Between Xbox Games Pass, Games with Gold, and Xbox Backward Compatibility, I have more games than I know what to do with. My backlog is ever-growing, piling up faster than I can get to them.
So what better time to push all that shit aside and go back to playing Elder Scrolls Online? Every MMO that comes out threatens to take me away, but time and time again, I end up going back to ESO.
Why? It’s not the deepest MMO ever, and honestly I think that’s what keeps me invested. All the systems in ESO are relatively simple. Extremely simple when compared to something like Black Desert. I really want to like that game, but holy shit.
Love it or hate it, ESO managed to hit that sweet spot between easy to get learn and tough to master. It has much in common with what made the original incarnation of World of Warcraft so successful. The world is varied and well-thought, and it doesn’t hurt that it already has years of Elder Scrolls lore to pull from.
Zenimax Media has done a really good job of keeping ESO relevant, with regular updates and expansions to expand the world of Tamriel, and their Tamriel Unlimited update turned a rocky start and dwindling userbase into an extremely successful product.
If anything, the updates were a little too regular. I preferred purchasing my expansions, as opposed to the monthly subscription, mainly because of aforementioned backlog and the fact that I play the game in spurts. As such, I quickly fell behind on the updates, to the point where it would cost me a small fortune to catch up.
Maybe one day I’ll have a small fortune, but for now I have to settle with being one or two expansions behind. Recently, I was able to take advantage of a free ESO Plus (the sub) trial, and was able to knock out the Murkmire expansion while it was active. After it ended, I was left with a new character that I had started, the Warden, and I was actually enjoying it very much.
I had a character that I reached Champion level 160 with, and this was back before they even launched Tamriel Unlimited, but it was a tank character and not much fun to play solo. It took forever to kill anything. Thus I fell off playing it, but ever since running with my DPS Warden, I’ve been having a blast.
So what is it with ESO that makes it so much easier and more enjoyable to play than any of the other MMO’s I’ve tried getting into lately?
Well, honestly, it comes down to stability and graphics. In most genres, things like graphical fidelity doesn’t make a difference, but in MMO’s it definitely does. World of Warcraft may not have been the prettiest game on the planet, but it had an art style that worked well, and the framerate was solid.
More importantly, the character feels grounded in the world, like they actually belong and exist there physically. Games like Black Desert are so fast and twitchy and jittery that the characters just feel like they’re running on a flat plane with a background whizzing by.
Some of you old folks like me might remember vintage games like the race car attached to a stick that you could slide back and forth, while a roll of paper that had a road drawn on it scrolled underneath? It’s a stretch of an analogy, I know, but that’s what some of these MMO’s remind me of, especially Black Desert. I just don’t feel like my character actually exists in this world. I fell like they’re running in place and the world is scrolling behind them. I push buttons to attack and I see stuff die but it never actually feels genuine.
Games like TERA are so choppy and inconsistent that I just can’t get into them. For a game that’s as graphically sparse as TERA, why is the pop-in so bad? Why does the frame rate suck?
ESO gets a lot of flack and some of it is deserved, the combat loops are a bit repetitive, but to their credit, a lot of that criticism came from people who played the launch version of ESO, and it’s changed dramatically since then. Hit detection has been refined over the years, and since Tamriel Unlimited allows players of all levels to share the same zone, it removes that need for multiple instances and lets everyone play together easily. That allows for a more populated game world. There were times before TU that I was literally the only person in a zone. That made closing dark anchors a bit of a chore.
While it does come with some drawbacks, like for instance, it’s impossible to become over-leveled, since everything scales with you. (That was literally the only way I could kill some world bosses). But the trade-off is that there are more people in the world to help you.
This is the first time I think I’ve ever really written about ESO. Maybe I have, years ago, but at that time it would’ve been as a player in a work-in-progress of a game, not one that’s refined and iterative. As I sit here writing this, I’m looking forward to diving back in and re-tracing the footsteps of my previous character, but this time with more tools at my disposal, due to the additions and tweaks the game has had since the first time around.
Oh and 4k. The first time I played through, I was on my base Xbox One, and now i’m on my X, playing with not only 4k resolution, but the “enhanced” version of the game, which is the equivalent of high/ultra on PC. So needless to say, it’s a lot prettier now, and in some ways it feels like I’m playing it for the first time.
And I’m fucking addicted all over again.
