I jumped right in and played as a RedGuard Dragon Knight and started off at a nice castle town. My first impression was that the characters and world look really nice. The other thing I noticed is how action oriented the combat is. Your left mouse button is you basic sword swing and you can hold it down for a power attack. The right mouse button is used to block, and if you press both at the same time you can parry attacks. It was very interesting - once you take out your sword and shield, it controls a bit like a third person action game. I didn't have enough time to really dig into my Skill trees since I was only a level 1 Dragon Knight, but even at these early levels combat was fun.

After acclimating myself to the controls, I went into town. As soon as I entered, a Golden Retriever came up to me and started barking at me. This dog clearly wanted me to follow him, so off I went. It turns out that he led me to the corpse of his master. On him I found a mysterious shopping list and from there the quest spiralled into a conspiracy to assassinate the king of the realm. Of course I had to stop it and eventually found myself searching creates down at the docks looking for hiding assassins. So yup, it's an MMORPG. Another thing that stood out was how much of the dialog is voice acted. That combined with the camera zooming on to a character's face while they are speaking made normal dialog a bit more interesting and cinematic than the usual text scroll I'm used to.

I have to say, as a fan of The Elder Scrolls series, I'm happy to see that this MMO has a lot of the vibe and trappings of that beloved series. I'm also happy to hear that this game is coming to Mac platforms with cross Windows/Mac play. Aside from WoW there aren't many high quality MMOs on the platform and I'm happy to see that The Elder Scrolls Online is looking to be a nice high quality alternative.