Anyone else just get a key? I know Purplefood and Avatar720 did.

I didn't even realize it was that far along yet

Nor did I until I got an email from them, I don't really remember when I signed up for the beta but I do vaguely remember doing so with Purps and Avatar...

It's been going on for awhile, I remember a month or two ago (probably just before Thanksgiving) that there was a beta weekend.

Downloading it on the laptop as I type. I'm interested to see how it feels compared to other MMO's and of course Skyrim/Oblivion.

What I've heard and seen so far it's essentialy a combination of a worse skyrim game with a worse WoW clone. Not to mention that they actually will be going down the subscription route.

I do not expect anything good to come of this.

I dunno which is worse, a subscription or the typical terrible F2P method.

Yeah, I played in the last Beta Weekend. It was okay. I think the game will get better as people spread out more, the starting zone was obviously just jammed with folks.

Will I pay a sub for it? Probably not. I can just go play some Skyrim. Which I think will hurt them, because it hasn't been long enough since the last ES game for people to build up the hunger for a new game in the series, especially one that is such a radical departure.

I got an invite for this weekend. If they are doing stress tests it can't be far from release.

From what I have read about it I don't expect this to do very well at all.

 KingCracker wrote:
I dunno which is worse, a subscription or the typical terrible F2P method.

Terrible F2P method, because Private Servers

Anyways, interested in seeing how TES Online will be. Hopefully subscription-free on Xbox

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 KingCracker wrote:
I dunno which is worse, a subscription or the typical terrible F2P method.

Terrible F2P method, because Private Servers

Anyways, interested in seeing how TES Online will be. Hopefully subscription-free on Xbox

They will not be subscription free on xbox, but subscription cards can be bought at stores independent of your account.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 KingCracker wrote:
I dunno which is worse, a subscription or the typical terrible F2P method.

Terrible F2P method, because Private Servers

Anyways, interested in seeing how TES Online will be. Hopefully subscription-free on Xbox

They will not be subscription free on xbox, but subscription cards can be bought at stores independent of your account.

Dangit. Last I read was that Bethesda and MS were talking 'bout that.

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 KingCracker wrote:
I dunno which is worse, a subscription or the typical terrible F2P method.

Terrible F2P method, because Private Servers

Anyways, interested in seeing how TES Online will be. Hopefully subscription-free on Xbox

They will not be subscription free on xbox, but subscription cards can be bought at stores independent of your account.

Dangit. Last I read was that Bethesda and MS were talking 'bout that.

Without really slipping any huge amount of details, the subscription fee was never really going to be "no subscription fee on X platform v Y". There was talk about something to the effect of Xbox Live members being able to 'add' the subscription fee to their Live membership at a discounted price but I think that went out the window.

That said there is a lot of content in the game even at launch, and Bethesda is only publishing this game.

Well, no TES Online for me then. Any subscriptions besides my Xbox Live equals a "I'm out" for me.

As of right now the working price for a subscription is $8/month, with the first two months of play time free.

I got one, surprisingly. Probably wont pay a huge sub fee but if it's only a few quid a month and it's good then I might think about it.

Subscription?

This MMO is dead to me.

Got the email with the key. Immediately saw that it was a stress test so I'm expecting very long queue times/multiple crashes and server downtime.

Saying that it will be a nice "trial" before I consider subscribing and as to whether to invest time in it. If its mostly the same as every other MMO I'v played then it won't be for me. Why play a Wow clone when I can go back to GW at anytime for free?

Shall see how things go.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Subscription?

This MMO is dead to me.

Personally, I prefer subs to pay-to-win freemium.

I'm a sad, no key for me, yet.

 Platuan4th wrote:

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Subscription?

This MMO is dead to me.

Personally, I prefer subs to pay-to-win freemium.

I'm a sad, no key for me, yet.

and down right paying for a game like it should be is out the window in relation to MMO's? sorry new to them never got the whole mindset needed and found them stupid. not that excited for TESO online, but its TES. luckily I got the anthology so I'm set for a year or 2

 Platuan4th wrote:

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Subscription?

This MMO is dead to me.

Personally, I prefer subs to pay-to-win freemium.

I'm a sad, no key for me, yet.

I'm about as PvE as PvE gets, so I couldn't care less about P2W; AFAIK there aren't any micro-transactions required in order to get mobs below 1hp (yet).

 Avatar 720 wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Subscription?

This MMO is dead to me.

Personally, I prefer subs to pay-to-win freemium.

I'm a sad, no key for me, yet.

I'm about as PvE as PvE gets, so I couldn't care less about P2W; AFAIK there aren't any micro-transactions required in order to get mobs below 1hp (yet).

You should see some of the Star Trek Online premium ships and gear in comparison to their level appropriate free equivalents.

Not bothered really, I accept that free stuff is worse than paid-for stuff by choosing the free option anyway; so long as most of the PvE is doable by free accounts then I'm fine - it's only really PvP where the inherent advantages premium stuff has start to show and are able to be exploited.

I'm not looking to breeze through PvE, or even to have an easier time of it.

 Platuan4th wrote:

You should see some of the Star Trek Online premium ships and gear in comparison to their level appropriate free equivalents.

STO is a bad example of a F2P MMO. Something like Lord of the Rings is a lot better.

Tbh with the download speed I am getting on this thing I'll be lucky if I get a chance to play. 7% after nearly a whole day of downloading is terrible even for here in rural Suffolk.

 Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:
Tbh with the download speed I am getting on this thing I'll be lucky if I get a chance to play. 7% after nearly a whole day of downloading is terrible even for here in rural Suffolk.

The same thing happened to you with Guild Wars 2 didn't it? That sucks man.

I'm in the middle of nowhere in mid-wales and my average download speed is 1.5MB/s.

Yeah, considering the size of the village here its bad. I'm getting 86KB download at the moment, and tbh that's a good day, seen it as low as 30KB last year.

On a positive, the whole of Suffolk is getting a broadband upgrade at the mo, but our village is due early to mid 2015 so doh.
It will bounce us up to about what you have mind, which to be blatantly honest would be an absolute dream.


It might make it, but will have to wait and see. Sadly its not sounding too great mind based on what folks are suggesting but I'll have a look. Oddly I might be more interesting in nabbing it on the Xbox One depending on how it is converted to a controller.


On a side note didn't spot you where in Aber, going to the Uni?

In my second year of a physics degree there.

I could do without the MMO. A simple multiplayer co-op option on the next elder scrolls though....pleasepleaseplease

 Maelstrom808 wrote:
I could do without the MMO. A simple multiplayer co-op option on the next elder scrolls though....pleasepleaseplease

Yeah. That would be awesome.

 Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:
Yeah, considering the size of the village here its bad. I'm getting 86KB download at the moment, and tbh that's a good day, seen it as low as 30KB last year.

On a positive, the whole of Suffolk is getting a broadband upgrade at the mo, but our village is due early to mid 2015 so doh.
It will bounce us up to about what you have mind, which to be blatantly honest would be an absolute dream.


It might make it, but will have to wait and see. Sadly its not sounding too great mind based on what folks are suggesting but I'll have a look. Oddly I might be more interesting in nabbing it on the Xbox One depending on how it is converted to a controller.


On a side note didn't spot you where in Aber, going to the Uni?

What the.. I've had faster dial ups then that. How can you live at that speed!?

It's actually pretty well thought out even it's current state. Claiming it's a WoW clone is disingenuous as there are hundreds of fantasy MMO's out there currently, all of which utilize a lot of aspects present in EVERY fantasy MMO.

Gameplay is solid, I didn't find myself irritated with a lot of what I've played last time, bugs aside. The community is better than any MMO I've had the pleasure of being apart of (which is huge for me given the horrible human beings that permeate the online scene nowadays). Graphics are on par with Neverwinter (a game I hold MMO's to in terms of presentation). To touch back on gameplay, I feel like every mmo is going to bear the curse of the 'WoW clone' moniker (which really sells so many games short as the description is a silly one), but the elements of 3rd person RPG/mmo's is certainly there.

All in all, I'm excited to see how it goes. Subscriptions are a way of life for MMO's (barring those that claim to be F2P, which is crap and we all know it), and I think it allows for a better product in general.

I could agree with that. If Skyrim had allowed split screen multiplayer me and Aura would probably still be playing the hell out of it, compared to our fairly long stints as it is.

 Kanluwen wrote:
As of right now the working price for a subscription is $8/month, with the first two months of play time free.

Looks like it's actually going to be $15 a month.

What payment model will The Elder Scrolls Online use?

We will be announcing exact payment methods at a later date, but globally we will be supporting multiple payment options. Players must purchase The Elder Scrolls Online in order to play it. They will have unlimited access for the first 30 days following activation and can continue beyond that with a subscription of $14.99/month (€12.99 / £8.99).

http://help.elderscrollsonline.com/

Anyone able to post a brief review or impressions of this to date?
Sort of looking forward to it but having played multiple mmos am not getting too excited over it.
Cannot endure another "first 20 levels are good and then poof" syndrome again.

I'm in on this current testing phase

 mega_bassist wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
As of right now the working price for a subscription is $8/month, with the first two months of play time free.

Looks like it's actually going to be $15 a month.

What payment model will The Elder Scrolls Online use?

We will be announcing exact payment methods at a later date, but globally we will be supporting multiple payment options. Players must purchase The Elder Scrolls Online in order to play it. They will have unlimited access for the first 30 days following activation and can continue beyond that with a subscription of $14.99/month (€12.99 / £8.99).

http://help.elderscrollsonline.com/

See? Things change quick.

Please remember though players in this current beta/stress test--you are under NDA, which means you should actually read the NDA. Whether it's legally enforceable or not, Bethesda might be willing to really bring the hammer down on people revealing too much.

Well, that means I won't be playing.

I don't believe any mmo that says they will be using a subscription fee. It just doesn't work out.

Seems to work just fine for WoW to me.

I won't be saying anything other than the fact I am in... if I get in. Its bloody odd though, its downloaded about 16gbs but its only noted its got 23% down. It's probably one of those finish a file update the progress bar type deals, but its not going to be done tonight, maybe tomorrow night.

I have 4349mb remaining as of right now.

WoW is a unique case no other MMO has been able to mimic. Probably best I don't say more before I start offending WoW players

 Melissia wrote:
WoW is a unique case no other MMO has been able to mimic. Probably best I don't say more before I start offending WoW players

90% of the WoW playerbase deserve to be offended, the other 10% don't care.

 Melissia wrote:
WoW is a unique case no other MMO has been able to mimic. Probably best I don't say more before I start offending WoW players

WoW is a unique case because of WoW. It's such a big whale that it ate all the fish and now mmos have to eat shrimp or something.

The tutorial isn't good.

But its Skyrim - online? maybe they hope "vets" will be used to it?

I got the beta....downloaded it whenever i got the email (the 7th maybe?)
Haven't played it yet just not really in the mood right now to try it for some reason haha

Subscription ontop of a $60 game sounds like a jip but you are basically just paying a subscription for constant updates and expansions. Instead of paying $60 then $30 for expansions etc etc

I am not sure if I will get it yet because its like Star Wars The Old Republic. Was $60 then 10-15 subscription. I was pumped for it and then ended up not buying it because I don't play much video games anymore and still haven't played the free to play.

I think this is just a different direction that the Eldar Scrolls series wants to take and that's not a bad thing. They will make other non online versions so I am not worried about this "ruining" the series. Just a different approach. If games didn't take different approaches to things we wouldn't have a lot of games some of us love.

Just a scruffy Canadians opinion

 Ratius wrote:
But its Skyrim - online? maybe they hope "vets" will be used to it?

It's just uninteresting, especially compared to Skyrim's tutorial.

Though take that with a pinch of salt as I wasn't actually able to complete the tutorial due to performance issues and getting stuck in a wall.

Played an hour or 2 and got to the main area. It felt instantly like an Elder Scrolls game until you see a load of players running around.

Its decent enough though not something I would pay for monthly. I dunno maybe playing more will help me decide.

I'm going to attempt to complete the tutorial again with a new character later on today, hopefully things will get better.

I've been thinking about playing, but I keep thinking of this picture. Not what I want in elder scrolls.

Are those the actual graphics/is that the actual interface? Because they're terrible.

~Tim?

No. That's a meme, where people took Oblivion or Morrowwind's interface.

Morrowind.

My client consistenly crashes when I try and run the game, the repair tool failed to fix this and my attempts to redownload the 20Gb clinet have been twarted by a glacial download speed. Frankly I'm not sufficently interested in the game to try and overcome these issues.

I like seeing the "I'm not really interested" posts from people who got the invite, when folks like me who really are interested, didn't.

:(

Well I was interested enough to try it, the problem is that I'm not interested enough to try and find a solution to fix it.

 djones520 wrote:
I like seeing the "I'm not really interested" posts from people who got the invite, when folks like me who really are interested, didn't.

:(

IKR?

 Palindrome wrote:
Well I was interested enough to try it, the problem is that I'm not interested enough to try and find a solution to fix it.

I'm not knocking on you specifically, I've just been seeing it around the internet a lot actually. I signed up for the beta when they first announced sign ups, and I haven't been invited to any of it, yet I'm constantly seeing people who have, who've treated it with ambivalence at best, and it just kinda gets annoying.

I was interested until the subscription news came up.

If nobody had posted about it then my interest wouldn't have immediately tanked.

As an aside, I haven't gotten an invite, so don't think o fme as one of those people lol.

I did, saw it was a 20GB download, decided that cleaning my SSD was to much effort and went back to watching stuff on netflix. No regrets.

I've managed to get through the tutorial without getting stuck in a wall but the game crashed whilst loading the first zone and I was far too put off by the performance issues to reopen the game, even on a rig considerably beefier than my laptop (which is still reasonably good) the game runs like gak.

Though as always beta is beta.

About everyone I asked says its "Bad Online Skyrim". I take this information with equal parts smug "Fething called it fanboys" (Because everytime it was mentioned, a lot of my buddies would fall into the usual "It's gonna be the WoW-Killer"-Rant), and a dissapointed sigh because the lack of Coop was the ONE thing besides the boring combat I didnt like about past Elder Scrolls.

Its especially funny following some of the discussions on Forums, both official and fan-variants. On one side there are those that shoot the Game down as a burning trainwreck going for the nearest cliff, while the other side just parrots the usual "Its just a Beta!". I Allways found that notion very funny, as if the Beta-Status meant that the game could change entirely within a few weeks.

 Bromsy wrote:

 Maelstrom808 wrote:
I could do without the MMO. A simple multiplayer co-op option on the next elder scrolls though....pleasepleaseplease

Yeah. That would be awesome.

Agreed. They need and instance type deal where 4 or 5 buds can go fight done epic bad ass monsters and get cool loot. Not an MMO.

I had a good bash on it, found a couple of bugs (redguard area took a age to load!!) but other than that it feels like a MMO without the feel of a MMO.I played WOW back in the day bit of SWTOR and dabbled here and there but i quite enjoyed it and it ran (just) on my piss poor PC.

I wasn't impressed with it, I'll wait for wildstar

Stuebi wrote:
About everyone I asked says its "Bad Online Skyrim". I take this information with equal parts smug "Fething called it fanboys" (Because everytime it was mentioned, a lot of my buddies would fall into the usual "It's gonna be the WoW-Killer"-Rant), and a dissapointed sigh because the lack of Coop was the ONE thing besides the boring combat I didnt like about past Elder Scrolls.

Its especially funny following some of the discussions on Forums, both official and fan-variants. On one side there are those that shoot the Game down as a burning trainwreck going for the nearest cliff, while the other side just parrots the usual "Its just a Beta!". I Allways found that notion very funny, as if the Beta-Status meant that the game could change entirely within a few weeks.

The performance issues a lot of people had are something that can be fixed entirely between beta and release. The fact that the game is incredibly dull cannot.

 Corpsesarefun wrote:

Stuebi wrote:
About everyone I asked says its "Bad Online Skyrim". I take this information with equal parts smug "Fething called it fanboys" (Because everytime it was mentioned, a lot of my buddies would fall into the usual "It's gonna be the WoW-Killer"-Rant), and a dissapointed sigh because the lack of Coop was the ONE thing besides the boring combat I didnt like about past Elder Scrolls.

Its especially funny following some of the discussions on Forums, both official and fan-variants. On one side there are those that shoot the Game down as a burning trainwreck going for the nearest cliff, while the other side just parrots the usual "Its just a Beta!". I Allways found that notion very funny, as if the Beta-Status meant that the game could change entirely within a few weeks.

The performance issues a lot of people had are something that can be fixed entirely between beta and release. The fact that the game is incredibly dull cannot.

Pretty much this yes.

TESO is actually a perfect example of "Lets take "Brand X" and make a game/movie/book out of it, the name alone will sell it.". The lack of innovation speaks volumes about the thought process that went into this whole thing.

one thing to remember in most all beta's for mmo's ... is the beta is never ran on the final hardware that the game server would be on.. it is normally a smaller, less powerful system. so that in it's self can cause more lag ... and then add into it the fact that they may not yet be paying for the extra bandwidth that will be needed when the game goes live... and that takes care of some of the issues ...

either way, after another weekend it worked better but still not quite there ... questing was a bit better .. combat was still meh...

From what I have seen of it its a hell of a systems hog needing much higher specs than skyrim inself.

Didnt play it myself but what I have heard about it was not overly impressive. Certainly not worth the subscription cost.

I would considering paying the subscription for FF14 if I could as I really enjoyed the first month of it. But cant afford it atm.

I give it 8/10 its a good game. I am playing every day and love it.

Combat is like most elder scrolls. The way you handle skills and every class can do damage and heal is a nice break from the holy trinity. Sure a templar has natural healing abilities but any class can equip a healing staff and get access to the spells. And how every class can wear every armour is amazing. Gone are the day of mages in dresses. I grouped with a healer in heavy armour. And he was a beast!

Crafting in ESO is utterly amazing. If you buy gear from vendors.... you bare doing it wrong. Gathering the needed materials for everything does not take forever. And enchanting is a mini game in it self.

To end my rant or praise of the game, it is far from perfect but this may be the game for a lot of folks. The only gripes I have with the game so far is the cost of a Mount.

PS the character creation process is the best! If you look like someone else. You just missed 1/2 of the fun. And the game has a slider for 'prostierer dimensions'. Need I say more?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 carlos13th wrote:
From what I have seen of it its a hell of a systems hog needing much higher specs than skyrim inself.

Didnt play it myself but what I have heard about it was not overly impressive. Certainly not worth the subscription cost.

I would considering paying the subscription for FF14 if I could as I really enjoyed the first month of it. But cant afford it atm.

I played FFXIV, got to end game and that game goes limp noodle. That game system specs is nuts compared to ESO to run it in pretty mode. But like everything on life don't go off what other people say is good or bad. If you don't try for your self you will never know. Like me with Tau in 5th edition, horrible army but I stuffed it out and look at Tau now

I watched the misses play it but didnt try it myself.

Never got to the end game of ff14. Her laptop handled ff14 much better than ESO so I think ESO requires higher specs than ff14.

I played ff14 on the ps3 personally.

lynxstrife wrote:
I give it 8/10 its a good game. I am playing every day and love it.

Combat is like most elder scrolls. The way you handle skills and every class can do damage and heal is a nice break from the holy trinity. Sure a templar has natural healing abilities but any class can equip a healing staff and get access to the spells. And how every class can wear every armour is amazing. Gone are the day of mages in dresses. I grouped with a healer in heavy armour. And he was a beast!

Crafting in ESO is utterly amazing. If you buy gear from vendors.... you bare doing it wrong. Gathering the needed materials for everything does not take forever. And enchanting is a mini game in it self.

To end my rant or praise of the game, it is far from perfect but this may be the game for a lot of folks. The only gripes I have with the game so far is the cost of a Mount.

PS the character creation process is the best! If you look like someone else. You just missed 1/2 of the fun. And the game has a slider for 'prostierer dimensions'. Need I say more?

I'm really not sure if you're being serious... The combat and the character creation were two of the worst parts of the game.

Too each their own. Like I said everyone has different tastes, what I like you may not. The character creation is one of the most in depth there is. Unless you like just going thru stock options that is. Combat is just like elder scrolls, sometimes a little laggy but that is the nature of such things. But click moist to attack, hold for bigger attack other mouse click to block. Works like a charm to me.

The only MMOs I've played where the character creation really mattered were superhero ones. Other than that, you are just going to be worried about getting cool looking gear.

Making characters in Champions for example would take me half an hour or more.

The character creator was pretty standard imo. You really shouldn't spend too long in one. Granted the more options the better.

The real looks should come from drops and crafting. Whether thats true or not I dunno.

I digress though, ESO is not something I will buy into. I have Skyrim for my Elder Scroll needs, even if it is a single player game. Would rather have had a multiplayer Skyrim(max 3/4 players) instead.

After playing this beta weekend Im no longer interested in buying the ESO, interest was already falling with the subscription amount.
The immersion is just not on the same level with all those people running around, for example encountering over 3 people murdering a single bear or a few ruins crawling with dozens of people. Its mostly plain boring with wonky combat so far, not something that can easily be fixed this late in development. The character creation was nice, but not all that special.

I would also prefer that they work on something like a co-op Skyrim instead

What might well for Skyrim, would be a VS and/or Coop Arena.

For balancing, instead of using your Single Player character, you select a preset class (though physical appearence could be customisable) and players are pitted against each other. Or they can team up and be pitted against waves of enemies. After every round, you gain levels and perks, and get to purchase new equipment.

An Arena environment would be self contained, so there wouldn't be a huge amount of development work involved.

Subscription? Sorry, my interest has evaporated. Really, more MMO's need to follow the GW2 model.

It's a shame, the game does look decent, but really, dammit Bethesda, just give us a TES game with co/op already. That's all I want. Not an MMO made by another company that will probably crash considering the MMO market's pretty iffy right now.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
What might well for Skyrim, would be a VS and/or Coop Arena.

For balancing, instead of using your Single Player character, you select a preset class (though physical appearence could be customisable) and players are pitted against each other. Or they can team up and be pitted against waves of enemies. After every round, you gain levels and perks, and get to purchase new equipment.

Nah, I would prefer it being purely your Single Player Character but matched to similar level and gear. That's what made the the Oblivion Arena good, you had to take your best gear or risk dying. Maybe just have the battle ramient being the only thing you must have on. The rest is fair game. I want to become arena champion with my character, not some preset character.

 johnscott10 wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
What might well for Skyrim, would be a VS and/or Coop Arena.

For balancing, instead of using your Single Player character, you select a preset class (though physical appearence could be customisable) and players are pitted against each other. Or they can team up and be pitted against waves of enemies. After every round, you gain levels and perks, and get to purchase new equipment.

Nah, I would prefer it being purely your Single Player Character but matched to similar level and gear. That's what made the the Oblivion Arena good, you had to take your best gear or risk dying. Maybe just have the battle ramient being the only thing you must have on. The rest is fair game. I want to become arena champion with my character, not some preset character.

Plus it isn't a TES game unless there's some hilarious enchanting/potions singularity model that allows you to become a god via a hilarious feedback loop.

The more I read/review this the more disappointed I get.
Will probably give it a miss which is a shame since I absolutely loved the TES series.

I adore TES games but TES online was terrible.

Ive read these reviews of heard, was quite disappointed, but when my launcher finally finishes I can check for my self


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 The Dark Apostle wrote:
Ive read these reviews of heard, was quite disappointed, but when my launcher finally finishes I can check for my self

speaking of which, the launcher is soooo weird, started out on 1.5bm/s then when on 30% jumped to 20mb/s

If I honestly wasn't so invested in GW2, I'd probably give TES a serious try.

As it is, I enjoy the no subscription, and have really come to like a lot of the little creature comforts in GW2 ( I love the account wallet.....).

We'll see how things shape up in the future for both games.

I've played a lot of MMOs, and this is one of the worst.

Don't really know how it stacks up against actual Elder Scrolls games, since I haven't played any other than a little Morrowind, but from what I've read form other people, this is not just a terrible MMO, but also a terrible Elder Scrolls Game.

i see all this comparason to GW2, GW2 is nothing more than a glorified Diablo 3. It is not a true MMO in that every area of the game is full of players.

So got my invite, played a touch this morning. Jury is still out. My computer is just a little choppy with it, so I'm focusing more on the ES feel to it, then game performance.

So far I haven't gotten that feel at all. Maybe seeing 500 people running around the starting area is what is responsible for that.

I played it. It was fun. The graphics are cool. It's no Skyrim. Skyrim is baddass.

Well they have fixed the flaw that prevented my client working in the last beta. I have played it a little bit (I'm lvl 6) and its quite a lot better than I was expecting.

Its still obviously an MMO it doesn't have a lot of the more tedious elements of traditional MMO gameplay although it is still reliant upon an attack bar. Its like a strange Morrowind/WoW hybrid.

Its defiantely not worth the ridiculous price that they are asking but I will probably give it a proper go when it becomes F2P.

From the reviews this is getting on youtube.... I'll wait for a Skyrim multi-player mod. (probably never happen but I'd rather wait for that than play ESO)

 SickSix wrote:
From the reviews this is getting on youtube.... I'll wait for a Skyrim multi-player mod. (probably never happen but I'd rather wait for that than play ESO)

There are already multiplayer mods for Skyrim but they're really janky.

I liked what I saw of it. I'm not sure how binding that NDA thing is, so I'm not going to give details on it, but there were some significant differences in things that I found refreshing.

It was hard to form a real solid opinion on the game because my PC did not at all do it the justice it deserved, but from what I saw I was eager to see more.

If the price wasn't so damn high.

I think this sums it up well. (need to read his editorial under the comic.)

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20140210

 Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:
I think this sums it up well. (need to read his editorial under the comic.)

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20140210

Thanks.

The seems to sum up pretty well most of the crticial reviews of these new chocolate chip cookies I have been reading.

And based on that, I am not going to try this new recipe of chocolate ship cookie. I like the ones I have now just fine. Even if I can't eat them with others.

I took part in the latest beta test, and i did enjoy the game quite a bit. (I should probably mention that im not really a big player of MMO's.) I created a Nord DragonKnight character and played through the early 'Ebonheart' campaign, which honestly was a little boring as the first 2 islands you're stuck on aren't really that enjoyable. Once i hit level 7-8 though is when i started to have a little more fun, a new region opened up that was much larger than the previous islands and i had more freedom along with more quests.

I probably enjoyed the Alliance wars PVP the most during the beta, it takes place on an absolutely huge map of Cyrodiil and involves the 3 in-game factions fighting for control of 6 elder scrolls. (Each faction starts with 2 scrolls.) There are multiple PVP campaigns going at once with each lasting a certain number of actual days/weeks, the servers for each campaign can also hold roughly 2000 players which often leads to some insanely massive battles between factions.

Angry Joe recently put out a video about the PVP, its worth a watch as he covers a good portion of how the PVP mechanics work in the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I82pz60iGL0&feature=c4-overview&list=UUsgv2QHkT2ljEixyulzOnUQ

Curious question. How is the ballance between archery, close combat, and magic?

Do the skills lock-on? In AngryJoe's gameplay there were a few times when he was hit by fireball spells that appeared to lock on and home in on him, without any chance of dodging.

It Dropped http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1487438-eso-support-and-beta-info-nda-has-lifted-updated-feb-15/

 The Dark Apostle wrote:
It Dropped http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1487438-eso-support-and-beta-info-nda-has-lifted-updated-feb-15/

Share for the work blocked?

ESO beta NDA is no more

The Elder Scrolls Online beta test is no longer under NDA! Feel free to share your beta experiences. As for media, like screenshots and video footage, please follow these guidelines for past betas - sharing content for any future events is fine.

The guidelines; https://help.elderscrollsonline.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5664/

Cool. I'll type up something later on my thoughts.

Welp, I only played a couple of hours on this last beta weekend, on a character I had from a previous beta weekend... I think I put a grand total of about four hours into that character, but it felt more like twenty.

I thought it was pretty awful; combat felt clunky as hell and the lack of any sort of feedback whatsoever other than a stat bar increasing or decreasing made it feel... crappy. I found I couldn't care less about any of the story elements; it seemed like the most generic and uninteresting fantasy tropes ever. "Blah blah chosen one, blah blah bunch of heroes blah blah betrayed by a necromancer with the sobriquet "King of Worms" (woah, what a surprsie!) blah blah Blind Prophet blah blah Daedric Prince."

Even the zone-based plot lines I encountered, which should've been cool, weren't. None of the characters or events were particularly memorable. I also got kind of annoyed at the quests that seemed to involve going through a door (loading screen!) talk to someone for fifteen seconds, leave (loading screen!) go into another building (loading screen!) collect an object, leave (loading screen!), go back to the first building (loading screen!) give object to dude, leave (loading screen!).

Also the fact that everything was uninstanced was actually a weakness. Need to explore a dark, mysterious cave to kill the evil conspirator inside? Cool, there's gonna be fifty other melon-fethers in that cave all sitting around with their thumbs up their arses until the guy respawns, then there'll be a button-mashing frenzy and a bunch of people will get credit and the other thirty melon-fethers who didn't get him will be left there waiting again.

I really saw absolutely nothing that convinced me that the game was better off being an MMO. They really should've just made it a normal Elder Scrolls game with a multi-player option. I seriously have never been so bored with an MMO so quickly and I've played a lot of 'em. Like, a stupid number of them.

YMMV, naturally.

EDIT: Supposedly the PvP's fun and the game in general gets better at level 10+. I just couldn't stomach it long enough to get there in a single (or even two, apparently) weekends. I know that MMORPGs aren't exactly gripping at low levels, but this was the only one I've found intolerably dull.

LOL that cookie sounds worse than Everquest for sure.

from what I've played, it seems like they sacrificed a bit too much elder scrolls, and a bit too much mmo

Really they just sacrificed any redeeming features whatsoever.

seems so to me

Bethesda and GW have a lot of common. Instead of furthering the damn story line and revealing the mystical foreign lands one by one (Akaviri, Cathay, etc) they waste resources on gak that there was never really any demand for. Who the feth thinks it is a good idea to keep release EQ-clones? Everything other than WoW had bombed in the western market with perhaps the sole exception of GW/GW2. Warhammer Online and The Old Republic had sexy trailers as well, both fell flat on their faces within the first six months of their release.

http://www.p4rgaming.com/zenimax-lifts-elder-scrolls-online-nda-in-the-hopes-of-finding-one-person-who-likes-the-game

With so much negativity surrounding The Elder Scrolls Online, the pressure is being felt by many of the people working on the game. In an interview with game director Matt Firor on the game’s site, he explained why they are lifting the non-disclosure agreement.
“We needed to find someone who liked the game,” said Firor, “It’s too hard to read what people have written about the game on the internet. We figured that the most hardcore dedicated fans are actually keeping quiet because they don’t want to get in trouble with the NDA. This is why we had to lift it. It was way too depressing in the office before.”

 Palindrome wrote:
http://www.p4rgaming.com/zenimax-lifts-elder-scrolls-online-nda-in-the-hopes-of-finding-one-person-who-likes-the-game

With so much negativity surrounding The Elder Scrolls Online, the pressure is being felt by many of the people working on the game. In an interview with game director Matt Firor on the game’s site, he explained why they are lifting the non-disclosure agreement.
“We needed to find someone who liked the game,” said Firor, “It’s too hard to read what people have written about the game on the internet. We figured that the most hardcore dedicated fans are actually keeping quiet because they don’t want to get in trouble with the NDA. This is why we had to lift it. It was way too depressing in the office before.”

I actually had a good laugh at that. Its another perfect example of a Developer unable to acknowledge that maybe he fethed up. No. OBVIOUSLY its "Hardcore Fans" keeping quiet. Absolutely. Totally.

“We needed to find someone who liked the game,” said Firor, “It’s too hard to read what people have written about the game on the internet. We figured that the most hardcore dedicated fans are actually keeping quiet because they don’t want to get in trouble with the NDA. This is why we had to lift it. It was way too depressing in the office before.”

And once again, Jimquisition is proven right. THis is the kind of self confirming nonsense that has put the industry in the position it is today. People aren't keeping quiet, evident by the fact that you keep being told your game is not that good. Hardcore fans don't keep quiet you twit they're the most vocal douchebags on the internet!

You're not making the latest mainstream game where you can just throw together some half assed attempt at a mediocre experience, collect $60 and then throw out some DLC and see who buys. You're making an MMO. If the hardcore fans aren't happy you have no business because they're the only ones who are going to pay a subscription fee for more than a few months.

 Palindrome wrote:
http://www.p4rgaming.com/zenimax-lifts-elder-scrolls-online-nda-in-the-hopes-of-finding-one-person-who-likes-the-game

With so much negativity surrounding The Elder Scrolls Online, the pressure is being felt by many of the people working on the game. In an interview with game director Matt Firor on the game’s site, he explained why they are lifting the non-disclosure agreement.
“We needed to find someone who liked the game,” said Firor, “It’s too hard to read what people have written about the game on the internet. We figured that the most hardcore dedicated fans are actually keeping quiet because they don’t want to get in trouble with the NDA. This is why we had to lift it. It was way too depressing in the office before.”

And this is why we can't have nice things. Because nobody listens to the internet, the true fans are all to shy and quiet to use such new fangled technology. Nope it's not the fans that are gakking up a storm because the game is bad no its just the naysayers on the internet. "Move along nothing to see here"

I can get that a developer doesn't want to just listen to the internet, but why they insist to themselves that the internet is some mythical place that only the 5 most unpleasable people in the world live is bizarre. If you have 100,000 users, and 10,000 regularly post on the forums at the official site, why assume that those 10,000 represent some minority party rather than a sample of the larger player base, and that when 2000 of them are complaining about something, maybe a little though should be given?

 LordofHats wrote:
I can get that a developer doesn't want to just listen to the internet, but why they insist to themselves that the internet is some mythical place that only the 5 most unpleasable people in the world live is bizarre. If you have 100,000 users, and 10,000 regularly post on the forums at the official site, why assume that those 10,000 represent some minority party rather than a sample of the larger player base, and that when 2000 of them are complaining about something, maybe a little though should be given?

With the number of people who will set up dummy accounts on "official forums" to troll/rage(in addition to them trying to get beta keys, etc)--it's not that hard to understand why a developer would not take the Internet seriously at this early of a juncture.

It's also worth noting that most of the people who "complain about something" do it in the most unintelligible, nonsensical way possible. To use an example, any time the balance changes for Mass Effect 3's multiplayer came up you would get the same people complaining about the smallest thing in the balance change--and it would always be a huge wall of text filled with swearing and the statement that "X could do a better job balancing than these developers".

I should add that yeah, sometimes you do get really useful complaints and feedback but more often than not it's just verbal diarrhea.

Stuebi wrote:

 Palindrome wrote:
http://www.p4rgaming.com/zenimax-lifts-elder-scrolls-online-nda-in-the-hopes-of-finding-one-person-who-likes-the-game

With so much negativity surrounding The Elder Scrolls Online, the pressure is being felt by many of the people working on the game. In an interview with game director Matt Firor on the game’s site, he explained why they are lifting the non-disclosure agreement.
“We needed to find someone who liked the game,” said Firor, “It’s too hard to read what people have written about the game on the internet. We figured that the most hardcore dedicated fans are actually keeping quiet because they don’t want to get in trouble with the NDA. This is why we had to lift it. It was way too depressing in the office before.”

I actually had a good laugh at that. Its another perfect example of a Developer unable to acknowledge that maybe he fethed up. No. OBVIOUSLY its "Hardcore Fans" keeping quiet. Absolutely. Totally.

Its a joke, that site is the gaming equivelent of the Daily Mash.

With the number of people who will set up dummy accounts on "official forums" to troll/rage(in addition to them trying to get beta keys, etc)

That's a lazy excuse (and an actual minority). Most trolls don't go through the process of proxying IP's and most server software can descern how many unique users are accessing it even if they do because even fewer people will proxy their MAC address. The technology is readily available and you'd think a company that codes for a living would use it.

This of course assumes they want to listen. They don't want to listen. It's far easier to blame pirates/trolls/metacritic/other games for poor sales than it is to tell share holders that the company is making bad decisions.

 Kanluwen wrote:

It's also worth noting that most of the people who "complain about something" do it in the most unintelligible, nonsensical way possible.

Developers (presumably in possession of some intellect) should be capable of descerning feedback. They already hire people to manage the forums, it's not going to kill them to hire people to shift through said forums and find useful information, especially since they have access to metrics that will tell them how many users are on the forums, what thread sthey view and how many pages, what posts recieve likes/dislikes.

Its a joke, that site is the gaming equivelent of the Daily Mash.

Curse you for giving false hope to my righteous indignation!

 LordofHats wrote:

With the number of people who will set up dummy accounts on "official forums" to troll/rage(in addition to them trying to get beta keys, etc)

That's a lazy excuse (and an actual minority). Most trolls don't go through the process of proxying IP's and most server software can descern how many unique users are accessing it even if they do because even fewer people will proxy their MAC address. The technology is readily available and you'd think a company that codes for a living would use it.

This of course assumes they want to listen. They don't want to listen. It's far easier to blame pirates/trolls/metacritic/other games for poor sales than it is to tell share holders that the company is making bad decisions.

It might be "an actual minority", but it's not like it is that hard now to proxy IP.

 Kanluwen wrote:

It's also worth noting that most of the people who "complain about something" do it in the most unintelligible, nonsensical way possible.

Developers (presumably in possession of some intellect) should be capable of descerning feedback. They already hire people to manage the forums, it's not going to kill them to hire people to shift through said forums and find useful information, especially since they have access to metrics that will tell them how many users are on the forums, what thread sthey view and how many pages, what posts recieve likes/dislikes.

The thing about that?

They do. It's just they won't publicly acknowledge those people, they'll do it privately.

To go back to the Mass Effect examples(I know--you wish I had more, but that was the only game where I was really active in giving feedback), any time a BioWare employee posted in a thread--it would get swarmed with people who thought they had the solution to whatever problem(real or perceived) cropped up in their latest playthrough of the multiplayer.

Oh I've been to the Bioware forums. I rank it as one of the 5 Cess Pools of the Internet. But I'll also point out how Bioware routinely ignores posts about technical problems for their games. I'm one of a small number of people who can't play ME3 at all because the Origin Cloud encounters an error with the game that makes it perpetually update and never stop updating, making it unplayable. It's a problem with the cloud not my computer.

People have been pointing to this problem for years since the game released and Bioware has never fixed it, commented on a fix for it, or even acknowledged the complaints. In itself it's kind of understandable until you see the same thing happens with nearly every game on Origin to some people. EA has never acknowledged the problem.

Likewise Cryptic, the developer of Star Trek Online, does the opposite. They use metrics to make decisions about their game but completely ignore the forums which would actually explain their metric and give them real context for why they're hemorraging players.

MWO likewise I think has an increasing problem with ignoring its playerbase and its inability to solve long standing problems, but that's just a hunch because companies don't release real statistics publically.

In the same vein, I've heard few positive reviews of ESO bordering on none. The game is becoming a joke on the internet for how mediocre a game it is. Yet, Zenimax isn't commenting on it, talking about it, and doesn't even seem concerned that this game will likely tank faster than any MMO in the past few years. Compare to SWTOR, Guild Wars 2, or even RIFT, all these games had very positive word of mouth upwards of a year from release and two of them still failed. ESO has mostly negative word of mouth and is 3 months out and no one making the game is seemingly listening.

If anyone is interested there is another stress test Beta weekend coming up on the 28th of February until the 2nd of March, it should pretty easy to get a key as numerous websites have been giving them away today. (Someone made a list of those websites here. http://orcz.com/ESO:_Beta_Key_Giveaways.)

If all of those websites are out of codes, there are 2 beta codes in the spoilers below that i accidentally snagged when testing to see if a one of those sites still had any codes left... (Be warned that the game download is roughly 24-30 gigs, so please don't use a code if you have no intention of playing.)
To redeem either of those codes you will need to create an account on the Elder scrolls online website.
https://account.elderscrollsonline.com/register/account-information

I have about 4 codes from my multiple emails so if people want them PM me

My Planetside 2 group are looking to move to ESO, due to the many issues in PS2 these days.
So, after tomorrow's first go, I'll be back with impressions.

In the meantime, it's not looking promising.
Skyrim was nice and did well, but if this is lowest-common-denominator, it'll fail.

I'll be trying this tonight.

Ive read mostly negative things about the game, but im going to ignore all that and give it a good try.

I want to get to level 10-15 at least this weekend before i judge.

Same. A friend got a code and sent it to me so I'll get to have some hands on time to explore the game.

because they keep sending me these and i have zero interest in the game.

TWLWYN4XMWYPRR3ENFGR

GN99XDTGYMAEJY9HJW7R

Well I was looking forward to maybe finding this game to be the opposite of what I heard, but I can't even play the game because the server keeps crashing so I got a mediocre two hours of a bad version of GW2 and instead of waiting for the servers to get fixed I'm updating my GW2 (no seriously, its a bad version of GW2 from what I can tell).

I'm enjoying the game! The freedom of speccing your character is great, and I love the first person view. Having so many options is something that WoW stopped delivering a long time ago in favor of forcing the optimum build on you, and Lord of the Rings online was always a bit more subtle.

I also thought it was really classy that you started out dead- took me back to my first MMO, Shadowbane.

I played until BT dropped my connection :(

It's a fairly standard meld of Skyrim (the only ES game I have played), and generic MMOs.
There are a lot of bugs still, but most appear to be quest-based. Some final mob fails to spawn, and the 30+ players standing there get bored and wander off to other quests.

The views are good, with 1st- and 3rd-person working well.
I played with both single and triple-screen views, and it managed both, but needed to be told the res I was running at after changing the screen size.

I had to cut some background apps to get it to stop stuttering, so a hefty CPU is recommended. This was with a quad-core 3.3 i5 Intel processor and 8GB RAM.

Crafting is well done, and intuitive, but the same Skyrim slog to get resources. Search every crate and barrel to get provision ingredients.

But, as MMOs go, this has promise. I've not read any of the plans for the game, but it's likely to be stable on release.

[Edit: I forgot to mention voice acting. There's a few big names in there, which is cool.]

I put about an hour and a half into it last night. Game looks and controls well. Voice acting had been good so far. The main reason I stopped playing last night was that me and a friend got booted, and we couldn't log back in. Eh, it's a beta after all. I'll be playing it tonight for sure, though.

One of my main gripes - I was disappointed with the amount of classes. I was hoping they would have "sub-classes" like a bard or shaman...I know it's not usual for an ES game, but I figured they'd add stuff like that to bring in more players. Also, the game doesn't feel like an MMO at all. From what I've played, I'm sure you could play it completely by yourself without too many issues.

That being said, the classes they do have have some neat skill trees; and being able to pick and choose between those trees was pretty cool. I made a fighter and a destruction mage, and both combat systems were pretty nice.

For info, the next beta weekend is coming up.
It's another stress test, says the report, so expect it to be busy.
But, it's also splitting the servers into US and EU locations. Check your ping times if you had problems last time.

If anyone has participated in a previous beta I'd really recommend that you give this one another try, because apparently the build for this beta is based on a much more recent version of the game which has had quite a few changes. They've added some smaller stuff like collision with PVE mobs, along with larger stuff like tweaking the early gameplay to have a faster leveling system. You can now also skip straight to your factions city on the mainland after completing the Cold harbor tutorial, instead of being forced to spend a few hours completing both of the starting islands. (You still have the option to go back and complete those islands though.)

Unfortunately my dying gaming PC finally gave up the fight 2 weeks ago so i can't participate in this test, although its probably for the best as i pre-ordered after my first beta experience and this saves me from burning myself out on the game.

While the game was incredibly buggy when I played it, that wasn't my main concern. Really the problem was that the game was incredibly dull, it managed to drain the wonder out of seeing a brand new daedric plane.

Anyone get into this weekends beta?
Any further updates considering launch date is very close?

They updated crafting, making refining gathered materials easier. There are lots more how-to books laying around now, too.

The vendor/bank issue is still there, and pressing '#' or similar is still needed to get out.

You get to skip the tutorial section if you're making a 2nd character.

The starter island is optional, and everyone starts in their main area. A quest-giver sending you back there if you want.

Its getting pretty close to the official ESO launch, with the 5 days 'Early access' starting in less than 20 hours for people who purchased the Imperial edition.

Overall im fairly excited for it, i know the online reception for ESO has been fairly mixed but i enjoyed the time i spent playing in the Beta enough to actually pre-order the game. It helps that i managed to get the Imperial version of the game region free from Getgamesgo for $70, which i consider to be a pretty good deal considering that most other online stores are enforcing the regional price fixing and charging us Australians the usual $120 for it.

Still most definitely torn on this one.
Such mixed reviews, which scares me a bit.

http://www.greenmangaming.com/

It's 20% off, and my Imperial pre-order worked a treat.
Not sure where they can sell it to, though.

From the beta I felt it was an enjoyable if not outstanding MMO. I personally don't think its worth the subscription fee.

 carlos13th wrote:
From the beta I felt it was an enjoyable if not outstanding MMO. I personally don't think its worth the subscription fee.

The PvP looks uninspired. 4v4s and similar? That'd get old quickly.
At least there's a fair bit or re-play in the PvE, with 3 realms, and 9/10 races.

The only PVP I ever played semi seriously was the original Guild Wars so its never been a huge draw for me.

ive been enjoying ESO a lot so far, if anyone is looking for a guild, since you can get in 5, please hit me up in game @ironicsilence

Can you give a brief rundown IS since its now live?

Just some thoughts in no real order, of note I never played skyrim so not sure how similar it is, and I avoiding the beta as I didnt want to get burnt out early

Overall its a very pretty game graphics wise. The quests actually make for a solid story thus far, and all things considering the launch has been really smooth. There has been some bumps and problems here and there but as a survivor of the diablo 3 launch this has been one of the better MMO launches I've been a part of.

The combat system is neat and also takes a bit of getting used to, its not like WOW where your toon can be jumping in circles firing off always hitting attacks. You actually have to face the bad guy and get in attack range to do any damage. Blocking is an active skill as, not like other MMOS where block just becomes a % based on skills and such

The overall crafting system is pretty solid, Its still early going so not really sure if the gear will outpace what you get from quests.

Some things I dont like
You can belong to up to 5 guilds, and guilds are at the account level and not the character level

No auction houses, a guild unlocks a guild only auction house at 50 members, this has resulted in people creating trading guilds, with max guild size at 500, this gives you some outlet to sell your stuff in an auction. Also the guild store interface is just awful, the filter options stink and there is no way to search for something by name....things that I suspect will get patched at some point

Group questing is a bit of a pain. there is no on screen notification when you share a quest, so you dont actually know if your party got the quest or is even eligible for it.

The world actually evolves around you as you complete quests....this is really cool but sucks at the same time. Basically if I go into a town that is overrun by bad guys and do all the quests to save the town, from my perspective this turns into a friendly town, the bad guys all disappear and the NPCs go back to normal life....that is really awesome...the sucky part is it might it really hard to help friends with a quest. If i've already saved the town so to speak I cant help you with a quest in that town as you will see a different instances of the area then I will. Really makes it hard to help out friends


Overall I'm really happy with the game. Its got its problems but I think most are easily fixable. And the launch has been pretty smooth all things considering

 ironicsilence wrote:
Just some thoughts in no real order, of note I never played skyrim so not sure how similar it is, and I avoiding the beta as I didnt want to get burnt out early

Overall its a very pretty game graphics wise. The quests actually make for a solid story thus far, and all things considering the launch has been really smooth. There has been some bumps and problems here and there but as a survivor of the diablo 3 launch this has been one of the better MMO launches I've been a part of.

The combat system is neat and also takes a bit of getting used to, its not like WOW where your toon can be jumping in circles firing off always hitting attacks. You actually have to face the bad guy and get in attack range to do any damage. Blocking is an active skill as, not like other MMOS where block just becomes a % based on skills and such

The overall crafting system is pretty solid, Its still early going so not really sure if the gear will outpace what you get from quests.

Some things I dont like
You can belong to up to 5 guilds, and guilds are at the account level and not the character level

No auction houses, a guild unlocks a guild only auction house at 50 members, this has resulted in people creating trading guilds, with max guild size at 500, this gives you some outlet to sell your stuff in an auction. Also the guild store interface is just awful, the filter options stink and there is no way to search for something by name....things that I suspect will get patched at some point

Group questing is a bit of a pain. there is no on screen notification when you share a quest, so you dont actually know if your party got the quest or is even eligible for it.

The world actually evolves around you as you complete quests....this is really cool but sucks at the same time. Basically if I go into a town that is overrun by bad guys and do all the quests to save the town, from my perspective this turns into a friendly town, the bad guys all disappear and the NPCs go back to normal life....that is really awesome...the sucky part is it might it really hard to help friends with a quest. If i've already saved the town so to speak I cant help you with a quest in that town as you will see a different instances of the area then I will. Really makes it hard to help out friends


Overall I'm really happy with the game. Its got its problems but I think most are easily fixable. And the launch has been pretty smooth all things considering

Indeed. My experience is similar.

Something to mention - the PvE world is designed for 1.5 players. Sometimes it's a little too tough if you're riding solo and completely trivial in a group of 2-3. This can be exciting for the soloist but can also be frustrating due to the resurrect system.

Dungeons are a thing unto themselves. They are highly entertaining. The bosses don't explain what they do, so there is an old-school learning curve where you have to apply some strategy to get around mechanics. Dungeons are the most fun I've had (although, I've been playing with friends so that no doubt contributes)

Classes are fun, and interesting enough. The holy trinity is looser - tank, healer, DPS - but still needed. Try a dungeon without a Healer and you'll get rekt m8.

Exploring is boss. I love running around, finding and harvesting everything I see. Sometime sI don;t even do quests, I just ass around and loot stuff int he world, or go and see what exactly is that random thing off in the distance. So it does retain that sort of feeling from previous ES games.

One bone I have to pick is the mechanics for classes can be described as... wonky. Maybe this is because I've played other MMO's with different systems and that has skewed how i see it but.. yeah. Wonky.

The main candidate is tanking. My housemate plays a Dragon Knight tank, and described why the system is nonsense. Essentially it boils down to a few problems;

- You need to block to reduce damage, because there is no other way to provide passive mitigation other than blocking. Blocking uses Stamina. This wouldn't be such a big issue if they had long swing timers so you could regen Stamina between hits, but as it stands most bosses strike about once every few seconds.
- There is no Threat Table. Enemies will run around willy-nilly providing they are not taunted.
- To actually get an enemy to attack you, you have to Taunt them. Taunting costs Stamina.
- After Taunting the enemy will attack you meaning that you have to block. But you don;t have Stamina to block because you had to Taunt.
- Bosses usually do PBAoE (point blank area of attack) spells which you have to dodge-roll out of. Dodge-rolling uses Stamina. You have no stamina because you have to Block and Taunt so any of these will probably hit you regardless of what you do.

He's a very experienced player, we did hardcore Raididng in WoW and he has plenty of experience under his belt, so its not user error. It's just wonky encounter design. Don't even mention AoE mobs, where all you do is throw stuff down and pray the mobs stick to you and don't go after the squishy DPS (me, in this case).

Another thing is the solo quests. Sometimes quests (like the main) will be instanced and you'll be locked away from your party members. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the instances areas can be really hard, especially if your character is built for group play (all mine are).
I have a Templar built only for Healing, I don't possess even a single damage spell - I had to wait to be about 4 levels higher than the quest to be able to do it, and even then it was just me spamming left click and healing myself. I encountered a similar problem with my glass-cannon Sorceror, and I had to exploit terrain advantages to get around it as I died in only a few hits.

Look, the game has issues, it does. The buggy quests is totally a thing, though most can be resolved with logging out/in again. With that said, it's the smoothest MMO launch I've ever seen, so that's worth mentioning.

That's some of my experiences. I'm at work at the moment so they are a bit scatterbrained (had to stop and start a lot) but if you need any more info I'll be happy to try and help.

Server maintenance done on the US server during german off hours is a bit of a pain. I hope once the game actually goes live the maintenance schedule will shift for the US server

The trick I have found when you want to get to a friend/party member when they are instanced differently is just use the travel to player function. I will actually bring you to their instance and vice/versa.

I´ve been enjoying it so far. The great thing about it is that it seems to focus on RPG crowd more than on an MMO crowd. I haven´t seen an MMO with such a great atmosphere since LOTRO.
There were a few bugged quests and such, but otherwise it runs very smoothly, I think I will pay the sub

So who else is playing in the Daggerfall Covenant?

Thanks guys for thre ingame reviews, sounds ok to me.
Just struggling with another MMO investment!

Noticed this was available now for pc & mac.. is it worth it? looks like they want $70.. and I'm assuming there's a monthly fee on top of that? How much is that?

Is the game worth it? or is it just WOW with Skyrim skins? Or is it not like WOW and more like an online FPS with swords?

It basically is a single-player MMO. Sounds weird, doesn't it? Most of the time, you will be going around solo, playing a much worse version of Skyrim. Coop with other players can be hard as the game uses a lot of different instances - choose to kill a certain NPC and you can't coop with anyone who chose to let him live.

The MMO part only comes in in dungeons and even then, it's only a handful of people. The dungeons are fun and good though and promote interactive, good teamplay.

All in all, though, the game is not worth its price. It comes at full price (!) and then 15$ per month on top of it. Bethesda lost the connection to the MMO market and failed to realize that people do not want paid subscriptions anymore.

In a few months, or a year, ESO will be F2P, just like pretty much every bigger post-WoW MMO.

If ESO was B2P (you only buy the game and can then play forever, like Guild Wars 2), I can only highly recommend the game to everyone. It is not, however, worth a monthly fee.

ah .. thanks.. I'll skip it and wait for F2P then I was hoping for something more like 1st person diablo 3

Hmm...no, it's not Diablo 3. The skill system is a mixture of real action and classic MMO as it uses manual targetting yet still uses the same old "press 1 to use spell 1" mechanic, so only the aiming is actually different from other MMOs. ESO is more about roleplaying, less combat-centric than other MMOs. The quests are really good and well-written.

ESO isn't a bad game. It's a good-ish RPG...it's difficult to describe. It plays like a MMO, but offers more than just grinding like most games, yet there hardly is any MMO value. A good RPG, however, doesn't have monthly payments. A MMO used to have those. And neither is ESO an actual MMO, nor are paid subscriptions a working thing anymore.

was in gamestop with my brother, had the money in my pocket, looked at the game, thoughts of TES nostalgia came to my mind, morrowind, oblivion, skyrim.

I walked away, I wont buy this game. Will go back within the week though to by diablo 3 and RoS though, for the same price as well!

Sounds good.. I'll wait though and see if it goes FTP sometime or at least has a free demo for your first few levels. I loved Skyrim, it consumed a solid 2 months of my life when it came out. I WOWed myself to death though, so I'm after more of a casual experience where I can play a little here and there like Diablo and still feel like i'm getting somewhere.

Exactly what I think too. I don't want to commit myself to one game for a set amount of time. With lots of work on my back, I just like to just check a game out first or sometimes look into other games.

I absolutely hate monthly subscriptions - it always feels like "Dude, you paid for it, play it! PLAY IT! DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY!". F2P games allow you to choose what to buy and I really like that concept.

The absolute best, of course, are B2P games like Guild Wars 2. But alas, high hopes.