ESO Glenumbra and Stormhaven
755 words.
Last time I mentioned Elder Scrolls Online, I was working my way through Rivenspire, which is the third zone of the Daggerfall Covenent. During the mad scramble of Blaugust and the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I wandered away from that. But I finally got back in there and finished up the Rivenspire zone story. It was less enjoyable toward the end, but I didn’t hate it.
I recorded the whole experience and I was thinking of uploading it, much like my playthrough of the Morrowind zone story. Then I realized that it wouldn’t make much sense to upload the Rivenspire zone story without the two previous zones that preceded it, so I decided to go through and record the Glenumbra and Stormhaven zone stories. I made a brand new character and started back at the beginning again.
ESO makes some cool screenshots now and then.
Weirdly enough, it was kind of fun. I had already completed the entire Glenumbra “save the planet and fight werewolves” story before, but it turned out I had only completed a small portion of the Stormhaven “Nightmare on Elm Street” story, so most of that was new to me.
So I have three more groups of ESO videos ready to upload. But now that I’ve done some livestreams, it seems entirely pointless to upload videos to YouTube. Livestreams get so many more views than uploaded videos. The view totals for my eight measly Astellia Online live videos utterly destroyed my entire Bloodborne series. But I digress.
The most interesting part of playing, to me, was discovering that there are a whole lot of NPCs in Glenumbra and Stormhaven voiced by the dudes of Critical Role. I heard Matt Mercer’s, Liam O’Brien’s, and Taliesin Jaffe’s voices over and over again. Not from Critical Role, but I also heard Courtney Taylor a lot, who is instantly recognizable to me as the voice of the female protagonist in Fallout 4, which I heard a lot in working on my podcast. Oh, and the guy who voices Paladin Danse from Fallout 4 is in there a lot, the guy whose name I always forget but I also instantly recognize as the voice of Paladin Danse (aka. Peter Jessop). I think those five voice actors alone cover at least 75% of the background NPC voices in those first two regions of Daggerfall. I don’t remember specifically hearing Travis Willingham but he is credited as “Additional Voices” in ESO. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear him doing Orc voices.
Never missing a chance to monetize their game, they put dragons flying around the cities to advertise the Elsewyr expansion. :)
I’m finding that Elder Scrolls Online is actually quite a fun game to record. Some games are good for recording, and some aren’t. ESO is a good one. Your character in the game is not voiced, so you get to read your own lines, which is quite fun for me. I also find it highly amusing that because every conversation just stops dead at the end, you can always get the last word with every NPC-there’s always a chance for some sort improvised last line before saying “Goodbye.” “Gosh you’re really a horrible person, you know? Welp, bye!” When you’re doing just the zone story, it’s a pretty tight narrative, and there isn’t very much down time or “kill 10 rats” time wasters. And because levels don’t matter in ESO, you’re never blocked from getting to the next part of the story. It makes for relatively focused half-hour story blocks of video content, which is hard to accomplish with most MMORPGs without judicious editing.
I’m still meh on the actual ESO gameplay mechanics though. I find combat terribly unsatisfying because it feels like random chaos. (Much like Guild Wars 2.) Character progression feels largely pointless because of the One Tamriel everything-is-the-same-power-level thing. (Much like Guild Wars 2 also hehe.) My characters feel disposable. I can start a brand new character and jump anywhere in Tamriel with the starter sword and no armor and get through it fine. So what’s the point of sticking with a character? (Note: With some exceptions. I just tried to go directly to Coldharbor after starting a character and it won’t let me. :)
So I might keep playing ESO for a while. It’s … wait for it … completely free for me to play! A great feature in a game these days. Next up after Rivenspire is the Alik’r Desert, another zone story which I’ve only seen a small piece of before.
Archived Comments
bhagpuss 2019-10-14T08:49:54Z
The reasons you find ESO’s questing enjoyable are the exact reasons I dislike it so much. As with all purely linear rpg narratives, where the player’s only function is to follow the storyline, I immediately feel a) the story is poor by the stanfdards of, oh, any other story-telling medium and b) literally any other medium would tell even such a poor story more enjoyably and efficiently. Following a narrative by playing an RPG is, as has often been said, like trying to read a novel by flashes of lightning. And not as exciting as that sounds, either.
As for the combat, I can’t stand it either. I think the comparisons to GW2 are entirely inappropriate, though. It’s evident from your posts on the game that you haven’t ever atempted to understand how the combat works. If you read some of Jeromai’s old posts on raiding and on some of the events that were adjudged to be challenging in their day, he goes into great technical detail about how the combat system works. I have never been able to play at those levels because it’s too challenging for my skill set but I don’t deny the technical reality of the game dsign behind it.
The one-level-everywhere thing is different, too. As far as I understand it, ESO these days is one level everywhere - you can go anywhere from Level One and have the zone match you. I might be wrong in that assumption because I haven’t played since they changed it. In GW2 you do have to play through the game once with everything higher than your level being much more powerful than you - unless, of course, you buy your way to max Level or use the free Level 80 boost you get with the expansions. You don’t have to do that, though.
I keep meaning to get back to ESO and try a different race and starting area but every time I remember those apallingly dour blocks of characterless, generic fantasy blockbuster quest text and that dismal combat system I always think of something I’d rather spend my time doing.
UltrViolet 2019-10-14T15:27:05Z
I could write a whole blog post in response to this. :) In bullet point form:
I said the combat feels chaotic not it is chaotic which applies to both ESO and GW2. I know there’s a logic to it but I suppose the best way to put it is that the games don’t punish casual players enough to bother taking the time to rise above a “random button mashing” level of expertise.
I also didn’t say that ESO’s story in these zones was particularly good or memorable or inventive, I just said I was enjoying the process of recording it. I approach playing games while recording them with a radically different mindset than playing games without recording them. If I wasn’t recording it, I doubt I would play ESO much at all.
I think you’re right about the GW2 levels, it’s been so long since I’ve played under level 80 that I don’t remember how it works anymore.
TheRoyalFamily 2019-10-16T02:11:03Z
It’s more like everything is scaled for level cap, and you are scaled up to match it, at least to a point. A subtle distinction, and…interesting design choice. But it lets them start new characters wherever the hot new DLC they just bought happens to be, so they’re not questing forever to get there (although it does mess up their story, as I found out as a new player). It also makes things quite awkward when you approach the (true) level cap, and suddenly you start sucking more and more, and the food bonuses get smaller and smaller for the exact same stuff.
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