Is ESO worth playing in 2020 as a complete newcomer? The new trailer for Greymoor was honestly pretty good and has me intrigued. However I've only previously played the game twice: first back during Beta and then again briefly years later during a free-login campaign before Elsweyr launched.
Beta was a complete shitfest, but the time I spent with the game during the free login period months ago was decent. Exploration and questing seemed good, but the combat was still pretty iffy and the cash shop shit turned me off a lot. Does combat improve as you level up? Is the cash shop shit as egregious as it looks, or is it fairly optional?
I'm trying to prevent myself from making a potential mistake by impulse buying this game.
I bought it for 10 bucks, went a little bit into the morrowind story and quit. It's not the great if you're just looking for elder scrolls. If you like mmos you might like it.
I haven't played it in six months, but I did sink about 3k hours into it.
It has a pretty strong honeymoon phase where as long as your not a 'It doesn't feel like elder scrolls' gay and realize it's an mmo, it can be very endearing. The narrative is actually fairly well done for quests, and the voice acting is passable. The dungeons are actually quite well designed sometimes, and the veteran versions of dungeons can sometimes be harder than raids in other games. But the game in my opinion caps out really quick as far as enjoyment goes, and doesn't have fun daily stuff to do. Crafting is profitable and making money is super easy, but serves little purpose. In my opinion it's worth a binge if you end up liking it, but it's sadly not the place to stay. The pvp is "fun" but it's also a fricking dumpster fire. Also, the engine isn't very stable and performs super bad in some instances of gameplay despite your computers specs.
>Does combat improve as you level up?
It gets worse. End game relies heavily on "spell weaving," which is a fancy way of saying "glitching out the game to cancel animations." That's ESO's end game identity; an unintentional glitch in order to maximize DPS. And it's pretty much fricking required.
>Is the cash shop shit as egregious as it looks, or is it fairly optional?
It's not bad overall; the cash shop is mostly cosmetic. DLCs are overpriced but you can circumvent that with a monthly sub, which also gives you more cash shop gold to buy stuff.
I say no; don't buy it, or wait for a sale for Morrowind and the other previous Chapters. No expansion (chapter) is worth buying, really, because they're pretty much all the same.
>End game relies heavily on "spell weaving," which is a fancy way of saying "glitching out the game to cancel animations."
Now that you mention it I remember reading something about that back when I was playing during the free login period and looking into endgame shit. That seems so fricking moronic. Why wouldn't that be fixed or at least actively discouraged by the devs? That alone turns me off so much. Reminds me of SSB Melee-Black folk.
>Having fun playing the game
>after a while realize the skill system is complete dogshit where you have to weapon swap to do more than 3 things
What an incredibly dumb “rotational” system.
it's a pretty good MMO in my opinion. You can make a lot of different character builds. Right now I'm working on making a pure werewolf character, choosing perks to maximize werewolf uptime, health and stamina, resource regen, there are even dungeon armor sets that lean heavily into werewolf characters.
You can come up with some crazy vampire builds too, but they aren't as effective in PvP anymore because everyone and their mother is running Dawnbreaker still. It's probably what I like most about the game, is the amount of builds available. I have one for werewolf, one pure bow nightblade, a dual wield nightblade, a 2h stamina necromancer... there's just a lot to it.
All of the quests are fully voiced, if that's your thing. Summerset has an interesting story to it, but Morrowind was kind of boring in my opinion. The best by far was the Dark Brotherhood storyline. Elsweyr is... ok, I guess. At the beginning of the expansion there used to be a lot of groups running around killing dragons, but not anymore. They're a bit too hard to solo so make some friends if you wanna kill dragons.
How's the game in terms of account-wide support for stuff like currencies, cosmetics, etc? Is it super cancer and alt-unfriendly like WoW or is it a lot more convenient like FFXIV/GW2?
All cosmetics are shared between all characters
All motifs (learned transmog styles) are available to your alts
All characters have access to the same bank for switching currency around
I dunno OP. I'm out of the honeymoon phase, ...but I will admit I spent a long time defending and playing it.
there's no cancerous character-specific infinite grind like Artifact Weapons or the Heart of Azeroth in ESO, right?
Not character specific, no. But there is the Champion Point system. After you get one character to level 50, you start earning champion points which the the end-game power progression. It caps out at 800 now I think. Each point lets you invest it in something, like more physical damage, more weapon damage, more resistance, more magic damage, more health/stamina regeneration, etc. It's account based, so once you start earning them on one character, you can put them on all your characters even if they are below level 50.
You earn them at a pretty good rate to. You could probably get to 50-75 champion points in a day if you take advantage of exp boosts, rested exp, and a daily dungeon exp bonus.
see I'm cool with stuff like that because it reminds me of Masteries in GW2 which I absolutely loved.
Also how does gear progression work in this game? Is it vertical? Horizontal?
So before you worry about gear too much, you'll want to get to Champion Point 160. Gear is based on levels, so for example a level 15 epic weapon might be worse than a level 20 rare weapon. Gear caps out at Champion Point 160, so once you hit CP160, you can start grinding dungeons and raids for specific gear sets. Gear will mostly come down to the set-specific bonuses they have. They also have enchantments on them that add things like "x amount of weapon crit dmg" or "x amount of spell dmg" which you can change for a fee. But depending on what role you are (DPS, heal, tank) you'll be after specific sets. Since I am DPS mostly, i have a few specific sets that offer bonuses to the types of weapons and abilities I use often.
For example, Hunding's Rage is a commonly used crafted set that's ideal for DPS players. It offers lots of increased weapon and physical damage as well as crit damage increases.
So gear is really all about the set bonuses that you want for your desired build, as well as making sure they have optimal enchantments on them.
mounts and costumes / premium cosmetics are account wide. Armor styles and recipes are character based. PvP currency is account-wide if I remember correctly. Gold technically isn't account-wide, but you can store it in a bank and then retrieve it on any character on your account.
I mean it's pay $10 and then you can just explore the world (bar expansion locks) for free. So... yeah.
I haven't gone back to it because the leveling was slow and the main-quest (non-expansions) was fricking boring. But the gameplay was fine. If you go in expecting it to play like a singleplayer Elder Scrolls, you'll be disappointed. But the gameplay was fine in the sense that it took the Elder Scrolls "freedom" sort of gameplay and put it into the MMOization.