1) Typical MMO-ish inflation of boring, boring content.
What? I don't think you know what inflation means.
You either do solo questing, which is focused on a "story" (which is written very poorly and was absolutely unable to grip me).
The stories are as good or better than any other MMO. Try again.
Or you do dungeons, which suddenly switch the entire emphasis to lots and lots of combat.
Wrong again. There is a whole huge PVP part of the game, there are world bosses, and raids. And there are tons of dungeons and a full crafting system etc. What do you think it is lacking, and tell me an MMO that has something this doesn't have.
I find it literally impossible to care for MMO stories as a number of mechanics, such as respawning enemies, absolutely kill the game world's coherence for me.
But that is how every MMO works.... This game does a better job than any MMO I've seen (including modern ones like GW2) because you can actually change parts of the world with your actions and what you do on quests.
The sheer amount of content makes everything feel inconsequential.
Gotta love these posts, lots of content is a bad thing herpy derpy doo. Nothing you do is inconsequential because it moves you forward in terms of skills and exp. I've played it hardcore for about 2 months and today was a huge landmark for me, finally reaching CP160 which is the maximum level that gear goes up to. But there are still about 400 more levels for me to make and each will build me up more. I also have still have lots of gear to get, and even at level 160 I still need to make more progress until I can start
doing Veteran dungeons and raids. I also can't even think about doing PVP without getting a whole second set of gear for that.
There is tons of content and it all achieves something. Clearly you just don't care about the game and don't want to give it a chance. I am sure most people who have played Skyrim but not MMO's feel the same way. You want to be the one person who saves the world and you want it to end after a few weeks. MMO's are not about that.
You reach an area, you do a quest. You immediately know you'll run into a very similar quest if you go into a different zone, simply because there's only so many types of quests you will work in an MMO.
There are only so many types of quests in any game... it has nothing to do with being an MMO. And there are more in this game than Skyrim.
Try to explore and do some sightseeing and all the feels you get from nice vistas are ruined by useless mobs attacking you every few minutes, for no reason, out of nowhere. Retrace your steps and the same mobs will attack you.
Stop dying like a spaz then... Nothing comes out of nowhere, all the mobs are easy to spot, and even ones that respawn don't attack for a while. It is hard at low levels because you have bad gear and no abilities. But that is why you try to progress because it all changes. At level 15 the number of spells/abilities you can use will double, and you start to feel stronger. I can now just charge through any number of mobs and survive, or turn and fight them and kill them all in 10 seconds. And they aren't useless, they give exp and they drop gear that is scaled to your level, and crafting materials.
The pretty vistas are always there no matter what.
2) The abilities system is interesting in principle, but in practice it still means you're designing routines a la WoW. Cast this, while it cools down add this, do DoT, heal if needed, rinse and repeat. Add or remove CC abilities depending on the situation. The details are pretty much number crunching and optimisation. In group play it does get a little bit more interesting because of aggro management and movement becoming more important, but not enough.
But what RPG or MMORPG is any different? Even crappy Skyrim is the same thing, hack until dead, pop a potion or cheese if injured. Where ESO is special is that you have a big selection of things you can choose to use as your own personal build, and the actual combat gets really interesting later on. When you do dungeons at higher levels you have 10 spells and use most of them constantly, all while moving carefully, avoiding stuff, diving out the way of stuff, blocking big attacks etc. How could an action RPG be any better than this? I would love to know.
3) Combat does a nicer job at pretending it's actually responsive than most MMORPGs, but still feels flimsy. That sword swing never feels impactful. Fiddling with archery brutally reminds you what you're playing if you've managed to fool yourself a bit - there can be no things like good physics in a game like this when they need to make sure a varying number of players stay in sync.
That is probably true. But I'm a sorcerer which is ok for that.
4) Crafting, just like in most MMOs, is a dreadful grind and never feels exciting. For every one thing you craft that has any impact on your character development, there's a hundred you'll craft for no other purpose than to grind the skill up.
No crafting in this game is really good. The end game is researching items, and every item you make can have several traits that you need to research from items you find. You have to level up too, and there is a lot of depth to it. The crafting is really good, and an integral part of the game. Money comes in from killing things and doing dungeons etc, so the game is made so that you can deconstruct and research most of the loot you make.
You don't have to do crafting at all, the uber end game build that I am following has no crafted items at all so I needn't have done it at all. But it is still useful because if I make a second character sometime, I can craft a whole set of gear for him and it can have any trait that I think will be useful, like an XP boost, or better tank stuff, better caster stuff, better heal stuff etc. It is the best crafting system I've ever seen. The only game that comes close was Vanguard which is now dead.
5) ESO absolutely fails at encouraging player interaction. I feel this is counterproductive; player interaction is one of clear advantages an MMO can bring to the table compared to SP games. Here, however, you have the freedom to solo and you actually need to go out of your way to meaningfully interact with others; if you play solo, you're essentially playing a bastardised single player RPG with a ton of mute NPCs running around in ways that suggest they're mentally challenged.
But it is made so that there is serious group stuff and plenty of solo stuff. Most of the best gear comes from raiding and group dungeons and you need to group from all of that. It also would be hard to play this game without a guild, and it lets you have 5 guilds. So I have trade guilds, and 2 adventuring guilds so far. It encourages player interactions by how the trade guilds work, there is no auction house like WoW, you have to sell via guilds and they need to help you to sell so they can take a cut and survive.
If you want to solo, you do questing. If you want to group, you do group stuff. Surely that is reasonable? There are only a few MMO's that ever existed which make you group almost all the time. They are a different type of experience, maybe better. But the downside is that you have to play with people all the time, you have to wait for them when they go afk for a drink, you have to wait for them to join a group etc.. At least having plenty of solo content content means you can just login for 30 minutes and do stuff.
6) Loot balance, just like in most MMOs, means that itemisation fails to excite. Improve your damage by +2 or your resistance by +5%. After 10 levels, you'll get gear that makes your character look different but still very much the same as other players in the same level range. Non wearable items are either potions that do very basic stuff like healing, or plain junk.
Nah. You are right about the way characters look, everyone looks like a noob at first and then a superhero once they get some gear. They might look different to each other but they all just look like different superheroes. But really, how do you fix this? Not many people would want to play a game for months and not look cool. But the actual balance and loot itself is really good. I can't be bothered explaining why, you just need to play more and see.
6a) You can get mildly exciting stuff from the cash shop; whatever excitement they bring doesn't really counterbalance the grown up in your head giving you tons of shit for thinking about spending real money on some kind of video game bling. If it was F2P I'd happily consider it but this is B2P and I already fucking paid.
But it is good value. It is B2P and then you don't NEED to spend anything else, so it can be great value to people on a tight budget. But if you want to buy extra stuff there is plenty of great stuff to get. The best thing you could buy would be the plus pack which is like a subscription and it basically gives you everything. But it is less than WoW subscription and it gives you more. Also there is more than cosmetic stuff on there, there are xp potions and health boosts etc which are can be really useful, especially if you don't craft your own provisions.
The prices of games like this are dictated by other games. That's how it works. None of them are buy to play and then no cash shop, because they couldn't afford to host millions of players on servers with monthly costs if they aren't getting any income.
In the end, I didn't enjoy it and neither did my GF. We played it for maybe 7 hours in total,
LOL..... I wish I read this first.