Category Archives: Games

Why Don’t I Like ESO More?

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Elder Scrolls Online is a strange game for me. I find it can never hold my attention for very long. I’ll play for a couple of weeks, then get bored and drop it for a few months before the cycle repeats.

My sorcerer using her ultimate ability in Elder Scrolls OnlineThis is perplexing because on paper it’s very nearly everything I want in a game. It puts story front and centre, it’s very solo-friendly but has accessible group content for when I want it, it has my favourite business model (B2P with DLC), it’s got action combat and global level-scaling, it has a very flexible build system, and it’s got more Elves than you can shake a stick at. It would not be far off the mark to say that ESO is essentially The Secret World, but high fantasy, which is pretty much my idea of perfection.

And yet, I still find it can only hold my attention sporadically. I always find myself thinking highly of the game, and intellectually there is perhaps no other MMO on the market I have more respect for, but still I struggle to muster true passion for it.

It’s vexing, but I think I am slowly beginning to identify why ESO doesn’t grab me as much as it theoretically should.

The story is bland:

I almost feel bad criticizing the story in ESO because Zenimax offers more story content than most any other MMO out there, and it’s clear that narrative has always been a priority for the dev team. That’s something I want to celebrate.

But the fact is quantity doesn’t equal quality. ESO may have many long, detailed quests with high production values, but they rarely offer anything memorable as stories. The characters are usually flat (with some notable exceptions), there are rarely any twists (that aren’t super easy to see coming), the reuse of the same voice actors becomes painfully obvious after a while, and there’s a tendency to substitute magical technobabble for truly inventive or thought-provoking fantasy concepts.

The Crystal Tower in Elder Scrolls OnlineThe Elder Scrolls setting is incredibly deep, with thousands of years of detailed history behind it, but there’s very little flavour or originality to any of it. There isn’t the creativity that I expect from a good fantasy setting. It’s either the same politicking you could read in any history book, or paper thin Daedric cultists trying to blow up the world for no reason.

That’s not to say ESO’s story-telling is bad by any stretch of the imagination. I have seen far, far worse. It’s just flat. Unambitious. It’s always competent, but it’s rarely exciting.

The combat is repetitive:

A lot of people tend to feel that something is off with ESO’s combat. It gets accused of being overly spammy and generally unsatisfying.

I’ve seen different explanations thrown around for this. A lot of people tend to blame the lack of ability cooldowns, or the limited action bar. Those might be contributing factors, but I don’t think that’s the real issue.

The problem is there’s no natural synergy to any of the abilities in ESO. TSW’s ability wheel was built so that each ability was like part of a jigsaw puzzle, meant to interact with each other to form cohesive rotations. All of ESO’s abilities feel like they were designed in a vacuum. They’re fine individually, but they weren’t built to come together into a cohesive whole.

My templar tanking a dungeon in Elder Scrolls OnlineAs a result, there aren’t really rotations in ESO, nor many proper combos. You mostly just end up spamming whatever your highest damage ability is all the time. There are exceptions of course, and you can mitigate this to some extent depending on your build choices (my main uses a lot of DoTs), but at the end of the day “spam your nuke until the button breaks” is still the heart of the game’s combat.

There isn’t a lot of variety to mob tactics, either, which exacerbates the issue. It’s not as bad as your average WoW clone, but there’s only a handful of different mechanics and fighting styles spread across the various mobs. Every fight just starts to feel the same after a while.

It’s unrewarding:

MMOs tend to be stingy with rewarding players in general, but ESO is an especially bad offender. Leveling is slow. Meaningful gear upgrades are less than common. Gold income is a trickle at best. You feel constantly starved for skill points, at least if you want to do anything beyond combat, like crafting or thieving.

People blame the level-scaling and lack of gear resets for this, but I’ve played horizontal progression games before, and they didn’t have this problem. Indeed, TSW — which, again, is probably the closest analogy to ESO in overall design — was probably the most rewarding MMO I’ve played. AP flowed like wine, as did cosmetic rewards, and there was always a new goal to pursue.

ESO doesn’t feel like that. I won’t say I’ve run out of goals to pursue, but everything I could do to progress my character at this point — even cosmetically — requires such a daunting grind it doesn’t even seem worth trying.

The Stonefalls zone in Elder Scrolls OnlineA game shouldn’t need rewards to be fun to play, but it is frustrating to spend an hour on a quest and have the only rewards be a tiny pittance of XP, a handful of gold, and a piece of vendor trash gear. Especially when, as mentioned above, those quests aren’t exactly setting the world on fire on their own merits.

It’s stagnant:

This is something that only became apparent with time, but I think it’s one of the main reasons I was so underwhelmed by Summerset. ESO doesn’t change. It doesn’t evolve. They keep putting out new content, but when you take away the superficialities of story and environment, it’s all the same.

If not for the box price and marketing, there’d be nothing to separate Summerset from any of the zones the game launched with. They all feature the same content presented in largely the same way. Quests, delves, skyshards. Same old, same old.

MMOs aren’t supposed to remain static like this. They’re meant to try new things, to deepen their experiences with time, to become better games. WoW may go overboard with the way it all but reboots the game every expansion, but at least Blizzard is always moving forward. ESO only ever plays it safe.

It’s no wonder ESO can keep up such an impressive content cadence. It must be easy when all you ever do is reskin the same content for ever and ever.

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My Dunmer templar in Elder Scrolls OnlineAll that’s not to say that ESO is a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, if you ask me, I’ll still tell you it’s one of the best MMOs on the market today. But it’s frustrating to see it come so close to perfection but not quite make it. I want to love this game, but no matter how hard I try, I just can’t.

SC2: Master and Commander

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It may have taken me the lion’s share of three years, but I’ve finally reached level 90 mastery in StarCraft II co-op.

Hitting level ninety mastery in StarCraft II co-op missionsThis is essentially the level cap, though that’s become a terribly nebulous concept in co-op. First we just had commander levels, but those run out fast, so account-wide mastery levels were added. Now after mastery you progress past level 90 into “Ascension” levels. But those are purely for bragging rights; your power level ceases to increase after 90.

I wasn’t exactly in a rush to get here. It’s the journey, not the destination, after all, and after about forty to fifty mastery points, it stops making any real difference to your playstyle. Some mastery can make a big difference to some commanders — unit cost reduction really changes how Karax plays, for instance — but after a while you’re just padding the score.

And I must admit that co-op does not hold the same thrill it once did in the heady days when Legacy of the Void was new and we still had hope for ongoing story DLC. Partly this is just the inevitable fatigue that comes with playing largely the same maps for three years. Partly, it’s down to questionable decisions on Blizzard’s part.

By far the biggest issue is that power creep is absolutely out of control. Nova, Stukov, and Dehaka were so absurdly over-powered they effectively broke the game, rendering even brutal difficulty almost trivial.

The real problem comes from the fact that rather than nerfing these outliers, Blizzard has decided to buff everyone else up to their level.

Defending on the Dead of Night map in StarCraft II co-op missions.You might think this is okay. Co-op is, after all, a non-competitive mode based around stomping the AI. Players are supposed to be over-powered. Rigorous balance and serious challenge were never the point of co-op. Certainly I would not have seen a problem with balancing the game by making everyone god-tier until I actually experienced it.

Unfortunately, this has turned out to be a master class in why nerfing things, while viscerally distasteful, is still necessary for the health of a game.

Between the absurd heights of power commanders have been buffed to and the fact pretty much everyone has high mastery now, very little outside of mutations requires any real effort now, and even those aren’t what they used to be. To have anything resembling a challenge, I need to play on brutal now, even though I dislike the increased game speed.

A more minor but still irritating issue is the fact we still don’t have a map veto option. The map pool is big enough now that there’s really no excuse not to let us veto at least one map. Personally I never want to see Lock and Load again.

I also must say I’m very disappointed in the addition of Tychus Findlay as the latest commander. It’s true that co-op was never a particularly story-driven mode, but I did like having it as a sort of “story adjacent” mode to fill in gaps in the lore. The addition of a character who was long dead at the time of the End War completely breaks that and makes the whole thing feel like a bit of a farce.

Tychus Findlay and his outlaws in StarCraft II co-op missions.Not to mention Tychus is arguably the worst character in StarCraft history, contributing nothing but Wings of Liberty’s biggest and most glaring plothole while being an annoying git on top of it all.

Perhaps most importantly, though, he’s just not interesting to play at all. Now, I like hero units a lot, and I prefer smaller armies, but having just five hero units and nothing else is just not how StarCraft was meant to be played, and it shows.

For starters, like Karax, he straight up doesn’t work at low levels. Oh, you can still win, but you’re sure not going to be having any fun. You have no choices on what outlaws to hire and thus no meaningful decisions to make whatsoever. You’ve got no map presence, crap mobility, and nothing to spend resources on in the late game.

I don’t doubt he gets a lot better at higher levels (I’m definitely not spending money on him), but some issues are going to persist. He’s always going to be an incredibly basic commander to play, with no economy to speak of and very little micro.

In theory, he’s meant to be a micro-intensive commander, but the power of the outlaws is weighted very heavily toward their raw stats, so their abilities never feel that impactful. Even if they did, at the end of the day you have at most five active abilities, which isn’t that much compared to what other commanders have to juggle. Fact is you’re mostly just a-moving.

Joey Ray's Bar in StarCraft II co-op missions.There’s a lot of other weird hiccups in his design, too. His Reaper outlaw’s ability is a bomb that deals high damage, but it has such a long wind-up that whatever you’re going to blow up will be long dead before it detonates. There’s an upgrade at high levels to reduce the wind-up, but it feels like you shouldn’t have to pay for an incredibly expensive upgrade just to make his ability not worthless against anything that isn’t a train or a Void Thrasher.

Meanwhile, the Medic outlaw’s pathfinding is just terrible. StarCraft 1 Dragoon terrible. Half the time she’s running ahead and getting herself killed, and the other half she just randomly stops moving and ends up way behind the rest of your troops.

Pathfinding in general is a problem for Tychus. The hitboxes for all of his outlaws are quite large, and they’re always getting in the way of each other and your ally — or your ally is getting in their way.

Also, the Hercules who drops his bar at the start of the game is obnoxiously loud, for both players. That is going to get old fast.

It’s not that he’s weak. He’s plenty strong. He’s just terribly unfun to play. He feels half-baked and unpolished.

Fact is he needed an army, even a small one. One time my ally (an Artanis) DCed, and I got to control his base and army along with Tychus’. And it was great fun. With an army and a real economy to manage in addition to the outlaws, he’s really enjoyable. The outlaws feel really good as the support to a larger force.

But as designed, it’s a very empty experience.

The Dominion Fleet calldown ability in StarCraft II co-op missions.All that being said, for all my complaints about Tychus and about the direction of co-op generally, I am still playing. StarCraft II is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and co-op is the best way to keep playing it indefinitely. The variety of maps, enemy compositions, and commanders gives it near infinite replayability, and the quick matches are ideal for whenever I want some low stress virtual slaughter.

Onward to level 1000, I suppose.