The Elder Scrolls Online Review (PC)

The first thing to do when considering The Elder Scrolls Online is to disabuse yourself of the notion that it’s a co-op version of Skyrim. Once you get over that, you’ll find a pretty decent game there.

The main problem is that it’s only a decent game. You run around the world, you meet unmemorable people, kill a few mobs and then move to another area to do it all over again. Fans of the single-player Elder Scrolls series will recognise plenty of familiar enemies and locations. You’ll see clannfear and scamps running around, chat to Argonians and drink with Nords. It doesn’t feel the same though, when there are dozens of other heroes running back and forth to the same NPCs and dousing the same fires that threaten the same houses.

It’s not that the writing is bad in itself. Many conversations can be quite funny and you’ll find sly references to single-player Elder Scrolls games everywhere. However, the nature of MMO progression means that you don’t spend a whole lot of time with most NPCs, so there’s little chance to develop a bond.

There is a main quest track, built with oddities like handing in a level 6 quest in a level 10 area which will get you absolutely spanked if you’re not careful. This is probably to encourage you to wander around on your own as exploration is key to the game. Chat to the townspeople. Help other gamers take on the elite mobs in a nearby grotto. Wander off the beaten path and you’ll forts, villages and plenty more people that need your help to ferry messages and find their lost friends.

The flip side of this is that you’ll find yourself participating in group battles without a clue as to what you’re doing. I’ve stuck my head into caverns, explored around a bit and then been congratulated on completing the area because other nearby players have killed the boss a few rooms away.

Huge steampunkish structures litter the landscape with names like “Inner Sea Armature”. I have no idea what they are but I’ve “completed” at least three of them simply by walking up and killing daedra for a couple of minutes alongside a group of other players. Does this help the game plot in any way? Not a clue. I can’t shake the feeling that I wandered off the beaten path a little too early but when I go back to the main plot, nothing really answers my questions.

The other problem with Elder Scrolls Online, at least in the PvE section, is that you can’t really venture with other players. Some quests affect the open world – one early area was infested with hostile ghosts. I completed the quest chain, pacified them and from that point forward, they were no longer hostile.

This sort of design simply doesn’t work with groups as players at different points in the quest chain will be dropped into different “phases” of the open world that match their progress. You’ll be able to see a floating indicator of where your friends are standing but you can’t help each other in combat.

Instances have their own problems – more than once I joined a group and had to run in and out of a dungeon trying to get one or another group member to appear in the same phase as the rest of us. There’s a menu option to travel to the same area and instance as a party member but this doesn’t always solve the problem. In a recent blog post, Bethesda have stated that they’re working on group phasing in the future. As it stands right now, you might spend extra 15 minutes on any group endeavour, simply trying to see each other.

On the crafting side, it’s simply awful for anyone but the most hardcore economist. As The Elder Scrolls Online uses continent-wide megaservers rather than old-style servers, there’s no faction-wide auction house for trading. Instead, players can join up to 5 guilds, each with the own guild store. Put your gear up for sale and hope someone wants it. This has given rise to trading guilds where people simply recruit as many as possible in order to widen the market. It sounds good but in practice it means that you go searching through up to five different stores looking for the best price on an item.

The store interface doesn’t help matters. Categories are so broad as to be almost meaningless. If you made the mistake of picking provisioning as your chosen profession, recipes will lumped in with ingredients, with no way to search for a specific type of recipe or ingredient and no applicable filter to narrow things down. Need just one item to complete a recipe? You’ll have to skip through a dozen or more pages to find it. Mods have attempted to automate this process but it’s not a real fix. Again, Bethesda have promised “guild store interface updates”. These are desperately needed.

I tried to give Elder Scrolls Online a chance but there nothing about it that makes me want to return after I’ve logged out. It feels more like a collection of amusing moments than a coherent world. If you’re venturing with a regular group of friends (and Bethesda fix the dungeon phasing) then I’m sure you’ll have fun tweaking your character, working your way up through your skill combos and eventually jumping into the epic PvP wars that were shown in all those trailers. For myself, I can’t find a good reason to spend my meagre leisure time struggling through all the issues.

Note: All screenshots here include the zrMiniMap mod, and Bazgrim’s Toolbar as part of the Wykkyd Framework. I also ran LootDrop, Inventory Grid View and Guild Store Search.