Having said all that, I’m perfectly prepared to judge the heck out of The Elder Scrolls Online, because that franchise is something I do know and love.
Game link: http://elderscrollsonline.com/en-uk/
The whole time I was playing The Elder Scrolls Online during a press beta over the past few weeks, I desperately wanted to be doing something – anything! else. I particularly wanted to be playing a different game in the franchise – Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind – or a different MMORPG. The reason for this is that The Elder Scrolls Online has rather failed in what I assume was its mission: to bring that ineffable, inimitable Bethesda quality to a very crowded market, in order to differentiate a game from its many competitors.
Maybe I know so little about MMORPGs that the glaring differentiations weren’t immediately apparent to me. But for me the real issue is that while I did not go into The Elder Scrolls Online expecting Skyrim multiplayer, I also did not go in expecting to be utterly bored – and I was.
I have a couple of major objections to The Elder Scrolls Online in its current state, and this first one may – thankfully – be ironed out during beta testing: the presentation is fiddly and non-intuitive.
I don’t want to get bogged down describing all the little pieces of the UI that frustrated or annoyed me, from the dark ages chat window to the console-style interaction wheel to the difficulty in determining which item is highlighted in a list. These problems (and the absolutely dreadful tutorial system, which if I were the kind to use sarcastic quotation marks would absolutely have borne that shame) may and hopefully will all be resolved, either before or just after launch.
There is one aspect of the presentation which is unlikely to change, though, and that makes my heart sink in disappointment: the story is presented in a very off-putting and old-fashioned manner.
I expected The Elder Scrolls Online to deviate from this trend because the franchise’s lore is so rad. It’s always suffered a bit in keeping its overarching plot hidden behind the story of the moment – a friend of mine has no idea the Daedra exist, for example – but if you’re even the slightest bit inclined to explore (like me) you uncover a massive amount of backstory, history and worldbuilding without having to do anything so tedious as read those books lying around everywhere (I never, ever do).
But it didn’t. The story in The Elder Scrolls Online is presented in the most humdrum way possible – gorgeous non-engine cinematics, long slabs of text, people standing around talking at you for hours on end. The Elder Scrolls skin kicks in again a bit here in that when you talk to somebody you zoom in, Oblivion style (remember how Skyrim got rid of that? Yeahhhh) so you can see their face and animations clearly. This is supposed to immerse you in the world, I guess, and the star-studded vocal cast no doubt cost a pretty penny and deserves a nod.
The gameplay in The Elder Scrolls Online is straight outta MMORPG 101. If you can follow a quest marker, you can put your brain in neutral and get on with it. I can’t emphasise enough how generic the quests are. This is a problem endemic to MMORPGs in particular but game design in general – how do you disguise the fact that you are giving the player the same kinds of tasks over and over again (the gameplay loop)? Well, I don’t know. You know who else doesn’t know? Zenimax Online.
I’m pretty sure there are mechanical aspects of The Elder Scrolls Online which are new and interesting, but in beta, these weren’t adequately presented or explained – don’t get me started on the tutorials again. As such, I didn’t find anything remarkable about it (well, the first person view is kind of cute, what with the hand animations and all – but also kind of unusable when wandering the field because ahh I’m trailing 18 mobs and ahh I can’t see the AoE markers) until I hit a sudden and dramatic difficulty spike.
Yeah well, you know; whatever floats your boat, dude. If you want to spend hours of your precious leisure time grinding away until you reach the “real” game at top levels, and thereafter have scheduled hours for raids or be constantly working on your gear to maintain your PvP ranking, then good on you. Personally, if I’m going to play an MMORPG – and as Dave says, especially if I’m going to pay for it – it’s got to be fun right from the start. Because you know what is fun right from the start? Skyrim.So what do you guys think. Let me know in the comment section below.
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