The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited - Worth it? [buying?]

[Thessera]

I have played Skyrim,Oblivion, and seen playthrough of Morrowind..and older games.. from the serie..

And i was wondering .. is it worth to buy it? and why?

I have heard that the Elder scrolls online, isn't "lore friendly"

and that it's more of a spin off ..

Few more questions:

- Is it time consuming?

- Does it takes ages to get decent armor/lvl

[iXenite]

I'll preface this by saying I am not a veteran of this game. I am not super high leveled. I think I'm close level 20. It's been a while since I last played (been busy with school, so not much gaming right now). That and most of these things are fairly subjective. What one finds fair and enjoyable, another may find unfair and enjoyable. So, take it with a grain of salt.

 

I wouldn't say it is too time consuming. As an MMO you have to expect it to be a little time consuming. But I didn't find it to be too grindy or anything. The missions and the world go at a good pace, and I found it fairly welcoming for the solo player (if you're into going solo).

 

As for armor, from an aesthetics point of view you kind of flip flop around. Getting a full set of the same material always looks nice. However, sometimes (I've noticed this anyway) you end up mixing up items from different material sets for the total armor value to go up. Aesthetics go down a little bit when that happens.I would say some of the very low level items may not be the best for aesthetics, but it picks up quickly and things start to look better.

 

Stat wise, I would say the quests you'll be getting, and the areas you explore are well matched to the equipment you'll be carrying. So, I wouldn't say you'll be suffering in your lower level armor too bad unless you're venturing in zones you shouldn't be.

 

Leveling is done at a pretty fair pace in my opinion. Plus, there are these things in the game (I think they're called Skyshards) that you can find, and when you find three you get a single skill point. It's a neat way to get more skills to add to your repertoire in between levels.

 

A lot of people dig at ESO for it not being "lore friendly". I haven't really found anything that ruined it for me in the time I've played, so I'm not sure what they mean by that. Some have described it as "Elder Scrolls Lite", which suppose might be fair. Although, I have enjoyed reading the books in this game more than I have in past TES games.

 

To me, it's worth it. The world is designed well, the overall art direction is on point, and the combat is the best in the series (in my opinion). I would suggest looking up more on it, maybe some gameplay or maybe see if there is anyone you know that will let you play it. It's not a perfect game by any means, there are some issues but overall it's enjoyable for me.

 

Be aware though, it is an MMORPG and it lacks a lot of the things that make TES game what it is. It will not feel like Skyrim or any of the previous Elder Scrolls titles straight away because it is an MMORPG. A lot of people rage on the game for not being TES VI, and I think that's unfair. So as long as you go into it knowing that it's not going to be the same, then you should be fine.

 

A good video to watch:

 

NOTE: This is during the beta. The game has changed some since then, but overall is still fairly helpful to kinda get a once over on the game.

 

The Elder Scrolls Online - Final Verdict by SorcererDave :

[Signette]

It's an MMO and that's enough I think...

I haven't bought it myself but some of my friends did (they stopped playing it pretty soon btw), I've played some and it felt just dumbed down in every possible aspect from combat to quests. Really, better get ANY game from series that this. It's still just an opinion, but I don't recommend it.

Edited March 7, 2016 by Signette

[iXenite]

It's an MMO and that's enough I think...

I haven't bought it myself but some of my friends did (they stopped playing it pretty soon btw), I've played some and it felt just dumbed down in every possible aspect from combat to quests. Really, better get ANY game from series that this. It's still just an opinion, but I don't recommend it.

 

If you're not fond of MMO's, then it was never going to be for you anyway. Not really the games fault as it is not a single player experience, and is a shared world, concessions needed to be made. Which is why it is more "dumbed down". The devs were pretty forthcoming when it came to features being paired back when compared to the single player main entry title of the TES series. Just saying.

 

With that said, I thought world exploration and dungeons were better in this game than Oblivion, the level scaling made the game more unforgiving like Morrowind, and the quests were more interesting than a lot of the Skyrim quests. Just my opinion, many may disagree with me on this part (and I'm okay with that).

[cartooncorpse]

Dumbed down in what specific ways? I don't get the phrase "dumbed down" I guess. No physics arc when an arrow is shot at something so you have to aim above a distant target?

Edited March 8, 2016 by cartoon corpse

[Vagrant0]

Dumbed down in what specific ways? I don't get the phrase "dumbed down" I guess. No physics arc when an arrow is shot at something so you have to aim above a distant target?

Mostly in terms of how combat works.

 

You are limited to only 2 weapon/skill sets, with any effects that are tied to one being canceled when you switch, and only 5 skills and 1 "ultimate" being set within each... For a total of 12 skills maximum that you can use at any time out of the few dozen available. Meaning that if you are a dragonborn as your class, most your class skills (3/5 of them self-buffs) will either need to be constantly on your bar to remain active when you switch weapons, or you will lose them upon switching. The problem comes in with how the majority of the game is setup to need means of both melee and ranged attack (made worse by a large number of quests which need to be done solo), so you are frequently switching between weapon sets. With the other classes, you have a very similar situation. The classes have self-buffs or abilities which give you an advantage (slowing, stunning, healing, summons, ect) but which aren't setup to allow continual use. The "Ultimates" on the other hand are long cooldown skills which often end up being fairly weak and situational, while also requiring a significant time investment with a weapon type to unlock them. Meaning that regardless of what weapon you prefer, at best you can maybe use 1-2 skills tied to that weapon and spamming them frequently between mouse clicks. While the skill morph system might have been a solution to this problem (granting utility to skills you use)... morphs are only 1 way and skills only morph once (mostly for cost reduction).

 

Combat itself isn't overly engaging since it ends up being the same old wow-style combat where things hit you based on turn as long as you are within a proximity. There's no evasion or blocking beyond dice checks. Meaning that where you stand around an enemy has no difference, and enemies that cast spells or use a bow pretty much auto-aim at you. Overall, it felt like the whole UI and game experience was heavily geared towards not requiring much in terms of framerate or connection, and being played with only about 8-12 buttons, and ends up being about as deep as a puddle.

 

While the quests differentiate from the standard "kill x amount of enemies" at several points, and is arguably the best part of the game, the combat and actual gaming sections of it just make it hard to tolerate, and even worse when most of it is non-cannon. Great as a singleplayer game, rubbish as an MMO where you frequently have to group with others, compete with bots for resource nodes, and constantly see people completing or killing the same things you are tasked with completing or killing. When I played, the freeform dungeons were among the worst... Bot players killing bosses as they spawned, meanwhile the loot from these bosses was the fastest way to get money and the only way to get certain enchantments. Supposedly this was eventually patched, but the result was nothing to do with preventing bots, but rather limiting the rewards further (which were already pretty bad due to how easy it was to become overleveled for areas).

[Kevaar]

The quest writing is decent, and I've enjoyed most of the stories, which isn't something I can say for most MMOs. There are some quests where you make important choices that may effect the outcome of the quest or other quests later on. Diehards will pick at instances the lore doesn't match the other games, but, uh, that's the case for every TES game ever. Dragon lore in Daggerfall being retconned by dragon lore in Skyrim. Jungle Cyrodiil in Morrowind being retconned by European Cyrodiil in Oblivion. Etc.

 

It's an MMO, so if you don't like (or do like) MMOs, that'll be your main point of contention (or satisfaction). The first person view I find goes a long way to giving it a different feel than other MMOS, more like a single player game. The time it takes to reach cap feels about the same as in other MMOs. There's grouped dungeons and there's PvP (though the PvP is more like WvW in Guild Wars 2: Zerg vs. Zerg instead of 10 person battlegrounds like WoW.)

 

The skills system is quite different and unique, which I like. You have four classes to choose from, but this only affects three skills lines out of...about 20 your character can choose from in all? You can wear any kind of armor and use any kind of weapon as any class, and because of this, the classes can fill pretty much any role. (The main exception I've found to this is Sorcerers are so far the only class that can summon a pet.) You can build yourself as a hybrid between tanking, healing, or DPS, or go pure (though, just like in most MMOs, pure is better for grouping). There are ways ingame to become a werewolf or a vampire, which give you another skill line and a nifty questline. You can also level all crafting professions on one character, but this does cut into the amount of skill points available for your combat skill lines, so it's a choice to make.

 

I'm not sure why people are saying there's no evasion or dodging, because there is. You double-tap your movement keys to dodge-roll out of enemy AOEs and you can kite mobs around as a ranged. Right-clicking to block is also incredibly important if you're melee. There's also various abilities that have you leap back or knock back the enemy.

 

The main dumbing down is you can only have 6 abilities or spells (12 with weapon swapping) on your combat bar at any one time. I find this a little restrictive, would prefer more like 8/16. But that's part of the strategy, thinking out of the box and choosing skills that have good synergy.

 

So, yeah. Overall I enjoy it and I'd say it's worth a try, but if you're expecting a game in the style of other TES games, it may not be your cup of tea.

Edited March 12, 2016 by Kevaar

[Zewp]

As far as MMOs go, this is one of my favorites and pretty much the only one I still make time for. It's a game that you can easily pick up for an hour, have a bit of fun, and then go do something else. It's probably the first MMO where I read all the quest text/listen to dialog, because it's just that good. The combat is also pretty fun and I love the skill system, because it encourages diversity and creativity. There are so many possible combinations of skills and weapons that you'd be hard-pressed to find an optimal build on your first character. You certainly can pull a build off the internet, but some of my best (and most fun) builds came from just experimenting in game.

So, I dunno. I certainly don't feel the game deserves the bad rap it gets. I've found that most of the critique comes from people who were expecting Skyrim Online or were just never going to like an Elder Scrolls MMO to bgein with. It's BuyToPlay now, so if you're still unsure just grab it in a 50% off sale and give it a go. I can guarantee you'll at least get your money's worth out of playing one of the three campaigns and if in the end you don't like it, you can just drop it with no hard feelings and your wallet only $30 lighter.

[nathaniel222]

A review said that The Elder Scrolls Online Tamriel Unlimited is not far from be one of the best experiences of online RPG on console.

 

 

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galaxy s7 edge samsung galaxy s7 edge

Edited March 25, 2016 by nathaniel222

[JonathanOstrus]

Thought I'd throw my 2 cents in on this seeing as I just recently played it. This is almost going to sound like a review but I could not do it justice as I only tried out one base class.

**Edit: this ended up way longer than I thought it would. Oh well. Hope you like the novella. :laugh:

 

I went in for a Templar High Elf healer/tank. I didn't get to actually get to try tanking much as I was building up the skill set and gear required to do so, more on that in a bit.

 

I did not buy the game for myself, a friend let me try out their account for a week while she was on vacation and had no computer access. In that week I got the character up to level 40 which seemed fairly quick to me. The leveling is 1-49 then Veteran 1-16. I'm not sure how fast the leveling of the veteran levels is so I can't speak to that.

 

A few things to note up front. It has many, many bugs. Still !!! I had the same question of "Is it worth it?" Simple answer is maybe, it depends. See the TL;DR at the end if you don't want all the details.

 

Basic gameplay run down:

If you've done any research on it you probably already know that every "class" can perform every role. Some better than others arguably but it's playable. Depending on the type of role style you prefer; read as tank, brute melee (think 2h warrior style), magic caster (attack mage), assassin/thief/rogue melee (dual wield dagger/sword), archer (bow duh); each race and base class has its pros and cons. You can have a sorcerer mage dps. The same sorcerer can also be a tank. They get a really cool class ability that's great for it. Templar can also do tank, melee close, ranged, or magic dps, and heals quite nicely. I didn't really look into the other base classes but I would presume they have similar traits.

 

You should also know there's just 3 types of armor. Heavy which should be used only on a tank. Medium which should be used on any damage dealer that is melee (including bows). Light which would be any magicka based user. Though you can wear whatever you want and earn xp for that type of armor to unlock skills and passives for it, the skills/passives of each type are based for those types of roles as just mentioned. Example, light has magicka cost reduction and regen. Medium has crit chance and stamina cost reduction. Heavy has hp pool and regen.

 

In the case of Templar as I tried I got 2 skill trees for damage and 1 for healing in the Templar class. Then adding in a healing staff weapon opened another skill line. If you plan to try that *do* find a guide as you don't need to mix and match them up too much. For a tank style it's pretty decent too though takes more skill. If you wanted to go mage damage style throwing in a destruction staff and switching up the attack skill lines is very practical.

 

Something that Vagrant0 mentioned about not being able to block seems incorrect if I understood the post correctly. The current version of the game does has active blocking, meaning you need to yourself use the block function. There's no random chance to block just by having a shield. Basically the same way you would do so in Skyrim. You can also block, albeit much less effectively, with any weapon equipped. You can also block against some projectile magic. Dodging is possible as well by using stamina to double tap and jump in a direction, which is used frequently during dungeon bosses. Or you can just move out of the way for some slow moving projectile magics.

 

Vagrant0 is right on with some potential issues related to weapons swaps and skills. Switching between weapons which have active buffs requires them to be on both weapons action bars limiting how many skills you get access to during a fight.

 

Leveling can go pretty quick if you spam random dungeons once an appropriate level as the daily completion gives you something like half the xp required for a level. Then 2 more generally will level you up. This is of course including xp from kills within said dungeon.

 

Group dungeons are interesting in that they scale. Depending on the type of dungeon you go for they scale either up to max or to the leader. Using the random queuing system everyone gets scaled up to max level Vet16 though their skill set is of their actual level. Food/Drink stats and effects get boosted to be equivalent to that of max level items as do potions. This makes for easy grouping. Random dungeon groups are groups of 4 consisting generally of tank, 2 dps, 1 heals. Though I had it group as 3dps 1 heals. Made things interesting. Drops off enemies will be level appropriate to you. Meaning if a weapon drops on a boss it will be your level.

 

Money wasn't really an issue since you can, pretty reliably, pickpocket easy targets and steal valuable "treasure" tagged items from containers and fence them right off the bat. My first day I had 2k gold which was way more than I needed for a level 5 character. There is a daily limit of how much you can fence, though it can be expanded via skill points. After a week, including bank and character inventory upgrades, I think I came out with 80k gold. Items aren't generally too expensive which is probably because of how hard it is to sell them. See below. An example is a blue (rare - 3rd quality level rarity type) ring or weapon from a guild vendor was like 250-300g. A single dungeon run if you were to just vendor sell all the drops without even looking at whether it's useful or not would net you something like 1000g (possibly more depending on quality luck) including gold from enemies in the dungeon.

 

Selling items could be a bit tricky. There's no general player merchant system like a faction auction house as in other games. In ESO there are guild stores. In short you would join a guild. Post an item in that guild's store. If they have a trader somewhere then anyone who talks to *that* trader would see the store your item is in. As well as anyone in the guild you posted it with. This can complicate selling really valuable items and just shouting in zones hoping someone wants to buy would probably end up a better solution.

 

Buying items has the same obvious issue. Trying to find "the right" item can be tricky. You'd have to search every trader and look for it. The search system on the traders is very lacking as it has a very weak content filter without being able to type in a text search. There may be an add-on available to help with that, but I didn't look into that.

 

Skill points are used to acquire and upgrade your base abilities for combat/healing and professions. They are acquired via leveling, main story quests, main quests for each zone, first time quest for each dungeon, and collecting skyshards in the world (there's an add-on to show you where every one of them is). There is a limit to how many skill points are available so you can't unlock everything at once but you can re-spec via cash store item or in game currency. Though at higher levels with many skill points it can become pricey to do it often as the cost is based on how many skill points you have. Doing a re-spec does not lose any progress (xp in a skill or morph), so acquiring it back later gives you back whatever its progression was.

 

A player who tries to roll a hybrid dual spec of mage dps and a healer will have the easiest time as you only need to do one armor type of skill tree and then 2 weapons. Active skills that are used via the action bar can be switching out at any time when out of combat provided they are unlocked via skill points. This makes it viable so if you were primarily a mage dps but on a certain boss the healer had trouble you could switch out one ability to throw out an extra heal or something just to help out and then back to dps. Same could be said for a melee dps if they had the appropriate skill set. Templar being a prime choice because their class healing tree doesn't require any specific weapon and since the melee use stamina throwing out a random heal that costs magicka doesn't hurt them. Albeit the potency of said heal is pretty low but low is better than zero.

 

Sadly I didn't get a chance to try out any PVP

 

TL;DR

If you like MMO's you'd probably be ok with it. If you like TES games, you'll probably like it. Don't buy it for full price, get it on sale. Do buy the imperial edition if for no other reason than starting out with a mount. You're gonna want that immediately and buying it from the game vendor is outrageously expensive. If you buy it through steam use the trick to copy the cd key and activate it on the eso account page so you can use the direct downloader there. If you download via steam it then has to update which basically downloads it twice. If you plan to use steam to buy dlc or boosts or such then disregard that.

 

Pros: Fairly quick leveling. Story and quests are fun and generally engaging. Acquiring items from drops in dungeons always give items appropriate to your level (quests give items based on quests level). Little repetition of action in side quests. Money isn't really an issue. One character can perform any role. The UI and control design seems to be intended for gamepad style play with the limited action button sets and what not (also a con of sorts).

 

Cons: General bugs all over. Random hanging/crashing. Some quests just don't progress or complete properly requiring abandon and reacquire and progress. The dungeon match maker is crap, anyone can queue as any role and it has no check to qualify if they can actually perform it.

 

The combat system isn't my personal favorite. I do plan to buy the game for myself if I see the imperial edition on sale for $30 sometime.

Edited March 27, 2016 by BigAndFlabby