ESO First Impressions

ESO seems like the trendy thing to be discussing lately on the Internets.  Will it fail?  Is it really an ESO game?  Will it fail?  And so on.  Unfortunately I appear to have a somewhat unpopular opinion based on the people I've interacted with, and that is that its a flawed but ultimately incredibly fun game that's worth the money I spent on it.

Most of the complaints I've heard are from other Elder Scrolls fans who think its too much like an MMO and not enough like Elder Scrolls.  I don't particularly feel that way myself, but I can understand the sentiment.  There are some things I like doing in Elder Scrolls games that I can't do in ESO, most of them involving the physics engine and random items - I've mentioned before my Skyrim character is a cheese-obsessed klepto.  I also (at this point) can't own a house wherein I lovingly and painstakingly arrange all the random crap I've picked up along the way.  I can't go through a dungeon and pick up every single rake and pile them at the entrance.  These things would require a level of interactivity that's not possible in a multiplayer experience as far as I can see.  At the very least elements like this would be prohibitively complicated to code in a multiplayer environment, so I can completely understand the designers not including them.  After all, there are other parts of the game to enjoy beyond rake-piles.

There's a lot of character customization possible, but admittedly it is not as much as single player Elder Scrolls games.  You only have 4 classes to choose from, but those classes have a staggering amount of variability because of the various weapon, armor, and class skill options.  Unlike other MMOs, you are not locked into a certain type of equipment based on your class - if you pick it up and you're high enough level you can use it.  So if you want to make a heavy armor-wearing sorcerer with a giant axe, you can.  Even within the same class there's several ways to make your character unique.  Its not the same as single player for sure, but I think Bethesda did a great job with the skill trees.  I will admit I miss being able to Frenzy a group of enemies until there's only one left for me to deal with, there are other things about combat I find very nearly as fun.  And that's a tactic that's not really possible in a multiplayer environment anyway.  Its not as though you can yell at people coming by to not attack because you're about to do something really cool.  Or you could, but I guarantee no one would heed your words.

On the topic of bugs, I have found a couple that are a little irritating.  The first has to do with grouping.  As far as I can tell the way ESO is built your character, while walking around the same world, might occupy a different "world state" than other characters based on what quests you were doing and how far into them you were.  This causes a big problem when you're grouped with someone who happens to be in a difference world state, as you will disappear from each others' sight whenever you enter an area in which you have temporal dissonance.  For people who always group and play the game together this isn't an issue, but not everybody does that.  This is really the only bug I hope they come up with a solution for soon, the others are minor annoyances.

I probably should say however that some of the things I consider to be minor annoyances others might consider to be game-breaking rage machines.  Probably the most irritating was the bug I came across when I got to the third zone in the Aldmeri Dominion and needed to complete a quest before I could fully access the starting town.  I wasn't able to finish it because there were too many people trying to finish it at once and so the final boss zone was having trouble resetting.  However, from this particular bug came one of the most hilarious trolls I have ever seen.

So the quest is called Unsafe Haven, and to finish it you need to stop some invading pirates and necromancers from doing a ritual to summon zombies all over the town.  I got through the sewers and into the keep and entered the place where the ritual was supposed to happen.  Nothing was there.  On my way to this area other players were yelling things like "DO NOT GO IN ROOM, DO NOT PULL MOBS" and "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET OUT OF THAT ROOM".  Very puzzling, until I got to the empty ritual area and found a bunch of players hiding out in front of this side room waiting for some NPCs to spawn.  Somehow word had gotten around that to complete the quest you had to wait for 3 specific NPCs to spawn in this room and then kill them.  Of course people are terrible at waiting, or didn't know what was going on, so someone would run into the room before the third NPC could spawn and rage flowed like a river of continuous invective.  I actually believed the nonsense about waiting outside the room for a hot minute but got bored quickly and logged out to do something else until the zone wasn't so crowded.  Some people waiting outside that room for hours.  Turns out the quest has nothing to do with that room at all - as an awesome Twitch streamer named Antpile pointed out - but only that the zone was having trouble resetting because of the traffic.  You can fix this by relogging over and over until you get an instance that isn't bugged, or if you're a sane person you can do what I did.  Which is something bloody else and come back later.  I came back at 6am because I like to get up early and game before work and finished the quest right away.  So all those people crouching outside that stupid room were actually inhibiting the zone from resetting by just being there.  Like I said, brilliant troll if that is indeed what it was.

The conclusion I came to from that experience was reinforced what I said at the beginning; even though ESO is a flawed game, I am enjoying it quite a bit.  I don't feel like I've wasted money and I plan to continue my subscription after my free time ends.  Because even though there are bugs that for a while make part of the game worth playing, there are hundreds of other things to do, other characters to explore, and areas to discover.  And hell, if I can't finish something because of a bug I have faith that the development team wants the game to succeed and will work to fix it.  Until they do I can always log off and do one of the zillion other activities vying for my free time.

All that being said however, I feel a little trepidatious about the future of ESO.   While I enjoy it greatly, its not blowing my mind in any capacity and I feel like in order for it to continually draw players back it needs to do that at least a little.  Yes, the NPC AI is much richer than any other MMOs I can name, the system itself is quite fun, and exploration in game feels very Elder Scrolls-y to me.  But my feeling is that being just "Elder Scrolls, but ONLINE" isn't enough.  Sure it'll keep the fans like me coming back - but not all of them as I know several Scrolls fans who don't like the game.  And Bethesda seems to me like a company that will do something on their own terms or not at all.  I don't think this game will ever be free to play, I think if its not successful Bethesda will pack it up and go back to single player games.  Or try again, but larger in scope.  Either of these things would be fine with me but it doesn't say great things about this particular game's future.
And of course there will be the ravening hordes wanting their money back.  My outlook is this - the developers will make the game they want to make and I will either enjoy it or I won't.  When I stop enjoying it, I'll stop playing it but I don't feel the time I have spent on any game is wasted.  Did I give up on KoTOR when I lost three hours of gameplay because my character got stuck in a wall?  No.  However, I don't really think that attitude is common to the masses.  So when (or if) ESO gets packed up and filed in the Vault of Forgotten MMOs there might be a bit of backlash for Bethesda.  I'm pretty sure they can handle it though - they kind of have the ultimate trump card.  They make Elder Scrolls games.

A Multiplayer Experience

Writing about the ESO beta got me thinking about storylines for multiplayer games - MMORPGs specifically.  Multiplayer strategy and shooter games less so, because the point there is to have fun with the mechanics whereas the online RPG is all about creating your own character and guiding it through a series of stories.  After all, quests are supposed to be stories not monotonous level grinds, right?  

I guess that would be the first premise I’m starting with here.  A thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time and RPGs are story games.  Particularly, they are character-driven story games.  You might think this isn’t worth pointing out, but I think its something that MMORPGs have lost touch with.  Or maybe they never had touch.  Maybe they’re like one of those super conservative homeschooling couples that has a gabillion kids but you can’t be sure they’ve ever had sex or if they just reproduce by budding.  Just me?  Ok, self, lay off the homeschoolers.  This is no time to air one’s childhood grievances.  As the hilarious Yatzee once said, there is an inherent existential crisis that resides in the MMORPG genre.  View his whole review of WoW: Cataclysm here, in which he asks that terrifying question - “Why do you raid?”  When you raid for the sake of loot and loot for the sake of raiding, what exactly is the point?

At this point I should make a caveat about my own opinions.  I have never been particularly interested in MMORPGs because I felt that by their very nature they couldn’t have immersive stories and I don’t find any appeal in raiding for the loot and vice versa.  At least, I’m not interested in playing a game long-term for that reason.  That includes single player games - as much as I love Elder Scrolls games I stop playing them once I’ve exhausted the storylines.  I can’t be completely engrossed in looting bandit caves if there isn’t some reason I’m doing it.  Therefore my experience playing MMOs is somewhat limited.  I played Guild Wars 2 enough to get a character to the level cap, a smattering of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and up to level 10 in WoW.  At which point I decided it was boring and grindy and no amount of “Oh its really fun once you hit level 90” was going to get me to slog through the hours it would take me to get there. So anything I say here will be colored by that point of view, which I realize may not be shared by all humankind.  Ok then, now I’m getting on the soapbox.

I said that I don’t believe MMO storylines can be immersive by their nature, and I should probably revise that statement.  I don’t believe the currently accepted formula for an MMO storyline can be immersive because there’s always an inherent conflict between the what is presented to the player and the player’s knowledge.  My experience has been once I create a character I am presented with an epic quest wherein I am the Most Special of all Snowflakes and am the last great hope to save the world.  This is a wonderful starting point for a single player game, but when I’m looking at dozens of other players around me who are being told the exact same thing the epicness of my journey rings hollow.  I am clearly not the sole savior of the world, lone swinger of the Great Spatula of Justice, or any of that.  I’m just another player in the machine that is the game, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that if you can see the machine behind the game there’s something amiss.  I wonder if there’s a way around that, a story that can still feel like a hero’s journey but also take into account the fact that there are many people involved.

Perhaps I am still power-tripping over being a Master of Dungeons but thinking along these lines brought me quickly to D&D, which is a story-driven multiplayer game.  In a D&D group, the DM has to consider the entire party when planning adventures.  Certainly there can be quests involving a single character’s background, but the overall focus has to be on the party as a whole or players will lose interest.  Have you ever played in a group where the DM’s significant other joins the game and all of a sudden the game has a laser-focus on one character?  That is the anti-fun and players will generally leave.  They will also leave if the DM tries to run each of them through the exact same situation concurrently.  That would be bewilderingly bad DMing.  So I guess my question is if player demand necessitates the production of true multi-player focused content from a single human, can we not demand it of huge companies comprised of many people?

That’s not to say that game developers need to become Dungeon Masters, that would be silly.  There is a difference between tabletop and virtual environments, one of them clearly being of scale.  Where a human DM can spend her time creating content for a specific group of players, game developers have a whole host of players to consider.  They can’t be expected to continually monitor the player base and create content based on their actions.  However, the current solution in my experience has been in essence to railroad players into a static storyline that is common to all.  I think there is a better way, and since there are essentially no new ideas I’m not the only one who thinks so.  Bethesda introduced the Radiant Story in Skyrim, and hopefully will continue to refine it in Elder Scrolls Online.

What I would like to see though is an expansion of the dynamic story beyond the sidequest and into a game as a whole.  In fact, what I would really love is to play an entire game whose developers didn’t write an actual story at all but rather a potential story waiting to be activated by the players.  By now any real game developers are probably staring at their monitors in horror, wondering if I realize the magnitude of what I’m asking.  Truth is, I do and I don’t.  I realize it is a huge thing to undertake, and I have an imagining of the kind of work necessary, but I am neither a game designer nor an AI engineer so specifics aren’t something I could really speculate about.

But generalizations are something I can speculate the hell out of, and if what I’m calling “potential storytelling” in my head were to come about I have a couple ideas on how it might happen.  I do know a little bit about relational databases and analytics - enough to know that the more data you have, the cleaner it is, and the more refined your methods of analyzing it are the better your results will be.  If the result is to be player engagement, then the more “data” or potential stories you have the better.  I believe (and this is the “faith” use of the word not “I believe you are full of crap”) this can be accomplished by building a network of smaller interconnected blocks of character archetypes, lore, morality codes, quest examples, and so on.

And here’s where I get science-fictiony.  You need more than a network of ideas to make a story, there has to be a plot.  The game still needs a Dungeon Master, one that can simultaneously create adventures for the solo player and for the group in hundreds of different places at once.  Or rather it needs something that does what D&D groups do when they get to big; split off into another group with another DM.  You see where I’m going with this, right?  An AI so powerful with such a vast database of possibilities that its calculated creativity is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.  Maybe the Singularity will happen in the land of the MMO - perhaps that is even where it should happen.  Don’t give me that look, I’m being serious.***

The landscape of gaming is changing.  With the newer consoles and super-powerful PCs the graphics race that defined previous generations is becoming less relevant.  Games are looking more and more like their concept art as time goes on and “having cool graphics” isn’t the badge of honor it used to be.  Rather, I think the focus should be more on what technologies can be leveraged to make games more dynamic and immersive, more alive if you will.  If I’m being honest, if there’s any one thing I believe with anything approaching religious certainty it is that if a technology can be sufficiently imagined it can (and probably will) be created.  I would like to see this particular technology happen in my lifetime.

I find it a little ironic that after all that my solution to MMOs that seem too much like machines being a machine that appears human.  Granted, I could still be high from unwrapping 3 epics and 2 legendaries in Hearthstone yesterday and I’m just talking nonsense.  I should probably stop before I hurt myself.

***The author would like to reiterate that she is neither a game designer nor an AI programmer, but a crazy lady with a blog.