2777

Hmmm, a null reference exception? ;)

2778

Oooh, I like those! I’ll take mine in Cobalt Blue, please!

2779

It’s probably part of a quest:

<sheogorath>Me box of cheese! Ah, ye found it! It’s been missing forever, I thought it had gotten eaten by skeevers!</sheogorath>

2780

Level 21 now and the game is starting to become familiar. Thoroughly immersed now, still playing it mainly as a single-person CRPG with a live background and the occasional grouping, haven’t touched the PvP yet. It’s captivated me and I feel it’s well worth the subscription to have a game pitched to this level of “realism” or simminess, and relatively free of the f2p crap. This game just puts me there in this virtual world, it works well for that. Don’t know anything beyond that, but it works for that. A whole host of good design features seem to conspire to produce that effect - mainly the key seems to be a sort of forced simplicity. I think the devs have tried to walk a fine line between “too much” and “not enough” in the gameplay and the UI, and it’s a good basis to work from.

There’s a very good synergy between the “size” of everything - or maybe better to say “expense” of everything, or “weighting” to everything. What I mean is that the way you pick up the quests seems like an important event, then the travelling there is an important event of about the same “size”, then the doing the combat is an important event of about the same “size” too. It’s like, the way everything is compressed makes it all a neat, miniaturized but semi-realistic adventure in a fantasy realm.

Looting barrels in the posh mansion of the person you’ve just turned a quest into never gets old - “excuse me ma’am, while I rummage around in your drawers”. It’s like there’s a disconnect between running around looting everything that shows a live “E”, and the story of the quest, they seem to go on parallel tracks. No complaints, but it’s amusing.

One neat trick this game has is having the quest turn-in move to relatively close to the quest finish point, so you don’t have to yomp back to the original quest giver’s position, and the way the quest is turned in is itself a mini-continuation of the story, the end of the story (often the quest-giving distraught parent will be waiting with the rescued child quite close to the quest finish point, which also adds to a sense of closure for the quest, but at the same time keeps your momentum going forward and eager to explore).

Appreciating the combat system and build system more now that I understand it more. Again, as with some of the other bits of the game that work, the forced simplicity is kind of good, and is one of the things that conspires to keep your head in the game world, instead of meta to it.

2781

For some reason since the Craglorn patch, when the game launches I can’t get the game window to have focus to put in my password. Alt Tab does nothing.

2782

The game gets a lot of flak, a lot of it deservedly so, but that was my take on it as well. Yes, it has problems and issues, but I still found it an enjoyable game. Definitely don’t regret buying it. With all the negativity surrounding the game, it’s nice to hear I’m not crazy for enjoying. Or if I am crazy, at least I have company. :)

2783

Beautiful post. Put words to some feelings I have about the game, and that make me like it.

Not included on your comment is the way we build our character, again walking the fine line between broken and bland. It could have been a much boring game, by playing safe bets. Then I have the feeling the game is possible only now, after hundreds of other mmos, the design has evolved with every iteration, eso is children of all the ideas, failures and success of these years.

Then It remember me (at times) Age of Conan, because the world is made to have the npc’s living there. Most other mmos are too cartony, …sorta 2d paintings.

2784

In Malabal Tor there’s this tall cliff that’s perfect for cliffdiving. Knockback + lone enemy facing the other way + long drop = very tempting target.


2785

Introducing a major patch on the first day of a four-day weekend means you’re delivering new content to paid subscribers at the start of a window in which they’re likely to be playing a lot, but it also results in a bunch of semi-broken add-ons at a time when add-on maintainers are less likely to be in a position where they can or want to deal with the changes quickly. I’m guessing the core dev team doesn’t proactively communicate changes to add-on devs. Running /reloadui seems to fix everything, but I’d sure like to not have to rely on it so much.

2786

Theres the Public Tester, but I suppose addons break when things like Id’s change. Addons sometimes do more than what really the game is designed to do, using hacks, I think is normal (and not bad) that hacks break.

Its not like addons is a well documented SDK based super-established programming framework. But I have to say that in this game these littel mods add a lot to the game.

2787

Yes, AoC and Vanguard are two other MMOs it reminds me a lot of, especially in the attempt at semi-realistic graphics and a slightly “grittier” tone than usual from these games. There’s a bit of stylization, but not nearly as much as many other recent MMOs have gone for, following Blizzard’s lead. The game is often reminiscent of Vanguard, in the best way.

Another thing I appreciate, is the mob density being quite low. Now LOTRO was another game that had a strong immersive side to it, but I always felt it was spoiled by having angry mobs or creatures every 5 feet you moved, and many other MMOs have taken mob density to ridiculous lengths too. This game has it about right, mob density is enough to have a fight when you want it, but not so much that you feel it’s unrealistic and gamey.

Further on this, a lot of the art of game design seems to be in timing things or getting numbers right - like how often certain kinds of things are likely to happen in a game, or how long it takes to recover your combat resource. All the numbers have to feel right, and feel right in relation to each other, then if you’re lucky that web of numerical interrelationships keeps the player entranced.

2788

Wildstar comes with Houston, a 64-bit addon IDE giving you access to everything in the base UI and all you need to make addons.
TESO comes with “obfuscated” ZLib .dat files which you have to extract using compiled exes based on source code found on .ru domains. :)

Funny thing is that a lot of events and triggers in the base TESO game are for stuff that was removed. Wonder if you could get some performance % from removing that stuff. (Finesse amongst other things)

2789

Weird quest continuity issue. Not a major one, but it’s still distracting. Early on in my Ebonheart Pact journeys I started working with a Khajiit on behalf of Queen Ayrenn and helped her out quite a bit. I came to realize that she remembered who I am only in the context of specific quest-lines. While completing other, parallel quests there were times when I must interact with her, and she had no idea who I am. There was even one point when I was standing right in front of Ayrenn, but she only wanted to discuss a quest relating to defeating her brother. I noticed that my journal showed a parallel quest that directed me to deliver Ayrenn a letter confirming the completion of a different quest (in a different location), and talking to her here would only invoke the brother-related quest.

Similar thing happened with the Green Lady. In one quest-line she (the second one) knew me and in that quest I was specifically educated about the Green Lady succession process. Then in a somewhat parallel quest, I became more deeply acquainted with what the Silvenar was and played a part in the new Silvenar’s emergence, but just now I started a new quest and the Green Lady has no idea who I am and while asking for my help in her upcoming marriage to the new Silvenar I helped create, she is trying to explain to me what/who she and he are all over again.

Maybe it’s just royalty/celebrity culture, or maybe elven lifespans and/or their hoodoo messes with their short-term memories, or maybe I’m misunderstanding something, or maybe it’s just challenging for MMO writers to keep everything in sync.

2790

Fucking uppity elves. They ruin everything.

2791

Other factions? fighting necromancers, spored infected zombies, vampires, dwemer robots.

Almeri Dominion fights vegetarians.

2792

Oh and another thing. Players are corralled along the lines of Dragon Knight, Nightshade, Sorcerer and Templar archetypes which is great and all, but how do those archetypes actually relate to the stories in the game? All these ESO lore factions and religions and cults we encounter, and never once do any of those archetype names manifest. Just once I’d love to encounter an NPC who recognized me and said, “Oh, a Templar, and in the flesh! Never have I been happier in these dark caves as I’ve huddled in this corner clutching my charley horse’d right arm! Now let me point you to these Daedra-summoning jerks on the level below…”.

2793

Oh and another thing. Players are corralled along the lines of Dragon Knight, Nightshade, Sorcerer and Templar archetypes which is great and all, but how do those archetypes actually relate to the stories in the game? All these ESO lore factions and religions and cults we encounter, and never once do any of those archetype names manifest. Just once I’d love to encounter an NPC who recognized me and said, “Oh, a Templar, and in the flesh! Never have I been happier in these dark caves as I’ve huddled in this corner clutching my arm! Now let me direct your attention to these Daedra-summoning jerks on the level below…”.

2794

Maybe thats what expansions are for. We could get a expansion fleshing out undaunted, maybe even with a different questline based on your class. A pure nightblade questline for the assasins brotherhood (but that would make a lot of people really angry and unhappy). The base game is a bit bland on the center and the borders, but thats usually the case in mmos because with soo much different quest, character, graphics,… artist need to focus on a few things. Even the ones with a production budget of 300 million dollars have to choose where to focus. I say they did a good job here in ESO, because you are consistenly exposed to the good parts, and not the worst parts (many mmos relase where the worst voiceover, graphics and ideas are the ones in foreground all the time, on this one theres a lot of air, and some good things on the other side).
Except these wav files withouth distance attenuation, fuck these things, haha.

2795

Well, I think I have a theory about some of the quest story continuity issues. The Fullfilling One’s Fate quest in Malabal Tor involves Spinners asking the player character to help rewrite stories in which they and the Green Lady and Silvenar were all involved. Again, at the start of the quest the Green Lady still doesn’t recognize the player character and once you go into the quest, the past incarnations of both of those characters don’t recognize the player character. The quest itself is all but unintelligable and ends up being a muddy and confusing medley of stories rewriting older stories and character motivations without any sense of cohesion. No wonder NPCs in this game routinely fail to recognize you.

I think the Spinners are actually just agents of some secret chaos cult who infiltrated the ESO writing team and are wreaking havoc on the quest trees.

Edit: Later, confirmation that the Spinners are still at it, and confirmation that the player character still isn’t wising up to the situation:


This is at worst an attack on postmodernism and at worst an experiment in replacing it with something far worse: an organic system in which player- and non-player characters routinely rewrite themselves into oblivion (no pun intended), but at the behest of a mysterious self-aware npc writing team, all under a paid subscription model. How far of a stretch is it from Skyrim to Skynet?? Shudder

Okay, okay, I’m probably over-analyzing things a bit. I’ll remove the tin-foil hat now.

2796

Its like they are inside a videogame, then?.

You are just now already inside a hypertext. I can make for you a link that will send you in a infinite loop if you read the text like a turing machine would do. This is trivial for me to do, and for you to ignore.

So why would us, post-internetians, mind any of that? we work with worse stuff (like a poorly organized wiki) very often.

To us, Spinners are like noobs that just discovered the Wikipedia.