Recent reviews by Screams-at-Thighs

With enough content to last several years and easy-to-pick-up-but-hard-to-master combat and character systems, ESO is a good choice for anyone looking to play an MMO that you can pick up and put down and not have to worry about frantic rotations like in FFXIV or WOW. Both the base game and its' expansions are massive, full of amazingly detailed environments that will make you feel lost in the setting, in a good way! The community is also very nice, and if you have Twitch Prime you'll regularly get various goodies to make your playtime all the sweeter.

Been playing for years and it's a hard recommend from me!

After years of waiting, years of looking forward to updates that would've made Neos better overall and years still of hearing the devs' stories of their mistreatment...the update was announced that will just ball-and-chain crypto to what could've been a great platform, game and experience. Had Neos and the staff been treated better I would've recommended this with a slight warning about the funky UI, but it's not really worth it when it's in this state.

(I've tried on and off again to get into the game directly, but the UI was too confusing to understand. So instead I've been learning more about Neos and keeping up with the community via other means, to explain my lack of playtime)

!! This isn't about the Definitive Edition as I don't own it. I don't know if the things I'm going to mention are fixed in that version, but hopefully they are. !!

I got this game some months back and I've attempted to play on-and-off ever since. This time around was probably my third playthrough, only to find that all my old characters are now gone, my co-op progress lost. Had I gotten further along I'd be more mad about it, but I hadn't even left Cierzo so I didn't think much of it. However, it's something to keep in mind, that your characters can just disappear like that.

The survival mechanics are neat, honestly, and the sleep/guard/repair system for camping out can keep an adventure going for a good bit before needing to head back to a town. The lore looks like it might have a lot of depth and the flora, fauna, and world aesthetics are pretty to look at, especially at night, devs nailed the lighting for outdoors.

The problems start on a more technical level unfortunately.

I used a bow as my main weapon, and the hitboxes for pretty much everything seem to be wildly variable, from being perfectly fitting to being too large. Oftentimes, I've had arrows get stuck in the air while I was shooting over grass, had arrows get stuck floating over enemies and yet not hitting, or shooting an arrow while standing straight up behind a box only to realize that the arrows were getting stuck half a meter above said box. When the hitboxes play nice the combat works, but with ranged combat you're fighting not only the enemy but also the invisible hitboxes of the world decor that just so happen to be in front of you.

I attempted to use melee weapons instead, however I ran into another issue with the animations themselves. The transition time (and likely exit time) for blending the animations together in their blendtrees/states takes too long and yet has no invulnerability whatsoever to compensate the delay, leading to situations where I'd get knocked over, and in my character getting up off the ground would get knocked over repeatedly until death, or I'd have situations where my co-op partner would swing his sword, not hit the enemy despite it being right in front of him, parry the enemies attack and yet still have that attack go through and letting the enemy combo. The delays in animation transition also leads to character movement as a whole feeling floaty, as it takes roughly a second to stop or change movement. Not something many folks would notice, but it's something I've grown to get a bit frustrated at after learning Unity myself.

Additionally, but unfortunately a side effect of using Unity, optimization isn't great. I'm past the recommended specs, yet somehow on second-to-highest performance profile I get less FPS in a small town than in the wide, vast expanses of the outdoors where there are more entities, particle systems, and shader action going on.

If these issues are fixed in the Definitive Edition, than great! I'd rather recommend that instead, however I really can't with the "original".