The Elder Scrolls Online Previews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on June 2nd, 2013

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Entering the area, I was told a local harvest festival was underway and if I would collect a few items on the ground and burn them in sacrifice to the local god, it would help the villagers in their celebrations. I was very happy to smell a trap coming my way.

Sure enough, the ritual cast me into a pocket dimension filled with ravenous giant bugs, crazed fanatics and a coven trying to undo the evil afoot (courtesy of Molag Bal, TESO's major Daedric Lord villain, of course). I was trapped and forced to fight my way out, and for the first time during my playthrough of the new content, I was truly excited at my circumstances in the game. There was a palpable sense of danger, as if a trap door had opened up and dropped me into a very dangerous level of a dungeon I was exploring, and I had to fight my way back out to the safety of the open world.

It was the kind of moment that I play games for. Hopefully, Zenimax can infuse the other parts of the game this kind of thrill.

Conquering foes, either in first-person or third-person perspective, is simple enough with the light attack, heavy attack, and blocks, though understanding the cues of the blocking system makes life much easier. Whenever an enemy begins charging an attack, the player can either parry or block to leave the enemy stunned or interrupted. Combined with the general knowledge of the aggro system, stealth mechanics, and awareness of mana and stamina reserves, one-on-one combat is never too arduous a task.

Every level up grants players points to distribute into various attributes and skills that can be hotkeyed onto the handy bar. My redguard had several effective skills, like Stonefist, that could trap or knock down enemies for free, unguarded hits. As the character's level rises, additional skill trees based on race, class, and guild open up, widening the customization and variety of possible builds.

The real challenge comes with instance dungeons where players will want to party up if they wish to survive the whole way through; besides, every player gets their own instance loot from enemy kills. The developers are not ready to discuss the party system or the trading system yet, as the balance and functionality are still in progress. The connected experience I had with the other fifteen or so journalists merely had us wading in and out of cooperative play.

Here's the part that intrigued me: At no point did the gameplay experience resemble an MMO. Sure, players weren't allowed to run rampant through NPC houses to steal everything in sight, and questing was still limited to "gather such item" or "talk to NPC B because NPC A doesn't feel like walking 10 feet" (those NPCs can be lazy!), but venturing out into the world felt natural, as if I were in any other Elder Scrolls title. The world is still populated with points of interest that actually generate interest. Players will find the nooks, crannies, hidden tunnels and decaying fortresses that dot the Tamriel landscape just as in the earlier games. There's a higher emphasis on exploration with ESO, and though some MMOs can deliver sub-par exploration opportunities, this demo felt authentic and met my expectations. Houses, taverns, and shops are plunderable too, with an occasional book lying around to let you dig into the vast lore about the game. While the Tamriel server was scarcely populated with a handful of testers in our Razer-themed room, Daggerfall and the surrounding areas were immersive enough to allow me to forget that there were other press folks tackling the same quests I was.

After helping a poor lass recover her misplaced pig (no surprise with those shoddy fences!), I was shamefully talked into confronting a murderous werewolf whereupon I encountered my first brush with death. It was the first enemy I had seriously encountered, and it took all my cunning to bury his brow and scavenge his deflated corpse it was at this point I remembered the ability to block attacks.

With such a limited timeframe, I quickly frolicked outside the township's walls to discover a burning village in distress from flying beasts wreaking havoc on the disgruntled settlers. After briefing aligning my goals with fellow battlers, I assumed the role of fireman, and bravely fought off an army of enemies surely not designed to be bested by a Level 6 commoner.

It was really the only time I bothered to form an alliance with other real-life players, as a bulk of my 90 minutes were played as if I was at the helm of Skyrim, not an expansive MMO and it seemed to make little difference to my success.

When I entered the first dungeon I came across in ESO (I found three in my wanderings), I wasn't aware any of them were public. Imagine my surprise when, as I made my way through monsters and bandits alike, I saw two fellow players come running down the pathway with a train of trouble on their tail. While I have fond memories of screaming, "Train to zone" playing EverQuest, rest assured that you won't be destroyed by a hoard of monsters running after anyone in The Elder Scrolls Online. When a monster aggros on a player, it aggros on that specific player. Anyone it passes by (assuming, of course, you didn't join in the battle), will be ignored as though they simply don't exist. When they reach the end of their imaginary leash, monsters will return to their starting point without collecting $200 or passing go. This will prevent hoards of players from being griefed and trolled by players who love to train mobs of... well... mobs... onto other players for the joy of seeing them die.

Along with other players being able to join you, another aspect from older games is making its return in ESO's dungeons -- respawning mobs. There's nothing quite like the first time you enter a dungeon and stop to look around, just to have a group of monsters spawn on top of you. This ensures that everyone is moving forward and making progress. Hanging around too long can result in hilarious if unexpectedly deadly repercussions.

That sense of exploration is something Zenimax want to emphasise. The likely reason being that they know Elder Scrolls fanatics to be curious trailblazers at heart. There certainly is a lot of landmass to cover comprising the land from all the previous games combined, plus more but it's how this landmass is to be populated that will determine how successfully sated the hungers of these trailblazers will be (or how satisfied the explorer '˜subgroup' of the MMO community will be, for that matter). It's been a common criticism of the single player Elder Scrolls games that although the worlds are huge, the geography stunning, and the architecture fantastic there is a serious lack of character among the majority of the quest-giving caste and other NPCs. Obviously, this being Elder Scrolls *Online*, it can rely on the human element to pick up the slack, but that doesn't make the first staid fetch-quest we encountered during our playthrough any more enjoyable, even if it was dressed up in a murder mystery plot and one of the characters was a dog.

The sense of progressing through the world in a geographical sense is perhaps more gratifying, since each village or town you arrive at appears to have a single big problem for you to solve. The first village we came across, just outside the city walls of Daggerfall, was being torched by imps that had to be eradicated at the same time as extinguishing the flames with a bucket of water filled from the village well. The next town we stopped in had been taken over by High Rock bandits, who would only attack if provoked but would eventually have to be ousted to give control back to the townspeople. It's not hard to imagine this process repeating itself for every settlement along the way and it might get tiresome to be greeted as the '˜one and only hope' to every single town when you know all along that there are several thousand other people being hailed in the same way. But that is more a perpetual problem of inconsistency with the genre, as opposed to being one specific to this game and, in fairness, there are offenders a lot worse than the Elder Scrolls in this regard. And you can always simply walk past or through a town without bothering the questfolk.

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