14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Bethesda launched The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and brought back into the public spotlight the long-running fantasy role-playing series, fans have asked for a multiplayer online game set in the universe or at least some sort of cooperative experience for games like Skyrim.
After quite some time, Bethesda tasked the Zenimax Online Studios team with creating The Elder Scrolls Online, a multiplayer experience set in the franchise's universe that allows players to play a role in a giant war that's spreading across the continent of Tamriel.
While the premise sounds really impressive, a few leaked images and gameplay footage cast the game in an unfavorable light and prompted some skepticism from fans.
At Gamescom 2013, Bethesda put those fears to rest showing off a brand new build of the online game that allowed players to create their characters choosing from Nord, Dark Elf, or Argonian species, and among several new classes like the Paladin, the Mage, or a Rogue-like class. After these different choices, players can choose to go in-depth with the variety of options included in the character creator, or just randomize everything and start playing.
Early levels in most massively multiplayer online games involve a variety of boring tutorial tasks, such as killing harmless creatures in order to learn basic attacks and strategies.
The Elder Scrolls Online does no such handholding and immediate presents you with three different choices in terms of quests, each quite varied, and slowly begins to open up the world with a variety of side quests, some ranging from mundane, such as a hunter asking you to kill the beast that wounded him, to the outlandish, such as a girl whose friends were turned into skeevers (rats) by an evil mage.
While taking on bandit camps and caves, or ruins infested with the undead was pretty simple in Skyrim, in The Elder Scrolls Online it can be quite hard and players have a lot of incentive to ally themselves against common enemies in order to better take them down.
The game is also looking good visually, although the version of the game world presented in the demo was at night and in a snowy area that looked a bit of a simpler version of the different Nordic environments from Skyrim.
Besides a few performance bugs, not to mention pretty tough difficulty, The Elder Scrolls Online is looking pretty good.
There's a closed beta currently underway and the game is set to debut in 2014 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.