Fallout 76 - Multiplayer, online, BGS Austin

I’m going to walk back part of what I said because I truly did shudder thinking about rep grinds in WoW back when I played. I had forgotten that evil entirely. Those were so much worse than anything since EQ back in the day.

I played TESO very early. I think you were earlier than me even, weren’t you one of the beta folks? At any rate, some quests were still broken and the instancing and, at that time, almost forced grouping for some stuff rubbed me wrong. There was also a lot of folks around so getting what you needed proved to be challenging sometimes. Tradeskills, like every MMO, were a cash/time grind. But it was so stark from the wonderful times I’ve spent in 4 major ES titles that it just didn’t click with me. I really should re-attempt, but I’m way full with a backlog and MMOs bite the part of me that gets somewhat addicted pretty readily.

That’s fair… you’re right, so much of the game was completely broken at launch, it was just a complete mess. The latter parts of beta were like that, too. It’s yet another case of “We warned them, but they launched anyway.”

The good news is that, years later, they fixed all those problems. Between the fixes and the ‘One Tamriel’ patch, the game is now simultaneously a top-flight MMO and a good Elder Scrolls experience. But I can absolutely understand someone playing at launch, uninstalling and never looking back.

You’ve piqued my interest. What was the One Tamriel patch? No more instancing?

‘One Tamriel’ made the world scale to you. Just as in the other ES games, you can now pick a direction and go… the zones and quests will all be your level. So the questing and leveling experiences are no longer on-rails.

Basically, they wanted people to be able to play TESO the same way they did Skyrim and its predecessors. It has been very well received.

As for instancing, it still exists. The world changes as you complete quests, so it will look different to different players. This is what caused so many (so many) bugs at launch. They have this more group-friendly, so there is much less forced soloing. And they worked out the bugs. But the world is still ‘one server, multiple instances.’

That sounds really nice, actually. It opens back up the, “do things the way you want to do them,” from the standalone games.

I’ve never been in an MMO beta where this wasn’t the case.

ESO is well worth the money just for the single player main quest string. Hell, John Cleese alone is worth the price of the game. The main quest is generally excellent, and you can do nothing but that really all the way to max level. You can certainly pop out into the world and do some other stuff, but it’s pretty great.

Once they changed the player level to really be perma 50, the game became the best MMO going in my opinion. That one change was just fantastic. You can literally just take off in any direction and do whatever you come across, it’s about as much freedom as you could possibly ask for in a leveling based game.

The fact that you can do those main quest strings, and in general play the game for hundreds of hours for only the price of the game, is a stupid amount of value for money, especially given how high quality is it from a production standpoint.

Oh wait…Fallout 76, nevermind, carry on.

Explain please. I didn’t know he was involved in the game.

he voices a character thats pretty funny

He plays a pretty big part in the main quest, and it’s really really good. It’s very ‘John Cleese-esque’. One of the things that really stands out about his voice work, is how fast he burns through his lines. So many voice actors stretch out every word trying to impart importance, but he just speeds through stuff, and it’s great. He’s such an amazing talent.

I have always the feel that people play MMO’s not because they like these, because the quality is lower than singleplayer games, but because people want the company of other people. That we are social animals and we feel bad (maybe even sad) without the company of other humans.

John Cleese is the voice on my GPS (I purchased him as an add-on voice years ago). People are always amazed and start smiling the moment they hear it. He has such a distinctive voice, with such perfect delivery, he can even make driving directions sound comical (plus he does toss in one-liners here and there depending on the directions). His part in ESO is fantastic, and as you say, totally worth the price of the game. The man is a comedic treasure.

I like John Cleese as much as the next guy, but I wouldn’t oversell his contribution to ESO. It’s a minor character you’ll have a handful of lines with a few times during the game. And it isn’t a subtle character. Not a big fan of “wacky”, here.

Says the guy with the South Park generated avatar.

J/K :)

Just want to chime in. You are partially accurate about launch WoW. Grinding definitely isn’t faster, but in launch WoW, it was necessary to be able to level up. Many leveling paths simply didn’t have enough quests to get you high enough level to move to the next zone. Hence all of the grinding.

Has anyone here played FOnline? I did, and could not survive longer than 20 minutes due to getting ganked by the Russians.

This is pretty much the baseline of all online games now.

I was talking about ESO at launch but yes, applies to OG WoW also.

Ah! ESO seems fine now. I just picked up the base game for 10 bucks in the steam sale.