Well, I was lucky enough to get a beta key for the Elder Scrolls Online beta event last weekend so I dove right into it. Most of the press I've seen regarding ESO has been from the perspective of long-time Elder Scrolls fans looking for their next fix rather than an MMO player checking out a new entry in the genre, which seems a bit unusual to me. Now I certainly have some experience with the past Elder Scrolls games but I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore fan of the series.
So, here are my first impressions of the game from the perspective of a fan of MMOs rather than Elder Scrolls specifically.
The Elder Scrolls Online has been receiving a lot of criticism lately. Last month when the NDA was lifted the most common complaint I heard in almost every article and video was that it didn't feel like an Elder Scrolls game - it didn't offer the same freedom and agency that has been a staple of the Elder Scrolls series so far.
This seemed like an extremely odd criticism to me. Certainly it's a valid statement and important information for fans to know, but it also seems almost required. You can't simply take the traditional Elder Scrolls formula and slap it into an MMO - with that degree of freedom and player agency to impact the state of the world there would be no untouched content for new players after a week. Simply stating that the game is an MMO should imply that there will be significant changes to the formula, so I don't think it's necessarily fair to criticize the game just because it's not true to the formula for an entirely different genre - it would be like criticizing Mario Kart for not staying true to the platforming mechanics of Super Mario Bros.
So instead of comparing ESO to previous Elder Scrolls titles I looked more at what the game itself had to offer and what the world and mechanics offer player in the new MMO format.
The Good
Character Progression
At first I was confused (and a little put off) by the fact that I only had 4 classes to choose from at character creation. After some poking around though I quickly discovered that your chosen class wasn't the primary determining factor in how your character played. Each class has 3 different subsets of skills to train with the ability to pick and choose which skills you learn and use and which you pass. Because you only have 5 skill slots (plus one slot for an ultimate skill) you have to choose your skills carefully in order to ensure they compliment each other and your play style.
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| You don't have access to all the skills right out of the gate though. |
Not only do you have your choice of which skills you pick up but periodically you have the option to morph skills you've leveled up, adding new effects to them. When you morph an ability you can choose one of two advancement options to help tailor the ability to your play style. Currently you can only morph active abilities once (and you can't morph passive abilities at all), however it's not clear whether that was a limitation in the beta or if that's the final design.
In addition to your class skills everyone has full access to every weapon and armor type and their respective skills. You could choose to be a staff wielding tank or a healer sporting a massive two handed axe if you so desired. This freedom of character progression is extremely rare in MMOs and the number of possible choices offered was refreshing - although whether all those options amount to more than a few viable builds remains to be seen.
Active Combat
While ESO certainly isn't the first to try and add a more active combat style into their MMO they seem to have done a decent job of it. Moving your character around in combat feels fluid and natural, the AI seems to cope with movement fairly well without glitching or rubber banding, and the hit detection feels reasonable despite frequent movement.
The dodging mechanic feels intuitive (and very similar to dodging in Guild Wars 2), with the added strategy of it sharing a resource with other physical active abilities. They also allow you to block, which can be performed with either a shield or whatever weapon you have equipped. Blocking will slowly drain your stamina, and if you're attacked while blocking you will prevent most of the damage from physical attacks (as well as briefly stun the enemy if they attempted a heavy attack). You can cancel almost any action with a block, so blocking feels very natural and rewarding when performed correctly.
They also included an interrupt mechanic, where you can perform a shield or weapon bash while blocking to interrupt an action. Unfortunately, it's not always immediately clear which attacks can and can't be interrupted so this can involve some trial and error. You also can't cancel other actions into an interrupt as easily as you can into a block, so this doesn't feel quite as natural or responsive as other actions.
The World
I'm not well versed in the full lore of the Elder Scrolls universe so I can't speak to it's accuracy to canon, however within ESO the world seemed fairly rich and decently populated. There's also a good variety of locales - even inside the short beta I visited a number of varying locales including, beaches, woods, marshes, underground tombs, and sprawling cities. The graphics and aesthetics were very nice (and fairly well optimized) so there should be no shortage of interesting and visually appealing places to explore.
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| Also lens flare. No shortage of lens flare. |
They also included a fast travel system between shrines that you've visited for a small fee. This was very appreciated (and necessary) because your normal movement speed feels a bit slow for traveling between places in the large world they've created. You can buy mounts, but they are quite expensive in-game so unless you grab a free mount from pre-ordering I wouldn't expect to get one until somewhere around level 20.
The Bad
Simplistic Combat
Although you are given tons of freedom in character build and movement during combat I feel that in practice it can go to waste. Combat was extremely simplistic and easy to the point where most of the time I could kill an enemy before it even got a chance to attack me and using only a single skill. Even the more difficult fights amounted to spamming your damage abilities and attacks while watching for the wind-up animations to block or dodge, and those fights were still usually over fairly quickly.
The skill variety also seemed fairly limited. There was often little difference in mechanics between abilities of a given type (e.g. attack abilities would all just deal damage with only minor variations such as area vs single, direct vs damage over time, etc). Unfortunately this meant you just picked a couple of the abilities and strategy felt closer to "cast X if fighting one enemy and cast Y if fighting a group" rather than offering real choice and strategic thinking within a combat encounter.
This is compounded by the fact that there are only 6 slots in your hotbar. While it's interesting working within that limitation when building your character it means that when in combat your choices are almost nonexistent. More often than not you don't have a set of possible options but instead have a set list of default actions and one or two possible responses to specific enemy actions. You can have a backup weapon set equipped with a different set of abilities, however you can't swap too frequently so you can't always have full access to 12 abilities.
It's very possible that there will be more depth to the combat once you get into the end game content, but I have my doubts.
Generic Questing
The questing in ESO feels very archaic and bland. Quests begin with an NPC with a black arrow above their heads and after a few lines of admittedly well voice acted dialogue it becomes a game of follow the quest marker. Most quests are some variant of the "go to area, kill or interact with all the black markers, return to quest giver", and as a result most quests blur together with few deviations. There were also a surprising number of fetch/courier quests. It seemed like half of the quests I found didn't involve any combat whatsoever and were instead used as an excuse to ferry the player around whatever area they just arrived in.
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| Those are black arrows, not exclamation points. They're completely different! |
There were also some problems with competition for quest resources. None of the collection quests I encountered had instanced nodes, so several players in an area trying to complete the same quest would often have to race to get the quest macguffins to progress. Collection quests weren't common enough in the areas I explored to have this be a major issue, but I could see it being problematic for some players and it makes me question why they didn't simply instance those resources and bypass the problem from the start.
Slow Leveling
Maybe it was just the areas I happened to be in or perhaps I missed a few quests, but after the first few levels the pace of gaining experience slowed to a crawl. It took a couple hours and a dozen quests to get from 5 to 6, and things didn't speed up after moving to the next area. It's hard to say how the leveling curve will feel overall - perhaps they went for a more linear feel so you didn't have 15 minute levels early on and 2 day levels toward the end, but progression felt unusually slow.
With leveling feeling like a slow chore this early in the game I really have to wonder how they plan to keep players engaged through to the end game.
Bugs
Now ESO is still in beta and it's expected that there will still be bugs present, however the bugs were more frequent and game breaking than I feel should be expected so close to release. There were some quests that seemed incomplete or completely broken to the point where the only way to progress would be to log out during a quest objective to get it to fail, then hope that the quest conditions got mixed up and let you progress anyway.
There were also frequent problems with quest step activation getting bugged and preventing progress. It became standard procedure to log out every 10-15 minutes to try and reset a bugged quest objective to progress. It may have been their servers under a heavy load or there might just be problems if too many people try to do an objective all at the same time, but that still gives me reservations on how playable the game will be on launch day.
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| There were a couple people stuck on this quest step. |
Wrap-Up
ESO definitely has a unique take on the MMO formula from a mechanics perspective, and there's enough potential there that I'll certainly be keeping an eye on the game as it develops. Unfortunately there are enough problems with the system they've created that I'm not sure it will work out exactly as they'd envisioned in the end. Overly simple and easy combat combined with bland questing and slow leveling leaves a lot to be desired from the minute to minute gameplay.
I'd have a hard time recommending the game based on my first impressions, doubly so if you consider that they're asking for a monthly fee on top of a full priced game. I'd suggest waiting on ESO until awhile after release when more is known about the end game and the stability of the release client before putting down your hard earned money.
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