So, what's everyone's favourite pervy gamer couple been up to this weekend? I wouldn't know, never met them. But we've been gaming till the homecoming of farmyard animals of the bovine persuation... or something.
Our playthrough of the first Baldur's Gate + expansion is almost complete. Problem is, all our progress has now been jeopardized by the impending release of other games. First off, there's the expansion for Diablo 3, which comes out Monday night. Fortunately for us, the good folks at Blizzard have made sure there's only enough new content to warrant an extra 5 or so hours of extra play time. Now there's some value for money! It's not like the expansion costs twice as much as the original game by now or anything. *coughs*
TESO starts next Sunday. Meanwhile, I'm supposed to write more articles and columns for work. And I can't slack off on TESO, because someone's gonna have to write all those quality guides on how to play that shit. So I gotta level up at a decent pace or else I won't be able to contribute and the publisher's gonna be disappointed. Can't pull a Kevin Sorbo on that one.
You dipshit.
Been out with Hugo the other day and bumped into a fellow dog owner. Hugo walked down the street on his leash and the lady who walked her dog just stood and stared for a while. "'sup?"
I should have said that the folks at the pet shelter told us he's a Rottweiler or something. The reaction is always the same, hilariously nonsensical one. "Is that thing real?"
What am I supposed to say to that? "You're just stressed and we only exist in your imagination - quit your job, leave your family and travel the world while you still can!"
Or maybe, "Nope, he's inflatable."
Perhaps this, "Internet. Amazing what animatronics can do these days, huh?"
No matter how you look at it, asking if a huge animal, which quite obviously walks around, looks at you and flicks its tongue right in front of your nose is real, is simply a bit stupid. And perfectly natural, I suppose. I'd imagine the train of thoughs to be something among the line of, "Holy shit, is that a crocodile? No, it's too small for that. But it's definitely a lizard. Is it a gecko? I don't even know what geckos are, I only know chameleons and this is definitely not a chameleon." My guess is the brain isn't quite done processing by the time they form the question. Is that thing an alligator/gecko/lizard? All these options are stupid and embarassing and lacking anything substantial to fill the gap, the next best thing people come up with is "real", apparently. Is that thing real. As in, is that thing really whatever the fuck it is? What the hell is that? Which, by the way, is the winning question here, but most people are too confused to come up with it.
Unfortunately, we don't have the room to provide Hugo with a vivarium the size he deserves. He can climb, sleep, bask and eat inside the little cube he's got, but aside from that we just share the house with him. He'll leave and climb back into his tank as he pleases and spends the rest of his time outside with us. Everyone is happy with that. Well, except our cats, maybe, who don't trust him at all. Can't blame 'em.
Grocery delivery guy showed up on my doorstep last night. Because, you know, I ordered groceries. I don't have a car, the supermarket isn't exactly 'round the corner and carrying a week's worth of shopping isn't fun. And since supermarkets let you order everything online, well...
It was around 9 o'clock and pitch-black outside. And inside. The lights in our corridor keep dying. Heck, all the lights around the fucking house keep dying, because there's something wrong with our wiring. At least that's what I assume when I plug in my camera via USB and get zapped whenever I touch the on/off button. But maybe that's the NSA, who simply don't want to see my dick anymore. You can never be too sure these days.
So the grocery guy looked at me and asked, "So... you're into medieval stuff, eh?"
And I thought to myself, "I always knew this day would come. This is the price I have to pay for having my groceries delivered to my doorstep. He's gonna rape me. Any moment now."
But my response was really more among the lines of, "What?"
Turns out he's been looking through our window and he saw my sword (no euphemism), the kite shields and all that stuff. Ooooo! Whew! The guy was just watching us through our window for a while before he decided it was time to deliver the groceries. That's not creepy at all!
I don't actually use that shit, though.
In other news: The gate of some dude named Baldur. In anticipation of the upcoming Divinity: Original Sin, Claire and I have started a cooperative playthrough of the complete BG-saga. The cool complete saga, modded into one huge game. Not the stupid "enhanced" edition. If I had to name my single-most favourite game of all time, it would probably be Baldur's Gate. There was just nothing like it when it came out. Use any image you want for a character portrait, pick from all kinds of different voices or record your own, mess around with colours and builds and classes and multi-classing and gear and... hooooolyshiet, there's so much depth and complexity and replay value there!
Of course it's easy to forgive all its shortcomings whilst wearing the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. But I have to admit it's far from perfect, especially from a cooperative point of view. Claire's experience with PC RPGs is limited to Mass Effect, Dragon Age and a bunch of MMORPGs, so getting her into this old game wasn't easy and I don't think she's really loving it (yet). We're half-way through the first game and the expansion and while I'm having the time of my life, well...
Fuck you, Dragon Age 2!
Let's start with the fact that Baldur's Gate simply isn't very multiplayer friendly. Yes, it supports up to six players and everything, but cooperative gameplay can actually make the game more difficult and even tedious at times. It's one thing when you spring a trap and get half your group killed, forcing you to reload a savegame. Or facing a particularly difficult battle, forcing you to reload several times in a row. It's another story when this kind of thing happens in a coop session, where the host needs to pick the right savegame (no quicksaves here), has to wait for the other player to re-synchronise and then both players need to tick the checkbox behind every character they're currently controlling in order to restart the game. What used to require a single keystroke in singleplayer turns into a bit of a clickfest, which easily takes an entire minute, making failure a bigger pain in the ass than ever in multiplayer. Not once have I completed Baldur's Gate on a difficulty setting lower than "normal". We're playing multiplayer on easy for the sake of our sanity.
There's also the fact that the characters, by today's standards, are pretty bleak if you start with the first game and zero previous experience with the series. Wait, what? Unthinkable, right? I love Minsc and Jaheira and on most playthroughs, I use some, if not all of the "canon" characters. Claire? HA!
She kicked out Khalid and Jaheira the first opportunity she got and never even allowed Minsc into our group in the first place. A crazy ranger, who talks to a giant, miniature space hamster and she doesn't want him? How the fuck is that even possible?
That shit right there is why I hate cosplay
Well, maybe it's related to the fact that he's introduced to the player by about five seconds of speech and a wall of text. Which was great back in 1998, but of course he can't compete with the Morrigans and Garruses of modern RPGs. I hope he'll make a better impression at the beginning of the second game, where characters get a little more fleshed-out and talkative. Right now our companions include generic druid #37 and Oheyitsanotherrighteouspaladin, because they had useful stats and abilities. I don't think I have ever played with those guys, they're powerful and everything, but they're not fun like Minsc. It's fascinating. From my point of view, taking him along was an absolute no-brainer. I didn't think it was at all possible to dislike him. But the fact that Claire wasn't at all swayed still makes perfect sense, I suppose. Just didn't see it coming.
We'll see how it goes. The story gets a lot more interesting towards the end of Baldur's Gate and really kicks off with the beginning of the second game. Right now I'm just happy exploring, hacking and slashing through dungeons and hunting down all that sweet, sweet loot. I'll admit I get a bit scared when I think of Durlag's Tower. Might wanna wait a bit before we do that one.
In other news, I've made a new friend:
Glorious day at the exotic pet shop. Chameleons are weird, fucked up and kind of ugly, but also utterly fascinating. That little creature inches forward, one tiny step at a time. "I'm just gonna climb you now, okay?" Most reptiles I've encountered so far will meet people with indifference. Or they'll run away or eat your face when you go near them. The chameleon came to have a good look. Funny stuff. Of course we've also brought our own, because we never leave home without Hugo when the weather is good enough.
'sup?
This guy is our pride and joy. People always comment on how huge and incredibly tame and friendly he is. A girl came to the shop, no older than seven or eight years old and asked if she could hold him. Which was fucking insane, of course, but Claire handed him over and the little girl, barely bigger than the lizard itself, carried him around in her arms like some huge toy. She cuddled and squeezed him and said he was lovely and humongous (holy fuck, the vocabulary with kids nowadays) and the whole time I thought, "Pleasedonteatherfacepleasedonteatherfacepleasedonteatherface..."
Hugo doesn't bite. The whole family hand-fed him prawns when we brought him over for Christmas and no fingers were lost. But when little kids squeeze him till his eyeballs pop out, poke him in the nose and fuss over him like he farts rainbows, well... I wouldn't hold it against him if he acted up. I know I would. But he remained perfectly still and put up with it. Thank fuck!
When Hugo was little, he'd hiss and bite and tail-whip and do all the nasty shit a wild animal would do. Some monitor lizards can never be tamed. Other big lizards should never be trusted at all.
Iguanas look cool. Also, they're dicks.
But he remained perfectly calm when the kids poked him and carried him around, when the old lady stroked him and when one customer emitted some high-pitched female joy-noises, as she couldn't contain herself over how much she wanted one.
Pray, calmeth thine mammaries, m'lady.
I won't lie. I love our big, scary lizard and he wouldn't be as awesome as he is if we had not spent so much time with him. But walking down the street with him, seeing how people poke their heads out of their cars, everyone stopping and staring and asking questions... yeah, that's pretty fucking awesome. We didn't get him because of that, not for the sake of showing off or anything, but I'll admit I like the attention. We have owl guy, who is famous for walking around with a pet owl on his shoulder. There's parrot guy, who has hilarious conversations with his parakeet, takes him to the supermarket and everything. Maybe we'll be the crazy lizard couple at some point. I like the idea.
Too much work and no play is making this place a dull blog. I finally have a few moments to bitch about all the bullshit I'm reading on the 'net lately. Let's start with South Park: The Stick of Truth.
Easily one of the best RPGs I have played in years. And what do I have to read in one of the many reviews out there? "It lacks depth."
Let me get this straight: The game features perks, fart magic, class abilities, various party members with unique abilities and skills and tons of gear with different strengths and weaknesses and it "lacks depth"? There is armor, which allows you to generate PP (read: mana) faster but lacks defense as well as the polar opposite. There is gear which provides bonuses against certain baddies. There are weapons, which deal high single target DPS as opposed to weapons, which harm entire groups of baddies with moderate damage, attack an entire row of enemies or debuff them with various negative effects. Many enemies are shielded or buffed in some way, making them vulnerable to only the right kind of attack. "It lacks depth."
"It is usually enough to simply equip your strongest weapon and armor." Oh yeah. You mean, as opposed to every other RPG in existence, right?
Then there is this:
While I genuinely think it's an interesting watch, I can't get over how some people lose their shit over this. Oh god, the outrage, E3 presentation footage looked better than the actual game, we're all being lied to, nooooo! Why is this news? Visuals on our $500 "next-generation" consoles are still shit compared to any mid-range gaming PC, nooooo! What's the fucking news here? Still, fun video. I like it.
What else? Oh yeah, something something something Warcraft:
And what's the #1 comment this kind of thing has generated, aside from the usual flaming, hating and trolling? Oh yeah: WoW is dead, RIP WoW, you get the idea.
Let's see here. WoW's subscriber numbers have actually gone up a bit and are close to 8 million paying customers right now. At its peak, WoW had something around 12 million subscribers, meaning it has lost 4 million players along the way. When was it that Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Hellgate: London or Age of Conan had 4 million paying subscribers again? Oh, that's right - fucking NEVER! WoW has lost more subscribers than any of its alleged "killers" ever had and is still the single-most successful subscription-based MMORPG to date. I haven't touched the game for years. Didn't like where they were going with it. But I'm not talking about how "it's dead", because I no longer enjoy playing it.
Is WoW past its prime? Of course it fucking is, nobody denies that. But stop making a complete idiot out of yourself by claiming it's "dead". As for the instant level 90 boost, however... look, if you can't make it to level 90 in an MMO as easy and casual as WoW or if you've played it so much that you just can't be bothered to level up yet another toon, well... makes me wonder if WoW is still the right game for you. That said, instant level 90 characters are gonna be another paid service and I think it's fine. Nobody is forcing you to use that service and everyone should be allowed to play the way they want. I mean, sure, back in my day leveling up a character was part of the experience, but after the fifth or so alt, things might get a little stale.
"But starting right at level 90 means you'll never learn how to play your class!" Right. Because playing dull kill and fetch quests for a week or two totally teaches you how to function in a raid.
Oh hey, speaking of Blizzard - could you tell me why you're all so hyped up about this?
It's the flashy trailers and brilliant marketing, isn't it? I mean, you all still remember that Diablo 3 was okay for a week or so and then turned out to be just that? Okay?
My friends are going crazy about this shit right now. Patch 2.0.2 (or something?) came out the other day and I read comments like, "This is what Diablo 3 should have been like all along! Finally, this game is good!" Wait, what?
Look, the game isn't horrible. Far from it. But it isn't great, either, and I fail to understand how the recent changes make it so.
So they have revamped the various difficulty levels, because there were too many of them and they were confusing, right? We had normal, nightmare, hell, inferno and an extra setting for "monster power". But now, everything is all nice and easy and not fucking stupid or anything.
Well...
Instead of the many confusing difficulty levels we now only have normal, hard, expert, master and "Torment" tier one through six. Ten fucking difficulty levels. Which really just scale monster damage and hit points, meaning that once you go high enough in difficulty, it may well take 50something hits to kill a baddie. At the promise of even more loot and experience. Oh the user-friendliness!
But that's not the real cool new feature. Everyone is hyped about about glorious "Loot 2.0". Basically, Loot 2.0 will make sure that, every so often, you will get a legendary drop. In fact, it doesn't even matter where you search for your fucking loot anymore. You could kill a boss monster, an elite pack or smash a clay pot. Just destroy everything and BAM - guaranteed legendary. And that legendary will be useful to your class 90% of the time, so you won't have to deal with the frustration of finding a magic wand whilst playing a barbarian. Still happens, but rarely so.
Alright, here's my problem with this: THERE IS NO FUCKING SENSE OF ACHIEVEMENT! If I pull a legendary sword out of a FUCKING CLAY POT, it's not exactly a heroic experience and after the fifth fucking legendary that same fucking day, I can't help but notice that I'm simply rewarded for BEING THERE. All I have to do is spread those butt cheeks and the legendary gear will come flying.
And that's what I see when I look at my goddam friends list on there: EVERYBODY IS FUCKING LEGENDARY!
Everyone suddenly sports gear, which would have sold for hundreds of millions of gold coins on the auction house. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the AH is gone, but there is no more reward for skillful play, there is no way to stand out, everybody is awesome. It doesn't matter if you kill or skip the elite baddies, if you go farm bosses or smash pots all day - repeat it until the game is satisfied and there's your legendary. How is this fun? How is getting "rewarded" simply for being online fun?
I've played through the campaign again over the weekend. Grabbed Claire, started a Torment II run from Act I and breezed through. And more often than not, the dull 3-button gameplay literally put me to sleep. I could feel my eyes shutting time and again and by the end of the playthrough, I had died exactly three times - always to an elite pack with "jailer" and "frost shit that gets you stuck and kills you" abilities. You don't die to those baddies because they're so clever or so great to fight. You die, because they use annoying, cheap abilities. Jailers hold you in place, then some little frost bomb explodes near you and you get raped by a dozen monsters while you can't move or use potions or fight back. Torment, indeed!
Didn't matter, though. "Respawn at corpse" is the magic button here. You get to revive EXACTLY WHERE YOU DIED, right by the monsters who fucking killed you, so you can just keep on respawning and hitting them until they eventually die. Sure, if you die three or so times in a row, the game will force you to respawn a little further away, but come on now. Really? Respawn on corpse? Maybe we should remove dying completely. You know, make Diablo 3 a little more casual-friendly.
Those cheap deaths aside, I didn't come close to dying. Not once. Not during any of the ridiculously pathetic boss battles. What put me to sleep wasn't just the fact that it was so incredibly easy, though. It was the kill speed. Or lack thereof. My barbarian is specced into a self-sustaining whirlwind and even with his 150k unbuffed attack power, fighting a horde of monsters meant pressing and holding the right mouse button and moving around said monsters for a full minute until they finally died. Every. Single. Time. Add 2-5 minutes per elite monster.
That's a minute of holding my right mouse button, a minute where I can't possibly die, a minute where I don't have to use my brain, a minute where I just keep my eyes peeled for the next legendary item to drop. And hey - we went from Paragon nothing to Paragon 50+ and full legendary in every slot in one playthrough. Now what? Torment III? Do the same shit again and waste even more time to kill harmless monsters with stupidly large amounts of health?
And how exactly is Reaper of Souls supposed to make this any better? The one thing that really appeals to me is the idea of Nephalem Rifts. Completely random dungeons. Random monsters, tilesets, bosses, everything is random. And that shit has so many strings attached, I may as well not bother. First you need a rift key, which can drop anywhere in the game, but it's easiest to just play a bounty mission, which is really just more of the same old shit. Kill a certain boss baddie or play a specific dungeon. You know, from the regular game, the kind of shit we all grew tired of after a week with the original game. Then and only then can you play a single Nephalem Rift. Want more? Restart your game, get a new key or get fucked.
WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT? Why can't I just fucking start "Rift mode" or some shit, play non-stop Nephalem Rifts for as long as I want, one random dungeon after another, chain them up and only stop when I've had enough? Why do the game designers hate that idea so much? Why am I forced to replay the same old crap over and over again to get the one tiny bit of really "new" content? Oh right, there's also a 5th act being added to the 4 existing ones, but COME ON! You play that shit once, maybe twice, then you've seen it, move along. I don't wanna repeat that crap ad nauseam only to gain access to the one thing I really wanna do.
Her. I wanna do her.
RoS isn't gonna fail. It's not gonna suck, not completely anyway. But I doubt anyone but the most dedicated, the most hardcore of D3 devouts will stay around for more than a week. Somehow I don't think this expansion will appeal to people any longer than the original Diablo 3 did. Guaranteed legendary loot may be fun for a while, especially if you usually suck too hard to actually earn that shit, but ideally, a game offers a little more than just loot. There should be substance. And I don't see it here.
I had to put lots and lots of hours into the TESO beta lately. You know, for work. And the whole time I couldn't stop thinking of my early WoW days, back when World of Warcraft was in beta and finally got released. Many of my friends and many of our users describe that magical "first time" kind of feeling, how everything is all new and mysterious and exciting and how that feeling never came back in any other MMO or even any WoW expansion post Burning Crusade. And here I am, going crazy about The Elder Scrolls Online and suddenly that good, old feeling is back. And I think I'm starting to understand why.
I'll never forget the first (retail) day of WoW. I rolled a night elf, I had to kill jumpy little demons and boars, looted my first bag (yay!) and then I had a timed quest to gather ingredients for an antidote and I came past a lake and the water looked kinda nice back then andand... it's weird. I still remember it in great detail. Spider cave. Lots of yucky, green crawlers. Then I left that little starting outpost and there was an owl and it bit my face off. There was also a satyr, but he's a dickhead and you could play a prank on him.
Those shoulders were earned in world PvP - we didn't need arenas and pillar-fucking back then!
Everything felt so huge! So strange! Overwhelming! There were those giant tree guardian thingies outside Darnassus and they were like level 55 and had a skull on their portrait and I was really impressed and thought, "Damn, I'll never be level 55!" At the same time, my old man was playing a dwarf in Dun Morogh and my brother was somewhere in Elwynn Forest. We were all part of the same faction, but it felt like we were all playing different games! I had no idea how to get to them. I had no idea how to get better gear. I bought mostly vendor trash. My first green item felt like a massive achievement.
And then - Westfall. Freddie Krueger harvest golems. And people in chat looking for a group to kill some guy named Van Cleef. And people telling me to go fuck myself when I died and asked for a rez in chat. You see, I just got there from Final Fantasy XI and on there it's common courtesy to revive people if somebody dies near you and it's perfectly normal to ask for that sort of thing in global chat. On WoW it's perfectly normal to tell people to get fucked.
When you read this stuff, you probably can't help but think, "What a noob!" Because I was - we ALL were! There were no excessive guides based solely on early beta phases, no video playthroughs, no "go there and do that", people didn't already know the entire game before ever touching it. Now fast-forward a few years to, say, Cataclysm beta. I was curious about the Worgen, so I looked them up and before I knew it I was watching TotalBiscuit's playthrough of the Worgen tutorial. And since his videos were pretty entertaining, I went and watched his heroic Deadmines playthrough. And so forth. You can see where this is going. By the time Cataclysm was finally out, I was already familiar with a huge chunk of the content. There was no "Oooh, what's this" or "How can I do that" and "Where do I go now", because I already knew. Everybody did.
Quests in vanilla WoW? You had to read the description. They told you to go east or west or wherever, there were no fun little quest markers pointing out exactly where you had to go on your map. No DeadlyBossMod telling you exactly what to do in a boss battle. Most of that stuff was created by the community until it got implemented into the game by default. The game tells you exactly where to go for your loot, which boss spawns where and drops what, where you have to click for your quest and how many more things you have to click. Maximum user-friendliness and convenience, zero immersion. No need to look, explore, read or think.
Playing Peekaboo has never been more terrifying.
"But TESO has quest markers", I hear you think, because that's apparently something I can do now. Yes, it does. They're optional, but they exist. But TESO doesn't breadcrumb you from one quest-hub to the next. You want to find all the quests, all the dungeons, all the skill points? Go explore! Uncover the entire map! I didn't know that at first, so I just went wherever the story lead me, picked up the most obvious quests and suddenly I had "nothing left to do" or all the quests and baddies around me were too high level. That's when I realized I had not uncovered shit. I missed so many little dungeons and stories and adventures and once I figured out how I was supposed to play this game, I had a blast.
We're creating guides for this game right now, because sadly, I'm part of this industry, which thrives on spoiling every last secret and every bit of content before most of you even get to play. But you know what? Figuring out the perfect build and play style was hard, because it's new, it's different and we all had to experiment - a lot! TESO makes me feel like a complete noob again. In a good way! The game isn't vomitting epix all over me, I have to earn my loot and the quests, while not frustratingly hard, are more difficult and challenging than any recent MMO has been in a long while. If I screw up, the game punishes me. I can fail. When's the last time you died leveling a toon on WoW?
I fucking love it. The devs didn't grant us access to aaaaaaaaaall the content way before release, there is still so much I don't know about TESO and there will be ooohs and aaahs and surprises and I can't wait to get on there, to be a total noob and to do stupid things, which will make me facepalm a while later, when I'm at the level cap and done with whatever content I choose to enjoy. So, unless you're hell-bent on leveling up faster than anybody else, unless you're super-competitive or just worried you might miss something or you're a complete newbie desperate for help, well... Do yourself a favour. Don't look at too many videos. Don't read too many guides. Don't spoil your own fun. The game is worth being experienced first-hand. Don't just see every last bit of content through magazine, websites and youtube. Especially not youtube! Okay, fine. Maybe just a little youtube. Mkay?
Laggy footage, because ShadowPlay doesn't capture TESO (yet), so I had to use Fraps instead.
and
I've managed to acquire two extra beta keys for the family this weekend and everybody is hooked. Again, I don't think any one of us actually gives a shit about TESO's MMO features. Claire met "nigger guy" in global chat, who kept calling people all kinds of nasty shit. Then there was naked Nord guy who was constantly asking for sexy Argonians (lizard people) to make out with. People loot chests before you get to them, they butt in on your fights and for what? The opportunity to play instanced 4man dungeons and large-scale PvP, which nobody ever requested as a feature for any Elder Scrolls game?
Look, the PvP is nice. It's not bad at all, if you can stand the overblown egos in chat and having a bunch of 14 year olds calling each other names and what not. I don't care for it, I'll probably ignore it. We've been streaming the first 3 group dungeons today with me as a tank and while I enjoy TESO dungeons more than those in, say, Guild Wars 2, I seriously don't care for group content in this game and one can easily ignore it. The loot was bad, battles are a huge clusterfuck (as a tank, I get one taunt, which works on a single target) and boss tactics never go beyond "don't stand in the red shit" or "destroy the magic healing bubble before it reaches the boss". Again, we had fun, I'm not gonna knock those instances, but I wouldn't shed a single tear if they were suddenly removed for whatever reason.
Release is just around the corner. And so is this character's impending wipeout. *sniffles*
I had to start a new character this weekend - you know, for work. I've decided I wated to try something tanky, so I went for the most defensively-specced toon I could come up with. I've rolled a dragon knight with armor-boosting abilities, thorns, a decent self-heal, as well as ye ole sword & board. I've put every last point into health and defense and ignored both stamina and magica, using an equal mix of special attacks and skills to draw from two very finite pools of resources.
And as you can see in the first of the two videos above, it worked like a charm. As someone who prefers to play warrior-types, I absolutely loved playing a "tank" on there. And I dare say that TESO has undone something that has fucked up warriors in just about every modern MMORPG since WoW. Let me try to explain by rewinding time a little.
Have you played the original Diablo? Or maybe Baldur's Gate? Warriors (or fighters, respectively) used to be tough, but back in the day, they also knew how to dish out. And unlike warriors in, say, Azeroth, they still knew how to do both!
Most modern MMORPGs "balance" classes by forcing you to be either a tank or a healer or a damage dealer. Tanks and healers dish out shitty damage, damage-dealers are squishy. Holy trinity and all. I'm sure I've already explained it in more detail than I have to.
TESO is full of heart.
My "tank" in TESO never felt weak in the DPS department. I've played a nightblade, I had dual-wielding characters, characters with greatswords, yet sword & board didn't really feel any weaker in comparison. And that's for a reason. First of all, "tanky" abilities still deal decent damage. The basic taunt ability also deals damage and reduces enemy armor 40 percent, all in one hotkey. Later on, I have upgraded the ability, so it would add the reduced enemy armour to my character as a buff.
Heavy armor, whilst raising resistances and recovery, also comes with a flat-out damage bonus to melee attacks, which also makes it a valid choice for mroe DPS-orientated specs. Unless you're a sneaky type, of course, as medium armor provides crit bonuses and makes sneaking easier, making it a more suitable choice.
Another reason why tanks are heavy hitters is how spells and special attacks work. Even with a tanky class you can put powerful spells and AoEs on your hotbar. And going sword&board doesn't make your special abilities hit any less hard. Your weapon of choice really just affects the corresponding weapon skills you can use and unlock, as well as your actual weapon damage (aka left-clicking a baddie). So, of course a basic attack with a giant two-handed war hammer will deal more damage than one dealt by a single one-handed sword. Your abilities and spells, however, will hit just as hard, whether you use a massive greatsword or a puny dagger. So, for as long as you have enough magicka and stamina to pump into special attacks, you'll deal damage.
I find Argonians disturbingly adorable in a strictly non-sexual way.
Still, even with fully pimped armor and health stats, the actual "tanking" rarely goes beyond keeping a single boss aggroed on you while the group finishes off the trash. There is no AoE taunt, you don't just run around and collect every single mob in a dungeon so the rest of the group can zerg 'em down. You protect the squishy ones from the most dangerous enemies and that's it. So, with your aggro-managing abilities somewhat limited, it only seems fair to be able to dish out more than your average MMO tank.
In all fairness, we didn't have the time to play much beyond level 20. Can I say for sure that pure DPS-specced characters won't kill enemies twice as fast as "tanks" at level 50? Of course not. That said, a friend has posted a video of herself soloing a dungeon on her level 50 templar (also sword & board) and she was doing just fine and felt pretty much the way I did - using a shield doesn't slow you down and is perfectly valid, even if you wanna kill shit.
So, if tanky characters can kill baddies just as well as folks focusing on DPS, is there any reason to go with medium or light armor at all, two-handers or dual weapons or staves and spells? Of course there is! Fun! Individualism! Doing whatever the fuck you want!
As mentioned above, if you want to sneak, medium armor is your best option. Same thing if you want to rack up those crits. You want to be an efficient healer or spellcaster? All the most powerful casters use light armor, which gives you all the extra spellpower you need for that extra oomph! Of course you can also be a sorcerer in full plate and swing a warhammer. Your spells will never be as powerful as those used by your robed colleagues, but you may be able to take an extra hit or two. It all has its strong and weak points.
It can't remotely compare to a well-modded Skyrim, but it looks alright.
And that's the one thing we've all taken with us from the beta. Many of the races and classes were fun to play. There are countless enjoyable, valid play styles. Even the three different alliances (read: player factions) were all great in their own way. We're having a really difficult time deciding what race, class and play style to "main" when the game goes live. Or which alliance we wish to join. And release is only a month away...
