Last Wednesday, the Aggronaut
put out it out there: pretty much anyone interested could obtain a key to this weekend's beta test of The Elder Scrolls Online. Belghast has been involved in TESO for a long time, so I decided to heed the call. After all, it might induce me to buy, and there are
monkeys at stake.
TL;DR
The Elder Scrolls Online is a great looking game with what looks to be a thorough lore and a solid character progression system. However, barring a big change of heart on the part of Scooter, I won't be purchasing TESO or committing to a subscription any time soon.
The Great
TESO looks fantastic. All the pictures in this post contain gorgeous scenery and avatars, and I really have no complaints on that front. The graphics engine is also optimized well enough that I had no discernible loss of framerate even in high traffic areas, unlike some other games that have been around for a while. The pics seem a little dark on my current computer, but that may be a consequence of converting the original bitmaps to jpegs and my current monitor. On my gaming laptop, they are fantastic.
The character creation experience was wonderful. There were plenty of ways to get my avatar's appearance just right, and the models themselves fit well into the art design of the game. I also like the character progression system. The skill trees allow for plenty of customization to get my characters away from the rigid classes of some other games. While there are classes and skills trees associated with them, racial trees and the ability to wield all weapon types (with their accompanying skill trees) allow for tremendous variation. You can have a bow tank, or a dual-wielding hatchet healer, or a sword-and-board sorceror. In the end, will those combinations be effective in a group setting? I don't know, but I bet they'd be fun to play.
The Good
The stories I encountered as part of the Daggerfall Covenant and the Aldmeri Dominion were standard MMO fare, though the implementation is quite pleasing. Scooter pointed out that none of the quests we encountered involved any kill-ten-rats goals exactly, though at least one did involve collecting six bits of magic in order to power a staff. I don't know if quests at the higher level devolve into KTR territory, but at least these early ones were entertaining enough. One thing that is worrisome to me is that the accompanying survey add-on seemed very interested in whether I felt heroic when doing or completing the quests, and how immersed in the world I was. For one thing, it is
not my desire to be The Hero in an MMO, for another, the survey itself often took me out of any immersion I might have been feeling. I eventually turned it off, since my answers didn't really change from one questionnaire to the next.
I felt more involved with the story of the Dominion integrating itself on the island of Khenarthi's Roost than I did with the conspiracy to depose the petty criminal tyrant of Stros M'kai. And Scooter and I were unable to continue to Daggerfall due to a bugged summoning in "Unearthing the Past." Belghast had mentioned that a more recent build of the game dispensed with the starter islands and dumped the player character directly from the Coldharbour tutorial to the main city, with the option of going to the islands. Hopefully, this would mean that players can easily return to the capital from the islands if they choose to. I'm glad we did encounter that bug, though, since it caused us to create new characters and experience a different starting area.
The Bad
The tutorial made it seem like you can cover all informational dialogue, but the first quest from Captain Kaleen locked in the first option before I could find out about the other two. Someone did come along later to give me the other two, but it was still frustrating to have an expectation from past experience within the game that was contradicted. Later on, the fact that there are irrevocable choices to be made becomes more apparent. It seems that there should be a stronger graphical cue as to when making a dialogue choice will lock out other choices.
Non-instancing of stuff leads to occasional immersion breaking. It breaks my immersion to have some guy tell me that to enter a temple is certain death, and then see other players wandering around the courtyard with no discernible problems. Some quests even bugged out because two or more players were trying to interact with the same object simultaneously. I will say some of the object instancing is "interesting" in groups. On one occasion, a quest objective for me was located in a different part of the cave than the same objective for Scooter, and we couldn't even see each other's corresponding objective. That was pretty cool, if slightly bemusing.
I wanted to get a good feel for the combat, but it was always over too quickly. The only times either of us died in combat was when we started out alt-tabbed or AFK, or there was something wrong with our controls, and our characters were separated geographically.
The Ugly
I really don't like the reticle targeting/navigation; or "action mmo perma-mouselook interface," as
Belghast put it. I also dislike having to "escape" to the interface windows, like character and skill windows. I assume it's similar to other Elder Scrolls games (that were buggy as hell, according to many). But for me, it is reminiscent of Neverwinter. It is painfully obvious that the game is designed around a game controller, with the PC version barely an afterthought. Guess what? If I wanted to play console games, I would buy a console. I'm a PC gamer, in part due to my keyboard/mouse controls. Playing effectively required extensive rejiggering of the game keybinds and my Nostromo and M570 mouse. Scooter had an even worse time with her new Logitech G14.
Did I get used to the interface after a day or so of playing? More or less. Did I like it? No.
Conclusion
I had honestly hoped to be blown away by TESO. I know a lot of people say you have to play quite a bit of a game before you really can decide whether you'll enjoy it. But in my experience, the games I have been drawn into within the first hour in the world have been the ones I have stuck with for months and even years. I ended up dropping within a short period of time those games that I struggled to become immersed in.
Still, the biggest barrier to me playing TESO is not the UI I really dislike, or even the box price. After all, Scooter and I just dropped $60 each on Landmark. The biggest barrier for me is the monthly subscription. I had a hard enough time trying not to think about the progress I was forgoing in both TSW and Landmark. To add a "
wasting money by not playing" component to that is unpleasant in the extreme. I don't like this game well enough to pay $30 (for me and Scooter) every month for it. Not when there are other alternatives not trying to lock me in.
Scooter is a much bigger fan of the Schwarzenegger movies than I (I still haven't seen any of them, to be honest), and so she gets a kick out of the world of Hyboria. But I have read some of the original stories, and the game is more a reference to them than the '80s sword-and-sorcery flicks. It's definitely more fun doing them as a pair than when I was all by myself three-ish years ago.
Unfortunately, I did something to my computer on Sunday that caused all the USB ports and sound card to become unresponsive, impairing my ability to play much of anything. These pics are from Friday. We'll see if I'll have much to blog about in the coming days and months.
