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Well.. so far...
I've got 3 characters; 1 in each alliance although I've only barely started the AD and EP characters. My Breton is a medium armor dual wield/archery Nightblade modeled on the Rogue from the "Sign up for Beta" trailer; my AD sorcerer in medium with dual wield/staff based on the elf chick (will probably be my only AD character; I'm not a fan of them and none of those races are among my favorites) and finally my Nord Dragonknight; medium with 2 hander and archery (ranger archetype). You're allowed up to 8 slots and I'll probably use them all.
My most important first impression is that they did as good of a job as they could have under the circumstances in duplicating the TES experience in an MMO. In every TES game to this point, the character has been a singular hero of some sort (in order, The Eternal Champion, The Imperial Agent, The Neverarine, The Champion of Cyrodill, and the Dragonborn) and I don't see any way to duplicate that in an MMO. A lot of the freedoms that are available in the single-player games would result in the game being unplayable as an MMO. In this regard, ZOS was faced with a truly unpleasable fanbase; there was a rift between Elder Scrolls enthusiasts and standard themepark MMO aficionados both of whom insisted that the game had to be made to their standards and was "Elder Scrolls First, MMO second" or vice versa respectively. I would say the MMO side won out in many ways.. but not by much. While it sacrifices a lot of the "sandbox" aspects of TES, it doesn't give them ALL away, and it feels like there is a lot more choice than there could have been had they just gone for "WOW clone".
In particular, the 2004-era "playing the interface" of WoW, EQ2 and quite a few other games after them is avoided. This is one of my favorite things; I'm watching the action on the screen rather than playing the interface and worrying about cooldown timers. Some people have complained about the lack of information the UI provides; there are no damage numbers or combat logs that I've seen, but I think that's a good thing, especially in a fantasy MMO. While on-screen cues are easy to see and react to, the play is still responsive rather than formulaic. While it's clearly still possible to optimize, it isn't as easy to do it to the extremes of previous games because there is an known factor of how good the player is at responding the screen. There is no "dodge stat" that can be included in tanking calculations; the dodge is based on player skill. There's also no inspect feature for other people's gear. These things really limited the ability of the "efficiency mafia" to control the meta, and from the major departures from the playerbase I've seen, a lot of them revolve around MMO players wanting to yet again race to max level, compute the winning forumlas, then commence to raiding their way through content as fast as possible. While this can be done, the difficulty of establishing perfectly optimal scripts to beat things and the relative absence of data to play Spreadsheets Online with helps limit the control of this portion of the community on development.
I haven't dipped into the actual PVP yet, although I will soon; I wanted to get a character to at least level 15 before trying it; that is now accomplished. Level 15 is where you get access to your insta-swap to another weapon which I regard as vital to PVP, even though you can technically start at 10. I feel the decision to go with the 3-way PVP was a strong choice both from its DAOC success, and it's compatibility with the lore of TES. Some people think the racial associations of the alliance are strained, and I tend to agree, but I think they were necessary and are better than any other combination that could have been made, barring some that would ahve left some alliances at EXTREME disadvantage due to having 1 race highly isolated. I'm not thrilled that they allowed cross-alliance racial choices as part of pre-order, but I am glad that they didn't allow it on a completely unlimited basis. I wouldn't be opposed to that down the road (both as a "renew interest" tactic when the game ages, and from a storyline development standpoint) but I don't think it should have been in early on.
Quests, mechanically, show signs of effort to keep the number of "collect 20 bear asses" quests down to the minimum; the quest helper and such still make them very easy especially at the low levels I'm at so far. Mechanically the quests aren't much more interesting than in the past, aside from a few puzzle quests that required some thought. For example, there was one quest where you had to click 4 pillars in quick succession so that the 4th one was clicked before the first reset. Initially, I couldn't do it.. until I remembered the sprint button. This is the kind of puzzle quest I like; really complex puzzle quests get very frusterating for me, especially when the clues are very obscure. I'm not sure that MMO quests can ever be THAT interesting from a mechanical standpoint, at least in the bulk of them. From a lore/roleplay standpoint though, the quests seem to be far better in connecting storylines to each other, and having the player do it for a logical reason; NPCs either assist the character, are too weak to be of help, or will be doing some other logical thing while you're doing the quest - I have not noticed any that are the style of "Go do this because I just can't be assed to move from my questgiver spot". They probably are out there, but either they're more subtle or I just haven't run across them yet. Some quests have different paths you can choose with different outcomes as well, and a few genuinely give you a dilemma as to which choice is best. For one, I had to choose between freeing trapped spirits haunting a village and leaving it uninhabitable to mortals, or making it safe for mortals but leaving the spirits trapped.
Both quests, points of interest, and rewards can be found by just striking out into the wilderness, and in this respect, an element of sandbox is preserved (though I would not describe this game as fundamentally sandbox in the way the single-player games or EVE are). My biggest beef with this is the lockpicking on the hidden treasure chests has ONLY a timed player-skill element to it without a lockpicking skill like the single player games had. I can do the simple through intermediate locks without too much trouble, but I'm just not quick enough for the harder types (yet). I really liked Oblivion's lockpicking and thought Skyrim's was a step down, but this is.. not impressive either. There are lots of things to see, however, that just make you go "huh". For example, on my Nord in the newbie area I ran across a skeleton in armor, with its sword point down in the snow next to it, that was seated, facing out to see on a snowy cliff, and evidently praying. It wasn't interactable, and didn't do anything, but it did make you wonder what it was doing there. Little events apparently happen out in the wilds as well; I read about one where an ice and a fire mage dual, and if you stand and watch to the conclusion you get quite a bit of EXP - more than you would for jumping in and killing them. I really want to run across this event and see it myself.
I like the class system a lot; I'm able to make all the archetypes I want by combining armor, weapons, and class to fit my image. I'll be using all 8 slots too. All 4 classes seem well represented in the player base so far, and except for the Templar being an obvious "primary healer" choice, none are really tied to playing a specific way. I saw a build for, and plan to make, a heavy-armor Nightblade with little stealth; this is suitable for tanking or DPS and simulates death knight/shadowknight reasonably in terms of flavor.
In some harder quests, you have to kill a "boss monster" at the end, which require special tactics, much like many dungeon and raid bosses require in other MMOs. It's nice to see this in the single-player experience, rather than just an endless horde of mooks. Some are a little frusterating to kill, but they all (so far) have had an exploitable weakness that's key to beating them rather than just relying on twitch speed to avoid their attacks.
Game needs more bankers. They're always swamped with a zillion players around them; often worse than any WoW bank ever was.
I am not much of a tradeskiller; I usually dabble in them but never get into them the way big-time crafters do. I find these ones to be a little bit onerous, especially enchanting, by which I am almost totally mystified. That said, I am glad that crafted gear will be among the best stuff you can get rather than just being "stuff you use for twinks until they get that dungeon loot".
Combat is better than beta; in particular basic and power attacks have been improved in terms of damage. In beta they both felt very anemic and I relied almost totally on abilities for damage, so I am pleased with that change. Bashing and blocking, however, feel ineffectual compared to Skyrim's except when used against enemy power attacks or special moves. Bashing, especially, could have been done better, although I could see it potentially being overpowered in PVP if it were buffed too much.
Stealth is not up to the standards of other TES games, IMO. On the other hand, I could see content being trivialized and PVP being dominated by stealth archers if it were up to Skyrim's standards of power, so that may be a good thing. I would like to see the stealth itself, if not the offensive benefits of it, improved some especially since it uses stamina, unlike the other games. There are perks to improve stealth but not anywhere near as extensively as Skyrim had them.
There is a "disguise" gear slot, and disguises are useful for many quests, providing a way to do some things other than just hacking your way through or sneaking past. Disguises seem pretty prolific too; I've done at least 6 quests involving them so far.
Bugs do not seem to be a huge problem. While the game has had serious issues with some bugs, they seem to be chasing them down pretty well; it is MUCH less buggy than earlier in beta. I tend to have good luck avoiding bugs in games though, so I may have simply avoided most. I have encountered a few, but they have either been inconsequential, or easily fixed by lgging out and back in.
That's all for now. Once I have tried PVP, gotten into the mid-levels, and tried a few more character concepts out I'll take another look at how I feel about things. I must say, though, I definitely needed something to break up the EVE. EVE is awesome but.. sometimes it's very frusterating and a lot of work, and it's nice to play a game where there are not other players constantly lurking for the opportunity to attack you.
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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."
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