1793

I played the beta for 12 hours through two sessions. I went into it very hesitant, both from the mixed feedback here and the overall negative impressions in the early press, but I came out of it quite happy.

I like ESO and plan to purchase it.

Why? Its fits into the game style I prefer. It has a semi-open skill system, focused on solo or small-group exploration and questing, with a PvP end-game and set in a low(er) fantasy world that feels grittier than WoW or GW2. The developers seem to be listening to player feedback and the improvements to MOB collision and the starter zones were pretty big changes this late in development that had the right effect.

I am able to build a character that feels (and looks) unique, pick a direction on the compass and wander off to find adventure. Is it a totally open-world game with the exact same feel as the single-player games? No. Is it a pure theme-park MMO with leveled areas arraigned in a straight line and lots of big flashing quest markers and XP flowing freely from kills? No. It is a hybrid of the two and I think a successful one.

The betas were not perfect. I had the same bugged quests that everyone else did, and it is inexcusable if they are still there in the full release. I still get a 5 sec freeze every few hours, not related to heat or drivers.

Riding horses alongside my friends and heading off towards an arbitrary point on the map was fun. Sharing quests and trying our hands at higher level elite mobs were fun. Seeing the play styles that emerged from the combinations of different people’s character builds were fun. And call me crazy but scrounging for cash during a rainy night trying to repair to my heavy armor after dying from necromancers was fun. All it needed was looting people for food and water and - wait, there is a plenty of searching containers for food and water so it had that too. :-)

I am not trying to come across like a fan boy, but after reading a lot of the comments here I wanted to let others know there is fun to be had in the game. Its not perfect - no game is - but I think the positive parts well outweigh the negatives, and I am crossing my fingers for a smooth release.

My Chick-Scale rating is 4 stars. Here’s hoping that it holds up just as well after 100 hours.

1794

I have also bought it, but I find it mediocre.

I have bought it because…

… WildStar seems a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
… ArcheAge or more sandbox mmos seems to taking a million years to get a western release, and like most asian mmos, can have a stupid amount of grinding on it.
… Everquest Next seems to be a Walking Simulator: The MMO.

…and mmos take around 5 to 6 years to see the light.

Perhaps I am not going to wait 10 years for the “One True” mmo.

1795

We MMO whores must stick together Teiman - See you ingame at 5 days headstart ;-)

1796

Sorry if this has already been answered or if its some kind of secret due to NDA, but I have a couple questions that I can’t seem to find the answer to (and I didn’t have time to try to get into the weekend’s beta):

  1. Is it possible to level up a weapon, unlock and acquire a skill for that weapon you like, then swap out to another type of weapon and still use the original weapon’s skill? For instance, can I unlock Twin Slashes for Dual Weild, equip it in one my my six slots, then switch to Sword and Shield and still use Twin Slashes? If so, would Twin Slashes ever level up like this, or would I have to switch back to Dual Weild?

  2. Are PC players allowed to remap all keybinds, most keybinds, some keybinds, or no keybinds?

Thanks in advance for any answers you (the community) can provide.

-Gil102

edit: wrong Dual Wield skill name, durrrr

1798

  1. You can’t use the original weapon’s skill, but you can still level up that skill (and weapon) that way.

  2. I believe all binds are changeable. I do extensive remapping of my skills and UI toggles, and I didn’t notice anything that could not be bound elsewhere. The only annoying limit is that you cannot use modifier keys (e.g., Shift-R cannot be used).

I’ll add a question of my own – did anyone notice whether the bank vault was cross-faction? I will have chars in both the AD and DC at launch.

1799

Fantastic! Thank you Shimarenda and Oghier! Sorry I cannot answer your question, though, Oghier. :(

-Gil102

1800

It is. Since I want to be able to mat farm across factions to craft chars, I even verified it.

I’ve gotten this game. More b/c a family member will be playing it, and he admits as a “tourist”. Though if I like the crafting I can see staying awhile myself. If he likes the AvA perhaps he will, and then maybe the WvW GW2 fan will come over. I was ranked once in DAoC PvP back in the day, I’m a lot older and slower now. Then again, we could both be so annoyed by bugs we both walk out before max level too.

The purchase horses amuse me (also a retired horse breeder so …).

Set-up: Base horse a light solid muddy brown, pre-purchase horse a “white” (grey), cash shop horse at release Palomino (for those that don’t know that is a color designation light brown body with white mane and tail, won’t bore you with genetics as irrelevant here). They are all in base stats and looks, other than color, exactly the same horse.

Why is this funny? The owner of one grey I bred, has told me how much she LOVES rolling in mud. When a grey horse rolls in the mud, it looks like a brown horse when it stands up! So this IS exactly the same horse. For a $20 pre-purchase upgrade, they’ll give you the horse and wash it for you. If you buy in the cash shop for, hopefully, less than $20, they’ll only wash its mane and tail. The horse people here are all in hysterics when I describe this.

1801

I was also interested in the crafting. Much like lotro, is very accessible and has this “numbers going up” thing getting experience breaking stuff in components. In the beta, I made my own gear and was better than the stuff I looted. I don’t know if that speaks bad of the itemization, but It made my time inversion in crafting pay up.
Too bad the game did not had special inventory bag for crafting ingredients. … so I was filling my inventory with random ingredients parts.

That thing about horses is fun :D

1802

I saw a quote from the head dev stating that crafted gear was meant to be best-in-slot, and that crafting could also be used to improve dungeon drops. So, it’s evidently fairly important.

Bag space is going to be a serious issue. I think I will take my starter mount and work on his carrying capacity, rather than speed. He’ll eventually be a pack mule.

1803

That was my thinking too. Later can get the fast horse and work it faster for PvP, since you can swap. Unsure what happens to the extra bag space when you swap horses?

1804

Interestingly, your bank vault appears to be tied to your account rather than your characters. At one point on the PTS I deleted all my characters to see what it would be like to start from scratch given changes that had been made to the game. It turned out that that wasn’t possible. My bank vault was unaffected by the deletions. Both the slots I’d added to it, and all my stored items were intact.

1805

You lose the slots when you switch to another horse–but that’s not really a problem if their purpose is to provide temp storage for items you’re going to vend or deconstruct. Of course you don’t want to switch with your bags overfull.

1806
  1. You can level up a weapon, buy the skill, equip it on your action bar, then EQUIP a different weapon, and you’ll still get XP for the SKILLED weapon. From my experience SKILL-BAR abilities gain XP quicker than EQUIPPED ITEM XP.
  2. Most keys can be rebind – Fun fact, “ALT+F” for example does not work, as you can EITHER bind “ALT” or “F” but not the combination. Probably something to do with consoles :)

What I do at the start is to level my main weapon, get a skill for it, equip it, then switch to other weapons so I can level those as well – until I have a full action bar - then you need to micro. And since reseting skills was very expensive, I suppose I’ll have to take a day off to “Plan” how I should skill my character up to 50 so as to not nerf it. in beta I had to make a new character simply because my first NB had all the wrong skills trained.

1807

Personally I don’t get the “micro” aspect of it. I had no problems just playing naturally.

1808

I went ahead and pre-ordered. Like Teiman, I don’t feel like dying waiting for the “perfect” MMO to come out when there is a reasonably-good one that I can play today.

I enjoyed the combat, really liked the stories that they built around the quest areas, and enjoyed the crafting. Having hit eighth level, I actually got a little of the “Skyrim” feel from wandering off in a random direction and coming across a weird little vignette.

1809

Anyone else try Crows Wood for the Ebon Pact leveling area? I feel that that zone would be a perfect starter zone for the game, as it had some cool quest givers and was “small enough” to not make it too bad for new players to get the feel for the game.

Of course, the end-quest in the zone was bugged so I never finished it…

Horses seemed to dismount constantly in PVP – I bet it was caused by the “Collision detection”.

1810

People are going to discover that exploring is not just encouraged – it’s required. Simply following breadcrumbs will not suffice, as you’ll miss an enormous amount of content and exp. I discovered more quests by wandering into unexplored areas than I did by talking to folks at the hubs. Caveat - my experience ended around level 17.

And then there is the Mages’ Guild, which has some really nice skills if you can advance in rank. You only advance by finding Lorebooks. Most of those are in the wilds, and often in very obscure little corners. You need to be a bit of a completionist to find them.

1811

Oghier:

Looking at this map http://esohead.com/map#7.3.57.51.70:4:8:12:14:20:30:31:32:34:35:36:66:67:68:69:71:1:2:7:10:15:16:18:21:22:24:25 you’ll get the impression that, just stick to the roads and you’ll get 95% of all the quests available.

1812

Many of them are on the road. Many are near a road, but not necessarily visible from it due to terrain (like Skyrim, though, you do get compass indicators when you’re near a questgiver).

Also, click on Lorebooks. Or caves. Or any crafting resource. If you simply chase breadcrumbs, you’re going to miss most of them. And that’s my point – people complained that the beginning bits were on rails. My experience in the (early) middle bits was that you not only do fine by picking a direction and exploring, but that you also find a great many things that the game would not otherwise point out.

1813

My point is, this game is not organized in big quest hubs, where you run to a town, pick up six quests, go do them all, then run to the next town. A lot of the quests are found by actually going to a forest, a graveyard, a ruin, etc, and picking up the quest from someone right there. So, if your approach is to pick a direction and see what’s there, you’re going to find stuff. It’s more like GW2 than WoW or Wildstar.

Also, click on Lorebooks or Caves. You want those, and you’ll need to be a bit of an explorer to find most of them. Or, just have ESOhead open on another moniter, I suppose ;)