Day 3,651: Elder Scrolls Online

 With the downtime in New World until the "big announcement" in June I decided to do some game exploration.  At first it was in my Steam backlog but it wasn't long before that MMO itch crept up on me.  At first it was just wanting to be in an open world so the though was survival/crafter but then the desire for multiplayer and if multiplayer why not massive multiplayer.  So  I made the plunge into Elder Scrolls Online (ESO).

 On day one of my adventure I created my character.  I was immediately annoyed by the fact that "heartlessgamer" as a name is already taken so I had to settle with "heartlessgamerr".  I have a sneaking suspicion when I played at launch that I did so under another account and may have self inflicted this (my current ESO account shows my beta access from 10 years ago but not my release purchase).  I guess this technically means this is really day 3,651 of my ESO adventure.

 Moving past the name I rolled up a Redguard Templar.  I am not one to spend too much time tweaking my appearance but found myself moving a good bit of the sliders available to get an old(er) looking bad ass ready to take on the world.

 I clicked create and set off into the tutorial.

 The quests and characters are all voiced which was nice but it wasn't long into the tutorial where it became click through material the same as most MMO quest and NPC fluff.  I have heard there is some great material from John Cleese in the game so that may change my mind on clicking through this.  The click through also may be related to my experience post-tutorial which I'll talk about in a bit.

 The world navigation involved a lot of segmented world slices separated by doors and minor loading pieces.  This was annoying but I assumed was part of the tutorial.  I expected a more open world experience out of the gate.  Unfortunately the segmented approach followed in to the main game so was off putting to not have a more seamless open world.

 With that said I am a bit lost in the main world.  I have lots of quests but find it hard to figure out what to do and not until late in my first day did I figure out how to see main vs side quests in the UI.  Wandering the world is pretty generic.  Enemies are very easy to defeat and there is no indication of difficulty anywhere that I can find.  My research says that PvE is easy and with "One Tamriel" there is level scaling, but seems like there should still be some challenge to expect.

 I've also gotten a bunch of "oh you should buy X" from players I've run into.  X being some content pack for the game that you have to buy and there is a lot of possible Xs to buy.  The store is a bit overwhelming in ESO.  I am sure it will make more sense as I progress but if a $19.99 box price (even though I got it for free) doesn't give me enough of a good starting experience then I am not likely buying X.

 Lastly I want to touch on combat.  It is the same "floaty" combat that I remember from playing in beta and launch.  I hate to say it but New World combat has spoiled me so it is very, very hard for me to go to older MMOs that have much less fluid combat.  This isn't to say New World's is perfect but it feels so much better than ESO.  Maybe it gets better later on in ESO?  Maybe PvP is better?

 I will keep trudging along in ESO for a bit here, but do have vacation and trips coming up so it may be forgotten depending on New World's big announcement in June.  But if the announcement for New World is just "thing coming later this year" then maybe I'll make it further in ESO.