5011

I played this years ago - started once and then stopped, restarted and then stopped. Is there only one starting point so would need to replay the same stuff again? Is it like Guild Wars 2 where the world moves on or if you start a new game in ESO are all the original quests / stories still there?

5012

Nope, you can start in several places. There’s three starting locations based on faction but there’s also new starting areas added in expansions, like Morrowind. Plus, the overworld scales to your level so you can pretty much go wherever you want.

The original quests should still be there.

5013

I forget what the strength of this game is, can someone give me a refresher? Is it exploring the world because it looks great, good story, etc?

5014

Yes, it’s basically a gigantic single-player Elder Scrolls game. You can ignore the MMO stuff.

5015

YMMV but the game is pretty mediocre, in my opinion. I didn’t find either the exploration or the story to be very engaging, but others disagree.

It’s not a bad experience to dink around with for a while but the game has never really grabbed me despite poking my head back in every few years.

5016

I soured on it a bit just because all the classes felt same-ey to me. Destruction staff on front bar, restoration staff on back bar, regardless of what you’re playing (okay, except the super tanky class maybe). I wanted more diversity there. Combat in general never felt quite right.

Can’t say how good the story is overall, but the big strength of the game is 100% voice acting of everything. And it seemed to be good voice acting as well. I would head to towns just to find a bard singing a new song because they are really good songs.

The voice acting can also be the downfall in some cities. NPCs with quests you haven’t completed with harangue you EVERY TIME. I think mods can address this though, and it isn’t a show-stopper by any means.

Worst part is thinking you can play this without a sub. You can. But the inventory management headache isn’t worth it. Go in knowing that sooner or later you will need to sub, and you should be fine.

5017

I feel the same way. On paper it’s pretty cool that you can combine class skill lines and weapon skill lines to come up with a cool build but in practice all my characters felt samey, like you say.

Combat got tighter compared to what it was at release but it still feels a little sluggish / unresponsive. I’m sure a good part of that is just small amounts of latency, but I can play other action MMOs like Lost Ark and they feel fantastic.

5018

I’ve tried this about 3 times, and each time I uninstall after a couple of hours. It looks good and captures the feel of the ES games well, but playing it solo feels sorta like playing a single player ES game with terrible combat.

Not that the ES games are known for having great combat systems, but it works for those games.

Having said that, I STILL want to give this another shot at some point. To be fair, I also think I go into it each time with a slightly negative attitude and a tiny bit of dread thinking how many years behind I am and how long it will take to make progress. I also think of my huge backlog and there are just so many single player games to play, especially when MMOs were never really my thing.

5019

I also dislike the class design and more importantly, find the combat in ESO super annoying, with the need to weave light attacks in-between abilities.

Once you get a bunch of champion points and your 5p set + 1p monster + ring of pale order, though, the solo game becomes extremely easy and you can just blast through everything to explore around and experience the story.

5020

Yeah, it’s really too bad the playerbase had a meltdown when they tried to address that. Glitchy animation cancels being so important to DPS is not interesting gameplay and if that’s what sets apart the sweaty elite from the scrubs maybe your combat system needs some work.

I got around it by using an AHK script but I really wish it wasn’t a thing. And it’s fucking terrible for onboarding new users since exploiting an unintended animation side effect isn’t exactly intuitive to anyone.

5021

I’ve had the same problem. I appreciate it for what it is, but I can never get beyond a couple of hours. The quests and story are good, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is missing all of the madcap sandbox energy of the single-player games.

5022

Same here, I was bummed-out when they decided not to fix it a year or two back. There was a core group of serious players who liked it, and they overwhelmed the voices of the majority who thought it was annoying, fiddly, poor gameplay.

I still love ESO, but not for its combat.

Also the horse training sucks balls.

5023

I can’t necessarily disagree with the idea that the combat is poor but my word do I prefer it to actual Elder Scrolls combat.

5024

I actually prefer Skyrim’s combat, but that comprised of crouching 50 feet away and shooting arrows into a draugr’s head.

5025

I fired this up again. When it first came out it came the closest to taking away from my WoW time, but then I got serious about raiding. However, I will say that of FFXIV, Lost Ark, and everything else out there that I’ve tried to fill my WoW-void, ESO has been the most fun. I hate how the quest UI works in FFXIV and maybe that is why I appreciate all of the spoken word in ESO. The combat is different, but I don’t have any problem with it. Game has changed a lot since the last time I payed, so I deleted my old characters and made a Red Guard stamina dps (which I found out later was probably not a good choice, hehe).

I am going to try it on my Mac Studio today and see how it fairs in Apple-land. If it works well, I may finally cancel my WoW account.

5026

FYI. They won’t be porting it to Apple Silicon,

5027

I’m getting around 100 FPS on the Mac Studio and 80 on my M1 Pro MBP 16. There’s a mac version of Minion, so seems to work fine for now.

5028
5029

For those of us who stay at least 6 months behind on new expansions, High Isle is down to $11 ($14 for the Collector’s Pack) on Green Man Gaming. That feels like the right price, finally.

https://www.greenmangaming.com/games/the-elder-scrolls-online-high-isle-upgrade-pc/

5030

Is that the version I need to get to add most recent and all the previous expansions to my account?

I last bought the Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset Digital Collector’s Edition back in 2018.