The

Elder Scrolls Online is really a hybrid game - part epic

single-player RPG, part MMO. As such, it simply wouldn't do to compare it

outright to any one game - most other games are either-or, not both.

Instead, when looking at the constituent parts of the Elder Scrolls

Online, it may be more beneficial to compare and contrast them against the

competition.

Character Classes

Competition: Other Elder Scrolls games

Elder Scrolls games have traditionally been skill-based rather than

class-based, and that's essentially the same path that Elder Scrolls

Online has taken. In most previous Elder Scrolls games, selecting or

creating a character class meant choosing a set of skills that started at

higher values and improved faster than others. TES V: Skyrim broke away

from that mold and presented us with an essentially class-free,

skill-based advancement system. Almost.

Really, Skyrim only presented us with one "character class": the

Dovahkiin. The Dovahkiin can use any armor or weapon or magic spell in the

game, and the more he uses them, the better he gets with them. But he

comes packaged with a unique skill set not shared by other characters -

the Thu'ums. In the MMO sense, the Dovahkiin's shouts are essentially

class skills for the only class in the game.

The Elder Scrolls Online offers 4 different classes, but they are closer

to Dovahkiin than to the older Elder Scrolls classes for which they are

named, or to traditional on-rails MMO classes. Like the Dovahkiin, each

class comes with a particular and unique set of skills, but can wear any

armor and use any weapon in the game. For the most part, class only

loosely defines a character's combat role (except for the role of Healer -

in the current beta, only Templars have healing abilities). Mage-tanks are

perfectly viable, as are heavy-plate archers.

Storytelling

Competition: Star Wars: The Old Republic

There are two core conflicts at play in the Elder Scrolls Online - the

three-way contention for the Emerald Throne in Cyrodiil, and the battle

against Molag Ball as he attempts to drag all of Nirn into his own private

hell of Coldharbor. We know absolutely how these events play out over the

course of history - all other Elder Scrolls games are set far into the

future, and contain historical references to the setting of ESO.

Eventually, Molag Bal is shut down and denied, and an Imperial named Tiber

Septim steps up and takes control of the Cyrodiilic Empire.

Tiber Septim doesn't come along for a few hundred years or so, so we can

guess that the three-way power struggle kind of rages on more or less

indefinitely. But the battle against Molag Bal is more immediate, and

likely reaches a decisive resolution within the story arc of the game.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

works in a similar way. The conflict between the Republic and the Sith

Empire will rage on well into the future, and we know that eventually

Darth Bane will come up with his Rule of Two, driving the Sith

underground, the Republic will come to be the dominant political force in

the galaxy, and will be supplanted by a wily Darth Sidious, who transforms

the Republic into the Galactic Empire. These events are all basically set

in stone. But there are eight other story arcs at work in SWTOR - one for

each base character class - which come to a firm resolution at around

level cap. The stories are brilliant and engaging, and they're all fully

voice-acted, but they come to an eventual conclusion.

The style of interaction is slightly different, though: SWTOR's stories

feature little dramatic scenes with multiple camera angles and character

movement and voiced dialogue by the player character, like a bunch of

little movies. ESO's stories are fully voiced, but stay focused on one

animated-mannequin NPC the whole time, the same as pretty much any other

Elder Scrolls game but with more NPC body animation. Guild

Wars 2 works in a similar way, with animated but static cut

scenes, but uses them only for main story cut scenes. ESO, like SWTOR,

uses them for practically every quest.

Both SWTOR and ESO have branching story options reflecting the

character's morality. SWTOR has far more of these, of course, but that

just makes ESO's branched options feel more significant.

In a way, the brilliant storytelling was one factor that contributed to

SWTOR's rapid decline as a subscription-based MMO. Elaborate storytelling

was one of the main attractions of the game, and remains so now. And it should, because they spent a crap-load of money on it. But once

the story is played out, players are left with gear-grind group runs,

end-game PvP or rolling a new character and playing a different story, pretty much the same as in every other MMO. To

be perfectly honest, I'm still more or less happy with that arrangement

because I haven't played through all the class stories yet. But loads of

players did play them all through, pretty much right away, vastly

exceeding BioWare's expectations of how quickly content is consumed by

avid players. And then those players got burned out by a lack of engaging

endgame content and left. Continued development funded by an emergency F2P

conversion pulled some of those former players back into the game, but for

a while there, things looked pretty shaky. This has to be a major worry

for ZeniMax Online, and we can only hope that they have a back-door F2P

recovery plan in place just in case things don't work out with their

subscription model like they are surely hoping. The escape plan helped SWTOR - and many other subscription games before it - bounce back and re-grow.

Console Cross-Compatibility

Competition: DC Universe Online

The Elder Scrolls series has been multi-platform ever since TES III:

Morrowind. I still have my ancient Xbox version, and my ancient Xbox to

play it on - though I had it for PC first, the Xbox version is the one I

actually played all the way through. TES IV: Oblivion was also

multi-platform, and the console versions outsold the PC versions. And a

lot more people played Skyrim than played either previous title, but most

of those players did so with a controller rather than a mouse and

keyboard. Releasing the Elder Scrolls Online as a multi-platform title

therefore makes a great deal of sense. Players know the brand name now,

and they know it as a console title. Even though it's a MMO with a monthly

subscription.

When DC Universe Online

launched as a multi-platform MMO, it was also subscription-based. That

didn't last for long, though - within 10 months, they had to convert to a

"Freemium" hybrid F2P model with a cash shop and optional subscription

plan, for both the PC version and the console version. Not because it is a

terrible game - it's actually pretty awesome, with engaging gameplay and a

killer IP, and it allows UberGunky to keep the citizens of Metropolis safe and be bros with Superman - but because that's how the market works.

Like DCUO, ZeniMax is keeping console players and PC players on their own

separate servers. Also like DCUO, and like the last couple of Elder

Scrolls games, the console versions will probably way outsell the PC

versions, despite the earlier launch for PC. It remains to be seen of the

Elder Scrolls Online can break the mold and maintain a subscription-paying

player base for more than 10 months.

Graphics and Sound

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Competition: Previous Elder Scrolls Games

Sound-wise, you'll know you're playing an Elder Scrolls game the moment

you hear those sweet, familiar Jeremy Soule themes. Some of the voice

acting will sound a bit familiar, too, but far from all of it. On the

other hand, in terms of graphics, this comparison is only really fair

because this game is bearing the Elder Scrolls brand. But it's really not

fair at all, because it's a different sort of game with different system

demands.

Skyrim was (and still is) a freakin' gorgeous game. Even with the weird

face textures when it first launched, it looked amazing - gritty and

realistic with just enough style to be cool. Back in its day, Oblivion

looked pretty amazing, too. And a hundred years ago when Morrowind was

current tech, that game looked fantastic also. Each game has looked

significantly better than the game before it.

Well, friend-o, this isn't The Elder Scrolls VI, and it's not a

continuation of that upward trend. ESO is a gorgeous game for a MMO, but

if you go in expecting improvements over the graphics of Skyrim, you are

going to be disappointed. Many of the NPCs in ESO look like plastic

mannequins compared to the muscle-bound, grimy Nords of Skyrim. The

environments are breathtaking, but the character models have the

long-legged stiffness of the Morrowind character models, and the lower

polygon counts and simpler skeletons of a game from several years ago. The

textures wrapped around those character models are great, but they're not

near the grimy, big-pored hi-def Skyrim models. Some of the NPCs look kind

of plastic. The graphics fall somewhere between Oblivion and Skyrim

quality.

That's how MMOs roll, though. You will never get video-card-crushing

graphics in a MMO because that's too much data to stream at once. Good

video cards get taxed enough in mid-grade MMOs when a large number of

characters appear on screen at once, all crackling with enchantments and

casting spells and fluttering their capes. If you start adding thousands

of extra polygons per character, and all the fancy pixel shaders and

shadow renderers and lighting enhancers and refraction vectors and all the

techy stuff that makes the very newest games push the most powerful cards

to their limits, your trip into town turns into a slideshow and your video

card starts smoking. Also, at 20+ gigabytes, the game client is already

big enough. Adding a bunch of fancy new tech and more polygons would only

make it more gigantic and bloated.

The best games do lots with little, managing to look pretty without

hammering your bandwidth and GPU processing power. For a MMO, Elder

Scrolls Online looks quite pretty. Not "better than Skyrim" pretty, but

certainly "better than a lot of other MMOs" pretty.

Play Style

Competition: World of Warcraft. HA HA Just kidding!

But seriously, World of

Warcraft is the elephant in every other MMO's room.

Comparisons will inevitably be made because it's a high-fantasy MMO with

elves and humans and orcs, regardless of whether or not the game bears any

other resemblances in terms of gameplay. I believe a lot of people are

fearing that ESO will be another "WoW clone" set in an Elder Scrolls

themepark, which is totally not the case (though I imagine the term will

pop up a lot in general chat in the low level areas for a while, because

it always does). So let's just get it out of the way in order that we

might discuss more accurate comparisons.

It does have some genre-specific similarities to WoW, as stated above.

Characters go questing for gear and gold and story advancement, and both

games feature crafting. And that's about all they have in common.

The action combat style is more modern than what WoW and its legion of

"clones" uses, closer in spirit to Guild Wars 2 or Neverwinter

or TERA.

Enemy power-attacks are telegraphed with red marks on the ground. The

character hits whatever is in front of his weapon, not what he has

tab-locked onto. It's a "soft targeting" system - targeted enemies are

highlighted, and ranged attacks might curve a bit to hit targeted enemies

on the move, but some enemies tend to move around a lot and avoid getting

hit. Like the ninja goblins on Stros M'kai, who perform spectacular Yuen

Wo Ping-style wire-fu overhead leaps to get behind their attackers. If you

play in 3rd person view, it's kind of funny to watch. If you're playing in

1st person, you might be all "Whaaaa..." for a second until you realize he

ninja'd behind you.





Telegraphed enemy attacks, like those seen in Neverwinter, are a hallmark

of the modern action-combat MMO.

As mentioned earlier, classes are quite flexible, so a character's gear

and skill loadout plays a really significant part in determining his

combat role. Sorcerer with a 2-handed axe? Sure, why not! In this sense,

it is once again more like Guild Wars 2, where warriors and wizards can

use many of the same weapons to more or less equal effect. And with a

maximum of 5 slottable combat powers, to be split between the dozens of

class-specific powers and shared common, racial and weapon specialization

powers, it's important to work out an effective combat rotation, the same

as some old-school games like original EverQuest.

It's going to be terribly interesting seeing some of the wonky build

failures that come with that kind of flexibility and lack of any real

guidelines. As with any game, ESO will be some players' very first, and it

is sure to draw in some players who have played all the Elder Scrolls

games but not one MMO. Heavily-armored stealth archers tend to work

super-awesome in Skyrim, and even for low-level solo questing in ESO, but

such characters might not work so well in a multiplayer dungeon, and are

liable to get eaten alive by the super-efficient min-maxers in PvP.

We can't really make a PvP comparison just yet. That's a whole other beta

weekend.

