You only get one first impression, and I’m sad to say that from where I’m sitting, The Elder Scrolls Online has blown it. After this morning’s Elder Scrolls Online teaser trailer that showed exactly nothing, Game Informer posted a single screenshot that reveals the look of the long-in-the-works MMORPG. Gotta say: it’s a huge letdown. If you’d shown me this screenshot and asked me to guess what it came from, I would never have guessed it was an Elder Scrolls game.
I’d have guessed that was another no-name game with the same generic, cartoonish art style we’ve seen in nearly every MMO of the past several years. That’s not to suggest that TES has ever really had a unique look that separates it from generic, realistic, Tolkien-esque high-fantasy, but having just come off over 100 hours of Skyrim I expected some visual cues that would connect the online world to the wildly popular offline one. The closest we get, though, are these Storm Atronachs, which are not terribly distinctive — you don’t have to look very far to find a nearly identical lightning elemental in most other fantasy games.
Even more disturbing than the unremarkable look is the trickle of info coming out from people who’ve read the full Game Informer story. As you’d expect, it sounds like there are a few innovations in dungeons and the opportunity for a player to become an emperor, and it’ll match Star Wars: The Old Republic in voice work, but by and large the picture that’s emerging is one of a safe, formulaic MMORPG design. For a game that’s set to come out next year, it’s really not good news for a genre frequently criticized as stuck in a World of Warcraft-derivative rut.