spoqster wrote: »

So, after already having written a couple of posts about how the Elder Scrolls part of the game is missing challenges, let me recount this story.

After me playing for months and sinking quite a bit of my free time into ESO, today my girlfriend finally wanted to check out why I love this game so much. So today we started playing together for a few hours (up to level 8). She is no gamer by any means - she is rather worried I spend so much time in a virtual world - has no rpg experience, but did play a lot of playstation when she was a kid. So in short, I expected her to enjoy the beautiful scenery, her horse and the healing spells. I took her to the starter zones, so she'll have an easier time getting used to the combat experience.

Here is what happened:

• She found the fighting *way* too easy, constantly telling me to let her fight alone. (And that at a stage where she still wastes half her resources on firing the wrong skills at the wrong time.)
• She found the quests unchallenging and unimmersive. She didn't understand why she should do the quests if they didn't unlock anything meaningful, like a new area, world changes or important gear. She had the feeling that she did not make a difference in the world, and that there were too many different quest givers to really allow for a relationship to form between the player and the world.
• She told me specifically that she enjoys challenges more than anything in a computer game, and that these challenges are what pique her interest and enthrall her.
• After she told me that, I suggested we stop doing quests and instead go into a public dungeon to fight the bosses. It being Sunday evening, obviously a few people were out and about and our visit to the dungeon consisted of "hey, there's supposed to be a boss here, but I guess he's not spawned currently, let's find the next one" and engaging in a boss fight only to be "helped" by other players, accompanied by "oh damn, can't this guy just leave us alone?". In 30 mins we literally passed 90% non-spawned bosses, and only fought two bosses, and both times it was ludicrously easy because 2 other players showed up mid fight.
• Thus we quit to watch House of Cards instead. We were both firmly disappointed.

So far I always thought I was so bored with the quest content because I am a "power user" who likes challenges disproportionally more than the normal player. But this experience indicates otherwise.

• There is simply too little challenging content in the Elder Scrolls part of the game. Yes, the group dungeons are fantastic, but you don't get to the vet dungeons until you played through the game once.
• And then there are the trials. I guess they're fun for Hodor and Mostly Harmless, when they are the first ones to figure out the best strategies, but for a casual gamer with much less time this part is gone. My experience with trials is that I joined a good guild and the runs where basically scripted. Do this, do that, puncture here, pull that guy and then stand there and wait for the dps fest. I felt powerful, but not challenged. It's either too time consuming to do it right and too easy to tag along.
• And I can't get into PVP. I enjoyed it a little while Forward Camps were still a thing. Since they were removed, I logged on three times, and each time I logged off once I died because I did not want to ride all the way back to the battle.

Anyway, I wish the ES content would be more challenging - not mind-numbingly difficult or grindy, just challenging and immersive. Give us a gameplay experience where we can log on in the evening, do one or two quests, and give us the feeling that we significantly influenced the game world and that we had to overcome challenges (combat, riddles or otherwise) to do so. And please give us a small scale PVP experience where we can log on for two hours and can log off with a better kill ratio than our buddies 2 hours later - fingers crossed for Imperial City.