Oh just some more impressions from my beta experience:
I rolled up 3 classes and admittedly was rather bored with the first 2 islands. Fortunately it seems each alliance have their own starting island? (not sure whether it was race or alliance, but i played 2 different starter islands) .
It is not bad, it's just not anything new or fresh. The only thing that kept me going was learning the class mechanics and combat that got some interesting things going. There was one interesting quest that came straight out of The Secret World with riddles and running across the map figuring directions, which was quite nice.
Anyhow, when i hit the 3rd island (i think this is the mainland rather than an island) things seemed to open up and i actually got more hooked (which is surprisingly the opposite to what usually happens in MMOs) . I felt a little more interested in what's going on. So this is a positive. Tutorial + first 2 islands are cookie cutter linear quest chains , which is not very inspiring but gives an idea what the game can do. Admittedly this is feeling alot more like a "world" as opposed to instanced action-RPG , Neverwinter which i've played the most the last year.
The graphics are pretty good, i was initially pretty excited about the first person combat thing, but realised it's not working very well for me. For example, you can't see the fact that the enemy is doing a special move (you know the red circle / fire / block / sign indicating you should be moving out of the way) , because this is showing on the GROUND (where you are obviously not looking in First Person mode). So i dunno, Zenimax need to change a few things if they want that to work. I pretty much switched back to 3rd person so i can see all this. Not sure whether i miss some setting or just doing it wrong, but it felt like a big oversight to me.
The world feels very Bethesda authentic, it has that rather mundane realism to it, which can be good or bad depending on where you come from . I suppose if you are use to WoW or GW2 with all these crazy vivid environments that can range from forest to purple outlands then Elder Scrolls will be rather meh in comparison. I primarily experienced sandy/desert and semi jungle/tropical environments, and knowing Tamriel, i won't expect things to become too exotic other than building architecture and insides of ruins.
Overall, i think it will be a good ride for 2-3 months at least (which is all i need at this point) . I have not tried the PvP yet, but the RvR/Siege stuff does look compelling.
At least i did not see anything glaringly wrong or missing in this game.
