Well there was no work on Aurora this weekend from me as I was involved in the ESO Beta test.
Just a view on it for you all. First a few statments so you can judge the comments.
-I am a role player, not a munchkin or raider or whatever. I don't max my min-maxing. My view of technical things in games tends to be based on ease of use, and can I stand to stare at this for 300 hours. "This" being my character, my characters gear, spell effects etc. I am online to be incharacter not to discuss fruit as sex toys in some open channel, so my first act is to find out how to stop the noise from showing up.
-I am not a huge fan of the Elder Scrolls games. I played Morrowind for 30 or so hours until it bored me to tears. I have Skyrim on my Xbox and I am at lvl 26 and find it enjoyable but frustrating playing as a mage where an arrow that should do 10 pts of damage can 1 shot me or 2 shot me if my mage armour is up. Add to that the frustration of having to swap spells etc plus their short durations and so on. I don't find the system for character advancement worse than Morrowind, I'd have to say it is better as it seems to avoid a lot of stupidity and exploitation that was in Morrowind.
-I died twice. The first time was to slaugher fish while swimming and trying to make it around a point of rock. The second time was in a boss fight at the very end of the quest chain. I didn't know if I should just attack him or wait or what so the fight sort of started before I realized what was going on and I was surprised by how many hit points he had. Up till then most fights had been very short. When I got back after raising I found two other players fighting him and both were at half hits (and one was bruiser orc) so I don't feel so bad.
-I got to daggerfall but didn't have time to explore much. I got to lvl 7 I think. I walked over both Mrho'sha (or whatever the name is) and Betnihk (or Betony as a proper breton would call it) and explored them extensively though I didn't find the soul shards in Betnihk as I recall...but I wasn't really looking for them.
So first the Ok-ish things.
-the setting seems to be well set in the Lore. The races of the Daggerfal Covenent (I was playing a Breton Mage) have clearly got friction but are working together rather than hang seperately.
-the quests are voice acted and I wasn't asked to go kill 10 rats or whatever. In general compared to the Elder Scrolls games the quests are actually a cut above the single player games.
-the combat system is pretty typical of a MMO, and I found it better than the ES single player system by a large margin. You have 5 abilities that you can draw from your skill trees that you activate with 1-5 and then the option of a fast attack, a power attack, a block or a counter depending on which mouse key you use. Overall it seemed to work better than the system in Skyrim. Also there was dodges as seem to be standard so double tapping would move you out of the red zone of impending doom. The only thing I found oddly hard was turning around. I was a lot more stationary than I am in TSW but on the other hand almost nothing made it to mellee range so moving wasn't necessary. Bethseda could use this system in their next single player game and I'd be happy.
-the skill system is a mix of ES and normal MMO. Your class gives you 3 skill lines and then each skill has a linee. The lines are divided into active and passive. So my mage had "Dark Magic", "Deadric Summoning", and "Stormlord" as lines from the class. "Breton" came from my race. Then there were weapons "single weapon and shield", "duel wield", "Two handed", "Bow", "Destruction staff" and "Restoration staff." The three armour "Light", "medium", "Heavy." Then Crafting skills. In a class skill line is an ultimate ability plus the regular ones. Other skills just have different abilities. So "Dark Magic" has an ultimate ability "dispel magic" and then an attack ability and then a rooting ability and then 2 more abilities. As well there was 4 passive abilites. The abilities are unlocked as your increase your overall dark magic level. All told it was flexible and allowed for good character customization.
-leveling up gave you a point to spend on magica, health or stamina...as in Skyrim. I found it ok. I got to lvl 7 I think so I was just putting 1 into each to give ma a basis to build on later.
-leveling up gave you a point to spend on your skills. You could morph a active ability that was at lvl 4 which gave it an new twist. My lightening strike I morphed to give me back magica when someone died. Or you could buy new abilites either active or passive that were unlocked. You could for example use a destruction staff without having any destruction abilites that just slowed down your progress. My dark magic was so high because of my 5 active abilities 2 were dark magic, 1 was storm lord, 1 was soul magic, and 1 was restoration staff magic. What was annoying was the restoration staff spell I could only use when I had a restoration staff equipped. This gave you a lot of leveling choices and flexibility.
-the armour was way better than in Skyrim. The light armour gave you some protection (as opposed to 0), plus bonuses in the passive abilities that reduced spell costs, increased magic regen, increased magic resistance etc. Medium armour improved melee and stealth. Can't recall what heavy armour passives did. But this was much better than running around in clothes and mage armour in Skyrim.
The Bad:
-one quest was hard to do "Abomination of X" this was because you had to convince people they had to do it one at a time. The "abomination of hate" blocked me for hours till someone said "everyone log off" and I did and was the first one back. The quest works if you do it one at a time but more than one staff in blocks it for whatever reason. I was glad to get out of there though. Herding cats is easier than dealing with typical MMO riff and raff.
-the single player main quest. It is really pretty much a single player quest but every player is on it. So unlike in TSW were the game is built around the existance of many Gaia warriors this game seems to ignore the fact that there is the second M in MMO. It is a philosophical issue but I find it is something that they could have done better.
-virtually no one spoke in game (in Say and in Character). I saw no role playing and the names ran the full gaument from absurd to lore following. Since there is only one Mega Server, this means role playing will be always subject to interference from xxx_Überdood_xxx and friends. There also seems to be minimal support for role playing...no chat bubbles etc. There are some emotes but I'm not sure how many as I could not find out how to display them.
-no public quests showed up (the abominations would have been much better done as a public quest rather than what they did do)...but maybe I was too low level. There didn't seem much interest in anyone in grouping up though I saw a few duos and possibly a trio. Overall little incentive to encourage socialization. Roleplaying locations were also pretty scarce and nothing like tables and such for tavern get togethers did I see.
-I had a few issues with lag and getting stuck in an crafting animation or while in a store. The only solution was to log out and then back on.
-immersion was destroye every few seconds as someone would come by with weapons out running full tilt and bounding like a jack rabbit...ah well.
The Good:
-Character creation was detailed and I spent about an hour or so making my character. You can tweek most things and I saw a wide variety of characters in game. As most people tended to have the same armour you would think that all would look alike but that seemed to be less critical. Most mages looked like mages in the robes but if you could look at them they had very different bodies and faces. Overall a job well done.
-the world is gorgeous. I walked all over it, swam out to islands and generally had my "explorer" itch scrated seriously. Walking to me is the way to go if you are a crafter as it is hard to spot the resources for alchemy and the others are easy to miss.
-crafting. They have a good system. The question will be how it works into the economy. As it stands each type of armour is divided by race so you can eventually learn to make different racial types of armour. As well you can learn abilites for each group of armour types...so for light armour chests you can learn to add a bonus to them that give more armour rating. In total there were about 10 things your could learn. Plus each level in the ability gives you the ability to craft some types. So level one lets you make iron weapons, level 2 steel and so on. But each weapon or armour requires an investment of 21 gold for the special racial material so you can't sell something for less than that without loosing money. And you can't willy nilly build stuff...unless you have an additional source of money. However by the end my mage had crafted the armour, weapons, food, and potions I was using. I had decifered a good chunk of the early runes and made about a dozen glyphs. My weapons boasted 20 pts of armour negation on my dagger, +3 points of poison damage on my sword and +3 shock on my lightening staff. I had also made a fine light armour chest. I was very happy with the system, but it is clear that to get good requires a lot of effort on the players part plus at least some points invested (keen eye is almost a requirement for alchemy as spotting the plants is hard).
-the UI. No floating names, no hot bars and the world makes it very immersive to be walking about. The hot bar fading when you are out of combat was a brillant idea.
They certainly did a lot of stuff "right" and few things "wrong" but I've no idea how this will work in reality. To me it would depend on finding good people to play with, which is true in my view of any MMO. They aren't bringing anything that new to the table that I can see. The world is gorgeous but the game seems unclear if this is supposed to be a MMO or just a single player game where you see other people around you doing the same thing you are. The main story quest really would better suit a single player game, it thematically is jarring with a MMO. I went in without many postive expectations and was pleasently surprised by the game. If nothing else using the system in the next ES game would make a lot of sense to me.