I've posted my original (Recommend this game) review in the comments section – please have a read if you think I am just lumping all the bad under an umbrella (sorry it's in chunks, but there is a 1000-character limit on comments for some reason).

I've been trying to get back to ESO for the better part of the last 5 years. I pretty much bashed the game all of COVID and had an immense level of fun with it, both on the PVE side and the PVP side – something that I don't commonly engage with in MMOs.

I've been gone long enough to see ESO at its best, but also long enough to notice when things have started going sideways. And honestly? Right now, it feels like the game I once loved is slipping away from what made it great. This isn't about personal drama or burnout – it's about real, structural stuff dragging the whole thing down.

While I was away, they introduced subclassing, which sounded incredible. More build freedom, more creativity, should've been an easy win, I almost had that ArcheAge itch coming from it in a way. What we got instead was absurd power creep, a handful of combinations (abominations even) dominating everything. A system meant to open choices ended up shrinking them. Old skills and passives barely fit anymore, and setups that used to work are just… gone.

Performance has become almost a meme at this point. Every big update seems to bring worse frame drops, stutters and crashes – even on clean installs. It feels like you're spending more time messing with the settings than actually enjoying ESO. PvP used to be this massive, exhilarating battlefield. Now it feels like combat is delayed and unresponsive, like everything is happening a second late.

Support hasn't exactly inspired confidence either. Tickets close with generic responses, or you wait forever for nothing that actually helps. If you're putting money and thousands of hours into something, you should at least feel like someone's got your back. You can genuinely feel the community morale dropping everywhere. It's like shouting into the void – the same threads, the same concerns, the same unanswered feedback.

Then there's the BACKSTORY that really matters. ZeniMax Media, the company behind ESO, was acquired by Micro$oft for about $7.5 billion back in 2021. That deal dissolved ZeniMax's board and folded all its studios, including ZeniMax Online, into Micro$oft Gaming's umbrella. What followed has been rough. In July 2025, Micro$oft cut roughly 9k jobs company-wide. ZeniMax Online lost projects and people in that wave, including an entire new MMO codenamed Project Blackbird that had been in development for years. Its cancellation led to the departure of Matt Firor, the longtime head of ESO, who confirmed that the decision to cancel the game he had wanted to make his whole life was his breaking point. The studio we all trusted with ESO suddenly has all its direction and leadership upended because a big corporate owner decided it wasn't worth finishing. No wonder updates feel lighter and less focused.

Speaking of updates. Big yearly expansions were replaced with smaller seasonal drops. Which, on paper, meant more frequent content, but in practice, it mostly means less meaningful content and more half-baked systems that feel rushed to meet deadlines.

Frankly, with how things are going, I'm confident ESO ends up on life support within the next few years. Not shut down – just handed off. The kind of move where the game gets parked at a studio like Daybreak or Broadsword: minimal team, minimal updates, keep the servers on, milk what's left. Micro$oft has already shown they don't care. If a project isn't hitting its internal numbers, it gets cut, no matter the legacy.

And that's the part that really hurts. I'm not angry, I just have that sinking feeling that the game I invested hundreds of hours into is slowly being put on autopilot.