I’ve been fairly disenchanted by MMOs for a long time. Nothing holds my interest, everything seems just about the same, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay a monthly fee to play something that won’t let me advance without depending on others. It was with curiosity that I sat down to play The Elder Scrolls Online for a while while waiting for the demo room to clear for the next group session.
The game offers an extensive character customization process, where you can tailor everything to create a character to your liking: face shape, body shape, eye colors, hair style, colors, age. The face modifiers allow you to tweak a number of things from eyebrows to jaw line.
There are three factions in the world: Ebonheart Pact, Aldmeri Dominion, Daggerfall Covenant. Each faction has specific races to choose from. Argonian, Dunmer and Nord for Ebonheart; Altmer, Bosmer and Khajiit for Aldmeri; Breton, Orc and Redguard for Daggerfall.
As for the character classes, Dragon Knight, Templar, Nightblade, Sorcerer and Warden were available to be played. I picked a Templar and moved on to check my skills. Since we were placed at level 6, there were already some attribute points and skill points to be distributed among whatever spell and weapon skills I wanted. After choosing some attack spells and a healing spell, the rest went into weapon mastery. Since you’re not bound by any specific weapon type, you can pick up any weapon and use it, and get better at it by practice. The same goes for armor.
The quest system is more involving than the usual “kill a number of these things and come back”, and there was a particular quest where you go around town putting out fires. During my hands-on, I was killing things to get acquainted to the combat – throwing a spear at sheep from a distance was actually fun target practice – when a dog walked up to me and encouraged me to follow. This started another quest, but before I noticed I was already talking to other people, looting things and forgetting about the dog to embark on another quest to solve the mysterious murders around town.
The combat system is interesting, allowing you to mix spell casting and weapon attacks with blocking and dodging. Obviously, being dropped at a few levels higher with no previous experience makes it feel a bit clumsy, but it works well after a few minutes of practice. While we were playing in a third-person setting, we were assured that a first-person combat system will be implemented later on.
The world is lootable, so there are plenty of crates and barrels to loot, nightstands and cupboards to open, chests hidden around the world and a lockpicking system. I expected to receive some sort of hate from a villager as I picked up food from her table, rummaged through her crates and looted her nightstand, but I got no reaction. Maybe that will change in the future.
A full crafting system will be in place, offering five professions: armorsmith, weaponsmith, alchemist, provisioner and enchanter.
The Elder Scrolls Online will also offer higher level group content, raid content and PVP, where we were told 200 players could be on screen at once.
The team is fully commited to bringing the game to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 Spring 2014, and assured us that it will not be just a dumbed-down version of the PC version since the new consoles will be able to handle it all.
As for me and based on my engaging experience, I think I have found my next MMORPG.