Disappointing and boring, but ok if you are playing with others
Elder Scrolls Online is like like the aliens stole your wife and then sent a robotic replacement and you feel that everything about the way she acts does not feel like the person you know and love. Or it is like some Chinese company tried to copy an Apple or a Samsung phone, not just the outside but the inside too. The engineers were given the real thing to hold and play with and then they were asked to copy it. This game seems like an Elder Scrolls game. It has a fairly good atmospheric music that is reminiscent of Elder Scrolls games; it has the looks of Elder Scrolls Oblivion mixed with Skyrim; it has the Elder Scrolls races, quests and lore; and yet playing it leaves you feeling empty and unsatisfied.
The quests are largely forgettable, especially the main quest. I am still on it and I cannot tell you what it is about even as I am playing it. I hear the characters introduce backstory or lore and I can almost hear my brain not caring. On top of the poor storytelling, there have been plenty of other unpleasant and un-Elder-Scrolls-like design choices made by the developers, like a limited map or forcing the races into alliances. Your race decides your alliance and players of different alliances cannot play together! I would like to remind readers that this is supposed to be an MMO. As for the limited map, most of the Tamriel (the main landmass in the Elder Scrolls games) is off-limits, either because the devlopers have not yet finished a particular part of it or because that part belongs to a different alliance. I would like to remind the readers that the full name of the game is Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited. The irony... There are some serious technical issues, and it must be one of the few games where the technical issues increase as the game gets patched. Performance issues get introduced to stay. Despite it being a multiplayer game, most of the quests require each member of the party to complete the objectives of a quest separately. Party members quietly disappear when they enter an area that the other party members have already completed (phasing issues).
In short, the game is painfully average. There is but one redeeming feature I found to justify a purchase of this game: girls like Elder Scrolls. In fact, a lot of people of different ages like Elder Scrolls. This means you could play this game with your significant other. That way the game is capable of providing some fun, but one has to ask whether this positive side can be attributed to the creators of the game, considering that the fun of playing together comes from...well, from playing together and not from something this game did particularly well.
