After owning this game for last 2-3 years or so and never giving it a shot, I thought of trying it out this year. So far I have played for about 300+ Hours spanned over 8-9 months. Here's my honest impressions of this game which includes what I liked, disliked, and just absolutely hated.

Liked:
- The graphics are great for an MMORPG. It stands its time and actually looks great even on a handheld. I played this game on SteamDeck and I was able to get constant 60+ FPS in PvE content on High settings. Now PvP is whole another story which I will mention below.
- Story is somewhat interesting compared to most other MMORPGs where they just have the story as a filler but here you actually get to learn an extensive lore of Elder Scrolls.
- Fully voice acted story. This is an extremely unique feature. Even Genshin Impact does not have fully voice acted characters at all times for all lines of text but ESO manages to give you A-Rated actors for their stories and all side missions too. Hats off for that.
- Grinding can be a bit fun, given that you have few friends. We all know that grinding is a major issue in games these days but I actually found doing my dailies and Undaunted dungeons to be quite fun. Crafting is good too but of course takes a lot of time. I think one needs to spend atleast 400-500 hours to unlock all traits for all weapons, maybe even more.
- Daily rewards have been good (atleast in last 2-3 months). However, I have also heard that they were horrible for last few years but I don't really care much about them honestly.

Disliked:
- The game dips massively in PvP content but that is a known issue from the developer's side which they finally tried to address this year (after almost a decade of abandoning PvP zones) but honestly nothing has been fixed as of the time of me writing this review. DO NOTE THAT AS OF NOW YOU ARE ONLY MAINLY PAYING THE PRICE OF THIS GAME FOR PVE CONTENT. PVP IS DOWN THE DRAIN. Check other reviews or Reddit to see the full story on PvP.
- Apart from the actual story of the quests, the gameplay itself is abhorrent. Everything is repetitive fetch quest. Talk to a person, go to the marked location, collect some items, defeat the boss (which is often times super easy even for a beginner), come back and deliver the item. If you are lucky the quest would end right there but if you are not (which for most quests you are not) then you need to repeat this same thing about 2-3 times but in different locations and finally you get an uncommon staff (which you will deconstruct at best) and 300 gold for completing the quest and wasting 15-30 min of your time.
- The game has a loooottt of weapon and armor sets. But only a dozen are worth having and every character revolves only around those dozen weapon and armor sets, which makes you wonder whats the point of 1000 armor sets in the first place??? Lazy developers, honestly. The community refers the collection of these items to as "Sticker Book", cause that's really what it is. You collect 99% of weapons just to fill the set so you can complete your collection and not because it is ever going to be used.
- No dynamic world difficulty. Once you reach level 50, the enemies in the world stop levelling up. However, you continue to do so till Champion Points 3600 which could take you few years (2-3) to reach if you are not a complete grease-munching loser in real life who has no life outside of video games. Anyways, the developers have long forsaken QoL updates for this game. That brings us to 2 difficulty levels basically that is often defined by dungeons. Normal and Veteran. Anyone can do Normal dungeons but in order to make any impact in Veteran dungeons, you either need a character which is Meta or you should be really high level (around 1000 CP+). Being 1000 CP+ could take you around 6-10 months of almost 1-2 hours of daily gaming. The rewards of Normal dungeon is low or mostly useless so people who play solo often queue up in Vet dungeons... Well... That brings me to the final section.

Absolutely Hated:
- The ESO community (especially in Europe) is filled with narcissistic a-holes. I would rather eat chalk every day for the rest of my life than deal with the regulars of ESO. People have such degrading personality that it is honestly laughable. Of course, some people are completely awesome, like a guy I met in my early days and he actually gifted me 1 million gold and crafted one of the best armor sets in the game for me to help me start off. Absolute legend! BUT.... that was one guy. One guy that I met about 8 months ago. Since then I have not met a single guy with personality or generosity even close to his. I made a promise to myself that I will quit this game once I repay this kindness off to a new player once I become capable enough of helping others, and after 8-9 months I feel like that I have achieved that tenfold and helped many new players but that's all. The game seriously needs to get rid of most of its older playerbase if it really wants to sell. Otherwise these a-holes will keep on creating a greater negative environment for all new players and no matter how many graphical updates ZOS will bring, it won't do any good.
- Inventory management is ridiculous. As many have already said in other reviews, this game is Pay-to-Play in disguise. Other MMORPGs atleast say it upfront that they are going to charge you a subscription fee in return for you to take advantage of the most basic features. But this game doesn't tell you that. It forces you to buy its monthly subscription, on top of the base game + the DLCs which you have already purchased separately every year. A scum move.
- THE SERVERS GO ON MAINTENANCE FOR ALMOST 7-12 HOURS EVERY WEEK!!! That means you will definitely miss doing your dailies + claim your daily login reward unless you are unemployed or are young and have freedom to play 24x7 (I call that lazy parenting).

Final Verdict:
- Would I have played or bought this game had I known all of this previously? NOOO WAYYYY!!! I honestly feel like I have wasted a lot of my time, energy and resources on this game. The only other game where I felt this same way with a disgusted stomach was The Crew Motorfest which I pre-purchased for almost $120 and then I later discovered that the game is infested with hackers and cheaters and developers actively ignored it for many months. Everything in that game was a chore. ESO is bit better than that but thats an extremely low bar.
- Was or will this game ever be good? Nope! Anyone who claims that this is the best MMORPG or even top 3 is lying to you or have clearly not played any other MMORPGs in their life for more than 6 months. I would put this in top 10 but definitely not top 5. FF14, Neverwinter, Guild Wars 2, Dune and Warframe are complete different beasts compared to this clown. ESO will never be able to top them or even be close to them in terms of QoL, gameplay and respecting its community (you should watch how ESO team treats its own community members).
- Should I get this game on sale? If you want to add this just to complete your Elder Scrolls collection in your library then sure. But if you are low on money, or want to get a game that you can actually have fun playing then I will advise you to steer clear off of this.
- Will this game be alive in next few years? Probably, probably not. ZOS - the developers - recently appointed a new CEO. Change in leadership can mean a good future but if we know anything about the market right now then it only raises red flags. Microsoft earlier this year laid off ZOS teams who were working a new MMO, there have been weekly server issues that lasts for 7-12 hours, declining player count, and recently ESO offered its subscription for free for a week which they had never done before! All of this screams red flag. Maybe this game will stay alive but keep your expectations extremely low if you want to be happy.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME AT ANY PRICE. NOT WORTH IT.

This is no longer the Elder Scrolls Online that I fell in love with and is just a shallow husk of a game that's being systematically ruined by the developers. As someone who has been playing since the launch of this game it really pains me to see the state that the game is currently in and where it is heading. Your time is better off playing a game where the devs actually care about their playerbase.

Itemization: There is over 650 unique item sets in the game and only a handful are being used. While there will always be a meta in video games this is less of an instance where a handful of sets just outperform the rest by a little bit and thus make them the meta; this is a case where the other sets have had the numbers lowered to the point where the sets that are meta are the meta because they are the only usable ones. For instance there was a new mythic item added to the game that interacted with a sorcerer ultimate ability that replaces your light and heavy attacks. This mythic item works by boosting heavy attacks by 50% and thus boosted the power of the ultimate. This was simply a fun setup that was good, but not meta for some of the endgame content, and yet they removed the mythic item working with the ultimate. Meanwhile there is another mythic item that reduces your light and heavy attack damage by 99% and this mythic had and still reduces the ultimate damage by 99%. These are the decisions that the developers choose to make where anything that benefits the player they take away and give us no replacement but anything that is detrimental is taken away.

Classes and Skills: There is no longer unique ways of playing the game or distinction between classes and specs as it has all been streamlined and homogenized to the point where everything plays the same. Sub classing has been one of the worst things to ever happen to this game. They already had issues balancing the base classes but letting you choose one line from two other classes meanwhile doing nothing to boost base classes to make up for the opportunity cost forces you to subclass to keep up. Unfortunately there are skill sand skill lines that are leagues better than others and picking certain skills and ability lines means that you are actively giving up and opportunity cost that gimps you as a player. We have had this system for a patch and this upcoming patch should have been a patch that focuses on tuning things that are blatantly overpowered such as the Arcanist class ability fatecarver (the best AOE and Single target spammable in the entire game for PvE) they instead chose to nerf things that were helping other classes keep up and even nerfed some of the class skill lines with a sub 5% pick rate for endgame PvE content AND PvP content. The week one patch notes were hit with so much backlash by the player base that they decided to walk back some truly awful changes, but then refused to walk back some others. They were then so scared of even more backlash that they gave us NOTHING for the following 3 weeks of the PTS cycle except for a few minor NERFS. The current state of pure classing is in shambles with some classes such as necromancer not being able to use it's own abilities. Necromancer works by having some abilities generate corpses and other use the corpses. They decided that the corpses that are core part of the necromancer rotation should count as pet and capped them at 10, with the oldest corpses you generated not being despawned if you try to summon another when you are at the cap, this means that if you use the more than a single corpse generating ability you rapidly hit the pet limit and are just not allowed to use your abilities due to being at the limit. It has been like this for months and they have done nothing to fix this outside of making it so that you don't use resources if the cast fails due to being at the pet limit.

Update cycles: Updates in this game happen four times a year, usually with around three months between them. For some reason the developers refuse to hotfix anything, such as the above stated Necromancer issues, UNLESS it positively impacts the players. For instance there have been patches where there is an issues with the code that allows players to get more items than intended or something in the crown store at a lower price than intended. These will rapidly be hotfixed within hours and players that benefited from them will be banned. This means that if something negatively impacts a class or playstyle then you will have to wait for at least three months or even more before the issue is addressed. For instance the above stated necromancer issues have been ongoing for three months and they have no intention of fixing them for at least another three months at a minimum. There have been so many cases over the years where certain sets and classes have been left in unplayable states for upwards of an entire year.

Developer team: The developers are plain and simple not a part of the player community. There is little to no communication with the dev team and any player based feed back gets thrown in the trash unless people start mass cancelling the subscription. The dev team is also just generally not knowledgeable about the game. The most blatant instance of this was the lead combat developer not knowing that heavy attacks restored resources (something that is taught to the player withing the first 5 minutes of gameplay. Another instance of the team behind ESO's incompetence was when the Community Manager actively and publicly shamed a large content creator to the point that he quit the game as a whole.

Monetization: To put it in one word it would be "predatory." The premium currency has such little value that the minimum buying option will buy you a single pack of crown crates "lootboxes" that have basically a 0% chance of giving you anything of value where you need to drop hundreds of dollars to get enough pity currency to buy a single on of the high tier items. There is also a free to play equivalent of the pity currency where you will need to play everyday for nearly a year to buy one of those higher tier items. outside of the crates you have things like in game houses costing hundreds of actual dollars to purchase in the game and to top it of they FOMO so many of the extremely pricy things. Another issue is with their change of content releases. In the past we had two dungeon packs, a main expansion, and a DLC zone. While you always had to pay for that year's expansion, you would get access to the two dungeon packs, the DLC zone, and all past dungeons, DLC zones, and previous years' expansions included with the ESO subscription. This year they upped the price of the expansion and instead of this price hike being due to the zone being bigger etc its because they are forcing you to buy the dungeon packs AND the DLC zone to buy the expansion. You cannot simply just buy the expansion without buying the other things that are already included with a subscription. While this may be nice for people without the subscription, let me start off by saying that a one month subscription is the same amount of money as the cheapest pack of premium currency and not only does it give you access to all of the subscription perks but it also gives you more of the premium currency than the premium currency pack. This means that if you wanted to eventually not have a subscription but still have access to the content it is more cost effective to pay for a subscription and buy the dungeon packs and DLC zones with the premium currency you get from the subscription and in the meantime of you getting the currency you already have access to all that content due to the subscription. So you may be asking what the subscription gets for losing 3/4ths of the yearly content value that was included with it? Well the answer is a chest to store up to 500 stacks of furnishings...

Buy to play. Keep buying to keep playing.