(T)ESO Appreciation Day

(The) Elder Scrolls Online does a bunch of shit that really pisses me off. Despite all that it's probably my all-time favourite MMO.

I'm going to praise this game today. But not right away, because I love to bitch about stuff. And bitch I will. There's a bunch of stuff about this MMO, which is so annoying it makes me want to punch my screen. Let's start with the title. I previewed and reviewed this game a bunch of times for work, contributed to guidebooks and compilations. For some of these magazines the folks at Zenimax insisted I refer to the game as 'The Elder Scrolls Online' and/or TESO. In later reviews they insisted all authors just call it 'Elder Scrolls Online' and ESO. For one magazine in particular they started by telling us to call it one thing, then asked us to edit and change it throughout the entire magazine when they changed their mind halfway through the process. Heck, their official URL is elderscrollsonline.com - yet it's titled 'Home - The Elder Scrolls Online'. Nobody knows what to fucking call it anymore. And that includes the folks who create and sell this thing. For the sake of my sanity, I'll continue referring to it as ESO from here on out.

Greed and tourists
An even bigger issue I have with ESO is its asshole monetization. The game is Buy2Play. The PC version of ESO costs 20 Quid and also includes the Morrowind expansion if you grab the correct edition, which is a perfectly reasonable price for a game of this size and quality. There's an optional subscription, which gives you some benefits (bigger inventory, slightly faster progression, even more content), but that stuff is by no means mandatory, especially before you complete the insane amounts of content found in the base game. And if you stop right there, you've got one of the fairest, most affordable MMOs with insane value for money. But that's where the greed kicks in.

Fucking loot crates.

ESO waits for a minute or two after you log on, then shows you a pop-up with special offers from the cash shop. Doesn't matter whether you're subscribed or not, you'll be looking at these fucking offers! The shop contains costumes, mounts, experience boosters, nothing game-breaking, no legendary weapons or anything that directly buys power. That's okay. What isn't okay is when you find in-game mount vendors, who have exotic stuff like wolves and tigers in their stables and even talk to you about them, but when you try to buy one, all they offer to you is a bunch of horses. If you want to ride something that isn't a horse (or you want a slightly cooler horse), then there's no way around the cash shop. And that actively hurts immersion. There's a guy who breeds riding tigers, who talks about how awesome they are and even pretends to sell them and all I can get there is the same stupid horses I can find at every mount vendor? Great, thanks for nothing!

And of course they had to put fucking loot crates in there. Spend a whole bunch of real money because you want one of the costumes or one of the epic mounts in these boxes and all you get is a dress or some make-up, which only works with a race you don't even play. They couldn't just put these mounts and outfits in the cash shop so you can simply select and buy them - they had to put them behind an annoying gambling system, which may very well reward you with items you cannot even use! Way to go, Zenimax!
And yes, I know that you can turn unwanted loot crate items into a tiny amount of yet another meta currency. And you can use that currency to buy the loot crate rewards you want - but only if you buy another ton of loot crates for real money and convert their rewards into enough currency first! Greedy fuckers.

Just let us buy cool mounts with gold!

Can we please put some stupid riding tigers in the shops of riding tiger breeders and vendors? Can we stop pretending that certain NPCs sell wolves, camels and panthers and have them sell actual exotic mounts instead of just horses? For ingame gold? Make them cost a whole lot of gold for all I care, but don't ruin the fucking immersion by not selling them at all outside of the fucking cash shop. I'm sure there's no point going on about the loot crates, seeing as this shit is far too lucrative for greedy developers. They're here to stay.

Before I stop complaining about the stuff I hate, let's not forget the one thing that makes every MMO annoying as fuck - the players. I've lost count of the millions of wankers I bumped into, who had names like 'Khalessi' or 'Karl Drogo', because not only are they too stupid to come up with anything creative, but they're also too dumb to properly spell the shit they're stealing. Massive groups of people who rampage through every public dungeon like a bunch of tourists, killing all the shit, plundering all the chests, turning the whole experience from an immersive dungeon-crawl into a ride at Disneyland. You may as well put shorts, Hawaiian shirts and cameras on all the characters.

I can appreciate how the occasional fellow adventurer may become an ally as you end up exploring the same monster-filled cave, but once you add 25 other adventurers to the mix, things turn into a ridiculous clusterfuck, which completely ruins the atmosphere. Because, you know, let's turn everything into a fucking MMO instead of adding optional multiplayer. You can't seriously try to pull off the whole 'you are the first one to set foot into these sacred halls in over a thousand years' shtick whilst filling the room with two dozen additional players. But hey, it's not all bad.

Sometimes other players are great
Outside of dungeons and story-related places, seeing other players actually helps the game's atmosphere. I never thought I'd say this about any online game, but thanks to the presence of other players the many cities and outposts in ESO come to life and look and feel more believable than anything I've seen in any other MMO. And that's because Zenimax went absolutely crazy with the amount of tools they gave players to animate and roleplay their characters. In most MMOs when you play an emote you just mime shit. For instance, Guild Wars lets you play an air guitar. Or you can type /lol and some ingame text claims that your character is laughing, even when there's no animation. WoW goes a bit further than that by adding sound to many emotes. I think /puke now has a particle effect. But they also have tons of emotes like /burp or /spit or /fart, which have no sound or animation at all. Lame!

On ESO you can make your character play around with a coin or a dagger, eat an apple, play an instrument and all sorts of other fun shit just through the emote system. You don't need to own a drum or a lute and carry it around in your inventory - you can just whip one out when you emote. If you want your character to sit, you can get them to whip out a little chair. Heck, even stuff that isn't tied to emotes at all is animated. Open your inventory window and people around you will see your character rummaging around in their backpack. Assign champion points and your character will be looking at the star constellations. Everything you do causes your character to look busy. Everyone is always doing stuff instead of just standing around and blankly staring into nowhere.

"And now to add the most important ingredient... hair!"

I ended up buying an ingame house in my favourite city, just because I enjoy hanging out there, crafting, trading, checking the guild stores while everyone around me is smithing, brewing and cooking. The place is packed, everyone is busy, it's all full of life. Like a real city. Thanks, Megaserver!

I can do what I want
The #1 thing that ultimately drives me away from every MMO is how I'm expected to play in a certain way, going through a certain type of content a certain amount of times, because if I don't, then I'll simply stop progressing. Take WoW, for instance. Once I hit the level cap, I'm supposed to team up and clear dungeons with other players to gear up. Then I'll use said gear to play raid content of increasing difficulty, getting stronger and stronger in the process, for as long as the group succeeds. If I don't want to raid or team up with other people, that's where my progress as a player ends. Sure, there are side activities like pet battles, reputation grind and so forth, but the very best gear is reserved for the smallest fraction of players, which can actually be fucked to play hardcore raids. Because as a single player you're worthless and your efforts count for nothing. It's in the name of the genre.

I stopped playing Warframe for a similar reason. In the Plains of Eidolon update you have to grind a stupid amount of reputation each day in order to unlock new abilities and powers. Thing is, I absolutely do not enjoy going out into that same area day after day after day to gather fish, rocks and sentient cores for the sake of progression. I never started playing Warframe because I'm crazy about fishing. And if I have to force myself to do something I do not enjoy for several hours each day, that's no longer a videogame. It's a job. Except I don't even get paid.

I used to be a badass cyber space ninja. WTF happened?

In ESO I don't grind reputation. I don't farm tokens. I just play the fucking game. It doesn't matter what I do - fight other players in pvp, kill monsters, complete quests, explore dungeons, team up with other players to tackle group content or duo world bosses with Claire. I can play any way I want, only take part in the activities I enjoy and feel like doing and absolutely everything rewards me with experience, champion points and skill points to make my character stronger. I can loot set items just by playing the game, I can craft my own item sets or I can trade for them. I can enhance my favourite items and make them legendary if i want to.

Yes, there is super challenging content for large groups of players. You can get stuff like a special hat or a free legendary in the mail for successfully tackling that shit. But that's okay. Because you don't get excluded if you don't want to play that way. You can still get your legendary gear. You can still get stronger and have as many champion points as everyone else. Heck, you can roll a whole new character and then all the champion points you've earned on your main character will also be available on your new one. Unlike other online games, ESO doesn't tell you that you're worthless and they don't give a shit about what you do. You get rewarded simply for doing whatever you want. For having fun. And damn, are we having fun!

The best damn PvP
"But DAoC did it first", "they're just ripping off GW2", "It's too random and messy" Oh yeah? Well, here's an idea: fuck off! The massive siege battles in Cyrodiil are the best fucking PvP I've ever played in any MMORPG. You could disagree with me, but you'd be wrong. And stupid. And also wrong. Yes, sometimes the servers lag out and that's annoying as fuck. But you get hundreds of players punching the absolute shit out of one another. You lay waste to entire armies and their castles with trebuchets and battering rams. Leading dozens of people across the battlefield to conquer one fortress after another whilst getting showered with experience, epic items and gold for your efforts is one of the best damn things you can do in any online game, ever!

If you can't understand how amazing the massive pvp battles are then you're objectively a cunt.

I don't care how much nicer this may look on Guild Wars 2 when the action on there slows down to 20 FPS or less whenever there are more than three characters on-screen. ESO also doesn't have a dozen or more parallel PvP-campaigns running, where all the strongest teams will constantly server-hop until they find the one where they dominate everything. Fuck, last time I played GW2 you couldn't even mount up in pvp. "Look, everyone, it's countless square miles of massive battlefields! Let's go everywhere! ON FOOT!"

It doesn't matter how weak or strong your character is on ESO - you can bring a fucking catapult at any level and absolutely wreck shit. Every player can make a difference. Or you can be an asshole, stealth on top of some hill and wait for random newbies to walk by, so you can murder them with poisoned arrows. Just watching a hundred blood-thirsty weirdos on horses, armies clashing into each other, sounding their warhorns, it looks, sounds and feels so much better than the pvp in any other MMO. And while there's always some bitching going on about balancing (because it's a videogame), you also don't get the same flavour of the month bullshit, where one class simply dominates certain other classes because "it wasn't designed with 1vs1 pvp in mind" or "it's more like rock-paper-scissors" or whatever other dumb shit WoW players use to excuse what's some of the worst PvP in any MMO, ever. Oh, so it's working as intended when a rogue gets to permanently stun, sap and disable your character, basically granting them an infinite amount of attempts at running away and recovering. Now that's some great balancing!

Actual great balancing
ESO uses a scaling system, which basically puts characters of all levels on the same relative power level. A level 10 character in full epic gear will have the same relative strength as a level 50 character in full epic gear of an appropriate level. They'll be dealing the same amount of damage to the exact same monsters in the same area. Quests, dungeons, monsters, bosses, other players in pvp - they all scale around each other. Of course the level 50 character will have more skill points under the hood, meaning he has more abilities and spells to choose from to fill up his action bars.

Players of all levels can team up and be useful.

This means that players can team up and play all content together regardless of character levels. It also means players can fight each other in PvP, no matter what level they are, and have a (somewhat) fair fight. Of course you could get upset about this. You could hate the fact that you can never grossly overlevel content or gank the shit out of lower-level players with this system. Technically, you'd be correct, but you'd also be a twunt and you can go fuck yourself.

Here's bow PvP "balance" works in WoW's open world PvP:

Scenario 1: another player spots you. He's 20 levels above you. He kills you in one hit, spams insulting emotes at you, then sits on your corpse, so he can kill you again when you respawn.

Scenario 2: another player spots you. His level and gearscore is equal to yours. There's no way he's gonna attempt to beat you in a fair fight, so he just walks away.

Scenario 3: you spot another player. Your level and gearscore are about even. You attack, he doesn't attempt to fight back and will spend the next 20 minutes running away.

Scenario 4: another player spots you. His level and gearscore is equal to yours. He follows you around, but doesn't attack until you get stuck in a fight against a particularly tough mob or until one of his guild mates shows up. He then proceeds to gank you.

I'm aware the comparison to ESO isn't completely fair, because all PvP on there is consensual. It's not like the game allows random enemy players to gank you repeatedly outside of Cyrodiil. With that said, you also cannot attack any random low level player in PvP and beat them to pudding simply because your level is so much higher. What matters is your gear, your build and personal skill. My first ever duel was against a level 5 twink from hell, who challenged absolutely everyone around him in town. The guy more than likely had a truckload of champion points and the most stupidly upgraded level 5 gear you can possibly get. How cool is it that you can just go and fight anyone you want and actually stand a chance, even if you don't spend all day grinding levels?

Great customization
If it sounds like I'm bashing WoW a lot, I don't actually have anything against that game and I can appreciate it for what it is. But can we all agree that, over the years, WoW became more and more of an MMO, whilst reducing the RPG part to a level where it almost doesn't exist anymore? Every class on WoW has three playable specs with minimal customization. By the time I got to my class hall I saw literally hundreds of other players using the exact same gear, weapon, spec, even transmog sets I was using. On WoW you're one among many. You're like every other player of your class. No margin for error, no room for customization, because god forbid, people might actually make mistakes, causing their characters to become so weak they can no longer manage the piss-easy solo content by smashing their faces into their keyboards.

Mind you, I feel the majority of content on ESO is also waaay too far on the easy side, but sadly, that's just what many mainstream-titles do these days. But ESO lets me create whatever character I want. I have a sorcerer in heavy armor, who charge-attacks baddies and fucks them up with a comically huge two-hander. I'm playing a Dragon Knight, who sneaks around and takes people out with deadly stealth attacks. I'm still trying to come up with a fun new build for a nightblade caster, who focuses solely on magic attacks. Maybe add a dash of vampire to that build.

I'm not a huge fan of the classes in ESO. I don't feel they're necessary. Yes, you can play a sorcerer and you'll be called a sorcerer and you can wear a robe and wave a stick if that's your cup of tea. But nothing stops you from putting on a full set of plate armor and pummeling shit into the ground with a giant warhammer. That's both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, hey, thanks for letting me create just about any character I want. Thanks for giving me the option to change gear, spells, skills and playstyle anytime I want without forcing me to create a new character. On the other hand - why even put classes in there at all? If we still have the same free-form character progression we're used to from the offline Elder Scrolls games, why restrict players by having them pick a class? Sure, older games of the series had 'classes' of sorts, but those mostly influenced your starting attributes and very little else.

Pictured: My "Sorceress".

Bitching aside, you can be as sneaky or 'in your face' as you want. Combine any two weapon types you want. Use a sword & board to fight elite monsters, then switch to a destruction staff to toast large amounts of trash baddies with a meteor shower. Shoot people in the back with a longbow, then finish off the ones who actually manage to get close to you with a greatsword. Turn into a werewolf and literally eat their faces. Drain their blood as a vampire. Be an upstanding citizen of Tamriel or steal all the shit from all the shelves, shops and NPCs or go on a murdering spree and slaughter a bunch of innocent people just because it's fun. And because crime seriously pays in this game, if you're good enough to avoid getting caught. This MMORPG actually remembered to keep the RPG side of things in there is what I'm saying.

ESO's name is stupid. The dungeon tourists are stupid. And fuck all the fucking lootboxes! But not many other MMOs grant me so much freedom when it comes to customizing my character and finding my own playstyle. And more than any other MMO I know, ESO respects my time as a player. Everything is rewarded. The game doesn't shit on me and end all progression just because I don't want to raid. Or because I'm not in the mood to queue for random dungeons or whatever. I can do anything I want. I can have fun. And the game rewards me for it. You know, like an actual fucking game and not a stupid virtual job like so many other games these days?

In other news, I'm still a god on STO.