The footage shows off character creation and the first quests new players will encounter.
Footage showing off character creation and the first 20 minutes of gameplay for Bethesda’s upcoming MMO, The Elder Scrolls Online has been leaked onto youtube. The character creation screen shows a huge variety of different customizations and nine playable races, but only three classes: Dragonknight, Sorcerer and Templar. The gameplay segments that follow look strikingly similar to 2011’s Skyrim, wrapped up with a couple of new MMO elements.
New players will find themselves on a ship, having being discovered floating in the water by the captain. No kind of opening cutscene or explanation of what the game will be about and what you are supposed to be doing is offered. The game looks and plays almost exactly like Skyrim does, but with an MMO-style UI draped over it. Just like Skyrim, you can go into first-person mode, although there doesn’t seem to be any hand or weapon animations for it yet. All NPCs appear to be fully voiced.
Later on in the video, we learn that the “constellation-style” skill trees present in Skyrim have been replaced with more basic MMO-style trees. Each class will have three different specializations, with the Sorcerer’s listed as Dark Magic, Daedric Summoning, and Storm Calling. Quests are your standard “talk to this guy, kill six of these, collect four of these” style quests.
Honestly, apart from the fully voiced NPCs, this game looks like another horribly generic run-of-the-mill World Of Warcraft style MMO. We should keep in mind that this is still early beta footage, and the game is sure to change drastically as it leads up to its release, but at the moment it doesn’t quite look as epic as the teaser trailer they released a while back, when soliciting beta sign-ups.
You can sign up for the beta on the Elder Scrolls Online website. The game is scheduled for release later this year.
Update: It looks like the video has been pulled from YouTube. A saved copy has been uploaded to Riot Pixels.
Published: Apr 15, 2013 07:36 am