I'd like to offer my initial impressions of the game so far. I'm not ready to do any kind of a full review on it, but I suppose I might consider doing that down the road.
I have to admit (and I'm certain to no surprise of many here) I like the game.
TESO has a certain, shall we say, simplicity to it. Refer to Ulminati's pic, above, I guess, but I don't care. "Clean" might be a better description.
- Let's get this out of the way right now: the graphics are pleasing. They really are. Hero Engine has been pretty heavily modified for TESO and ZO has done an excellent job streamlining it while not making it look like ass. The game runs at extremely smooth framerates even on a single GPU, even when most settings are maxed out, on at least a decent rig. While the character models aren't perfect by any means, there are enough nice touches thrown in with weapons and armor details, spell effects, the creature models and so forth to not make one vomit while playing. Looks better than SWTOR, not as nice as Skyrim. Somewhere in-between.
- The controls are eh..... not bad. I do have a problem with the sluggish feeling of combat, especially when playing a heavy two-hander (think big Nerf bat swinging at large cotton balls), at least casting spells seems to be pretty snappy as does running, jumping, mounting your horse, and the like. I've noticed some bugs hanging around such as having your character occasionally facing in the wrong direction once you initiate the mining of a resource node, but it's pretty rare. Also, most display-based problems, if they do occur, can easily be cured by re initializing the UI with a simple command.
- Speaking of the UI, it's minimal, but it's fairly well-done. The inventory screen doesn't take up the whole screen and the paper doll is very basic, but it's effective. The game uses a Skyrim-like approach to organizing your items, so you can filter between apparel, weapons, crafting materials, quest items, etc. You can also sort by value and you can designate anything in your inventory as junk to easily facilitate selling anything you don't need to vendors quickly.
- So far I like the crafting. I'm not much of a pre-researcher when it comes to MMO's; I like to just discover how to do things as I go along, and working out how the creation of items works, how to deconstruct them, how to enchant them, etc., has been rather fun. I appreciate that you can sacrifice certain types of items at a forge to "research" how their attributes work so you can improve your own items with them later on. Finding the rather mysterious materials needed to do a lot of this so far has been trial-and-error for me, but again I don't mind that because I tend to ease into crafting slowly in MMO's.
- The areas in Tamriel I've visited so far have all been at least a little bit interesting. I like the landscapes, things like rocks and trees and bodies of water have been placed fairly intelligently from what I can tell, and the towns and cities in particular are surprisingly non-retarded as well. I'd even venture that they're much better done than in Skyrim, which makes sense because they have to accommodate a much larger population being in an MMO, but many of the building admittedly don't really contain much. Still, it's often worth it to enter some of those non-decript or out-of-the-way buildings just to see if they've got a bookshelf or extra chest hidden in them somewhere which can contain some really useful items. Skills can be improved (instantly, yes) by finding certain books so you never know if it'll be worth it to poke around.
- The skill tree is a mixed bag for me. It's certainly not a deep one, but then again it's rather refreshing not to have your skills ding after every other mob killed. Attaining the next level in a skill or in a perk is a real accomplishment, and it's funny because if you're a fighter like me you're constantly balancing the desire to take on more trash mobs to keep leveling your skills along with the equal desire to not use up your weapon's charges too quickly since soul gems aren't lying around everywhere (like they were in Skyrim!)
Here are some things I don't like:
- At this stage, I see no point in grouping up with anyone, not even
Irenaeus. I'm currently only level 8, so I'm sure the later dungeons and mob bosses will require teamwork, but I was a little surprised at just how much solo play is encouraged. To be fair, apparently Zenimax claimed that the entire time, so it doesn't upset me, but it does leave one wondering what the damned point is. Oh well, there's always cybering and LARPing that you're a filthy cat, right?
- The quests. They suck. Actually, not all of them are horrible -- you can disguise yourself and rescue your new pirate friends in one quest, and you have to re-enter Coldharbour (Molag Bal's realm) with "The Prophet" and witness some of the history of what led up to Tamriel's predicament in this game in another, so some effort's been put in here and there. But most of them are pretty bad. The writing and often the VO are the major offenders, though; at times it's comically bad. I think a lot of cleanup work is still needed and more than a little polishing. One example of ZO's desire to do so is the much higher-quality version of the game's opening cinematic which recently got updated in a large patch. The difference was night and day, so it's pretty clear a lot of stuff might be currently in "placeholder" mode. We'll see.
- The game, as large as it is, is still compartmentalized. While Daggerfall and its surrounding environs seems huge at first, it's still disappointing that there isn't a more open-world design as with GW2. More than a couple of people have commented on this, expecting it to be so with a TES title. And I don't blame them, but I do understand the need to segment off to some degree. Apparently the game, while not using true instances, does use "partitions" to keep the population on any particular map to a manageable amount. What it's lead to, from what I understand, is real frustration when attempting to group up with friends or guildmates, and in particular there's a real awkwardness when it comes to cooperating on quests. You really can't do that. What happens is that players get "out of phase" with one another because one player's already killed this mob or done that part of the current quest so the game won't let them participate again. I'm not sure how they're going to fix this, but they're promising to do so. See above about my point about, uh, pointlessness.
Still, TESO has surprised me. I went in expecting shit, and I'm at more of a solid 'meh' than that. Hell, I'll even give it a half-boner, because again the game is very smooth, it's easy to get into, and I'm *hoping* that the difficulty will start to escalate otherwise I'll be bailing after my pre-paid month's sub runs out. So, if you're carefully straddling your nutsack on the fence over this one, and if you can afford the entry fee, I'd say jump in. If only to help get the population of my own guild, the Purifiers of the Codex, past exactly one member. So ronery.
TL;DR: It's good for what it is.