5 Logical Rebuttals To Illogical Criticisms Of Elder Scrolls Online

1. "It's Watered-Down And Not Immersive" - You're Unique Like Everyone Else

There were a number of disgruntled commentors discussing (bickering, really) about how Elder Scrolls Online isn't immersive. That is to say, you won't be able to lose yourself in the game and waste hours in a world you could swear was real. While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, most beta-testers seemed to be totally absorbed in the world. Here are a few things detractors were complaining about. The removal of the patented "Kill Cams". That's the colloquial term for the dynamic camera that rotates around your character in slow motion while you commit a spectacularly animated murder. It first showed up in Bethesda's Fallout series, and then quietly migrated to Skyrim in a patch after the game was released. Also, they were pretty sweet. Fans everywhere were excited when they heard that this feature would make the jump to ESO. However, players were disheartened at their apparent absence from the beta. There's no hard evidence one way or the other whether or not the Kill Cam actually made it into ESO, but they certainly didn't happen for me or any other players.

This is one of the things that players are griping about. In regards to immersion, it's hard to understand how Kill Cams enhanced that. If anything, the abrupt camera change and slow-motion effect made you more aware that you were playing a video game, not less. Maybe they'll eventually show up in some form in ESO, but the fact that people are saying that a Tarantino-style action-shot improves realism is counter-intuitive. Another complaint was regarding the way the actual plot unfolded. Basically, when you start out, a disembodied voice guides you through the starting area and sends you on your journey, claiming that you are "special". That's all well and good, but he's doing the same thing with every other player in the game. Critics feel that you lose that sense of "uniqueness" if each player is destined to save the world, and that's understandable, but they're missing a crucial point. It's just the nature of the MMO beast. You have to subscribe to it (literally and figuratively). Yes, you're going to run into NPCs that say things like "You're the first person to come here in a thousand years!" as a group of twenty other players skitter in and out of your screen, but that's how MMOs are. People that go to Broadway musicals suspend their own reality long enough in order to believe that the characters on stage really do burst into song at the drop of a hat - it's the same thing with MMOs. You have to remember that while your character is "special", every other player is too. There's really no other effective way to develop an MMO short of hammering out ten or twenty different narratives and assigning them randomly to players. People were also complaining that the undergarments for the female characters were too modest.

I've got nothing to say to those people. Thanks a lot for reading. Hopefully this provided some good information about this game, or at least enough information to clarify some complaints that you may have been reading on the web. Is ESO is a perfect game? Maybe, maybe not. The fact is that it's not even released yet, so we'll all have to wait and see. But remember, if you want Elder Scrolls VI or Skyrim II, you won't find it here. What you will find is a fun atmosphere, a beautiful environment, and an Elder Scrolls experience that is new enough to be exciting, and familiar enough to be nostalgic about.