The State of The Elder Scrolls Online: 3 Months After Launch

PC Gamer’s Leif Johnson has taken The Elder Scrolls Online for another spin now that 3 months have passed since launch and editorializes on the state of the title. Here’s an excerpt on the end game:

If you can stick it out to Veteran Rank, Elder Scrolls Online’s end game shows promise. The dungeons found in veteran ranks alone are worth the effort it takes to reach them, as some of the encounters resemble mini-raids that demand at least a modicum of coordination and cooperation among random players. Here the depth of ESO’s combat best reveals itself, and the resulting challenges reveal weaknesses in builds that weren’tapparent when bulldozing through the core 1-50 content. I’d spend the majority of the veteran leveling process in the dungeons if I could, but poor XP for repeated runthroughs and boss loot that’s easily salable in guild stores diminish some of the appeal.

But for weeks after launch, those dungeons constituted the end game experience aside from faction battles in the PvP zone of Cyrodiil (and why, ZeniMax is there no world PvP?). The Craglorn patch back in May added an “adventure zone” dedicated to group content, whether it be dynamic events and world bosses, public dungeons that required other players to complete, or two new 12-player “trials” that filled in the need for raid-like encounters. It was one of the first signs that ZeniMax might know what it’s doing with late-game content, after all.

It’s thus a shame that the trials, while fun enough, serve as a poster child for the issues Elder Scrolls Online faces every time it tries to deliver a non-standard MMO experience. The emphasis is usually on speed, as the trials limit the number of resurrections and reward players with leaderboard rankings depending on how fast they clear them. In another MMO without similar pressures, players usually allow concessions to support a player with a build or class that’s not quite optimal for specific encounters.

Forget about that in ESO. Random groups actively turn away damage-focused Nightblade characters, as the class’ DPS is in such a pitiful state right now (particularly for stamina builds) that bringing them would likely result in a lower ranking or outright failure. Balance as a whole remains a problem, and it’s not uncommon to see trial groups composed almost entirely of players equipped with destruction staffs and clad in light armor regardless of class.