613 replies to this topic

[Silent The Legend]

Robsy128, on 29 January 2013 - 06:18 PM, said:

Wait... so I could be in a level 5 area and a level 50 could come along and kill me from behind? That sounds like fun!

I'm not really too fond of being a specific role forever, anyway. I know you can probably pay a trainer or something so you can respec your character, but I love the option of just switching roles with the touch of a button. This is done in many games today and even in GW2, so I can't see why MMOs in development today want to stick to the same formula that has been tried and tested so many times. Where's the innovation?

This ain't no innovation, because, as almost everyone clearly sees, this game is just the next moneygrab. Copy-paste WoW, put Elder scrolls lore in, but I guess you know how it works. And the (little)info theyve released doesnt make me change my mind.

Or I might be wrong and they are working on the superduper MMO of the generation. Which is quite unlikely since the company has no clue whatsoever on how to make MMOs, and even if they had, they would have no reason to make it since... ya know, its ELDER SCROLLS!

[Arquenya]

Robsy128, on 29 January 2013 - 06:18 PM, said:

Wait... so I could be in a level 5 area and a level 50 could come along and kill me from behind? That sounds like fun!

As far as I've read, players from different factions can't enter the levelling zones from other factions.
So apparently it's not one big open world PvP game.

Robsy128, on 29 January 2013 - 06:18 PM, said:

I'm not really too fond of being a specific role forever, anyway. I know you can probably pay a trainer or something so you can respec your character, but I love the option of just switching roles with the touch of a button. This is done in many games today and even in GW2, so I can't see why MMOs in development today want to stick to the same formula that has been tried and tested so many times. Where's the innovation?

As far as I know there's nothing been said about respec costs or how choosing your favourite setup exactly works. But the fact that roles aren't very much predetermined by your class already seems a step forward compared to many other MMOs around. It may be not as extremely versatile as GW but probably more flexible than GW2.

Edit:

• Q: Can you change your character role in the middle of raids?
  
• A: Yes.  As long as you are not in combat, you are able to slot your different abilities the way you want to.  If your healer dies, you are able to run out of combat, change, pick up your healing staff and come back in.

Edited by Arquenya, 29 January 2013 - 09:48 PM.

[Robsy128]

That does clear some stuff up - thanks! At least I know it won't be as bad as I imagined when I read your last post haha.

[Heart Collector]

Arquenya, on 29 January 2013 - 08:07 PM, said:

As far as I've read, players from different factions can't enter the levelling zones from other factions.
So apparently it's not one big open world PvP game.

And thank god for that! I don't think too many Elder Scrolls fans would take too kindly to non-consentual open world PvP. I wouldn't either for that matter, it's not my proverbial cup of tea.

[Rune100]

Hoping for the best and I will sign up myself. I will not try and bash the game already before trying it out myself, I've had enough of the whole "WoW vs GW2 vs SWTOR vs Secret world" fanboy discussion.

[Soki]

Rune100, on 29 January 2013 - 11:17 PM, said:

Hoping for the best and I will sign up myself. I will not try and bash the game already before trying it out myself, I've had enough of the whole "WoW vs GW2 vs SWTOR vs Secret world" fanboy discussion.

Making comparisons to other MMOs is a good way to see how well a new one will fare.
It just so happens that the big name - WoW - is an easy comparison to make with every other hotbar-MMO, because every other hotbar-MMO borrows from its success (just as it borrowed from EQ's).

I see a lot of TOR in TESO. I don't see much promise in it, especially based on what they've shown us. (Algonians literally look like humans, with long faces and tails; the combat is choppy and indicative of Skyrim with more stiff animations; their proposal for phasing/instancing of quests is remniscent of GW1, in the bad ways).

[Own Age Myname]

Don't know if anyone mentioned this, but you can apparently fill out a survey and based on the answers you'll be paired on a shard of like minded individuals, pretty cool thing. Small, but small things add up. Something GW2 failed to do. (not trying to bait anyone who still likes GW2, just saying small things like this add up, for me atleast which is something MMOs, recently GW2, have failed to do)

Edited by Own Age Myname, 31 January 2013 - 06:58 AM.

[Ashreaver]

Signed up for the beta ..
Although I do not think skyrim type combat will transfer well to an mmo...
I'm willing to try first, judge later.

[Illein]

Own Age Myname, on 31 January 2013 - 06:55 AM, said:

Don't know if anyone mentioned this, but you can apparently fill out a survey and based on the answers you'll be paired on a shard of like minded individuals, pretty cool thing. Small, but small things add up. Something GW2 failed to do. (not trying to bait anyone who still likes GW2, just saying small things like this add up, for me atleast which is something MMOs, recently GW2, have failed to do)

Sounds like a good feature!

[Menehune]

Own Age Myname, on 31 January 2013 - 06:55 AM, said:

Don't know if anyone mentioned this, but you can apparently fill out a survey and based on the answers you'll be paired on a shard of like minded individuals, pretty cool thing. Small, but small things add up. Something GW2 failed to do. (not trying to bait anyone who still likes GW2, just saying small things like this add up, for me atleast which is something MMOs, recently GW2, have failed to do)

I'm having problems reconciling this with the "one big serverless/shardless world where you can always play with your friends" concept. Earlier I commented on the feature where you say I want to play with him/her/them and you or they will be moved to the same "version of the world", one of many running on all servers. Seems similar to but not quite the same as districts in GW. The two features seem to conflict IMO. Am I misunderstanding something here?

[Specialz]

Is it true that each faction can ONLY access 1/3 of the world in PvE, so playing i a specific faction means you lose the other 66.67 percent of content? (note I heard it on massively from some guy).

[Own Age Myname]

Menehune, on 31 January 2013 - 12:36 PM, said:

I'm having problems reconciling this with the "one big serverless/shardless world where you can always play with your friends" concept. Earlier I commented on the feature where you say I want to play with him/her/them and you or they will be moved to the same "version of the world", one of many running on all servers. Seems similar to but not quite the same as districts in GW. The two features seem to conflict IMO. Am I misunderstanding something here?

Yeah I'm a bit confused on it also. If you don't believe me look up "22 reasons to be excited for ESO", cba to find it right now.

[Heart Collector]

Specialz, on 31 January 2013 - 05:21 PM, said:

Is it true that each faction can ONLY access 1/3 of the world in PvE, so playing i a specific faction means you lose the other 66.67 percent of content? (note I heard it on massively from some guy).

I think so. Nothing is stopping us from rolling characters of different factions I guess (though we don't know how many characters we'll be able to make). I think I read somewhere that we can have characters of different factions, but don't quote me on this... IF it's possible I'd probably have a soldier type on one faction, a roguish dude on another and a caster on the third.

Also... I guess if the zones are big enough, this shouldn't be too much of an issue... But it remains to be seen.

[TGIFrisbie]

Specialz, on 31 January 2013 - 05:21 PM, said:

Is it true that each faction can ONLY access 1/3 of the world in PvE, so playing i a specific faction means you lose the other 66.67 percent of content? (note I heard it on massively from some guy).

In DAoC this was enforced.  It was RvR, each realm had it's own races, it's own classes (though each were just deviations of those in the other 2 realms), etc.  Originally on the Test Server you could play in all 3 realms, also not sure what may have changed later I only played the game for the first 6 months after release before I confessed to myself I was paying to beta their crap.

[Edge]

Specialz, on 31 January 2013 - 05:21 PM, said:

Is it true that each faction can ONLY access 1/3 of the world in PvE, so playing i a specific faction means you lose the other 66.67 percent of content? (note I heard it on massively from some guy).

This is how it works in RvR games like Dark Age of Camelot and Regnum Online. Not sure, but you'll probably only be able to play in a single realm at once. You most likely won't be able to play with multiple characters in multiple realms. Some people have separate accounts for each realm though, the popular term for this is "multirealming".

[Arquenya]

Edge, on 31 January 2013 - 11:20 PM, said:

This is how it works in RvR games like Dark Age of Camelot and Regnum Online. Not sure, but you'll probably only be able to play in a single realm at once. You most likely won't be able to play with multiple characters in multiple realms. Some people have separate accounts for each realm though, the popular term for this is "multirealming".

As far as I've read, you can have a character in each realm in TESO.
With one "megaserver" it's just not possible to have a character of a different faction on another server, like WoW.

Basically you have 3 seperate areas with eash their own style and storyline and (perhaps) even their own dungeons.
But the idea of 3 seperate worlds sounds ok to me. As long as they're all enjoyable and big enough.

[Own Age Myname]

Arquenya, on 01 February 2013 - 07:45 AM, said:

As far as I've read, you can have a character in each realm in TESO.
With one "megaserver" it's just not possible to have a character of a different faction on another server, like WoW.

Basically you have 3 seperate areas with eash their own style and storyline and (perhaps) even their own dungeons.
But the idea of 3 seperate worlds sounds ok to me. As long as they're all enjoyable and big enough.

Considering they are each provinces (more then 1 province per faction), I sure hope the scale is huge.

[Fishman]

I just hope they do the scale justice and don't cop out. For instance: we KNOW how big Cyrodiil is. We've played Oblivion. This means that the zone has to be at least that big.  Same thing with Skyrim. If they don't cop out on this, then we're going to have a massive world in which one can truly be immersed. Of course, scale isn't everything, gameplay and combat is important too, but from what I've seen it seems like they're going with a combination of the mousedriven combat from the other TES-games coupled with actionbar spells/skills. Which is totally fine in my opinion.
They also seem to have it down graphicswise so what I'm worried about at the moment are the more social and end-game aspects

Will there be proper incentives to form guilds?

GW2 didn't do very well at this. There is no reason to form a guild at all, other than having some structure in WvWvW. Meaning only those who like PvP have any incentive to guild up. In this aspect, I'd say that WoW (Yes, the game that everyone seems to hate) had far better guild-incentives, simply because of the reason that: You can't DO everything unless you have a certain amount of people.

Crap, this post is getting long, but I need to convey these feelings.

Players need to be FORCED to cooperate. To do this, we must identify what players WANT.

The answer is simple: Players want gratification , instant as well as having an overarching goal, WoW solved this by having dungeons, and raids.
Easing up access of said gratification significantly lowers its worth. More people with the same thing == less unique == less sense of acknowledgement and achievement == boring.

In essence, people want to be the "Special snowflake" Standing around in Stormwind with their epic gear.
Some try to construe this as negative and egotistical, but fact remains that this is how people work. There isn't a single person in the world who doesn't want to be perceived as superior/unique/special. It's basic human behaviour and should be taken into account when making a game.

This also means that a progression ladder should be maintained. WoW got rid of this in WOTLK and suffered a huge player loss because of it. Essentially, a lot of people left because the game got too "Casual". That may, again, sound very elitist, and Blizzard's reason for removing it was basically that only 2% of the total population got to experience the very end-raids.

However, there was a big flaw with their solution (Which was introducing badges to "skip tiers").
It basically meant that:

Instead of a small percentage of the players seeing the majority of the raids,
a large percentage of the players now get to see a minority of the raids.

I confirmed this in April when I bought 1 month of WoW. In this 1 month. I leveled from 80-85, got full epic gear and raided Deathwing. Skipping A LOT of content simply by buying gear with badges.

A long rant but vital to the point I'm making.

For a game to be successful, I believe the social/guild aspect to be of outmost importance. To enable this. We need a "gratification incentive" to guide the masses.


TL;DR --  I think we should look at what made WoW so addictive and inject it into TESO.

[Heart Collector]

Fishman, on 01 February 2013 - 10:27 AM, said:

I just hope they do the scale justice and don't cop out. For instance: we KNOW how big Cyrodiil is. We've played Oblivion. This means that the zone has to be at least that big.  Same thing with Skyrim. If they don't cop out on this, then we're going to have a massive world in which one can truly be immersed. Of course, scale isn't everything, gameplay and combat is important too, but from what I've seen it seems like they're going with a combination of the mousedriven combat from the other TES-games coupled with actionbar spells/skills. Which is totally fine in my opinion.
They also seem to have it down graphicswise so what I'm worried about at the moment are the more social and end-game aspects

Will there be proper incentives to form guilds?

GW2 didn't do very well at this. There is no reason to form a guild at all, other than having some structure in WvWvW. Meaning only those who like PvP have any incentive to guild up. In this aspect, I'd say that WoW (Yes, the game that everyone seems to hate) had far better guild-incentives, simply because of the reason that: You can't DO everything unless you have a certain amount of people.

Crap, this post is getting long, but I need to convey these feelings.

Players need to be FORCED to cooperate. To do this, we must identify what players WANT.

The answer is simple: Players want gratification , instant as well as having an overarching goal, WoW solved this by having dungeons, and raids.
Easing up access of said gratification significantly lowers its worth. More people with the same thing == less unique == less sense of acknowledgement and achievement == boring.

In essence, people want to be the "Special snowflake" Standing around in Stormwind with their epic gear.
Some try to construe this as negative and egotistical, but fact remains that this is how people work. There isn't a single person in the world who doesn't want to be perceived as superior/unique/special. It's basic human behaviour and should be taken into account when making a game.

This also means that a progression ladder should be maintained. WoW got rid of this in WOTLK and suffered a huge player loss because of it. Essentially, a lot of people left because the game got too "Casual". That may, again, sound very elitist, and Blizzard's reason for removing it was basically that only 2% of the total population got to experience the very end-raids.

However, there was a big flaw with their solution (Which was introducing badges to "skip tiers").
It basically meant that:

Instead of a small percentage of the players seeing the majority of the raids,
a large percentage of the players now get to see a minority of the raids.

I confirmed this in April when I bought 1 month of WoW. In this 1 month. I leveled from 80-85, got full epic gear and raided Deathwing. Skipping A LOT of content simply by buying gear with badges.

A long rant but vital to the point I'm making.

For a game to be successful, I believe the social/guild aspect to be of outmost importance. To enable this. We need a "gratification incentive" to guide the masses.


TL;DR --  I think we should look at what made WoW so addictive and inject it into TESO.

If there's one thing I absolutely hate, it's forced grouping and raiding. Which is what GW2 did away with to an extent - or at least, disguised well enough under a mantle of accessibility and minimum hassle.

To be honest... I don't really care about being a unique snowflake. But I do want to progress my character without feeling forced to rely on others. In WoW this was not possible in PvE as I hated raiding, and I got fed up of BGs (arenas never appealed to me), hence the end game did not hold me. In fact, in retrospect, max level in WoW was probably one of the worst gaming experiences I've had, but I was a Slave to the Grind (Skid Row reference) at the time so I soldiered on for a while, eventually taking a break for many months and returning sporadically before I finally quit.

Just to be clear I am not obviously not against raids in TESO! It is an MMORPG after all and large group content in some form or another is a given. But I am against WoW-style raids being the only meaningful way to progress in PvE in any other than a cosmetic way.

Anyway, let's not turn this into a raid thread any more than we have to

TBH I am worried about the scale of the provinces. They filled entire videogames before... Will they be of comparable scale here? Of course quality is much more important and I'd rather have smaller but better zones than huge but empty content, but there is always the risk that they may be too scaled down, and (this will be an issue for long time Elder Scrolls fans which I'm not) not as true to the original games as they should be. In addition, the game is being developed by a separate studio, which I think will do a great job - but will it live up to what TES fans expect?

Edited by Heart Collector, 01 February 2013 - 12:18 PM.

[Fishman]

Heart Collector, on 01 February 2013 - 12:16 PM, said:

If there's one thing I absolutely hate, it's forced grouping and raiding. Which is what GW2 did away with to an extent - or at least, disguised well enough under a mantle of accessibility and minimum hassle.

To be honest... I don't really care about being a unique snowflake. But I do want to progress my character without feeling forced to rely on others. In WoW this was not possible in PvE as I hated raiding, and I got fed up of BGs (arenas never appealed to me), hence the end game did not hold me. In fact, in retrospect, max level in WoW was probably one of the worst gaming experiences I've had, but I was a Slave to the Grind (Skid Row reference) at the time so I soldiered on for a while, eventually taking a break for many months and returning sporadically before I finally quit.

Just to be clear I am not obviously not against raids in TESO! It is an MMORPG after all and large group content in some form or another is a given. But I am against WoW-style raids being the only meaningful way to progress in PvE in any other than a cosmetic way.

Anyway, let's not turn this into a raid thread any more than we have to

TBH I am worried about the scale of the provinces. They filled entire videogames before... Will they be of comparable scale here? Of course quality is much more important and I'd rather have smaller but better zones than huge but empty content, but there is always the risk that they may be too scaled down, and (this will be an issue for long time Elder Scrolls fans which I'm not) not as true to the original games as they should be. In addition, the game is being developed by a separate studio, which I think will do a great job - but will it live up to what TES fans expect?

I hear you , but for me it was the other way around. I LOVED PvE and raiding in WoW and it was probably the BEST game-experience I had.

It just goes to show that people have different opinions. Is there a middle ground here? Can something be made that appeals to both audiences?

[Heart Collector]

Fishman, on 01 February 2013 - 12:29 PM, said:

I hear you , but for me it was the other way around. I LOVED PvE and raiding in WoW and it was probably the BEST game-experience I had.

It just goes to show that people have different opinions. Is there a middle ground here? Can something be made that appeals to both audiences?

I love it when I can agree to disagree in a civilized way on the internet, its so rare these days I was half afraid I'd get drawn out into a long argument, but thankfully I chanced upon a raider with a good mindset!

As for a middle ground... It's tough. But I believe that GW2 could provide groundwork for something like this. An example: Phased "heroic" world bosses for guilds. Doing them could require gathering special materials in the zone to create a "summoning stone" for the boss (this keeps the zone alive too), which would be used by up to X people in the guild. The raid group is then "phased" into the fight. Rewards could be super unique skins and minipets among other things.

Another thing could be a zone with a "guild city" for people to build. Almost like a guild hall, but spanning an entire small zone. The zone could be a different instance for each guild, though guests could be bought in via partying up with them or something. And there could be random events that occur in the zone that if left unchecked end up threatening to destroy the guild city. I guess there could be NPC guards to bolster the city for "dead" hours, or maybe the events would only trigger when enough guild members are within the zone.

Just a couple of ideas!

Edited by Heart Collector, 01 February 2013 - 12:48 PM.

[Fishman]

Heart Collector, on 01 February 2013 - 12:46 PM, said:

I love it when I can agree to disagree in a civilized way on the internet, its so rare these days I was half afraid I'd get drawn out into a long argument, but thankfully I chanced upon a raider with a good mindset!

As for a middle ground... It's tough. But I believe that GW2 could provide groundwork for something like this. An example: Phased "heroic" world bosses for guilds. Doing them could require gathering special materials in the zone to create a "summoning stone" for the boss (this keeps the zone alive too), which would be used by up to X people in the guild. The raid group is then "phased" into the fight. Rewards could be super unique skins and minipets among other things.

Another thing could be a zone with a "guild city" for people to build. The zone could be a different instance for each guild, though guests could be bought in via partying up with them or something. And there could be random events that occur in the zone that if left unchecked end up threatening to destroy the guild city. I guess there could be NPC guards to bolster the city for "dead" hours, or maybe the events would only trigger when enough guild members are within the zone.

Just a couple of ideas!

I like those ideas, especially the guild city, I'd love to see something like that implemented. It'd be immersive AND cooperative. Require a real effort and produce a result for more than just one person. Do want!

[Heart Collector]

Fishman, on 01 February 2013 - 12:48 PM, said:

I like those ideas, especially the guild city, I'd love to see something like that implemented. It'd be immersive AND cooperative. Require a real effort and produce a result for more than just one person. Do want!

And the cherry on top would be that everyone could have different things to do, even people like me who don't like WoW-style raiding... I believe Pathfinder Online will implement something like this on a very grand scale - it will actually all happen in the open world, and players will be able to found from bandit camps to kingdoms. My idea was more limited and within the framework of GW2 of course, a game which I believe does a lot right and still has huge potential to do far more.

Edited by Heart Collector, 01 February 2013 - 01:01 PM.

[Edge]

Arquenya, on 01 February 2013 - 07:45 AM, said:

As far as I've read, you can have a character in each realm in TESO.
With one "megaserver" it's just not possible to have a character of a different faction on another server, like WoW.

Basically you have 3 seperate areas with eash their own style and storyline and (perhaps) even their own dungeons.
But the idea of 3 seperate worlds sounds ok to me. As long as they're all enjoyable and big enough.

No, I'm not talking about servers, in RvR games realm and server aren't tied, realm and account are tied. It doesn't work like WvW in GW2 where 3 servers fight. One server, 3 realms to choose from. Usually you choose the realm you play for before you choose your characters. The downside when they use a system like this is that your options become more limited (3 races for each realm). If they are serious about wanting their PvP to be professional though they'll have to enable this to prevent multi-realming. There are people that deliberately spy on opposing teams and sabotage plans by having characters in multiple realms. This might not seem like much to the normal person, but to the people that take RvR very seriously it's a huge problem.

Usually what they do with a system like this when you want to have characters in another realm is force you to delete all existing characters. Overall the realm selection screen comes before the character creation screen. AFAIR though we don't have any official statement on how it's going to work.

[Rhododendron]

Beta signup video:

Edited by Kamatsu, 02 February 2013 - 11:53 PM.

[Illein]

Say what you want, but they assure themselves a huge chunk of hype with that cinematic trailer alone. I am honestly stunned by its quality, considering what we've seen of the game's quality itself, so far.

Massive kudos at the CGI department over at Zenimax.

[Gilles VI]

Rhododendron, on 02 February 2013 - 12:24 PM, said:

Beta signup video:

Cause it's a big waste of money..
Only little kids still believe CGI means anything to real gameplay, and often it isn't even a show of skill because it's been made by another, specialised company, and not by the game devs..

Edited by Kamatsu, 02 February 2013 - 11:53 PM.

[Rezo]

Gilles VI, on 02 February 2013 - 05:21 PM, said:

Cause it's a big waste of money..
Only little kids still believe CGI means anything to real gameplay, and often it isn't even a show of skill because it's been made by another, specialised company, and not by the game devs..

If they have money to spend them on trailers and on creation of the game I don't really see a problem here.And it looks really nice btw.

[Dervo]

Honestly, that video reminds me of warhammer online, which was a horrible game.  Actually, it was worse cause the "players" only fought against general mob enemies before circling around each other, at least warhammer's showed how the different professions interacted with each other.

Edited by Kamatsu, 02 February 2013 - 11:54 PM.
editing

[BuddhaKeks]

Okay I don't quite get it. We have 3 factions: The Ebonheart Pact, which is represented by that Nord and his Dunmer friend, who crawl through the dungeon, the Aldmeri Dominion, which is the one attacking with those "brigde ballistas" I presume, since their leader wears black-yellow, which were the colors of them in Skyrim. But who is the last group? I would say Daggerfall Convenant, but this factions has no elves in it (except if you count the orcs, which were once elves), but the group is clearly led by somehting which looks like an Bosmer to me. The Bosmer however belong to the Aldmeri Dominion.
The only thing I could come up with as an explanation is that this "elf girl" is actually a Breton, which are known to have elfish blood in them. But she looks a little to heavy on the elf side for a Breton. So I ahve to ask, who screwed this up?