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just about every player i saw had a companion following them and eventually i thought, should probably look into that, so i did her quest and now this is my new catwife Ember. she's impatient and you lose rapport with her if you go fishing, so i'm eagerly waiting for them to add another Khajiit companion 'cause if i gotta choose between the two well there's plenty of fish in the sea if you know what i'm saying yup i tell you what..

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back off budy

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absolutely everything in this game inexplicably takes place within the same year due to Simpsons rules and letting people do whatever whenever, which already makes the timeline enough of a mess. but "twice in a month" when the first time was only a couple quests ago... i guess even if in the game's world it only seemed like a day or two that's still technically within a month. but i've done enough complaining about the timeline, there are more pressing issues at hand such as my favorite catguy Razum-dar fast approaching his deathbed due to Khajiit years evidently being an hour long

i have hit my favorite point in playing any MMO, and to a lesser extent most RPGs where i start to obsess over game rules and what i consider fun/fair for me. this is an Elder Scrolls game which means any question from someone looking to start playing it will be met with most people saying to mod it, at least to some extent. with a singleplayer game there's more of a choice, not just in terms of what mods you use but if you even use mods. because two people playing Skyrim are expected to be having somewhat different experiences, in large part from how they choose to customize their own game. but two people playing ESO are both just playing the video game The Elder Scrolls Online Designed By ZeniMax Online Studios. there's a level playing field they have to keep because of leaderboards and PvP (and microtransactions), so obviously add-on capabilities are much more limited, and paradoxically this results in less choice in whether you use them

when the sky isn't the limit with modding and you're constantly being shown other players' progress (if not having to compete against them outright), "vanilla" turns into "suboptimal". i complain about this game's handholding already, but the add-ons increase it tenfold. added menus to minmax every aspect of your inventory/skills/crafting, on-screen notifications that tell you exactly what to do in combat and when to do it, map overlays that show you locations of every possible collectible/resource, etc etc. and if you're a top-level epic raider PvP esports guywhatever you are pretty much expected to use all these things that turn the game into not even a game at all and actually just a data entry job

if the majority of a playerbase uses these add-ons (they do) then that essentially becomes what the game is - what the video game The Elder Scrolls Online Designed By ZeniMax Online Studios is. things get designed and balanced around the capabilities those add-ons bring; this game apparently has a big problem with combat mechanic cues, which the developers don't care about improving because "everyone uses the add-ons anyway". i played RuneScape and you are the big fool of the hour if you don't use the RuneLite client to make the game as mind-numbingly, existentially boring (but efficient!) as possible, so much so that the most powerful and widely-used add-ons get implemented into the official client

so i engage in my patented OCD-brooding over this for a while before remembering i'm playing this game despite it being an MMO. hell the second the game starts telling me that to progress further i gotta do some multiplayer dungeons where i have to look up the mechanics and spoil everything for myself beforehand or else i'll get yelled at, i am extremely out. the only people who would ever see or have the chance to care about my progress anyway are whoever stumbles across this website, and here i also have the opportunity to spell out the game i'm playing, not what all the other players around me are playing. and i think for now, what i want the game i'm playing to be, is a little more immersive, and less handholdy. i'm going to try turning off quest markers for a while because i think it would be more fun :) and knowing that i'm about to be told exactly where to go anyway makes me less attentive to dialogue

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Man. well that'll have to do i'm not gonna open an Add-on Door just for this and then suddenly i'm downloading every "immersion" add-on i can find. i don't wanna design a game!! i wanna play one. oh and they still show on the map, you can't turn that off. whatever then lmao ignore the last paragraph

right after this i did a quest where a guy was in danger of being killed but wouldn't leave without his wedding ring. you can offer to help find it, you don't have to, so it'll be a nice extra challenge i thought. quest marker appeared on top of a basket right next to him. i'll say it again - Man

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finally some damn Gaming around here

there's a card game inside the game. i mostly started it so the NPCs in big cities would stop yelling at me about it when i walk past. every RPG should have a card game, and the more the focus is on collecting cards rather than actually playing the better. unfortunately this one looks like they want you to play it, and playing it looks like this. a shame!

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i guess it's cool. it's definitely the most confusing RPG card game i've played which got annoying when i couldn't figure out why i kept losing but needed a win to complete the quest

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there's that mention of my "fellow adventurers" ok i'm sufficiently immersed now

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the years have come for him, and the years have a bow

i wonder about how often i have opinions about this game that begin with "for an MMO," especially with how often i'm finding myself thinking about how much i'd like to be playing a singleplayer Elder Scrolls game. why am i still on here instead? i think i just like posting about it on my little website. anyway i say this because i've been doing a lot of sidequests and i will say that, for an MMO, the sidequests are very good and cool. this is the only MMO i've played where the sidequests don't feel like they're only there to help me level up. of course this is just because of the story and setpieces, the game side of things definitely wants to speed me along by telling me exactly what to do, which is why i say the sidequests are good, for an MMO

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i don't think i've done any actual dungeons yet. there are "delves" which are like sort-of almost-dungeons? i don't know what the proper dungeons are like (hoping they're not but still expecting them to be more like WoW/FFXIV dungeons (bad)) so i don't know how different delves are. i can just kinda enter them, un-instanced, other players can come and go, no complex mechanics. there's some story littered about with journal pages, etc. each one is mostly a bunch of rooms and hallways with the same enemies, a skyshard, a sidequest and a boss

it's the boss that makes delves seem weird structurally because it's not really presented like, this is the end of the delve and this is the boss i fight before i leave, because there's not a clear progression path through the area, but you get an achievement for killing the boss - "clearing" the delve. and because other players are just around i can very possibly make it to the boss room and not know it's the boss room. because there's no boss. because other players killed it. i've also encountered rooms i thought were the boss room, and that the boss had already been killed, so i hung out for a while waiting for it to respawn. but it was actually just a big empty room

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noo don't call the guard we thought it said Ember's House haha honest

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shame this game has a trimmed-down dialogue system because i'd definitely have the INT not to ask such a stupid question