Elder scroll online advice...to buy or not to buy

[krazykidd]

Snip

I have to disagree on you about the story part of WoW. Most any quest line will tell you in the flavor text what's going on and why you're getting 8 wolf hearts for Mrs McMuffin, and a fair bit of the lore of your chosen race is summarized in an opening cinematic. As to the rest of the lore you don't get filled in on in the places you don't quest or races you don't play, that really just adds to the suspension of belief that this is an actual world, and not just some playground with a story you can summarize in a few paragraphs of text. The story is really the part of WoW that makes it feel grand and epic, because it feels like an actual history of a world, civilizations rise and fall, races live and die, leaders fade in and out of memory, there is so much to it that it's overwhelming just enough to cause the player to want to learn more.

Now I realize that's not for everyone, but I feel like if someone is wanting a straight forward story, then the MMO genre just doesn't seem the right place to look for it.

OT: eh, I haven't heard anything defining about it, but if you like TES lore a lot, and you're willing to pay each month, go for it. Past that, it looks like an MMO, so, yeah.

You mean like a evolving world, where things have happened before you got there , and things will happen once you are gone? Interesting, i never looked at it that way.

 

[SecondPrize]

Does the "farm few hours for a horse" mean killing the odd 42,000 bosses for one gold piece each? Because it's just ridiculous.

Angry Joe somehow forgot to mention the gold you get from quest rewards and selling items you pick up or mats. Getting a horse isn't hard, but it's certainly not something you can do in a few hours.

OP, I like the game, the combat, questing and classes are different enough from the standard that it's keeping me happy. If Craglorn turns out well and future Adventure Zones will be added in a timely manner then I'll be sticking with it.

I was unable to actually find anything on it having a cash shop. the complaints are about them having plans to implement one.

You weren't able to find anything because there isn't one. There are no plans to add one either. You can buy a CE upgrade, a horse skin and name changes in account management, like wow did before they added a cash shop.

 

[Granfaloon]

I played a bit of it when it was in beta, and I didn't think it was a game worth buying, let alone paying a monthly sub fee for. It might have gotten better in the interim but I'm still not going to get it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

This one was ChaosD1's complaint. Either he found the crafting annoying compared to MMOs with swift crafting like Ragnarok 2, or it's because he was playing in closed beta.

I think it's pretty good, and I generally hate MMO crafting. It's nothing that will sell the game all by itself, and it won't appeal to lunatics who liked the crafting in EQ2 or Aion, but it's pretty decent.

This one was Joe's complaint. I'm guessing it's one of those games that caps out at level 50 & goes into a mastery system. I avoid PvP, so I'll never know.

Yep, it caps at 50. Joe was rushing because he wanted to take the Angry Army out into 3 faction PvP. Rushing is entirely on him, although he's not wrong...the game does not cater to rushers. Zenimax Online have created something of a fragile experience that must be played in a particular way to get real enjoyment out of it. That's not entirely laudable.

I was unable to actually find anything on it having a cash shop. the complaints are about them having plans to implement one.

It doesn't have one, and as far as I'm aware there are no immediate plans to implement one. They likely have a plan for one for the inevitable FTP transition though.

Well, that's how it went for Joe's group. & his review is barely a week old.

That's NOT how it went for Joe's group, because you cannot buy anything tangible with real money other than a (bad) horse. Ironically, in many games you CAN buy power or in-game currency with money, including GW2, a game Joe gave 9/10 to. Now, I'm not shitting on GW2, it's a fine game in its own right. And if you handle cash/currency transactions well it can be a good way to undercut gold sellers. But there's a REASON TESO is swarming with gold farmers and bots, and it's because there's no other way to "buy yourself ahead". Joe was just venting his spleen. I was pretty disappointed in him when he went off on that tangent.

ChaosD1 has a hard time NOT comparing things to WoW, but the two guest reviewers also felt that it didn't play like ES & that the developers were trying to appeal to the WoW crowd with familiar game mechanics.

I view WoW as a high watermark for theme park MMOs, and I take comparisons to it pretty seriously. You better have something to show other than "Is an MMO" if you want that "WoW clone" label. TESO does little to nothing to ape WoW's game play conventions, and will likely be enraging for fans of WoW. If it merits comparisons to MMOs, it could be tangentially compared to SWTOR or TSW (huge focus on heavily voice acted story), DAoC or GW2 (open field 3 faction PvP), or VERY tangentially EQ (you don't see a lot of first person perspective in MMOs). But really it's not a lot like any of them. It's fairly unique in the MMO space. In terms of Elder Scrolls, it shares a location, general visual design, lore, the UI is VERY similar to Skyrim, the same "three stat" system, the same LMB swing/power strike basic combat, the same stealth system, the same "loot 500 crates in a 20 square foot room" attempt to add verisimilitude to the world (for good or ill), the same music, etc, etc, etc. I'll leave it to you to decide what it shares more in common with.

Since both the MMO & any ES game can be moded, it's kind of a mute point.

*moot

Personally, I can't stand to be in any area for more than 2-3 days. The very first thing I do when I enter a new zone is a good half hour of landscape photography.

Well, that's fine, but it's still not a design weakness. "Zones too big and too full of content" would be a strange stick to beat it with, since the opposite is a routine complaint for genre entries.

Yeah, I've read many a quote from Subscription Elitists who can't even fathom the idea of a goof FTP MMO or the worst PTP being worse than the best FTP. Worse yet, I often see that the ONLY reason they claim to be playing a game is BECAUSE it charges a subscription, like...."fun be damned, spending makes me feel good." There are some stubborn publishers & developers who would shut a game down before they'd switch to the FTP model.

There's been a few predatory free to play pricing models that have people feeling sour towards the business model, and older MMO fans remember a golden era where you got "everything" for your $15 and didn't run into pay walls everywhere. So there's a perception that $15 a month is a stamp of quality. It has its own problems though, most primarily barrier to entry and sharper fall-off after the free month, which usually leads to a FTP transition to boost profits.

 

[Hagi]

*You can add mods, like any other ES game.

This isn't true.

ESO has UI add-ons, which is something different than a mod.

You can add elements to the UI, you can not modify the game.