» Mon Mar 03, 2014 2:43 am I've been following Elder Scrolls Online development for months now. I am a huge Oblivion and Skyrim fan and I was thrilled to find out my favorite fantasy series was coming to life in a mass multiplayer format. The concepts being proposed for the game were exciting and left me enthusiastic for a potentially fun and interesting game. I was utterly psyched when I got my first Beta key and carved out a weekend to devote to playing. However, after devoting a weekend to playing, what I got was pure disappointment.
To sum up the reason I won't buy the game in one word, it's boredom. I was bored my entire weekend in Beta. The game seems to combine a variety of elements from World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and the Elder Scrolls single player games and yet manages to be effectively more boring than any single one of these games. I can't possibly justify spending $60 dollars on this game and $240 a year for the game experience, particularly after this second Beta where I ended up playing for a hour before I said "What's the point?" and uninstalled the client all together. Mind you, this doesn't come from an unwillingness to support my favorite games monetarily; when I play Guild Wars 2, I make a point to spend a monthly sum of money in the gem store, because I want to encourage future development of the living world. This comes from an absence of fun.
Mind you, I did not past level 10, so I am, to some extent, being unfairly harsh, but when you are asking me to buy the most expensive MMORPG since WoW, I am going to make hard judgements based off what I see before investing the money.
In the hopes of making this less than a rant and more constructive criticism, let me drill down into specific points that killed the experience for me.
- Let's start with the crafting system. While it was a bit unintuitive and took me awhile to figure out how to use, the system, in and of itself, is actually pretty cool. What effectively killed the crafting experience for me wasn't the system itself, but rather the open world competition for resource nodes. I can't, for the life of me, figure out why this is in this game. With the absence of an auction house and no plans to implement one that I have seen, the game does not require this competition to control economic prices. All it manages to accomplish, with the over-population of the zones, is hours of wandering around, hoping to be the first one to a node of Jute, so maybe in a couple of hours I can craft myself a new cloth robe. It creates grind times, at the lowest level, on par with high level items in other MMORPG. Ironically, this won't be so bad if there was an auction house, because we could easily trade and sell the unneeded components for components for our chosen professions.
- The crafting system piggybacks off the skill point system used for our weapon, armor and class skills. This is a Elder Scrolls game concept that, in my opinion, was poorly adapted and does not fit with the game mechanics of this MMORPG. The reason this worked in Elder Scrolls games was, because crafting was divided among three skill point lines that we could easily devote points to without suffering in our combat skills. However, in Elder Scrolls Online, it is divided among 6 different crafting professions, each requiring their own point investment. With the current progression of skill points from leveling and finding stones, this makes managing and developing a single crafting skill along side an armor, weapon and class skill cumbersome and difficult. With the abscense of an auction house to easily purchase items produced by other crafters, it's kind of an all or nothing thing. You either invest in a crafting skill to get the benefits or go without it due to a lack of an open trading forum.
- The game combat mechanics seem to be a hybrid between traditional Elder Scrolls games and Guild Wars 2, but produces an awkward end result that doesn't seem to "fit" together well. To highlight this point, let's look at the class skills and the weapon skills. Each line presents 5 abilities and 1 ultimate ability and the setup leads the average player to invest in a weapon skill and a class skill. Despite this, we only have 5 skill slots and an extra slot for the ultimate ability. This means that if were to max out both skill lines, we would never be able to fit all 10 abilities and 2 ultimate abilities into our action bar. This leads to carefully picking and choosing active abilities if we want to invest in more than 1 combat skill line with the knowledge that some will probably never see the light of day, unless we constantly swap out abilities in between battles.
- I suppose weapon swap is the answer to this, but once again, this is a Guild Wars 2 mechanic that has been tooled into the game and doesn't seem to fit. Why? It works in Guild Wars 2, because your first 5 abilities are entirely dependent on the weapon, but doesn't work here, because the class skills are not weapon dependent. So let's say I want to devote one set of skills purely to a weapon's active abilities and the second set purely to my class active abilities. Because this is tied into weapon swap, this means I have to effectively maintain two of the exact same weapon, so I have both available between swapping sets. What if I want to use both a Destruction Staff and Restoration Staff and still invest points into a class skill? This leads us back to my previous point where we don't even come close to using the full potential of any skill line unless we neglect one or the other. Why is there not a separate set of action ability slots for class skills? You clearly designed the game with the intention of a character having both a weapon skill and a class skill. With the extra set, we could fully harness the power of both, making for more interesting gameplay and leaving us with more choices and options. I could effectively max out 2 weapons and a class skill, allowing me to harness the full potential of weapon swap and use the full power of a single class skill alongside each weapon or I could split the points between two class skills, customizing my class action abilities in my own way without my weapon skills suffering at all. Looking at the game mechanics, it's like you almost threw in class skills as an extra when the setup of the action bars was clearly designed for one single weapon skill. It's crazy to have all these skill line options and then have them effectively limited by a such a small number of action skill slots.
- Character development is overly simplified and less diverse than any MMORPG I have played. Seperate mechanics for the development of passive abilities and active abilities have been streamlined into one single system. Stat progression exists as three options, about half of what is available in other MMORPGs. This follows an Elder Scrolls style of game mechanics, which was cool in Elder Scrolls, because character progression was tied into the skill lines. This is the same here, but the difference is in the Elder Scrolls single player games, you could pause the game and use your quick menu to rotate threw all your abilities and use them all in different combinations in a single fight. This is not the case here, because we are effectively limited to using only 5 at once, double that if you manage to tool your ability choices in some non-awkward way into the awkward weapon swap system. This means no matter how much we progress, how many cool abilities we acquire, we are capped at how many we can use in the course of one fight. This cap is half of what is available in Guild Wars 2 and way way less than what is available in WoW. Further more, there is a lack of stat customization to suit a particular play style, because all three stats are so heavily ingrained into all the skills, it makes neglecting one in favor of the other a poor choice.
- The game combat mechanics were clearly designed after Guild Wars 2, but lack the elements that made that particular brand of mechanics so exciting and fun to play. So far, there is no heavy emphasis on skill combos that allowed multiple players to start cooperating together with bare minimum communication and always made the battles incredibly diverse, based on what class builds participated. So far, there is no heavy focus on quick reflexive dodges that can mean life or death. If there is a combo system, it isn't defined in the info windows when selecting abilities, so picking abilities that work together to create combos is a crap shoot. So far, dodge is relatively pointless. The powerful attacks executed by enemies I encountered are so slow, I can just move out of the way without ever using dodge. Combat is just boring and repeatable and made even worse by the heavy limitation of action skill slots.
- The individual passive abilities of the skill lines lack synergy with the exception of the armor, which presents abilities that favor a play style as opposed to a specific skill choice. Passive abilities really benefit the weapon they are invested in and only that weapon, limiting your build options to either being really good at one thing or kind of good at multiple things. The only real option for synergy I see is combining action abilities from different skill lines on your action bar, but once again, this is severely limited by the availability of only 5 action bar slots, far less than any other MMORPG I have played.
- The graphics, while nice, so far, lack the awe and wonder of a Skyrim. The characters I have encountered are mundane, generic and unmemorable. The quests are generic and lack excitement.
- While I haven't done a dungeon, so far, the cooperative experience differs very little from the single player experience. We basically just get quests done faster.
- I haven't participated in PVP, so maybe it's this game's shining gem. But given my disappointment with the game mechanics so far, I fail to see how that's possible.
In conclusion, it's just mundane, simplified and boring. It's tried to appease so many audiences that it fails to shine in any area. It lacks the immersion and awe of a Skyrim, the fluid and dynamic combat system of Guild Wars 2 and the heavy team based design of WoW.
If it becomes free to play, I would probably pick it up and join in on the occasion. But I can't justify paying a subscription fee every month for a game that fails to keep me engaged.
