Writing this review after 2,991 hours in, lots of things to say but I did my best to summarize my experience as follows.

THE GOOD:
[1.] The World of Elder Scrolls. This game is updated on a yearly basis with each Chapter featuring a new Zone, a new part of Tamriel or an Oblivion Realm. Throughout my play time in this game, I have learnt lots of lores of other races, cultures, myths that I did not know back when I was only playing TES:V Skyrim. It really opens up my view on Tamriel and I'm actually satisfied.

[2.] Storytelling. This is a mixed bag really. Some of the zone stories are quite boring to be frank, but out of principle I always let the NPCs finish their dialogues. However, every so often, an excellent piece of writing/storytelling just came out of nowhere. E.g. In latest Gold Road Chapter, there's a side quest chain involving newly added feature of Scribing (Spell Crafting) and it involves a Netch (floating jellyfish like creature in TES) which turns out to be a Luminary (primordial being of pure magic). Story about how a primordial being with immense arcane power doesn't care at all about itself, but would rather use its power to do little good deeds in life, guiding us (players) to help reunite and reconcile a father and its son during his final moments, helping some desperate, scared kids finding their way out of dark places, etc. There're quite a lot of other heart-warming stories through the base game and all its Chapters and DLCs but this one stands out for me personally.

[3.] Theorycrafting. Every so often when I suddenly thought of a build, I can't help but get to work on it, like I would write down the Armor sets, their traits and enchantments, the skills and champion points to go with that build, and the mode (PVE, PVP) I want to try it on (mostly PVP, PVE is a bit more rigid in my opinion). There're currently seven classes in-game, [I.] hyper tanky fire-breathing Dragonknight, [II.] stealth assassin and rogue class Nightblade, [III.] dark magic and thunder channeling Sorcerer, [IV.] Holy Paladin-ish and light power wielding Templar, [V.] Nature magic and cryomancer Warden, [VI.] undead-manipulating Necromancer, and [VII.] abyssal, eldritch power channeler and Mora's follower Arcanist. Each of these classes offers so many opportunities for different builds and throughout my thousand hours of play time, I have YET to grow bored.

[4.] Graphics. This one is very, very debatable. But the graphics are decent in my book. I recommend a few zones that I particularly like, High Isle zone with its countryside and coast, the High Elves' island paradise of Summerset and its associated zone Artaeum, etc. If you like autumn vibes, I recommend West Weald zone (the latest addition to the game). A few other zones I do not like but seem to be popular: Blackreach Caverns (dark and gloomy underground cavernous zones associated with Western Skyrim), Murkmire in Black Marsh, and the ash-covered zones of Stonefalls and Vvardenfell (why would anyone lives in these places?!).

[5.] Outfit styles and Skins. I dabble a bit in editing outfits for my characters and I quite enjoy it. Basically you equip armor sets (different armor sets offer different bonus and perks, outfit styles change the looks but not their properties), and you mix and mash your outfit. From the coolest looking Knight, or Mage to the foulest looking Lich/Undead or rotting zombie, the options are limitless. There's a subreddit called ESOFashion dedicated to this topic. It's also commonly associated with roleplaying but I do not roleplay personally so I won't go into that.

THE BAD:
[1.] Occasional server issue. If anyone has played consistently throughout 2024, you'd have noticed the unstable performance of their servers, I said "occasional" because I could go a couple weeks without any issues on my end; or I couldn't do anything at all in a day because of the disconnects and lagging. The devs acknowledged this issue and I hoped they actually look into it and do something.

[2.] A small portion of elitist and toxic community. I need to emphasize that the majority of the community is nice and friendly, and would even give out some old stuff (e.g. style pages, motifs, or other consumables) for free to help out lower level players. But occasionally there're also people who constantly judge and tell you how you should build and play your character. I encountered lots of these instances in PVP, e.g. people telling you not play one bar (Oakensoul build) because it's lazy, people telling you to shore up your defenses to at least 30k+ HP so you don't get one shotted, people telling you to not build your character to be too tanky because no one likes tank meta; people telling you to not play healer role because it's for cowards that like to hide at the back of others, etc. My opinion? I play what I want, end of story.

[3.] Crown Store and Crown Crates. So yea this game like most others has a in-game store that stocks items to be bought using IRL money. There's also this ESO+ Subscription that gives you unlimited storage for raw crafting materials which is REALLY necessary or else your 90% of game time would be used to organize your inventory. Crown Crates (ESO loot boxes) occasionally go on sales, these are completely RNG-based, some people get the 1% chance reward (Radiant Apex mount) in just opening a few boxes, while others opened up 20-50 boxes for nothing. If anyone's interested, I'd recommend buying Inventory Pets and Assistants in Crown Stores, and Furnishings if you're into decorating houses. But personally I have bad experiences with Crown Crates so I'd advise people to try stay away from them or only buy them if you have like lots of disposable income.

[4.] FOMO. Every time there's an event going on, people would be rushing in to farm it, causing certain zones and areas to be crowded (as commonly seen in MMORPG?)... screen would be lagging, flashing like crazy with everyone rushing in for the kills, casting skills and spells and whatnot, etc. Maybe it's just a common scene in MMORPG, but still it makes me feel dreadful to be among them.

Despite its many flaws, TESO has been my go-to game for over a year now, I'm fully addicted to the theorycrafting aspect of it. Not to mention the beautiful worlds and its lores.

If you're new to TES world or MMORPG in general, I highly recommend buying this game on sales. And if you decided you like it, you can consider paying for ESO+ Subscription which grants you access to all zones (EXCEPT the latest zone) and DLCs and unlimited crafting bag. Or you can just pick the DLCs you like and buy them separately in Crown Stores using Crowns.

This game is celebrating its 10th Year Anniversary milestone. Here's hoping for more glorious adventures and battles to come!