in dungeons, and PVE could level up in Questing....
Then came exploiters in PVP and Dungeons, so they had to nerf it down to 1 xp so bots wouldn't hit max level in one week of botting. They are working on a way to make both of those viable ways to level up again, its not really their fault a few bad apples spoiled it for everyone.
Tiny? Did you just say that starter islands are tiny? That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of. Either you have not played ESO or your self brainwashing yourself to think they are tiny. They are pretty huge, more then enough to level without doing all the quests from 1-15.
You got what you wanted by complaining, its a fully unrestrictive game, except for the PVP xp and Dungeon xp. Exploiters ruined the xp in those areas for everyone....
If you don't want quests, and you want more freedom, Try EQ Next, its going to be a sandbox. Elder Scrolls Online isn't your cup of tea.
I chose the Xfinity speed test because it does not reveal my ISP.
2/14 registration date and almost 1000 posts? Wow, you obviously feel very strongly about ESO.
Whether you are employed by them or maybe just a very big fan, you should perhaps take a step back and consider how an unbiased person would view things. It might illuminate you--if you are interested in being illuminated.
From my "outsider" perspective, ESO has basically a completely typical feature list for a moden MMO. I don't remotely see it having "added more features to a game then (sic) most MMO's have never (sic) seen in the last 10 years." It has the standard feature list of a AAA MMO releasing in 2010+. no less and certainly no more...
It has perhaps larger than the normal amount of bugs for a AAA MMO releasing in 2010+, a little more than the average but not overwhelmingly so.
This will be ignored...
You are correct. My favorite ES game is Morrowind and it had game breaking bugs that weren't hard to do and what about exploiting the distance aggro on NPC's that everybody has done. These same people that complain about the bugs in ESO would gladly accept the same (hide-then-shoot-with-bow-then-run-until-npc-forgets) when the new single player ES game comes out. I bet we will even see the (I-wish-ESO-was-like-New-single-player-ES-game) threads on this site.... Hypocrites.
The starter islands weren't removed, you can take a boat back there when you create your character. The only thing you can avoid which you can't go back to is the Coldharbour prison intro.
Personally I love the starter islands. They were created with a lot of care at the start of the process it seems to me, and you can farm without competition. Plus there are shards there for a skill point early on. They all have a real flavour as well that the later zones don't have, a frozen wilderness, a jungle and a desert. After the snow of Bleakrock, Stonefalls is a grey nothingness I'm afraid.
When I started playing this game I realised it wasn't another Elder Scrolls game, it's another themepark mmo on rails in the mode of ToR, TSW, and pretty much every other mmo that has been released in the last 5 years, and the two are not compatible. I guess if you accept that then it's a lot easier to play it. It was going to be my summer game this year during the holidays, but I'm not sure if I'll last another two months...
I always find it funny when the excuse "B-But! The single player games had bugs too!!!2!" pops up.
One is a single player game with no monthly fees, the other is a mmorpg with monthly fees. Yes the single player games have bugs, skyrim to a much lesser extent (They seem to be finally learning) doesn't mean they don't get criticised for the bugs so why shouldn't an mmorpg with a budget of 200 million AND monthly fee be excused?
If i'm paying a monthly fee I expect quality not bugs and restrictions and imperial/mount/faction selection pre order when the game is just launching.
Sorry but zenimax screwed up.
They destroyed the lore to fit the pvp, destroyed freedom, destroyed freedom of classes (Yea yea you can where whatever you want doesn't mean you are not forced to pick a class at the start tough) and brought nothing remotely that feels like elder scrolls apart of the UI and maybe some lore here and there.
It's just a skin there's no soul.
Are you sure you've played this game? There aren't just three starting zones. There are multiple instances of each starting zone.
Hmm have you? the spam in chat isn't divided by what instance of map you are in. Spam in chat is common to all instances.
That's like saying there's not 3 starting zones there are 20 servers with 3 starting zones!
It's still the same 3 starting zones. I'm 100% sure admins can hop from instance to instance without having to relog.
The "let people experience the game the way they want to" crowd ignores the fact that game design has consequences. If you bump up the experience for killing mobs you have to reduce the experience for questing - because otherwise people out-level the content. This game allows everyone in group to get credit for kills, which is a huge help in promoting social gaming. This also makes it possible to kill an astonishing number of mobs with AoE skills - meaning that players would simply level to cap in hours to days, frequently without actually doing anything at all (e.g. powerleveling). You would be handicapping people who didn't run around in AoE killing groups and there would be fights and complaints about "the good experience spots being camped." It's not as simple as some offhand forum "freedom of choice" comment.
Elder Scrolls games have *always* been story heavy, so the claim that this lacks the "freedom" of an ES game is silly. Every one since Morrowind has had hundreds of hours of quest story lines and mountains of text. People didn't "grind mobs" to level in Morrowind. Every one but Skyrim had character classes.
A lot of MMO players want to ignore the leveling, ignore the story, and just do things at endgame. ESO actually has a real story, there is real time associated with leveling, and it's far from being trivially easy. The most common complaint on the forums is that the game is too hard, by a wide margin. The various complaints about "forced questing" indicate that the real issue here is that MMO players have been trained to expect quick, easy, and filler tasks to get them to the end. This game is closer to the difficulty of single player games than any MMO that I've ever seen (although it is easier than, say, Witcher 2 and far less brutal than Dark Souls.)