March 3, 2014 3:39 AM EST
I got the change to play the Elder Scrolls Online this weekend. Here's my opinion on it.
Before I started my son had already begun, His commend after an hour was "Boringgggg..." so this was a good way to start with it *ahumm*. But he wasn't the only one, I've seen such comments appear the whole weekend in chat.
First of all, ESO is an MMORPG and not Skyrim. This is quite obvious maybe because it is an MMO and not a single player game, but if you expect a Skyrim like game, it isn't. It's a MMO with ES topping.
For me the gameplay was good. It use in fact the basic Skyrim controls with a few adjustable buttoms for special attacks, defense, etc. thus more like GW2 and no wall of buttom like WoW. It's a free world and you can go everywhere you want, the only real limitations are your opponents, as far as I could see there's no scaling and the further you go the harder your opponent become. I think they did a good job on graphics, no cartoon style, it do feels like ES. Though the requirement are quite high for an MMO, my computer can run it on the highest setting without any problems. It has a vast quest system, but I find it too guidy and paternalizing, just go to the arrow and do your thing. The crafting system looks good and is quite straight forwards. I haven't done an instance, though, according to the comments, this should be possible. I also haven't done PvP, but therefor you need to be level 10 at least and I had reached only level 7.
Beside this quite good news I was astonisched and dissappointed by the amount of imo stupid and in fact simple bugs the game suffers off though. Quests which doesn't continue after finishing a task, The freezing of the game when leaving a quest giver or crafting station, the constant dissapearing of your special ability buttons, the buggy or hard to get interaction menu for player to player communication and sunday morning the game wasn't reachable, it freezes or you got kicked out all the time with the only commend "Unknow error occured". I know it was still a beta, but afaik this was the last one and the game goes gold in a month. Imho a game should be next to perfect if you want to charge around € 50,- for to get it and around € 15,- a month to play it. I got grave doubts that they can fix these things within the last month, so I've put it on hold for now, until they prove me wrong.