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.
MMO Fallout 