In one instance, an Aldmeri player decided to fire up a siege weapon on a ridge overlooking the flag of our nearby lumber mill. Intending to end the support she was providing her allies, another archer and I broke off from our group and sneaked around to flank her. We managed to dispatch her quickly and set fire to her siege weapon, which no doubt helped the rest of our group in overcoming the attacking force. It’s many of these small snapshots that combine together to convince me that there is definitely more to ESO’s AvA than zerg on zerg action.
As a solo or small group player, there are also formalized ways for you to contribute via missions provided by your alliance’s bounty boards. The most solo friendly missions being scout missions that send you deep into enemy territory to find out how things are looking at a particular enemy position. There are also kill missions, which are theoretically something you can complete solo, and battle missions that send you to capture enemy resources.
If you want to be creative about it, there are other ways to play as a lone wolf or in a small group. In ESO, everyone can sneak, and this means you can get yourself positioned in frequently trafficked areas and set up for an ambush. Once you get the lay of the land and figure out where a lot of the Cyrodiil PvE is going on (more on that later), you can also head to these areas of the map and look for other lone wolves or small groups of targets to fight.
I played around as a lone wolf a couple of times and positioned myself in stealth near a number of Forward Camps I discovered. Given the staggered appearance of players spawning from these things, it wasn’t too hard to stalk reinforcements and ambush them as they made their way back to a nearby keep siege. This was both a satisfying way to sate one’s bloodlust without having to be part of a group and also contributed to the war effort, even in a small way.
At one point, I was far enough behind enemy lines that I actually worked my way behind the array of siege weaponry assaulting one of our keeps. I managed to take out a few Aldmeri Dominion players operating trebuchets and destroyed their siege weapons, making a dent in their assault and distracting the enemy enough to have to deal with me. I didn’t last too long, but one life for two and two trebuchets isn’t half bad.
As for PvE, there is a lot of it to do in Cyrodiil, and just like the PvE areas found in the rest of the game, you often come upon it in a pretty organic way. Simply exploring Cyrodiil will offer plenty of opportunities for PvE. But there are quest hubs, too. Wandering around, I came upon a small camp with two patrolling trolls. In the camp, I found a letter addressed to a character named Jena, who had been tracked by its author to Cheydinhal. This was a breadcrumb quest that brought me to Cheydinhal, which serves as a repeatable quest hub for the Ebonheart Pact in Cyrodiil. You can undertake a number of quests here, including a quest that will take you to Vehtacen, an Ayleid ruin found in Cyrodiil, which also happens to be one of the zone’s public dungeons.
Finally, I want to touch on something that honestly trumps all else, and that is performance. It doesn’t matter how awesome your approach to large scale warfare is if it’s a laggy mess and this is where games like Warhammer Online, PlanetSide 2, and even Guild Wars 2 all fell short. All three of these games feature large scale PvP warfare, but suffer or suffered from significant performance issues that impacted the overall experience. WAR wasn’t an amazing looking game, though it was still fairly laggy in large fights. PlanetSide 2 wasn’t optimized well enough at launch, but SOE has devoted significant resources to improve things. Guild Wars 2 was also incredibly laggy in my experience, which initially forced ArenaNet to employ unpopular solutions such as culling (since removed) in order to keep performance at an acceptable level. Making matters worse, Guild Wars 2 was (and perhaps still is?) also a bit of a VFX soup, with spell effects exploding everywhere, making it hard to parse what was going on in all the chaos, especially when frame rates were low.
I had heard rumors that ESO’s AvA held up well in large fights, but I was still surprised by how well things performed once I finally got to Cyrodiil. I’ve never seen an MMO handle as many players on screen as ESO does without significant performance degradation or visual noise. At one point, I took part in a siege where no fewer than 14 siege weapons were firing at the keep (overkill, anyone?) while the fight raged on and my frame rate never dropped below 30 or 35 FPS while running on all max settings. This was a worst case scenario for a game with roughly a month and a half left for optimization and polish and during a weekend where somewhere around 500,000 players or more were hammering the game. Under strenuous, but not as chaotic circumstances, my frame rate sat in the 40-55 FPS range. This was impressive, to say the least.
There were, however, many intermittent instances of latency issues during some large scale fights. Sometimes abilities or attacks took a few seconds to fire off after being executed, but again, I was in a fully populated campaign in what was essentially a massive stress test weekend, so keep that in mind.
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That’s not to say that everything is perfect with Alliance War. One issue I ran into frequently was the inability to tell if I had actually hit someone using my bow. I feel that some sort of ranged hit indicator might be useful here. There are also unknowns that can’t be answered by a single beta weekend. With a fairly freeform skill system and a lack of cooldowns, I can’t help but be apprehensive about how things will play out once players are at high level and have figured out crazy skill and item builds for PvP.
But aside from that, I feel Zenimax has put together an extremely solid foundation with satisfying, well-performing PvP gameplay. If you’ve been on the hunt for a game that scratches your itch for large-scale MMO warfare, The Elder Scrolls Online may just be the one to perhaps bring back the glory days not experienced since Mythic struck gold with RvR in Dark Age of Camelot.
Michael Bitton / Michael began his career at the WarCry Network in 2005 as the site manager for several different WarCry fansite portals. In 2008, Michael worked for the startup magazine Massive Gamer as a columnist and online news editor. In June of 2009, Michael joined MMORPG.com as the site's Community Manager. Follow him on Twitter @eMikeB
