Reviews, Bias, & Context
Quite a few people seem to be almost angry at my critiques and reviewing of The Elder Scrolls Online.
You all need to rest assured that I’m by no means a “Guild Wars 2 fanboy,” and I’m not “hating” on the game at all. In fact, I’ve put months into constructing my opinion. My needs are not met, and frankly I don’t give a damn how much better it is mechanically as a MMO if I can’t have fun making it to the end-game.
You also have to realize where I'm coming from.
- It's just criticism. I had very high hopes for this game and they weren't met. Disappointment leads to being more critical.
- Being a "good MMO" doesn't make it an appealing or interesting game. Just because it meets the needs of hardcore MMO players doesn't mean it compels or will be appreciated by everyone else. Back in the day this would be fine, but ESO is targeted at a much wider audience than just hardcore MMO players, so they need to make the game appealing to non-MMO players. I don't mean "dumbing it down" because a lot of hardcore MMO fans feel they've dumbed it down and it doesn't feel any better through that.
- I've beta tested this game for months. When I started playing it was completely broken and unplayable, other times truly a pain to try to play. This colors my perspective a bit, but at the same time I've seen it grow and be fixed so this brings up positive notes for me.
- I paid ZERO attention to the story. I didn't want to spoil much for myself during the game, so a core part of the gameplay was cut out for me.
I addressed ALL of these things in the video to give disclaimers and context to the criticisms I gave about it. I'm not hating on the game at all. I want to see it do well. And my opinions on the business model don't affect that. That's a completely different conversation.
Being a low-income university student, I judge whether or not /I/ should buy games based on how much the games give me a reason to buy them. When there's fun games coming out all the time, I feel a game - ESPECIALLY when it's going to require ~$250 of me for the first year and ~$75 for the initial purchase (more if I want typical MMO freedom of travelling the whole world - which I still disagree with) - I feel a game needs to give me a pretty good reason to play it for me to put my money into it.
ESO doesn't do that for me. It doesn't offer much that I can't get elsewhere or don't already. It's got some fun PVP and a good system of ranged attacks that's a lot more fun (which I only discovered halfway through my first PVP video) that many games, but outside of PVP I don't see much value.
For many hardcore MMO players, good end-game is all they need to sub. I've never seen how that's logical. If I'm expected to make it through 80 levels, the actual core gameplay better be damn good. The questing is uninteresting and sub-par, PVE combat gets repetitive and dull, and grouping is still lacking to a very disappointing extreme.
I want to see this game do well, I do. I hope to hell actually getting involved in the story will sway my opinion some. But you don't get to say I'm just "hating" on this game when I've put months into constructing my thoughts on it. No sir.