In Elder Scrolls Online you start the game in a prison cell, because of course you do.
I've got very little history with the Elder Scrolls. I tried Oblivion years ago but didn't get very far into it, and when I revisited that game at the start of this year I got further, but only far enough to confirm that it wasn't for me. I've never played any other game in the series and don't know much about them beyond Skyrim memes.
I've actually owned ESO for years, having picked it up on Steam during a sale something like six years ago, but I've never actually got around to playing it. Whenever I was in the mood for an MMO there was always another one that I wanted to play more, so this is the first time I've actually pressed Play.
It's also the first time since I started this blog that I'm going into an MMO completely blind. Even with RIFT I had a couple of hours of prior experience. Not much beyond the intro sequence, but a little. Not here. This is entirely new to me, so first impressions and ill-informed snap judgements may well follow.
Elder Scrolls Online has dark elves, so that's my character's race selected, and for a class I've gone with a Rogue. Sure, the game calls them Nightblades, but if it sneaks like a Rogue and stabs like a Rogue it's a Rogue.
With character generation out of the way it's onward to the tutorial, which walks the player through the basics of the game. It's not subtle, with a friendly NPC tagging along the entire way to explain it all. There's not actually that much to explain but every line of dialogue is voice acted, which has the effect that it has in every MMO that isn't Secret World Legends, underlining how mundane most of what's being said actually is.
The conversation interface is bizarre. The camera zooms in on the character who is speaking but pushes them to one side of the screen while the text of what's being said - and options to respond - are on the other side. Perhaps this works if the game is being played on a console and the player is sitting further away from the screen. Perhaps not. There's a reason why subtitles are always in the centre of the field of view, but here what I'm supposed to be looking at is off to the left and what I have to interact with is on the right. Who was this designed for? Are a lot of geckos playing MMOs now?
All in all the tutorial takes a long time to say not much and not a lot happens. It's also entirely detached from what follows. At the end of it I walked through a portal that took me to Bleakrock Island, and it took me a while to realize that the mysterious stranger who everyone was talking about - and who had apparently washed up on the shore - was actually me.
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