This week, a group of my online friends decided that we would be playing Elder Scrolls Online together, so I bought it to play with them. My thoughts remain overall unchanged from when I played the open beta a decade ago. The game feels lackluster. Not bad mind you, but I don't feel excited to play it.
Visually, the game still has that washed out, plastic look. Shiny plastic surfaces. Blocky, shiny characters that look like grotesque toy action figures, but not as cool as say in WoW. Character animations are stiff and the spell effects weak.
One plus is that you can start customizing your character mechanically from the get go. You create your character and within 2 minutes you walk into a room with different weapons for you to pick up (bow, 2H axe, 1H sword and shield, and a staff. There are also pairs of daggers in a side room a little up ahead). When you level up, you can invest in one of three talent trees for your class, including magic spells, so if you want you could ignore the weapon types and just focus on spamming spells from one of those three schools of magic (or all of them). So I made a 2H weapon wielding warrior who has a couple of frost abilities.
Unfortunately, the class system gets in the way, ie you can't mix and match talents from different classes, and the classes thus far do not feel like they have distinct identities/class fantasies. I don't see why only Sorcerers can access the lightning magic tree while only Wardens can access the frost magic tree, and so on. And what is the difference between a sorcerer and an arcanist? Maybe the further into the game you get and the more lore you absorb these classes will wind up feeling more concrete, but at character creation they felt feel vague and illdefined compared to rival MMOs, and as such the talent tree restrictions feel arbitrary and archaic.
I like how you can transmog your appearance, and then don't have to reapply the transmog every time you equip new gear. Wish my transmog was always maintained in WoW, GW2, and FF14.
One other positive I will say is that it is like Guild Wars in that the number of abilities you can have equipped is limited, in this case you can have up to 6 abilities on your hotbar (as opposed to GW1's and GW2's 10), so you do not need to have 20+ different keybinds to execute your rotation like in WoW or FF14, and that also means less time spent looking down at your hotbar looking at cooldown timers.
Now we get to my real issue, which is the boring gameplay. I do not feel like I am playing an MMO. I feel like I am playing a singleplayer RPG, and just so happening to do a playthrough at the same time as other people. We are not really playing together like in FF11 or GW2. About 90% of my playtime was spent running to talk to NPCs, reading dialogue boxes, running to interact with the next quest objective such as clicking on a magical artifact or clicking on diplomatic papers, running back to an NPC, etc. That's not playing with people. That's playing a singleplayer game. Occasionally in between running to the next NPC or plot device to click on, there would be some wildlife I would leap at and attack out of boredom, but since there was 3+ of us the wildlife died within a couple seconds. Mobs die so fast, I don't even get to execute my full 3 button rotation (gap close with leap, cast the icicle DoT AoE, and then start using my heavy swing ability). I am lucky if I can leap to a target and get in a quick basic attack swing before it dies. But again, the mobs weren't the quest objective. They were just occasionally there in between running to the next objectives, and I killed a mob and only got 50 EXP while I had the 50% EXP scroll active, so without the scroll it probably would have been 33 EXP per mob, when I needed 4,000 EXP to level up. That would be 121 mob kills, and the mobs are nowhere near dense enough. Farming them with your friends to level up is not viable. You're clearly supposed to be doing the singleplayer questing to progress.
Another issue is that so far, there is nothing to look forward to, no real reason to progress. I do not feel like I have become more powerful when I level up. I am fighting the same mobs at level 10 that I was when I was level 2, and the still die in the same amount of time. It's not like FF11 where you level up and become noticeably more powerful fighting the same mobs, and you become excited because now you can venture into new areas, and there are dozens of new zones you will eventually become powerful enough to go to.
Music thus far has been forgettable.
UI is unattractive.
I guess it's serviceable enough to fire up and spend time playing with friends, but I don't love the game holistically (aesthetics, setting, character customization, ability animations, etc) like WoW/GW2/FF14, nor do I look forward to the next stage of my journey like when I was playing FF11.
That being said, I did enjoy the game to plop down another $10 to buy a Guar mount for my Argonian, so I am not riding around on that inappropriate starter horse, and I am willing to give it at least a few more goes. Two and a half weeks until TWW launches and I become preoccupied playing that. Hopefully the group dungeons provide a better experience than the singleplayer questing.
