I have been playing MMO's since the launch of Ultimo online. I have seen great strides since then and lately a lot of the same thing. I jump in new MMO's now and get maybe a few weeks to a month out of them before I get bored. It is a lot of "been there, done that".

So I wanted to ask if this could be different and something new or will it be more of the same?

Feels very much like more of the same to me. I put my faith in Wildstar, but we'll see.

@vash108:
1. What is it youre looking for in an MMO exactly?
2. Are you a fan of the Elder Scrolls series?
3. Do you prefer Dynamic combat or something more like what WoW's Tank DPS Heal system uses?
4 Are you able to take your time in an MMO to explore, or are you the kind that wants to race to endgame?

speaking to people in the Giantbomb guild in the game, most of them are pretty amazed by how well the sidequests have bee

@morningstar: i played Wildstar last week, wasnt blown away by it.. nice art style but not much past that.. it feels a LOT like wow in terms of its combat though the skill trees seemed far more diverse

There is a lengthy Quick Look, that may give you some insight.

Not at all. Nothing new here

@viciousbearmauling: you must have played some really great mmos that ive never heard of before

I'm coming from a different place but, I've played WoW, Guild Wars 2, and this and I'm really liking ESO. The look of the game is really nice and I have to hand it to them because the servers are running strong. Really solid launch.

@grimmie92:

1. I am looking for something to keep me interested. I want something new gameplay wise. I guess it is hard to explain but when I jump in MMO's nowadays I play for about a week and then kinda feel like I hit a wall where I just lose interest or feel like I have done this before. I guess I need to find a good group to run with as well.

UO: was a good example that I feel Elderscrolls borrows from the "leveling up" aspect to where you train by doing. You want to be a wizard, get out there and start using spells to get better.

DAoC: Loved this game for the PVP, it was simply some of the best times I have had online. Sacking castles and enemies actually meant something in that game an opened rewards up for your who faction.

WoW: Was fun for a time but the expansions bounced between casual and hard core too much for me to stick with it. I hate the fact that it turned into a job to keep up to snuff with the newest armor and items to move on, and if you could not get into those big groups to do so you are left behind.

Warhammer: It had a lot of potential but was rushed out far to fast and unfinished. PvP would have been so good if they were given the time to make it playable.

Everquest 1 & 2: It was alright but the lack of the PvP like DAoC i missed. But I enjoyed the exploration and finding new things and seeing where I could get to.

2. I am a fan, not hardcore, but a fan.

3. I like dynamic and something that shys away from the usual cookie cutter roles.

4 I take my time for the most part. I also enjoy playing with others who do so as well.

@vash108: I think we maybe similar. I've played a lot of MMOs since Star Wars Galaxies (Which I played from a couple of months after it came out for 5 years) and then tons of other MMOs after that.

I can only speak to what I've seen of this game, but no. I don't think it will keep you interested. If you're like me, and all MMOs just kind of feel meh fairly quickly, you'll probably enjoy Skyrim more. That's not to say that I think it looks bad, but it just looks like another MMO (and from what I hear the mechanics are poorly thought out).

This is all hear say, what I've seen in videos (I saw the Giantbomb quick look which is 4 hours and I watched Kevin Van Ords live stream as well), and speculation though. I haven't played it. I just know me and how I feel about MMOs anymore.

It really is a lot like chasing the dragon at this point.

@vash108:
1. The only game ive played on your list above is WoW but from what i hear ESO, GW2 and DAoC share a similar style of PvP 3 factions, keeps to take resources to capture etc, what made me really excited about the PvP in ESO from my time in the beta is the potential for actualy tactics, if you look at this map of Cyrodiil Ill explain what i mean.

The three factions start in different corners, each keep is connected by a line of the factions colour, this means that they can travel to any keep connected by that line (unless under attack) this is really cool because witha large enough force you could take a keep near the enemies base and cut off the majority of reinforcements as new players loading in wont be able to join the battlefield unless they run, which takes ~5 mins to get between each keep (ignore the numbers and stuff on the map, i have no idea where this image is from i just linked it as it was the first i found)

Anywho, from what ive heard of people who played DAoC, theyre having a blast in ESO's Alliance War

In terms of the combat itsself.. it is a pretty decent cross of Skyrim and Guild Wars 2, you have 5 skills and your ultimate, at level you can unlock a second weapon set and assign separate skills to that weapon setup, that is very GW2, and several MMOs have done similar things, it is more interesting than GW2 in that instead of having your ulti just be on a cooldown, you build "ultimate" (a separate resource to magicka and stamina) by playing with skill, blocking an enemy's hit, or taking advantage of them while in a confused state etc builds your ultimate, then you can unleash it. There is also a decent variety of ultimate skills, as a sorceror one of mine can call down a storm atronarch, using all my ultimate and it will fight alongside me for a while, another imbues me with lighting and basically gives me full on force lightning - sith lord style, this is a toggle and i can turn it on and off as long as i have ultimate to drain.

The Skyrim-ness comes from the combat mechanics; you block, stun, light attack, heavy attack, pop potions, eat food, enchant weapons, use stealth and terrain to your advantage, mages can lay traps on the ground and lure enemies into them causing explosive aoe damage for example. the emphasis on dodge rolls and blocking in this game is massive compared to most MMOs ive played where shields just give a flat defence rating, the skill lines for "One Hand and Shield" gives bonus damage for shield bash, reduce the stamina cost of blocking etc.. you could compare it to dark souls, but this game isnt such a bastard all the time. :)

2. If you enjoyed the feel of the world and will recognise certain references to skyrim or other TES games i think youll have a great time exploring, and there is plenty to explore. I recently finished the third island for the Aldmeri Dominion, i thought i was done and was headed towards the side of the map that would lead me to the next zone, i found 3 more quests on the way out of the map and one public dungeon.

3. The roles are kind of crazy, obviously people have min-maxed the crap out of this game before it even released, but almost any build is viable, there are people who swear by a mage who uses a bow, because it uses both stamina and magicka so you never run out of skills to use, heavy armoured (or at least partly so) mages are great, I use mostly light armour for mana regen, but i have so much regen at this point ive reached diminishing returns so i put on a few pieces of steel heavy armour, shoulders and greaves, not only does it look totally badass, but it has dramatically increased my survivability without losing any major advantage that full light armour would have had, others have gone full heavy armour and carry a healing staff and are virtually indestructible.

4.If you played Skyrim, youll know what good voice acting can do for an RPG Ive been claiming in the forums against popular opinion that all RPGs are boring fetch quests and kill (x) number of (y) animals quests etc, recently i was playing Skyrim and discovered that even slaying dragons was a quest, given to me by the Bar-keep in the local tavern because he heard that there was a dragon terrorising a town.. So the only thing that sets single player RPG questing and MMORPG questing apart, is whether you feel like you care about the quest or not, which often comes down to the voice acting and script, ZOS has done a superb job on delivering both for Elder Scrolls Online, if you take the time to listen to dialogue this game can really grow on you, if you care about the world that is.

If you have any specific questions feel free to ask away, im only picking flowers on ESO atm anyway :)

As a former DAoC player, the PvP in this game sounds right up my alley. Like something I've been dying to have back for years and years. I bought the game earlier today and just finished downloading.

It's funny because I just couldn't get into Oblivion or Skyrim. The lore and setting sounded great but the first person view and awkward combat / character actions just completely ruined my time and I didn't play much more than that. I've watched enough of this game to see that there isn't that strange zoom in on characters ugly faces when you're talking to them, which is nice. This game will allow me to play and fight in third person too, and in doing so, will alleviate a lot of what I didn't enjoy in previous Elder Scrolls games. It's like I'm having my cake and eating it too with that and the PvP (I hope).

the PvP sounds like it may be something I enjoy. Is there friend codes or a trial yet?

@vash108: sadly no, but with the free month of play time you could probably play through the story and play a fair amount of pvp, then call it a day before you get charged for a sub. Personally I went for a 3 month sub because I'm really enjoying this game and being the GL of the giant bomb guild I want to organise some pvp get-togethers a few months in once a bunch of the members have settled on how they want to play, people are still re-rolling characters to try new classes so getting a decent group of above lvl 10s (required for pvp) is proving challenging.

More like... Elder...eh.. bores.. on toilet. Amirite. Seriously, it's looks unbelievably generic.

i think jeff's idea of limiting games to 64 players was the way to go. still an immersive sandbox world that other players can fuck with and cause repercussions for your game.

but the real future may lie in something more like everquest next where thy throw in the user generated stuff, at least for the more hardcore sect. it'll be hard to strike the balance between innovative and user-friendly.

@avantegardener: hush now child, the grownups are trying to have a conversation here

@ripelivejam: To be fair, Zenimax Online Studios wanted to create an MMO, while what you are describing might be a fine enough game, it wouldnt be an MMO, and plenty of people out there have been wanting an Elder Scrolls MMO, myself included.

the game needs instancing, but running private servers, or joining servers that only support 64 players at a time would have been a far lesser experience, the player-run economy would not exist as we know it now. Not to mention the PvP, when Cyrodiil shards were intended to support 200 players on screen at a time, and a count of several times that for the entire map, making it even 90 players so it could be 30vs30vs30, the map would be far less interesting.

As for your forecast of things to come, I can only speak for myself but i am not a content creator, nor have I any interested in creating game for the developers. while influencing the world is fun, giving gamers control over it gets messy so i would venture a guess that anything the players change will be either temporary or limited by the number of areas you can construct on, which sounds far less awesome than Minecraft the MMO which is what everyone is claiming this game to be.

With others who aren't familiar with MMOs I put it like this: They should have went with the DayZ approach. That is where ZM/Bethesda should have tried to make their money where they sell players the box and either sell the software as a service or rent out the servers themselves.

I have not played the full game, only a beta weekend, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.

a) I think that ESO does provide a breath of fresh air on some aspects of the MMO experience. I think going to first person perspective and giving relatively 1:1 controls on attacking and blocking are huge advances even if I have reservations about the implementation of each.

b) I think that neither of these is going to stave off your ennui in the long run, because I think that those things come from a conditioned indifference to the small, frequent reward schedule that MMOs are built on. ESO still has you working on a half dozen quests at a time that take about ten minutes each to complete, and if you're like me (your background is similar, judging by the games you mention) it just doesn't take long to get tired of a treadmill like that, regardless of the content and mechanics surrounding it.

Edit: A great example of this was Age of Reckoning, which wasn't even an MMO, but it had that same quest structure and I was done with that game after a week.

Can a hardened long term been there done that seen it all and got a t-shirt about it mmo player find something to enjoy in this game? Short answer. Yes.

The mechanics are different from other MMO's, again the quick look does it no favors. Obviously the mechanics aren't going to be that deep at level 5 in a newbie zone. When you get that second weapon slot, start morphing skills, get access to ultimates, and have enough skills that gee you can't slot everything and you can start building skill bars for specific things.... it starts to get good. This is the only mmo I have ever played where first person seems like a reasonable way to play it at any time period. No it isn't great in grouping if you are anything other than a DPS. That shouldn't really shock anyone though should it? That said the fact that first person is even viable as a play mode should tell you a lot about how different this game can feel from other mmo's.

Combat is fine, you just need to get higher level and earn more skills before it opens up. There are classes but they are still very open, in theory you could play a character and never even learn a single skill from your class line. It would be odd for someone to do that but it is totally possible. You can also fill any role as any class even though some have advantages. You can wear any armor as any class and it can be perfectly viable, most players right now say you should actually run a mix and not wear just one or the other. There is just a ton of depth to the character creation and skills.

Also of course there is a story to experience and play through, which is at least equal to the story/plot of Skyrim. While Skyrim is more "open" the game will eventually feature all the same staples. There is already a fighters and mages guild, the thieves guild and dark brotherhood are coming in later, you can visit literally every major province of Tamriel, all npc's are voiced (even if there is repetition, not like other Bethesda games have that issue...), all of that Elder Scrolls lore is still there too. This game even has over 250 lore books written specifically for it alone. So if the world of the Elder Scrolls is your thing it is there.

So all that said, is the game an MMO. Yes. Is it a WoW Clone? No. If someone tells you it is they have no clue what they are talking about and either never played the game or played it through like a level 5 zone and quit. The start sucks, yes terrible terrible, but then the start of every MMO sucks so can you blame it too much?

It's a game with a confused identity and goal. It's attempting to mold the mechanics of an Elder Scrolls game into an MMORPG cookie cutter. The MMO aspects of this game are tried and true, boring quests until max level, farm for gear (EQ/WOW), PvP is tried and true tri-realm formula that was successful in DAOC and Warhammer Online. What is lacking to me, after a few betas and owning the game, is that it misses the mark that made Elder Scrolls games fun, in my opinion; the sense of adventure!

Morrrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were realms of possibility, where instead of going to Quest A, you took a left turn and hours later find yourself completely off the beaten path with stories to tell your buddies on what happened. ESO is essentially on rails, you are stuck to that zone until you reach the level for the next, and the next and the next. I just cannot get into this game, it's entirely boring to me after 10 minutes in and I log-out. Furthermore, the sense of immersion is deadened by the requirement to lower fidelity to reach a larger user base, Skyrim held back no punches; there is a great video below on IGN comparing Windhelm between the two games. However, some seem to enjoy it, but this is not revolution, it's a cash grab.

@vonsoot: That video is kind of hilarious in how it's blatantly making ESO look like shit while actively avoiding saying anything to that effect.

"Look how different the layout of these cities are! In Skyrim, the stables are outside the city, but in ESO, they're inside!" Video zooms in on crappy looking ESO horse for like ten seconds, then compares to high resolution Skyrim horse.

@vonsoot: while what you are saying is at least not bashful like the rest of the Giant Bomb trolls and you actually purchased the game, id like to point out that the MMO aspects you described are present in TES games as well, boring quests and farming are known tropes of the series. and i wouldnt describe TES as "on rails", more like a theme park, you get on a ride (and island) ans you go around it, maybe even a couple of time.. but then you can move to the next one. Theyre also claiming at lvl 50 they will scale all mobs to your level, so you can go to another alliances starter zone and be challenged by the level 3 mudcrabs (cant promise this as im only lvl 24 after a week, but thats what they said)

While the game isnt massively detailed it looks gorgeous on max graphics, something you cannot claim about Vanilla Skyrim, sure, after plugging it full with Add-ons and running it on a $5000 rig it is the most beautiful game ever created, but that isnt a fair comparison. All but the horses seem to be of a higher resolution in ESO than it was in Skyrim and the art style is magnificent, I havent been to Skyrim yet in ESO, but The Summerset Isles are absolutely amazing in their art direction.

It is unfortunate that you can't seem to get the immersion you are looking for, but I can say i've found it. Isn't every videogame ever just a cashgrab?

I've been having a lot of fun with the game, the PvP has really caught my attention and so far the quest have been supported by high quality VO that if you take the time to at least pay attention to whats going on has been a step above the rest of what I have played in an MMO so that with the PvP and I have been having a great time.

Holy shit, you mean in a 1000 year time shift a City changes how it looks? OMG!!!!!!!!

Meanwhile what annoys me is this cash grab nonsense people keep saying. You don't invest MILLIONS in a making an MMO as a "cash grab" it doesn't work like that. It costs too much money and time to make an MMO for it to ever be anything resembling a "cash grab". "Cash grabs" are about fast, easy, and cheap ways of making money. ESO is not a fast, easy, or cheap way of doing that. If they wanted that this would be a microtransaction mobile based card collecting game.

@karkarov: did you just describe hearthstone on purpose? or was that a legit accident?

Dude look up the most profitable apps on the google play store for example. Other than Candy Crush all of them will be card games.

People think it is a cash grab because the designs show lack of "imagination" in either the TES or MMO direction. That doesn't mean it is cheap or easy or sinister but it does seem to show they weren't very interested in the game as much as the name "The Elder Scrolls" which is complaint echoed multiple times.

I will not be surprised if it turns out Hearthstone makes a metric ton of money for Blizzard. This model, a model Valve uses as well, seems to be the way to go if you can afford it where they end up leveraging multiple properties through multiple games: You win something in one game, you win something in another. You buy something in one game, something is delivered in another. This only really works if some or all of the games are cheap or free to access.

@extomar: for the large part what you are talking about is preorder bonuses, ive yeat to earn a single thing in a blizzard or valve game that has affected another game, even purchased for that matter, outside of buying collectors/preorder versions of the game which gives bonuses to their other properties. Id also like to point out that not a single on of the Blizzard properties is cheap or free other than Hearthstone, if you wish to earn these crossgame rewards that is.

One of my best friends IRL complained because ESO broke away from the genre in such a way that he (whose latest and probably most played MMO under his belt is WoW) couldnt comprehend to be a good thing. The issue he had was the lack of a Global Auction House.

• MMOs have for a long time been using AHs, but for the large part only MMOs that have you locked to a single server are after creating your character making the market limited (WoW, SWTOR, GW2).
• Other MMOs, some of which let you swap between server shards (and the community normally chooses a certain shard to be the primary Trading Shard) let you create a shop in a map that is determined by the developers to be the "Marketplace" of the game, and you can put your items up for sale, anyone who clicks on your little stall can browse youre wares (Conquer Online, Battle of the Immortals)
• Elder Scrolls Online achieves a very good hybrid in its method, the only way to sell an item to other players other than direct trade is to use a guild store. every guild with over 50 members can have a store (admittedly this requirement is a little steep) and these stores are exclusive to members of said guild, the only way for outsiders to browse the wares of the guild is if that guild has conquered a keep in Cyrodiil (the PvP map) and claimed it for the Guild. at this point anyone of that alliance can click on an NPC and buy items in the guild's store. If you wish to experience the market at large you can join up to 5 player-made guilds so you could have access to the wares of up to 2,495 people and players have already taken to creating "East Empire Trading Co." and other such guilds that will be guilds purely for trading, they are not your friends, they will likely crank up the prices for their own benefit. But if you create a guild with your friends, or as I did, with the userbase of the Giant Bomb Community, you can police your own prices, and create a micro-economy that is free from the pressure of the market at large, sell things for below NPC prices to help guild mates, or buy from the guild store instead of an NPC to give your Guild-mate the gold he desperately needs to feed his horse.

If that isnt Innovation, or Imagination, or Creativity i dont know what is. It fits lore much better than the sentiment that there is a person who exists in every town in the game simultaneously and has a backpack that contains every item ever conceived that is willing to sell it to you for a cut of the profit which will go to some random person you cant even be sure really exists. It also helps keep the market in check because the market is no loner global, if you dont like the prices in a guild, you can go elsewhere, join the Aldmeri Traders Union instead.

No.

It's actually got me hooked so far. I played a shit load of WoW, and a decent amount of GW, and I was expecting ESO to be some shitty copy of every other MMO out there so I honestly never paid attention to it until it launched. After briefly watching the quick look it turned me off more just from the negative and dismissive feedback from the gang, but I was impressed at least that it looked like an Elder Scrolls game and that they didn't do what Bioware did with the Old Republic. After watching some youtube vids, and some developer video about a dungeon challenge thing, I decided since it didn't look awful I should just buy it and see for myself already. I'm really impressed. It immediately had me feeling nostalgic as if I was playing Morrowind again, but with modern textures and mechanics of course. The nitpicks I saw from the quick look basically didn't apply to my experience at all. First off, they got it wrong when they said you can be any race no matter what alliance you were part of, just to clear that up. The 3rd person camera is over the shoulder because you need the crosshairs for targeting (no clicking or tabbing your targets). The inventory is a list of items, and not a grid of slots because it's not WoW, it's an Elder Scrolls game. When you walk into a room you can basically pick up anything aside from the furniture, and it's easy enough to click the weapons tab or whatever when you want to find something. It's also not really the kind of game for a group of friends to all watch. It's more fun to play at your own pace and immerse yourself into it, which is easy enough when they do such a good job with the quests and story telling. Seriously I'm used to WoW where I had an addon that automatically accepted or completed quests because I didn't give a shit, I just wanted my pay. It was like work. In ESO I'm playing it like a proper RPG and just taking my time. Writing all this was hard because I just want to play ESO now that I got off work but I felt like there needs to be some positive feedback since so many people dismissed it entirely.

Diablo 3 was pretty cheap for me a bunch of others. As long as you sustained your subscription for the promised period, you got it free. You get items and pets in WoW for buying Diablo 3. You got items in Diablo 3 for buying Starcraft 2. Today you can get a mount in WoW for playing Heartstone. You can get free packs in Heartstone for buying Diablo 3 RoS. So on and so on. Valve does the same thing it is far more expensive: Buy a game and get something in one of Valve's games. The point is to get you in the system for free and seamless. If you have to put more money in or even click an additional button to receive these things then it wouldn't work.

Server/shards are becoming archaic where even the oldest games have started to move away from them due to advancements in tech. Even WoW which couldn't function originally with server populations of 1000 split into hundreds of servers with queue times now has "cross-realm areas" and "virtual realms" which render the idea of a server just an extra name stuck onto your name like "Joe from California". New games going forward will gravitate away from "shards".

As for the economy, really Guild Wars 2 is closest to the best where items float in "escrow" or "commodity markets" which means the system will have everything but special and the rarest items for sale with high availability to buy when you need it and the prices free float depending on people selling to the system and people buying out of the system instead of directly set by any player. That is the "fairest" system because there are ways to game markets in both cases with "low pop" and "high pop" server markets (the thing that stops WoW from doing even 'battleground markets' today). The GW system could go farther to float on time and money which gets even closer to what EVE almost accomplishes.

This particular thing about MMOs is kind of a fascinating side topic because the issue to make it fairer and more efficient actually breaks the RPG-ness of games. If you really believe the players have to run the market then it is inefficient and slow and behaves a lot like "classic auction houses" but if you go for an advanced, easy to use and highly automated one then it becomes more like MX which isn't realistic at all for a fantasy/sword-sorcery setting...unless you have an army of goblins who do nothing but double entry book keeping. :)

So sure...ESO is very imaginative....I guess since they aren't solving things that are really problems using a business model that is being deprecated by other schemes. They get points for uniqueness.

I have to ask. Have you even played the game? Did you play it in one beta weekend like a month ago for like an hour or two? People get it, you don't like the game. That's fine you don't have to. It is just getting really odd that every time someone posts something positive or at least lukewarm you have to come into the thread and say something negative. So if you don't have anything to add other than "ESO is shit" maybe could you just move on? Trust me, we got the message.

With the huge wellspring of negativity about the game online I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed it, and continue to enjoy it.

It definitely isn't a WoW style game, and it really feels to me far more like a multiplayer Elder Scrolls game than it does an Elder Scrolls themed MMO.

I don't know if it has what you need to be engaged with it, but I know it isn't the same thing as all the other MMOs (some of which I have really loved) over and over again.

The flexibility of builds themselves is insane. It isn't lip service either, they each can do anything. Melee dps, ranged dps, tanking, healing, it is all viable to each of the four classes but with a different flavor and strengths/weakness that they bring to it. It takes work, you can't be playing a sword and board tank the entire time and immediately change to a healer/archer. You need to build up weapon proficiencies, and it really rewards foresight. A real drawback to it is not getting your second weapon bar until level 15 (which is NOT an insignificant amount of time to get to), leaving you feeling fairly hamstrung early on, especially if you want to be gaining experience in a weapon you aren't currently using.

There are some build paths that make way more sense with a specific race/class combo, like the absolute lack of a stamina regen ability for sorcerers making sorcerers wanting to build around weapon combat almost have to choose Redguard for their powerful stamina racials. Also something that can hopefully be addressed.

Buying/Selling is a NIGHTMARE and there's a potential for the economy to be just fucked, leaving people to self or guild sufficiency, but hopefully they improve on that.

So yeah, long story really short: it is absolutely worth trying if the box cost with the included 30 days game time isn't prohibitive to you.

@extomar: Diablo, Starcraft and WoW Expansions cost approximately the same as buying ESO..

The rest of your message i cant even be bothered replying to, im too busy playing ESO to care about your negative nancy attitude