Steam thinks writing a second review time travels you to when you wrote the first one. I have 5300 hours, not 360

ESO is an amazing game with an incompetent developer team. Since this is my most played game, i have a lot of thoughts on it, and I'd like to split that into sections.


DLC, and the first impressions:

Firstly, there's no pay-to-win. None. PvE endgame is all DLC content, but you can't pay for power, only overpriced convenience and cosmetics.

It's no secret that ESO was not a good game at launch. It shows. The base game areas are often incredibly dull visually and occassionally contain outright bad texturing and map design. This also applies to the base game armours, which are just textures stretched over your skin 80% of the time. Zenimax (zos) seems to be aware of this, and so have made the game's first DLC of Morrowind completely free for all new accounts. Morrowind itself is a nice looking location, though problems arise almost immediately; New players will start out here rather than the curated starter zones designed to ease players into the game, and are now thrust into the largest zone in the game, withdead space between important areas and no direction to discover important locations and events within the game - most notably, the main story.

For reasons I can't explain, the main quest does not begin for new players until they finally leave the DLC area in which they began - which may be halfway to the road to max level if they've done all there is to do there - and that means they won't find the main quest until initiated with the game, where it appears in the quest log from nowhere. If they realise it's important and continue they're brought to the base game tutorial no matter their level, forced to learn basic actions again. At the end, they are finally sent to the real starting location, which feels odd to a player with experience. Every player I've spoken to on the subject has been annoyed about missing out on the proper new player start, and it gets worse when you consider the DLC areas in which they begin are continuations of the base game's plot, effectively forcing you to start a plotline you've yet to gain the context for before you can acquire that context. It's incredibly messy, and frankly as a result I can't recommend this game to new players without an existing player as a guide. The new player experience is that bad.


Combat, and how the fans fixed it:

ESO's combat at it's core is very fun for its limitations. You're limited to 10 abilities and further limited by how you go about casting them by resource pools that abilities can draw from. All skills are on a global cooldown of one second but have no individual cooldowns, which lends to a very satisfying rhythm when you're smacking a boss or a player, especially when mastering weaving, a major damage increase where a player inputs a basic attack immediately before a skill cast. Simple on paper, fun in practice, and it remains just as engaging at any level.

Problems lie in tracking your ability usage. Many lingering skills have odd durations which don't line up with anything, and the only tool in game to track your effects is laughably bad and practically unusable. Unfortunately, the only way to enjoy the combat (for me, at least) is with tons of addons to streamline the experience. Ability timers, GCD trackers, saving/loading ability bars and gear sets, it's all limited to addons. Addons are explicitly allowed and supported, but there's a level of jank to many of them that leaves a player wanting. Having dabbled in other MMOs I can see how it may be extremely jarring to another MMO fan coming into this game. My only recommendation is to look into addons for yourself before you decide whether or not you like the combat.

Further problems come from the lack of proper tab targeting. Whatever your crosshair is on is your target. You can't really move your camera around to inspect your surroundings (important in many trials) without losing several casts, and a common strategy in PVP is to circle your opponent incredibly quickly, unfairly losing out on tons of casts for motor impaired players like myself.

Aside from that, the classes are balanced, though there's a slight favour to th DLC classes, which tend to apply buffs/debuffs that can't be otherwise obtained. This isn't a big problem though, as all endgame raids can be completed at their highest difficulty with no deaths with any class setup as long as all players are skilled. Differences between classes are negligible. All classes play fairly similar, and are defined by a few quirks that are mostly just how it feels to play. Balance shifts a lot, so pick what you like. Unfortunately the game seems to be balanced around PvP, and skills are not separated in effect between PvP and pve, so oftentimes the weakest PvE classes will be nerfed because of some PvP jank.


Visuals:

Among other MMOs, ESO looks nice. Not great, but not bad. Base game areas are often fairly plain, but the DLC areas are very inspired and are a joy to explore. The Character creator is likewise pretty good, but not impressive. You won't see a duplicate of your face in thousands of hours, at least. The textures are low res, but an addon can help this, allowing access to the uncompressed textures, which look fairly good unless you zoom in super close.


PvE?:

It's good after 300 hours. Base dungeons are pathetic, their bosses are punching bags with no mechanics. Unenjoyable while leveling up. They get good by the 2nd dungeon DLC, but every piece of PvE content that I like is behind a DLC paywall, and it's a very large price. Skipping straight to that point is also not possible, as lots of leveling is required to meet the base requirements for even the easiest of the fun dungeons. DLC trials are even worse for this, and many trials are a slog unless done on their hardest difficulty, requiring the top gear and research to the fight's mechanics, as well as a dedicated team capable of pulling it off. The problem is that these groups vastly vary in skill, and fast learners can get frustrated when they master a fight before their allies have figured out basic mechanics. Finding competent groups that will accept you with no prior clear is nearly impossible, you just need to know the right people. Still, the PvE itself is the most fun I've had in any game, so whether it's worth the time investment is up for debate.

PvP?:

No. It's unbalanced, and has not received a proper content update since 2017. On top of that, it's laggy. So laggy it's become notorious for slowing the entire server down during PvP events. This is a major problem considering the targeting system, because pointing at a target under 5000 ping isn't intuitive. I don't recommend this game for PvP at all.

RP?:

Absolutely. Elder Scrolls has very deep and intricately woven lore, allowing for your character to feel really entwined with the world if you'd like, but it's also up to interpretation enough to give you some wiggle room with stranger concepts. I've met some of the coolest people I know through RP in this game, though my only problem with it is the elitist attitude the RP hub discord can have, the small communities you can find using them tend to be very welcoming and friendly.


Updates, and the windows 98 game server:

This is a problem that arose in 2020, but it's a big enough problem I need to mention it even if later fixed. 2020, the so-called 'year of performance' for this game was a disaster. Crashes run rampart, with several an hour, and the game still runs horribly for it's age. Server lag is also very common. Even with nothing going on you often get dropped from server, which is disappointing for a game with this much income.



Overall, I love this game, but don't play it until the crashes are fixed if you're considering it. That's why my review is currently negative, but I'll be changing that when they're done making 200 dollar in game houses and decide to fix it.