Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited is now live on PC, following a hefty update yesterday.
Among the raft of changes made to the game ahead of its release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Zenimax Online has removed the need to have a subscription in order to play the game. You can still pay an optional monthly fee, however - doing so nets you certain benefits, such as a monthly amount of Crowns to spend in the new Crown Store.
Zenimax has wisely avoided adding any unbalancing gear to the crown store, instead opting for “vanity and convenience items”. These include pets, mounts, costumes and potions which increase the rate at which you can gain XP. You can also buy bundles of certain items at a reduced rate.
While removing the subscription requirement and adding the Crown store are the main additions the patch brings, there are also balance changes and fixes, such as improving performance when playing the game in Direct X 9, and fixing a bug which made a character’s torso disappear if you previewed a tabard. Oh, and apparently cleaning a fish sounds “less obnoxious”, whatever that means. You can read the full list of changes here.
With the removal of the subscription fee, Elder Scrolls Online follows in the footsteps of ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 and Funcom’s The Secret World by operating on a buy-to-play model. Zenimax Online’s MMO had been struggling. Despite launching amidst a wave of hype and carrying an established name, Elder Scrolls Online disappointed many players thanks to its linear storyline and restrictions on letting players explore, while quests were little more than the usual MMO fodder asking you to kill a certain number of enemies or collect a certain number of items.
Despite its troubles and wavering popularity, Zenimax has soldiered on - since release it has added no less than 6 major content updates to the game, containing new dungeons, raids, no small amount of balance tweaks and fixes, and bolstering the game’s popular PvP, Alliance War. Whether this latest update will be enough to get players to return to the game remains to be seen, but the impending release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One should at least net a few new interested players when it arrives on June 9th.
A new trailer for the game has also been released, which you can view below.
Dale Morgan
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