Hi everyone, I just played ESO for a few hours and wanted to share.

I should add I've only played yesterday evening and a few hours today, though I made several characters and one of them ("Stargelman") got quite a few hours of play. My experience is limited, but enough for a first impression, I think.

The good:

Character generation is fun, so you get fun right at the beginning. You can customize your character in many ways, and it's very easy to make your character very pretty or butt-ugly. I always thought that to be impossible in Oblivion, I was never happy with the way my character would look. Not so in ESO. You can easily get the look you're aiming for, and the options for customization are good and plenty.

Speaking of good and plenty, that's also true for the world. It's huge and it's pretty-looking. No matter in what part of Tamriel you start, it all looks pretty, and all three starting locations have their own unique look. There are forests, beaches, hills, mountains and of course all kinds of critters both friendly and fierce. Deer seem to be on tranqs as they no longer run away. You can also opt to chase butterflies or fireflies (called lamp bugs) for hours, if that floats your boat.

The bad:

Don't expect any of your choices to matter, save the decision what faction you wish to belong to. That, after all, determines your starting location. Anything else? Doesn't matter. You can pick a class, but what difference that makes in the end is a mystery to me. Everyone gets skills based on stamina and magicka, it's just different but very similar-working skills. I haven't seen any class-based quest differences at all. So why even pick a class? Why even have them?

As for dialog... that's never been a strength of TES games, I guess. But it's actually worse in ESO than it is in other games, for one simple reason. In the main series games, you were automatically assumed to be the hero, the guy (or gal) who saves the entire universe and then some. So when people approached you and said "I've heard good things of you. Can you please save my entire family while risiking your immortal soul, and all of that for free?" you'd think, "sure, I am THE hero, after all". In ESO, it's harder to pretend to be The Chosen One™ when you're literally drowning in crowds of heroes and you have to search high and low for something to kill because as soon as anything spawns, someone else will be there and mow it down.

Still, in other MMOs, you get to at least pick and act a certain role. You can play a guy who's just in it for the money, a classical hero or a guy who's just a total bastard for the heck of it. The dialog options in, say SWTOR allow to act that out and it does make a difference. Sometimes just in subtle ways like an alignment shirt, but still. Nothing like that I've seen in ESO.

I won't moan about bugs because what I played was a beta, so you'd expect some rough edges. That's after all what a beta is for. There still seem to be plenty left, but then, it's got "Elder Scrolls" in the name

The interface, in my opinion, still needs a lot of work until it's up to par in terms of usability and features. Five quick slots? FIVE? I've got 50 in SWTOR Also, there seems to be very little customizability there, aside from resizing the chat window.


In summary:

Good-looking, but kind of soulless. Kind of yadda yadda. I can't see myself spending money on that or playing it for prolonged times. Someone said good content would only come at a higher level (they said something like level 45) but why would I stick with it that long if I didn't really enjoy it? Or pay big bucks for it, for that matter? If they make it free-to-play later, I might give it a second look, but I'll probably spend most of my time in character generation.

Hmm. I'm thinking of getting it. Compared to other MMO games, is it any good?

I think the summary said "No, not really," lol

The spawn rates are very high because of beta.

That's why things get mowed down very quickly, it's a stress test it won't be as full when the game comes out.

Also the interface will be mod-able.

Also SWTOR is completely different, don't compare the too.

If anything, the spawn rates were too low, not too high. What I meant was that it was overcrowded with players. SWTOR handles that by dividing players into several instances. I don't know if anything like that is planned for ESO though.

And I can't compare it to anything else because I haven't played anything else

I'll say this though: If you like TES games solely or mostly for the ability to roam a huge open world and discovering stuff, you will probably like ESO.

Sounds like I'll enjoy ESO then

Sounds good to me!

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts after playing some.

ESO is instanced as well, and I've had issues where people that I want to group with are in different instances of the game... and we can't see each other or interact.

I played it briefly and while the environment was beautiful, the game felt a bit hollow.

I also noticed that there were too few enemies to go around and one of the other major issues that I noticed was that you tend to get stuck randomly in a few places or fall through the terrain. It was the beta though so hopefully they'll iron all of that out later on. I'm not sure though because the other ES games are still filled with bugs years after release despite numerous patches and revisions and the scale of the single player games is much smaller.

TBH concerning the overcrowding, I guess it's to be expected considering there's only a few days of beta-playing for everyone. It'll probably be quieter a few months after launch.

And getting stuck is for one an old TES tradition and secondly it also happens in other MMOs. In SWTOR, I think /stuck is my most used command

KC, I'd think that if you join a group, it should switch instances. If it doesn't, I'd talk to the developers, because that'd sound like a bug. It also explains why some people in the zone chat complained about there being so few people around. Also, perhaps there's a manual way to switch instances?

I don't think you should be comparing all MMOs to SWTOR.

There's a reason the game went F2P in record time.

I would think that it should too. I've complained about it numerous times. I have no idea if there is a way to manually switch.

To me too, but I still don´t feel drawn towards MMOs. Thanks though for your first impressions, mr Stargel

Ok you can actually travel to friends.

There are so many broken quests.

This thread's an interesting read. I won't be getting ES: O anytime soon, but it's cool to read others impressions about it.

My opinion of ESO is about the same as yours. Good looking (for an MMO) but soulless.

The combat needs a lot of work, it feels very generic and lackluster. There's no "zing" to anything you do, it just feels like whacking things with foam until one of you keels over. Skyrim's combat may have been over-simplistic, but it did have a feel to it similar to the game (rough and harsh). ESO's is just robotic.

It also commits a major no-no for MMOs: allowing other players you don't know and have never actually met (or even seen their characters at all) to impact your quests. Say you get a "kill boss" quest. You walk across the map to the cave, enter, then one of two things happen:

1. You find the boss room has no boss, just a horde of players waiting for it to respawn. When it does, it dies in two seconds, you only got one or two hits in.

2. five seconds after entering, your objective updates. The boss died and updated your quest. You were never even there.

I didn't play past the starter segments because the game made a TERRIBLE first-impression for me. The starter segments need to sell your game, not bore the players.

One MAJOR reason I prefer single player games...

OH my gosh. What the hell?

I can remember playing Everquest long ago; although the issues I had with that game aren't similar to the ones in this thread so far, I too found myself rolling my eyes at all the other player characters crowding out the quests I managed to find. I remember hooking up with a group of other PCs, getting really excited, only to find this horde would RUN everywhere at full speed. I had to run to keep up with them, and for this reason, immersion was out the door. There were some good things about EQ too, but overall I couldn't get into it.

Well. I mean, people begged and begged Bethesda (or Zenimax, in this case) to make an MMO; now they've got their wish. *shrugs*

I've been watching a few ESO videos and as I watch them I start to think to myself:

"Oh this actually looks quite good."

"The world looks so cool."

"I would love to explore the unseen parts of Tamriel"

etc etc etc

Then I see all the 'heroes' running around and realise I could never play a game, let alone an elder scrolls game, with that many people running around doing the exact same thing as me. That just completely ruins roleplay for me. The game looks pretty good, but I don't think I could ever do an MMO.

Also, Renee. I don't think many people really wanted an elder scrolls MMO. Most TES players don't really play MMOs. I think what most people wanted was a way to play TES with a friend or two. Somehow that got warped into an elder scrolls MMO.

So everyone's in agreement in wishing for a single player version of ESO?

You aren't a member of Beth's forums, my friend. Over and over the threads would pop up: When will Bethesda make an MMO? ... so many of these threads the mods had to lock them up over and over. Beth definitely say the dollar signs before them.

-Aye!

So it's not possible to make a 'private' party? .. Guess that's a dumb question but I don't know much about MMORPGs. The game simply dumps everybody into one giant server, and it's not possible to eliminate the crowd? It would be really cool if we could invite only people in our circle of friends and that's all.

I think Vital got it. The people asked for a two-player co-operative game to play with a friend and they heard it as "millions of hostile strangers".

Indeed, this is my fondest wish for ESO! My first question knowing nothing about MMOs was, “Will there be a single player mode?”

I think most MMOs would be vastly improved by making them single player games...

This is known, derivatively, as zerg mentality. It was named after the ever popular Zerg-rush tactic in Starcraft.

Basically, it's a very large group of players taking the path of least resistance to both minimize time spent and maximize reward income. The simple idea of the best way to get things done quickly is to throw as many players as the game will allow at it. It works, but it also pretty much means you are no longer playing a game.

Interesting. Zerg mentality. I"ve got a friend who loves Starcraft (like, it's just about the only vid game he plays) I'll have to call him a Zerg next time talk to him.

I pretty much agree. There were lots of requests for multiplayer but from what I was seeing when I constantly frequented Bethsoft's forum, most of them were "why can't I play coop with a few other people?".

To be fair, that is probably not true for ESO. At least not in all cases. If it's one of those quests where you have to slaughter a $random creature at range, you may get that situation. Other than that, ESO seems to have something I haven't seen in the one other MMO I played: certain quest NPCs and monsters seem to be "local" to you. I've interacted with NPCs that were out there, in broad daylight, but then they were following me around and it seemed like none of the other players could see that because for them, the NPC still was someplace else. Also, there were quests to put fires out in a village and after I put them out, they stayed out. It seemed like other players were still extinguishing their own, private fires. So I'm not entirely sure how bosses are handled. It's quite possible they're player or for that matter group specific.

That's actually one aspect I really liked about ESO. In the unnamed other MMO I played, it always seemed like your actions never had a lasting effect. You blew up something, and a minute later it's there again, unsynched and unharmed. As if nothing happened. You probably will never experience that in ESO.