Video game review: The Elder Scrolls Online

The game which I will be going over and reviewing today comes from a series that has been a part of my life since I was a young teenager, as I'm sure is the same for some of you, it's called The Elder Scrolls Online. The Elder Scrolls Online, or TESO for short, is a game where you play as a gardener who's working on his next saucy love novel, Erect Nipples 2: Electric Boogaloo. a MMORPG game that was developed by ZeniMax Studios and then published by Bethesda Softworks. It was released in April of 2014 for the Windows platform as well as OS X, and later saw release for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One in June of 2015. 

Now, this was my first MMORPG, so I wasn't quite sure if I would like it or not. The only reason I really gave it a shot was because it was taking place in The Elder Scrolls universe and had gameplay in a similar vein to the past entries in the series. Having said that, I'm quite familiar with other MMORPG's and knew somewhat of what I wanted and expected out of this game. At first I was pretty impressed and happy with how the game worked, I would say up until around level 18-20 I was enthusiastic and thought this was probably one of the better MMO's I've seen or played. However, it pretty quickly started showing its problems after I got around level 20 and I started noticing more and more issues that made me a saaad panda. 

One of the things I really enjoyed about this game at the start was how clear it made your main goals. The main/direct storyline is done quite well and seems like something you'd see in one of the other Elder Scrolls games. Every few levels you're given another piece of the storyline to walk through, and introduced along the way to a handful of characters that you grow slightly attached to. The voice acting performances are mostly pretty well done for the main storyline, and I think it was pretty well done overall. Though, don't expect an insane amount of depth and substance to it. While it's quite similar to an Elder Scrolls game story, it's not anywhere near as long or rich with backstory and a multitude of characters and narrative. Still, it's more than enough for an MMO questline. 

Now, having said that, the rest of the game falls pretty flat in the mission/quests aspect. The rest of the quests in game are very, very, very repetitive and grindy. There isn't really any variety to them, and they start all following the same basic formula with very basic changes. You're either delivering an item, killing a certain enemy or find a specific item/objective. It's all just very vanilla, really, and eats up most of the quest time. I also noticed that the voice acting started having overlays throughout the quests, where one person would voice the same dialogue for several different characters using the same exact voice. I thought this was a bit lazy, and it kind of got to be annoying after awhile. At least for me, personally. I mean, how am I supposed to jack my big old dick off to the same guys voice for 7 hours? 

Another thing that makes it a bit tedious to do all the quests is that most of the rewards you get for completing them are very lackluster. It's hard to want to run through everything when you don't get much in return beyond some EXP. You often times will get some gold and then a special piece of equipment of varying rarity, such as a weapon or piece of armor. You make very little gold this way, however, and the items you often get aren't usually all that great or worth any money. This actually kinda brings up the next point I wanted to talk about.

I truly believe that they need to create some kind of public auction house for you to list your items. Currently, you have only two choices in regards to selling any special items you collect. You can either sell it to the NPC's for barely anything, or you can join some guilds and use their traders to list your stuff up for people to buy should they come across it. The problem with this is that you have to do a lot of guild hunting to see which ones have actual traders that are useful, and you also have to make sure that guild is recruiting and that you're able to actually get into it. 

You can also attempt to find someone on the text or voice chat that might be interested in buying what you have for sale, but that's mostly up to luck as well. This issue also influences other sections of the game, in my opinion. Such as the crafting element. While you definitely should work on some crafting skill lines for yourself so you can make things such as specific sets of armor or weapons and enchant them with special abilities, there's not much of a point otherwise. Selling your wares in the guild stores can help net you some profit, but if you can't get into a guild with a good store then there's little return on your huge investment into crafting. (Seriously, the amount of resources and time you invest into crafting can be bonkers.) 

A good way to find some sets of weapons and armor besides crafting them yourself is to go dungeon running. There are dozens of dungeons for you to run through, each of which having a few specific sets of armor and weapons available to drop. There's a built in dungeon finder that will place you into a dungeon with a group, or you can attempt to enter whichever dungeon you want on your own solo. The dungeon finder has some kinks that need to be worked out, as I've witnessed many days where it was just flat out broken for myself and several other players. I remember one day where it was down and not able to place people into a dungeon for around 7-8 hours before I just logged off and tried again the next day. 

Generally when it does work, however, it works pretty alright. You'll select which role for the dungeon you want to fulfill, which depends on your character, then get teleported to the dungeon. You can either run as a damage dealer (There's two per dungeon) a tank or a healer. Each of these roles is essential, and for most of the dungeons you need to learn and adapt to different combat strategies. I think the dungeons are done particularly well by the developers. However, running dungeons with random people can be a nightmare since there is little to no communication and most of the time if there is it some guy crying about how he got some cat hair stuck in his pee pee hole so he needs to be the leader of the group. person being annoying or trying to act like they're the god of dungeons. 

The amount of enemies in a dungeon as well as the massive amount of different bosses with different mechanics do make it quite challenging, and it is pretty refreshing to take a break from all the vanilla quests to run a dungeon for a bit. There is a lot of different mechanics that go into the dungeons, and you'll more than likely need to learn some specific skills for your class if you want to be effective at your job. Armor bonuses are pretty important for dungeon raids as well, and there's just so many things you need to grind and work on to be a good member of a party for these. 

The class system can be experimented with heavily, and there are hundreds of different builds out there that you can use and develop. There are so many different ways for you to level in this game, that you can be on a different path than pretty much everyone that you run across. You'd be hard pressed to run into someone who is using 100 percent the same skill choices as you, as there's a fairly decent variety to choose from. It's pretty interesting and I think it's a positive thing that it was developed to be so open ended for players. The game certainly shows some of its Elder Scrolls influence in this way. 

Leveling itself can feel like a chore however, as pretty early on everything feels quite sluggish. I believe level 22 and upwards for me was a sloggish mess that bored me to tears. Until you hit level 50 and ascend to the leveling system it just sucks, at least in my opinion. You have so much EXP to grind, but barely any discernible events happening throughout the world, so you're mostly left with just dungeons and questing to try and grind your way through. The dungeons unlock as you level up, so at certain times you only have a handful of dungeons to run through which gets really boring and repetitive. Add in the boring, vanilla quests and you have yourself a horrible mess involving lots and lots of booze and most certainly bashing your head into a wall to just end it all  a very boring time. 

After hitting level 50 though and reaching the Veteran rank, the pace does pick up a bit and things don't feel quite as grindy. The reason being is that you get accelerated EXP and can level up at a pretty fast rate. You also get a new level system which allots you master points to help continue developing your character. While the pace picks up, it is most certainly still grind filled content. Especially considering that they continue to raise the level cap up every few months. As of the last time I logged on and played it was at a whopping 720. My character is floating around 360, and I don't see myself logging enough time in to actually hit that 720 mark. There are veteran zones you can venture into which provide quite a bit of challenge, but aren't very fun unless you're running with a group. 

Since we have went over the skills/leveling/classes and all that jazz, lets talk about the combat of the game. Because I feel like most people who play MMO's are going to feel very out of their comfort zone with this game. There is no auto attacking mechanism in this game, and there is a lot of strategy that goes into the combat which requires your full attention. When playing in the first person mode, the combat definitely makes you feel like you're back into an Elder Scrolls game like Skyrim or Oblivion. It was really enjoyable for me and is probably one of my favorite things about the game. 

It does take a little while to get used to, and there are plenty of skills that help you evolve your combat prowess and strategies. Combat mostly consists of blocking, roll dodging, counter attacking while enemies are stunned and of course just doing your normal combat attacks. If you're going to be a sorcerer and not rely on ranged or melee combat, then things will be a bit different for you but still have similar elements. I think this works in the games favor and helps set it apart from most other MMO's, but I suppose I could see why someone wouldn't be a huge fan of this. 

The PVP aspect of the game can be a bit hit or miss, and I think combat can get a little wonky here, however. I never was one for the PVP part of this game, and I believe in my hundreds of hours of playing this game I probably only engaged in maybe around 4 or 5 PVP fights. This isn't including the alliance war PVP section, which I also participated in for a few hours to just unlock a couple of skills. I found that section to be very underwhelming and poorly done. There's no real leadership there, and no way to organize it very well beyond shouting to people in the voice chat. It was always a mess and I found it to be very, very laggy when too many players got near each other. It was definitely one of the less polished parts of the game, and felt like Zenimax probably just wiped their ass with that section and put the crusty shit stained remnants back into the game for us to suffer through. 

Oh, and one more thing I'd like to mention before I end this. It was probably one of the more annoying things actually. I can't say I enjoyed how Zenimas pushed their DLC's onto you, especially considering the high prices for them. If you want to have all of the in game content, it can be very, very pricey. And, even if you don't want it, prepare your sphincters for the huge updates they make you download anyways even if you don't use it. I believe the file size for my download is something like 120GB's of space due to the DLC's they kept putting out which they force down everyone's throats. Its' hilarious that my PS4's HD has 1/3rd of the space taken up by this single game. I mean, what, doesn't everyone love wasted space that you can't access? It's the greatest, right?! 

Overall, there was a lot about this game that I quite enjoyed. Especially if you could play with a few friends. It can be a pretty enjoyable experience at times. But, on the other hand, there is so much about it that was lazily done or is just poorly handled. It needs so many things to be tweaked and changed, but I don't think we will ever see it because they just wanna keep rolling out loot crates and other big DLC packages for more money. I would say personally that I'd rate this game as a solid 6/10, and that's that. 

But, yeah. Thanks for stopping by to check out my review! Appreciate it!