The Elder Scrolls worlds have always been a love of mine - I modded the hell out of Morrowind on the PC, even to the point of creating a whole island full of interlocked scripted adventures, weird buildings, and custom reskinned character models for a group of online friends.
Fast forward to the present and Skyrim on the XBox is my current TES fix, where months after I started playing, I'm still busy being swept away by a tidal wave of sidequests, exploration and sight-seeing...
So naturally I was seriously interested when I learned of TES Online!
...until I found out about the factions that is.
IMO the way they're handling factions and communications in ESO is an immediate game breaker for me before I've even set foot in the game. There are over 20 years of unique lore already there in TES, but the game's production company appears to have ignored all of it and gone with a completely lame and out of date Warcraft style concept of factions.
"For the sake of gameplay" they say. Hah! What a load of bs - if they had any respect at all for the millions of people who've played games in the world of Tamriel and fallen in love with its lore, they'd never have dared pigeonhole players into arbitrary fixed factions. If there's one thing I've learned from playing TES games over the years, it's that the world of the Elder Scrolls is in perpetual flux. The whole point of the RP games is that a character of any race can, if they wish, be any class and follow any career path - career paths which quite often mean simultaneously being part of rival organisations.
For me, it's that unrivalled open-ended flexibility that has made the Elder Scrolls games what they are. And this MMO spectacularly misses that core feature of all the TES games by dismissing two decades' worth of lore with a wave of the hand, all in what seems to me to simply be a sad attempt to steal a few WoW players.
Unlss they change the way factions are handled in ESO, I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to play it. To do so would feel like I was endorsing the betrayal of an old friend. Which upsets me on several levels because of all the MMOs I've looked at in the dark post-CoH days, ESO was the one I really wanted to work, thanks to my love of the world and lore of Tamriel.
