What my imagination of the game was back when first purchased all those years ago, what was yours?

ArchMikem

I, no doubt like many others, initially assumed this game would be very similar to my experience with the mainline Singleplayer titles. An expansive world, complicated combat, completely time consuming to get anything done. Basically an MMO Skyrim, that's been said a lot here. I did quickly learn that wasn't going to be the case, but from time to time I've always imagined what I would've liked this game to have been, things that would never be, and obviously, things that wouldn't sit well with the majority of us. Things such as;

• More focused, but larger Zones. ESO spans the entire continent (and then some). This has introduced a horrible scaling issue that makes the overall world feel much smaller, more claustrophobic, even if the zones themselves seem big, they encompass VAST regions on the world map. Regions that in-game, take you less than ten minutes to traverse on a Mount. The same regions that, realistically, should take much, much longer to travel across. I believe that's one of the game's biggest follies. Giving the players the chance to explore every corner of Tamriel, but at the cost of making Tamriel feel like a Theme Park.
• The Alliance War robbed us of an entire Empire of exploration and Quest potential. Yes, I understand there needed to be a PvP aspect to the game, that's half of what an MMO is, but making it a War setting and using almost the entirety of the Cyrodiil province as the arena gave us simply a giant map without much of anything of note within other than the bare bones needed to satisfy the PvP mode. All of the cities are barely "Towns" with a set of fetch Quests, the terrain wasn't given much of any attention, because the goal was to give players space to fight, not explore. Bravil isn't even accessible, and the Great Forest doesn't exist to the level of it's namesake. Bruma is reused Nord assets without it's own identity. The Jerall Mountains are just a barrier of raised snowy terrain. You get it.
• Hot Take: Wayshrines shouldn't have been a thing. I do appreciate Fast Travel, don't get that wrong. I used it ample times in Skyrim, however for ESO, I imagined ways of making the game world feel bigger, and one way was making it take more effort to travel to new lands. Players Hubs would be ACTUAL Hubs, where you spent chunks of your play time within, and traveling to a new Hub would take a little planning, provisioning, exploration etc. Journeys from Windhelm to Riften would be a trek. Leaving Daggerfall for Shornhelm would take time. Imagine if the boat from Skywatch to Haven actually had a countdown timer simulating the voyage, requiring advance planning, where you could initiate the voyage and log off, and when you log back on in a couple hours you'd have arrived in Grahtwood. Making travel times take longer would indirectly create more localized communities, regions where players that stuck around would become familiar faces. A Citizenry would develop, new faces would be welcomed because the locals would recognize they took the time to journey there, and people leaving for other Zones would be wished bountiful travels. Achievements related to exploring the world would be worth and respected a LOT more.
• Zones resemble Disney Land, not a World. Pick any Zone, and there will be something within 10 steps of something else. You can't walk a minute without stumble into a pack of Mobs or a Quest Area. I expected the World to be vast wilderness, swathes of "nothing" before coming across a densely detailed Quest area. My hopes for the Alik'r Desert, for example, were images of an actual Desert. Expansive sand dunes that had to be crossed to reach the next City. Perhaps a vast Dwemer Ruin Quest area where the entrance is this tiny Lift just barely poking out of the sand without nothing else around, easily missed if too tunnel visioned.
  
  Here's a good representation of what I mean, captured when I got out of bounds in Elsweyr.
  
• Magic doesn't require a Staff to use. One of my greatest woes, carried over from TES:V. In Elder Scrolls, Magic is just, THERE. Almost anyone in this world is capable of conjuring Fire from their bare hand, but for gameplay purposes, any kind of meaningful ability concerning Magic requires using a physical Staff. For Lore purposes, yes, Staves exist, they're used to help channel Magicka and can be enchanted with specific Spells, but that doesn't remove the fact that Magic can be cast with your hands alone, and this is seen countless times in-game. Even after all these years, with the introduction of new Skill Lines and Classes, the concept of Unarmed Magicka remains untouched, probably ignored on purpose, considering being able to perform proper Damage output without equipping a Weapon goes against how the game was built.

With how many years this game is going on now, what's your retrospection? What were your assumptions and hopes walking into ESO for the first time, and what are your wishes of how things had possibly been instead?

Danikat

ArchMikem wrote: »

I, no doubt like many others, initially assumed this game would be very similar to my experience with the mainline Singleplayer titles. An expansive world, complicated combat, completely time consuming to get anything done. Basically an MMO Skyrim, that's been said a lot here.

My initial reaction was the opposite of yours. I found out about the game via a Facebook advert asking for beta testers and at the time I'd heard a lot about companies trying to cash in on WoW's popularity by making a generic MMO then licensing whatever existing IP they could get and dressing it up to vaguely fit in the hope of buying into an existing fan base so I was worried this would be the same.

It was relatively easy to confirm that wasn't the case, once I found out the game was being made in-house by Zenimax I was less worried (and signed up to be a beta tester) but I think starting with that mindset meant I wasn't surprised when it was more like an MMO which happens to be set in Tamriel than a TES game which happens to be multiplayer.

TaSheen

By the time I got into ESO, I was fully aware of how it worked due to friends who've played since beta. I was perfectly happy by that time to get back into an MMO, especially one set in my "home universe" for so many years - and equally especially because my friends made it perfectly clear that the stupid 3 Banners War could be completely ignored.

ESO fits my preconceptions pretty closely.

PrimeSeptim

ArchMikem wrote: »

I, no doubt like many others, initially assumed this game would be very similar to my experience with the mainline Singleplayer titles.

Pretty much this.

At first I was like wow!

I saw the trailer showcasing massive armies and epic battles with swords and magic (Cyrodiil). I thought hell yeah! I'm gonna go in there sword swinging for Elven superiority! Little did I know, it's a little more complicated than that...

My only experience with MMOs prior to that (if you can call it an MMO) was a game called Destiny. I had no concept of builds, DPS, etc. That was all basically non existent to me. I just played video games to have fun, live out fantasies and exist in better worlds. I thought every one was the same.

Played the beta (if that's where you were on Khenarthi's Roost?) and that sold me. Hype! Anyway, I can't remember everything but when I started playing when the game released, it was basically like a single player game to me (just with other people running around). I used one handed sword and shield (no concept of Tank/DD/Healer) and even did some Veteran dungeons as 1h/shield DD lol! I did my quests and the usual. Everyone was so chill, friendly and having fun. Nothing unusual.

Now I might be remembering wrong but back then I don't think there was a crown store? Nothing intrusive anyway. But then over time came the weird mounts. The weirdest thing then was the fiery warhorse and black senche panther - now look what we have!

l thought yeah okay that's fine but they're surely going to stay original and not go full WoW mode...

Then a whole month farming IC for the Xivkyn polymorph with its low drop rate and just being in IC/sewers gave me depression, I quit for 2 years and return to find the game with Crown Crates, Twitch drops, events and plenty more FOMO stuff than all games combined. It's a totally different game.

Also back then I thought it was Bethesda who made the game and not ZOS and that all developers were passionate and made games for the players and not profit. For the player, by the player. Oh how naïve I was.

TL;DR Ultimately, I was hoping it would be more Elder Scrolls than MMO.

Tandor

I wasn't in the beta as by then I'd stopped looking at games before they launched (bearing in mind that I started testing single player games for developers in about 1984 and multiplayer games in about 1998 so had been doing it for quite a while). When ESO launched in 2014 and I logged in I immediately realised it was an online MMORPG that would become my natural home for years, as EQ, EQ2, LoTRO and to a lesser degree WoW had been before it. That's how I envisaged it, on a steadily evolving basis over the coming years, and so it has proved to be. I never had a particular view on whether it would or should be Skyrim with friends or a full-on MMO with TES undertones. I just saw it as a hybrid, as ESO.

DrNukenstein

I expected "30x sneak attack" like in Skyrim, but on other players.

Until update 35, I really wasn't that far off.

ArchMikem

DrNukenstein wrote: »

I expected "30x sneak attack" like in Skyrim, but on other players.

Until update 35, I really wasn't that far off.

I think it was around 2016 or 2017, maybe later I can't remember exactly, it used to be stupid easy compared to now to stack Critical stats, especially on a Khajiit. Like 70% Chance was simple to achieve. Really do miss those days.

SkaraMinoc

I crouched around Tamriel for a few months questing like ESO was a single player game. I'd spend hours in a tiny slice of Morrowind questing and killing mobs, reading every dialogue, working on the one character I had.

ESO lost some of its wonder once I fully explored the map, ran every dungeon 50 to 100 times, fully decorated multiple houses, etc. Now ESO is just a combat system in a world with outdated textures, small zones (except Cyrodiil), and shallow carrot-on-a-stick daily quests that don't enhance the game in any meaningful way. There's no Trial Finder and I have zero interest in the card game even after slogging through the tutorial. PvP is the only remaining activity I enjoy but has serious design flaws like HoT stacking, Capture the Relic, etc. and some skills go unbalanced for years like Undeath.

zaria

Played multiple MMO before trying out ESO in the open beta. I was impressed it felt like an elder scroll game while being an MMO. Now wiping multiple times on the first trash in FG 1 with an group was weird.
Now this was before ending the zone quest and below level 50.

katanagirl1

I disagree with most of your points, except that the zones should be bigger based on their size on the map, some zones more so than others.

I love Cyrodiil the way it is, spend a lot of time there.

Wayshrines are fine, I don’t want to spend time traveling with so much to do.

Kappachi

I thought it'd be MMO Skyrim, and I was right. I used addons to minimize my UI, make dialog like Skyrim and have been playing the game as if it was Skyrim since beta all the way to now.

Carcamongus

I expected it to be a Tamriel-wide Skyrim with other people. I was clueless and took a while to understand the concept of zones, which is why I tried to swim from Davon's Watch to Vvardenfell 3 years before that was added to the game. I would grumble how Nord funerary urns contain crap in ESO but precious loot in Skyrim. To be fair, I still grumble every now and then when I find a pile of ash or a lockpick in those.

RicAlmighty

If there were no fast travel, this game would have been dead inside of a year. No one is interested in slogging across a map to get somewhere. It may "sound" great, and to be honest there's not much preventing you from doing just that if you'd like. But the greater player base would have revolted and left the game in short order.

I do agree however that the zones seem comically small. What they should have done is adapt the current zones to small portions of each area. Instead of the entire island of Vvardenfell, the playable area would only represent a smaller portion of it. That way they can still have a manageable game zone, without compromising the lore and canonical sizes of these areas.

TinyDragon

There's a lot to respond to here! Firstly, my preconceptions.
I didn't play this game for many years after it came out, as I feared what it would be. I came form Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, and I had never played an MMOR before. I had no interest in anything but a single player title experience, and I strongly doubted I'd get one.

Picked up the game on sale, and have been playing ever since. I started off in first person, no idea how food worked, just questing and exploring. I've progressed to endgame PvP and PvE, but my heart's main focus is still the exploration and quests.

In response to your points:
More focused, but larger Zones.
I agree- I'd love to see a base game refresh, that results in all the zones of one culture together- so we have a High Rock zone, a Valenwood zone, etc. Give us larger zones, with meaningful names, that aren't crowded. Apocrypha was particularly bad for crowding this year.

Zones resemble Disney Land, not a World.
Yes- I enjoy that new zones have clear footpaths, because the old base game zones with enemies on the main paths are a nightmare for navigating. I'd like to see less mobs personally, and I'd like them to be more chunky. The wandering world bosses are cool, and engaging.

Magic doesn't require a Staff to use.
I sincerely hope we get a magicka system that allows us to cast as we did in the single player titles. How we don't have this is beyond me. I dream of a filler 'weapon' called rune, and we can use it as 1H and rune, duel rune, shield and rune. Allows us to cast skills like fireball (my personal favourite), or other spells from the single player titles, without a staff.

Supreme_Atromancer

The most disheartening thing for me, as a new player back in 2014 was coming into the game from the single player titles and learning my intuition on how to build a character for the challenges of Tamriel had literally zero currency. Little of what I thought about building my character, my way, was right. Instead, success, progress and power, and even being a good team-mate were achieved by sticking your nose to the spreadsheet of oblique, utterly abstract number combinations, or forgetting what you think and listening instead to Sweaty Joe Streamer tell you what to think.

That was very disenfranchising.

Supreme_Atromancer

The wayshrines/travel thing I do care about quite a bit, because it involves how I engage the game: I think that wayshrines are fine, ftr. But overland travel should not require them. There are still some zones that should have connections to neighbouring zones, which don't. Murkmire/Blackwood, Alik'r/Bangkorai, The Reach/Craglorn, Malabal Tor/Gold Coast.

The ship system could be a good solution, but its often implemented with little thought. I'd love to take a ship from Daggerfall to Southport, for a quest, for instance, but if I have to actually go all the way to Elden Root and run back, at that point, I might as well just click on the bloody wayshrine. There are ports all over Tamriel at this point, and very few of them can you actually even use. Which means if you want to use ships for travel, its gonna be awkward. I guess that it would be too much work to make an intelligent, immersive ship travel system at this point, but I can dream!

I do think that the world is sometimes overcrowded, especially the launch zones. The locations and structures have no breathing space between them and often tumble one into the other. Bangkorai is the best example, for me; there's a straggle of towers and walls all helter-skelter across the whole eastern side of the map, spilling out in every direction from Jackdaw Cove, to Fang Lair, to Arlimahera's Sanctum, to Bangkorai Garrison. Meanwhile, on the west, Northglen spills into Evermore, which jumbles into Pelin's Graveyard, forming another unintelligible sprawl. I guess we can't get anything like the breath-taking open spaces we experience in games like Skyrim, but some of those locations could really do with at least a little space to stand out.

Regarding the magic system, I've belaboured it a lot in previous posts already, so I wont go in to it all over again but yeah, being able to hold spell-charges (unarmed?) is a dear wish for me. I still feel like spellcrafting could fill a lot of the magic styles we had from the old games, and I still wish for the traditional schools of magic to make a return. As separate skill lines (as originally envisioned) would be dope- I seriously have 72 free skill points sitting around waiting for some use!

I'm not *explicitly* arguing for a pve-only cyro, but I'd at least personally love to see that zone remastered. Chorrol was beautiful in TESIV Oblivion, as was Bruma and Cheydinhal. In this game? ehhhhh.... not so much. Seeing how beautifully they've rendered Leyawiin, Anvil and Kvatch just highlights what a fantastic job they *could* do these days.

Anumaril

I'm surprised that I agree with pretty much all of your points. Usually with posts like these there's one or two things I utterly disagree on, but here you seemed to hit the nail on the head each time.

Some things I'd change the wording of, but otherwise it encapsulates a handful of my own gripes with the current state of the game.

Anumaril

Supreme_Atromancer wrote: »

The most disheartening thing for me, as a new player back in 2014 was coming into the game from the single player titles and learning my intuition on how to build a character for the challenges of Tamriel had literally zero currency. Little of what I thought about building my character, my way, was right. Instead, success, progress and power, and even being a good team-mate were achieved by sticking your nose to the spreadsheet of oblique, utterly abstract number combinations, or forgetting what you think and listening instead to Sweaty Joe Streamer tell you what to think.

I very much agree with this. ESO has none of the "play your way" feelings that the single player titles give, and I think this comes down to, in large part, the introduction of a class system into a game that shouldn't have had one.

Oblivion, Morrowind, and Daggerfall, etc, had "classes" but they were soft classes that let you easily use skills from outside that playstyle whenever you wanted. Did you choose a barbarian but want to learn magic? You can! It might take some more effort, but you can certainly do it. Skyrim took this to a whole new level by just letting you learn whatever skills you felt like learning (rather like how real life would be).

But with ESO, ZOS just decided to shoehorn a class system into the game because... well... that's what all the other MMOs do. I absolutely hate how if I'm a daedra-worshipping necromancer, I can't use any daedra-related skills because that's locked behind being a sorcerer. If I'm a sorcerer I can't use any fire-based skills (outside of the destruction staff line) because I'm not a dragonknight and apparently sorcerers only study lightning magic.

ESO does player freedom better than most MMOs, but somehow that makes it feel so much more suffocating and annoying. Like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I can't ever reach it. I sincerely hope that in the future ZOS decides to overhaul ESO and go with a class-less model, which is something that seems to be catching on with many new MMOs. Rather like how action combat used to be a novel thing, but now every new MMO implements it.

Supreme_Atromancer

Anumaril wrote: »

Supreme_Atromancer wrote: »

The most disheartening thing for me, as a new player back in 2014 was coming into the game from the single player titles and learning my intuition on how to build a character for the challenges of Tamriel had literally zero currency. Little of what I thought about building my character, my way, was right. Instead, success, progress and power, and even being a good team-mate were achieved by sticking your nose to the spreadsheet of oblique, utterly abstract number combinations, or forgetting what you think and listening instead to Sweaty Joe Streamer tell you what to think.

I very much agree with this. ESO has none of the "play your way" feelings that the single player titles give, and I think this comes down to, in large part, the introduction of a class system into a game that shouldn't have had one.

Oblivion, Morrowind, and Daggerfall, etc, had "classes" but they were soft classes that let you easily use skills from outside that playstyle whenever you wanted. Did you choose a barbarian but want to learn magic? You can! It might take some more effort, but you can certainly do it. Skyrim took this to a whole new level by just letting you learn whatever skills you felt like learning (rather like how real life would be).

But with ESO, ZOS just decided to shoehorn a class system into the game because... well... that's what all the other MMOs do. I absolutely hate how if I'm a daedra-worshipping necromancer, I can't use any daedra-related skills because that's locked behind being a sorcerer. If I'm a sorcerer I can't use any fire-based skills (outside of the destruction staff line) because I'm not a dragonknight and apparently sorcerers only study lightning magic.

ESO does player freedom better than most MMOs, but somehow that makes it feel so much more suffocating and annoying. Like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I can't ever reach it.

During an stream a few years ago, Rich Lambert said that one of the team's regrets was that they didn't "take a closer look at Skyrim" when they were developing ESO. I guess its up for debate exactly what this means, but I feel like it could certainly refer to things like how classes were done. I have some sympathy for them on this- they were developing the game off the back of Oblivion, which (while you rightly point out the classes were "soft" classes), they were classes all the same. Still, given the game was received poorly at launch I can't help but think that this was amongst the reasons.

For me, I found it surprising that there was peculiar stuff like Dragonknights when core TES tropes like martial warriors and barbarians were neglected, and pretty much impossible to build in any viable, satisfying way. It *felt* like they chose to ignore what TES people would clearly want in favour of what *they* thought was best. Templars fit the priest/healer trope very loosely, with little real thought about how such would fit into a diverse world like Tamriel. Sorcerers and Nightblades were probably the best fits for classic concepts, but they, too, were hobbled by the needless imposition of Power Ranger-style "energy" types, which constitute an entire skill line, making them almost obligate for any sort of viable build. You can be a classic Nightblade, but you're probably gonna be locked into the blood-magic theme whether you like it or not. Same with sorcerer/lightning. I'd personally be fine with keeping classes as they are, but losing redundant energy lines like lightning, and having weapons/guilds/other skill lines handle them like they were intended to do. Its a big change though, so I doubt it, sadly.

I sincerely hope that in the future ZOS decides to overhaul ESO and go with a class-less model, which is something that seems to be catching on with many new MMOs. Rather like how action combat used to be a novel thing, but now every new MMO implements it.

Its hard to see something like that on the immediate horizon, but who knows? Over long periods of time, player bases change, development priorities change. There are things in the game today I would not have predicted in 2015.

YstradClud

ArchMikem wrote: »

With how many years this game is going on now, what's your retrospection?

I came here for beta once WoW started moving away from being a traditional mmorpg and even though ESO has done that as well it is still remaining fairly true to the sub-genre.

ProudMary

At first I was disappointed that the game wasn't like Skyrim, but then I became addicted to the MMO parts of the game. Now I don't ever want to play a solo game again. I only want to play MMO's now.

LukosCreyden

As sarcastic as sounds;
I expected Elder Scrolls, but online.

What I got; a version of that which, honestly, makes more sense for an online game.

I may have many, MANY complaints about balancing, bugs etc, but in regards to how the game is as a whole, I am actually quite impressed.
It could be better, of course everything could be improved, but I think they did a fantastic job at translating TES into an mmo game.

rpa

What I expected at 2015: a bit drab generic MMO with Elder Scrolls skin but at least it's not WoW.
I basically got what I expected and soon quit. Took few years before I gave it a retry and only because of lack of viable competition. Have to admit I had more experience of genre by then and game had evolved too.

Castagere

That my Redguard would be the best warrior in the game like the lore and every single player game said they were.