The Long Game
A progress report on the games we can’t quit, featuring The Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor
Six years after we put Skyrim back in its box and began adventuring in the online Tamriel, a return to Solitude should feel like coming home. Yet at first we find Greymoor underwhelming. Here and there, though not quite game-breaking, are short-cuts and rough edges: near-broken missions such as a library where pulling an emote to face-plant a bookshelf is the only way to find a secret passage; identical, bald vampire victims; shorter multiplayer dungeons. Even the region itself is smaller than previous updates.
While 2018’s Summerset felt fresh and breezy, with a fairytale colour palette and a sense of mischief that made it seem like one long summer Saturday night, Greymoor’s caverns and dour settlements feel like a wet, wintry Wednesday. It feels unloved – rushed, even. With The Elder Scrolls VI on the horizon we worry that, like the abandoned machines in Blackreach’s Dwemer ruins, ESO might be running out of steam.
That is, until we are reminded of why we, and 15 million others, keep coming back: ESO’s superior storytelling. The starting point may have been to let Skyrim fans have at it in PvP battles or loot together in dungeons, but the majority of the 1,200 or so hours we’ve sunk into it have been spent in solo enterprise.
ESO has always served up irresistible characters and bold ideas within even the smallest encounters.
Greymoor’s central story of a rising vampiric evil is strong, but ESO is great at providing sidequests that spin out into surprising adventures. We find an icebound ship whose crew members are being picked off by a monster in the frozen mists, break the curse of a woman doomed by love, rescue a prisoner from an imposing subterranean keep, chase a phantasm called The Pale Man and join our old pal Rigurt The Brash in some inept Nord diplomacy – all funny and engaging quests of the kind to be found throughout ESO’s Tamriel. Unlike most MMOs, the game is not bound by the quality of its PvP combat; it has never asked us to sink our time into battle royales (or even play sociably, if we don’t want to), quietly building a deep singleplayer experience which the game’s online nature would allow to constantly evolve.
This world-building has strengthened the shared experience of multiplayer too, and the game’s community – all those people running around us as we quest onwards, alone and unbowed – is still thriving as a result. The Elder Scrolls VI may eventually spell the end for ESO, if players migrate en masse, but while it could have been just a multiplayer stop-gap between full series entries, Bethesda should be looking very closely at what Zenimax has achieved with ESO. You simply can’t put all that back in its box.