psychotrip wrote: »

This is what happens when you suck the personality and weirdness out of (most of) the Elder Scrolls. You're left with a bland, grey, generic medieval fantasy world. The whiplash from clockwork tower (set in one of the only regions allowed to be creative anymore) to Summerset is strong enough to kill a man.

I mean Jesus Christ. Yet another generic european forest? As if Tamriel didnt have enough of those already. Only one city style, making them all look the same. Only one biome and it doesnt even make sense for an island south of hammerfell. Ever seen Hawaii? Or Japan? Islands can have more than one environment.

Meanwhile, similarly popular and budgeted MMOs are releasing multiple unique regions, new forms of gameplay, more engaging, varied quests, and more. Why cant ESO do the same? Why dont we expect the same?

People always ask, "Why do you care so much about lore? Or architecture? Or environments? Or all that weird stuff from the old books?" This is why.

Unless they can piggy-back off previous games Zenimax almost always goes for the most bland interpretation of Tamriel they can get away with.

Daraugh wrote: »

There's a world of difference between Jeremy Soule's work and Brad Derrick and Rik Shaffer. The opening music is Soule's work while the majority of in-game is Derrick and Shaffer. Soule of course did Skyrim and Eso's cinematics. The difference for me is palpable. Derrick and Shaffer are good composers, but Soule is amazing. (I didn't know at the time I played through Wow's Mists of Pandaria that Soule did a lot of the music including my favorite theme from the Wood of Staves and Krasarang Wilds especially the part around two minutes in.) Remember Secunda? Yeah, I miss Soule. A lot of Eso music feels like background music and nothing more. Soule's compositions capture the heart and well, soul of the experience.

The color palette is very bland. I know they're trying to capture the most realistic feel they can, but looking out the window at grass and trees, the real world greens are so bright! The flowers are vibrantly colored and a blue sky is brilliant, not tempered with "realistic" grays. I know greens are difficult for an artist to represent well. If you paint what you see, the brain has a hard time accepting that yes, that really is how green grass and trees look. It feels too bright and unreal, it looks over the top on paper, so you mix in reds or blues to tone it to what our brains expect to see. It's weird, but true! The art direction feels very safe to me. It's not too surprising how popular Reshade and Sweetfx are. Personally I like the distance fog, but the washed out colors feel false and timid to me.

craybest wrote: »

Please don't get me wrong, I enjoy the game, in general. I've been playing for years.
But there's always this feeling that it's lacking something. To be fair, Im not talking about loot, or group dungeons, or min maxing. I care about other things, I care about immersion, I care about graphics and art direction, about music, about story, about quests. So if you don't care much about these feel free to skip the topic.

The game's music is good, but not really memorable and gets boring after hours of listening to it, it all sounds too similar, and doesn't have many high or interesting moments, it's mostly backgorund music without much personality. The only music I think stands out is the one from the login screen we have now, that has defined ups and down moments, and it's in general the only music I can sing along, because I remember how it goes, and it's not so much a bland background music.

Same goes for the graphics. this game has very good graphics, but again, they also suffer from the same problem. repetitiveness and lack of personality. maybe it's the art direction. I know this game isn't supposed to be "high fantasy" and tries to keep relatively realistic graphics, but you can get much more interesting things while still doing "realistic" graphics. take the witcher 3 for example, it doesn't have any kind of high fantasy settting in general, and it's mostly about travelling from normal villages or cities and fields, but it offers great graphis and art direction, the storms, the sunsets, the fog in the swamps, the forests with the trees in the wind, the world looks much more alive than here where everything just looks static. From the design of most building that are done with grey stones, to the lack of color saturation, where everything is always tending towards the grey color, to the mostly repetitive feeling of nature in maps, it lacks that "punch" that could help it go all the way. most vanilla cities look very similar between themselves (at least between the same race cities) and there isn't much that sets them apart from eachother.

There's also the feeling of many places looking the same, including dungeons, villages, cities, forests, roads, fields, caves. everytime you reach a new place, there's the feeling of "this looks like generic uderground dungeon n 45645. there's no personality to most of them.

Then there's the mostly lack of cinematics and our own character's voice, he or she, never talks other than some random "ugghs " and "aaaahs", which isn't terrible by itself, but added to the lack of cinematics, (i only remember the old one we had ad the intro when starting a new character; and the one we have at the end of the story. it makes out character feel completely bland and lack of personality, we have all these emotes, all these voices to choose from, and they're not used at all in the story or quests. Some games have cinematics for the main story where we see our character's reactions to things (like FFXIV or Secret world legends) other games gives our characters actual dialogue lines (like gw2) that also helps to make them have some more personality. But in here there's nothing that makes them something more than just a generic lifeless character.

Then there's the quests, while they're beautifully voiced (and I really appreciate that since it gives the npc some more personality) the fact is that many quests feels the same. talk to NPC, either kill monsters or collect items, go back to NPC. sadly this goes both for sidequests and for main quests in the storyline. I know many older MMOs suffer from the same problem but in 2019 there's a much more varied range of what we could be doing in a quest in general, including different things and animations to make it stand out from the rest.

Obviously this is my opinion and you're free to disagree, but It's the feeling I get from playing this game in general for all these years. ultimately it feels...bland. and it's a pity because all these things could be improved without much more work, it's just art direction that could be better. What do you think? agree or disagree?

craybest wrote: »

when i say it lacks architecture variety, I don't mean between the difference races, I know each one has their own style, I mean within the same race's cities. most breton cities look the same, most khajit cities look the same, and even inside all cities, all buildings look pretty much the same.
In reality in a same village, there are wooden houses, red brick houses, white brick with wooden logs houses, etc.
even in summerset which is supposed to be their most "high fantasy" setting, the supposedly luxury buildings in summerset are all light grey, their walls are light grey, their roads are light grey, their roofs are light grey, their stairs are light grey, etc...
same thing with regular grey in many other places, like ruins, or cities.

quests are not terrible, but I think SWL does it better, with most quests having their own cinematics. and it's done by a small team. of course this depends to every person's taste.