Rants tag

Rants, ruminations, and rambling remarks from my mad, muddled, meandering mind.

Monday, March 31, 2014

QOTD: So Much For Playing Together

This is one of the few confusing points, in that characters can live in multiple guilds… but functionally you can only group with your own faction.
~Belghast, The Dragon Knight Comes
What a complete waste. Long-time readers will know that I am against factionalism and other things that prevent players from playing the kinds of characters they want with the people they choose. Fragmenting the playerbase is so last decade. So when games like GW2 are managing to have guilds span across servers, Zenimax can't even figure out how to get players of different factions playing together, unless it's against each other, even while paying lip service to cross-faction guilds.

This may not affect those who preordered. They can choose any playable race to be in any faction. But those who come along later will be shut out of that option. I'll stick with TSW; where, in contrast, player characters intermingle freely everywhere but faction HQs, and cabals are just about the last bastion of faction exclusivity.
~~~
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9 comments:

  1. Though I don't remember off the top of my head when, at some point in your leveling you can open up the second faction, and when you cap at 50 you can open the third.

    I am completely on your side of the fence, I am not a fan of artificial restrictions. Just pointing out that in this case, those restrictions are at least temporary rather than permanent in nature.

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    1. That's better than nothing. But how much better depends on how long they expect people to be leveling and not maxed out. Of course, there will be quite a few players with at least one max-level character before the end of the head start, complaining hat there wasn't enough content in the game.

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  2. My understanding is that you don't actually play with the other faction though -- what happens is that at 50 you unlock the ability to play in scaled up versions of the other factions' zones, and begin earning "veteran levels." This doesn't allow you to group with opposing faction people just opens up more landmass for you to play in as you continue your horizontal progression. Of course, I'm only level 11 now, so I'm going solely on what I've read from people who were in the full beta.

    My day 1 post: http://nomadicgamer.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/eso-elder-scrolls-online-early-launch-day-1/

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    1. Thanks for the link. I wish Blogger would auto-link stuff. I think has something to to do with their spam prevention.

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    2. I wish it would do that, too. However, though not so convenient (yet very oldschool), html is supposed to work, if you have it enabled. Let's test:
      http://nomadicgamer.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/eso-elder-scrolls-online-early-launch-day-1. :)

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    3. Ahh, so it's up to the commenter to write the code, then. Hmm.

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  3. I hate faction-divided worlds with a passion. In some older games, they managed to add to the experience (Dark Age of Camelot, early World of Warcraft). Over time, however, they have more and more detracted from new MMOs. If you are going to only have a handful of races then why limit each to specific factions and specific content, forcing me to make a pre-gaming decision on which faction to join?

    I can handle faction-based conflict but unless your game is about all out world PvP, let's leave faction-based conflict in the zones where it matters.

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    1. I don't really mind stuff in the style of Rift's "Faction as Fiction" wherein the guards of an opposing faction capital may not like me, but I can freely interact with merchants and of course other players out in the world. TSW is like this, too. Even better, IMO, are worlds like GW2, where there is no restriction on travel, and yet they seem to have a thriving PvP system, using small teams and server competitions.

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  4. The faction thing was something that disappointed me in ESO as well. It just puts restrictions on the social aspect, on who to play with. Tehre will always be some friends who prefer another faction and spend most of their time there. It already annoys me a bit in SWTOR, and there's only two factions there (which you can't really get around, lore-wise).

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