The times that I do play the game, the world is always full of people, but I have to bet that a majority of this is coming from a small amount of people using the shop. What a crazy amount of money.
I tried it, it’s well made, looks good, has very good voice acting. I just don’t find it to be fun. At all.
I tried to get into it a number of times, and the three major things that always wear me down are, first and foremost:
The obscene lack of difficulty in overworld content (next to running completely gearless or taking on group content/bosses solo to create an artificial sense of risk or danger). Most enemies are so easy that you never need to maneuver or use your full array of combat abilities. You end up mashing the same two or three hot keys on every single enemy while your HP remains at 99%.
The weird choice of classes and themes that do not accurately reflect what The Elder Scrolls has always been about. Rather than building classes based on my preferred weapon class, skill sets (Sneak, Lockpick, etc.), and magic classes (Alteration, Restoration, etc.), I have to be locked into a holy javelin-chucking warrior of light, a lightning-slinging daedric sorcerer, a fire magic dragon warrior with wings and spikes growing from my back, or some other weirdly themed class that didn’t need to be a core archetype in the Second Era. Like, fuck man… Base classes could have easily been born under the Warrior, Mage, Thief, etc. and then built upon from there.
The absolute clusterfuck of major/DLC quests that start the moment you walk into town or pass an NPC. It feels like navigating a fever dream as a new player, and it’s overwhelming. A thousand tangled threads and no room to breathe. Even the main quest no longer has level requirements at each stage, so the Prophet will bid you goodbye and immediately call out again the moment you leave the cave. It’s an absolute mess.
I could go on, but these are the worst three.
That quest bloat is no joke. I ended up mainlinining the main quest then started following a fucking flow chart to have a vague sense of progression.
The chart in question:  and each time you ventured out of them and into the PvE world, it would be a new instance only open to you and your group.
Private servers are sometimes a thing. Otherwise I’ve heard ff14 is stellar as a solo game.
I remember when Star Trek Online redid the map for Deep Space Nine and it was so much better because it stopped being comically large. The downside is that it’s a little bit possible to bump into geometry (in particular, the spiral stairs are a little awkward), but the change was 100% worth it.
(They also made a huge improvement re-doing Earth Spacedock, but it wasn’t a location we were intimately familiar with from TV and they changed the layout significantly, so the wow factor wasn’t as directly attributable to fixing the scale.)
Too bad they seem unlikely to fix Starbase 39-Sierra, Deep Space K7, or any of the other older social hubs any time soon.
Its been awhile so maybe things have changed. When I tried it out it basically took everything I enjoyed about these games and scrapped that to make it work as an MMO. Somehow Im the main hero but had several dozen people jumping around me at all times. All agency of character choice was gone, along with half the possible skill sets. Every quest had one way, maybe two ways, to complete them. It was no longer I could sneak or bribe or negotiate or fight or pickpocket or trick them into fighting someone else or use a spell to mesmerize or put them to sleep or poison them or whatever else came to mind with my incredible multitude of tools. It was just dull.
once you stop seeing ESO as an Elder Scrolls game, and instead look at it as an MMO set in the world of the Elder Scrolls - it gets really fun
even for lore fanatics who don’t see ESO as canon it can still be fun to run around areas we haven’t seen since Arena! Sure, it probably won’t look like the real thing once we get TES: Elsweyr or TES: Black Marsh, but it’s the best we’ve got right now, and with the current lighting fast development of TES series a lot of us won’t live to play those games
I always thought ESO was what Elder Scrolls could be if it wasn’t built on GameBryo/Creation. Because it basically is. Though it’s also made by a completely different team/studio so it also misses a certain something that Bethesda GS does .
Calling Creation Engine Gamebryo Engine is like calling Unreal Engine 5 Unreal Engine 1. Almost no part of both engines are alike anymore after so many years of development. And Creation Engine can do so many things that other engines can’t do like their easy and simple modability or stuff like how the engine remembers where every item in the world is regardless of if the player put it somewhere else. This notion that Bethesda RPGs would be 10 times better if they would just use another engine is so stupid.
How can $15 million be considered a lot of money in a month when Diablo 4 has made a billion dollars in just over a year? I mean, that’s a factor of 10.
I could also ask how it could be possible that Diablo could make a billion dollars despite pretty much everyone saying it sucks? And then what might the logic be in subsequently firing all the people who made it?
But I digress.
ESO is also almost 10x older than Diablo 4.
Factor 66 😈
