Gaming The Elder Scrolls Online Preview

It's not a dreadful game, though at the same time it's not a decent one yet.
I'd say at present I feel like the MMO is a little below average, so I don't think it's at a level that justifies the monthly subscription... or at least at the value their asking alongside the initial purchase cost (it wouldn't be so bad if they said free client download with a 7 day trial, then subscription with a nominal activation fee).

There's potential for it to be really good, but I don't think the development team at ZeniMax have the vision of the Bethesda team that produce the single-player titles.

In terms of the graphics and ugly characters, I think the main pitfall for this game is that the regular Elder Scrolls games have the advantage of being completely open to the modding community... so they get a lot of custom content to improve on the graphics (and everything else).
With an MMO it can be quite dangerous to open it up to modding as players could use it to their advantage (wallhacks, changing character textures of everyone else, highlighting dangers, and so on) over everyone else, so there's not really much scope of the game to get to the beauty of Skyrim with 150+ graphical enhancing mods.


On a side note:
Anyone else had any issues with creatures clipping into the surface of a mountain and then getting stuck?

 

The worst thing about Bethesda RPGs is that the player character is "special", in my opinion.

 

Indeedles. I'm currently stuck in the middle of a massive Mount and Blade: Warband campaign (Florics mod) and you start of as a bloody peasant....there's naff all special about you except what you achieve for yourself. To have everyone in an MMO as some kind of saviour is very, very silly.

 

I'll be amazed if this survives a year from release. It sounds dire.

 

I played 2 beta sessions. Coming out similar to the article. The first few hours is a tad boring (and frustrating if you expected some fast actions), but if you hold out (thanks to the beautiful graphic) for about 10 - 12 levels, it all opens up greatly. Combat becomes more fluid. Crafting are complex and useful. Skills and leveling is superb with high variety. And so on.

Also, PvP is awesome.

Now... I don't know if it's good enough for $60 buy out, plus $15 monthly... but I enjoy this more than Skyrim (then again, I'm an MMO kinda-guy)