ESO is a great game!

ZachariasT

Just wanted to put out a thank you to the developers of this game. I have been playing Guild Wars 2 since it's release and despite my issues with the game stuck with it because of the people I met ingame and the hope that it would get better. I finally quit the game after some unpleasant experiences with Arenanet.

I decided on ESO despite the things I had heard about the game mainly because of it's 3 Faction Region vs Region area and the combat system had similarities with GW. I'm not big into structured PvP so I wasn't bothered that it wasn't offered. So glad I gave ESO a try! So many things turned out to be untrue. Even though these forums have many complaints about lag I only rarely felt any issues. Some said the community was toxic but everyone is so helpful and friendly online. I have found a very open and helpful guild. I am a bit worried about the level of grind involved for gear and veteran levels but I'm still so new at this point everything is fun and interesting so far. My only issues are the lack of storage and no Auction House/Trading Post.

I have 4 toons after a month of playing, my highest leveled character is a dragonknight level 45. I know you all know this game but personally these are the things I love about ESO:
1. The lore and many of the quests are amazing, especially compared to GW, where the stories seem to have been written by teenagers and are just not believable. They are very immersive and it is great to be able to play a game that seems targeted at adults for a change.
2. The variety and customization of builds seems unlimited. There is the trinity but it is reassuring that I can change any of my characters to fit any role.
3. The PvE can be very challenging, no more pressing '1' over and over to get through everything.
4. At this point I am getting regularly wiped in Cyrodiil but it's still fun and once I am more familiar with the area I can see myself spending most of my time here and in IC. It does seem a bit disorganized at least in nonveteran areas.

I don't have a question for anyone but did wanted to express my opinion. ESO isn't very well known compared to other games probably because of it's rocky start but I find it a superior game and often wonder while I am playing why it isn't more popular.

newtinmpls

I've never tried an MMORPG before, so I was pleasantly surprised.

I'm even more shocked that I'm starting to enjoy PvP, but chalk that one up to a really cool guild I accidentally ran into... shout out to M4D!

hrothbern

a great game indeed

and for all the shouters with ***...

please confirm this also if you find points of improvement

TheShadowScout

Indeed it is a great game!
Still ample room for improvement of course, but regardless, a great game!

I kinda followed a friend here, at first I wasn't so sure about it through the 1st person view that always gives me terrible motion sickness, but when I found out one can switch to 3rd person view... it quickly became my all time favorite MMO!

The visuals were stunning all around, both landscape and characters, and getting better all the time since I started playing last year. Adding dyes, redoing some armors, adding new styles, having new and great regions, and now the crown store with those extra goodies... I love how many of the different regions look all so -different-, yet blend into each other... stonefalls is different from deshaan is different from eastmarch, as well as the high rock lands are different from the alik'r desert, and yet the borders are not really "pop, everything new", you see how the landscape in one region gradually approaches the next one... how parts of stonefalls are all volcanic, and other parts show a hint of deshaan to come... how the rift between eastmarch and stonefalls bridges from the icy nothern climate of former to the temperate climate of latter... how the border between high rock and the desert in bangkorai is depicted... etc. It looks alive and believeble, which not every game manages...

The character options are varied, those four classes are merely the beginning, combined with magica/stamina/balanced build option and free weapon selection it multiplied nicely. Add to that the rather limited number of active skills promoting lots of thought and some hard choices... and its no surprise I fell in love with the combat system which promotes mobility and paying attention to the fight instead of just watching ability cooldown timers like in all too many other games...

The lore is rich as one would come to expect from any game that draws on the nicely fleshed out TES background, and the quests are nicely done as well. Oh, sure, a few times one wonders "why isn't there an option to choose -this-", and a few times one finds the quest outline familiar from classic stories or clichees... but that can hardly be avoided, and in a whole it is very neatly done (I especially like those quests where the objectives change halfway in, and surprise you by suddenly switching to a different direction...)

PvP in cyrodil was a blast for me when I encountered it, having only known the "group vs. group arena" style of PvP... having a huge region to play in, and join sieges/keep defenses often made it fun even when (as happens all too often to me) getting trounced by those with bigger PvPness. Especially when ones side manages to trump quality with sheer quantity, and you join in the success as lowly archer supporting a big warband long before your PvP skills grew to the point where you could call them "adequate"...

And the champion system... ahhh... never again will I lament over all the XP I might have lost playing at level cap when the cap gets raised, now it all goes into c-points, and I get a continous feeling of "ding - you got better", even if that feeling will mean less and less through diminishing returns... it will still be great! And better yet, all my veteran playing adds to the shared pot, so I can play as many alts as I want (well, as many as the game allows for my account, really) without ever despairing of how much I have to play to get them "up to task" should I decide to try endgame with a different class then my main...

All in all, my favorite MMO; and still getting better!

Farorin

I also think it is a very good game. Needs a bit of balancing, and they need to stop listening to all those that cry nerf all the time. But aside from that, quite good.

UltimaJoe777

newtinmpls wrote: »

I've never tried an MMORPG before, so I was pleasantly surprised.

I'm even more shocked that I'm starting to enjoy PvP, but chalk that one up to a really cool guild I accidentally ran into... shout out to M4D!

I am generally not a big PvP fan but I do enjoy the PvP in this game simply because of its war games theme. It's more than just PvP... It's WAR!

Greatsword

ESO has a few really crappy and immersion-breaking combat animations.
And of course you will never ever be able to be competitive if you haven't been there from the start to amass huge amounts of CP
...but other than that it's actually quite good for an MMO.
I guess.

Personally, I played since beta and my highest character is level 17. But just because I can't love the game as much as I want to (and tried to, like 10 times over), it doesn't mean others can't. But I will keep trying, as I still believe this game can become the real deal.

ESO is certainly better than its reputation. If you see people talking about this game anywhere in the internet (from users to "professional" reviewers) it's usually treated like pure garbage while ES fans will tell you how much of a disgrace this game is to the Elder Scrolls series. Nonsense. It's still better than the potatohead simulator aka Oblivion!
Of course you can tell most of those people never really played the game, but joining the hate wagon is so much fun.

On a serious note:

• the combat system is pretty dope for an MMO
• the PvP CONCEPT (!) might be the best since DAoC or at least WAR
• environment graphics (with SweetFX and ESO Launcher anyway) are on par with modern single player games - even if the character models and their wooden animations are not and therefore can look a bit out of place
• still, character models are not bad and still among the better ones in MMOs
• so far the devs managed to maintain a homogenous overall style (i.e. they resisted to add immersion-breaking funky costumes in bright colors to their cash shop, although the direction they take with some mounts DOES worry me)
• speaking of: I love the real, slightly understated, slightly dark, medieval overall style
• this game has by far the best quests of any MMO ever (ok, along with TSW)
• lots of cities with some breath-taking architecture and impressive size/scale (honestly, in this regard it even blows all the single player TES games out of the water)
• great score, please give us more music!
• if you listen to the devs in the video streams it kinds seems like this game is in good hands; these guys definitely are gamers who try to develop a game for gamers - no, that's NOT a given in a time where MMOs are serious investments of several hundred million dollars
• etc. - might have missed a lot