TLDR: The fact that you guys are trying to make this come out next month scares the living hell out of me. You NEED to push your date back by at least three months in my opinion simply to get what you have working properly. You have serious flaws that need to be addressed or this will be just another MMO launched before it was ready, only to see it die on the delivery room floor.

Background:

I am an MMO heavy player and generally consider myself to be hardcoe. I am looking for a game with strong, massive pvp, and interesting pve because I want to play both regularly. I have raided top 50 and I have been 2200+ in WoW's arena, but will do neither again in an MMO due to the sheer negativity so prevalent between the players. I played DAoC for years as a max realm ranked Ranger and looked forward to ESO to remake this character in a current game. In Guild Wars 2, I have numerous max level characters and one legendary weapon. I do not say the above to brag, simply to prove the reader context into the kind of player that I am so that this feedback can be taken with that in mind. This is my very first foray into Elder Scrolls. I haven't played the other games at all, so will be unable to comment on the shared lore.

Technical: 3/10.

I'm going to start here because this is the phase that you're on and you're not likely to change a whole lot in the story/graphics/lore department if you're planning on pushing this kid out next month. AvA crashed on me probably a dozen times in a third as many hours. The entire server coming down due to the load. I regularly halted for several seconds then watched a flurry of activity as the game caught up. When attacked by a group of 5, I never even saw any spell effects, arrows, or melee attacks, I just keeled over as if I'd had a heart attack. What this tells me is that your net code, while capable of handling an impressive amount of players on screen, is sloppy. In a game that tells me to block or dodge incoming attacks, not being able to see those attacks is fairly inexcusable. Even in PVE, I found dodging and blocking attacks to be difficult, where I'd take full damage from a hit despite having the key depressed and bow out in the (absurd) block position. You have a lot of work here and realistically, this should have been addressed months ago. I'm really worried about the client and server-side lag and general server stability come launch.

The First Several Hours: 2/10.

There was an obscene amount of running in this area. As a player, I had to push through it, and this is a huge problem that I feel that MMOs are beginning to learn from. The opening part of the game is your sales pitch to me as a player. It should set the tone for what is to come and should show me both my class and your game as it will be. What I read from your storyline is that this will be a throwback to the MMO of Olde and be a grindy mess until max level, where I will be able to finally play the game. We are done with that kind of game development, and you will lose probably 80% of your playerbase over the first month to this issue alone because there are games out there which are much easier to get into and enjoy right away instead of having to work through the crap to be rewarded by the good.

The PVE Experience (Ebonheart Pact) 6/10.

Taking the above into account, I see where you were trying to go with this faction. These are all hardened races, surviving the brutality of a hostile part of the world. They're used to tragedy, famine, cold, volcanoes, and in one case, having been taken from their idyllic homeland and forced into slavery by a race that they must now co-exist with as equals. There is massive potential here, which I feel falls flat on contrived story and bad voice acting. The Argonians sound like the guy on South Park with the "Cancer Kazoo," and most of their NPCs that don't seem this way are suicidal, willing to give up their lives to plant trees or save some coral for... the... people that enslaved them? They're branded as almost a Native American shamanistic tribe, where I feel like their resentment of their former captors could have been played up a lot and created quite a bit of interesting story. I did appreciate the racism prevalent in the game. As a Dark Elf, every now and then, some NPC would make a comment that I wasn't welcome there or that I was a "fancy" boy. I found relative mob powerlevels to vary wildly. I'd go from two shotting a mob, then do the coral quest and have a caster npc who took very little damage, who could nuke me dead in 3 hits with no discernible counter who's healthbar reset three times when I killed her. Probably died four times on that thing. Then I'd go back to two shotting mobs. Then suddenly two imps would pop me like a graqe. It was just inconsistent. Still, I felt like I was part of a vibrant world, even if the creatures that populated it were somewhat dull.

Graphics: Character/NPC/Mobs 3/10. Landscapes 10/10. (Daedra -27/10) //edited away from a general 4/10 rating to show that I'm happy with the landscapes, but unimpressed with the characters/npcs/mobs.

This brought me back to DAoC, in sometimes good, but mostly bad ways. The textures in this game look like they were stolen from DAoC, which is well over a decade old. They just look bad and uninspired. The character designs and animations were uninspired and boring. My bow string had white pixels all over it moving back and forth, which was distracting. No idea what you were trying to do there. The landscapes and buildings, however, were absolutely astonishingly gorgeous. Hands down the best of any MMO I have ever played, and I've played a lot of them. All in all, that you plan to release this on Xbox One and PS4 is obvious due to the busted textures that need to support the cheap hardware in those boxes.

Also, what the hell is with the design on the daedra? These things look terrible. These have got to be from previous games because they make no sense. The anatomy is just screwed up beyond repair, the triceratops thing looks like it should be able to grab things with the fingers on its tail and it's body looks like its made of flat, pastel colored dryer exhaust vent. Seriously, I don't even know how to use zbrush, but give me a day to figure it out and I'd be happy to make you a better model.

The User Interface: 2/10.

You're going to have to sell this thing with a keyboard, because typing /reloadui on a controller between quests is going to be horrific. Additionally, I have absolutely no idea how you plan on putting this on console because it is designed like a geocities website from the 90s. I can't even imagine being forced to interact with this thing with a controller. There are menus within menus, all of which could be streamlined. When I want to queue for AvA, you don't need a page showing the available shards (so much for your megaserver concept), just make it a dropdown showing my current selection. Don't include the leaderboards and other crap in game, host that junk on your website. When playing the game, we have no need of it. Everything you can do to eliminate a menu is time well spent. Go through it, and if it's not explicitly necessary, remove it. For as much as you tried to streamline ability hotkeys, you completely flubbed it on all of the other hotkeys needed to run this game. Where a simple right click or interact key should suffice, I need to bind like 4 keys, which I can't do. Your UI is completely busted and needs a lot of love. Probably a new UI team in general as their choices are just frustrating.

Additionally, there is no concept of when we hit something other than a flinch animation. No concept of when we crit versus hit, how much damage was done, or even if we missed. There is also no concept of what loot we've just picked up until you look at your inventory except a jingle of change.

The PVP Concept (9/10)

Honestly, this could save you. If you can get this stable, I'll be all about this game, flaws and all. I felt like all but squishy melee had a place in the game, and unlike GW2, it was spread out enough to make the stealthgame worth playing. I loved picking off stragglers in DAoC, and this is scratching an itch that I've not been able to reach in years. Playing in the zerg came right back to me and it was a lot of fun. I feel like you've done a very smart thing with the siege equipment being purchasable with a wide selection of options, and either gold or pvp currency. I feel like you've done a lot of really hard and good work on the keeps, making them crumble under damage and making them difficult to breach. I feel like there is a balance where it isn't easy to take the keep, but it's not an impossible task. Nor is it too difficult to defend. I liked that you could be pulled off the ramparts by a dragon knight, that arrows reached the top from a reasonable distance, and that siege was very useful. I feel like repairing the walls is too steep a cost, though, I remember carting wood out to the keeps in DAoC on stubby lurikeen legs back and forth for a long time to repair the doors after an assault, and I'm not sure I could make a good enough dent in it with the extremely small amount of repairing done per kit. IMO, put a huge cast time on the thing to put the bottleneck on the time spent repairing rather than quantity of kits used. Or vastly increase the repair time on keeps that havent been in combat for x period of time.

My only huge complaint is that I don't get XP in pvp. I probably received maybe 25% of a level in ~6 hours. Fix it.

Combat: (5/10)

Not much to say about this. It wants to be action based, it really does, but it isn't, though it seems to have fooled some players. The combat is typical tab target mmo style, but instead of tabbing or clicking on a target, we mouse over them to select it. All subsequent attacks go to that target and have a hit or miss component dependent on a percent chance to hit. This is disappointing, but average.

Overall impressions:

What you have is a healthy baby which hasn't finished developing. All the important bits are there, but they're not well defined yet, and it's not far along enough to survive in the world. The mother, your producers, need to recognize this, smile, and be patient, because with the right care, the right food, and enough time, you'll have one hell of a kid. But, you wont because Mommy wants this baby now and she's about to cut it out of her belly with a broken shard of glass in a gas station bathroom, be sent in critical condition to a hospital, and doctors will spend the next few months trying desperately to save mother and child, who would have been fine with just a little patience.

I'd like to see you take the time to really make this good. Get a full time beta running. Get some work in on your netcode and UI. Polish the player/mob/npc graphics where possible, and build a strong addon development community. If you've got to have mommy committed for a few months to save the baby, do it. She'll come to her senses when she sees a beautiful baby.

This beta is said to be a previous beta version.
Meaning there is a fixed version we have yet seen.

Surprised you marked it so low on graphics considering that it's the best looking medieval fantasy MMO coming out any time soon by quite a bit (compared to other MMOs, not other single/multiplayer games).

I pretty much agree with you on everything else though. Everything is pretty typical MMO copy paste, besides AvA, which is basically a massively improved copy paste lol.

I'm guessing his Graphics card svcks, and can't handle max settings to see just how good TESO really looks.

This was a stress, as far I can tell the patch was not an update other than to support what they did in the background, it nice the op took the time to write feedback, but maybe next patch will have game updates, I have seen one patch to game make a huge difference both bad and good over the years..

I doubt a hardcoe gamer has a bad video card. I'm assuming he's comparing it to games other than MMOs though, which have MUCH better graphics because they don't have to worry about server strains.

Agree with some stuff. Not so much with others. The graphics are very pretty but there is a sense of disconnect between your character and the environment. I can't put my finger on it but the first person view definitely gives this sense of not being part of the world, whereas the third person view is offputting due to the character offset.

Insofar as the general speed of progression is concerned I have no problem with it being too slow. The worst thing in any MMO is when cap is attained by people within a couple of days and the content effectively runs out on them leading to a chorus of complaints on the forums. Sure some people only want to play the PvP but the life of any MMO that survives release is very long and I for one (as an ex oldschool EQ2 raider) sees this as the last chance saloon. I have no longer have any desire to be the first to cap of the first to gain the Mega Uber Fist of Awesomness super weapon. I just want a game that is fun to play, has some depth to it and is around for a few years. There is a reason why a game like EVE is still so successful after so many years and that is that it doesn't pander to the people who want a I Win button.

The main issue I have with the game is the lack of intuitive gameplay... Quickslots, crafting, morphing.....what?? No doubt I will work these out in due course but at the moment they're just words to me.

Overall ESO is a game that I have prepaid and I am looking forward to it. The engine seems stable and the game enjoyable. The next month will doubtless be spent watching videos explaining all the "stuff" to me.

Seriously? You gave the graphics a 4? You need to fix your broke computer. These graphics look http://s124.photobucket.com/user/Tiffany-Lane/slideshow/Elder%20Scrolls%20Online%20Beta%20Screenies.

Graphic look amazing indeed..I'd give it an 8 or something

Why only a four?perhaps because it rhymes with graphic [censored]

For an MMO, yes lol.

I know one thing. People need to stop expecting a Jesus patch with one month till release. I love the game and I will give it much higher marks than the OP, but I expect it to go live with the same progression killing bugs it has now.

This. I believe nothing until I see it with my own eyes. Don't expect that your issues are solved, make them prove it.

On the graphics, I'm on highest possible settings. At a distance things look great. Up close, their textures stink. Unfortunately, one of the closest things to me is my character. Compared to the level of detail in the landscapes, the character and NPC models look like they came out of another, much older game. Being happy with the graphics does not mean that they are comparable to other games that have been out for a long time. Aion, for example, has vastly superior graphics and has been out for a long time. As I said, it looks like the landscapes and character/npc/mob graphics were done by different teams.

Edit: To give examples:

The hair graphics are awful. It's 2014. You can make some hair that doesn't clip through my ears or clip into my back.

The weapon textures in first person mode look like they came out of minecraft. Their design is okay, but they're just typical fantasy weapons, nothing to write home about

The combat and animations in general are uninspired and lack a sense of weight or momentum. I appreciate that casters use their weapons, not enough games do that, but again, it's 2014. You can do better than pointing and grunting.

Armor graphics are flat and boring, at least cloth and leather. Other games like gw2 show that we can do better. Again, 2014, not 1999.

Are the graphics an improvement from WoW character models? Sure, but so is a potato.

I have to agree with him. I am running on full graphics settings, zero lag, no real hint of my rig remotely straining but yet when up close to objects they just seem to be poorly done and pixeled at times.

You my support 100% on the weapon animations, especially for the bow. TERRIBLE. Wheres the blood? Wheres the impact animations that actually let me know that i hit something?

The Ui seems fine, really approachable actually imo

I had to motivate my friend like a 400 pound fatty trying to lose weight in order for him to get to level 10. Its not just a boring experience, its very lackluster and badly put together. Once at level 10 you get a few gems here and there, about 1 in 10 quests become exciting.

REALLY REALLY hard to figure out the range of my sword. This game uses hitboxes like World of Warcraft but its not very good at it. Sometimes i hit things really far away with my sword, other times i miss simply by aiming slightly to the left, dafuq?

PvP is good, i agree with that, though cyrodil could have a bit more going on in its lands, it is where oblivion took place, after all.

You think the graphics look bad? Try playing the EQN Landmark Alpha. Graphics look 15 years old and the memory overhead is crippling. People wanted Skyrim online and these graphics give them that.