The Elder Scrolls Online goes public
I'm pounding along a hallway in the Wailing Prison, Coldharbor, leading an old blind man I know only as The Prophet to a Daedric anchor portal. Coldharbor is the realm of the Daedric Prince Molag Bal, a nasty piece of work whose list of titles begins with Lord of Domination and goes downhill from there, ending with King of Rape. We're both on the high end of Molag Bal's Most Wanted list, so we need to leave now, while the Lord of Cruelty is distracted by a prison riot. The Prophet claims he can get us back to Nirn, the mortal world, by piggybacking on one of Molag Bal's Dark Anchors, gigantic structures of chain and ironwork that are intended to terminate the existence of said mortal world by winching it into a shotgun marriage with Coldharbor, at which point Molag Bal will be able to have his wicked way with it.
Goodbye to Coldharbor -- if the portal doesn't glitch, that is.
We arrive at the anchor portal without much fuss, and after a few preliminaries The Prophet invokes the aid of one of the gods with a prayer (a good prayer too, for those of you who shudder at characters named The Prophet and religion in games in general), and takes off into the air to be sucked into the portal and ejected somewhere in Nirn. After filling my pockets a bit fuller from the odd selection of supplies available – raw chicken meat? – I try my own takeoff. I rise to the portal, touch it....and the transfer fails, as the game helpfully informs me. I then fall a couple of hundred feet to go splat on the metal floor. That
wasn't in the script.
Fortunately, in The Elder Scrolls Online, death has an almost farcical impermanence. Besides, strictly speaking, I'm dead already, since Molag Bal has stolen my soul for his own dark purposes. I resurrect and try again. And again. And again. Nine times in all, before someone in chat suggests I quit the game and restart it. Then, and only then, it works and drops me back onto Nirn, in the city of Daggerfall, where I wake up in some nameless resident's house. The Prophet appears to me as a projection, and confirms that one of his fears has come true – the two of you have arrived in different places. So, he sends me off to keep myself busy confounding the agents of Molag Bal while he sorts out his side of the story.
Here I am in Daggerfall, with no idea where anything is, only a few supplies, and even less money. So what do I do first in my new career as a warrior for righteousness? Steal everything that isn't screwed down in the house I arrived in. And then go across the street to clean out the house there. And then visit next door, like Santa Claus in reverse. And clean out anywhere else I please, for that matter, even the Cathedral. No one seems to care about me disappearing into residences not my own and emerging staggering under a load of loot. And then I sell it all, sometimes to the very merchant I've stolen it from, which gives me enough money to get on with. I go looking for trouble, or in game jargon, “quests,” and find it, of course....
The ESO editor allows you a good deal of flexibility in creating your character. Here's my raging Elf granny. Don't talk back to her.
Glad I could be of help, ma'am.
When I reviewed the beta of
Elder Scrolls Online some weeks earlier, the main issues were technical. At that time, just about everything in the game failed at one point or another. Fortunately, this isn't the case with the final product, although it still has far more than its share of irritating glitches. Falling through the map is not something that should happen in a shipping game; I've done it three times now. Ditto for crashing during an attack and finding yourself alone in the middle of a crowd of resurrected enemies when you restart. Nevertheless, taken by themselves, the technical problems that remain should not be enough to deter a determined gamer, and I will be mentioning them as little as possible below.
At the time of your arrival, quite apart from Molag Bal's antics, three alliances are struggling with each other for the vacant Imperial throne: the Daggerfall Covenant, the Ebonheart Pact, and the Aldmeri Dominion. Although there are a number of individual exceptions, the Covenant is made up of Bretons, Orcs, and Redguards; the Pact of Nords, Dark Elves, and Argonians [lizard-like]; and the Dominion of High Elves, Wood Elves and Khajiit [feline]. This general alignment does not determine who you play: you can be a member of any race, male or female, on the side of your choice. The tenth race, the Imperials, live in Cyrodiil, the province at the center of the map, and the main battleground for the civil war. Playing Imperials is restricted to those who shelled out for the premium edition of the game, which also includes a horse, an extremely expensive purchase otherwise. (So expensive that one player who gave his girlfriend enough gold to buy one was promptly banned, the system assuming that there was no good reason for one player to give another 17,000 septims and get nothing in return. After much protest, the ban was reversed.)
Player vs. Player combat is restricted to Cyrodiil, and for characters who have “veteran” rank – that is, level 50 and above (you can fake your way in earlier, but you're a bit handicapped). It is not running smoothly yet, partly because of technical problems, and partly because people like to join the winning side and so one of the alliances is much stronger than the other two, resulting in a painfully unbalanced game. Since I dislike PvP – it tends to bring out the worst in people – I haven't been to Cyrodiil yet and may never go. I have also concentrated on playing the Covenant side, which means that to get a true idea of the game's size and scope, everything I mention below should be multiplied by three.
The stage and the cast. The damned thing is immense. There's really no comparison with any of the earlier Elder Scrolls games. Finally, the cities are large enough to get hopelessly lost in. The countryside has become much more realistic as well – no more pretending that three farms the size of tennis courts are all that are needed to supply the neighbouring city.
And all of it, city and countryside, is generously sprinkled with NPCs [non-player characters], nearly all of whom will respond if you talk to them, sometimes at considerable length or with eccentric touches that individualize them. Take, for instance, this orc with his nose in a book by the side of a road in Daggerfall.
And they say orcs don't appreciate good literature....
You never really
do anything with this guy other than exchange a few words – he just stands there and reads – but his choice of reading material and his comments turn him from a decorative statue into an individual.
The more important of the NPCs are developed so well that there is little difficulty in thinking of them as real. The Prophet, the central figure in the resistance to Molag Bal, is no tiresome Yoda but a conflicted character with a very complicated past, not all of which he is willing to reveal to you at the beginning. The group of companions you begin to assemble to frustrate Molag Bal are delightfully snarly with each other, rather than being swept up with improbable nobility to the point where they forget their pasts. The beggar woman in Port Hunding will snap “Find your own crate. Piss off!” if you interrupt her scavenging. The game even goes so far as gentle mockery of the genre with the priestess of Stendarr who has the grace to be embarrassed by the ghastly Wardour Street English her role forces on her, and helpfully provides a running translation into ordinary speech.
Those of you who became nauseous at the horribly contrived “high language” in Sovngarde, one of the low points of
Skyrim, will be repaid by a giggle here.
There are so many well-developed characters that it seems unfair to single out any one of them, but if pressed, I suspect that most people would choose Cadwell, voiced by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. Cadwell is a very British former knight-errant who wears an iron kettle on his head like someone out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. He seems to be having the time of his life, despite the depressing surroundings.
Cadwell, who has not been driven insane by his fate because he was "crazy as a box of frogs" even before he left the mortal world, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the ins and outs of Coldharbor, and a taste for "derring-do" that comes in useful to the player more than once.
And those with experience in Elder Scrolls games will be delighted to find old friends such as the meta-character M'aiq the Liar, who has been with the series since Morrowind. In Elder Scrolls Online, you get an achievement for finding him and listening to his enigmatic commentary in each major area of the game space.
(You also get an achievement for being eaten by slaughterfish, an "honor" that I've avoided so far.)
Apart from mortals – soldiers, civilians, farmers, priests, and mystics as the good guys, “witches” (thankfully largely male), bandits, necromancers, and cultists as the baddies – there are two other groups you will deal with at length: the dead, and the Daedric lords.
The dead have a major role, appropriate in a way, since after all, you're one of them.
You know you're in trouble when even the local phantoms find you a bit weird.
Quite a few of the quests have you interacting with ghosts and returned spirits of various sorts, some civil, some bloodthirsty, to set right something that was still uncorrected when they passed, or foil some necromantic attempt to raise them to fight for Molag Bal. The cause can be as serious as neutralizing an ancient relic that can summon a huge and uncontrollable army of the undead, as trivial as discovering what an ancient catacomb contained on behalf of a deceased explorer who was murdered before he could reach it -- the ghost is devastated when you return and tell him that there was no treasure after all, only an ancient and buried library, of value only to scholars: “Do you mean to say that I died for a pile of moldy books?” -- or as personal as searching out proof for a young girl's ghost that her father had really loved her.
There is something quietly satisfying about these closure quests, perhaps because they do what is so impossible for us to accomplish, make things right despite the intervention of death.
Weaving in and out of the action are the Daedric lords, the demigods of the Elder Scrolls universe, nearly all of whom have an irritating habit of toying with human beings for their own amusement. Molag Bal has gone a bit over the top, even for a Daedric prince, by trying to annex the whole of the mortal world, but that doesn't mean the others can't have a bit of fun with it and its hapless residents before it goes. For instance, there is a long sub-plot centered on a clash between the venomously sweet-tongued Vaermina, Lady of Nightmares, patron saint of torture, and Molag Bal's ally, and Azura, Queen of Dusk and Dawn, who of all the Daedra is the one most inclined to favor mortals, or at least refrain from harassing them.
That story is well done, but it pales before the triumphant re-entry of an old favorite, the Lord of Madness, Sheogorath. After letting rip in
The Shivering Isles extension of Elder Scrolls IV,
Oblivion, Sheogorath's part in
Skyrim was meager and disappointing, but he's back in fine form here.
He's even brought his butler Haskill, who has retained his sardonic sense of humor though not his medieval wardrobe.
His antagonist is the shade of the ancient mage Shalidor, whose books you searched for off and on when there was nothing better to do in
Skyrim.
Shalidor is in a perpetual state of barely restrained fury at Sheogorath, both for the Daedric Prince stealing one of his creations, which it is your mission to recover, and with Sheogorath's general refusal to take anything, including Shalidor himself, seriously.
Not all the characters are credible; not all the dialog works. As with most fictional products, what is said has been tilted towards the "interesting," and occasionally tilted too far. For instance, i doubt that any devotee of a traditional deity, faced with the desecration of one of his god's most important shrines, would express himself quite as flippantly as the last line from the gentleman below.
Fortunately, this is an exception. Most of the time, the mode of expression and the context are better suited to each other:
The plot proceeds along two main lines, one that follows your efforts, with The Prophet, to oppose and defeat Molag Bal directly, and the other, which can be going in a dozen different directions at once, where you are accomplishing various tasks that often, but not always, combat Molag Bal's influence among the bandits and other evil-doers in the world.
It is putting it politely to say that Elder Scrolls games have rarely been known for the strength of their main plots. Linear-minded players can drastically misconstrue them, since most of the interest and effort has been invested in the sub-plots and side-plots. The phrase that George Orwell used of Dickens is equally appropriate for Skyrim: "Rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles."
The main plot of Elder Scrolls Online is stronger and tidier than in earlier Elder Scrolls games, but the other action has not been trimmed down; if anything, it is denser and more complex than before. Some side quests are relatively dull and predictable; many are not. In quite a number of them, you misconstrue the situation completely at first and begin by working for the villain, until something or someone enlightens you. Or you are faced by a situation where you can't please everyone, but must decide who gets the prize and who gets the shaft, making instant enemies of half the people you are working with. In one minor quest in the Alik'r Desert, for instance, you have to recover the design documents for several advanced ships that an inventor has been building in an isolated shipyard on the coast. When you finally locate the last set of plans, you find out that you weren't the only one after them – the last set are in the possession of a Dark Elf from Morrowind, who tells you that unless she brings back all three sets to her Telvanni masters, not only she herself but her whole family will be executed. There's no time to make copies – do you let her leave with them, or not? The game has a reliable bias towards the most merciful alternative, so I let her take them and go. After all, Morrowind is far away, no threat to this land, and the designs won't be lost to the original owners – they still have both the original designer and the ships themselves to work from. But I never did get around to telling the designer what I'd done....
One result of the sheer number of side quests is that despite the size of the playing field, the game often has an uncomfortably crowded feeling. Trying to circle around or take a short cut when doing a quest all too often lands you in the middle of the cast for another quest, and can easily mean your abrupt termination when the quest you have wandered into is significantly higher level than the one you thought you were pursuing. Elder Scrolls Online can be an unpleasantly tense game to play solo or in a small group, since you can never tell whether what is over the next hill is going to be trivial or lethal. On top of this, the powers of hostile entities you may think you know from earlier games have often been drastically upgraded, and their reach is generous to the point that it's very difficult to judge whether or not you are in range of whatever they are wielding. The carefree wandering that is one of the most pleasant aspects of earlier Elder Scrolls games is not entirely absent, but is certainly harder to find in Elder Scrolls Online. The player has much more of a sense that the game is always trying to kill him or her, a feeling made stronger by the unpredictable fluctuations in overall difficulty. Some quests marked as above your level can be very simple, if you happen to have the right equipment, and some that are supposed to be easy turn out to be all but impossible without dying multiple times.
Another glaring fault with the quests is that they are often very rigidly scripted, and if you do not accomplish them in exactly the way the game demands, your success may be arbitrarily ignored. I am not speaking of taking advantage of exploits here, but of a failure to tolerate relatively minor variations. For instance, there is one quest that involves dodging through a valley and up a hillside while ogres throw boulders at you. It is beyond frustrating to make it across the valley and to the objective, kill the ogres, and then be told to go and do it all again because you failed to hide behind the right rocks in the right order while crossing the valley.
This situation is unfortunately not confined to that one scenario. For example, very early in the game, on Stros M'Kai, you are asked to help a ship's captain release her crew from captivity, and told to look for the captain's pet monkey as a way of finding her. If you find her without interacting with the monkey – quite easy to do if you happen to wander into the correct building – she will fill you in on the situation and give you the disguises to slip to her crew members so that they can leave without raising the alarm. You take the disguises, begin to work your way towards the building where the nearest crew member is being held, and bingo! You are told that you have failed the quest because you are “out of zone” or some such nonsense, and told to go find the monkey again. Even though the little horror is completely unnecessary to the mechanics of the quest, if it is left out of the loop, the game will sulk and go no further until you discover by trial and error what exactly you have done wrong.
Taking down the Dark Anchors that are being used to pull the mortal realm into Coldharbor is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game precisely because it is unscripted. Whoever happens to be in the vicinity when a Dark Anchor activates dashes over to mob it, at which Molag Bal begins to throw more and more powerful warriors of his own into the fight to defend the anchor.
The result is a gloriously chaotic swirl round and round the anchor base until Molag Bal runs out of defenders and the entire thing explodes and vanishes -- no quest structure, nothing to "accomplish" other than clear the area and keep it clear. It's tremendous fun, and if all the quests were equally free-form, the game would be much better.
Perhaps the worst fault in the quest structure is the obsession with ending a quest or quest stage by boxing the player into a cage match with a powerful enemy or enemies. I prefer single-player, but it's indisputable that the impossible becomes possible and the difficult easy if you go into a situation with a crowd of other people, whether or not you are all members of the same group. So why the need to force single-player combat against some of the most difficult figures in the game? And why is it handled so crudely, with unbelievable contrivances?
Sometimes there is a reasonable explanation given for the fact that you can't take friends along. For instance, in the quest involving the Impervious Vault (which unfortunately does not live up to its name), the mage you are working with tells you that she can only relax the magical wards enough to let a single person through. At least here they give you the courtesy of a believable explanation. But why can't you bring the whole gang when you are battling Faolchu the werewolf lord? You don't need to relax a ward or pass a portal to get to him; you're just going through a wooden door. No coherent reason is ever given for that door being open only to you. For that matter, why do you bother to battle him at all? He's stuck inside a burning building, and fire will kill him. He looks like an idiot for staying there – he knows he's vulnerable to fire – and you look like an idiot for going in to get him. He should be high-tailing it out of that inferno and taking you on in the streets outside. That would be a challenge, and a believable one. Why lock you into a space that feels as small as a broom closet? It's an exercise in repeated frustration to go in after him unless you have a heavy-armor high-damage build, whereas if he were running around, you could dodge and hunt him in different ways according to how you have chosen to be equipped.
Still, with Faolchu you do have a bit of room to maneuver and one wall that you can try to keep between you and him. Some of the other cage matches are fiddled to the point that one is tempted to say that the game is cheating. One of the most common dodges is to make the objects in the room noclip to the projectiles, and sometimes the bodies, of your enemies. When I tried to defend the north brazier at Tu'whacca's Throne, for instance, I was immediately floored by an attacker who jumped casually through a stone pillar. The developers didn't even have the decency to make the pillar break, or allow me to return the compliment – the pillar was solid to me, but not to my (human) enemies. That stinks. The cage match that ends your rescue of Abnar Tharn is another conspicuous example. The central podium is supposedly solid, but it stops absolutely nothing except your vision. Your enemies see and shoot you through it, which means that the battle area is another medium-size round room with no cover at all, where you are trying to out-DPS multiple enemies who arrive in multiple waves, “assisted” by a decorative but largely useless Lyris Titanborn (Where are you, Serana? Lydia? Hell, even Belethor.....).
It's about as enjoyable as banging your head with a hammer, and it's absolutely unavoidable if you wish to progress, meaning that this, like most of the other cage matches, stands square in the way of the game doing any effective storytelling.
The most infernally idiotic of these matches, at least among those that I personally experienced, is the one that takes place inside the trunk of the Wyrd Tree – again, medium-sized round room, no cover. Here you have four divinities that are allegedly your allies (like most of your allies in this game, they're either crippled or inept), spaced out around the perimeter, with an enemy who can paralyze you and then kill you with one shot. Still, even given this and the unoriginality of the setup, it wouldn't be so bad if you could actually find out what you are supposed to do. The divinities are able to recharge and heal you, but they can't move themselves, and their powers appear at random. The way to win is to have enough stamina to break free of your enemy's paralysis and get near one of them when it begins to glow. They're supposed to tell you this and feed you other information to help you win, and they do. In German. Why the gottverdamnt nature spirits in another reality are speaking German to you is never explained. In retrospect, this seems like a piece of sheer, unalloyed nerd jerkishness by the developers, who no doubt laughed until they peed themselves at the players frantically trying to remember the scraps of Deutch they might have been exposed to over the years. I didn't see the joke myself, and like virtually everyone else I talked to, scuttled over to YouTube in a very foul mood to learn what I had to do to win.
In general, there is far too much pointless combat in Elder Scrolls Online. Even when you are overwhelmingly superior to your enemies, hacking your way through ten or fifteen of them just to walk down the street is BORING. It's like hacking your way through a blackberry thicket with a machete, only this blackberry thicket regrows almost instantly. And to add insult to injury, you often don't get a single experience point for all that unavoidable work. Respawn intervals are surrealistically short; I've had enemies get up again in less than two minutes, not even enough time to let me finish rifling through their things. I know that the nature of MMOs dictates a fairly short respawn interval, otherwise the first player through would leave an empty path for others to follow. But need it be this short? And need it be a flat and unsubtle respawn, rather than reinforcements arriving from somewhere credible? It simply feels stupid to be walking down a corridor and to have enemies suddenly appear from thin air all around you, not because of some magical operation, but because, well, that's just what they do.
* * * * * *
Too good an Elder Scrolls game to leave;
too clunky an MMO to endure....
Not an easy choice.
As for myself, I stopped playing
Elder Scrolls Online when my most advanced character was Level 33. I may return to it later, but I don't know. It had become more of a frustration than a pleasure. This was chiefly because of the rigidity of the game and the unpredictable changes of difficulty but also because of a plague of harvester bots stealing resources and the game's habit of crashing, less often than with the beta but still frequently enough to be a major annoyance. A number of what formerly had seemed like advantages had also begun to show serious disadvantages -- crafting, for instance, which seems delightfully complex at the beginning, becomes irritatingly convoluted fairly quickly, as the plethora of supplementary materials strains your available storage space and the number of perks you have to spend to gain advanced crafting skills cuts into your combat effectiveness.
My two or three weeks in game were enough to confirm that the writing is considerably above average quality, the characters are well-developed, and the story lines, both of the main quest and of side quests, are usually interesting. There is little to object to in the "Elder Scrolls" part of the game. It was the MMO side that in the end spoiled the experience for me -- the endless, dreary killing; the badly contrived boss battles; the absurdly rigid structure of quests; the mechanical end-of-quest reward structure; and the impracticality of advancing in the game single-player. This last is probably the single most alienating factor for those who come to Elder Scrolls Online from Oblivion or Skyrim, rather than from another MMO game. Single-player functionality is not something one normally expects from Massively Multiplayer Online games, but the designers had promised it would be there. They failed to deliver, and in so failing, I suspect, lost a large part of their potential customer base.