The Elder Scrolls Online

The Elder Scrolls Online. As of the writing of this, we are in early access! If you haven’t played any of the other Elder Scrolls games, I highly recommend you do so. The lore and immersion is extensive. You can find the full anthology at Amazon here. And that contains Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. I remember getting a free demo for Daggerfall from PC World magazine back in the day. Ah the 2d graphics era.

Anyway, if you haven’t ordered your copy of Elder Scrolls Online, I would highly recommend it.

So what makes Elder Scrolls different from other MMOs? Well the play style is very much like Skyrim with some major differences. First, you don’t really have to aim your attacks. Rather you just mouse over and highlight the enemy and click. I wish they would change that, but it makes sense why they did it that way. The normal aiming method isn’t really noob friendly. They are trying to appeal to a wider audience by doing this.

Another great thing is when you buy a horse (1g if you have Imperial Edition), you can actually upgrade your horse in Speed, Stamina, or Capacity every 20 hours for a small fee. Capacity is just bag slots, 1 per upgrade and it is tacked onto your own bag slot capacity. It is a nice little perk, don’t worry, you can also upgrade your backpack from a vendor.

Basically you have 4 classes to choose from and each class has 3 skill trees with differing play styles for each one. Not only do those trees exist, but you can put skill points into weapon skills, crafting, racial, armor and so on. This allows you to create a highly customized character based on what you want to play, not just some cookie cutter build that many MMOs suffer from.

They also allow for addons. This is very important as it really does enhance the quality of the game. Addon makers have great ideas and really enhance games. I was always frustrated that Star Wars: The Old Republic didn’t allow addons. You can find addons at esoui.com or you can install them through the Minion game manager (which I use).

Here are a few of the addons I use and find very good:

Foundry Tactical Combat – Adds scrolling combat text and unit frames for yourself and your target. This is pretty nice as normally ESO doesn’t give you any type of visual notification of how much damage you are doing with each attack.

Loot Drop – This adds a gold and item notification in the bottom right of the screen when you pick it up. It will tell you the amount of gold or the name of the item you received along with an icon. It kind of seems like ESO should do this already, but this is a well built addon to handle it.

Multi Quest Tracker – This allows you to see multiple quests on screen without having to open your quest journal. You can see all the icons on your navigational hud anyway, but this is just added information on what you need to be doing. Strangely enough, ESO only allows showing one quest on screen at a time.

insMobs2Level – This will add a notification to your chat log every time you gain experience and it will predict how many kills you need to the next level, or quests if you turned in a quest. I’m an infomaniac so it works well for me.

There are a handful of other minor addons I use. But they are just very specific UI tweaks.