Iccotak wrote: »

ESO could really take more from Craglorn in making zones challenging.
Put in group delves, I know there are people who like to play alone but this is an mmo.

Oh, ESO learned a LOT fron their Craglorn fiasco. They learned so much that they have reworked Craglorn twice already to incorporate their knowledge of what to do and what...not to do.,,,in Craglorn and the rest of the game. Todays game is based on that knowledge in fact.

And its not a MMO.

Epic fail of Craglorn was just a drop that turned the tide. Game died. Thats how awesome Craglorn was.

They reworked it the first time but it wasnt enough and they had to rework it second time.

But hey, im sure you have your imaginary reasons to believe otherwise, you are free to believe what you want, i will stick to facts.

Yes, shame on them for developing something people actually want to play!

We should go back to the time when online games were reserved for no life teenage nerds only!

We should demand they remove the map too. You should draw your own map scrub just like in the "good ol' days"!!!!!!! (not because there was not map because of technical limitations but because maps are for scrubs!"

Also no quest journal, you should write down all the quest or else! SCRUB!

Fast travelling a TRAVESTY! You should FOOT it or ride it to wherever want to go!

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its hilarious these people dont undestand many of these things were missing from good ol' days because of technical limitations of the time, not because devs (or most players) didnt want them in games

zyk wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

video games being entertainment and all are by definition - pointless. even so called challenge in the end - is pointless.

This post is basically a poster for something I say fairly often: gaming is being coopted by people who, fundamentally, don't enjoy games.

Whether it's Tetris or Quake, at its core gaming is about problem solving. Without that element, it's merely interactive entertainment.

Up until recently, most games were moderately challenging and had been for decades. Progressive difficulty was standard across all genres. This was especially true in PC gaming which has been the major disruptor over the years.

From what I recall, this all began to change during the PS3/360 generation of console games. l think it was the cinematic Sony games that looked amazing, but actually had very basic gameplay. By the end of that generation most games had become impossible to lose at with virtually no learning curve.

Now it's hit online games. This is basically gaming going full mainstream.

It is very frustrating for me. I've played RPGs since AD&D as a child. I've played adventure games and RPGs on the PC since Space Quest and Bard's Tale. I am reminded of an LCD Soundsystem song, I waaaaasssss there.. PC gaming, in particular, has always been deep. For decades, I've enjoyed learning systems to solve problems and overcome challenges. Being forced to find creative solutions or hone muscle memory or focus (etc) has been the rush I've been addicted to.

It has amazing benefits. Gaming taught me how to function "in the zone" which has helped me avoid several car accidents.

Gaming gave me so many advantages as a young man in the work force. Gaming had given me above average problem solving/leadership/communication skills. I had lead teams I had built and trained with 5 nights a week to success already. Challenging MMOs had given me the mental endurance to grind through double shifts of mentally challenging work. I could handle the ups and downs of competition. I was confident and unafraid to take on new challenges.

Gaming also has been shown to have a huge array of therapeutic benefits.

ESO is actually a tragic monster of a game. Its systems are so deep, complex and detailed and completely pointless 99.999% of the time. It was made for one audience and then contorted for another.

oh please, I have been playing video games on pc since early 90ties, and arcade games before that. don't you start that hipster nonsense on me. my very first pc game was Inidiana Jones, Fate of Atlantis, which got me into all sorts of adventure puzzle games, and there was also wolfenstein 3d in there (you know that OG shooter with all the hidden rooms you wanted to figure out locations of)

games are entertainment. always have been. there is nothing wrong with entertainment, however - don't try to make it like its something more virtuous than it is. does it engage our mind? yes yes it does - and i'm aware that by engaging our mind it has been shown to stave off Altzheimers and the like. but to make it like "challenge" in gaming is the same thing for everyone or that its the "achievement" in gaming that makes it good is just. dude...

you are supposed to be enjoying gaming, its supposed to be fun as a hobby would but you all hipster people are making claiming that unless you sweat through it and overcome something or other - its pointless? guess what? its ALL pointless. cause in game achievement like that is a digital milestone that took time out of your real life. MMO shuts down? all of your "achievements" are lost in the ether.

oh and funny story about those "hard games" from the olden days (and i still have a shelf full of old manuals and guides that traveled with me through all the moves over the years) they were ONLY hard to impossible if you screwed up without realizing and set up your character wrong. if you meta gamed them instead of trying to figure it out on your own, only to be punished for it 70 hours into the game? you did more then fine. you know what changed, REALLY changed? OUR ABILITY TO RE-SPEC AND FIX OUR CHARACTERS. oh and games have gotten better at explaining themselves WITH gameplay vs throwing it all into a manual you have to read before hand.

edited to add. @MikaHR your history is a bit wrong. sure not everyone could afford personal computers back then, but they were far more advanced than you claim and were already getting fairly accessible. I started playing on PC in 1992 to be precise, when our highschool got a PC lab - in theory we were supposed to be using it to learn early programing, and we did, during class hours. in practice, it was full of people playing games during recess. this is what fate of atlantis looked like.

by 1995 - my family immigrated to US and one of the first things we did, as soon as we could - we bought a personal computer (not amiga or atari). we were NOT rich. that same PC had to work to help me study in college, the same PC was used by entire family. but it also played games like this


though I personaly started with 2, kinda skipping heroes of might and magic 1 entirely even back then

consoles revolutionized accessibility of gaming, but they didn't start the narrative and visual improvements. PC did

Oh i have every clue, i was there, guess what, very very few people had a small fortune to invest in PC that could do anything but basic monochrome with PC beeper....even THAT was much more expensive than basic console.

zyk wrote: »

The playstation was undoubtedly an important console, but it is very obvious to any impartial observer that games like Quake represented the future of gaming. The gaming paradigm of today began then, on PC with influential studios/creators like id, blizzard, bioware, epic, bethesda, valve and many others emerging. Their work would become the template for much of what we do today. The Quake engine, in particular, had an outsized influence as it was popular and open sourced only a few years after it was released, allowing everyone in the world to learn from it.

The gaming paradigm started on consoles, your "developers" are actually what came AFTER it. But we know now that you werent there and only make stuff up, back in those times gaming was pretty much console only. Even years after it you had to know MS-DOS and tricks to start a game on PC.

zyk wrote: »

Uhm, and? Heh. Not the same thing at all. But also, it was a PC game. The Amiga is a personal computer and Psygnosis mainly developed PC games until Sony bought them. I was a big fan of Psygnosis. They didn't really do anything special as part of SCE, but my understanding is that they had some influence in shaping SCE into what it became.

Amiga and Atari were consoles

zyk wrote: »

Wikipedia wrote:

The Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model was part of a wave of 16- and 32-bit computers that featured 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio over 8-bit systems. This wave included the Atari ST—released the same year—Apple's Macintosh, and later the Apple IIGS. Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Amiga differed from its contemporaries through the inclusion of custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites and a blitter, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS.

I was an Amiga enthusiast, but gaming came second. The Amiga had a very robust operating system that was far ahead of its time. Windows would not have a comparable CLI until Powershell. It even had Rexx support which is incredible! But I also had a kick ass 33Mhz 386 which did amazing things the Amiga could not through brute force. The Amiga would play an important role in history behind the scenes as a disruptor in Desktop Video. It's a computer and not a console. Eeesh.

If you only played PC games on the Amiga, you were missing out; and vice versa, certainly, in the early 90s.

lets see, what does this sounds like:

A one part "all inclusive" system with built in media device (floppy disc) that you plug into your TV, plug in controller (joystick at the time) put in the disc and game, no other input required!

Thats right a CONSOLE. Except its description of Amiga. You had to load Workbench SEPARATELY if you wanted to use it.

Rawkan wrote: »

This has gone way off topic. Take it to private messages guys.

to bring it back on topic, which in theory history of gaming is, tangentially - Op complained that questing was nerfed again. it wasn't. they just got better as a gamer. which.. i mean you play long enough, especially play the same game long enough and its inevitable to get better. it is impossible to replicate new/inexperienced player experience when you yourself are experienced. but that doesn't mean that the game needs to be made inaccessible to actual new and inexperienced (or even just less twitchy) gamers. ESPECIALLY IN OG starting zones.

zyk wrote: »

MikaHR wrote: »

A one part "all inclusive" system with built in media device (floppy disc) that you plug into your TV, plug in controller (joystick at the time) put in the disc and game, no other input required!

Thats right a CONSOLE. Except its description of Amiga. You had to load Workbench SEPARATELY if you wanted to use it.

Just because one could boot games from a floppy and connect the Amiga to a tv via composite, does not make it a console. It may have only been a console to you, but it is irrefutably a personal computer and an impressive one at that.

My Amiga was not ever connected to a tv. I know a lot of people bought Amigas just for games in Europe, but it was very powerful PC that could play games. Like the one I am using now. Especially for Desktop Video and multimedia authoring.

Booting directly to a game and bypassing the operating would have been possible on all computers from that period had the will to do it been there. It didn't happen on IBM compatibles because of compatibility with a wide range of clone hardware. That doesn't make it a console. I mean, you're just being one of those people who can't admit they're wrong even in the face of irrefutable evidence.

Rawkan wrote: »

This has gone way off topic. Take it to private messages guys.

It's actually relevant. Much in the same way Mika is adapting history to suit him, the modern gamer wants the game to adapt to them instead of adapting to the game.

But I'm done.

you know its funny you should say this as you seem to be the one who wants the game to be changed to be harder to suit YOUR preferences.

zyk wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

you know its funny you should say this as you seem to be the one who wants the game to be changed to be harder to suit YOUR preferences.

That's not accurate at all. In this thread, I've only really for a advocated for a DLC comparable to what has previously existed in ESO and the kind of content ZOS said they would deliver in 2014 interviews. I only want ESO to be more like the game I bought.

you want current game adjust to your expectations from 5 years ago. my statement still stands.

MasterSpatula wrote: »

Just about every time I go into a base-game zone, I encounter someone in Zone Chat asking for help with one of these "boring, easy" encounters.

Veteran players:

Overland.

Isn't.

Aimed.

At.

You!

You're right of course but how many square kilometers of the world do we need dedicated to the new player experience? Do expansions really need to keep adding content for people who have never played a video game before? Could we maybe get an open world solo-challenging exploration area with quests and call it overland overworld or something?

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

MikaHR wrote: »

Epic fail of Craglorn was just a drop that turned the tide. Game died. Thats how awesome Craglorn was.

They reworked it the first time but it wasnt enough and they had to rework it second time.

But hey, im sure you have your imaginary reasons to believe otherwise, you are free to believe what you want, i will stick to facts.

Damn, about what epic fail of Craglorn you are talking? This is basically best zone of all game, with most expensive traders, with best farming places and best solo experience outside of VMA. While in other non-dlc zones you will met nobody in hours with exception of deshaan, bangkorai and rivenspire where people grind expensive gear and alik'r with damn dolmen groups.

and there I thought the most expensive traders were in capitol cities (cause pledges) and on pc - Rawl'ka? Craglorn hasn't been the defacto best trader zone since they made writ turn ins be possible in zone of your choice. the moment people doing max level writs could get out of Bankorai? most did. and I do run into people in other zones. pretty much every zone. only reason people still farm Crag is because its still the only source of nirn. and I'm trying to remember when was the last time I went into one of the trials manually. fast travel IS a thing, you know.

oh yeah.. there are still people who go there to skip the game by doing that oh so challenging skyreach grind.

also. reminder. there are plenty of us who have been playing for a while who actualy enjoy this level of difficulty of over-world. allows us to relax and actualy makes the game MORE immersive becasue of it.

This is the problem right there. We don't know where you started your story. Almost any quest in the game could have been your first ever quest and ZOS refuses to change that fact. When you combine that and the difference between a new player and an experienced one there is no way to balance the content for everyone.

Well, the story began in Coldharbour, the Alliance questline goes along with that; they are decoupled now but the dialogue is still there and the story makes no sense if you don´t play it in that order - you just don´t have to. Anyone who has played Summerset through knows that it features the return of a certain character from the main quest (and I am not talking about Raz), and also Morrowind -> Clockwork -> Summerset have a complete story arc in that order. Summerset also of course has a certain character from Morrowind play a... let´s say big part

So there is no doubt that it is written as a story arc and not separate independent chapters; the same sort of goes for IC (I didn´t pay perfect attention to the story there tbh). Thieves´ guild and DB are more standalone AFAIK but there is nothing about them that suggests they should be played on non-main characters.

So just play the story and you will far outlevel the content.

Now they have written things to accomodate for new players so that you don´t automatically get screwed or confused when starting in the middle of the story; which makes sense to me. What doesn´t make sense is leaving what you would suppose is the average TES / Skyrim player - someone coming from solo games and expecting some kind of opposition, with vMA and then nothing for 4 years in terms of solo trials, and no option to crank things up apart from the completely absurd suggestions we´ve seen in threads like this, like "you can just deliberately gimp yourself and hope everyone else does - it makes sense!".