Another post about Elder Scrolls Online, because I still just can’t get enough about it. Something that still strikes me as awe-inspiring about this game even to this day is the massive sense of scale I get.
With Oblivion, and to a lesser extent Skyrim, the world we’re playing in feels just enormous. Especially that first hour of Oblivion when you’re not able to fast travel yet, walking to your destination makes you feel so small in the scale of the world map. Skyrim feels large, but not as much. I would say this is because the developers tried to pack much more into the land, you can’t go 2 minutes without running into something interesting. What makes Oblivion feel large is also how empty it is, and that feels real because a lot of the wildness is, well, empty.
ESO is not empty, and it does not provide a sense of massive scale that way, there are a few large areas that feel very secluded and private, but it’s an MMO so any wasted land risks being a waste of an already long development time. No, what makes ESO feel large is just the raw quantity of content within the game. The number of game areas, NPCs, quests, areas to explore, it makes the world feel much more alive.
The most recent thing to strike me in this way is when I arrived at Wrothgar and opened the map. The map was just ridiculously large, much more so than I expected. Just discovering all the wayshrines to enable me to fast travel is an effort, and forces me to explore. When I’m forced to explore I inevitably stumble upon random quests, do those, which take me to other places, wash, rinse, repeat. The ability to lose time in this game is uncanny, and it is something I have sorely missed.
World of Warcraft used to give me this sense of scale, but anymore the game world isn’t as pretty as I’d like, or rather, the level of detail in the game world feels very synthetic. You can find some very nice looking screenshots of WoW no doubt. If you turn all the settings as far as they will go the ground is littered with grass and flowers, the trees full of life. However, compare any WoW screenshot to an ESO screenshot and I challenge you to say that WoW’s looks more lifelike and not lie at the same time.
I have never looked up at a tree in ESO and been able to count the polygons that make it up, it never looked like an amalgamation of leaf-like plates no matter how low my settings were. Fly above Elwynn forest in WoW and it’s too easy to see the immersion-ruining polygons. This doesn’t mean the game isn’t fun, not at all, the money that WoW still brings in and the history of hours I’ve personally sunk into the game is testament to it’s enjoyability. I hear that the latest expansion is particularly enjoyable.
Nevertheless, WoW doesn’t give me a sense of scale like ESO does. Not because the world isn’t large, in fact WoW’s land area is probably magnitude larger than ESO’s. But when I’m traversing WoW’s landscape the lack of detail in the land makes it feel like I’m covering a distinctly video-game-made land mass. There is no immersion in WoW, fortunately it doesn’t have to be immersive to be fun. ESO on the other hand, while I still know I’m playing a game, it feels more like a game in a fantasy world, than a game in a game world.
