Chrithu wrote: »

In answer to various posts I don't want to quote for readability's sake.

Imo the metacritic reviews (especially the user reviews but also some of the "professional" reviews) for a far too big part boil down to: It doesn't look and feel like Skyrim, thus it isn't a true ES game, thus it deserves a 0/10 rating. Same goes for Steam. Sure there are negative reviews that bring up pretty valid points (like the PvP problems). But I can easily see how the average rating for the game without those baseless biased reviews would easily climb by a point or two.

As far as dull and repetitive combat goes: Go name one MMO or game in general that is not repetitive in it's combat. I think what you are trying to say is that NPCs outside of bosses in the dungeons aren't a real challenge. Especially not before hitting level 50. And even less if you play through the faction content in a group. The learning curve is not steep enough, thus by the time NPCs slowly start to become a bit more of a challenge (and they sure do in the Veteran Rank content) most enthusiast gamers are pretty bored. I have to admit myself that the only thing that kept me hooked was the awesome storyline in the Daggerfall Covenant.

As far as class and skill system go: Yeah it isn't as freeform as Sykrim. That does NOT make it bad. If there is one thing that ES games should be recognized for then it is that every title so far made changes to the combat mechanics and character progression. Oblivion wasn't Morrowind and Skyrim was different all over again. And if I expect one thing from TES 6 then it is another round of changes to how character progression and combat mechanics work.

Actually judged from a MMO standpoint (and I think I can make an educated judgement here since I have played I think any major AAA MMO except for GW 2 in the past 8 years) ESO offers the most freeform and encouraging character progression system so far. Yeah there is a framework of classes, but you can (at least as far as PvE goes) make any class a tank, DD or Healer. Which is pretty awesome in my book.

Another thing that in my view sets ESO apart from the rest of the MMO riff raff is that if you manage to break people out of their mindset you can actually beat dungeons in any group setup. Something the devs were promissing and delivered on. The trinity still makes things easier but it is nowhere near being a necessity. I've beaten any dungeon in 4 DD setups.

And now upon the sensitive topic of whether ESO is a true ES game or not: Lore shenanigans and the stupid "It isn't Skyrim" (I covered that above: ES games have never been the same compared to each other) argument aside ESO managed to immerse me in the world of Tamriel on a whole other level: The voice work in this game (at least in english, haven't tried german) is superb. Especially when it comes to racial identity. In none of the former ES games could you tell the race of a character by their way of speaking and use of pro-verbs. And in my view that totally makes up for their twist in storytelling away from a world in shades of grey towards more of a black and white world (speaking about the severe lack of good intentioned Daedra worshippers and similar stuff here you found in the other ES games).

Concluding this wall of text I'd like to name the one thing that really makes me lower the score I'd give ESO to 8.5/10:

The game has too little group focus before you get to Craglorn.

Non-endgame, non-dungeon content not being really group-compatible is a problem in most MMOs. But at least you could solve it like SWTOR did. That is my gripe with ESO. My RL friends that used to play with me, stopped because the content was far too easy and dull in a group and on top of it you did all the dialogs and a lot of quests just solo without sharing progress (shared quest progress being fixed for most quests by now though).

SWTOR pretty much is a similar thing except for the fact that their group dialog system completely makes up for it. Selecting different answers and then seeing who's answer wins is a meta level of fun that shouldn't be underestimated. It became sort of an internal minigame to try and *** up the direction that your group mates want the dialog to take. And any MMO that fails to adopt that in the future will get a 1 to 2 points malus from me for it. MMOs should focus on groups and SWTOR's dialog system is exactly how you do that in the audiovisual presentation part of the game.