1633

Daggerfall Covenant has two newbie islands (Stros Mkai, then Betnikh) before you get to Daggerfall proper. The second one is bad and notoriously buggy. The main quest line in Betnikh is broken more often than not, completely blocking progress.

I’m doing the Aldmeri newbie zone this weekend, and it was a far better experience. It’s still on rails, but at least everything worked.

1634

I just did that one with a friend. Yea, it worked, but it still felt like hours of walking around a town and talking to NPC A, then NPC B, then clicking on object C, talking to NPC A again… ugh. We eventually made it off the island but my friend had no interest in playing the game any more after that.

1635

FoundryTacticalCombat – Gives you health bar for yourself/target as well as scrolling combat text showing hits/misses and also has debuff/buff timers.
ZAM_Stats - Just some tiny bars showing bag space, time, gold, etc…
LootSummary - good for when you’re grouping, shows you all your pickups/party pickups for easy linking and has a little timer for “gold per hour” if you’re into that sort of things. Also shows the sell value of items summarized.

1636

Any tips on getting past the Abomination of Fear bug, where the abomination himself doesn’t want to appear? I believe this is preventing me from moving forward in the game.

In the zone chat, players are saying that it has to do with how many people are standing around it, and that the trick is to log out and in and out until you’re alone at that spot. But I’m skeptical. Other players say that it just “magically” fixes itself every so often.

1637

Ya I generally just relog until I get into another version of the zone where the bugged mob it fine.

1638

Ran into quite a number of bugged quests tonight.

Seems like the game is centered around following the roads until you get a “^” arrow indicating a questgiver, then running offroad to complete the quest, before returning to the roads.
Found a tiny public dungeon that I completed (and it was indicated on the map). Seemed decent enough, but it was very crowded.
I am very worried about release - even though we are supposedly running a very old build in the public beta.

Managed to submit a few more /bugs at least.

1639

Relog and pray. Lots of both.

People really shouldn’t roll DC at this stage, as the beginning is buggy and not that good even when it works. I’ve been playing Aldmeri today, and the start is much better. You even get to do quests for Kate Beckinsale('s voice). Which totally works for me.

For the record, it was level 7 when she gave me the “Ok, nice work – I’ll be up north, so you go do whatever the heck you want for a while, then find me later” speech. It’s basically the same talk you got from Caius Cosades in Balmora – go level up some, then find me again. So that’s when they throw you off the rails. It took a lot longer for my Breton.

1640

I kind of dislike the combat in this game. Age of Conan has a better “contact” feeling, Vanguard has better magic feel, Anarchy Online has better buffing. ESO contact feels weak, magic is kind of bad/bland and theres not buffing. Or maybe I have to find the right class for me.

The game is pretty and has things that intrigue me, but I am not going to play it, because the combat. Also because playing a mmorpg is like running on NASCAR with autopilot.

1641

It’s interesting that first they make a big fuss about NDA, then release in the open a buggy version with no changes.

Who’s running this game? Maybe they’ll find out the office’s empty.

1642

I’ve been playing all weekend, and I have encountered zero showstopper bugs. Zero. Not one. I’ve seen some folks in chat complaining about a quest I never found (Deathclaw), but that did not block my progress. My Altmer and my Argonian both got through the newbie bits and to their respective main cities quite smoothly. The only persistent glitch is the need to /reloadui during some merchant conversations.

Part of that is because I’m not playing Daggerfall Covenant. Their starting areas have multiple quests with show-stopper bugs. I see patch notes indicating they are fixed, but they are not. Evidently, they’re not easy fixes. Quests where interactable objects spawn a critter seem to break when multiple people try at once. It reminds me of the broken stuff at the start of the Secret World, which took six months to fix.

1643

I’ve had one crash, and several times I’ve needed to /reloadui because the person I was talking to, usually a merchant, suddenly ate my interface. Other than that, it has been ok technically.

It’s kind of growing on me; I’m just about to leave the gods-forsaken island…

1644

They really need to fix the lag in Cyrodiil. Feels like Warhammer Fortress/City Siege all over again.

Would be nice if we got some target-markers as well, so you could mark yourself as “raid Leader/Follow objective” when you do PUG Raids.

Had 27 fps in a Siege which was pretty decent, but CPU/GPU load was below 50% so their engine seems a bit borked. (Normal questing is around 95 fps)
Hopefully they’ll have another beta weekend with a more recent build so we can actually see some improvements being done, and find new stuff to break.

Solo instance bosses are still horribly unbalanced, so I ended up using map geometry (i.e. pathfinding) to kill a quest mob.

Biggest improvement this week has been testing a lot of addons. Auto-Invite addon in PVP Area is very handy to get a full raid going, just a shame the addon bugs and people show up as ‘offline’ even when they aren’t.

I wonder what the server hardware / server software is running on/at.

1645

It’s very pretty and it feels like the next iteration of Elder Scrolls but I still can’t justify a monthly subscription for this one. I also have some issues with the way skills are leveled up. This morning I was happily hacking away with my dagger for my night blade…when I suddenly get a message that my bow skill increased. That seems odd. It also makes me wonder if the skill system really works,

1646

It works. It’s not a use-based system, instead whenever you earn EXP it is put towards your various skills/lines you have unlocked and equipped. The more abilities of a particular line you have on your hotbar, the larger of a percentage of that EXP goes to it. So you can be hacking away with a dagger but you’re still going to be getting some points in bow. It’s the same concept as a use-based skill system but without the silliness of wanting to shoot a fireball at every passing squirrel for the chance to level it up.

1647

That’s silly.

I also don’t like use-based system, but the right way is always about letting the player allocate some generic points. It’s really not that much hard to do, and surely better than seeing on screen messages that make no sense, or the silly hotbar mechanic.

If you reinvent the wheel at least reinvent it the same or better. This choice is just both silly and counterintuitive.

1648

Near as I can tell, you dislike virtually everything about this game. It makes me wonder why you continue to be interested in it.

1649

Okay. Why is “always letting the player allocate some generic points” the “Right Way™”? Perhaps you meant to say “it’s my personal preference”.

It’s not like the player is bereft of point allocation or decisions while leveling up. You allocate your skill points and you allocate your stat points. Your stat points contribute to your abilities (i.e. put points into Magika to increase magic damage, put points into Stamina to increase main attacks and stamina-based abilities). Every level-up, you choose among several skill lines what ability to unlock or to forego a new one and morph an existing ability instead.

1650

So what’s your verdict so far, KevinC?

1651

My personal opinion is that this is a game that is worth the box price for me. I’m not a raving fanboy and I don’t think it’s represents any seismic shift in the MMO landscape or anything like that. I think if someone approaches the game expecting Skyrim Online or another MMO in the vein of World of Warcraft they’re going to be disappointed, which I think is going to make it tricky for this game to be successful (especially with the atrocious starting experience, which thankfully is getting serious attention).

For me, what this game offers is something different. While it’s not an Elder Scrolls game per se, once the game opened up it felt much more open and free-form than a themepark MMO. Once I stopped beelining quests like I would in WoW and just started roaming around the world, I started getting engaged with the game. It’s a different experience for me. This is not an MMO I’m going to push my way to max level, it’s one that I’m just going to stop and smell the roses and take it all in slowly. I like what I’ve seen so far of the crafting system, so a typical gameplay session for me might be roaming around looking for resources in a random direction and then running into a few quests, which I’m complete while I’m in the area.

While this information is all going to end up on a Wiki somewhere, or perhaps there’s even a quest someone that would lead me to it, I’ve gotten a kick out of the things I discover while wandering around. I decided to poke my head into a cave I discovered and inside I found crafting stations for a set of equipment which provides a nice regen boost while hidden. This was pretty cool, since I was playing a stealthy guy. No one told me to go there and find that, I didn’t look it up on a Wiki, I just found it organically while playing the game. Now I have a mini-objective for the next little while!

All in all, while the setup for the game isn’t vastly different from a typical MMO (You do quests and level up and get more powerful and do more quests), it somehow ends up being a different experience for me. I plan to play the game largely disconnected from internet resources (and keeping zone chat off), like I would while playing Skyrim. I want to find all the cool locations on my own, experiment with my own character builds, that sort of thing. Eventually I’ll jump into AvA, which is something I’m very interested in. I liked DAOC RvR and wanted to like GW2 WvW, but the maps were too small and I had several issues with the overall design, which appear to be addressed in ESO. I’m going to take my time getting there, which IMO is how the game is set up to be played. Trying to grind through quests to get to the “real game” that’s typically at the end of these MMOs didn’t play well for me, but once I started taking it slow and just let things come to me instead of forcing it I started having a much better time.

So… not the greatest thing since sliced bread but an enjoyable enough experience for me to be willing to drop $60 on. How long I subscribe depends on how the game holds up further in and what type of support it gets post-release.

1652

Because it’s preference when there’s a mechanical parity and you prefer one and the other.

In this case there’s no parity. There are just flaws embedded in the system:

  • the silly hotbar mechanic that improves the skills on the ratio of your hotbar
  • seeing skills being improved when you are doing something else entirely

It’s an objectively incongruous system.

Is it possible to design it so that it works more or less the same without having those problems? Sure. So that makes one system objectively better than the other.

We wouldn’t need any game designer if game design as a discipline was entirely “arbitrary”. But it is not. Because game design is closer to engineering that it is to subjective “art”. It is driven by cause and effect, and not by whims or hopes or faiths.