The Elder Scrolls Online Review: Something Less Than Elder Scrolls

The early access period for The Elder Scrolls Online was pretty rough. Things were breaking all over Tamriel (The Prophet’s voice changed from Michael Gambon to someone else in one conversation I had, even), and I was forcibly logged out a bunch of times. In fact, my first attempt to even create a character turned into six attempts as I kept being logged out while I was trying to settle on how fat my khajit nightblade would be. But sorting through those issues is why Bethesda held an early access period prior to the official launch of the game last Friday, and when that launch actually occurred everything went swimmingly.

It’s been an immense credit to Bethesda that it’s been able to pull off what has by all appearances been a perfectly stable first few days of release, after the past two years of launch nightmares for plenty of other high profile online games. Since Friday, I’ve had no serious technical issues with The Elder Scrolls Online, period. As far as I can tell the game has been running as intended.

But, of course, “as intended” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s great. I’ve discussed some pros and cons of the game at length before based on my experiences playing the beta version of TESO, but things are a bit different now. The changes are not so much with the game itself, mind you, although there are some cosmetic alterations scattered about the world. Instead, the experience of questing through whichever part of the world your faction calls home is different because now that world is full of other players.

I’ve always enjoyed the way BioWare splits up the population in Star Wars: The Old Republic — most planets have a population cap of 50 or so, and when it grows beyond that the game creates new instances of the world for the overflow. Chat still spans across all the instances, so if you’re looking for a group you’re not impeded by the divide. And people who want to quest without the help of a bunch of randos can do so. On top of that, most story areas are usually instanced for you (or your group) specifically, so even if there’s somebody else doing all the same quests at the same time as you, you’ll be able to those parts alone.

Despite being a similarly story-centric MMO, TESO doesn’t appear to do anything like that. For the moment, at least during peak times, I’ve been unable to do pretty much anything alone. No matter where I go or what quest I do, there’s always a couple other players around fighting through the same baddies and talking to the same NPCs. Questgivers and the world are not static, no — the state of the world changes based on what you’ve done, but there are nonetheless constantly other people whose worlds mirror mine, fighting the same boss I’m there to take down

Some might complain that this is a distraction, and it is, but the bigger concern is that it feels like I don’t have to make any effort in combat most of the time. Really, I can just hang back and let others handle the fighting if I want. Either way, that’s a big hit on my engagement with the game, and defeats the purpose of the long MMO grind, which exists to force you to learn how to play well through repetition. Peak hours are peak for a reason, so a lot of folks are going to get a short shrift because of this.

The pervasiveness of Others in the world isn’t all bad, though. It makes group dungeons more efficient since you don’t have to actually form a group to play them. So there’s that. And to be fair, having a random friend around all the time isn’t really so bad since it does alleviate the grind significantly. But typically I’ve been stumbling into groups of five or six others at a time, which makes the game feel more like a race than a relaxed Elder Scrolls experience.

But in the right space at the right time you can have a semblance of what we typically play TES games for. Though level-specific areas seem to be a necessary MMO evil that inhibits straying from the path (or so most developers seem to believe), TESO at least eschews quest hubs with a need to explore in order to find all the quests. On the island of Auridon, for example, if you stay on the main road that runs up its length, you’re going to be underleveled and over your head fairly quickly. You’ll have to roam simply to stay on level.

That is, of course, just its own kind of restricting structure. You have the freedom to walk every square foot of this area, and by freedom I mean you have to do that. At points it kinda slaps you in the face with that, too — at level 11, halfway across Auridon (which is Dominion territory), I received a fighters guild quest that had me take a boat to a different questing area on the mainland of Tamriel, but it turned out that was a level 15 quest. Why the game would give you an immediately accessible level 15 quest when you’re in the middle of an 10-11 area is anyone’s guess. It’s not unusual for a guild to give you a quest above your level, but more often you’d have to walk by a dozen other quests to do them.

It’d be easy to shrug that kind of thing off in most games, but in TESO that situation just reminded me of what that game is not. You can hang around fishing or mining stuff so you can craft stuff or looting containers for stuff to cook, all while wandering the world killing stuff and meeting random NPCs — and all that sounds like Skyrim, but it’s not. Unless you PVP a lot, you can’t abandon any quest on a whim because you need that XP. You kinda just have to quest.

Unless, as I said, you just PVP. The PVP of TESO is pretty novel, being world PVP exclusively. You go to Tamriel and when there’s not a big battle happening you can hunt players or scout enemy fortifications. When there is a big battle happening, you can shoot catapults at your enemies or fight on the ground or take on any number of supporting roles. But Tamriel is a big place, so finding some bros to kill may take a while, particularly if in your PVP campaign your faction pretty much rampaged through early on and most of the other factions’ players switched to a different campaign, as happened with mine. There are some random NPCs you can kill as well, and there are skyshards to be found all over Tamriel that will get you extra skill points, but the PVP area is very PVP focused, and it is huge, and there may not be much PVPing to do all the time. And even with stat leveling partially leveling the playing field in Tamriel, if you roll in at level 10 you’re still going to get your ass kicked by most everybody else there. It doesn’t feel like Tamriel is intended to be a leveling area, but it is a good break from the regular grind.

Fans of the series will be happy to know that everyone still talks at you like they’re giving a stage monologue. And most of your interactions with NPCs consist of you prompting them to continue talking.

Despite all I’ve said sound pretty down on the game, I do have a strange compulsion to continue rolling with it a while longer because I do enjoy exploring it. My impressions from the first week may not be so hot on it, but I don’t hate it. Yet. I’ll let you know if that changes.