Elder Scrolls Online betas?

[Brian G Turner]

Anyone else got an invite from Amazon for the Elder Scrolls Online beta later today?

Servers open at 4pm and close on Monday.

While they're titled a "beta", the fact that the game is out in 3 weeks suggests to me this is more a marketing drive.

Not that I'm complaining about the chance to have a try out.

 

[Wybren]

I will be playing Played the first Beta and it was good but I didn't get enough play time to try it out fully and the second beta I was sick with the flu the whole weekend and missed it and as I contracted food poisoning last weekend and am now on the mend, fingers crossed this weekend I should be fine!

 

[GWakeling]

I played the last couple of Beta tests I was invited to, but I have to say, I was a little bored. Perhaps it's the fact I've never played previous Elder Scrolls games. They had A LOT of bugs in previous tests too - but after all, it IS beta.

I'll probably log on and play a bit. If you're an Elder Scrolls fan, you'll probably love it.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Am *still* downloading the 22GB's required to access the European server!

 

[lonewolfwanderer]

I got accepted into the beta program beginning of the year already, but my internet here in SA is so slow by the time i get anywhere with the download, the beta ends. So haven't had a chance to play

 

[Brian G Turner]

So far, am very unwhelmed.

Even with 4GB of RAM and a1GB graphics card I have to select the "low" graphics options and a low screen resolution to ensure smooth movement. So while the world looks pretty enough, it's far less detailed than Oblivion.

Starting the game - well, you wear no armour and have just a sword. You can't pick up anything from any bodies, except perhaps 1 gold piece, if you're lucky. So there's no way to equip even in a basic way that I can find - so far.

I've attempted a few quests. In Daggerfall I was asked to find the murderer of someone in the king's intelligence network. Even though I'm a nobody, the characters are happy for me to take charge of the investigation, which soon lapsed into boredom of just talking people.

Then was asked on a Fighter's Guild quest. Had to travel for ages to reach the cave - any random nasties easier killed me travelling there. Upon arrival, the Fighter's Guild members there decided to rally around my first level unarmoured character, and insist I fight some big gnarly spiders - which killed me instantly, and repeatedly. So had to give up.

There's little sense of engagement with this game - no sense of purpose, and I can't even do random dungeons so far as everything seems able to kill me.

Haven't been able to figure out how to do magic on this.

Quite a few bugs, quite a few random crashes.

I keep trying to get into this, but so far the only selling point appears to be that it's multiplayer. So long as you don't mind a 22GB download, £50 cost to start, and subscription to continue. In a world that is less engaging and graphically weaker than even Oblivion, let alone Skyrim.

Will try to persevere, but so far, it's just a disappointment.

 

[GWakeling]

I know exactly how you feel. I'm desperate for a great new online game, and have been trying to get into ESO, but I just can't. It gets incredibly boring, lots of bugs and though the world is quite pretty, it IS quite laggy. I have a newish laptop but can't play on optimum settings because the world doesn't run smoothly.

It's quite disappointing. I've never been a huge one for MMO's - tried several things and never been as happy as I was in SWG.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I finally managed to join and complete a quest - but was very frustrating and took an awful long time to complete. All I had to do was find and disable a few traps with a click, but the traps kept failing to appear, so I was left wandering around for far too long, waiting for them to spawn.

And when I completed it, I found my character had become level 4 - good - BUT my reward for the quest was armour - great - BUT was level 8 so I wasn't allowed to wear it! Wtf? Since when in Oblivion or Skyrim did you pick up Ebony armour but weren't allowed to wear it because you weren't considered a high enough level??

Also, when wandering around the quest, there were racks with some weapons that I just could not pick up from. There's a general lack of interaction with the world that was normal in previous Bethseda games.

Elder Scrolls Online is a great concept that should be really enjoyable - but the execution seems really poor. Not being able to equip, and having to spend so long with no armour and not being able to equip, or interact with the environment - and not being able to use things you are actually given - it all seems very badly considered and results in being just plain frustrating IMO.

I was really looking forward to this before, as was all the family - but I think we'll stick with playing Skyrim for the moment.

 

[Dozmonic]

As with most MMORPGs the only reason to play this will be for the PvP (player vs player) combat and for the PvE (player vs environment) end game dungeons. The scope, feel and polish of the game falls far short of Skyrim and pretty much any single player RPG.

To me it felt like an unpolished WoW clone, which is a shame for the MMORPG world. It's going to take someone big and brave to break the mould and do it well, bringing the level of freedom we had in MMORPGs of old.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Yeah, that's the thing - this is a game for existing MMO players.

Anyone expecting something like Oblivion or Skyrim is going to be severely disappointed.

At £50 to buy the game, then £15/month subscription, it's almost certainly going to be better to wait until it becomes Free2Play if anyone wants to have a dip in it.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

I plan on skipping this out entirely. I am not a fan of MMOs, and while Elder Scrolls is a series that is near to my heart, I just don't like the thought of it being turned into something like this. I hope Bethesda eventually makes TES VI, so the series doesn't go the way Warcraft did. *sigh* RIP Warcraft. We hardly knew ye.

 

[ralphkern]

I must admit I'm not a fan of online gaming, I tend to prefer richer storylines than they provide. Still I was quite tempted by the elder scrolls online, but now not so much.

Sigh, well not so long until mass effect 4...