the sad part is that Zenimax had to jump to the mmo bancwagon with an Elder Scrolls mmo to learn the mmo ropes. They had to use Fallout as a test bed so they learn how to make a good mmo first and then make TES mmo after they learn to do it right.
lol
yup. instead of not telling anyone about the MMO they were making for 5 years they could have just asked us what we want.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
I am waiting for it to go free to play, There was so much wrong that they did not get right at the start. I know 14 folks who left eq2 to go play ESO, all but one have returned to EQ2, its to bad by that time we had virtually disbanded our raiding guild in eq2. I know 1 die hard who is still playing it.
Once it goes free to play I might spend some time in it. I played my 30 day game time that was enough.
Sometimes I get so confused by people who trying to play these games.
ESO is a good game, but it is missing soooo much content, for instance a simple dueling system to allow players to 1v1....how hard is that?!
PvP battlegrounds are an important part of most MMORPGs, considering Cyrodyl is often to laggy to play in Battlegrounds seem NECASSARY for this game.
Raids, raids where the f are the raids?!?
I am currently subbed to Wildstar, a game I was never going to buy because ESO bored me after a month, with the amount of great games coming out this year and next year it will be hard for them to keep subscribers
Well if you make a new character and enter any of the starting cities and try to get to the banker its almost impossible to see them due to so many players accessing the bank at the same time, I guess this speaks to how dead it may or may not be.
This game was born dead. They decided to chose subscription model when it doesn't fit to the market anymore. The game itself is beatiful, but boring. Brings nothing really new to the table. Played beta and got so bored that I decided not to buy it. It was clear to me that it would die fast just as SWTOR because it is just a generic MMO. They sacriiced too many TES mechanics to make a MMO. Not much of the good TES games features have left. It is just like GW2: they took a good brand and made a bad game. TES games are awesome, just like GW1 was. They brought new things to their games. ESO and GW2 are just generic MMOs inspired in the lore of previous games. Maybe when it goes f2p more people will join. And probably they will leave soon after, since the game does not have much to offer. After GW2 I stopped believing in hype.
Originally posted by ICEBLUE Well if you make a new character and enter any of the starting cities and try to get to the banker its almost impossible to see them due to so many players accessing the bank at the same time, I guess this speaks to how dead it may or may not be.
More mmo's should use a single server.
How many of the AvA maps are full. According to the author it seems that only one is. What's the player cap on one of those maps?
I, like many others, played for the first few weeks and then stopped after I become tired of the bugs and imbalance.
I started playing again a few weeks ago, and it's already a vastly improved game compared to its condition at launch. I haven't had any quest bugs or crashes in a month, and the new interior lighting engine they added last week is one of the most profoundly atmospheric features in any video game, MMO or not, that I've ever seen. The framerate issues that a lot of people are experiencing this week hasn't affected me yet, but overall this game is headed in a great direction, it just needs some clearer goals for future content. I wish the entire game were designed to be just like Cyrodiil, with massive landscapes and constant attrition with enemy players. There's just so much PvE content that was a waste of development time, and so little focus on PvP, that I don't blame a lot of people for not playing as much as they would have hoped. It isn't dying, but it will never be king of the castle if the developers don't start working on unique content. Craglorn and raids are not what makes the game great, Cyrodiil is. I just hope ZeniMax realizes that before it's too late.
I still recall the 40 page shit storm here back in late beta when a prominent beta tester up and quit. The responses were so typical.
"Who's he again?"
"He's just burned out"
"Why should I care?"
"Oh look, he got 6 MOs out of the game, I'll be happy with that" (I love that one)
and the list went on.
He posted exactly why he felt the game would fail and why he didn't like the direction ZOS was going with it and yet so many people posted their interpretations of why that tester was "really" quitting. But he was right. When a prominent leader (ES Fanboy) in the beta community, up and quits, there is a huge red flag there, and these red flags were seen waving in the wind from miles away, in spite of the many who buried their heads in the sand.
ESO may be lame for PC MMO players but for the console players who have never touch an mmo or multiplayer they will lap the game up imo. I said from the start that ZeniMax have put there money on console TES players.
As an mmo it's a pile of crap but to a out and out console player it's going to be different imo.
Is it dying? That’s a premature assessment. Is it suffering and bedridden? Yes. On life-support? No… not yet. If console release doesn’t bring in a ton of sales, however, I suspect the coffin lid will be nailed down even if the body is still somewhat warm at the time.
Reality bites… the reactions by players to the game are, IMHO, largely a backlash against the deceptive marketing tactics used by ZOS. As such, I have no sympathy for them. My sympathies are for Elder Scrolls aficionados who’d hoped for a good game and got what was evidently intended to be DAoC II with an Elder Scrolls skin, and for DAoC aficionados who’d hoped for a good game and got a quest-grinder with mediocre AvAvA PvP instead. Player reactions should have been expected; gamers are not as stupid as developers – especially the marketing staffs within game developing companies – want to believe them to be. We all expect lies from marketers; in today’s world we have no choice but to be jaundiced in our expectations for truth in advertising; and perhaps that’s more true in gaming than in any other consumer-focused industry. But we don’t expect abject lies.
When the NDA was lifted on closed Beta, we heard tons of complaints from disgruntled testers. To some extent, this is expected for any new game development, but usually there is an equal amount of praise from other testers. What was clear – to me at least, given my perspective from decades of experience – was that Beta testing for ESO had been primarily a tool used by the marketers to elicit future sales. Beta testers were largely members of those big gaming guilds out there and the marketers presumed that would lead to sales. However, that strategy seemed to backfire. Large numbers of Beta testers claimed that the development team didn’t listen to what the testers said (which actually is a good thing; testers aren’t developers, no matter what they want to believe themselves to be); and, most importantly, didn’t react to bug reports.
There is evidence that lots of preorders were cancelled, evidence in both lots of forum posts on many sites and in ZOS’ subsequent actions that can only be categorized as “damage control”.
The first open Beta weekend was a mess, excused by many as due to use of an old release of the software. Open Beta’s serve only one real purpose, to introduce the product to a wider market and increase sales. There isn’t adequate time between an open Beta even and release to fix any real problems, so it’s not an actual test of the software or architecture. Given that reality, who uses a defective version of a product to increase sales?
There is evidence that strategy backfired, too. I suspect that instead of engendering more preorders, it caused more cancellations. Damage control actions continued and ZOS promptly declared they knew the cause of all the bugs (phasing) and decided they’d have an additional open Beta. Yes, a lot of the phasing problems were resolved in that release. Other problems weren’t. Given that players weren’t going to advance too many levels while just playing in an open Beta weekend, ZOS probably expected that those problems weren’t going to be discovered.
However, those problems surfaced after release. Tons of bugs ate away at any pretense of fun, and fun is why we play games. Not just a few bugs; but tons of bugs: NPCs that spoke German in the English release of the game (fine; I read, write, and speak German; but do most players?); falling through the world; bank problems; skills that wouldn’t fire or apparently did nothing at all; class imbalance, class imbalance, class imbalance… on and on; add to that some really idiotic and questionable game design decisions and game mechanics that play-testing should have immediately pointed out as unworkable (e.g., their version of phasing and their hybrid skill-class system)… I don’t think there was any doubt in anyone’s mind that the game wasn’t ready for release.
In my case, the game crashed repeatedly – HARD crashes, not soft crashes – so frequently that the game became unplayable. Other players had their own problems; lots of players and lots of problems… so we cancelled subscriptions. Shouldn't that have been expected? Or were the management team and marketers so arrogant as to believe the gamers just wouldn't notice the problems with the game? If so, that was an extraordinary degree of arrogance...
Will we come back?
I will if the game is ever properly re-released. I will happily pay a subscription. I do not want F2P or B2P because I’ve seen firsthand too many times how that destroys good games, but I will not pay for a bad game. I suspect many others feel the same way.
However, I also suspect that many of us have no faith in ZOS, given its reputation so far (and they only have the reputation from one MMORPG development) and given its continued use of paid posters in forums, and unless they somehow instill confidence that they can turn this mess around, the game population will continue to erode. They aren’t going to get enough new players to replace those who are leaving unless the reputation of the game changes dramatically; they aren’t going to get enough console sales to sustain the game.
I give them credit for their bug fixes, although it’s hard to reconcile all those claims by posters in forums that there are no bugs in the game when patches are huge. Gamers are not as stupid as developers want to believe them to be. Maybe someday developers and marketers will understand that. Phony posters in forums don't convince us that the realities we experienced were something other than what they were.
They have shot themselves in the foot. Poor integrity tends to do that. Unless they bring in a new management team, things aren’t going to change.
Thank you. Really, thank you. I stopped commenting on this site after reading so many "it is a good game, future of mmo's, go buy it" articles written by staff, and reading this article after a period showed me nothing changed: Article basically says "everyone says it is bad but no it is not that bad". I am commenting just for your post and probably vanish again.
Shameless companies, paid posters and "give us the ad money-we will hype it" websites. This is the truth of "mmo gaming" nowadays. We are not gamers, just cash cows. I really hope more people understands this.
Stages of a new mmo: 1) It's just beta. It still has plenty of time before release. 2) It just launched. Give it time. WoW wasn't built in a day. 3) We don't need you anyway. 4) F2P announced. 5)Huge influx of players. 6) Look how much has changed. 7) Cash shop is the only thing developed lately. 8) It has been a long journey and we thank everyone who was part of it. Shutting down in 3 months. (Courtesy of Robokapp.)
ESO may be lame for PC MMO players but for the console players who have never touch an mmo or multiplayer they will lap the game up imo. I said from the start that ZeniMax have put there money on console TES players.
As an mmo it's a pile of crap but to a out and out console player it's going to be different imo.
Yeah but the Consolers are probably expecting another Skyrim, They will be massively disappointed once they find out it falls short of that.
People only leave the mmo they bought if they dont like it....
Remember a time where people played their mmo for years ? months without breaks ?
That is because those mmo's were decent and good.
The current mmo's that come out are garbage and thus people who hope to have found an mmo that is on level of their old time mmo's and fun to play for a decent amount of time just find themselves bored 2 weeks ro 1 month past their purchase......
I wouldn't say the new mmorpgs are garbage and that this is the reason people dont play them for years. The thing with recent or maybe even the MMORPGs over the last decade (damn time goes fast) is that most stuff you see today has already been done in one way or the other. RvR, huge themeparks, sandbox'ish games... So for older players it is only a reminder of times when things were new.
As to success or not, the first MMOs only needed a few thousand subs to be called a success. Today with anything less than 100k or maybe even a milion players games are called a failure by default. I'd really like to name a reason but other then high(er) production cost I cant say why. I can't even point to a specific reason why the cost went up.
Maybe that is the point. MMORPGs dont seem to have much of an improvement compared to the first gen ones. You see the same features that people like used over and over again. I guess it comes back to be sure that the investment pays off and trying new stuff might fail and none wants to loose millions of $.
And on the specific topic of ESO all I have to say is that I played different beta stages, didnt buy the game and later played a friends account from time to time. But that possability will be gone soon too. It is fun but imho not worth the sub fee even if it is about 50cents a day like others pointed out.There is just too much competition(other games) that more or less offer the same in a F2P model. The game might have been a giant success 10 years ago but for today it is just not good enough. Maybe if they made a real TES online with all the feature of the singleplayer series but not like this.
Speaking for myself I play single player games and MMO games and I honestly do not make a distinction between the two. There are not certain features or aspects that I want out of a single player game that I don't get in a MMO and vice versa. Other than save files for single player, and groups for MMOs.
So I have always struggled with the concept that the two game style and communities are different because I don't think they are.
I am your polar opposite. I only play MMORPG's, for over 11 years now, and normally only one at a time.
I view people who play single player, console games along with MMORPG's, as tourists, and part of the problem as developers have tried to cater to this audience.
I consider myself a purist, looking for a virtual world experience to immerse myself in over the long haul.
To you and most others, these are just "games", I view them as worlds to explore and and live in.
So I do believe there is a significant difference in what these two groups want, you just happen to be part of the much greater sized one.
Now, as for the OP. I played ESO, with the thought that I would get myself to level 50 and then go spend most of my time PVPing with my guild mates.
When I realized the full impact of VR levels, and how they would increase prowess in PVP, then I realized I'd have to grind through all of them, and then the new expansion content, and so would all my guildmates.
As we all level at different speeds, we were spread all over the game world, with only a few couples actually playing together. No way was I going to solo to VR12, nor pug up with others in the expansion to get through the content efficiently, so I left the game to play something else.
I agreed with you till you started blaming people as being a problem.
Only in bizzaro MMo world some one would diss you for having more active social life than willing to live in a virtual world.
God forbid people just want to treat video game as that 'video games'.
What losers right? *rolls eyes*
You are putting words in my mouth. I never called them losers, but we have significantly different tastes in game design and unfortunately, for me they are mutually exclusive at times.
In order for dev's to create a game to appeal to the tourists, they inevitably alienate the purists, and as we are outnumbered, the games we would like to see made are not.
Instead we get modern theme park 349 and counting.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
We call an MMO a flop when the game fails to make the amount of money that it had the potential to do.
Most people, including previous posters, seems to think that when a bad game is produced it is obvoius that it was on purpose to make a quick dollar. What they obviously fail to see is that it is the long term quality that will really make a company the money.
I was in the beta and it just didn't feel right, didn't feel like Elder Scrolls and it didn't feel like an MMO. I'm rather annoyed with MMO's making the single player story the main emphasis of the MMO. It makes the game feel like the single player story is separate from the rest of the game, and to me at least it makes you feel disconnected from the world you're playing in.
If ESO was F2P I would play it, at least level up a character and give it a try, but from what I experienced in beta it wasn't worth the sub.
When it 1st came out. 1 - 50 was one of the best mmo's I've ever played. I still check on it from time 2 time.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
You think only maybe thousands left? My guild of over 300 people was down to less then 40 after 2 months. I myself left after 3 months. To be more accurate probably hundreds of thousands have left.
The population decline from the 1st month to the 2nd and 3rd in Cyrodiil was the best way to judge how much of the active pvp community left. There was 2 full pop campagins for each faction and 1 campaign with med-high's in primetime. At 3 months not a single campaign could get a high population. Now the population caps have been lowered so no accurate info can be gathered compared to launch.
I was one of the 5% of players, guildies and friends, that I knew who defended this game post-launch and stuck with it. After 3 months of horrible patching and more and more game breaking issues I left.
The game will not die, but it will become SWTOR 2 in the essence of going f2p soon and having to fire 60% of it's staff making it incapable of doing anything besides minor patching and poor updates.
Haxus Council Member 21 year MMO veteran PvP Raid Leader Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
It's a failure. I found the graphics ugly, the combat boring and the storyline lacking. Bring on the next SINGLE player Elder Scrolls. Wildstar shits on ESO to be honest.
"ESO is a fantastic game, it has the best graphics that have ever been in a MMORPG, and the story lines far exceed any expectations that I had for it. Star Wars: The Old Republic did an amazing job with their story, but they didn’t have the emotion that ESO has, or the incredibly hard choices. I spent over 30 minutes starring at my screen trying to decide which option I wanted to pick for the main story line."
ESO--emotion? Best graphics in an MMORPG? Hard choices?
ESO faceplanted at launch and never recovered. The game had so much potential and the push to get it out the door killed it. Corporate greed once again reared its ugly head.
It probably wouldn't have been so bad if the beta bugs that hundreds and hundreds of people reported had been fixed at launch, but they never were. Launch came and people saw exactly how much Zenimax cared for its customers.
Give us your money for early access and overpriced package deals that realistically gave you nothing, and go f**k yourselves...
Comments
The reason I say sadly because I wanted to love it. I wanted it to be so much better.
yup. instead of not telling anyone about the MMO they were making for 5 years they could have just asked us what we want.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Sometimes I get so confused by people who trying to play these games.
PvP battlegrounds are an important part of most MMORPGs, considering Cyrodyl is often to laggy to play in Battlegrounds seem NECASSARY for this game.
Raids, raids where the f are the raids?!?
I am currently subbed to Wildstar, a game I was never going to buy because ESO bored me after a month, with the amount of great games coming out this year and next year it will be hard for them to keep subscribers
Mystery Bounty
More mmo's should use a single server.
How many of the AvA maps are full. According to the author it seems that only one is. What's the player cap on one of those maps?
I, like many others, played for the first few weeks and then stopped after I become tired of the bugs and imbalance.
I started playing again a few weeks ago, and it's already a vastly improved game compared to its condition at launch. I haven't had any quest bugs or crashes in a month, and the new interior lighting engine they added last week is one of the most profoundly atmospheric features in any video game, MMO or not, that I've ever seen. The framerate issues that a lot of people are experiencing this week hasn't affected me yet, but overall this game is headed in a great direction, it just needs some clearer goals for future content. I wish the entire game were designed to be just like Cyrodiil, with massive landscapes and constant attrition with enemy players. There's just so much PvE content that was a waste of development time, and so little focus on PvP, that I don't blame a lot of people for not playing as much as they would have hoped. It isn't dying, but it will never be king of the castle if the developers don't start working on unique content. Craglorn and raids are not what makes the game great, Cyrodiil is. I just hope ZeniMax realizes that before it's too late.
I still recall the 40 page shit storm here back in late beta when a prominent beta tester up and quit. The responses were so typical.
"Who's he again?"
"He's just burned out"
"Why should I care?"
"Oh look, he got 6 MOs out of the game, I'll be happy with that" (I love that one)
and the list went on.
He posted exactly why he felt the game would fail and why he didn't like the direction ZOS was going with it and yet so many people posted their interpretations of why that tester was "really" quitting. But he was right. When a prominent leader (ES Fanboy) in the beta community, up and quits, there is a huge red flag there, and these red flags were seen waving in the wind from miles away, in spite of the many who buried their heads in the sand.
Pfft.
What a mess.
ESO may be lame for PC MMO players but for the console players who have never touch an mmo or multiplayer they will lap the game up imo. I said from the start that ZeniMax have put there money on console TES players.
As an mmo it's a pile of crap but to a out and out console player it's going to be different imo.
Thank you. Really, thank you. I stopped commenting on this site after reading so many "it is a good game, future of mmo's, go buy it" articles written by staff, and reading this article after a period showed me nothing changed: Article basically says "everyone says it is bad but no it is not that bad". I am commenting just for your post and probably vanish again.
Shameless companies, paid posters and "give us the ad money-we will hype it" websites. This is the truth of "mmo gaming" nowadays. We are not gamers, just cash cows. I really hope more people understands this.
Stages of a new mmo: 1) It's just beta. It still has plenty of time before release. 2) It just launched. Give it time. WoW wasn't built in a day. 3) We don't need you anyway. 4) F2P announced. 5)Huge influx of players. 6) Look how much has changed. 7) Cash shop is the only thing developed lately. 8) It has been a long journey and we thank everyone who was part of it. Shutting down in 3 months. (Courtesy of Robokapp.)
Yeah but the Consolers are probably expecting another Skyrim, They will be massively disappointed once they find out it falls short of that.
I wouldn't say the new mmorpgs are garbage and that this is the reason people dont play them for years. The thing with recent or maybe even the MMORPGs over the last decade (damn time goes fast) is that most stuff you see today has already been done in one way or the other. RvR, huge themeparks, sandbox'ish games... So for older players it is only a reminder of times when things were new.
As to success or not, the first MMOs only needed a few thousand subs to be called a success. Today with anything less than 100k or maybe even a milion players games are called a failure by default. I'd really like to name a reason but other then high(er) production cost I cant say why. I can't even point to a specific reason why the cost went up.
Maybe that is the point. MMORPGs dont seem to have much of an improvement compared to the first gen ones. You see the same features that people like used over and over again. I guess it comes back to be sure that the investment pays off and trying new stuff might fail and none wants to loose millions of $.
And on the specific topic of ESO all I have to say is that I played different beta stages, didnt buy the game and later played a friends account from time to time. But that possability will be gone soon too. It is fun but imho not worth the sub fee even if it is about 50cents a day like others pointed out.There is just too much competition(other games) that more or less offer the same in a F2P model. The game might have been a giant success 10 years ago but for today it is just not good enough. Maybe if they made a real TES online with all the feature of the singleplayer series but not like this.
You are putting words in my mouth. I never called them losers, but we have significantly different tastes in game design and unfortunately, for me they are mutually exclusive at times.
In order for dev's to create a game to appeal to the tourists, they inevitably alienate the purists, and as we are outnumbered, the games we would like to see made are not.
Instead we get modern theme park 349 and counting.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
We call an MMO a flop when the game fails to make the amount of money that it had the potential to do.
Most people, including previous posters, seems to think that when a bad game is produced it is obvoius that it was on purpose to make a quick dollar. What they obviously fail to see is that it is the long term quality that will really make a company the money.
I was in the beta and it just didn't feel right, didn't feel like Elder Scrolls and it didn't feel like an MMO. I'm rather annoyed with MMO's making the single player story the main emphasis of the MMO. It makes the game feel like the single player story is separate from the rest of the game, and to me at least it makes you feel disconnected from the world you're playing in.
If ESO was F2P I would play it, at least level up a character and give it a try, but from what I experienced in beta it wasn't worth the sub.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
You think only maybe thousands left? My guild of over 300 people was down to less then 40 after 2 months. I myself left after 3 months. To be more accurate probably hundreds of thousands have left.
The population decline from the 1st month to the 2nd and 3rd in Cyrodiil was the best way to judge how much of the active pvp community left. There was 2 full pop campagins for each faction and 1 campaign with med-high's in primetime. At 3 months not a single campaign could get a high population. Now the population caps have been lowered so no accurate info can be gathered compared to launch.
I was one of the 5% of players, guildies and friends, that I knew who defended this game post-launch and stuck with it. After 3 months of horrible patching and more and more game breaking issues I left.
The game will not die, but it will become SWTOR 2 in the essence of going f2p soon and having to fire 60% of it's staff making it incapable of doing anything besides minor patching and poor updates.
21 year MMO veteran
PvP Raid Leader
Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
Aloha Mr Hand !
This site is really trying to push ESO into a better light, just like they tried with Defiance back then.
Look where Defiance is now...you'll find ESO in the same spot soon.
"ESO is a fantastic game, it has the best graphics that have ever been in a MMORPG, and the story lines far exceed any expectations that I had for it. Star Wars: The Old Republic did an amazing job with their story, but they didn’t have the emotion that ESO has, or the incredibly hard choices. I spent over 30 minutes starring at my screen trying to decide which option I wanted to pick for the main story line."
ESO--emotion? Best graphics in an MMORPG? Hard choices?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
ESO faceplanted at launch and never recovered. The game had so much potential and the push to get it out the door killed it. Corporate greed once again reared its ugly head.
It probably wouldn't have been so bad if the beta bugs that hundreds and hundreds of people reported had been fixed at launch, but they never were. Launch came and people saw exactly how much Zenimax cared for its customers.
Give us your money for early access and overpriced package deals that realistically gave you nothing, and go f**k yourselves...