I figured that for this Friday, I'd like to highlight some art from The Elder Scrolls Online. ESO builds upon the lore from The Elder Scrolls video game series into an MMO in its own right, and over the past decade Zenimax has figured out how to keep the game alive after its own disastrous rollout back in the day.*
Almost all of this art comes from loading screens for the game, which works well in highlighting the style the game intents to evoke.
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| Can't have an ESO game without a dragon making an appearance somewhere. |
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| The character models look so much better than even the Skyrim days. |
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| This is all of the major NPCs --minus the faction leads-- in the original game. |
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| If you've ever seen the Morrowind expansion trailer, you recognize these two. Of course, the Dunmer is everybody's favorite Morag Tong agent, Naryu. |
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| These login screens always inspire me. |
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| The loading screen between zones when you fast travel have a quick overview, but I'm here for the scenery. |
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| Unlike World of Warcraft --and I'm including Warlords of Draenor here-- ESO has gone all in on housing. It's actually quite nice, as similar to SWTOR there's a variety of houses to select all across Tamriel. |
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| In my wandering around today, I stumbled across this quest area that I'd never seen before. Boy, was I out of practice on playing. |
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| These three NPCs are found in the original trailers for The Elder Scrolls Online. The Aldmeri makes an appearance in the Summerset trailer, and I think the Daggerfall Covenant rogue shows up in another of the trailers. (Can't remember which; maybe it was Elsweyr?) |
*This seems to be a trend about MMOs that came out after WoW. Even WoW didn't have the greatest original launch, people who played back then are fond of reminding me, but still a disastrous launch is very difficult to overcome if you don't have any buildup of goodwill from potential players.
EtA: Corrected spelling.
It seems to have been forgotten - indeed, until you mentined the WoW launch just then I'd been in danger of forgetting it myself, but for a very long time MMORPGs were *expected* to have really bad launches. The advice for everyone but the truly obsessed was usually to leave it at least a couple of months before jumping in, just to give the devs time to get the servers stable and squash the really game-breaking bugs no-one noticed in beta. Even then, the game would still be expected to be rough for anything up to six months or more before things settled down.
ReplyDeleteWhen MMORPGs were seen as places you might be spending the next several years, that didn't seem too bad. I think it must have been later, maybe around the time of the three-monther, that having a bad launch became harder to recover from. If people are only expecting to stay for a few months you can't really take a few months to get the game into a playable state. Now that three months has dropped to maybe three weeks if the game goes really well, games need to be pretty slick on arrival. That they rarely are explains why so many of them have no players left after a month or so.
I might have to turn this into a post sometime...
I do believe that part of the problem is that MMOs are trying to stay ahead of the rat race of people burning through content to get to the end "when the game starts to be played". In order to stay ahead, they need a good launch experience, and in order to have that they need extended beta periods. But those beta periods mean there are guides out on YouTube before launch, so everybody knows the most efficient way to play to "get to the end", and so the cycle continues.
DeleteThe last time I played it few years ago, I was really amazed by the graphical fidelity of ESO. The art direction was good too, with a lit of thought obviously going into little details like what types of plants are found in different areas. I have always wanted to start a side project where I publish a field guide to mobs in some MMO, written to look as much as possible like entries from Reader's Digest guide to the birds of North America.* ESO would be a great game to do that with (that or maybe the original EQ).
ReplyDeleteOn bad launches, I think it really depends on how large the audience for a game is as far as how much that cripples you. For example, if you are aiming for a niche audience, as are most new MMO releases, you will only get one shot at them. On the other hand, if your likely audience is huge, you can actually turn things around within the first year and still end up very successful. ESO, FFXIV and Cyberpunk 2077 are all good examples. They fell flat on their faces at launch, but there were still enough people left and willing to try them once they turned the corner, and good word of mouth from those players and gaming news outlets got most of the folks that left at launch back eventually.
*It's not great for actually using out in the field, but apart from that probably the best species level general audience reference on any group that I am aware of.
ESO would be ideal for a Petersen's Field Guide type of guide, and another thing about ESO that Zenimax did extremely well was the level scaling. The mobs aren't too hard, but you have to respect them, no matter the level you are.
DeleteThe bad part of niche MMO designs is that the developers are hoping for just enough whales to keep them going, but that's a bad design for long term viability.
As for Cyberpunk 2077, I was so bummed to see it's First Person only. Given that First Person gets me motion sick, it's a shame I can't play it now that the game is where it should have been at launch.