ESO beta

[CJ2311]

Well, here's a couple of beta keys for those willing to waste bandwidth on this game :P

 

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[Octopuss]

If anyone needs a key I have one as well.

[Nearox]

Been playing for the last hour. After all the opinions I read before on sites like metacritic... My first impression is that I am suprsisingly impressed by ESO. Graphics seem decent for an MMO. 

 

Don't forget to turn on Ambien Occlusion in the options (default is off) otherwise it'll look much worse!

[torminater]

Yeah it seems a lot better than I had imagined it, but I've never before played a MMO :D

[Nearox]

Yeah, the only thing that bothered me was the shimmering of the foilage... The architecture suffers little aliasing but the grass and trees... I hope they do something about that, or have transparency and/or temporal AA support in the future.

[Neovalen]

Yeah, the only thing that bothered me was the shimmering of the foilage... The architecture suffers little aliasing but the grass and trees... I hope they do something about that, or have transparency and/or temporal AA support in the future.

Did you try forcing it in the driver? My copy for this weekend is still downloading.

[Nearox]

Did you try forcing it in the driver? My copy for this weekend is still downloading.

 

I didn't yet, because AMD's version of Temporal AA, "morphological AA", is generally terrible. I did try forcing transparency AA via drivers, which gave some improvement but it didn't solve the shimmering issue when moving. 

 

After a while I can live with the shimmering that is observable in most games, so I guess I'll get used to this one as well. Then again I play at 1680x1050 so there's generally more aliasing there anyways.

 

I'm sure with your cards you can easily force 4x SSAA and get rid of everything. ESO is surprisingly lightweight on GPUs (or well on my GPU at least). Putting everything at Ultra, I get more FPS with ESO than I used to with WoW at Ultra...

Edited March 1, 2014 by Nearox

[Nearox]

Well after playing it a couple of hours this weekend, all I can say is that I've completely overcome my huge skepticism towards elder scrolls in MMO format. All previous MMOs I played I unsubscribed within 1 months, except WoW which I played for 2.5 years. I am extremely surprised and impressed with ESO beta.

I started all 3 alliance areas and then completed the quests to explore their next areas(lvl 5+). While the starer areas were nice, the follow ups were almost unbelievably good to me. Especially arriving in Stonefalls I was literally shocked. There is an incredible amount of visual detail in the game. The engine is extremely smooth. I was playing at Ultra, see specs in my sig, and I had no hiccups whatsoever even though there were often at least 20-30 other players in my screen. Honestly, for an MMO is the most immersive visual impression I've ever had. 

Gameplay-wise, I played some pvp at lvl 10+. It is refreshing to only have 5 abilities + quick slot + ultimate ability at your disposal. Also nice having to dodge incoming attacks and that a visual range zone is indicated where an archer or mage is going to land the spell so you can avoid it. Even ehaling is based on pointing your staff and/or spell at the person. There is no selection of other NPCs, or anything in the UI really. The controls are much like Skyrim and not like WoW.

The professions have rather different mechanics than what we're used to from MMOs and to research new recipes is based on chance and real time (some things take like e.g. 6 hours to research) instead of grinding. You can join 5 different guilds, all with different end goals and trading possibilities. 

Lore and quest-wise, I have yet to encounter a quest which simply said go kill 10 boars. Perhaps later in the game they might become more gridny, idk, I find it hard to believe they can keep interesting quests going for such a long time. 

At the moment the only major criticism I have is that the UI is not informative enough, but there are already addons out which attempt to fix that.

Now I'm jsut asking myself: Am I really going to sink time in another MMO after being disappointed with so many of them (SWTOR in particular)? Hell yeah. 

Edited March 3, 2014 by Nearox

[torminater]

I enjoyed playing eso too much. I'll promised myself i would never play a mmorpg. I hope I can resist...

I've never played anything like that before, and many things, especially concerning crafting felt really odd. I didn't understand half or more of those things. I would need at least a week playing and that might be enough that I get addicted. :D

[PlanetExp]

It looks like it plays 100% like a WoW clone. Everything up to the minimap quest markers looks the same. Never been fan of the WoW play style. It's fun until it becomes a chore you have to do 8 hours a day to keep up with clan members. Very skeptical of this.

[Nearox]

It has some of the basics of WoW, but in most respects it is not like Wow at all... There is no minimap in the UI, there's only the compass which functions nearly identical to the SKyrim compass. 

 

I don't want to start an argument about the merits of ESO vs WoW though. To me personally, ESO is refreshing and of a largely different style than WoW. As long as you confine the observation to genre then you cannot come to another conclusion. Many people expect something completely novel, yet forget that within every genre the novelty of a new game is to be found in the minor differences. A First Person Shooter is still a FPS. Same with an MMO.