Read Part 1 Here
Read Part 2 Here
Now for the Final Part
ESO has been live for a decent amount of time now, and it seems appropriate to put together some final thoughts for ZeniMax’s promising MMO port of the flagship Elder Scrolls franchise.
It gets a lot right. A hell of a lot. The character building is comprehensive and enjoyable. It’s gorgeous – the environments and characters look incredible if you have a PC that can manage it. For the most part, it’s good fun. Just not fun enough to justify £8.99 a month.
Unfortunately, so many of the things that make the Elder Scrolls core games great don’t translate at all to the MMO genre. ESO boasts too much about things completely tertiary to what makes an MMO great – plot based quests that can’t be shared (Why?!), all-star voice actors, and a quantity over quality approach that just leaves you with a relatively weak game all around. The sheer amount of content needed to fill the vast game world is almost a guarantee that no matter how much they expand or tweak things, there’s always going to be way more chafe than wheat. To get to the good bits of ESO, you have to sift through a hell of a lot of crap, and the rewards just don’t justify the process.
What’s worse is that the core premise of the plot doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. You start out, as always, as a prisoner in the hellish dimension of Coldharbour, until the ghost of Dumbledore comes to visit and tells you that you and you alone are the prophesied one, destined to get the mystical plot MacGuffin and bring an end to Molag Bal’s foul tyranny (ad nauseam). Right. Except the same is true of the thousands of other players roaming Tamriel. Either this prophecy is taking the “if you throw enough shit at a wall, it’ll eventually stick” approach, or the ghost of Dumbledore is lying en masse to thousands of people at once. ESO not once attempts to gloss over or explain this in its nightmarish procession of bland quests and it exposes an ugly flaw in the game’s writing direction. Why not just say an army of soulless chosen ones were going to rise out of hell and send thwart the Daedric Prince of destruction? I bet there were some savage tavern fights caused by that plot flaw.
It only serves to isolate the experience further. As a questing/grinding game, ESO falls flat on its face. It tries so hard to eliminate the fetch-and-carry staple that most developers use to bulk out the space between plot events, and that’s admirable, but the end result is a bunch of bland, heavily written and unsatisfying quests. I don’t mind the “Go here. Kill ten bears and bring me their spleens. Don’t ask why I want ten bear spleens” format. You get into some kind of weird fantasy manual labour mindset. It’s like working in McDonalds – you know you’re just doing the same stuff every day, but hell, at least you’re getting paid, and the experience probably helps, right?
There’s just no personality in the quests and characters that make up the world. Few characters stand out, despite a voice cast including Alfred Molina, John Cleese, and Michael Gambon. The characters graced with the decent voice actors do set those particular quests apart, but the majority of the voices you’ll hear will be sub standard and hackneyed, and they make up the real meat of the game. There should be an option to just turn the voice over off entirely.
There’s very little to distinguish one region from the next, or one campaign from the other. Even the group events (Dolmens, Delves, PvP) struggle to appeal, with a messy, unsatisfying soup of players clustered together in a desperate attempt to hit as many things as possible before an archer or a mage puts you down. Everything is sequestered and linear, and the promise of freedom and forging your own story is always dangling just out of reach in a vaguely taunting manner.
ESO had a hell of a lot of promise (As you can tell from my previews and the former parts of this review) but is ultimately falling prey to the same issues The Old Republic did – in attempting to stay as true to the single player experience that spawned it as possible, it sacrificed some of the core pillars of the MMO genre. It really shines in character creation and development – but that doesn’t count for much when the world you play in is the equivalent of a typical 80’s movie blonde cheerleader – lovely to look at, but not much going on between the ears.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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