Elder Scrolls Online: first impressions

I spent much of last weekend on Stros M’Kai – a tiny island in the vast virtual world of Tamriel that will, come April, be the setting for a the long-awaited cult multiplayer game Elder Scrolls Online.

I was taking part in the invite-only Beta test and, as the non-disclosure agreement you have to sign has now been lifted, I’ll give my first impressions.

ESO is what’s technically known as a MMORPG – massively multiplayer online role playing game. I used to be slightly addicted to these but you don’t remain addicted long when you realise that, beneath the ever more shiny and realistic skin of the games, you are going through the same basic process.

You have to capture a base, working collaboratively with a few other players, level up your weaponry and skill, and try to avoid getting shouted at, or constantly killed, by boringly expert players who spend their entire lives inside the game.

Then – after a long break from computer games – I drifted into playing Skyrim.

Skyrim is a first-person role play game – so it’s you versus the computer, which throws up quests, monsters, dungeons etc – with a lot of emphasis on creating a unique character, through traits, skills and customized weapons.

Skyrim was the first video game I played that felt cinematic: a haunting score by Jeremy Soule and various bits of breathtaking landscape revelation are designed to create an emotional connection in the player, similar to what you feel at the end of an epic movie like Close Encounters.

ESO is an attempt to combine the two: the scripted emotional connection and narrative of a game like Skyrim with the run, jump, let’s-kill-a-dragon-and-defend-this-castle world of the MMORPG.

The game forums show I am not the first to wonder whether it works. Lots of Skyrim diehards have been complaining that the magic quality has gone, while lots of MMORPG-heads have been saying it’s “just a basic MMORPG”.

The interesting thing here is how overt the players’ understanding has become of the genre they’re taking part in. I am pretty certain that most moviegoers didn’t come out of Casablanca in 1944 saying “the second act reversal was amazing”; and even with Star Wars, and a much more savvy public, you didn’t hear people complaining that it was too reliant on Jungian archetypes.

So there’s something new about the way dedicated players play video games: the structure and narrative and implicit rules are all understood explicitly. So if you suddenly meet a character whose boyfriend’s been kidnapped by goblins and she thinks he’s been taken “into this cave” you are pretty certainly going to soon be on a dungeon quest – which means killing AI-controlled goblins and stealing their stuff before liberating said boyfriend and gaining some extra skill points in the process.

And of course this new literacy we have about gaming spills over into other narrative forms that have begun to copy games: so the second Hobbit movie – Desolation of Smaug – has not only a bunch of classic Hollywood screenwriting plot devices but also clear excursions into the dungeon and chase genres you find in video games.

So the launch of ESO in its finished form, in April this year, is an interesting moment in the evolution of games and narratives. The attraction of MMORPGs has always been the human interaction: it doesn’t matter how realistic the interface is – what we bring to the collaborative virtual slaughter of a dragon are the real human attributes of the people sitting at the screen. That’s why it is common for people to form real friendships as they “see” the character of the people they’re playing with.

In contrast the attraction of a game like Skyrim, where you are just playing against the AI, has been the ability of the writer to script moments of deep experience, comparable to the ones we get in movies.

The writers of ESO have tried to compensate for the inability to do this by giving the player a long and complex journey of self-creation: the stuff you can make at skill-level n is going to look different to the stuff you make with skill n+10. And with millions of potential looks and playing styles – I played as a Redguard Nightblade with green eyes and a face tattoo – they’re clearly hoping that will engage people enough to shell out the equivalent of the price of one DVD per month to play online.

But I think we might be coming to a moment where – as with all things digital – MMORPGs get commoditised: that is the paying public sees beyond the magic of the marketing message and starts to understand how the product is made and demand it to be provided cheaper.

My hunch is that the money in videogaming still lies in the “movie I can be in” – which is the extension into virtual reality of our inner desire to be Bogart (or Bergman) in Casablanca or Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters. This is the quality that lies behind the massive success of game franchises like Call of Duty.

And just in case you think the whole gaming thing is the stuff of dweeby irrelevance, a reminder: the video games industry, with global revenues of about $67 billion and rising, is not far off overtaking the revenues of the global movie industry, which stand at $97 billion and are falling. What’s more, the need for unique log-ins, and the ability to lock people into console formats makes videogames virtually impossible to pirate – unlike music and the movies.

This is a creative industry and an area of mass culture that’s come out of nowhere in the last 20 years and provides, for many people, the richest cultural experience of their lives. Where it goes next is going to be fascinating, and my few hours stumbling around inside Tamriel the other day convinces me that ESO is going to be a landmark in that journey. With a rumoured development cost in excess of $200 million there is a lot riding on it.

In the meantime, if you happen to be in Tamriel and you see a haplessly under-armoured Redguard Nightblade with a face tattoo getting serially killed by rabid wolves, that would be me.

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