Elder Scrolls Online: First Impressions

I haven’t done a review (or a post) in a long time. Today will change both of those by giving out a review of my brief experience with the Elder Scrolls Online beta.

First off, the email I received regarding it said there was not an NDA on it, so I am allowed to speak about it. Bethesda, do not whip your lawyers out just because I want to openly discuss it. Second, I received that email as an invite from a good friend of mine to play with him in the game. As much as I enjoy playing games with him, this might be one I skip out on overall. That said, he came to similar conclusions, so I don’t feel as bad for coming to them myself.

With that out of the way, let’s actually get the review proper started. 

Zenimax, Bethesda, and whoever else was working on this, I have to say that I’m disappointed. First impressions are the most important thing when introducing someone to a new person, place, thing, and in this case, a game. If you can’t have me hooked within the first ten minutes (let alone the first hour) of your game, then you have already dropped the ball in making your game interesting or good. First impression of this game is pretty sour at best.

For starters, you have us starting in a dungeon as a prisoner escaping the dungeon… again. And the game looks absolutely silly when you have hundreds to thousands of people running around a dungeon being told they’re the chosen one and trying to escape. Yes, I suppose a prison break would run with hundreds of people going wild. But, realistically, only a handful of people, at best, actually manage to escape and this is a magic prison, which I think would cut those odds down even more, or maybe I’m just cynical. 

But then there’s the other thing I mentioned, the whole “you’re the chosen one” nonsense. This works perfectly fine for single player games. You are the only person not handicapped by being an NPC, therefore you really are the only possible person to be the chosen one since you are the only person capable of true independent thought (or so we hope). But in a big MMO with thousands of people playing, not only does that “chosen one” line feel forced, but it also comes off as a blatant lie. We can’t all be the chosen one, as a thousand is far greater than one. And the premise loses all meaning when you have that many people being considered as the chosen one. I can’t help but feel my presence is not really needed or in any way meaningful like it was in Skyrim, Fallout, Portal, etc.

Hey, we don’t play an MMO for a plot, we play because… actually I don’t know why people play MMOs. It certainly can’t be for gameplay alone, strictly talking in an MMORPG kind of sense. There really isn’t much gameplay from everything I’ve observed thus far. In most MMORPGs, you spend most of your time clicking on enemies (sometimes more than once) while waiting for things to lose their cooldown timer so you can launch another one of your spells that lacks the same impressive feel of magic from a more fleshed out RPG that you get in a single player setting. 

And the gameplay in ESO is very much in that same vein. It doesn’t matter which class you ultimately pick because, at the start at least, the enemies are all rather piss easy where you can one-shot most of them. I get it’s the area we learn to play game, but the early enemies I fought in Skyrim actually require a bit of effort to kill (not the rats) but soldiers. This gave you a better feel for how the combat would work. Plus they would actually damage you. I walked through an area that had maybe eight Flame Elementals and they didn’t such insignificant damage to me that it was regenerated relatively quick.

Oh, and health regenerates. Because of course it does. 

And don’t get me started on the disappointment that is trying to be an archer with a focus on sneaking. First off, archery feels simplistic because you don’t have ammunition, but an unlimited amount of arrows you can pull out of your asshole at any time, making inventory management something you no longer have to concern yourself with (unless this is only just in the beta). But I miss the ability to pull my arrows from some of the corpses I killed because it gave me a sense of pride that I was not only killing dudes, but recycling my old weaponry and tools for future fights.

But this also cuts out the need to use any other weapon (so to speak). I don’t have to pick up a sword or an axe or anything for the event I run out of arrows because I never will. This means that the gameplay here doesn’t encourage experimentation and blending different concepts together like a good RPG should. Instead it follows the same bullshit method that WoW and other popular MMOs do where you find a build or a skill tree that works and diligently stick to it because anything else is worthless. 

Then there’s sneaking. I loved in Skyrim how I could be sneaking in the grass or on a tall ledge some distance away and pick off enemies with a bow. I loved the sense of killing large assortments of dudes without being seen because it was a skill I had practiced and developed patience to pull off. But that kind of fighting isn’t permitted in this game, at least not in the fluid organic sense like it is in Skyrim. In ESO, I was trying to sneak on a dude to shoot him in the head. First off, head shots do no extra damage from what I can tell. Second, the minute you launch your attack, you are kicked out of sneak-mode and immediately lose your hiding place.

I’m sure this is less of a problem for those of you who enjoy just beating the shit out of things with a sword or axe, but this kills the enjoyment for us who enjoy playing rogue-esk characters and likely there’s little enjoyment for magic-users too, given that Skyrim’s mechanics made using magic less enjoyable than really anything else. I can’t imagine that ESO took time to improve the magic abilities to make them scale to the same degree as melee-combat or make them more impressive than they used to be. 

Maybe we play MMOs to play with other people? While I’ve never fully understood that concept since other people are absolute shit to play with, it doesn’t hold up here in this game. As I said before, you are the chosen one, but that is killed when you add over nine thousand other chosen ones. And during my brief run, I never noticed people working together at all in any way. Maybe I hadn’t gotten to the big horde of people yet or something, but I can’t think of anything I did in Skyrim that would necessarily be better with having other people around.

Sure, we could be dicks to the game or fuck around some. But all sense of challenge would be gone. Giants and Dragons would be easier to kill because there’d be two people attacking it with hit and run tactics instead of just one. And all sense of accomplishment would be mitigated because you have to share the victory. You lose the achievement of having slain the beast yourself and feeling like a true warrior. Plus making a series that’s been heavy in its use of lore and storytelling feels almost water-down when you have to play with other people because if you’re with friends, odds are they’ll want to power through and kill things while you are the one person who wants to sit there and read the shit.

I see ways where a game like Skyrim could be opened up to a multiplayer level and might have some enjoyment, but I feel it would ultimately lessen the experience overall, which is why I don’t feel like an MMO’s reason to exist is solely to play with other people.

So if not story, gameplay, or enjoy the presence of other people… then why bother playing this game? 

Why bother, indeed. From my brief stint with this game, the impression I walked away with was that this was a fairly watered-down version of what Skyrim was. The combat felt less impressive, making the experience overall less engaging on both dealing out damage and having to deal with enemies. The story itself is absolutely pointless in an MMO setting, but I didn’t expect much of a story in an MMO. And the multiplayer doesn’t really fondle me in the same way the big vast openness and emptiness of the Skyrim world did, making me want to actually go back and play that all the more now.

And they want to charge me $15 bucks a month for this? If you added a component to Skyrim to make it multiplayer, you might have me interested in paying that. But this game isn’t worth that price. Which is a shame because this was my first outing into the MMO experience and from everything I had seen up until now, ESO was looking like it could be a good one. But it did nothing to convince me to enjoy or play more MMOs. So I’ll go back to my Skyim, Pokemon, and Saints Row until the next interesting attempt comes along and tries to disappoint me again.