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My personal review of The Elder Scrolls Online
TomLukman
✭✭✭
Having played this game for 2 months now and experiencing all of its ups and downs I decided to write this honest review. Before I begin, I'd like to share some information about myself to help all of you reading this better understand where all this is coming from. I'm a 35 year old 3D artist who had a privilege to work on an open source 3D MMORPG for a while. I've been a huge fan of the Elder Scrolls ever since Morrowind.
After having spend over 900 hours playing Skyrim, I was really excited to get my hands on ESO.
Let's start with the purchase itself. The price was OK, in the expected price range however there was a decision to be made – should I go for the Imperial edition? Having tested this in BETA, my final verdict was a solid no. What did I miss because of that decision? A 1 gold horse? Well, the best horses in game can only be bought by spending over 40K gold anyway. I generally don't agree with pay to win concepts but if I pay real money for a horse – I'd expect that one to be the best. Rings of Mara? Unfortunately I didn't have any friends starting the game with me and I didn't want to share those rings with a random person. Playing as Imperial? Well, I always belonged to that group of players who never liked Imperials. I know that Imperial racial allows all 3 stats to be maxed with gear but still – meh.
Now, the game itself. Character creation is well done however I do think there should have been more customization options in markings, adornment and hair styles. This was the first Elder Scrolls game where I could make elves look what I considered attractive. However, I must say that I found making attractive humans quite challenging. The head shapes of Nords or Bretons look kinda funky.
Next – the tutorial area. Nicely done, not too long and I found the learning curve to be very fast and easy. I also like the option to skip the tutorial on future characters without loosing anything.
Now the game world. While missing that wow factor I had in Skyrim or Oblivion, I found graphics to be nicely done in general. Since this is an MMO and there are some limits compared to single player games I didn't really expect a wow factor anyway. My opinion was that the Aldmeri got the best looking nature but I found the Pact realm to be the easiest to play on since the lack of vegetation made crafting resources easier to spot. Being a 3D artist I can find ways to improve pretty much anything in game but for this review – graphics are well done, there are nice shaders and effects in game and recent patches brought some improvements too. I only noticed a bit of lack in detail in Cyrodiil.
Sound and music – well done as expected. All characters are voice acted which is very nice. I do find having to read large chunks of quest dialogs in other games very boring so having everything voice acted is a big plus. Questing up to level 50 (to battle with Molag Bal) was fun and I could do the quests all by myself. There were two things I found annoying however. The fact that I had to share some quest goals with other players such as picking mushrooms. I found a mushroom I wanted to take only to have another player pick it up in front of my face leaving me annoyed and sometimes frustrated by the fact I had to waste time waiting for more mushrooms to spawn and then quickly hoping to recover enough of them before other players get to them first. The other annoyance was the fact that some quests instances are solo only and quite challenging to complete. Not being able to bring a friend to help me kill some boss was a bit annoying sometimes too. I feel I should be able to bring my friends everywhere in an MMO. Also to be noted – some quests really have ridiculous walking distances to cover which often made me feel that those quests were designed to annoy me and make me spend some euros to buy a horse or the Imperial upgrade.
After that there are veteran zones. I found the mobs in veteran areas a bit overpowered. Sure everyone should have some friends by the veteran areas which I found were best done in pairs, however the game advertising I saw claimed that the players can do everything by themselves and are only encouraged to team up. Sorry ZOS but unless we want to waste time and resources on many hard situations we're actually forced to to team up, not encouraged. The final mother of all annoyances was in bugs which I will cover later in the review.
Finally, there's PvP. After entering the first battle in Cyrodiil – that was my wow moment of the game. PvP in Cyrodiil covers many things – quests, dungeons, small scale fights, large scale fights and my favorite at that time – siege on forts and keeps. Experiencing the PvP in beta was the selling factor of this game for me. What ruined the experience in PvP were the occasional lag spikes and the constant feeling of minor lag in general.
My final verdict for the game based on the facts above would be solid 8/10. One point lost to quest/mob annoyances I mentioned and another for the lag. This is an MMO so the fact that we can't have friends with us all the time is in my opinion a design flaw I can't forgive. The advertising promised plenty of customization options for out characters – I don't feel there are enough. They also promised everything would be lootable – not really, you mostly get provisioning from that so it's far from looting crates in Skyrim. We're often forced to team up and last but not least – the EU server is still in USA. I don't know what it's like for American players but for us in Europe lag really breaks PvP and sometimes even PvE.
Now the bad part of the review – where I drop the verdict from the solid 8.
We've had bugs, bugs and more annoying bugs preventing us from completing the quests. Developers did a rather good job patching those bugs over the past two months and I thank them for that, however even after 2 months there are still bugged achievements we cannot unlock (example: Pact hero, Daggerfal hero, some quests we did but never got the achievement etc.). I consider myself being pretty patient but I've seen many players being really annoyed by this. It's been two months already. Are we ever going to get our already earned achievements and titles that come with them or not? Sure, go ahead and take another month to fix it if you have to but please give us some positive feedback. Every day I log into the game and look at my journal I cannot help but wonder if those achievements are ever going to be there or will I have to play another character some day to get them all – which I really can't be bothered to do again (for now anyway).
We're paying customers here so please give us some feedback if these things are being fixed and more importantly when! A simple "We're aware of it and are working on it..." doesn't really cut it anymore specially since those issues were promised to be fixed with the Craglorn patch and weren't. In fact, all our quest achievements now show 0/XX quests done.
Every patch that brings some fixes often brings new problems with it too. I do understand how programming works and can understand some of those new problems but often times I feel that someone had been poking with things that used to work really well and broke them. (See 0/XX example above).
Then there's Fishing. It's been two months and fishing achievements still don't work. Just to remind everyone, we were promised they would be fixed with the Craglorn patch. I'm beginning to feel like an idiot for trying to get the (broken) fishing achievement after each patch. Couldn't you have just put those fishing achievements in game after someone finally made them work?
Next there are bots and gold selling spam. I understand that it's an endless war with those and in fact a bot here and there doesn't really bother me that much unless they prevent me from being able to do something in game. However, how hard can it be to have someone monitoring zone chats and banning those gold spammers on sight. Sometimes low level areas are impossible to zone chat with those annoying idiots spamming their ads multiple times in a row. Even the simplest open source MMOs have anti spam protection built into their servers that lock player chat for some time to those players who spam the same things more then three times in a row.
And last, but not least – the PvP issues. The biggest being that lots of lag prevents abilities to be used. Me and my group charge into battle with full ultimates only to discover we can't drop them when we get there – or use any other abilities for that matter. And then poof – we're all dead somewhere or worst – disconnected. Since I don't use any add-on at all I can only contribute this to flaws in game design and/or lag. Again, I can't speak for those in America but for us in Europe one of the factor contributing to the problem is the server not actually being located in Europe. Another factor contributing are multiboxer blobs. While I don't have a problem with someone having multiple accounts and being logged into more of them to move items between them or something similar, I do consider multiboxing in PvP cheating and an annoyance for two following reasons. First, the player can't control all those "bots" individually, but uses scripts which make the blob overpowered. All those bots can cast a single ability (like impulse) at the same time and instant kill anyone caught in the spell radius. This 100% sync. can't be done by a similar group of actual players and it also can't be out healed. It also seems to cause massive lag on the server preventing us, the real players, from using skills. Scripting also allows the multiboxer blob to cast perfectly coordinated group buffs making it almost invulnerable.
Then there are PvP balance issues. I'm glad to see someone fixing them but I can't understand why the developers always seem to break the balance further by adding or changing things that worked fine in the first place. A good example being the recent changes done to guards and mercenaries.
Again, what is the most annoying of it all is the lack of solid response to these issues. I've seen many complaints on the official forums about all of the PvP issues mentioned above and not a single solid official response from developers. Simple "We're aware of it and are working on it..." responses don't really cut it anymore since we've yet to see a solid result from "working on it". Forgive me if I seem impatient here, but I'm trying to honestly share how I feel and how many of my friends in game feel. (not to mention those who already rage quit)
In the end I'm not going to give a final verdict because I honestly don't think I can and it would be pointless since the game is changing weekly. I really hope that ZOS developers will continue working hard to fix all issues for us and really earn that 8/10 – or even improve the grade. I really enjoy the game despite the issues above and will continue playing the game as long as there are people to play it with. What worries me a lot is the fact that I see many fed up players leaving PvP and I can't really remember the last time I saw any PvP campaign being locked full.
Would I recommend the game to my friends? If I did the recommendation would come with a big warning about issues mentioned above – just to avoid my friends hating me for not mentioning them. I do have to give credit to the in game customer support that was very quick to respond and solve a few issues I had in game (such as being stuck). I really hope someone in ZOS takes time to read through this lengthy review and that it will help make ESO a better game for all of us to enjoy.
Thanks for reading.
After having spend over 900 hours playing Skyrim, I was really excited to get my hands on ESO.
Let's start with the purchase itself. The price was OK, in the expected price range however there was a decision to be made – should I go for the Imperial edition? Having tested this in BETA, my final verdict was a solid no. What did I miss because of that decision? A 1 gold horse? Well, the best horses in game can only be bought by spending over 40K gold anyway. I generally don't agree with pay to win concepts but if I pay real money for a horse – I'd expect that one to be the best. Rings of Mara? Unfortunately I didn't have any friends starting the game with me and I didn't want to share those rings with a random person. Playing as Imperial? Well, I always belonged to that group of players who never liked Imperials. I know that Imperial racial allows all 3 stats to be maxed with gear but still – meh.
Now, the game itself. Character creation is well done however I do think there should have been more customization options in markings, adornment and hair styles. This was the first Elder Scrolls game where I could make elves look what I considered attractive. However, I must say that I found making attractive humans quite challenging. The head shapes of Nords or Bretons look kinda funky.
Next – the tutorial area. Nicely done, not too long and I found the learning curve to be very fast and easy. I also like the option to skip the tutorial on future characters without loosing anything.
Now the game world. While missing that wow factor I had in Skyrim or Oblivion, I found graphics to be nicely done in general. Since this is an MMO and there are some limits compared to single player games I didn't really expect a wow factor anyway. My opinion was that the Aldmeri got the best looking nature but I found the Pact realm to be the easiest to play on since the lack of vegetation made crafting resources easier to spot. Being a 3D artist I can find ways to improve pretty much anything in game but for this review – graphics are well done, there are nice shaders and effects in game and recent patches brought some improvements too. I only noticed a bit of lack in detail in Cyrodiil.
Sound and music – well done as expected. All characters are voice acted which is very nice. I do find having to read large chunks of quest dialogs in other games very boring so having everything voice acted is a big plus. Questing up to level 50 (to battle with Molag Bal) was fun and I could do the quests all by myself. There were two things I found annoying however. The fact that I had to share some quest goals with other players such as picking mushrooms. I found a mushroom I wanted to take only to have another player pick it up in front of my face leaving me annoyed and sometimes frustrated by the fact I had to waste time waiting for more mushrooms to spawn and then quickly hoping to recover enough of them before other players get to them first. The other annoyance was the fact that some quests instances are solo only and quite challenging to complete. Not being able to bring a friend to help me kill some boss was a bit annoying sometimes too. I feel I should be able to bring my friends everywhere in an MMO. Also to be noted – some quests really have ridiculous walking distances to cover which often made me feel that those quests were designed to annoy me and make me spend some euros to buy a horse or the Imperial upgrade.
After that there are veteran zones. I found the mobs in veteran areas a bit overpowered. Sure everyone should have some friends by the veteran areas which I found were best done in pairs, however the game advertising I saw claimed that the players can do everything by themselves and are only encouraged to team up. Sorry ZOS but unless we want to waste time and resources on many hard situations we're actually forced to to team up, not encouraged. The final mother of all annoyances was in bugs which I will cover later in the review.
Finally, there's PvP. After entering the first battle in Cyrodiil – that was my wow moment of the game. PvP in Cyrodiil covers many things – quests, dungeons, small scale fights, large scale fights and my favorite at that time – siege on forts and keeps. Experiencing the PvP in beta was the selling factor of this game for me. What ruined the experience in PvP were the occasional lag spikes and the constant feeling of minor lag in general.
My final verdict for the game based on the facts above would be solid 8/10. One point lost to quest/mob annoyances I mentioned and another for the lag. This is an MMO so the fact that we can't have friends with us all the time is in my opinion a design flaw I can't forgive. The advertising promised plenty of customization options for out characters – I don't feel there are enough. They also promised everything would be lootable – not really, you mostly get provisioning from that so it's far from looting crates in Skyrim. We're often forced to team up and last but not least – the EU server is still in USA. I don't know what it's like for American players but for us in Europe lag really breaks PvP and sometimes even PvE.
Now the bad part of the review – where I drop the verdict from the solid 8.
We've had bugs, bugs and more annoying bugs preventing us from completing the quests. Developers did a rather good job patching those bugs over the past two months and I thank them for that, however even after 2 months there are still bugged achievements we cannot unlock (example: Pact hero, Daggerfal hero, some quests we did but never got the achievement etc.). I consider myself being pretty patient but I've seen many players being really annoyed by this. It's been two months already. Are we ever going to get our already earned achievements and titles that come with them or not? Sure, go ahead and take another month to fix it if you have to but please give us some positive feedback. Every day I log into the game and look at my journal I cannot help but wonder if those achievements are ever going to be there or will I have to play another character some day to get them all – which I really can't be bothered to do again (for now anyway).
We're paying customers here so please give us some feedback if these things are being fixed and more importantly when! A simple "We're aware of it and are working on it..." doesn't really cut it anymore specially since those issues were promised to be fixed with the Craglorn patch and weren't. In fact, all our quest achievements now show 0/XX quests done.
Every patch that brings some fixes often brings new problems with it too. I do understand how programming works and can understand some of those new problems but often times I feel that someone had been poking with things that used to work really well and broke them. (See 0/XX example above).
Then there's Fishing. It's been two months and fishing achievements still don't work. Just to remind everyone, we were promised they would be fixed with the Craglorn patch. I'm beginning to feel like an idiot for trying to get the (broken) fishing achievement after each patch. Couldn't you have just put those fishing achievements in game after someone finally made them work?
Next there are bots and gold selling spam. I understand that it's an endless war with those and in fact a bot here and there doesn't really bother me that much unless they prevent me from being able to do something in game. However, how hard can it be to have someone monitoring zone chats and banning those gold spammers on sight. Sometimes low level areas are impossible to zone chat with those annoying idiots spamming their ads multiple times in a row. Even the simplest open source MMOs have anti spam protection built into their servers that lock player chat for some time to those players who spam the same things more then three times in a row.
And last, but not least – the PvP issues. The biggest being that lots of lag prevents abilities to be used. Me and my group charge into battle with full ultimates only to discover we can't drop them when we get there – or use any other abilities for that matter. And then poof – we're all dead somewhere or worst – disconnected. Since I don't use any add-on at all I can only contribute this to flaws in game design and/or lag. Again, I can't speak for those in America but for us in Europe one of the factor contributing to the problem is the server not actually being located in Europe. Another factor contributing are multiboxer blobs. While I don't have a problem with someone having multiple accounts and being logged into more of them to move items between them or something similar, I do consider multiboxing in PvP cheating and an annoyance for two following reasons. First, the player can't control all those "bots" individually, but uses scripts which make the blob overpowered. All those bots can cast a single ability (like impulse) at the same time and instant kill anyone caught in the spell radius. This 100% sync. can't be done by a similar group of actual players and it also can't be out healed. It also seems to cause massive lag on the server preventing us, the real players, from using skills. Scripting also allows the multiboxer blob to cast perfectly coordinated group buffs making it almost invulnerable.
Then there are PvP balance issues. I'm glad to see someone fixing them but I can't understand why the developers always seem to break the balance further by adding or changing things that worked fine in the first place. A good example being the recent changes done to guards and mercenaries.
Again, what is the most annoying of it all is the lack of solid response to these issues. I've seen many complaints on the official forums about all of the PvP issues mentioned above and not a single solid official response from developers. Simple "We're aware of it and are working on it..." responses don't really cut it anymore since we've yet to see a solid result from "working on it". Forgive me if I seem impatient here, but I'm trying to honestly share how I feel and how many of my friends in game feel. (not to mention those who already rage quit)
In the end I'm not going to give a final verdict because I honestly don't think I can and it would be pointless since the game is changing weekly. I really hope that ZOS developers will continue working hard to fix all issues for us and really earn that 8/10 – or even improve the grade. I really enjoy the game despite the issues above and will continue playing the game as long as there are people to play it with. What worries me a lot is the fact that I see many fed up players leaving PvP and I can't really remember the last time I saw any PvP campaign being locked full.
Would I recommend the game to my friends? If I did the recommendation would come with a big warning about issues mentioned above – just to avoid my friends hating me for not mentioning them. I do have to give credit to the in game customer support that was very quick to respond and solve a few issues I had in game (such as being stuck). I really hope someone in ZOS takes time to read through this lengthy review and that it will help make ESO a better game for all of us to enjoy.
Thanks for reading.
5
-
frwinters_ESO✭✭✭✭Who are you and why does your review matter? Oh wait you did the resume thing people do in these situations.
Less you write for a magazine or a major publication, why do you feel the need to write a personal review?
This is a serious question.1 -
Gedalya✭✭✭✭✭After having spend over 900 hours playing Skyrim, I was really excited to get my hands on ESO.
I love ESO and plain on playing it for quite some time. I also love Skyrim and have played it quite a bit; but 900 hours? Really? Are you using Steam's time in game estimates?0 -
Skillet✭✭✭"After having spend over 900 hours playing Skyrim, I was really excited to get my hands on ESO."
Stopped reading here. This is not Skyrim.
2 -
aleister✭✭✭✭frwinters_ESO wrote: »Who are you and why does your review matter? Oh wait you did the resume thing people do in these situations.
Less you write for a magazine or a major publication, why do you feel the need to write a personal review?
This is a serious question.
Maybe he sees the potential of the game and cares about where it is headed?5 -
AH93✭✭✭Agree with most of what you said, lack of interaction, bugged achievements and imbalance between classes have killed it for me.
It's a shame because everything else in the game is good and I have enjoyed trials but this game is not worth renewing my sub for.0 -
KitLightning✭✭✭✭"I'd rather be insane in a sane world, than sane in an insane world!" ~MeWarning - This is a spoiler and looking at it for too long may cause irrecoverable eyesight issues.
◔̯◔
MechWarrior: Living Legends – Total conversion modification for Crysis Wars.
kitlightning.deviantart0 -
TomLukman✭✭✭I love ESO and plain on playing it for quite some time. I also love Skyrim and have played it quite a bit; but 900 hours? Really? Are you using Steam's time in game estimates?
902 hours on Steam time
The game has been there for almost 3 years after all and I found it fun to start over and try different builds or difficulties. 1 -
daneyulebub17_ESO✭✭✭✭✭
✭frwinters_ESO wrote: »Who are you and why does your review matter? Oh wait you did the resume thing people do in these situations.
Less you write for a magazine or a major publication, why do you feel the need to write a personal review?
This is a serious question.
What credentials do you have to ask questions on these forums, and why do they matter?
This is a serious question.
(And I'm accredited by the Official Forum Question Askers Association, before you ask for my credentials.)This message confirms that you have successfully cancelled your subscription to The Elder Scrolls Online. You will no longer be charged for a subscription on a recurring basis, and your access to the game will expire at the end of your current subscription cycle.
We're sad to see you go now, but we'll be happy to welcome you back at any time! Whenever you're ready to come back, your characters will be waiting for you, just like you left them. You can return anytime by resubscribing on the Manage Subscription page on your Elder Scrolls Online account.
Please print this email and keep it for your records.2
