Instead, it wants you to use Area voice chat, which means that visiting cities results in listening to random people who are (hopefully) unaware that their mics are on, playing everything from Amon Amarth to Mozart in the background, to say nothing of the kids arguing with their parents and telling their brothers to get the pizza out of the oven. That's right-in contrast to almost every MMORPG out there, ESO doesn't allow you to use a keyboard or app to enter text information in zone or some other form of local chat. That's also important in a game that doesn't allow text chat. With the names remaining the same, I'll more easily remember these folks.
My buddy list in the PC version of Elder Scrolls Online is quite extensive, and many times I'd lose track of who someone was when they switched to another character. Still, I can see the benefits of the approach. Happily, mine's not so bad, but it's not uncommon to see the likes of NinjaBustexxx345 running around Riften and Mournhold, which claws at some of the sympathies of the roleplayer inside me. One quirk of The Elder Scrolls Online for consoles is that other players don't see your name as whatever cool roleplay-inspired name you made for yourself at character creations instead, they see it as your gamertag. (And even then.) An option to add players to a guild by "interacting" them would have worked better.Ībout those names. Adding people to guilds seems to be a chore, as you have to enter the player's name in full, which can be a pain if you don't happen to have a keyboard or the Xbox SmartGlass app on a phone or tablet. As an avid crafter, I use the mail service frequently, but here it's buried in the Social tab, where it takes multiple steps to reach. ESO's near-instantaneous weapon-swapping is a huge part of its higher-level gameplay, but here, it's awkward to take your fingers off the main action buttons to switch from a sword to a bow in the middle of combat.Įlsewhere, other key elements are buried in the user interface or complicated by it. That is, with one massive exception: Under the current scheme, you activate crouch/sneak mode by pressing down the right thumbstick, while you swap weapons by clicking the "west" button on the D-pad. The minimalist action bar with five ability slots is well-suited to gamepad play, and most of the abilities are intuitively mapped as well. On the gameplay front, I'm happy to report that ESO's combat is as well suited to console gameplay as I predicted it would be way back in February of last year. Now I wish I'd splurged before importing my account.
It's a good deal, although I couldn't help but be bummed that all my premium "crowns" from months of playing for ESO Plus (essentially the subscription fee reborn) didn't carry over as well, although some items I'd bought from the Crown Store cash shop with them in previous weeks did. The endgame zone of Craglorn is a ghost town, which leads me to believe that very few PC players made the jump to consoles on day one, or at least with their accounts intact. I played heavily when I reviewed The Elder Scrolls Online for PC last year, so I took advantage of the option to import my PC character data to the console, and thus my Dragonknight is romping around Craglorn at the de facto level cap of Veteran Rank 14. Most of the people I’ve seen logged into Elder Scrolls Online’s Xbox One servers appear to be experiencing it for the first time with brand-new characters I, on the other hand, am seeing it (for now) from the opposite extreme of the leveling process.