Getting Around to The Elder Scrolls Online a Decade Down the Road

On Saturday Potshot broached the idea of maybe giving The Edler Scrolls Online a try.

The Elder Scrolls Online

While this was unexpected in the moment, it wasn’t a complete surprise either.  Our group has clearly fallen off the WoW Classic wagon for the moment.  We have played out Wrath Classic and jumped into Hardcore and Season of Discovery a bit, but the latter two are really just replays of content we’ve already done with minor changes, so were not all that engaging.  Then there is Cataclysm Classic, which is probably a few months away still, and a bit of an untested destination for us, so the draw of Azeroth is very much in decline.

Meanwhile, a return to Valheim wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, so there was an position open for a more worldly MMORPG with the group.  Valheim will keep going for us… we have the Mistlands to explore, and maybe the Ashlands if Iron Gate can move things along…. but having another title for the group seemed appropriate, and The Elder Scrolls Online has managed to survive for ten years… I gather the launch anniversary is coming up in April, so maybe it was time to try it out.

I believe they hit that date, but it was a decade back so I don’t remember

ESO, which seems to be its preferred acronym even if it never seems to go without the definite acticle when spelled out in full, was, along with WildStar, the last gasp attempts by the genre to make a subscription only MMORPG.  There was a sense by both teams that only a subscription model would let them remain pure to the traditions of the genre or some such.

The fact that the word “monetized” exists points to the heart of the issue for us: We don’t want the player to worry about which parts of the game to pay for – with our system, they get it all.

-Matt Firor, General Manager of ZeniMax Online, on the original subscription model choice

It didn’t work out.

For ESO, the mandetory subscription plan was ditched less than a year after launch.  It remained a buy to play title, selling things in the cash shop as well as expansion content to earn its keep.  (WildStar lasted longer, but still had to dump the subscription… but even that wasn’t enough to save the problematic title.

Anyway, that was all ages ago and a lot has changed since, but ESO still abides, so there must be something there.  I told Potshot I was in and went over to Steam and bought the base game for $20 and set Steam to installing it.

However, ESO is a title that is in Steam, but not of Steam, so that only downloaded the installer, which itself had to run.  That then brought up the launcher, which had to do some patching of its own.  Then I had to create an account… but I figured I already had an account because I was pretty sure I had played a bit in the beta.  I am sure there are some blog posts about that.

I found the account and managed to recover the password then got that linked up to whatever I was doing in Steam so it was all on the same page.  Later on, when I figured out where the in-game mail was I found that I had a reward for participating in the beta.

Thank you for your service!

I also had a vague recollection that server choice was not going to be an issue as the game had gone to some sort of “mega server” system, with one for each side of the Atlantic.  All those Massively OP headlines rattle around in my brain I guess.  So we would not have to worry about server choice.

Of course, when you have one server for everybody and that server goes down… well, then everybody was out of luck.  And on Saturday morning the server was down.

We are not accepting connections at this time

Not a fortuitous start to our venture, but these things happen and we all had stuff to do that day anyway.

That evening I sat down and was able to log in and make a character.  I made a Redguard Templar, because that seemed tanky, and grabbed heavy armor, a sword, and a shield as we walked through the tutorial.

The tutorial was annoying but short.  It imparted a few useful facts, but was guided by a chirpy NPC in that annoying “I’m going to tell you things directly and make you demonstrate them before we move on, but not in any connected way.”  Tutorials are tough, I know, and there are few that appeal to me, but I found this one more grating that most because it managed to be condescending while assuming knowledge it hadn’t passed on.

Fortunately we’ve been playing Valheim recently, and the basic combat and movement controls are about the same, so I picked that up quickly.  The fact that this is both a PC and console title was quickly obvious… so much so that I picked up my controller to give it a try, only to put it down immediately as the camera got away from me.  So everything is a series of menus designed for our most slow witted console brethren.  That it still confounds me at times probably doesn’t reflect well on my own wits.

I made it through the tutorial and was brought to a room with a bunch of portals and was given some extremely unhelpful guidence about where I should go.  Even my NPC guide called it overwhelming while dispensing useless tidbits.  Do I care about the great alliances?  I don’t know, should I?

Looking at the portals

I tabbed out and Googled which portal I should choose and the answers were mostly “Go to your race starting area and do those quests first,” which didn’t tell me where I should go.  Some of the portals had chains across them and wouldn’t let me in.  I assume those must be expansion content.  Of the others I went with Stos M’kai, in part because it said something about pirates, but mostly because I heard it in my head as, “Mkaaaaay” in that South Park Mr. Mackey voice.

And so I was off into whatever ESO is or has become.  We’ll see how far our group gets.