The fantasy MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online, short TESO, has been officially navigable and explorative in Germany and the rest of the world since April 4th. We put the biggest MMORPG release of the first half of 2014 to the test.
Has the game convinced, does it have a chance for the title “Best MMO 2014”, or has it disgraced the great name it carries?
Our tester Schuhmann has spent 300 hours in Tamriel, tussled in caves, gotten annoyed by bugs and bots, been eaten by slaughterfish, and slain by countless enemies. He met with hardcore PvPers for a chat, roamed the darkest corners of forums, and familiarized himself with the game mechanics behind the game. But how is it now: What is The Elder Scrolls Online like?
The Gameplay: Story-Telling and Quest Flow at its Best
We want to start with the biggest strength of the game. The way a hero gradually conquers the world of Tamriel is really well done. The map gradually reveals its secrets. Driven by the story or pure curiosity, one searches for rough outlines on the map and tries to set things right that the King of Worms and his minions have done wrong. The driving force is not quests that constrain me, but the urge to explore.
In a “normal” game, there would be small villages or clusters of NPCs everywhere. One of the residents would have a question mark above their head and would tell me where I need to go. In TESO, I often wander around, a symbol appears, and I follow it. There is no quest leading me into a dungeon, but my urge to explore does that. This makes the game narratively much more open.
Or I simply go into a tavern: In every larger city, there are hero-like figures, the fearless ones. While I listen to their boasts, I get a hint about where my character and my sword are needed. One of many beautiful details in the game, which can be criticized for various reasons but certainly not for soullessness.
Sheogorath as a Notable Antagonist
TESO has great strengths when it comes to telling a big story—or at least a small one very well.
Especially the questline of the Mage Guild has captivated me: The main character is a trickster god, somewhat like Loki in Norse mythology… or the Joker for all Marvel fans, the Daedric prince Sheogorath, who likes to call himself Uncle Sheo. The way he plays his games with a dead-serious Archmage, making heroes jump through hoops, and yet somehow remains the smartest in the room throughout the chaos is really enjoyable.
Even the main quest has great moments and is a strong red thread that leads through the hero’s life. Although the story seems a bit clichéd at the beginning, it reaches operational temperature at the latest in the 30s and develops a wonderful drive, so that one can look forward to the Prophet’s call every 5 levels.
Standard Quests are Good, but Almost Too Many
But even the “smaller standard quests” are often strong, even if they do not give the player as much freedom and choice as in the single-player games of the series. The quests are quite varied: There are puzzles (that aren’t too difficult), longer delivery tasks, and of course many battles to fight. However, the quests are really rewarding only if one is willing to listen to the story.
I confess: I didn’t gift my cat’s ear to every fair maiden in distress, but rather skipped a dialogue here and there. But whenever a story managed to capture my attention, the player experience was really good and profound.
TESO and the way it tells stories are both excellent for being consumed in small doses. The zones are large, besides the main quest and the two semi-main quests, the guild quests, there is still an overarching zone quest, alongside dungeons and skulls (which could be seen as mini-quests) and local quests, where you have to set something right.
There is always something to do. You save Tamriel piece by piece, drive out a ghost here, take down a power-mad wizard there, or thwart a pirate conspiracy somewhere else. And always (or at least almost always) it seems that the sun shines a little brighter and the grass is a little greener when you finish an area. Unless you leave behind tragic fates of unfulfilled love or misunderstood pride—that happens, fortunately, from time to time as well.
The game is excellent for escaping into this fantasy world for two or three hours after a stressful day, questing in an area, attentively listening to the stories, and being interested in what happens there.
The quest system is not suited for rushing through because one wants to be quickly at veteran rank 10. The quests are too lengthy, there are too many passages without fights, and it breaks up too much. The game is just not designed for that. Even those who listen attentively to the quests will show signs of fatigue after a few hours straight. Names and stories blend together; as a player, you are simply “full” of stories and cannot separate them anymore.
The Gameplay: Character Development and the Importance of Items
The Elder Scrolls Online relies on a relatively free skill system. There are four different classes: Dragonknight, Templar, Sorcerer, and Nightblade. Each class has access to three individual talent trees, meaning they have 15 skills and some passives; the remaining skills are shared among all heroes in the game. Further skills come from the weapon used:
- Bows and destruction staffs characterize typical ranged DPS, like the classic archer or the sorcerer from other games
- Healing staffs turn every hero into a healer and are also very popular as a second weapon
- With two-handed swords or two one-handed weapons, one becomes a melee DPS with a focus on either raw violence or more subtle maneuvers
- And with one-handed weapons and a shield in hand, one becomes the tank
Each hero has two weapon slots to choose between at will. When he changes weapons, the abilities change too. Finding a combination of two weapons, and thereby two roles, that can be played optimally is a challenging task and difficult to master.
Regarding weapon skills that best guarantee a typical role of the Holy Trinity of tank, DPS, and healer, there are also armor skills that go in a similar direction. Furthermore, there are special abilities that come from quest rewards, PvP, or special sources, like vampirism.
The majority of skill lines level up by gaining EXP while having an ability from the line in the hotbar. Others level up through progression in the main story, by defeating demonic enemies, or by finding rare tomes.
Skill points are earned by leveling up, completing special quests, or collecting sky shards scattered throughout the world. Individual abilities can then be changed (or morphed) at a certain level. The player then chooses between two rather smaller bonus effects. Unlike most other games, there is no shortage of skill points in TESO.
Great Variety, Small Plate
In practice, the game allows for incredible possibilities to shape your character, but the parts in stock are somewhat limited. One can pursue a certain idea for their character, such as a two-handed warrior in heavy armor with a healing staff and corresponding skills in reserve, just in case things go wrong or to recover between battles.
Only the selection of abilities that you ultimately have in the role is limited. Only 5 abilities can fit on the hotbar, plus one ultimate. With clever weapon switching, this becomes 10 abilities. Lags and weaknesses in the combat system unfortunately prevent a dynamic gaming experience too often at the moment.
What TESO lacks a bit is the change in the gaming experience as one progresses further in the game. Similar to Guild Wars 2, the individual roles play relatively consistently. In later levels, a so-called “game changer” rarely if ever comes into play. A skill that significantly changes the gaming experience. World of Warcraft does this very well by enabling players to have a slightly different gaming experience with new abilities.
In TESO, however, you must restructure the character accordingly for a new gaming experience by exchanging skills, changing armor type, or switching weapons and thus also roles. But an archer in their 30s will not play significantly differently than an archer at the highest level, even though there is a huge amount of playtime between the two. Additional skill points could then be more likely to go into an alternative build, to turn the archer into a decent melee fighter or healer with alternative class skills.
The Items: Crafting Top, Drops Flop
The Elder Scrolls Online features a sophisticated crafting system that players can spend a lot of time on. Almost all properties that are on drops can also be applied to crafted items. Quality levels increase items through a refinement process. The most skilled blacksmiths, tailors, and woodworkers can create armor pieces from specific sets.
In practice, the system works such that players find items with good stats but a low-quality level. They then upgrade these items in crafting. It’s not particularly exciting. Until they reach the maximum level, few players have to seriously worry about their gear and can simply wear quest rewards or whatever is lying around in the guild store, which replaces an auction house.
Some players have obtained the best items in the game, the so-called “Best in Slot” items, because they created seven twinks and hired crafting apprentices through the skill menu for each twink. Thus, players receive up to thirty loot bags each day, which may contain the highest crafting materials. This way, a player can obtain the best items simply by sitting in the capital and waiting.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that runs through The Elder Scrolls Online like the footprints of an elephant in cheesecake: Many aspects of the game are a great idea in themselves but negatively impact other parts of the game. Crafting is great in itself, but it takes a bit of the thrill out of drops.
When the best items are not pulled from the still bleeding body of a dragon (as it should be!), but instead land as a periodic PvP reward as a letter in your inventory, and later become the best items in the game by cleverly exploiting somewhat unfortunate twink mechanics, it doesn’t feel very “heroic”. A genuine hunting and gathering spirit is missing.
This drives many MMORPGs for motivation beyond their natural half-life (“I won’t stop until I get this three-times-cursed crown from this eight-times-cursed end boss, which NEVER drops, and when it does, I’m not there, or the random one gets it!”).
The PvP: The Elder Sieges Online
The PvP is ambitious and great in concept, but in practice, it will take a while before the major issues are resolved. The PvP in TESO is not about airtight skirmishes in arenas or taking place on manageable battlefields; it’s about fortresses, outposts, and the titular Elder Scrolls on a huge map.
The concept of such a vast map pushes many players into one pot. There are
- Players who long for one-on-one duels
- Others who prefer to travel in small groups and measure themselves against opponents
- Players who want to achieve something in guilds to prove they can decide a battle
- And also fans of large battles who want to capture castles with 200 or more people and smash the opposing army.
All these players can have their fun in Cyrodiil, the PvP zone, as long as they don’t run into each other. Because anyone overwhelmed by a large group of enemies, whether alone or in a small group, of course, has no fun. In Cyrodiil, there are relatively few moments where it’s unclear what will happen next. Often one side is numerically or in firepower so superior that the outcome of the fight is already determined in advance. A long battle, where the luck of war varies with strategic skill, is currently one of the precious, rare moments.
Highlights in Siege Combat and the Hunt for the Elder Scrolls
The game has strengths in sieges. Here, a variety of siege machines and a clever strategy provide excitement. Moreover, one enjoys the feeling of making a difference as an “individual,” because here, a strategically placed bucket of boiling oil can cause a lot of trouble for attackers.
Even more enjoyable is indeed the stealing of an Elder Scroll; the path for the scroll bearer from an enemy temple to a friendly keep can be incredibly long, as the group of friends along the way slowly thins out and more and more enemies pick up the scent.
A Sunday afternoon with your own PvP guild in Cyrodiil can indeed become a fulfilling experience for the whole clan: It’s known that cruelty is much more fun with friends.
Balance and Lag Problems
A playground like Cyrodiil, with so many different items, builds, and player types, is as hard to balance as the egg of Columbus. And no, you can’t just prop it up until it stands. Currently, “turtling” prevails in Cyrodiil; players gather closely together, as AE abilities (except siege weapons) only hit a maximum of 6 players. This leads to two situations: Either a cluster of players charges through like a human wrecking ball, leaving a trail of destruction, or two of these human clumps stand next to each other and cast their AEs until one group falls. The spectacle often goes along with an almost endless number of AE effects and siege weapons and doesn’t look much like Braveheart or a battle in the fields of Rohan.
Anyone watching a current PvP video from group PvP, which basically only consists of the leader giving commands as if trying to tell his girlfriend how to park (“A little more, a little more—Stop! Gather! And now over there!”), will have to agree that the PvP still has several issues at the moment. However, these are normal after a month.
Even now, it’s already possible to have a lot of fun in Cyrodiil if you adapt to the game and do not stubbornly try to do PvP the way you are used to.
Lag problems, which still hinder smooth gameplay, should come to an end with the server move from the USA to Frankfurt. The move has been long announced.
The Problem with the VR Rank: Long-term Motivation
In the preview, we mentioned it back then: Zenimax’s decision to chase players through the two other factions after level 50 and the end of the main quest proves to be as unfortunate as expected. Not only do you return from the celebrated hero to a novice, but the level progression becomes quite sluggish. While normally in a zone, you see the EXP bar moving forward a bit with each completed dungeon and anchor, in the veteran ranks, it feels like a crawl.
The motivation then lies rather in finally becoming VR 10 to use the best items and shine in PvP or the upcoming raids. Whether the majority of players find motivation and enjoyment in crawling to VR 10 is questionable. Yes, it is hard. Yes, it’s not for everyone, and yes, if you stick with it, you are certainly “hardcore”, but it also requires a certain level of suffering, a high tolerance to frustration, and immense patience. All of this is not necessarily equated with enjoyment in gaming.
Stretching the content in this way to almost three times (the main story quests fall away) might be a clever idea in quiet rooms, but in practice, I am running into a wall of sluggishness and boredom. Moreover, the difficulty significantly increases here; battles against mobs take much longer, and you are reliant on a teammate doing the quest you are stuck on.
This is another weakness of the game that persists: the lack of scaling. Through a quest dungeon where fifty people are currently raging, you can go through to the end and be happy to see the final boss to complete the dungeon and pocket the bonus EXP. However, if no player is there and the dungeon is set to be harder, you fight through a multitude of enemies just to get by—or in the veteran ranks, you can’t anymore. A scaling system would have worked wonders here—and also with the anchors.
The anchors, with which the archvillain Molag Bal wants to expand his influence (wonderfully demonstrated in a cinematic trailer), belong atmospherically to the great strengths of the game. Summoners mutter, call upon their dark lord, a human sacrifice is offered, and the air hums with evil energy: Great! The actual anchor then usually becomes a farce because way too many heroes are fighting over way too few mobs: Too bad!
It Lacks Polish: My Best and Worst Vacation Experience
To conclude the test, I’d like to share an experience that summarizes my month with TESO well. Just before the end of the main quest, I found myself in a mysterious library (by the way, the entire zone Cold Harbour is excellently done). There, players kept falling to their deaths. I wondered: What the hell is happening? Were those bots, but if so, how did they get here? And what were they doing? It turned out that a quest was buggy, and you could only solve it by jumping to a specific point, falling to your death from there, and spamming the action button like a madman in the hope of hitting the “sweet spot” from which a resolution was possible.
Just before the decisive moment of the game, many players, who were still caught up in the war against Molag Bal, mindlessly and nakedly jumped to their deaths because something was terribly buggy. I did that too, felt stupid doing it, and was about to flame the game. But right after that, a fantastic finale of the main quests awaited me, which had great moments and reconciled me again.
This is a bit of what the first month of The Elder Scrolls Online looks like in a nutshell for me. The game lacks, more than anything else, thorough polishing and a rethink of some game mechanics. But at the same time, the game has great strengths and can, if Zenimax continues to work hard on it, actually become a great title. Even now, there are always great passages where I can forget myself and my surroundings to truly immerse in the game. And I say this as an MMO veteran who does not flutter his heart at every butterfly or wants to name his firstborn son Jon Snow. But the game is indeed THAT good in certain moments.
The Elder Scrolls Online – Recommendation: Yes or No?
For me, the game is definitely worth its purchase price. Especially for fans of great stories who want to spend two or three hours in a foreign world after a stressful day, it is a great game. I see long-term play enjoyment for casual players definitely being given for months.
The game likely contains 150-200 hours of fun if you take it easy and we’re leaving the endgame in the veteran ranks aside. Content locusts who buzz through these quests like a Duracell bunny and just quest and quest and quest can squeeze even more quest enjoyment out of it. Fans of group PvP who want to travel with a large guild and continuously improve could find a great game for the coming years with TESO.
Those who enjoy a classic MMO with a steady improvement of their character, who aim for the best items, are likely not the right audience for TESO at this moment. The content wall after the end of the main quest will be too high a hurdle for many “normal” MMORPG players at the moment. The motivation curve flattens out too strongly here. But even these players can get three times their purchase price out before then.
A difficult group are the burning fans of the single-player series, who approach the game with the expectation of finding a second Skyrim. The game may be able to provide that in a few months, but right now it lacks the refinement for such immersion.
My expectations before the release have been met by the game. Even though the first month was turbulent and some game concepts turned out to be as problematic as assumed. The total hype around the game, fueled by fans of the single-player series, is, however, exaggerated. It is a solid and above-average MMORPG with a lot of potential and room for improvement, but also substantial problems in terms of polish.
No one can say how the game will look in a half or a full year. If Zenimax provides at least half of the content it announced and makes good progress on the polish, the game could be in for great success for years to come. However, some structural issues are so severe that it will probably never be a game for “everyone,” but will instead reach a specific niche of players and keep them engaged for a long time.
Rating Categories
Presentation: The game thrives on its details at the highest level; the voiced quests are great, the landscapes are epic, only the NPCs’ facial expressions need some work: 9/10
Story: Main quests deserve a 1+, the numerous reading materials another star, while some tedious standard quests barely impact the score: 10/10.
Gameplay: The combat system lacks a bit of dynamism; the item progression is rather weak, but a varied game with diverse options to design the hero stands against that: 8/10.
Long-term Motivation: Great up to level 50; thereafter it becomes monotonous in veteran rank unless one engages in PvP; the industry-standard achievements and an Elder Scrolls typical explorer’s drive are to be highlighted: 8/10.
Social Component: Much is done solo; guilds and larger alliances are useful for PvP; group play is currently hampered by phasing bugs. Dungeons are average and are currently run rather rarely. With Orsinium this could change. Raid PvE content is announced: 7.5/10.
Polish Factor: TESO is still at the beginning of its life span; everything is exciting, but the game suffers significantly from bugs and problems; hopefully, this will improve over time: 6/10.
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