*Why* ESO doesn't smell like Skyrim

isailandshootub17_ESO

"Look at your game, now back to me. Now back to your game, now back to me. Sadly, your ESO is not me. But it could smell like me, if it stopped using lady scented game mechanics. Look down, we've just loaded your save from 3 years ago in Skyrim. You're character is just as powerful now as it was then. No skills have been nerfed, no need to re-imagine that perfect character...."

Do you remember the feeling of sneaking into a necromancer's tower to recover books for the College of Winterhold with your sneaky archer? Miss those one shot, one kill, well aimed head shots with the locational damage mod? You find that the Frost Atronachs are quite formidable so you begin working on your conjuration and illusion skills so that you can summon your own minions silently and from a distance to distract your enemies as you pick them off. You might find one particular item which will greatly enhance your character's power (thank Talos you get all of the benefits without having to collect 4 other items with the same name in order to gain the benefits). From this one tower you make a good bit of gold. Possibly enough to buy a horse and a couple of spells to begin mastering illusion and conjuration. The time investment / reward and incentive is very good. You put in an hour or two and you've progressed a good deal and it was in no way a grind. If you enhanced your experience with difficulty mods such as D.U.E.L. or survival mods like Frostfall or Realistic Needs, then your incentive for playing increases, and your incentive for playing smart increases, which make the victory sweeter....

Ahhh, but this is not Skyrim. Why is gameplay so extraordinarily different? I can't imagine ESO giving me an experience like the one above. But oh, to hope against hope, and dream against dream that it might....


WARNING: The following is a rant. I really like many aspects of ESO. I'm thankful for the game, but would like to raise some quasi-legitimate annoyances. I don't always complain. But when I do, its because I'm a beautiful snowflake...

ALSO: Rant might not make ESO smell any better or even determine *WHY* it doesn't smell like Skyrim as the title indicates. This is of no fault of my own. Its just my lack of cleverness.

Begin Rant:

Whenever I get the urge to test out an idea for a PVP build, I log into ESO and grind. Then I grind. Then I go to sleep. Then I work. A few days later I grind again. Just a few hours here and there, and after a few months I have a level 50 character with none of the skill points from quests or shards, with only a few wayshrines unlocked. A few weeks later I have some decent purple gear, and 400cp, collectively. I go into Cyrodiil and do moderately decent when in groups, but it turns out the build I wanted to play needs to be augmented with skills that are most common to PVP.

"Well, you can play the way you want in PvE," you say.

I suppose you're right, partially. But I prefer Skyrim, or Oblivion, or the Witcher if I want the immersion of a world in which others aren't all running around and jumping and twirling like ice-skating princesses with destruction staves to spoil the story. To me, for immersing myself into a quest story, I'm either totally in, or totally grinding. I would love for the grind to be completely gone. I'd love to kill monsters and they disappear for long enough so that it feels like I've accomplished something. Maybe the respawn timer could be 20 minutes, but the xp could be insanely higher to justify this, along with increased difficulty, giving me incentive to go on to new areas that I've never been once I've cleared the zombie spawn that I've been grinding for the past 10000 kills (at least ESO players are better prepared for the Zombie apocalypse).

Okay, I realize this is a vague and perhaps a somewhat pointless post. It sounds like I'm upset because ESO is not a single player game, BUT THAT'S NOT THE ISSUE AT ALL!!! Okay, maybe it is the issue, and is therefore somewhat unfair. I guess I am upset for partially unrealistic expectations. However, I believe part of the hype at ESO release was that it played like any other Elder Scrolls game, but now with friends.

I don't think raising such issues are pointless for an MMO. I think there are some great ways that ESO might become more attractive for the casual PVPers who love single player games, or even for those who play solely for the PVE content.

Let's see if I can be a bit more focused:

-I am discouraged to play to find new gear because of how encumbered this game is with all of the less-than-useful sets. It is a real challenge to organize everything, and just sorting through stuff to equip a character can be very difficult. I don't know how to fix this. I suppose this is one of the downsides to having a gear based game versus a skill based game (A skill based game, in this line of reasoning, is one in which any benefit which we presently see on gear through buffs would be available through normal character progression without gear, and gear would become more basic and vanilla, such as old school Ultima Online). In other words, it would be the gear which determined your playstyle, but your skills.

- Once I've invested in gear which, to me, is extremely expensive and time consuming to acquire (especially if I goldify it), if it isn't all I hoped, then I lose desire to play, and lose hope that another set will work better (unless I'm following a somewhat cookie-cutter build which is popular during a given patch period). Don't know how to fix this without the game not being gear based. I suppose the PTS is helpful, but that is still pretty time consuming.

- Patches seem to change gameplay quite a bit in my experience. This is another discouraging element for a casual gamer such as myself.

- Quests give too little experience. WAAAAAY too little. No way I'm wasting my precious little gaming time on quests (as end game PVP always seems to be what draws me to MMOs) And the XP potions and scrolls, though a great improvement over vanilla, make me want to rush through the quests as fast as possible. Perhaps experience scrolls which grant increased XP to a certain number of quests regardless of how slowly we go through them? This might spread out people from the grind spots and make leveling a bit more fun, especially now that we can start out in any faction with One Tamriel.

- The big problem in the first few paragraphs of this post concerned immersion and its relation to having other people in your game. A possible fix for this is more solo instances. Perhaps the choice to enter an dungeon or delve as a solo instance? I'm sure some really intelligent and kind hearted people will correct me as to how this is a lame idea, thanks in advance.

- Immersion in the open world... Why is it that other people in my MMO PVE experience seem to cheapen the immersion? What could possibly be done? I suppose I could just deal with it. I'm sure loads of people who read every line of dialogue and explore every location deal with others without so much as batting an eye-lash. I'm just a bit immersionally challenged, I suppose. What would change this? I suppose there is no way in oblivion there is a chance of each player having access to their own private instance of Tamriel....

- Gear grinding. Every day a few more VET Maelstrom posts appear about changing the weapon reward, or selecting the reward. Selected rewards from a list for quests does sound nice. We also, I think, desperately need the ability to change things about gear. For example, we need a way to change the motif on gear. maybe add a new skill to game? Artificer or something? And casual folks such as myself would love a way to increase the level of gear, even if the cost in mats was quite high. Also, how about jewelry upgrades?

There are really tons of things in my head, but this post is already incoherent enough. My apologies if I've hurt anyones feelings, especially ZOS employees. I know y'all do some of the best work in the industry, and I have had LOADS of fun with ESO. That is why I have been a subscriber since launch. ESO is the most beautiful MMO I've ever seen, that is why I'm in Tamriel instead of Azeroth. Thanks ZOS

Respectfully,
The game your game could smell like
I mean, John.

*EDIT*

I'm on a horse.

FLuFFyxMuFFiN

Tl;dr

Sotha_Sil

ESO is not supposed to be Skyrim 2 sorry if I broke your feelings.

Aletheion

TL:DR

But.. Single Player =/= MMO

-Aletheion

Zorgon_The_Revenged

/facepalm

Kronz

isailandshootub17_ESO wrote: »

"Look at your game, now back to me. Now back to your game, now back to me. Sadly, your ESO is not me. But it could smell like me, if it stopped using lady scented game mechanics. Look down, we've just loaded your save from 3 years ago in Skyrim. You're character is just as powerful now as it was then. No skills have been nerfed, no need to re-imagine that perfect character...."

Do you remember the feeling of sneaking into a necromancer's tower to recover books for the College of Winterhold with your sneaky archer? Miss those one shot, one kill, well aimed head shots with the locational damage mod? You find that the Frost Atronachs are quite formidable so you begin working on your conjuration and illusion skills so that you can summon your own minions silently and from a distance to distract your enemies as you pick them off. You might find one particular item which will greatly enhance your character's power (thank Talos you get all of the benefits without having to collect 4 other items with the same name in order to gain the benefits). From this one tower you make a good bit of gold. Possibly enough to buy a horse and a couple of spells to begin mastering illusion and conjuration. The time investment / reward and incentive is very good. You put in an hour or two and you've progressed a good deal and it was in no way a grind. If you enhanced your experience with difficulty mods such as D.U.E.L. or survival mods like Frostfall or Realistic Needs, then your incentive for playing increases, and your incentive for playing smart increases, which make the victory sweeter....

Ahhh, but this is not Skyrim. Why is gameplay so extraordinarily different? I can't imagine ESO giving me an experience like the one above. But oh, to hope against hope, and dream against dream that it might....


WARNING: The following is a rant. I really like many aspects of ESO. I'm thankful for the game, but would like to raise some quasi-legitimate annoyances. I don't always complain. But when I do, its because I'm a beautiful snowflake...

ALSO: Rant might not make ESO smell any better or even determine *WHY* it doesn't smell like Skyrim as the title indicates. This is of no fault of my own. Its jsut my lack of cleverness.

Begin Rant:

Whenever I get the urge to test out an idea for a PVP build, I log into ESO and grind. Then I grind. Then I go to sleep. Then I work. A few days later I grind again. Just a few hours here and there, and after a few months I have a level 50 character with none of the skill points from quests or shards, with only a few wayshrines unlocked. A few weeks later I have some decent purple gear, and 400cp, collectively. I go into Cyrodiil and do moderately decent when in groups, but it turns out the build I wanted to play needs to be augmented with skills that are most common to PVP.

"Well, you can play the way you want in PvE," you say.

I suppose you're right, partially. But I prefer Skyrim, or Oblivion, or the Witcher if I want the immersion of a world in which others aren't all running around and jumping and twirling like ice-skating princesses with destruction staves to spoil the story. To me, for immersing myself into a quest story, I'm either totally in, or totally grinding. I would love for the grind to be completely gone. I'd love to kill monsters and they disappear for long enough so that it feels like I've accomplished something. Maybe the respawn timer could be 20 minutes, but the xp could be insanely higher to justify this, along with increased difficulty, giving me incentive to go on to new areas that I've never been once I've cleared the zombie spawn that I've been grinding for the past 10000 kills (at least ESO players are better prepared for the Zombie apocalypse).

Okay, I realize this is a vague and perhaps a somewhat pointless post. It sounds like I'm upset because ESO is not a single player game, BUT THAT'S NOT THE ISSUE AT ALL!!! Okay, maybe it is the issue, and is therefore somewhat unfair. I guess I am upset for partially unrealistic expectations. However, I believe part of the hype at ESO release was that it played like any other Elder Scrolls game, but now with friends.

I don't think raising such issues are pointless for an MMO. I think there are some great ways that ESO might become more attractive for the casual PVPers who love single player games, or even for those who play solely for the PVE content.

Let's see if I can be a bit more focused:

-I am discouraged to play to find new gear because of how encumbered this game is with all of the less-than-useful sets. It is a real challenge to organize everything, and just sorting through stuff to equip a character can be very difficult. I don't know how to fix this. I suppose this is one of the downsides to having a gear based game versus a skill based game (A skill based game, in this line of reasoning, is one in which any benefit which we presently see on gear through buffs would be available through normal character progression without gear, and gear would become more basic and vanilla, such as old school Ultima Online). In other words, it would be the gear which determined your playstyle, but your skills.

- Once I've invested in gear which, to me, is extremely expensive and time consuming to acquire (especially if I goldify it), if it isn't all I hoped, then I lose desire to play, and lose hope that another set will work better (unless I'm following a somewhat cookie-cutter build which is popular during a given patch period). Don't know how to fix this without the game not being gear based. I suppose the PTS is helpful, but that is still pretty time consuming.

- Patches seem to change gameplay quite a bit in my experience. This is another discouraging element for a casual gamer such as myself.

- Quests give too little experience. WAAAAAY too little. No way I'm wasting my precious little gaming time on quests (as end game PVP always seems to be what draws me to MMOs) And the XP potions and scrolls, though a great improvement over vanilla, make me want to rush through the quests as fast as possible. Perhaps experience scrolls which grant increased XP to a certain number of quests regardless of how slowly we go through them? This might spread out people from the grind spots and make leveling a bit more fun, especially now that we can start out in any faction with One Tamriel.

- The big problem in the first few paragraphs of this post concerned immersion and its relation to having other people in your game. A possible fix for this is more solo instances. Perhaps the choice to enter an dungeon or delve as a solo instance? I'm sure some really intelligent and kind hearted people will correct me as to how this is a lame idea, thanks in advance.

- Immersion in the open world... Why is it that other people in my MMO PVE experience seem to cheapen the immersion? What could possibly be done? I suppose I could just deal with it. I'm sure loads of people who read every line of dialogue and explore every location deal with others without so much as batting an eye-lash. I'm just a bit immersionally challenged, I suppose. What would change this? I suppose there is no way in oblivion there is a chance of each player having access to their own private instance of Tamriel....

- Gear grinding. Every day a few more VET Maelstrom posts appear about changing the weapon reward, or selecting the reward. Selected rewards from a list for quests does sound nice. We also, I think, desperately need the ability to change things about gear. For example, we need a way to change the motif on gear. maybe add a new skill to game? Artificer or something? And casual folks such as myself would love a way to increase the level of gear, even if the cost in mats was quite high. Also, how about jewelry upgrades?

There are really tons of things in my head, but this post is already incoherent enough. My apologies if I've hurt anyones feelings, especially ZOS employees. I know y'all do some of the best work in the industry, and I have had LOADS of fun with ESO. That is why I have been a subscriber since launch. ESO is the most beautiful MMO I've ever seen, that is why I'm in Tamriel instead of Azeroth. Thanks ZOS

Respectfully,
The game your game could smell like
I mean, John.

You mean there's less balance issues in a single player game then in an MMO?

Balamoor

I'm personally glad ESO isn't Skyrim. ESO to me is like a multiplayer Daggerfall You can really play the game however you want.

Banetek

the reason it does not smell the same for me is due to mods not being able to be used in ESO... sevenbase etc... my room smells a lot better now cause of it.

Wollust

You make it sound as if this game should be Skyrim 2.
Good thing it's not.

Elsonso

I have not finished reading the OP, but I can answer the question in the title.... fewer Nords who do not bathe.

Abeille

I was expecting a joke about Nord hygiene. I am disappointed.

Kodrac

Kronz wrote: »

You mean there's less balance issues in a single player game then in an MMO?

Did you really need to quote the whole damn novel?

SHADOW2KK

It is a MMO set in TeS universe, got bored reading half of your post OP but sounds like you prefer single player games

It is not Skyrim 2.0

Kronz

Kodrac wrote: »

Kronz wrote: »

You mean there's less balance issues in a single player game then in an MMO?

Did you really need to quote the whole damn novel?

Yes

pattyLtd

I have bought Skyrim remastered because of ESO and i don't like it just saying that to get it out their that not everyone is here because of that game.

Just shelve ESO and play skyrim each their own and all that.

Aliyavana

Morrowind is better than skyrim , get triggered m8! I find eso to have far more repeatability than skyrim ever did.

Parafrost

arcadiadark wrote: »

Morrowind is better than skyrim , get triggered m8! I find eso to have far more repeatability than skyrim ever did.

It is a mmo after all, not a single player game where you finish all quests and its over.

kip_silverwolf

lordrichter wrote: »

I have not finished reading the OP, but I can answer the question in the title.... fewer Nords who do not bathe.

Us Nords bath! Sometimes twice in the same month!

Prof_Bawbag

The long and the short of it all is, Skyrim needed mods, ESO doesn't. I love Skyrim as much as the next Skyrim lover, but some of what you mention isn't even available to a large section of gamers or at least they weren't for the first 5 years.

Even ignoring the SP v MMO aspect, it's unfair to compare a modded game to a vanilla game. In Skyrim, sneak was waaaaaaaaaaay too OP, the cross hair of bows were off and there were no head shots. So i have no idea what you're talking about because I had none of that in my Skyrim due to having no access to mods. As for the horse, I don't think I ever bought one. The first time I rode a horse in Skyrim was Arvak and that soon got old. The rest i didn't read.

itehache

I don't know how many times I have said this: ESO is an MMO, Skyrim/Oblivion/The Witcher are single player games. You cannot compare them.

AzuraKin

isailandshootub17_ESO wrote: »

"Look at your game, now back to me. Now back to your game, now back to me. Sadly, your ESO is not me. But it could smell like me, if it stopped using lady scented game mechanics. Look down, we've just loaded your save from 3 years ago in Skyrim. You're character is just as powerful now as it was then. No skills have been nerfed, no need to re-imagine that perfect character...."

Do you remember the feeling of sneaking into a necromancer's tower to recover books for the College of Winterhold with your sneaky archer? Miss those one shot, one kill, well aimed head shots with the locational damage mod? You find that the Frost Atronachs are quite formidable so you begin working on your conjuration and illusion skills so that you can summon your own minions silently and from a distance to distract your enemies as you pick them off. You might find one particular item which will greatly enhance your character's power (thank Talos you get all of the benefits without having to collect 4 other items with the same name in order to gain the benefits). From this one tower you make a good bit of gold. Possibly enough to buy a horse and a couple of spells to begin mastering illusion and conjuration. The time investment / reward and incentive is very good. You put in an hour or two and you've progressed a good deal and it was in no way a grind. If you enhanced your experience with difficulty mods such as D.U.E.L. or survival mods like Frostfall or Realistic Needs, then your incentive for playing increases, and your incentive for playing smart increases, which make the victory sweeter....

Ahhh, but this is not Skyrim. Why is gameplay so extraordinarily different? I can't imagine ESO giving me an experience like the one above. But oh, to hope against hope, and dream against dream that it might....


WARNING: The following is a rant. I really like many aspects of ESO. I'm thankful for the game, but would like to raise some quasi-legitimate annoyances. I don't always complain. But when I do, its because I'm a beautiful snowflake...

ALSO: Rant might not make ESO smell any better or even determine *WHY* it doesn't smell like Skyrim as the title indicates. This is of no fault of my own. Its jsut my lack of cleverness.

Begin Rant:

Whenever I get the urge to test out an idea for a PVP build, I log into ESO and grind. Then I grind. Then I go to sleep. Then I work. A few days later I grind again. Just a few hours here and there, and after a few months I have a level 50 character with none of the skill points from quests or shards, with only a few wayshrines unlocked. A few weeks later I have some decent purple gear, and 400cp, collectively. I go into Cyrodiil and do moderately decent when in groups, but it turns out the build I wanted to play needs to be augmented with skills that are most common to PVP.

"Well, you can play the way you want in PvE," you say.

I suppose you're right, partially. But I prefer Skyrim, or Oblivion, or the Witcher if I want the immersion of a world in which others aren't all running around and jumping and twirling like ice-skating princesses with destruction staves to spoil the story. To me, for immersing myself into a quest story, I'm either totally in, or totally grinding. I would love for the grind to be completely gone. I'd love to kill monsters and they disappear for long enough so that it feels like I've accomplished something. Maybe the respawn timer could be 20 minutes, but the xp could be insanely higher to justify this, along with increased difficulty, giving me incentive to go on to new areas that I've never been once I've cleared the zombie spawn that I've been grinding for the past 10000 kills (at least ESO players are better prepared for the Zombie apocalypse).

Okay, I realize this is a vague and perhaps a somewhat pointless post. It sounds like I'm upset because ESO is not a single player game, BUT THAT'S NOT THE ISSUE AT ALL!!! Okay, maybe it is the issue, and is therefore somewhat unfair. I guess I am upset for partially unrealistic expectations. However, I believe part of the hype at ESO release was that it played like any other Elder Scrolls game, but now with friends.

I don't think raising such issues are pointless for an MMO. I think there are some great ways that ESO might become more attractive for the casual PVPers who love single player games, or even for those who play solely for the PVE content.

Let's see if I can be a bit more focused:

-I am discouraged to play to find new gear because of how encumbered this game is with all of the less-than-useful sets. It is a real challenge to organize everything, and just sorting through stuff to equip a character can be very difficult. I don't know how to fix this. I suppose this is one of the downsides to having a gear based game versus a skill based game (A skill based game, in this line of reasoning, is one in which any benefit which we presently see on gear through buffs would be available through normal character progression without gear, and gear would become more basic and vanilla, such as old school Ultima Online). In other words, it would be the gear which determined your playstyle, but your skills.

- Once I've invested in gear which, to me, is extremely expensive and time consuming to acquire (especially if I goldify it), if it isn't all I hoped, then I lose desire to play, and lose hope that another set will work better (unless I'm following a somewhat cookie-cutter build which is popular during a given patch period). Don't know how to fix this without the game not being gear based. I suppose the PTS is helpful, but that is still pretty time consuming.

- Patches seem to change gameplay quite a bit in my experience. This is another discouraging element for a casual gamer such as myself.

- Quests give too little experience. WAAAAAY too little. No way I'm wasting my precious little gaming time on quests (as end game PVP always seems to be what draws me to MMOs) And the XP potions and scrolls, though a great improvement over vanilla, make me want to rush through the quests as fast as possible. Perhaps experience scrolls which grant increased XP to a certain number of quests regardless of how slowly we go through them? This might spread out people from the grind spots and make leveling a bit more fun, especially now that we can start out in any faction with One Tamriel.

- The big problem in the first few paragraphs of this post concerned immersion and its relation to having other people in your game. A possible fix for this is more solo instances. Perhaps the choice to enter an dungeon or delve as a solo instance? I'm sure some really intelligent and kind hearted people will correct me as to how this is a lame idea, thanks in advance.

- Immersion in the open world... Why is it that other people in my MMO PVE experience seem to cheapen the immersion? What could possibly be done? I suppose I could just deal with it. I'm sure loads of people who read every line of dialogue and explore every location deal with others without so much as batting an eye-lash. I'm just a bit immersionally challenged, I suppose. What would change this? I suppose there is no way in oblivion there is a chance of each player having access to their own private instance of Tamriel....

- Gear grinding. Every day a few more VET Maelstrom posts appear about changing the weapon reward, or selecting the reward. Selected rewards from a list for quests does sound nice. We also, I think, desperately need the ability to change things about gear. For example, we need a way to change the motif on gear. maybe add a new skill to game? Artificer or something? And casual folks such as myself would love a way to increase the level of gear, even if the cost in mats was quite high. Also, how about jewelry upgrades?

There are really tons of things in my head, but this post is already incoherent enough. My apologies if I've hurt anyones feelings, especially ZOS employees. I know y'all do some of the best work in the industry, and I have had LOADS of fun with ESO. That is why I have been a subscriber since launch. ESO is the most beautiful MMO I've ever seen, that is why I'm in Tamriel instead of Azeroth. Thanks ZOS

Respectfully,
The game your game could smell like
I mean, John.

i seen words comparing eso to skyrim, and saying its great skyrim wasnt about grinding. well good news dude, removal of grinding is why any real es fan hates skyrim. it makes no sense in skyrim to run around stealth killing *** then get increase in health. it makes no sense sit there for 2 hours getting bashed to get magicka. none whatsoever. did you know when they announced eso i wasnt surprised? why because skyrim was the test for the eso system of magicka/health/stamina model of damage scaling. because lets face it its more realistic that if you wanna be better with a sword and have greater strength you use a *** *** sword. the post-arena pre-skyrim system of stat lvling was near perfection for a rpg game. imo i would rather es6 go back to the old system with some changes like all resources go up each lvl by the same system as health did at lvl up you gain x% increase based on the stats that effect that pool. this means you want the biggest health pool, the biggest mana pool, or the biggest stamina pool, you have to focus on lvling the associated attributes. in fact i would go a step further and make each of the 3 pools based on 2 of the stats differing from each other and all share luck stat. this means if you want the maximum health, your stamina and magicka wont be as high as someone who focus'd on stamina or someone who focused on magicka. this would have created a better system then what skyrim had while maintaining the realism feel that daggerfall, morrowind, oblivion system of skill lvling to lvl raising had.

Prof_Bawbag

itehache wrote: »

I don't know how many times I have said this: ESO is an MMO, Skyrim is a single player game. You cannot compare them.

Yet that's what a lot of the anti ESO crowd do over on the Bethesda TES forums. For a game they claim to have never watched a second of footage for or picked up, it's a bastardized version of Morrowind/Oblivion/skyrim. No doubt the same people who defend Fallout 3 and 4 from the No Mutants allowed crowd. They too loathe everything Fallout having never played them because they're not FO1 or 2.

Voxicity

skyrim is ***


an amazing game that i love

Spaceclown

cry baby

lazarus102

Spaceclown wrote: »

cry baby

Bed wetter! See, how do you like being called names?

This was kinda TL;DR even for me but I skimmed over it and I gotta say, these issues seem more like someone that doesn't like MMO's than someone making valid points at all. It's an mmo so it's not gonna be a carbon copy of Skyrim but there are a few things I wish they'd carried over like the fancy skill tree UI and the ability to steal everything but the kitchen sink and pick-pocketing. On a personal note I wish leveling before lvl 10 was a bit faster.

Fodore

Eso = mmorpg
Skyrim = single player rpg

Nuff' said

SHADOW2KK

Prof_Bawbag wrote: »

The long and the short of it all is, Skyrim needed mods, ESO doesn't. I love Skyrim as much as the next Skyrim lover, but some of what you mention isn't even available to a large section of gamers or at least they weren't for the first 5 years.

Even ignoring the SP v MMO aspect, it's unfair to compare a modded game to a vanilla game. In Skyrim, sneak was waaaaaaaaaaay too OP, the cross hair of bows were off and there were no head shots. So i have no idea what you're talking about because I had none of that in my Skyrim due to having no access to mods. As for the horse, I don't think I ever bought one. The first time I rode a horse in Skyrim was Arvak and that soon got old. The rest i didn't read.

Actually it was very easy to get headshots in vanillla Skyrim, well if you can aim

Jaeysa

Most of this seems to be the complaints of someone who was expecting a static solo-player game instead of an MMO that is regularly being updated. That being said:

isailandshootub17_ESO wrote: »

- Immersion in the open world... Why is it that other people in my MMO PVE experience seem to cheapen the immersion? What could possibly be done? I suppose I could just deal with it. I'm sure loads of people who read every line of dialogue and explore every location deal with others without so much as batting an eye-lash. I'm just a bit immersionally challenged, I suppose. What would change this? I suppose there is no way in oblivion there is a chance of each player having access to their own private instance of Tamriel....

I'm not sure what exactly you're asking for here. Are you looking for a solo-player game that you can make into a multi-player for PVP? Without getting into the merits of this, Zen has previously said they have no plans on doing this. Really not sure what's taking away from your immersion, other than possibly dueling. But I'm willing to bet that'll be banned from cities in a patch or two.

isailandshootub17_ESO wrote: »

- Gear grinding. Every day a few more VET Maelstrom posts appear about changing the weapon reward, or selecting the reward. Selected rewards from a list for quests does sound nice. We also, I think, desperately need the ability to change things about gear. For example, we need a way to change the motif on gear. maybe add a new skill to game? Artificer or something? And casual folks such as myself would love a way to increase the level of gear, even if the cost in mats was quite high. Also, how about jewelry upgrades?

Legit the only thing I agree with. I would LOVE to be able to change the motif's of my gear. Just love that.

DovresMalven

isailandshootub17_ESO wrote: »

I am discouraged to play to find new gear because of how encumbered this game is with all of the less-than-useful sets

This is the big thing thats really been bothering me lately, some setups are just massively more effective than others and there's no clear direction on acquiring the right ones. I have friends that talk about how their Stamina Sorcs get 50k single target dps in PvE? 50k? I feel good when I pull out 23k in Leviathan, Agility and Krags. And this imbalance makes a divided community of elitists and casuals with a bridge thats immensely difficult to cross without getting condescending advice from elite players.

danno8

AzuraKin wrote: »

i seen words comparing eso to skyrim, and saying its great skyrim wasnt about grinding. well good news dude, removal of grinding is why any real es fan hates skyrim. it makes no sense in skyrim to run around stealth killing *** then get increase in health. it makes no sense sit there for 2 hours getting bashed to get magicka. none whatsoever. did you know when they announced eso i wasnt surprised? why because skyrim was the test for the eso system of magicka/health/stamina model of damage scaling. because lets face it its more realistic that if you wanna be better with a sword and have greater strength you use a *** *** sword. the post-arena pre-skyrim system of stat lvling was near perfection for a rpg game. imo i would rather es6 go back to the old system with some changes like all resources go up each lvl by the same system as health did at lvl up you gain x% increase based on the stats that effect that pool. this means you want the biggest health pool, the biggest mana pool, or the biggest stamina pool, you have to focus on lvling the associated attributes. in fact i would go a step further and make each of the 3 pools based on 2 of the stats differing from each other and all share luck stat. this means if you want the maximum health, your stamina and magicka wont be as high as someone who focus'd on stamina or someone who focused on magicka. this would have created a better system then what skyrim had while maintaining the realism feel that daggerfall, morrowind, oblivion system of skill lvling to lvl raising had.

Except for one thing. Remember in Oblivion where you had to set the skills you actually wanted to use as Minor skills so that you could level them up without increasing your actually player level too fast so that you could get all the +5 attribute bonuses at level up?

And then you had to set skills that you would never really want to use as Major skills so that when you were done getting all the +5 attribute bonuses you would just spam a worthless Major skill to actually level up?

Yah that was far from perfection in my mind. But if you didn't work the system this way, or you didn't know this is how it works, every level up was a potential gimping of your character since all the baddies levelled with you.

Hurbster

The OP is quite correct. I was in a desert earlier and it didn't feel like Skyrim at all. I was disappoint.