The Elder Scrolls Online Preview

VG247’s Brenna Hillier is offering a second take on The Elder Scrolls Online, and makes abundantly clear that she’s far less impressed than her colleague Dave Cook. Here’s a snippet:

The whole time I was playing The Elder Scrolls Online during a press beta over the past few weeks, I desperately wanted to be doing something anything! else. I particularly wanted to be playing a different game in the franchise Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind or a different MMORPG. The reason for this is that The Elder Scrolls Online has rather failed in what I assume was its mission: to bring that ineffable, inimitable Bethesda quality to a very crowded market, in order to differentiate a game from its many competitors.

In his own reflections on the press beta weekend, Dave said that he felt like he was playing Skyrim with some optional multiplayer components. I don’t agree. At all. Skyrim, for all its repetitiveness and various limitations, is a game I never get sick of.

This was not the case with The Elder Scrolls Online, which I wanted to stop playing almost immediately; a feeling that only intensified. It didn’t feel like Skyrim, or any of The Elder Scrolls games, to me, although it shared elements a certain aesthetic in the UI, assets drawn from the same concept sources.

There’s nothing wrong with this Skyrim skin. It makes The Elder Scrolls Online feel comfortable, familiar. This is a good thing. I’m praising it. It’s just that for me, that’s pretty much where the similarities ended. Strip away the lore and the aesthetics, and what I found was an MMORPG packed to the gills with all the tropes and conventions that have always put me off the genre as a whole.

Maybe I know so little about MMORPGs that the glaring differentiations weren’t immediately apparent to me. But for me the real issue is that while I did not go into The Elder Scrolls Online expecting Skyrim multiplayer, I also did not go in expecting to be utterly bored and I was.