I'd watch it. I actually bought the game back at Launch (pretty sure I have some preorder bonuses, too), got a couple of hours in, and went back to The Old Republic instead. Wouldn't mind seeing what I missed!
Fun fact: Waking up in the prison in Coldharbour used to be how the game started when it came out. It wasn't a repeat when the game came out, and it's also why it's so highly detailed compared to the rest - it was the hook. To this day I do not understand what the hell is up with the new intro.
Mmos seem to think the reason no new people want to join the game is because they don't understand it, so they go and revamp the tutorials. But the tutorials don't cover all the confusing annoying shit that's actually stopping people
@@Hemostat yeah. eso especially has a problem with not explaining things to the player. like new players are supposed to know that tanks have to slot a taunt to keep aggro on the enemy.
I actually enjoy the new intros, they change with different chapters that come out.. Keeps it a little more fresh for the recurring players (which make up most of the player base).
As someone who was a beta tester for Ultima Online when I was a teen and experienced the endless potential of the genre at its very beginning… it’s wild how constricted and railroaded the genre has become thanks to the dark arts sales psychology that consumed mmos during the 00’s. Dunno that there’s a more abused genre fanbase than this one
My impression after playing this game for a couple of hours was: This is not an Elder Scrolls game that happens to be an MMO, it is an MMO that happens to be set in Tamriel.
What most ppl dont get is that they took away almost every key aspect of an elder scrolls game and expect it to work. Best example is fucking classes. The whole point of every eso game was always, build you character how you like it. But here nonono ppl defend their class system like its the best thing in the game.
@@markusgame3 Not to mention how stupidly scuffed the mechanics are compared to the actual games. Go into stealth -> attack an enemy with a bow -> your character stands up and makes himself visible to the enemy for some fucking reason. This is the point where I said "fuck that" and dropped out of the free trial.
My thought exactly. Got it for free on Epic, played something like 5 hrs, found it lacking on so many levels, took a peak at the shop and noped the f*ck out.
It's a really funny bit of irony: I WAS a master blacksmith back in the day. Even had many of the rarest styles that were in heavy demand. Was In a guild with people who could basically get emperor title in pvp on demand. Was super addicted. However I stopped paying the monthly fee for a while cause of money constraints at the time. This was a handful of years ago. Being a crafter my inventory is FULL FULL. So every time I considered going back to the game because it's "free to play" I remember that my inventory is so screwed and I'm endlessly encumbered and that makes me not want to play. Lol They created their own perfect storm of not wanting to play despite liking most of the game. That said I heard they kinda revamped the style system since then idk if it's better or worse than it was.
Im on the same boat as you, I eventually turned my bank to my crafting mats storage cause i didnt care enough to pay for ESO+ again after years of playing
@@ramy9450 I had so many things in my inventory left even though I was also using my bank that it would take an impossibly long time to transfer anything, that's partly why I didn't go back too lol
@@baddragonite I get you lol. It's really daunting having to deal with that storage.. I recently only got back after really enjoying the new class, so the inventory management was worth it eventually
@@ramy9450 yeah, like I said I was a no life master blacksmith with basically no money put in the game except for the monthly sub and a couple MTs, (and buying the initial disk before it was ftp and expansions and stuff) so for the inventory to be daunting to me you know it was really bad hahaha
The prophet immediately messaging you right after you leave him was originally gated behind level. So originally, you wouldn't be contacted until you were X levels higher the next time you were in a major settlement. It's only because they removed the level blocks that now he just contacts you the moment you set foot near town lol.
How annoying and immersion breaking. It's like how in Days Gone to get the next story mission / camp mission you have to exit a camp via a gate and THEN will you be contacted to come back to said camp to talk to associated NPC😅😅
Doubt you’ll ever read this but having watched the channel from almost the start to now, and remembering how gut wrenching your just incase goodbye during your outerworlds video was, it has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to have taken this ride with you Strat. I watched you from when I was in the army, to when I was a husband, and all the way to my days as a widower; your videos have stood as great comfort to my life during the best and darkest days. You’re a real one Strat, don’t forget that brother, love you man 😎🤝
The problem is many have tried to create something new and utterly failed. Either because they didnt understand the genre enough, they turned it into a cashgrab at some point, couldnt provide content, or just constant technical issues that never got fixed. The hardest part of making a mmo today is that you pretty much need every well recieved qol thing all the other mmo have, an engaging story preferably in an already established universe, fluid gameplay, pve and pvp content, constant updates ect. ect. ect. and more to really set it above the big 3 or 4. And i highly doubt that this is possible nowadays just from a financial standpoint alone.
Well I mean for a time they did in the early 2000s. The Matrix Online, City of Heroes, there was that post apocalyptic one where you drove cars. Not really sure how you can make an mmo without having it be a certain type of rpg.
They just moved “leveled zones” behind dlc content “veteran and hardmodes” and left open world to the casuals. That challenge still exists, just do a no death hardmode speed run of a trial.
Honestly, love the review. Fills out most of my main complaints while still providing praise towards the care and effort they put into the quests and lore. I think my biggest gripe, aside from things like Backpack space and Mount levels being character specific; would be how One Tamriel straight up MURDERED my ability as a master crafter to go to low level zones, stock up on low-level resources, and help new players get gear that would not only help them level, but look great. Since materials were scaled just as much as enemies, I could no longer go to starter zones for starter materials; I'd only end up getting rubedite no matter where I went. I genuinely had to adapt my strategy to offer my services as a crafter where they had to provide their own crafting mats, which just felt wrong. Like, at that point, I should just encourage them to level crafting (even if they didnt' want to).
if you have less skills point in a specific skill line you will find that material so if you have 0/10 in that skill youll find the mats for that skill lol youll also find the max level mat but youll still find the material equal to your skill
@@velidreth9856 True, but I also don't like the idea of having to respect just to help out some new players. Honestly I ended up just buying stacks of mats from guild shops.
@@Kilrathi95 honestly you get so many of the starting resources by doing writs. but that skill 0/10 skill trick is useful for getting lower level alchemy solvents which everyone needs to level up their alchemy.
The only thing I disagree with here is how ESO handled the lore of the Elder Scrolls--It's been completely fucked, with so many holes ripped into it due to ESO having to fish for content. Who in their right mind thought that House Dagoth should be fully functional faction that far back? Or that atronachs just come in all animal shapes now? Why did they have to ruin the mystique about the Yokudan pantheon by throwing them at the wall and saying "Yep, they work exactly like Daedra. No, it's not unique." or show that the Imperial City just hasn't changed at all in a thousand years? How come Mehrunes Dagon has to look a fool by trying a grand total of three times to invade Tamriel, why couldn't we just stick with the two? Or the one, if you don't count battlespire. Molag Bal, anyone? What about the dragon-priests that are now up and kicking, along with dragons, just so they could sell a shitload of diet Skyrim DLC? Even the small things, included purely for meme value, show no respect. The Lusty Argonian Maid existed 800 years before it was ever written? That might seem like a really trite thing to point out or complain about, but if you can't keep your timeline straight and do even a bare amount of research into the little things, how are you going to handle the big things? tl;dr care was taken to include lore that would sell well and get laughs out of nerds finding meta-jokes funny. It was not taken to lore consistency.
@@TheReuleaux You're absolutely correct! I should have specified that the lore of ESO is designed to work within its closed system, and it works well for that. The quests, journals, and self-contained stories within each zone are for the most part well written and consistent. It's a non-canon entry, and takes place in a time period that had not yet been explored by the main series.
The dungeons seems similar to the ones in Kingdoms of Amalur, but those were way more complicated, some had puzzles, most of them had bosses, because they were quest dungeons, even the castles never had a clear path to reach to the end, you needed to explore, and of course, not Skyrim door to go back to the beginning, meaning that you need to run back to the entrance of the dungeon.
I mean... It's a fun popcorn RPG, and there's enough hinted-at lore that you're left wanting to know more. But the gameplay loop is repetitive, it's absurdly easy to make a busted character, area levelling makes full exploration pointless, and unpatched quest bugs mean the game is impossible to 100%. All in all? A half baked game that could have been great with more time and better management, but as such is only just pretty alright.
55:18 I just have to say that I'm kind of into the idea of the prince of domination making a prison that will always without exception hold ONE prisoner. For every one of those prisons he will always have a plaything, regardless of it being a valuable soul or not.
Oh bro I remember when I pre-ordered this as a kid after playing Skyrim and Oblivion expecting it to be similar not really knowing what an MMO is, haven't played since it released
Same here, I revisited it years later and actually had a pretty good time with it, but not being an MMO player meant playing strictly solo and I always felt like I couldn't experience half of the game
Man, hearing cyrodil pvp is dead is a huge bummer, since it was my favorite part of the game I have fond memories of organizing armies of players across 1 to sometimes 3 raid groups for my faction, and leading them like a general.
Cyrodill is dead in all but CP modes at 50. There its pretty back and forth, but its only one instance. Imperial city is dead all around though. Good way to make gold though as the runes from imperial city sell for 100k each.
It has been around ten years and they still can't figured out how to keep the Cyrodiil servers stable. In fact, over time Cyrodiil has become more unstable. It's a damn shame because you used to be able to run around with hundreds of players fighting it out in multiple spots all over the map.
How come more people have complained about Fallout 76 & Starfield but are completely silent when it comes to ESO's micro-transaction system? This is the first video I've ever seen that says anything negative about it.
They did when ESO first came out, and since then most main stream audiences believe the game died back when it launched and therefore don't care to look into what its been up to since. Also probably the fact it's an MMO, and its practices are very very common
I played that game for like 5 hours and just couldn’t get into the groove of it… …to be fair though, that’s exactly what happened with Morrowwind too. I’ll pick it up in 5 years, try again, do better, and kick myself for not trying harder sooner… I’ve been on this radiant quest once before! 😂
After the next gen update and how visual update, it’s been fun and it almost scratched the icy morrow wind have with the hidden weapons and armor you’d have to find just by looking around a corner or a random body in some dungeon.
Strat would like Outward. He'd bang his head on it for the first playthrough, then zoom through a second with all of the meta knowledge then get hooked on build creation. As long as he avoids the brothers DLC.
It's one of my favorite games tbh and the one with the most hours played on steam. I love just walking around and enjoying the environment while questing.. simple, but enjoyable. I hope they go out of Tamriel and visit other continents on Nirn!
That's some pure hopium, we both know that's never happening and even if it does it's gonna be dog ass just like everything else Bethesda makes (I know Bethesda didn't make ESO but they swinging for the fences to make bad games like them)
My boy Strat is one of the very few channels I'll sit down and watch a 2.5 hour video for. I love his writing. I'm a bit of a writer myself so I appreciate the skill quite a bit.
Another ppint regarding elden ring for atats wise is just to look at tropies/achievements and realise just how small the amount of people that get to the end of these games are
Thank god for this. I just got back into the game , and by god is it really a minefield of manipulative real-life money sinks. So, so predatory. Thank goodness I am an adult with self control and realistic desires. Otherwise, I can see it in every fiber of the game how in one day , I could probably spend $1000 and still not even make a dent in the mountain of purchasable/monetized systems.
2:14:00 as a hardcore pvp player, I left because of poor server performance, and they couldn't figure out that their main pvp mode (of the time) Cyrodiil played right into their servers crashing: to catch a castle, you need a big group, but too many big groups in one place caused heavy server lag to the point where it would crash. That and the gear grind and low build variation.
And I still think that stupid spawning hammer was freaking unimaginative and took away from the PvP. Instead of fixing issues, they stuck that dumbness in. Gear grind. Low build variation. Gear and mechanics getting balanced to PvE standards. The intentionally breaking of the game by making every new class OP for a bit so everyone would rush to buy it. One Tamerial. Battlegrounds.
@@jesperburns Yeah, it was a meant to be Zenimax’s solution to how one faction regularly outnumbered the others. A super hammer occasionally spawns at certain locations, typically in areas controlled by the losing factions. A player can pick it up and pretty much destroy multiple teams of players and crush keep walls. So it basically makes the person who grabs it OP. Personally I hated the very idea of it. But to make it worse, the dominating faction can also pick the hammer up. Even if another faction picks it up, the dominating one would eventually overwhelm the person and pick the hammer up upon their death. There was also a problem with the people “spying” on behalf of the main faction. They’d keep characters logged into the opposing factions and use those characters to grab the hammer when it spawned and then either run it to the winning faction or jump into a river full off slaughter fish with it, which prevents anyone from retrieving it. It sort of took the concepts of strategy and skill and tossed it out the window.
As a big Elder Scrolls fan (playing all of the main series games, except only a little bit of Arena), I finally dipped into ESO. At first, I was a bit shocked by how different it was, as I had never played an MMO either before. I enjoyed the world, the destinations, the little connections of lore to places and people only mentioned in the lore of the other games, and to an extent, interacting with other players was kinda novel and cool to me. HOWEVER, I kinda fizzled out after a while, because ultimately the game just kinda felt like busy work. Also, every other damn player seems so much more skilled than you, and they've already played every location a hundred times, so when you quest in groups, everyone is just sprinting through dungeons- no stopping to admire the sights, take in the lore/story, etc. It's like all they do is compulsively do busy work to max level a character as quickly as possible. I even had an idea to start and promote a guild that would cater to players who want to SLOW DOWN and suck in the exploration of places and lore a bit more, take their time, smell the flowers, etc. I keep thinking to dip back in from time to time, but it's a real OCD time waster, so I kinda stick to regular single player games most of the time.
In ESO, dungeons ARE a chore for high-level players. I'm a medium-skill player, and even to me, normal dungeons are a cakewalk with my main character. I even soloed some when I got bored of waiting for 40 mins in the dungeon finder. Imagine people to whom even veteran dungeons are easy and boring, but are forced to do daily dungeon runs of specific dungeons to get those armor styles from the Undaunted. I did it for a few weeks, and then took months off of the game as a result. It's mind-numbingly boring. This, of course doesn't only apply to skilled players, because everyone can get the daily rewards, but for those people running normals, the reward is halved, so they have to run MORE of them.
its because MMO players have this weird thing about efficiency to the point of taking the fun of the game, they will rush through everything to get to the end, and then complain that theres nothing to do. so devs are kind of forced to design their games around these weird systems that are only meant to waste time, it sucks because the genre has so much potential
A lot of MMO players have that "Rocket in the Ass Style" of play,that is why i Don't come near mmos 😹😹😹 if TESO was a singleplayer game,even a 500gb game,i definitely would played it.
As one of those that flat out sprints thru dungeons, I’d like to say….”knees to chest” I got pvping to do, and I wanna try out that set and see how I like it. Not sit around looking at scenery while you read every damn bookcase in a dungeon.
Do you switch pvp sets from dungeons daily? If not, this doesn't really apply to you. As far as I know, the pvp meta changes mostly at major patches, and the set collection makes revisiting the dungeon after it's complete moot, if you just pvp.
Small reminder, In morrowind it was suppose to be living world. So nothing scaled with the players expect couple monster spawns. This made the world feel more alive and player just exploring it. It didn't felt like "game" in that way.
I absolutely love Elder Scrolls and being able to share it with my friends, primarily through RP. There's a lot in ESO that allows me to do that. I'm happy to spend a decent bit of money on the game to enhance my experience through cool thematic stuff like housing and cosmetics. But I can never bring myself to feel invested in anything because it's all so dull and grindy, and there's barely any support for RPers. These days I just like painting Call to Arms miniatures to play with my friends.
People these days feel a need to be constantly stimulated. To be constantly satisfied and happy. That's not how anything works. That's what MMO engagement preys upon. It's not a good thing for you or the industry. Less fun, more engagement. Because it lasts longer, even if it's more miserable. No self-control makes an MMO fan out of anyone.
I think it's hilarious how ESO was initially dismissive and even hated by some members of the Elder Scrolls fandom, but now you can easily find people praising ESO and saying it's the proof that other studios would be better at handling the Elder Scrolls IP than modern Bethesda... especially after Starfield.
@@LostHorizons0not in any echo chsmber but from the little bit of lore i found in eso. They somehow contradicted and retconned alot of lore. Or tried to justify other retcons bethsada made like why cyrondii isnt a tropical jungle (hint real reason is cuz they saw the lord of the rinfs movies). Idc cuz elder scrolls lore has always been kinda stupid since oblivion after they fired the only guy who knew the lore. I just dont like badly written stories.
For Fungal Grotto II, you only need to kill one of the mobs chaining your teammate down. If all focus attacks on one single target and kill it before the sword drops, the player will be freed successfully.
Incidentally, Fungal Grotto was my college girlfriend's nickname. Yeah, my questing companion and I made jokes like that a lot when we were playing this game. Something to break up the tedium.
Yknow, ESO is literally the only MMO to ever hold my attention for more than about 2 weeks. I got sucked in pretty hard a couple times. I think it was purely the fashion- I wasn't playing ESO to be an unstoppable vet dungeon soloing badass (although I was eventually), I was playing it to style on mfs with my sick drip. Nobody had style like me, and they knew it. I would stand around town, /leanbackcoin, and just let everyone bask in envy of how swag I looked. (You can get all the good stuff from guild traders, I actually really like the in game economy in this game. I never bought a single thing from the crown store, besides wasting my free subscription crowns on mount upgrades or whatever.)
Sad to hear this in past tense :P I may not be as advanced in the drip game myself, as I collect the houses instead... Been playing off and on since the game's early release, yet still never finished the main story.
i have about 4k hours in the game and just thinking about getting back into it. Never bought eso+, never spent money on the store. The drip was always the main point for me too, got into harder content just to unlock skins and therefore more fashion lol. And yeah guild traders are the thing that saves from some of the negatives like grinding motifs, gear and you can actually buy research scrolls aswell with ingame money.
So, I first played ESO somewhat near-ish to launch, and the Coldharbour stuff used to be the intro. Which makes sense, because the two big characters you mentioned there are clearly voiced by Michael Gambon (of Dumbledore fame) and John Cleese (of Monty Python fame.) Which like, yeah, that's pretty Bethesda-y. Oblivion's opening features Patrick Stewart pretty heavily, and then transitions quickly to escorting Sean Bean around. Fallout 3' intro also features Sean Bean. Skyrim and FO4 don't really have much in the way of celebrity VA's, but I know where they'd be if they had em.
I have soooo many fond memories of this game, playing it with everything from friends to family members to now-estranged lovers. If you want an open world with endless okayish content, adventuring and thieving or decorating a house together, you could go worse.
I also remember another time in the faction war where we had a huge group together all turning into werewolves hopping around the map lol It was a really fun mode, too bad it fell off
that bit about veteran players being annoyed with newer players is interesting. admittedly i do get aggravated with newer players because they can make the dungeons take a looot longer. but i always know that it isn't really their fault because zos doesn't teach new players. new players have to seek out resources to find out what they should be doing.
On the other hand, you get "pros" who claim they can tank veterans in DPS gear just fine, and refuse to suit up for UG, and such. I often saw them with like 19k hp, and the life expectancy of a blind, dehydrated mayfly, blindly running into red circles, then giving shit to the others before leaving.
@@remiss6355 *some* people can manage it, like for a veteran base game dungeon hardmode, you'll get someone with like 20k hp and they never die while holding the main bosses taunt (they don't hold elites/enemies that can cc the team). i had that happen with a pvper in coa2 hm, pleasantly surprised when i saw he wasn't dying. granted that story is very different if it's vet dlc, it just won't be possible for most people. also what is UG, unhallowed grave?
@@colonian83 Yes, UG is Unhallowed Grave. I don't know what server/platform you've played on, but there was a LOT of overconfident people on Europe PC when I last played, who watched a single youtuber/clanmate who could actually play the game solo a dungeon, then tried to emulate them, and got slapped in the face hard. Sure, I myself played with someone who helped us in CoA2, when me and my friend wanted to do vet on that for the first time, but that is the exception. I think the circle goes like this: Newbies are annoyed with skilled players, skilled players are annoyed with everyone not "efficient" and medium skill people are annoyed with both, but mostly shut up, because they realise if they say something, it's another 50 mins in the finder.
@@remiss6355 i agree with your assessment of the community's feelings depending on their skill level. and sheesh 50 minutes, hoping that's hyperbole. in xb na it takes like 15 minutes for stuff like rnd and daily pledges. but haven't queued into a specific dungeon that wasn't a pledge for a while now. idk about EU. maybe they saw their boy alcast do it and got inspired lol.
Thanks for PERFECTLY matching my energy and language on these subjects. This game could be SO much better with the simplest of QoL changes, but they just DON'T fuckin' do it. (Or put it behind a paywall like they do all the time) And a few additions to that armor styles section and Zen's braindead GREED. - You're incorrect about the deconstruct/sell unlocking for motifs, you HAVE to find/buy the motif pages in order to unlock them to wear or craft. (+Some of those 'helpful' notes saying where you can find some styles, are there for styles that can't even DROP YET, so it tells you where, but you literally can't because they haven't added it to the loot pools.) - Alot of the crown store motifs are severely overpriced in comparison to purchasing them with gold through guild stores, there's a few that are that $40+ price tag, when you can just buy them for gold at a pretty cheap price of gold. [If you bought gold, you'd ONLY pay $2, get that motif, and several other motifs for your money in gold.] - They REMASTERED all the low-res base race motif styles, and instead of just updating the old versions like they should have, they put them behind a paid content wall of Greymoors antiquities, and left the old low-res motifs in. Just amazing this game and it's developers, a m a z i n g.
I like the free exploration (and especially being able to do other factions' zones) but I do think the totally flat scaling is a problem because it makes every quest feel identical and every boss/quest anti-climactic. And you also lose the sense of progression from levelling pretty quickly because you can slot so few abilities (10 if you're sweaty; 5 if you're lazy). I do think the openness is worth it but I wish they'd made a few small changes to their approach: 1) Scale players down to the zone (like SWTOR) instead of scaling everything up to 50 (makes no mechanical difference but makes progression feel better to the player) 2) Allow more abilities on your bar (like 8-10) so players are more excited about trying new abilities 3) Allow story content to have a difficulty curve, _even if_ it's all still easy. It's fine to cater narrative content to narrative players but the last boss of an epic questline being identical to the first and dying in 5 seconds *hurts the narrative experience*
@@joshhobson2340 yep just add an optional difficult like LOTRO did in the form of a debuff to the player. its not a perfect solution but when a game run by a skeleton crew can do it I'm sure ESO can pull it off if they actually cared to
I stayed with my mage main character over the years and i am subscribed to ESO still it took me one year of dayly logins and looting to have all traits researched. The 9st trait i had to buy from Guild vendors to often high prices and it took 30 days for each 3 at a time for each category of weapons, armors and jewelery. I have all the crafting lines maxed out so i can research them faster and more efficient - but it still took one year. I would have never tryed that without beeing subscribed.
I've been playing ESO and Oblivion a lot lately. It really got me thinking. One of the funnest parts of Oblivion for me is running through Oblivion gates and shutting them down. I also love the deadric quest where you have to enter an Oblivion gate to face off in an arena against a bunch of other champions. Imagine if they added an Oblivion gate PvPvE dungeon to the game, through a new quest or instanced area, where players would enter into some kind of arena, where they might face off against another player in a duel, or multiple players in a battle. But there's also mobs and traps you need to watch out for. I think this idea could be so fucking sick if they added it to the game, and also if they modeled a version of it to be sort of like the Corrupted Dungeons in Albion online. The nostalgia of running through Oblivion gates like the good old days, combined with the excitement of a new dungeon with the threat of PvP. It would be so awesome, but it's unlikely to happen unless we all demand it right the fuck now.
Regarding the Style and Motif point, I agree with you completely with only one small observation. You had insanely bad luck. I played a couple of years ago and I remember getting 5 or 6 blue books with motifs and 2 purple books in only a couple of days. All on the same character. It was a nord warrior and I did not play for more than 2 leveling zones.
Those are considered "racial styles" now, and are pretty common, they sell for less that 500g a pop. The real time and money sink is in the over 100 OTHER motifs, which all drops from individual sources and in one of thirteen PAGES, not whole books. Complete a group boss quest in, say, Vvardenfell, and you have a chance to get one of 13 pages for one specific motif style which you may of may not already have.
@@profdracko I didn't even know the crown store existed before I knew how to do research of traits and train daily at the staples. The fact this guy says jt would cost $2000 of actual money to get upgrade inventory space is absurd. How about playing the game BEFORE going into the crown store? If anything the crown store is confusing. I didn't know how to get crowns for the longest time. Maybe because I already knew how to do daily horse training and wasn't going to spend actual money to speed up the process that cost me 250 gold per day. Or maybe because I wasn't so ADHD that I demanded instant inventory max space for all characters at once. I am cp 3600. In reality I am WAY higher than that if ESO allowed it. This guy has no idea how to play an RPG. I don't believe e for a second he ever played Final Fantasy or Skyrim. Grinding things out is kinda an RPG thing. If you don't like it YOU DONT LIKE RPGS. And jts clear this guy hates to the very essence what an RPG is. Much less an MMORPG.
"This game charges you for simple quality of life improvements every chance it gets, so the game has all these design decisions which are stupid, time consuming and annoying for the player to deal with and in order to get around those deficiencies you have to pay your way around them, so in a way the developers are encouraged to make their game worse to play in order to encourage you to spend money" Oh wait, I thought I was watching a 100% accurate description of Guild Wars 2 for a second.
True, and WoW... and FFXIV... and Runescape... and... yeah, MMOs are predatory by nature. I dont think there's even one that isn't predatory. People should stop playing them as a whole and stop being slaves to these shit "games"
Both these games are same cash grab but defended by long-time players are that are balls deep into Sunk Cost Falacy and Buyers Remorse so they can't stop becasue that would be like wasting hundreds/thousands $ at that point. I just tried ESO this week and immideitly quit when I saw that most of stuff that is good/QOL is behind paywall/RNG/FOMO. And I immidietly thought - yup, just like GW2. Games like that basically make slaves from playerbase, making them invest so much money and time that they just can't quit to not feel like losers.
@bababooey6034 I really wouldn't count WoW in that list. Yes there are microtransactions, but I have leveled many toons to max level and done mythic dungeons and raids from classic to DF and never once spent money on anything other than a few optional mounts and a realm transfer.
1 minute and 30 seconds into the video and I already love it, sharp slightly edgy comedic writing and sharp editing, will definitely subscribe. It feels like 2014-15 youtube. Need more of this in my life
@@1sonicthe the definition of edgy is joking/making fun of something that is either socially unacceptable or borderline socially unacceptable. There is nothing more mainstream than parroting bethesda = BAD!
Just want to say i love how unfiltered the videos you put out are. I know that can mess with monetization, but being yourself can be worth it, and you sir are a fantastic creator.
I got back to the game after almost 8 years during the New Year's Eve and been playing for almost 4 days now. I think the greatest issue of the game is that it is so heavily monetized. I bought a dlc pack from steam thinking that was all I needed to do, and I saw 500 more dlcs I needed /full of content/ and at high prices, including stuff that looks like it could be fun - like the dark brotherhood and thieves guild stuff - and all of this wasn't even mentioned anywhere before purchase. On top of that, the ESO PLUS they want you to buy is bloody expensive for not granting you anything permanent. Everything in the game, even though they may be fun, is designed to empty your wallet... which makes me really tired just thinking about.
bro you’re getting into an mmo that releases 2-3 dlcs a year if you come back after 8 years it’s gonna have a lot of content that you “need” to buy. as someone who has over 8k hours and 2 accounts at max lvl with over 35 characters between the two you absolutely DONT need any dlc to perform well in pvp or pve. Also ESO plus gives you every dlc that isn’t an expansion plus crowns worth the money you already spent and bag space…
ya i'm not sure why people act like its rocket science. play f2p for a couple days and if you like it buy a 1 month sub to see whats available. once you realize about 5k hours is available to you, you don't need to spend another cent with your sub active. I never wasted money on this game wondering what was happening with the docs and expansions
To add onto the Traits thing, there are crafted sets that need a certain amount of Traits learned before you can make that set. Some of the good viable crafted Sets require a minimum of 6 Traits learned per Armor Piece/Weapon.
The main missions used to only be granted every five levels back in 2014, and that was good. I haven't actually done the main quest since to see this negative effect of it all being doable at once.
Eso is like any other mmo you either hate or love it. I agree it needs work especially for a 10 year old game and hopefully they start listening to the community and bring some balance to it.
Great review, I was about to give it a try again and then you helped me remember all of the scummy business practices that are packed into the gameplay loop of this game. Back to Morrowind I go.
I resonate with this a lot, losing loved ones is hard.. I'm a big fan of your videos because i believe we both think the same way. Keep up the positive outlook man!
Honestly, these monetization practices are the reason I stick with mainly single player games. I feel like I keep getting held back by the devs for the purpose of a quick buck. : (
Games are made for toddlers today. If you lose, the developer fears you will quit. When I see this gameplay, all I can think of is Conan Exiles and how much more fun that is.
My background: I was a min-maxing end-game player a few years ago. I was a raidleader ('trials' as they're called in ESO) and did things like vHRC HM, vCR+1, and vSCP HM. Some of my knowledge might be outdated. I definitely agree with you on how mind-numbingly easy the questing is and how bad the story is. I do think you made some mistakes, some of which I will quickly outline: - Even in endgame, most class/role combinations are viable unless we are talking top 1%. Sorcerer tanks, templar DDs, etcetera. - Champion Levels have diminishing returns: The difference between a cp300 and a cp800 character is like 5%. So grinding for CP is not needed at all. - CP is shared between *all* characters, so they don't need to be levelled again with a new character. - There are many item sets that are good, and there are many that are crafteable, like Hunding's Rage. Just ask someone to craft a full set of you, it's probably free (costs are negligible). - Doing a mixed build (mixing Magicka/Stamina) is generally not advised. This is because damage calculations of your weapons and abilities is scaled based on your maximum amount of Stamina/Magicka. So by mixing, you are significantly diminishing your damage output. This *is* one of the more limiting factors on build creation, and limits creativity, but it might be why you felt so 'weak' in terms of damage. Lots of what you said made sense, but I wish you had experienced more of the game. It looks like you only stuck to the base game. There is an entire dungeon based around solo play (Maelstrom Arena) and the only dungeon you talked about is Fungal Grotto II. To be clear, this is *exclusively* content from 2014! Since then many dungeons have been added, but it doesn't seem like you explored any of them! And of course my favorite part of the game, (veteran) trials (12 person dungeons) were not touched upon at all. I think these are a fantastic experience!
This certainly answers my unasked questions I had about whether or not I should pick up ESO. I've drifted around a bit after I dropped WoW in 2018, and I remember participating in the ESO Beta long ago and wondered what it looked like now after all this time has passed. Thank you for your thorough explanations and hard work!
The sad part is, the game started out bad, and then it actually got very good, and then tamriel one update hit, which ruined any sense of lore (if you were ebonheart pact, you could still travel to other locations as if your alliance never mattered), ruined any sense of progression (killing a rat was tedious when you started, and it's still tedious at endgame), ruined any sense of danger, and that's when the downhill slope began. There was still potential, but it was right before update 35 when the downhill slope accelerated brutally. Part of me still has hope that maybe they'll release some of that hidden potential, but with every update, they stray farther away from it.
I've wanted to love this game, for years now, even before it came out. The premise alone kept me from trying it for its full first year of release. I remember where grouping up with friend was impossible for story quests, as they would get stuck in their own instances of the map while technically being right beside you and my fear of other players ruining the dungeon experience for me was completely justified as the first open worlds dungeon I entered had 50 dozen of the same dead boss body in a room, with 3 players camping him for the 10 gold it dropped at the time, which 10 gold as a drop at LAUNCH was huge. That's right, money used to be hard to find originally. Stealth was meaningless and stealing like pointed out in the video was a gimmic to make you think you were getting money. Dungeons while can be fun sometimes are zerg fests where bosses are usually skipped if not mandatory and RNG on reward loot makes it a waste of time, backpacking useless and more useless loot I am unable to use. The companion system was a blessing but even they have problems, firstly they die incredibly easily, they don't know how to dodge attacks and face tank aoes, they do make the worlds more lively and immersive but that's because there's no one else around since I am playing dead maps. Which is another problem, the game is massive, huge, its empty. Older expansions get abandoned as the entire player base flocks to the newest content as they should. So killing older world bosses, or group content can become impossible. Hell I played the Morrowind expansion a few year backs and never saw a player for my entire time with the main story. But the biggest crime to me is the trend of expansions being cut into 2 parts, the part that you pay for, and the second half of what you pay for. Example, I bought the Skyrim expansion, vampires taking over solitude, I kill the Jarl but the main Vampire guy, the one who put every thing in motion is just gone, you need to buy part two to finish the story, same with Elsewere, beat the main dragons second in command on the moon and the story stops. Same with Deadlands, we stopped Mehrunes Dagon but there's still a living weapon out there and the one girl was gonna find them, needed to buy the ending for that to see where it goes. I'm buying half a game each time, and because I have no sub I'm getting less than a full game when I buy it. And no, the sub isn't worth it, a monthly subscription for dead content and redundant systems. But again, as much as I hate my time with it...I am currently reinstalling for the umpteenth time as I type because I want to like it, its so close to being enjoyable. ESO is the painful edging of MMOS where you never get to climax but hope to god you one day will when it just clicks all into place.
the subscription is worth it if you value your time thanks to the craft bag, and if you want to do the dlc dungeons. dlc dungeons are done the intended way with no bosses being skipped (except secret bosses depending on teams) and with mechanics and challenging gameplay. idk about dead zones, on xbox NA i always find players roaming around in zones (mostly newer players doing the stories and exploring). but some zones in this game just suck, like malabal tor and greenshade.
I love this game. Was a dragonknight tank. So solo play took a while to take certian things down but I played it like years after it came out so I could just switch my stats for damage dealing when solo without makeing a whole new character that was awsome.
This is my biggest issue with the game. DKs are absolutely crap for solo PvE content. It took me twice the time to kill the same enemies. Not worth it, saving a few minutes during a dungeon queue to lose it all and some more during PvE standard content.
Are you classed out as a Dragon Knight Tank ? Any race / class that is build to Tank will take longer to take out enemies. If I remember ( have not played the game in a long time ) you can change your stats and gear I think at the Armoury in your free house or anyone you get. They should of did that from the start lol I dident mind if it took longer but by god for the big bosses it takes a long time if just pure tank. easy though because of your high health and damage resist but you dont do as much damage. Let me know mybie I can help. Thanks for sharing.@@diewott1337
The scaling is ridic. The purpose is to enable you to play with friends, regardless of the level difference. What it really does it prevent you from feeling like you are making any progress.
I love this teardown of TESO, and I have to say it's pretty funny to refer to John Cleese (Cadwell) as "the best actor in the game" -- because of course he is. Dude handles roles like this (especially roles with mediocre direction) in his sleep.
The main story used to be paced according to region like a typical MMO...but they ditched this in One Tamriel. They could have kept it locked behind level progression...but they decided to allow you to breeze through it. Its still better than retail WoW's treatment of its earlier content.
Having 6 Vet level characters of all types and not a single one from an online build I can tell you that if you can think of something you can build it and you can beat Vet dungeons. And yes you do need healers to do Vet dungeons. My only real complaint about this game is about every Vet Dungeon boss has insta-death mechanics. That means all the work you put into your character and gear mean nothing. That is the only real frustrating part. Otherwise you can do a home grown build and with a decent group you will be fine.
Dude, have a nice NY! May this year be a new beginning for all the jank that failed in the last one. Wish you be in a good health and within the circle of loving souls. Take care, thanks for your gard work on this channel, it makes me smile every time I see your new video-essay. You are making art, not content❤
Pretty much how I feel about it. It can be a very very fun experience, while being a pain in the pipe. I may get back into it some time, but at this stage it's a fond memory.
I remember dreaming about exploring Tamriel. Unity Daggerfall did it just fine. Sure, hey, not multiplayer, not very modern, repetitive - but complete and without the need to purchase tokens. /shrug
That main quest that starts at around 50:00 was the original game opening if I recall correctly. I played it day one and oblivion was starting area. With John Clese doing vo.
I played this for about 4 months straight. I got a max lvl character and started doing end-game content but quickly lost interest when I realized the only reason I was playing was to unlock higher difficulty modes of the same content. I think MMOs just aren't my thing. I like games with a beginning, middle and end. MMOs are designed to be endless and I just can't do that for very long
I think that it was moronic of you to make fun of story at 1:05:00 as it was pretty nice to get to know people that matter for story. SPOILER ALERT. You have to choose who dies later and so it is important to know who are those people to make you feel something before you choose.
Cheapest way to get the story DLC is to buy the current expansion version of the game (who knows what that will be after Necrom) then wait for crowns to go on 40% discount and buy 21000 of them, then search the ingame crown store for "DLC bundle" or "Guilds and Glory" or "Year 2" or "Year 3" when those go on discount. Lacking ESO+ probably means you should create a few crafting alternate characters and upgrade their horse/backpack storage like your main character, then use Inventory Manager addon to auto-stash materials to those characters (like one alt for provisioning, one for the 3 magic crafting skills, one for the 3 last crafting skills, remaining characters for other stuff/furnishings) and join trading guild so you can push excess materials there.
I started playing ESO a couple months after launch in 2014 and through it's relaunch in 2016. I played for, shit, 5 years I think, before quitting in discontent. I hadn't been enjoying the game for the last couple years, but like all lifestyle games do, it had deeply ingrained itself into my daily routine during the 3 years I did. I've got mixed feelings about this review: glad that I left before the cash shop got this aggressive, sad that the playerbase is in notable decline. I was a hardcore player, I raided trials and raided Cyrodiil. I engaged in the 1,000-man PvP of the early days and in the 12-man trials of the elite guilds; I soloed veteran dungeons, hell I even soloed a couple trials. I had 4000 hours on my first character, and 3 others at max level. I mastered crafting, every single line. I remember when level scaling was introduced, I remember when the main quest had a veteran version. I've watched as the game I loved turned into a game I didn't. I'm not going back now, I don't think I ever will, but a part of me still wishes well for this aggressively OK game.
Do you ever read a comment and you just wanna pick someone's brain to see how they function? Feeling it hard rn lol. For your sake I hope you've never touched CS:GO.
2:09:00 On needing a specific armour piece (light, medium, heavy): not sure if it's still the case but you can get a bonus if you wear one of each type, so 5 heavy, 1 medium, 1 light (you need 5 heavy for the heavy bonus). And the heavy pieces have less of an impact on small armour pieces like shoulders, so you can go light on those.
I absolutely love ESO. I have been playing on/off since release (definitely more on in the last few years) and have spent countless thousands of hours into the game. I was fully expecting to absolutely hate and disagree with many of your takes, while keeping an open mind for the things I (and many others) who play the game completely agree with. No more was I expecting to hate a take than when your intro to the story said how it made no sense because one thing I think ESO does better than most MMO’s (FF14 excluded, even though that’s not the style of play I enjoy, the questing is immaculate and done absolutely perfectly), but my god, you are absolutely spot on. With practically everything! Don’t get me wrong, there are a few (and I mean only a few) things which, although partially accurate, aren’t completely so…but when it comes to a completely unbais perspective (you’re saying what’s wrong with certain things, not what you don’t like and judging it based on that, because far to many people publish reviews based solely on opinion and not fact), this may be the best take I have ever heard on ANY game. And again, I say that as someone who has spent literal thousands of hours enjoying the game, who will put a hell of a lot more in and heck, who literally even has the game on at this moment! Absolutely brilliant stuff!
Am I the only one for whom ESO never really clicked? I tried to like this game and spent quite a lot of time on it, and I must admit it's by no means a low-quality product, but I also cannot pinpoint at least one area where the game shines for me. It just was a very flat experience
I have to agree. I have plenty of games I like and play, but for some reason I've put a lot of hours in ESO. I don't feel my time was exactly wasted, but I'm not sure what I got out of it.
198 is barely even early game lets be real. At 198 you're not even fully comfortable with the combat system and are nowhere near exploring it's intricacies
almost every good technique ive learned has been taught or picked up from another player not the game i do agree with alot of the problems you have had alot of work went into this video and i can appreciate that i really like how you put some tips you learned along the way at the end im sure it helped a few people
Back when I played the game I really thought they should have made a veteran option for overworld zones once you hit max level, make it more interesting with more mechanics. Same way vet dungeons work just for the open world
When you're finding LYris' gear, you're not just finding her gear, it's symbolic. You're finding pieces of her soul or something, so when she get it back she's becoming spiritually whole and that's why she feels better afterwards.
As an old Elder Scrolls fan, I was really into ESO, despite it's disregard of lore. Fallout 4 had already taught me that Bethesda doesn't care anymore, so, I ended up liking ESO quite a lot. Then I discovered Final Fantasy XIV. Impossible to go back. Eat fuck, Bethesda.
Meanwhile for endgame trials some classes are so bad, they straight up absent from team compositions. And there is kinda no build variety either, because there is meta build per role and then everything else that can't clear vet trial on hard mode. Also difference in healers exists in ESO, but instead of having special abilities and stuff, main difference is between bad healer (only heals) and good healer (heals, restores resources, uses buff sets, deals damage to enemies, debuffs enemies).
When i played the game, my main was a crafter, i loved it. My view is that while the waiting is annoying, im going to be playing the game anyway so its not a big deal...for me.
@devangoad I bought the game when the EoD expansion was released, my first few weeks was learning the game and then instantly went on a journey to get the skyscale. The game is absolutely awesome
![[#2024MAMA] ROSÉ (로제), Bruno Mars - APT. | Mnet 241122 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dgGqD28J6aQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Would anyone like to see my thoughts on the DLC of ESO? Comment below and let me know.
I think some of the expansions are even better than the base game, please do this
Yeah but lock it behind some form of payment like Patreon sub to keep the overall ESO vibe
Thank you Sir, may we have another! 😎👍
Yes, please. I would love to see that.
I'd watch it. I actually bought the game back at Launch (pretty sure I have some preorder bonuses, too), got a couple of hours in, and went back to The Old Republic instead. Wouldn't mind seeing what I missed!
Fun fact: Waking up in the prison in Coldharbour used to be how the game started when it came out. It wasn't a repeat when the game came out, and it's also why it's so highly detailed compared to the rest - it was the hook. To this day I do not understand what the hell is up with the new intro.
Mmos seem to think the reason no new people want to join the game is because they don't understand it, so they go and revamp the tutorials. But the tutorials don't cover all the confusing annoying shit that's actually stopping people
@@Hemostat yeah. eso especially has a problem with not explaining things to the player. like new players are supposed to know that tanks have to slot a taunt to keep aggro on the enemy.
@@colonian83 that should be obvious i guess, but i see your point
I actually enjoy the new intros, they change with different chapters that come out.. Keeps it a little more fresh for the recurring players (which make up most of the player base).
@@anublsunder kinda sad some of the intros are just lost now. The morrowind one was pretty cool
As someone who was a beta tester for Ultima Online when I was a teen and experienced the endless potential of the genre at its very beginning… it’s wild how constricted and railroaded the genre has become thanks to the dark arts sales psychology that consumed mmos during the 00’s. Dunno that there’s a more abused genre fanbase than this one
God damn I miss old, old UO
The customer has always been a sucker
The Customer: "I'll buy it.... But you better not screw me over again"
Futbol Games.
brother i long for it every day. UO Alive is the best thing to come out since the OG Client went to open source @@GoodnightMoon4
My impression after playing this game for a couple of hours was:
This is not an Elder Scrolls game that happens to be an MMO, it is an MMO that happens to be set in Tamriel.
What most ppl dont get is that they took away almost every key aspect of an elder scrolls game and expect it to work. Best example is fucking classes. The whole point of every eso game was always, build you character how you like it. But here nonono ppl defend their class system like its the best thing in the game.
and not a very good MMO at that.
@@markusgame3 Not to mention how stupidly scuffed the mechanics are compared to the actual games.
Go into stealth -> attack an enemy with a bow -> your character stands up and makes himself visible to the enemy for some fucking reason.
This is the point where I said "fuck that" and dropped out of the free trial.
My thought exactly. Got it for free on Epic, played something like 5 hrs, found it lacking on so many levels, took a peak at the shop and noped the f*ck out.
@@Caydiemactual elder scrolls games combat sucks ass and always has.
It's a really funny bit of irony: I WAS a master blacksmith back in the day. Even had many of the rarest styles that were in heavy demand. Was In a guild with people who could basically get emperor title in pvp on demand. Was super addicted.
However I stopped paying the monthly fee for a while cause of money constraints at the time. This was a handful of years ago. Being a crafter my inventory is FULL FULL.
So every time I considered going back to the game because it's "free to play" I remember that my inventory is so screwed and I'm endlessly encumbered and that makes me not want to play. Lol
They created their own perfect storm of not wanting to play despite liking most of the game.
That said I heard they kinda revamped the style system since then idk if it's better or worse than it was.
Im on the same boat as you, I eventually turned my bank to my crafting mats storage cause i didnt care enough to pay for ESO+ again after years of playing
@@ramy9450 I had so many things in my inventory left even though I was also using my bank that it would take an impossibly long time to transfer anything, that's partly why I didn't go back too lol
@@baddragonite I get you lol. It's really daunting having to deal with that storage.. I recently only got back after really enjoying the new class, so the inventory management was worth it eventually
Personally I quit when the game hit me with 30 real days crafting timer.
...and was offering micro transactions to reduce it.
@@ramy9450 yeah, like I said I was a no life master blacksmith with basically no money put in the game except for the monthly sub and a couple MTs, (and buying the initial disk before it was ftp and expansions and stuff) so for the inventory to be daunting to me you know it was really bad hahaha
The prophet immediately messaging you right after you leave him was originally gated behind level. So originally, you wouldn't be contacted until you were X levels higher the next time you were in a major settlement. It's only because they removed the level blocks that now he just contacts you the moment you set foot near town lol.
Hes a massive troll with that shit 😂😂
How annoying and immersion breaking. It's like how in Days Gone to get the next story mission / camp mission you have to exit a camp via a gate and THEN will you be contacted to come back to said camp to talk to associated NPC😅😅
Doubt you’ll ever read this but having watched the channel from almost the start to now, and remembering how gut wrenching your just incase goodbye during your outerworlds video was, it has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to have taken this ride with you Strat. I watched you from when I was in the army, to when I was a husband, and all the way to my days as a widower; your videos have stood as great comfort to my life during the best and darkest days. You’re a real one Strat, don’t forget that brother, love you man 😎🤝
I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but I am glad to hear I could bring some comfort. Thank you for the kind words.
One thing I know about this game is that its cinematic trailers are awesome
Every MMO and Ubisoft trailer pretty much
Only thing I knew about this game was that it had worse UI than SkyUI.
These gray-brown trailers? Awesome?
Western society is fucking doomed yo
@@jesustyronechrist2330 skyui is better than what bethesda had going on
So much potential in the mmo genre untapped I feel, if developers could look past wow and do their own gameplay style.
Yes. Everything has to be a wow clone. Annoying.
Now that costs are even bigger, it will never happen, and at the same time MMOs are too complex for indies to do AND market so it's not a ghost town.
The problem is many have tried to create something new and utterly failed. Either because they didnt understand the genre enough, they turned it into a cashgrab at some point, couldnt provide content, or just constant technical issues that never got fixed. The hardest part of making a mmo today is that you pretty much need every well recieved qol thing all the other mmo have, an engaging story preferably in an already established universe, fluid gameplay, pve and pvp content, constant updates ect. ect. ect. and more to really set it above the big 3 or 4. And i highly doubt that this is possible nowadays just from a financial standpoint alone.
@@TheRogueJedii*laughs in ff14*
Well I mean for a time they did in the early 2000s. The Matrix Online, City of Heroes, there was that post apocalyptic one where you drove cars. Not really sure how you can make an mmo without having it be a certain type of rpg.
Hot take: One Tamriel was a mistake and leveled zones were good.
I agree
bad take*
Amen brother. One tamriel was the worst sht what happened to eso
They just moved “leveled zones” behind dlc content “veteran and hardmodes” and left open world to the casuals. That challenge still exists, just do a no death hardmode speed run of a trial.
NOOOOO that actually almost killed the game.
Honestly, love the review. Fills out most of my main complaints while still providing praise towards the care and effort they put into the quests and lore.
I think my biggest gripe, aside from things like Backpack space and Mount levels being character specific; would be how One Tamriel straight up MURDERED my ability as a master crafter to go to low level zones, stock up on low-level resources, and help new players get gear that would not only help them level, but look great. Since materials were scaled just as much as enemies, I could no longer go to starter zones for starter materials; I'd only end up getting rubedite no matter where I went.
I genuinely had to adapt my strategy to offer my services as a crafter where they had to provide their own crafting mats, which just felt wrong. Like, at that point, I should just encourage them to level crafting (even if they didnt' want to).
if you have less skills point in a specific skill line you will find that material so if you have 0/10 in that skill youll find the mats for that skill lol youll also find the max level mat but youll still find the material equal to your skill
@@velidreth9856 True, but I also don't like the idea of having to respect just to help out some new players. Honestly I ended up just buying stacks of mats from guild shops.
@@Kilrathi95 honestly you get so many of the starting resources by doing writs. but that skill 0/10 skill trick is useful for getting lower level alchemy solvents which everyone needs to level up their alchemy.
The only thing I disagree with here is how ESO handled the lore of the Elder Scrolls--It's been completely fucked, with so many holes ripped into it due to ESO having to fish for content. Who in their right mind thought that House Dagoth should be fully functional faction that far back? Or that atronachs just come in all animal shapes now? Why did they have to ruin the mystique about the Yokudan pantheon by throwing them at the wall and saying "Yep, they work exactly like Daedra. No, it's not unique." or show that the Imperial City just hasn't changed at all in a thousand years? How come Mehrunes Dagon has to look a fool by trying a grand total of three times to invade Tamriel, why couldn't we just stick with the two? Or the one, if you don't count battlespire. Molag Bal, anyone? What about the dragon-priests that are now up and kicking, along with dragons, just so they could sell a shitload of diet Skyrim DLC?
Even the small things, included purely for meme value, show no respect. The Lusty Argonian Maid existed 800 years before it was ever written? That might seem like a really trite thing to point out or complain about, but if you can't keep your timeline straight and do even a bare amount of research into the little things, how are you going to handle the big things?
tl;dr care was taken to include lore that would sell well and get laughs out of nerds finding meta-jokes funny. It was not taken to lore consistency.
@@TheReuleaux You're absolutely correct!
I should have specified that the lore of ESO is designed to work within its closed system, and it works well for that. The quests, journals, and self-contained stories within each zone are for the most part well written and consistent.
It's a non-canon entry, and takes place in a time period that had not yet been explored by the main series.
The dungeons seems similar to the ones in Kingdoms of Amalur, but those were way more complicated, some had puzzles, most of them had bosses, because they were quest dungeons, even the castles never had a clear path to reach to the end, you needed to explore, and of course, not Skyrim door to go back to the beginning, meaning that you need to run back to the entrance of the dungeon.
I loved Kingdoms of Amalur. I hope we get a sequel one day.
uhm no this game isnt good
A likeable but severely overrated game
@@Chumpskey I disagree with the overrated part. I think it's just rated. 😆
I mean... It's a fun popcorn RPG, and there's enough hinted-at lore that you're left wanting to know more. But the gameplay loop is repetitive, it's absurdly easy to make a busted character, area levelling makes full exploration pointless, and unpatched quest bugs mean the game is impossible to 100%.
All in all? A half baked game that could have been great with more time and better management, but as such is only just pretty alright.
55:18 I just have to say that I'm kind of into the idea of the prince of domination making a prison that will always without exception hold ONE prisoner. For every one of those prisons he will always have a plaything, regardless of it being a valuable soul or not.
Oh bro I remember when I pre-ordered this as a kid after playing Skyrim and Oblivion expecting it to be similar not really knowing what an MMO is, haven't played since it released
Same here, I revisited it years later and actually had a pretty good time with it, but not being an MMO player meant playing strictly solo and I always felt like I couldn't experience half of the game
Try it now you will not regret.
@@abettertomorrow5928 whats different now?
@@abettertomorrow5928did we watch the same video ?
@@DarthVictious 9 years of extra content and improvement 👍💯
This was my quarantine game. And I really enjoyed it I just felt like once I was bored with 1 class there was no incentive to start again.
Yup, a new class just means spamming a new set of hot keys.
I play PC now but i played it on console mainly and i felt like the community was so cool almost took me back to 360 golden age.@@chrisbfreelance
Go for godslayer
First day back to work for the year and you bless me with a 2 and 1/2 hour video. You are the man! Cant wait to not get shit done today!
Man I felt so sorry for you before I realized we just entered into 2024. Thought you had been in work for a full solid year.
Man, hearing cyrodil pvp is dead is a huge bummer, since it was my favorite part of the game
I have fond memories of organizing armies of players across 1 to sometimes 3 raid groups for my faction, and leading them like a general.
Cyrodill is dead in all but CP modes at 50. There its pretty back and forth, but its only one instance. Imperial city is dead all around though. Good way to make gold though as the runes from imperial city sell for 100k each.
@archmagemc3561 damn that's fucking depressing.
Aside from classic AV, cyrodil was always one of the best PVP experiences I had in an MMO
@@alexanderrahl7034 same but it is what it is. zos had one of the most unique pvp systems i've ever seen and just neglected it.
It has been around ten years and they still can't figured out how to keep the Cyrodiil servers stable. In fact, over time Cyrodiil has become more unstable. It's a damn shame because you used to be able to run around with hundreds of players fighting it out in multiple spots all over the map.
CP faction locked cyrodil pvp is not dead at all. there is a wait list to get in.
How come more people have complained about Fallout 76 & Starfield but are completely silent when it comes to ESO's micro-transaction system? This is the first video I've ever seen that says anything negative about it.
They did when ESO first came out, and since then most main stream audiences believe the game died back when it launched and therefore don't care to look into what its been up to since. Also probably the fact it's an MMO, and its practices are very very common
Should give Outward a try. Been wanting to hear your views on how it compares to the feeling of adventure and secrets that Morrow wind gave off.
Praise Elatt, someone mentioned Outward.
I played that game for like 5 hours and just couldn’t get into the groove of it…
…to be fair though, that’s exactly what happened with Morrowwind too.
I’ll pick it up in 5 years, try again, do better, and kick myself for not trying harder sooner… I’ve been on this radiant quest once before! 😂
After the next gen update and how visual update, it’s been fun and it almost scratched the icy morrow wind have with the hidden weapons and armor you’d have to find just by looking around a corner or a random body in some dungeon.
@@Saviorselves
Hey, my dude, you @ed the wrong guy.
Strat would like Outward. He'd bang his head on it for the first playthrough, then zoom through a second with all of the meta knowledge then get hooked on build creation. As long as he avoids the brothers DLC.
It's one of my favorite games tbh and the one with the most hours played on steam. I love just walking around and enjoying the environment while questing.. simple, but enjoyable. I hope they go out of Tamriel and visit other continents on Nirn!
That's some pure hopium, we both know that's never happening and even if it does it's gonna be dog ass just like everything else Bethesda makes (I know Bethesda didn't make ESO but they swinging for the fences to make bad games like them)
That would be great!
the intro of " I play this game a lot so I'll chat shit about it" it literally me with Destiny 2 , I have over 2.5k hours in the game and I hate it ❤
I remember one day a video of yours popped up back when you had only a few subs and I've been here ever since. Very well put video.
My boy Strat is one of the very few channels I'll sit down and watch a 2.5 hour video for. I love his writing. I'm a bit of a writer myself so I appreciate the skill quite a bit.
Another ppint regarding elden ring for atats wise is just to look at tropies/achievements and realise just how small the amount of people that get to the end of these games are
Thank god for this. I just got back into the game , and by god is it really a minefield of manipulative real-life money sinks. So, so predatory.
Thank goodness I am an adult with self control and realistic desires. Otherwise, I can see it in every fiber of the game how in one day , I could probably spend $1000 and still not even make a dent in the mountain of purchasable/monetized systems.
Buy eso plus and not spend another dime till they bring out another crown crate for you to gamble.
which make no difference in your experience....
2:14:00 as a hardcore pvp player, I left because of poor server performance, and they couldn't figure out that their main pvp mode (of the time) Cyrodiil played right into their servers crashing: to catch a castle, you need a big group, but too many big groups in one place caused heavy server lag to the point where it would crash.
That and the gear grind and low build variation.
And I still think that stupid spawning hammer was freaking unimaginative and took away from the PvP. Instead of fixing issues, they stuck that dumbness in.
Gear grind. Low build variation. Gear and mechanics getting balanced to PvE standards. The intentionally breaking of the game by making every new class OP for a bit so everyone would rush to buy it. One Tamerial. Battlegrounds.
@@jippy8976 spawning hammer? I may have missed that
@@jesperburns Yeah, it was a meant to be Zenimax’s solution to how one faction regularly outnumbered the others. A super hammer occasionally spawns at certain locations, typically in areas controlled by the losing factions. A player can pick it up and pretty much destroy multiple teams of players and crush keep walls. So it basically makes the person who grabs it OP.
Personally I hated the very idea of it. But to make it worse, the dominating faction can also pick the hammer up. Even if another faction picks it up, the dominating one would eventually overwhelm the person and pick the hammer up upon their death. There was also a problem with the people “spying” on behalf of the main faction. They’d keep characters logged into the opposing factions and use those characters to grab the hammer when it spawned and then either run it to the winning faction or jump into a river full off slaughter fish with it, which prevents anyone from retrieving it.
It sort of took the concepts of strategy and skill and tossed it out the window.
I play on xbox and i never crash 6 hours straight catching and defending keeps
As a big Elder Scrolls fan (playing all of the main series games, except only a little bit of Arena), I finally dipped into ESO. At first, I was a bit shocked by how different it was, as I had never played an MMO either before. I enjoyed the world, the destinations, the little connections of lore to places and people only mentioned in the lore of the other games, and to an extent, interacting with other players was kinda novel and cool to me. HOWEVER, I kinda fizzled out after a while, because ultimately the game just kinda felt like busy work. Also, every other damn player seems so much more skilled than you, and they've already played every location a hundred times, so when you quest in groups, everyone is just sprinting through dungeons- no stopping to admire the sights, take in the lore/story, etc. It's like all they do is compulsively do busy work to max level a character as quickly as possible. I even had an idea to start and promote a guild that would cater to players who want to SLOW DOWN and suck in the exploration of places and lore a bit more, take their time, smell the flowers, etc. I keep thinking to dip back in from time to time, but it's a real OCD time waster, so I kinda stick to regular single player games most of the time.
In ESO, dungeons ARE a chore for high-level players. I'm a medium-skill player, and even to me, normal dungeons are a cakewalk with my main character. I even soloed some when I got bored of waiting for 40 mins in the dungeon finder. Imagine people to whom even veteran dungeons are easy and boring, but are forced to do daily dungeon runs of specific dungeons to get those armor styles from the Undaunted. I did it for a few weeks, and then took months off of the game as a result. It's mind-numbingly boring. This, of course doesn't only apply to skilled players, because everyone can get the daily rewards, but for those people running normals, the reward is halved, so they have to run MORE of them.
its because MMO players have this weird thing about efficiency to the point of taking the fun of the game, they will rush through everything to get to the end, and then complain that theres nothing to do.
so devs are kind of forced to design their games around these weird systems that are only meant to waste time, it sucks because the genre has so much potential
A lot of MMO players have that "Rocket in the Ass Style" of play,that is why i Don't come near mmos 😹😹😹 if TESO was a singleplayer game,even a 500gb game,i definitely would played it.
As one of those that flat out sprints thru dungeons, I’d like to say….”knees to chest” I got pvping to do, and I wanna try out that set and see how I like it. Not sit around looking at scenery while you read every damn bookcase in a dungeon.
Do you switch pvp sets from dungeons daily? If not, this doesn't really apply to you. As far as I know, the pvp meta changes mostly at major patches, and the set collection makes revisiting the dungeon after it's complete moot, if you just pvp.
The second prison you break out of was originally the tutorial back in the beta, I felt it was a cool intro.
Yeah the way they've integrated that with the new tutorial is... pretty awkward.
Small reminder, In morrowind it was suppose to be living world. So nothing scaled with the players expect couple monster spawns. This made the world feel more alive and player just exploring it. It didn't felt like "game" in that way.
I absolutely love Elder Scrolls and being able to share it with my friends, primarily through RP. There's a lot in ESO that allows me to do that. I'm happy to spend a decent bit of money on the game to enhance my experience through cool thematic stuff like housing and cosmetics. But I can never bring myself to feel invested in anything because it's all so dull and grindy, and there's barely any support for RPers. These days I just like painting Call to Arms miniatures to play with my friends.
People these days feel a need to be constantly stimulated. To be constantly satisfied and happy. That's not how anything works.
That's what MMO engagement preys upon. It's not a good thing for you or the industry.
Less fun, more engagement. Because it lasts longer, even if it's more miserable.
No self-control makes an MMO fan out of anyone.
I've been pushed to my limit today while trying to keep a strong face; I'm so happy to see you upload! Your videos are great, helps me unwind ❤
I think it's hilarious how ESO was initially dismissive and even hated by some members of the Elder Scrolls fandom, but now you can easily find people praising ESO and saying it's the proof that other studios would be better at handling the Elder Scrolls IP than modern Bethesda... especially after Starfield.
I’m not in your echo chamber so I don’t know what you’re talking about but elder scrolls lore died decades ago
Sounds like your in a worse echo chamber ^
@@LostHorizons0 gottem
I’m talking about you ^ clown 🤡
@@LostHorizons0not in any echo chsmber but from the little bit of lore i found in eso. They somehow contradicted and retconned alot of lore. Or tried to justify other retcons bethsada made like why cyrondii isnt a tropical jungle (hint real reason is cuz they saw the lord of the rinfs movies). Idc cuz elder scrolls lore has always been kinda stupid since oblivion after they fired the only guy who knew the lore. I just dont like badly written stories.
For Fungal Grotto II, you only need to kill one of the mobs chaining your teammate down. If all focus attacks on one single target and kill it before the sword drops, the player will be freed successfully.
Incidentally, Fungal Grotto was my college girlfriend's nickname.
Yeah, my questing companion and I made jokes like that a lot when we were playing this game. Something to break up the tedium.
Hahahihi @@unclerukmer
Yknow, ESO is literally the only MMO to ever hold my attention for more than about 2 weeks. I got sucked in pretty hard a couple times. I think it was purely the fashion- I wasn't playing ESO to be an unstoppable vet dungeon soloing badass (although I was eventually), I was playing it to style on mfs with my sick drip. Nobody had style like me, and they knew it. I would stand around town, /leanbackcoin, and just let everyone bask in envy of how swag I looked.
(You can get all the good stuff from guild traders, I actually really like the in game economy in this game. I never bought a single thing from the crown store, besides wasting my free subscription crowns on mount upgrades or whatever.)
Sad to hear this in past tense :P
I may not be as advanced in the drip game myself, as I collect the houses instead... Been playing off and on since the game's early release, yet still never finished the main story.
Bruh the /leanbackcoin made me laugh
The endgame will always and forever be looking cute. A true patrician.
i have about 4k hours in the game and just thinking about getting back into it. Never bought eso+, never spent money on the store. The drip was always the main point for me too, got into harder content just to unlock skins and therefore more fashion lol. And yeah guild traders are the thing that saves from some of the negatives like grinding motifs, gear and you can actually buy research scrolls aswell with ingame money.
So, I first played ESO somewhat near-ish to launch, and the Coldharbour stuff used to be the intro. Which makes sense, because the two big characters you mentioned there are clearly voiced by Michael Gambon (of Dumbledore fame) and John Cleese (of Monty Python fame.) Which like, yeah, that's pretty Bethesda-y. Oblivion's opening features Patrick Stewart pretty heavily, and then transitions quickly to escorting Sean Bean around. Fallout 3' intro also features Sean Bean. Skyrim and FO4 don't really have much in the way of celebrity VA's, but I know where they'd be if they had em.
I have soooo many fond memories of this game, playing it with everything from friends to family members to now-estranged lovers. If you want an open world with endless okayish content, adventuring and thieving or decorating a house together, you could go worse.
Yeah I don't really understand why he's so mad. It's really not a terrible game.
I also remember another time in the faction war where we had a huge group together all turning into werewolves hopping around the map lol
It was a really fun mode, too bad it fell off
that bit about veteran players being annoyed with newer players is interesting. admittedly i do get aggravated with newer players because they can make the dungeons take a looot longer. but i always know that it isn't really their fault because zos doesn't teach new players. new players have to seek out resources to find out what they should be doing.
On the other hand, you get "pros" who claim they can tank veterans in DPS gear just fine, and refuse to suit up for UG, and such. I often saw them with like 19k hp, and the life expectancy of a blind, dehydrated mayfly, blindly running into red circles, then giving shit to the others before leaving.
@@remiss6355 *some* people can manage it, like for a veteran base game dungeon hardmode, you'll get someone with like 20k hp and they never die while holding the main bosses taunt (they don't hold elites/enemies that can cc the team). i had that happen with a pvper in coa2 hm, pleasantly surprised when i saw he wasn't dying.
granted that story is very different if it's vet dlc, it just won't be possible for most people. also what is UG, unhallowed grave?
@@colonian83 Yes, UG is Unhallowed Grave. I don't know what server/platform you've played on, but there was a LOT of overconfident people on Europe PC when I last played, who watched a single youtuber/clanmate who could actually play the game solo a dungeon, then tried to emulate them, and got slapped in the face hard. Sure, I myself played with someone who helped us in CoA2, when me and my friend wanted to do vet on that for the first time, but that is the exception. I think the circle goes like this: Newbies are annoyed with skilled players, skilled players are annoyed with everyone not "efficient" and medium skill people are annoyed with both, but mostly shut up, because they realise if they say something, it's another 50 mins in the finder.
@@remiss6355 i agree with your assessment of the community's feelings depending on their skill level. and sheesh 50 minutes, hoping that's hyperbole. in xb na it takes like 15 minutes for stuff like rnd and daily pledges. but haven't queued into a specific dungeon that wasn't a pledge for a while now.
idk about EU. maybe they saw their boy alcast do it and got inspired lol.
I agree with you. Best time i had in this game was just listening to music and exploring the world randomly. If that your jam it's worth trying.
One thing I love about ESO is shared CP, I have 7 700+ CP toons just because my main is 700+. Makes farming gear for different builds super easy.
one of the many things that should be shared like mount speed.
"Toons"? Whut
@@wasserruebenvergilbungsvirus it's old-school mmo head speak for alt characters
Thanks for PERFECTLY matching my energy and language on these subjects.
This game could be SO much better with the simplest of QoL changes, but they just DON'T fuckin' do it. (Or put it behind a paywall like they do all the time)
And a few additions to that armor styles section and Zen's braindead GREED.
- You're incorrect about the deconstruct/sell unlocking for motifs, you HAVE to find/buy the motif pages in order to unlock them to wear or craft. (+Some of those 'helpful' notes saying where you can find some styles, are there for styles that can't even DROP YET, so it tells you where, but you literally can't because they haven't added it to the loot pools.)
- Alot of the crown store motifs are severely overpriced in comparison to purchasing them with gold through guild stores, there's a few that are that $40+ price tag, when you can just buy them for gold at a pretty cheap price of gold. [If you bought gold, you'd ONLY pay $2, get that motif, and several other motifs for your money in gold.]
- They REMASTERED all the low-res base race motif styles, and instead of just updating the old versions like they should have, they put them behind a paid content wall of Greymoors antiquities, and left the old low-res motifs in.
Just amazing this game and it's developers, a m a z i n g.
I like the free exploration (and especially being able to do other factions' zones) but I do think the totally flat scaling is a problem because it makes every quest feel identical and every boss/quest anti-climactic. And you also lose the sense of progression from levelling pretty quickly because you can slot so few abilities (10 if you're sweaty; 5 if you're lazy). I do think the openness is worth it but I wish they'd made a few small changes to their approach:
1) Scale players down to the zone (like SWTOR) instead of scaling everything up to 50 (makes no mechanical difference but makes progression feel better to the player)
2) Allow more abilities on your bar (like 8-10) so players are more excited about trying new abilities
3) Allow story content to have a difficulty curve, _even if_ it's all still easy. It's fine to cater narrative content to narrative players but the last boss of an epic questline being identical to the first and dying in 5 seconds *hurts the narrative experience*
The way to fix overland scaling is to add optional veteran overland.
@@joshhobson2340 yep just add an optional difficult like LOTRO did in the form of a debuff to the player. its not a perfect solution but when a game run by a skeleton crew can do it I'm sure ESO can pull it off if they actually cared to
I stayed with my mage main character over the years and i am subscribed to ESO still it took me one year of dayly logins and looting to have all traits researched. The 9st trait i had to buy from Guild vendors to often high prices and it took 30 days for each 3 at a time for each category of weapons, armors and jewelery. I have all the crafting lines maxed out so i can research them faster and more efficient - but it still took one year. I would have never tryed that without beeing subscribed.
Dude i f'ing love your delivery. "The Anus is only so elastic" had me burst out laughing. Content always on point as well. True yt gem
I've been playing ESO and Oblivion a lot lately. It really got me thinking. One of the funnest parts of Oblivion for me is running through Oblivion gates and shutting them down. I also love the deadric quest where you have to enter an Oblivion gate to face off in an arena against a bunch of other champions. Imagine if they added an Oblivion gate PvPvE dungeon to the game, through a new quest or instanced area, where players would enter into some kind of arena, where they might face off against another player in a duel, or multiple players in a battle. But there's also mobs and traps you need to watch out for. I think this idea could be so fucking sick if they added it to the game, and also if they modeled a version of it to be sort of like the Corrupted Dungeons in Albion online. The nostalgia of running through Oblivion gates like the good old days, combined with the excitement of a new dungeon with the threat of PvP. It would be so awesome, but it's unlikely to happen unless we all demand it right the fuck now.
Regarding the Style and Motif point, I agree with you completely with only one small observation. You had insanely bad luck. I played a couple of years ago and I remember getting 5 or 6 blue books with motifs and 2 purple books in only a couple of days. All on the same character. It was a nord warrior and I did not play for more than 2 leveling zones.
Those are considered "racial styles" now, and are pretty common, they sell for less that 500g a pop. The real time and money sink is in the over 100 OTHER motifs, which all drops from individual sources and in one of thirteen PAGES, not whole books. Complete a group boss quest in, say, Vvardenfell, and you have a chance to get one of 13 pages for one specific motif style which you may of may not already have.
They are free.
@@profdrackojust buy crowns from another player to get the whole set at once.
Geez.
It isn't this hard to do.
@@DS94everXev I mean you can buy them with gold in game. Or just do the quests and trade away extras. Crowns don't need to factor in at all.
@@profdracko I didn't even know the crown store existed before I knew how to do research of traits and train daily at the staples.
The fact this guy says jt would cost $2000 of actual money to get upgrade inventory space is absurd.
How about playing the game BEFORE going into the crown store?
If anything the crown store is confusing. I didn't know how to get crowns for the longest time. Maybe because I already knew how to do daily horse training and wasn't going to spend actual money to speed up the process that cost me 250 gold per day.
Or maybe because I wasn't so ADHD that I demanded instant inventory max space for all characters at once.
I am cp 3600. In reality I am WAY higher than that if ESO allowed it.
This guy has no idea how to play an RPG. I don't believe e for a second he ever played Final Fantasy or Skyrim. Grinding things out is kinda an RPG thing. If you don't like it YOU DONT LIKE RPGS.
And jts clear this guy hates to the very essence what an RPG is. Much less an MMORPG.
"This game charges you for simple quality of life improvements every chance it gets, so the game has all these design decisions which are stupid, time consuming and annoying for the player to deal with and in order to get around those deficiencies you have to pay your way around them, so in a way the developers are encouraged to make their game worse to play in order to encourage you to spend money"
Oh wait, I thought I was watching a 100% accurate description of Guild Wars 2 for a second.
@Smewthtell me you don't play eso without telling me so
True, and WoW... and FFXIV... and Runescape... and... yeah, MMOs are predatory by nature. I dont think there's even one that isn't predatory. People should stop playing them as a whole and stop being slaves to these shit "games"
Both these games are same cash grab but defended by long-time players are that are balls deep into Sunk Cost Falacy and Buyers Remorse so they can't stop becasue that would be like wasting hundreds/thousands $ at that point. I just tried ESO this week and immideitly quit when I saw that most of stuff that is good/QOL is behind paywall/RNG/FOMO. And I immidietly thought - yup, just like GW2.
Games like that basically make slaves from playerbase, making them invest so much money and time that they just can't quit to not feel like losers.
@bababooey6034 I really wouldn't count WoW in that list. Yes there are microtransactions, but I have leveled many toons to max level and done mythic dungeons and raids from classic to DF and never once spent money on anything other than a few optional mounts and a realm transfer.
1 minute and 30 seconds into the video and I already love it, sharp slightly edgy comedic writing and sharp editing, will definitely subscribe. It feels like 2014-15 youtube. Need more of this in my life
How the fuck can it be edgy when its the most basic, mainstream youtuber opinion?
@@SERO9898 Edgy doesn't mean the opinion goes against the grain I was just refering to the comedy style being crass
@@1sonicthe the definition of edgy is joking/making fun of something that is either socially unacceptable or borderline socially unacceptable. There is nothing more mainstream than parroting bethesda = BAD!
Just saw your Outer Worlds video and I just wanted to say I’m happy you’re still around man! I’m sure everyone else is too.
Just want to say i love how unfiltered the videos you put out are. I know that can mess with monetization, but being yourself can be worth it, and you sir are a fantastic creator.
This is, so far, my favortie surgical disassembly of a game. Thanks, Strat!
I got back to the game after almost 8 years during the New Year's Eve and been playing for almost 4 days now. I think the greatest issue of the game is that it is so heavily monetized. I bought a dlc pack from steam thinking that was all I needed to do, and I saw 500 more dlcs I needed /full of content/ and at high prices, including stuff that looks like it could be fun - like the dark brotherhood and thieves guild stuff - and all of this wasn't even mentioned anywhere before purchase.
On top of that, the ESO PLUS they want you to buy is bloody expensive for not granting you anything permanent. Everything in the game, even though they may be fun, is designed to empty your wallet... which makes me really tired just thinking about.
bro you’re getting into an mmo that releases 2-3 dlcs a year if you come back after 8 years it’s gonna have a lot of content that you “need” to buy. as someone who has over 8k hours and 2 accounts at max lvl with over 35 characters between the two you absolutely DONT need any dlc to perform well in pvp or pve. Also ESO plus gives you every dlc that isn’t an expansion plus crowns worth the money you already spent and bag space…
ya i'm not sure why people act like its rocket science. play f2p for a couple days and if you like it buy a 1 month sub to see whats available. once you realize about 5k hours is available to you, you don't need to spend another cent with your sub active. I never wasted money on this game wondering what was happening with the docs and expansions
The best part of ESO+ is that it gives more Crowns than actually buying the Crowns for a better price 😂😂😂
To add onto the Traits thing, there are crafted sets that need a certain amount of Traits learned before you can make that set. Some of the good viable crafted Sets require a minimum of 6 Traits learned per Armor Piece/Weapon.
Absolutely stoked to see this review.
The main missions used to only be granted every five levels back in 2014, and that was good. I haven't actually done the main quest since to see this negative effect of it all being doable at once.
Eso is like any other mmo you either hate or love it. I agree it needs work especially for a 10 year old game and hopefully they start listening to the community and bring some balance to it.
It has problems but its one of the best out there still. If it was cross platform it would rank way higher
Great review, I was about to give it a try again and then you helped me remember all of the scummy business practices that are packed into the gameplay loop of this game. Back to Morrowind I go.
2 minutes in and I already love this review.
I resonate with this a lot, losing loved ones is hard.. I'm a big fan of your videos because i believe we both think the same way. Keep up the positive outlook man!
Honestly, these monetization practices are the reason I stick with mainly single player games. I feel like I keep getting held back by the devs for the purpose of a quick buck. : (
I really like your choice of background music. It's a very important part of a video like this, and it's not obvious unless you do it badly. Good job!
Games are made for toddlers today. If you lose, the developer fears you will quit.
When I see this gameplay, all I can think of is Conan Exiles and how much more fun that is.
Brooo i love conan exiles. Combat in that game is so fun. Also i love slaves
This game used to have harder content like normal dungeons and world bosses but they nerfed everything when they released it for consoles.
@@jesperburns what made it harder. Like higher boss health and damage? What about it got nerfed jw
My background: I was a min-maxing end-game player a few years ago. I was a raidleader ('trials' as they're called in ESO) and did things like vHRC HM, vCR+1, and vSCP HM. Some of my knowledge might be outdated.
I definitely agree with you on how mind-numbingly easy the questing is and how bad the story is. I do think you made some mistakes, some of which I will quickly outline:
- Even in endgame, most class/role combinations are viable unless we are talking top 1%. Sorcerer tanks, templar DDs, etcetera.
- Champion Levels have diminishing returns: The difference between a cp300 and a cp800 character is like 5%. So grinding for CP is not needed at all.
- CP is shared between *all* characters, so they don't need to be levelled again with a new character.
- There are many item sets that are good, and there are many that are crafteable, like Hunding's Rage. Just ask someone to craft a full set of you, it's probably free (costs are negligible).
- Doing a mixed build (mixing Magicka/Stamina) is generally not advised. This is because damage calculations of your weapons and abilities is scaled based on your maximum amount of Stamina/Magicka. So by mixing, you are significantly diminishing your damage output. This *is* one of the more limiting factors on build creation, and limits creativity, but it might be why you felt so 'weak' in terms of damage.
Lots of what you said made sense, but I wish you had experienced more of the game. It looks like you only stuck to the base game. There is an entire dungeon based around solo play (Maelstrom Arena) and the only dungeon you talked about is Fungal Grotto II. To be clear, this is *exclusively* content from 2014! Since then many dungeons have been added, but it doesn't seem like you explored any of them! And of course my favorite part of the game, (veteran) trials (12 person dungeons) were not touched upon at all. I think these are a fantastic experience!
I'd be happy to answer any specific questions. I'd also be happy to hear if someone can inform me if something I said is outdated information :D
This certainly answers my unasked questions I had about whether or not I should pick up ESO. I've drifted around a bit after I dropped WoW in 2018, and I remember participating in the ESO Beta long ago and wondered what it looked like now after all this time has passed.
Thank you for your thorough explanations and hard work!
The sad part is, the game started out bad, and then it actually got very good, and then tamriel one update hit, which ruined any sense of lore (if you were ebonheart pact, you could still travel to other locations as if your alliance never mattered), ruined any sense of progression (killing a rat was tedious when you started, and it's still tedious at endgame), ruined any sense of danger, and that's when the downhill slope began. There was still potential, but it was right before update 35 when the downhill slope accelerated brutally. Part of me still has hope that maybe they'll release some of that hidden potential, but with every update, they stray farther away from it.
Thank you for the video. Great watch man. Hope you and your family had a good holiday. Cheers
I've wanted to love this game, for years now, even before it came out. The premise alone kept me from trying it for its full first year of release. I remember where grouping up with friend was impossible for story quests, as they would get stuck in their own instances of the map while technically being right beside you and my fear of other players ruining the dungeon experience for me was completely justified as the first open worlds dungeon I entered had 50 dozen of the same dead boss body in a room, with 3 players camping him for the 10 gold it dropped at the time, which 10 gold as a drop at LAUNCH was huge. That's right, money used to be hard to find originally. Stealth was meaningless and stealing like pointed out in the video was a gimmic to make you think you were getting money.
Dungeons while can be fun sometimes are zerg fests where bosses are usually skipped if not mandatory and RNG on reward loot makes it a waste of time, backpacking useless and more useless loot I am unable to use. The companion system was a blessing but even they have problems, firstly they die incredibly easily, they don't know how to dodge attacks and face tank aoes, they do make the worlds more lively and immersive but that's because there's no one else around since I am playing dead maps. Which is another problem, the game is massive, huge, its empty. Older expansions get abandoned as the entire player base flocks to the newest content as they should. So killing older world bosses, or group content can become impossible. Hell I played the Morrowind expansion a few year backs and never saw a player for my entire time with the main story.
But the biggest crime to me is the trend of expansions being cut into 2 parts, the part that you pay for, and the second half of what you pay for. Example, I bought the Skyrim expansion, vampires taking over solitude, I kill the Jarl but the main Vampire guy, the one who put every thing in motion is just gone, you need to buy part two to finish the story, same with Elsewere, beat the main dragons second in command on the moon and the story stops. Same with Deadlands, we stopped Mehrunes Dagon but there's still a living weapon out there and the one girl was gonna find them, needed to buy the ending for that to see where it goes. I'm buying half a game each time, and because I have no sub I'm getting less than a full game when I buy it. And no, the sub isn't worth it, a monthly subscription for dead content and redundant systems. But again, as much as I hate my time with it...I am currently reinstalling for the umpteenth time as I type because I want to like it, its so close to being enjoyable. ESO is the painful edging of MMOS where you never get to climax but hope to god you one day will when it just clicks all into place.
the subscription is worth it if you value your time thanks to the craft bag, and if you want to do the dlc dungeons. dlc dungeons are done the intended way with no bosses being skipped (except secret bosses depending on teams) and with mechanics and challenging gameplay.
idk about dead zones, on xbox NA i always find players roaming around in zones (mostly newer players doing the stories and exploring). but some zones in this game just suck, like malabal tor and greenshade.
honestly sounds like every mmo ever made, beside the "own instance" crap
I listened to your rant while doing stuff. It was very enjoyable. Even though I don't play any kind of MMO since decades.
I love this game. Was a dragonknight tank. So solo play took a while to take certian things down but I played it like years after it came out so I could just switch my stats for damage dealing when solo without makeing a whole new character that was awsome.
This is my biggest issue with the game. DKs are absolutely crap for solo PvE content. It took me twice the time to kill the same enemies. Not worth it, saving a few minutes during a dungeon queue to lose it all and some more during PvE standard content.
Are you classed out as a Dragon Knight Tank ? Any race / class that is build to Tank will take longer to take out enemies. If I remember ( have not played the game in a long time ) you can change your stats and gear I think at the Armoury in your free house or anyone you get. They should of did that from the start lol I dident mind if it took longer but by god for the big bosses it takes a long time if just pure tank. easy though because of your high health and damage resist but you dont do as much damage. Let me know mybie I can help. Thanks for sharing.@@diewott1337
Thank you for shinning a light on this part on the harsh reality of ESO Cyrodill 2:18:36
The scaling is ridic. The purpose is to enable you to play with friends, regardless of the level difference.
What it really does it prevent you from feeling like you are making any progress.
I love this teardown of TESO, and I have to say it's pretty funny to refer to John Cleese (Cadwell) as "the best actor in the game" -- because of course he is. Dude handles roles like this (especially roles with mediocre direction) in his sleep.
The main story used to be paced according to region like a typical MMO...but they ditched this in One Tamriel. They could have kept it locked behind level progression...but they decided to allow you to breeze through it. Its still better than retail WoW's treatment of its earlier content.
Having 6 Vet level characters of all types and not a single one from an online build I can tell you that if you can think of something you can build it and you can beat Vet dungeons. And yes you do need healers to do Vet dungeons. My only real complaint about this game is about every Vet Dungeon boss has insta-death mechanics. That means all the work you put into your character and gear mean nothing. That is the only real frustrating part. Otherwise you can do a home grown build and with a decent group you will be fine.
Dude, have a nice NY! May this year be a new beginning for all the jank that failed in the last one.
Wish you be in a good health and within the circle of loving souls. Take care, thanks for your gard work on this channel, it makes me smile every time I see your new video-essay.
You are making art, not content❤
Now, I'm gonna make myself a snack and retreat from the daily horrors for the next 2.5 hours 🎉
Pretty much how I feel about it.
It can be a very very fun experience, while being a pain in the pipe.
I may get back into it some time, but at this stage it's a fond memory.
I remember dreaming about exploring Tamriel.
Unity Daggerfall did it just fine. Sure, hey, not multiplayer, not very modern, repetitive -
but complete and without the need to purchase tokens. /shrug
That main quest that starts at around 50:00 was the original game opening if I recall correctly. I played it day one and oblivion was starting area. With John Clese doing vo.
I played this for about 4 months straight. I got a max lvl character and started doing end-game content but quickly lost interest when I realized the only reason I was playing was to unlock higher difficulty modes of the same content. I think MMOs just aren't my thing. I like games with a beginning, middle and end. MMOs are designed to be endless and I just can't do that for very long
It took me over a week to finish the video. But you really did a good job explaining the pros and cons of the game.
I think that it was moronic of you to make fun of story at 1:05:00 as it was pretty nice to get to know people that matter for story. SPOILER ALERT. You have to choose who dies later and so it is important to know who are those people to make you feel something before you choose.
Cheapest way to get the story DLC is to buy the current expansion version of the game (who knows what that will be after Necrom) then wait for crowns to go on 40% discount and buy 21000 of them, then search the ingame crown store for "DLC bundle" or "Guilds and Glory" or "Year 2" or "Year 3" when those go on discount. Lacking ESO+ probably means you should create a few crafting alternate characters and upgrade their horse/backpack storage like your main character, then use Inventory Manager addon to auto-stash materials to those characters (like one alt for provisioning, one for the 3 magic crafting skills, one for the 3 last crafting skills, remaining characters for other stuff/furnishings) and join trading guild so you can push excess materials there.
I started playing ESO a couple months after launch in 2014 and through it's relaunch in 2016. I played for, shit, 5 years I think, before quitting in discontent. I hadn't been enjoying the game for the last couple years, but like all lifestyle games do, it had deeply ingrained itself into my daily routine during the 3 years I did. I've got mixed feelings about this review: glad that I left before the cash shop got this aggressive, sad that the playerbase is in notable decline. I was a hardcore player, I raided trials and raided Cyrodiil. I engaged in the 1,000-man PvP of the early days and in the 12-man trials of the elite guilds; I soloed veteran dungeons, hell I even soloed a couple trials. I had 4000 hours on my first character, and 3 others at max level. I mastered crafting, every single line. I remember when level scaling was introduced, I remember when the main quest had a veteran version. I've watched as the game I loved turned into a game I didn't. I'm not going back now, I don't think I ever will, but a part of me still wishes well for this aggressively OK game.
Do you ever read a comment and you just wanna pick someone's brain to see how they function? Feeling it hard rn lol. For your sake I hope you've never touched CS:GO.
you made a two hour video, and in the first ten minutes, you told me all that I needed to know about ESO. damn
The rest is filled with high pitched whining, don't even bother
2:09:00 On needing a specific armour piece (light, medium, heavy): not sure if it's still the case but you can get a bonus if you wear one of each type, so 5 heavy, 1 medium, 1 light (you need 5 heavy for the heavy bonus). And the heavy pieces have less of an impact on small armour pieces like shoulders, so you can go light on those.
Yeah, I was rocking all three at one point, but decided to go all medium for soloing dungeons and endless archives.
I don't normally sub to channels, but I subbed in the first 1:17 sec. Keep it real friendo.
I absolutely love ESO. I have been playing on/off since release (definitely more on in the last few years) and have spent countless thousands of hours into the game.
I was fully expecting to absolutely hate and disagree with many of your takes, while keeping an open mind for the things I (and many others) who play the game completely agree with.
No more was I expecting to hate a take than when your intro to the story said how it made no sense because one thing I think ESO does better than most MMO’s (FF14 excluded, even though that’s not the style of play I enjoy, the questing is immaculate and done absolutely perfectly), but my god, you are absolutely spot on. With practically everything!
Don’t get me wrong, there are a few (and I mean only a few) things which, although partially accurate, aren’t completely so…but when it comes to a completely unbais perspective (you’re saying what’s wrong with certain things, not what you don’t like and judging it based on that, because far to many people publish reviews based solely on opinion and not fact), this may be the best take I have ever heard on ANY game.
And again, I say that as someone who has spent literal thousands of hours enjoying the game, who will put a hell of a lot more in and heck, who literally even has the game on at this moment!
Absolutely brilliant stuff!
Am I the only one for whom ESO never really clicked? I tried to like this game and spent quite a lot of time on it, and I must admit it's by no means a low-quality product, but I also cannot pinpoint at least one area where the game shines for me. It just was a very flat experience
I have to agree. I have plenty of games I like and play, but for some reason I've put a lot of hours in ESO. I don't feel my time was exactly wasted, but I'm not sure what I got out of it.
1 lvl 50 character and CP 198 is not "I've played this game A LOT", that's "i've reached mid-game"
198 is barely even early game lets be real. At 198 you're not even fully comfortable with the combat system and are nowhere near exploring it's intricacies
Meanwhile I'm level 30 and just doing quests and exploring the map... ^^
almost every good technique ive learned has been taught or picked up from another player not the game i do agree with alot of the problems you have had alot of work went into this video and i can appreciate that i really like how you put some tips you learned along the way at the end im sure it helped a few people
44:50 Armor styles are incredibly easy to find. They are dirt cheap on auction houses too.
Back when I played the game I really thought they should have made a veteran option for overworld zones once you hit max level, make it more interesting with more mechanics. Same way vet dungeons work just for the open world
ESO's a good time eater, but I never got a real challenge out of it until I started soloing group dungeons.
Finish vma without death and then you can say that
I love how you address my biggest complaints with this game right from the start. I will subscribe.
When you're finding LYris' gear, you're not just finding her gear, it's symbolic. You're finding pieces of her soul or something, so when she get it back she's becoming spiritually whole and that's why she feels better afterwards.
Agreed
As an old Elder Scrolls fan, I was really into ESO, despite it's disregard of lore. Fallout 4 had already taught me that Bethesda doesn't care anymore, so, I ended up liking ESO quite a lot.
Then I discovered Final Fantasy XIV. Impossible to go back.
Eat fuck, Bethesda.
Meanwhile for endgame trials some classes are so bad, they straight up absent from team compositions. And there is kinda no build variety either, because there is meta build per role and then everything else that can't clear vet trial on hard mode. Also difference in healers exists in ESO, but instead of having special abilities and stuff, main difference is between bad healer (only heals) and good healer (heals, restores resources, uses buff sets, deals damage to enemies, debuffs enemies).
When i played the game, my main was a crafter, i loved it. My view is that while the waiting is annoying, im going to be playing the game anyway so its not a big deal...for me.
I played a lot of this game, and I did enjoy it. After watching this though I just want to play more GW2
GW2 still the best
@@vpaul4374 for real, the wow killer that did it
@devangoad I bought the game when the EoD expansion was released, my first few weeks was learning the game and then instantly went on a journey to get the skyscale. The game is absolutely awesome
I finished research everything in the game last November. I started playing in 2015