Review: Elder Scrolls Online : Tamriel UnlimitedBethesdaXBOX One and PS4(Ps4 version reviewed)

I sat down to play it just over a week ago and I am now level 20. I don’t know what that means in hours but I do know that it is many.

A lot of nights have started at five in the evening and ended quite triumphantly at four or five in the morning with the realisation that I had not eaten or done anything and was probably, percentage wise, more dead than alive.

This game doesn’t quite feel like Oblivion or Skyrim but is definitely an Elder Scrolls game all on its own and is addictive and glitchy, and beautiful and hard when it shouldn’t be and a glorious way to fill the time in between Skyrim and Elder Scrolls 6, though it seems there may be enough time to fill in between last Christmas and the fall of civilisation in 2094.

I started the game, being asked to choose which faction I wanted to belong to, the three factions come with their own starting areas and useful side effects. The Nords for example have their own skill tree that allows you to develop strength with a resistance to frost which is unavailable, at least as far as I’m aware, to anyone who plays as an Argonian for example.

Starting in Coldharbour which is a small Hamlet at the edge of Oblivion. Cold harbour is latching on to Tamriel liek a Pirate trying to take a ship via gigantic threatening paddling pools in the sky that talk in a deep voice and vomit demons relentlessly onto the ground. When you eventually see these things appear in real time the sudden rush of other players towards them is a fascinating sight. Sometimes I saw ten people run towards it at once, sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty and sometimes a box would appear in my screen everything would go blue, and I will have been sent back to the Playstation homescreen feeling like I’m the only one of my friends not invited to Channing Tatum’s birthday party.

Though the game doesn’t cost anything to play like it did originally on the PC, I did have the opportunity to subscribe to a service of sorts, a certain ‘pay-to-win’ feel. The most important aspect of which grants you crowns, and faster experience gain, so in this respect you can buy a few hours of your life back for a tenner a month. You will have to work a couple of hours a week IRL to make up for it though, and I think I’d rather spend that time playing the game.

Anyone who gets the Imperial Edition of the game has the opportunity to propose to someone they play with on occasion, permanently attaching themselves to each other by two rings, when worn at the same time grant both players a 10% boost in exp also, which makes team work a fruitful decision.

There are more quests than you could realistically deal with thrown at you instantly, some of which are oddly level 25 and involve nothing more than bringing a book to someone, and some around level 10 had me fighting angry level 25 skeletons through a cave to my demise.

The game is really addictive and I have found myself dedicating more than a fair amount of time to it before reviewing, because once I write this, playing it is no longer work, and what does that mean for me?

In short, glitchy sometimes but not as bad as you’ve heard and the game is so fun and massive that it’s worth playing even by yourself for a while but is ultimately more fun with others. So on that note I better get back to the PVP that I’ve only started to scratch the surface of, I think that guy just said my mother was an Argonian.