5 Things to Love (and Hate) About The Elder Scrolls Online

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

The more I time I spend with The Elder Scrolls Online, the more conflicted I feel about it.

Since I wrote about it last Friday I've only gone deeper down the rabbit hole. I still have fun playing (I would have stopped ong ago otherwise), but it seems that for every element I enjoy there's another element working directly against it. Here's what I mean:

Skills Are Exciting and Plentiful, but Levelling is a Crawl

For a while I thought I was just playing the game wrong. I never shy away from a fight, I do every quest I come across, I explore, I craft, but my character's level is always just barely creeping forward. It's frustrating both because it doesn't feel true to my experience with MMOs or with Elder Scrolls games in general. Every level is hard-earned (though that could certainly be the point).

At the same time the skill points acquired from levelling can also be earned from completing key quests or finding Skyshards in the world. I've yet to feel starved for the skill points needed to learn a new skill or morph an existing one, so it feels like the turnover on your flashy combat abilities is pretty good, in spite of frustratingly slow and slogging level progress.

Good Equipment Comes Easily and Often, but the Economy is Beyond Broken

ESO just loves dropping green-tier (or better) gear in your lap. If you can get a handle on the games Oblivion-style lockpicking mechanic you'll be even better off thanks to the treasure chests scattered around the world. If you can't get the hang of that, questgivers and enemies will still offer you more and more equipment the further you get, not to mention the random PVP rewards and what you can buy and craft for yourself.

... But buying from NPC merchants just isn't worth it, to the point that I don't know that they even need to be there. Not when enemies, no matter how powerful, still only drop one or two gold apiece. If you scrimp and save you'll find that you have enough gold to get the necessities (and maybe even a low-level horse around level 15 if you're very lucky), but a few hundred to a merchant here and there for materials or tempting random enchanted items and you'll find yourself with empty pockets in the blink of an eye.

COD Mail and Trade Guilds are Both Handy, but They Don't Make up for the Absence of Auctions

ESO isn't the first MMO to offer a COD feature in their mail system, but that doesn't mean it's not still cool. No need to meet up for a trade, just mail the item and have the other party pay upon receipt. For larger-scale trading you can always join a trading guild and take advantage of their player-to-player shop. You can join up to 5 guilds, so there's no need to sacrifice your social plans for access to a solid storefront.

And there shouldn't be. There's no need in most MMOs because an auction house satisfies the issue quite well. No such luck here, so multiple guild slots and a consistently noisy trade chat channel pick up the slack. While this system might be more lore-friendly, I'm just not convinced that it's player-friendly.

Crafting is Varied and Interesting, but Inventory Management is a Mess

Maybe you can forget the shops and trades altogether, because even when the drops don't meet your needs crafting in The Elder Scrolls Online is an incredibly interesting process. There are just so many variables: You can directly control the level of weapons or armor you'r making by adding or subtracting materials, you can find Motif books in the world that will allow you to craft in the styles of a variety of different races and factions, and you can research items with traits to learn how to imbue them into your own creations. When it comes to potions, the trial-and-error method of alchemy that you might remember from Skyrim or earlier games is present, alongside an enchanting mechanic that has you translating and combining runes in a similar fashion. In fact, I'd love to see both the rune-based enchanting and the variable equipment crafting make it back into the core single-player games.

But.

Crafting requires a lot of materials, especially when it comes to cooking, brewing potions, and enchanting. All those ingredients add up, and in true Elder Scrolls fashion your inventory is a disorienting black and white list. You also only have 60 slots in a bank that is split between all of your character and here's the cherry on top: pets, bonus items, and treasure maps (god help you if you have all those CE maps) will all take up slots in your inventory. That might sound like nothing out of the ordinary, but by MMO standards this is a slightly old-fashioned system It fills up fast, and a full inventory in ESO is not a pleasure to navigate.

At least the game's plug-in support means that there's potential for fans to step in and fix the game's UI shortcomings (which isn't exactly new for the franchise as a whole) so that may be a bright spot to look forward to.

Cyrodiil Feels Like the Rest of ESO Should

I am not a big PVP player, in general it's just not the kind of content I enjoy. Even so, I'd heard good things about ESO's PVP zone, Cyrodiil, where the game's 3 player factions vie for control of the seat of the empire. In particular, a friend of mine had told me that "it's like a portal into a world that's a little bit closer to what we wanted." How could I say no?

Cyrodiil is a massive, open place with skyshards, PVE quests, and dungeons in addition to the PVP content you'd expect... Although there's more to that than just castles and key points needing to be secured or sieged, too. As I rode across the countryside on horseback, on a scouting mission for my faction while also on the lookout for NPC villagers needing help with comparatively more mundane problems, I understood exactly what my friend meant. I was struck by how just much closer this experience was to what I'd wanted from ESO as a whole. I came across other players or saw them off in the distance, sometimes I killed them, sometimes I was killed by them. It felt worlds away from the suffocating crowds I'd moved through in the PVE areas of the world.

But Cyrodiil is still just a fraction of The Elder Scrolls Online, and the rest of it is what it is. Very fun, but very far from perfect.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times, and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Ciaran_Laval]

The pre-auhorisation billing mess has not helped the launch for those of us watching from the outside.

The lack of an auction house is an interesting idea but I really can't see it lasting, the problem with MMO's is that a lot of people like to do their own thing and don't want to be tied to guilds, even if it is just for trading and trade chat may become way too noisy. However it's early days there, it will be interesting to see how it evolves.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I can see the point of not having an auction house, but personally I don't think the advantages of the current system outweigh the disadvantages.

Crafting is a bit odd because you get more experience from destroying gear than from creating it, and you get much more from destroying other people's creations (and dropped gear) than your own. That's clever from a design perspective, as it acts as an item sink, but from the player perspective, it means you don't get the best advancement rate unless you team up with another crafter.

I see a lot of that in this design -- systems that address issues like database bloat but don't adequately consider the impact on the player experience.

The guild-centric elements have a disproportionate negative impact on soloists. I know pro-guild designers think this will encourage soloists to join up; in reality, soloists will just cancel and go play a more welcoming game. We don't like people telling us what to do, whether it's a guildmaster or a game designer.

It's by no means a bad MMO, but it has a lot of work to do to be a good one, much less a great one.

[Pussycat Catnap]

So as an outsider reading this - I wonder how much of this is 'release bugs' and how much is 'by design' aspects that will more or less push this game to the discount bin and layoffs by year's end?

[Arcadia Codesmith]

The "discount bin" for a subscription MMO is going free-to-play, where it's transformed into a marketing tool for the cash shop.

A responsive live team can salvage bad design decisions, but they have to act fast and be very attuned to the community. There are some good games out there that were horrible at launch, and getting people to give them another look is an uphill struggle.

I count this as a "not bad" game that could be salvaged, but I'm not seeing much evidence that the developers are actively soliciting the community for advice. That's an error. Never assume you know your own game better than the people who play it every day.