A dynamic combat system which is challenging but fun to use. Voice acting. Well-scripted stories.

Interesting trial/dungeon mechanics, albeit hit and miss. At least they hit more often than they miss for me.

There is also a huge variety of choices available to any player. Like Taesar said there is parts of the game he'd never play but that just makes it feel better.

Graphics!
Sooo pretty!

Other games I've played were at earlier points in history; it's possible more modern competitors are similarly good to ESO. With that caveat:

1. ESO is ahead in art vs. other games I've played (GW2, LOTRO, GW1, older single-person RPGs). The usual situation is for buildings to have well-designed and sometimes even beautiful inside. The usual situation is for NPCs to move around naturally. In LOTRO, such circumstances were rare exceptions. And in GW2 the art was lazy/cartoonish.

2. ESO tries to have NPC character richness. The voice acting goes a long way towards that, of course.

3. ESO, like Morrowind before it (that's the only single-person Elder Scrolls game I played), has lots of mysteries and plot twists. A number of them are actually interesting.

4. There's thankfully little "kill 10 rats" grind -- more in the EP areas than others, but thankfully little overall.

5. ESO pulls off an epic feel to its stories occasionally. I'm not sure that this puts it ahead of GW1's first chapter or a couple of bits of LOTRO, but they definitely pull it off, at least in the main quest.

6. Summerset has the most beautiful art I've seen in any game, period.

7. Picking up crafting nodes, thankfully, doesn't have a stupid grind of using equipment to do so.

8. Leveling mule/crafting alts is thankfully fast.

starkerealm wrote: »

Oh god, TSW... *vomits blood*

If anyone's watching, Secret World Legends did manage to elevate the combat in that game to almost playable.

It really didn't. All their dumbing down of the weapons and skill tag system did was limit weapon/skill customization outside of DPS classes. And their outright refusal to re-enable tab targeting, for a game with encounters designed for tab targeting, made target management insufferable. It was the worst game I've ever tanked in.

They did some things right, especially their post launch Anima Allocation (in essence, on-the-fly stat point reallocation). That should be MMO industry standard by now. But the nuts and bolts of combat in SWL is worse than TSW.

Except SWL's removal of Aegis, of course.

I love all the little details in the game. Like dying. Depending on how you die, you can end up as a corpse, a pile of ashes, or shattered into a million pieces after being frozen!

I haven't played any other MMOs, but I am here because I am invested in the lore and the game is enjoyable. I don't want to compare gameplay to other games as there are many other games I enjoy playing just as much. I'm just not as invested in the lore in those other games.

One of my favorite aspects of ESO is that we get to focus on each race in their own zones. We get to see the subcultures in those races vividly, depending upon where we are.

Waffennacht wrote: »

Things in ESO I took for granted before playing Anthem. (Even in the beginning)

Content - ESO ad months worth, now I can't even fathom how long it would take to do all quests beginning to end.
Community - populace and visual confirmation of other players
Chat - people have and use all chat methods
Viable Variety - even with meta sets etc, it's not nearly as uniform as other games
PvP - it's an option most don't have
Fundamentally sound - putting on a level 1 staff doesn't suddenly grant you 55k dps. Damage numbers actually matter.
Load screens - at least in ESO you feel there's enough content to justify one
Variety of enemies and spawn locals - you have more than 6 enemies that aren't just reskins of 2

While I am not done with the story in Anthem, even just doing the story quests led me to grow weary of the same fights over and over again. I got the game free with a video card and never intended to do any gear grinding, so I feel very happy with the enjoyment I've had with Anthem. Still, the fighting really does feel meaningless most of the time.

Anthem also no longer has enough new players for story missions to be coop. Matchmaking more often than not can't find even a single player to group with me for missions. That can make normal difficulty quite hard at times. I got the game free before release, so I started with full teams. Since then I have been very casual, playing once or twice a week. The decline has been steep. Especially considering I am playing in the late evening Eastern US time, which should be primetime.

Huge world to explore and thousands of things to do. And the new content just keeps coming. Of the 4 MMO's I have played ESO by far has the most content.

Some form of mid-combat resurrection

This is pretty much how one tests whether or not the developer has any idea what fun is. Dying sucks, it's a punishment for failure. On the other hand, dying with no way to revive in a boss fight is boring. You're removed from the conflict with no way to return and no reason to even watch.

Games with combat resurrection on a healer are par for the course. Games that allow anyone to perform the resurrection are ahead of the curve. ESO allows anyone to revive an ally, and it's pretty fast. That said, Guild Wars 2 is superior in this area. While their combat resurrection is much slower, they have an additional downed state that bridges the gap between an able fighter and defeat. And while in that state you can both be revived faster, and you can still take action/fight back.

Tanking can be engaging

This is partially a consequence of the DPS meta, but tanks are expected to do more than stand there blocking, interrupting, and spamming defensive abilities. They have buffs, debuffs, and heals to cast, resources to manage, synergies to trigger, and even synergies for others to trigger. It's infinitely better than SWL or Champions, even if all tanks are expected to play relatively the same.

On the other hand, take TERA where you can be a block heavy tank that mitigates such extreme damage that everyone else would be dead 5 times over (while you're barely scratched, even without a healer). Or you can be an acrobatic tank that deals a significant degree of damage themselves. By comparison, tanking in ESO is not only extremely limited in variety, it can feel very unrewarding (since nothing you do is for your own benefit, only the group's, which is doubly apparent when solo).

There's robust build variety

In BDO or TERA, an archer is an archer and a berserker is a berserker. ESO's combination of class pools with weapon and other skill pools plus racial passives allows for a far greater degree of customization, but with a genre-aware limitation of not allowing the player to pick literally anything (which was Champions' failure).

Unfortunately, that's all the positive there is to say.
Champions did it better via team roles (which could be switched on the fly) and super stats (which could result in two players with the same abilities still playing very differently).
TSW did it better via their state exploitation system (SWL screwed that up, but added an even more customizable role switching system than what Champions had).
GW2 has a very similar system to ESO that's straight up better.
And City of Heroes did it better via their power pools, which focused on active skills you had to maintain or throw into your rotation, versus passives you were just expected to have (especially once fitness became inherent).

Possesses a degree of balance

This doesn't apply to encounters. Encounters are terribly balanced. But considering all the different things there are available, the upper end of what any given race/class combination is capable of is pretty close, while still being different. Not close enough to avoid meta chasing (nothing ever will be), but pretty close. Champions utterly failed at this and for a well thought out character it was practically a walking simulator. Meanwhile a differently themed character could be getting stomped repeatedly.

I doubt anything will ever be able to match what City of Heroes was capable of in terms of overall balance. But while a lot of that was due to stacking buffs with class-based hard-caps, a great deal could be attributed to their instanced mission structure. They had much less worry about fighting an enemy that's much weaker than you or possesses much stronger abilities, because the instanced missions would scale the encounters to within a very close threshold of your combat ability (which could then be independently turned up higher or lower). Although, modern MMOs relying less on one-shot mechanics would certainly be a leap in the right direction.

The game world is very large, well populated, diverse, and full of stories

There are a wealth of stories, characters, and environments to explore. The mission structures are far less grind-focused than most, even if we're still doing the same thing we always do (in an MMO, it's all about framing). And there is at least some instancing used to make the world as you see and hear it reflective of your personal actions. ESO has a unique combination here that no other game matches.

BDO's gameworld is bigger, more saturated in set pieces, and it's towns are very immersive. And BDO's game world isn't instanced. There are no load screens (unless you teleport).
TERA has a wide range of gorgeous environments, even if they are very empty.
GW2's gameworld is also massive, and it has better voice acting, probably because everyone that speaks is someone specific and wasn't just labeled "Breton Male" on the voice actor's script. Extra special bonus points from me, your character is an actual character in the story with spoken dialog, instead of a proxy for the player to self-insert themselves into the game world.
FF14 has a great storyline with highs and lows and lengthy side stories all over the place.
SWL is, or at least should be, legendary at this point. It's story, presentation, and voice acting is triple-A single player quality. It's level of detail in chirography during cutsecnes is unheard of in the entire MMO genre. It doesn't have very many environments to explore, but what's there is fantastic and it's characters are phenomenal. Not just a couple of them, all of them. The guardians in Egypt part 2, which is a low point in SWL, would be a high point in ESO. If the combat and end-game in SWL wasn't an unbalanced dumpster fire of gear fusing and cooldown chasing, I'd be playing that, not this.

The crafting is pretty painless

Kind of reaching at this point, but considering how common horrible crafting systems are, you take what you can get. Necessary crafting materials are relatively common and there are even options to earn them passively. Aside from possibly requiring you to travel to a zone you don't have access to, like Coldharbor or Summerset if you don't own it, it's fairly benign (and can be bypassed by a guild with attunement stations).

However, this is also true of BDO, which has far more you can do with the materials (like building a ship that you can navigate). Firefall had the best crafting system, asking for a type of item rather than a specific material. And each of those types had their own tiers. This resulted in potentially very different, but not better, stats on crafted items (far more so than weapon/armor traits in ESO).

Story telling and the ability of solo play are the strengths of the game to me. Combat isn't bad at all but I prefer BDO along with it's graphics. The only thing that hurts ESO is the pve scaling once over 600+ CP and the lack of in-game rewards, so questing at high CP is way too easy and meaningless.