Awakening in my room, A strange voice calls out to me advising me to collect a letter and the key to my room from the dresser opposite me. Outside the stranger informs me that he was travelling with me, when we were attacked by a dragon, before then being rescued and brought to Star Haven by the adepts residing here.

The Adept travelling with me named Zamarak tells me that the Grand Adept, Ma’Jha-Dro wishes to speak to me and guides me down the hall, Ma’Jha-Dro wishes to test my strength and encourages me to meet him outside where we take part in a brief sparring session.

After the sparring session, we are introduced to one of Elsweyr’s main adversaries, The Dragon! Ma’Jha-Dro instructs me to head to the catacombs to help the other adepts…

Gameplay

I’m no stranger to mmorpg’s but admittedly it has been quite some time since I last sunk my teeth into one and having never played The Elder Scrolls Online before I’ll be providing a review from the perspective of a New player.

Upon starting you’ll need to pick a race and class for your character from 9 races and 6 classes, Elsweyr introduces a new class to the lineup, The Necromancer.

The Necromancer has been highly anticipated by long-time players. This new character class gives you the ability to raise the dead and can fit the role of DPS (Damage per Second, the team member that dishes out the damage for the group), Tank (Designed to take damage for the group) or Healer (This one’s fairly self explanatory, your role is to keep the team alive). A neat feature of The Elder Scrolls Online is that unlike other MMO’s. You aren’t limited by class or race when creating a build, each race and class can potentially become a DPS/Tank/Healer role depending on your skill choices and equipment, certain races may have a racial advantage to certain roles.

Elsweyr is the home of the Khajiit, Elder Scrolls “Cat race”, the first few main quests have you working with Abnur Tharn to Eliminate the attacking dragons and also helping the Khajiit to liberate their towns from The Usurper Queen Euraxia! A side quest in an area known as the Stitches has you reforming a motley crew of criminals to rob the current leader.

I found the quests well written, the characters quite charming with their own distinct character coming through. You could sense the distrust between the Khajiit and outsiders and the disgust of Necromancers and their dead magic!

My only issue with the game so far is that since the One Tamriel update the whole game is open to players to explore at their leisure. You can literally go anywhere and battle anything.

For some players this is great, for me though, it poses a huge problem, I have no idea where to go, what to do, or what I should do next, With a game of this size personally I’d rather more structure and less sandbox, As I find myself distracted. But during my play, I couldn’t find any other faults.

Graphics

Graphically the game looks great, even on medium settings everything looks well modelled and detailed, the architecture of the town’s buildings and temples looks fantastic and the mountain desert setting of Northern Elsweyr feels like a welcome change from the usual green forest and snowy mountain settings I’ve gotten used to in previous Elder Scrolls.

Audio

I love the music, from the loading screens to the background music it really helps capture the setting of Elsweyr. The voice acting is done well and the sound of approaching dragons struck fear into me.

Longevity

What more can I say, it’s an Elder Scrolls game lol. The base game launched 5 years ago and in that time we have seen 3 (Including Elsweyr) Chapters and 10 DLC’s of extra content as well as numerous updates. So it’s safe to say as a new player you’ll not be short of things to do for quite some time, there’s no shortage of story quests, side quests, dungeons and arenas to complete (some will require paid DLC or the Elder Scrolls Plus monthly subscription) with more to come during this year’s season of the dragon.

Second Opinion

As a new player to the world of Elder Scrolls Online, I thought it would be interesting to get the opinion of a more experienced player so I spoke with Paganwolf13 of the Team Zeal guild to ask her thoughts on the new chapter.

Paganwolf13 has been playing Elder Scrolls Online for the last 2 years on and off and loves the new content saying she feels like it’s “brought a new freshness and excitement to the game” having played most of the existing content.

She loves playing the new Necromancer class, “Throwing skulls at enemies is wonderful and dropping healing skull totems”, She just wishes players weren’t penalised for using Necromancer skills in cities.

When I asked her if there was anything she didn’t like about the new content, The only thing was a personal preference. “The Senche-raht looks funny and runs funny to me I think it could have been done so much better.”

PaganWolf13 can’t wait for the new additions Zenimax Online Studios is bringing later this year. “ZeniMax Online Studios is bringing wonderful content to its players and I hope it continues for the future.”

Conclusion

I have a love/hate relationship with RPGs, I’m a huge procrastinator so I really lose myself in these types of games, often being distracted from the main quest, by side quests, exploration and collections.

The amount of quests and things to do with just the base game/chapters is in my opinion great value for money and with the option to subscribe to ESO Plus for £8.99 a month, giving you access to all of the current dlcs and access to a (I feel essential) handy crafting pack with unlimited space for crafting materials.

This is a game with the potential to sink many hours into, with much more to come. As a new player, I find it hard to find much I don’t like with the game, except possibly that it’s too big?! and award it the Thumb Culture Gold Award!

Disclaimer: A Digital Code was provided in order for us to complete this review.

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