Elder Scrolls Online: First Month of Launch

Elder Scrolls Online released a month ago and while the game is stunningly beautiful, did it live up to my expectations of perfection once I started playing the game on a daily basis?  Complicated question with a short answer, not really.

Don’t misunderstand, I love the game.  I love the depth of character immersion and questing.  I love that I can get lost and uncover quests I would have otherwise missed and that not every NPC is young, fit, and wrinkle free. 

What I’m not loving is the inventory management nightmare and the horribly unbalanced gains in crafting.  It makes no sense that provisioning (cooking) can be leveled to the maximum before a player reaches level fifteen but any other skill you are lucky if you make it to level ten.  Enchanting is the worst of all the skills with the least available raw materials out in the world.  It levels slower than a glacier moves and deconstructing every glyph you craft for a slightly larger miniscule gain is frustrating and irrational.

Inventory management is a mini-game all it’s own.  I don’t mind the high costs associated with increasing bag and bank space.  I would prefer it if I got more space for my gold however.  What truly irritates me to no end is that each and every time I open my bank it is sorted automatically from Z to A and not A to Z.  This one thing makes me grind my teeth every time I open the bank.  I love that there is shared storage, what I don’t love is that there is no individual storage.  Having to create characters just to hold crafting goods, maps, pets, etc. is poor game design.

The director’s letter just released did not give me hope.  There is no mention of housing, not one.  Housing is an integral part of every Elder Scrolls game since Morrowind.  Housing had the potential to solve inventory issues for a lot of players.  Instead, they are working on horse racing?  Really?  Horse racing is a quality of life improvement?  I could care less that other players will now have the ability to kill guards and NPC’s.  All that is going to lead to is an unplayable world where quest givers can be killed by the bored to irritate others.

So now the question becomes, do we renew our subscriptions and give Zenimax and Bethesda the benefit of the doubt?  Or, do we rationally cut our losses now and wait for the bots and gold spam to lessen while the game loses players at an incredible rate?  I’m on the fence.  Part of me desperately wants to play ESO and love it and lose myself in the world but the other part of me is extremely tired of reporting gold farmers, dealing with botters, shuffling inventory, and crafting skills.

I do know that right now, as the game stands it is beautiful, immersive, and frustrating.  I can’t imagine it will be that much better on the consoles either.  Speaking of consoles, not a word of a beta is mentioned in the producer’s letter and not a hint of if they will hit their target release date of June.  My guess is that it will be pushed back.  And honestly, the game is either going to be much better on the console or so frustrating controllers will be flung across rooms globally.

I’ll confess, I haven’t logged into ESO in almost a week.  We have been playing SWTOR and enjoy ourselves.  I will log into ESO this week but probably more out of guilt than a desire to report gold farmers, botters, and to juggle inventory.  I love the beauty and questing but that experience is marred by the negatives for me at the moment.

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What keeps me long term interested in playing & coming back to ANY game?

I’ve thought about this a lot recently and we will completely discount story for this posting because if any game doesn’t have a great story then there is no chance of keeping me interested for any length of time.

Games must have housing and wardrobe appearance slots.  These two items alone make all the difference in my long term interest in any game.

I played Oblivion eons and ages ago on the XBox 360, heck it was my introduction to the Elder Scrolls IP.  It may not have had the detailed customization options that Morrowind had, which my husband still laments to this day, but I knew I could log-in and my character had a house where she could catch a nap, brew some potions, or just spend the rest of eternity safely. 

Everquest II has done housing and housing customization the flat out best I’ve ever seen in any game.  The options for housing are seemingly endless and the developers, and now the community, continually add to the housing diversity.  All of my EQ2 characters share one house, which I must admit I love.  They’ve all got their alters to their particular gods and their trophies from questing.  I love the pillows strewn about the floor and the critters that roam the home. 

Lord of the Rings Online has a good wardrobe system as does Everquest II (appearance clothing).  However, neither game does it perfectly.  Both have stunningly beautiful armor and clothing models that my characters drool over but they both suffer from the same flaw.  No game offers enough wardrobe space to make it expansive enough to switch outfits as often as I’d like.  The Secret World has a pretty good wardrobe system which is perfect for a game set in the modern world with modern clothing, but a lot of their clothing is geared to a much younger player and none of my characters particularly want to walk around in what I consider slutty clothing.  Rift now offers a decent amount of wardrobe slots for in-game currency or real life cash.  Problem is none of my characters are that rich in-game and I’m not spending real life money on wardrobe slots.

I love the look of this NPC in Everquest II.

My Guardian Hobbit in LOTRO never wears shoes but she does love a jaunty hat and on this fine day in Rivendell she was sporting her favorite hauberk.

The one thing Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 do better than any of their competitors, and the only thing in my opinion, is the dye system.  Collecting dyes and not having them be consumed on use is brilliant and perfect system.  Other games need to adopt this model.  Yes they might lose out on some revenue but they would undoubtedly make up that revenue from players like me that won’t purchase a single use dye.

No game, to date, gets housing or wardrobe perfect.  Rift has a goodly number of wardrobe slots but dyes are consumed on use and they don’t have pink dyes.  Rift does have housing but it has yet to make an emotional connection with me.  The Secret World has a decent wardrobe closet but the clothes are too revealing and cannot be dyed.  Guild Wars 2 only has the dye system in it’s favor.  Everquest II has phenomenal and extensive housing but no dyes and limited wardrobe to one outfit.  My characters NEED many, many more wardrobe slots in Everquest Next!  The clothing and armor in the Everquest franchise is so well done and so varied texturally that limiting appearance clothing to one slot is simply criminal.  Lord of the Rings Online has beautiful clothing but dyes are consumed on use and wardrobe storage and slots are too limited.  LOTRO housing is also lacking in comparison with Everquest franchise.

 

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Aww Crap

 

Ok, this, The Elder Scrolls Online, is going to be truly amazing or truly awful an Elder Scrolls MMO.  I LOVED Oblivion and HATED Skyrim with a passion.  I’m very pleased to learn that the MMO is set a millennium before Skyrim.  That means the world created in Elder Scrolls will make sense and won’t be full of the dark, racist crap that was Skyrim.  I started gaming long after Morrowind was released and I tried to play it several times.  I can’t get past the graphics unfortunately, but I love the story.  Hubby played and loved Morrowind however. 

We both hated Skyrim after more than 30 hours of game play.  The Dark Brotherhood lost it’s focus, the Thieves Guild was pathetic, and the Nords turned into a community of xenophobes.  Heck even the Imperial were pathetic in Skyrim.  Hubby finished the game but I haven’t yet.  Killing the never ending stream of dragons was old and boring after a while, and no challenge.  And another pet peeve of mine … the OVER simplification and leveling in Skyrim was out of control.  Seriously, crafting gains you experience levels? 

So yes, I hate Skyrim and I love the Elder Scrolls franchise.  I’m hopeful that the developers, who thankfully are NOT associated with Skyrim, do not follow the mistakes made in the game.  At this point, despite it’s proposed release date of 2013, I’m taking a wait and see attitude.