Is it just me?

I'm the Hero of Tamriel. No really, I am. Just ignore these other guys.

I touched on this in my original foray into Elder Scrolls Online, but it's worth reiterating that the open world nature of this game is really at odds with the story it's trying to tell. It's awkward to say the least when you enter a location and battle some mobs, then watch four other players rush past you and pile into the boss. It's even more awkward when you then go back to the questgiver and talk about what the boss didn't actually say to you before the fight you didn't actually take part in.

The storytelling in ESO is very singleplayer and no doubt that's by design. Of course the MMO is going to emulate the style of the other games of the franchise, and it's doing so not only with how it presents its quests but also with its chosen one narrative - oh yeah, we're doing another of those - and rather like in Final Fantasy XIV the story is in complete denial that other players even exist. Except in ESO the gameplay is ensuring that those other players show up pretty much everywhere.

It's to be expected that there's a lot of other players around - this is a popular game - and it's possible, even probable, that this will become less noticeable as I level up... but there's a time when it's justified to instance a quest, even in an open world game, is what I'm saying.

12 hours in and the main impression that ESO has made on me is that it's made very little impression on me at all. It's not that it's bad as such. Yes, it shoehorns a single player story awkwardly into an MMO but it's hardly the first game in the genre to do that. In other categories like gameplay and graphics it's okay, it's fine, it's... good enough.

(I'll come back to this another time. The combat deserves its own discussion, as does the art style.)

However in a few other areas the game barely reaches the level of adequate. The voice acting feels like a colossal waste of time, money and disk space because while there's a lot being said, very little of it is in any way interesting. The NPCs are a step up from the dead eyed mannequins of Oblivion but that's not saying much, and there's just no life to the conversations. In the past I've criticized The Old Republic for phoning it in with too much use of shot/reverse shot in their conversation sequences, but even that is better than what we get here. since ESO's idea of staging begins and ends at stand-still-and-speak-directly-into-the-camera.

This game lives in the uncanny valley like no other MMO I've played. The realistic visual style only makes it more jarring when game logic intrudes - as when you have to hang around waiting for the boss to respawn because superraccoon77 and his buddies got there first. The NPCs look like real people and sound like real people, but they don't act like real people.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of the audio I may as well add that the music is utterly unmemorable, in a "We got an AI to listen to 1000 Hours of Epic Fantasy Music and this is what it came up with..." kind of way.

Sigh.

Is it just me? Is it because I've never taken to the Elder Scrolls games? Do I need to be a fan of the franchise to appreciate this game? Or is the fantasy genre just overrepresented in MMOs and I've hit saturation point?

I don't know. I guess I've another 12 hours to find out.