Trying out “Elder Scrolls Online”

Not sure if it was beta traffic, or a tweak to our firewall, but we finally got on over the weekend to play in the final ESO open beta.

It was … hmmm. Okay. Nice graphics. Somewhat irritating interface. Nothing terribly new under the sun, and a lot of feel of button mashing, but some of that might  just have been newness and ignorance.

The new character tutorial was okay. It was too easy to forget how to do things that flashed by (and some of the notifications flash by pretty quickly). At one point I leveled, but realized I’d forgotten how to do anything about it. It took a while to figure out.

Pay attention to the map. The map is your friend. Running around without the map makes you prone to running into dead ends, even in the open.

There appears to be a lot of crafting. Like, a lot of stuff you pick up that, when you examine it, is all about making meals and making other stuff. Meh.

Some nice bits to make you character feel “special” (how that will all work together with multiple characters was unclear).

We didn’t play through far enough to get a feel for how teaming works.

So … was it Incredibly Keen Enough to buy a subscription? Margie and I will need to talk.