Why Does ESO Not Feel Like Skyrim? (MMO vs RPG)

Megatto

Your biggest mistake was to expect an online Skyrim... Besides there are other Elder Scrolls games besides Skyrim! Why weren't you expecting an online Oblivion? You know what, just get out. Go back to playing Skyrim

Cavedog

Skyrim is not an MMO, ESO is. As stated above, they are different games.

morrowjen

The biggest difference is story vs. combat. TES games are far more story oriented whereas an MMO is more action/combat oriented. ESO has done a fairly good job of still giving us good stories that fit into the overall ES world but the richness that single player TES games have is a product of being a single player/offline game. When you make the choice of what type of game you're making that choice determines a ton of things for you.

vestahls

The most striking difference is probably the game engine, and the assets along with it. When I first started ESO, I was also hoping for a more classic TES experience, but I was struck by how plastic it all looked and felt. Skyrim feels much more earthy and real, if that makes sense.

The way the camera is set up too adds to that - I tried playing ESO with a more upclose camera like you do in Skyrim, but it just doesn't work. Your character just feels much smaller than in Skyrim, compared to the surrounding world.
Also, there's no viable 1st person play. I'm not even sure why it's even an option. In Skyrim, you could definitely play the whole thing 1st person, here it's practically impossible, especially in terms of combat, like say goodbye to most of the game.

And the graphics, yes. Completely different, even in the Skyrim areas. The plants look different, the buildings, the weather, the sky, the sunset - it's not necessarily bad in ESO, just less atmospheric. And yeah the music - while very good in places - does not have the level of situational awareness that Skyrim did, if that makes sense. Listening to Skyrim music feels like going home, ESO's music is good but it doesn't impress you that much.

Another thing that was a disappointment was that in ESO you can't loot all that a dead NPC was carrying. This triggers me to this day. Doesn't matter if it's trash, I want to have the option to loot e v e r y t h i n g. I want to be able to dress my character like a random bandit, or like the coolest mage I just defeated, or try on a normal peasant's clothes. No, collectibles don't count, I want to earn it from NPCs.

Also, the weather is less diverse. Just sunny and rain, no snow or storms really. This sux.

And NPC behaviour is much less realistic. Everyone is always at the shop, the town is always full of people, no matter the hour. It was nice how in Skyrim, NPCs would go to bed and so on, the towns at night really had a nice mood to them.

Speaking of NPCs, I also liked how you can just start dialogue and retain full control of the camera and whatnot. It's kind of irritating how in ESO you suddenly have to have a closeup on the NPCs.


I guess in brief, Skyrim made an effort to be immersive, and ESO is just trying to be functional.

Katahdin

Oh, I dont know?
Because it's Elder Scrolls Online ?

NOT Skyrim Online

.

AcadianPaladin

My elf spent 4k hours in Oblivion starting back in 2007. She then learned time travel and spent 4k hours in Skyrim. She has now called ESO home for the last 6.5k hours of her play time.

I found Skyrim unplayable without plenty of mods. This was due to poor character generation options, poor combat mechanics (tedious character hand micromanagement), no ability to heal allies. That said, with a good mod list, the game blossomed into a very enjoyable experience. Despite a strong preference for single player, my elf simply 'outgrew' Skyrim's small (compared to ESO) scale of lands to explore.

ESO has great character generation, a fine combat system and truly massive scale. Therefore, the fact that it is multiplayer is a drawback that I live with. In some fairness, ESO is rather solo friendly - my main objection to ESO/MMO is the frequent and usually frustrating nerf/balance/changes.

Soella

Single player game revolves around you - your decisions can change world, combat difficulty is adjusted to your level, you really can play whatever you want (though ESO is amazingly good in freedom for solo player), the world sleeps while you are offline, you don't have to wait for boss to spawn. And if we think about all game changing addons you can use... My latest setup had close to 400. But you are alone - probably that's why so many companion mods for Skyrim. And sure single player game can have far better graphics and more responsive combat.

In MMO even solo player share world with others, compete for nodes or bosses, depend on average skill level of other players as game cannot be adjusted to you personally. Combat system must be designed with possible latency in mind. Economy system is designed with ability to trade in mind (again, ESO is amazingly good in allowing self sufficient toons). Single player cannot make really world changing decisions - was any explanations provided to players who chose to sacrifice Sai during the main quest?

Gnortranermara

The control scheme (at least for console) is 10000x superior.

zaria

Then I tried out ESO the first time I was amazed how much it felt like an TES game, had played WOW and some other MMO so knew the limitations, my main complain was the jumping who feel clunky and still does.
This was in beta long before the justice system and housing.

No wilderness, mostly true but not entirely, doing an public dungeon during this event at prime time will not feel very immersive. I hold back this DLC main quest until after event for this reason.
Go in on slow hours and its much better for immersion.
Held out murkmire for an month because of this.

Dungeon dlc is the other way around, first couple of days all want the dungeon story.

Obviously ESO is an multiplayer game and TES games has been extremely exploitable from Morrowind alchemy and magic who made it easy to one shot everything.
Oblivion was the most balanced game Skyrim nerfed magic but added crafting

Goregrinder

The same reason why Skyrim doesn't feel like playing an MMO, which is the main reason why I don't play Skyrim.

SeaGtGruff

Faulgor wrote: »

ESO is Disneyland

It's funny you mentioned that, because that's exactly what I think of whenever I go to a guild trader and it's a smallish Wood Elf lady with a ginormous drumstick in her hand.

BattleAxe

madeeh91rwb17_ESO wrote: »

I play this game a lot.
All because of it's highly intricate and no-skillcap PvP.

Even tough in the beginning I mainly got it to play an "Online Skyrim".
But I HAVE now gotten over the fact that it just sadly is not and never will be. (Fingers Crossed for ESO-2)

I created this thread just because I want to know from a game design/environment perspective, what exactly are all the things that makes it different.
Everything from bandits taunting you about "counting all your coin", to the way the NPCs don't give a crap about their friends being beaten 5 meters away.

The simplest answer that can be given is eso is a mmorpg and Skyrim is just an rpg.

DuckInRealLife

Why this game doesn't feel like Skyrim to me:
- Art style is the same but different
- Lack of freedom and still being viable
- Companions are other people (and they're scary)
- Freedom to murder chickens

The biggest one for me is probably the time difference, there's about 2000 or so years before "Skyrim" actually happens.
There's a lot of things that just seem strange and not right due to wars, rebuilding, ect. I kinda lost my *** going to ESO Riften for the first time and feelings like things just weren't quite right. Like it wasn't deep enough there wasn't all these things I knew and it didn't feel correct.

Windhelm feels too pleasant for how it's portrayed. The most pleasant true to place I can feel is Anvil. Cause I look at that random pond in the city and look back to Oblivion and go "I murdered that guy there."

fgoron2000

For me it was no mods. This is not the same thing as the UI addons in ESO, but instead were capable of adding significant content as well. For instance, in vanilla Oblivion, Kvatch is devastated. But there's a mod called Kvatch Rebuilt which over the course of time, after you finish the vanilla quests in Kvatch, the entire city is completely rebuilt, and actually was a lot like the city is in ESO. When I saw Kvatch for the first time in ESO, it actually brought a tear to my eye. There's also a lot of other content-related mods adding rather fleshed out (no pun intended) companions who would travel with you & fight with you in both Oblivion & Skyrim. The one that amazed me though, was a major mod that added a whole quest line, and total Oblivion plane game space to Skyrim. It felt and looked almost better than those planes in the Oblivion game itself.

mikemacon

Why Does Skyrim Not Feel Like Morrowind?

Why Does Skyrim Not Feel Like Daggerfall?

Why Does Oblivion Not Feel Like Arena?

Why Does...

Well, we could be here all night.

wolfbone

because it isn't skyrim.

eso is a online mmo, it's not meant to feel like skyrim.

being angry or annoyed that it isnt the same as skyrim, is silly.

it's not meant to be and never will be skyrim.

LMar

It's also the scale. That strikes as the first major difference. Scale in ESO is a bit smaller, character, building wise and texture wise.

MartiniDaniels

- bad lightning and weather. Yes, they are really bad in ESO, most probably some engine limitations. Even applying re-shade makes game look notably better. Wherever I turn off re-shade it looks like mid-2000 game despite high resolution textures;
- lack of progression feeling. Well, you have some feeling of progression from CP160 to ~CP600 and while you acquire decent gear. After that you may only progress with your own skill;
- multiplayer-nature of the game prevents that kind of immersion we had in Skyrim
- zones are too small and toy-ish in scale... moving from southern Skyrim to northern Skyrim and change of weather, plants, colors, trees... it all is seemless and well-directed. In ESO you just jump between different climates, even if you travel on foot

TL;DR. Skyrim is one of the most immersive game ever made. ESO is not.

^ all this is mostly about base game zones. DLC ones are much better in terms of immersion and graphics

BlueRaven

Hello all,

Just want to point out that the op was specifically pointing out Skyrim and eso for comparison, not morrowind or oblivion.

Also I feel just because one is an mmo and the other is not, does not mean that the systems for combat and adventuring could not have been closer.

Fallout 76 is essentially an mmo, and how that game plays is pretty close to how Fallout 4 plays. The main differences being “vats” and how the player slots skills. The lack of human npcs was also an esthetic choice (as it turns out), but that appears to be changing.
But if a person were to compare combat and visual styles on the screen, the two games would appear to be basically the same.

Why does everyone feel eso had to be wildly different then Skyrim looks and feels?

Chilly-McFreeze

For me it's mostly because everything feels so weightless. Hard to put it in words. If it's running, jumping, riding, hitting someone or get hit with a greatsword, fireball etc. there is just no real impact behind it. It feels like a training simulation with holograms so to say. Doesn't help there is no body collision on players.

Then there's the lack of danger. You can be on a fresh out of a box toon an never ever get in danger during overland quest content. Exploring isn't a risk and death means very little. You usually don't get real item rewards for straying from the path. Sure, set items kinda fill in for that but it's just not as satisfying. [E: except for arena weapons, some of them transport that feel of a good artifact] The RNG nature of (boss) drops adds to that.

And finally it just feels like your on crack all the time. Everyone including myself is always in a hurry and rushes at lightning speed from one ore or plant to the next.

I know, it's a MMO and mechanics are like they are for a reason and I'm totally fine with that.

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

- bad lightning and weather. Yes, they are really bad in ESO, most probably some engine limitations. Even applying re-shade makes game look notably better. Wherever I turn off re-shade it looks like mid-2000 game despite high resolution textures;

^ all this is mostly about base game zones. DLC ones are much better in terms of immersion and graphics

And this. They really upped their game. It struck me first in one of the early Elsweyr main quest dungeons where you kill the necromancer and get a warning from the dragon. Some cool shadowplay there.

Sarousse

To OP :

Because its difficulty level is -42000.

zyk

ESO began development years before Skyrim was released. While the TES series was popular, no one had any idea Skyrim would have phenomenal sales that pushed the series into the mainstream. It outsold the rest of the series combined by a significant margin.

Zenimax was more focused on the success of WoW when ESO began development. At the time, WoW had exceeded 8M subs and was earning over 1B annually. ESO was designed to compete with it. It was not intended to be like a traditional TES game, but a TES themed MMO.

However, by the time ESO launched, the MMO sub model was starting to fail. ESO was late and unfinished. It was too difficult for Skyrim fans and lacked refinement and endgame content for MMO enthusiasts who were not impressed.

After the poor launch, ZOS focused on making the game easier and more appealing to fans of Skyrim.

beadabow

I was always under the assumption that the original developers where designing things with the intention of making it an entirely different and better experience than Skyrim as a part of the draw to what was then an entirely new ESO game. If they failed to accomplish their goal, players would complain that it was too much like Skyrim, and people wouldn't want to buy the game.

Edit to add:
And I just got to @Zyk's post. Looks like we are discussing similar things, early development of ESO.

happyhughes2001

Probably because they are different games.

Ecileh71

It's been years since I played Skyrim, but...

It felt "bigger", to me. I remember having to walk from Riften to Whitehold once before I could afford a horse and over-laden with gear...felt like it took a YEAR. Cyrodiil feels similarly big to me, but the rest of ESO-Tamriel feels small. You can run from one side of a zone to the other pretty quickly. (And you don't slow down if you are over-laden.)

It also felt more difficult. Harder to earn gold, harder to level up. Though that last one might have been a factor of me being relatively new to gaming. Being able to apply CP points account wide in ESO makes even low-level characters relatively powerful and hard to kill (I do not apply it on alts, personally).

MasterSpatula

MinuitPro wrote: »

It doesn't feel like Skyrim because the 2020 Chapter isn't released yet.

I seriously doubt they're going to squander the opportunity to celebrate Skyrim's tenth anniversary by giving us a big Skyrim Chapter on the ninth anniversary.

MartiniDaniels

Ecileh71 wrote: »

It's been years since I played Skyrim, but...

It felt "bigger", to me. I remember having to walk from Riften to Whitehold once before I could afford a horse and over-laden with gear...felt like it took a YEAR. Cyrodiil feels similarly big to me, but the rest of ESO-Tamriel feels small. You can run from one side of a zone to the other pretty quickly. (And you don't slow down if you are over-laden.)

It also felt more difficult. Harder to earn gold, harder to level up. Though that last one might have been a factor of me being relatively new to gaming. Being able to apply CP points account wide in ESO makes even low-level characters relatively powerful and hard to kill (I do not apply it on alts, personally).

I always played Skyrim without using fast travel, and that moment when you need to guide Serana from Fort Dawnguard to Volkihar.. damn, it was quite a journey.

Ratzkifal

Another thing is that Skyrim, on an appropriate difficulty with mods that make the AI not brain dead, enemies are more on par with you for the early and midgame, while ESO feels like playing Skyrim in its latest stages where the only real "challenge" is the amount of enemies you face at the same time and the terrain.

Also, delves/public dungeons in ESO are very linear, even moreso than in Skyrim. In Skyrim, although you always have one path that leads further down, you'd often have to go into side branches to be able to continue on the main path. This seems to be missing from ESO completely. At least I can't remember it ever happening, which speaks for how rarely it is the case in ESO. This downgrades the exploration aspect of ESO only further.

Loves_guars

It's a MMO. A lot of things kill the immersion in a (theme park) MMO. To mention a few:

• The same exact mobs respawn in the same place every 3 minutes.
• You see other players doing the same quest.
• There's balance so you can't cast 40 spells.
• Exploration is not that rewarding as in a single player game

LegacyDM

Skyrim is sandboxed. Go anywhere and have that feeling of open world exploration. Eso is theme park. You feel restricted to following a progressive storyline on islands that are splattered with lackluster quest lines.

You can customize and build your character any way you want in Skyrim. In eso you are restricted to classes and a handful of skills.

Skyrim you can do anything you want. Want to kill a quest giver? Want to steal anything and everything? On eso you can only kill what the devs want you to kill. Steal certain useless items.

Skyrim has a difficulty slider. It’s challenging. Eso is too easy. Once you get gold gear and learn character mechanics the content becomes a joke. Rather than make more challenging content devs just nerf classes.

In Skyrim finding power magical rare items is possible. You get a sense of awe and wonderment when you explore a cave kill a badass and get a kickass sword. In eso everything you find or quest for is junk. Only way to get powerful items is either crafting, run dungeons for monster helmets, or raids/maelstrom.

In Skyrim your actions have consequences. In eso your actions are void of anything lifelike but the AI characters following a script based on your actions. For example in eso, win a battle or quest, townsfolk cheer for you, lame. In Skyrim, you do
Something and the game world actually changes.

In Skyrim you can have companions and you can outfit them. In eso your companion is a little pet that can’t do anything.

In Skyrim you can rent and build houses that remain static in the world. You actually craft them. In eso your house is instance, purchased, and not seen by the general public. Lame.

Eso is not Skyrim. It’s just another typical mmorpg with bells and whistles riding on the brand name success. It’s the same formula that’s been around since eq and wow. Another boring mmorpg.