The Elder Scrolls Online Previews and Gameplay Footage
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Now that the embargo has been lifted, a significant number of previews, opinions and videos concerning The Elder Scrolls Online has been released. Caution and caveats aside, it doesn't seem like it's setting the world on fire, with multiple attacks to its subscription model.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
ESO tries to make changes to the traditional format. So in that opening section, there's not a single (kill 10) quest to be found. (Great!) you might think what a refreshing change. Except, so far there's nothing in its place. Instead, in an effort I suppose to be more true to TES's nature, the emphasis is on the little vignette you're playing out. There are rapidly respawning beasts about the land, but they're incidental to what you're up to. So in the end, what you're left with is just the stuff that you'd usually click through in other MMOs to get to the good bits. The banal conversations, scrambled justifications to have you move from point A to point B. Well, in the opening few hours, at least.
Were these encounters, these play-lets, of any interest, this would likely be pretty enticing. But instead it's all bluster, people telling you how utterly important everything is, because the Grand High Priest Of Cliffaffle Poplington has sworn his enmity to the Wolf Queen Of Qqqqqqqb, which will likely cause the Ancient God Robert to rise from the Tombs Of Fort Backalick, raising the terrifying forces of BasingStoke. As hard as I try to concentrate on what they're saying, not only my eyes but my entire brain glazes over, until I realise they've all stopped speaking and the little arrow on the map has moved one building over. Actually, I needn't make up my own barely-parodied versions here's a genuine sentence from the game:
(The ritual tore the veil between Nirn and Oblivion, allowing Mannimarco to begin stealing the souls his master needed to power the Dark Anchors and initiate the Planemeld.)
Two moments in the opening hour were so awful I had to walk away from the screen. The first was the gratuitous appearance of a blithering John Cleese, as a character wearing a pot on his head because WACKY! IT'S JOHN CLEESE FROM OFF OF THE MONTY PYTHONS, REMEMBER! LOOK! A POT ON HIS HEAD! Bleaurgh. The second occurred when someone emphatically informed me,
(You're important, and everyone and everything we've ever loved is in danger.)
That's not a parody that's word for word what is said.
VG247 has a write-up and a video:
Skyrim is still the better game, and it's a game I can play right now for a single flat fee. The question I kept on asking myself while playing The Elder Scrolls Online was, '˜Do I need to pay for this game?' It all feels too familiar without offering anything new. Sure I can group and take on quests with friends, but I'm one of those players who likes the nomad style of play, where I wander the world solo and drink in the introversion at my own pace.
You might not be the same, and if you like grouping and the '˜multiplayer Skyrim' elevator pitch then by all means discard most of what I've said above. I appreciate that to many series fans this game is a dream come true, and it's not a small feat either. There's a hell of a lot of content in here; from countless quests, page after page of collectible lore and parchments, right up to the sheer scale of the environment. The effort can't be discounted so readily.
But it also feels old, developed back in the old MMO gold rush days where taking a franchise into the online arena was a license to print money. We're past that now. MMOs need to distinguish themselves from the pack with new ideas and an attractive suite of features that stray from the '˜me-too' mindset. If Zenimax Online has copied anyone too closely then it's Bethesda itself. I really felt I had done most of the level 1-10 stuff before, and for argument's sake I had; in Skyrim.
IGN plays from a console gamer's perspective:
Part of the reason why my most recent romp through Elder Scrolls Online felt so similar to my single-player experience is because I had to play on the sparsely populated Public Test Server, which doesn't capture the experience of playing with other people as well as I wanted. Until I qualified for a dungeon around level 12 (which takes ages in reach in ESO), I might as well been playing Elder Scrolls VI. Importantly, I played no PvP, so I had no idea of how the gamepad would serve me in such a frantic environment.
As an Elder Scrolls fan, this makes me reluctantly happy. You have very little reason to group with players for most of the leveling journey, from what I can tell, and even when you try, there's a good chance your friends will be "phased" (and thus invisible) because they're on a different leg of the quest. It proves that Elder Scrolls Online performs quite well as the single-player RPG experience consoles players are used to, and it's easy to see that ESO's menus and inventory screens were designed for easy translations to consoles. (Don't worry: the native inventory here is far more manageable than Skyrim ever dreamed of.)
This satisfaction carries over to the quests themselves. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say I remember a few of them more fondly than some adventures in Skyrim and Oblivion. That's the real reason why I'd personally pick up The Elder Scrolls Online as a fan of the series; it captures the ambiance and lore in ways I'd previously thought impossible, and that means so much more to me than the absence of the ability to kill friendly NPCs or steal random crap off of tavern tables. To conjure the tired comparison, this is far more Skyrim than World of Warcraft.
AusGamers doesn't usually play MMOs:
Item crafting is another feature that translates quite well from the offline Elder Scrolls experience. The availability of raw materials and time cost of production is inflated to suit a persistent online game's economy, but the techniques and methods available are all pleasantly familiar. Much of the game is like this; you can perform a lot of the same things you could in Skyrim; it will just take a bit longer and won't let you get too powerful.
Pacing has been pretty good so far too, and I haven't had to do any kind of grinding. As long as you're vanquishing enough foes along the course of your quests (and not just sneaking around them) the level progress seems to track quest availability quite well in the early game. Whether that concentrated content will continue into the later levels remains to be seen.
Polygon argues that Skyrim's success is the best argument against the title and offers an overview video:
If hell is truly other people, Skyrim provided a sort of gaming heaven, free from being nickel and dimed, free from the tyranny of **Buttmonster420** and his friends, and free from the sort of grinding progression and forced social interaction that happens in traditional MMOs.
That sense of being the one hero, of having worlds hinge on your actions, is lost in the Elder Scrolls Online. There are players walking around each dungeon, looking at their notes for what they had to do next. It felt surreal to be busting someone out of prison amidst a group of people who were also trying to do just that.
We were warned that there would be few people online during the beta, and that we should expect a much larger group of players at launch. I took the opposite view of that e-mail and decided to enjoy what little solitude could be found before more people rush in to begin chattering about every quest.
This isn't a eulogy for Elder Scrolls, as the series will continue on, and there will likely be an amazing single-player sequel to Skyrim for next generation systems and the PC. Until then, taking that world online could be the end of a train wreck that began years ago, back when it seemed like a good idea and that business model was still viable.
CNet:
At least ESO starts with a bit of a bang, in a daring prison break set in another dimension (which you are inconveniently trapped in on account of having been murdered). From there, there's exploration, fighting, and a minor quest, all aimed at teaching you the game's controls.
Combat is not as finessed as it is in Skyrim, which instituted an excellent left-hand/right-hand system for combining weapons, spells, and accessories. Instead, this feels much more like other MMO games, with spells and abilities mapped to the number keys on your keyboard and gear equipped via an inventory screen, using a diagram of your character straight out of every classic RPG ever.
Fighting someone or something usually comes down to a short left mouse click for a light attack, and a long click for a heavy attack. Right-clicking blocks, and clicking both mouse buttons is a type of parry. While fighting, I found myself putting together combos of number-key spells, plus melee attacks. Compared with the depth and strategy of fighting in the single-player Elder Scrolls games, it felt a bit button-mashy.
Escaping the realm of the dead (which looks about the same as every other RPG underground lair), you end up on an island in the Elder Scrolls continent of Tamriel, where the game starts to look and feel a lot more like the single-player games in the series.
At least during its first 10 levels, Elder Scrolls Online is never boring. There are just frequent enough dips into the main story to keep the plot-hungry (like me) satisfied, and the variety of quests and the frequency with which they occur means you're never stuck on doing one thing for too long. I enjoyed the vistas I observed, and thought the creators did well at linking locales as diverse as deserts, woods, pirate ships, camps, and incorporated communities without ever making it feel forced. Though there's unquestionably much of this Tamriel I haven't seen yet, I feel as though what I have explored has consistent rules and laws, and I like that. I can honestly say I enjoyed the time I spent playing Elder Scrolls Online.
Whether I'd want to stick with it over the long term is another, more difficult question. By the time I hit level seven or eight, I began getting fatigued with the same-feeling quests, and with the relative smallness of the section of Tamriel I was in. (Once you've left Hammerfell for Daggerfall, for example, there's no easy way to get back.) What sets the later Elder Scrolls games apart is how vast and filled with possibility their worlds feel, as though you may really discover something just up the road or behind the next hill that no one's ever seen before. Elder Scrolls Online's more pristine, orderly, civilized take precludes those kind of experiences. And once Elder Scrolls is stripped of them, what's left?
To be fair, I still have huge portions of the main plot to see, and Bethesda has promised that much of it won't be available until after the April launch, and that it will be in continuous development beyond that. That's heartening, and could mean a Tamriel as vibrant and exciting as the one that's been hinted at for 20 years. If I'm still a little skeptical, that prospect alone is enough to keep me interested if only for now.
Odd as it might sound, The Elder Scrolls Online is also. um, very console-focused. Your quickbar can support a whopping five abilities, plus one ultimate. Quick-use of items is done via an item wheel. The reason for this other than (to make it work on consoles) is that combat also adopts the ability-less hack-and-slash combat of Oblivion and Skyrim. You can attack, or perform a powerful attack, or block, or interrupt, without needing to use abilities (although you'll have to watch your stamina gauge). There's not a huge amount of depth to this if an enemy has white sparkles above them while they're charging up an attack, you can block it to stun them. If they have red sparkles above them, you want to interrupt it to stun them. Stunning them means more damage on your subsequent attack, and they won't hit you for a little while. Hooray!
If I don't sound overly enthusiastic, it's because I'm not. Sorry. This is less an Elder Scrolls MMO, and more a standard MMO with Elder Scrolls elements. It's not bad at any of this at all, but thus far, nothing within has really managed to capture my attention. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn had a ridiculous amount of choice and stuff to do, insofar as a single character could level up everything; getting bored doing one thing meant I had about a dozen other things to try. The Secret World had unique character-building, fascinating lore, and some thought-provoking quests. World of Warcraft perfected the theme park MMO years ago. The Elder Scrolls Online. well, it's a largely standard MMO with Elder Scrolls stuff, but not necessarily the stuff that makes The Elder Scrolls series so damn fascinating.
Thus far, the quests are a mixed bag. The quests threading through the main plot which seems to be about fighting the minions of Molag Bal and trying to reclaim my soul after the cheeky bugger nicked it afford an amount of choice. Early on I was stranded on an island and needed to find my way off, which resulted in me enlisting the help of a privateer. but only after I'd helped her with a heist. And performing that heist required me to find and recruit at least one other person, with a full three available. Recruiting all three made things a lot easier, and even gave me some additional help in subsequent quests once I got off the island. That, at least, is rather neat, although I have no idea how much the decisions in these quests (and in other quests, like the one in the video that should also be popping up right now) will actually impact future events.
Each quest is a rounded story, a neatly designed mini-saga of some 40 or 60 minutes' length, with a beginning, middle and end. They're not always inspired, but they're not perfunctory either. Yet their pacing is broken as they keep bumping up against the walls of numbers the game's MMO underpinnings erect in their path - numbers that, in the offline Elder Scrolls games, would invisibly adjust themselves out of the way.
This is not a game-breaking problem, and it is not an unfixable one either. Much of it, especially on the economy side, is a matter of tuning that will doubtless be undertaken through the beta and beyond launch. It's also true that we were playing on a rather underpopulated server, and overall progress may be faster and smoother in an environment where it's easier to take part in the game's multiplayer content - of which there appears to be plenty, in the form of Dark Anchor gates to take down, open public dungeons, elite monsters, and private instanced dungeons, not to mention the game's large-scale, three-way player-versus-player warfare (which wasn't available to test last weekend).
For many players, the promise of an MMO without padding will be worth the slightly slow and lumpy ride. Others - and I'm only a little sheepish to count myself among them - might find themselves missing the soothing monotony and steady-as-she goes progress of ESO's peers, whether it's World of Warcraft's hypnotic grind and refined item game, or Guild Wars 2's fast-paced rush of flowing multiplayer events. Grind is often used as a dirty word, but - whisper it - some of us enjoy it. More to the point, if a game is going to throw it out altogether, it will need to make deeper revisions to those MMO foundations than The Elder Scrolls Online does.
After stumbling through the tutorial, the The Elder Scrolls Online really started to shine for me. The minimalistic UI keeping my focus on the world around me, the sandbox exploration allowing me to stumble upon new quests and the ubiquitous voice acting of both quest givers and random NPCs served to pull me in and accomplish the one thing every game strives for: immersion. I haven't felt this drawn in to the world of an MMO since Lord of the Rings Online. The crew at Bethesda have done a stellar job at weaving together a number of elements to create a living, breathing environment. From sound design and music to hidden lore read on screen to quest-giver stories, a tapestry is created that makes the land come alive.
As for game mechanics, well, the combat is standard action with dodging and positioning vital to survival. The class skill lines are nothing new to an RPG fan. And the quests themselves are of the standard fetch, kill and explore variety. But one area that pulls the game out of being just another progression grind MMO is the story. And The Elder Scrolls Online has that in spades.
TESO does not claim to reinvent the genre, just like World of Warcraft did not. But just like Blizzard's earlier efforts, the Bethesda team succeeds in taking the best of what has come before it and infused it with the feeling of adventure and excitement. Like a good book, it will keep me coming back to experience the next part of the story. And isn't that what we ultimately ask of our entertainment?
Forbes' contributor Paul Tassi criticizes the developers' monetization choices:
The way I see it, TESO should choose whether they want to charge $60 up front and have it be free-to-play, or charge $15 a month, but have it be downloadable for free or cheap (and preferably have less microtransactions).
It's an old argument that TESO should go free to play, and $60 per copy is nothing to sneeze at. Skyrim sold 20 million $60 copies, and has been one of gaming's biggest hits the past decade. No, it's not 10 million players giving Blizzard $15 a month like WoW at its peak, but it's still pretty damn good, even if TESO's numbers don't match Skyrim's (which they wouldn't).
But as TESO is determined to stay a subscription-based game at least in its launch window, I think perhaps now a better idea would be to eliminate the up front cost of the game. Keeping that $60 cost seems to me like they're expecting players not to like the game past the first month or so, and it's in place to ensure that they're at least making something from it, even if the player cancels right away.
Perhaps from TESO's point of view, bowing to pressure to change either of these pricing systems would look like they're admitting defeat before the game is even released. Maybe they think that it would be an admission the game isn't that great, or worth the price.
The fact is, nearly no games are worth that price. $240 to play one game over the course of one year is an outdated model that only works for a very, very select few well-established MMOs. An Elder Scrolls MMO exactly as TESO appears would probably have been all the rage five, six or seven years ago, but now? It feels instantly outdated, as does its pricing model. It's even weirder to think it's being applied to a console game, as those sort of players have never had to deal with any such game requiring an online subscription on top of what they already pay for Xbox Live or PS Plus.
Finally, GameSpot has a video preview.
