Zero Punctuation: The Elder Scrolls Online - We Can MMO Too

[Carnagath]

Kind of expected this from the moment I heard of Elder Scrolls Online...

Yeah.. There seems to be so little chance of non-WOW MMOs succeeding nowadays that it depresses me when a good developer feels the need to throw their hat into the ring.

The no chance of being successful comes from the sad fact that noone apart from Blizzard seem to be able to do cooperative PvE well. Like, noone. Not a single soul. Even though WoW ran out of kickass interesting mega-villains a long time ago, they are still the best at designing raid encounters with a huge variety of fresh mechanics and then tuning them to a boner-inducing "extremely hard but not unfair" level of difficulty (as anyone who has actually played MoP in a 25 man raiding guild knows).

 

[android927]

I don't get the appeal of MMOs. I dunno, I guess the fact that you're not the one savung the day anymore kinda rubs me the wrong way... (Though if they made a decent Firefly MMO, I admit I'd give it a shot...)

Last i checked, Firefly Online [https://keepflying.com/] was still on track for release later this year.

 

[shogunblade]

Can I say "Electric Shite Orchestra" is now officially my takeaway from you? That was probably my favorite joke in the entire video, and a picture of a coil on Jeff Lynne's head makes my respect for you go up, up, up because of it? Not because you crapped on them, but because it was funny as hell, and you knew who was in it instead of using the band's logo instead.

OT: I really don't know how to feel about Elder Scrolls Online, it seems like as much a bad idea as any other game getting an MMO, but your response to how people feel about MMOs is exactly how I feel about them, with the slight exception of a Firefly MMO, I really am not big on those types of games.

That being said, I probably know a few people who will play it like an expansion of Skyrim, so there goes that.

 

[bdcjacko]

I know there is "no wrong way" to play an Elder Scrolls game, but if you aren't a cat guy, you are clearly doing it wrong. Car guys for life.

 

[Lord_Bryon]

I really do agree with the "why mmo" for the Elder scrolls franchise. I wanted to play Skyrim with "a" friend not a 1000 random people.
What really broke it for me was when on an early quest I had to do this pillar light beam puzzle as part of the only way that "I" could get the macguffen to defeat the baddie running around and there were about 50 other people stack on top of them spamming away trying to solve it.
As movie bob and other in the comments have said, why mmo?

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

We get lame MMOs that we don't ask for, and we DON'T get the MMOs we DO ask for. How's that for logic.

SEGA. Stop. Withholding. PSO2. From. Me.

Me and most of my friends would be all the hell over it. We loved PSO1. Stop ignoring the fans!

 

[Grape_Bullion]

Less than surprised at the reactions coming out. Guess I'll just turn to substance abuse again until the next ES comes out...

 

[GalanDun]

A new ZP on my birthday? BEST. PRESENT. EVAR.
From what Yahtzee said it's pretty much how I expected it to be. Elder Scrolls, only not as good.

 

[kanetsb]

Uuuuu... Defiance fans joke... That's not funny when you offend both of them. We all know it's just one guy with split personality disorder...

 

[Vie]

"But don't you see, I did this for you! I had to cut my legs off to make it easier to get the spoons in!"

Can we have this as a T-Shirt slogan? It's a wonderful example of the sort of insane troll logic that seems to pervade real life today.

 

[Thanatos2k]

So another feeble attempt to try and get the money from the WoW cash pot by releasing an MMO that has no business existing.

I'm calling it going free to play within 6 months.

 

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

I know you probably won't be reading this Yahtzee, but Pandaren were in Warcraft 3 (especially Chen Stormstout the main pandaren hero) before Kung Fu Panda was even made so your joke about that part falls rather flat.

Of course there are few that actually know this, but hey..all in good fun right? Right.

however, they were still made as an april fool's joke back then, and the design changed a lot from then into the Modern Pandaren on "mists". And it happened to launch at a time when the iconography was becoming quite popular thanks to the movies, so the criticism still stands.

In any case, IMO, the answer of how long can a game keep putting out expansions was responded far earlier (particularly because vanilla WoW wasn't even a very revolutionary game at the time it launched, it just had A LOT of content). But by most standards, Wow climaxed around burning crusade, and dropped steadily after that. It's no secret, blizzard likes milking all it's cows till nothing has any meaning and all you have is stale udder shaped jerky.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

I know you probably won't be reading this Yahtzee, but Pandaren were in Warcraft 3 (especially Chen Stormstout the main pandaren hero) before Kung Fu Panda was even made so your joke about that part falls rather flat.

Of course there are few that actually know this, but hey..all in good fun right? Right.

Not really, because why did Blizzard introduce the Pandaren AFTER Kung Fu Panda's success? It's not really coincidental.

 

[OrokuSaki]

....I don't know why they made the Elder Scrolls into an MMO. That just seems like a bad idea to begin with, people who liked Skyrim are people who like having their own gameplay experience personalized to them, while people who like MMO's are virtually unfathomable people who want to share their time with other human beings.

I tried an MMO a few times, it was The Old Republic; and while the story was good enough to keep me playing for a while, I always resented seeing other player characters because that usually meant that all the treasure chests were empty and I'd have to wait for the monsters to respawn. And seeing as how Knights of the Old Republic was somewhat similar to the Elder Scrolls in terms of having a single-player focus, I didn't think that anything could actually be gained by adding more people to the experience.

But I think I could enjoy an Elder Scrolls game with online multiplayer, something where you can invite your friends and block anyone that you don't trust to not loot all the treasure while you're fighting an entire dungeon worth of monsters at once. I think the main problem with MMO games is that people are assholes and I don't want to associate with any of them. But hey, I'm just an antisocial nerd who's wasted his life playing video games, so what do I know?

 

[Fdzzaigl]

The PvP in ESO is rather good. But the rest is a trainwreck in progress imo.

I don't say this often because I value singleplayer aspects in MMO's as well, but ESO just isn't a real MMO. Due to the phasing mechanics you can't even be sure that grouping up with your friends will work unless you're on the exact same quest stage as those friends. And even then a quest target will often not update simultaneously, requiring you to take turns doing it.

Hell, in my opinion, SW:TOR was and still is far more efficiënt and smart about presenting storyline in the MMORPG format. Atleast they came up with solutions to allow for group dialogue and grouping in general (not perfect, but still).

Aside from that, other rookie mistakes like putting most of the loot from dungeons in chests that are FFA and thus often get nabbed by the fastest ninjas, not kicking players who are kicked out of groups out of the dungeon instance (so they can continue to ninja your loot), designing a retarded trading system that's basically an inferior auction house forcing you to join big zerg guilds as a marketplace coupled with inventory management hell because every barrel drops different materials but you have no way to easily sell them.

Not to talk about some of the easiest to exploit dupe bugs ever seen in MMORPG history, that they are also slow to react to.

Yeah, ... color me unimpressed.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

Well... I was a big fan of the previous two Elder Scrolls games... and for the life of me I don't understand why anybody would think I'd want to explore their world with a bunch of strangers. I agree with Yahtzee's opening here because I don't see who this game is even aimed at. Was this something that Elder Scrolls fans who aren't me were crying out for?

 

[Scribblesense]

Wasn't there an episode of Doctor Who called The Kittyspock Alliance?

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

This is why I stay away from MMO's and lose a tiny bit of respect for an existing brand whenever a new MMO is announced for it. It would be great if someone made a mod for Oblivion or Skyrim that let a party of friends play together, or the next real The Elder Scrolls had optional multi-player. But, I don't want to pay $60, plus $15 a month plus have micro transaction offers shoved down my throat to play a TES game, while some schmuck next to me is doing the same quest and demands to me come with him after we get the rewards even though I want to go off somewhere else.

 

[Seldon2639]

I've never played an MMO before, but even I have to ask why the hell you'd do the whole "destiny" thing when you're not even the only player in the world.

Because modern MMOs have attempted to compete with WoW by focusing far more strongly on the single-player plot aspect, hoping to gain an edge over WoW's almost explicitly autonomous storyline, and evoke the same kind of response people have to a game like Skyrim or KOTOR.

And it fails, because while the same people who play MMOs probably also play KOTOR, if I want to play KOTOR I'm going to go play KOTOR.