3323

It’s not really much of an MMO in the sense of a social game, but it’s very much an MMO in the sense of being a large, persistent virtual world to explore, with deep lore, and it’s the best of recent years in that sense (followed closely by GW2). It does somewhat recapture the magic in the sense of when you were new to MMOs and mostly soloing and finding your feet, exploring.

3324

I just read that gamesharing on the PS4 actually works - the only thing that doesn’t carry over, is any account specific things, like Imperial version for instance.

3325

Ironically, ESO seems to be a much more social game on consoles than on PC. I play on PC and am never grouped outside of a group-required dungeon or sometimes in Cyrodil. Even when I am grouped, there is very little communication between members of the group.

My son bought this for Xbox One recently and plays with his friends, who are grouped more often than not and constantly chattering via their XBL party. Granted, they are teenagers and are all used to hanging out in chat for games like Destiny and CoD, but I did find it interesting how the very first thing they did was setup a room so they could blabber at each other about where to go, what to do and how to improve one another’s characters. It make me miss the old days of MMOs with large clans in TeamSpeak.

3326

My wife was unable to get into the game at all last night. The game was stuck on that loading/login screen all night. (She left it on while watching TV and just switched back and forth to check.) She’s pretty frustrated and I think the shine of the MMO has worn off.

3327

Well, fret no more, because thats exactly what ESO has brought back. There is NO text chat, but there is built-in area voicechat, group voicechat, and guild voicechat, as the only way to communicate in the game.

3328

Strange. My son had a couple of issues with getting disconnected but was always able to get right back in afterwards. Sounds like there might be an issue with the game on your console. Is there a way to kick off a file check or repair like you can do in the PC version? Have you rebooted your console since this started happening?

3329

I thought that as well. We unplugged the console completely. Recycled the power and started it back up.

Back to the eternal login screen.

3330

Without text chat I’d be silent throughout my game time. I guess I’ll look at the PC version after all.

3331

If you just want to play it as a single player game, then its awesome. You don’t need communcation with others.

3332

Take heart in the fact that you are not alone. Apparently the console launch for ESO is a complete clusterfuck. 20 pages of people stuck at the loading/login screens for the past 3 days.

Article here relates the problems and links back to the ESO Forum page I linked. I like the bit about Everquest Adventures on the PS2. I bought that, and bought a network adaptor for my PS2 just to play EQA. The game was pretty terrible, but it never had any issues with login/performance.

3333

My PS4 copy should arrive in the mail today, so they better sort it out by the time I play it tonight. :)

3334

Ended up playing this all weekend! It’s really enjoyable on the console, kicking back on the couch and questing, listening to the relaxing game music. I had no issues logging in (longest wait time was about a minute) and have never been disconnected, very smooth experience so far. It’s a solo game for me at this point, though I’m always surrounded by other players, this being a new release. I found I didn’t mind the lack of text chatter. I did hear a few people using voice chat in the open channel, which I found annoying so I turned it off.

I don’t find using a controller to be a hindrance, though it might be when I get around to trying out PvP.

One thing that irks me is that player names show up as their PSN account name rather than their character name. So you see players running around with names like “SploogeDaddy69” and “xxBig_Dongxx” instead of fantasy style, role-play names. Seems like such an odd thing for Zenimax to do. Maybe it’s a limitation put on them by Sony. Hopefully they will patch the game and allow this to be toggled.

3335

I’m pretty sure that a lot of people name their characters things like that too. Or at least as close as the naming policy will allow.

3336

I just played this for the first time and got up to level 6. That didn’t take very long. I’ve only done a handful of quests.

They went a bit crazy with telling you exactly where quest items are. Found a quest to locate 4 dwarven machine parts and they are all marked right on the map. How the heck would my character know that? Same thing with rescuing the crew of some captain. Showed me exactly what buildings they were in when I should of had to explore to find them. I turned off the quest markers on the compass, but I noticed the dwarven parts are still noted on the map itself. I’m not sure why games can’t do a better job of giving the player information they should know but not making the player know everything.

I haven’t seen a lot of the world, but what I have seen looks nice. I’d say combat feels a little bit better than Skyrim and much better than Guild Wars 2. My guess is that this really isn’t a game I needed. The MMOness bothers me - respawning enemies, watching other players complete the same quest I’m doing - right down to having 2 corpses for the same named enemy.

Any settings or anything that are a must have to improve the experience?

3337

Rob - I say this with the utmost respect, but MMO’s aren’t for you. Really! I’ve seen you try numerous others by now in other threads, and sadly I forgot to post here when I saw you expressed interested in the game, that you shouldn’t waste money on it.

I don’t think anything can salvage it out of the core MMO functionalities that you don’t like :-) Its an awesome game, and I enjoy my time in it immensely, but its not for you.

Get Fallout 4 , Witcher 3 and Skyrim instead!

3338

Exploration tends to be a bit pointless in most of these games, GW2 being an exception. They are all quest-driven so if you explore buildings or caves you either run into random monsters or quest-related stuff, and if you’re not on the related quest you get nothing out of it. The devs don’t really build interesting areas that exist just to be interesting and that have secrets to find. Everything ties into quests or is otherwise random, and random quickly becomes uninteresting.

3339

Well, I kinda disagree where ESO is concerned. There is a LOT to see in this game, even if there isn’t a quest. That said, there is a ton of quests in every zone that you don’t HAVE to complete, but is part of that zones particular lore, which you only find you explore and look everywhere on a map.

3340

Yeah, ESO is an exception to that rule, which I would otherwise agree with. Tons of stuff to find by exploring. Hell, in one of the early areas I found a whole dungeon that is not signposted (though there are a couple of hints). Honestly I think I’ve gotten more out of exploring ESO than GW2.

3341

I’m thinking that myself. I couldn’t help but try it but I think this is my last MMO. I’m sure I’ll get Fallout 4 and already have Witcher 3 and Skyrim! They suit me much better.

I don’t hate ESO or anything, just isn’t a must have for me. I’m still playing it for now.

3342

The problem is that ever since WoW blew the roof off of subscription numbers everyone has been tripping over themselves to duplicate its success. Why was WoW successful? For a lot of reasons that have been discussed ad nauseam but a major one was how convenient/easy things were on the player compared to other MMOs that were out at the time. Irritated that you can’t solo in Everquest? You can in WoW. Frustrated with death penalties? WoW is going to greatly reduce that. Sick of the dungeon being camped by other players or having to schedule your raid on a calendar? WoW has instances. And while not the case at release, if you were sick of trying to put a group together, you could use the Dungeon Finder to let the server match you with a group of mute subhumans.

Point being, I think a lot of people in the industry took a look at why World of Warcraft was so successful and came to the conclusion that one of the key ingredients was eliminating player frustration points, as each one of these is an opportunity for the user to consider their subscription. Let’s move away from death penalties, as players might get frustrated. Lets move to a more “on rails” quest experience, so we can guide players up to max level. And speaking of quests, for the love of god make sure that the user doesn’t get stuck or lost on what to do.

If you buy The Elder Scrolls VI, it’s not a huge deal if one quest was difficult, frustrating, or if you never found it. You already paid your $60 after all. But for a MMO, they want those subscription dollars (or in the case of B2P/F2P games, keep you playing so you hopefully keep buying from a store) to keep flowing, and that means eliminating player frustration points. So, rather than have someone potentially get annoyed bumbling around in a cave or dungeon looking for dwarven machine parts, they’re going to highlight it on the map, maybe put a nice particle effect on the item itself to be sure you don’t miss it. That way you can move on to the next 50 quests, which will hopefully take you to the point where your subscription rolls over to the next month. These games are not about overcoming challenges, they’re about pulling levers and pushing buttons to make your EXP bar move in the correct direction. Hopefully, the leveling curve is long enough to keep you doing that for a few months, but by and large anything that gets in the way of that EXP bar marching to the right is a Bad Thing.

In the original Everquest, it was pretty difficult to find the quests, let alone figure out how to complete them. It involved talking to NPCs and trying to suss out how to get quest info, if they had any at all. Maybe MMOs of yore were more up your alley. I know I have problems with the modern MMO design philosophy. I don’t enjoy being overly frustrated by any means (and EQ fell into this category), but the Fisher Price MMOs of today are so filled with rounded corners and padded walls that it ends up feeling very bland to me.

Fundamentally, I find it’s hard to savor victory when there wasn’t any chance of defeat, and the quest you mentioned illustrates that. This was no dungeon that you had to really explore and were wary of danger around every corner. It’s about as interesting as your wife leaving a note on the fridge asking if you’ll pick up a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.