Re: The Elder Scrolls Online

by **Cial** Sun May 13, 2012 8:43 am

The entire game is basically exploring, finding quests and killing things, and not every quest is just a gathering quest. Especially the Daedric quests, which are some of the most entertaining quests in the game. (see: Haunted House and Wabbajack). You can pretty much do as you please, you don't have to just do preset quests. Want to climb that mountain you saw a dragon land on? Sure, knock yourself out. Want to kill a bunch of bandits and zombies in a huge underground cavern/dungeon? Nothing's stopping you.

by **Erik** Sun May 13, 2012 9:00 am

The combat is stopping me from killing things. The odd landscape that is full of blank areas is stopping me from climbing the mountain. I have to take the one path up the mountain that I find by going around the side of it for an hour.

by **Cial** Sun May 13, 2012 9:17 am

Well yes, beaten paths do help to get up mountains even in real life, Erik, that's why castles are built on hills, they're harder to climb than regular terrain. And it's a northern province, of course it's filled with high peaks and long plains.

And combat doesn't prevent you from killing things, that's kind of it's job.

Also, you realize that every. single. dungeon in Skyrim is unique, right? Literally, every dungeon was designed by hand and all have their own varying characteristics. Yes, some corridors have the same designs because it's supposed to be made by a culture of people who had a similar design and building techniques.

You could walk into one dungeon and find a maze of rooms with burial chambers and vaults, and walk into another to find it's a natural cave system with waterfalls and plant life living in the cave.

by **Erik** Sun May 13, 2012 9:28 am

I was making fun of the combat. In real life of course, you can climb up an angle of more than 30 degrees, instead of being forced to exploit glitches to get up it. And in real life you can't jump and then control your midair velocity in different directions, so don't pull the realism BS out.

by **DigDog** Sun May 13, 2012 9:36 am

I have to agree with the mountain thing, sometimes you can't even climb slopes that are barely 45 degrees.

by **Cial** Sun May 13, 2012 9:59 am

True, Skyrim does fall victim to invisible-walling. It's not that big of a deal though, seeing as you can pretty much climb any mountain in the game with a fair amount of ease if you find the right path, and do it without encountering a loading screen once while exploring.

by **Erik** Sun May 13, 2012 10:27 am

Cial, none of the issues are a big deal to you. Or even a problem. They're all ingenious ideas implemented by Bethesda especially for you, in your opinion.

by **Cial** Sun May 13, 2012 10:36 am

No, not all of them are ingenious.

The walls are annoying, but to have a map the size of Skyrim have no loading screens while outside is pretty impressive.

by Peregrine Sun May 13, 2012 7:48 pm

I would rather have a map smaller than Skyrim and with loading screens outside but with radically different terrain and actually interesting things to explore than a map the size of Skyrim without loading screens that's a bunch of mountains and plains with filler caves for radiant quests and very little interesting things to explore.

In case you're wondering, yes I had something very specific in mind with that example, and no that game didn't have endless walls. Instead it was set on an island and leaving the island resulted in endless ocean being generated, but you could keep going if you were so inclined.

by **DigDog** Sun May 13, 2012 11:32 pm

Spoiler: It's Morrowind.

It could also apply to Gothic II though.

by **Cial** Mon May 14, 2012 12:05 am

There are bunch of cool things to explore besides mountains, though. Tons of weird and interesting frozen ruins and large outside fortresses with shrines and interesting places like Bard's Jump, which is basically a huge diving board that you can jump off of to see how far you can fall without dying.

by Peregrine Mon May 14, 2012 1:06 am

You can fall as far as you want with the perk.

by **Erik** Mon May 14, 2012 2:35 am

Its just a wooden plank that you can jump off of. There are plenty of things to jump off of.

by **DigDog** Mon May 14, 2012 8:02 am

There's water at the bottom of Bard's Jump, so you'd have to be stupid to not survive that.

by **DigDog** Tue May 22, 2012 1:07 am

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Online wrote:The gameplay featured in The Elder Scrolls Online is radically different when compared to its predecessors. Many of the gameplay mechanics are reminiscent of the popular MMO World of Warcraft. The game is primarily experienced from the third person. Character creation and development is class-based, with level progression being experience-based rather than skill-based. Combat isn't played out in real-time; instead, the player controls how their character uses their stamina, which controls their ability to block, break, and interrupt enemy attacks. The player also controls the use of special abilities that come from their equipment or their class abilities.

> make TES MMO
> make gameplay nothing like the previous TES games that established the brand but like WoW instead

Peregrine wrote:ALL ABOARD THE BETHESDENBURG

by **Tim Hortans** Tue May 22, 2012 1:53 am

Soo... it's WoW?

by Leb Tue May 22, 2012 1:56 am

Every MMO that comes out these days is WoW.
Just look at Tortanic! Except maybe not Guild Wars 2. That's not WoW really since the two use way different battle mechanics.