Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-50.135.236.134-20140226125517/@comment-3076045-20140328132540

Loati wrote: I love the elder scrolls skyrim and oblivion. Skyrim is my favourite game and yet I dind't feel dissapointed with the elder scrolls online and that's because I wasn't expecting a Skyrim 2.0 or a TES 6 because it isn't. Of course its different, it's an online. It has significative changes but they kept the lore and some basics. You can`t say they didn't keep the Skyrim lore because in the elder scrolls online the Skyrim events hasn't happened yet! Skyrim happens in the 4E 201-202. The elder scolls online it's based in the 2E 583 right after the Akaviri war.

I personally like ESO and I understand not everyone likes it. But in my opinon most of the people i have read about complaining give poor arguments based on graphics, different lore or that's not skyrim. I really think that most of that people in fact likes ESO but they can't affort play it so they have to convince themselves not to like it so they feel better.

Just an opinion. Not everyone its the same. I didn't generalize. Sorry if I offended someone

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head there.

But lets talk about the 3 most common complaints people are using to justify why ESO will suck

1) "The Graphics are bad" - well. Yeah. It's not as flashy as the previous game in the series, Skyrim. That's because ITS ONLINE. They actually wanted to be able to have large numbers of people fighting each other in PVP. Sure, they could have had graphics as good as Skyrim, but if there were more than 3 people on the entire server at any one time, it would have blown up someone's computer. Also, the best game in the series (at least in my opinion) was Morrowind. Have a look at the graphics of that game. Or Oblivion, even. The graphics are not really what makes this series as epicly awesome as it is. It never has been. Its the gameplay that makes this series so great. And in terms of gameplay - its right up there with the other ones.

2) It's not Skyrim 2.0  - I kind of covered this one already. No, it's really not. And you know what? It's not trying to be. People who make that claim are not actually fans of the series. That's a big call, sure, but it is also true. They are a fan of Skyrim, not of the Elder Scrolls series. You can't have played only one of the dozen games in the series and claim to know what the series is about. And it shows, too. Take Oblivion - the previous game in the series. Anyone who had only played that game would have been extremely disappointed with Skyrim if they expected it to be Oblivion 2.0. Each game in the series is substantially different in terms of gameplay than the previous game in the series. That's deliberate. They don't want it to be the same. Each game is designed to be incredibly immersive and playable for hundreds of hours on their own. You literally can play Skyrim for 200+ hours. Many of us have. It's also nothing like Oblivion. Much like the map system on Oblivion, and the active quest options, not to mention the whole fast-travel to locations thing, meant that Oblivion is nothing like Morrowind. (That game had no quest markers - there was something written in your journal IF YOU WERE LUCKY and you had a rough idea which way to go - sometimes). And if you forgot about it, you'd end up going back 20 pages in your player journal trying to find out where you were up to in your quest. And that HAPPENED, because you literally walked around the game experiencing EVERYTHING about the game. Anyways, I'll stop there.

Lets move on to the 3rd point:

3) It breaks the Lore.

Well... Answer me this ... HOW does it break the lore. Sure, I've written a few examples on the Discontinuity page about minor differences that I've uncovered so far. Those are actually minor differences, and personally, I think they are more geared towards the different style of gameplay for the game, rather than true lore-breaking. For every claim about lore-breaking though, there are a over a dozen examples where existing lore has been matched, or more often than not, has been complemented and added too extremely nicely. As for the rest - well, a lot of the stuff that went on at this time was actually lost due to the instability of the period. What that means is that even some of the stuff we think we know about what happened in the Second Era was actually wrong, but in the same way that Historians in real life have no way of knowing exactly what happened in ancient greece.

Final note: If you read Zenimax's notes on the elderscrollsonline.com website - people were actually complaining about how accurately they were sticking to the lore. They had races like the Argonians have bonuses similar to how they have been in every other game in the series, and this meant that they were extremely underpowered when it came to pvp. As a result - they had to up the ante, and give them additional powers, like increased Stamina recovery. That is because the gameplay requires players to have an even playing field when it comes to PvP. (Otherwise, why would anyone be Argonian?) Its a similar dilemma. (Personally, though, I find the fact that Skyrim books often talk about Mysticism to be lore-breaking, since they removed it as a skill). That is just me, though, and I fully realise its because they used a lot of books from Morrowind and Oblivion (because this is what the fans wanted - they WANTED to have some of the familiar books, because it makes it feel like it is a chronological progression from the previous era).

/End Rant.