ESOFollow

The game is interesting, but is drowning in bugs. There's also quite a lot of inconsistency with story, NPC dialogue, and events that the player takes place in. To give a little insight as to why. Before the last 3 beta events, ESO placed you in a starting zone like any other MMORPG. This depended on your faction choice. Stros M'kai, Bleakrock, etc.

You would follow through the quests there and eventually end up in the mainland, where the actual game took place. About a few weeks before the game released, they completely scrapped this idea and made the player START in the main land, by passing the starter zones completely. Of course, this broke all the dialogue and new dialogue had to be written and recorded in less than 2 weeks before the full release.

By the time the game released, the Prophet (Voiced by Michael Gambon), had some of his dialogue changed to reflect the new decision to allow the player the ability to optionally return to the starting zone rather than start there. Unfortunately, he was given a new voice actor instead of Michael Gambon and sounds completely awkward and out of place. After his initial dialogue explaining your return to tamriel with the new actor, he goes back to Michael Gambon. It reeks of a shoddy job, but it doesn't get better until after you've progressed past all the starting areas.

If the player adventures into how they were saved, they'll meet a new NPC that was added a week before release. This NPC helps you get back to the original starting zones. If you return to the starting zones; however.. The player will find out that the NPC dialogues and quests have not be fixed. The result is the player is in a "Time Bubble" where NPCs recognize the player as being saved as if the Starting zones were still mandatory. Dialogue and quests are performed with the player being told their origin story is completely wrong from how it truly happened, leaving the player feeling as if they aren't part of the world.

Should you choose to never return to the starting zones at all (And miss Skyshards, a form of permanent character advacement), you still get dialogue proclaiming yourself as a savior to the starting zones you have never even visited.

The dialogue is a total mess in ESO, and for story-driven players like myself you'll find yourself sick to your stomach each time you hear a NPC proclaim you a hero for something you've never even done yet.

But let's bullet point some of the problems.

- Dungeons aren't instanced and are heavily camped by bots and players. You can walk through the entire dungeon never fighting a single enemy. In fact, the vast majority of dungeons are this way. Most times you'll wait with at least 10+ other people in hopes of damaging the boss enough to get loot, or to update your quest progress. EDIT: This only applies to Public Dungeons

- Some quests are beyond bugged, requiring you to logout to get another "Phase" area. All you can do is hope you get a new server area that isn't bugged.

- The FOV is locked at a sickeningly low amount that even I get nauseated and I have never ever gotten nauseated in a First-person game in my entire life.

- Story and Dialogue events are completely inconsistent with actual events taking place.

- Bank space and inventory management are completely and utterly a nightmare. There's more items than there is room and even the most stringent of players will find themselves discarding the most precious of items to make room for what is needed.

- Deleting your character will remove all rewards and pre-order bonuses like treasure maps and pets. (They are in the process of fixing this, I understand).

- Bugs will cause your bank to reset any upgrades you've added to it and you can sometimes lose all your items without warning. You can read more about this bug in the subreddit.

- You will constantly fall through the world, or get stuck in permanent loading screens. For instance, logging out in Cyrodiil (An open World PvP area) can prevent you from logging in again if the area is full. The only way is to contact a GM to have yourself moved.

- As with all faction based games, one faction dominates the PvP portion of the game. This may even out later since race is locked to faction for people who did not pre-order, but for now it's pretty obvious the game is unbalanced in that regard.

- Upgrading armor "tiers" is completely RNG. You get stones for which to change your gear's tier color. "White > Green > Blue > Purple > Orange". If you use only one stone, your chance to upgrade is abyssmal. It's 5% per orange stone, meaning you'd need 20 stones to 100% upgrade an item. What happens if you fail? the item is destroyed. That's something I'd expect from a F2P game, honestly. The great thing about it is you can upgrade any item to legendary quality (the highest quality) so if you're rich, or lucky, or persistent, you can upgrade your gear as you see fit.

- To be honest, I wouldn't recommend ESO until after they make changes. Sure, the game has its moments. The fact you can just do whatever you want without chain quests dragging you from continent to continent is pretty nice, and what quests there are have some interesting bits to them, but unless they fix the dialogue problems, the bugs with banking, the inventory game, and the broken quests and events, then I would wait on ESO. If you do choose to play ESO, you will find that the later parts of the game the the dialogue between NPCs and the player, etc are more consistent. You'll also find a ton of easter eggs and delightful things to hunt down. Even becoming a werewolf or Vampire is something fun and exciting to do and completely changes the way you view your character. Also, you can find powerful motifs that let you craft some really cool looking armor. Of course, the ability to upgrade armor is a pain in the butt..