We’ve rounded up a few early reviews for The Elder Scrolls Online and some review-in-progress articles for the online title. First, the proper reviews, starting from this Hooked Gamers piece, 9.0/10.
In today’s free-to-play dominated atmosphere, selling a game and then charging a subscription seems a bit greedy. Having played the game, I realized how much I enjoyed not having a huge eyesore of a ‘store’ button and the absence of the relentless droning about in-game currency that buys a pink unicorn with a blue feathered hat. I can easily imagine paying the $15 a month and not having to deal with any of that.
If you wanted TESO to be a Skyrim sequel, you’re going to be disappointed. If you wanted it to be another World of Warcraft clone, then stick to Lord of the Rings Online. If you are looking for something fresh in a familiar setting then you are in for a feast.
With The Elder Scrolls Online, Zenimax has created something truly amazing, possibly a new standard for virtual worlds. Whereas every MMO has tried to copy the success of World of Warcraft and Everquest by emulating them in almost every way, TESO makes no such attempt. It follows the same philosophy that lead the creators of World of Warcraft to make that game a hit in the first place: look at what you don’t like about the dominant games on the market and make ‘not that’.
VentureBeat, 90/100.
Where The Elder Scrolls Online fails is when it doesn’t break enough from the traditional MMO formula, which is the same mistake other massively multiplayer games keep making, but the only places I’ve felt that weakness so far are in the monster behavior and quest systems. If the endgame and player-versus-player content I haven’t gotten to yet also stick too close to typical MMO formulas, then it’s going to be difficult for Bethesda to justify the cost of a subscription for The Elder Scrolls Online unless additional, fresh, and substantial story material is regularly added to the game for high-level players, maybe even on a monthly basis.
Elder Scrolls veterans who don’t normally play massively multiplayer games but decide to jump into The Elder Scrolls Online because they think this might be the MMO they can enjoy are likely to find the rubber-banding enemies, the overly simplistic quests, and the lack of dungeons in the open world alienating and/or dissatisfying.
However, enough defining design elements of the Elder Scrolls single-player RPGs have been successfully grafted onto the traditional MMO template to make The Elder Scrolls Online feel like what an Elder Scrolls massively multiplayer online game ought to be. In that sense, not only is a comparison to the single-player games in the Elder Scrolls franchise rendered irrelevant, it also makes The Elder Scrolls Online a success, at least in the short term.
The long-term value of the game, as is always the case with a fresh MMO, remains to be seen.
Cheat Code Central, 4.5/5.
After a few dozen hours in Tamriel, I’ve been given a good sense of what The Elder Scrolls Online has to offer. A few bugs and balance issues aside, it genuinely feels like its single-player predecessors rather than a cookie cutter MMO, and that in itself is enough to draw back in the weary crowd yearning for something fresh from the genre. There’s still plenty of “veteran” content that awaits me once I breach the level fifty mark. Keep an eye out in the coming months for an updated feature about the endgame content and anything new that might crop up. Until then, grab your friends, play with or against strangers, or go it alone in The Elder Scrolls Online. The choice is finally yours.
Hardcore Gamer, 4/5.
Whether or not The Elder Scrolls Online is for you will depend entirely on what you’re looking for out of it. If you want a true Elder Scrolls experience, with all the freedom, exploration, and immersion that comes with it, you’re likely to be disappointed. With a fairly restricted journey through the game world and tons of immersion breaking elements, like dozens of players huddled around NPCs and merchants or enemies (including bosses) that respawn mere seconds after you kill them, it’s just not going to provide what many look for out of an Elder Scrolls game. However, it’s got enough Elder Scrolls in it’s lore, story, and quest design to make it a worthwhile experience, even for hardcore TES fans, as long you can enjoy for it is. With its wide array of diverse locations, nice visuals, engaging quests and interesting PvP, The Elder Scrolls Online has a lot to offer despite its lack of freedom and exploration; with an absurd amount content, you’ll be occupied for a long time.
GameRevolution, 4.0/5.
How far you stay with The Elder Scrolls Online, if you choose to stay at all, will depend heavily on your expectations. This is not Skyrim with a co-op partner a solid, sellable concept of its own and it’s not just another MMO to fill in the genre. The Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t fit neatly in one category or the other, because it challenges the traditions of both. So if you feel slighted or confused within the first five hours, that’s to be expected, and no one should berate you for waiting until the game perhaps becomes free-to-play. But if you can stick through the starting areas to around Level 10, find several friends to group with, and stomach the litany of technical flaws, The Elder Scrolls Online will more than grow on you. Whether it remains that way will be determined when I review the endgame content more thoroughly several weeks from now.
Trusted Reviews, 8/10.
If you had The Elder Scrolls Online down as another MMO turkey, think again. This is a good Elder Scrolls game and a solid MMO, even if it can’t quite scale the same heights as Skyrim or provide such a satisfying experience for solo players.
Still, there are other, more social pleasures to be found here, the story-led questing works brilliantly, and Tamriel is a great place to explore. Whether you’re a lapsed WoW veteran or an Elder Scrolls fanatic, you’re unlikely to go away dissatisfied.
Then we move on to the reviews in progress, as Destructoid continues their analysis of the title:
In terms of the overall server quality, ESO is one of the smoothest launches in MMO history. Not only did ZeniMax employ a “megaserver” solution to allow everyone to play on the same realm, but I also haven’t had more than one disconnect — which was the result of a service patch during the Early Access week period. While there are a few bugs still present during some quests, a lot of them have been squashed by a major update two days ago. It’s nice to see ZeniMax staying on top of things.
I see a lot of promise in Elder Scrolls Online. But right now, I wouldn’t recommend the game for newcomers to the genre, or those of you who don’t really care about the Elder Scrolls lore in general. But for the people that do meet that criteria — I think you’ll have a ton of fun experimenting with builds, roaming around the world looking for skystones and other secrets, and fighting through the game’s challenging and well-designed dungeons.
PC Gamer:
TESO’s tutorial section has you escape from prison in Coldharbour, a very very grey plane of Oblivion presided over by Molag Bal, the game’s daedric antagonist. After collecting my weapons of choice a sword and shield I’m taught combat by battering a few skeletons. Fighting has been improved since the beta: weapon blows seem to be emphasised more in the audio mix, and you can no longer clip freely through any other characters. It’s still weak compared to Skyrim, but it’s better than it was. That said, I remain pretty unconvinced by the game’s first-person mode. There’s very little sense of connection, and the red shapes used to telegraph enemy attacks are much easier to see with the camera pulled back. I zoom out to an over-the-shoulder view and stay there.
In this sequence you are introduced to a nord warrior called Lyris, played by Jennifer Hale, and a mysterious prophet played by Michael Gambon. There’s an early cameo by John Cleese, too, playing a quote-unquote “wacky” prisoner of Coldharbour who serves to direct you from one corridor to another. Bethesda’s casting budget carpet-bombs the sequence in a way that is honestly very distracting: rather than be drawn into this world and its characters, I find myself wondering instead about how much it all must have cost. This isn’t helped by very rudimentary facial animation, which traps acting talent behind a looping range of unblinking gurns. I never thought I’d say this about the game, but Oblivion had more convincing people.
It’s not an inspiring start, then. There’s something off about the pace you’re asked to believe that you’re the key to solving a world-ending crisis but given no sense of what that really means. You’re told that you’re taking part in a mass slave uprising but most everybody else you see is hovering around like it’s no big deal. Coldharbour itself is alien but drab. It’s supposed to be Tamriel’s dark mirror, but there’s little to differentiate it from any other gothic fantasy dungeon.
Kotaku:
What I Liked
Building my character. I don’t mean character creation (though it’s not too shabby), but rather taking my base character and slowly unlocking skills based on how I want to play. Every level I get a skill point. Major quests will reward them as well. These points unlock new active and passive skills.
If it were just a matter of placing a point in one of my class’ three core skill sets, that would be simple also boring. But I’ve got those skill sets, skills based on the armor I wear, the weapons I carry, the race of my character, the guilds I join and more. Skills can be evolved into different forms, transforming them in subtle but significant ways.
I may have selected a class template during character creation, but the Rande I’m playing at level ten is very much my own creation.
The quests. Or not performing quests, because most of the major ones in The Elder Scrolls Online feel like they’re much more than that. I am curing villages of plague, thwarting invasions, freeing non-player characters from the dripping maw of madness. I am an important player in this world.
It’s not that there aren’t simple fetch quests in the game. It’s that those simple quests inevitably lead to something bigger and more rewarding.
