Through These Reviews Let You Know More About The Elder Scrolls

My time in the live version of TESO begins a few hours later than I'd hoped. The PC that I use to test games in the office has a hard drive failure before I can start playing, so I rush home to play the game there. By the time I begin, it's midday on the day of the game's launch. If there were ever going to be a time when an MMO wasn't going to work properly, it'd be now—but to TESO's credit, I experience no problems getting connected.


Having played the game a few times in earlier versions, I know what character I'm going to make. The first time I played TESO was at a preview event a year ago, when I played a Daggerfall Covenant character up to level six or seven. I'm interested in charting the same course to see how much has changed since then. It turns out that a lot has, and not all of it for the better.

I create a Redguard Dragonknight, a melee tank with access to damaging and defensive magic. Character customisation has a lot of depth—more so than most games in this genre—and the range of body types available in particular provides a lot of room to give your character a distinctive silhouette. That said, I struggle to create a face with personality. There are plenty of sliders to tweak, but only a few seem to have a really perceptible impact. Characters in TESO tend towards a kind of bland prettiness. This flaw is something it shares with a lot of other MMOs—and a lot of other Elder Scrolls games—but it's still a flaw. I settle for using the 'Eye Squint' bar to give my character an expression that could pass for a hardened middle-distance stare. The whole process takes about twenty minutes, but I'm the type of player who tends to lose a lot of time to character creation in RPGs.


TESO's tutorial section has you escape from prison in Coldharbour, a very very grey plane of Oblivion presided over by Molag Bal, the game's daedric antagonist. After collecting my weapons of choice—a sword and shield—I'm taught combat by battering a few skeletons. Fighting has been improved since the beta: weapon blows seem to be emphasised more in the audio mix, and you can no longer clip freely through any other characters. It's still weak compared to Skyrim, but it's better than it was. That said, I remain pretty unconvinced by the game's first-person mode. There's very little sense of connection, and the red shapes used to telegraph enemy attacks are much easier to see with the camera pulled back. I zoom out to an over-the-shoulder view and stay there.


After completing the quest I head to the Fighter's Guild to sign up. I'm too low level to do their quests, but I do want to grab their skill tree for later. Then, I head to the docks. I already feel like I've broken TESO's narrative arc by getting ahead of myself, so I want to get back on track— but the way the story loops back on itself to get you to the starting island is… confusing.
 You're asked to get on board a ship that will take you to Stros M'Kai, where the person who rescued you—Captain Kaleen—is recruiting a new crew. Except Kaleen's ship is in Daggerfall, and the NPC who explains all of this to you intimates that you're already in Stros M'Kai before you've even left. In older versions of the game, Kaleen was stranded in Stros M'Kai when her crew mutinied. TESO still tries to establish that this has happened, but the nuts and bolts of the plot make absolutely no sense—why would she allow the ship to go to Daggerfall? How did it even get there with no crew? Why would they rescue you, drop you off half a world away, and then sail back the way they came?


Scripted narrative isn't important to MMOs, necessarily, but worldbuilding is. TESO's scrappy quest structure has thrown off my sense of place, and I'm having to work hard to pull it back. I hope the next couple of hours fare better.

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