So the much anticipated Elder Scrolls Online is only 4 days away. Who'll be playing this fantastic looking game?

I'll be waiting for the PS4 version in June I think, by which time I'll have saved up enough to buy a PS4. This will be the first MMO I've really been involved in, the only other being 3 months on EVE. I'm very much an Eldsr Scrolls Player rather than an MMO player, but it looks like a great game for both types. I'm reluctant to pay monthly for anything, but I'll give it a go.

Between now and June I'd love to hear accounts from people who've got it on PC. Trawling the hate-forums of most MMOs is a chore. People here are somewhat more sensible, and thus I value your opinions highly

I'm on the PC early access because I'm special that way.

Here's my rundown.

QUESTS: Very Elder-Scrollsy in theme, but the execution is a little shaky. Quests are usually multi-step and often multi-stage. Go to this place, find these things, use them in this way, deal with this complication, talk to that guy. Enemies are generally obstacles to that, rather than goals. Kill X guys or collect Y things quests are few and far between, and usually have some weird complication in them.

Example: there's a quest that involves killing cultists and collecting energy spheres from their rituals. The catch is that you have to wait for them to start their rituals before murdering them to get the energy spheres (they're doing the rituals to create and collect these things), which means patience and either stealth or a disguise.

Often there are "collect information and make a decision" quests, which is a sort of take on the basic fetch quest where you go find and talk to some folks and then talk to some other folks and then talk to some other folks and tell them what you think.

When there is a straight up "kill that guy and take his stuff" quest, that's usually it. The bad guy has a thing, kill him and take it. The other 900 enemies surrounding him are just in the way. No extra credit.

Also there are quests where what you do in one stage affects the next -- you can decide to fully complete one stage and get all the benefits to make stage 2 easier. Or not, and make stage 2 harder.

COMBAT: Not exactly Elder-Scrollsy, but not ludicrously so. You have your basic attack, charged attack, block, interrupt a la Skyrim. You also get a double-tap dodge. This stuff costs Stamina. You also get a very short hotbar (5 items) to contain your special abilities, which are magic attacks, special stabs, class abilities, et cetera. The bulk of magic attacks are on staves (destruction or restoration) -- these contain your basic fireballs, elemental walls, healing auras, and so on. Let's go to a subheading:

SPECIAL ABILITIES: There are a crap-ton of these, and you only ever have 5 slotted at a time. Each class has a list of abilities. Each weapon type has a list of abilities. Each guild (fighters', mages', and so on -- there are probably at least 5 of these guilds so far) has a list of abilities. There's a "World" classification of abilities that includes Soul magic (to charge soul stones), Werewolves, and Vampires, each with their own full trees. Let's say you use a bow, and also a sword and shield. You'll have something like 20 active-use abilities and maybe 2/3 that as passive-use abilities available, without getting into guilds or anything. Oh, and then there are a couple of PvP trees for assault and support. To mix and match to 5 slots. Good luck, min-maxers.

Anyone can do anything -- the only unique stuff you get is class stuff. If you want to make a Nightblade (rogue-type) that uses a pair of daggers and sneaks and stabs, that's cool. If you want to make a Nightblade who uses Fire Staves and summons shadows, that's cool too. If you want to make a Sorcerer that summons demons, wears heavy armor, and fights sword-and-shield, go for it.

GAMEPLAY: A little quirky. The game lacks the "presence" of Skyrim -- because it's an MMO, things are rather spaced out and big. You don't accidentally (or intentionally) kick over buckets or shove silverware off of tables. Everything's glued in place. You run through other people (but not enemies). It comes off as a little flimsy.

Numbers are low for an MMO. You start out with the classic Skyrim 100 Health/Stamina/Mana, and each level you can drop 10 points into one. There are supposedly diminishing returns after a point, so you can expect those numbers to stay below 1000 after the game's 50 levels, which is a far cry from WoW's 100k+ hit point tanks.

The game is very chaotic. Enemies move. A lot. A sorcerer will stand off and fire energy bolts at you or make things rain from the sky while the fighter jukes and dodge in front of you. A pack of wolves will attack from 3 directions. A bandit rogue might dodge and do backflips over you, forcing you to keep re-acquiring him.

The biggest downside is the sheer quantity of dumbasses sprinting around all over the place, making it hard to do anything well. You could have the perfect plan to sneak quietly through an enemy stronghold and take down sentries, only to have the cast of Rambo: First Blood, Part II sprint through and murder everything while you're still drawing your dagger. Eventually the population density may spread out, but for now someone else is always where you are.

ART and DESIGN: A pretty awesome departure from the cartoony and grotesque. Towns and villages actually have buildings that aren't plot or market related. Dozens of NPCs hang around for no other reason than to provide color and realism. Massive things are massive. Cramped alleys are cramped. It's a little hard to distinguish NPCs from PCs.

CRAFTING (and such): Really rather complicated. Resource gathering is simple -- you can run out in the world and find ingredients all over the place. Putting them together is weird. You can deconstruct items for raw materials or research them to learn their traits (non-magical bonuses). Alchemy involves learning what features ingredients have and how to mix them with what solvents to get what effects. Enchanting involves mixing runes into "rune phrases" to convert into an enchantment rune that can be applied to gear. Building a bow might take 5 wood, but you can use 6, 7, 8, and so on wood to make it more powerful and higher level. You can make arms and armor in your racial style but you can also learn the other racial styles and make those things too. You tend to make your own gear an awful lot, at least in the early levels that I've played. Right now my guy is wielding a bow that he made, a sword that he made, and more than half his armor pieces he also made. Side note: magic items have charges like all the other Elder Scrolls games, and you have to recharge them with soul gems. Soul gems also allow you to resurrect yourself or other players. It pays to think ahead.

Overall, I find the game rather enjoyable. It's sufficiently different from WoW, without launching itself into some easily failed experimental territory.

Overall, after the couple of beta phases I did for ESO, I'm just not sold on it. It's not a bad game by any stretch but it just fails to capture me and draw me in. I guess the word I'd use is unimpressive. I can't find a reason to move to it over WoW or SWTOR, let alone for any length of time before Wildstar comes out which I found quite a bit more engaging. So this one is a sit out for me.

WoW is archaic at this point (and was at its best the prettiest treadmill in the land) and SWTOR is just pathetic -- great concept, bullshiat execution. Of course I'll never get to see the game I actually want, ever, which is a game with Star Wars: Galaxies open-world sandbox and economy (and player cities and property, etc) merged with something like Asheron's Call's sense of exploration and Oblivion/Skyrim-esque quantities of lore and combat.

One thing I'm feeling pretty good about in ESO (or is it TESO?) is the feeling of progress without feeling grindy, as if the point of the game is to actually go out and look around and do stuff. I do wish it were more open, though, and encouraged more wandering around and finding those random caves and towers to plunder.

I guess that's going to be the curse of the MMO forever: too open and it's an undirected mess, but too directed and it's nothing more than a long tunnel from hotspot to hotspot.

In fairness, WoW was practially archaic when it came out. It was like the Casablanca of MMOs. It didn't provide anything new, it just did everything simply and well. It didn't pioneer anything we hadn't already seen in EQ, AC, or DAoC. I tend to play it in spurts as is, on and off every couple of months. While SWTOR I only play for setting and friends.

I just really wanted something more out of ESO. I would've much preferred them to have more class options with restrictions applied, rather than the 4 they went with. If I go back to Daggerfall or Morrowind, the number of "pre gen" classes is quite diverse and interesting. And most of the human foes you encounter fall into these classes as well. You didn't see Orc assassins wearing heavy armor and using 2h axes, they all wore light armor and used light weapons.

(I also admit I was put off a bit by the TTS stuff in the earlier betas. One second someone would have a VA line and the next it was TTS).

The TTS stuff was hilarious, but that's all gone now. It was placeholder.

Oddly enough, there's an enormous amount of diversity in the 4 classes. You can say eff-it and use zero class skills if you want, and just be the best archer you can be -- focusing solely on weapon, racial, and armor skills. I was actually wondering "where's the mundane fighter?" on the class list, and then I realized that it's anyone. You choose your stat upgrades manually, and those are what contribute to your magic/weapon/power effectiveness, not arbitrary class bonuses.

For someone who didn't get in on the beta, What's TTS?

Text-to-Speech. Computer voice. A lot of the voice-acting in the beta was placeholder TTS, which I'll say was rather impressively well-done but also somewhere in the Uncanny Valley.

Thanks for all that. Good rundown. I've got more time to reply now than I did when I read it

I have a few questions relating to different things...

1) You mentioned that there's always another player charging around messing things up. This was one of the things I picked up on from reviews that I thought might be the most annoying. How does this work with regard dungeons and such? I read (I think) that caves and dungeons aren't instanced and are instead there for everyone to run in to together. If that's the case, when do they reset? Is there just a constant stream of players running through a zone with dead enemies? One of the theories was that population will spread out once the game is live, but won't there also be many more players?

2) Minor point this one but I quite like the faction idea and was a little disappointed when they announced that pre-orders could play any race in any faction. What's the point? That kinda makes the whole thing irrelevant. Have many people switched factions or are they predominantly still all where they should be? Do people only get to do this with one character or all of them for evermore?

3) These next 2 will be a bit longer as they're the main things I've struggled to find information on. Skills. You mention that there are 5 skill slots. Are these 5 for active abilities and then your passives are separate, or are 5 slots all you can ever have active and additional skills are wasted when not slotted, passive or otherwise? Also I'm coming from a Skyrim background - do skill still have a value up to 100 that does something or are the skills just for unlocking abilities? If I train one-handed to 100 am I great with swords even if I have no sword abilities active or even chosen? I also noticed that there's a sword and board and a dual wield skill tree but not just a one-handed one. Is sword and staff still possible or are staves 2 handed? Another thing that's not mentioned much - it says you can train to max in every skill eventually (I believe) but you do presumably have a limited number of skill points to assign to abilities?

4) Spells. Is there a Skyrim-like spell system at all? There doesn't seem to be any mention of one. Are all the spells therefore on Staves? Are there different staves? The only ones I've seen mentioned again are Destruction and Restoration. Are there different ones of these then? I loved the Skyrim spells and magic system so it'd be a shame to see it go, though I understand that from an MMO point of view it was probably a bit involved.

Sorry, that was a bit longer than I intended and question 3 contains about 5 questions


Thanks for any info

There are a few instanced dungeons. I think 3 at the mid-levels and 6 at the high levels (or a total of 3 per faction, but that's bendable). Most of the rest of the gameworld is open, though I've run into a few tiny pockets where you end up by yourself. For the most part, if there's a target like a book or a staff or a pot of rice or something, you get your own version. Plot NPCs move relative to your own progress, so everyone sees their own version of things. Occasionally if you change an area in a permanent way (purging the evil undead from a temple, etc) it becomes an NPC inhabited safe zone.. for you. Other people who wander in may still have to fight stuff, but you won't see it exactly.

The problem is that all the enemies leading up to your target in most areas just get swarmed. Sometimes. It goes in waves. Enemies are on a respawn timer, so a short time after they're killed they just show back up.



It's everyone. I haven't noticed too many people playing outside their faction though.



Five for active abilities, passives are separate -- passives are usually keyed to whatever tree they're on, though. For example, on the Dual Wield tree you might have a passive ability that enhances damage against low-health targets by 1% for every Dual Wield active ability on your skill bar.

Skills still have a value up to 100. I think it modifies weapon performance (damage/crit/etc) and maybe blocking but I don't know the details on how much. The level is also a gate for buying abilities.

Staves are two-handed.

You can go just one-handed from the one-handed-with-shield category, though you'd lose out on some of the abilities that utilize the shield.

You get a skill point every level, a la Skyrim. You can also get skill points from exploring and finding "Skyshards" that are usually a few to an area, and every 3 found gets you one skill point. Also sometimes some other stuff will get you a skill point. Achievements I think. I'm not sure what the theoretical max is. Also once you get an ability to a certain level you can "morph" it with another skill point and tack on a secondary effect. An assassin's stab ability starts off doing extra magic damage and then can be morphed to either debuff the enemy or heal you.



Not exactly.

Staves are Destruction or Restoration. Within Destruction there are Fire, Ice, and Lightning. These provide basic elemental attacks (firebolt, lighting blast, icebolt) from your normal attack button. Then in the Destruction Staff abilities there are things like "Elemental Wall" and "Magicky Staff-Whack" (I forgot the name, but you whomp the enemy with your stick and it does magic stuff).

Restoration staves heal things and I think can provide shields and such in the abilities.

Now, Spells are typically in the ability trees and they're all over the map.

Sorcerers get summons and daedric magic, storm magic (long-distance zaps, Lightning Form), and some sort of weird crystal-based thing.
Nightblades can get some summons and, notably, Invisibility
Templars can get some cool anti-undead zaps and other Restoration/Abjuration type stuff.
Dragonknights tend to get some self-buffs but also some magical earthy stuff.

I'm leaving a lot out.

There's also the Mage's Guild tree that provides some more utility-looking spells like Magesight.

Spells are all really just "mana-based abilities". You'd recognize a lot of spells from older games, but you can't really get them all on one character. You can, at least, tack primary Destruction or Restoration skillsets onto any character.

Oh, there's also Soul Magic, which everyone has access to, to do some drains and Soul Trap to fill your soul stones. And some other stuff.

Cheers for that, that was all very handy. So presumably after a point characters don't become more powerful just more diverse? I quite like that I think. As you say I don't know what skill points are limited to, but it's nice to think that you could master multiple combat/armour styles with one character.

Let me know how you're enjoying it every so often. I wanna try and keep up to date between now and June

So I played through the opening area of Daggerfall and discovered something interesting.

First I went through and did the basic introductory quests and what not and followed the progressive quest line that shuffles you on out to the next area. It seemed short, and I was thinking "wow these zones aren't that big." Then I noticed that I had a "Main Quest" line back in that area, and went to bring myself up to date (and also check out the Mage's Guild). And then I noticed that there were some extra places around the zone I hadn't visited, so I wandered off to check it out, and ended up in a dozen-part quest with tens of side-quests spread out over a huge area visiting a castle siege, ruined manor, small enclaves and villages, a ghost battlefield and so on.

And I went back and found some more stuff I'd missed the first time because I wanted to lead one of my buddies to the meat of the zone, and ended up assisting a group of refugees holing up in an old mill.

Basically, there's a gabillion things to do if you go out and look for them.

As a secondary thing, the guild system is goddamned brilliant. You join a guild on your account rather than per character, and you can be a member of up to 5 different guilds. On the Guild screen, you can flip amongst them. In your chat you can talk in any guild you're a member of by using /g1 /g2 /g3 etc. So you also get guild bank/store access on all your characters (so no flipping back and forth amongst characters to manage things or passing out dozens of extra permissions). This also works with your personal bank -- you don't have to mail stuff and money to your other characters, because you share a communal bank with them. No matter what faction each individual character might be in.

At first when you said Daggerfall I thought you meant the game rather than the place.

It's hard enough to get Morrowind running. I can't imagine trying to start up Daggerfall.

I think you have to DOSBox it, which comes with its own challenges.

Brief update:

You get a lot of skill points, so experimentation in different lines is advisable. I'm bouncing back and forth between two different class skill trees and three weapon trees while still managing to put points in a few crafting skills and the Mage's Guild line. With the ability to swap between two weapon sets at level 15 you also get to put together a skill set for both, so you can go from swords and close-range stuff to bows and long-range stuff in the middle of a fight, and then back if things change.

Quests. Quests are pretty awesome. The writing's solid, and each little point of interest on the map tends to get a short quest chain and a few flavor quests. And often you never get pointed toward these places, you have to wander and find them (or go toward interesting looking blobs on the map). So I wandered into one area looking for adventure, and found an injured soldier on the side of the road who tasked me with breaking into an enemy camp and freeing some of his comrades. That done, the now reformed group of soldiers took some territory and moved up, asking me to go take out one of the camp's leaders and grab the enemy's orders. They advanced again and got some reinforcements, and I went to go douse some signal fires -- in the meantime the area that was once full of enemies was now a rolling brawl between NPC soldiers and enemies. A secondary quest-giver popped up and asked me to go assist some recruits. Once done with everything, we had driven the enemy off the beach and reclaimed the tower, which was now being re-purposed as a base.

When I got back to town, the NPCs were talking about the reclamation of the keep.

PVP is also pretty sweet. The PVP area is really, really, really big, and it's full of stuff. Even if you don't rush forward and join the assault/defense of keeps, there are dungeons and camps to explore, monsters to fight, resources to gather, and then (of course) player raiding parties to foil. Sitting off on a flank somewhere with a few other people and laying in ambush is a cross between hilarious and heroic.

Everything I've heard about ESO has given me a supreme impression of mediocrity.

Then again, I admit I'm biased in that I'm head over heels for Wildstar. If money wasn't tight, I'd have pre-ordered by now.

~Umi

Thanks for the update Epicedion, sounds promising. What's the population like? Is it quite full already or rather sparse? Are there (m)any problems with griefers and stuff?

Another thing I wondered, it says in the press released stuff that after level 50 you can enter all the zones. How do players of rival factions react to you in their own zones? They're PvE areas so presumably they can't attack you, which seems weird.

The population is pretty high. Everything's on what they call a "megaserver" (one for North America, one for Europe -- these are kept entirely separate). Everyone in an area is load-balanced dynamically with everyone else on the continental megaserver.

There are some serious issues regarding botters and spammers -- public dungeons are a mess (a public dungeon is one where you mingle with other players rather than getting your own instance) because each one has a small boss. If you walk into one you can expect a dozen or more people standing on the boss spawn spamming attacks and then autolooting the corpse. Most of these guys are gold farmers, and hopefully they'll institute some systems to keep it down to a dull roar.

Once you hit 50(ish) the storyline carries you through the other factional zones. These are treated as special instances (just you and your faction's other high-levels can be seen) with different quests and different enemies, so that when you're in the Level 10 area for one faction you're not fighting level 10 enemies and the level 10 players aren't fighting level 50 monsters. You don't actually interact with the other faction's players.

My beta experience with ESO was very meh.

Wildstar looks really fun.

Unfortunately, they are saddled with NCSoft. Which I refuse to give money to.



-k

Any particular reason?

I mean, I've never really cared for them as a publisher because most of their games just never appealed to me, but I've never had much reason to actively dislike them. Some of their games were crap (Tabula Rasa), some of their games were pretty good (City of Heroes), but that can be broken down along the lines of who the developer was, rather than that a game was published by NCSoft.

I never personally got into Lineage or Lineage II (which NCSoft actually did develop themselves), but they have their share of loyal fans and relative popularity. And while Carbine Studios is technically a subsidiary of NCSoft, the devs involved seem to know what they're doing and have a strong pedigree coming from Blizzard, so I have high hopes for the quality of the game. If it's as fun as it looks, I'd need there to be some really solid flaw with NCSoft for me to care that they in particular are publishing it.

~Umi

NCSoft cancelled no less than three MMOs out from under me with little to no warning.

The last was City of Heroes, which as far as anyone can tell, was cancelled because they weren't making ENOUGH money (they were still comfortably profitable at the end), combined with political infighting between the US and Korean offices. They also treated the developer Paragon Studios very shabbily, with most of the employees not knowing they were fired until the morning the studio was shut down by the Korean HQ.

NCSoft has in total cancelled 7 different MMOs in a similar fashion, more than any other publisher in history.

If Carbine had hooked up with any other publisher I'd pre-order Wildstar in a heartbeat. As it is, NCSoft owns Wildstar and Carbine lock, stock, and barrel, and given NCSoft's track record I'm not investing in something the publisher might yank at a whim.

I won't buy EA Games product for similar reasons. That publisher is known for buying out successful developers, gutting the company, and then cancelling everything that developer had been working on except the one or two properties they had actually been interested in. I still mourn Westwood Studios. And Earth & Beyond, as flawed as it was.


-k

I'll be one of the last people to defend EA, but I was quite surprised when I heard they took up the slack on running servers for some of their older titles that don't have a huge population when... I think Gamespy used to run the server? Whomever it was, rather than just mothballing the online play for those games, they took over the servers. Not something I expected from EA.

And of course what arrives in my email today. A beta invite for Wildstar.

...

On the other hand I found out there's a thriving emulator for Earth & Beyond. Neat.



-k

This weekend even, you ought to at least give it a shot.

Well, I looked at it. It looks like a good game from what I could find. But I just can’t talk myself into paying $15 per month for the privilege of playing with myself when I can play with myself for free elsewhere.

*cough*
*snicker*

No really, the price is too steep when there are a lot of free to play game out there that are pretty good and don't cost $60 to buy, then another $15 per month. I usually end up solo most of the time anyway so MMO isn't a big deal.

I tried the full version of it... yawned the whole time.

LOVE IT!!!! but then again ive logged well over 1k hours on daggerfall and probably close to 1k on Morrowind. I would have logged that much with Obliivion but the world was soo small i ran out of things to do much much sooner even with fan content. Skyrimm I havent had to play that long yet, and perhaps i never will now.

That was pretty much my reaction to the betas as well.

My biggest issue was that it just didn't feel like an elder scrolls game. I mean, it did at first--it's got a pretty decent coat of elder scrolls paint on it--but pretty soon it became obvious that you were more or less locked into playing an archetypal hero character dedicated to doing his best for king and country. (Or queen, if you're allied with the Thalmor faction.) There's none of the moral relativism that makes elder scrolls games what they are. You can't steal from anybody, unless it's part of the plot. You can't run around killing NPCs that cheese you off. Even the addition of a few extra dialogue buttons to represent different personality types would have done loads to make it feel like you were playing an actual character rather than a cardboard cut out.

FFS, I started out playing a khajiit--I expect to at least be able to throw a little snark around when talking to people.

I'd be seriously surprised to find either the thieves' guild or the dark brotherhood as playable factions in this game, at least in any meaningful capacity. I can somewhat understand the decision to leave the dark brotherhood out, but nixing the thieves' guild is dumping a sizable portion of the fanbase. I also wonder if there are going to be any "daedric quests" in ESO considering how whitewashed they force the main characters to be.