The 3-hour Elder Scrolls Online beta went down Friday, and here's what happened minute by minute

At the legal request of Bethesda, we were forced to remove this article.

3:00 pm PST: Great , time to play this wonderful game. Client loads, enter my login credentials and — Error 201: Login Failed

3:01 pm PST: I’ve been been beta-testing since the days of Ultima Online, so I knew problems like this were just expected. However a new notification occurred now: Error 200: Timeout without response from server.

3:03 pm PST: After repeatedly hammering at the login button for a while, I finally got something new to happen. The screen switched to black, with a ‘Requesting World List,’ then an Error 101: Failed to obtain list of realms from the directory service.

3:13 pm PST: The same three errors sort of cycled for the previous tens minutes while I methodically clicked on the login button whenever it was available.

3:14 pm PST: Finally, after the ‘Requesting World List’ I saw a progress bar appear for the first time. It sort of stopped around the 67% mark but I held out hope that it didn’t just freeze on me and I would be forced to undergo that entire sequence of events again.

3:17 pm PST: After three minutes of waiting, I was officially in . The game immediately went to a character selection screen, which was a female Nord by default. My first impression was that it looked better than Elder Scrolls Skyrim. In fact nearly every message I saw in the in-game chat box reflected the same opinion.

Since I was pretty worried about my hardware, I disabled all screen-capturing software. The only thing I had was my iPhone 5 so I did my best with in-game footage. It’s also important to note that my email address was sprawled all over the screen so Bethesda can identify who exactly leaked out the photos. At MiddleEasy, we’ll take one for the team and cross our fingers that we won’t be held liable for breaking the non disclosure agreement.

In this beta test only one alliance was available: The Ebonheart Pact, which only consists of Elves, Nordes, and Argonians. You can read more about the other two alliances on ESO’s official page . There were four classes up for grabs: Dragonknight (master of arms and magic, so basically a battle mage), Nightblade (your standard stealthy rouge), Sorcerer (the quintessential mage/summoner), and Templar (the group class for restoring health/magic/stamina).

3:23 pm PST: After a few cosmetic tweaks, I finally have my Argonian Sorcerer ready to rock.

3:28 pm PST: After I pushed the accept button, it appeared I was stuck on the character load screen. I figured that since I already sat around for five minutes, I could spare at least five more before I aborted everything and restarted.

3:30 pm PST: Boom, in . I started off as a prisoner, talking to some ethereal prophet. I saw people running in the background so I knew I had to wrap up this conversation and start running around like everyone else. This is what it looked like.

3:35 pm PST: After running around and talking to a few NPCs, I finally grabbed my weapon, which was a two-handed restoration staff. Yeah, I’m not sure how something that heals can actually do damage, but it appears that when I used it, it siphoned life from my opponents. I finally exited the prison and arrived in a much larger cave with stuff to actually kill.

So what intrigued me about Elder Scrolls Online when I initially played it at E3 was the simplicity of the controls. People in the chat likened it to World of Warcraft, however I’ve never played it so I really wouldn’t know. I think the last MMO I played aside from ESO was DC Universe, and that was on a Playstation 4 at E3.

All movement is done with the WASD keys — your puny arrows are useless on ESO. Chests, doors, portals, quest-related items, and NPCs can be utilized by pushing the E button. The F button is used in order to interact with another player — and it brings up a floating rotating menu with options like ‘Add to group, trade…etc.’ Your character also has the ability to dodge/roll by double-tapping the WASD keys in the desired direction. To attack, you aim the cursor reticle and left click on your target, which will have a red glow covering them. It’s pretty easy to discern who an enemy is if you just pay attention to the color that surrounds them, friendlies are highlighted in yellow. To block an incoming attack, you hold the right mouse button. In order to charge up your weapon, you hold the left button and ensure that you’re aiming at your target. For my restoration staff, holding down the left button enabled me to manifest a visible tube that (I assume) drained enemies of life.

There was an ongoing mission throughout this portion of the beta. I was assigned with the task of finding soul shards to activate some device that was going to teleport me to Bleakrock Isle. The cave I was in wasn’t an instance. It was filled with other players trying to accomplish the same task, however each player had their own ‘quest interactions,’ which was shared in the same location. It’s somewhat difficult to explain, but imagine you have to find a sword in a dungeon that’s located in a specific chest. There may be 40 players simultaneously in the dungeon but each player will have the ability to pick up their unique sword that is entirely localized on their screen — quest items aren’t shared between players.

After killing a few mobs that appeared in this gargantuan cave, I eventually leveled up and had one attribute and skill point to use. I placed one in magic and I unlocked ‘summon familiar’ so I can have a little creature to do my dirty work. As with in Skyrim, in ESO the more you use a skill the more it levels up, which is very reminiscent of the skill system used in Ultima Online. It appears that creative director of ESO Paul Sage utilized some of his lead design roots from Ultima Online — and we’re damn happy.

3:58 pm PST: After collecting all the soul shards and talking to whatever NPCs, I finally had the opportunity to escape through this crazy teleport block. My character levitated up, screen went black, then I returned to the platform with a message that read ‘my transfer to escape failed.’

4:13 pm PST: This bug happened for fifteen minutes until I was able to actually leave the place and enter Bleakrock isle — and it was damn beautiful.

The photo from my iPhone simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s Elder Scrolls, just astronomically improved and changed into an MMORPG. Elder Scrolls Online is exactly what you expect it to be.

As I ran around this open area I saw a bandit camp with a few players hopping in on the action. I thought I would join and use some of my newly-acquired talents to take out some baddies. Everything was going well until ESO announced the servers would be going down in fifteen minutes. Damn, I knew I had to do as much as possible before the server temporarily went down, so I started killing every enemy in sight, and the gear they dropped was pretty nice. Here’s my Argonian Sorcerer rocking some fresh armor threads acquired just before the server went down.

4:24 pm PST: The server was down. Bummer. My friend called me to tell me about his detox in which he only drinks juice and water for 21 days. I entertained him since I had nothing else to do. Apparently it got rid of all his ailments — seems pretty extreme. The dude should just be a vegan and he can have the same results with a drastically reduced approach.

The server popped back up so I had to cut our conversation short.

I took time to explore the environment, really take in some of the gorgeous visuals being presented — so I found a small lake and just started swimming around. The water effects were pretty amazing.

4:31 pm PST: Another notification, the server is going to shut down in 15 minutes. Damn, not again!

4:45 pm PST: Server shuts off again and I checked Twitter to get a sense of everyone’s reaction thus far to the 3-hour beta — and it seemed to be positive.

5:01 pm PST: I log back in and my dude is dead! I’m not sure what happened but when I got back in ESO he was surrounded by bad guys. I had two options: To be revived or to transport to a location. I chose to be revived and I came back as a ghost and then later materialized as my former self. I’m not sure if I took an XP loss after being revived, but I did notice that I had reached level 3 in the game so I had two points to spend.

I placed them in a spell that allowed me to summon lightning above an enemy and I unlocked another spell that enabled me to teleport to a location while doing damage in my path. Pretty good stuff if you want to PvP — and while we’re on the topic of PvP, this ESO beta had none of it. Bummer.

5:27 pm PST: After exploring for a bit, I did another quest in some icy cavern. It took a while to figure it out, I actually fell to my death more than once, but eventually I completed it, just in time for the servers to go down yet again.

5:48 pm PST: The servers went down for a third time, but now they’re back on an ESO announced they would extend the beta for 30 addtional minutes — but only after yet some more server downtime.

At this point I thought I did everything I wanted to with the beta so it was my time to call it quits.

Playing Elder Scrolls Online for the second time I had a sudden realization that every obligation, responsibility, promise, and relationship would be meaningless come Spring 2014. This was MMORPG that I’ve been waiting for ever since Ultima Online back in 1997. The controls are extremely intuitive, the skill leveling system only builds the skills that you use the most, something that was rather ground breaking in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (still, UO did it before anyone else). As far as the graphics — damn. I could have spent well over three hours just admiring the creativity of the world designers that worked on this game.

Granted it’s a long ways away, but with Elder Scrolls Online coming to Xbox One and PS4 as well as PC and Mac, players will have the ability to get absolutely addicted on multiple platforms. When this game comes out in the Spring of 2014, all of my doors will be locked, the phone will immediately go to sleep mode, and I’ll stock enough food supplies to last me well into a five-day gaming binge. This Elder Scrolls Online beta gets a review score of a 9.1 from MiddleEasy for its sheer elegance combined with trusted gameplay.

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The 3-hour Elder Scrolls Online beta went down Friday, and here’s what happened minute by minute

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