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Ignore anyone who says the game is Pay 2 Win because nothing in the store is P2W. Nothing. It's Pay 2 Look Good because of cosmetic skins, mounts, specialist houses etc.
There are chapters, yearly expansions kind of like WotLK or TBC. You can buy these on Steam.
There are DLCs of 2 types: zone (add a zone, a little of story, sometimes an extra activity) and dungeon (a pack of 2 dungeons). You can buy these only in the in-game crown store which uses real money.
There is a subscription, it is not required to play, but while you're subbed you have access to all the expansions and DLCs except for the latest chapter (currently, Necrom), along with other bonuses, like unlimited space for your crafting materials.
Here on this page you can see two different purchase options.
Standard Edition is base game (still has A LOT of content) and the Morrowind chapter (which is free now).
The Elder Scrolls Online Collection: Necrom is the most you can get on Steam, it includes the base game and all the chapters. The DLCs you'll have to get in the crown store.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/306130/The_Elder_Scrolls_Online/
As for how this compares to WoW, well... I quit WoW because of what they've done to the story (with all the retcons), and ESO is a little better in that regard.
The game is beautiful, though the artstyle is different from what you're used to. The story is good up until Elsweyr, after that it noticeably drops in quality. Every quest is voiced and they all make sense, so no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like "go kill 8 kobolds, then 8 other kobolds, then 8 different kobolds" in 3 consecutive quests.
If you play the game chronologically (which requires a guide, because the game doesn't limit which stories are available to you, you can start wherever you want), characters you've met before will recognize you later. Makes questing fun and relaxing.
You can commit crimes in this game (to an extent) buy stealing, killing innocents, becoming a werewolf or a vampire. There are DLCs which add guilds for the first two, giving you skills which might be helpful if you favor that kind of gameplay.
You can have companions - NPCs which follow you and fight alongside you. You can customize their armor and set which skills they're going to use, making one a tank, or a healer, or a dd.
You can have houses in the game and decorate them with furniture, some of which has functionality, like crafting stations.
PvE content consists of dungeons (4-player activities with 1 tank, 1 healer and 2 dds), which have a normal and a veteran difficulty, and a hard mode on top of the latter. DLC dungeons are much harder than base game ones.
There are also trials - 12-player raids, ususally with 2 tanks, 2 healers and 8 dds, but sometimes there's need for a 3rd tank, the group composition is not set in stone.
Lastly, there's arenas where you have to fight waves of enemies with bosses at the end. Two of them are for 4 players, and the other 2 are for a single player.
New expansions don't add a new max level cap, and the gear progression is not linear, so for example a set from a dungeon released 8 years ago is still considered good. The meta changes when new sets (and nerfs) are introduced, but that doesn't automatically mean that equipment from the newest activities is better than the old.
PvP content consists of Cyrodiil, the Imperial City and Battlegrounds. In Cyrodiil your alliance is at actual war with the other two, where players capture and defend keeps using various siege engines. Imperial City is a smaller verson of that, and in Battlegrounds there are 3 teams with 4 players in each, all fighting each other while trying to complete a certain goal, like capturing relics or holding capture points.
And the combat system is greatly different from WoW's one. There is no auto weapon swing, or blocking, or parrying - you have to do all of that manually. You also can't lock onto a target, gotta keep the crosshair on the enemy for your abilities to work on them.
Getting skills is a problem. Firstly you have to level the skill tree to unlock a skill, then you have to buy it with a skill point, then you have to level the skill to be able to morph it, which requires another skill point. When you're just starting a character, or when you don't have all of the DLCs, you'll be running low on skillpoints, but you can always reset your skills buy paying a little gold at a rededications shrine.
Professions in this game are also skill trees. You can have all of them on a single character, no limit on that (as long as you have enough skill points), but you also have to research traits, which takes real time, which increases with each trait you've researched for a type of item, and can take up to 18 weeks.
It takes a while to get used to this game, and it has a lot of downsides, but honestly, I switched to ESO from BfA and don't regret a thing.
I would also like to add a tip that I don't see given to enough new players:
While you have ESO plus active (you being a former WoW player I suspect you will eventually cave, even if you don't have to) do side DLCs you really want and use the "free" Crowns to buy DLCs that are less important. This gives you more to do while you are not paying for ESO plus. (maybe you can't afford it, or you can only play once or twice that month, or maybe your government collapsed. ♥♥♥♥ happens)
This works even better if you wait for sales/discounts.
I completed the entire Thieves Guild DLC while subbed and bought the remaining 3 OG DLC for 1k out of the 1.6k Crowns I got for subbing that month.
So while being subbed is nice and does grant infinite DLC access (but not Expansions, you still gotta buy those) if you spend your crowns smartly you'll eventually find yourself only subbing because you find the crafting bag convenient.
ESO tries to bridge the gap somewhat between f2p and sub, and as you may have seen everyone's got a different opinion of it.
I'd say buy the base game first, do all the zones, coldharbour quests, dungeons and trials. If you get through all that and you like it, then decide sub or buy as you go.
Yes, I covered that, thanks. It would obviously add up over time if you paid for it, of course, but everyone would be able to realise that. Of course that doesn't make it, or anything else in the game you can buy P2W though despite MXUltra's little fantasy..
You'll have either 1 of 2 problems.
1: If you actually let the world build around you it would probably take decades to reach a point of accomplishment.
2. If you rush through, it will be boring, repetitive, and uninspiring.
The overwhelming majority rush through, people in dungeons will be on the final boss before you even get through the first dialogue or find the first lore book. Which is not unreasonable for those that have ran it 100 times. So in a sense, the community has determined, right or wrong, that the most fun and efficient way to play this game is to rush through to rewards and play with builds.
tl;dr if you play it like most people do, it's just another wow.
If you think me pointing out "yes, I covered that" is ridiculing you, you are far too delicate for internet forums. All I pointed out was something that, from your post, made it look like you hadn't read my post properly and were telling me something I already knew. I heap return blessings on you, too.
Huge portions of the game have also been literally abandoned for over 4 years at this point such as PvP, with server performance getting worse with literally every single update until they lower pop caps again like they have done many times over the past 4 years. Cyrodiil for example went from being a 300v300v300 player battleground to being 50v50v50 and the performance is still worse now than it originally was back then.
Majority of the dev team got moved on to ZOS' new MMO that they have still not announced yet 4 years ago, which co-incides exactly with ESO becoming nothing but a lazy cash cow for them to funnel the profits into their new game instead while they leave the game that is paying the bills, to rot.
Don't get stuck in crap big company games.
One thing that GW2 and ESO do great is the relevance of content you buy. All previous expansions for GW2 are just as relevant as the brand new one due to horizontal progression and scaling. ESO has pretty much the exact same thing, meaning you can get Necrom (the latest expac) and decide that you want to go back to Clockwork City DLC and everything you do there is just as relevant as anything you'd do in Necrom.
tl;dr, 40$ for 8 years of content = easily getting your 1$ per hour. It's a really good deal, you cannot go wrong. Everything in the game is relevant and won't be wiped out when the next Expansions comes out.