An MMO Recruit vs. a High-Level Elder Scrolls Online Scalebreaker Dungeon

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense why I never got into the MMORPG thing. Though my twisted gaming heart belongs to the shooter genre, I’ve loved many an RPG over the years. Deus Ex. Skyrim. Fallout: New Vegas. Even some buggier-than-Klendathu entries like the Gothic games.The truth is, I temporarily lost a friend to World of Warcraft. By that I mean I saw an incredibly social guy – the kind of friend who was, ironically, on my case to be more social – become a next-level hermit. During the height of his WoW addiction, he once reluctantly sprinted downstairs in his undies to let me in because he was in the middle of some uninterruptable WoW thing and had to get back upstairs. This was very odd to the shooter guy whose multiplayer rounds lasted no more than half an hour and are very quittable.

What made the irony all the sweeter was it was me, the still-to-this-day gaming recluse, telling my friend that he was gaming too much.

It became less an intervention and more an unintended ghost in my mind that MMO equals addiction. Since then, I’ve developed a bias wherein my brain goes seeking that kind of negative MMO reinforcement. A girlfriend who got upset with me because I apparently should have told her I wanted to go to bed before she started her WoW raid. Anecdotal stories about how MMO X is way too grindy or MMO Y is on its death legs because it went free-to-play.

What I’m getting at is though I’ve known for years that the problem is my attitude, it’s still hard to shake. So when the opportunity came along to play a dungeon from the upcoming Scalebreaker expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online

(ESO), this lowly MMO scrub – or whatever the MMO equivalent term is; I’m sure it’s nicer than the shooter nomenclature – took a punt. Far be it for me to try to sprint in full elven armour before I’d properly learnt to walk in my character-creation undies.

In fairness, I have dabbled in ESO before. As someone who sunk hundreds of hours into Skyrim before switching from Xbox 360 (the platform I reviewed it on) to PC just for faster loading times, ESO has long been on my radar as the MMO that might help change my mind. But the beta left me underwhelmed, the launch was less-than-sparkling, and despite a dragon-themed recent Elsweyr expansion, I’ve only managed to put in a meagre handful of hours across the life of the property. Embarrassingly, that’s on top of multiple forgotten-password, forgotten-security-answer accounts that are lost to the ether.

To make matters easier, the fellowship of my dungeon run featured the Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli of legendary support to my short-skilled Frodo self. Creative Director Rich Lambert. Lead Content Designer Jeremy Sera. Dungeon Lead Mike Finnigan. In the same frosty dragon breath, that’s incredibly intimidating company to keep when you’re a supremely confident action gamer, but embarrassingly underequipped MMO player.

It didn’t help that I erroneously loaded one of my still-in-the-training-area ESO Public Test Server (PTS) characters. There’d be no dungeoning with that lad. Mercifully, the PTO lets you load a high-level character to partake in high-level fantasy shenanigans, like the Lair of Maarselok dungeon, one of two dungeons set to launch with Scalebreaker. As if my initial faux pas wasn’t red-cheeked enough, the lovely lads had to talk me through digging into the menus to open sacks that held sets of weapons and armour to at least get my into the foursome fight half-cocked.

The start was, as I had feared, incredibly intimidating to the newcomer, despite the fact I was keenly aware this was high-level content where all of these basics would likely be straightforward for those who’ve played long enough to tackle the content. After the fact, I feel slightly better perusing what appears to be a friendly community of forums wherein advice is both positive and helpful, and failing at dungeons – at least initially – is apparently the norm.

Despite my lack of experience, it quickly became clear I was playing on easy mode given my expert guides. Some of the later steps in the dungeon – which I won’t ruin for those looking to experience it for the first time – were reminiscent of my raid time in Destiny. I realise that’s ironic, given Destiny has borrowed heavily from the MMORPG space, but the idea is that this ESO dungeon doesn’t spoonfeed you the solutions to every little combat-room puzzle and, instead, gives you enough logical pieces of a puzzle to empower you to figure out the rest.

In fact, Lair of Maarselok is kinder in that regard, with an NPC guide who occasionally offers helpful advice to make certain solutions a whole lot more obvious. (What Lambert teased of the dungeon’s hard mode sounded suitably challenging for those ESO players so inclined.) This helpful theme carries over into how ESO teaches you, whether you’re a lapsed fan or as green as me. I decided to take a dual-wielding melee slasher into the fight and took Lambert’s advice to pour all of my XP points into health to help keep me alive for longer.

ESO keeps combat controls straightforward – light attack, heavy attack, block and a blocking push – but it keeps gameplay active in managing the cooldowns on various powers (Diablo style) and avoiding the red-circle indicators of enemy area-of-effect attacks. Sometimes you have to take hits to learn the wisdom (or lack thereof) in certain attack strategies, while other times death acts as a teacher.

In the handful of times that I died, sometimes confused about what’d put me on the ground, I was able to receive a posthumous education from the death recap pop-up. It detailed the total damage I’d taken from which enemy attacks and offered basic hints for how to better avoid death next time, as well as the gear consequences of death. There was time enough to take it in while I waited to be revived.

After watching my recording of the dungeon, it was clear that Sera, whose avatar had the incredibly apt moniker ‘Jeremy Heals’, was adept at making me avoid that death recap screen more often than I’d care to admit. At one part of an earlier encounter, this particular point was proven when the group took massive damage as Sera had a swig of coffee. While the dungeon did have combat peaks as well as narrative troughs and navigation lulls that let you take in the fantasy backdrop of this inside-a-mountain dungeon, there really isn’t much breathing space in any of the battles.

The deeper we got into the mountain, the more Maarselok’s blue corruption took over. It was something that Lambert talked about with the art team to ensure this ethereal blue stuff was immediately at ends with the otherwise natural design of the location and “to sell it’s definitely wrong”. The deeper you get, the more blue stuff you find. More blue stuff equals more corrupted critters, which means the combat difficulty ramps up.

The peon ads that were previously not worthy of combat respect in small numbers start to swarm and take down the player foolhardy enough to Leeroy Jenkins their way into the middle of them. They swarmed around the presence of different ‘Azureblight’ mini-bosses who are convinced to see the truth in your pursuit via videogame diplomacy: by knocking the digital snot out of them. “Convince them by beating them up,” says Lambert. “Once they’re sufficiently beaten up, they can live their lives in peace now.”

This kind of tongue-in-cheek banter continues throughout the dungeon and is reflective of why games can be a lot more fun than the sum of their gameplay parts when played with the right people. At a later point, when fighting nature-inspired foes, Lambert revved up his sarcasm. “We’re mowing through them. Because it’s nature. Mowing. You don’t have to laugh at that.” But, as a sucker for puns, I did.

More importantly, as we progressed, it was clear the earlier seemingly easier encounters were intended as a learning tool, which is appreciated when you’re swimming in the deep end of ESO content. “Some of the things that we try to do as you’re progressing through a dungeon is we try to teach you mechanics, so when you get to a boss fight you don’t get hit by so many mechanics that you haven’t seen before,” explains Lambert.

Normally, a larger group is required to take on a single dragon. Given that ESO dungeons are restricted to four players and Lambert “didn’t want to cheapen the dragon experience”, it was decided to split the fight in trine. Again, no spoilers here, but it feels “very much [like] a dragon hunt”, as Lambert describes it, and each encounter with Maarselok highlights a different aspect of a deadly dragon dance.

Though the initial setup and inventory management had me feeling like I’d made a huge, intimidating mistake, there was plenty of fun to be found once we started tackling the dungeon. Obviously, the company you keep is closely equated to success, but I really liked how organically we split off into different combat tasks and got things done, more so considering how little the Australia-to-U.S. latency impacted the experience.

And while I didn’t finish the play session with an unshakeable MMO addiction, as I’d illogically feared would be the case all those years ago, I am keen to improve upon my own recruit status and see what other non-dungeon enjoyment ESO has to offer.

Nathan Lawrence is a freelance writer based in Sydney who writes about games and film, and is a shooter specialist. He recently wrote about Google Stadia’s prospects in Australia. Say hey on Twitter.