I only just recently hopped on the Elder Scrolls Online bandwagon due to peer pressure, and it's struck me how little I've been enjoying the game. So, I apologize if you think this has been talked to death by now, but I'm pretty new to the discussion and want to try and clarify my thoughts by laying them out for all the internet to see.
With that in mind, here are the things that really rustle my jimmies in ESO, and some thoughts on how they could tickle them instead.
-Other People. I realize that when you buy a game with Online in the title, you're implicitly agreeing to interact with other players at some point. I don't mind having a bustling city full of players running about; that actually added to the feel of it for me. And I don't care that I'd be starting a quest alongside a dozen random people. What stung me, and I can't be alone in this, was that I couldn't kill a mudcrab on a quest without running into any number of other players doing the same things at the same time. I can't help but wish for a system like in Guild Wars where you'd interact with people in cities, but each time you left the world was your own. Then again, I'll concede that I'm not a big MMO fan so I might be reacting to harshly to this part of the experience.
Quick side note: I hate how easy-to-kill enemies respawn infinitely along any given quest path. I know this is entirely because of the hoard of people participating at any given time, so it's part of the same problem, but it's still something that irks me.
-Quest Markers. This kills me. I could deal with other players as a separate issue, but I can't handle this. There's just something lost in the atmosphere of the game when you're given a pirate-infested town to investigate, and you're fighting off pirates trying to find the person you're looking for, and where it should be this interesting/challenging search of the town, you instead walk straight to the blinking arrow hovering in front of your face. Immersion is a bit of a dirty word, because you can use it to unfairly complain about anything, but I think it's justified here. There's nothing absorbing or entertaining about having a great open world and being dragged on a connect-the-dots tour through it.
I'm not going to say quest markers are always bad. They are in this case, but it could have been so much better with just a minor change in scope. Part of the reason for that design choice is probably that the quest givers don't tell you jack about where to actually go, and it would be unreasonable in a lot of cases to make the player figure out exactly what to do. Okay, fine. What if the quest markers then only led you to the general region you need to be in? That might be a half decent compromise, e.g. if you need to talk to a certain vendor it'll only lead you to the shop area in town, or in the case of the pirate town it would get you as far as the town itself before handing you the reins. I'm basically thinking of a system like in Halo 3: ODST, where you're guided to an area and have to search for the next clue. It's pretty sad when you look at a Halo game and say, "See? That was less linear," but here we are.
That's all I've got for now, aside from some minor gripes. Fans of the Elder Scrolls games, if you're not sick of the topic, what's wrong with the game, what's good about it, and how do you think it can be improved?
With that in mind, here are the things that really rustle my jimmies in ESO, and some thoughts on how they could tickle them instead.
-Other People. I realize that when you buy a game with Online in the title, you're implicitly agreeing to interact with other players at some point. I don't mind having a bustling city full of players running about; that actually added to the feel of it for me. And I don't care that I'd be starting a quest alongside a dozen random people. What stung me, and I can't be alone in this, was that I couldn't kill a mudcrab on a quest without running into any number of other players doing the same things at the same time. I can't help but wish for a system like in Guild Wars where you'd interact with people in cities, but each time you left the world was your own. Then again, I'll concede that I'm not a big MMO fan so I might be reacting to harshly to this part of the experience.
Quick side note: I hate how easy-to-kill enemies respawn infinitely along any given quest path. I know this is entirely because of the hoard of people participating at any given time, so it's part of the same problem, but it's still something that irks me.
-Quest Markers. This kills me. I could deal with other players as a separate issue, but I can't handle this. There's just something lost in the atmosphere of the game when you're given a pirate-infested town to investigate, and you're fighting off pirates trying to find the person you're looking for, and where it should be this interesting/challenging search of the town, you instead walk straight to the blinking arrow hovering in front of your face. Immersion is a bit of a dirty word, because you can use it to unfairly complain about anything, but I think it's justified here. There's nothing absorbing or entertaining about having a great open world and being dragged on a connect-the-dots tour through it.
I'm not going to say quest markers are always bad. They are in this case, but it could have been so much better with just a minor change in scope. Part of the reason for that design choice is probably that the quest givers don't tell you jack about where to actually go, and it would be unreasonable in a lot of cases to make the player figure out exactly what to do. Okay, fine. What if the quest markers then only led you to the general region you need to be in? That might be a half decent compromise, e.g. if you need to talk to a certain vendor it'll only lead you to the shop area in town, or in the case of the pirate town it would get you as far as the town itself before handing you the reins. I'm basically thinking of a system like in Halo 3: ODST, where you're guided to an area and have to search for the next clue. It's pretty sad when you look at a Halo game and say, "See? That was less linear," but here we are.
That's all I've got for now, aside from some minor gripes. Fans of the Elder Scrolls games, if you're not sick of the topic, what's wrong with the game, what's good about it, and how do you think it can be improved?