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10:18am on Monday, 26th January, 2026:
Anecdote
After three weeks, I've finished replaying Elder Scrolls Online, having last finished playing it in September 2019.
It hasn't really changed a lot. There's new content, although acquisition of experience points and the like has been speeded up so you whisk through and miss a great deal. I started a new character, but experimented on a build that didn't work out so gave up on it after maybe a week. I began another one, for for which it took me two weeks to reach the level cap and garner a slough of champion points.
As usual with Bethesda games, none of this actually matters because of the dynamic difficulty adjustment. Mudcrabs take just as long to kill at level 50 as they did at level 5. By the time you have a decent set of skills slotted, every fight is the same and therefore boring.
The stories associated with the quests are usually good in principle, but in practice they all involve very similar activities. 90% of them are: : go to these nearby places, where you'll need to kill the mobs that are guarding the thing you have to click on, then after you've clicked on all the things, come back here. If you're in a dungeon, the boss will be in the furthest room from the entrance, so either run through the trash along the way or do the sub-quest that you'll come across early on. If the boss isn't an end boss, expect it to tell you "you're too late" to stop the end boss.
There was a lot of activity in the chat logs, most of which was guild-related. Not every guild that was trying to recruit was German or Russian. The first three invites I saw in English were for LGBT guilds. I didn't join a guild, anyway, as I knew I wasn't going to be playing for long. I don't think anyone talked to me directly, but it's hard to tell when the chat box is packed with plaintive five-line requests for gawd-knows-what that no-one reads.
They still haven't fixed the quest-tracking problem, whereby you're in the middle of a quest chain, complete the link and are given the next one, only to find the currently tracked quest is now one in a different zone entirely. Maybe there's a setting that makes it less prevalent or something, but if so that should be the default setting.
Overall, ESO in 2026 is an improvement on ESO 2019, but it has the wrong focus. Its main strength is its stories, but you're zipped through these to reach some tiresome elder game that assumes you want to spend your time in groups repeatedly running limited content.
I confess that I do feel an urge to replay Skyrim after this, though.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).