After the difficulties of my buggy beta experience, I got an early start on the “live” version of The Elder Scrolls Online. I didn’t expect extra access or anything else, but I was also not impressed with the game, so I was really surprised to receive a Digital Imperial Edition Code and an extra 30 days of play time. With 60 days to play and a clean slate to begin with, I took advantage of the code and decided to try out an Imperial Dragonknight and forget all about the Templar.
I’m happy to report that the Dragonknight is a lot of fun, but not so happy to have found out that in the time that I played the supposedly finished game, existing bugs were still not fixed, and there were plenty of other added issues thrown in the mix.
I won’t go into the character creation or tutorial again, as they remain the same, so feel free to read the beta preview for those impressions.
I started in a different area this time around, which lead me to Daggerfall after completing all the “newbie” quests. Here I remembered some of the things I had seen during my E3 hands-on, particularly where the stable was so I could redeem my mount for 1g instead of the 17,000 – a perk of the Digital Imperial Edition. I didn’t have a mount before, so I was pretty happy with the benefits, and not just the obvious faster travel, since you can upgrade your mount’s stats by feeding it daily. Depending on what you feed your horse (feeding costs 250 gold) you can increase its speed, stamina and carrying capacity. I noticed after some time that my harness and saddle starting going through cosmetic changes with the upgrades, which is a nice little added touch.
Most of my combat was one handed and shield, but I did try out dual wielding for a little while. However, I preferred the extra attributes of wearing a shield over the extra DPS, so that is what I used for levelling up. Only much later on I was switching between a 2-handed weapon and my usual one handed and shield, mostly for “boss” fights. You can easily set this up with a click once you reach level 15 and unlock the ability to change weapons.
I really enjoyed the Dragonknight combat, the skills were quite effective, and I admit I didn’t really use the weapon class skills. Having a very limited skill bar when there are so many skills to pick from is a total turn-off. There were things I wanted to use but couldn’t because of having no hotkeys left! This time around I also progressed enough to use some of the specials, my favorite being an AE attack where I’d grow dragon wings and jump into whatever I was targeting. It certainly helped me decimate groups of 4 or 5 enemies on my own!
I won’t say combat is perfect, but I got the hang of the dodging/rolling and blocking, especially because with the Templar I’d have to be still to finish casting spells. The Dragonknight skills I was using were mostly instant, so I became a more efficient fighter. So much for my tradition of playing healers…
I did notice the difficulty spike again around level 10, but it didn’t seem impossible. I actually went on to level 35, but started to become bored and annoyed long before that. I’ll try to explain why.
Bugs were everywhere. Yep, still. Not much difference from the beta there! One particular quest that required an item to spawn so you could inspect it was broken for at least two weeks. Several quests would bug out at the end and I couldn’t finish them without logging out and back in (sometimes more than once).
Being stuck in places was still a thing, and no other way to fix it but to kill myself. Really, why not have the /stuck command reset us to an early position? I get stuck on some random thing, fall through the floor or whatever, and my way to get out is to die? And then I have to pay for repair costs? That’s unfair. And speaking of resetting, there were some days where the game would just roll everything back 15 minutes across random zones every 30 minutes or so. Pointless to play and particularly annoying when I had just gotten a nice piece of armor as loot from lockpicking a treasure chest!
The latency continued to be a problem too, even in random areas that didn’t seem crowded. Oh, and then there were the great moments of logging into the game and dying because I fell through the world for unknown reasons.
Another major annoyance… spammers are everywhere. They send you private messages, in-game emails, they spam open channels, and all you can do is ignore and report them. Your ignore list is very limited, which is ridiculous, when I was adding them by the handfuls a day. And then there are the bots, all standing in a certain spot wherever a boss spawns and when it does, you will see them all attack at once and create some impressive lag in the process. This was making certain quest completions impossible. Again, all you can do is report and hope someone does something about it so you can come back later and attempt to kill whatever you needed to complete the quest.
These are some of the things that were driving me nuts, but there was one particular annoyance: the guild store system. To use or browse a store, you must belong to a guild. Sure, you can be part of five different guilds at once, but aside from promoting your own goods in open channels and trade, you don’t have a public marketplace or auction house to go to, only the store of the guild you belong to.
Bag space and bank space can be increased, but your bank is shared by ALL characters in your account. This is really not a good system in my opinion, since it’s too easy to crowd up the bank with trade skill materials. Character-specific bank would have been much better, which a few extra slots that are shared by all characters in the same account. Everquest did it, why can’t TESO?
This time around, I spent a lot of time getting acquainted with trade skills. I tried them all, and of course some are easier to level than others, but since everyone can gather all materials regardless of skill level, it’s not difficult to improve. Provisioning was capped fairly early, but at least I came across more recipes than before. Most of the time I was making my own armor and shields, adding traits (you must research them first to learn them) and took the time to level up enchanting to make my own glyphs as well. Alchemy finally made sense once I started figuring out which plants did what, but once you learn their properties, their respective effects show up on a list and it’s easy to combine them for the desired effect.
Armor and weapon making is deceiving for levelling up though. You’d figure the more you make, the more experience you get. However, you get a lot more from deconstructing things than making them. That was a trial and error process too. You can also make armor sets and special weapons at the respective crafting stations, which are scattered throughout the world.
I also progressed much further through the Fighter and Mage Guilds’ quests, which have interesting stories. Sheogorath is particularly insane and hilarious, and his quests were quite different, challenging and fun. There were still plenty of kill, fetch and escort quests, but a few others were more dynamic, ended up with us having to choose a side and having slightly different outcomes.
My favorite portion of the game had to do with vampires and respective quests. That entire storyline was really good and even if I wasn’t too keen on how it ended up, it was a nice touch, and I’m glad because at that point I was really getting sick and tired of all the quests that require you to go into someone’s dream and pull them out or relive someone’s memories.
The public events where the anchors come down were fun and helped break the pace of questing (not to mention they look pretty cool), and everyone can join in and kill whatever comes through the portal. It was one of the things that as soon as I heard it or saw the icon on the map, away I went in that direction. Smaller Daedra portals also randomly appear, giving you something else to do for a while as enemies come one after another until the mini-boss comes through.
I did make an effort to actually group a few times this time around, but neither of my attempts was very successful. The first time, everyone was on a quest that I didn’t even have yet but they were asking for help, so I accepted the group invitation. Right after they killed what they needed, they all left the group and went their separate ways. I was left at the back of a dungeon by myself trying not to die on my way to the NPC I was supposed to be talking to next. The thing is, if you’re going into a dungeon to do a certain quest, you can just follow whatever group around and get a hit on whatever you are supposed to kill, and it will still complete it for you when said quest mob dies. You don’t have to get the kill, which seems weird. So most times, I’d see people piggy back after I’ve cleared spots I needed to clear for my own goals, without them ever moving a finger to help.
On another occasion, I grouped with a random person, and while we weren’t talking, we still got along thanks to common goals. But few steps into this quest, we became completely lost as far as what we were doing, because our quest marker was being weird and making us run around in circles. In fact, there were quite a few occasions where the quest marker just couldn’t make up its mind and would require the logout/login process to fix.
I guess when I look back at my experience, the whole thing was a mixed bag. And even if a mixed bag can have some positive things going on in there, it’s still a bag that I wouldn’t want to pay for every month. Maybe when the console version is released, things will be more stable. At least I’ll get a discount in case I want to transfer a character over to the Xbox One version… but that’s assuming I will want to do that when the time comes.