Game Details Developer: Zenimax Online

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Platform: Windows (reviewed), Mac, PS4, Xbox One

Release Date: April 4 2014 (PC, Mac); June 2014 (consoles)

Price: $59.99, plus $15 monthly fee

Links: Official website Zenimax OnlineBethesda Softworks: Windows (reviewed), Mac, PS4, Xbox OneApril 4 2014 (PC, Mac); June 2014 (consoles): $59.99, plus $15 monthly fee

The Elder Scrolls games are lonely. That's their greatest strength. They're about wandering through huge worlds, picking flowers or hunting wolves or seeking out unexplored caves. They're games about freedom, which they grant to the player by pushing the biggest concerns into the background. When everything is relatively unimportant, anything can be important. So why not play Daggerfall as a local hero who picks a tiny village and does every quest there until all the cardboard cutout townspeople virtually sing your name every time you talk to them? Why not spend your time in Skyrim collecting every cheese wheel in the game, dumping them into your new house's living room? The moments of greatness in the series occur when that freedom meets the game systems in ridiculous or fantastic fashion, like cresting a hill and watching a giant kick a poacher a hundred yards or desperately fleeing from a lich king into the path of a rampaging dragon and then falling down the mountain as the two fight one another.

In contrast, massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs) have, since the days of Everquest and especially World Of Warcraft, been about control. After Ultima Online's early attempts at granting freedom to players ran into both technical and sociological problems, the genre achieved success by controlling the player experience and granting potential rewards as authored by the game developers. This certainly beats the brutal nightmare that UO's ridiculous player-versus-player system quickly became, and it's not like the genre can't include moments of beauty and ridiculousness. They just happen to occur in spite of the game's controlling systems, not in harmony with them.

For this reason, The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO) always deserved skepticism. Was there any good reason to expect that the joys of the Elder Scrolls games would translate to a massively multiplayer format? I would love to be able to tell you that TESO manages to bridge those worlds of freedom and control, combining the best of both into a beautiful paradox. Unfortunately, after playing this past weekend's semi-open beta while TESO prepares for launch in just a couple of weeks, I found that the opposite was true: it was the worst of both worlds. TESO takes the most predictable path, putting a superficial coating of The Elder Scrolls over a fairly conventional MMORPG.

TESO does a good job of converting the facts of the world of Tamriel to its purpose. The best part of this is its character creator, where the Nords, the Dunmer, the Redguards, and all the various races of the world are available for customization. For the first time since the series went polygonal with Morrowind, the characters actually look good. No “Better Faces” mod required.

The conversion of the “lore” to TESO seems to have just as much fidelity as that of the races of Tamriel, but that's not necessarily beneficial to the game. As background to a world promising freedom, the mythology of The Elder Scrolls was sufficient, but as its own motivation, it's severely lacking. In this case, similar to the (offputting) main story of Oblivion, a Daedric prince of such-and-such is attempting to merge his somewhat chilly hell dimension with Tamriel. Only you (and literally everyone else playing the game) can save the world. I have no idea why massively multiplayer games insist on having "chosen one" narratives that could quite easily be ignored, but here we are.

The biggest problem, though, is that the structure of a MMORPG removes the soul of The Elder Scrolls. The feeling of loneliness, of being able to focus on whatever aspect of the world strikes your fancy, is utterly missing. It's not just the other players running around, although that certainly doesn't help. It's the entire geographical structure of the game.

As I was starting, I noticed a loading screen that said “Pick a direction and start walking.” It's an indication that the design team did know about that critically important part of Elder Scrolls design. But the game itself doesn't actually support that directive. First of all, its geography isn't particularly open. Instead, it uses the typical MMORPG geography of having small, open zones connected by passes and channels. Here's a graveyard filled with zombies, now walk down a hill via a narrow road into a valley of mages and assassins. The enemies are also spaced in typical MMORPG fashion, hanging out in just enough space that it's difficult to simply avoid them. It's a far cry from the wandering or sparse monsters of a single-player Elder Scrolls game. There's also no real emergent conflict; you can't pull a monster next to an enemy mage or a guard until they fight.

The biggest issue, however, is that those enemies all have specific levels. If your level five character wanders into an area with level 15 monsters, you're not going to be able to do much of anything. This, combined with quests, is the chief way that MMORPGs control their players: by making it clear that you don't belong and you can't do anything of note in areas that are above your level. It would be tempting to declare that's just conventional design in the massively multiplayer genre, but refining those concepts has been an important source of MMO innovation since World Of Warcraft's release. TESO, by and large, lacks that innovation. The enemies are simply there.

Quests, meanwhile, tie players to specific regions by saying that the story and rewards are only available there. As in most MMORPGs, these quests form the basic structure for playing the game: get quest, follow arrow, complete quest. While it was possible to play Skyrim like that, there was still a level of travel that made it difficult, especially as many of those quests were far across the map with dozens of distractions along the way. In TESO, the quest structure is used to lead you around by a very short leash. The geography of the world is only important as it might be in your way to find that next monster.

That's a thoroughly mechanical process, and it can be fine—I have certainly liked my share of RPGs that have used it. So if TESO had done it well, I might have swallowed my objections. But I never had a moment that made me say, “This could be great!” I saw none of Final Fantasy XIV's joy in the form, none of Guild Wars 2's energy and personality, none of The Secret World's willingness to experiment with both story and mechanics, and none of Star Wars: The Old Republic's commitment to storytelling (or lightsabers, for that matter). It's simply a fairly competent MMORPG that uses names and an interface from The Elder Scrolls series.

And I say “fairly competent” because, well, this game has problems well in excess of what I'd expect from a major release less than three weeks out from launch. Sometimes they're weird and funny, like when your character is loaded in the same place as another player and you can only see the back of their mouth. Others issues are more serious, particularly a regular occurrence of buggy, uncompletable quests. The first two quest chains I did after the tutorial missions both led me to paths where I'd hit a wall. It's been nearly a decade since I played World Of Warcraft and waited with half a dozen people for a quest monster to respawn, a design issue most contemporary MMORPGs have figured out how to work around. And yet there I was, waiting for 15 minutes, checking out what /dance and /clap did, before deciding that the quest monster would never appear and that there was no chance of completion.

Whether this was indicative of an unfinished game was a matter of some strenuous debate in the game chat, with many fans (how does this game already have so many fans?) insisting that this was an older build used only for stress testing. In my view, an open beta also serves as publicity, and this experience did not appear to put TESO's best foot forward. Skepticism is warranted for TESO's stability—sadly in addition to its premise.