Ya see I see myself as somewhat of an Elder Scrolls fan boy. I've been enthralled by the games since ESIII. The story, the lore, the art, all of it. Now when I heard we were going MMO with ES I was a bit worried, but my love for these games won out and I quickly became a champion for Elder Scrolls Online. I spent hours and hours watching all the updates of the progress towards consoles (where I primarily game) and tried to ignore the negative comments I'd hear from those who play it on PC.
Now it is time that I face the music though. It's here and it is quickly heading in the direction of a disaster. I spent 80$ on my preorder so I could get all the goodies and had a chunk set aside to spend on the Crown Store as well, since this is such a big deal to me, I had no problem investing some more money. Then it started. I had the game preloaded on my Xbox One waiting for 12:01. 12:01 comes around and the servers are so terrible I am not able to get in even after 2 and a half hours of trying so I decide to sleep and try it again in the AM. Sure enough I am able to get on and throw together a character and get questing. A FULL 10 AND A HALF HOURS AFTER IT WENT LIVE!
Being the positive guy I am I decided to chalk that one up to possibly my connection or something that is now fixed and won't be a problem again so I can dive in and enjoy Tamriel. Should have just stopped there and asked for my money back. I spent 12 hours 1030-1030 switching between a few different characters and exploring different areas. When I finally stuck with one of my characters for awhile I started noticing funny things going on. At first it was just one or two player characters who would show up as blacked out or silhouetted ghosts on my Xbox. Then it was half of them. Before I logged off it was almost every single other player showing up on my screen as a blacked out body shape. Really *** on the immersion into the game.
During this 12 hour trial I put myself through I got to experience other *** instances as well. For example when wandering through town in Daggerfall and setting up my first character I used a heal spell on myself and was attacked by the guards. I had 0 gold to pay my bounty so I just fled which increased my bounty. Thanks to that little mess up I had to wander around and not enter Daggerfall and not start any of the beginner quests until my bounty dropped. Thanks! But to me the worst one so far has been the NPC glitches. Over that span of 12 hours I had to start ignoring quests one by one because the NPC that I have to talk to won't show up. I will go to the location, I will even find the exact location he/she is at and their name will be there as if you are targeting them, but no character model is there and you cannot interact with them! GAMEBREAKER! Turns out the fix to this is to reset your entire Xbox and log back in. Seems easy enough if it was just one or two. Problem is I had 14 quests stuck like this at one point. On top of the number of missing NPCs the log in time ranges from 15mins-1.5hours for me sitting in the queue! If it fixed them all and I could do them all I would still attempt to continue on and give the benefit of the doubt that these problems are fixed.
This is where I am currently. Today I logged on begrudgingly because last night the game crashed when I was just walking around and after over and hour of waiting in the queue to hop on the server I went to bed because I got nothing. Today is a new day I told myself. They've been working and fixing it up, I shouldn't have any problem! WRONG! I log in after waiting 15 minutes, found out that 2 of the NPCs that were inaccessible were showing up and got excited. But alas, that was short lived. The game froze up walking through town and started buzzing loudly. I attempted to get back to the Xbox homescreen to close out ESO, but that wouldn't even work. Had to hard reset. After that I decided to test it out one more time and was met with the extremely long log in time and a wonderful crash about 15 minutes later. I keep running into scenarios where my character never leaves combat or is completely unable to enter it as well. Standing next to a group of 3 enemies and them ignoring you is funny, but game ruining. Especially when you're trying to kill them and play the game. In the time I have been writing this I have been in the queue. In fact I was in queue 10 minutes before I even started typing and JUST NOW I am logging in. Fingers crossed that I don't crash here in a couple minutes, because that is no way to live my life. ESO is really really wearing thin.
UPDATE: I decided to leave the area I was in just to test it out and I couldn't even get out of the dungeon before it crashed again. Please fix your game or give me my money back. I've already wasted oodles of time and it is getting really old.