The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited Evaluation

The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited: The analogy of a massively multiplayer role-playing game to a theme park is one of the most pervasive in the gaming industry. In World of Warcraft, gamers are free to explore an expansive playground reminiscent of Disney World.

You’re given free rein over themed areas and tasked with completing a variety of exciting objectives within them, such as killing Arthas, ascending the Tower of Terror, amassing six rabbit’s feet, obtaining your souvenir photograph, and so on.

Disney World, in particular, has long seemed like the natural conclusion to that amusement park metaphor. You’re standing in line to have your say in a truncated version of a much larger narrative.

But what if that transport suddenly stops working? What do you do when Br’er Bear emerges from his hole on Splash Mountain for the fourth time while you’re locked in your log? When the Rock ‘n’ Rollercoaster breaks down and the party in the front car continues to celebrate, what do you do? No longer can one believe in magic, as all illusion has been broken.

If there aren’t enough visual diversions, you’ll keep thinking about how much you paid to stand in line all day. The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited is an expansive and gorgeous virtual playground created by ZeniMax Online Studios, yet its bare bones are always just a heartbeat away from being exposed.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited

The PC version of the game debuted last year to mediocre reviews. Of all, a lot can change in MMORPGs in a year, and while ZeniMax Online Studios hasn’t marketed the console release as a reimagining of the game in the vein of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, the constant stream of big releases does constitute a course correction. The Elder Scrolls Online has undergone a number of changes and updates, but these have simply served to highlight the inconsistencies in the game’s foundation.

One thousand years precede Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls Online. Without giving too much away (the game is dedicated to telling a grand fantasy tale), you play as the Vestige, a heartless adventurer who was killed by the servants of Daedric lord Molag Bal (think Snow Lucifer) and given a second shot at life.

You travel all over Tamriel, fending against demonic invasions and the political upheaval caused by the continent’s three great military alliances. There are three main things you do in the game: questing, combat, and exploring. To varying degrees, The Elder Scrolls Online is a magnificent and tempting facade of the wonderful game it could have been or a boring tour of the relics of MMOG and RPG design that we’ve moved past in the last decade.

The game’s pleasant appearance is crucial to the overall experience; it’s what prevented my dozens of hours with the game from being a complete waste of time. It is no longer necessary to complete a series of “kill X opponents” or “gather X objects” tasks in The Elder Scrolls Online. When you believe you’ve reached the end of a mission in The Elder Scrolls Online, it may just be the beginning of a new and more involved adventure.

In the Elven (and Khajiti) Aldmerri Dominion, my Bosmer Nightblade wasted no time foiling Daedric schemes to infiltrate the government, forming alliances with island kingdoms, and preventing the assassination of the king. While the tasks themselves are standard fare for role-playing games (“beat Boss A,” “talk to Characters B and C,” “work your way through Dungeon D to find MacGuffin E”), I find that in The Elder Scrolls Online, I am able to remember the quests in a way that I cannot in other massively multiplayer online games.

The developer’s best intentions to create epic, unforgettable quests start to backfire as soon as they get underway. The Elder Scrolls Online is like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World in terms of character and expression (to return to my original metaphor). It’s entertaining at first, but once you start paying attention, you’ll see that the characters have the depth of feeling you’d expect from an episode of a cheap soap opera and that the dialogue is all dryly delivered information.

You’ll hear voice acting that would make Star Wars: The Old Republic green with envy, but the dialogue is so dull that you’ll want to tune it out the moment a character opens their mouth. The active involvement payoff in Tamriel is so high that I vividly recall every exciting experience I’ve had there, but I can only recall fragments of dialogue and too few specifics about my ultimate goal. When the game insists on informing you about the characters rather than showing you who they are, even those characters with intriguing debuts end up falling flat.

If I had to, I could get over it. That’s essentially all that Bethesda does now. The Elder Scrolls Online’s inability to bridge its single-player roots and MMOG playground was considerably more difficult to see beyond.

Today, in 2015 (even if the game’s core was released in 2014), MMOGs have learned that phasing is an excellent method for providing the immersion of single-player and/or small-group-centric storytelling without compromising the larger social experience. The Elder Scrolls Online uses phasing. Phasing is heavily utilized.

If you rid a community of marauding pirates or reverse the curse that has all the forest’s woodland creatures assaulting you, the situation is fixed forever. Although this is less “phasing” than “all these foes are now corpses on your vision of the map” or “all enemies’ aggro meters have been set to neutral,” you are free to explore certain areas of the map without interference. It is funny to witness wolves that were just peaceful with you attacking a new player who comes roaming into the area as you’re leaving.

In more extreme cases, players may encounter problems such as fighting enemies that only they are meant to engage for very specific plot reasons while dozens of other players swarm around them, or seeing multiple versions of the same NPC wandering around (or one alive version and another dead one lying by his feet). That suspension of disbelief is part of the genre, but the game goes so far out of its way to make you feel like the star of the show that dealing with other “stars” continuously drags you out of the experience.

The Elder Scrolls Online’s battle system is consistently repetitive. On paper, a conventional The Elder Scrolls fighting system in an MMOG seems like the perfect antidote to the stale “memorize your hotkey ability rotation” nature of MMOG combat. Unfortunately, that’s just what this game becomes, and when it’s seen from the first-person perspective (a mode I adhered to for the game’s evident strong suit: exploration), attacks have no impact.

You can pelt your foe with arrows till they’re dead, but you won’t know for sure unless the attack’s specified consequence is to physically move them. The combat animations have improved greatly since release, however, most encounters still consist of mindlessly draining the health of a group of damaged sponge foes one after the other until only the bosses remain.

And God forbid you to experiment too much with the game’s open-ended skill system because, early on, failing to stick to a single, strong build can make your character absolutely ill-equipped for the most grueling combat situations.

As for fighting, the good news is that The Elder Scrolls Online’s move to consoles should finally put to rest the outdated concept that MMOGs can only work on PC. Using a controller is simple, and the game’s first-person, open-world perspective works well with the range of motion and view offered by analog sticks. Wandering Tamriel and killing monsters with a controller in hand is a natural procedure, providing The Elder Scrolls Online isn’t getting in its own way in other aspects.

If you peeled away the clunky combat and empty questing, you’d be left with the most magnificent fantasy hiking simulator on this side of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Whether you study the jungle Khajiti ruins of the island of Khenarthi’s Roost, the strangely Aegean coastlines of Auridon, or the swampy, huge forest of the Grahtwood, roaming across Tamriel is a transportive experience.

Different towns’ torch sconces have different themes, the art of the tree houses in Grahtwood features intricate latticework, and the room of a deranged killer reminiscent of the protagonist in Misery is set up as a skeletal performance show, all of which contribute to the game’s whimsical atmosphere.

The game’s biggest success still has the uncooked center. The same interiors keep popping up. You have seen one grand estate manor and seen them all. Your Ayleid ruins are the same corridor, antechamber, looping corridor, antechamber, looping to entrance corridor design.

Watch towers are all in one room and a viewing area. Despite the game’s best efforts to make the outside world fascinating and full of things to do (albeit you may need to venture into PvP zones to level up because experience points are so scarce), exploring dungeons, houses, and castles is rarely more than a dull chore.

Concerning player versus player interaction, one area where The Elder Scrolls Online comes close to nailing it is in its approach. The PvP focuses on interfactional fighting over Cyrodiil’s massive landscape using a siege mechanism similar to that of Dark Age of Camelot, whose former devs make up a large portion of the development team. Can you tell me how big this map is? This is Cyrodiil as a whole, not just a section of it; it encompasses the whole overworld of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

If you want to capture the lonely adventure of a single-player experience, pick a direction on the map and ride off into the distance. For extended periods of time, you might not encounter any other players. The map’s huge expanse is ultimately the downfall of PvP in Cyrodiil, despite the fact that the island also has PvE content.

To get anywhere on the PvP map without a mount will take an extremely long time (and mounts don’t really help alleviate the boredom of travel anyhow). Fast transit is only available at the keeps your faction controls, so if your goal is on the opposite side of the map, you best hope you have at least half an hour to ride there.

This is battle, after all, so if you meet a more powerful player five minutes before your destination and they kill you, you’ll have to do the same long journey again. Does it make PvP more exciting? Absolutely. It’s not too bad in and of itself, but it may be a real pain if you have to go back to that section of the game repeatedly just to level up properly.

Perhaps I’m masochistic, but I have a feeling that future months will find me back in The Elder Scrolls Online. Since I can’t afford a monthly membership to see more of Tamriel, my inner Magellan is willing to endure the hardships in order to do so. My experience with the globe has never led me to the conclusion that “Okay, I’ve seen enough of this world.”

If the prospect of discovery doesn’t excite you on a fundamental level, you may safely skip The Elder Scrolls Online in favor of more compelling options like Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars 2, yet, to paraphrase a certain Jack Twist, Tamriel, I wish I knew how to quit you.

Frequently asked questions

Is Elder Scrolls Online Tamriel Unlimited the full game?

Everything that has been added to the PC version of the game in the past year is included in Tamriel Unlimited, and more is on the way in the coming months. There will no longer be a requirement for a gaming subscription with Tamriel Unlimited, which is the largest change coming to the game.

What is the difference between Elder Scrolls Online and Tamriel Unlimited?

Purchasing Tamriel Unlimited on disc grants access to the entire game, not just the base game. Morrowind, Summerset, the Imperial City, Orsinium, the Thieves Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood, as well as the palomino horse, are all included in The Elder Scrolls Online Collection.

What does the Elder Scrolls Online Tamriel Unlimited give you?

If you enjoy Elder Scrolls Online and want to support the developers by paying a small monthly fee, you can subscribe to the premium service ESO Plus, which grants you access to all downloadable content (DLC), additional Crowns (the premium currency), and bonuses to crafting.

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