Do you remember your first day in eso?

Starlight_Whisper

If so what was it like?

kargen27

Overwhelming and stayed that way for a while. Almost quit several times early on trying to get through the main quest line.

Starlight_Whisper

kargen27 wrote: »

Overwhelming and stayed that way for a while. Almost quit several times early on trying to get through the main quest line.

What got you to stay eventually?

SirAndy

Almost exactly 8 years ago, late alpha and/or early beta.

The only zone that existed was Bleakrock Isle and there were just a few of us running around somewhat aimlessly.

RemanCyrodiil_I

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Shantu

I remember having a monstrous sword I couldn't even kill bugs with. Everything killed me. I checked out for about 6 months before I came back and gave it another shot. This time I did quests and stuck around long enough to get into the combat, though I pretty much sucked at it for another 6 months. That was about 4 years ago. Still enjoy the combat, though it's losing its appeal with all the "fixing" it has endured over the last couple of years.

Seminolegirl1992

Oh gods yes. Nostalgia. 5 years ago, I created my first character. A khajiit with one name because I could not understand at the time why it kept going red when I spaced to start creating her last name. So rather than type more I just gave up haha. I was instantly hooked on the game. Auridon was so beyond gorgeous. There were many others around me that were also new and would emote dance. I began playing in January 2016 and there were firework celebrations and giveaways because it was the New Year. There were fireworks on the beach in Auridon, and someone said to go to Rawl'kha where the celebration would continue. The guy stood on the famous rock, surrounded by at least 30+ people. He would shout out something, like do this emote or he'd ask a question. First to answer or respond would get a prize. I remember how shocked I was when I won 150 mastic, 150 turpen, and 150 pitch. My lowbie self was mesmerized. People were so beyond helpful. I still have a friend on my list today who offered to craft me lowbie gear (back then) and teach me all about crafting because I had no clue what I was doing. Good times.

tomofhyrule

I avoided ESO so long because I was scared of MMOs. Finally joined up when I found out you could play solo and I had serious Elder Scrolls withdrawal.

My first day, I made a Nord and went for the Morrowind tutorial long enough to go straight to the Crown Store and use my first-timer crowns to get the Any Race Any Alliance pack since I had my main's story of a Pact Orc in my head. Also spent an inordinate amount of time playing with the character creation in the first place.

But I still remember playing through the Morrowind tutorial and then leaving the boat in Seyda Neen, and ending up seeing the updated version of TESIII:Morrowind's first sight as you got out of the boat. Knew right there that I made a good choice.

kargen27

Starlight_Whisper wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Overwhelming and stayed that way for a while. Almost quit several times early on trying to get through the main quest line.

What got you to stay eventually?

I liked previous Elder Scroll games. Also had someone in game say in zone chat if you are struggling with the main quest go do some side quests and come back when you are leveled higher. So I ran around in the zone for a while doing random crap and decided it was worth sticking around.
Maybe a month in someone posted in zone chat they were starting a new guild and I joined that. Joining the guild really helped with not getting overly frustrated.
Now I wish the game was as hard as it was back at the very beginning.

Alurria

I remember my first day of beta we were testing something, I got in and after 15 mins the server came down. I think I was still in the tutorial. I had to work the next day and logged in after work only to have the server go down. Then open beta came it was crazy. Launch day was a much better day except everyone was doing quests and the mud crabs were a lot stronger. Lol

Kaurie

It wasn't great. I popped on very confused about the world. I went through the tutorial that didn't feel like it properly taught me. I didn't understand the compass icons or what to do and the whole 5-10 minute tutorial took 1-2 hours. After I left it exhausted and bored, I wandered around Khenathri's Roost. I was skeptical that 5 skills would be fun enough after having more ptime in FFXIV and GW2/WoW, and after about 30 more minutes I decided the combat wasn't for me. I uninstalled. I reinstalled it 2 or so more times trying things out. I never made it past khenathri roost before uninstalling (usually 0.5-2 hours in).

Upon my 4th time in, I was in Vvardenfell and really enjoyed the story telling. After awhile the combat clicked. Eventually, I found out I wasn't doing the story in order and went back to do that (after having finished morrowinds story).

phaneub17_ESO

3 days pre-release, Imperial Templar. I paid for 6 month sub after the free month and got bored after 3. I think I got to VR10 and there wasn't much to do at that point.

Supertonicbaker

Yes I do. Started after Summerset came out and Elsweyr was about to. Went into the city and just got confused and a bit angry because I didn’t know what was going on. Decided to figure it out later and just look around as I loved the scenery.

Started running and ran into this weird scene with some robed and hooded person what looked like talking to a pearl. I just absolutely HAD to investigate what was going on as I’m so very curious. I have never seen a toon die so fast in my life.

Actually, I had. Elsweyr came out and I made a new character then. Still very much confused as to what to do, so I ran out. Saw a dragon chilling and absolutely HAD to run up to this thing because, it’s a dragon!! I think I died so fast my ps4 turned off.

Redguards_Revenge

The multiple beta tests. I still have videos of the voice actors delivering their lines differently. Of course I couldn't share it at the time. They even had roboticides voices for some people. You could even hear the voices of some NPCs hundreds of yards away. lol.

I recently did the coulharbor start and boy is it far different nowadays. In the beta there was a light that took us up and warped us to the next place.

Unfortunately as it is the beta, we came crashing back down and died on the platform.

Casdha

In about 2 weeks it will be eight years and I was just thrilled to be invited to try this game out. I remember always playing 1st person being as I came in as an Elder Scrolls fan and thinking that if they hadn't added 1st person play there would be no way I would play this game as I hated playing in 3rd person. Now 3rd person is the only way I play.

I also remember the level 50 squirrels that use to be on Bleakrock Isle. ( do they even have squirrels in game anymore?)

Shazanti

The very first day, only vaguely. I was playing with friends, but they quit the game. I played a few months after they left because I was enjoying the game, but I had terrible luck finding people to play with regularly (which is what I enjoy most),so I eventually left the game also.

Then Morrowind launched. I came back. I VERY MUCH remember my first day in Morrowind. Getting to and recognizing the Seyda Neen docks, then hearing the call of the silt strider, the massive rush of nostalgia hit me SO hard I will never forget that moment. Even more so when, after beginning questing, stumbling upon a quest that lead me into a canton and as I approach it I see a hound on the slope above the entrance staring at me intently and I just KNEW it had to be Barbas. So, to me, it's the Morrowind 'first day' that is the incredibly, pleasantly memorable one.

M_Volsung

Played the game for about 48 hours straight... had no idea what I was doing and it was the most fun I'd had in a very long time.

rpa

Not particulary well. I reacall slowly (sooo slllooooowwwly) wading thru Coldharbor, Bleakrock, Bal Foyen and getting enough of the dullness of it all at Early Stonefalls, finally attempting to walk to anywhere less depressing and getting eaten by mobs.

orion_1981usub17_ESO

I remember getting my invitation to beta and waiting to the appointed day. Making my dunmer Templar, really taking two hours to simply test out the character maker completely. Then getting going threw the old original tutorial in cold harbor and doing the bleak rock and bal foyen quest before calling it a day. I had a crafted linen robe and two crafted swords in the redguard style. And took a picture in a burning house.

aaisoaho

Dunmer nightblade back in good ol' beta days. Played pact story from bleakrock to mid-stonefalls, until eventually I wanted to see Riften in-game, but the big bad skellies killed me in the southern part of The Rift. (overland used to not scale with the player, so transitioning from Stonefalls to The Rift meant going from level 12 mobs to level 40 mobs - facing a level 40 mudcrab was a death sentence to level 14 character)

I remember a puzzle with lightbeams and chests in Stonefalls, but don't remember facing it after beta. 🤔

Lugaldu

As a fan of TES III-V, I waited and watched for three years until I read that ESO also had a lot of content for solo players - only then did I buy the game with Summerset. However, as others have already written, I was not really enthusiastic when I played it for the first time, because there was just so much to discover and quests that I felt rather lost. In the first few months I only played from time to time (and the order of the main quests totally messed up) until I had more time to play during the Christmas holidays and then got into the game after a more intensive time.

So, many words, but no real answer to the question - I would most likely describe my first day in ESO as "sensory overload".

Supreme_Atromancer

Vaguely. It was 2014 (cue harp strum and foggy lens). I had resisted buying in because of the MMO reputation, but really needed my TES fix after I'd exhausted all of the single player content I could. As someone who always got into the world, story and exploration. I'd particularly always wanted to see what was just over the border from Markarth and Deep Folk Crossing because that's where I pictured my Breton hero to have come from. So by a couple months after launch, I caved and bought in.

The things that stick in my mind are how funny the running animation looked, and just running around Stros M'kai discovering how these peculiar mechanics all worked. It took me a long time to realise that heavy attacks restored magicka, and being mystified by the whole morphing skills scheme. Of course, back then, whenever I made choices they were based on rationalising my choices on what seemed to fit my playstyle or fill gaps in my toolkit. I had no idea what meta was, even though even as early as then, one was developing. I was actually wilfully ignorant for quite some time, because I wanted to get a feel for how the game played for myself and avoid doing what I was told.

My first guild that I joined was based on Magic The Gathering concepts (which I didn't know well), and we all took on roles. I was assigned to be the guild alchemist, presumably to craft potions whenever anyone needed them. I misunderstood, and began stockpiling the guild bank with stacks of Sip of Health and Magicka. Funnily enough, no one ever pulled me up on it lol.

My first dungeon was hectic. I had never played an MMO before, and really had no idea about basic mechanics, expectations, or core game assumptions like "trash" etc, because none of the games I had played worked like that. It was a bewildering experience with so much happening I had no idea what to do. Someone was calling for us to "focus archers" as the first priority but there was just so much mobs everywhere I was just utterly overwhelmed lol.

I remember my first time in PvP, jumping in on the Chillrend server which was DC's "buff server" (back then, many of the significant buffs carried over to pve, so there was a lot of incentive to adopt and maintain your campaign, regardless of content you did). I remember getting stomped and tbagged within minutes by great quality people like Patrick Scott, and getting chewed out by the DC keyboard heroes like Tiberius when I tried to get a group lol. I thought I'd better join a guild, so I signed up with Guardians of the Covenant to learn how to play and the joker in charge of the Cyro group told me I had to stand on the wall at Faregyl for 40 minutes by myself to watch for attackers, and another scab from the guild buying up all my raw mats for dirt cheap, telling me he was doing me a favour lol.

I remember talking my brother and some workmates into forking out the $80 to jump in. I remember my brother being so excited when he thought he'd beat the system by discovering that enchanting nodes respawned. My friends and I ran around a bit, did a public dungeon and literally never ever came back. Its funny because they were excited about it - all MASSIVE elder scrolls fans and some even long-time WOW players, but there was just something that the game didn't do right that didn't click for them.

My friends moved on, that guild died years ago and some *** came back in and petitioned for control of it so he could take all the gold. I've persevered though, met lots of great new people along the way, and hope to be here for a good time to come!

Kram8ion

On the docks in alderon or whatever it’s called and a bunch of idk players or npcs circling me praying and praising didn’t know what was going on but thought wow cool entry to an mmo for me yay
6 years ago now

Danikat

I don't remember much of my first day. It was during the beta tests and if I had to go by my memory I'd swear the Coldharbour tutorial wasn't in then and you started on Khenarthi's Roost, Bleakrock or Stros M'kai. I know that's not the case but I don't remember my first time through Coldharbour at all.

I was mainly concerned about whether this would be an authetic TES game or a generic MMO with TES skins and names thrown on top. (After WoW got popular there was a bit of a trend of companies making their own MMO then licensing a property to market it with and showing little/no regard for the source material.) When I first signed up as a beta tester I didn't know the name Zenimax. Finding out Zenimax Media was created by Bethesda helped, but I still wanted to see the game for myself.

I spent a lot of time checking out Khenarthi's Roost because it was the first time Elseweyr had been in a game, but I also remember asking if it was always raining in Daggerfall, the surprise when I saw someone had managed to get a horse during a beta (which cost 10,000g and was character specific) and encountering a lot of bugs and poor design decisions. Like walking in the front door of a house and being told my quest had completed because someone upstairs had killed the boss and it decided I was in range and gave me credit for the kill, skipping all the intermediate steps.

I thought the game was ok, but would be much better if they fixed more of the bugs. I remember going from "it's a beta test, of course some things are broken" to "Hopefully they just didn't bother patching this version because this is just a stress test for the servers, not a full beta" to "Well the game comes out next week so I don't know what they're doing". Overall I decided it would be worth buying but not worth paying a subscription to play, so my first day in the real game was almost a year later after they announced the switch to buy-to-play. (I timed it so my free month ran out a day after the switch and I didn't have to stop playing in between.) Most of that first day was spent catching up on what had changed (and what hadn't) and deciding on race/profession combinations for my characters.

kip_silverwolf

My first time was in one of the early Beta's. I remember being blown away by the original theme music - I felt the same excitement and anticipation that I always get from Oblivion's theme and I knew in that instant I would be making a home for good in ESO.
I rolled a Nord and had the most wonderful time exploring Bleakrock and Stonefalls with a good friend, with both of us being disappointed that we couldn't explore The Rift, which wasn't open at that stage.
Lol I also remember Doshia being soooo difficult!

BoraxFlux

The sheer beauty of Vulkhel Guard when I first arrived there, I was surprised an MMO could look so good in game.

RaddlemanNumber7

I joined with ESO:TU, when the compulsory subscription ended. Paid about $5 for the game on Amazon. Since they were practically giving it away, I didn't expect the game to last much longer. So I thought I'd have a go and see what all the fuss was about.

Spent a couple of hours in the Wailing Prison and then Bleakrock Isle with a Nord DK, running around with all the other self-absorbed soloists, hitting things with a sword. It felt clunky, mystifyingly over-complicated, somehow old, clearly chopped about by many clumsily-executed system changes, and the graphics were pitifully low res for 2014. Pretty much what I was expecting. I was glad I hadn't paid any more for it.

The game's only saving grace turned out to be it's sheer size. By the time I'd explored the base game, things had started to get significantly better.

KingofAnnwn

It was pre 1T and I ran around Coldharbour like a headless chicken. Eventually went to Stros M'kai and pretty much did the same there for a bit. Everything felt like it took ages to do as I had no idea what was going on

DreamyLu

Yes! I recall very well... It was such a negative experience to me, that I stopped playing immediately and swapped back to my main game!

Some days later, pushed by friends, I gave it another short try, and then another on another day, and so on, playing a little bit here and there... After a while, slowly, l found a way to play in ESO bringing some fun to me. By now, I enjoy the way I play it, chilling solo in explorable, my laziness deciding on what I'm doing (or not!).

Easily_Lost

The only thing I remember was dying 3 times in the Walling Prison, but I kept trying and finally made it thru to the most beautiful landscape.
Been hooked ever since.

JamieAubrey

I don't but I have a few old livestream vods on YT of a few older older chars and what is now my main