The Eureka Moment

Well, that was... an experience.

When I look back at my time in MMOs I can often point to exactly when a particular game clicked for me - the Eureka moment when I saw what it was that would bring me back to that game again and again. Sometimes it happened early on - I was sold on Fallen Earth the moment I stepped out of the LifeNet bunker and into the vast open world, even though I wouldn't realize for days exactly how vast it was. The Rikti invasion that hit Kings Row during my original trial period of City of Heroes is another moment that comes to mind - that's the moment when I fell in love with this genre and became an MMO player. Other times it took longer. It wasn't until I entered the Old Forest in Lord of the Rings Online that I saw that game as anything more than a somewhat uninspired imitation of World of Warcraft. The Old Forest hooked me (Tom Bombadil!) and the Barrow Downs reeled me in.

It's different for every game, and as I've played more and more MMOs it's perhaps become more of a challenge for each new game to deliver that (lower case) wow moment. Requiem, my very first MMO, amazed me just with the fact that there were all these other players in the world with me. The bar is set rather higher these days.

So have I had a Eureka moment in Elder Scrolls Online? No, no I have not, and I'm not thrilled to say that. I want to like every game I play, especially when it's an MMO, and it's disappointing to come away from one of the newer and bigger names in the genre feeling underwhelmed.

I'll readily admit that a lot of what I dislike about ESO is highly subjective. The understated, desaturated art style  doesn't do much for me, and the game has the same problem as The Old Republic in that you spend a lot of time fighting very slight variations on the theme of dude in armor. Sometimes you also fight dude in robe or dude with bow, but there's not much to differentiate one group of dudes from another a lot of the time.

I've found the game's music to be forgettable. It's just... there.

The voice acting is underwhelming. It's not the actors' fault; they've not got much to work with and it's hard for it not to come across as flat when almost all of it is delivered in stiff, straight to camera monologues.

There are good moments to be found in some quests, but the questing structure as a whole is absolutely terrible, and the fact that you have so many fast travel options thrown at you within quest chains suggests that the dev team knows it's terrible and is trying to compensate. There's no sense of the scale of the world, no sense of journey. Tamriel might as well be a cluster of instanced zones ala Neverwinter. Judging by the clumsiness of some of the zone transitions I'm not altogether sure it isn't.

(At one point I went from a beach to the middle of a bridge so abruptly that I thought that the player standing next to me had somehow teleported me along with him. No, I was just moving from one zone to another.)

With all of this said, I can't bring myself to say ESO is a bad MMO. Yes, the structure of the questing is bad and yes, the game could and should have done more to make the world accessible to players outside the ESO fanbase, but in other ways it works.

It's a big game with a lot of content, and on a mechanical level it functions pretty much exactly as it ought to. The level scaling is not as good as that of Guild Wars 2 but neither is it as game breakingly bad as it is in WoW and SWTOR. The controls are responsive, the animations are smooth and the graphics aren't glitchy. At times, when it gets away from drab pseudo-medievalism, the visuals can be striking. The game also runs well on my increasingly aged PC. To anyone who'd played the other Elder Scrolls games and was looking to get into MMOs I would recommend this game unreservedly. To anyone else I'd be a bit more qualified in my praise.

Will I come back to ESO? Probably. My six game rotation (now split into five ongoing and one new) means that there are always more games I want to play than I can fit in, but there is good stuff here and I do want to see more of it has to offer. It's not badly made, and the minute to minute gameplay is often quite engaging. However, if and when I do return back I'll probably reroll and take a somewhat different approach, now that I'm more familiar with the game's idiosyncracies.