ESOFollow

I gots it on sale from steam during the holidays couple years back.

I'm surprised this never was a mod.

There was usually a tough draugr(?) thing at the end of the tombs. One that could use various shouts and dropped better loot. Sometimes with a bigger chest. Much like the first area you visit.

And of course there were mods to make it different if you so wished.

Huh, I came away with a completely different feeling from them.

It felt like a lot of them would have a final area or something with some decent loot, or word wall or something. Albeit sometimes you couldn't get there without the right quest from town. I mean sometimes there was little there, but others had things you could stumble upon. I dunno, sometimes it was a simple "help us clear out those spiders!" But I recall that cult thing south of Helgen, the Dwarven ruin "collect all the shards" thingy as notable side stories, there always that bandit lair that got overrun by falmer as a "surprise got ya" kind of thing, or the one where the bridge breaks and you find yourself being swept down the rapids to the trolls.

Some of them. But few enough that it stood out when they did. Although even those instances weren't really anything to write home about.

Of course this was the game that rewarded becoming the Archmage with "Huh, guess you're the Archmage now. Here's the keys to the dead guy's apartment and... that's it I guess. Now get lost."

I was more amused that the staff and students continue to give you the "WTF do you want?" attitude. Apparently Archmage is more of a figurehead position without any ability to expel students or fire staff (strong union?).

Oh, and the dope in Whiterun who keeps saying "Hey, if you like magic you should go see the wizard's college!"

Edited, Mar 3rd 2014 2:21pm by Jophiel

I wouldn't trust those tomatoes if I were you.


As for entertainment vs time played, I've got 262 hours in Torchlight 2 according to Steam and I got that for a fiver, I'm not done with it yet either.

Already at 90 hours on Path of Exile and have not spent a dime.

Don't get me wrong though I enjoyed TL 2 as well.

What weapon were you using? And were you using your light and heavy weapon attacks? Forgive me if that last one is a dumb question but it actually took me a while to adjust to the percentage of my damage that comes from those attacks, because in what other MMO is that an acceptable practice? It's not an autoattack per se because you still have to aim and fire and block and dodge, but it still feels odd to not be using abilities off my toolbar 100% of the time. But they clearly did not mean those abilities to be spammed, and your resource pools won't last if you try to play that way. Weapon attacks (by which I mean light and heavy, not weapon skills) should account for a fair amount of your damage in a given fight. If you want to keep an enemy at range, you need to shoot at them with a staff or bow and use your toolbar abilities every so often to keep them away and/or make kiting easier. This isn't to say that your tooldbar abilities aren't doing damage, but in that scenario they're more important as utilities than as a primary source of pain.

Again, sorry if that was all obvious to you. It was not obvious to me and I really didn't enjoy the ESO combat until I adjusted my thinking - then it became really fun. It feels plenty active and there is thinking and strategy involved in managing your resource pools and picking the right ability at the right time, but you aren't spending the whole time worrying about mashing a specific rotation in the most efficient way, and it's in keeping with their "watch the game, not the interface" philosophy.



Pretty much everybody can afford to put all or most of their attribute points into health for survivability. Soft caps on magicka and stamina are pretty easy to hit through gear, enchants, etc. (Or so I keep reading. I haven't gotten any of my beta characters to very high level.) Edit: also worth noting - and I hope I'm saying it right - that if you put an attribute point into health it's +15, but if you put a health enchant on something it's +10, so it's worthwhile to put attribute points into health and get your other stats via other means.

Edited, Mar 4th 2014 7:49am by teacake

I have to say, I had the exact opposite reaction to ESO's combat. It doesn't feel active to me at all, it feels horribly passive in the worst way (specifically, because it requires so much action from the player, yet feels so passive).

For one, your aim doesn't matter. At all. The game targets the enemy closest to your cursor, as long as you are in the hit box and they are somewhat close to the cursor. There's no headshotting or anything like that. It's really not an aiming system, it's a tab-targetting system with limits (and I believe you actually CAN tab-target, though I don't remember right now).

It requires so much effort, but there's literally no return on your investment. In an FPS, the better you are at aiming (and speed of aiming), the higher your return on the skill. The entire FP system is meant to be focusing your attention into that act of aiming - of targeting things in the environment. When aiming isn't actually a thing, all you're left with is a really confined field of vision for no good reason.


Then we get to the actual clicking. It really wasn't interesting as a system, to me, at all. Because it's just spamming your left click. Or it'll just be spamming the power attack. That's it

I mean, what else would it be? There's no special interaction between your attacks and power attacks. You aren't juggling effects or anything. This may have changed, but when I last played it was apparent there was no good reason to use my power attack unless:

1. It would kill the mob outright.
2. I only had a moment of uptime to make use of.

So, in a PVE scenario, I was just spamming my normal attack. In PVP, I'm sure that will be different, since you'll be moving and you won't be able to land a constant stream of normal attacks. But it's horribly boring in PVE.

If they had multiple grades of attacks, and usage of one could trigger something to make another superior, or if you could use them to maximize damage through exposing enemy weaknesses, or something, it would be a different story.

But in terms of PVE, that's it. Either you'll be wanting to only power attack, or only standard attack, because that's where the numbers place the maximum DPS.

And in the context of "standard attacks are really boring," it's really problematic to have such a bulk of the players' time and attention devoted to them.

The game would have been MUCH better off if we were assigning actual skills to our left and right click buttons (like, different swing styles or something), so we could create combos, and meld them into the rest of our abilities to set up burst scenarios, or something.

But just - standard attack, power attack, assorted abilities you don't use much - is a really boring system.

There's collision detection already - if there wasn't you'd be walking through walls and mountains.

Hopefully technology has improved for collision between player characters. Traditionally, it's been the cause of easy exploitation. Any trouble maker can get a couple of their friends to make a wall and block stuff off.

I have to admit I get pretty pissy when Aethien, Æthien, Aeth and Æth don't work and Path of Exile was way more troublesome than that.

Seems like the obvious solution is for them to implement surnames as an option (even if that's just adding space as an accepted character in the naming field).

Stephiroth.