Crafting in The Elder Scrolls Online may very well become a metagame in its own right. Speaking strictly of woodworking, blacksmithing, and clothiers, it’s impressive how demanding it is to make things of value. While you can still create new weapons or armor, you’re now also able to improve the quality of an item if you have the knowledge and materials. You can research the knowledge by deconstructing items, but the process takes hours initially and only gets longer depending on how many traits you’ve already learned for that type of item.
Once you’ve learned the traits, you’ll need “boosters” to ensure successful upgrading. These boosters are found by, you guessed it, deconstructing higher quality items for their source materials. At face value, it looks like an incredibly intricate and detailed system and one that’s destined to claim many hours of my life. However, I do worry about how much of this will translate into actually being fun in the long run.
Of course, we did run into a few bugs during our time spent with the game. There were some issues with quests that broke in spectacular fashion, as well as some NPC issues. Watching poor Jeaun Pierre fall completely through the map was fairly heartbreaking, as there was nothing I could do to silence his screams until he eventually hit a false bottom and died immediately. There is a bit of a communication issue with the server at times. too, so arguments over where an NPC is standing can arise, resulting in them suddenly lurching at you as well as me suddenly shrieking like a twelve year old girl. Zenimax is aware of these bugs, though, and we’re hoping that they’ll be sorted out by launch.
We’re not done with our time in Tamriel quite yet, but this is all we’re allowed to talk to you about today. Check back next week when we can break down the high level PVP found in The Elder Scrolls Online, which may very well end up being the selling point for some of us. Spoiler warning: Jeaun Pierre will probably hit things with his hammer.
In the meantime, if there’s anything we missed and you want to know about, leave a message for us in the comments and we’ll be sure to answer as many of your questions as we can.
