Ultimately, I recommend Elder Scrolls Online(ESO) due to its overwhelming amount of fun content, especially if you're mostly interested in PvE. If you're a "completionist" type of player then playing a bit of PVP with your PVE is still pretty great. If you're predominately a PVP player then my recommendation quickly turns into a toss up.

All of the NPCs are animated w voiced dialogue and there are many well-written quests/stories, some are even heart-touching. When you're bored with quests, there are dozens of other neat elements of this game where you can spend your time. You could buy and decorate a house or you could creatively use those furnishings by building a house directly out of them. Crafting has been designed in a way that it is not only a useful but lucrative feature at every point of the game. Essentially, ESO is a successful MMO that has built so much content into the platform over the years that it is easy to feel overwhelmed with deciding what you want to do next.

If you are only interested in PvP, a recommendation becomes more challenging. The best part of PVP is that sets, skills, and attributes are fluid enough that there is a lot of freedom in making builds. The fundamental elements and additional mechanics offer you a great diversity of combinations to play around with and make your own. I've had a lot of fun in Cyrodiil where the alliance vs alliance vs alliance pvp occurs.

...That said, ESO has consistently had terrible server-side performance during prime time and I assure you it is more than frustrating. Not only does this affect your enjoyment when your skill or potion doesn't actually go off, probably causing calamity, but this also occurs for everyone else... so you get to deal with frustrated people in general, too! The broken functionality surrounding server capacity is so consistent that it has become a mechanic that people not only try to utilize... some try to cause failure state to occur so that they can utilize it.

To me, ESO feels like an "asset" that had a 5-year lifespan assigned to it by management and despite it's successful player population surge during 2020 they've stuck to that plan. I feel this way because ZOS's servers performed pretty well when PVP events were going on because ZOS set up more shards and servers. Without an event going on, it felt like servers were being taken offline in an effort to save on costs. I'd be shocked if the subject of server investment was ever publicly discussed by ZOS because the solutions they have offered/implemented were a severe compromise that have crippled some playstyles of the game. Group sizes were halved and you can no longer heal people outside your group. Even the randomness of probability-based effects(6% chance to cause x) were removed from every set in the game, with the intention to remove random-number-generator calculation costs(!!!). I mean... I salute their ingenuity but despite the changes, server performance remains bad enough to quit over.

Some players are hoping that Microsoft's acquisition of ZOS will result in proper hosting such as a switch of platform... well, it's just as possible that the current strategy remains unchanged and this asset will continue to be neglected. It's also possible that cutting the server bills happened because lower costs makes you look like a juicier acquisition target? Yeah, at this point I'm just making educated guesses. If you're reading this, though... can you find someone to turn the servers back on?

Then add to all of this that the scoring rules for the Cyrodiil campaign make success meaningless. Its meant to reward more money to people playing on a less-populated faction, which is good, however ESO also overcompensates the worst performing alliance with a huge score bonus. In a 1v1v1 month-long campaign this changes every social dynamic for the worse since it means that 1st place only needs to wreck their biggest rival... and so the weakest team often slides easily into 2nd place because they literally didn't log in so they received a 2x score bonus. The difference of rewards for 1st/2nd/3rd place aren't meaningful but these irrational rules for a competitive mode makes it all so... pointless.

The fact that nearly everyone in Cyrodiil is frustrated by the terrible performance causes general toxicity. Since there isn't any tangible reason for winning the campaign(or fighting against mechanics for 2nd place), your "allies" in Cyrodiil are often the most toxic people in the game and they will relish the opportunity to take a scroll or hammer you conquered and run it straight into the enemy, giving it back to them.

So clearly, unfortunately, recommending my favorite part of this game isn't possible. You can have tons of fun with PvP but you need patience or friends to suffer through it with.



I've said enough on the game but with an MMO it's important to also review the community.

ZOS managed a good community. There are many guilds filled with people trying to make the best out of the game, making schedules for their preferred content. You can use the guild finder to easily filter guilds based on content. And you can join/trial as many as you need, as long as you need up to 5 ;). There are community-written mods which we all rely on to make this an enjoyable game. The people who play ESO are usually really cool but we're also dealing with a game lore with race wars so obviously it's good you can report/block conventional trolls and racists.

However the toxic elements of the community really stick out because you can't help when a glass cannon queues into your group as a fake tank(well, you can try to kick them but you're still left waiting for a tank.) You can't help it when someone charges through the entire dungeon in front of you, dragging all the mobs with them and skipping all the content. You can't do anything when your friend spent 15 minutes setting an ambush so they could steal an enemy hammer and massacre them... just so someone on your alliance could watch you like a hawk in order to grab the hammer when it eventually drops, so they can deliberately run it into a lava pit. You can't do anything if you attempt to buy crowns with gold and they defraud you(technically ZOS will repay you ONE TIME if you get scammed this way, their stated position is 'buyer beware')... never mind that this is a scam caused by ZOS's determination to never add crown trading to the trade window. These failings really stick out like a sore thumb.