If I bring up this game to my friends, they hastily claim “well, that game sucks.” But they’ve never played it—they’ve only read online other people claiming it sucks: people who also read online from other people that it sucks. It seems, The Elder Scrolls Online is a victim of a collectively imagined reality. Gamers have a habit of appropriating other gamers opinions, “facts,” claims, ideas, and ideologies without verifying them. Perhaps because the majority of gamers wish only to fit in and so to fit in they mindlessly hop onto the closest and most convenient bandwagon.
About a year ago, ESO was released on PC with the promise for a future console release. Like any Elder Scrolls adventure, ESO brought with it bugs—but not the endearing kind such as back-words flying dragons. Elder Scrolls Online was caught between two genres: one that it created, and one that it awkwardly tried to settle into. If the “facts” are true, thankfully my computer was too ancient to allow me the first-hand experience of this so-called abomination of a genre’s bugs and broken content. (I did, however, enjoy the prologue in Cold Harbor during the beta period for five different characters). Now, ESO is back with a subtitle: Tamriel Unlimited. In other words, “free to play” after you purchase a copy of the game.
“The Elder Scrolls series is about the treasures picked from the corpses you leave behind…”
Everyone “called it” then—ESO couldn’t last with a subscription plan. None of its WoW-killing predecessors did. ESO’s ambitions besides the point: gamers have mostly rejected the pay-per-month model of the MMORPG. Fair enough. The price for this allergy is cash shops and inconveniently placed shopping-mall buttons. Have you seen what happened to RIFT? What began as an innocent cash-shop with the purpose of keeping the game online (and fixing broken content) turned into an aggressive money-making scheme via veteran rewards and loyalty points. A similar corruption happened to The Old Republic after it dawned on gamers how vapid the content of that game and they migrated to no-so-better games. So, our Facebook news feeds are filled with advertisements for The Old Republic, RIFT, and Hearthstone because the developers are now more concerned with drawing in a massive virtual-consumer audience than anything else.
Let me hitch upon a common argument as to why ESO sucks. The argument: ESO is not the real or authentic experience that Skyrim offered us. (At this point, someone pipes up, “Oblivion was better than Skyrim!” Next, someone retorts: “Nay, Morrowind is the definitive Elder Scrolls experience.” Beyond this, it’s a circle jerk, comparing the mechanics and narrative of each game while trying to locate where it all went wrong.) However, I wish to further clarify this argument: it is the introduction of the cash-shop that prevents the authentic experience we are all looking for. ESO’s cash-shop—interestingly titled the “crown store”—is in its humble beginnings, offering potions, crafting motifs, and vanity items. And I predict that one day—in the near future—the crown store will hijack the purpose of ESO. I am fearful of this trend only because I’ve seen too many good games (i.e. RIFT) fall victim to their own commodification. It becomes more important to the producers and developers to strategically design content that sells than introduce free content that pay-per-month models originally promised. Albeit, this is the trend the industry has adopted in general (i.e. Call of Duty and the Battlefield series).
There is hope, however. The Secret World has maintained a quaint cash-shop that supplements game-play. It still contains vanity items, items that give new avatars a slight advantage, and pets, but it does not drop treasure chests that can only be opened with keys found in the cash-shop such as in Guild Wars 2. But I must curb this doom-and-gloom argument because cash-shops have a benefit that hte pay-per-month model lacks: it enables a free-to-play game. I must admit that not everyone can afford nor wishes to invest the near two-hundred dollars per month a subscription model demands. If implemented properly, a cash-shop is a benefit to every player.
The Elder Scrolls series is about the treasures picked from the corpses you leave behind, and your avatar, encumbered by his or her inventory, dragging these treasures to the nearest town to make a quick buck. It is about the main quest never completed—if even started—as you find yourself cave spelunking, and sifting through every urn. It is about stealing from towns-folks pockets, and fleeing from the town guard as your bounty rises. The Elder Scrolls is as much about goofing off as you punt NPCs from mountain’s peaks as it is about slaying giants, mammoths, dragons, and mudcrabs. Thankfully, ESO has preserved most of this formula insofar as it is squashed inside a linearly progressive, theme-park MMORPG structure. That is, ESO maintains an illusion of the sand-box style game-play it is celebrated for. At the end of the day, your character is not limited by their inventory space, but by their level. You cannot necessarily ditch the beginner zones, travel half-way across the continent, and explore ancient High Elf ruins.
Clik here to view.
Every town, hamlet, and village is this detailed.
“Stepping off the “beaten trail” is a rewarding experience…”
The biggest problem with ESO, ironically, is its quests. On the one hand, Elder Scrolls is known for its imaginative and humorous story-lines that take you in unexpected directions. I would even argue that the writing in the Elder Scrolls series is stronger than what Bioware often offers. This is because Elder Scrolls games offer a healthy balance between fantasy driven drama and story’s that don’t bog down the game-play. No doubt, the same can be said for ESO. On the other hand, ESO is plagued by its own tropes. Sure, ESO has has traded the “kill ten mudcrabs and bring back their claws to a busy quest hub” style of quest for no hubs, no collecting garbage for pennies, and a fully voice acted experience. Yet, there are only so many times you can save a wandering NPC’s friend or spouse. There are only so many times you can fetch and item or kill a boss for an NPC at the entrance of a cave. Eventually, you catch onto the formula, and find yourself skipping past dialogue sequences, and your following the bread-crumbs from cave to cave—periodically stopping in a town to dump your inventory.
Regardless, ESO’s narratives and quests are a step forward in the MMORPG genre. In fact, it is even a step ahead of Bioware’s The Old Republic which promised to redefine the MMORPG experience strictly via its story-driven missions. After all, Bioware is heralded for its story-telling prowess. In the end, TOR failed to live up to its antecedents—and though the same could be argued about ESO, at least Zenimax never relied on quests that were a petty excuse to slay endless hordes of monsters. For every mission in TOR that was accompanied by voiced dialogue, there was another two that were simply kill X minions. A grind is a grind is a grind… ESO’s succeeds insofar as there are moments when you lapse into the illusion there is no grind.
Perhaps we stumble in our over-analyzing of ESO’s MMORPG and Elder Scrolls ancestry. I remember being sixteen, in my friends basement, and on his projector screen was Oblivion. At the time, I didn’t have a console or PC capable of playing Oblivion—so I was stuck watching him play it. Then I thought this game needs to be multiplayer: better, it needs to be online so I could play with my friend. This is an idea that carried over with Skyrim, and it was a collective wish of the Elder Scrolls fan-base. The realms of Tamriel—whether they be Morrowind or Skyrim—is too big not to share an adventure with. In addition, a group of friends could share the encumbering nature of Elder Scrolls loot system.
Despite the tropes that ESO deploys (it is unavoidable really, so I won’t hammer the point too far), it goes to show the amount of detail Tamriel offers. To harken back to ESO’s subtitle, “unlimited”: the breadth of detail is truly unlimited. These are the type of hand-crafted environments you’d expect to see at a Games Workshop. Every nook and cranny is characterized with either a treasure chest, a camp fire and tent, or a lore book. Stepping off the “beaten trail” is a rewarding experience. Most importantly, buildings and structures have a function beyond simple decor—especially with the recently implemented Justice System. Steal cutlery from an NPC’s dresser or a bread-roll off their bed-side table and you will soon find a town guard chasing you. Now you can murder guards and civilians in the streets like the good ol’ times in Skyrim or Oblivion. This lack of moral freedom was a game-play feature ESO was missing and, arguably, was hurting for.
Where ESO excelles is its character customization. Aesthetics aside, it is the elegant skill system that ESO deploys that sets it apart from its competition. In fact, it is an improvement upon Skyrims, perhaps, over-simplified combat and character progression system.
So, the Elder Scrolls experience is inside Elder Scrolls Online. Perhaps ESO set off to a rocky start not so much because it was subscription based, or because the MMORPG genre itself is tired, but rather because ESO was rejected by gamers on two fronts. The first being the die-hard ESO crowd who are now anticipating the sixth edition to the Elder Scrolls series…and, to a lesser extent, the next Fallout. Then the MMORPG crowd rejected ESO because they are never satisfied with the shadow of World of Warcraft freezing all innovation. Despite WoW’s continued success through numbers, we are no longer in the age of Warcraft as some gamers still believe. Today, we game in the era of the MOBA. Micro-transactions define our day-to-day gaming experience, something which, surprisingly, WoW has avoided for more than half its life-span. Yet, to no surprise, even WoW is refining its subscription models and cashing in (quite literally) on the micro-transaction scheme. Take Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone as an example. The only benefit of this shift in the online-gaming scene is that now Blizzard pumps out content on a regular basis rather every other millennium.