I pre-purchased the standard edition immediately after playing my first beta back in January.
I absolutely love it. The atmosphere is great, story lines are brilliant, the weapons and armour are cool, there are great monsters and enemies, cool characters and it really feels like you're in the Elder Scrolls Universe.
The downsides however start to become apparant if you come in to the game as a fan of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, and less so as a fan of MMORPGs.
There are a number of changes to the lore of the game, which fit reasonably well, but to some are just too jarring.
For example, enchanting in this game is incredibly different to that in Skyrim. Rather than using soul gems at enchanting tables to apply learned enchantments, you instead gather glyphs from the environment. There are 3 different types, and you need 1 of each. You mix them together to then create a rune, which is an item. You can then trade that item, or apply it to a weapon.
This is a perfect system for an MMORPG with a gathering/crafting system, but it's caused a lot of trouble with die-hard TES fans, since there is no explanation for it in terms of pre-existing lore.
Combat is pretty decent in game, but can feel a little bit floaty. Since it's an MMORPG it becomes obvious at times that ultimately combat is turn-based, rather than fluid like Skyrim. In moments where you might experience a tidbit of lag you'll notice this and it can ruin your atmosphere a little bit.
Like all Elder Scrolls games, there are glitches and bugs that crop up from time to time.
That might be something like your cursor getting stuck in a certain way, or being trapped in the terrain, or a quest getting bugged out. But, there's a really great customer support system, plus bug reporter, and there's bi-weekly maintenance on both the US and EU servers (both set at early morning times to affect minimal traffic) that usually patch up most of the prominent bugs.
There are downsides to the MMO aspect of the game though. For example, you're heavily limited on your skillbar.
You can only have 5 skills available at any time. There's a stuffload of skills to choose from though. Skills related to the type of weapon you're holding, your class, your guild, PvP, Soul Magic (the game's system for refilling enchantments as well as in-field resurrections), and more.
They didn't want to create a game where you're inundated with buttons.
But instead they limit you severely.
At level 15 you unlock a second item slot however. This means you can carry a second weapon that you can toggle to (otherwise you have to swap over to a different weapon outside of battle (no in-battle switching), and also manually change your skills to be relevant).
The second item slot allows for changing to an alternate weapon, good for archers/mages who then have a sword for nearby enemies. The second item slot also comes with 5 extra skill slots, which you change over to.
This helps to some extent, since it's 5 more skills. But, you can't use certain skills if you swap to the alternate skill bar. For example, if you have a summoning skill on 1 bar, and you use it, if you then swap to the other bar, your summon despawns.
Furthermore, the suggestion is that for those of you who like to just use 1 type of weapon, say sword and shield, you can just place another sword and shield in the second slot. Then change over in battle, and it'll be like you've just changed skill bars, but not weapons.
Of course the obvious downside there is that you have to try and get matching weapons to maintain damage, and you have to continue to upkeep twice as many weapons. :/
PvP is a lot of fun, but difficult if you're not in a sizable group of atleast 5-6+ people.
There are some truly great moments in PvP, but you really need to get with others to have even a fighting chance at it.
You're also even more susceptible to doing badly should you be slightly laggy.
Group moments are great in game however. Beyond PvP there are group PvE dungeons, which can be a real challenge and very entertaining. Even more, across the world you'll find Dark Anchors, where you and others from nearby fight off against waves of daedric/undead enemies attempting to invade Tamriel.
There's a lot more I could go on about, but I can't think of it all at this moment and I'll just seriously ramble on.
I truly love this game (but haven't played in a while, since I've not got great connection on my laptop, and haven't been on my desktop in a while).
If there's anything more specific you want to know about, then send me a PM and I'll let you know if I can.
