Gaming "Divines Smile On You, Friend" - The Elder Scrolls Thread

Is the game itself more stable in terms of bugs? Is Zenimax still wildly buffing and debuffing skills, armors & weapons?

 

I think so. Haven't noticed anything but might depend on how you play it. I mean, my preferred MO is whacking enemies with a greatsword until they die.

 

Ugh. The Markarth DLC was doing OK, not great but not bad either, it was doing good enough. Then they wreck the boss fight.

The mechanic is simple enough - use void portals. But up to this point every activation / interaction has been distance-based. You have to be so close for it to work, for the prompt to come up. Here? There is no minimum distance and it gives zero indicator of where they are. You get told to use a portal but you don't know where to look as your "ally" opens them all over the place.

Like with the final boss in Greymoor, a boss with 820k HP is the definition of boring. I'm sure there must be others out there who love this attrition based gameplay but I don't. I eventually got through it but it seriously marred the Markarth chapter.

Not that the previous boss fight helped either. Unblockable, area attacks that practically fill the entire arena for instance. Or a boss so large you have to look up and can't see the ground attacks it has done.

Hopefully the final set of quests to pay off both Greymoor and Markarth will be better, especially boss fight design.

 

I had similar complaints about that boss fight. The other issue for me with the void portals is that they were shiny & sparkly & hard to see.

I don't really remember much else about Markarth. I also think this is when I started having problems with my attacks doing no damage. That's annoying enough when I was just exploring, but it made the boss fight even harder.

 

Yeah, the visual clutter didn't help at all. The game also trains you to look for the white arrows as to what is interactive or not.

 

Well, fortunately, the final boss fight for the Greymoor-Markarth duo was much better than the preceding duo. The gameplay mechanic was much clearer and the plot pay-off was good.

Did the intro quests, ended up doing a brief trip to the hellhole of Oblivion and am now in Blackwood. Might be time to take a break, having gone through four expansions back to back.

 

Finished up Blackwood in Elder Scrolls Online.

One major surprise was getting a couple of companions, one of whom I can have active at a time. It works far better than any previous version as the companion is a lot smarter.

Onto the Deadlands....

 

Finished the Deadlands expansion. It was mostly very good but marred by the design of the Incarnate bosses.

The first one had a crappy mechanic of Lyranth setting an energy pool in a random location, which was poorly indicated amid the graphical clutter.

The second had a mostly working mechanic with Rynkyz shielding at set moments. But it also did some weird 80% health hit attack that was cheap.

The third and final one was terribly designed. He has an attack that fills the entire area with lava! If there was a safe area I could not see it. It was awful design, success was practically luck-based, that that attack isn't used. As the fight went on, it became more chaotic, more cluttered, it was a mess.

I'm now on the epilogue quests that pull the two pieces together. Will see how they go.

 

Compared to the Deadlands expansions, the High Isle / Firesong had been mostly bullcrap free. The finale to Deadlands was both far more epic and free of lazy, cheap crap game design that was not true for Deadlands' final boss.

Unfortunately, the finale quest for Firesong is utterly blighted by lazy, cheap design. Rising lava that kills you very quickly? Check. A boss with an instant kill attack? Check. Too much graphical clutter in the final fight? Check.

Still, despite this, I nearly did it then, having done it successfully a few times before, the game put up the prompt, I pressed the buttons, same as before - except this time it refused to register them! Get killed, all the way back to the start by something that I have no counter for.

Due to this cheap crap Firesong may be abandoned and Tamriel dies due to stupid game designers.

 

High Isle / Galen Finale

Just couldn't let it lie so gave it another go on this final quest, with an awful boss fight. This time, however, I managed to, just, take the bastard out.

It remains a terrible boss fight due to too much visual clutter. At one point I suddenly had less than 1% health, I couldn't tell you what caused it. There's also a luck aspect of what moves are used. It was a little less chaotic, so maybe the game reduced the difficulty a bit. It remains a very crappy, unimaginative boss fight of attrition.

 

Several months and 470 hours later and I'm at the end, for now, of Elder Scrolls Online.

While the world design, characters and quests are often very good, the major bosses on the most recent expansions are not. I can sometimes go with attrition boss fights, a good example is Monster Hunter World. Here the boss fights are boring, sometimes suffering from visual clutter and a lack of clarity when you really need it.

That said, no way do I end up racking up 470 hours on a game, unless a game is doing a lot of things right - which it does. I like the systems and how it plays most of the time. The voice cast is often excellent. The variance across the various zones is also excellent.

 

With the Gold Road expansion in-bound next month and getting tipped off that there's a free house to be bagged before 31 May, decided to return to this. Turns out the Prologue quest for the Gold Road is out.

If you haven't played Necrom, I recommend playing that first, as it's pretty much a direct continuation. The quest itself is, bar an irritating boss fight, a very good scene-setter. It's also a good way to return to the game, as it uses several established locations and characters.

 

They really don't want to deliver ES: VI ever, do they...

 

If it's the quality of Starfield, do you really want it?

And I enjoyed Starfield

 

Starfield is only going to get better.

Oh yeah, the free house for 3 daily log-ins, is huge! Definitely nab it.

 

Gold Road is here!

Got Scribing unlocked and at Skingrad. Both of these really show how good the visual design is in ESO.

 

Big ESO news.

The 2025 expansion is continuing the main game story with the Worm Cult.

 

We are never going to get VI until they stop making money on ESO.

I am convinced of this now.

 

ESO is developed by ZeniMax Online Studios. The mainline Elder Scrolls games are developed by Bethesda Game Studios. ESO's existence does nothing to stop TESVI from being made.

 

Development, you are probably right...the only caveat being the investment in the studios to have the staff to develop...I suspect the crew working at Zenimax is getting the bulk of the investment/staffing from the parent company to produce, while Bethesda Game Studio trundles along.

But this is because schedule and release are above the development branches...and so long as ESO brings in enough income for the parent company...then the development of Elder Scrolls VI is seen more as R&D...cooking up cool ideas and testing them. It is their long term money...their guarantee, should the business look bleak...release the new mainline game and suddenly they will be beloved and enriched again!

At the rate they are going, they've probably had to migrate or reset on new game engines (or upgrade the engine) because the technology is moving faster than they can get a game out.

And I can only imagine after some of the other receptions for games coming out of this ecosystem since the last mainline game (Fallout: 76, Starfield) they are not going to release until they have to. I wish I could say "until the game was right"...but what Bethesda game is ever "right"?

I remember wondering what took so long between Morrowind - Oblivion and Oblivion - Skyrim...now that seems like lightspeed.

It has to be deliberate.

(It also doesn't help they keep repackaging Skyrim and it keeps selling on each new generation of platform)

 

ESO has been making them a ton of money for a decade, and all throughout that time period BethSoft has given Bethesda money to make games. Maybe instead of blaming ESO, blame Starfield. Why did they waste time and money on that???

 

I think I put it in the gaming thread, but update on my Skyrim progress - I'm over level 200, I've reverse-pickpocketed legendary weapons onto most NPCs so they can probably insta-kill any dragons or vampires who come to attack, and I haven't yet talked to the Jarl of Whiterun to trigger the dragon attacks or the Dawnguard leader to trigger vampire attacks

I think they said a year ago they were in early development stages of Elder Scrolls VI, when they teased the map of which 2 regions it will cover.

 

They put this out...in 2018...


But some people have said now they think that was bait to get someone to buy the whole company...which Microsoft did in 2021.

In any event...I'm not waiting in anticipation for when this game actually releases.

I'll probably wait 5 years to get the Super Double Bonus Ancestry Edition...in a bargain bin.

 

£50 quid though

//Goes to debate paying for Gamepass for a month again just to see if its worth it with the updates (Oblivion didn't gel with me first time round)