WALL O' TEXT INCOMING! I focused on his bullet points and added my thoughts to them.
1) Starting Islands
Agree somewhat. Originally, players began on Starter Island, started their faction story and met characters they’d deal with later on, earned greatly needed skillpoints and shards, then progressed to the mainland. Now, they are tossed onto the mainland city with a glossed over “By the way…your story actually begins
back there”. The current solution is convoluted, and takes away story continuity. I like the choice they’ve given players, but it could have been implemented much better.
Actually, the player can skip an entire zone and continue the main storyline quest in the next area, and everyone in that area thinks you’ve completed the previous (uncompleted) storyline quest.
NPC: Hey, hero of X! You saved Y! And killed Z!
Player: No…no I didn’t…
2) Dungeons
Agree more than less. Most of the Public or Solo dungeons feel very similar, and have the exact same mechanics (excluding a few shiny looking ones). I’m immediately reminded of Dragon Age 2 and the same problem they had with their instances.
3) Loot
Loot is a mixed bag. On bosses and mobs in quests, you generally only find a few gold pieces and maybe some foul leather something or other. In public dungeons, especially if you have other players around, it’s a veritable farm fest. You get crap mixed with greens and blues, and it’s a good place to farm items for decons in crafting. Treasure chests are fun to find and the loot they give isn’t bad, you can get occasional blues or treasure maps. Inventory management needs work though. Or I need to hoard less. *cough*
4) Grouping
Grouping needs a lot of help. Think of Gw2’s megaserver problems and amplify them by 5. Can’t see or help players who are on a different part of the quest than you, can’t help players on most (all?) of the main story or guild quests, can’t mentor down to help players, most of the time your group isn’t in the same instance so you have to travel to one another. No nameplates or friendly targeting doesn’t help either, especially for healing.
5) Combat
I do, more or less, like the combat. I still don’t like the homing projectiles that go through terrain or objects, or that a melee character can hit me from 5 yards away with its lil’ arms, but it’s engaging and fun overall. It feels visceral, dodging out of killshots, using the limited skillbar appropriately does make for a pretty good system. The skill system I really enjoy, mixing and matching to make whatever you’d like.
6) Quests.
Quests are tricky. The first, main zone for each faction I’ve found has solid quest pacing and placement, with difficulty scaling well for each encounter. The end of the second and into the third zones I wanted to start punching chicken guar. A big chunk of the quests (was in Daggerfall Faction) made you run back and forth from two different areas
three times, then pulled another quests that made you go back again to do something you could have done while you were there but nooooo, it was only available after you earned messenger boy of the year award. Most of these quests truly felt like filler, repeating content with different skins, and as I started getting into the middle of the third zone, I literally just had to stop questing. It felt like they ran out of ideas and had to hurriedly shove quests in there before release date.
The main story quest, so far, and the guild quests are the only ones that I think they’ve truly fleshed out. They all seem to be leading up to something big, and the buildup for them is well done. The only real gripe I have with these is that friends can’t help you with them at all, and that you are gated from leveling past lvl 50 and from doing other faction content until you finish your main story quest. So I can’t…PvP to Vet Rank 10 (level 60) or gain skill points or earn money or do quests in other places…I
have to PvE and do my main story. Even though the forums have lengthy threads complaining how hard the last boss can be for certain classes.
7) Environment
ESO is a pretty game. With everything turned up to max, it’s hard to not get lost in some of the vistas. It’s not the most…detailed or varied game when it comes to environment assets, and it does seem to lack an actual visual style that it wants to go for. Realism? Stylized Fantasy? Maybe? One thing I think ESO does suffer from is the same thing I think Rift suffered from, and that’s the “clay” model design. Many of the characters, assets, environments have a very clay like appearance to them, with under saturated tones and stiff animations. In mah opinion.
8) Crafting
I do enjoy the crafting to some extent. It's more in depth than many other mmorpgs, and does take time (YEARS EVEN) to master all the crafts. There's a satisfaction to crafting your own gear and weapon in this game, and discovering special crafting stations around the world used to make special set armors. Deconstructing items just to gain experience can be a pain sometimes. I'm not even going to mention enchanting (I hate you. SO MUCH). ESO's crafting is still very linear in comparison to something like Vanguard or SWG, and it seems it's only worth upgrading your white equipment (your basic lvl) to something better when you hit lvl 50, but, it's not bad, and can be fun.
9) Voice Acting
Eh. Some are good, some are bad, but it’s
definitely one of the better Voice Acted mmorpgs out there.
10) Dark Anchors and fissures
They’re a thing, I guess. Take Rift’s rifts, put an obvious icon on the map, remove the goals and failure mechanics, add bosses that die in a few hits and remove loot. But add a shiny cool blue anchory thing that looks sweet. With fissures, they appear “randomly” (they have set spawn locations and are triggered by a player passing there), add about 3 waves of 3 mobs, with a boss mob at the end that can give you some loot. So eh? No point in doing them, really.
WALL O’ TEXT ALMOST OVER
So basically…it’s not a bad game, not the best game, could have been more. I know they’ve a lot of work in the pipeline this year, adding Dark brotherhood, justice system, etc, so I guess it depends how that stuff turns out to determine if I’m going to stick around for this. Need to get more into the PvP to say anything about it, but I hear it’s one of the best RvRs out there. Omnom.
WALL O’ TEXT DONE.
