Should You Play ESO in 2024? | New & Returning Player Guide 

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ESO needs a big Wow factor update. Something huge like a complete combat update to improve the decade old sounds and visuals. A major overhaul to Cyrodiil. Or a new major activity to stand beside the tentpoles of questing, pvp, housing, dungeons/trials, etc...

I have started ESO last week! it's bit hard to get into it but I am level 15 right now and having a blast. Very worth it to pay attention to the story and Dialogue.

Just hopped back on this game after like 4 years of being off. Having tons of fun with the arcanist

Thanks for the well explained, very informative video format. I sub and i just pre-ordered Gold Road!

Merry Christmas !!

Ah Hack, always love your upbeat nature.

Thank you for this video! It was very helpful!

Very detailed video mate, very helful for begginers 👍

This was very informative, thanks. I played several years ago and just reinstalled, and have forgotten so much. I think I'm going to need to sub though, as I've got a bunch of alts I had made for storage, all with inventories full, and a bank with 198/100 slots filled lol. And I honestly can't remember if any of the crap I hoarded is valuable or if there was any reason to hoard it in the first place. I don't think I was ever in a guild with a trader so I never had access to auction houses. Honestly the way the auction houses work in this game is kind of odd. I mean, there's a separate auction house for all these different guilds right? Are they actually at all useful?

Tyvm for the insight.

They need to update old sets in some way, but I suspect that those old sets are intended for materials harvesting at this point. Having 500+ sets or whatever is silly. It's artificial variety, even though most players still gravitate to the BIS sets.

You mentioned trading in unwanted pets. How do i do that please?

I discovered you back when Elsweyr first came out and I use to watch all your builds one after the other binge watching. I then took the jump and literally made 18 characters all between lvl.16 to lvl.40 solo leveling specifically story mode adventuring before quitting each character from burnout, trying different classes but I became to overwhelmed by complex guides on where to go, which quests to pick in specific order and where to run before progressing the main story. I always wanted to play the game as a single player game so I could experience all the story and lore content as a die hard lore fan of the the franchise before doing any multiplayer stuff and my biggest issue was it was so hard trying to keep up and not confuse myself amongst it all so I could have a chronological experience of the content and chapters. I saw the trailer for the new chapter and immediately ignited a fire in me again, so I'm returning and buying this chapter and your video just helped me solidify that decision but I know I'll be chasing years of content so I don't expect to play the new chapter until a few years from how convoluted and inefficient my questing becomes. I'm hopeful my first experience for an MMO actually becomes an experience this time and I can come to enjoy the genre.

Yeah that's all I want ESO Plus for...crafting bag and outfit dye. Well the catching up on all dlc except the latest us a great bonus.

Dlc purchase is not pay to win its how they keep the game going. Its how they afford to keep large updates and game progession coming as often as they do

I used to play eso on Xbox and I have transferred to pc and play esp their now and I’ve noticed a lot not a lot of ppl want to help ppl gearing up I don’t see a lot of normal trial runs in group finder and the vet trials a lot of them require u to show achievement to join , joining guilds doesn’t seem to make a difference anymore not many ppl are social or wanna help , I don’t see a lot of progression guilds either

i played the game for years on console.switched to pc 2 weeks ago and im loving the game again

I wonder if they could implement an option to remove level scaling when solo or when grouping with other players over cp 200 or 300. would there be any bad results from that

I really like the feel of ESO combat compared to other MMOs and I don't mind limiting the number of abilities but I do think 5 (or 5x2) is too few. There are so many cool abilities I never used or stopped using because there's just no space for them. It feels like my character can only ever do a tiny subset of the stuff they should be able to do.

I love ESO for what it is. more tamriel lore. I like to play with friends but most often than not I end up playing alone just listening to the story, reading all the lore books and feeling the immersion

Just returning to game, how to get that on screen combat text and the buffs to display where they are? Also great video thanks!

i get sucked into loot crates sometimes😯 I like watching the cat pass out the cards. lol its addicting

Hey is your immortal necro still good?

I was addicted to this game, playing 15hrs a day on my days off of work and this was back in 2016. I have a gaming PC now and want to dive back in and with the new gold road dlc

I played it for the first time when elsewyr was released. Played until like level 10 with two characters then got bored. Just now redownloaded and started a dragon knight and got him to cp 40 but noticed I was not completely happy with it so I just restarted with a Templar and I love it. I bought the necrom collection and I’m debating on trying out eso plus but I dont want to be dependent on it and I want to familiarize myself with a game a little more. I’m surprised how populated the game is aswell.

Great video I was actually just thinking about this. Question, did I read somewhere that if you get the subscription for a month and you get all of the DLC that comes with the subscription you keep the DLC that you get even if you cancel your subscription after a month? Because if so, that with game pass is a sweet deal.

I quit eso a year ago because as a pvp player i got burned from the same bgs and only cyrodil, is anything change pvp wise or same all?

I was obsessed with ESO 2 years ago got to level 1000CP on all my characters and then just didnt know what else to do. I miss the fun and chase in the game but don't know if I have anything to come back for.

I just started today I’m excited but we will see

The best part of eso is being able to just wander around and the very high chance you will stumble across something you missed before

doesn't gold road deluxe give you previous chapters and dlc too?

Agree with a combat update , I find it anoyying I’m clicking attack and because the enemy is on slight hill I need to reposition to on the hill to attack them ? Wtf

Cyrodiil needs a lot of work. 10 year anniversary soon & still on day one map bar the additions of the outpost. Endless archive is amazing. Would love update to Cryodiil and an endless trial so say trial one is sunspire, you dont loose a thread next you get AA then SO & so on untill your team looses all threads, each cycle trial gets harder like endless archive. But cyro needs a new map & nerfing of ball groups

Nice Video ! I started last monday its so fun i sure will play this a long time ;D .

Once in a year I log in at least once in a year just to purchase new chapter 😅 I joined in 2018 and I never knew about any possibility to win anything by simply logging in but at some point in 2019 I joined after several months break only to be rewarded by Psijic Vila (something about loging in between specific dates) There must be so much content by now. Most of those chapters since 2018-2019 I never even played properly. Cant wait for some looong solo PVE story ride.

for returning players to have fun respec your skills and try a new class and or weapon now i have to find a way to make alot of coin to do so

I’m an old eso vet I played from the release week til about 2020 having completed every dungeon and vet trial until the shadow one in summer set i think. My gf wants to start playing and knew I loved this game (and that I was pretty good at it) I need a true vet (if any) to be completely honest because I know the state of the game when I left in 2020 was very average at best. I honestly can’t think of another mmo to get into that’s casual enough and that I have mastered enough to play and get her liking it and carry her thru pretty much. So Will a eso vet or someone with some decent hours and experience be honest. What’s the game really like as of April 2024 and is it flourishing enough to add a new player to the mix of LFG Dungeons and battlegrounds. I don’t think she will reach trial and guild level at all but looking forward to that if I decide to play. Any help is very appreciated

Would love to see a non scaling server. I like it to progress through the lands and countries. 😊

I've tried basically all the MMOs and the winner for 'best/easiest to solo' is clearly ESO. Maayyyybe I'll jump back in. I had a blast playing for a year up until High Isle dropped. Necrom looks lit.

We need big changes this year. The dlc drop with a zone and 2 dungeons is getting very stale. I hope new/different things come in 2024

I started to play eso due a video like this. It has been some years, and I am quite positively satisfied, made a few good friends, and had experiences I wouldn't if i didn't give this game a try. Keep up the good work, friend. Hopefully, we can meet many new faces on the roads of Tamriel in 2024.

I have sooo many hours played in this game, and I just cant get back into it..I try but I just cant

I hate the lvl 20 companion limit and the fact that they can't wear regular item.... i wish i could form full 4 people group with companion.

All i want is a Vampire buff its really tough rn 😂😢

I slowed down alot of my play due to constant set changes. I cant keep up with it all. Tired of getting my character where its effective only to have it turn to complete trash with the latest update. I absolutely love this game. I just do not have all the resources to change gear every month or two. 🥵

Id lvoe new weapons, spears or crossbows would be amazing

I just started eso on Saturday morning, I got the necron deluxe for £12 so i said lets do it... now im level 19 and completely lost at what im doing haha

That combat is a game breaker for me... just to clunky other than that pretty solid.

I love playing ESO. I play it on the ps4, i love the lore, exploring.

Also as someone who started in 2016, played for 8 hours and went back to final fantasy 14, then this time last year was about 100 hours into the game, now I'm 700 hours through and still loving it, the game has improved alot over the last 12 months with just little changes with quality of life and such. Managed to play ff14 for maybe 50 hours this year, which is the least time in 9 years, for me Eso has overtaken 14 in many ways. As 14 gets stale, Eso is trying to mix it up

I guess I'll have to keep waiting for a reason to play it again.

I’m new to the game and I’ve never played mmos before I play a lot of rpgs but this seems overwhelming for example why do people never put points into health doesn’t that make the game harder and there are a lot of mechanics I don’t understand

Haven't played since Skyrim update. Gonna be coming back soon. I bet the meya has changed multiple times.

Great video and I couldn’t agree more with all your points. ESO has been my main since 2017. Most newbies start out with overland content for the first several months while they build their character and learn the game. However while the storyline is excellent, many leave because the overland combat is as you said, essentially story mode difficulty. It doesn’t have to be hardcore but it definitely needs to be more challenging to keep players coming back for more.

Nice.

I want a new magic weapon, preferably sword and rune. Magic is my favorite spec but im tired of staffs and the occasional dw staff setup

Bought it a week ago and already done a noob mistake. Used the allowance you get from the membership to buy a dlc 😅

i mean... if you have not played the story and etc - sure why not its never late to explore the world i would say...

TYTY..perfect timing

Veteran mode for story questing Please!!

Getting into this game is so hard lol, i just started yesterday already lvl 20 and i still dont even get the storyline 😂. I just spawned it was greeted by some random dude and now im doing random missions.

Great video as always Hack. I swear if ZOS made challenging overland content ESO would be an almost perfect MMO.

Although ESO Could be fun to play and I have played it off and on since it’s release one of the truly annoying things over the last year to two years is the in game lag in both PVE & PVP which is not being addressed or rectified which brings the game down in my opinion

As long as you keep updating and making builds, I will always play ESO, HTM! :D

I want an unarmed skill line in ESO.

ugh WHY!! I just started playing gw2 lol now I bought ESO and have 2 mmos to play.... help lol

I think I can say about Necrom-year: not bad even good but not enough

I know it's probably way too late now, but I actually think ESO would have been a better game if they had not inclued any classes, but instead allowed us to choose from a variety of spells and magics to essentially create our own playstyles.

A few things i think needs to be added into the game for full character's class to be in-depth and some other things. First, when you pick your Class it has three specialization with a choice to alter it, but what about adding a furthering skill depth by what your weapon is? I mean, it would add further gameplay elements to your performance as to what you focus your skills on and yes, the weapon has a skill tree of its own despite that why not give the Class a unique altered gameplay focus on the weapon alone? To give more actual in-depth. Second, a Combat overhaul is indeed needed for the entirety of how slow and sluggish the combat is at times along with the sound effects needing a revamp to be exciting as you immerse into combat and at the same time, enjoy your character's play style as you perform your abilities and such. Third, difficulty should be raised up to give players a edge to enjoy the game in a much thrilling sense? You barely lose much when you die and why not make Open Public Dungeons a little extra difficult as in you got to keep your guard up against the enemies being organized in their pattern to cooperate against you, since you are intruding their base. Finally, a lot of games are updating and revamping in some way to improve the experience in a much upgraded design and I believe it will not hurt to see ESO being given this treatment on its 10 year establishment of still going with upcoming content.

Great review, made me want to jump in to it again

ESO needs to finish the storyline with humeaous mora 7 quests was more questions than answers, but endless archive is my favorite tool to lvl up new toons

We need to be able to improve damage output and health and healing, after 1000 cp/ 1200cp the points are pretty useless, which is a shame ad it doesn't give players incentive to carry on earning cp points

I spent like $30 for this game on Black Friday and when it downloaded I couldn’t play it bc I needed ps+. I cried that day. Heavy manly tears.

For me the game's biggest drawback right now is locomotion quality and interactivity with the environment. I want smoother and "weightier" transitions between different animations, a sprint that doesn't look as if I'm constipated and flora/grass that responds accordingly when I'm running through it. Combat that sounds and feels weightier (specifically for melee) and not as if I'm cutting through paper. The fact that the game's visuals aren't fully committed to either realistic or stylized makes the game look kinda awkward and dated in 2024. The environments also need a bit more clutter and vegetation in general, to make them feel more tactile and lived-in. I'm sure they have the budget to improve on at least character animation. Would go a long way towards making the core experience feel more premium and less like your typical pre-2020/2010 MMO. That's the main reason I put the game down when Morrowind expansion was announced. The game was getting such massive new content but since I was playing it as a SP game anyways and the core feel of the game was already dated - I'd rather just play a premium SP game instead for that extra immersion I wanted.

My biggest complaint on the game is actually the community. It’s the quietest community I’ve come across in gaming. Rarely anyone talks even in bigger guilds. You see a lot of people but game feels lonely because not a lot of social chatting. Seems to be an issue with a lot of games nowadays. People talked a lot more in the early 2000’s when online gaming was hitting a rise. I miss those days.

im still thinking....being 3000 cp levels behind is VERY scary....

I havent played the game in two months. Honestly I love this game and enjoy so many (or too many!) things about it. But why I stopped playing was the constant nerfing of gear sets. This constant having to change sets is exhausting and too time consuming and too costly. If and when I hop back on it'll only be to run around and farm.

idk i lost my motivation after the gold price for crowns has skyrocketed. i dont have the energy to be grinding for millions of gold. also, tired of paying for a subscription to remove ads and annoyances, aka craft bag.

I briefly tried ESO on game pass last year. I stopped playing it very quickly after realizing I didn't have all of my collected stuff because it's a totally different game account. I don't remember....do you still need to sub and pay extra for ESO plus on game pass? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes and that sucks. I absolutely would have zero interest in playing via game pass if u have to pay for the Xbox sub and the same price again for the ESO sub

I will say this after playing for over 5K hours on PS and Xbox. This game REQUIRES ESO+, yes you can kind of play it on a gamepass or for 5 bucks but the game is so stripped down you miss out on key sets of gear and content that is required to do any true endgame content. If you really want to play this game and get a full experience, you got to have ESO+ just because of the resource bags and allowing for everything besides the most newest DLC. One could play long enough to get gold and have someone buy the DLC but sadly this game has been around for such a long time in order to get into a decent guild, you have good amount of Champion point levels in order to just be able to sell in an auction store or be able to do active questing with people besides randoms. Still this game can be a lot of fun but there gets to be a point where you are just facerolling 90% of the stuff out there and that 10% is so hard to gap that if you are not running the most meta sets of gear, most trial guilds and PVP guilds will kick you for not being able to pull your weight. Still the game does a bad job at gapping difficulty, you would be playing the base game and you can use your level 3 weapons and kick the shit out of everything including World Bosses in area, then when you do overland content or some DLC content you are getting beat up a bit more. Also there are tons of quality of life that are in the game. Hack explains mythics which are now pretty much a requirement to do any "tough" endgame situations, but aside from that you need the craft bag otherwise your inventory gets filled with shit. Also you might need mobile shops, banks, armory, and breakdown. It's a key difference and can be quite annoying. I will say Hack covers it but he paints it massively positive, when in reality this game REQUIRES ESO+ to get to any form of endgame. If you are willing to spend 15 dollars a month, then this game is worth it to a degree just got to put in the hours but if you think you're going to do a base game run and get a good experience, then you are going to be annoyed by the gatekept end game content but if you just want little small senseless meaningless lore, then the base game is okay, you might enjoy that.

still playing eso since beta 2014 but since updates get scarcer and next year probably also only 1 dungeon and 1 chapter update (i bet winterhold + solstheim); wondering about starting fallout 76

I would likke to go back into the game, but i don't want to spend so much money on eso plus. Without that, the game seems more like aa chalange, having to manage your inventory all tje time,, keeping only what you need to progress and cant take all the products and items that i see around. I am so used to that from some other rog games i've been playing that i cant resist picking every flower i see and any runes.

Just paid 5.99 on ps5 and am having a blast at level 12

The biggest way this game is being held back for me is how easy the overworld has been.

Can we get cross platform please

The problem with the "Solo" content is that it is so easy, it is nearly impossible to die. Where is the fun in walking around and simply clicking buttons. Again I bring up Age Of Conan, you can be maxed out on T-6 raid gear and if you are questing by yourself and do something stupid you will get killed. Age Of Conan ALWAYS had that level of intensity when you were playing and it was always challenging which made the game so much fun. ESO is a lot like SWTOR in that aspect, SWTOR is so easy it is more point and click adventure than an MMO. Catering to solo players and low IQ players is exactly what they shouldn't be doing.

Haven't been playing in a while, but I miss all the peace and fun I've experienced when I was still a deeply troubled teen. This game helped me greatly to keep on fighting through tough times. But after 1300h of playing, I was drained, which was my fault for doing things in the game that I didn't enjoy, like daily writs, dungeons, pvp... Everybody was drilling on me for not having decent gear, master crafting, best rotation, and you need milions and milions of gold to try buying crowns with gold, and even then it was disgustingly hard to do when you were bad at combat. These days this method went from barely doable to impossible, inflation killed that market. But, it's still "my" game. I have went through around five or six other MMORPSs and the only one I managed to stick to for a while is Guild Wars 2. Even if GW2 is very fun, well made game, it's also very predatory on my wallet. So yeah, will only take like 2 days and nights to download.

Most importantly is there transmog?!

Can someone help me here, my 3 brothers and I used to play this but the game 2 years ago and it was SO EASY AND BRAIN DEAD. We literally would play for hours and our life bars didn't drop below 80%. How can this game be more difficult? Like, actually a challenge. Is there any settings to change? 95% of all enemies from the very START of ESO was just brain dead spamming the same buttons with chance of dying. I love the graphics, gameplay and lore and want it to be a challenge so we can all play again.

Good game but it definitely needs an upgraded version

Returning player here (1500hrs in game) - just spent the last year trying out other games, most recently playing WOW’s new Season of Discovery (complete WoW virgin). Honestly it’s crazy that ESO isn’t more successful. It outshines WoW in EVERY CATEGORY, except for levelling. Overland + and some actual dev participation on reddit/forums and ESO would have millions of players. Zenimax are absolutely throwing away a golden goose here.

Left eso for a bit and vent bk to wow. Would like some chances. Feels boring and all is the same. Rep should be added and would make some more fun for doing quest and can get mounts after maxed rep. Like wow. Pvp needs something fast. Think most of us can type so much stuff that needs to get added or chanced. Been playing for many years but last month i stop, needed a chance. Still a grate game

Nothing worse when they reset the champion points. I hate remembering where i had them to begin with lol

I was expecting an ESO video, but by the time I was finished eating, I had only seen a video on that other game that sponsors... :/

Cyrodil and PvP feel abandoned, Expansions are too predictable, No new class abilities or weapon types, Constant Gear nerfs have left 70-80% of gear sets useless, and the “Meta” hasn’t changed since launch, Sorcerer and Templar have remained the best classes in the game for as long as I can remember. I love this game and I don’t want it to die, just wished zenimax would address these issues.

I certainly should, yet I don't know what to do. I don't really do any questing nor hard pve or pvp content - I don't want to get involved in any constant group. May be I should just continue doing crafting and housing?? A little tired of it tbh. Already reached stage 5 in the endless archive (almost stage 6) solo. May be I should get into tales of tribute hmm ... Overall idk. Happy to hear your suggestions guys

I will come back when I can obtain cool stuff by playing and not just paying to the store. Also, just buff overland content already. Last time I played I was making my characters underpowered by choice to feel a sense of progression...

just picked up the game, man this is complex and the grind is real for solo player

just great