The Important Pieces of Paper - The Elder Scrolls online, a new chapter in my MMORPG journey.

As you may have seen from my most recent Hustling through the Old Republic post I had completed all of the class stories and decided it was time for a break, that said I will probably be going back as SWTOR was one of the best MMORPG experience I had ever had. It's just the futuristic atmosphere that got a bit cold and lifeless over time. World of Warcraft as well will always hold a place in my heart as a game of wonder, it's hard to explain it was just the feel of it, the aesthetic and made it special, and the fact that I was so deeply involved with the multiplayer and playing with others. I dunno, I was younger then, maybe less jaded then I am now hah. I'll be 40 in a years time, for some people that's a scary thought, but not me, I just accept it. I was never as heavily into raiding in SWTOR as I was with WoW, maybe there was less Australians, honestly I'm afraid to admit I haven't done any raiding as yet in this new venture.

It's so epic! this is in fact the first ever screenshot of ESO I took.

When deciding on a new MMORPG to explore I didn't really look at many options, in fact I didn't know of many options, Guild Wars 2? Lord of the Rings Online? I didn't even consider them. I'd know about The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) for a long time, and of course I am a big fan of Skyrim if the post label didn't suggest it enough, also a friend of mine plays ESO so it was all the reason to try it. I was sad to leave SWTOR but I knew I could always come back plus starting a new online game means you have all of their backlog content to play and with ESO being released in 2014, that was going to be a lot to get through. Yes there has been no less then 17 updates to Elder Scrolls Online and the same as GTA online I intend to do all of them in order. Another reason was that I was missing the medieval theme, after playing so much Star Wars the Old Republic in it's cold metal space stations it would be a nice change. Unfortunately though Elder Scrolls visual style is nowhere near as warm and friendly as World of Warcraft with it's bright and almost cartoony graphical style. I may have mentioned this before but unless I had some friends who wanted to get back into it I don't think I could go back to WoW, I messed up moving my characters to the AU servers so now their split over two different ones.

Nice shot this one.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when starting ESO I guess something like Skyrim which I had played before. I already had a bit of an idea of what class I wanted, started off with what I thought was a more simple class, a Dragonknight which was sort of like a Warrior with some Magic abilities, but different from the Templar who are basically like a Paladin from WoW using the Holy Light. Dragonknights have abilities like breathing fire and spiked armor and molten weapons all in like a flame/dragon/volcano theme I guess. It was the closest thing to a Warrior from WoW that you can get in ESO as literally all classes have magical abilities of some kind, it's just what abilities you use, you could have a Dragonknight that uses purely stamina-based weapon abilities or a Nightblade that only uses archery skills. 

My Dragonknight, I settled on a colour scheme of grey red and gold for my armour. Which is another perk of 'ESO Plus'

The tutorial was very useful for working out the combat system which is quite interesting indeed it introduced you to light and heavy attacks and interrupting spellcasting and stunning opponents and taking advantage of opponents after stunning them etc. The way the combat system works is basically the same as Skyrim where you can do light or heavy attacks with your main weapon but you also have an ability bar as well. The difference is though unlike most MMORPG's where the bottom of your screen is lined with abilities ESO only has 5, so you sort of need to be selective with what you pick. I like to rotate around with the sequence of abilities I use as I always like to have some direct damage abilities then AOE then a buff and a defense ability on my F key as usual. Because there's not as many abilities I tend to just use the number keys rather then my mouse buttons as I used to. It's taken a bit of getting used to but it's ok. WoW and SWTOR were basically just the same kind of playing so it's good to try something else.

My first play through the tutorial.

There's also the sprinting and the stamina bar, SWTOR basically you have a permanent sprint but ESO you need to hold it down to go fast of which my finger gets a bit sore sometimes. I had to really get my head around the spell/ability system to start with as it's quite different from what I had played before. Same as Skyrim when levelling you get attribute points that can be spent on either health, magicka or stamina and you add points into whatever your character is doing most: magicka for spells or physical abilities that use stamina which is easy enough. The entire skill system is based on skill points which you acquire by levelling up or finding Skyshards around the world, the skill points are used to level up pretty much everything, from class skills, to weapon skills, armor skills, racial skills and even crafting. 

My Mages Skills, this is where I spent the attribute points

The skills points and abilities were a learning experience in themselves. Each class has three unique ability sections, for the Dragonknight it's Ardent Flame, Draconic Power and Earthen Heart which could be simplified as Fire, Dragon and Stone/Volcano skill trees if you will. These are you main class abilities but it isn't simple as that oh no, you have skills for the type of armor you wear (i.e. heavy) for any and every weapon you equip and even your race, so there's a lot to think about when spending them. Each skill section also has it's own "ultimate ability" which is a powerful ability that always has a time limit. Similar to when I go a warrior class on Skyrim I alternated between two handed and one hand and shield, what particular weapon I use just depends on what I have picked up on my journey. It's a bit of a struggle on what to do in what order but I put points in two handed, one handed and shield and heavy armor, along with my racial skills and crafting skills. However as you could with Skyrim any class can use any weapon really you just need to equip it then you can level it up.

Raagh I am fearsome! also I need to learn to do the lighting right when doing screenshots.

So after the tutorial you go through a portal and magically appear at your alliances starting area. Yes ESO has Alliances, Why? Zero Punctuation makes a good point about that, I guess because it feels more like an MMO that way. Anyways so I was a Redguard Dragonknight and I started in the small Island of Stros M'kai which was actually one of my own races areas and if you follow the main questline in order you go through the 'provinces' of each of the races of your alliance, get it? right. Now when I say 'main questline' there is actually two main questlines in ESO the first is basically the story when you first start the game and you see characters who will follow you throughout your whole trip that will pop-up from time to time and you meet all the races and alliances and leaders eventually and go through the whole alliance war throughout every zone. The second is started by something that sounds like horror story of a tourist being coaxed into a house in a strange city by a shady fellow then beaten and robbed or worse. Well this time it's worse as me being my completionist self and wanting to pick up every quest I could got to my first main city and went into a house and then got my soul stolen by an evil necromancer called Mannimarco then this guy called the Prophet found me called me the 'vestige' and said I was the only one who could stop the Daedric Prince Morlag Bal etc etc who we have encountered before in Skyrim albeit briefly. This time he is the game's main villian and this whole storyline is about stopping him, well both of them combine for this main purpose.

One of the main story missions with the companions, exploring the Valley of the Blades Tomb

So anyway that's the story, after that I was faced with learning how to do the crafting in the game and boy that was a learning curve, it works a bit differently to what I had played before with all the researching and deconstructing and putting ability points into them in order to go further with them. Interestingly in this game one character could do every single crafting ability if they wanted to so players often had one character dedicated to just crafting and would send them all of the things they picked up to process. However I still wanted to play how I usually did and picked Blacksmithing and Woodworking for my Dragonknight, woodworking because it could make shields. Woodworking interestingly isn't in Warcraft which was a shame as you also use it to make mage staffs and bows neither of which you can create in WoW. So I chose those and got to work with them, gathering resources is pretty similar though looking at my inventory and bank I eventually had a big decision to make. ESO Plus yes like SWTOR, ESO is free which I did play initially but I quickly went on to purchase a subscription for the many benefits including:

• Access to all DLC
• Subscription duration-based crowns (1,650 Crowns every 30 days)
• Account-wide Craft Bag for storing unlimited crafting supplies
• Double Bank space for your account
• Passive effect that causes 10% increase in experience, gold, inspiration, and trait research speed
• Exclusive ability to Dye Costumes
• Double Furnishings & Collectibles space in player housing
• Double currency cap for Transmutation Crystals
• Exclusive content in Crown Store
• Free items in Crown Store
• Discounts in Crown Store

This was too much to resist, the crafting bag alone freed up half my space and many experienced players swore by it. I admit that it was useful as I had acquired a lot of crafting material already, it doesn't help that you can gather any type of resource even if you didn't have that crafting skill active. It was like Skyrim again managing all of those items hah, I remember playing WoW doing mining and/or herbalism and half the time running all over the place cause the starting areas had so much resources. So I enjoyed all of the benefits of the subscription including 'crowns' which are like ESO's 'premium' money which I used mostly to buy cool mounts! (mostly) Speaking of mounts, ESO has a menagerie of different animals from camels to something that looks like a giant cockroach. You start out with a basic horse and unfortunately unless you use crowns to buy from the crown store or do some particularly difficult end game tasks you only have access to different kinds of horses which sucks. I spent a lot of time actually researching what mount would go with what race though I used my starting horse for a long time on my Redguard before changing to a Camel which I thought was more appropriate as the Redguard are from the desert originally.

Me on my mage riding my Nix-oxen steed with my companion Isobel, my summoned Clannfear best and if you look closely my pet cat, yes I got a big crew goin.

ESO has some weirds mount and crafting mechanics in regards to upgrading and levelling them up especially the way you level up your mounted speed. You get to spend 200 gold each day to level up either their, speed, stamina or carry capacity one point, and each stat has 60 points yes 60. So if you log in a lot I guess it's not too hard to get your speed up to the highest but damn it is a weird way of doing it. However it is interesting as I find myself logging in to my alt character to level up whenever I log into my main so if you do that it will go quickly although that might get time consuming if you have like 6 alts hah. One thing that makes ESO mounts stand out though is that when you get 60 points in a section it changes the look of the mount, adding armour or bags to them.

One of the crafting/market areas in each main town in a province.

I've been doing crafting for a while and it's still complicated but I've got the hang of it, you need to spend skill points to be able to use new types of ore for example for better items but you increase you 'skill level' of it through deconstructing items. So I've got a decent system going of sending items to each alt that can do that particular crafting skill to deconstruct for skill and items though they may not be at the right level to deconstruct it which sucks, no wonder people use the one alt for crafting. I ended up having to just all sell the stuff I couldn't deconstruct which gets me money anyway. In regards to crafting my own armor pieces the way it works is that you can only craft 'white' rarity armor/weapons then you upgrade it so it uses quite a bit of materials. This often isn't worth it as you'd no sooner spend the resources making an rare (blue) level item then end up doing a dungeon and replacing it straight away. The only times I had ever made new items is when I accidentally equipped a medium instead of heavy piece of armor or I didn't like one item that I had.

The look of your armour varies a lot depending on the style, for example the robe I am wearong now is in the 'Barbaric' style which is very tribal looking

I've said before that ESO is generally a different MMORPG then say WoW and SWTOR and it is, the fighting mechanics, the HUD and ability slots and much darker edgier graphical style all make it very different. It's no longer the colourful worlds and characters that I'm used to. Though I must say it's an alright change as it's something different. The locations are beautiful, and change depending on what species is resident there. My race the Redguards has their home in Hammerfell a vast desert expanse, sort of like Egyptian I guess, though you go through all of your races lands in a different order, for example the starting area was a Redguard port of Stros M'kai but then went on to the Breton homelands of Glenumbra, Stormhaven and Rivenspire before finally getting tot he Alik'ir Desert and Bangkorai which was my homeland (You can see all of these places here. I've now actually finished both main quests and been through all of the zones of my factions storyline, the Orcs are actually part of the Daggerfall Covenant also but their homeland Orsimer is actually the Wrothgar DLC. Honestly the graphics are beautiful but it's a bit dark and dingy (thats realism for you!) and I sort of miss the happy simplistic brightness of WoW and SWTOR. As far as NPC interaction goes ESO is sort of a mix between them as when you talk to someone it switches to a static camera facing them directly and the text on the right but of course they do have voice acting. It's still not as a good as SWTOR though.

Questing on my Mage in Deshaan

Making my second character now and thinking about a third, ESO has been a good change of pace and good to do something different though it's probably my least favourite of the three as it's so different from the other two. That said, the world of Elder Scrolls is rich, and the realistic graphics look amazing. I didn't delve into PvP or other features too much and I haven't really any end game content yet, I'm still getting the hang of these 'Champion Points' which are the high end sort of "talent tree" similar to the one in Skyrim but a bit more complicated. I'll have to look at some guides to sort it out.Doing dungeons (at least non veteran mode)  ones are one hell of a rush, people do them so fast just to get their daily achievements in. Often if you try to do the actual dungeon quest and speak to NPC's you will be left behind. You really need to let the group know you want to do the missions and take it slowly.

The champion points screen.

Im thinking about making an Archer/Assassin type of character that uses bows/daggers and dual wields, which yes you guessed it I went Warrior/Mage/Rogue. I think the next one I do might be a Warden, or one of the lesser used classes. There's definitely some non run of the mill classes in there such as the Arcanist which is sort of like a Sorcerer subclass. As I mentioned before there's also no straight warrior class with there being only the Dragonknight and the Templar which both use magicka but again you can change any class to use any type of fighting really. Want to have a Nightblade that uses a mace and shield? Sure, just equip the weapons then you will unlock the skill section for that type of fighting. You can use your attribute points for whatever you want, I tend to go the traditional route for each class with appropriate skills and weapon but you can still mix and match, for example I swap my Dragonknight between One Hand and Shield and Two Handed weapons occasionally. Doing dungeons (at least non veteran mode)  ones are one hell of a rush, people do them so fast just to get their daily achievements in. Often if you try to do the actual dungeon quest and speak to NPC's you will be left behind. You really need to let the group know you want to do the missions and take it slowly.

Seriously some players have got some of the dungeons on speedrun so much that's just ridiculous, you they can finish them in like under 5 minutes

So if you love Skyrim and want more Skyrim really with a flavour of MMORPG then ESO is for you, just be warned it's not quite the same as either of them, it's not Skyrim and it's not your traditional MMORPG like WoW but it's definately worth a try, especially that it's free to play. Of course with all free to play games these days you don't get any of the cool cosmetic armor and mounts unless you start shelving out actual money, but it can be played perfectly fine for free and at least give you an idea of what it's like.

JD




Yes that is a giant talking cat.

JD

Yet another brave new world.