After 20 hours with Elder Scrolls Online, we’re not quite ready to give our final verdict, but we have enough of a feel for the game that we’re able to bring you some early impressions.
Put simply, it’s not good; from the graphics, to the quest design, to the user interface and beyond - everything about the game reeks of mediocrity.
On paper, a massively-multiplayer Elder Scrolls game sounds like a great idea. Tamriel is a huge world, ripe for exploring, and many of its areas have never before been witnessed in gaming. In theory, exploring the whole of Tamriel should make for a thrilling experience - a giant, multiplayer version of Skyrim where the player is able to simply point at a direction and head there. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Instead, Elder Scrolls Online is a painfully linear experience that shepherds you through zones and a turgid main questline, hemming you in until it deems you ready to progress to a new area. In a series that built its reputation on exploration and player freedom, such rigidity is sacrilegious.
On a superficial level, it at least looks faithful to the franchise: the familiar compass resides at the top of your screen pointing the way to locations of interest, you level up your skills by using them, and the familiar conversation system is in place, allowing you to choose from various options. Unfortunately, where undiscovered markers on the map in Oblivion and Skyrim act as tantalizing promises of adventure, in ESO they act only to move you from quest hub to quest hub. It doesn’t help that any quests you acquire have their destinations immediately marked on your map, with a big arrow on the HUD pointing the way.
Actually, it’s worth pointing out just how awful that UI is. It’s completely unintuitive, with the most basic actions hidden in a difficult-to-navigate selection of sub-menus, while the game does little if anything to explain what the hell you’re doing. While menus in Skyrim and Oblivion could be irritating to navigate, requiring plenty of scrolling through endless lists, here it’s difficult to even find the list you need to scroll through. Crafting is a chore, made worse by the fact that the game doesn’t properly explain how to perform it. The map, meanwhile, is horrendous - opening it reveals a sketched-out diagram of your immediate vicinity, and zooming out to see the wider area is a total pain. There’s an in-built-player guide that can be brought up with the F1 key, but it’s a poor substitute for a decent tutorial and you’ll hardly feel as though you’re having an epic experience when you have to open the user guide every five minutes simply to work out how to play the game.
Instead of feeling like some powerful warrior on a quest to save the world, instead you’ll feel like Gunther the tourist, with socks rolled up to his knees and wearing a pair of well-worn leather sandals, consulting a giant tourist guide every five minutes just to understand what he’s supposed to do next.
All of this could be tolerable if questing and engaging in combat were satisfying. Unfortunately, ESO falls down on both of these counts.
Quests are of the usual “kill X number of Y monster” variety that are standard to the MMO genre, but where other games manage to at least make them interesting through mixing up the formula or providing interesting backstory, in Elder Scrolls Online they simply feel dull. You’ll skip through a lot of badly-voiced dialogue delivered by badly-animated NPCs, then traipse the hundred or so meters to the marker labeled on your HUD. Once you’re there, you’ll kill a few things - or maybe collect a few things - and then traipse back, only to be thanked by an NPC in a tone of voice which suggests they would actually rather you crawl under a rock and die. Or maybe they are considering what to cook for dinner rather than being too concerned that you just saved the love of their life. It’s difficult to say; but either way, you don’t feel as though your efforts have made any difference to anything - a fact not helped by the fact that the same NPC will have a dozen other players crowded around them, all turning in the same quest.
Combat, meanwhile, sees the developer attempting to force a square peg into a round hole. The option to play in first-person is there - albeit added late into the development cycle - but using it in combat is cumbersome as the restricted field of view makes it difficult to gauge your surroundings, particularly when confronted by multiple foes at the same time. It also has no sense of weight; your weapons don’t so much connect with your opponents as slide through them as if they are ghosts. There’s little visual feedback or spectacle, and while there is a dodge-roll to let you move out of the way, attacks are telegraphed so early - and take so long to execute - that it’s just as easy to side-step out of the big red zone on the ground which shows where the enemy is aiming. Enemy hitboxes also seem to be far too large - we frequently inflicted damage to an enemy with our sword, despite them being at least six feet away from the edge of our blade.
Visually, the game looks dated. Animations are laughable, and it’s not just in conversations where their poor quality is highlighted. Jumping while on horseback looks ridiculous, characters’ mouths move seemingly independently of whether words are coming out of them or not, and any thrill in combat is ruined as characters regularly clip through each other. Meanwhile, environments are a mess of poor textures and endlessly repeated objects, while crafting nodes blend into their surroundings so well that it’s difficult to identify them - made worse by the total absence of any kind of mini-map. The end result is a game which looks like it was released years ago, not one that’s only just been launched. Hell, Everquest 2 looks - and plays - better than this, and that game launched a decade ago.
As mentioned, we have a long time to go before we’re ready to deliver our final verdict - MMOs take time to thoroughly evaluate after all, and we’re still a long way from being able to participate in end-game dungeons, experience every faction, or dig deep into PvP. It’s quite possible that the game becomes transformed into some nirvana-esque experience at some point (we doubt it, though). But based on our experience so far, it’s fair to say that we’re more than slightly underwhelmed. Simply put, there are far better MMOs out there which don’t require you to lay down best part of $60 before you can experience them, and then don’t ask you to pay a subscription fee. Hell, we listed a few a short while back.
If you’re hoping that Elder Scrolls Online will provide all the fun you had with Skyrim, only with other people, then you’re in for a rude awakening.
Dale Morgan
@spamdangled
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