Can't really tell before we see the real endgame. It's all speculation till that point. It does have that genuine TES combat system and very lore-rich world. It also seems to hype the faction vs faction vs faction mass pvp.

 

For me it all depends on the cashshop, if this shit is pay to win I'm not gonna bother.

 

Funny enough, I only got the freeze twice, and both times I was in the middle of nowhere. I did not have to /reloadui at all, but I didn't get to put in more than about 3 hours any of the days this time. Damn you, recreational sports. How dare you interfere with my blerching.

 

I feel the need to point out that this isn't a plus. The shoddy combat has always been the worst aspect of TES games. It was fine for Daggerfall and Arena, because that was back in the Quake Era of gaming, but translating it into 3D has always been the biggest stumbling block of the series. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim all have a bad combat system. There's functionally no skill involved, and we're well beyond the first-person quasi-turn-based combat of the originals, so it's not excusable on the grounds of being an RPG. We should have counter attacks, parrying, interrupts, and limb damage by now, but we don't, because Bethesda was really lazy. That's part of the reason I'm so looking forward to Kingdom Come: Deliverance. At the very least, we should have something approximating Dragon's Dogma, or even Monster Hunter, and yet we don't. It's just poking monsters with LARP swords or stunlock training them with magic.

The combat system is one of the few things in the series that needs to be massively overhauled. Retaining it in an MMO setting is a minus, not a plus.

 

Eh. It's old, I'll give you that. Simple, too. It can get boring, but it can also be interesting. Preferences, yo.

Also, no Visa Electron payment option. Fuck.

 

It can be interesting for mages, in theory, because they have different powers that are useful in a variety of tactical situations, in theory. The melee combat, though, is not the slightest bit entertaining or interesting, and I don't see how it could be. The only difference between Skyrim sword swings and Minecraft sword swings is that your arm has three different animations when you flail your weapon around instead of one, and you have a charge attack.

Morrowind at least had different types of attacks, but they were shoddily executed and poorly implemented into the actual combat system. Nobody moved directions in combat just to get a specific type of swing out, especially since the only difference in those swings was the amount of damage they dealt that was listed on the weapon card. It was even more useless since bare basic vanilla literally gave you an option to just have weapons auto-default to the type of attack that dealt the most damage (i.e. spears always stab, claymores always swing, ect). At least if they hadn't had that you would have been forced to adapt to the shitty system by using different footwork for different weapon types, but no. Even the developers were like "yeah, this is a shit idea" when they put it in, and it was dropped entirely from all future games.

The method of fighting that we have is not inherently flawed. It's fine for a Doom Roguelike or other simple hack and slash dungeon crawler, which is what The Elder Scrolls originally was. The problem is that we're still fundamentally here even though we're all the way up to motherfucking Skyrim and the goddamn spin-off MMO. We don't have combos. We don't have dedicated powers. We don't have concrete advantages or disadvantages to using certain weapons in certain situations. You can sneak attack with any weapon, power attack with any weapon, ect. The only differences between weapons besides the damage they deal per swing is how fast they can be swung and how long their reach is. Maybe people really wanted spears in Skyrim, and I was, and still am, among those people, but I'll cheerfully admit to you that spears would have completely broken the game, because even if their thrusts were slow as fuck, their reach would have let you utterly dominate, because there's absolutely nothing in the game besides fireballs and lightning bolts that could compete with it. Skyrim would have turned into pre-nerf Dark Souls, with everybody running around cheesing the game with electrified washing poles.

You want the list of games that did combat better than Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind, and are all in the same genre? Dragon's Dogma did combat better than The Elder Scrolls. Dragon Age did combat better than The Elder Scrolls. Dragon Age 2 did combat better than The Elder Scrolls, and as I've noted in the past, DA2 combat got boring and repetitive after around the hour three mark. Motherfucking Kingdoms of Alamur: Reckoning did combat better than The Elder Scrolls. You know, that game that's owned by the state of Rhode Island because of how shitty it did. That one.

In this day and age, Skyrim has no excuse. They handed out entire perk trees, and yet half that shit is just flat "invest in this to increase your damage, efficiency, or effectiveness with these by a fixed percentage," which is an utter waste of time, space, and effort. Putting in perks like that is just lazy. They could have just as easily had the damage adjustment scale to your level and only handed out a perk once every other level, for all the depth it added to the choices you could make.

They don't have to go Devil May Cry/10, but at this point, after everything that has gone before and all the material they have to draw from, there's no reason for them not to at least be able to make the melee combat interesting or immersive. Radically cutting down on the variety of weapons that can be found and used over the course of the games hasn't done them any favors either, and killcams are a useless shiny widget that can only distract the CoDbabby crowd.

Being able to independently control what goes into your hands (i.e. "dual wielding") is literally the only step in the right direction the entire franchise has taken in regards to combat since the games became 3d. And that's sad.

 

I do agree with most of what you're saying, except that Kingdoms of Amalur was in my opinion a good, not great, but good, game. Especially the combat!

They're trying to make the combat system more interesting with skills. The melee skills I got in the beta... they did make the combat more fun. Definitely more engaging than in Skyrim.

I won't blame you for criticizing the combat system, but a lot of people find it at least okay, myself included.

 

Kingdoms of Amalur was awesome. The problem was that they decided to put 1.75 games into a single game, and then sold it for the price of a single game, thereby putting them into massive debt. That shit should have ended at the Siege. Arguably earlier. It is a solid fantasy RPG that is too goddamn long. It actually has too much content. Way, way too much. Trying a completion run is like taking a nailgun to your own genitals, and that's coming from the person who logged over 120+ hours in a totalist Mass Effect 1 run that included looping a New Game Plus three times to attempt every choice option and watch Jenkins die at level sixty to a single drone shot, as well as finding every mineral deposit on every planet. Yes. All of them. That's almost five times more than you need for the survey mission. I did that three times, once for each run.

It's too big. It's too big. Holy shit it is too biiiiiiig.

There were problems with it. People that are walking being almost impossible to assassinate, stealth killing being completely impossible if an enemy is sitting down or god forbid sleeping in a bed, the monsters being repetitive in spite of covering such a vast amount of ground and habitats. And four slots for powers is not NEARLY enough. It's skimping if you're doing a purist build. God help you if you're trying to multiclass, and people interested in trying the Universalist path are basically told to go fuck themselves at level five. Swiping the Dragon's Dogma trick of having two shift keys that grant control over a total of three four-slotted wheels would have improved the overall Kingdoms combat experience by an entire order of magnitude.

That said, it's fun. Definitely more than worth what you could probably pick it up for. The melee and magic combat is solid, entertaining, and tactical enough to keep things interesting, especially if you restrain yourself from nuking the holy hell out of everything with the Magic end tree AoEs.

 

You just convinced me to buy Kingdoms of Amalur. Well, you and a couple of Let's Plays I watched recently.

My one complaint based on what I've seen so far is that it only has the illusion of an open world, when in fact it's more like a massive tangle of linear paths.

 

After watching this video, I can't help but have my overall opinion changed on this game. The PvP alone could support the game if enough people get past the slow start and get to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I82pz60iGL0

 

I know right, I don't really have much experience when it comes to PvP but, man, it was a fucking blast. If I'd had any doubts about purchasing the game they were gone when I was running around Cyrodil.

 

Lord Raine your the only TES Lore bloke I know, what the hell was C0da. I have no idea what the hell I just read.

 

That video made me dizzy. The narrator kept moving his head and hands a lot.

Anyway, I do agree with the reviewer that the massive world pvp is like Guild Wars 2, requiring strategy, coordination and situation awareness ... but imo, the actual combat is still lacking. I wish they tell you what the range of your attacks are and how close you are from a target. I wasted time missing and waiting for the animation to finish before I could hit again. In pve, not that devastating, but in pvp, ugh ...

 

Visceral vs Stimulating

M&B's combat for me, or Chivalry or whatever- that's visceral. It's fun to deflect attacks and play mindgames with players and stuff. It's simple, intuitive and fluid.

Path of Exile's combat for me, or FFT, or whatever- that's stimulating. It's fun to play with numbers and items and equipment and mechanics and build something that shreds things. It's fun to navigate a web of options and make strategic/tactical decisions in combat over a slower period of time.

TES has never really had either. But I don't think either approach is wrong. Too many games are visceral, so it'd be ncie if TESVI had more stimulating combat-- but it's likely they will dumb it down only further and make it into a visceral action game when it'd probably be better suited for something relaxing or just thoughtful.

 

Once the NDA is no longer in effect, I'll probably say more on the endgame, but coming from someone who's been in beta for around 6 months, almost made it to Emperor last beta and has guildies in alpha, which has full access to the game 24/7, I can honestly say that the PvP will definitely carry the game and is incredible.

The problem with all these first impressions videos are that they barely touched the game. It isn't until you get to the main areas, Glenumbra for the Daggerfall Covenant, that the questing become interesting and organic. Once you get there you can start exploring and just randomly find quest, POI's, public dungeons and more. Also the combat significantly improves once you hit levels 10-15, skill set levels 15-20, that you actually have to make decisions in combat.

I've broken my NDA enough for now.

 

Everyone that likes RPGs and fantasy stuff should get it. It's actually a really good game. It's got problems, but they're not game-ruining problems. It's a fantastic first try for a studio that had never made an RPG before.

It didn't die because it sucked. It bombed because they spent entirely too much goddamn money on it. The graphics and textures are a lot nicer than they need to be, and as I said before, the game is bigger than five Xboxes Voltroning together to make a Dimension Fortress Macross. If you count just the main story and ground covered in the map, it's a full game plus another third of a second game, and if we count the goddamn unending avalanche of side quests, it's literally two games worth of content.

This is literally a game where you can fuck off and do nothing but sidequests for an entire week IRL without ever touching anything that even looks like the plot of the game. And depending where you are in the game, that may not even make an appreciable dent in the Library of Congress backlog of sidequests, objectives, and standing tasks that you have.

Shit, I still haven't beaten it, because I'm the kind of psychopath that won't stop trying to do a completionist run even if you, well. Force me to play Kingdoms of Amalur.

They could have spent another five months working on the project and dropped them as a full game and the full, immediate sequel to that game, no problem.

I can list all the problems with the game. Most of them are minor irritations at best. The limit of four powers to your hotkeys is beyond irritating, especially since they give you a massive sixteen slot item wheel that you will literally never use for anything besides the Crystal Flute for that one fucking quest because health and mana pots are already left and right on the D-Pad, and Fateshifting is incredibly cool, but becomes completely obsolete later in the game, and all the Main Quest Twists of Fate give nothing but piddling stuff like +1% to all Physical Damage or +5% XP, when those two problems could have solved each other by the Main Quest Twists upgrading your Fateshift.

Again, these are all minor issues. It's a really good game, and it makes me sad that we'll never see a sequel.

As to your concerns about it being linear, no, not really. The world setup is basically like the newer Legend of Zelda games, with large freeroam areas connected to each other by various paths. It's just that there are like fourty-five to fifty of those areas instead of a more reasonable, less ball-busting number.

Seriously. Very few games make me thankful for fast-travel, but this is one of them.

What did you read? C0da itself, or my giant wall of text about C0da?

 

C0da itself, I understood what was going on until Vivec was fighting the TV people.

 

I should probably read it then, because I have no idea what that's on about.

[EDIT]

They might be from the future. Remember, 8th era.

 

Beta NDA has been lifted, so we can talk freely.

http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/news/post/2014/02/15/the-beta-nda-has-lifted

 

Lord Raine, respectfully, KoA died because it was woefully uninspired. Maybe it's the most amazing game ever made - but I have the patience of Job sometimes when it comes to games, but even I could not make it more than one hour into the game. I got to the first town, received the first "Kill X of Y" quest from a man with a ! over his head, and proceeded to uninstall. The story had no compelling characters at the start, the camera was awkward and made me uncomfortable; none of the mechanics grabbed me. It's cool that you enjoyed the game, but I think you're dangerously overhyping it for people.