The Elder Scrolls Online Review (Dewi Morgan)
Ignore the "4 hrs played": I've been playing this game since beta, just usually not through Steam. I'm trying it just to see if it'll fix an issue I'm having with detecting it in the Nvidia App, since there's currently a reward for running it for 50 mins through Nvidia.
No Steam Achievements, I consider a plus, as the plethora of ingame achievements can be grindier than I prefer for Steam.
No reall "pay-to-win": their ingame purchases are almost all about cosmetics, though there's also a fair bit of "pay-for-convenience". Like, buying the monthly "ESO+" subscription gives you much more storage space, etc, to the point that most longtime players swear by it as it just makes the game way more convenient. Similarly, you can buy pets who act as shopkeepers, bankers, etc. so you don't have to lug your loot back to a town. If you've already achieved something grindy on one character, you can usually pay to unlock it on another character to avoid doing the grind again; I've never bothered, but nice that the option's there. Most cool stuff (mounts, housing, etc) can be obtained for free; you can just get more of them with money.
Different areas of the game have different modes: single-player, or play casually with friends ("overland PvE" - what I'll talk about most here), group co-op ("Group PvE": Trials, Group Dungeons), and player-vs-player ("PvP").
Like myself, I'd say most players come from the single-player Elder Scrolls fanbase, rather than from other MMO fanbases, so we want single-player or casual small-group co-op content. Most agree that PvP just isn't the game's main strength. PvP has three forms: open-world battles based around besieging keeps across Cyrodiil (I rarely see more than a couple dozen people in a siege, though); similar fighting but in the Imperial city, where it's more about capture-the-flag; and 4v4 "battlegrounds". It's OK if that's what you're into.
Some areas require or at least encourage co-op. At the moment, even the areas which encourage co-op ("Group Dungeons") can mostly be solo'd unless you go for the harder "veteran" difficulty, though a few dungeons have "mechanics" that require two or more people. Trials are 12-person things where you go up against heftier NPC opponents ("mobs"). Trials and Dungeons are non-casual, in that it's kinda a jerk move to drop out in the middle of running one.
The overwhelming majority of the world, however, is "overland". Despite its name, this includes a lot of the underground smaller delves. You can do this in a group or alone, but really, solo play is *better* unless you commit to doing quests together, otherwise you fall out of synch, where one person has a quest to run off and complete, while someone else has already done it. Like, my wife and I have characters reserved just for playing together. Fro the most part they've made it so that you at least CAN group together, though, regardless of whether you've done the quest in that area or not.
But casual PvE is where the game shines.
It's clearly what all the devs enjoy, and clearly what most players do, too. There is *months* of story-based quest content, that mostly isn't just oldschool-MMO "kill 10 rats and come back" but more like "find out who's behind nefarious goings-on by searching for clues, talking to people, fighting, exploring, interacting with the world, etc". Not saying there aren't any grindy quests: just that they aren't the norm.
The main questline of the area is story-based, and there're a significant number of story-based side-quests in each zone too. Just about every delve has one, plus there are many others throughout the world, as both fixed and random encounters.
Then each zone has about three repeatable "daily" quests (meaning you can't usually pick up the quest more than once a day, not that you have to do 'em all every day: there's well over a hundred!). These are usually one simple "kill
As well as the solo questing, there's also lots of other things to do: the "tales of Tribute" card game I already mentioned; legerdemain has you picking pockets and stealing from houses; crafting is a whole specialty you can sink years into mastering; fishing (collect 9 rare fish from each zone for an achievement); housing (you can buy and craft furniture, invite people to it, and make things convenient by putting all sorts of utilities like bankers, merchants, crafting tables, training dummies, mundus stones, etc all close together; you can tour other people's works and see some truly amazing stuff they've made (my favorite was a Borg Cube); arenas (where you go through several rounds of monsters, in interesting environments that make it harder but more interesting); the "infinite archive" (like an arena, but an unlimited number of rounds); antiquities (where you solve a couple of simple puzzle minigames to find and dig up interesting things); and more I'm forgetting.
The game is designed to support being played intermittently; you pick it up when there's an event, or a new release, and then you drop it for a while, and come back when there's something else cool going on. But at the same time, it's also designed to make you WANT to keep playing, to complete that outfit, to finish decorating that house, etc.
Overall: I've been playing for over ten years, and there's still so much I haven't yet done in the game. And I likely never will, because they expand it at least as fast as I can consume the content.