Regardless of whether you assume the guise of an orc or an elf, Elder Scrolls Online is the story of an adventurer in search of his or her soul. It's a fitting setup for a beloved single-player franchise that finds itself taking its first shaky steps in the unfamiliar massively multiplayer roleplaying game genre, and just moments past the character creation screen you can feel it struggling to reconcile its heritage with its new duds. Just as the adventurer tries to learn the truth of their past, ESO itself struggles with its identity through each leg of the lengthy leveling content.
A Guided Epic
It takes a while for the pieces to fall into place over the course of its 100-hour main story, but in time it delivers an experience that's at least as worthy of the Elder Scrolls name as any of the three most recent single-player games. (It suffers from the same occasional cliches, too.) It presents its own unique twists and cameos of important figures from Elder Scrolls lore, as well as a final boss encounter that both exceeds the challenges of some of the single-player games and points to what's in store in the promising Veteran content that comes after 50.
As in Skyrim, it's the quests you find from random townsfolk and Dunmer guar herders that make up the bulk of the PvE experience, as well as stories from series favorites such as the Mages’ and Fighters’ Guilds. They're fully voiced to a degree that puts even Star Wars: The Old Republic to shame, although the quality of the delivery from the limited voice actors ranges from adequate to robotic (particularly for some male Argonians). The catch? If you’re unaccustomed to the conventions of MMOs, you may bristle at the sight of other adventurers undertaking the same clandestine dealings with the same sketchy Breton landowners. These stories written for a singular hero but delivered to a crowd are a spot where ESO seems to hold onto its single-player beginnings more than it probably should.
Good thing, then, that the quests themselves capture the essence of Elder Scrolls. The series' signature quests, which tend to send you into caves and ruins to seek out important relics or slaughter some bandits, match up with traditional instanced MMO design well. You do a lot of killing and fetching, yes, but it's rarely more intrusive than venturing into Skyrim's Korvanjund to cut through dozens of draugr to pick up a toothy crown. Puzzles and investigative missions add further spice, as do quests that affect how NPCs relate to you later down the road depending on your decisions. Further complementing the experience is a soundtrack that generally captures the spirit of Jeremy Soule's celebrated work for the franchise, although it's a shame that the score for thelogin screen represents Soule's only direct contribution to the project. In spirit, at least, ESO swims in the same low-fantasy vibe that makes Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and the rest so appealing: you're generally asked to dispatch mundane threats like bandits rather than spending too much time caught up in matters ofworld import, so when those come along they’re more interesting.
Elder Scrolls Online - Life After the Level Cap
TRAILER
IMAGES