Levels one through fifteen of The Elder Scrolls Online are demolished by an angry orc mage-tank.
By Tim Colwill on April 24, 2014 at 3:32 pm
Playing as an orc named 'Grabnadz' has been my fond MMO tradition ever since the days of Warhammer Online, and so it was — after enjoying my time as a lizardman in the beta — I immediately jumped at the chance to recreate my favourite green-skinned murderer in the world of Tamriel. Grabnadz is usually a tank of some kind, but this time around I decided to see just how far I could push TESO's weapon/class flexibility by becoming some sort of mage-tank.
Combining spell-casting with heavy armour and a two-handed greatsword would spell doom in almost any roleplaying game (either digital or tabletop), but I'm pretty pleased to report that fifteen levels in, it's working out quite well. Sinking my points into daedric summoning and storm calling as my main skill lines has given me both a portable meat-shield to take the hits for me and an electrical shield to protect me if any slip through — and the the daedric summoning ultimate, which drops a storm atronach onto the enemy, seems fantastically overpowered (although it takes forever to charge, so that's probably legit).
One of the things that impressed me during the beta and that continues to impress me post-launch is the amount of stuff to do in the world: there's a loading screen tip that literally says "pick a direction and start walking", and I'm continually impressed at just how often that strategy results in something interesting happening. The main "story" in the Daggerfall Covenant seems to drop off quite early and as a result you suddenly find yourself with no real leads to chase despite only having explored maybe 10% of the island you end up on. I've spent the last eight or nine levels just wandering around and looking at landmarks, and TESO does a fantastic job of making sure quests find you.
It's unfortunate but perhaps inevitable that wandering through Tamriel in TESO doesn't have the same majesty or sense of wonder that exploring the world of Skyrim creates. That's not to say it's not pretty — it certainly is — but it's just not the same. There's a few reasons for this and all of them boil down to "because this is an MMO, lol", but the end result is that what look like vast and epic distances on the map are really only two or so minutes of sprinting. People will be having all-out wars with invasion forces camped just twenty metres away down the road, and scouts can be found 'hiding' in the grass literally three metres away from enemies who are supposedly hunting them. I mean I get it, I do, there's only so much you can do but it does occasionally feel like the space isn't big enough for the amount of content they're trying to cram in.
The quest design so far has been a mixed bag, with some less-than-impressive "kill X thingos" quests but some very impressive main story quests which manage to do a great job of making you feel like your decisions are stacking up. One of the early quests involved assembling a team for a heist, and you could start the heist at any time or assemble more team members, which gave you more options in the final heist mission.
Just recently I also finished a quest that involved travelling back in time, and Jess — the constant DPS companion to my tank — who did the same quest ended up altering her present by making different choices in the past. It's just a matter of some simple model- and dialogue-swapping, but it's nice and makes you feel a little bit more immersed.
Honestly my experience so far hasn't really been drastically different to the beta (see above video) but it's early days yet and as these journals continue I'll make a note of what changes and what doesn't. Lag is still an issue, absolutely atrocious lag in some cases, with important quest NPCs like Definitely-Not-Dumbledore freezing up, snapping into fast forward and then freezing up again while trying to deliver their lines. Both Jess and I have died dozens of times from enemies who somehow 'hit' you even though they're on the other side of the room, and resource nodes like iron ore will occasionally fade out as soon as you try to mine them. It varies with the time of day and 90% of the time it's not too bad at all, but the idea of switching to a bow or using anything that actually required twitch aiming fills me with dread.
Overall the combat remains fun and meaty — I still get a big grin when I block and stun an enemy or shove them around just as they're about to perform a flashy windup punch, and now I've got my own brutal uppercut move which sends enemies flying (I miss you, City of Heroes) and gives me an even bigger, grinnier grin every time it connects. I also continue to be impressed by the varied skill lines and the organic experience gain, and putting time into learning enchanting has proven interesting.
The one thing that absolutely has to be said — and that there's no getting away from — is that in terms of bots and spammers, this is the single worst MMO launch I've ever seen. I've been present in the launch weeks of City of Heroes, Warhammer Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, WoW: Cataclysm… nothing has been this bad. It's nearly impossible to use the zone chat in any major city, with dozens and dozens of spammers spraying out their gold messages every 30 seconds, and the public dungeons are even worse (see below).
Literally every single public dungeon is infested with 10-15 bots who do nothing but silently camp the boss spawn, making it a herculean task to kill the boss and complete the dungeon. Jess and I have spent literally fifteen or twenty minutes in the one spot just trying over and over to get a hit in, just a single crappy hit, before the horde of bots smash the boss into the ground. It's really bad, and although Zenimax Online are on the case, it's not happening anywhere near fast enough.
There's also an impressive helping of bugs, including some old favourites from the beta like weapon animations that never end, and some great new ones like earth spirits that only speak in German. I've also fallen out of the world on a handful of occasions, which is just bizarre. None of them are Machine-Destroying Crash Bugs From Hell so it's a relatively stable MMO launch as far as that goes, but it's honestly strange that this many issues still remain unresolved in a game which, in other areas, is so polished.
Stay tuned for more updates — we're not done with Tamriel yet.
Put the internet to work for you.
