Preview: The Elder Scrolls Online – Good, but not great

The most recent beta event for The Elder Scrolls Online is over and, thanks to the NDA being lifted a while back, a lot of people are talking about how things went. My impression? The Elder Scrolls Online manages to be a mash up of a great RPG and a mundane MMORPG. Perhaps the problem is that the bar is set too high. Skyrim was a runaway success and that expectation of quality has carried over into the series’ first online incarnation. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t feeling it. I’m not saying that The Elder Scrolls online is a bad game, just not a great one – and that’s a problem.

Working in the wrong order

Graphics quality was turned up to the max. And then I found Skyrim.

Here’s my personal weird scenario: I had impulsively bought Skyrim on a Steam sale quite some time ago but never started playing. I knew that I wanted to play but I also knew, from my experience with Bethesda’s Fallout games, that it would suck away every moment of my free and not so free time. And so it sat in my library for months waiting to be installed. Eventually I got into the beta for ESO and played that for a bit. I enjoyed it, but it just felt like something was missing. So I gave in and started up Skyrim to get a frame of reference – it was awesome.

Skyrim delivers an RPG experience of epic scale with me as the focal point. I feel invested in the character I play and care about the characters I interact with. I can also interact with nearly everything in the world. I can pick up or steal virtually everything I see around me and there are consequences. I can openly develop my character any way I see fit and there are a lot of highly transparent ways to do so. The skill system is beautiful and I can easily use it to plot a course for my character. It turned out to be everything I could want in an adventure RPG. That’s how I found that The Elder Scrolls Online is missing the awesome.

And so I have some issues

For starters, the world is full of PCs with silly names running and jumping and feeling out of place when the game attempts to feel epic. When I’m en route to my quest objective and a character with the name “Butt Carrot” over his head (I’m not even being facetious) runs past me, some sense of wonder is lost. It robs The Elder Scrolls of what made Skyrim feel so incredibly awesome: me as a singularly outstanding person in a world full of conflict. While the quests try to bring that sense of uniqueness to my character, I can’t help but notice I’m one of a dozen people being freed from a cell or gathering the herbs that will heal the plague victims.

The loot system doesn’t end up pushing my buttons. The rewards are infrequent and lack that certain compulsion of being stat sticks that I’m familiar with in an MMO. After 4 – 5 hours of play, I was still running around wearing the tunic in which I started the game. Some people in game declared this to be a virtue and a sign of how much the game wasn’t a WoW clone. However, early game rewards are highly important to making any MMO feel compelling for me. This is especially true when there’s going to be a crafting system in place that lets me break down unwanted items for raw materials.

Quests are, in a word, boring. Yes, I said it. Half of the quests I was given felt like I was being asked to run a mile, press a button, then run back to find out where the next button is. In fact, progression is boring in general. There was a lack of resistance or difficulty in the quests that I encountered. They required minimal effort to complete and also often had a very minimal reward. This is nothing like wandering the wilds of Skyrim where death could easily be lurking around every corner. Skyrim sets an expectation of challenge in reaching objectives early on, whereas The Elder Scrolls Online seems to make everything as easy as possible for me.

I logged just shy of 12 hours in the game and still hadn’t hit level 8. The ability to quickly change weapons in combat (a hallmark of Skyrim) doesn’t become unlocked until level 15. I’m not willing to suffer through 20 hours of boredom to hope that the good part is just around the corner. As far as I’m concerned, the starting zones in an MMO are the place to really bring a level of excitement and immersion for players and get them hooked. ESO really didn’t do that for me.

A bow and leather armor: I am clearly a wizard.

The one thing that I’m willing to say is actually bad, and not just a matter of personal taste, about The Elder Scrolls Online is the class system and skill trees. Skyrim had a completely open and freeform system where you could craft whatever character you wanted. That was great, but ESO tries to keep that same feeling of freedom while also trying to cram it into a class system. So I can be a fire staff wielding nightblade in heavy armor? Is that a good thing? I don’t think it is because the majority of the nightblade class powers don’t support that play style. My big issue here isn’t even the ridiculous abandoning of traditional RPG class constraints (i.e. rogues use daggers and wear leather) so much as it is with the complete lack of transparency in the skill trees. As in Skyrim, using items leads to gaining levels of proficiency with them. As players level and gain skill points, they can put those points into talents if they have enough proficiency and gain passive abilities or special attacks. Players can see what the base level skills will do, but skills gain ranks as well and when they reach rank 4, they can be “morphed” into improved and sometimes quite different skills such as a melee ability becoming ranged. My problem is that I didn’t get to see what these options were or where those paths might lead until it was time to spend my precious skill points on them. I’m not aware of a respec option currently, so a lack of transparency in character building is a huge non-starter in my book.

Let us not forget the good parts

There were, of course, good points to the game and I would be remiss not to mention them. One of my favorites is hunting down the skyshards. They’re glowing crystals that grant you an extra skill point for every 3 you find in the world. You can find hints to the locations of each skyshard by looking in the achievements tab for skyshards and looking up the achievement for your current map area. I found it to be a fun scavenger hunt to go on similar to the datacrons in SWTOR.

The Elder Scrolls Online also maintains that quest discovery feeling when stumbling across icons on the navigation bar, albeit in a smaller scale than Skyrim. Still, I got excited every time that I saw a new dark icon pop up and went running heedlessly toward it. These quests tended to be shorter and more action oriented than those from the main plot lines. I found them to be more engaging and rewarding to complete. Sometimes it was just some ruins and other times it was a village being attacked by pyromancers that required saving. The villagers needed saving, not the pyromancers. Although, that would be a fun twist.

So here’s the thing: The Elder Scrolls Online has the look of an Elder Scrolls game and even a bit of the feel of one. The problem is that it tries too hard to keep that feel and cram it into an MMORPG framework and doesn’t work because it refuses to assign specific roles to classes. An obtuse, “classless class” system was the biggest issue for me, but overall ESO simply doesn’t bring anything new or groundbreaking to the genre and adds a number of unnecessary complications. I can’t recommend buying the game and paying a monthly fee instead of simply replaying Skyrim or picking it up for the first time and playing as much as you want for the purchase price. I find it to be a much more engaging world and far more worth exploring, not to mention the extensive mod community support for it. If ESO is still something you very much want to play, it launches on PC, Mac, PS4, and Xbox One on April 4th.