The Elder Scrolls Online Review

After you have mastered your crafting skills, done some questing, and leveled your character up to 10, you can hop into Elder Scrolls Online’s PvP. Taking place in Cyrodiil, the central nation of the Empire which rules Tamriel, players battle against other factions for control of the Imperial Throne. The PvP world is broken into dozens of servers, each their own individual instance. One server may be controlled primarily by the Daggerfall Covenant, another might be an even split between the three factions. While you can operate as an individual unit, rushing the front lines as a tank or hanging back as archery support, the real meat of the PvP lies in siege weapons. There is some combat which takes place in the vast expanse of country between encampments, but generally battles shift between either side falling back to the confines of their fortresses and holding off a siege. Players can purchase ballistas, battering rams, trebuchets, catapults, and other large scale weapons to attack or defend, so while your efforts as an archer, mage, or swordsman are appreciated, they are almost insignificant compared to having a good ballista on your wall. There are many exciting moments to be had in the PvP with players in the chat giving rallying cries such as, “Hold the Line” or “Fall back to the Keep”. It feels exhilarating to take part in these battles, but after a few hours in it becomes a lot of back and forth with little payoff.

The PvP and crafting are exemplary of The Elder Scrolls Online on the whole. The game is a deep grind, requiring many hours of commitment. This commitment gives way to a sense of accomplishment, such as taking part in a siege which finally captures a fortress or seeing your craftsmanship yield more visually impressive armor. This type of requirement is expected for an MMO, and there are plenty of fans - especially Elder Scrolls fans - who are used to this and Elder Scrolls Online is happy to provide. But again, hitting walls of difficulty or spending countless hours hunting for a beast to get the last scraps of leather needed tries one's patience and dilutes the fun.

The Elder Scrolls Online also runs into its fair share of technical difficulties. To be fair, the servers were fairly stable for the first month of play, a decent feat for any online game at launch. That being said, servers were taken down regularly for a couple hours for maintenance. More prominent are quests which are bugged, or at least you think are bugged but simply require you to stand in the exact right spot to trigger an action. It is frustrating to think you have encountered a bug, leave a quest for hours, come back to it, think it is still bugged, then check a forum to find out you need to look up and turn left to pick up the magic crystal. A portal will be opened for you, but you can’t enter it unless you run around for a minute or two looking for the exact right spot to trigger the action prompt. Zenimax has shown a commitment to weeding out these problems and worked to provide consistent updates (hence the maintenance), but the quests which aren’t technically bugged are the bigger problems because they are not getting reported as consistently, thus not getting resolved.

I also found myself getting disconnected quite often and at inconvenient times. Sometimes I would go hours without issue, but there are times I would log in only to have myself disconnected five minutes later. If you're disconnected around enemies, your character will die, which damages your armor each time, and that costs money to repair. Making these disconnects not only annoying, but costly. It seemed to be a larger issue when playing in a group, becoming particularly troublesome as we fought our way through a dungeon and my group had to keep waiting for me to connect time and again. In one of these instances I logged back in to find my character stuck in an infinite fall. The falling character bug is one - based on help forums - which has afflicted numerous players, but this time my character was not playable until I wrote to customer support to have the character respawned back into the world. These bugs have persisted enough for Zenimax to issue five days of free game time an apology. This is most likely launch pains, and it is hard to imagine Zenimax will not be sorting these issues eventually, but as of right now it is simply another road block keeping you from digging your teeth into the amazing world the developers have created.

The current issues facing The Elder Scrolls Online are pesky, but underneath them is a really great game which blends the much-loved single-player formula with that of an MMORPG. It is hard to imagine Zenimax won’t resolve many of these complaints with updates and patches in the future, but one can’t speculate on what The Elder Scrolls Online will become. Right now hiccups such as difficulty balance and technical quirks plague the experience, especially in the late game. Hardcore Elder Scrolls fans and those hungry for a new MMORPG might be able to look past these issues and see all the good things Zenimax Online Studios has built, but those on the fence might want to wait until the experience is smoothed out.

Review based on ~100 hours of playtime, across all classes