The Love/Hate for ESO Turns Once Again

I’ve written extensively about ESO. I started during COVID with some IRL friends, took a break, came back for Oakensoul and Arcanist, took another long break, recently came back for subclassing, and now I think I’m well and truly done.

It’s the combat. I just can’t get away from the fact that I don’t like it. I’m not great at it. Passable, not great. But here’s the revelation: I don’t think I’d enjoy the game even if I was good at it. The combat is just not interesting to me. It never was. In all the roughly 5,000 hours I’ve put into it, I’ve never thought it was fun. It was just something to be endured while questing and grinding.

(And the one non-combat thing to do in the game is Tales of Tribute, but I truly despise it, and do not believe a collectible card game has any place in an MMO.)

Zenimax Online has made stunning announcements about new content, systems, quality of life upgrades, and game modes coming to the game over the next couple of years. That’s great. Great for the long-term prospects of the game as a business, and great for the people who like it.

Unfortunately, all this does is make my OCD tingle. There will be thousands of hours of content added as well as thousands of new achievements to earn. The thought of it is overwhelming, and the reason has taken me years to articulate: I want to complete the content, but I can only do that through the combat I don’t enjoy. This is why it feels overwhelming to me. I don’t enjoy the process.

That was my reason for leaving last time. I was obsessed with grinding out achievements at the expense of the terrible combat, and it was hurting my mental health. Once all of this new content lands, the problem would be multiplied for me.

Perfect example time. I decided to try veteran Vateshran Hollows. I’ve done it several times on regular, but never cleared it on vet. I figured with all the power creep from subclassing, I’d have a pretty good shot at it. Since coming back, I got everything leveled and got all new meta gear, so I followed Hyperiox’s guide on making a solo build, and went in. It was 2 hours of frustrating grind. After 17 deaths and the third wipe on the final boss due to some mechanic of one particular enemy that I wasn’t understanding, I just quit. I simply closed the game. Then I went to Steam and turned off auto-renew on ESO+.

(I logged back in to remove all my items in the guild store so they wouldn’t expire and then be deleted in emails I never open, because I had a couple million-gold items up for sale.)

The start of these sweeping changes landed yesterday. I successfully ignored my curiosity to log in and look at them.

Some people like the process of getting your head bashed in for a couple of hours, reading a guide and watching a video, and then trying again, until they’ve mastered all 50 different fights in a particular dungeon. I could do that. I was already very close on the first try. But what I finally realized is that I don’t enjoy that, and never will, and I’m tired of pretending that I do. A run of the thing is about an hour, once you know what you’re doing. (The speed run time limit is 45 minutes.) That sounds more manageable, but who knows how many runs it would take for me to get to that kind of time.

And then I realized that you need to clear it ten times to unlock all the perfected weapons.

This was the final straw for me. I don’t enjoy this combat. I don’t enjoy the grind. I don’t enjoy the process. So, for the third and, I think, final time, I’m retiring.

I’m just quiet quitting this time. Last time, I made announcements with my guilds. This time, I’m just going to let it fallow. Making announcements makes people uncomfortable, regardless of my autistic need to put a cap on it. People come and go all the time. I finally figured out that it’s part of the unwritten community rules to not talk about it, so there’s no pressure either way. So I can only blog about it. Sorry, world.

I like the thought of doing content with other people now, instead of just playing single-player games. That was the best part of ESO, running dungeons and trials with guilds. I’ve looked around at a lot of replacements. I’ve heard the skill ceilings are quite high in both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV, so that puts me off of them. I want to like Destiny 2. The gunplay seems to be the right style of combat for me. But everyone agrees that the game is not in a good place right now, and it’s famously inscrutable to new players. I’ve played a few hours, and it’s not clicking. Bungie is promising a refresh, but it’s been pushed several months, due to having their hands full with Marathon, I’m sure. So I’m going to keep an eye on this.

I still love Fallout 76, bugs and crappy RNG and all.