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Elder Scrolls games are terrible, but Elder Scrolls Online is a masterpiece.

anvi

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I have played any tactical or turn based RPG you can mention, but I also like action RPG's sometimes. I just need the action to be exciting and require some thought.

I think MMORPG's are promising, generally better than the action RPG's that have dominated single player RPG's since 2000 ish. But they also leave so much to be desired. Most of the modern ones I play for a month and have done everything. But The Elder Scrolls Online has blown my mind.

I played it in beta and something unbelievable happened. A mob killed me! It is something that hasn't happened to me in an MMO since about 2001. So I bought the game cheap (on Amazon) a while after it was released and tried it again, and every mob I fought went splat. I figured that like various other MMO's I've played in beta and then release, they dumbed it down at the end and made everything too easy. So I rage quit like I did to most other MMO's, although usually I play them for a month first until I begin to hate them.

But there was a huge update recently and the game is also free to play now, so I figured I would give it another try. I have been hopelessly addicted since. I've played it every day for about 2 months and still only scratching the surface of the game. The game is huge, and really high standard. And the reason some mobs are easy and some aren't, is that there are so many different types in this game. There are several types of dungeons, most are designed for groups of various sizes, but some can be done solo if you are good. I hate the Elder Scrolls games in general, I had some fun with Morrowind but Oblivion and Skyrim I think are an insult to gaming and they are all so under developed. But ES Online only looks like an ES game on the surface. It cost $200 million and it shows. The world is enormous and varied, the mobs too, but more importantly every single game system has been changed, and changed into something far better, more developed, and more thought out. It is basically a proper RPG, with meaningful progression and character building, and the combat is really good. It is spammy and actiony, but it does a better job than almost any other action game I can think of. It is also like multiple games in one, you can do solo questing like Skyrim or something (but a higher standard), but there are really good scripted instanced dungeons, and there are LOTS of them. It has about 3 times the number of the last MMO I played.

If you like action RPG's you really should try it. Ask me if you want to know anything about it. I am still relatively a newbie so can't give pro tips on builds or anything, but I can describe the game well and how it works.

p.s. Don't be typical snooty codexers. Yeah it isn't Baldurs Gate and it is never going to play anything like that. But it offers a lot and it is really good and you shouldn't cheat yourself out of a great game just because of the "Elder Scrolls" tag. I nearly did too and it was a bad idea. I could explain in more detail why it is special but this post would be too big.
 
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agris

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Everquest 1 or go home. Instanced dungeons? GTFO. Play Gothic 1/2 if you want a good, open world aRPG that challenges you.
 

anvi

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Everquest 1 or go home. Instanced dungeons? GTFO. Play Gothic 1/2 if you want a good, open world aRPG that challenges you.

There are several types of dungeons in this game and most of them are NOT instanced. This is one of the only games to have non instanced dungeons since about 2007, and that previous one was the only one since EQ in 1999. Be prejudiced about all the other MMORPG's, you aren't missing much. But don't do it to this game.

I played EQ for about 14 years in total, in several different forms, I have every single class at max level with an epic weapon on various servers. It is amazing but it can't be played forever, also it is dominated by raid content which is boring as fuck. Also this game isn't really even the same kind of experience at all, EQ is hardcore and tedious, this game is all about fun. For more EQ you have to wait for Pantheon. Also there is nothing wrong with instanced dungeons, they are just different. EQ is about sitting in one room and camping stuff, but these modern instanced dungeons you go through the zone from scripted boss to scripted boss. As long as those fights are fun and challenging then I don't see a problem with it. Also the combat in this game is very similar to Gothic, but miiiiiiiiles better. If you like Gothic you should try it. No point trying to convince yourself it is bad, when it really isn't.

I vomited in my mouth a little bit.

But why? Whatever it is about Skyrim that you don't like, this game doesn't do that thing. It is so different. They changed everything. It also does a lot of things differently to most other MMO's. For example there is no auction house, you buy and sell stuff manually like a trader or your join a trading guild that bid against other guilds for NPC traders and you can sell your wares on that. There are so many things that this game does differently, and unique ideas.

There are like 10 different things you can do. Delves are solo dungeons but they are not instanced, so other people can be in there doing stuff and you can team up with them if you like. There are group delves too which are harder and you have to group to do it. Then there are "public dungeons" which again are not instanced, and are big and tough and you can solo it if you are uber, but most people will want to team up with someone in there or beforehand. Then there are group dungeons which are instanced and finely tuned. Then there are veteran versions of those same dungeons which are ball bustingly hard and only for end game players. Then there is a lot of other stuff outside of dungeons, every zone has multiple world bosses which are like a mini raid. Some can be soloed by a skilled player but most need at least a few people, some need more. And then there are Dolems which are like mini raids, again a few in each zone. And there is also the usual questing (but a high standard of it), and PVP which I haven't even seen yet. Same goes for raid content.
 
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anvi

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"Tough Guy" you shouldn't have deleted your post because it was the only reply with a legit concern tbh. There is a definite downside of playing with other people, and I would much rather this be a single player game. But the harsh reality is that there is never going to be a single player RPG with this much content, not this decade at least. There is also not going to be one that plays like this. They are either hardcore tactical games, or they are dumbass action games for dudebox retards. There is never anything in between. That is one of the reasons why this game is so special.
 

A horse of course

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I tried playing it as a single-player-friendly MMO and got past the final boss to start the alternative faction questlines, but it's absolutely pathetic compared to SWTOR, which has like 50x the budget for unique assets, voice acting and quest design.
 

anvi

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I tried playing it as a single-player-friendly MMO and got past the final boss to start the alternative faction questlines, but it's absolutely pathetic compared to SWTOR, which has like 50x the budget for unique assets, voice acting and quest design.
No the questing in this game is as good as SWTOR. Most of the side quests are better than any MMO and better than the main quest. It maybe doesn't have as many voices but it has far more than any ES game. Also this game has FAR more content than SWTOR.

I just want to state for the record this is not an alt of mine.
Yeah thank god I am me. Here are some reasons why you guys shouldn't be snooty about this game:

  1. I've played every MMO you have ever heard of, and 50 you have never heard of, yet this is the only one I have subscribed to since EverQuest in 1999.
  2. Everything is different and better than any Elder Scrolls game.
  3. The world is about 10 times the size of Skyrim, and 100 times better and more varied. It is Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc. all in one game at the same time, and more.
  4. There are hundreds of different types of enemies, unlike Skyrim where all you fight is Draugr and wolves.
  5. The environment matters. You die if you go in lava, your slowly freeze to death up a mountain unless you huddle around campfires.
  6. Travel through a swamp and huge crocks are lying in wait in the water. Or mosquitos. In snowy areas, giant white bears. In deserts, scorpions, jackals, etc. etc.. etc.
  7. Enemies have tactics, warriors will leap at you while their sorcerer buddies will stand back and nuke hell out of you with stuff that you either have to block or dodge, or lose 90% of your health. Unlike Skyrim, this game has challenge and depth. Blocking and dodging is not optional. Rangers actually have abilities to use too, not just 1 shotting stuff from stealth. You have area attacks, damage over time, poisons, snares, traps, a line attack that shoots arrows through anything along that line etc..etc..
  8. The combat is nothing like any Elder Scrolls game. You need skill, have to play well, and to build your character well. The "talent tree" and ability/spell selection is multiple times larger than any ES game.
  9. The game doesn't pause when you choose a new spell, or item.
  10. You can't win by spamming food or potions. Both alchemy and provisioning (food) are well thought out mechanics, and nothing can be exploited, or spammed to make life easy on yourself.
  11. This is one of the only games ever made where you can "change the world". Others promise it but you can't really do it. But here, a big village of undead can be saved by you, and it becomes full of normal people.
  12. You can easily die in this game, it has a lot of challenge and depth, believe it or not.
  13. There are hundreds of unique dungeons, and many are huge. Not just the same few caves cut and pasted 50 times.
  14. Itemisation and trading is a billion times better than any ES game. There are hundreds of items and dozens of HAND MADE item sets (not randomly generated loot). They let you drastically change how your class plays depending on what you choose. If you want to be a Battlemage you can, or a glass cannon, you can. Or anything in between. And every class has the same freedom because of the deep character building and gear.
  15. There are around 80-90 cities in this game, each better than anything in Skyrim, and many of them are bigger.
  16. Each city has unique traders that you can buy and sell stuff at, and this will be different to every other city. It is not "global loot" like most dumb MMO's with Auction Houses.
  17. Every quest is voice acted and is far better than anything in Skyrim.
  18. You can level up without even doing a single quest because there is so much other content.
 
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Humanophage

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I thought the game was reasonably enjoyable two years ago.

The decentralised market system meant you could get a lot of money by selling things you did not possess. E.g., you shout that you are selling a broad range of books for 1.5k. You have all of them on your five guild markets for 1k. If some player decides to buy a certain book from you, you acquire it from the market, and get a giant margin of 0.5k. At the same time, there is almost zero risk involved, since you only buy the book once you have a client. You don't have to worry that you'll fail to sell the book today, and the prices will go down in the future. I got absurdly rich this way, while the regular player had to grind for a long while to get the same income, even if their character was much more advanced. It reminded me of good old times in UO, where I also managed to abuse the system a little (killing 'invincible' vendors with a certain spell and purchasing poorly placed houses to place a bigger house). It is satisfying compared to cheating in single-player games, where you are simply stripping yourself of fun.

I also liked the deregulated class system. Everyone was whining about the poor performance of melee classes, whereas I had a fun and unique stealth rogue with a two-handed club, who could solo monsters well above his level. Again, made me feel rather superior. In general, character building was interesting and unbalanced in the same reasonable way as in DDO.

The cutscenes and almost all quests were pathetic, however. Exploration was moderately curious, since there were fewer invisible walls than in most AAA MMOs.

Overall, MMOs consume too much time and fry the brain, I find, at least if you play them the intended way.
 
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anvi

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I thought the game was reasonably enjoyable two years ago.
.....snip..

You should try it again, it is free if you already own it. There has been a massive amount of new content since then and lots of balance changes, nothing is unbalanced now and nothing is weak (although you can still do uber things if you are good enough). Everyone enjoys their class even though they whine for a while when something gets nerfed. The classes are really good and the combat works well. But yeah if you are short on time, maybe steer clear. This is something for people who want to lose entire evenings getting absorbed in something. I doubt there is any game better than it for that.
 
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anvi

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Jick Magger desperately downvoting every post, about a game he never played and knows nothing about. Where on the doll did an MMO touch you?
 

J1M

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anvi

The damage-type litmus test:
-Are fire creatures immune to fire damage?
-Do skeletons take more damage from maces than spears?
 

Helton

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How has One Tamriel changed the game?

I was really interested in TESO a few months ago but the impending One Tamriel patch with cryptic description gave me pause (of course then it wasn't free). Sounded like they were going to make levelling essentially pointless? Oblivion level scaling all over again?

How does it play in practice?

Mostly academic questions, I'm pretty into DDO at the moment.
 

anvi

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anvi

The damage-type litmus test:
-Are fire creatures immune to fire damage?
-Do skeletons take more damage from maces than spears?
Hardly any games do that. It was one of EQ2's features, and that game sucks compared to EQ1 which doesn't do it. ESO does have immunities though. As hardcore as old school RPG's seem, they still don't have a lot of mechanics a game like this has. BG2 or MOTB is still tough, and they may have fire elementals that are immune to fire, but there are no mobs that reflect spells back at you, or huge enemies that will kill you in 1 hit if they stomp on you and you don't get out the way, dive, block, or quickly cast your ward spell etc. This game is serious business in terms of reflexes and skill, there are big attacks that only give you 1 second to react, and if you don't do something in that time, you are dead. And that can wipe out the whole group. Games like this are not dumb action games. Skyrim is, but these big MMOs are filled with depth. There are also hundreds of web pages with people discussing the complex maths and formulas of various builds. There are so many different things you can do to change your build, not just spells and abilities, but all the different passives, all the different talent tree boosts, and all the many different gear sets. It really takes clever build theorists to figure out the best builds, and everyone copies those guys. I like to theory craft builds myself in games, and in Path of Exile I was a god with very little thought, yet in this game the build I came up with was a lot worse than one I ended up copying from the web, because there are just so many variables that would take forever to test yourself.

How has One Tamriel changed the game?

How does it play in practice?

I absolutely love it, it is miraculous how it works. I assumed it would be terrible, and I think on paper level scaling is a really horrible idea. I think in a game like EverQuest it would destroy the game, but in this game it works so well.

Basically all it means is that the entire world is now available to you. You can go anywhere, find a world boss, a dungeon, a delve, a series of quests, etc.. and you can just do it and it will be perfectly balanced for you. And as you are enjoying questing and killing stuff in a region that you enjoy, you are no longer making many other areas obsolete. It is something I used to really hate, there was so much to do previously but if you spent 5 levels getting involved in some quests, you would outlevel the next area you intended to go to. So you had to abandon a bunch of quests and figure out a new route, and there would be huge entire regions of the game that you could now no longer go to. It wasn't too bad if you are happy to make a second character and go to all new places, but if you like your main character and want to keep playing it, the game kind of punished you for making progress.

Now there is a massive amount of content no matter what level you are. Even at high levels, you aren't shoe horned into a few small areas for high level content, because instead you can just go anywhere in the huge world. Even what used to be "newbie zones", you just go there and everything is a high level mob and high level dungeon, and all the quests are magically high level etc.

It totally transformed this game into something far better. It fits the game perfectly. And you are motivated to level up because it is the only way you unlock all the new abilities and skills. Your actual level matters but the level of your abilities matters even more because that is how you unlock the best abilities, and you can only level those things up by getting out there and playing and gaining exp. Also, you tend to get ahead of the curve as you level, so you go to a group dungeon now and there will be a level 19 newbie playing with a level 500 pro, and the game miraculously scales everything in real time so the whole thing plays the same to all players regardless of their level. So the level 19 will be doing similar damage to a level 500, and will be taking similar damage etc. In theory anyway. But in reality, the low levels often struggle with dungeons because they haven't unlocked some of the better abilities yet and their gear sucks. And high level players have the best abilities and amazingly powerful gear sets that makes them really powerful. So you still get a strong sense of progression, but it just fees up the game far more and lets everyone go anywhere and do anything, and it works so well.

There are some downsides to it though. You can't just 1 hit lower level mobs anymore, so if some little wolf starts nibbling your ankles as you are passing by, it can knock you off the horse or whatever. And a bunch of them could still kill you if you don't turn and fight them off quickly. But you do still feel stronger because you can easily blast any mob to death like that in 5 seconds. I don't think everything scales 100% so it feels ok. But dungeon bosses are 100% so whether you are level 10 or level 550 they can still really hurt you and it still takes effort to hurt them back.

Another downside is you can't go to areas that are above you for an extra challenge. But there are plenty of challenges to have anyway. World bosses still wipe the floor with people yet they could be soloed if you have the right build, but it is deadly. And delves although soloable, everything is scaled up so even at level 551 the trash will hurt and the bosses can easily kill you, etc.

There are some ups and downs but overall it is waaaaaay better off for it. The game is gigantic now. The zones are huge and there lots of them and they are packed with content, and none of gets out levelled anymore. So it means this game has way more content than any other game out there. Every quest in the game is doable no matter what level you are. Every group dungeon, public dungeon, delve, dolmen, etc. all of them in the world are doable any time.
 
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Jazz_

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what1.gif
 

anvi

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An entire world level scaled to you???
It doesn't seem any different to any other game. In other games you only ever go to places that are level appropriate anyway. The only difference now is that the whole world is level appropriate.

I don't know people, anvi looks like a good guy. I think we should all listen to him and play The Elder Scrolls® Online: Tamriel Unlimited™!
You should at least look it up. There is life outside of Planescape and sometimes it is good.
 

agris

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Everquest 1 or go home. Instanced dungeons? GTFO. Play Gothic 1/2 if you want a good, open world aRPG that challenges you.

There are several types of dungeons in this game and most of them are NOT instanced. This is one of the only games to have non instanced dungeons since about 2007, and that previous one was the only one since EQ in 1999. Be prejudiced about all the other MMORPG's, you aren't missing much. But don't do it to this game.

[[...]

Also the combat in this game is very similar to Gothic, but miiiiiiiiles better. If you like Gothic you should try it. No point trying to convince yourself it is bad, when it really isn't

While I
rating_agenda.png
, Dark Age of Camelot has (had?) non-instanced dungeons. Also, how is the combat similar to the Gothic games (which only went up to #2)?
 

made

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The Elder Scrolls® Online: Tamriel Unlimited™ seems like a really good game, I think I will download the tria-

The Windows/Mac free-play event begins on Steam at 1 pm ET today. That download is 85 GB.

LOL! GTFO!
 

Morkar Left

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The Elder Scrolls® Online: Tamriel Unlimited™ seems like a really good game, I think I will download the tria-

The Windows/Mac free-play event begins on Steam at 1 pm ET today. That download is 85 GB.

LOL! GTFO!

BEST MMO EVER CREATED! TOTALLY SERIOUSLY AND TRUE! BEST EVER!
 

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