The fantasy MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online has had a mixed launch. While the first days went relatively smoothly for pre-order customers, more and more issues have arisen since the official launch: problems with subscriptions, overwhelmed support, and server maintenance during peak hours.
And those are just difficulties outside the game. We don’t want to deal with those today. We’ll take a look at where TESO’s game design still offers improvement opportunities and glance at the two things in Tamriel that annoy us the most. We’ll leave bugs and lags aside and focus only on things that seem to have been intentionally designed this way.
Or to put it another way: Welcome to our first show at mein-mmo.de.
Thank you, I would like to do this alone
The quest system of TESO is highly praised, but it conflicts with the design decision to avoid instanced areas as much as possible and to keep the world open. This is something quite normal and known in the open field. If you need to kill 10 bears for a quest, then the game is designed to have 50 bears in a field: enough bears for everyone. In TESO, however, many quests lead in a tube-like manner toward a dungeon or a cave. And while there are also 50 bears, they all wait neatly in a row like dominoes.
This means a player enters a cave, wonders why there are only corpses lying around, pushes further towards the end, encounters a group of players who are currently squashing an unfortunate bear in a team of five, joins in, and – poof – suddenly six players are hitting the next fur carrier. But that one is also only designed for one player.
Unfortunately, too many quests in The Elder Scrolls Online play out this way.
This becomes unpleasant especially at the end of a cave when 8, 10, or 12 people gather around the poor cave boss, just to send him promptly to the afterlife. The good guy lives on average four frames.
When you compare this quest experience with the solo quests that a player experiences in the service of the Fighter’s or Mage’s Guild, there are worlds of difference in fun.
In other games, the run on certain quests eventually dwindles, but with The Elder Scrolls Online this is not necessarily to be expected due to the mega-server.
Why is this a case for “WTF Zenimax? Really?!”: Because it’s simply not fun to take the poor boss’s milk money with 12 people. We are not schoolyard bullies… (anymore).
- What should change? It is commendable that Zenimax is moving away from instancing with TESO and towards an open MMORPG, but the opponents must scale with the number of players.
Where did I put that again?
The inventory system from Zenimax is a return to the origins – one could say it politely. In other words: it is simply outdated. Space is scarce in many RPGs, and players have to consider what they need and what they can leave behind. But the question must be allowed: Why is this the case? Does anyone enjoy this?
Guild Wars 2 or the new WildStar have found an excellent system to immediately remove crafting materials (boring, boring crafting materials) from the player’s focus and put them into a special bank. Nowhere would this system be more appropriate than in The Elder Scrolls Online, where every player can collect every type of resource. And every single damned thing takes up one of the few inventory slots.
Billions of different runes, trillions of different food additives, plus crafting stones to create various styles, and health potions! Oh God! Health potions! Any tiny difference in level immediately occupies a new slot. There are also mana and stamina potions!
Can you remember this graphic showing how many weapons are in the game and how much coffee everyone drank at Zenimax and how many played the beta and so? Why is the following number missing: We give you 80 inventory slots and 300 different food ingredients! Yeah!
Of course, one could now say: But that is realistic, no one can carry everything around. No, it’s not. Why do 3 health potions of level 14 only take up one slot in the inventory, while 2 health potions of level 14 and one of level 13 take up two slots? And why does a forty-kilo heavy chain mail take up as much space in my backpack as a single grape?
Additionally, there’s a really odd interface in the guild store and general frustration with the inventory. Who gets a kick out of coming home from an adventure and wondering whether an onion still has space in the bank or should be sold directly? And who wants to think about such things in 2014? And yes: you can expand the backpack, then you have 10-40 additional items that you have to decide whether to store in the bank or sell right away.
- Why is this a case for “WTF Zenimax? Really?!”: Because the inventory system may be a concession to hardcore role players, purists, and nostalgics, but it is both pointless and pretty frustrating. If you want to stop players from hoarding, you should either forbid them from looting every cheese crate. Or you tie the abilities of gathering crafting resources directly to skill level – just like in other games.
What should change: A deep, long, and thorough look at the inventory and banking system of Guild Wars 2 or WildStar should solve this problem.
In the next issue of “WTF Zenimax? Really?”: The salt rice cracker of completion and the difficulties of proper localization.
