The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited

 PC
User Score
8.4

Generally favorable reviews- based on 484 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 393 out of 484
  2. Mixed: 25 out of 484
  3. Negative: 66 out of 484
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  1. Darkiboo
    Feb 16, 2022
    3
    Since ESO's transition to Free-To-Play and a Paid Subscription model, the game has failed to balance the two differing game environments.

    In Free-To-Play games, you can expect long wait times to complete activities, grinds to compel you to pay up for convenience, repetitive content only varied with additional purchases, and more RNG than deserves to exist in 2022. Even as a Paid    Since ESO's transition to Free-To-Play and a Paid Subscription model, the game has failed to balance the two differing game environments.

    In Free-To-Play games, you can expect long wait times to complete activities, grinds to compel you to pay up for convenience, repetitive content only varied with additional purchases, and more RNG than deserves to exist in 2022. Even as a Paid Subscriber, you must endure all of this.

    ESO prides itself on making hoarders and collectors of out every player. In order to experience convenience, you must experienced hours and hours of inconvenience. In order to attain gear, you must steadily fill a stickerbook that can then reconstruct any obtained gear for the very rare currency of transmute crystals. In order to make money, you need to purchase additional character slots, or own a second account, and complete the exact same set of money-making dailies to feel you can have a say in the ever-inflating marketplace. Every solution to the above problems and more can be solved with the purchase of the game's monetary currency: crowns, buying the newest chapter or DLC (they are separate), or being a paid subscriber to earn 10% increased gold and double transmute crystal storage--though you're likely never to reach that threshold.

    There is something for everyone in ESO and that has how the developer's intend for the game to be going forward. The plans for 2022 and beyond include adding even more superficial systems, creating more grinds and collection incentives, and overall inundating players with more choices than is healthy in a videogame. They do not revisit old content without great intervention and as a new policy in 2022 will not deepen any existing systems. The amount of options for your dwindling free time will be overwhelming to you now and more so in the future; with each day, you'll know you're missing out on something. This long, drawn-out playtime culminates in you playing ESO for decades to come--and still not completing any activity available.

    Elder Scrolls Online would do well to limit it's Free-To-Play model to a level cap or certain activities, allowing Paid Subscribers to actually reap the benefits of putting in money. But as it stands, you are no different than a chore-working robot, desperately trying to engage with the game that wants to instill unhealthy habits in you. 2022 will define what kind of player they want: the passive slave, or the struggling addict. Your love of the Elder Scrolls IP will be tested as you enable or rebel against this fate.    … Expand
  2. Telembrium
    Mar 24, 2018
    1
    The Elder Scrolls Online is a another "triple a" MMORPG that fails to provide a unique experience or even basic roleplay functionality. It is, in essence, a collection of fetch quests given out by characters you could care less about in a world that, despite having the entirety of the elder scrolls universe available to it, fails to provide any sort of unique world, story, or environments.The Elder Scrolls Online is a another "triple a" MMORPG that fails to provide a unique experience or even basic roleplay functionality. It is, in essence, a collection of fetch quests given out by characters you could care less about in a world that, despite having the entirety of the elder scrolls universe available to it, fails to provide any sort of unique world, story, or environments. You bet your rear end that there's a cash shop, an ("optional") subscription fee, an upfront cost, as well as DLC to buy for it, though.

    After suffering through an uninspired "You are the chosen one." style tutorial which treats you like you've never played a game before, you're dumped on a dumpy island where the game ushers you towards speaking to more uninteresting characters. After that, it's back to more tutorial-esque "look at the enemy and mash m1" combat that desperate begs for an auto-attack function. At this point, I couldn't stand it any longer and began to search for interesting content, only to find that the game is just a big, bland set piece filled with hostile trash mobs. In about an hour of wandering outside the city of Daggerfall, I only found two characters I could actually speak to. The first was a generic merchant with bad voice acting. The second was some insane guy who accused me of being a mudcrab. This is the only interesting character I encountered in the game. Although I felt bad doing it, the man had insulted my honour, and I was obligated to kill him. Surprisingly, the game let me do it, but unsurprisingly, it went right back to being lame by putting a bounty on my head despite the fact that there were no law-abiding characters for miles around to report me. I gave up on it right there.

    On top of this, the game looks bad, despite being gigantic in size. It has blurry textures, regular pop-in rendering, a weird issue with rendering shadows that causes interlocking grid-like patterns overlaid on things, poor-looking character models, animations with too few frames, death animations that rival the original Half-Life in fidelity, and environments that feel like the same twenty or so props were just copy and pasted indefinitely over a displacement mesh.

    Furthermore, the game's website is godawful. Normally, I wouldn't even critique this, but using this website for even ten minutes is aggravating. I had pages take several MINUTES to load, as it loaded a seemingly blank page and then reloaded itself repeatedly, as if a scripting element were broken and it didn't know what to do. It would do this even without any browser plug-ins installed. Navigation was awful. There were header links on different pages of the site with the same titles that would bring you to completely different areas. You would have to log in multiple times for no apparent reason. Sometimes the log in button wouldn't work at all, and you would have to refresh and re-enter your details (after the several minute loading loop finished, of course). It was the closest thing I've experienced to using dial-up in a nearly a decade.

    If you want a game in which you can actually role-play, this isn't it. This is another generic "Bullet Sponge Trash Mob Killing Spree: The Totally Original Button Mashing EXTREME Edition" MMO. I don't even know if there is anything to do other than combat. The tutorial didn't show anything apart from that and lock-picking. The lock-picking, by the way, was so unintuitive that I had to Google how to do it, though I had admittedly been skipping all the dialogue at that point, as it was insufferable. I can't tell you a single unique feature of this game, other than its facade of being an Elder Scrolls game and its unprecedentedly large file size. Between that, the poor graphics, the horrendous website, and, of course, the quadruple dipping in monetisation methods, it's quite clear that the motives behind its creation were in greed rather than passion.    … Expand
  3. TsukasaHiiragi
    Oct 30, 2017
    4
    Always ignore all the 10 fake/paid reviews, they are the worst on metacritic. The sad fact for EOS is that, honestly? Its broken, the core of the game is just broken and Beth/Zeni don't care as long as people continue to spend money in the crown store.

    If you've played any MMO, you'll understand this EOS does not bring anything new to the plate, it just rehashes the same principals    Always ignore all the 10 fake/paid reviews, they are the worst on metacritic. The sad fact for EOS is that, honestly? Its broken, the core of the game is just broken and Beth/Zeni don't care as long as people continue to spend money in the crown store.

    If you've played any MMO, you'll understand this EOS does not bring anything new to the plate, it just rehashes the same principals over and over, new zone? Same quests...fetch this...talk to that person, whilst in this department the game is pretty much playable until you meet broken mobs and ruins the experience completely.

    EOS ranges from being fun and playable to frustratingly broken, imagine running into mobs that frequently knock you through the world or throw you to the other side of the zone, often killing you in the process or WORSE - being banned because you're exploiting the scenery because that 2H mob used uppercut skill and keeps knocking you through the floor into the world below... or another common issue is invisible enemies...trust me, the bug list is fairly extensive.

    Now, add insult to further injury with the crown store and Beth severely over-monetizing the game, they literally want to sell you everything, and it isn't cheap either. Then comes the psuedo 'free' to play as long as you buy the game, lets make things clear - YES you can play free, but with some very heavy limitations which will heavily impact everything you do, essentially if you want to seriously play, then the monthly subscription is required.

    There are more issues such as requiring you to join a trade guild if you want to sell items (auction system), this system has always been controversial but frankly, it sucks and is needless complicated and annoying, there are addons which can help - but not by much.    … Expand
  4. Pronounce
    Nov 5, 2017
    3
    I had high hopes for playing in the realm of Mundus on the planet Nirn, but what ZinMax is offering to the MMORPG community is quite depressing to me.

    Comparatively you just have to look at active reviews to see what's going on. The 2004 released WoW base game, not including the expansions, has 14 reviews in the last year, and 2014 released ESO has 4 reviews in the last year.    I had high hopes for playing in the realm of Mundus on the planet Nirn, but what ZinMax is offering to the MMORPG community is quite depressing to me.

    Comparatively you just have to look at active reviews to see what's going on.

    The 2004 released WoW base game, not including the expansions, has 14 reviews in the last year, and 2014 released ESO has 4 reviews in the last year.

    According to Wikipedia: "In February 2017, it was announced that the game had surpassed over 8.5 million in retail sales having around one million monthly active players."

    I suspect that the people who are still buying and checking out ESO are bored Skyrim players depressed over the fact Bethesda isn't going to deliver a new Elder Scroll title anytime soon.

    If that's you, then I recommend you stay in Skyrim and pass on purchasing ESO.    … Expand
  5. DemonHeroKing
    Nov 13, 2019
    0
    It was a good game until level scaling! What the point of leveling up if you don't feel stronger, that's the whole point of an RPG. Absolute ****
  6. magnusnet
    Nov 23, 2015
    0
    How this game can get a score of 9.0 is baffleing if you look at all the long term issues that it has had since launch that haven't been fixed or have worsenned.

    The game makers are nothing but a bunch of liars first of all, they promised a subscription game, they failed. They promised new exciting content: they failed. The quest is the worst of all TES games, the multiplayer? well    How this game can get a score of 9.0 is baffleing if you look at all the long term issues that it has had since launch that haven't been fixed or have worsenned.

    The game makers are nothing but a bunch of liars first of all, they promised a subscription game, they failed.
    They promised new exciting content: they failed. The quest is the worst of all TES games, the multiplayer? well it's been over a year since new raids have been implemented.
    They promised multiplayer battles with hundreds of players: Look up videos on the internet about the LAG on primetime.
    They introduced the champion system which creates the biggest unbalance in the game, we had to fight to make them limit it but new players will still be unable to compete with old players.
    Class balance is horrible.

    Do yourself a favor, don't waste time & money on this dying game (at least the PC version is dying).

    Game deserves a 6 at most, but since it has a 9.0, I'm gonna have to go with 0 to help bring things to balance.    … Expand
  7. DaedricLord
    Mar 20, 2016
    0
    I bought this game on sale solely because I wanted to experience more of the Elder Scrolls. But the result is terrible. I will get to the details for you now.

    Positive: Graphics are nice for a MMO. Initial character creation. You can have eight characters. Negative: World feels empty and bland, not even close to anything from Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind, Oblivion    I bought this game on sale solely because I wanted to experience more of the Elder Scrolls. But the result is terrible. I will get to the details for you now.

    Positive:

    Graphics are nice for a MMO.

    Initial character creation.

    You can have eight characters.

    Negative:

    World feels empty and bland, not even close to anything from Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. It is populated with players, boring NPCs with no character, and very little lore.

    Quests are repetitive and boring.

    Combat has zero RPG feeling, feels very arcade and grinding. Skills are not even close to those in Skyrim, they are very much dumbed down and have an arcade feeling that caters to non hardcore RPG players.

    Difficulty is unbalanced, instead of making enemies scale nicely with you like in Skyrim, you run into enemies you kill easily, and those that kill you fast even though they are 30 seconds of walk from the town where you started, not in some obscure dungeon.

    Getting equipment is a nightmare, you either scurry around for crafting ingredients or if you are lucky buy some for absurd prices, finding equipment is a chore. Expect to run around in Soul Shriven equipment for quite a while. Complete opposite of Elder Scrolls games where you find equipment in every dungeon and you can loot it from your enemies. In this game looting is not well implemented at all. And yes the wear of the equipment is back, you will have to fix it after a while, thank God they removed that from Skyrim.

    No immersion in Elder Scrolls universe in this game, it feels like a MMO on which someone slapped some Elder Scrolls elements here and there.

    If you were expecting a light version of Skyrim you will be greatly disappointed. Same goes if you expected a MMO with a good amount of Elder Scrolls lore.

    I will give it some more time but so far I am not impressed in the least and I think I wasted 23 dollars I paid for this. It has all the downsides of a MMO and nothing of value copied from Skyrim.    … Expand
  8. FRAge
    Jun 9, 2015
    0
    The combat system is broken. The servers are terrible, im unable to play. The world Tamrial is empty and lacks interesting lore and quests. Everything feels like a grind, not once have i come across an interesting quest, even with 9 hours put in the game.
  9. Herbert-West
    Jul 21, 2015
    4
    They made an MMO about Elder Scrolls, rather than an Elder Scrolls MMO.

    Score given solely on the fact that it's buy to play now, try it out, but don't expect much.
  10. Barnews
    Jul 5, 2015
    4
    The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited can be described as another boring MMORPG.

    Yes. It is sad but true. It's not only problem with TESO but with almost all MMORPGs. TESO developers tried to change some things in common MMORPG formula but i think they did not suceed. There was a lot of potential to be sure but the result is quite a mess. It was definetly not worth monthly    The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited can be described as another boring MMORPG.

    Yes. It is sad but true. It's not only problem with TESO but with almost all MMORPGs. TESO developers tried to change some things in common MMORPG formula but i think they did not suceed. There was a lot of potential to be sure but the result is quite a mess. It was definetly not worth monthly subscribtions nor the cost over 50 EUR right now in shop. If you can get the game cheap, you can try it.

    GOOD

    The game is not all bad. There are some things i like. For example questing locations. Atmosphere of weather (rain, sunny days) and day and night cycle. Exploring is quite fun. Skills and Atributes system also was good. You can really make your character as you want. Unique and interesting.
    But thats all.

    BAD

    There are a lot of things that are not done well.
    I feel that the game is not immersive and fun overall. The world, small details like music, graphics, towns scenery, voice acting (accent, khajjits are horribly voice acted) and many other things are really bad. They take the immersion from the game. The questing is faceroll! World bosses are faceroll. I had not good feeling when i soloed everything. There was almost no satisfaction from playing.

    The storyline in TESO is so DUMB. Really boring and i would be more happy without it. The guild and trade system has bad design. The loot is boring too.

    RESULT

    TESO: TU is not an AAA game. Its not even AA game. There is enough content, soem good game elements, but thats all. Everything else feels bad or average. Even graphics feels often very dull. It's not worth full price. I recommend you to buy it with decent discount somewhere if you really want to play it.    … Expand
  11. ArchBOg
    Oct 10, 2015
    1
    Wait a second please. I really want to "review" this game. But what's the problem with ESO? Downloading speed is holy crap. Maybe I must keep my PC turning on with ESO launcher for at least 7days.
    Before I get on this game, I already feel tired.
  12. dontezz
    Apr 24, 2022
    1
    I honestly would not recommend ESO to even die hard Skyrim fans. There are still game breaking bugs that have been around since launch that affect players that have't logged in awhile (Phantom Mail Bug). Stability and lag seem to have gotten worse over the years instead of better making pvp and moving around Towns terrible. Every major update is a month of game breaking bugs, and all yourI honestly would not recommend ESO to even die hard Skyrim fans. There are still game breaking bugs that have been around since launch that affect players that have't logged in awhile (Phantom Mail Bug). Stability and lag seem to have gotten worse over the years instead of better making pvp and moving around Towns terrible. Every major update is a month of game breaking bugs, and all your gear may be nerfed for "balance". The gameplay is very repetitive. This is a game of people who have been tricked into paying thousands of $$ and are trapped.I have heard a dozen people say they would quit except they spent so much $$ already and feel guilty. Don't get trapped.… Expand
  13. Rickyboblin
    Dec 26, 2022
    0
    They ran this game into the ground. Their “DLC” is like stacking more trash onto a teetering garbage heap with a loose foundation. I played 1000’s of hours and the game has only gotten worse since 2017. It was salvageable if they could have focused on gameplay instead of creating more “content” behind paywalls. Their content is just reskinned zones with fetch quests and a few must havesThey ran this game into the ground. Their “DLC” is like stacking more trash onto a teetering garbage heap with a loose foundation. I played 1000’s of hours and the game has only gotten worse since 2017. It was salvageable if they could have focused on gameplay instead of creating more “content” behind paywalls. Their content is just reskinned zones with fetch quests and a few must haves to stay in the competitive loop. You just feel used for your money when you are paying $15 a month and you have to buy a $60 expansion every year that ends up being free if you buy the chapter next year. They only screw over their loyal base of players. The pvp used to be kinda fun but they completely screwed up the class identity and the pvp content has been the same for 6 years.… Expand

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
80

Generally favorable reviews - based on 4 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 4
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 4
  3. Negative: 0 out of 4
  1. CD-Action
    Jun 29, 2015
    60
    Same old grind, same old lags, still no content promised to be delivered “just after the game’s release”. [06/2015, p.58]
  2. InsideGamer.nl
    Jun 24, 2015
    90
    The Elder Scrolls Online is not the best Elder Scrolls-game nor the best MMO. However, we did love spending tens of hours in Tamriel and this huge world does not seem to grow old quick. There are some flaws, but those are not even big enough to mention as in the end, Tamriel Unlimited is very entertaining, especially now that there are no subscription costs anymore.
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  3. SpazioGames
    Jun 9, 2015
    80
    The Elder Scrolls Online is a solid MMORPG, with content for hundreds of hours and playable with no monthly fees. Ultimately, this Tamriel Unlimited confirms to be the best edition for those who want to delve into the fantasy world created by Bethesda twenty years ago.
    Read full review
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