She pores over the lore, explores each location at a crawl, and peers into every last nook and cranny, uncovering everything, and tackling Tier 2 bosses on her lonesome. She’d racked up over 220 hours at last count, according to Steam. I have a friend who plays The Elder Scrolls Online as a solo. Nowhere was this more obvious than when he described solo players as “casuals”.
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Firor is an MMO veteran, one of the founders of Mythic and a lead creative on the legendary Dark Age of Camelot – so he naturally tends to speak to the hardcore MMO audience first, and everyone else second. I still don’t like MMOs and all the mansions in the world won’t change that, but I do think it’s worth your popping that ESO disc back in and taking another look, which is something I never thought I’d say.īefore I even sat down to play ESO: Morrowind, I spoke to game director Matt Firor over Skype. It’s no wonder Bethesda is pushing the MMO on all fronts now that it has Morrowind as an excuse: it’s got a product it’s proud of, that plenty of people enjoy, but it’s battling uphill to get a slice of its core fans to even look at the blessed thing. Only the lure of a private chef and a house once featured in a 12 page Vogue spread got me to revisit my ideas, and I like The Elder Scrolls. This is not a fair assessment of The Elder Scrolls Online as it exists in May 2017, let alone when the doors open on the Morrowind content next week, but it’s a common one. “Don’t leverage our nostalgia for your dodgy World of Warcraft knock off.” “Give us a proper Morrowind remake,” I might have said. The news of the Morrowind expansion brought nothing but scorn from me. Probably because of attitudes like mine: I love The Elder Scrolls, but I don’t like MMOs and I didn’t enjoy ESO at release. So why is the publisher marketing the heck out of ESO right now, and why had it brought a handful of press – and after we’d been bussed out, a follow up troop of influencers – on a sumptuous getaway, at what must have been breathtaking expense? No, of course not: if it were, Bethesda would already have trashed it this is a cutthroat business. Surely The Elder Scrolls Online can’t be so far onto the rocks that this sort of luxurious excess is necessary?
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“Did you have to use up the ANZ budget before the end of the financial year or what,” I asked a Bethesda staffer.
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A full disclosure of the many delightful and expensive things that occurred during my little vacation would take tens of thousands of words and embarrass us all. I went, I admit it – I am not made of stone – and it was over the top fancy. If you can get past the MMO wrapper – which Zenimax Online to its credit has made as inessential as possible – there is a pretty fun Elder Scrolls game in ESO. Perhaps Bethesda overheard, because when I totally ignored the unsolicited expansion early access key I was sent, the publisher upped the ante by inviting me to stay in a great big fuck off mansion in the country to be wined and dined out of what little sense I possess – and incidentally play a little ESO: Morrowind. I once joked that you’d have to pay me to play The Elder Scrolls Online again. Morrowind is a great excuse to give Elder Scrolls Online another look, and maybe finally forgive it for being an MMO.