1593

I had a youtube stream of the diablo3 expansion beta on yesterday that started with 6 minutes of the author eating a hot pocket while his demon hunter idled in town. Riveting.

1594

I’ll try to top that, but no promises

1595

I demand that you do at least 7 minutes of hot pocket eating. At least a Steakumm.

1596

I’m playing a breton named Fred de Cordova, btw

1597

I always thought the Hot Pocket was more of an urban/internet myth kinda thing. I think the only patience I have for watching eating is reserved for cookie monster.

1598

You really should watch this.

1599

After playing a little bit I’m noticing problems I didn’t the first time, like:

  • NPCs have very muddy textures, until you get really close and, after a while, they get swapped to high resolution.
  • Everything that is fixed environment is quite gorgeous looking, everything that moves is kinda crap.

Really, player models in particular are utter crap. The animations are so dreadful that they look worse than some cheap indie title. Customization on character creation is ridiculously bad.

I really wonder how it’s possible that with a so HUGE budget they can’t even afford PASSABLE character models and animations. It’s really sloppy work. We are at Morrowind’s level of woody animations.

The game isn’t even out and it needs already a complete character model upgrade. If there’s one thing that sticks immediately out it’s how bad this looks and moves.

1600

I think the game looks pretty good. It certainly has good enough graphics for me, especially if it means AvA runs decently.

1601

I haven’t played the game, but watching videos I’m always amazed by the terrible quality of the animations. I don’t recall the last time I saw animations that terrible across the board. I’m often bothered by the shitty animation in games, but this is just a whole different level of bad. It’s a bit like the default running animations in FO3 and FO:NV (seriously, how did those get past alpha? they look like placeholders), except it’s pretty much every animation.

1602

The game looks better than good, overall. It’s character and animations that are many levels behind everything else. And it’s not a matter of “performance”. This is just bad art and animations on the character side.

The models are detailed enough. It’s just that they are ugly. It’s not the polycount, it’s how they are used.

1603

Isn’t that consistent with past Bethesda games? They always have ugly characters. Ever since Daggerfall, really.

1604

Kind of, but in this case it’s worse than ever. Skyrim is way better than this, and this is a MMO, where you are supposed to have characters on screen all the time, and many of them.

And being a MMO you are also more likely to play in 3rd person.

It’s part of the bigger problem: the game inherited some of the worst aspects of the other games, like characters and combat, on top of all the MMO contrivances.

1605

And I was forgetting that while observing the ugly animations my character got stuck with his arm while swinging the weapon, so he kept running around with the arm all twisted up and sideways.

This is the kind of lack of polish you don’t expect.

1606

Have to say about three hours in not terribly impressed - having to click for every basic attack feels awkward. Movement in the world is very floaty, it must be really hard to get the characters to seem like they belong in the world only wow and to some extent gw2 has gotten this right in my experience so far.

1607

They still using a old beta build so there might be fixes in the closed beta version. Then again, you’d think they would benefit from having a more up-to-date client be tested by a larger group of people this close to release.
Goods news is that you can run a lot of addons that have been made available now, and I even managed to get my own shitty little addon to work :)

1608

I played for a while earlier, and I didn’t encounter that bug where you would get stuck talking to an NPC, so maybe they fixed it. If it does happen, you can get unstuck by eating or drinking something.

1609

It still happens, but it’s a lot less common.

Another fix is /reloadui.

1610

this is the biggest challenge ATM - getting passed the first few hours

1611

Absolutely. Especially right now, where the first few hours are typically spent on Newbie Island. It’s unfortunate they weren’t able to get the latest build out for this weekend’s stress test so that more newcomers don’t have to suffer through that.

I really hated this game at first but it’s grown on me. I’ve been conditioned by all the MMOs since WoW to play a certain way (quest grinding, quest hubs, etc). I despise that sort of thing, but I was still conditioned to approach MMOs that way and it just doesn’t really work with ESO. Not having the EXP bar prominently displayed at all times I think is an indication that one shouldn’t approach the game that way. Now that I play the game with a “stop and smell the roses” approach, it feels much better and I’m having a better time. No, it’s not Skyrim Online, but the world is more open and there’s a greater ability to just wander around than typically found in modern MMOs. I just kind of wander around and do quests as I bump into them rather than bee-lining from one quest objective to the next. It also means that I’m just watching the world more as I explore, instead of orienteering to the next quest marker on my map/compass.

I don’t know, I think this MMO is just… different. It’s not revolutionary or anything, but the pacing feels very different. Slower. I like it now, but it certainly took a while to grow on me.

1612

Holyeee Sheeet! That raises a “woman after my own heart” to a whole new level!