Massively.com: The Elder Scrolls Online beta is absolutely nothing special

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Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, Game Mechanics, Opinion, Consoles, First Impressions, The Elder Scrolls Online, Subscription

I've always had a profound antipathy toward the Elder Scrolls franchise. Part of this may very well be timing; the first three major installments released when I didn't have a computer that could handle them (I was generally more of a console gamer), and so I've no memories of happily chugging away across Tamriel as a young lad to sustain me. But I've also never seen anything that's reached out and grabbed me, no inspiring bits of lore, no systems that particularly grab my interest, just the promise that "you can do anything you want" without a great deal of encouragement.

The point I'm making here is that the franchise is not my jam. But that's part of the reason I wanted to try out The Elder Scrolls Online in the first place. Sure, at a glance, it seemed like a fairly generic fantasy RPG that had the weight of a franchise behind it, but that's an evaluation based on nothing but bits of story and gameplay videos. So I settled in over the past weekend to play the beta and see what all the fuss was about, to give it a more fair evaluation than one based simply on the name of the franchise and what I saw at a glance.

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In summation: "I hate Elder Scroll games and know I am going to tell you why I hate this one specifically." Uh, ok dude.

 I think this reinforces the statement that this game is not for every one.  I can see the concerns about the game not being ready for it's launch like so many other games as of late but truthfully unless your one of the people actually building the game you can only speculate.  I'm hoping like so many others that they don't make that mistake but we can only wait and see. 

 Reverting back to the statement that this game may not be for every one? I hate to say it but sadly I may end up being one of those people.  From what I've been reading it's really leaning towards a game that I might play for six months.  It doesn't have that true faction rivalry that I have so desperately miss. I would really love to sink my teeth into a game that made me actually almost hate the other faction players like vanilla WoW once did.  It gave you that feeling of true rivalry. You met some one in real life that played the other faction you joked with them the same way Red sox and Yankees fans rib each other.  I strongly prefer faction locked races. (For example a human playing through an Orc story line makes no sense to me. Orcs hate humans and will always hate humans.) I really love it when there are faction specific classes.  I feel it adds to making a true difference between the factions.  TESO just doesn't seem to have any of what I so desperately would love for my next mmo. 

 However, having aired that openly please know this. I am still approaching this game with as much of an open mind as I can.  I am still holding out hope that it just might surprise me.  But most of all I am not in any way trying to discourage any one else from loving this game. I am glad that the family is so excited about this game and I truly hope it turns into many nights of them all playing together. I can see this game becoming the playground for many new and fun memories for our family members.  And who knows maybe this will be a game that I can make some memories with them.  As for a bad launch?  I can easily see our family over coming that well enough. We're a resilient bunch. Just means we'll be eating a few more nachos and cookies while we talk in raidcall and wait for the server to get back up. 

Having never played a single Elder Scrolls game in my life, therefore I have no nostalgia boosting my opinions, I am not impressed at all.

The combat looks clunky and unresponsive. I was never a fan of this action style combat, but Tera did it right.

The FPS mode seems confusing and the lack of collision would make targeting incredibly difficult in melee range, as things went through you they were no longer in range, this is a REALLY big problem if it's present in PVP. Flashbacks to the circle jumping rouges knifing you to death while never being able to target them come to mind.

The races all look the same and the graphics are dull and uninspiring. And the ability to pretty much buy a special race and bypass the faction limitation pretty much ruins the reason factions exist.

The loot system is no longer socially acceptable. It's just not.

And above all, the class system, the one thing that made me put 1000 hours into Rift and ultimately made me quit GW2 for being too simple, looks absolutely boring.

This would have been a revolutionary MMO that would have changed the world, if it came out the same time Oblivion came out. As of now it's looks like a relic right out of the gate, only fueled by it's loyal fanbase. I'm sorry but I've never been a fan of the ES games, I've always pictured them as an single player MMO, which is pointless, and have such avoided them until the day an ES MMO arrived. It's a shame really, I was looking forward to running with the guild again. Guess I'll have to wait for Chapter 6.

EDIT: None of this info came from the alpha and is publicly available in beta impressions video's on youtube. AngryJoe's Beta Review

Edited out.

» Edited on: 2014-02-08 07:21:51