Back at E3 2013, we got the chance to experience The Elder Scrolls Online hands on, and to be honest, it had my undivided attention until we had to move on to the next meeting. For the past weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to participate in the media beta and experience the levelling up process on my own, without jumping into a pre-made and already equipped character.
You have four different classes available – Dragonknight, Templar, Sorcerer and Nightblade – and nine races to pick from: Wood Elf, High Elf, Human, Breton, Orc, Redguard, Nord, Dark Elf and Argonian. Races are bound to one of the three alliances: Daggerfall Convenant, Aldmeri Dominion and Ebonheart Pact.
The character creation process is quite extensive, and you can spend a considerable amount of time just adjusting facial features. Height, body fat, face shape, hair style and color, eye shape, eye color, cheekbones, jaw, lips, nose, age marks, length of legs and arms, size of hands and feet, chest, shoulders, waist, hips… even your “posterior dimensions”! I laughed so much at this, because honestly, I don’t get how an enormous butt is relevant, but then again, there can’t be a character without a butt, so you might as well customize it too!
I decided on a High Elf Templar. Without a giant butt.
The game’s story begins with the traditional Elder Scrolls prison escape, which serves as a tutorial. This part is the same for everyone, but where you land in Tamriel depends on the race/alliance you belong to.
In the tutorial, you are given the premise of the story. The Prophet (wonderfully voiced by Michael Gambon, a.k.a. Albus Dumbledore) tells you that the forces of Molag Bal are invading Tamriel. Like everyone else in this prison, you are in fact already dead. With the help of Lyris Titanborn, you must escape and release the Prophet.
The HUD is for the most part what you know from Skyrim, with added common elements from any MMORPG. Your compass is on top, showing you markers for a number of things. The top right corner shows your focused quest. At the bottom, magicka, hitpoints and stamina bars, plus hotkeys. The chat window is placed on the bottom left.
Lyris serves as a combat aid while you get used to the controls. Moving is done via WASD. To dodge an attack, you tap WASD twice for whatever direction you want to roll into. Attacking is done with the left mouse button and number keys, once you have skills linked to them. To block, you hold the right mouse button. There are times when you can interrupt an enemy by pressing both mouse buttons simultaneously. The Ctrl key lets you hide to sneak around, and Alt is your sprint button.
Sprinting, blocking and dodging all use stamina. Blocking and dodging are important in combat, since enemies can do charge attacks. If you block it properly, they will be stunned for a little while, which also gives you time to do a charge attack. For AoE atatcks, you will see markers on the ground, so get out of the red area as soon as you see it. This was actually the most relevant aspect that made me switch from first person to third person view, so I could have a better look at what is going on around me and what shape and how big are the AoE spots.
The world is huge, with plenty to do and explore. There are plenty of NPCs to talk to, books to read, quests to do, skyshards to find, and crates, barrels and bags to loot all over. Occasionally you will spot locked chests, all stating the difficulty of the lock. I actually really liked lock picking once I figured it out, so I found myself exploring every nook and cranny (and waterfall) to see if I could find more.
There are several professions at your disposal, and gathering materials is easily done all over the world. You can choose to be an enchanter, provisioner, weaponsmith, armorsmith or alchemist. Or all of them! I was picking up materials whenever I spotted them just to see what could be done with them. I found wood, ore, plants, herbs and runes. I even found some fishing spots. And once I had found a few recipes I was making food and drink. However, effects of food and drink do not stack, could only have one active at any given time).
Unfortunately, the game lacked better tutorials on the most basic of things: how to turn raw materials into the items you need for crafting. Took me a long while to figure out how I could turn my raw materials into usable items (for example, ore into ingots) because the icons weren’t really self-explanatory.
Alchemy was pretty confusing and I was just basically taking shots in the dark adding random herbs. Enchanting is the same, since you can mix and match the runes to make glyphs (which you use to apply properties to weapons and armor), and if successful, you translate the rune and discover its property. Discovering what each herb or rune did was a trial and error process. But overall, I really enjoy the professions.
Limited inventory is your enemy when gathering materials, but you can purchase additional backpack and bank space, which at this point were rather expensive. I’m sure once the economy gets going and people are actually profiting from their professions, gold won’t be an issue. Speaking of profiting, I didn’t find anything like an auction house. I did find the option to open a guild store, but nothing that would allow me to sell my own crafted products or buy things (I was really hoping for more provisioning recipes, they’re not easy to find).
The world was so big that all I wanted was to go around and explore. Of course, I ended up dying in weird places because I wasn’t supposed to be there yet, but it was still good to open up a new zone, discover a new city and find another Wayshrine. Wayshrines let you fast travel between them for free, and to them from anywhere else for a fee. There are also mounts, which are pretty costly (around 17,000 for the lower level one) and have level requirements.
As far as character advancement, I was doing well until I reached level 8. From there, it was like I hit some weird difficulty spike and felt my character became pretty ineffective. I was dying more than I should, which obviously resulted in damaged equipment, repair costs and treks from my your spawn point back to wherever I was.
I think this is where the game said “Hold on there, girl, this is an MMO… it’s time for you to find a group!”. Well then, I am not happy about that! I should still have the option to go around and explore on my own and not be bound by group progression. And that was a major turn-off. I found myself forced to grind experience to level up and get new skills. At some point, I went up to level 11, improved some skills, procured better gear, added some glyphs, went back and still couldn’t finish a particular level 8 quest on my own. What the hell?
I didn’t see that many people online either. In fact, aside from in cities (and even then, they weren’t bursting with player activity) players were scarce. Occasionally, I’d pass someone on the road or see someone working on their professions at a workstation. And yet, the latency was ridiculous most of the time.
Fortunately, there were other things to do in the meantime, so I moved on to do quests as I could. The good news about the quests is that they are fairly varied and not just your kill and fetch type. I found myself putting out fires and saving villagers, finding missing soldiers, escorting people, setting spirits free, racing a frog, doing a checkpoint race around an island, and I even solved a puzzle that consisted of constellations drawn on pillars and pressure plates to open a locked chest. There are also quests that involve wearing disguises, and just as I was starting to think what sneaking was good for, I found one where I finally got to sneak around creatures that I couldn’t kill unless I crossed over to another dimension.
Obviously, this was a beta, and bugs were expected. I fell through stairs and got stuck under them when trying to reach the Fighters Guild. Several times. Too many, if you ask me. The only way out was to use /stuck, and that killed me. Which meant… you got it! Extra repair costs! You’d figure a command to get you unstuck wouldn’t just kill you and spawn you at the nearest shrine, but hey, what do I know?
Other bugs included items that were marked lootable but never opened, NPCs missing that were needed to complete quests, exits missing that were needed to move on in certain quests, quests that wouldn’t finish for unknown reasons, and some collision issues where NPCs were sinking into the ground or inside a crate. And on random occasions, I’d get stuck auto-running without a way to fix it except by aiming at a corner to get stuck there and logging off.
I was really looking forward to The Elder Scrolls Online, but after my experience, now I’m not so sure anymore. There is quite a bit that I like: the professions, the lockpicking, the story, the dynamic quests, the combat and the ability to pick and improve any weapon and armor skill that I want. But at the same time, I seriously hate depending on groups to progress and the difficulty curve seems to be pretty steep way too early in the game. I’m sure it would have been better had Gil’s beta account let him log on at all so we could play together…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still occasionally fooling around in the play test server, sincerely hoping it gets better before launch. But it’s this “occasionally” that so far doesn’t justify a $60 game purchase with a $15 monthly fee.