The Elder Scrolls Online Preview - E3 2012
The popular RPG franchise is going online
Enemies in the game will use mostly the same skills and builds as the players, meaning that you will need to effectively counter realistic builds used by the AI. Users can employ an ultimate attack, which causes large damage but with a long cooldown, as well as a bailout skill of sorts, which lets you escape immediate danger. These skills can be used at the cost of finesse meter, which fills for players when they attack and block effectively in combat – which also gets you extra loot.
We then saw an example of a quest in the game. Exploring the world, we came across an NPC (all of whom will be fully voiced) who said that ghosts have been harassing the local population lately. We learned that an ancient artifact has been broken and scattered around the area, thus disturbing the spirits. After fighting our way through the ghosts and collecting all pieces of the artifact, we put it together, at which point a spirit appeared and let us know that a rift in time has caused the artifact to break. We were teleported back in time, to make history right by defeating a key enemy.
There was also an opportunity to complete a sidequest by saving a character from death – the descendant of whom then appeared in the present time upon our return. The boss was a werewolf, who could only be damaged when he was in human form, so we dodged our way around the dungeon littered with light sources, timing our attacks to when the enemy was within range of a torch. The quest and boss battle mechanics were said to be fairly low level, with higher difficulty and complexities promised for late game content.
There wasn’t much talk about PvP during the presentation, though we heard that the game will allow for 150 player battles, which was shown as a quick clip. The competitive modes will often involve conflicts for the key cities of one of the three factions, trying to capture and hold cities using weapons such as catapults.
From everything we saw, The Elder Scrolls Online is looking rather familiar to many of the other MMOs out there. The style of art and animations are said to ensure that the game runs on the lowest levels of PC hardware specs. Early builds that we saw certainly still had a lot of polish to go through, but the mechanics seem functional enough already. And though it has the Elder Scrolls IP behind it, TES Online will really need to prove it has enough unique features and solid gameplay if it wants to stand out among the ever increasingly crowded MMO space. The Elder Scrolls Online is currently slated for a 2013 launch.
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