Okay, here we go~
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My biggest two beefs. I'll try to keep it concise:
This is true, most of the enemies you encounter in the lower level areas will drop 1-2 gold each. What is also true is that they drop armor, weapons, jewelry, and junk loot solely meant for vendoring. The items you find usually have a vendor value of 10-15 gold, though some loot you find have special traits that allow you to sell them for more than double their base value.
As for why quest "bosses" don't drop fat, I'm assuming it's because they don't want players to farm them. You'll almost always get a reward in the form of a piece of equipment given to you by the quest NPC upon completion of the quest, however.
It's particularly funny in the
context of the review, because he cuts the clip and bitches about receiving no reward for killing the boss. What you don't see is him walking out of the instance and immediately getting an item for killing the boss and finishing the quest. I know this because I did the same quest last night. This clip is also silly for reasons I will explain further on.
Also, the loot issue he's talking about only applies to quest mobs. World / dungeon bosses will almost always drop common, and uncommon quality items on death, but also have a chance to drop unique rare items.
For this next part I will use a map:
Ignoring for a moment that the maps are pretty densely packed with points of interest, with each symbol on the map containing quests (or world bosses in the case of the skulls), you'll notice a dozen shrine looking icons with blue auras surrounding them. From any point on them map, you can click on these shrines to instantly teleport to them for a small gold fee. If you interact with a shrine directly, you can teleport for no fee at all.
What does this mean? It means that after you explore the map for the first time, you can travel to any point within it in under a minute. On foot.
Why didn't Joe bring it up in the review? I don't know, and I won't question his motivations, but he can't claim ignorance to the fact that fast travel exists because you're forced to use it in order to leave Cyrodiil.
And yes, you could kill 40,000 skeletons and pick up individual gold pieces to obtain a tier 2 horse-- If you were completely inept at the game. You could just vendor your loot and trade with other players to get it. In the case of the 17k horse, you can easily get it before level 20 by doing this. For comparison, the chocobo mount in FFXIV requires you to be level 20 before you can complete the quest to get it (although there is no gil cost attached).
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Some smaller things:
Map complaints (
link):
Here you see him wandering around on the second floor balcony of a building, complaining about how horrible the map is because he can't find the banker. Since I'm currently questing in the area, I decided to take a screenshot of that building's entrance. And yes, this is some darksydephil shit.
His minute long visit to Oblivion (
link):
Here he shows some footage of him entering the Deadlands, pressing a button and exiting the instance. The implication here is that this is the entire quest, despite the quest text "Close the Portals: 1/3" appearing on the screen. So where's the rest of the quest? It's 12 minutes earlier in the review where he fights the boss and bitches about the 2 gold drop.
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Two things I noticed that are probably legit misconceptions:
- The ability to make a character part of any alliance is not a collector's edition bonus, it was exclusive to pre-orders.
- The horse from the collector's edition is equivalent to the tier 1 horse, and not the 42k one.
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I could go on, but I'll cut it off here. As I said before, many of his concerns are legitimate. Phasing and quest progress are handled abysmally in a group setting. The impact of players camping and botting in dungeons absolutely shatters immersion, and makes stealth nearly worthless at times. And technical issues like the dupe glitch, bank wipe bug, and falling through the map were inexcusable post launch.
It's just grating to see him grossly misrepresent parts of the game, or speaking at length about issues that are anything but.
Still, the review did have its uses. I hope Zenimax sees the bad press and makes adjustments to the game that will ultimately make it better in the long run.
Eschaton, I will take my L now.