Razgon
1653
Its a wonder they didn’t call you and ask how to make the game. Remind me again why you aren’t a world famous game designer?
+1, where exactly is your multi-million dollar profiting game that is vastly to every single other game ever made? I would think game developers would be lining up outside your door begging for your advice by now!
UO had a system where in you used a skill and it would level up. It was quite good. Only problem was that eventually you’d start to lose skill points if you leveled others, but they patched this in like 2 years later so you could ‘lock down’ a few skills you didn’t want to “forget” as you leveled others.
Actually one of the ok things in TESO is that I can use one weapon, yet have an ability for another weapon in the skill slot and it will then level it as well. Only downside is that it would be nice to have a ‘equip/skill’ setup that you could save and load quickly, so you could have one xp setup for questing, and another for ‘world travel/fighting’.
KevinC
1656
These aren’t flaws. These are things that you have personally taken a disliking too, but they are not flaws. For instance, if I have 3/5 of my hotbar slots taken up by Restoration Staff abilities, why is it “silly” that I level up faster in Restoration staff while this is the case? If I have focused heavily on one particular skill line, I don’t see what’s “silly” about that focus resulting in faster skill gain in that area. I mean, it’s certainly not any more ridiculous than completing a quest for the town blacksmith and it resulting in you suddenly being able to cast a higher rank fireball or being able to cast teleport, as is the standard for many RPGs (automatically getting new/better abilities by filling up an EXP bar by any means).
Feel free to dislike design decisions. Feel free to talk about how you would have rather they implement a mechanic. Just stop correlating your preferences and predilections with The One True Way to make a game and berating developers for not following the gospel of HRose. It gets a little tiresome.
HRose
1658
What’s amusing is that these have noting to do with my personal ideas.
The difference between me and you is that I passed lots of time reading actual game designers debating these things. “How to build a skill based system” is not some novel topic, it’s maybe one of the most well known and most debated, out there and surely the TESO guys didn’t invent it. There were countless iterations and improvements. So sorry if I give for granted years of specialized discussions about this.
There’s nothing about “me” in those ideas that I defined as objectively better. There’s just a canon of game design. See for example Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
So in this case I merely echoed knowledge that is considered the standard out there.
Specifically:
- if I have 3/5 of my hotbar slots taken up by Restoration Staff abilities, why is it “silly” that I level up faster in Restoration staff while this is the case?
Because it means one has to build the hotbar not for optimal and ease of use in gameplay, but to chase after skill growth. It’s only less annoying than a full use-based system, but still annoying. Why can’t I still focus on Restoration skill even if I only want to use one skill and specialize in it?
It’s silly that building your skill bar is now an activity also dependent on what skill you want to improve faster. It’s just a clunky, unwanted and annoying imposition that brings nothing of value.
It’s up to you to prove that the other method is inferior: just let a player distribute which skills are active and distribute exp flow into them. Why the need to bind this control to the hotbar? Is there a reason?
rei
1659
Ugh. So boring. Things got slightly better outside of Bleakrock Isle but the questing is still terrible. I got to level 7 and watching the boring old prophet’s retelling of the Five Companions before succumbing to boredom.
It does get better off the island, and it does have a good chunk of TES “feel” in the look at least. But it’s not got its hooks into me yet. It’s all so meh. “Close the rifts the invading mages are opening!” means run to a glowing, shimmering thing and hit E. Do it to the same one four times in a row if you like. You might, or might not, be attacked by one of the (very sparse) “hordes” of invading mages. I killed the general without knowing he was the general; he was just some dude with a red outline I two-shotted.
When you run around you do find some neat stuff to do, but it all piles on top of everything else, and I never quite know which quest I’m on or where to go. The interface does tell you these things, mostly, but somehow it all feels unintuitive. OTOH, I kind of like the movement/combat feel; it’s not ideal, but it’s not bad either, by any means.
I’m on the fence still. If it was FTP, probably. Subscription? Ehhh…
Weird thing happened yesterday. I opened the ESO launcher again to see how slow the download was going. I’m looking at the progress bar, which is back at 0%. What? How can that be? Hold on, it says “Complete”. Holy rubber duckies! Well, that was unexpected, especially as last time I closed it it was at 68% with a 4 Gb file downloading.
Sure enough, “Play” works and I’m in the game at last. I suspect some strange behaviour is going on with that launcher, I’ve duly reported it as a possible bug (hey, I’m supposed to be beta testing this thing right?).
That is how I leveled my characters. Even change gear/spells on quest handins so I can level other stuff for quest xp than normal “Kill/world” xp. Seemed to be the most effective way, even if it was a bit tedious, I could get it working.
Another funny thing with replacing is that you get so much gear that boost your crafting stats, but no ‘quick’ way to replace gear, so you end up drag-drop on all your equipment every time you go crafting (if you want to be effective). /saveequip anyone?
I’m on the fence. It’s an enjoyable, if relaxing, MMO, but I still can’t shake the “wish this were more like Skyrim” feeling.
Oghier
1665
Lazy Shiftless - that was funny :)
As a former MMO quest designer I just don’t understand how this is possible. I’m responsible for any number of more or less mediocre quests, but none that actually didn’t work at all, and none for sure that were broken in the main track of newbie quests for an upcoming launch. I suppose it’s possible that someone pushed some code infrastructure change that broke the quest engine, but even so, it seems like remarkably bad work all around.
The only quest bug I’ve encountered was the Unearthing the Past quest in Daggerfall Covenant Betnikh. As advised, I relogged a thousand times and wasted several hours before finally getting all three abominations. The bug appears to occur when too many players have summoned any one of the three abominations. I’m surprised that the bug is still there after weeks of complaints, but then again the devs have their own reasons for deciding which builds they want to throw at the beta testers. Could be they’ve fixed this bug in another build, but aren’t ready to roll out that build to betatesters just yet.
Oghier
1668
I certainly don’t know, but this isn’t the first time I have seen an MMO where complex quests break under the stress of many players trying to do them at once. Nor is it the first time it’s taken them a long time to fix.
In any event, the Aldmeri and Ebonheart newbie experiences are both a lot better. I particularly liked the fact that, for Ebonheart, you just get dumped on an island with instructions to explore, and no quest markers telling you where to beeline.
Even when it works, Daggerfall is tiresome and boring. I don’t recommend it :)
Unfortunately, Dagerfall seems to be the only choice if you want to roll a Breton, Orc or Redguad. And I like Bretons. :)
Imryll
1670
The explorer pack you receive if you pre-order allows you to play any race as part of any alliance. If you don’t pre-order, your Breton can only serve Daggerfall.
Oghier
1671
And even if you don’t pre-order, you’ll be able to skip the newbie island altogether at launch. Daggerfall Covenant is much better when you get to the mainland (though I still like Aldmeri the most, and my Breton will likely end up there).
I spent some time streaming this weekend and put together a video - http://www.twitch.tv/jvmcmaster/c/3820113
