Elder Scrolls Online - Preview Roundup

If your curious about the beta of Elder Scrolls Online I have three new previews that give thier opinion. Thank you Thrasher for sending in one of the links.

Capsule Computers

Overall, The Elder Scrolls Online has had a solid first showing. Fans of the franchise looking to play in Tamriel with friends should definitely keep their eyes peeled for this game. If it stays the course, it will deliver excellent narrative, compelling voice work, and a beautiful, intriguing world to explore. Hard-line fans of the single-player games may not be happy with all of the changes, but it’s ultimately poised to deliver what fans have been asking for – an Elder Scrolls experience with an online framework.

Strategy Informer

Instead of the huge rolling landscapes, random dungeons, and incidental details, there is a definite theme park built somewhere within the provinces of Tamriel. Where Oblivion gave you access to all areas of Cyrodil, ESO instead dolls out in meagre portions. Maps are chunks of the game world rather than the actual entirety. And while it would be too much of an ask for the new studio to completely recreate, and in some cases just create, all of the provinces in the Elder Scrolls lore, it only feels like a vague disappointment to be given a blinkered version of the world.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m not going to pretend that the above doesn’t look like a kicking. But I want to reiterate that in delivering a bland, ordinary MMO, Bethesda appear to be succeeding. It’s pretty, detailed, packed with wildlife you can senselessly murder. But the issue is, we’ve got an awful lot of bland, ordinary MMOs, and we don’t have a nice shiny new The Elder Scrolls RPG.

Try as I might, I can’t help but see this as all the worst bits of TES games – the dreadful dialogue, the crummy acting, the god-awful inventories (WHY! Why would they deliberately bring that aspect of TES into the MMO world, so you’ve got endless vertical scrolling lists of items, rather than a nice, useful tiled window?), put into an old-fashioned MMO space.