Remember when every so often, somebody would ask Todd Howard if Bethesda would ever do an MMO? And he’d say, ‘Meh, probably not. Who owns Fallout these days?’.
Well: there’s a game named The Elder Scrolls Online out on PC today and we’ve got an Elder Scrolls review. It’s not made by Howard and co, and maybe looks a little more like WoW than the interconnected Oblivion we’d anticipated all those years ago. But our Nick’s enjoying it, and you might too.
Our Nick has had a good deal of fun sneaking about the perimeter of Cyrodiil’s forts, picking off PvP stragglers. Check his Elder Scrolls Online impressions blog for updates.
Zenimax Online, for their part, have released a ream of charmingly impractical stats to accompany the release – most of which are designed to reinforce the game’s undeniable vastness.
Potentially useful for players willing to dedicate their live to ESO is the knowledge that there are 5.0952187*10^58 character variations to try out, and 40,656,000 different weapon configurations.
Less so the fact that there are 10,202 non-player characters hanging around Tamriel, and some 2235 books – totalling 480,000 words. That’s 32 hours of reading material right there, apparently.
There are, also, 61 million items in the game – which Zenimax helpfully point out is around the same number as the mainland UK population. I’m beginning to understand why not all of those items can be individually physics-enabled. But I don’t think I’m able to stop being grumpy about it.
Oh: and you’ll need to kill 119,050 mudcrabs to reach level 50. Is that the way you’ll do it, or do you have other goals in mind?