Choose My Adventure: Getting ready for The Elder Scrolls Online

The votes have been tallied and the verdict is in; the next month of the column will be all about The Elder Scrolls Online. Technically, yes, the votes were tallied a few days ago, but let’s just roll with it. The important point is that our destination is Tamriel, more specifically One Tamriel, and even more specifically…

Er, well, that’s kind of the point of the polls, isn’t it? So I guess that’s as specific as I can get.

Of course, where I start doesn’t actually matter as much as it used to due to the aforementioned “One Tamriel” update. For those of you unfamiliar with the premise, let’s go over what the game has to offer as well as my own history with it before we get to the voting and get on with the adventure.  If you’re already intimately familiar with all of it… well, let’s hope you’re still entertained by sparkling prose, or as sparkling as prose can be when the writer still giggles at words like “fart.”

The thing about One Tamriel is that it’s a rather giant overhaul to how the game works, but it’s mostly in place because, well, people have played other games in The Elder Scrolls series. I’m not really one of them, but I understand that the flow of questing in the games works something like this:

1. Talk to an NPC to get a quest.
2. Ignore what that NPC told you to do.
3. Head off to the west because of some entirely ambiguous reason.
4. Find a cave.
5. Go into the cave.
6. Kill everything that moves in the cave whilst looting corpses and winding up with a few hundred pounds of cheese and brooms.
7. Especially kill a demon lord at the bottom of the cave by finding a place where said demon lord can’t get to you and then crouching and poking him with your starter dagger.
8. Forget all about this.
9. Five hours later, run into someone else asking you to kill the demon lord you already killed.
10. Move into that NPC’s house and steal all of his brooms.

And that’s just the questing experience; I haven’t even gotten into sorting mods that can allow you to spend several dozen hours carefully arranging horse farts if any of the mods ever worked together. As we all know, the real fun of a game is community-made patches to change it into a totally different game. But I digress.

The point is that people who logged into TESO at launch expecting that questing experience were instead greeted by the following:

1. Talk to an NPC to get a quest.
2. Ignore what that NPC told you to do.
3. Head off to the west and then find out that you aren’t nearly high enough level for that zone.
4. Die.
5. Get annoyed.
6. Log off.

It’s a bit of a different experience.

One Tamriel does not allow you to entirely replicate that single-player feel, but it is designed to ensure that if you decide to just wander off into the west and go do stuff there, you’re not going to be getting one-shotted by everything. Rather than shackling you to a single faction’s storyline or a single main quest with various sidequests, the game now allows you to take on everything right from the start. Want to head out to Craglorn right away and ignore the storyline altogether? Sure thing, the game’s not going to stop you. Level however you like.

This already does tie in nicely to the game’s rather free-form structure with character builds; while your starting class makes something of a difference, you won’t find yourself locked into a single skill tree and can advance in several areas. You can’t be great at everything at once, no, but you aren’t stuck in melee if you prefer ranged combat, and you always have more options for new and diverse skills.

That’s combined with a whole lot of combat improvements and other gameplay improvements since I last played the game in its beta testing. And the net result is that this is a very different game than it was when the game first launched or went into testing.

Back when I played that version of the game, I didn’t find it bad, just boring. It all worked well enough, but it struck me as averaging out to a rather mixed bag. But that was also before a lot of improvements and expansions. And sure, I don’t have much history with the franchise, but that’s a combination of a lot of factors; I have not declared a perpetual personal war of dislike with the series. (I reserve that for Gears of War.)

So let’s get started, and by getting started, I mean it’s time for our poll! This week, you’re choosing my starting faction before I start playing.

“But how does starting faction matter any more?” you ask. The answer is that it doesn’t stop you from playing different things, but it still does give you a starting point. Your character has to start somewhere, and while there’s nothing stopping me from heading off into the wild blue yonder almost as soon as I get started, it does mean that I’ll be starting somewhere. All three factions have their own associated races, and all three are after the throne; their philosophical differences thus come down mostly to “we want to be in charge instead of those dudes.”

The Aldmeri Dominion is located in the southwestern portion of the map and consists of the Bosmer, the Altmer, and the Khajiit. With two different flavors of elves and all the cats you could want, it certainly makes a strong case for itself, although the fact that it’s locked off behind a bunch of islands is kind of irritating.

The Daggerfall Covenant has the Orcs and the dusky Redguards, which almost makes up for the rather stock fantasy humans that are the Bretons. They’re up in the northwest and seem to rather like fighting with swords, so I can definitely see the appeal in that. Swords are good things to fight with. That’s what they’re made for.

Last but not least, the Ebonheart Pack has the Nords allied with the Dunmer and the Argonians, but it’s largely an alliance of convenience for all concerned; this compensates for the fact that the faction has the largest cut of the world map, all along the east and through the north. No cats, but you do get lizard people and dark elves, and I’m generally fond of any human race that’s associated with the north. I’m counting the Norn in there, too.

So you tell me, folks. Where am I going?

Polling ends at 4:00 p.m. EST on Friday, so I’ll have time to get started and get into the meat of the game with plenty of time. I would also like to thank everyone for voting for this now, as it meant I could buy the game on the cheap, which is always a positive from my perspective.