As promised from my last blog, I want to discuss a problem that has been grinding me since I started playing this god-forsaken game. I absolutely love it when PC gamers like to brag about how they're the best of the best, that a PC game looks like something out of a live action film compared to the dark and rudimentary tools we consol gamers have to work with. One thing they tend to avoid though is when it comes MMO's not nearly having the same kind of photo realism, whereas on an Xbox360 when you play Halo, the graphics are still great. Granted, an MMO has to deal with probably hundreds of more characters on screen than a regular PC game does, but the point is that the PC is not as powerful as one may think, at least, the average one, which is what the Elder Scrolls Online is tuned for.
One can argue that I can't really rant on this because the poor graphics of this game are not necessarily the developers fault, but the scale of their project had to sacrifice visuals for gameplay if everyone could join, and it is unfortunate that the gameplay sucks @$$ too. Moving on, the message from Zenimax is that they simply do not have the technical prowess to bring an MMO that has the visual expertise that Skyrim possesses to the genre just yet, which I call bullsh*t on! Given that Zenimax had five years to develop this game, I would imagine that SOME work and research would be put into the visual department. Of course, I don't expect it to look like Crysis 3, and if it did, I would let a man dressed up as Smokey Bear have his way with my cat out of sheer happiness that the visual industry has come so far (Not really. The cat is off limits. The gerbal is fair game though). I realize a game of this scale, with huge expanses of nothing in between places your supposed to go, poor design of the map, and...wait a minute, there is no f*ckng excuse for this! Has anyone seen at what the lowest setting of the graphics looks like? I've seen better graphics from a PS1 game! With nothing really happening on screen, I would imagine that the graphics would be better than this! Maybe we are still stuck in a day and age where we are held back by pixels and polygons, but I would imagine some advancements to be made since the 19-f*cking-70's. The enviroment looks like the back end of your mothers face (Just kidding. When I think of ugly old butt looking things I automatically assume it's one's mother) and the stylized look of the characters makes me sick to my stomach when I think of Skyrim.
The fact of the matter is, all this game really accomplishes is that it draws a massive comparison to the Skyrim game and it brings ESO down into the depths. While we got a gritty fantasy world in Skyrm, we recieved dead eyes NPC's, enviroments with nothing in them, lack of scale with the visuals- Yes, let's talk about that for a moment. For those of you who have played the game, some of you have probably come across the chain portal things coming from Oblivion to suck up Nirn into Coldharbor. In the trailers, it was made out to be this huge f*cking deal when it turned out to be a huge f*cking dissapointment when you saw how small the thing was. Wouldn't you expect this world sucking machine thing as massive as possible and make use of every visual style the game had to offer? Nope, I could hold the thing in my hand. The general boredom that spawns from actually stopping it doesn't help either.
True, technology holds us back sometimes when we havn't advanced far enough yet, but the question comes up, could I like the Elder Scrolls Online if it had great gameplay but crappy visuals? Theoretically of course because the game fails on both accounts, but could I? Graphics are important to impressing a wide range of people, but for me, gameplay is what comes first. So when I rant about this ever so fiercely, it's because I am dissapointed on how drastic it is and how it shouldn't even be there. If someone has the time to make the Elder Scrolls Online look better, I feel they have an obligation to do so. I'll be back soon with more problems with the game soon. Stay Ranty everyone.