I won't waste your time today with a lot of clever remarks or personal stories about Ultima Online. I'll save that for future stories when I need to fill space.
No, right now we're here to talk about Elder Scrolls Online. They just finished up with another beta, and while I only dipped my toes in this one, I did play the last one quite a bit. I don't know if the NDA is still in effect or not, but who cares! MechaBZ is small enough to skirt by the law anyway. That's how we get away with obvious copyright infringement and our award winning whiskey distillery!
Before we get started, who wants some hooch?
So I started playing the last beta thanks to Chris from our LoL Zone affiliate. He scored invites when even I could not. I guess the developers are unaware of my reputation, because as you all know I'm kind of a big deal.
The first thing I noticed upon logging in was the way the races were all tied into three different factions. That's fine by me, as the three way PVP is one of the biggest draws of the game for me. I've always loved open world PVP, from the intense life and death battles in UO to the grand battles in Warhammer Online. A three way dance sounded right up my alley, as I hadn't experienced an epic three way since the No Mercy ladder match between myself, Chaps, and Justin.
Hope you weren't expecting something more scandalous. I'm really quite boring. But that match was an hour and half long and we all became best friends after that. Show me a tryst that can create the kind of bond that steel on skeleton can make!
From what I've read, the whole faction thing can be avoided through either preorder or by buying the collectors edition, I forget which. It seems to be a hot button topic for a lot of gamers, but the ability to play any race in any faction makes sense to me. I hate when games like WoW force you to be a certain race on a certain side with no way to cross factions. Yet, at the same time, members of the enemy races are constantly seen in your towns and as allies. Gah!
Character customization is pretty good. You have your basics here - sliders, a handful of hair styles, and even voice options. I've never been a big fan of my online characters having voices. It was cool in The Old Republic, because even though you didn't have a choice in the way you sounded, the well written script made everything your character had to say seem interesting ad pivotal. Here it's mostly grunts and yells. Not very exciting. Plus, you only get a sample of what the character sounds like, and it's not always indicative of how it'll be when you're actually in game. When I played Aion I thought I picked a great voice for my female archer, but once I started playing I quickly discovered she had the most obnoxious voice I had ever heard and I honestly did not play her because of how annoying she came across as.
The meat and potatoes of an Elder Scrolls game is the story. That's a no brainer, right? After all, this is a series built on some classic single player RPG traditions. A lot of people wondered how they would handle the kind of personal narrative of an Elder Scrolls game in a massive multiplayer setting. Well, in my opinion at least, it works about as well as you could imagine.
The introduction quest has you escaping a sort of prison and rescuing an important individual. While I originally thought this to be instanced, I soon found myself surrounded by other adventurers all on the same quest to rescue him. Succeeding did not recognize it as a group effort though. Much like your other theme park style MMO's, you're the hero of the story, even if there another hundred right behind you with the same heroic aspirations.
You wind up in a desert town, look around, fight some pirates, meet new people, etc etc. If it doesn't sound like it's terribly thrilling, it's because it isn't. It really is your standard MMO fare just wrapped in a more attractive package. Yes, ESO is a beautiful game and seems to run well on most systems. Thanks to all the money I sunk into my PC and not into paying my bills, I was able to run the game on max settings and I was very impressed by the visuals. Some of the animations still need work, and the scenery is a bit generic fantasy, but otherwise it's a fine specimen.
The class system is surprisingly robust. I picked a mage but was able to use a two handed sword proficiently. I'm sure there will be limitations and reasons to pick one weapon or another later on, but at least in the beginning I felt like I had some control over what kind of character I wanted to build. The same goes for the abilities, which at first felt foreign to me. An Elder Scrolls game with slotted hotbar abilities? It doesn't seem right, but you quickly adapt. It works very well, and I never felt like I had a screen full of abilities and little room to actually see the game, like when I play World of Warcraft.
The combat system plays almost identically to the single player games, except with the added hotbar. For some people this will be awesome, and that's including myself. I love the twitch style MMO's like this and Tera, as it makes you feel like personal skill can triumph over higher levels and better equipment. For someone like my girlfriend though, this would be a deal breaker. She much prefers the tab targeting and auto attacks of your basic MMO.
Really, the only problem with the game is how by the book it is. I can't keep doing the same thing in these games. Fetch quests, kill X amount of X, talk to this person and return, blah blah blah. It's not an inferior game, it just doesn't bring anything new to the genre.
And for an Elder Scrolls game, it feels surprisingly apathetic from a player perspective. I'm used to being immersed in a world that I've helped mold, but it's hard to do that in an MMO. One of the early quests has you either giving a pirate a potion to save her life or letting her die a horrible death on the floor of her ship. In any single player ES game I would feel like her life is in my hands, but when there are 20 other people standing around me making the same decision, I could really care less what happens to her. I feel no connection with the world, and that's the worst possible thing that could happen to an Elder Scrolls game.
It actually made me realize something kind of depressing about the series as a whole. I don't really give a damn about the world of any Elder Scrolls game. The only reason I enjoy them as much as I do is because I'm a PC (master race) gamer and I take much joy in modding them. My Fallout 3 game had so many mods in it you wouldn't even realize it was a Fallout game anymore. I had terminators, Highlander swords, anime companions, Warhammer 40k skins for the different factions, floating fortresses, and so much unnecessary nudity that you would think it was sponsored by Larry Flynt.
Part of the fun of a Bethesda RPG is to dismantle it any way possible and rebuild it as something completely different. Despite being a solid and beautiful MMORPG, can Elder Scrolls Online keep my interest without the ability to alter it any way I see fit?
I reserve complete judgment on this game until it is released. For the most part I've chosen to ignore the beta, as too many times in the past I've poured days into a beta only to repeat the same steps once the game is released and lose interest. I've yet to experience the PVP, and perhaps over time I'll warm to my character and the world will open up for me. There have been plenty of other MMO's that I was on the fence on and ended up enjoying immensely - Aion, Tera, Defiance to just name a few. And, to be fair, there have been some games I was absolutely hyped about that ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm looking at you, Guild Wars 2.
For now I'm putting Elder Scrolls Online on my list of games to pick up, but I have serious reservations about it's long term appeal. So many MMO's now crash and burn within the first few months, and despite having unlimited potential I'm worried this one will follow the same path.
We'll all find out in June, when Elder Scrolls Online launches. Until then, I'm crossing my fingers for the ability to become a vampire or a werewolf. Or a vampire werewolf. A werepyre!
Wait, didn't Underworld try that once? How did that turn out?
*shudder*
