The Elder Scrolls Online Beta!

Hello everyone, Kieran 'Mukea' Miller here again. This weekend there was a server stress test for the Elder Scrolls Online and I managed to get my hands on a key! I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement so I don't really know how much I am allowed to say but I've had a whale of a time playing it over this weekend.

First off I just want to say I haven't played Skyrim very much (I did however play a hell of a lot of Morrowind), but to me the overall look and feel of it felt a lot like Skyrim. The combat is very much like it, except you have abilities that can be bound to numbers 1-5 which depend on your class and weapon type. From what I know the professions and weapon/armour skills work the same as they do in Skyrim where you can use anything and gain skill levels depending on how much you use them.

However I didn't get to play it as much as I would have liked as I was having several issues logging in to my character. When I finally did get in, I finished the first area, and went through the portal to get to the next area and it was taking way too long to load so I thought it had crashed. So I closed the game, reopened it and couldn't log into my character again. I tried a few hours later, managed to get in, and plummeted to my death where I was previously trying to load the next area. So I respawned and tried the portal again and this time I left it and walked away for a while, ten minutes later it had finished loading and I was able to continue playing.

The combat system and quest style has been getting a lot of negative feedback from a lot of people, whereas I personally felt it was a breath of fresh air. I have played many MMORPG's and am currently still playing World of Warcraft. Because of this the more action orientated combat felt amazing to me (I hear a lot of the problems came in for the ranged combat whereas I only used melee so can't really give my opinion). The entire game was incredibly good to look at and the overall atmosphere was great.

I think a lot of people that are giving this game bad reviews don't like how classic MMORPG's work, for example the sort of quests you have to do (simple kill these, collect that quests). Therefore I say even if you adore The Elder Scrolls series, you may not necessarily like this game as it definitely has the MMORPG feel to it. Any of you that played Horde on World Of Warcraft back when people actually levelled through zones rather than just doing dungeons, you will probably remember the reputation that Barrens Chat had? Well all of my experience with the chat reminded me of that, luckily you can just minimize the chat window to avoid it.

Apart from the log in issues and the various bugs (getting stuck in dialogues and crafting, had to do /reloadui to get out of it) which you'd assume will get fixed in the few months before it is released, my only problem is the price. On PC, it is £40 for the base game and then £8.99 per month. The base game costs even more on the consoles. I find this price incredibly steep for what the game is. I didn't get to the level at which you can start doing the dungeons or the PvP so I don't know how good they are, but I was playing through it as if it was a single player game. If the dungeons and PvP aren't very good then you might as well stick to an offline Elder Scrolls game.

I would also like to point out that it is not going to be cross platform, this was a big disappointment to me seeing as this would be a massive selling point. One of my friends was going to get it on PS4 until we found this out, but seeing as I don't have a PS4 he will now have to get it on PC in order to play with me.

In conclusion I will more than likely buy this game (released April 4th 2014 on PC, sometime in June for XBox One and PS4), along with at least one of my friends, and if everything is ironed out by release I will most definitely thoroughly enjoy it. However I expect the price of either the base game or the subscription fee to drop otherwise I fear it will turn out like Star Wars: The Old Republic and end up going free to play.

I don't know how helpful this insight into the beta actually was as I didn't want to overstep the boundaries of the non-disclosure agreement but I hope you enjoyed it. Goodbye until next time!