You made it longer than I did.
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Elder Scrolls Online Beta sign up
- Thread starter peetfeet
- Start date
You made it longer than I did.
OldAsUrSock
Banned
Subscription is fine, but they are pricing it too competitive with WoW. They need to lower the sub prices.
BattleMonkey
Member
I've played almost every MMO since UO, they all had merits that instantly showed or were fun. Have played several hours now, and it's been not fun at all. I'm struggling through it just to try the RvR but that is taking forever.
For a beta this is pretty awful, if anything it almost feels like an alpha with how janky it is.
Why is it unbelievable? An hour should be more than enough time to see what's special about a game, if anything. If a game can't hook you in the first hour when it's brand new, why the hell would someone spend 499 more hours with it?
You need to play at least 100 hours and get to max level to even begin to see how fun an MMO is. You should really just dedicate a full year of time to the game. If at that point you don't like it, I would say it's time to move on.
/sarcasm. No I am with you, this crap where you need to play forever to see how fun the game really is doesn't make sense. Why shouldn't the game be fun in the first hour? If it take 20 hours to get fun, throw those first 20 hours out because who the hell wants to play a game that isn't fun for that long?
Starbuck2907
Member
I'm enjoying it.
Playing in 3rd person kills my joy though. First person is the way to go.
The first hour of the game is my least favorite part. 8 hours in. I'm enjoying myself. (edit: Really, the game seemed to get a lot better around the two hour part. I really didn't care much for the starting area.)
This image describes my feelings about some of the comments here:
Playing in 3rd person kills my joy though. First person is the way to go.
The first hour of the game is my least favorite part. 8 hours in. I'm enjoying myself. (edit: Really, the game seemed to get a lot better around the two hour part. I really didn't care much for the starting area.)
This image describes my feelings about some of the comments here:
Shining Sunshine
Banned
I'm enjoying it.
Playing in 3rd person kills my joy though. First person is the way to go.
The first hour of the game is my least favorite part. 8 hours in. I'm enjoying myself.
This image describes my feelings about some of the comments here:
What's wrong with that comment? Does someone need to play 500 hours of it if they couldn't get into it?
If it sucks to start, no one needs to justify their complaint by playing the whole thing.
There is no point in playing through content when the mechanics are terrible.
Starbuck2907
Member
I don't think 1 hour is enough time to properly evaluate a 500 hour game.
If I read a review of a game where the reviewer played one hour of a mmo and said it sucked, I wouldn't take him seriously. That's how how I feel about some of the comments here.
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One time I played the first ten minutes of Super Mario Bros 3.
Man, it sucked. So I never played it again.
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One time I played an hour of Battlefield 3 multiplayer. I played a 1200 ticket match on a really crappy map. I didn't really enjoy the game. I assume the rest of the game sucked too. So, I never played it again.
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I can't help it guys. I'm sitting here on my couch with my pc hooked up to a 55 inch tv and I'm really enjoying the game. I didn't really enjoy the first hour or so, but the further I go, the more I dig it. Just being honest. I didn't enjoy the 3rd person view though. The game plays totally different to me in 1st vs 3rd person.
But anyway, I'll probably quit commenting for a while. Gotta play the game and don't want to say too much or risk violating NDA. Just wanted to make it clear that some of us are enjoying it.
(edited to clarify my point)
If I read a review of a game where the reviewer played one hour of a mmo and said it sucked, I wouldn't take him seriously. That's how how I feel about some of the comments here.
------------------------
One time I played the first ten minutes of Super Mario Bros 3.
Man, it sucked. So I never played it again.
----------------
One time I played an hour of Battlefield 3 multiplayer. I played a 1200 ticket match on a really crappy map. I didn't really enjoy the game. I assume the rest of the game sucked too. So, I never played it again.
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I can't help it guys. I'm sitting here on my couch with my pc hooked up to a 55 inch tv and I'm really enjoying the game. I didn't really enjoy the first hour or so, but the further I go, the more I dig it. Just being honest. I didn't enjoy the 3rd person view though. The game plays totally different to me in 1st vs 3rd person.
But anyway, I'll probably quit commenting for a while. Gotta play the game and don't want to say too much or risk violating NDA. Just wanted to make it clear that some of us are enjoying it.
(edited to clarify my point)
Maleko Saint
Banned
I'm enjoying it.
Playing in 3rd person kills my joy though. First person is the way to go.
The first hour of the game is my least favorite part. 8 hours in. I'm enjoying myself. (edit: Really, the game seemed to get a lot better around the two hour part. I really didn't care much for the starting area.)
This image describes my feelings about some of the comments here:
If the game can't hook you at the start, why would I be motivated to keep playing? There's really no reason to keep chipping away at it in its current state. While others may enjoy it, it's not something I can force myself to keep at to 'obtain a better opinion' or what have you. I'm weary of MMOs in general anymore. If one can't grab my interest, or at least give me something to strive for while being decently average, then I can't see the reason in keeping at it.
I'll just say that this didn't feel like something that was nearly ready at all to be shown to a mass amount of players without leaving a bad taste in their mouth.
Starbuck2907
Member
Last thing,
I would also argue that after one hour of play, you haven't even unlocked all the "game mechanics" of a 500 hour game.
I also thought that Demon Souls "sucked" for the first 30 minutes or so until I "got" what the devs were trying to achieve with it.
I wish I could say more to defend the game. I would specify exactly what I like about it and how the later parts differ from the first hour or so, but I'll have to wait a while.
I would also argue that after one hour of play, you haven't even unlocked all the "game mechanics" of a 500 hour game.
I also thought that Demon Souls "sucked" for the first 30 minutes or so until I "got" what the devs were trying to achieve with it.
I wish I could say more to defend the game. I would specify exactly what I like about it and how the later parts differ from the first hour or so, but I'll have to wait a while.
piratepwnsninja
Member
Part of me feels like the reason I enjoy TES so much is the feeling of solitude you have while exploring. A full out MMO just has and does feel weird to me. Part of me thinks they should have thought in smaller scale, utilizing a cloud bank to spin off virtual servers that host around 50 people a piece. Then you could run into other players, but still have a large world to explore while still having that feeling. If you liked playing with people you met, you could tag them and it could check/shift/preference you to end up in the same virtual world when you logged in. Yes, I'm overlooking a lot of things, but technically it's possible. I looked into the technology when I was doing a paper design for a Highlander game years ago, in which each server started with a bunch of people, but there was perma-death for the server you were assigned to, and there could "Be only one" at the end.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
You're playing what Demon's Souls is about within the first couple of minutes of putting in the disc.
RaySpencer
Member
If you play enough MMOs you can pretty easily tell if they are good or not. Or at least you can tell what parts are good and bad, and what parts might get better.
publicpwnerer
Member
I'm enjoying it.
Playing in 3rd person kills my joy though. First person is the way to go.
The first hour of the game is my least favorite part. 8 hours in. I'm enjoying myself. (edit: Really, the game seemed to get a lot better around the two hour part. I really didn't care much for the starting area.)
This image describes my feelings about some of the comments here:
JRPG mentality. The games awful, but it has hundreds of hours of gameplay (grinding) and multiple endings!
It just seems that a lot of people don't even get the point of a beta to be honest... I just hope no one here who's only comment was "it sucks" without elaborating at least gives other devs the respect of not ever signing up for betas again.
I too am enjoying it however. I play in 3rd person though. ;P
I love the defense force? Like...I've played EVERY MMO that's come around from the west in the past 15 years, in beta or release. This is absolute bottom of the barrel jank. Beta or not, it's not going to do a magic 180. The worst I've played in at least 5 or 6 years, no joke.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
You don't seem to understand the reality for MMORPGs. You don't go into beta unless you're at a point where your game is more or less put together and you're in the bug fixing/polishing stages.
It's nothing about respect for devs or not. You have to have some kind of fun core gameplay--something that grabs people--in order for them to care enough to give detailed feedback in an attempt to make the game better. Any veteran MMORPG player will know within minutes whether or not it's worth the effort to do this. They'll know within minutes if a game is going to be complete shit or if it has potential.
Maleko Saint
Banned
Other than providing feedback for what I feel is amiss in the game, we can't exactly elaborate on anything due to the NDA. So broad opinions is what's on the menu for the moment. I've played enough MMOs in my day to get a good feeling about a title in a fairly reasonable amount of time. I managed to get about 4 hours in before I had to just stop. This game lacks identity of what it wants to be, so it ends up being this gelatinous blob of blandness without really going anywhere.
MMO's, especially ones with monthly payments, should have you hooked after the first hour. WOW was exciting and had tons of shit to explore and you knew what to expect after the first hour.
I'm not going to force myself to play hours of a game because it MIGHT get better 20 hours down the line. Life is way too short for that shit. Plus I have other games to play. Or read 'Gaf all day...
I've played tons of alphas and betas of various MMOs, starting with the closed beta of Ultima Online. First 30min in, I was hooked.
Played EverQuest Beta 3 through till release. Was also hooked within 30min.
Vanilla World Of Warcraft, watched and played a friend's beta. Was hooked just by watching.
All of the WOW betas, I enjoyed from the get-go.
Starwars Old Republic? Didn't scratch my itch and I wasn't surprised to see it go F2P.
Enjoyed FFXIV ARR beta that I picked up 3 collector's editions for my family.
Those saying that you can't judge an MMO from it's initial few hours is simply defending the game for the sake of defending it. A 'good' mmo should be able to hook you in rather quickly, especially since it has that feeling of 'new' all around it.
ESO's beta left me looking for something, anything else, to play. As a F2P game it might 'might' have a chance. As a subscription based game priced at the WOW pricepoint, it'll fail and rightfully so. It simply isn't engaging.
Played EverQuest Beta 3 through till release. Was also hooked within 30min.
Vanilla World Of Warcraft, watched and played a friend's beta. Was hooked just by watching.
All of the WOW betas, I enjoyed from the get-go.
Starwars Old Republic? Didn't scratch my itch and I wasn't surprised to see it go F2P.
Enjoyed FFXIV ARR beta that I picked up 3 collector's editions for my family.
Those saying that you can't judge an MMO from it's initial few hours is simply defending the game for the sake of defending it. A 'good' mmo should be able to hook you in rather quickly, especially since it has that feeling of 'new' all around it.
ESO's beta left me looking for something, anything else, to play. As a F2P game it might 'might' have a chance. As a subscription based game priced at the WOW pricepoint, it'll fail and rightfully so. It simply isn't engaging.
When it's F2P 3 months after launch, and we can pay 20 bucks in the cash shop to skip right to the 'good part' I may give it another shot.
What's wrong with the combat? A bunch of REALLY generic skills, with basically lock on 'left click attack, right click block' functionality, with no visceral feel to any of it nor physics to make it interesting. Watch someone play Wildstar, or heck even GW2, in terms of 'action' combat and then watch some TESO and it's like night and day. It's not entirely dissimilar from the single player elder scrolls games in that regard, but stock elder scrolls melee gameplay is not exactly super compelling in the first place. Enemies take quite a few hits typically too, to make it really sink in how droll left clicking things to death really is.
Yeah, you won't get everything from a super complex MMO within 30 minutes. What about within 3 hours? I've played at least that much. If there's more compelling shit to be had, they need to put it somewhere within sight of me installing the game, it's not the player's job to find what doesn't suck in the game, it's the Dev's job to make sure it's there and accessible. It's actually far more common for an MMO to succeed at grabbing you from the start and failing to retain you than it is for them to just falter out of the gate - This happens because the basic gameplay of many games is fun, or they have something unique to offer. TESO just feels like a really shitty retread and absolutely nothing that any elder scrolls fan actually wants from a game - linear quest hub garbage with even worse combat than you can imagine. Joy. It's one thing to have a fun levelling experience and then nothing to do once you finish (FF14, Guild Wars 2, SWTOR), it's entirely another to fail to captivate players enough to even hit LEVEL TEN (which is what they're encouraging people to do so they can test pvp).
What's wrong with the combat? A bunch of REALLY generic skills, with basically lock on 'left click attack, right click block' functionality, with no visceral feel to any of it nor physics to make it interesting. Watch someone play Wildstar, or heck even GW2, in terms of 'action' combat and then watch some TESO and it's like night and day. It's not entirely dissimilar from the single player elder scrolls games in that regard, but stock elder scrolls melee gameplay is not exactly super compelling in the first place. Enemies take quite a few hits typically too, to make it really sink in how droll left clicking things to death really is.
Yeah, you won't get everything from a super complex MMO within 30 minutes. What about within 3 hours? I've played at least that much. If there's more compelling shit to be had, they need to put it somewhere within sight of me installing the game, it's not the player's job to find what doesn't suck in the game, it's the Dev's job to make sure it's there and accessible. It's actually far more common for an MMO to succeed at grabbing you from the start and failing to retain you than it is for them to just falter out of the gate - This happens because the basic gameplay of many games is fun, or they have something unique to offer. TESO just feels like a really shitty retread and absolutely nothing that any elder scrolls fan actually wants from a game - linear quest hub garbage with even worse combat than you can imagine. Joy. It's one thing to have a fun levelling experience and then nothing to do once you finish (FF14, Guild Wars 2, SWTOR), it's entirely another to fail to captivate players enough to even hit LEVEL TEN (which is what they're encouraging people to do so they can test pvp).
You can bet your ass that if some of these people liked a game and read a review from someone who hated it after an hour they'd be raising hell about how the "guy didn't give the game enough time", or that "how do you know anything about a game after an hour, he barely played it".
I'm not saying ESO is a good game, but fuck if playing it for an hour tells you anything.
Is there an element of timing at all, or is it just a clickfest?
ab.aeterno
Member
There's some timing, but not much - hitting both mouse buttons when an enemy readies a special cancels it and stuns them for a short time. You can also hold RMB to block an attack. That's the only things from my time playing I've come across. The rest is spamming abilities, LMB, holding LMB until it dies.
I put in about 5 hours and pretty much agree with everything you said here. The one thing that this game has going for it IMO is rewarding exploration with skillpoints for when you collect skyshards. I'm always for MMOs that reward exploration and hope that they consider adding more stuff like this (along with making the things that you find when exploring more interesting of course).
That's not saying much...
I don't even think it's better than ToR. ToR at least had an interesting intro, this has just been... torture.
I'll give it another hour or so but I doubt I'll ever touch this game again.
I agree completely. Having bugs (besides game breaking bugs) or not has very little to do with my enjoyment of a game that is in beta or even released. As you mentioned, EQ1 and WoW hooked me immediately, games such as FFXIV, SWTOR, ESO, failed to do that for me, and were all boring as hell from the start. It blows my mind that the combat is so janky, that is one of the few aspects of an MMO that cannot be fucked up. The awful combat mixed with the usual questing system killed any possibility of me enjoying it.
BattleMonkey
Member
They somehow made the combat of the ES worse. The hit detection is a joke especially, and toss in lag.... lol.
TOR is amazing compared to this crap.
TOR is amazing compared to this crap.
Exactly. Oh, the first 30 hours are awful, but stick with it! After that it gets fun!
...Ya no.
The most clever thing in this game is how they're preventing people from leaking screens and videos. Otherwise it feels like a stiff version of Oblivion, ignoring improvements brought in to Skyrim. It's competent for the most part, but there's nothing at all interesting about it. Pick any other MMO on the market and despite their flaws they're at least doing something unique. This game... it's got nothing. Like eating a bread sandwich.
ToR at least had/has a fairly decent story which helps to offset the rest of the overall jank. This is just beyond bland.
The combat, as others have said, is just downright mind-numbingly boring and it has no "feel" at all. I feel like I'm playing a loot-whore game(click, click, click, click) with my eyes closed.
About the only interesting part for me is the potential of the PvP system, which I didn't get to try out...because I got bored before reaching lvl 10. We had about 80 people in the GW2 server TS grumbling through the leveling to experience the PvP, so I'll just listen in and see what they have to say (ESO is about the only game on the near horizon that could draw WvW players away from GW2). Again, if I were to pick up ESO it would be solely for the PvP, as the ES content is just extremely lacking(and I don't feel like it plays well with other people).
The combat, as others have said, is just downright mind-numbingly boring and it has no "feel" at all. I feel like I'm playing a loot-whore game(click, click, click, click) with my eyes closed.
About the only interesting part for me is the potential of the PvP system, which I didn't get to try out...because I got bored before reaching lvl 10. We had about 80 people in the GW2 server TS grumbling through the leveling to experience the PvP, so I'll just listen in and see what they have to say (ESO is about the only game on the near horizon that could draw WvW players away from GW2). Again, if I were to pick up ESO it would be solely for the PvP, as the ES content is just extremely lacking(and I don't feel like it plays well with other people).
SeventhSon
Member
Has anyone successfully picked a lock in this beta?
Damn..sounds more and more of a disaster then i thought.
Didn't pique my interests prior to this, doesn't pique my interests now.
While I can understand the sentiment that it takes time to like the game - I'm a Monster Hunter fan, it's almost a prerequisite that you spend a large number of hours before you know if the game is for you or not - I think it's telling enough that many people couldn't bear the game for more than an hour.
I might not have necessarily 'liked' Monster Hunter at the 1 hour mark, but I was pretty sure there was something special about it - and this was before I got into the multi-player or checked GAF to see what the general consensus on the series was. Something about it seemed to be coherently going on in the background.
On that basis, everybody saying that they're not seeing anything special in that 1-hour span of time is enough to make me give up on this game.
While I can understand the sentiment that it takes time to like the game - I'm a Monster Hunter fan, it's almost a prerequisite that you spend a large number of hours before you know if the game is for you or not - I think it's telling enough that many people couldn't bear the game for more than an hour.
I might not have necessarily 'liked' Monster Hunter at the 1 hour mark, but I was pretty sure there was something special about it - and this was before I got into the multi-player or checked GAF to see what the general consensus on the series was. Something about it seemed to be coherently going on in the background.
On that basis, everybody saying that they're not seeing anything special in that 1-hour span of time is enough to make me give up on this game.