RATINGS:
Graphics: 9
Sound: 9
Gameplay: 7
Overall: 8
Pros: Seemingly fully voiced NPC quests, exceptional graphics, in-depth lore.
Cons: Sometimes presumptuous that the mechanics are obvious due to people previously playing Skyrim, starting areas way too easy even for newbie areas (which makes it boring).
We recently took an extended look at The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO or ESO). The game has been live for a month and we haven’t looked at it much since beta, even then only getting the chance to do a quick play through of the tutorial and a little beyond. So here we are.
Loading up our press account, we saw that some of the other guys from our company had already made some characters, no biggie as you get eight character slots, but the best part for us was that, as they’d already completed the tutorial with another character, we could skip it and get straight into the game! We created a Khajit Templar, having already tried out the Sorcerer and Nightblade in previous tests, we wanted to see how it felt to be a heavy hitter.
We began our adventure in Davon’s Watch, which whilst not initially obvious you learn is currently under siege from enemy forces (we might have found this out in the tutorial coming into the area, or there might have been an NPC that mentioned it but we were skipping a lot of the dialogue so we could get more content done in the game. We were armed with a two-handed sword and, not that we noticed straight away, began with three skill points due to our freebie three levels we would have earned in the tutorial.
We picked up a handful of quests, but only focused on trying to complete one of the quest chains (Legacy of the Ancestors), ours picked up when it lead us to talking to some elven type noble called Tanval Indoril. For the quest Tanval wanted us to go into the crypts where his ancestors were buried to claim a relic that would help in the attack on Davon’s Watch, for him to go would be blasphemy, but we had no such morals when it came to desecrating tombs. The area was an instanced based public zone, so there were already half a dozen people running around doing the same quests, killing most of the monsters so there was pretty much zero challenge at this stage. Any mob we did come up against people still seemed to come running over to hit it (not sure whether they were trying to help or just try to gain up some weapon skill points). We made our way through the mini crypt and claimed a skull from a chest at the lowest floor and then headed back... easy enough.
When we got back to Tanval, the dialogue said that there had been an enraged spirit who attacked us and said he would destroy us all. There wasn’t. Our character is either a liar who wanted to make himself look tough, the quest is bugged or (more likely) other players had already killed whatever guardian is normally there before we arrived. Either way, it was a job well done and we were led to speak with Holgunn (the commander of the watch we believe). One of the interesting options here was that Tanval gave us the option of finding Holgunn on our own (which isn’t hard given the compass waypoint) or be led by one of the other characters, which we chose. The NPC goes running off and we followed him straight to Holgunn; it was a nice touch (and he didn’t walk at a ridiculously slow pace and he even had a little small talk with us en route).
Here Holgunn wanted us to go and destroy Ballista and ladders for the sieging units outside the walls. We were excited to see what waited beyond the walls... Honestly, it was pretty disappointing. A build up of more forces, even if not attackable, would have been much more exciting, but the area was pretty empty, a few guards fighting the enemy and given that there were also other players doing the same quest we could pretty much move freely from objective to objective without even needing to engage the enemy.
We found out that the attack had been a feint and the real attack had come from a different direction, scaled the walls and were fighting in the street! Success! Perhaps this is why there were no soldiers outside the walls (rubbish tactic)... alas... there were hardly any fighters in the streets either. We were sent back into the crypt to speak to Tanval again, we had to defend him and hold back attacking Covenant until he could summon some huge flaming skeleton creature, again... about half a dozen people doing the same quest meant this wasn’t a challenge. Task completed, we were sent through a portal with the summoned creature to make an attack and wipe out some camp. By the time we’d loaded up the new screen, everything had already been killed, we got a "Mission Completed" pop-up and were told to head back to Davon’s Watch, thus ending that part of the quest, giving us a magic staff as a reward and being notified we’d saved Davon’s Watch from an "invading army".
We then headed to the next area, the Starved Plain and pretty much wrapped up the video here, but carried on playing for a while. The next quest was a little more interesting as it wasn’t as saturated with players, so we got to do a bit more combat. We pumped the points we’d picked up into various skills and tried out some of our specials, mixing between some martial attacks and some casting abilities, and whilst our attacks seemed to do pretty well damage wise we did start to notice that we were taking a LOT more damage from the mobs.
The main quest at the Starved Plains gave us a nice twist on the quest, the location was filled with the spirits of dead soldiers and for one of the quests we were sent out to trap some of the ghosts in the hopes that we might be able to use them. For the second quest, from a different NPC, we were shown that we could free the ghosts from their eternal torment. We then got a third quest where we were asked which method we wished to employ; using the ghosts for our forces or to free them and let them find peace in the afterlife, whichever choice you made determined the next part of the quest which was nice to see. We of course chose to use them in our army and had to go dig up the bones of the ghost army generals that had fallen, which then lead to a fight against a boss mob that was summoned.
Now, something to say about this fight. We died twice. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious "This mob is too hard for you to kill" mechanic, so we presume it just comes with knowing the levels of stuff (or there may have been a quest log mechanic that we didn’t notice). However, given that the rest of the quests in this chain had been ridiculously easy it was a massive jump up in difficulty and the only reason we managed to complete it was because someone else came along and put some damage on the mob whilst we were fighting it giving us the chance to drop it. He was dealing out a lot of big hits, whilst even with us blocks and heals, we didn’t seem to do much against him.
So we figured we’d maybe check out some of the early quests that we’d picked up, one being stealing a bottle of wine from a tavern, which we did by going picking up a rat from the dock and then letting it loose in the tavern to distract the barkeep whilst we swiped it. In there, we spoke to some Dwarven fella who was part of some group of hardened warriors who said we could join them if we proved ourself by heading to some grotto; sounded good to us so we started following our compass waypoint, which lead us back out of Davon’s Watch. The waypoint then led us deeper into the wilds... and deeper... and deeper. Out of curiosity after about 10 minutes of running, we opened up the map to see how far away this grotto was... and it was at the other side of the map. Dammit.
So like anyone would do we attacked the nearest things near us, they looked like two giant mudcrabs near some village, and they systematically executed us. We ressed at a shrine and decided to head to one of the nearby waypoint quests, to go find some dude from another quest we’d randomly picked up in town whilst running around on the side of the Ashen mountain. Fighting our way up there was pretty easy, at level 6 now we could take down most stuff, but was still noticing we were taking decent damage in only a handful of hits. We found the guy unconscious at a camp in the distance, standing over him was some big level 9 frog type creature... and once more it absolutely kicked our butt. In two big hits, that whilst easy enough to dodge meant we could rarely get next to it to do any damage back, fortunately you are able to resurrect at the spot and take durability damage to your gear. We lured the mob away from the camp then sprinted over to try and click through the dialogue and complete the quest... no such luck, we died again and firmly decided that we needed some armour.
We looked through our pack and were surprised that we’d picked up a few different items, even some weapons, but no armour that was of any use to us, trying to find the armour merchant NPC was a pretty arduous affair and not as simple as you would expect it to be and after running around to a few merchants we decided to give it up and call it a day.
So what do we think of ESO? Well it looks great, combat is simple enough and the levelling up of your skills using the standard Elder Scrolls method works well, making it a combination of skill based and class based levelling. For those people who like reading lore and finding out about the world the dialogue options are extensive, but can be skipped over if you are the type of person who just wants the next quest waypoint. Taking it purely on a first look basis, we’d say the starting zone was lacklustre, and this is no doubt due to the number of new players in the area making questing way too easy and boring; whilst this undoubtedly evens out as you get away from the starting zones it doesn’t (in our mind) leave the best first impression for anyone new to MMORPGs or who isn’t already an Elder Scrolls fanboy.
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