The Glade 4.0

Pulled it down this past weekend. I played for maybe 5 minutes before I was completely disinterested in the game.

- Combat was terrible. Slow, clunky and sub-par animations.
- Quests were ok, but nothing special
- Character creation was fairly good overall
- Overall graphics were really sub-par.

In general, really not at the level I was expecting based on the cinema trailer however long ago.

I'll maybe try another class or to give it a little more time, but I doubt this game will do anything for me.

I played half an hour on Friday, and on Sat, I gave it a good two or three hours of play.

Initial thoughts..
Oh, we're prisoners... again. But this time, we're dead prisoners? Alright whatever. I guess this is a TES thing.
Alright, grab a weapon. Well, there's a bow. I want a bow for my ranger sort of experience. And now that I have a bow, I maybe want a sword in case things get close and personal. Nope. Only one weapon for you! But... the racks are right there... why can't I... Ok, fine. /sigh.
Where's the fighting? Shouldn't there be more... I dunno, tutoring in a tutorial? Beta game is beta I guess.
Gawd these NPCs are talky. This is like TOR all over again. STFU and let me go do the thing you want me to do. I already read your text.
John Cleese? Really? How the hell did you pull *that* off game?
Moreover, you have John Cleese, and you waste him on an NPC in the tutorial? Way to manage your priceless assets game.
Run here, click this, run there, click that. Oh, god, stop rolling every time I press a direction on my gamepad. Options-controls- double tap to roll... OFF!
Oh, hey, some combat. Wow, I'm going to wear out my clicker finger with this game. No auto attack, clickclickclickclick to kill. Its like a worse version of Neverwinter. At least there, your attacks had some oomph to them.
Alright, done with the tutorial section... Wait.. that was it? BGIB I suppose.
Off to adventure! Let's talk to this chick. She says, go find dude one of three. Ok chick, I can do that! That's what I do! I'm a questing machine!
Ah, a side quest. Hang on a sec... are you voiced by a TTS program? (Bethesda, here's a hint, if your quest can be voiced by a TTS program, you're better off not voicing it.) Go kill a thing. Went, killed the thing, came back, got XP. This is feeling a little better now.
Went and found dude. He said go talk to another dude. Talked to another dude, he said get these things, and put them in the places. Got things, fought skeletons (I *really* hate the combat in this game.) put things in places, and went into the place that opened.
Yay! a dungeon to explore! Nope. Its just a room. With a dude to kill. Ok, fine. Its early I suppose. Can't go big yet. I get it. Killed dude, did thing, went back.
Dude said go back to chick, and I did. *Expected* to get the next set of quests for dudes 2 and 3.
*What I got* was Find 13 random villagers or evacuate village.
Wait, didn't you have another couple of dudes for me to quest with first? I mean, it seems a bit extreme to evacuate already. Alright, I'll go see if I can get some more villagers to evacuate.
On, back outside, pull up the map... damn it map, stop closing every time I try to turn! Fine, I'll play it your way. I'll stand still to look at the goddamn map. Where are the quest icons for these villagers I'm supposed to be finding? Where are the villagers? I don't see them... oh hell no game. I'm not running around this entire zone looking for 13 more villagers to evacuate. Nope. We're just going to write them off as lost. **** em.
Hey, chick, we're outa here. Yeah, the villagers are all dead. We should evacuate. Ok, light the fire? I can do that. That seems to be the only way to XP around here, by running somewhere and clicking a thing.
Ok, lit the fire. and now there's bad guys everywhere. Huh. Weird. Oh well, I really don't care about any of this. And, lets see how bad fall damage is.
Ok, pretty bad. And I rezzed way the hell away from where I was. huh. That's kind of a PITA, but whatever. BGIB. Oh, hey, I found a hand axe. Let's equip this for when melee happens because this bow? It sucks ***. Hang on... only one weapon set? I can have a bow OR an axe? I can't swap in combat till level 15? No. **** you game. That's awful. At this rate, I'll be an awful bowman for roughly 30 hours.
Oh, hey, its that one chick from the middle of the village... and she's wounded(?) Why oh why didn't you evacuate when I told you to? Meh, whatever. I don't care about you. There was no investment in any of this at all. I'm not from around here. And, I'm out.

Like I said, this isn't for me.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I found that combat was overall pretty good, except for the power attacks and bashing. Those seemed hard to execute for some reason, not as good as Skyrim's. I also found the early weapons somewhat underpowered. Need buffs.

The graphics were.. hard to quantify. In some respects, they were disappointing, in others they were excellent. I'm prepared to be a little tolerant on graphics, however, since one stated goal is reasonable system requirements.

The quests, I agree, were nothing special in and of themselves, but on the other hand I'm not really sure what better quests would look like. I don't know that quests can really be made any better, and people are just being cynical about them because they're fantasy tropes.

That said, they definitely had me playing the game, not the UI, I saw A LOT of recognizable stuff from TES lore, and I never want to see auto-attack again, ever. **** that noise. I felt like I was controlling the character, rather than the computer doing it for me, and if it stymies the people that want to optimize their way through every encounter via Spreadsheets Online, so much the better.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I wasn't lamenting the loss of autoattack, I thought NW did it pretty well. That said, your base attack feels very autoattacky and worthless. A sort of frenetic slashy attack that is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or an arrow from a bow that feels like shooting BBs at your target with the "power attack" shooting a BB and a half.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Sounds disappointingly like every other Elder Scrolls game.

Well, it's supposed to be as much like every other TES game as possible within the limits of what can be done with an MMO when you're not the lone hero. That's what's going to appeal to TES fans. Trying to be a standard MMO is going to mean climbing in the failboat.

With regard to the basic attack, it seemed to me to be a matter more of underpowered weapons than anything wrong with the attack itself. The bows especially seemed like they needed a buff. The power attacks seemed slow and clumsy, but mostly effective.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Its not MMOy enough for MMO fans, and its not TESy enough for TES fans.

Squish. Just like grape.

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Holy shitsnacks!

For the extremists, that's true. For the more reasonable players, it will do fine. I fall firmly into the TES camp, but I don't want it to try to be "skyrim online"; that would never work.

That said, I've been telling people expecting the impossible to go elsewhere on other forums for some time now. The worst thing any MMO can do is try to be all things to all people.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Fair enough. To me though, it felt like Oblivion with a chat channel.

And I didn't like Oblivion.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Well, if you're not a TES fan, you probably won't care for it much. That said, a lot of what you and Aizle are saying sounds to me like having played a lot of MMOs over the years and starting to get jaded with them in general.. which is understandable.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Eh. I still play Rift, and I got into Neverwinter before I realized that Perfect World was a bunch of greedy moneygrubbing bastards. Played a bunch of Defiance (Action MMO done right) and had a bunch of fun with that. Played TOR to about 45ish before I realized that I didn't want to continue the sub because I wasn't having as much fun as I thought I would. Was hopeful for TSW but then I played it and it wasn't as good as I had hoped it was going to be. Awesome concept, not as awesome execution. Never touched TERA or GW/GW2 (too grindy/PVP isn't my thing).

TESO is going to have to be a LOT better to be a P2P game.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Yeah, not buying it. As far as I'm concerned, F2P/B2p nearly guarantees a **** game. Most arguments in favor of either model amount to "but why can't I just pay less?" EVE is A) old and B) niche and does fine as sub/P2P.

Frankly, I think it's a damn good game, and that's after my first half hour was sort of "wow, this isn't really that good." Thing is, I could never put my finger on my disappointment and it faded away after that.

I think you're confusing your tastes with poor quality, especially given that this was only a beta build.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

EVE does well *because* it is niche. Rift is F2P, and its still pretty good. Neverwinter is F2P and is pretty good quality and fun, I just disagreed with some of the decisions they made for the F2Pness.

TESO is just another fantasy MMO. It needs to be special, different, breathtakingly awesome. As it stands, for me, its none of those things.

I don't know how beta it currently is, I figured since they're handing out invites that its pretty well done with the core stuff, and all that remains is the polishing. I was in the NW, Rift, and TSW betas and those three went live pretty much as they were betaed with just some polishing adjustments.

It remains to be seen whether the annoying bits (combat, skill progression, slow as molasses level advancement) will be "polished" enough to be awesome.

I can't see the future, but as it stands now, its not for me. If I get invited to the next beta or whatever, I'll try it again to see what they change, but I don't know if that'll happen.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I had fun. Probably not enough fun to want to pay a monthly fee to play when it goes live but that's mostly me not being a 3-4 hrs/day kind of player anymore. These days I just don't devote enough sustained attention to justify the subscription. If it were B2P like GW2, I'd totally pick it up.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

While yes I have played a lot of MMOs over the years, I don't think I'm particularly jaded with them in general. It's more that I've seen what the standard is today, and these guys are well below it.

It would be like someone releasing EQ1 vanilla today and trying to compete with the other MMOs out there. They would be far behind the times.

It's very hard to take that seriously when you formed your opinion after only 5 minutes. That's why you sound jaded.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's very easy to start a game, after having played so many, and immediately realize its short-comings. That doesn't make him a jaded player. If I log into a game with a crappy interface, it doesn't take time to recognize that. Same thing with boring quest lines, unoriginal origin stories, or outdated combat mechanics.

Not really buying that either - especially regarding quests. There is no such thing as a "boring quest line". There's only so much that can be done with quests; they're boring in all games or none of them.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That is just completely false. You can have fun quest lines and you can have shitty quest lines. Don't break it down to "someone tells you to do something and you do it" and pretend that every single quest is the same. You might as well claim every single video game is the same because you play them on a screen with some form of controller.

I've either purchased or been in the beta of pretty much every major MMO that's been released in the last few years. For each one of them I was fairly excited to see what they brought to the table and played them for times ranging from a few hours to a long time.

FFXIV - What I'm currently playing. Maybe a bit too WoW-like, but very fun storyline once you get into it. Holy trinity is alive and well, but you know, sometimes it's just nice to know what your role is and do it well.
GW2 - Was super excited for this game and it brought a bunch of new things to the table in terms of mechanics. Played to max lvl and a ton of alts. In the end, it suffered from the age old development focus problem between pvp and pve.
SW:TOR - WoW in SPAAAAAAACE! Multiple max lvl toons, great main storyline and lightsabers. Ultimately ended up being too much like WoW too soon after being burned out on WoW to hold me. Also, very obvious it was Bioware's first MMO, as they made a number of newbie mistakes on game design. Nothing major, but all stuff that they should have known better.
Neverwinter Online - So much promise and really fun combat. Also brought a number of new mechanics to the table and with player generated content had the potential to be nirvana. Ultimately, the FTP model started to annoy me, as everything was for sale and expensive. I spent the equivalent of 2 years of $15/month subscription in a month getting things I wanted, and there was no end in sight for that kind of desire. Ended up turning me off the game.

Basically, each of these games was at least able to entice me long enough to spend many hours playing. And that was by having a very good UI, solid game mechanics or compelling storyline or some combination of those 3. I really didn't get any of that from ESO, although the storyline had some potential but trying to get to it though the interface didn't seem worth the effort.

All that said, I'll probably give it another shot on the next beta weekend.

No, it's really not completely false, nor am I breaking it down to "someone tells you to do something and you do it". The fact is that almost all MMO quests fall into one of several broad themes like "go kill X number of Y", "go bring back X number of Y", "go to this location, pick up the Z, and bring it back" and a few other themes like escort missions. There's not a whole lot of room for other variations.

We had Mus ***** that he had to click on things above. Guess what? You have to click things in every game. Yeah, some quests are better done than others, but overall questing is something that doesn't vary a lot from game to game. Same thing with complaining about running around finding 13 villagers to evacuate. How that's different from other MMO quests I don't know exactly.

If TES is not your thing, then it's not your thing. That doesn't mean you can recognize flaws after 5 minutes.



That's all great, but it really doesn't help me understand what you saw int he first 5 minutes that caused a problem for you. I mean, you've said at least 2 games are WoW-like. Is that good, bad, or indifferent?



I find this really astounding. ESO has the BEST interface of any MMO I've ever played; in fact I hardly even looked at the interface (that's what made it so good.) I was actually watching my character fight and reacting to the enemy, not staring at cooldowns and hordes of buttons.



I hope so. I didn't get anything you're saying from it, and some of what you had to say above is bog-standard MMO complaints. I haven't run across a game yet where some people weren't talking about "sub par this or that" or "clunky" the other thing, and frequently the same elements you're citing.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm with Aizle on 90% of his post. Haven't played FFXIV or GW2, but the rest resonates greatly. Was turned off of NWO by the exact same reason(10 real dollars for a freaking bag? Come on PW.).

I agree that the interface for TESO is awful. Its basically a blank screen, a chat box, 5 buttons (that you can't click because of the awful, awful perma mouselook), and a reticle. Fade in/out health/stam/mana/xp/everything bars with no obvious way to pull them up, no visible stats on any gear, no minimap, poor world map (that closes when you move),

As far as reacting to the enemy, the controls are clunky enough that blocking/interrupting was a crapshoot every time... which doesn't really matter. You spam one attack until you are out of stam, and then wave your weapon at the bad guy till it finishes falling down.

Yes, BGIB. But I don't see these things being changed too much as they appear to be intentional design choices.

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Holy shitsnacks!

As far as I'm concerned, all you're doing is describing the game in the most cynical terms you can think of. With the exception of the underpowered basic attacks, that's all stuff that's great about it. If you don't like it, you don't like it. I especially find the part about blocking being clunky or a crapshoot to be.. weird. I'm not all that good at reactive stuff, and I find it to be fine. Not quite as good as Skyrim's but better than Oblivion.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

At the end of the day the combat doesn't seem to lend itself well to MMO paradigms and likely means that there will never be a very challenging or large-party-oriented end game.

That's really an issue of the MMO paradigms needing to adapt to the game. The habit of MMO players of trying to do "progression raiding" in every game using the same forumla needs to be broken.

In any case, the real endgame of this one is the PVP. The MMO crowd that's into this game hates hearing that, but they may as well get used to it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."