Ragar ventures into the world of Tamriel to give his impressions of Zenimax Online's upcoming MMO

No Preview’s Over Until Ragar Talks About Crafting

TESO has six different tradeskills for any would-be crafters out there: Provisioning (food/drinks for temporary buffs), Enchanting (glyphs for enchanting weapons and armor), Alchemy (potions to restore your resource pools or buff yourself), Clothing (light and medium armor), Blacksmithing (melee weapons and heavy armor) and Woodworking (staves, bows and shields). Unlike other MMOs where you would start by finding a trainer and picking which two or three professions you’d like to master, TESO lets you work on everything. Gathering isn’t a profession choice – everyone can do it and there doesn’t appear to be any tool restriction on getting materials. You can pick up any and all resources (assuming you have any space in your limited inventory) while you’re out questing to help craft when you get back: ore, wood or even weapons you don’t want.

All but one of the crafting professions (sorry Provisioners) in TESO allow players to extract and refine finished goods and raw materials to get ingots, cloth and other components needed for the crafting process. This process also has a chance of giving you components for the other areas of crafting, which we’ll talk about in a bit. First thing’s first though – let’s get into how crafting works.

Provisioning is pretty basic MMO crafting: you learn recipes from drops or NPCs, they show up on your list, then you highlight a recipe and click Craft. Alchemy and Enchanting are a bit more interesting. Each of these professions has a group of blanks that need filled in with certain types of components (e.g. specific types of runes for Enchanting, water and ingredients for Alchemy), but there are no set recipes for these professions. Through trial and error players will discover the traits for the individual components and eventually be able to piece together which patterns lead to great power and which ones are destined for refining or vendoring. As much as I enjoyed finding out what all of my Enchanting and Alchemy components did, the real interesting parts of TESO crafting belonged to those other three professions.

Clothing, Blacksmithing and Woodworking all have the same design: Extraction for breaking down raw materials and old gear into crafting supplies, Creation for making the actual items, Improvement for boosting existing equipment and Research for learning new traits to give crafted equipment. We already explained Extraction earlier, so let’s start with Creation. In the Creation menu, you’ll see four panels (and two tab icons for weapons/armor unless you’re a Clothier). In the first panel there’s a scroll bar of all of the different weapons/armor available to you with that profession. In the second panel, the scroll bar shows all of the different materials you can use to craft that piece of equipment. The third panel shows the materials used for crafting in the various racial styles and the fourth panel shows materials used for adding traits to equipment.

When you’re starting off with one of these professions, your options will be fairly limited; you’ll have one material option (iron/jute/maple), one racial style (your character’s race) and no traits to select. Your only option for crafting these pieces is how much material you put into the recipe. Each recipe has a range of material to use: the more material you put into the recipe, the higher its base armor/damage and the higher the level requirement. While this does mean a smaller selection of items are on your crafting list, it also gives the player more control on how powerful they want an item to be as well as what traits/aesthetics they want it to have.

Racial style is purely aesthetic – a Nord Iron Helmet looks different than an Argonian one, but the stats are the same. There’s nothing to prevent a crafter from learning all of the different styles, but each must be learned out in the world and they do use different vendor-purchased material components. Traits are a little more interesting and require you to refrain from just Extracting every old piece of gear in your bags. When you look at the description of a piece of gear, you’ll see its base statistics, any enchantments it may possess, and at the bottom there may be a Trait listed with a name to describe it as well as what the trait does. In the Research tab of the crafting screen, these pieces of gear can be sacrificed in the name of progress to research how to add that trait to gear you craft. Once the research is complete, you can use the associated crafting material to add that trait to newly made equipment… assuming it’s the same type of gear. Research is a very time consuming process: not only do you have to research each trait for each different category of equipment, but it takes increasing amounts of time the more traits you learn for each category.

That just leaves us with the Improvement tab. From here you can take a basic (white) item and upgrade it to fine (green), superior (blue), epic (purple), or even legendary (yellow) with all of the base stat improvements that come with it. Each of these steps requires a tempering component acquired only through Extraction; the more tempering components you add, the higher the chance your Improvement will succeed until it’s 100% guaranteed with five tempers. So you can hold off until you can guarantee your upgrade will succeed, you can gamble with fewer items or you can tweak the odds by spending skill points.

Each branch of crafting has its own associated skill line in the same menu with your combat skills. The higher level your profession, the more skills you have access to. Each tree gives you access to skills like hirelings bringing you free materials, improved odds with Extraction and Improvement, faster Research with extra slots to do more simultaneously and, of course, access to better materials for higher level crafting. I was not able to test adding skill points to the crafting skill lines during this beta period, so I wasn’t able to verify the proposed “master two skills or be a jack of all trades” limitations the developers talked about in earlier Q&A sessions. I would have liked to see when that limitation started to rear its head, and I felt like focus was necessary, but with everything else that needed to be covered during my trip to Tamriel, it was hard to justify just living in the mountains and mining for 20 hours.

Conclusion

So after that mountain of text, what’s the verdict for the current state of The Elder Scrolls Online? It really depends on which camp you’re coming from: the fans of the single-player series or veteran MMO players.

If you’re a fan of Skyrim and the previous games and all you want is have that experience with other people around, that is exactly what Zenimax Online has provided, for good and for ill. The story, writing and voice acting are all on par with what Skyrim had to offer and the world feels like the Tamriel you remember from the other games. The minimalist UI serves to keep players immersed in the world around them and the menu system is actually better than the nested mess that Skyrim offered, though a bit clunky in spots. The combat is an improvement over Skyrim’s due to the addition of the extra active skills, so now there’s a bit more variety in what you can do here. It’s not MMO caliber combat though, which is where the other camp comes in.

In their attempt to keep the feel of Skyrim alive in their first online game, I don’t believe Zenimax has taken the lessons of previous MMOs to heart with their design. The combat, while an improvement over the other Elder Scrolls games, feels far more simplistic than other limited action set MMOs like The Secret World, WildStar and Guild Wars 2. Yes, there are filler attack abilities in those other MMOs, but at least those are actual abilities rather than just generic attacks/power attacks. In many cases those filler attacks have a resource regeneration aspect to them to provide a gameplay decision of storing points versus dumping them for burst. Combine this with the limited UI’s tendency to hide the existence of other players and the game just doesn’t feel like it was designed with the modern MMO player in mind.

Would I recommend people try out the game based on what I’ve played the last two weeks? Yes, for a time. I feel the story is strong enough to warrant buying the boxed copy and playing through the free month, perhaps an extra month if you need more time or want to see the other two Alliance storylines. After that though, I’m not convinced it would hold my attention or that of any other MMO-focused gamer enough to justify paying a monthly subscription. If their endgame dungeons and content are strong, I might change my mind, but I cannot comment on material I’ve not been exposed to. If you’re looking for an alternative to GW2’s WvWvW, I might be able to recommend this a little more though, but I’m not sure it’s enough of an improvement to beat GW2’s lack of a monthly fee.

Michael “Ragar” Branham