» Tue Mar 04, 2014 1:51 am This weekend i joined the ESO community for the beta weekend, it was my first experience so you'll hear about the first look impression (lvl 1 to 12).
Let's start from the plus side:
- Nice open map, pretty big and worth exploring
- Character customization seems okay even if i didn't managed to get to level 15 to unlock the weapon swap which will surely allow another degree of freedom
- Crafting seems worthwhile and well implemented but space for resources is very limited (more on this in the minus side)
- PvP, which should be the core of this game looks like well done and, barring some tech problems, scales well from small scale operations (1vs1 and 2vs2) to group vs group (6vs6) to bigger blobs; you feel important enough even in bigger battles due to the abundance of secondary goals
What i didn't liked:
- Open world plus instanced quests lead to some awkward situations; i wasn't able to easily party with a friend as we were always ending in different instances but, otoh, i was always surrounded by other random players in quest spots (dousing those fires in the village was a chore as there were like ten players per fire and); this also lead to lots of bugs and many of the quest chains were broken somewhere due to this mix (open world plus mini instance) like "kill Melanie", "spar with guards" and a couple other minor ones
- Inventory space is too limited, it would be more than okay if we had a separate tab for crafting resources (ie a system like the guild wars 2 one)
- The first few levels were really dragging, the starter island as a whole seemed like a chore and it was mildly boring; i found myself rushing ahead just to open bigger maps and i ended up doing contents a few levels above me (a combination of bugged Q lines and this slow start)
I won't mention lag, dc and other assorted problems as i think they are perfectly normal for a beta stress test.
Overall i liked the game but i hope the whole concept of semi-instanced quests get a serious polish before release as it was a bit frustrating
