Been playing this for the last few years. Helped me get through lockdown!
It’s been around for long enough that there is absolutely loads of content. I love that there are several different ways to play, too. I love housing and decorating, but there’s casual questing, end game content, PVP, crafting… It’s fun!
I don’t know if we’re permitted to post links that that here, so I won’t. But if you go to the Epic Games store, it’s free through 27 July.
Happy questing!
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I left right before High Isle came out, but nothing I’ve tried since has really caught my attention the same way. Even GW2, as awesome as it is, and as many QoL features it has that I deeply missed in ESO, just… isn’t the same.
Did they ever get the Champion Points re-worked into something that doesn’t suck? I hate the way the green constellations worked, particularly; whose idea was it to say “Nobody harvests, chest-hunts, fishes, and searches for crafting recipes at the same time, so obviously it’s silly to let players equip all those bonuses at once”??
Even if not, I think I might drop Netflix and re-up my subscription. If just to remind me why I left, maybe?
I can’t speak on that specific timeline, but CP has had a pretty large makeover recently. You still only have 4 slottable abilities, but quite a few have moved to passive status. Unsure if the ones you reference specifically are though, green tree is usually a throwaway tree for me.
As someone who played GW2 a ton; what does it have that ESO doesn’t? Just curious.
Getting access to all the weapon skills is so much faster, which makes trying out new builds a thousand times easier.
Not having to find and speak to the quest giver before I can do the quest is great. I like just having to get into their radius without having to track them down before and after.
I’m a big explorer, so I really appreciate the rewards for exploring the maps (and the compass pointing me towards the things I missed).
The jumping puzzles are amazing.
The free mount not being a boring-ass horse is pretty cool. Mounts having different abilities is also cool. Not having to spend 120 real days upgrading your mounts is really nice.
Getting experience from harvesting and crafting. Not having to spend real-time months researching things to craft them.
Underwater exploration. Yeah, underwater combat is kind of a pain, but it’s still cool to have the option.
The directed story mode complete with boss fights in instances that can be done solo.
Classes are all totally different from each other; there are no “meta” skills for a specific role no matter what class you’re playing (eg, unstable wall, aggressive warhorn).
Enough skill points in the game to learn every skill and every specialization, along with the ability to switch builds on the fly just whenever (without having to go back to a shrine and pay to do it).
I’m not sure how I feel about having a centralized auction house. A lot of my endgame in ESO was shopping and flipping valuable things from one trader to another, but I have to admit it’s really handy to just be able to go buy a bunch of crafting materials in any city for the lowest available price.
Like, I could just keep going; there are so many things, both little and big, that I love about GW2. But for some reason, I just can’t get into it. Maybe it’s that it levels me up so fast that I don’t get to really enjoy the view and learn the class. Maybe it’s because the elite specializations change the class so dramatically that most of what I did learn during leveling is immediately obsolete at 80. Maybe it’s because the combat feels kind of clunky due to being a weird hybrid of action combat and tab targeting. Maybe it’s how complicated the buff system is, that I can’t really wrap my brain around all the different boons and when I need them. None of those are really big deals, just quirks of the game that make it unique, like all games have. But it’s not doing the same thing that ESO did for me.
Yo! I love guild wars 2, if there’s anything I can offer to help you click with the game? Or answer any questions for you? Regarding tab targeting vs action, really you can play it almost entirely like one or the other and you don’t need to interact with the other system if you don’t want to. And I’m happy to give you a breakdown of boons, hopefully it’s not as complex as it seems as first blush? But I love helping people click with the game because it took me a while and I’m glad I finally stuck so I’d love to pay it forward
Yeah, this is a good one. Works surprisingly well for solo playthroughs, too. The base game for free is a great deal. Lots to do before you get to the later DLC.
Good writing, voice acting is miles above all other Elder Scrolls games, the magic and abilities are really fun (don’t know if it’s available with this free version, but Necromancer class is fucking awesome).
And so. much. lore. If you ever read the books in any of the games, there’s a particular individual who often comes up in necromancer books which sometimes net you a skill point in Conjuration in Skyrim. This game fleshes out that entire story.
You also get to discover areas we haven’t seen much of. Elsweyr, Black Marsh, Summerset Isles, High Rock, and more. Every province, basically.
Literally my only complaint is that I really loved Molag Bal’s voice actor in Skyrim and this new one doesn’t hit as hard for me. Actually goes for a few of the Daedric Princes. I know why people didn’t like his voice, but I fucking loved Hermaeus Mora in Skyrim. Also doesn’t hit as hard here, but it doesn’t matter much.
I should actually maybe get back to it. Kind of burned myself out, but now feels like a good time to jump back in.
There is some stuff (other than the story DLC) which essentially requires real money, but none of it is particularly necessary (although one could argue that the crafting bag is absolutely necessary, which I wouldn’t entirely disagree with).
They got the Skyrim voice actor (wes Johnson) back for old Herma Mora for the new expansion in Apocrypha. And they had him go back and rerecord the old voice lines as well. I think they did that with Dagon as well.
Oh, nice! That is for letting me know. I’ll have to check it out when I play again.
Game isn’t bad overall. Biggest downside is that the open world content is sleep-inducingly easy.
I consider this a selling point!
I like exploration and generally mucking around in a MMO; this is why I like base GW2 instead of the expansions (which had me dying a lot). If I wanted a challenge, I’d do WoW raids or play a Souls-like.
RAmen ! Totally agree.
Personally, I couldn’t get through the main and faction stories because of that. I liked the stories well enough, but getting through them was so tedious because I couldn’t even use all my skills. I don’t know how end game is, I have one max lvl character with a bunch of cp, but I rarely play an mmo for end game content.
If they had like a difficulty slider for the open world content, that would be enough to make me return, but I don’t want to shut down my brain while leveling, that’s not fun at all!
My girlfriend and I played through the quest line of where we started in Morrowind (I think?) and had a blast, but once we left we were totally lost! I was really engrossed with the story but all of a sudden we’re just doing something completely different. I was quite disappointed and it left me wondering if we had done something wrong or out of order.
Yeah, the zone quests vs. the main quest are not explained very well. I started just after Elsweyr came out and was trying to play through the main quest at the same time I did the zone quest. I didn’t understand why some of the characters showed up in both with different, ah, statuses, shall we say?
Probably the easiest thing to do for continuity is to play through the quests for your faction. They will lead you to the next logical zone. With Morrowind / Vvardenfell, it’s a DLC so it’s a bit outside the main continuity lines. DLC’s can be done at any time, though with some recurring characters, it can be fun to do them after doing the main quests. You’ll sometimes get unique dialogue as the NPC’s acknowledge your previous adventures with them. Release order of the DLC’s is one option. However, the skills you get from the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests can be really helpful, so it’s OK to take a detour and pick those up early on (and they don’t cross over with the main quest).
Some lovely person wrote up a nice guide on the forums about which order to quest in for every faction: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/525351/a-clear-step-by-step-guide-to-playing-eso-in-chronological-order.
hey, nice, always wanted to give that one a try. thanks
Nope, that’s not gonna convince me to install Epic’s spyware. Nice try, though.
