I recall reading that Tarisland is being built by a team in China after they kicked World of Warcraft out of the country. And it’s apparently coming to the West soon.
Ten classes – pretty much the standard ones you’d expect based on Wow and other popular MMOs.
Classes follow the Holy Trinity. Healer, Tank and DPS, as you would expect.
The Art style is reminiscent of Everquest Next.
The game seems to check all the boxes for gameplay types. But lacks any rich character customization and the classes are gender and race locked, which is odd for a game in this decade.
I’ve made a short video of the website and character creation here:
Video of Website, gameplay trailer and char creation
In Elder Scrolls Online, there are three Gear Set Buffs, that I know of, that provide a colorful signal around your character that you are carrying the buff. These buffs provide a wide area buff to many of the group members around you.
Notice the buff that is listed when Five items from that set are equipped.
What the note does not say is that each buff is signaled by three colored orbs floating around you. Red for Ebon Armor, Blue for Worm Cult and Green for Hircine’s Veneer.
Each of these sets are dropped in a different dungeon. Check out these pages for a description of the items and where to get them:
Harvesting in Elder Scrolls Online is a pain without help from a plug-in. There are a few problems.
There is no way to see the nodes until you are on top of them. You literately have to be within a meter of the node and pointing at it with your cursor to see it. The Keen Eye passives from crafting skills mitigate this problem somewhat.
There is no Mini-Map built into the game, and if you use a mini-map AddOn, it does not show nodes either. Unless you use another Add On.
So HarvestMap Add On to the rescue. And it’s great, but it’s confusing to get started which is why I wrote this post. You can find the HarvestMap Add On here. I’m assuming that you know how to install Add Ons in ESO. If not there are lots of folks that will show you how.
In all other MMO games I’ve played, glamour allows many options to “Show Some Leg”, but in ESO, it’s not an easy option. I’ve played for a while now and there are no glamour options for short-shorts. There are whole costumes, for example, the Nordic Bather’s Towel, but that is of limited usefulness. There are some other outfits, but none that look like Armor. Here’s one outfit from the Crown Store – Still no Leg really.
Guild Wars 2 has recently released a chapter called “What Lies Beneath” in the End of Dragons Expansion. I decided to start to play through the chapter and later join on another character with my friend so that we could play though. All went well for a couple of story segments and I reached a new area of the map.
Here you can see where the new map zones are and you can see that my character is max level [which is required for End of Dragons expansion] and you can see that I have a full set of Exotic Armor with the last available Elite Spec for the Guardian class which is WillBender. Which is to say that I’m not new to this game or new to the class.
Within Elder Scrolls Online, fast travel can be expensive. When you use a Wayshrine the price goes up dramatically for a while. And the base price is never all that cheap for a lower level player. The cost scales with level and for a level 20 player is around 80 gold to anywhere in the world to a wayshrine that you have visited before, but as soon as you travel, the cost is about 6 times that for your next trip and the cost begins to count down every second until it reaches that base cost. However, there are free ways to travel – coaches, wagons and boats.
BenevolentBowd has made a very nice map showing the routes for free travel. However, given the way boat captains and wagon masters talk about their destinations, this map can be confusing. This map reports the destination cities, but leaves out the zones. And the travel vendors report the zones they travel to. I’ve taken BenevolentBowd’s map and added the zone names so that it can be more easily used by the novice adventurer. To use the full size map, right click and “Save Image As” to your hard drive. Enjoy. :ww
However I recently came back, after about 3 years with Final Fantasy XIV, with some Guild Wars 2 along the way and found the experience with ESO very different. I’m sure that I’ve changed, but the ESO game has changed too.
I recall that in 2018, as I started, the quests seemed very disconnected and hard to find. Also, they sent me off to do things that were Killing Me quite often. I did get a starter pack with a nice mount and some other goodies. Not sure if I bought it or if it was a gift.
ESO Economic Model
The ESO economic model is a lot like Guild Wars 2, which is Buy-Cheap-To-Play and then Pay-For-DLC [Download Content] and Cosmetic items in the store.
ESO appears to be Free to Play, with Pay-For-DLC and Cosmetic rewards, and an Optional Subscription with Perks. ESO does not appear to be Pay-To-Win. As I have come back, I find things in my account wide collection – Four Nice Outfits – light, medium and heavy armor and a fancy dress up armor, among other things – that I didn’t think were there four years ago.
Not Dying As Much
As I have returned, quests were never life threatening. At least I have not died all the time. A few times. And one quest even has death as part of the story line. But repair of gear is required not only after death, but after fighting for a while. One of my playing rewards was a stack of repair kits tho. So there is that.
I have a level 8 character, with a companion who is level 2, and we were just in High Isles, a zone from the recent DLC. We came across lots of mobs on the road and as part of quests that had bright red names – as if they were much higher level, but we dispatched them in two’s and three’s with no problem. I’m not sure what the Bright Red Names are meant to signify. Those mobs didn’t seem any stronger than the ones I’ve seen in Summerset for example, which is a “Starter Zone”. Looks like ESO scales so you can deal with any of the zones or quest content that you will see.
A lot more fun
I’m having a lot more fun now with ESO than I did four years ago. This is not a detailed review. Just take this as an advertisement [unpaid of course] to encourage you to go try ESO for yourself if you’re interested in an MMO and haven’t played Elder Scrolls Online in a while or have never played it.
In a few days we are going to get a new feature in Final Fantasy XIV – Island Sanctuaries. These are “Instanced Housing” in the form of a large island for every player. Here’s the FFXIV official page and here’s an article with some details.
How disappointing. I had assumed that they would be available at, oh say, 30 or 50. So I could take my friends who are new to the game and show them my Island Sanctuaries. Or as an alternative activity for my 2 dozen alts. But no. The Island Sanctuaries are locked behind a tall, tall ladder of level 90 and Endwalker. Current housing is locked behind scarcity and high cost in Gil and Island Sanctuaries are “End Game Content” at least now. In a couple of years it won’t seem like End Game any more.
And of course the other obvious question would be why can’t the whole account share the same Island? All the alts could work to progress the same island.
All of my Alts are 50+ and about half have completed Heavenward that’s 3.0. And my friend started more recently and of their half dozen alts they only have a couple beyond Heavensward and one at Endwalker which is 6.0. Are you seeing a theme here?
I played FFXIV on 25 July 2022 from 4:30 – 5:30am in Praetorium Dungeon for Moogle Tomes as part of the event. Later on, shortly after playing, I tried to log into the forums and got the following screen.
I tried both Firefox latest of that date, and Chrome latest of that date and both failed the same way. I am running an updated Windows release. And clearly FFXIV was updated as I started to play.
Not sure what the problem is but I can’t access the forums.
Windy Weather 