why you should play elder scrolls online in 2023
Okay, I've been considering making posts about "why to play X game I love" but finally decided "what the hell, no time like the present." And since ESO is on my mind today, it gets first dibs!
It's an MMO set in the Elder Scrolls universe - think Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, etc. It's the Elder Scrolls theme park in the same way that FFXIV is the Final Fantasy theme park. But, in the same way, it's not exclusively for people who have experience with the previous games - it's a fun, immersive fantasy world whether you know anything about previous lore or not.
You should play ESO if ...
You like immersive fantasy worldbuilding. Listen, if there's one thing the Elder Scrolls team can do, it's worldbuild like motherfuckers. Do you want a story that reaches back thousands of years and covers dozens of countries/empires/territories, where you can find lorebooks around every corner, and expansive essays on the internet about the briefest of details? ESO has you covered.
You love overland exploration. This is ESO's bread and butter. The explorable areas are expansive and varied and absolutely gorgeous, and the game is built for the player who just wants to travel and collect things and see the sights. Tamriel has pretty much every biome you can imagine - you want medieval Britain? Head for High Isle! You want an Arabic-style desert? Alik'r Desert is your place! Rugged arctic landscape? Listen, there are FOUR SEPARATE Skyrim areas for you. You're like "I just want weird fantasy things that don't look like anywhere on earth?" Vvardenfell and its surrounding areas have you covered. You can explore as you play the story, you can go on a hunt for the perfect screenshot location, you can find an RP location that fits your character exactly, you can make it your goal to complete every exploration achievement in the game ... you can do it all.
You want a game where exploration isn't gated behind your level. ESO made the switch to what they call "One Tamriel" fairly early in their development cycle - this means that all mobs and quests are synced to your level in the overworld, and you can start or go anywhere you want no matter how low level you are. You can play through the storyline in release order, or you can say "I want to start in the newest expansion," or you can go "listen I'm only here for vampires in Western Skyrim," all of these are valid and possible ways of playing. You don't have to go "man the new expansion looks great but I have to put in HOW many hours to get there??" It's all available to you from level 1!
You love decorating houses. Listen, if there is one thing ESO does better than any other MMO (at least the ones I've played), it's the housing system. You can own ALL THE HOUSES. SO MANY HOUSES. Small and large and every conceivable style! You can buy land with no house on it, and build your own structures! You can decorate without having to learn how to glitch or press six buttons at once! And housing feeds very well into the rest of the gameplay - you earn furnishing plans from pretty much every conceivable gameplay system, so it becomes an excellent reason to go do your daily stuff and explore. And the housing community in ESO is one of the most creative groups I've ever seen, I could watch their YouTube videos and streams forever.
You like MMOs that allow you to play mostly solo. None of the story progression is gated behind the need to group up. There is plenty of group content, but it's all optional. There are bosses across the landscape and in public dungeons that require multiple people to kill, but you'll always come across people who want to help kill them without having to group up. And with the last few expansions, you now have companions - NPCs you can unlock and have follow you around everywhere. They can be set and geared to perform any role - tank, healer, DPS - and the AI is good enough at any of those to get you through pretty much anything overland you want to do. (And as a side note, some of the companion quests are really good, and they've been getting really, really good voice actors for the companions themselves - see: Laura Bailey, Brandon Keener - and they have fun dialogue as you wander.)
If you play for story, your mileage will vary. Don't get me wrong, ESO has some very, very good stories within it! But it's not a linear story a la FFXIV or single player MMOs - it has a main storyline for the base game zones, and each DLC/expansion has its own storyline that sometimes connects into what happened in the base game, but for the most part ESO's story is a fragmented experience, and you have to go searching for the stories that connect most with you. Can you find them? Yes, but be ready to put in the time to look. (My personal recommendations? The vampire story that starts in Rivenspire and continues in Western Skyrim and The Reach is my absolute favorite; Elsweyr is also very good, but is more of a direct continuation of the base game story than anything else, so would probably need that context going in. A good portion of the fanbase will cite the larger Morrowind-Summerset storyline as the best the game has, and it's very good, but didn't quite stick with me as much as the others mentioned.) ESO tends to be more about the story of the world at large than about the stories of individual characters.
And speaking of story, the game is absolute balls at directing you to places where starting the story would make the most sense. If you want to experience the story in a vaguely linear fashion, here's what to do when you create a character - immediately head to whatever city is your chosen faction's starting city (Daggerfall, Auridon, or Stonefalls), and wander around until you trigger the "Soul Shriven in Coldharbor" quest. That starts the base game main story, and is the best place to start as a brand new player. The other tip: the fancy striped quest markers are indicative of the "main" story quest in each zone, do those when at all possible.
And speaking of factions, those only matter if you want to play PvP - and only Cyrodiil and Imperial City PvP at that. Otherwise, it's just flavor these days.
ESO is my comfort "explore and collect" game - I find it very chill to just wander around, level new characters, dig up antiquities (ANTIQUITIES, my favorite side system, seriously I could look for leads and dig things up forever), collect materials to sell in my guild trader, and vaguely achievement hunt while listening to music or YouTube. The scenery is beautiful, the character creation is robust and turns out very cool looking characters, and the combat system is simple enough that I easily remember how to do things even if I've been away for a little while. And it is free-to-play, after buying the game; you don't need a subscription to access anything you've purchased, you just miss out on a few good quality of life features. (The craft bag, I could not live without my craft bag, seriously.)
Some version of ESO will be free on the Epic Game store starting tomorrow - my assumption is that it will be the version that contains all DLC/expansions except the Necrom chapter, which was just released last month. I highly recommend picking it up if you play on PC, just to check it out, if anything above sounds appealing to you! (And if you want to splurge, I can very highly recommend Necrom - the new class it introduces is maybe my favorite class to play yet, the two companions it introduces are fantastic, and Apocrypha is a fascinating area to explore if you like creepy eldritch horror type stuff.)
If you want to know more about ESO, just give me a shout! And if you're a mutual who decides to try it, hit me up, I have many gifts to give people!
