Quick Look: The Elder Scrolls Online - Part 02

I couldn't imagine these horrors.

What is this madness?

The quickest of looks!

This is....wonderful?

I like content!

Multipart Quick Looks - somewhat of a dichotomy.

3:45 quick look. New record!

I did not expect them to go on for so long. It's a new record!

If you consider the amount of time someone could put into Elder Scrolls Online, I guess you could call this arelatively quick look?

yea i dunno it seemed ok.

Seeing this reminds me of how dreary Skyrim's world looked, which it seems to be mimicking. Remember how Oblivion had like... blues and greens?

That is... that is not an impressive siege...

Part 2!? I especially like when they enter the dark nothingness, I think that makes for a good video game time thing.

@jarowdowsky: That's not true. Even the quests that were fetchy often took you through a dungeon or the like.
Not saying the quests tended to be very complex, they mostly had you run through a dungeon or two. But the game wasn't just filled with fetch quests.

@namesonkel: Oop, think the peep mentioning the fetch quests has disappeared into the black oblivion of ES:Online

Personally I've liked what they did with some of the most interesting quests in Oblivion and Skyrim. The twist in the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion, the Dark Mother stuff, the painted world and some of the guilds in both games.

My biggest issues with Skyrim was always the lack of variety. Those same fucking tunnels with the same zombies... just miles and miles and miles and miles of the identical corridors.

Great fun when that wasn't dragging it down.

Oh and magically appearing grass, really need a better solution to draw distances than that.

Two parts for this shitty game, and only 30 minutes for Guild Wars 2. Sometimes I don't get GB.

So does TESO. Jeff picked the alliance that starts in Skyrim, hence the "dreary Skyrim" look. If he'd picked the Daggerfall Covenant, he'd have started in Stros M'Kai - essentially a tropical desert setting - and thereafter in two green, forested areas.

Back of the box quote: "Yeah, man, this game, ehnen frmm...." - Giant Bomb

Edit: With all the talk about voice actors, did they ever acknowledge that they spent a good half-hour talking to Dumbledore?

Still convinced this was Jeff's idea for an April Fool's joke.

@ililillillillilil: The lore of TES is one of constant "raping". Around the time Tiber Septim became the god Talos, he learned of CHIM and basically became sentient of his place in a video game universe. Using this knowledge, he retconned Cyrodil from being a jungle to being a moderate forest area. There are multiple timelines of the universe, and it's weird as fuck. I mean have you played Skyrim? Time travel is basically one of the major plot points in the main quest. Them making an MMO in the TES setting is definitely not the weirdest thing that has happened to the series.

@tr0n: Somewhere out there there's someone who'll comment "Thank goodness they just spent 30 minutes on Guild Wars 2".

@spitznock: They chose the worst starting area for graphics in the whole game. The Sommerset Isles and Cyrodil really look wonderful.

mutlipart Quick Look! by 2024 all Quick Looks will be 10 parts long.

I feel like this game would have gotten a different outlook if it launched with controller support. It's, from what I understand, meant to be dumbed down and actiony so anybody can play it. The point isn't to bring over World of Warcraft players, but to open the flood gates to the millions that bought Skyrim.

I totally get the comparison to all the other games, but it's sort of doing it's own mixed type of thing so should be judged accordingly. It also seems strange for Jeff to be playing this since he doesn't seem like the type of person that would enjoy playing Skyrim for long periods of time.

The game also looks great for an MMORPG. I know that's not saying a lot, but it still gets kudos from me for that. I still enjoy the coverage and the videos are cool, but I just wanted to add my two cents.

I don't get why people are so down on this game. It looks exactly like skyrim to me.

modular quick looks son

Would it have hurt them to have made all the starting areas as good looking as those though?

@sledgemeyers: I hear ya. I was hoping to play this on the couch too without having to map it with Xpadder. Will just have to wait for the console version, I guess.

@danthegamer32: I think they recreated the Skyrim environment rather well actually, pretty drab in a lot of places. That's kinda what you get with a snow biome. The contrast is actually pretty cool as it immerses you when traveling from one zone to another.

@seminormal: Go check out the part in Part 1 where they first talk to "Dumbledore", they mention it right away and are seriously underwhelmed

Scumbag Brad: Complains everything looks like Skyrim then when environment completely changes, says nothing. Also recognises random words and then completely mis-remembers the context and makes up stuff to complain about.

Scumbag Jeff: Complains about a lack of story after having skipped 95% of all the story and admits he doesn't care about lore.

Just stop covering MMO's, none of you "get" them and they'll never make one for you.

Moments like those at 13:55 is exactly why I hate the Xbox One name. For a good solid minute there I thought @rorie was trashing the new Xbox lol

They would if other shit came out this week. :)

I would totally buy this if it didn't require a monthly fee.

Or, you know, how about you don't watch the fucking video? How does that sound, big guy?

Well, this seems okay. Better than people make it out to be at least. Also I just really like the Elder Scrolls universe, and coming back to Morrowind and co. is a pretty cool prospect.

I still don't think I'll play this, especially not as long as the monthly fee is a thing.

Scumbag sharkeh: complains when a Quick look does not live up to his personal expectations. And takes it as a personal insult.

Just stop commenting on Quick Looks if you don't like them they will never make one just for you

Homestar Runner is old school Internet? Damn I'm old.

Anyway, going around the non-Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim areas seems like it could be fun, but I'll probably wait until this is cheap to jump in at all.

@bunny_fire: Actually it exactly matched my expectations which wasn't insulting, just disappointing. Nearly all quicklooks are for me, they're generally great.

Like, on the one hand, I get it that this is an MMO. The payment structure seems undeserved for the kind of game this is trying to be, and I get where a lot of the weird MMO part of this game is a bit off-putting.

But on the other hand, this is kind of still basically an Elder Scrolls game. The graphics are more stylized, there's less individual detail in picking up items, the part where there's other people is weird, but the exploration, the quests, conversing with NPCs, the story, the moment to moment stuff, it all just seems like Skyrim.

I guess I'm just not sure where the negativity is coming from, I don't know. I kind of don't really know what this game or any other MMO could do to convince people at this point who have already decided they dislike the genre.

This is a totally fair assessment. I always found it insane that games charge monthly fees in addition to being a game you have to buy in the first place. I get server maintenance, but all games are basically connected to servers at all times now. It's just a money sham at this point, because they know they can get away with it.

Two hours of Rorie asking questions and Jeff saying he doesn't know.

@delta_ass: Yeeeeeeeah, coulda done with a little less of the technical questions or just had Rorie do the quick look with Jeff and Brad sitting in.

Well, it's definitely an Elder Scrolls game, but without complete mod freedom and the chance of player-made overhauls and unofficial patches to fix the bugs…I would never want to play an Elder Scrolls game. I hope the people who are into it have fun, but I don't think I'd try this even if it did go free to play. It's not just the bugs—every MMO has bugs—that bother me, but the combat and animations as well. I generally played archers in Oblivion and Skyrim, and the archery animations in this look horrible to me. The melee animations also look pretty far off to me. If it were like other mmo's, where you play from zoomed out, it wouldn't matter as much, because you wouldn't notice the details, but in 3rd person, the controls looked odd. Maybe they'll iron these things out, but again, this being an Elder Scrolls game, I would rather have the modders be given complete control over the experience. These are small issues, sure, but I wouldn't want to spend hundreds of hours looking at them and being annoyed by them every time I get into combat.

If it was me I would of released it as a subscription first. This is a AAA franchise that everyone knows, you would be stupid to go free to play at release. The publisher is doing this so they can liquidise the game until they are satisfied and then they will go F2P.

Furthermore, there is no way to be sure if this game will be a massive hit, and if they had gone free to play from the very start, they will always be asking themselves, "would this have happened if it was a subscription based game".

You just have to put your selves in the shoes from a businessman, and understand this WAS the correct decision, it is all about making money at the end of the day, meeting their bottom line.

Also, I like using Bold.

Looks way to conventional for me. If i'm playing an MMO ES game I want to go all in.

For example coming across parties or individuals organically while wandering across the world to a quest, as opposed to 20 morons running around aimlessly around me at all times while everyone kills the same enemies. Like always the level of strategy on the combat (if it's even there) is hidden too far behind the actual interface to make it seem like a coherent world. It's just to goddam gamey and there's absolutely no room for immersion - one of ES games big appeals.

It's too bad MMO's have sort of developed into their own weird shitty genre instead of being something implemented in a more organic way that suits the actual game.

Maybe the next PROPER elder scrolls game can implement some sort of measured way to allow limited people to enter your game.

I dunno, I really like the look of this, but I'm a total MMO sucker.

And now they've mentioned City of Heroes, and I'm kinda depressed. What a cool game that was.