angharad_gam

So I've been playing ESO for about a week now, and I thought I'd throw out a few impressions. I would be playing it right now instead of writing this, except that I played for about three hours straight this afternoon and I think my wrist needs a rest. Which probably tells you something right off (yes, people with RSI shouldn't play MMORPGs :-) ).

Firstly you should note that the game (if you buy a hardcopy) comes on four disks and took most of one evening to install. It slurps up 30Gb of hard disk space, and then downloads a very large extra chunk in patches and updates once you sign in for the first time. It was hard to guess how much extra because the interface was a bit unclear about it, but I think it was at least 20Gb. God only knows how much of your internet allowance would get used up if you downloaded it from Steam.

The start feels a lot like an Elder Scrolls game. There's the same character design screen where you can tweak your character's face and body to be as bizarre or amazing as you wish. They're back to character classes though, and there's a pretty limited selection, which seems a bit weird in some ways. Your character's face is infinitely elastic - their skill set not so much.

And then it stops feeling like an Elder Scrolls game and starts feeling a lot more like an MMORPG. Okay, so it looks a lot like an Elder Scrolls game - the design of landscape, architecture, faces etc, even the voice actors are all very satisfyingly familiar, if you've played Morrowind, Oblivion and/or Skyrim. But the gameplay, while it sometimes feels like an Elder Scrolls game, mostly feels like an MMORPG. And given that it is an MMORPG I guess that's fair enough. But I'm a little disappointed. Having said that, it's much meatier and more satisfying feeling than the other MMORPG I've played - Guild Wars II.

I think the main thing that bugs me is the way the world is less open and interactive. In Skyrim you can pick up pretty much anything you can see (that isn't furniture). You can jump on the tables, and when you do you knock over the cups and send the plates flying. You can put buckets on NPCs heads. If there's a sword in a weapons rack, you can pick it up and stab someone with it. In ESO, while the scenery is loaded with lush detail, you can't touch much of it, and what you can touch you can't tell until you pause and mouse over it. Some books can be read and some are just part of the walls. Some bottles you can take and some are apparently glued to the tables.

The storyline is not quite on rails, but because the quests/areas aren't scaled you can't really just go wandering off and do whatever you feel like. The further you get from the 'starting' area the harder things are, so it's clearly designed for you to do things a certain way. I suppose it would be possible to just wander around and collect things and make potions and so on, but the monsters/enemies are scattered a lot more thickly through the landscape than they are in Oblivion or Skyrim, so even just walking around means you've got to be prepared to fight things.

The classes are the most different from previous games. Rather than having a large range of skills, which you level up by using, ESO has a fairly small set associated with each class, which you improve by gaining experience (killing stuff plus finishing quests) and a kind of skill tree, from which you can gain special abilities when you level up. These are kind of fun, and allow a degree of customisation, but are still fairly narrow. You can't, for example, be a warrior who learns some basic spells, or a wizard with some thievery skills.

Actually, that latter one may not be true, because the lock picking and stealth aspects of the game are a bit weird. They don't seem to be skills you can improve in the same way as in other Elder Scrolls games - you just do them. As someone who generally prefers stealthy type characters this is a bit annoying. The lock picking is really hard too, so the prospect of not being able to get better at it kind of bites.

So, I guess this has turned slightly into a 'things that bug me a bit about ESO' rant, but the game has nonetheless gotten its hooks into me. It still looks (and sounds) like an Elder Scrolls game. It still has masses of background detail in books and NPCs' stories. And bad poetry about netches. It's great to see parts of Tamriel we haven't yet encountered, and more pieces of its history (I've already run into Shalidor). The quests are engaging and meaningful (not just 'fetch the foozle'), and you want to keep doing them. And then going on to see what's around the next corner. And there's a place where you can walk in on a BDSM scene and the NPCs get all offended and tell you to go away. So there's that... :-D