ESO:ZOS, good or bad?

Posted by ZOE on May 8th, 2024

I made the same warning when they first announced that for last year. That they were just finding a way of spinning less content as a positive for the players. You don't ask all the level designers, texture artists, quest writers, encounter teams etc to stop doing their jobs and focus on QoL systems and bug fixes for half a year instead. That's not how it works. And now here we are the following year with no Q3 dungeons, and no Q4 zone again, without any changes to ESO+ pricing.

The team got smaller, and that's fine. ZOS have a new MMO they needed to shift people onto. That's all fine. It's just a shame that they spin it this way, and an even bigger shame when people buy the lies.

It was the main complain of the player base for many years that ZoS had this year-long-story cycle and didnt focus enough on QoL updates. Now they are doing exactly that by slowing down the story content and dedicating time to base game updates. Yet people still find a way to complain.

Necrom was the best expansion in years, which finally helped to recover many of those players who left during the High Isle disaster. Also making Infinite Archive free was a huge unexpected move by a company selling pixel houses for 100 Euro+

I gave ZoS a lot of s*it for their decisions over they years and I will keep calling them out for their bs, but this change makes sense and is a move in the right direction.

Also in the live stream you could clearly hear between the lines that ESO is a huge cash cow for them. They were super excited about that. Obviously they gonna keep working on it for the forseeable future.

High Isle was basically the low point where the most players left the game. The story was dull and predictable (they kinda used the same formula from past expansions), people didnt like the card game as the main feature etc. Many social guild chats became a wasteland.

That's all anecdotal though. You can look at steam chart numbers. Necrom and High Isle have been pretty similar in concurrent players. With the Necrom chapter actually going lower than last years bottoms. In fact the real lowest point, was August of 2023, when we had a QOL update instead of real new content.

Their team is pretty barebones if you take a look at the patch notes, as well as forum responses. Gina disappeared, so it's only Kevin doing all the community management on the forums now, and the patch notes for last years Q3 update were 30 pages worth of quest dialogue fixes, quest animation timings, quest markers, and rare quest event soft locks. Notice how everything is just quest-related instead of bugs that have been plaguing the game for years. So players usually can't get enough ESO Gold they need. If it's the same this year, then I would guess they're only having their quest team work on the Q3 update while their other teams can focus on a Q4 and Q1 update.

It sucks they're hiding the shift to less content per year, but when comparing this year's dungeons to previous years, and the IA to VH, the jump in quality for those I would say is worth it over having those teams work on another generic DLC zone to finish a story and 2 extra DLC dungeons for Q3 and Q4.

I wouldn’t even go as far as to outright accuse ZOS of doing this, I’m just pointing out that I’ve seen similar patterns with other games and that it’s a red flag to me.

One MMO I played used to have weekly updates in the early-mid 00s, then started doing patch only weeks, then eventually they started substituting in temporary events with boosted exp and other FOMO rather than content updates, and then eventually it got to a point where the new microtransactions and loot box seasons WERE your “updates” rather than actual content which was now once in a blue moon.

And not just that, but the initial patch weeks were genuinely very well received by the players since they had addressed many longtime complaints + had long requested QoL but then eventually devolved into more inconsequential and arbitrary things