“Three nations are vying for the Ruby Throne amidst the threat of Molag Ball’s imminent invasion of Tamriel. The Aldmeri Dominion, the Daggerfall Covenant, and the Ebonheart Pact. I think they’re fools the lot of them, losing men and women to fighting against each other for an old chair when there are greater things at stake!
“The High King of Skyrim has sent word across all the lands that loyal Nords, Dunmer, and Argonians are to return to their homelands and take up arms in the war between these three alliances. Am I a loyal Dunmer for answering the calls to defend the homeland, or am I a disloyal Dunmer because my homeland is Daggerfall?
“No matter what the Nord king and the Dunmer say, my home is in Northpoint. I was born and raised there, and I’ve never once set foot in Morrowind. I’ve never once prayed to ALMSIVI.
“I am Mathyn Aris, a Dunmer sorcerer from Northpoint, and I’ve answered the call to arms from King Emeric and the Daggerfall Covenant. May the Divines watch over me in this turbulent time.” –Mathyn Aris’ journal
Welcome to the first proper part to my Damon’s Adventures series set in ESO. I’ve made up my mind that this will only be a two part thing. The first post will detail my character I’ve made and the 20 minutes or so I spent in the tutorial section, and the second part will cover my experiences on Stros M’kai, the Daggerfall Covenant’s starting area. We’ll keep it at those two, maybe I’ll touch on something interesting like DLC that I find worth getting, but don’t hold your breath on it.
As my boring little introduction says, I made a Dunmer sorcerer as my first character, and I started in the Daggerfall Covenant. Well, it’s technically my second character. I made a Nord in the Ebonheart Pact, played for a whopping hour, but decided I didn’t care for being a generic warrior and wanted to change things up by having a mage as my first character. I’m always warriors and thieves. Never mages, so I’m a mage! The Daggerfall Covenant was more out of that being what the UESP’s guild is aligned to. I don’t know how my alliance affects guilds, if at all, but it sounded a good idea to be in the same alliance. Not that I’m in a rush, because I prefer solo play and will be running alone as often as I am able to do so and won’t immediately join the guild.
So, as all ESO players presumably do, I woke up in my cell, broke out with the woman who sacrificed herself to free that mysterious “Prophet” that we had to fight our way to, and in a brief 20-30 minutes, excluding screwing about and looking at the interface, inventory, the cell I was in, etc, I was outside.
The tutorial was pretty cool and despite the brevity was able to give me maximum know-how for pllaying the game in that little amount of time, and aside from the muscle memory of wanting to click-in the right stick for 3rd-Person thanks to Fallout: NV, it’s been smooth sailing so far. Coldharbour looked spooky and interesting, though that’s par for the course with Daedric realms, and I didn’t get to see much of Coldharbour, as it was pretty fast to get out of the area and into the alliance starting area, which was Stros M’kai in my case.
Thanks to that option in-game for beta controller support on PC, I was able to download Input Mapper, do the usual “trick your PC into thinking a Sony controller was an Xbox one”, and play the game using the PS4 controller for the PS4 that’s never played.
First impressions of the tutorial area are favorable for me. The UI was nice and clean, the game ran smoothly, even with my being opted-in to a beta feature of using a controller to play the game, and my initial set of mage powers that I unlocked are fun to use.
I like the Character Creation segment of the game. When I made Mathyn Aris, I already knew I was making a Dunmer of that name when I went into creation, but I still spent a solid hour looking at the different races and their creation options just to see what there was.
That’s definitely left a favorable impression for me. Being able to scale height, have such degree of control over body features, even down to minor details like scars and burns across the face and body, etc was all excellent!
I’ve done the tutorial region and at the time of this writing only one and a half of the handful of quests that the wiki has documented for Stros M’kai, so it’s a little early to say how I feel about ESO as a game, but thus far my initial impressions are that it’s a good representation of a TES game, as far as feel and questing goes, despite the odd wanker hopping across the map like a rabbit that comes with playing an MMO.
I’ll leave this post with these two images here, showing my first Nord that I quit using after the tutorial, as well as the Dunmer standing on the boat in Stros M’kai.
I’ll save the actual posting about Stros M’kai for in a week or so, whenever I find time to play ESO enough to leave the tutorial area.
See you later, guys!
