This past weekend I played the final beta test of The Elder Scrolls Online, after spending a large amount of time on the fence about how I felt about the game. After watching a few videos and looking things up about it, I decided to jump in at the last possible opportunity and give it a proper look for myself, and I was surprised by how well some aspects of the game worked, while mortified at how badly some aspects of the game didn't. I won't hide it: I liked the game and I'm much closer to considering playing it at launch than I was earlier, but that doesn't mean I don't know good design decisions from bad ones, and I wanted to write up the things I liked and disliked about the game.
What I Liked:Fast travel isn't anything new to TES, since it was in place all the way back in Arena, but Online's variant of it is helpful without making players overly reliant on them. I think of it as a nice balance between the fast travel that Morrowind has (only from specific spots) and the fast travel the rest of the series has (anywhere, anytime).
You can find Wayshrines scattered around the provinces (sans Cyrodiil, of course), mostly placed in general areas that make up the regions of a province. For example, there's a Wayshrine in Daggerfall, a Wayshrine in Aldcroft, and some Wayshrines in the wilderness in between, like near Glenumbra Moors and such. Players can use these to fast travel to any other wayshrines they've discovered. It's also possible to fast travel to any wayshrine from anywhere... but doing so will cost you gold.
It's a nice way to nudge players towards actual travel and exploration so they don't just fast travel all the time, without taking fast travel away entirely or making it inconvenient to get to far-off places. There's plenty to see and do in Tamriel, and this means that you're much more likely to see it. It's also a nice way to force newbies to explore early, too, as they probably won't have enough cash to blow on frivolous fast travel.
For being such a marketed aspect of the game, the Civil War in Cyrodiil is surprisingly full-featured, with a large number of forts, outposts, and even quests exclusive to the province that don't involve the civil war in the slightest. The PvP as a whole, though, manages to set the right atmosphere while also being quite fun to play in its own way.
Cyrodiil in general feels very lifeless. This makes sense, given that the whole province is supposed to be basically ransacked and devoid of lots of people aside from soldiers (ie: players), but it helps make the place feel beautiful, yet bleak. It looks familiar, and so it should, to anyone who's played Oblivion before, but many of the landmarks are destroyed or taken over; Chorrol, an idyllic city in the future, is utterly destroyed right now thanks to huge rifts in the earth filled with lava, while Bruma has ironically been taken over by daedra, with Cloud Ruler Temple featuring an Anchor of Coldharbour right above it.
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As for the gameplay, it's well-done, albeit a bit problematic in certain aspects. Perhaps my inexperience with MMOs is coming into play here, but seeing an enormous group of people all rushing in or out, towards or away from forts and places makes things feel grand in scale, and whenever skirmishes or raids break out between factions, there's an appropriate amount of chaos going on in the areas to make battlefields feel warlike. You might fight, and even kill, an enemy player, only to get caught completely off-guard by someone hitting and killing you with a magic spell completely out of left field. I don't consider this to be unfair, and I think Zenimax didn't either, given that the typical durability penalties death brings don't occur in PvP. This is simply how a war like ESO's would work. When I got killed at some points and watched a dozen or so people trample over my corpse during the deathcam, I couldn't help but laugh, simply because it's just so cool.
Unfortunately, it is marred somewhat by a combination of lag and graphical glitches. During an attack on a fort held by the Ebonheart Pact, I was trying to make my way inside to let some arrows fly before I inevitably got my ass handed to me, but the stairs – and the entire wall on the side facing out to the wilderness – was missing and invisible, meaning I had to bungle my way around until I finally found the slope shape that was the stairs. As for the lag, it's what you'd expect. It makes the combat more frustrating than it should be, which is especially unfortunate given how the combat being real-time (so to speak) is important to the gameplay as a whole.
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This is a big one for me, as an increasing lack of choice in developing my character has been a pox on the Elder Scrolls series for a long time. Morrowind had just the right amount of skills for me, and although it didn't have a lot of non-combat skills (like crafting and such) like Skyrim does, it had enough ways to make for a variety of builds. Thankfully, Zenimax seems to be smarter than Bethesda (or at least, Skyrim's development team) in this regard, as Online's pool of skills is the best I've seen out of the series in a long while, comparable to Morrowind and Daggerfall without question.
When you start the character creation, you can choose one of four classes, but these are really just extremely basic templates. Each class has three exclusive skill trees, but you don't have to put points into them, as things like one-handed weapons and shields, dual wielding, archery, and such are all general skills. Where one Dragonknight might focus on increasing their Dragonknight magic, swordsmanship and heavy armor, another might use medium armor, swords and bows.
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For weapons, there's one-handed and shield, dual wielding, two-handed weapons, archery, and the use of restoration and destruction staves. For armor, there's light armor, consisting of things like robes and hoods for mages, medium armor, consisting of leather or rawhide armor for scouts, rangers or thieves, and heavy armor, the standard choice of the tank. Each race also has its own small skill tree tailored towards its specialties (Khajiit are suited to stealth and medium armor, etc), and even the Fighters and Mages Guilds both have a small number of skills only accessible to members of their ranks. Then you have the crafting skills (blacksmithing, clothing, woodworking, enchanting, and alchemy), and skills to aid in the Civil War, there's tons of potential to build characters, be they generalist or specialist. A siege soldier who can help attack or defend forts, a craftsman who knows how to create and refine items, a hunter, a thief, a berserker.
I can't even begin to really describe how happy I was to discover how much there is to play around with in Online. While there are many other classic skills missing, such as Speech, Sneaking and Lockpicking, I don't mind this. Lockpicking is still around as a small minigame and it requires the player's skill, not the characters, Speech is incorporated into some other trees (a Fighters Guild skill is intimidating some NPCs), and Sneaking is incorporated into a variety of other skill trees. As it stands, Online has the best offering of skills and abilities in years.
What I Disliked:When crafting items in the game, you need materials, of course. For clothing you'll need Jute, gathered from flower patches, or Rawhide, gathered from animals like deer and wolves (and werewolves!). For metal items you'll need Iron Ore, for wooden items like shields and bows you'll need Maple wood. What I don't like is how annoyingly difficult it is to find these items in large quantities, especially in some areas.
Each faction of the game has a “starter island” that newbie players will probably end up going to, and the quests and enemies on them are a low enough level to ease characters into the game. Supplies tend to be plentiful on these islands, but unfortunately that's not really the case for some materials. Rawhide is easily collected from areas that are populated with lots of wolves, but wood and ore is more scarce, which isn't a good idea.
Take Stros M'kai, for example. Just outside of Port Hunding, the main town on the island, is a spot with five wolves all close by, and a short walk away can find you three more wolves to kill. While you aren't 100% guaranteed a Rawhide drop, with eight enemies and a fairly quick respawn time, going hunting is a fairly efficient gathering process, and actually rather fun instead of feeling grindy.
However, it's a bit more difficult to find Iron Ore spots to mine at, and even harder to find places to chop up some Maple wood for your shields and bows; neither material type has a fast respawn time, either, which exacerbates the issue. This can lead to a lot of running around like a headless chicken, looking for ore and wood spots or just stubbornly waiting for ones to respawn, which does feel grindy and not very fun. I understand that Zenimax doesn't want people camping these areas, but the amount of time wasted looking for chopping blocks and rocks to smash open gets annoying fast.
The dungeons in Online are one of the biggest disappointments for me, and I imagine anyone else in my position would probably feel similarly. This is probably more of a personal issue than the other things I've discussed here, since obviously the game's world had to be squashed some to fit properly, but the dungeons are housed in separate sections compared to the mostly-seamless outside areas, so there's little reason that going spelunking should be so lacking.
The main areas I found this to be noticeable were in a Dwemer ruin on Stros M'Kai, and in an Ayleid ruin on Betnikh. Both were particularly small and exceedingly linear to boot, with the Ayleid ruin consisting of a hallway or two with one small, empty room connecting them before leading into the boss area. It's hard to feel like a treasure hunter or an adventurer if all the dangerous ruins or caverns are so simple.
Ironically, the tutorial area, consisting of large rooms with an entrance, exit, and some confusing, similar-looking passages filled with item bags and spike traps, was one of the best dungeons I played through during the whole weekend. It wasn't so big that it was hard to get around, but it wasn't so small that it felt like filler. A different dungeon on Stros M'kai, a prison cavern, was also fairly good; still somewhat linear, but at least containing some sprawling rooms and a little exploration. If more dungeons in the game could be like this, I think that the atmosphere of exploration would be improved as a result. I don't expect dungeons to be as big as the ones in Oblivion or Skyrim, but they do need to be bigger than most of the ones I played are right now.
The difficulty curve that the game seems to have is atrocious, mainly because it seems to run somewhat in opposition compared to the rest of the series or even the design concepts of Online as a whole. Granted, it's easy to just sprint past enemies before they can go from unaware to cautious to aggressive, but it doesn't always work and once you've aggro'd an enemy, you'll have a tough time getting them to bugger off. There's clearly an attempt here to halt progress by making enemies unreasonably difficult to combat, and it probably sounded good on paper, but it just doesn't work here.
The main reason I bring this up is because of the way this curve is implemented, at least when it comes to the Daggerfall Covenant. In Daggerfall, some of the earliest quests you can start are right in the city, and pit players against enemies that are no higher than levels 3 or 4, around the same strength the character will be once they leave the tutorial. Outside of the city, however, things are far more dangerous. Red Rook bandits are level 6 or 7, and imps and other creatures can be found on the way to the next town, Aldcroft, that are levels 8 or 9. Heading to Glenumbra Moors and Camlorn after that brings enemies that are level 10 at least and level 12 at most, with the boss in Camlorn being level 14.
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What the curve expects players to do is finish the quests in Daggerfall city, then take a ship to Stros M'kai, where the hardest enemies are level 4 and there are a multitude of simple, get-your-feet-wet quests to bump a character's level up to 4 or 5, possibly 6. After finishing the line of quests there, players can travel to Betnikh, which has some more quests and where enemies are around levels 5 and 6. Once the quests here are finished, a player will probably be around level 7 or 8, making travel back outside of Daggerfall much less precarious.
This feels very unintuitive to me and I'm not sure why Zenimax decided to design the areas with this in mind. The reason players will probably travel around the provinces is to explore, find dungeons or enemies to fight, and complete quests to gain experience, items and levels, but the quests further into the world rise in difficulty, which seems to force players down one of two bottlenecks: either do the easier quests first, or try and form a group with some higher-level players so they can help you out. One could also just stubbornly grind every enemy they can find until they slowly gain enough experience to start taking on the harder monsters. But this ends up feeling grindy, of course, and it will never be as time- and experience-efficient as completing the quests.
This may simply be my inexperience with MMOs speaking (as I've only seriously played Runescape, Mabinogi and TESO), but it's disheartening to see how the difficulty of the game damages the aspects of freedom and exploration that the series is known for. If it were easier to gain levels without having to do quests, this problem might be alleviated somewhat, but I'm not sure how this would be possible without increasing the enemy experience payout, which would result in new problems.
It also makes me wonder about the viability of a crafting specialist character like I mentioned up above. How will crafters get the experience, levels and skill points necessary to increase their crafting skills?
Overall:...I really, really want to preorder Online. I'm not even going to mince words, I probably will end up preordering Online just because it hooked me right from the start, which is something scant few games do to me nowadays.
I haven't even discussed some of the more general things about the game here, like the graphical fidelity of the game (it looks pretty good, not cutting-edge, but certainly not terrible), the various questlines in each area, so on and so forth. While I don't think it's a WoW-killer by any means, Online's got a lot of potential and I'm surprisingly confident in Zenimax's ability to pull it off. Comparing it to some other online games that were released in recent years, like TORtanic, Online simply looks much more polished, which is ironic considering it partly comes from a company known for releasing buggy games.
Personally, what I think the game does best is serve as an entry point to the series. Placing the game in the 2nd Era chronologically cuts it off from the singleplayer games, and offering three factions and lots of skills and build opportunities means it has far more roleplaying content than Oblivion or Skyrim, meaning Online can be enjoyed perfectly well without any prior experience or knowledge of the main series gameplay- or story-wise.
Given that the beta test this weekend was on a less recent build (this stress test was on the most-PvP-optimized server, which had bugs on it that have been ironed out in more recent builds, I'm expecting the launch to have less issues in that regard (solving some problems in regards to the difficulty curve at least), but it obviously won't change the small size of the dungeons or the item drop rate. However, it'll probably make the good things I mentioned even more appreciable, and I can say that if I was on the fence about how I felt about Online before, I'm certainly more positive about it now.
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So I say... for the Covenant!
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