Tuesday 29 April 2014

Craglorn may be the nail in the coffin...

I've been faltering with ESO as of late. In my post The Dissapointment of the ESO AMA, I asked how long would I be able to keep playing. And it's been hitting me.

The individual zone exploration is great, but it finishes. I'm nearly done the Rift and have no reason to return to previous areas. No alternate leveling paths to go back too. At any time there is only ever the one zone appropriate to my level, and once I'm in veteran ranks it won't even be a zone for my faction. Morrowind, my favorite province of Tamriel, was finished at level 30.

Actually a small correction, there are two reasons to go back to previous zones. If you want to craft something with a specific set bonus, and because Shadowfen has the best laid out crafting area. Say what you will about WoW dailies, there continues to be reasons to visit every corner of Pandaria.

City of Heroes had missions that sent you back to various zones all the time. Level scaling and the ouroboros time travel missions could keep any local relevant at any time.

The upcoming Craglorn, a place meant for Veteran 10 players (Players who have already completed every zone in the game), raises the Veteran cap to 12. We now have precedent to treadmill content philosophy as opposed to horizontal content philosophy for the future of the game. Where now areas released will be the only relevant areas. Windhelm, capitol of the Ebonheart Pact may well never have a reason to return to other then a pick up quest for the next new patch added area.

The writing past the 2nd zone of a faction changes style to you're the only one who can do anything of worth to stop current issues. It's a writing style I don't enjoy, and so I have little interest in continuing the narrative in the game overall. That's a giant shame as until level 20 I had done nothing but praise the writing, and in most MMOs the introductory style of the early level writings are usually the worst.

I still enjoy the pvp when I find it, but is that enough? I'm not big on dungeons, I'm no longer a fan of this story, and RP is hard or impossible to find outside select groups. No world pvp in the pve areas to keep things interesting, no tension standing on roads or safe pockets where NPCs don't patrol.

This perhaps is a bit fragmented I suppose, the gist of it is the parts that impressed me no longer do. The first half of Deshaan is probably my favorite writing in any MMO at the moment but ESO seems dead set on no, only YOU can solve this. This not being the huge main story, but each individual zone story. I don't mind the hero of a thing, but when I'm the special hero of ALL THE THINGS, it's lazy. At the same time, the parts that kept disappointing me keep doing so. Combined now with the treadmill attitude to future content I just feel done.

The rp/server communities aren't there. I'm no longer interested in the pve world. Pve players will continue to level faster to dominate the pvp areas which hurts motivation. I just don't want to log in anymore...

City of Heroes would have been 10 this week....

2 comments:

  1. That whole "you're our only hope, Great Hero" thing drives me nuts. Sadly it seems to be the default these days. Did you play The Secret World at all? That's my gold standard for MMO quest writing.

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    1. I did! Thematically I loved The Secret World dearly. It was the last game I got super hyped about pre-launch. Kingsmouth was everything I wanted it to be, but the story there ended abruptly and I was sent to Egypt despite the loose ends. I enjoyed Egypt less and then disliked how that story wrapped up before being sent to Transylvania. I ended up loosing interest there, the atmosphere I loved from Kingsmouth was gone and didn't enjoy the combat enough to remain afterwards.

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