The Elder Scrolls Online

By Mystic Mungis
in Gamers' Hangout

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Grand Master

Slugsie

Posted
Posted

Eventually got on, just played for about an hour, and I've been totally drained of what little enthusiasm I had left. Utterly unengaged with the story and the characters. The animations are a joke. Crucial dialogue is quiet and utterly overpowered by background noises. The menu system is confusing. The skill system is confusing.

 

Suffice it to say, I'm out.

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

The game itself looks and plays just fine, I don't see how their skills can be confusing though, they're about as straight forward as you can make them.

 

The graphics are a bit bland though, but thta's typical for realistic graphics. The animations are actually fairly good I'd say. they're not over exaggarated like WoW, but it's a more realistic game anyway, but unlike any NCsoft game for example they actually put some work into them, and the obvious ones like Jumping, has a proper soft landing and you can't jump again untill you have done it, and there's a little bit of a "take" before jumping, but not much, since most peopel expect their player to jump when they hit the button, that part is usually dropped though, even WoW the character just insta jumps. 

 

My biggest gripe with the game is the view though, the force semi FPS offset over shoulder view. it was what ruined SWG when they implemented it there, and it's what ruins this for me. I understand it's a "semi" necessity for this kind of action MMORPG where you actually aim with the mouse, but I don't like it. I prefer a good free camera mouse/tab targetting system MMORPG. 

 

The game as a lot more ambience than other games though, with most of the NPC's around acknowledging your presence as you walk buy and saying hi and such. 

 

And I do like the very powerful character editor allowing you to actually make a unique character. 

 

Suspicius lack of people with wounded knees so far though....

Veteran

Mystic Mungis

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Do you keep your old character from previous betas? I only got to lvl 3 but I cant be bothered to do the tutorial again.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that I read in the e-mail that all characters from the previous beta will be playable. 

 

Not participating this time, mainly because I've got a lot of work to do this weekend and I've been replaying Final Fantasy VIII for the billionth time so what little free time I do get I can't help but play it :P

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

It's a bit weird to stand and listen to the bards who sing and play lute and hear them singing but not move their lips though :p


Yeah, I'm pretty sure that I read in the e-mail that all characters from the previous beta will be playable. 

 

Not participating this time, mainly because I've got a lot of work to do this weekend and I've been replaying Final Fantasy VIII for the billionth time so what little free time I do get I can't help but play it :p

 

yeah, my old characters where there from last beta. 

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

yeah, I said forced first person. 

 

I haven't discovered many bugs, only bugs I really found that annoyed me was having to reloadui after exciting crafting UI a lot. and a annoying one but not hugely bad one where the path durign the assasing hunt don't lead you to the abandoned house. 

 

the game is growing on me though, and after I got off mistral I decided to not play anymore as the progress will be gone and I might be getting the game. 

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

Not really, it's still first person just with the camera offset. I

 w

ouldn't mind it so much if the camera wasn't offset so ridiculouorsly much to the side when zoomed close to the character.

 

but a free camera with proper mouse/tab targetting is better anyway. while the game pretends to play like a Firs person RPG with real targetting it doesn't actually, it doesn't matter where you actually aim as long as the target is still highlighted(i.e. targetted) the attack will hit. 

 

Age of Conan actually uses real targetting better than this game and it doesn't force you into a pretend FPS perspective of using the cemra to target. The game should just use proper targetting not linked to the camera. 

Mentor

+ir0nw0lf Subscriber²

Posted
  • Subscriber²
Posted

The UI freezing issue is probably the biggest issue I ran into.  Having to reload the UI a bajillion times was grating at my nerves.  Mostly after crafting but also after some dialogs/vendors.  They squash that issue and it'll be a bit more stable/sane.  I've always been more crafter-centric in MMOs and the crafting here isn't so bad.  No tools to worry about or tool durability is nice.  Being able to gather all resources without specific gathering skills is nice as well.  I ended up selling a lot of runes and non-metal crafting stuff.  Made a bunch of my own heavy metal armor.  Love the looks of some of the stuff.  No real instructions/tutorials on crafting however made things very confusing.  Last night I heard literally every 30 seconds "How do I smelt iron ore" or similar questions.  Durability was something I didn't realize initally.  Items like weapons with procs on them have a finite amount of charges on them and I think you have to use soul gems to recharge them.  At least I think.  The zoomed out camera angles suck it hard.  The 1st person FOV seems to bite as well. 

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

The more zoomed out you are the more you are behind the character, so at max zoom the camera is mostly directly behind the character, hat view I don't mind so much. I understand the need to offset the camera as you get closer to some degree, but the amount they use is ridiculous, and really annoying. when you have the camera directly behind the character there's a huge distance between the character and cursor. 

 

And I can't stand playing RPG's in first person. 

Grand Master

Slugsie

Posted
Posted

I personally can't stand *not* being in first person. It's disorienting for me, and I have ended up not playing certain games that I would otherwise enjoy simply because they only allow third person (Red Dead Redemption being a prime example). I respect that I'm in the minority here, but I appreciate the choice.

 

As to the animations I found appalling, three instances stick out. First was when the prophet dude (whatever he was called) took me to meet The Five, and they started talking individually I had no idea which was talking because the entire talking animation was just a slight movement of the lips, even when one of them was speaking in a grandiose manner. Then when one was being flung around by Molag, their animation looked like a bad attempt at break dancing. And finally, the one that had me laughing, was when you shoot a deer with an arrow. Every single time they just rise up on their hind legs, then flop down in a manner that would bring a tear to the eye of am-dram actor hamming up a death scene.

 

One other thing that just made the world seem ...odd, in the likes of Oblivion and Skyrim when you see something lying on a table or the floor or whatever you can at least mouse over it and get some info about it, even if actually picking it up instantly brands you a theif. In ESO it's like it isn't there, and makes the world just feel empty. I realise it's a side effect of an MMO, but it breaks the immersion for me.

Grand Master

HawkMan

Posted
Posted

Read dead redemption is not a RPG and plays differently, what you shoot is what you hit, this isn't the case with ESO, ESO plays like WoW but uses the camera/crosshairs as a way to target instead of mouse and tab targeting.

Grand Master

LaP

Posted
Posted

I just don't see myself playing a MMO with a controller.

 

I like Skyrim but it is unplayable with a mouse and keyboard unless you mod the hell out of it. And these days i feel like i'm too old to mod. I just don't have a weekend to waste modding a game because the dev doesn't care about PC gaming. I played SKyrim with a controller and it was ok but it could have been su much better with a proper UI and a mouse.

 

Unless Bethesda steps up its game and make a mouse friendly UI i'll have to skip this game. Skyrim had imo the worst UI ever created in the history of PC gaming.

Grand Master

LaP

Posted
Posted

Skyrim's UI sucked but come on it hardly takes all weekend to install SkyUI :)

 

Dunno i installed it and it did not work out of the box like Morrowind UI mod did. Then i learned i had to install some third party app to improve Skyrim scripting ability for it to work. And then i learned i had to launch the game using a special launcher instead of launching it via Steam. Then i was so frustrated with Bestheada level of failure that i decided to play the game with a controller. It's not like it is an online fps anyway. This is how bethesda wants you to play their games in the end. They spend a lot of time to be sure you do play them with a controller. Anyway personally i'm done with Bethesda on PC i wont ever buy any of their PC game again. They lost me as a customer after Skyrim.

 

[edit] It's not only about the UI tough it's about the ini modifications you have the make in all of their games too. In Skyrim the only way to turn off mouse accel, DoP and radial blur is from the ini. Only way to change the FoV is from the ini.

Grand Master

firey

Posted
Posted

Got the key from Curse yesterday.. currently over my internet cap so not going to download the client yet.. have heard mixed reviews.  Played the hell out of wow until it was dumbed down, and GW2 never kept my interest (the whole everyone can do everything thing bugged me).  

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SPC for NAS (TOS 7) is basically the same principle as UAC in Windows; it blocks executables from being launched by non-Super Users. After reaching out to my contact about these issues, I received the following response: Anyway, this only became clear when I closed the OpenClaw app screen and clicked on the OpenClaw icon in the taskbar; that is when I saw the message about disabling SPC. I think, due to the fact that this is a requirement, this should be a prompt during the installation process, not when closing the App Market and then trying to launch OpenClaw. There's also no 'Getting started' guide for people like me who have never used OpenClaw. I tried to add an LLM and discovered the tutorial led nowhere. That's when I started looking around the official TerraMaster forums, and I found a guide that helpfully explains that you won't get anywhere with OpenClaw unless you have a paid plan, which is disappointing because I imagined there would be an option to use a local LLM as I do in SubtitleEdit with Whisper-XXL. In addition, with the marketing imagery on the official site, it says that the OpenClaw feature is "all processed 100% locally for absolute privacy." which led me to believe that I could install a local LLM, not one that required paid tokens. In any case, TerraMaster does not provide guidance for this new feature, which was also a selling point of the F4-425 Pro! My contact also provided clarification about the above points I raised with TerraMaster Since it is not in the scope of the review to add paid services, I'll leave that to the people who are more qualified with OpenClaw. F4-425 Pro Surveillance App TOS also comes with a Surveillance app, which is not installed by default; it can be found in the App Market recommended section. In addition, after installing, it doesn't drop a shortcut on the Desktop or top taskbar, but you can "Send to Desktop" from the App Market listing for the app for a quick way to open it. Adding my Reolink POE doorbell camera was painless. TerraMaster doesn't appear to have a repository of preconfigured cameras; instead, the camera must be added using ONVIF or RTSP. No mobile Surveillance app TerraMaster still doesn't have a dedicated Surveillance app, although from searching online, Surveillance can be used and managed through the TNAS mobile app. I tried this with the updated TNAS mobile app beta in combination with TOS 7 and got a message that Surveillance was "Only accessible through web browser," so I reckon this must be limited to the stable versions of TOS 6 and the mobile app. More quirks In addition, whenever I minimized the Live View window in the browser Surveillance app, the feed appeared to switch to the Low-bandwidth stream, and there was no way to get the High-quality stream back. To get the High-quality stream back, I had to close Live View and then reopen it. Benchmarking A pretty cool feature of the TOS 7 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD. In order to do that, you would have to leave out any HDDs during initialization, and even then, the system partitions are always written to two HDDs when they are eventually added. With three NVMe slots, this also gives an interesting scenario where you could build a TRAID storage Pool for installing all your apps and Docker on, and keep the third for SSD cache on the HDD pool. Limitless options! SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges. Although the read result on SATA was a little less than with the F4-425 Plus, for some reason, while writes were generally better. SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that. TOS 7, which, as of testing, is still in Beta, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F4-425 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core N350 CPU and its 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app. It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan (which was a little annoying) when the disks were not actively copying or reading data. Conclusion So what have I learned? Unfortunately, this release raises a few important questions and concerns that I feel haven't been adequately addressed. What I didn't like Our variant shipped with TOS 7 beta, and it's advised not to use it in a production environment. I feel that's a bit limiting on an $800 device. The mobile app is also still in beta and does not support some of the first-party apps, like Surveillance, and it still has quite a few bugs. I am a bit confused about the OpenClaw marketing along with the F4-425 Pro. I feel like that if it's going to be a main selling point, then offer official guidance on how to get started with it. TerraMaster recommends enabling SPC, but then markets the NAS for use with OpenClaw, which requires disabling SPC to be able to use it, opening up genuine security concerns for the NAS; and that's before you get into the security concerns of OpenClaw itself. Of course, the above issues won't be a problem if you decide to install something else on it, or even go back to the stable TOS 6. I wish TerraMaster had just given TOS 7 as opt-in rather than shipping with it. TOS 7 has been available as a preview since December 2025 (so well before my last TerraMaster review), and according to a thread on Reddit where a user shared a screenshot from the TerraMaster Facebook page, it is scheduled to launch today, June 23, but there's nothing about that in the TerraMaster news blog. My contact confirmed over email that TOS 7 exits beta today. The rubber feet also deserve a mention as they continue to be a problem, with them coming unstuck the moment you shift the F4-425 Pro anywhere on your desk. What I liked What it comes down to, though, aside from what I already mentioned, you are still getting a quality, affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, backup your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device that will certainly futureproof you for some time. It provides good performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Four bays afford proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link. Considering the 2024 releases were more about power, with the likes of an Intel Core i5-1235U high-end laptop CPU under the hood, I asked my contact last time if we could expect more of the same in higher-end models and was told: It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N350 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the F4-425 Pro is intended for, media streaming and backup. The only downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. Along with the other things I mentioned, it all ends up costing it a couple of points. If you are comfortable with the command line, Docker, and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. In TOS, the apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected.\ AI NAS?! What has become clear to me this year is that we are going to start seeing all kinds of "AI NAS" come to market, and while that might be good for us consumers, be diligent and research these claims. Although the F4-425 Pro technically comes with AI, it is really using a cloud service that is externally sourced off-device through the third party OpenClaw app. My colleague did review a newcomer to the NAS space earlier this year, and it includes a local AI assistant inside the Zettlab D4 NAS, and they do not even use AI in the product name, check out Chris' review here. Where to buy and a discount coupon However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster is having a 20% off launch discount, plus you can also still apply our unique 10% off coupon on checkout, which only works on the official website. So here is a breakdown of the pricing that is only valid on the official TerraMaster website. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $575.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $503.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £525.59 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £460.79 Use NEOWIN coupon code during checkout for 10% discount Over on Amazon US and UK, the F4-425 Pro also gets a 20% launch discount, but here, the above 10% coupon cannot be applied. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for $639.99 at Amazon US (was $799.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for $559.99 at Amazon US (was $699.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for £583.99 at Amazon UK (was £729.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for £511.99 at Amazon UK (was £639.99) As an Amazon Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.

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