Weird take to have for an always online single player RPG.
Real Talk here, if you don't want to play an MMO there are plenty of single player games to fill your niche. This seems to be the only genre in the history of gaming where people can complain away everything that made MMO's what they were and still continue to bitch about it, then wonder why the genre is so stagnant. Imagine going onto the Super Mario forums or reddit and demanding the game be a massive multiplayer affair? You'd be laughed at and mocked because that's not what Super Mario is.
Listening to "hot takes" like this article is exactly why MMORPG's are absolute shit now.
ESO is not a single player game. It's a MMORPG. The only thing weird is people trying to claim it is other than it is. There are plenty of solo Elder Scrolls games for those that want that. ESO doesn't provide that experience nor should it be expected to.
As for real talk, people can and will play whatever they want, and need not adjust to whatever pigeon hole another wishes to shove them into.
Mario games are whatever Nintendo wants them to be. Platform, racing, tennis, golf, console RPG, and so on. If they were inclined they could easily make a MMORPG in that universe and plenty of players would be all over it.
You can put a pig in a dress, but it's still a pig.
You can solo everything in the game, especially now with companions, which makes it a single player game. An always online single player game you can be banned from at any time, which has been the dream of big publishers for several decades now, and the opinion you expressed just allows them to continue with their anti-consumer practices.
You are free to have this very wrong opinion, but if you and others have and express as much, don't keep being surprised with every flop in the genre. It's axiomatic.
Yes, one can, as is aptly demonstrated by the arguments that ESO isn't a MMORPG that fail each time a new outfit is applied.
Your claim is the typical solo player waltzes through 12 player trials with ease, and conquers the entirety of Cyrodill and the Imperial City single-handed because it's just that easy, and now with companions it will be even more so. Those are all a part of the "single player" game after all.
My counter argument to yours is.. Rubbish.
ESO is just as much a MMORPG as any of the others of like nature, with your counter argument of "no it's not" coming with absolutely nothing to support your position or counter mine which is somewhat more detailed than "yes it is."
On that note I'm just going to put out there that my DK tank in ESO just solo'd his first 4 man dungeon tonight.
Lesson learned was just because something is possible doesn't mean it is a good idea, bringing a few of my dps friends along next time.
It was great practice for me however as some of the boss fights took 10 or more minutes (seemed like hours at times) which let me work on muscle memory switching between bars and rotating between attacks, self heals, damage shields all while keeping my sustain up on mana and stamina.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
On that note I'm just going to put out there that my DK tank in ESO just solo'd his first 4 man dungeon tonight.
Lesson learned was just because something is possible doesn't mean it is a good idea, bringing a few of my dps friends along next time.
Which one did you pick?
My Magicka DPS/Healer can zoom through Fungal Grotto 1 very, very fast... but then that's with 900+ CP
I used to farm it solo for the Viper Stamina DPS set when that used to be good - I still have an all golden set of that kicking around somewhere in one of my storage chests. Who knows? With all their never ending nerf/buff cycles to set gear it may be a good set again sometime lol.
Kudos to you for having the patience to solo one with a slow ass tank build though.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
On that note I'm just going to put out there that my DK tank in ESO just solo'd his first 4 man dungeon tonight.
Lesson learned was just because something is possible doesn't mean it is a good idea, bringing a few of my dps friends along next time.
Which one did you pick?
My Magicka DPS/Healer can zoom through Fungal Grotto 1 very, very fast... but then that's with 900+ CP
I used to farm it solo for the Viper Stamina DPS set when that used to be good - I still have an all golden set of that kicking around somewhere in one of my storage chests. Who knows? With all their never ending nerf/buff cycles to set gear it may be a good set again sometime lol.
Kudos to you for having the patience to solo one with a slow ass tank build though.
Volenfell in the Alik'r Desert, my first time ever in it for extra challenge and no, I didn't Google any of the fights beforehand.
People are always saying tank builds are horribly slow to level and more than one person has said they have a high level tank but avoid playing them these days.
Fortunately I've never played any other build so I guess I don't know what I'm missing other than my two Magika DPS friends level their CP far more with far less play time in game.
When tanking 4 mans with others I wear two gold sets, Beekeeper / Thunderbug (still need to get one more BK gold ring, but they are damn expensive to upgrade or buy) Gives me about 50K HPs when using purple tri-food.
When soloing including last night I wear the gold Thunderbug along with a purple Jolt set, not sure if it was much better than my main build but I was going for the extra shield slam damage / resists the latter set provides. This provides about 45K HP, which is more than fine in normal questing.
It's the best gear I've managed to collect, buy or upgrade considering I've never run a veteran level or trial yet.
I'm a little over CP400 at this point putting most of my Warfare / Fitness points into skills the guides tell me are good for keeping tanks alive.
I've spec'd to do some self healing with Dragons blood plus I have two or three damage resists including balance so I'm big on defense / quick recovery, but a bit light on stamina.
Unfortunately our "trio" doesn't really have a dedicated healer (we won't run with randos) though one has spec'd her second bar for it and having just reached CP 160 yesterday and now collecting purple sets she should be more effective going forward.
I keep trying to interest @Torval to play with us on his healer but he's a bit of a gad-about so isn't able to stick with ESO for too long. (Or he just knows better to avoid us)
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Weird take to have for an always online single player RPG.
Real Talk here, if you don't want to play an MMO there are plenty of single player games to fill your niche. This seems to be the only genre in the history of gaming where people can complain away everything that made MMO's what they were and still continue to bitch about it, then wonder why the genre is so stagnant. Imagine going onto the Super Mario forums or reddit and demanding the game be a massive multiplayer affair? You'd be laughed at and mocked because that's not what Super Mario is.
Listening to "hot takes" like this article is exactly why MMORPG's are absolute shit now.
ESO is not a single player game. It's a MMORPG. The only thing weird is people trying to claim it is other than it is. There are plenty of solo Elder Scrolls games for those that want that. ESO doesn't provide that experience nor should it be expected to.
As for real talk, people can and will play whatever they want, and need not adjust to whatever pigeon hole another wishes to shove them into.
Mario games are whatever Nintendo wants them to be. Platform, racing, tennis, golf, console RPG, and so on. If they were inclined they could easily make a MMORPG in that universe and plenty of players would be all over it.
You can put a pig in a dress, but it's still a pig.
You can solo everything in the game, especially now with companions, which makes it a single player game. An always online single player game you can be banned from at any time, which has been the dream of big publishers for several decades now, and the opinion you expressed just allows them to continue with their anti-consumer practices.
You are free to have this very wrong opinion, but if you and others have and express as much, don't keep being surprised with every flop in the genre. It's axiomatic.
Yes, one can, as is aptly demonstrated by the arguments that ESO isn't a MMORPG that fail each time a new outfit is applied.
Your claim is the typical solo player waltzes through 12 player trials with ease, and conquers the entirety of Cyrodill and the Imperial City single-handed because it's just that easy, and now with companions it will be even more so. Those are all a part of the "single player" game after all.
My counter argument to yours is.. Rubbish.
ESO is just as much a MMORPG as any of the others of like nature, with your counter argument of "no it's not" coming with absolutely nothing to support your position or counter mine which is somewhat more detailed than "yes it is."
On that note I'm just going to put out there that my DK tank in ESO just solo'd his first 4 man dungeon tonight.
Lesson learned was just because something is possible doesn't mean it is a good idea, bringing a few of my dps friends along next time.
It was great practice for me however as some of the boss fights took 10 or more minutes (seemed like hours at times) which let me work on muscle memory switching between bars and rotating between attacks, self heals, damage shields all while keeping my sustain up on mana and stamina.
That's what I play when with my fiance's sorcerer. Things become agonizingly slow in comparison when we are separated for any reason.
I don't know....Listening to other posters it seems more like the RPG gets in the way of the MMO........
Exactly. There's a whole generation of MMO players who mistakenly think an MMO should be a special-snowflake single player RPG experience and that the existence of other players ruins the fun.
IMO, the author of the article should stick to offline RPGs.
There is an exception to this rule. Think back to year 2010 or so. Now, think of Warhammer Fantasy. Name ONE RPG that you can play on your PC(or otherwise). WAR innit?
Thus, can you blame us singleplayer people playing the only PC RPG version we have? Warhammer, LoTR, Conan, Warcraft? You know. It's not like we had(in fact in some cases, we still don't) that much of a choice.
But yeah, MMOs and sRPGs are entirely different beasts so to speak. MMOs are ok to me, but sRPGs(especially of Diablo or Souls type) are...on the entirely different level.
I don't know....Listening to other posters it seems more like the RPG gets in the way of the MMO........
Exactly. There's a whole generation of MMO players who mistakenly think an MMO should be a special-snowflake single player RPG experience and that the existence of other players ruins the fun.
IMO, the author of the article should stick to offline RPGs.
Seeing as a good number of MMORPGs largely accommodate that these days, they aren't mistaken. Being enamoured with the past doesn't negate the tendency for it to be past for the most part. People that can't accept MMORPGs have changed over time and characterize newer ones as something else due to that are essentially in denial.
Big story fan here, put that in your PvE areas. Big PvP fan here put that in your PvP areas.
Sorted.
There's a couple PVE games that managed to have a virtual world without being story driven. ATitD being one. E:D (with its private group mode) being another.
ATitD does a fantastic job in being a rich non-story-driven PVE sandbox. But I find the E:D approach in particular to be very interesting. You have the background simulation (BGS), that all players can affect. So you can group up and do PVE to flip the state of a system and throw it into anarchy, or support a faction and make it grow its influence in a system and even expand to another, etc. Other factions can work against you, so you have a non-scripted, dynamic world that you can affect with your friends/squad etc, without having to do any PVP for those that do not want it.
I personally find the game loops on top of the BGS a bit shallow, but the BGS itself and the concept is fascinating.
If they don't have story the MMO is lacking, if they don't have PvP lacking once again.
I don't know....Listening to other posters it seems more like the RPG gets in the way of the MMO........
Exactly. There's a whole generation of MMO players who mistakenly think an MMO should be a special-snowflake single player RPG experience and that the existence of other players ruins the fun.
IMO, the author of the article should stick to offline RPGs.
Bradford is one of the best gaming journalists I have seen in a long time, we need more like him, not less.
Big story fan here, put that in your PvE areas. Big PvP fan here put that in your PvP areas.
Sorted.
There's a couple PVE games that managed to have a virtual world without being story driven. ATitD being one. E:D (with its private group mode) being another.
ATitD does a fantastic job in being a rich non-story-driven PVE sandbox. But I find the E:D approach in particular to be very interesting. You have the background simulation (BGS), that all players can affect. So you can group up and do PVE to flip the state of a system and throw it into anarchy, or support a faction and make it grow its influence in a system and even expand to another, etc. Other factions can work against you, so you have a non-scripted, dynamic world that you can affect with your friends/squad etc, without having to do any PVP for those that do not want it.
I personally find the game loops on top of the BGS a bit shallow, but the BGS itself and the concept is fascinating.
Everquest had lore but hardly any quests to speak of in spite of its name, you actually just continuously sat in one place grinding mobs. But the lore was rich you just had to look for it and listen to the conversations and piece it together from there. It didn't have an overreaching story either.
Both types of games can do well but I like a good story and being part of it.
For me a mmorpg just has some mecanism of an RPG like leveling with xp and universe mood.
I'm not expecting a simulated game masters with real choices that realy affect the world, more a linear story that is the contrary of the choose your own adventure book effect I expect from a pen and paper or good computer rpg. In short a mmorpg is not an rpg, it just catches some mood like sci-fi or fantasy world and the simplest of rpg mecanics: kill get xp. It's probably because I started with pen and paper rpg and don't have the same view of what a rpg is suposed to be. Role playing evolution vs xp for dices rolls.
The more deserving of the RPG label games these days are VNs, not MMOs or JRPGs. Old 3d isometric Fallout and Baldur Gates where even better.
Comments
Lesson learned was just because something is possible doesn't mean it is a good idea, bringing a few of my dps friends along next time.
It was great practice for me however as some of the boss fights took 10 or more minutes (seemed like hours at times) which let me work on muscle memory switching between bars and rotating between attacks, self heals, damage shields all while keeping my sustain up on mana and stamina.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
My Magicka DPS/Healer can zoom through Fungal Grotto 1 very, very fast... but then that's with 900+ CP
I used to farm it solo for the Viper Stamina DPS set when that used to be good - I still have an all golden set of that kicking around somewhere in one of my storage chests. Who knows? With all their never ending nerf/buff cycles to set gear it may be a good set again sometime lol.
Kudos to you for having the patience to solo one with a slow ass tank build though.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
People are always saying tank builds are horribly slow to level and more than one person has said they have a high level tank but avoid playing them these days.
Fortunately I've never played any other build so I guess I don't know what I'm missing other than my two Magika DPS friends level their CP far more with far less play time in game.
When tanking 4 mans with others I wear two gold sets, Beekeeper / Thunderbug (still need to get one more BK gold ring, but they are damn expensive to upgrade or buy) Gives me about 50K HPs when using purple tri-food.
When soloing including last night I wear the gold Thunderbug along with a purple Jolt set, not sure if it was much better than my main build but I was going for the extra shield slam damage / resists the latter set provides. This provides about 45K HP, which is more than fine in normal questing.
It's the best gear I've managed to collect, buy or upgrade considering I've never run a veteran level or trial yet.
I'm a little over CP400 at this point putting most of my Warfare / Fitness points into skills the guides tell me are good for keeping tanks alive.
I've spec'd to do some self healing with Dragons blood plus I have two or three damage resists including balance so I'm big on defense / quick recovery, but a bit light on stamina.
Unfortunately our "trio" doesn't really have a dedicated healer (we won't run with randos) though one has spec'd her second bar for it and having just reached CP 160 yesterday and now collecting purple sets she should be more effective going forward.
I keep trying to interest @Torval to play with us on his healer but he's a bit of a gad-about so isn't able to stick with ESO for too long. (Or he just knows better to avoid us)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Seeing as a good number of MMORPGs largely accommodate that these days, they aren't mistaken. Being enamoured with the past doesn't negate the tendency for it to be past for the most part. People that can't accept MMORPGs have changed over time and characterize newer ones as something else due to that are essentially in denial.
Both types of games can do well but I like a good story and being part of it.
I'm not expecting a simulated game masters with real choices that realy affect the world, more a linear story that is the contrary of the choose your own adventure book effect I expect from a pen and paper or good computer rpg. In short a mmorpg is not an rpg, it just catches some mood like sci-fi or fantasy world and the simplest of rpg mecanics: kill get xp. It's probably because I started with pen and paper rpg and don't have the same view of what a rpg is suposed to be. Role playing evolution vs xp for dices rolls.
The more deserving of the RPG label games these days are VNs, not MMOs or JRPGs. Old 3d isometric Fallout and Baldur Gates where even better.
Personally, I embrace diversity and the unexpected that comes with an open world game.