The Elder Scrolls Online is a Good MMO... But Not a Very Good Elder Scrolls Game

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

The very first thing that I will tell you about my time with The Elder Scrolls Online is how much I absolutely hated it during the beta. Playing it was like a chore -- gaming housework I had to do -- and I just wasn't having fun, full stop. The second thing I will tell you is that at some point, that changed. Since Head-Start access opened last week, I've spent every day eagerly anticipating the moment when my work is done and I'm free to play more. It's hard to pin down exactly why I've done a complete 180, but I think it has something to do with adjusting my expectations.

Writing about an MMO of this scope and scale at launch is difficult, so I will be breaking my coverage up. Progress in ESO feels slower than most MMOs I've played recently (Full disclosure, I'm playing ESO with a review code provided by the developer on request) and after a week of playing for about 2-5 hours a night on my main character I've only just hit level 10. So this week I'm going to be focussing on first impressions, and addressing the question that's on everyone's lips: How good an Elder Scrolls game is The Elder Scrolls Online?

The most important thing to remember about The Elder Scrolls Online it's that it's an MMORPG first and an Elder Scrolls game second. If you're coming to ESO just to get your Elder Scrolls fix without any love of, appreciation for, or experience with MMORPGs as a genre you will probably be very disappointed. I'm a much bigger fan of TES than I am of MMOs, and that undoutedly had a negative impact my opinion of ESO. It's still a pebble in my shoe whenever I play, but I'm much more at peace with it now than I was at first.

This game is built on an MMO engine by a team that had little if anything to do with the last TES game, and it shows. After initial ESO previews generated a tremendous amount of blowback from fans they gave the game a serious Skyrim-influenced facelift, and much like a real facelift those changes are only skin-deep. It's a problem, because so much of what makes The Elder Scrolls series what it is works against the standard MMORPG tropes. They're practically oil and water.

I found myself keeping a list of these oil-and-water conflicts, and it's these four that stood out the most:

4. Looting, Diluted

10 levels in and enemies still don't drop more than 1 gold at a time. I thought this was a bug in beta, but now I'm not so sure. A boss once dropped a whopping 3 gold and let me tell you, that was like Christmas day. Don't even get me started on daedra only dropping daedra hearts when you have a quest to collect them. I'm also only just starting to regularly find enemies with actual loot on them -- and no, there's no undressing a dead foe to appropriate their weapons or armor. In Skyrim, killing a character because they have a shirt you like is par for the course, but I can understand how that mechanic could be more difficult to implement in an MMO. 

Here's what bothers me most, though: What can be looted from a corpse in The Elder Scrolls games is often used to say something about who that person was. Do they have a lot of money, or none? Are they carrying poisons, keys, letters, alchemical ingredients? But that brings me to the next point...

3. Staging As Storytelling

Loot is one of the primary reasons to pay attention to the finer details of what's going on around you in an Elder Scrolls game. There are so many little moments and scenes, subtly staged, waiting to tell you their story... Usually through items and lore you can acquire there. At one point in ESO I found a skeleton, partially armored, sitting meditatively at the top of a cliff. There was no note, no journal, no quest, and nothing I could take for myself. In short, there was absolutely no reward for me as a player uncovering this. It was just a neat thing a designer had spent time to make, and it meant absolutely nothing. Beyond an abstract appreciation for the creativity involved there was no reason for me to care, or to pay attention to it in the first place.

2. Non-Person Characters

A quest-giver's sole purpose is to shepherd you from one area to the next and passively disrupt any attempts to roam freely. While quests in Skyrim often send you far afield and facilitate your or independent exploration, everything I've done in ESO so far feels like a tour group moving from one point of interest to the next. They often move, but only so you'll know where to go next. Furthermore, NPCs (non-player characters) in general exist like pieces of furniture, exactly where you need them whenever you need them with no routines or lives of their own, and they can't be affected unless the story demands it. 

1. The Chosen One [Thousand]

Whenever a massively-multiplayer-anything sets out to make you The Chosen One, they are making a huge mistake. It's nearly impossible to suspend your disbelief enough to ignore the thousands of other "chosen ones" running around you, dancing beside the blacksmith, doing pushups on a dying NPC...

It wouldn't be quite so bad if ESO used instancing in any reasonable way. Sometimes party members on a different step of a quest will phase out of existence, yet at the same time there are pathetically few quests where you will actually be alone in a dungeon, doing something meant to feel important. More often than not you'll be surrounded by the same swarms of people you find everywhere else. Sometimes they'll just be in a cluster, farming an enemy that is supposed to be significant but has been reduced to little more than a harvesting node. 

Even when NPCs lined up on the sides of the road to applaud my triumphant return to town, I was hard pressed to even remember what I'd done for them that was so important. 

Most of these issues are completely acceptable (and often technically required or limited) parts of your run-of-the-mill MMO, but they also directly work against much of what makes the worlds of Elder Scrolls games like Skyrim and Oblivion feel so immersive and real. Consequently ESO feels even more two-dimensional by comparison, and for the best possible experience you should probably try to avoid making that comparison altogether. 

As I said before (and I do feel that I need to restate this) I'm enjoying my time in The Elder Scrolls Online, but I don't think it's because I like The Elder Scrolls. If anything it's in spite of that. 

This is not the multiplayer Elder Scrolls game so many of us desperately want. It does do a lot of interesting things with MMO conventions (which I'll talk about in more detail next week), but it is what it is. There is still a lot that will appeal to the die-hard franchise fan. You'll find ancestors of familiar characters, you'll see what some of your favorite locations looked like a millenia earlier, you'll get to interact with events you'd only read about in lorebooks before, and if you're anything like me the arrangements of all-too familiar music will send shivers down your spine... Just know what you're getting into, and adjust your expectations accordingly.

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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]

I'll wait for it to go free to play in 12 to 18 months, I'm a fan of Skyrim and wish I'd got into these games earlier but I decided to go back to World Of Warcraft instead of going to TESO, better the devil you know.

From your description it sounds like they are maybe trying to be too clever with instancing, I've seen it in Wow too, you team up but you're in different instances, it's a nice concept but in some ways, it defeats the object of an MMO.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Of MMOs released or in development, I think EverQuest Next Landmark looks most interesting. ESO had the potential to break the mold, but instead they gilded it and put it in a pretty museum case.

The elements that most remind me of Skyrim are those that are also most annoying, such as the counterintuitive interface. THAT's the place to cleave to MMO standards, not in the story-on-rails theme park structure.

It's not a bad game, it's quite playable, but in a genre desperately in need of revolutionaries and reformers, we got another conformist -- well-mannered, well-executed and entirely forgettable.