ESO is Dead to Me, and It’s Been Liberating

I wrote a post a month and a half ago in which I was waffling about getting back into Elder Scrolls Online. They had announced that they would be adding “subclassing” (or more accurately, multiclassing), which I thought was intriguing. I had kept everything as it was when I stopped playing. I left the door wide open to walk back through.

Their big patch came out, and I updated the game and tried it. Sure, it launched with a content expansion, but the new zone, with its new mythics and new sets and new achievements and all the rest was secondary to me. I didn’t pay for that. All I cared about was subclassing. I was going to see how that worked out before I dropped money on the expansion.

Now, you can’t just start using other class skill lines. You have to re-level them, even if you’ve maxed them out on other characters. And they level at half the normal speed, which I already thought was tedious. So I got to work, running dolmens in Alik’r and running around Spellscar in Craglorn. I used my high-level training gear for a 66% XP increase, my Mora’s Whispers mythic for another 25%, and scrolls for an extra 50%, 100%, and even one 150% buff.

I spent the next six hours in the game doing nothing but grinding. I finished three skill lines that were almost maxed on a couple other characters, just to unlock them for subclassing, and I got three skill lines fully leveled and morphed. I was working on one more, and had just gotten the last skill to level IV, ready to morph all the skills and level those alternate styles, when it finally hit me.

This wasn’t fun to me. This is the whole game; this combat. This endless click-click, click-click, click-click to the timing of an invisible one-second world clock. The net effect of it is like DDR or Crypt of the Necrodancer or something. And I wasn’t enjoying it. Still. I’ve always thought that the combat was the worst part of the game, and nothing about this has changed.

On top of this, the stress of needing to get all of these skill lines leveled and morphed, and then to follow the emerging meta build how-to videos, and then to take my new builds into old content to see how they were doing and how well I could manage it, and then to start taking it into new content and running down all the new collectibles and achievements… It brought back all the community-gatekept anxiety that was the reason I stopped playing six months ago.

So I quit.

I removed myself from all my guilds. I removed all my non-IRL friends. I left all the Discord servers. I stopped the subscription I had just signed back up for. I uninstalled the game. I quit following all the ESO streamers on YouTube and Twitch. I scrubbed all the videos about it in my watch history so that the algorithm would stop recommending them.

And I gotta say, for the record, that it’s been unexpectedly liberating. It’s been a huge load off my mind. (And I could use the extra bandwidth, let me tell you!)