My favourite thing so far is every whiner that promises to quit. Makes me feel better for the community's chances .

My favorite thing I guess is how easy it is to immerse yourself in. The questing and even the side quests feel deep and amazing. Honestly when I'm off doing PvE I turn my chat window off and just sink into the story XD

My favorite thing? The buff to Nightblades that actually nerfed them and managed to break even more of their borderline useless and broken skills. Definitely lolworthy in my books. lol

The stunning scenery

The bots

Oh, this is going to be a long one...

1. The De-emphasis on grinding/The emphasis on exploration and story:
Overworld/delve trash mobs give a minimal amount of experience and they sparsely populate the over world landscape. This game is not about killing 300 rat-men while running from point A to point B. It is about trekking off the beaten path and this design philosophy is very conducive to exploration. I love when I'm out looking for skyshards, resources, chests, quests, and I happen to come across the World Story Flair.

For example: I found a hut in a Grahtwood swamp one day, surrounded by wisps. Inside the hut was a skeleton and on the table was an unfinished journal detailing the life of a fisherman who claimed to have found his "perfect home" where the fish were plentiful and the nighttime sounds lulled him to sleep. As the journal progresses it gets grimmer as he talks about how the "fire lights" would come out at night and were scaring away all the fish. Then they were coming out during the day and he was starting to slowly starve. In the final entry he says "it's time to do something about those lights..."

2. I love the freedom of character progression:
Being able to mix and match skills as I level, and have any combination be (to some degree) viable is a level of freedom that most MMOs have not offered up to this point.

3. The combat is right up my alley:
I think a lot of people want to compare the combat in this game to MMOs like Tera or the single-player Elder Scrolls games. I can see where they are coming from, but I see a slightly different design philosophy being implemented:

Resources are an integral part of any RPG combat system, but in this game they are much more precious. They deplete quickly, but recharge slowly (comparatively speaking). You can't just spam skills until everything is dead. Your ability to block, dodge, or interrupt an enemy at a crucial moment is tied to your stamina, so you have to plan ahead for those more difficult fights, you have to bide your time, know when to be defensive or when to press the advantage. It's not flashy, but it's more cerebral than the more twitch-based action oriented combat systems. And if you are in the middle of an attack animation, or don't have the stamina, you will be unable to react to the enemy telegraphs quickly enough to prevent the incoming damage- and a lot of enemies hit really, really hard. In a roundabout sort of way- the combat in ESO reminds me of Dark Souls (just without the same level of technical proficiency, but I'm sure that will change with time).

4. Difficulty spikes:
Not a lot to be said here, it's a fantastic way of shaking things up! Trash mobs can be bulldozed, but regularly, either through a quest or a over world/dungeon "boss", you will run into something that will ruin your day if you're not approaching it with a plan in mind and the patience to implement it. This goes back to what I love about the combat system.

5. Phasing:
Most people aren't fans of this, but it's because of the phasing that I feel as though my character has made a substantial impact on the game world. Freeing a town from a curse of stone or raiding bandits and then seeing the crowds cheer at my very presence is just cool.

It is my hope that when Zenimax "fixes" the phasing, they do so in a way that doesn't hinder the inherent design philosophy originally offered by the phasing. My suggestion would be to implement a "Guesting" system where the people invited to the group are pulled into the group leader's phase of a quest, that way people can still play together without changing what I like about this.

6. Voice Acting:
Yeah, the skill of the voice actors varies from "I was a tree in a middle-school play this one time..." to "I'm an academy award winner with several block-buster movies under my belt, want me to recite Shakespeare?", but the fact that every quest is voice acted has done so much to draw me into the world of Tamriel.

7. Immersion:
I have never, ever played an MMO with any sort of expectation that I would be immersed. MMOs are a social experience, and social experience ruins that immersion factor every time, without fail. I play them because they are social, not because they are immersive... but, ESO has managed to utterly suck me into the game on more than one occasion, and it has been a hugely pleasant surprise. See my previous points to support this one.

8. Compartmentalized design philosophy:
As compartmentalized as ESO is in its design philosophy, that compartmentalization has afforded Zenimax the opportunity to finely tune the various aspects of the game design. Solo quests are designed to be solo, and they excel at being solo quests. Dungeons are fun, frantic, and engaging too! They require strategy and communication in order to achieve success. Delves are a great middle ground between solo and group content. And the PVP just looks cool!

There is another side to this compartmentalization that I have yet to hear anyone mention- It hinders Bots! Everything inherently acts as a "Bot slowing mechanism".

The 5 part crafting process: Relatively simple for a human being to accomplish, but it still requires a cognitive level of human understanding in order to progress beyond the initial crafting levels with any sort of efficiency. Only so many resources can be harvested so quickly, then they have to be combined to make basic crafting components, then they have to be scaled to the appropriate level, then they have to be created, then improved, then improved, then improved again, then they have to be enchanted. Traits have to be researched. Bots can neither create the best items in the game nor can they break down the best items to get the best crafting materials all that efficiently, because well, the best materials for improving items come from skill point distribution and deconstructing other items- those cannot simply be found while farming in the open world.

The Guild operated stores: Guild leaders control who is and is not allowed to access their stores, and I don't imagine any guild leader would be too keen on giving their personal economy over to an army of Bots. And, even if that were to happen, it wouldn't affect any of the other guild stores run by other guilds, just the one. This ensures that Bots are unable to ruin the in-game economy for all players... just the few that didn't pay attention to who they invited into the guild, which I wouldn't imagine would be any.

The low exp mobs that sparsely populate the over world make it difficult for Bots to mindlessly grind to max level content. In order to level quickly, players have to quest and react to those difficulty spikes I mentioned earlier. It is "possible" for Bots to reach max level, but they can't do it as fast as player controlled characters, so players will consistently out level them. Notice how they still infest the low-level areas but become increasingly less common passed level 10? That wasn't a happy accident, that's how this game was designed. Along with the slow leveling comes the slow gold farming. Grinding mobs for gold just doesn't get you anywhere fast, and it is slower still for Bots. Yeah, there's an infestation, but what has it really accomplished? Not much to be honest, and they will be gone soon because this game is designed to slow them down at every turn. It's only been a month and half and I have already become aware that I haven't seen more than a handful here and there at the mid-level content. I could throw out anecdotes about games like GW2 and WoW, and their long running Bot problems post-release, but I digress...

TL;DR: I like a few things about ESO.

Makarion wrote: »

My favourite thing so far is every whiner that promises to quit. Makes me feel better for the community's chances .

LOL thank you! I was going to post this exact same thing

Personally, my favorite thing about ESO is the level of detail of the world itself. The combination of environment design, textures, lighting, day/night cycles, and sounds. Its very lifelike, and that makes immersion very easy and enjoyable.

It is delightful to quest, explore, or RP, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on advancement, it is always time well spent. In my estimation, an MMO is about having an *recreational* experience that is enjoyable.

I don't like simplified cartoons that are only there to facilitate a perpetual race for status/resources. If I want work and stress, it will be waiting for me at my job every day, 8am sharp.

The official forums. Lots to see and do around here.

Adoryn wrote: »

World design, some very good questlines, fun emotes, good voice acting, tiny guars...

So glad you brought up the pony and bantam guar. Every one in my house gets confused when i scream "PONY GUAR" while I'm adventuring.