Awesome. Much sooner than I expected which is great because now I can play it for 6 months before moving to Wildstar
Again still going to keep my opinion of the ToR thing........ Also wonder why they are pushing it for a sooner release date?
It looks very Skyrim-y, which I like. But with very Guild Wars 2-y PvP, which I not so much liked. Not at all like Dark Age of Camelot RvR, like I wanted it to. I remain sceptical.
PvP video was quite depressing. Depending on what XoO does and what's going on with my gaming in April I'll make a final decision.
During the beta there were seriously 100-200 people on screen fighting at the same time. PS2 doesn't even come close to allowing that many people on the screen at the same time. FPS was was quite smooth as well. It was really impressive.
I didn't play GW2 but I do remember people saying that it has the system that PS2 has, where it will filter out people who are farther away from you after 50 or so players. All the MMOs I have played previously were not technically robust enough to display as many players at once as I saw in ESO without risking server integrity or trading for an unplayable latency. There are exceptions of course (EVE?). Let's assume ESO servers can scale to release populations. So far the weakest part of ESO is the questing system, which is a copy pasted version of the questing system of all MMOs, so it not really that fair to complain about if doing any sort of comparison. It actually has a leg up in this area in that the quests are all fully voiced, which is a nice touch. If think if you skip through the quest text, you're in for a boring ride, and may as well be playing a Korean grind MMO. In the Beta builds I have played, guilds and crafting weren't even enabled, and endgame was unreachable. That's why I dislike when people condemn the game based on the Beta so far. As a huge fan of TES, it has everything I could ask for. It has references galore and tons of new information about races that haven't been featured in previous elder scrolls games. Sure the whole concept of these races working seems contrived, they do a fair job of explaining it, better than I had expected. There's plenty of funny dialogue to go along with it, along the lines of what you can find in the interactive map http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/map/tamriel. The game even features the offspring of a Nord and a Dunmer, a rarely discussed topic. Overall I think many people will be happily suprsied with ESO after all the negative hype caused by lack of information, rumors, and bad Beta testers subsides. Of course, if you're just burned out of MMOs you aren't going to like it no matter what Zenimax does.
Utherix! We are gonna start agreeing on stuff about this game? I didn't expect to see you so positive. Would you say the game has turned you around from most of your early fears? And I've also read from many others who feel the game was very quest based, that grinding wasn't really a feasible option. A fair assessment. It really didn't feel like staying in an area and killing mobs repeatedly was beneficial. I love games with slow leveling so on the surface I like this. If it helps them drag out progression and encourage exploration of the world/zones I'm 100% for it, but who knows if it will. What do you think their goals were with the quest-focused leveling system and it's pace? I also get the feeling those who want to rush through all the leveling will hate this game. More agreement from me. But I guess we also don't know if Cyrodiil leveling will be/feel any different. I don't have much to say personally. People pretty much know how I feel and beta testing hasn't dissuaded me. Skill/ability progression is still my favorite aspect of this game and reason enough for me to play it. There are a handful of parts of it that I have criticized, but overall I still think it makes the gameplay strong. No cooldowns are also awesome. There are A LOT of critics, people who think beta=demo and dismiss the game after one weekend of starter zone gameplay, but a TES game is naturally going to attract a lot of attention like the vocal negative (the vocal minority in my eyes).
Hm, yeah, GW2 had like an "invisible wall" at which u didn't see other players anymore... U could still hit them tho with ur abilities like the mesmer wall that was doing damage to everyone shooting thru it (it was helluva fun to use). Hm. It's really hard to make an idea about the game without playing it tho... But as long as u don't have to run the same dungeons over and over to get that piece of equipment it can be interesting. Also, if they manage to have always open & active PVP areas it'd be fun. The most important part about the TES series (which is less true with the last games tho) is the freedom and the size of it. Normally, ESO should have the same size than Arena which was, back in the very old days, roughly the same as Europe !! As you said Utherix tho if crafting wasn't around then a big big chunk of the game hasn't been reviewed, because TES crafting is epic... Especially if u could craft spells like in Arena / daggerfall (if they remove the possibility of doing some retarded stuff like AOE dmg + AOE mana absobtion and spam it like a moron killing everything in ur parth lol) ! The thing that really makes me afraid of ESO tho is the speed at which it's released, it really feels like a rushed game somehow, unless they really worked on it secretely for a good while. I'm still afraid it ends up like WAR/TOR, both games that could've been very good but missed it
Just a head's up guys. ESO has been in development since 2007. It will be a game 7 years in the making. Doing a little research for perspective: Before WoW, a lot of games (like Lineage 2 and DAoC) took about 3 years to develop. WoW was in development for 5 years. Guild Wars 2 was in development for 5 years. Rift, 5 years as well. The Secret World, 7-8 years not counting a little time development was shelved. NCsoft started backing Carbine's unannounced MMO (later known to be Wildstar) in 2007, which will mean 7 years for that game assuming they don't fall behind. Seven seems to be the magic number for a modern MMO now. At least with this game you don't have a publisher like EA shoving it out the door for an Xmas release (SWTOR, 6 years).
My biggest issue right now, is that I have people I trust to make good judgement calls on games, who're in the beta, but they're giving me mixed opinions on the game so far. I REALLY hope there'll be an open beta soonish, or that I'll get a key to fool around in it, and judge for myself, before launch. :/
The only PvP area is Cyrodiil. It will always be active because it runs 24/7 campaigns and new instances are only created when one becomes full. While there is no open world PvP, I did notice that because of Cyrodiil's enormous size and PvE content mixed in, there was opportunity to get some open world-like pvp in by going behind enemy lines where people did not necessarily expect to be attacked, and by attacking players doing the PvE content.