First impressions of Elder Scrolls Online’s Summerset (Via massivelyop)

Tiller

Interesting read. 

http://massivelyop.com/2018/04/25/tamriel-infinium-first-impressions-of-elder-scrolls-onlines-summerset-mostly-without-spoilers/

Lord.Bachus

I rejoined the game about 3 months ago
playing somewhat casual pve..
and i am still overwhelmed by the amount of story based content..

so here i am having leveled 2 more characters to 50
and raised my CP from 30 to 160
and stil only done a fraction of the content

summerset means even more content and stories to flesh out the world.
including a new skill line...(they should add more over time)
despite the fact that there is so much to do allready
new content is allways welcome
and it will be kind of fun with everyone concentrating on the new content.

Iselin

Summerset and Arteum are both very well done. The visuals and atmosphere make these two new areas feel very different.

Summerset does have some areas where the hostile mob density is medium by ESO standards but they are rare and most of the landscape is very low on them. This more than anything else in the new zones makes them feel like less of a wild frontier and more civilized which fits the lore of the locales.

The quests, especially the main zone quest chain, are well written with some surprising twists and turns. It's also a continuation and conclusion of a story arc that has been playing itself out for a while in several DLC zones. It has ties to Orsinium, Morrowind and the Clockwork City and some characters (even going back to the assault on Molag Bal in Coldharbour) you have met before will make an appearance here as well. The story is self-contained and enjoyable in its own right. You can do it without having done the previous content but it's even more enjoyable if you have.

The Abyssal Geysers mentioned in that article are similar to the dark anchor dolmens in the ESO vanilla zones. They are casual group events with several waves of enemies and then a boss and reward chest at the end. I have done a few of them and I would rate their difficulty as slightly higher than dark anchors. I can solo dolmens when no one else is around hardly breaking a sweat but to solo the geysers' boss you need to bring your "A" game.

Another nice feature is that Summerset has a lot of delves and public dungeons that do not take place underground in caves. Some are but most of those instances here are not. One of those is a public dungeon that takes place in a port city that has been overrun by Maomer. That's a fun and well-designed instance.

I do have my gripes about this chapter though:

The Psijic skill line does bring some new, useful and quite different skills into the game. Those are a great addition that will be fun to incorporate into builds. But the bulk of the time you will spend advancing the skill line to get at those skills gets repetitive and feels uninspired most of the time. You get maps with vague hints about locations where "time rifts" have appeared - 9 locations per map, and you need to find them and close them. If you like exploring and going all over the continent that part is not too bad (although you'll likely feel different by the 5th of 6th map ) But then you get to where the time rift is and there is nothing to fight there - you just walk up to it, press "E" and off you go to the next one. That's a very dull conclusion to your search.

But the worst part of this is their implementation of jewelry crafting. They've decided that crafting jewelry should be much, much more resource intensive than any of the other gear crafting professions. If jewelry did not already exists in the game and had an established rarity/prestige relationship to the other gear slots, then fair enough, they could make it just as rare and exclusive as they wanted.

But that's not the case. Jewelry is already in the game and what they're doing with the crafting of it is shoehorning a new relationship with other crafted gear that bears no resemblance to the relationship that already exists with jewelry drops vs. other gear drops.

They are doing this in several ways: more rare harvesting mats, rarity and location-specific drops of jewelry in the 6 new traits that you need for trait research and 10X the number of required trait and upgrade mats. The first two rarities would be OK if that's all they did to make this more rare/prestigious. It's that 10X trait and upgrade requirement that is way over the top and brings this from the realm of rare and prestigious to outright insanity.

And good luck crafting your own as a reasonable casual crafter. The type of enforced rarity they have created will make the harvesting nodes a lucrative magnet for bots and gold farmers - especially since the harvesting part is a base game activity anyone can do with or without Summerset.

If you haven't experienced jc on the PTS this probably just sounds like negative Nancy fear mongering. Fair enough. It'll be live on the PC in a couple of weeks and you'll be able to experience the new jc economy for yourselves... have fun with that.