Elder Scrolls Online

Elder Scrolls Online is the MMO I keep going back to, which is not the same thing as an MMO I stayed with. I've drifted into ESO more times than I can count, played it hard for a few weeks, drifted back out, and then found myself reinstalling it a year later when the itch returned. Nothing else has that pull-and-release pattern on me. So this is the honest accounting of what keeps dragging me back and what keeps letting me go.

I have no memory of taking this screenshot, but it seems cool.

Start with what kept me. It's Tamriel. I played the single-player Elder Scrolls games, I've got real affection for that world, and ESO lets me walk around inside it with other people wandering by. Morrowind as a living zone, Summerset, Elsweyr with the actual Khajiit at home, the whole map slowly filling in over the years. The questing is genuinely good, fully voiced, more written care per quest than a lot of MMOs bother with. You can stumble into a side story in some no-name town that's better told than the main plot of games I've paid more attention to.

The other thing that kept me is the shape of it. Buy the box, and the subscription is optional. That's huge for a guy like me. ESO doesn't punish you for leaving. I can vanish for eight months, come back, and pick up more or less where I left off without a wall of catch-up, because the whole world scales to you. Go anywhere, any order, any time. For someone who plays in bursts around real life, that freedom is exactly right. It's a game built to be left and returned to, and I've tested that promise thoroughly.

And here's the tell that I've tested it deeper than "drops in now and then" makes it sound. I'm an altoholic to the core, in every game I touch, and ESO got the same treatment. Across all those on-again stretches I've built up a max-level character of every class in the thing. That's not a tourist's résumé. The drifting is real, but so are the hours, because when I drop back in I don't roll one character and wander around. I roll all of them, because at this point I don't seem to be capable of doing it any other way.

Now what didn't keep me, and it mostly comes down to one thing. The combat never felt right in my hands. After seventeen years of WoW, ESO's fighting feels floaty to me, a little weightless, like my hits aren't quite landing on anything solid. I know the high-end players have a whole intricate rhythm to it, animation timing and weaving that turns it into something skillful. I could never make myself care enough to learn it. Every time I got to the point where the combat should have hooked me, it instead reminded me it wasn't the combat my hands already knew.

The other thing is just the size of it. ESO is enormous, and it presents that enormity as a giant menu on day one. Chapters, DLCs, zones, systems, all shouting at once. WoW at least walks you down a path. ESO drops you into a buffet and wishes you luck, and for a certain kind of player that's paradise, but for me it sometimes tips into paralysis. Too many doors, and I end up standing in the hallway.

So that's the pattern. Tamriel pulls me in, the questing and the freedom keep me happy for a while, and then the combat feel and the WoW gravity quietly pull me back home. It's the healthiest relationship I have with any game outside WoW, precisely because ESO never demanded I commit. It lets me treat it like a place I visit rather than a place I live, and honestly, that suits both of us.

I'll be back in Tamriel again. I always am. I just won't be moving in, and ESO, to its credit, has never once asked me to.

Cheers! 

Joar