How bout an overview from somebody who liked it enough to buy it then? (me)
It's admittedly pretty generic. A lot of stuff he complains about other MMOs doing in that satire ESO does. Like you'll often see a bunch of players bunched up around a central quest NPC because EVERYBODY is doing that one quest. It really does fail pretty hard at the usual you are the chosen one thing. But it's not the first or even third MMO I've played that tried to make you seem special in a format where you clearly are not.
It has phasing like WoW does. Which does work a little bit at making stuff you do seem more permanent. For example I played as an aldmeri cat for 2 of the betas, and one of the quest on summerset isles involves a town being burned by a rebel group
(a rebel group that pretty much the moment you are introduced to them clearly indicates they are the future Thalmor)
. Once I handled the quest when I came back to that town it was a gutted burnt ruin which is a nice bit of permanency.
That did however have a downside, as I could not help another player through that quest. Whenever I went there we disappeared on eachothers clients, as we were out of phase from eachother.
Some quests also have multiple paths that determine the outcome, and they are helpfully pointed out in red in the conversations to indicate it's an important choice. I haven't seen any other mmo do that myself and I thought that was neat. Unfortunately such quests don't appear to be too common.
A big downside I saw is that there does not appear to be any kind of trading post for selling or buying items with the general public. There is a guild shop, and that appears to be the closest thing, but if you are like me and prefer small kinda socialist style close knit guilds it is going to be completely worthless. Even during the beta zone chat was often being spammed by people trying to sell items.
What got me to buy was the PvP. If you've played GW2 WvW it's pretty much the same thing, except with a larger map and shorter range siege engines. There's no trebbing one keep from within another which really pissed me off about GW2's WvW after they increased siege range. Also while stealth is quite effective
everybody can do it. They may not be particularly good at it, but if a place is plagued by stealth ambushers there really isn't anything keeping anyone from just stealthing past the dangerous spot. I played as a cat nightblade in medium armor, pretty much the stealthiest you can be, and it still didn't seem all that overpowered when your opponent can counter just by going into stealth themselves forcing what amounts to old WW2 submarine vs submarine warfare.
Horses are expensive, and imperial edition players get one basically for free, which will probably amount to an early advantage, but as more and more people buy the standard horses I think that will get evened out.
It seems you can make just about any weapon you could ever want. It appears possible to even make basic crafted gear legendary quality. Though researching traits is a time consuming process (you have to destroy an item in the crafting bench to learn how to make the same item with the same traits, but it takes half a day to research one trait) it allows some great customization. There are also hidden crafting stations in the wilderness, that allow you to create equipment with set bonuses assuming you are good enough at the craft. You are not limited on how many crafts you can use, but you use skill points from leveling up to gain skills in your crafting, so if you choose to be a master craftsman you may not be as versatile in combat as others.
Combat itself seems to be a step down from skyrim. There are no directional power attacks, and bows have a max range. You are only given 5 skill slots, which I like, but some people may find that restricting.
Theres probably more stuff I can say, but I don't want to make this wall of text any longer.
Author
Topic: The Elder Scrolls Online: Removing Subscription Requirements (Read 61054 times)