(thread title courtesy of Shrug)
Is the Elder Scrolls Online a good game? probably not.
Have I sunk at least forty hours into it in the past two weeks? Yes.
Welcome to the Elder Scrolls Online thread, your number one place for moonsugar crime discussion.
Like a lot of folks, I was sort of vaguely aware of ESO continuing to operate on it’s ‘buy once, optional monthy fee’ model. I remembered being baffled by it’s existence, it’s seemingly too little too late approach to making an MMO upon it’s original release.
What’s in the game now is…an odd mix of things. It’s aggresively level scaled, so with the exception of the intentionally late game content, you can pretty much fuck around anywhere, doing whatever. As long as that ‘whatever’ is some sort of MMO bullshit, like questing, crafting, and presumably some sort of PVP that, lets be real here, I’m never going to touch.
There’s presumably large dungeons and raids and crap too. I’ve yet to dip my toe into any of those.
What I have done is treated it like a regular Elder Scrolls game but with optional co-op. That’s actually worked out pretty ok so far. No actual part of the game’s mechanics are outstanding, but they function well enough even if the combat has become kinda rote now that I’ve optimized my skill bar a little bit. There’s a stealth system that sort of works. A lockpicking system that mostly works. A crafting system that seems to be the actual meat of the game based heavily around collecting resources and researching desirable weapon traits from old gear.
What I’ve found the most appealing thing about the game so far though is the vibe. The writing isn’t exactly good, but is occasionally pretty charming. For whatever reason, the devteam on it seem a lot more enamored with old Elder Scrolls Lore?
You get help from talking ravens to reveal a spy ring.
You kill elf-supremacist nazis and bust up an elf-supremacist nazi school.
Like, on the one hand Vivec is just a jolly dude who you help out with some false Nevarine troubles, but on the other hand your journey to help him eventually means you have to use the arguments of dead false nevarines to disprove a new false Nevarine. And you do this on a debate stage in the fossilized corpse of a giant crab.
Elder Scrolls Online is garbage, but comforting garbage, and I want a thread to dump ESO stuff in as it occurs to me, or any of the other handful of SBers crawling through Tamriel.
