It was, more or less, exactly the same as my typical Elder Scrolls solo experience. Character creation was pretty familiar, if simpler, but the typical races were represented. I went around doing a bunch of quests that didn’t have much to do with one another, and I wandered around looking at stuff while random assassins tried to murder me. I talked to some people, and my dialogue options were usually pretty meaningless. It’s all what I would have expected from any other internally developed Bethesda RPG.
One might read what I just wrote and interpret that as me asserting that TESO is some sort of grand evolution of the MMO, but that is not at all what I am trying to say. Rather, what playing TESO made me realize is that all those other Elder Scrolls titles were actually MMO-style games that you had to play alone. That’s not an insult, because those games have avoided some of the key annoyances about MMOs, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
To be fair, TESO is not exactly identical to Skyrim. There is an action bar, for one, though there is no cursor as mouse look is locked on. Yeah, you’ll hit the left mouse button a lot to attack, but then you’ll throw some abilities, which you buy with skill points that you gain from leveling up, in from time to time with the 1-5 keys. And, like, uh, I’m sure there were other things that were different. No, this feels like Elder Scrolls.
