Lessons Learned from ESO

When I decided to patch up ESO on new year's eve for a laugh, I didn't expect that to turn into six months of subscription time for Zenimax, but that's what happened. That said, I did just allow my subscription to run out again, as my play time decreased significantly over the past two months and I'd really rather focus on other games as my "secondaries" over the summer. (Hellooo, WoW Classic!)

While I'm very much someone who focuses on a single game and is happy to call it home, I do think that it's good to dip your toes into the wider MMO waters at least every now and then, as it can expand your horizons in terms of what's possible but also helps to crystallise just what it is that you love about your "home" MMO.

Here are the main things I learned while playing ESO:

I really like an "explorable" world

Until my husband decided to get in on the game too and "forced" me to make some actual progress with my questing, I was extremely slow to get anything done in ESO as I found it very hard to focus on any given task. I would leave town to get back to where I last stopped questing and immediately be distracted by a gathering node, a fishing pool or a random chest, and before you knew it I had wandered off into a completely different direction. And I loved it!

Some of my favourite ESO memories simply have me thinking back to those days of wandering around aimlessly and marvelling at the beautiful trees in Auridon. Without wanting to change the game into something it isn't, this does make me wish that SWTOR rewarded random exploration like that a bit more too.

Combat matters more to me than I expected

I love old-fashioned hotbar combat and am not a fan of action combat at all, but I don't completely hate the latter, as I've spent years playing Neverwinter and having a pretty good time. However, until ESO I'd never really thought about why that is, or what makes the difference between tolerable and tedious for me when it comes to playing with a limited action set.

I'm still not entirely sure to be honest, but I do know that while I don't completely hate ESO's combat either, I noticed that it tended to get tiresome pretty quickly for me. The best way I could think of describing it is that it feels like all the abilities were conceived to be part of a classic hotbar system and were then simply mashed into an action combat framework without much adjustment.

What I mean by that is that in Neverwinter, as an example of action combat that I like, all the abilities on my limited action bar feel very impactful, usually serve very different purposes, and most of them have cooldowns. It feels good to execute them in the right order, watch the flashy animations, and top things off with a powerful ultimate.

In ESO, a lot of abilities actually feel pretty samey, and except for your ultimate nothing has a cooldown, with your only constraint being resources. In a game with classic hotbar combat, I'd be quite happy to have several abilities that do similar things, because I can have them all on my bar and choose the one that is best for any given situation, plus there are often cooldowns to juggle. In ESO you just find one thing that does a lot of damage and then spam it.

I tried to get a bit of variation in my rotation by going for several damage over time abilities, but the default UI makes it a pain to track them, and ever since the Elsweyr patch the game has stopped showing them to me completely (and yes, before anyone asks, the respective UI option is turned on - buffs and debuffs just flash up for half a second when I cast them and then disappear). It's all just not very fun. And it's surprising how off-putting that can be when seeing the next bit of the story involves slogging your way through a bunch of mobs to the other end of a cave for example.

Just give me classes, I hate skill systems

Again, this is something I'd long felt on a gut level. I never saw the appeal in Rift's much praised soul system for example. But playing ESO really drove the point home. People say that the freedom of picking and choosing your own skills is fun, but to me it's like someone handing me a bunch of cardboard and some markers to give me the "freedom" to build my own board game. That is not the fun part, and since I'm not an expert on game design, the result is unlikely to be particularly balanced or enjoyable to play.

That said, I also don't like looking up guides on how to build my character to be viable, so it's simply a lose-lose proposition from my point of view. I originally hoped that it wasn't going to be an issue in levelling/easier content, but you do start to notice a bad build dragging you down after a while when you watch the speed with which other people around you kill things.

Finally, while ESO technically has classes, they are not very distinct as the vast majority of skills are cross-class, most notably all the weapon skills. So you can be a Sorcerer wielding a staff, or a Templar wielding a staff, or a Warden wielding a staff... you get the idea. Apart from a few signature abilities such as certain pet summons, I generally can't even tell what class the characters around me are because they all appear so samey.

Character identity is also really important to me

I now have two level 50 characters in ESO, a Templar and a Sorcerer. Even though I intentionally made different choices while levelling them, the problem described above has made it difficult for me to feel like they have distinct identities, and in fact I largely lost the enthusiasm to create a third character because it feels pointless making more alts if the experience isn't going to lead to anything that I'm not already getting from my first two characters.

This was made worse by the questing. I've mentioned before that ESO's questing is very much plot-, not character-driven, which means there is some interesting stuff going on, but you're just a blank slate being steered around by more powerful personalities and doing what you're told to advance the plot. (Kind of similar to the way KotFE & KotET feel at times actually...) Moving from one quest giver to the next, you'll be recognised as a hero one moment and get mistaken for a servant the next, depending on what's convenient for the story being told.

Unfortunately that even extends to the factions. I originally thought that the game would surely foster a lot of faction pride, what with the three-way PvP zone being a big focus, but if that's the case then it's clearly limited to that game mode.

The PvE content actually starts out really strong, with each faction having its own dedicated levelling path that introduces you to its different cultures, which is very interesting and did help me form an attachment to my faction at the beginning... but then you're given a quest to do the story of the other two factions too, because why let good content go to waste reasons, and the DLC content doesn't give a damn about any previous loyalties, happily sending you to slaughter soldiers of your own faction without as much as acknowledging that this might not be something a character of your background might want to do.

I actually found that worse than if there had never been any concern for factions at all. If I'm just some random adventurer, who cares, I can be a sellsword for hire by anyone. But to build me up as the Saviour of the Dominion for example, just to then send me off to kill soldiers of that same Dominion with abandon raised my hackles.

Anyway, all that might sound very critical of ESO, and it does explain how the game fell short of my expectations in several ways. However, I wouldn't have paid for a subscription for six months if I hadn't had any fun, and I'm still planning to go back to see more of the story eventually.

The whole experience really drove home for me though that I'm a very picky customer when it comes to MMORPGs, to the point that even a well-made game that does a lot of things right can fail to be "sticky" for me if it doesn't manage to hit certain notes that are important to me on a personal level.

Good Quest, Bad Quest

I'm still playing Elder Scrolls Online on the side, though my enthusiasm for it has been waning as of late, and I think that I'll want to give it an extended break soon in order to come back to it at a later date. I'm at the point where I've completed about two thirds of the game's base content (personal story, Aldmeri Dominion and Daggerfall Covenant), so there is lots still to discover if I fancy it.

Since, like SWTOR, ESO has a reputation for offering a high-quality questing experience, I've found myself making a lot of direct comparisons between the two, as well as thinking about what makes for a good quest in general.

I think that MMO players are not the most discerning customers when it comes to quests. We'll say that we consider them good or boring, but rarely go into any detail about what exactly makes them so. I've been trying to split out different aspects of the quest experience to better come to grips with what I like or don't like about the way each game I've played handles them.

Presentation

I think this is something that matters a lot to people these days but is rarely openly stated as such. The old-school way of simply having a box of text tell you what's going on has very much fallen out of favour, and these days players expect to at the very least hear some voice-overs and see the occasional cut scene, but if you can make it even flashier then that's all the better. This is one area where SWTOR really shines, what with the little interactive cut scenes at the beginning and end of most missions, and to be honest I think that those are responsible for a good chunk of the praise that the game's questing has received.

Writing

A lot of different things can potentially fall under this umbrella, but since I want to give most of them their own sections, I'll only really consider actual skill with words here. And in that regard... most MMOs are honestly okay but not outstanding. SWTOR has some good lines here and there, but let's not pretend that most of it is particularly deep. The tone mostly stays true to the genre, which is fairly straightforward and sometimes clichéd. Secret World is the only MMO I've played that I can think of that stood out a bit from the rest here, even if the delivery was sometimes weird due to the endless monologuing characters liked to engage in.

Plot

Now this varies a lot depending on quest type. Your average side quest simply doesn't have much to say beyond "go over there and do a thing". Longer chains can try to weave in twists and surprises, like you find in some of SWTOR's class stories.

Something I found interesting in ESO is that it tries very hard to infuse even the shortest side quest with a slightly longer plot, presumably to keep things more engaging. In some ways I find this admirable, but it becomes a bit of a trope of its own after a while, to the point where you expect things to never be what they seem to be at first. The biggest surprise I remember feeling while doing the quests I've completed so far was when our characters were tasked with rescuing a certain elf lady and it turned out that this was indeed all we had to do. We kept joking about how a member of the search party was surely a traitor, or maybe she was secretly a werewolf or what have you - because that's how these things always go - but no, we just saved her and that was that. Who'd have thought it.

Characters

This is another thing that I'd like to single out because I think it's possible to have a good plot and solid writing but boring characters and vice versa (even if they are often connected). Are the people that give you quests and that you interact with during your adventures unique and memorable individuals? I'm not expecting to always remember their names, but something about them should make them memorable as characters.

I think most MMO non-player characters are pretty forgettable, but I think this is at least in part a numbers problem. If you stick to fewer characters and have them make repeat appearances, they'll be more memorable by default, as opposed to when someone new is introduced to relay every single mission. Again, I think this is something that SWTOR does pretty well, and ESO to some extent, though the latter stumbles a bit in my eyes due to the sheer amount of characters/quests it likes to throw at you in every zone (at least in the base game, not sure if it changes later). This is exacerbated by the same small handful of voice actors voicing a mind-boggling number of different NPCs, which causes a lot of them to meld into one giant mishmash after a while. (Also, as a SWTOR player it hasn't helped that they seem to have used a lot of the same voice actors as SWTOR. So every other quest I'd go: "Hey, it's the female Jedi knight / Kaliyo / Baron Deathmark / Theron Shan again!") In SWTOR this sort of repetition is mainly a problem when side quest givers speak Huttese and regurgitate the same handful of voice lines over and over.

Gameplay

Let's not forget that quests are ultimately always about doing something, so it matters what you are being asked to do. There's the classic "kill ten rats" here, as well as "collect five bear asses". Sometimes you also get to click on stuff on the ground or walls, or are simply asked to walk from A to B and talk to someone.

This is something that I've often seen criticised about SWTOR - that people feel drawn in by the high production values used in the presentation of each quest, and then they look at their log and it's basically just another instruction to kill ten rats. I guess I can sort of understand that, but at the same time I don't really mind. As far as basic gameplay is concerned, I'm happy to stick to what works and what everyone's familiar with. When games decide to do something completely different here, such as Secret World with its investigation missions, the result is usually something that a minority will absolutely love but that to most people feels like a bit of a chore since it's not what they signed up for. (I previously wrote a similar post talking about this problem in regards to SWTOR's - much simpler - puzzle quests.)

What was interesting about ESO here is that one of the lead designers clearly hated "kill ten rats" type quests with a passion, so you're never ever asked to kill x mobs. Collect quests have also been so rare that I think I can count the ones I was given on the fingers of one hand. Instead, the vast majority of quests in ESO ask you to either kill a named mob or to talk to someone. It's an interesting design choice in my eyes, though it does get a bit weird at times how you're constantly sent into areas that are crawling with zombies/ghosts/bandits or whatever but everyone's always extremely blasé about this (because if they acknowledged the mobs as a threat, they'd probably realistically ask you to take some out on the way, but the game's core design doc clearly forbids this kind of thing).

World Building

Finally, something that you can't really judge based on an individual quest but which I still considered relevant on the subject matter: whether the things featured in different missions come together to paint a picture of the virtual world as a coherent whole. This is something I actually found quite amazing about SWTOR's launch content because of how all the storylines on both Republic and Empire side sort of wove together to form a tapestry of the state of the galaxy. (Except Quesh. Quesh makes no sense.)

ESO and Secret World do a good job at this too, and to some extent Vanilla WoW. (People like to say that Vanilla WoW's questing was bad, but if you looked at the big picture assembled by the quests I always thought it was quite interesting.)

Unfortunately, the trend towards linear personal stories is pretty much in direct opposition to this. So KotFE and KotET had some really interesting characters for example, but they left you mostly in the dark about what's been going on in the galaxy at large. Likewise ESO's "personal story" has very little connection to the vibrant world portrayed in the rest of the game, aside from featuring the same common foe.

In Conclusion

I think for overall quest presentation, SWTOR is still best in class on the market. More and more games also include things like high-quality cut scenes, but not to the same extent or as consistently. I also really love how vibrant and interesting the galaxy far, far away is built up to be during the time period of the base game, and the many interesting and memorable characters featured in the stories. The quality of the plot varies, and the gameplay is run-off-the-mill, but I'm fine with that because it's a style I enjoy.

One Tamriel vs. A Galaxy Far, Far Away - Thoughts on Level Sync

I've come to the realisation that I hold two rather contradictory opinions on the subject of levels.

One is that I absolutely love a meaningful levelling system, where what level you are makes a noticeable difference to the way you play and you genuinely feel your character increasing in power every time you level up. The thing that really drove this home for me was playing on a private World of Warcraft server that emulated the Vanilla version of the game. It made a noticeable difference there whether you fought a mob that was the same level as you, one that was lower, or one that was higher, and a single level could be the difference between failure and success. It made me realise just how watered down the levelling systems in many modern MMOs have become in comparison, which gives me one more reason to look forward to the release of Classic WoW.

On the other hand... I also love level sync, but for a completely different reason, namely that of immersion. Feeling more powerful every time I level up is great, but going back to the starter zone at max level is another matter. Yes, it makes sense for my character to have become more powerful, but not to the point where enemies that previously threatened me should fall over dead the moment I merely look at them funny. It's always made me feel awkward and out of place when returning to lower-level zones. (I talked about this a bit when I first started on the Loremaster achievement in WoW back in 2010.) Considering that SWTOR is a very immersion-driven game, I was super hyped when Bioware first announced that they were going to add level scaling with KotFE. Seriously, I can even remember where I was when I first read the announcement (I was in a shopping centre during my lunch break at work) and how much it excited me.

Soloing what was previously meant to be group content can be entertaining... but also kind of awkward.

The funny thing is that for the longest time I didn't even realise that these two things were at odds with each other. What finally did cause me to put two and two together was Elder Scrolls Online, which I'm still playing on the side right now. ESO also had a traditional levelling system at launch, but replaced this with "One Tamriel" in late 2016. One Tamriel introduced open world level scaling that works both upwards and downwards, so you can basically walk out of the starter zone and go wherever you want, to do things in any order you like.

I do have to say that this has been implemented in an extremely polished way. You really can go wherever you want right away, and a lower level friend can join the fun at any time without feeling like they are dragging the group down. The existence of such an expertly crafted level scaling system makes atrocities like Neverwinter's scaling look even worse than I already thought they were (though at least Cryptic is planning to address that in the next module).

However, it also made me realise that at least for me, there is such a thing as making level scaling too good. I've sometimes grumbled about how SWTOR's level sync makes you too powerful too quickly if you over-level content, but ESO showed me what a possible alternative to that looks like, and it actually has its downsides too.

Specifically, levelling in ESO feels incredibly boring and pointless to me. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that I'm not enjoying the game overall; I have absolutely been having a good time doing quests and other things. However, the act of increasing my character level by itself has been an exercise in tedium and futility - I pretty much end up having the most fun whenever I manage to ignore my character level entirely while playing. If I end up glancing up at that bar in the top left corner too many times, it just gets me down.

It was all right for the first couple of levels, because I actually wanted to earn some skill points to fill my action bar - however, with the game limiting you to five abilities at a time (ten later on, once you unlock the option to swap weapons in combat) and skill points also being awarded from other sources such as completing quests and doing dungeons, I found myself quickly running out of things I actually wanted to spend them on. I've actually rolled up a second character by now, and both of them routinely run around with a dozen unspent skill points or more because I just don't feel any particular urge to spend them on anything. It's all horizontal progression anyway: Most of my early skill point allocations have been desperate attempts to find some combination of abilities that I actually enjoyed using - and once I did, there was no real incentive to unlock any more.

So gaining new abilities doesn't make you feel more powerful, and your character level in itself doesn't really do anything either. (I'm told that the scaling does eventually stop once you get to a certain champion rank, which seems to be supported by the high-level players I occasionally see rampaging across the landscape two-shotting everything, but that strikes me as too little, too late.) If a boss is giving you trouble, you can't just level up and come back later either, though funnily enough, simple food and drink serve as alternative power-ups in such situations. Never mind levelling up; just eating a stale loaf of bread will basically turn you into Popeye after a can of spinach.

You don't get to look forward to being able to equip more powerful gear (though again, this might change once you hit champion rank territory), because for the most part, your gear doesn't feel like it matters much either. And you don't unlock any new content, because you can go anywhere from a low level anyway. (Except dungeons, strangely enough, which is an interesting reversal from the way SWTOR does it. In SWTOR, you still need to level to be able to access the quest content, but can do any instance/flashpoint once you're past the starter planet. In ESO, you can do any quest at any level, but for some reason each dungeon is still gated behind a minimum level. Would love to know how that came about.)

So you gain levels for nothing, and you gain them extremely slowly to boot. From what I gather there are certain ways to level very quickly, such as via random dungeons, but for some reason the rate at which you gain XP from simply doing quests and killing mobs - as I would expect most new players to level - is an absolute pittance compared to that.

All this has made me more appreciative of the way SWTOR does level scaling. I still think it has resulted in levelling being too quick and your character becoming too powerful too quickly, but I appreciate that you do feel more powerful as you go up in levels, and that doing so actually grants you access to more content. I like that mobs never lose the ability to do damage to you, yet you don't need to be a max-level character in top-end gear to notice a power difference once you're past the planet's recommended level. I may not want to feel god-like when I return to the starter zone, but I still prefer my levels to matter in some way at least.

Tracking My Playtime

After seeing it mentioned both by UltrViolet and Wilhelm, I downloaded and installed an application called ManicTime at the start of February to track which programmes I use the most in my day-to-day life. Its paid version seems to be targeted at businesses that want to keep an extremely close eye on just what exactly their employees get up to on their PCs, but the free version is good enough to allow for some easy fun with personal statistics. Unlike some similar services, it also doesn't get confused if you accidentally leave a game launcher up in the background for example - it only counts whatever you're actively engaging with at the time.

Since we're now in March, I thought it would be interesting to look back at what data it recorded for February. Unsurprisingly, I only played two different games all month: SWTOR and ESO. SWTOR clocked in at 66.5 hours and ESO at 63.5 hours. I was honestly kind of impressed with myself for somehow managing to fit 130 hours of gaming into a 28-day month, especially since I was also off for a few days to get married. (Though, saying that, I'm also a bit worried now that some readers will think me a freak for spending that much time at my computer. And that's not even counting the hours spent just browsing the web!) On a normal work day I barely have three to four hours left between coming home and going to bed, and that also includes things like having dinner. Clearly I underestimated just how long my weekend play sessions can get to make up for that. Plus it helped that I had a couple of days off this month I guess.

It was also interesting to see the different patterns in which I played the two games. The biggest chunk of SWTOR's playtime came from doing group content with my guild. On days when I didn't do any of that, I would maybe log in briefly to do a round of Ossus dailies but that was usually only a matter of minutes. Whenever ops night came around however, more or less my whole evening was dedicated to SWTOR.

Meanwhile, my daily engagement with ESO also tends to be short, but nonetheless a little longer than the SWTOR dailies, as I mainly log in to do things like claim my daily login reward, train my horse, or queue some new crafting research, which requires a bit of fiddling. I haven't done much group content in that game however (though I've done a little). Mostly what happens is that I make a point of sitting down for a really long play session on the weekend when I want to make some quest progress, because for some reason the quests feel really time-consuming to me and I worry that I'll lose the plot if I don't spend several hours on focusing what's going on. I don't think that really is a requirement, but with the way I play and still being relatively new to the game, I spend a lot of time puttering about in ways that I suspect most long-time players don't, which makes for very slow progress.

Anyway, it's interesting to have a baseline number to which I can compare future months. Also, I once again feel pleased with just how cheap my hobbies are. I'm a subscriber both in SWTOR and in ESO, and looking at those playtime numbers, the entertainment cost for each game was 11p / hour for SWTOR and about 16p / hour for ESO.

ESO vs. SWTOR: Comparing Business Models

After playing Elder Scrolls Online for a few hours on New Year's Eve, I joked that I probably wasn't going to get back into it for another year, but actually I've ended up playing it casually throughout the past month and even splurged on an ESO Plus subscription too. Turns out that now that I made it over the hump of replaying content that I'd already seen in the beta years ago, I've been rather enjoying myself, though not always in the ways I expected.

I'll probably be able to get a couple more comparison posts out of the experience, but I'm a bit wary of making shallow "first impressions" posts at this point, as these are a dime a dozen in the MMO space and can end up being very oddly skewed, so I don't want to write about anything that I haven't been able to actually sink some time into/research in a bit more depth. So let's start by talking about business models, as these are very straightforward. (Well, relatively speaking. Actually they are pretty complex, but still less so than the gameplay itself.)

In a nutshell, I was surprised by how similar the two games are when it comes to their business model, considering that SWTOR is often decried for having a terrible one, while I mostly keep hearing people gush about ESO's being oh so great. I guess Bioware is still having a hard time with bad PR.

Buy to Play vs. Free to Play

To be honest I've never quite understood the obsession many outspoken MMORPG players seem to have with B2P over F2P. That one-off box purchase on its own isn't going to pay for years and years of content to be developed, so the devs still need to push the subscription option/additional cash shop purchases either way.

That said, having tried ESO I can see one advantage for the player in that the required buy-in means there has to be less worrying about restrictions during the early levels in particular. SWTOR places some pretty brutal chat restrictions on low-level free players, simply because of how much gold/credit sellers have abused the ability to create new accounts for free.

That said, having to spend money to start playing at all is still an obstacle, even if the price of the base game is quite low these days. I know I was unwilling to give Secret World a try until it went free-to-play for example, but then ended up enjoying it enough to be willing to give Funcom some money afterwards, so there's obviously some value to not having a pay wall at the very beginning. I'd love to know how the two models compare behind the scenes in terms of acquisition/player lifetime value.

The "Optional" Subscription

People often criticise that SWTOR's subscription isn't really optional as playing without it you'll feel very limited. I don't think I've ever met a SWTOR player that denies this either, though I think people sometimes don't give credit to all the content you can access completely for free, which includes all the class stories.

ESO definitely doesn't nag you about subscribing nearly as much, though in fairness they also don't have to since you've already given them money by the point you've started playing. That said, I actually found the game pretty unplayable without a subscription by level ten or so, for the simple reason that is the crafting bag.

The crafting bag is a feature that you only get access to while subscribed and is basically a portable hole that can hold infinite amounts of everything related to crafting. The thing that people don't tell you is that if you're the kind of person who likes to click on everything around you that the game will let you interact with, 90 percent of everything you loot will be crafting materials. Since I'm somewhat interested in crafting, I wanted to keep them too, but from level five or so onwards this basically meant that I could barely complete a single quest before my bags were full. By the time I ponied up for a month of ESO Plus, both my bags and my bank were full to burst, yet the instant I subscribed and the crafting mats were automatically transferred to the crafting bag, my normal bags and bank were suddenly virtually empty.

I guess this particular limitation doesn't get as much publicity because I know from experience with my guildies that most players aren't as obsessed with picking up everything that sparkles and will happily ignore large numbers of dropped loot, and what they do pick up they will happily vendor without thinking about potential future use for crafting or anything like that, but I suppose it goes to show that "optional" is in the eye of the beholder. At least I know that I'm not the only one who's struggled with the lack of crafting bag for non-subscribers, as people's opinions on the official forums range from "it's okay; you can circumvent it by making extra storage alts/a personal guild bank/buying additional accounts" to being entirely put off the game by this particular restriction.

Convenience aside, another thing that both games' subscriptions have in common is that they give you a cash shop stipend for every month that you're subscribed. ESO is much more generous however, by throwing in 1500 Crowns per month vs. SWTOR's 500-600 Cartel Coins. While the value of funny money like that can be hard to gauge accurately, I did the maths and the two currencies are actually very close in terms of real life value as well, so ESO really does give you more bang for your buck, which is nice! It's pretty obviously part of their marketing strategy too, as one month of ESO Plus actually costs less than buying 1500 Crowns separately, so the idea is to use the lower price to lure you into subscribing instead of having you simply make a one-time purchase.

General Cash Shop Observations

ESO for some reason felt the need to not have just one but two cash shop icons, because they figured the Crown Crates (random lootboxes) needed their own, which is kind of funny to me. Either way the icons are similarly unobtrusive as the Cartel Market icon in SWTOR.

In general, I like the Crown Store's UI a bit better. SWTOR's store UI is much better now than it was, but ESO still requires fewer clicks in comparison to navigate between categories, which makes it easier to casually browse what's on offer. There are also helpful sub-categories, such as "mounts" being split into "exotic", "horses" or "special". I've often wished that SWTOR had more of these, for example to make it easier to only look at animal mounts vs. speeders, or in the armour section at Jedi styles vs. bounty hunter outfits for example.

Another big plus in favour of the ESO store's UI is that they make it much easier to preview everything before buying. While SWTOR technically has a preview function, it's sometimes disabled for bundled items. Compare this to ESO selling a bundle with several dozen hairstyles in it and letting you preview literally every single one of them before buying (though how to do so isn't super obvious and - like many things relating to ESO's UI - I had to google how to do it).

The general wares in both stores mostly consist of cosmetics of some variety or another, with no power-related purchases. The main thing that SWTOR has that ESO doesn't is that they allow you to manually unlock some of the subscriber benefits (such as the infamous extra hotbars) permanently. The only comparable thing that ESO has is that you can buy DLC content - it's generally free to access for subscribers but unlike in SWTOR, you don't automatically get to keep it if your sub lapses. Also, the current newest "chapter" in ESO or whatever word they use to avoid saying "expansion" is not included in the subscription and still requires an extra purchase no matter what. Another thing that's worth pointing out is that ESO sells some insta-gratification consumables - as I mentioned in my last post, there are mechanics such as riding training and crafting trait research that are gated behind literally months of waiting... unless you're willing to pay up that is.

In general it seems to me that SWTOR's Cartel Market is somewhat better stocked than ESO's Crown store, despite of both games periodically removing items to create artificial scarcity; there's just more stuff to choose from in the former than in the latter.

Funny Money

Now, let's talk pricing! As mentioned above, funny money's whole purpose is to make it less obvious just how much you're spending on things, which it generally succeeds at (especially with additional discounts if you buy larger amounts at once etc.). There is however some napkin maths that you can do, and while doing so I was pleasantly surprised to find that SWTOR and ESO made it easy for me to draw comparisons between the two by having an extremely similar exchange rate. (Note that all prices in this post are in pounds as I'm located in the UK.)

Basically Cartel Coins range in price from £4 to £7 per thousand, depending on which bundle you choose, while ESO's Crowns range from £5 to £8 per thousand. So Crowns are slightly more expensive, but not massively so. The main thing that surprised me was the variance in bundle pricing. I think I've only ever bought Cartel Coins once a long time ago, so I didn't remember how it works in detail, but basically the bundles you can buy range in price from £1.80 to £24. For all the talk about "whales" people like to engage in nowadays, a maximum transaction amount of £24 is hardly daylight robbery. I mean, that's only slightly more than I have to pay for my daily commute. In comparison, ESO's Crown bundles start at £6 for the cheapest one but go up to £110. I wonder how many players actually go for that last one? I think I would struggle to even find enough things in the store that I'd like to spend 21,000 Crowns on.

Anyway, I figured that for price comparison purposes it was both fair and easiest to assume a value of about £5 per thousand Cartel Coins or Crowns. Looking at the different categories you can see some interesting differences.

For example on checking the mounts categories in both stores, SWTOR's ranged in price from about £2 to £13, with most averaging around £7.50. In comparison an ESO store mount will set you back £4.50 to £15, with most of them averaging around £9. One interesting tidbit about ESO store mounts is that the in-game alternatives to them are extremely restricted. I've sometimes heard people complain that SWTOR hides all the good cosmetic stuff in the store - something I've always disagreed with - but even if you see some merit in the argument it's nothing compared to the way ESO handles its mount skins. There are literally only four differently coloured horses plus an event mount available from actually playing the game; every other mount is exclusive to the store.

Another category I compared was that of non-combat pets, where again, SWTOR was a bit cheaper, with the average price for a pet being only a little over a pound, while ESO's tended to hover around £3.50. I suspect that this is simple market pressure at work as pets are not very popular in SWTOR and I doubt they'd sell any at all if they cost more than they do. In ESO on the other hand I see people running around with non-combat pets all the time, despite of their higher prices.

When it came to character looks, I compared SWTOR's armour shells to ESO's appearances, which are slightly different but essentially both grant you a full cosmetic outfit for your character, which I judged similar enough for the purposes of this post. Here ESO is more generous, with prices ranging from £2.50 to £5, while SWTOR's armours can cost up to £13 for some, with most hovering around the £7 price point. I guess this must be one of Bioware's main money makers. I mean, I'm sure ESO players care about their characters' looks too, but SWTOR makes it more of an issue with all the cut scenes making you want to look your most fabulous for the camera. People jokingly refer to the game as "Space Barbie" for a reason.

Crown Crates vs. Cartel Packs

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: lootboxes, oh em gee! I've noted previously that SWTOR has effectively been phasing them out, but the Ultimate Cartel pack is still available, so I guess it counts. As far as I'm aware ESO has shown no signs of shifting away from relying on Crown Crates for its income.

Interestingly, there is a big price difference between Cartel Packs and Crown Crates, with the latter costing twice as much as the former: £2 vs. £1 per pack. (That said, this is still less than I thought either of them were going to cost in real money.) Now, it might be that the ESO crates make up for their higher price with better contents, but to be honest that's hard to judge considering that nobody knows the drop rates for anything for certain, and even if we did know, if the items aren't also sold in the store for a fixed price, there isn't an objective value we can attach to any of them, seeing how people have different opinions on what's a good or a bad drop. One person's favourite mount ever might be another one's trash.

That aside, I do think that SWTOR is miles ahead in terms of consumer-friendliness in this area simply because all the contents of the boxes are tradable. So if you enjoy opening random boxes you can, but if you just want a specific item, you can simply buy it off another player for credits. There is a chance that your particular item might not be available for sale at all times, but in general there is a pretty healthy secondary market for pack items.

I'd previously been told that ESO had this "Crown Gem" system, which was just as good or even better because you can use gems to buy crate items directly, but after having seen it myself I have to call shenanigans on that one. Basically you get gems for disintegrating unwanted junk items from the boxes, such as potions, but they are only worth one gem a pop, which is basically nothing. Bigger items such as pets or mounts cannot be turned into gems at will, only if they're duplicates! So getting an ugly mount that you're not going to use doesn't get you one bit closer to getting the thing you actually want, whereas in SWTOR you'd at least be able to sell it.

Also, and this is something nobody had ever mentioned to me before and that I only learned while looking it up, the top reward tier, which is called "radiant apex" rewards, can't be purchased with gems, ever, so you can only get those via sheer luck.

Really, the only thing I can say in favour of ESO's Crown Crates is that aside from the radiant apex rewards, all the rewards for the current crate season can be inspected via the in-game UI and you don't need to go to an outside site to learn what they are. This would have been a good feature for SWTOR to have too back in the day, though it has now become redundant with the Ultimate pack (as I get that they can't easily give you a preview of every Cartel Market item ever produced).

Trading & Unlocks

After railing against the lack of tradability of Crown Crate items, I do want to mention something positive related to store items and other players in ESO: the game has the option to give store items to others as gifts directly, which I think is very neat. In SWTOR you can give gifts too, but you have to buy them yourself, wait for the bind timer to run out and then send them through the mail or hand them over in person. I think a dedicated gift UI as part of the store is a nice idea.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that (as far as I could tell; personally I still only have one character), all of ESO's cosmetic cash store purchases are automatically unlocked account-wide, whereas in SWTOR you have to pay an additional fee through the Collection UI to get access on all your characters. How much of a boon that is to you depends on your play style I guess - I love creating alts myself but tend to give them all unique looks anyway, so to me automated account-wide unlocks are a moot point. However to players who don't mind recycling a good look, this can be a boon and drastically increase the value for money of purchases in ESO.

Whew, this ended up being longer than expected!

TL;DR: SWTOR's and ESO's business models are remarkably similar. The main differences are:

- SWTOR gives you a big chunk of content for free, but restricts and nags you a lot if you don't spend any money
- ESO's subscription feels more like a nice bonus than a requirement to fully enjoy the game (unless you have a specific play style), largely due to the generous currency stipend
- Both cash stores rely heavily on cosmetics, with no direct power purchases. Both have only a couple of what I would call slightly iffy items in there, such as SWTOR's extra hotbars for non-subscribers, or ESO's unlocks to skip months of waiting.
- ESO's store has the slightly better UI, but SWTOR's has more merchandise to choose from.
- In both cases, the prices for most items are what I'd call pretty reasonable, usually coming in at £5 to £10. I was actually kind of surprised by this, which is funny in itself as you'd think that as a long-time player I'd know better. It gets a lot of publicity when they experiment with releasing something super expensive, but if you look at the everyday items and prices, it's actually much ado about nothing.
- ESO still relies heavily on lootboxes at this point, with some bad luck protection but no ability to trade, which makes them a bad deal for anyone who just wants a specific drop, whereas SWTOR players can get pretty much anything they want from them without having to rely on RNG.

Do you think there's anything important I got wrong or left out? Feel free to add it in the comments and I'll edit it in where applicable.

A Short Visit to Tamriel

With no real plans for New Year's Eve, I recalled that last year, I had used it as an opportunity to load up Elder Scrolls Online for the first time in ages. So I thought to myself: Why not make a tradition of that? Just give it a few hours to patch and perform the mandatory repair (because for some reason the game seems to like breaking itself while I'm not playing), and I should be good to go.

ESO remains the one MMO that I feel I should really like more than I do, due to its similarities to SWTOR in terms of lore focus, voice acting, other players with similar taste as me liking it etc. but somehow it never quite clicks. Still, nothing wrong with taking it for another non-committal spin, right?

I had forgotten that I'd left my cat person at level seven wearing an utterly hideous helmet, but I did remember that I still had Kenarthi's Roost (whose name I just had to google to find out what it's really called, because apparently I had horribly mangled it in my head) left to finish up, so I did that. It was okay I guess.

During the last quest in the main chain, when you're supposed to "escape the area" with some urgency, I got distracted by a fishing hole and started fishing, which quickly gained me several achievements. I knew that urgency was a lie anyway. Then I tried to go for a swim and was killed by "slaughterfish", resulting in another achievement and me having to run back inside the instance just to be able to escape from it properly.

I wasn't really feeling it yet at this point, but then I hit level eight and saw that they had introduced some level up rewards since the last time I played, which also hint at things that you will get later, and saw that at level ten I was going to get a free horse. Free horse! I still vaguely recall all the hubbub about the game's collector's edition coming with an exclusive horse back in the day, so the times have clearly changed a lot. Anyway, that served as a motivator for me to press on.

As this also marked the point where I was finally entering territory that I hadn't already seen back in the beta, I actually found myself getting somewhat drawn into the main storyline, despite of being constantly addressed as "Vestige". What am I, an appendix? If there is a good lore explanation for this, feel free to enlighten me in the comments, but I still think that it's a stupid-sounding title.

Also, the prophet is worse than General Garza and her constant requests for troopers to go back to Coruscant. He kept telling me that I should go because he needed to meditate or something like that, and as soon as I was two steps out of his cave his spectral form would pop up in front of me and call me right back. Seriously, every time. I'm hoping that this an accidental side-effect of the way I'm playing or an unintentional leftover from previous questing changes, because it's really awkward.

Levelling up somehow manages to feel really slow by modern standards, and having to assign new skill points makes me want to cry every time. Others may love having the freedom to build their own class, but I know that I suck at it and I just wish the game had some built-in recommendations or something. (In case you need a reminder, I'm the person who managed to build a KOTOR character that was lacking so many crucial abilities that it turned the final fight of the game into a soul-crushing slog.)

At level ten I got my horse though. Hurrah! And then was promptly defeated by ESO's UI. I didn't think I'd ever have to google something like "how do I summon my mount in ESO" but that's what I ended up doing, because the in-game help pages unfortunately were of no help. Apparently the answer is that you press H for horse, which probably made sense to someone somewhere. I don't know, from a distance all Bethesda games kind of look the same to me, so maybe there is a certain consistency there and they just expect people to know how everything works. As someone who hasn't played any other games from the studio I often feel a bit lost though.

You can recognise the noob by her mismatched armour and free starter horse.

I was also kind of surprised by how "needy" the game is these days, considering that it's buy to play with some subscription encouragement. Apparently there are daily log in rewards now; when you want to research something it takes a long time and you can only run one research project per skill at a time, and to fully train up your riding skill you're apparently supposed to visit the riding trainer once a day for half a year to queue a new training session each day. These "make sure to log in every day just to press a button" tactics are something I tend to associate more with free-to-play titles.

Shortly after I acquired my horse, I also had my first ever interaction with another player, and it was super awkward. I had this quest that required me to enter a certain area, but a guard was rebuffing and blocking me. I thought I'd try to sneak past. I failed, but since I hadn't really done much sneaking before, I re-tried a couple of times just to make sure I wasn't doing it wrong. Someone else saw this and started whispering me that I was doing it wrong and should follow him instead, switching to all caps and then /yelling when I didn't immediately respond. This made me so embarrassed that I just ran away and did something else entirely for a bit. It's funny because I'm 100% convinced that this person was just trying to be helpful but I felt uncomfortably judged for being a noob and just wanting to figure things out on my own.

The storyline continues to be somewhat interesting, though for some reason I really struggle to remember the names of characters and places - the naming conventions in Tamriel just don't work for me, and while you can sometimes ask questions about things in the dialogue options, the game generally seems to assume that you're already somewhat familiar with the world of the Elder Scrolls, name-dropping important characters, concepts and places like there's no tomorrow, which can cause me to zone out a bit. It's an interesting contrast to WoW, where I also had no knowledge of the IP when I started playing back in 2005, but a lot of the early vanilla quests were designed around giving you a basic idea of the culture your character lived in.

Also, the degree of importance bestowed on your character based on very little whatsoever is almost comical. Redbeard wrote a post on this subject recently but made it about MMOs in general, and my reaction was: "Okay, but in how many games does this actually happen?" Okay, so ESO is where it happens. I still can't believe I went to personally warn the queen of the Aldermarimeri Dominion of an assassination attempt against her and was then elevated into the position of one of her personal besties within about five minutes.

Combat is a mixed bag, as I'm not a huge fan of the style of action combat. I was kind of impressed when I suffered my first "real" death (not counting the slaughterfish) fairly early on, from one of the raptor-like things (again, don't ask me about names). Up until then everything had been a cakewalk, but then that thing just kept knocking me about to the point that I could barely scratch it before dying. Fortunately that particular challenge was easily overcome by using my stun breaker and block more effectively, but the overall flow of combat still feels kind of clunky to me.

Anyway, I made it to level 11 before I logged off for the evening and enjoyed puttering about enough that I also got myself certified in all the (default) crafting skills. Same thing again next year I guess?

Inventory Management

One of the shared writing prompts inspired by Blaugust that I've seen going around in the past few days has been on the subject of inventory management (appropriately inspired by Bhagpuss of Inventory Full). I think this is quite a fun subject to talk about, not least because a lot of it applies across different games but also because I actually kind of enjoy fiddling with my inventory (to a certain extent).

Here are the people I found who have already written about the subject at the time of posting this. Feel free to let me know if I left anyone out:

• Princess in a Castle
• StarShadow
• Why I Game
• Shards of Imagination
• Magen Tales
• mmosey
• Aywren Sojourner
• This Thing Is Neat

So one thing I found interesting was that in many of these posts, people talk about the annoyances of inventory management and dealing with a lack of storage space, but there was very little about how they do actually manage their inventory on a day-to-day basis, so I thought I'd write about that.

At its core, my system is very straightforward: Put stuff you want to keep and always have with you (such as toys or stacks of consumables) in the top left corner. Stuff I want to keep for a while but expect to use up soon (such as armour pieces which I'm planning to wear but for which I'm not high enough level yet) goes into the bottom right corner. Everything else goes in between. In games where things go into multiple bags instead of a single unified inventory, I might spread things out across different bags, but the core system is still the same.

The key thing about this is that I always know where new stuff goes: in the bit I marked in green on the screenshot. I'm always a little horrified when people show me screenshots of their own inventories and they are not just very full but have random gaps everywhere. No wonder you're having trouble keeping things organised if you never know where your newest bit of loot might end up. Random gaps are the enemy. I hate it when one of them appears in my "keep this" rows (because the item I stored there was unexpectedly used up or disappeared), then some random junk item ends up filling the hole and keeps occupying that slot for ages because I never notice it or think to look for something to vendor there.

I always make sure to visit vendors religiously. Always keep as much free space for the next adventure as possible. My biggest problem are usually items that I don't want to vendor because they could be useful later (to me or even someone else). Actually, now that I think about it that may well be why ESO never clicked for me. That game allows you to gather everything and learn every crafting profession, so my bags filled up with crafting-related items repeatedly before I'd even hit level five. I didn't want to throw them away because I knew they had a purpose... usually what I'd do in such a scenario would be to visit the auction house and at least sell things to other people so they can use them, but of course ESO doesn't have an auction house. Faced with a never-ending avalanche of potentially useful stuff that I didn't know what to do with I preferred to log off instead, heh. (Not to mention that ESO doesn't allow you to arrange your inventory the way you want to either.)

Anyway, I digress. Lest you think that I'm some sort of inventory management guru, let me assure you that I'm not. Like many people I struggle with wanting to hold on to too many things that really aren't that valuable or important when you think about it. The above screenshot actually showed the inventory of one of my alts, so let me show you my main's for comparison:

Yes, it's still orderly, but way too full of random stuff. I don't really have that many things I need or want to carry around with me at all times, I'm just too lazy to sort them out. I highlighted some of them in red. For example I always have not one but two holo trainers with me - why? Since I first hit the level cap back in 2012, I probably haven't spent more than a few hours levelling on my main (every time the cap got raised basically). Or those four goodies from... I think it was the pre-order bonus? I never use those, ever. But I guess I feel I should have them around just in case I suddenly need to prove my veteran cred or something. Then there's that social token that has no purpose other than to make you do a little cheer emote and which I only own because there used to be a quest that told you to buy one. (I think that mission has been removed since then.) Also, two different stacks of anniversary fireworks? Really?

The bottom right corner doesn't fare much better. How likely am I to use those bound pink and purple dyes that I got from a cantina crate any time soon? And oh my god, the armour shells! Yes, it makes sense to keep some of them to upgrade later but how many different sets of armour do I realistically expect to be buying in the future? Maybe writing about this will help me with finally overcoming the inertia that has kept those items in their places for so long and encourage me to engage in some spring/autumn cleaning.

Stagnation Appreciation

Like I suspect many others, my guild has been fairly quiet over the holidays, with members spending  a good chunk of time away from the internet and with their families. Last week we finally got enough people together to organise a guild run again but we wanted to take it easy, so we ran Eternity Vault, Karagga's Palace and Explosive Conflict on story mode of all things.

And... I was kind of surprised by how much of a good time I'm still having with these operations. Sure, Eternity Vault seemed amazing to me when I ran it for the first time six years ago, but shouldn't I be tired of this stuff by now? When Bioware first announced their plans to scale all content, I wrote at length about my hopes and concerns about it, and the potential of getting tired of the same instances remaining relevant endgame forever was certainly one of my worries.

And yet, here I am and I'm still having fun. In fact, this week I also ran another group finder operation with random strangers (Karagga's Palace) and had a blast providing guidance to those who were unfamiliar with the content for one reason or another. There's just something extremely comfortable about doing something that you know very well with only minimal variation. It's kind of like knitting another scarf I guess. If you're an experienced knitter I mean.

The other night I decided that I really wanted to do something fresh and different, so I patched and fired up Elder Scrolls Online. Quite a few people in my wider social circle have been playing it as of late and most of them have been full of praise for it. I managed to gain two levels and it was... okay I guess. Nothing was wrong exactly, but part of me found the experience oddly overwhelming and exhausting. While looking for something in the UI, lots of windows kept popping up to tell me about this feature and that, and even though depth is a good thing, something that's supposed to intrigue and entice me, I just felt tired even thinking about having to learn and understand all these new systems.

Back to SWTOR it was.

Bhagpuss also wrote a post only a few days ago about how he's actually quite happy playing all the MMOs that already exist and not exactly dying for something new right here, right now. Like he says, maybe it's the season.

I kept thinking that for me, it's probably also a case of MMOs not just being different things to different people, but also different things to the same person at different times. When I first started playing World of Warcraft over ten years ago (yikes), my real life was in a somewhat awkward, uncertain and unsatisfying place. I relished the opportunity to escape into a virtual fantasy world full of adventure and systems that were a lot more straightforward than the real world (kill kobolds, level up - got it).

No, I haven't become one of those fabled "gamers with real lives" who barely have ten minutes of spare time to play each day, but I do have a full-time job right now and in the last few months in particular it's actually been quite engaging and I've had to learn a lot of new things. That takes brain power, and by the time I come home I'm not really looking to learn a whole new set of rules. I'd much rather have some comfort food that takes me through a well-practised and satisfying routine before going to bed.

That doesn't mean that I don't want new content of course - just that I'm still getting a lot of mileage out of the old stuff in the meantime. While I've been there and done that, right now I'm actually quite happy to be there and do it again.

MMOs I've Played

While this blog is about Star Wars: The Old Republic, and SWTOR is the game I spend by the far the most time on these days, I have on occasion tried other MMOs. Sometimes I've even talked about the experience on here, but not always. Either way, I thought it would be interesting to write a little summary of all the MMOs I've tried over the years. It's not that many in the grand scheme of things, because I'm ridiculously picky when it comes to even trying a new game, but there's almost always a funny story there.

World of Warcraft

Alright, so I won't say that much about this one other than that it's where it all began in 2006. My first MMO and I loved it. I played nothing else for several years. I learned what raiding was and enjoyed it. I met people and fell in love. I moved to a different country. Playing WoW helped me find a job. It changed my life.

However, by 2012, I didn't like it all that much anymore and made the move to SWTOR. I went back once during Mists of Pandaria because my pet tank gifted me a couple of months of play time (I think to spite me after we'd had an argument about pandas). In 2015, I discovered private servers and the Vanilla WoW retro experience, something I engaged with on and off again. I'm looking forward to WoW Classic now.

I also have a blog about it, where I wrote about my adventures regularly from 2009 to 2011 and where I also documented the above-mentioned MoP stint and my private server adventures.

Champions Online

In 2009, I still wasn't really interested in playing anything other than WoW, but my then-boyfriend gifted me a copy of Champions Online for some reason, so we tried that together. I created a character called Val(k)yrie and took a screenshot of her. I also created another character, a little green reptile person, of whom I unfortunately never took a screenshot. The character creator seemed pretty amazing.

Unfortunately, the game was utterly unplayable for me. In theory, my old PC met the minimum requirements, but even with the graphics turned down, the game was nothing but a slideshow and my input with keyboard and mouse only caused erratic responses, if any at all. I struggled to even move around and only made it through the starter area by basically having my partner complete all the quests for me while I clumsily tagged along. When we moved on to the next area, I fell off the platform we arrived on and somehow managed to wedge myself into a corner I couldn't get out of, not with how unreliable the movement controls were for me anyway. I sighed and logged off, never to be seen again.

It's a testament to the strength of the character creator that I actually found myself missing those barely-played characters in a burst of nostalgia the other day, to the point that I contacted Cryptic's customer service to ask if my account could still be recovered somehow. (When I downloaded the game and logged in, with the same credentials I used back in the day, nothing was there.) The answer seemed to be "maybe", but only if I created an entirely new Arc account because for some reason they couldn't link my old account to my current one. That was more effort than I was willing to go to in the end.

Warhammer Online

Fun fact: Warhammer Online was what got me into World of Warcraft. How does that work? Well, my boyfriend at the time was into tabletop gaming and introduced me to the world of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. Somehow, while reading up on these online, I came across the site for a game called Warhammer Online, which sounded amazing! Unfortunately it was still several years away from release. But there was this similar game called World of Warcraft... the rest is history.

By the time WAR actually came out, I was way too engrossed in WoW to care about anything else. Though I remember a friend of mine playing it and getting all glassy-eyed when he told me about his dwarf standing shoulder to shoulder with other dwarves to hold off an orc attack, saying it was the most fun he'd ever had in PvP.

Anyway, I did eventually get around to trying the game, but not until early 2011, by which point it offered a free trial. It wasn't easy to find though, as EA seemed to already have more or less abandoned maintaining the website at the time.

Again, my then-boyfriend and I went in as a team, me as a warrior priest and him as a bright wizard. The starter area seemed okay, though not particularly exciting. I do remember being impressed by the first public event we encountered, as I hadn't seen anything like it before, though I also remember the scoreboard it had being super confusing to me.

However, by the time we got to the next area, the population thinned out drastically, and the next public event we encountered proved too much for just the two of us. (These things didn't scale at the time.) We made a note to come back later, but then never did. RIP WAR.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

No need to go into any detail on this one, that's what this whole blog is about!

Neverwinter

Initially it looked like Neverwinter was going to be just another experiment with friends, as everyone including myself lost interest in it within a month, but then we came back to try again and since then I've never entirely gone off it. I have a blog about this one as well, though I only update it sporadically, just like I'm going through phases of playing the game a lot or not at all.

I think it complements SWTOR very well on my gaming menu in that it's completely different - not just because of fantasy vs. sci-fi but also in that its appeal lies very much in the moment-to-moment gameplay/combat, while the story is rather weak, which is pretty much the opposite of how SWTOR works. It's also the game that taught me what it's like to play something casually but still be attached to it. Before that I never truly understood how someone could like an MMO but not want to go all in with it and play it all the time. Neverwinter showed me how that can work.

Star Trek Online

I was pulled into STO by my pet tank and he more or less carried me all the way to the level cap. I wrote a post about it at the time. In hindsight it's a bit surprising to me just how positive that post ended up sounding, because in the end I left the game with a somewhat sour feeling. I seem to remember that it had just had an update, with me once again expecting my pet tank to help me through the new content, but he got distracted by something else, so I eventually just logged off with a sigh... and never came back.

While I liked the setting, I just couldn't abide the combat, whether on the ground or in space. I'd like to say that to me, gameplay doesn't matter as much in an MMO as things like setting, but STO proved me wrong in so far as it showed me that no matter how much I like the setting, if I can't log in and simply have some fun playing, even while on my own, it's just not going to last. The things I actually remember liking the most were the little mini games involved in scanning space anomalies and mining dilithium, flying around searching for good duty officer missions and chasing epohhs on New Romulus, none of which had anything to do with the core game.

Elder Scrolls Online

My relationship with ESO is weird. I have no connection to the Elder Scrolls franchise and had no interest in playing this at first, but a friend gifted me a beta key so I thought I'd give it a try for a weekend so his gift wouldn't feel wasted. And I liked it quite a lot! This was during the period when everyone was bashing it as buggy, boring and uninspired, mind you. Even though I knew that I wasn't going to play it at launch, I vowed to myself that I was going to keep an eye on it.

Some time after it dropped the mandatory subscription and reduced its box price, I bought a copy from Amazon. I didn't actually have enough disk space to install it at the time, but again I told myself that I was going to get around to it eventually.

Finally, after another one and a half years of the game sitting shrink-wrapped next to my desk, I had a chance to install it. By now, people had also changed their minds about it and were praising it as so much better than at launch! I logged in, amused to find myself gifted with a free monkey pet for having participated in the beta more than three years ago, played through the tutorial... and then logged off again, never to return.

I'm still telling myself that I'll get back to it eventually, but I just haven't felt any itch to return to it at all since I actually played the live version. Maybe all that waiting caused me to subconsciously hype it up in my head to expect more from it than it could deliver and that's why I ended up disappointed when I actually logged in again? Sometimes I don't quite understand myself.

Lord of the Rings Online

I wrote about trying out LOTRO earlier this year. We were having a reasonably good time with it, even though it was really showing its age by overwhelming new players with lots of confusing systems. I ended that post by noting that we were going to try the first dungeon next.

That's another funny story actually. Everyone kept telling us not to use the group finder because "nobody uses it". I took this with a grain of salt in the same way that "nobody" uses the group finder to get random ops groups in SWTOR - the experienced players mostly form their groups in chat, but there are people queueing through the interface too. These groups are just rarer and more prone to failure. I really wanted to see whether LOTRO worked the same way, plus I was honestly a bit shy about putting a group together in chat since I knew so little about the different classes and what sort of setup would be desirable.

The problem turned out to be this: We couldn't actually figure out how to use the group finder interface. How silly is that? Our one attempt to use it just ended up teleporting us inside the instance with only the two of us. That didn't go so well. I actually went to reddit afterwards to ask for advice and it turned out that we had used the wrong one of the many tabs of LOTRO's group finder tool. I planned to give it another try later, but then Secret World Legends came out and my pet tank was all over that instead, so LOTRO fell by the wayside. I still want to conquer the Great Barrow some day.

Secret World Legends

I wrote a first impressions post about that one as well, but unlike with LOTRO we've managed to stay surprisingly loyal to it. We don't play every weekend, but we have kept coming back to it and are nearly done with Tokyo now. I have a post in my drafts folder that details my "second impressions" of the game, which I will put up whenever we manage to finish the current storyline.

I think the takeaway from this history of my MMO experiences is that it takes a strong IP as well as social hooks for me to want to try something new, and both friends and fun gameplay to make me want to hang around. I guess with people like me it's not surprising that new games are having a hard time establishing themselves in a crowded market.

ESO Beta Weekend Impressions

Time for my bi-annual completely off-topic post! I've never played an Elder Scrolls game in my life, so I had little interest in the upcoming online version, even more so since pseudo-realistic graphics generally aren't my cup of tea, as they tend to look kind of samey and boring even when they are well done. However, I have to admit that my interest was piqued after the game got some (relatively) bad press recently - I haven't seen anyone call it outright bad, but terms like "nothing special" and "bland" were certainly thrown around a lot. The reason I find this intriguing is that pretty much every new major MMO release since I've been following these things was initially hailed as the next big thing by the gaming press - just to turn out not to be. So what does this mean for a game that isn't getting hyped up to eleven pre-release? When a friend sent me an invite code for this week's ESO beta weekend, I decided to find out for myself.

Knowing absolutely nothing about Elder Scrolls lore and not finding the character creation screen very informative when it came to races, I decided to make a cat person simply because I like cat people. I chose the templar class because after skimming the different descriptions that one seemed to be the only one capable of healing. It made no sense for me to choose a healer since I was going to play on my own and wasn't going to have anyone to heal, but I just like being a healer anyway, ok? When it came to customising my character's looks, I was given a lot of options involving sliders, most of which didn't seem to do much. I was however amused that butt size was one of the things I could change, and that the slider for it was called "posterior dimensions". I was also given the option to add some facial hair to my female cat person, which I thought was quite novel, though I just went with a mohawk in the end.

Many things have been written about the "tutorial level" where you wake up in a prison cell, so I'll just say that it was indeed pretty boring. There was a lot of talking going on about how I was somehow important, and other people were important, but since I had absolutely no clue what any of it was about I found it hard to care. However, even considering that I was taking my time and stumbling around cluelessly like a noob, that part of the game didn't take very long, and I soon found myself released into the overworld, waking up on a tropical island.

The only thing wrong with this picture is the "please stab me here" hole in her armour.

This is where things got interesting. I got given a quest to "investigate" several areas, and soon found myself getting distracted. Due to an extremely minimalistic UI and no mini-map, the game is very immersive. (I don't know if there's an option to change that, but at a glance I couldn't even tell other players and NPCs apart, everything just melded together visually.) I'm the kind of person who usually has her eyes pretty much glued to the mini-map - and in a way that makes me sad because I know that I miss out by not paying more attention to my surroundings, but I tend to get lost easily and the mini-map is usually my anchor. Well, ESO simply gave me no choice in the matter, and while there is a compass on top of the screen as well as regular maps to look at, I found myself flailing around a lot and running in the wrong direction quite frequently. But you know what? I didn't mind. I enjoyed gathering crafting materials wherever I found them and generally picking up everything and anything that wasn't nailed down. I could even catch butterflies to use as fishing bait! Is there anything more appropriate than a cat person catching butterflies?

I've seen other people make this comparison already but I also found it to be true that the questing reminded me a bit of Vanilla WoW. Sure, you got a quest or two, and there are markers on the map, but they are comparatively low key, stuff on the ground doesn't sparkle, and you spend a lot of time running back and forth - but you don't mind, because it feels like there are interesting things to find around every corner anyway. In one case I found myself stopping in the middle of a rescue quest involving a horrible thunderstorm to start fishing - because I hadn't done it before and there was a fishing hole right there, so why not?

Of course there are differences to Vanilla WoW questing, such as everything being fully voiced and some quests actually offering you choices. The voice acting is actually pretty well-done too... though it does feel a bit redundant when you have the whole text right there to read anyway, and I have to admit that I clicked through without waiting for the voiceover to finish whenever I had finished reading (though I tried to not interrupt people mid-sentence; that grates on me for some reason). The NPCs aren't as expressive as SWTOR's, but much better than Neverwinter's dead-eyed quest givers. The ability to make choices about the outcome on some of the missions was a pleasant surprise for me as well, since I didn't actually expect it. And it's interesting that not a single quest was about "killing ten rats" or anything like it, with a heavy focus on talking to people instead. However, clearly none of this is anything "special" in a new MMO these days... [/sarcasm]

Another thing I previously saw criticised more than once was the combat not feeling "right". I don't have much of a point of reference, but I did indeed struggle a bit early on because I felt like I wasn't getting good feedback in response to my mouse-clicks, in the sense that I couldn't tell whether it made any difference whether I mashed my buttons like crazy or clicked them more slowly. However, as time went on I felt like I got to understand the rhythm of the game better and fights started to go more smoothly... except for the interrupt mechanic, which I hardly ever got to work for some reason. I was also pleasantly surprised that the combat, while avoiding the classic hotbar model, didn't feel too "action-y" (which I personally don't like). While some enemies had attacks that could be dodged, others could simply be shut down by blocking and interrupting (whenever I got it to work), which I found vastly preferable.

The game also seemed pretty polished already, apart from the fact that it started me off with a screen that said "intro cinematic placeholder". I only really ran into two kinds of bugs, one of which caused my UI to get stuck in the "zoomed in" mode you see when you talk to an NPC or craft something, and which required me to relog to fix it.  The other was that pressing E (the default "interact with this" key) on certain lootable chests didn't actually do anything. I'd consider both of these quite minor, though the UI error happened quite frequently and forced me to relog a lot.

I stopped after I reached level five and made it off the island, not because I wasn't enjoying myself, but because I didn't want to invest too much time in a beta that's just going to get wiped anyway. I currently don't see myself buying the game at launch, simply because I already have more than enough on my plate when it comes to MMOs - however I definitely could see myself playing it at some point if I manage to find some time in my schedule for a secondary MMO (and if I can get someone else to play with me).

After five levels spent on my own I obviously have no idea how the game holds up in many areas that are very important to an MMO's longevity: social features, endgame and so on - but I would say that what I've seen in those first couple of levels was interesting enough to justify giving it a try at least (even more so since from everything I've heard, the game only opens up and becomes even more "explorable" as you go up in levels).