My MMO existential crisis

[Talgurin]

Okay, so I decided to take a gamble and use the Christmas discount for Elder Scrolls Online to wrap up my MMO exploration. Here's my review.

In a couple words: "Not shit." Compared to Oblivion and Skyrim, it suffers in some areas. Compared to Archeage, Black Desert, and GW2... Well, there is no comparison.

The Good:

1.) NPCs with good voice acting who are actually interesting, similar to other ES games. The story isn't shit, either. No more bizarre Korean mistranslated garbage to deal with.

2.) A good combat system. Superior to other 'semi-twitch' MMOs, like the horrendously boring combat in Guild Wars 2. Here there's combat where I thankfully feel like my sword is actually connecting with an enemy who can fight back. In some ways I may EVEN say it's better than combat in Skyrim, because it's more dynamic and has some of the good MMO elements of long-term skill advancement.

3.) Like other MMOs I checked out, I'm also going from quest to quest, which bugs me in other games (including even WoW), but this time it's okay, because it's ES style quests that are, generally speaking, interesting and fun to discover. It still feels more like exploration compared to just looking for big exclamation points over heads and then finding enemies and mashing buttons.

4.) I heard player interaction can suffer in the game. Yes and no. I'm happy to see players do have a presence of sorts. I found myself getting "kill stealed" (sort of), and competing a bit for some spawns, which other players bitch about, but because i'm an EQ player and not a pussy, I was really happy to see players affecting the world in some ways.

5.) Better difficulty... A little mini boss near the beginning almost killed me until another player took some hits at it. Even bears can drop my life a bit making it necessary to dodge their attacks. Still not quite as hard as i'd want so far, though.

6.) Progression: played a lot today and i'm only level 6 and wearing clunky iron armor, which is also nice to see. If I were playing BDO i'd already be level 35 and flying a unicorn or some shit.

7.) The world seems huge. With alliance restrictions taken off, I'll be able to go anywhere, which is sweet. Edit: In addition, although i'm still new to the game, it SEEMS like the game puts a focus on travel. I heard people saying things like "Can anyone help me travel to Cyrodill?" -- this is really refreshing. Instead of fast travel in other ES games, there's waypoints--but they cost gold to use. In the end, it seems people actually do travel the old fashioned way.

The Bad / Unsure Of:

1.) I was worried most about the level scaling. Well, it's similar to the level scaling in Oblivion, except it seems to affect ALL enemies and I don't think it means harder enemies spawn in easier areas, either. On paper, it seems bad, but for creating an "adventure" game where you can travel and explore anywhere and always be challenged, it makes sense, I guess. Without this feature, I suppose you could level past the point of challenge in your home starting area WAY too quickly.

Basically, every level is a new instance of the game, and you'll only see other players running around at that level. I am unsure though how I'll feel in 45 levels if the skeletons on my newbie island can't be killed in 1 hit. I'm told though after level 50 there's a kind of post-50 AA-style system, and when you get to like 160 of them you're now progressing beyond the scaling system and you can start having the end-game God like powers you'd expect.

2.) The world is NOT fully interactive like Skyrim and Oblivion, this means no "asshole physics" of being able to pick up items and boot them around the game (Whyyyy?). I know there's limitations because it's an MMO, but if they can instance everything, why can't they instance that, too? For that matter, I can't sit in chairs or walk into someone's house and sleep in their bed like in Skyrim (their solution is a command /sitchair that spawns your own chair, I guess they just could not integrate this into an MMO any other way.) It's not a complete mess, though... Like in other ES games, you can pick items off the ground, steal items in towns (apples, carrots, soul gems laying around, etc), pick up armor or other goods in dungeons, etc. So it's "somewhat" interactive, just not like Skyrim, Oblivion, etc.

Long story short, it's a bit less immersive than my favorite ES games, but WAY, WAY more immersive and interesting than BDO, Archeage or GW2.