There's nothing good to watch on TV or Netflix lately, so I went insane and bought a game, Elder Scrolls Online. I'd like to say ESO was worth the $30, but I don't really think it was. I'd like to say I am enjoying playing it, but I'm not. I'd like to say there's an engaging story line and the quests aren't boring and repetitive, but I can't. I'd like to say they didn't take the entire Elder Scrolls Universe and turn it into another boring MMO grind, but, well, you know. They did.
Let's start at the beginning. Character Selection. The backstory tells us that there are ten races in ESO, divided up into three groups of three races each, fighting against each other for... reasons. Don't ask me what the reasons are. That part of the backstory was kinda vague. And yes, I know 3x3=9. That leaves one race missing. As it turns out, you can't be the Imperial race unless you pre-ordered the game (an impossibility now that it's out), or want to shell out additional cash to pay for the privilege of being an Imperial. Why are the Imperials cash-only? Are they that much better than the other races that they are worth the money to pay for them? I don't know. You can't find that stuff out unless you shell out the money first, and I don't buy anything sight-unseen. Like most MMO's, each race is better one thing or another, and some races have multiple bonuses for different things.
Classes. There's 4 classes, or 5 if you order Morrowind, the big $40 DLC add-on that the game REALLY wants you to buy. Dragonknights are armored warriors that cast flame spells, but their real focus is melee weapons. Templars are armored healers who use light and fire to damage enemies. Nightblades are stealth-archer-assassins with a bit of life-stealing magic. Sorcerors are spell-slingers who mostly wield lightning magic, and can summon a daedric pet. The fifth class is Warden, and I have no idea what that is, but I see a lot of people in game running around with pet bears. I can't find out what Wardens do without shelling out another $40 cash for the Morrowind Expansion.
None of the races seem particularly interesting, at least to me. There's Bretons, Orcs and Redguard for the Daggerfall Covenant. Bretons are humans, good at resisting magic and regenerating magicka (that you use to cast spells with). Orcs are good at melee and heavy armor. Redguards also seem good at melee, though I never tried one, to be honest. For the Aldmeri Dominion, there's High Elves, Wood Elves, and Khajit (cat-like species). High Elves are good at raising magicka and dealing magic staff damage (if they can find one), Wood Elves are good at archery, and I'm not sure what Khajit are good at, as I never tried them either. For the Ebonheart Pact, there's the Argonians (lizard-folk), Dark Elves, and Nords. Argonians make decent healers, Dark elves are good at dealing magic damage, and Nords are good at melee and resisting cold. Honestly, I never tried a Nord either. I really dislike humans in MMO's, and never pick them as racial choices.
I like spell-casting in my MMO's, but you'll be using a weapon in ESO whether you want to or not. No matter what race or class you select, you're stuck with a two-handed sword to play through the tutorial with, until you find something better. Eventually you defeat some evil douchebag in the tutorial and make a level, and you can spend your first skill point on obtaining a skill. You have three skill choices to start with, the varieties dependent upon what class you decided on. Ultimately, you'll be relying on that two-handed sword to put the enemies down with, because at the beginning levels, you just don't have the spells to damage the bad guys enough. After a few more levels and spending more skill points, you can spam the two damage spells you get to put the enemy down, if your mana bar was full to start with. if it wasn't, or if your enemy was tough (most of them are), then you're still slashing away with that two handed sword until the bad guy goes down.
Much like the Elder Scrolls game that bethesda made in the past, you learn as you go in this game. Using that two-handed sword levels up your skill with two-handed weapons, but i'm not exactly sure what good that does you. Maybe you do more damage? I don't know. I do know you don't get any additional skill points to spend until your character actually levels up, and that means grinding away killing beasts and running around finishing quests. Find a knife? that's one-handed, and if you keep using it, your one-hand skill goes up. At some point, if you're a spell-caster, you hope to find a magic staff. If you've very lucky, at some point int he first 5 levels, you actually find a magic staff that you can use as a weapon.
Quests are pretty repetitive. Go here, kill this beast. Find my friends. Find my lost things. And... yeah, that's about it. Seems like nobody in the entire game wants to just go and find their own friends, go and kill the beasts themselves, and why the fuck does everyone keep losing their stuff? If I lost my stuff as much as the people in this game, I'd go and get my brain checked for dementia. The quests that further the plot line are a mix of all three of these types of quests, so don't think you can avoid the grind just by sticking to the plot line.
The graphics are nice, and the character detail is impressive, but the locations really aren't that spectacular. Everyone starts out in another dimension, the realm of Molag Bal, which is pretty boring. Once you get past the tutorial, the landscape doesn't get much more interesting. If you join the Ebonheart pact (by choosing a Nord, Argonian or Dark Elf as your race), you start the game on a snow-covered little rock in the middle of the sea. Half the villagers are missing, and you have to find them just to get off the rock. Rocks and snow aren't much fun to look at, at least, not for me. The other groups start out in deserts, or on sandy islands. You'd think the scenery would be nice to look at, but somehow, it's not. There's broken ruins everywhere, huge stone pieces of junk that look like they should be interesting, but they aren't. I have a minor in Archaeology, for crying out loud. You'd think, if anyone playing this game would be curious about pieces of rock with runes on them, it'd be me. But nope! They all look pretty boring, and serve only to separate one area from the next.
There's not really any point in making friends in this game. Even if you start out at the same time, whoever has more spare time to kill is going to rapidly outstrip their friends in terms of levels. You'll still be playing the start quests, while they are off riding their new mounts in lands you've never heard off. Same rationale for joining a guild. Sure, they'll help out new folks at first, but then, you're all different levels, in all different locations, doing all different things.
Perhaps the most annoying part of this game is the in-game store. The game wants you to spend big moolah on whatever you want. Fancy mounts, pets, costumes, and even hidden locations can be purchased, for the low low price of $8 for 750 points, which you can spend on anything you like. Except the cheapest shit in the store costs a thousand points. I didn't buy anything extra. After spending the $30 for the base game, I felt I gave them enough of my money.
Crafting seems needlessly difficult. You have to collect resources, like wood or jute flowers, which are hard to find. Once you collect enough, you can refine the resources at a crafting station, which is also sometimes hard to find. Once you refine the resources, you can craft some basic item, like a robe or staff. To make a staff, you need refined wood, and a mineral that defines your style (for argonians, it's flint, for instance). If you want the staff to have some special trait or ability, you must also collect runes. Runes are involved in the enchanting process. Once you collect enough runes, and can combine them into enchantments at an enchanting table. Once you manage to find a decent enchantment (it's sort of a random process based on what runes you collect), then you can apply that enchantment to your robe or staff, IF that enchantment can be placed on those items. Sometimes, it can't. Researching a special trait for an item takes 6 hours, real time, and you can only research certain traits based on what items you've taken apart. Forget about crafting anything of any style except the one race you start with, like the Argonian Style, until you find a crafting book that allows you to craft some other style. I haven't found any yet, and I been looking.
None of the races or classes seem to have enough background or special abilities to make them very interesting. The spells do not seem very useful. It seems to me that if you can only wield lighting (like Sorcerors), then anything immune to lightning is going to be very hard to kill. Some of your spells don't even seem to do much damage, like they just hold the enemy in place for a few seconds. I suppose that's good, but other spells don't do damage to the bad guys until 5 to 10 seconds go by. Most fights should be over in 5 or ten seconds, so,a lot of my spells go off after the bad guys are dead. Seems dumb.
You can upgrade your skills or spells, once you've used them enough, and have a spare skill point to spend. You get two options and if you pick the wrong one, you can't undo it. Later on, you can find a place (there's ONE place in ONE city in ONE area, one for each side of the conflict) to reset your skill points, but it costs you gold. 100 gold for each skill point you want to undo. So if you're 30 level and want to undo your points, it will cost you 3000 gold. It seems like a trivial amount in some games, but not this one. My 10th level argonian templar has 670 gold. I couldn't even afford to reset my points if I wanted to. You can buy a skill reset with real money, but why would you want to?
If you realize you'd mis-spent your points, and you will when you're just starting out, you can always delete that character and start over. Of course, you're only allowed 8 characters, and you can't just delete them willy-nilly. You're allowed three deletions, and you have to earn the rest by playing. So, if you've made 8 characters, deleted three, made three more, and you're still dissatisfied (so, I make a lot of mistakes...), you can't delete what you have and start over until you've played the game for about 6-12 hours. Then, you earn ONE deletion. It's not even done by time passed, so if you leave the game for three days ad come back, you won't have 3 more options to delete characters you don't like. You'll still have zero, and have to earn them back by playing. Can you buy more character slots in the in-game store? Of course you can! With real money.
ESO seems little more than a generic MMO clone set in the ESO universe, with none of the character that Bethesda put into their own award-winning games. I've maxed out my character limit, and at the moment I'm kind of bored with playing the characters I made. I made a very ugly Orc sorceror, but he's horrible at spellcasting. If I want to be good at casting spells, i need to make an elf or a breton, and I don't like them. Now, I have to figure out if I want to play until I get another deletion slot, with characters I made that I don't like, or say frig it, and delete the entire game from my hard drive. Which, might be a good idea. To install ESO, you need an astonishing 87 GIGABYTES of free disk space. Using an older hard drive, I had to delete all my other games just to make room, and ended up with 4 gigabytes to spare. Hell, Skyrim only required like 5-15 Gigs, and I thought THAT was a ton.
So, was ESO worth it? Hell, no. ESO is a cash-grab designed to look like an MMO, and I'm sorry I sent Zenimax Online (the company that Bethesda licensed to make this game) my thirty bucks. Sure, I'm still playing it, but it's that or watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island, and at this point, I'm thinking maybe Gilligan would be more fun.
That's all for tonight. Til the next time I find a good movie, enjoy the summer before the snow starts falling.
