The beta this weekend was a mixed bag at best. There were things I liked. I loved the collision system and combat felt much less “floaty”. The ability to start out in your factions major city was nice. Both were good additions, especially the combat and collision system. It really improved the feel of combat, which was one of the biggest gripes that people had with game.
Even with the improvements, there were some major problems with the beta this weekend. Matter of fact, in many ways, it was one step forward and two steps back. With everything they improved or added, they also broke something or changed something for the worse. For that reason, it was an incredibly frustrating beta experience.
Let’s start with the changes to the starting experience. The new tutorial is much shorter than the old one and the “boss” fight at the end is better, if a bit anti-climatic, but they took the weapon racks out of the tutorial and replaced then with a single table that contains a single weapon. A sword. Before you had a choice what weapon you wanted to pick up, now you get stuck with a sword. Doesn’t matter if you want to heal or use a bow or burn things with fire magic. You get a sword.
This, of course, really sucks. I created a character and could not find a bow until I got out of the tutorial and saved up enough gold to buy one in the first city. This means I could not level the weapon skills I intended to use until I found the right weapon. Why they took away this choice from the tutorial I have no idea. There was really no reason to do so. None at all. I can understand shortening the tutorial and changing the boss fight at the end. This improves the experience. Removing weapon choice in the tutorial does nothing to improve the experience. They need to give this choice back. Pronto.
The next problem I came across in the new player experience, was being dumped in the major city and bypassing the started island entirely. Now, there is nothing wrong with them giving that option. If you’ve done the starter isle on one character, there is no reason to do it again. Its nice to have the choice to skip it but the way they handle it is just stupid. After the tutorial, you are placed in the city with no explanation and no mention of the starter isle at all. You can go back to the isle but there is nothing around to tell you how to do that. It took me asking in chat to figure it out. I could see this being extremely confusing to a new player.
A better way to do this is to place you on the starter isle and then give a choice to skip to the main city. New players would then be able to do the starter isle and veterans could easily skip it. No confusion, no fuss, no mess. Easy.
Finally, the bugs. Oh, god the bugs. There were bugs everywhere. Tons more than last beta, in fact. Quest mobs not spawning, quest givers not working correctly. At one point, I had four quests in my log that I could not finish due to bugs. Luckily, most bugs could be cleared up by relogging but it was extremely frustrating no matter what.
And I was not the only one with problems. People in chat were not shy about their feelings on the bugs. Players were pissed and rightfully so. It was an extremely difficult and frustrating experience. I am sure it turned a lot of players off on the game. The bugs need to be fixed by launch, especially the quest bugs.
One good thing about the bugs, is that I believe they are all related. The quest bugs don’t seem to be 50 individually different bugs but one bug that is causing problems with 50 different quests. Due to the fact that relogging fixes the problem and the fact that the more players in an area, the likelier the bug, I believe it is a problem with the server. This might make it easier to fix. Much easier to hunt down one bug affecting 50 quests than 50 quests affecting 50 quests. Or so it seems to me.
With all that being said, I still have high hopes for the game. I can put up with bugs. All MMOs have them on release. It will suck for a few months, until its ironed out, but they will get them fixed. The PvP is just too much fun for me to give up on. The PvE is good enough, though I won’t know how good until they release details on endgame, but the PvP is just a hell of a lot of fun and worth paying for, in my opinion.
Going to close this out with a video that illustrates just why I have high hopes for ESO. The large scale PvP is certainly fun but, in this video, a small group is shown being effective while playing outside the zerg. This is what I hoped for from Warhammer Online and Guild Wars 2. This is what I didn’t find in Warhammer Online or Guild Wars 2, or enough of it, at least. If things like this are possible in ESO, then I will be playing for a long, long time. Only time will tell.
This sort of fight happened a lot in WAR. Usually as people made their way to a keep, a premade group would cut them off. The difference is Cyrodiil is quite a bit bigger, so the zerg takes longer to respond.
Yeah, I did see it occasionally in WAR and a few times in GW2 as well. The problem, as you mentioned, is that the area in WAR and GW2 was so small in comparison to Cyrodiil that the zerg could respond in moments. The zerg completely controlled the map in both games due, primarily, to the relatively small map size.
There were zergs in Dark Age of Camelot, of course, but the Frontier was huge so you could hide from it and work around it. That is one reason why I am excited about ESO AvA. It is the closest replica of DAoC RvR that I have yet seen and, for me, that is a very good thing.
The biggest issue I have with ESO is pretty much the same reason I got bored with GW2 the lack of proper world pvp or open world pvp if you want to call it that. The leveling game/pve side of MMOs is always easy and if you remove the threat of bumping into opposing factions then I just get bored.
In saying that the Map for pvp does look vast in ESO and will alleviate some of the problems gw2 had with zerging due to that but at the end of the day it remains one zone to pvp in, are there bgs? arena or anything else on the cards? . That map alone isn’t enticing enough for me and i could see myself getting bored like i did in WvW.
That is some of the beauty of the ESO PvP map. There are tons of PvE areas within it. During beta I would break away solo from the zerg and go solo. I found PvE caves and dungeons, tons of ruins and towns. All had PvE mobs to fight (which were, in many cases, tougher than the PvE mobs in the PvE zone) and quests associated with them.
A lot of my small group and solo PvP happened at these PvE spots. The zergs avoid them because there are no real PvP objectives to be found there but there are lots of small groups and solo players doing the PvE content. I ganked so many players who were grinding mobs or doing quests. I joined up with a group and we went around fighting other small groups and the zerg never even came near us. The map is simply huge. Its bigger than all the GW2 WvW maps combined. Almost twice as big as all of them combined, in fact.
There are no battlegrounds and I am kind of glad there are not. I am so tired of typical battlegrounds. They are the same in Wildstar as they were in WoW, GW2, SWToR and Warhammer. I am just tired of PvP’ing in a small box and don’t even get me started on Arenas.
I do know that ESO will be getting a “Darkness Falls” type dungeon. Its rumored that the Imperial City in the middle of the Cyrodiil map will be its location. If you never played DAoC, let me tell you that Darkness Falls was just amazing. A PvE dungeon that only one faction at a time could enter. This was determined by who owned the keeps in the Frontier. If your side owned them, they could go in and do the PvE quests and mobs. But if you lost the keeps, the faction that took them could enter. The cool part of DF was that if you lost the keeps, you were not immediately booted out of DF. You could run around and gank the incoming faction or they could do the same to you. You could even log out in DF and log back in and gank even if DF had changed hands two or three times since you logged out.
The beauty of DF was that not only was it fun but it served a purpose in terms of the realm war as well. The faction that took the keeps would start going into DF and would actually weaken their realm in the main realm war map. This made it easier for the other factions to fight back and take the keeps back. Not only was it fun but it was a balancing mechanism. Simply an inspired design.