Immersion – MMO Fallout

The Elder Scrolls Online is yet another lesson in the running line of recent MMORPGs that you can either have an immersive single player story-based experience or you can have a game that encourages cooperative play, but you can’t have both at the same time and expect that neither side will suffer from it. Elder Scrolls Online is at its core a fun game with a lot of great ideas, but it loses a lot of the Elder Scrolls charm in its transition from single player to massively multiplayer, and I’m not just talking about the ability to be an evil bastard.

We all knew that sacrifices had to be made in the transition to an online game, and for some the deal was over right off the bat. It’s hard to vilify either side in this argument because technically neither are wrong. You would be correct in surmising that an online game has to have more restrictions in place because it has more responsibility to a connected community. Responsibility to maintain an economy, to allow a certain level of fairness, to make sure that everyone can have fun and no one in particular is left out, etcetera ipso facto.

And then you apply it to the Elder Scrolls, and that means no pickpocketing, no killing sprees, no stealing. NPCs no longer drop everything when they die, no extensive book collections, no criminal status, a reliance on random number generators for your loot, lag, skills tied to your number bar, respawning baskets and mobs, and a complete intrusion of other players on your business.

If the sacrifices of other features are the death of immersion by a thousand cuts, then the publicly accessible dungeons and buildings are the hammer that causes a mortal wound, if not instant death. Nothing cuts immersion in half like sneaking into a building or uncovering a “secret passageway that hasn’t been touched in centuries” only to find a couple dozen players already inside. In other quests, I battled my way through a dungeon filled with spiders in order to kill their queen, only to find the spawn point being camped by at least twenty bots/players. They seemed to have it covered, so I left.

Public dungeons are also a mood killer if you prefer to play stealthy and avoid or silently take down mobs, only to have three or four people rush in and start slaughtering everything in your path. Even worse, when the dungeon just has a train of people going back and forth, killing everything in sight. Not that it matters, because there is no incentive to actually get behind your opponent and strike them with a bow. This is especially annoying with dungeon bosses/mini-bosses, who spawn about once in a never, assuming they aren’t completely broken, and only the player who delivers the final blow will receive credit for killing them.

Sit around for twenty minutes for a mini-boss to spawn only to have someone jump in at the last second and steal the kill? Please, sign me up. For cancellation that is.

I also have a hard time taking the quests seriously in Elder Scrolls Online. I feel like every city I come across follows the same pattern: the town is overrun with zombies/pirates/bandits/etc, as though the folks at Zenimax were so proud of their phasing technology that they had to shoehorn it into every crevice of the game. The formula is always the same: Go to [insert town], receive quest from [guard/citizen] telling you not to enter, enter anyway, rescue [citizens/guards], defeat [x number of enemy], enter building, defeat boss guy. Unlock rescued town with merchants and crafting spots, rinse, repeat.

Now I know why the Imperials don’t want any of the three factions in power, these guys are fighting over territory while allowing virtually 100% of their own land be taken over by every necromancer and bandit with access to a sword. At this rate, I think the Aldmeri Dominion should just go ahead and elect a corpse as supreme leader. The country would still be in shambles, but at least we’d have a decent excuse. Someone please read the Elder Scroll that we stole from the Ebonheart Pact, maybe there are instructions in it on how to competently run an empire.

I like the fact that content is gated behind levels, and I say this as one of “those people” who preferred when enemies didn’t scale with you in Morrowind and installed mods to achieve the same concept in Oblivion and Skyrim. The idea falls short when you consider that you are being ushered from one area to the next, rather than being given free reign to go where you want as with previous games in the series, but it isn’t surprising or particularly detrimental in an MMO frame of mind.

Otherwise I have no strong opinions on the matter.

Here at MMO Fallout, I like to take rumors and expand on them in theory rather than posting a simple “this might come out,” so at least if the game does turn out to be fake, we had a decent discussion. With the rumored upcoming announcement of the Elder Scrolls MMO, an announcement that will be about as surprising as Earthrise shutting down, I got to thinking: What would I be willing to sacrifice for an Elder Scrolls MMO? The answer? I’ll have to get back to you.

I have a certain disconnect with MMOs. Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest are enjoyable, and I take particular joy in building a character and giving him far more of a back story than is really necessary, but I have no emotional investment in anything that goes on in my quest grind to end-game or boredom, whichever comes first. Unlike most single player games, I am constantly reminded that I am indeed knee deep in slow moving pepper grinder, making my way up to the fate of endless raiding. The quest logs lining the side of my screen, hotbars down below, enemies that are impossible to defeat until I turn in a quest, level up, and can suddenly knock them upside the head without missing a beat.

But more so, it is the community that ruins my sense of immersion. I may not be a real general in the fight against hell, nor have I traversed the real land of the elves, and you won’t find my blaster in a sand dune on Tatooine, but any immersion I would have had in the game goes right out the door when I enter the first area and see names that amount to the creativity that might bleed out of a preteen AOL Instant Messenger chat room. And I’m not even going to include the thousands of Legolas and Gordon Freeman I’ve seen. As a writer, I understand that sometimes people just want to play as their favorite characters.

I’m talking about seeing xXxPwnNoObzxXx, or FkdUrMum95, or screen names that look like the person rolled their hands on the keyboard. The names serve an important purpose, no doubt: They are a free beacon to let me know who to avoid, because odds are engaging in discussion with players like FkdUrMum95 is just going to lead to the filling of my ignore list.

Is my stand elitist? Probably, I’d like to say that it isn’t. I log into World of Warcraft knowing that I will likely have my sexuality, weight, and social life questioned, someone will attempt to scam me, Chuck Norris jokes, Chuck Testa jokes, the cake is a lie, my mother is a ho, and at least one high level player will be complaining that his meme-based name was in style back when he created the character, and now he is stuck with it. But after ten straight years of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, I’ve come to expect something of a serious atmosphere. One without people bunny-hopping all over the map and playing dance emotes while saying “stripping 4 gold, plz tip,” one without the ridiculous holiday events that break immersion, where I am the sole hope for the survival of the world, and more importantly: One where the game isn’t compromised for the sake of building a world where thousands of people can interact online.

So I will play Elder Scrolls Online, but for me it will be a cheap imitation. Sure it may look like Elder Scrolls, taste like Elder Scrolls, and may fill me up, but it won’t grant the satisfaction of a true offline Elder Scrolls title.