I decided to completely waste my free Christmas time, bite the pillow and engage in
cock and ball torture finish
everything* that ESO had to offer. It was so, so, SO unbelievably bad, boring, annoying and cringe. 6 or 7 years after I got it for pennies on a sale I finally sat down and went through every story there was, then promptly uninstalled.
The main issue with the
stories is that they're all the same. Literally every zone follows the same formula of an Evil Force utilizing Something Old and Forgotten to inflict some kind of disaster upon the world. On Vvardenfell, it's Clavicus Vile almost killing Vivec via some metal rod he stole from Clockwork City. In eastern Skyrim, it's vampires trying so sacrifice the souls of all mortals to separate themselves from Molag Bal with yet again some ancient Dwemer contraption. On Summerset, it's Nocturnal trying to use a thingamajig to become an omnidimensional deity. The latest expansion basically introduced a Marvel-tier og donut steel daedric prince who
had the power to reshape destiny and fate. It was
so retarded they deleted her out of existence in the same expac. It goes on, and on, and on. You might think it's only the DLCs that suffer from this, but no, base game is very much guilty of it as well, complete with the basic zones for every alliance. Necromancers, vampires, barbarians, whatever. They all got up one day and stumbled upon some Ancient Knowledge and now the reality itself is in peril, simultanously, in 20 different expansions all at once.
I'm not even going to bother with the writing. It's all whedonisms, and whoever wrote the lines for
Augur of the Obscure deserves to die the most humiliating, painful death imaginable.
But that's not even the worst part. The worst part of ESO is how
dull, unremarkable and sterile it is. There's really no other way to put it. Everything about this game is like soggy white bread. Everything is played safe to appease the easily triggered crowd. The TES universe is canonically extremely racist and it's apparent in the latest three games. Slavery in Morrowind, the Oblivion intro cellmate berating you based on your race and sex (+ the dark seducer in Shivering Isles, see pic below), even Skyrim which was already teetering on the edge had everyone being racist towards cats and lizards. There is none of it in ESO. I mean fucking hell, the Ebonheart Pact existing is a travesty, as it puts three races which absolutely
despise each other - Nords, Dunmer, and Argonians - under one banner. And nobody questions that and gets along just fine. Fuck
off.
ESO effectively has no music - nothing stands out, nothing gives you "the earworm", and when you finally think you're hearing something good, it's just
Road Most Travelled (0:43). It's all ambient droning with no substance. Last time I said that about the game around 2017, when I realized I couldn't remember anything about Diablo 3's music. There's really nothing to else to say.
*I didn't do the latest chapter, because fuck paying for that. You only need to know they shoehorned in "emotional" responses, so now you can be a corny asshole or a corny wholesome chungus and literally confess gay love to the one NPC the female writers have been gay-ifying since his inception. There's also canon trannies, including tranny dragons.
Then there's the NPCs, or character design in general. Outside of the obvious outliers (cats and lizards) there is no way of telling what class and race someone is at a glance. Nords and Altmer are equally tall, and once armored, you won't be able to tell them apart. If a Breton wears a helmet, you will mistake him for an Imperial. Since there's no assigned voice type per race, anyone can and will sound like anything, except cats use that fucking revolting pajeet accent and "this one knows you suck and fuck" type of speech, and lizard VAs I'm pretty sure were forced to swallow tablespoons of gravel before recording.
Spotting someone's class was and still is impossible without looking at their health bar to locate the tiny symbol next to it. The only exception are
sometimes Wardens who will be hauling ass alongside the bear summon that gets in everyone's way.
Then there's the faces. Particularly human faces. I don't know what they did to them, but they're fucking unsettling to look at, like something straight out of Deus Ex IW, like they're trying to kill you with their gaze. They also look basically the same, something Skyrim is also guilty of.
Another issue worth mentioning it that despite trying their damnest to create memorable and/or quirky haha random characters, I do not remember
anyone who wasn't already an established figure in the previous games (daedric princes, Vivec, Almalexia, Sotha Sil, Sheogorath etc.) outside of the definitive main cast that you're forced to interact with - the three alliance leaders, the Five Companions and the mercs you can hire. It's worse for NPCs that aren't involved in any quests, and I remember the names of most merchants from TES3-5.
Since we're on the subjects of how stuff looks, the game itself is for the most part painfully ugly. To begin with, it has an ubiquitous blue tint, to the point where even shadows are vibrant blue. The only way to get rid of it is through trannyshade. The textures are painfully low res and low quality - it's basically a meme within the "community" how early armors look like body paint. I have never, once, been "wowed" by a vista. Nothing grand like seeing the incomplete Akulakhan in Morrowind or the Imperial City palace's exterior in Oblivion. Not once did I go "I really enjoyed looking at that". That might also be caused by a different issue I will describe later.
To expand on the subject of audio, everything in this game sounds anemic. Footsteps, hit sounds, spells, ambience, pain sounds, everything. Your footstep sounds don't even change with the type of footwear you use - bare feet make the exact same lifeless thud as dwarven sabatons, which is particularly grating when moving on wood or stone. And there's only two types of footstep sounds anyway - dirt and wood. Dirt is used for everything that isn't wood. Ice, stone, gravel, deep grass, metal - it all sounds like walking on dirt. The only good sounding things in this game are four skills used by the Arcanist - channeled laser, that tentacle bitchslap, "green shit weapon power up", and the tentacle laser ultimate. Nothing else has any impact. The classes themselves are a whole different can of worms.
Then there's the animations. ESO made one set of animations on release and they recycle it for EVERYTHING. 10 years later the newest expansion still has generic enemy faction grunts with axes, bows, swords&shields and staves using the same skills, the same audio, and the same animations. Even big bads, gigantic demons or glass golems, use
the same fucking dying animations as generic trash mobs. Once you've played for some amount of time you it will become immediately noticeable, as two of them stand out - one is just a complete, instant faceplant while the other looks like slipping on a banana peel and falling on your back via the heel of your foot.
You will also grow really tired really quickly of the set of 16 or so dialogue animations. Always the same "jolting back in shock", always the same facepalm, always the same handwave when explaining something, always the same hand on chin when thinking. No matter if it's a beggar or the head of state, they all have the same body language.
The combat is arguably the most notorious thing ESO is infamous for. All, and I do mean
all singleplayer mainline installments compare to it favorably. Thanks to the issues mentioned earlier, terrible netcode and balancing it's easily the most unsatisfying you will ever feel fighting something in a video game, especially if you're a retard and delve into the autism of hardcore pvp/pve and get introduced to
weaving, which is a hellish concept of spamming light attacks between skill casts to maximize DPS.
All classes feel the same, they all have tools for everything, and as such, none has any identity, which has been further eroded by the addition of subclassing, which just made everyone spec into Arcanist. Unless you have that one item which permanently gives you basically every buff in the game, you will be autistically swapping between your main and secondary weapon trying to keep up with stacks, dots, timers and the like. And again, thanks to the terrible netcode, there's a 50% chance your button press won't even register. ESO advertises itself with "play your way", and despite that, there isn't such a thing as a spellsword. You literally cannot have a melee weapon in one hand and a spell in another. You can't even cast something like a basic fireball or lightning bolt.
The weakness of the combat is also accentuated by the fact everything levels with you and just like in Oblivion you get
weaker the more you level up, and that a generic grunt can cripple you, a literal godslaying one man army, with a single swing or spell. Grunts always begin combat with any CC they have available, so unless you can kill them in under a second, they will charge up their claymore swing and send you flying even if you attempt to run away.
I mentioned earlier that the lack of "wow" factors might be caused by a different design flaw, and that's because it is. ESO is a theme park, and it desperately wants you to visit
all the rides as quickly as possible. That's the issue. Because of time limits, daily resets, no ability to pause, wait or sleep and everything respawning within minutes you're encouraged to just blaze through zones. The speed with which you move while mounted effectively ruins the experience and all the hard work that was undoubtedly put into making sure the world looks as nice as possible.
After uninstalling I ironically went back to the original Morrowind and forgot how much of a trip you had to undertake from Seyda Neen to Balmora on foot. In ESO, it takes 40 seconds while mounted.
Immersion isn't something this game has ever heard of. Outside of regular damage/experience/healing prompts, you can't be a criminal, because only like 10% of the NPCs are killable, and guards on top of being invincible become instant death machines after 1 minute of combat. Everything respawning means there's no consequences to anything. The landscape doesn't change. The ablaze plantation you put out will be on fire again once you turn the quest in.
You also get treated like a nobody and a complete idiot. It doesn't matter that you saved the world from destruction tens of times, you will always have to prove your sodding worth. The dialogue in later expansions turns you into an increasingly bigger fool - every conversation will have options like "remind me again, who are you?", "who was X again?", "what was I supposed to do again" and the like. There is no sense of progression, gaining power or prominence. Random NPCs will sometimes blurt out "oh you did X during Y? Gods bless you stranger!"
Quest starter NPCs will also relentlessly pester you around the zone the quest takes place, fading in and out of existence as you move past the affected zone.
The loot crates are on a new level of predatory. Basically all of their contents are immersion-breaking, gaudy, ugly flashy garbage at rates that would make even Bossman cringe. Calling these rigged bullshit is a gentle way of putting it, dood.
I mean, fucking
look at this.
The rotten cherry on top is that they're actually adding
lore descriptions to make these items
canon. If you're thinking "heh, like that's ever gonna happen", one of these is already a paid Skyrim DLC.
The final nail in the coffin is the nostalgia blueballing. Not baiting, blueballing. Everything that relied on nostalgia from Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim has been bastardized in some way and will cause you a letdown if you're expecting a trip down memory lane.
My initial disappointment was Balmora, which was not only significantly shrunk down and full of inaccessible houses (and no player home), but also fairly irrelevant to the plot. The Dwemer ruin you have to visit very early during the TES3 MQ? Inaccessible. Sheogorad? Inaccessible. Most of Red Mountain? Inaccessible. Caldera? Doesn't exist. Vivec? Half of it is under construction. Most daedric shrines? Inaccessible.
If you're an Oblivion fan, then you probably got hit the most. Imperial City and most of Cyrodiil are pvp-exclusive shitholes. Bruma, Cheydinhal and Chorrol might as well not exist since they're ravaged ruins full of bandits and monsters. Bravil
does not exist. The only saving grace is being able to visit a non-ruined Kvatch. One of the most recent expansions introduced Skingrad, and instead of waffling about how people got scammed, I will just show you the maps from Oblivion and Online side by side.
You may notice that literally half of the city is missing. Castle Skingrad isn't available either, it's just a player home that costs 14000 crowns (premium currency), so around A HUNDRED UNITED STATES DOLLARYDOOS.
Leyawiin was hyped up as this big worthy successor to its appearance and Oblivion, and guess what? Most of the time you won't even visit the city. You will be going on trips between the Deadlands (Mehrunes Dagon's plane of Oblivion), some og donut steel location called Fargrave and random ruins/forts.
Skyrim fans aren't eating good, either. Solitude/Morthal and Markarkth are in their separate DLCs. Base game only has Windhelm and The Rift, both of which are oddly spacious and empty. You can't visit High Hrothgar or the Sky Haven temple. Whiterun, Dawnstar and Winterhold aren't in the game, and they might be the last hope for the devs, as every other bit of nostalgia has been milked dry.
Thanks for coming to my TES talk. Don't fucking buy this garbage.
