I agree that the game can be, should be, and to a large extent is both.

But since the question was which is most important to me I voted for being a TES game first, since that's why I'm here. ESO appealed to me as my best chance to see more of Tamriel (and beyond) than the single-player games are ever likely to get to, and that was before we found out how long TES VI is taking. No I didn't want "Skyrim, but online", I already had a game where I could go to Skyrim. I was, and still am, specifically interested in the areas of the world we haven't seen before, or not since Arena which only let you visit tiny snippets of each one (many of which looked very different to how they were described). Summerset, Blackmarsh and Elseweyr are highlights for me since those provinces haven't been in a game at all since Arena, and the various Oblivion planes. (I'm not a fan of the aesthetic or the themes but it's also interesting to see the Clockwork City intact and mostly functional as well.)

But I don't think that's mutually exclusive to being an MMO. That just means there's lots of other people in the world with you, it doesn't have to mean the game focuses on PvP or grinding stats or whatever. The first game to use the term 'massively multiplayer' was Ultima Online which was designed as basically a role-play driven sandbox, largely dependant on players creating and playing out their own storylines within it's world. I see ESO as very similar, but with a greater focus on the developers stories. I love just heading out into a zone to see what I can find, following quests to see what happens, but I also love that while I'm doing that I can encounter other people doing the same things, or doing entirely different things in the same area, and we can end up helping each other, even fighting bosses together. To me that's what an MMO is all about.

This makes me wonder if this question comes up for other MMOs based on existing IPs, and how each one affects the answer? For example I could imagine WoW or SWTOR players saying that making it a Warcraft or Star Wars game first means it should be focused on faction-based PvP, which most people here seem to put firmly in the 'MMO first' category, even though war, and smaller scale skirmishes and feuds, have always been a big part of TES lore as well.

I chose my poll answer specifically based on the "Are you here because" wording.

I joined ESO all those years ago to play with my friends in an MMO. I had only dipped my toe into Skyrim before ESO, and knew very little about the lore. Most of what I've learned about the TES universe has come from ESO or the forums. I always play one MMO and that's pretty much all the gaming I have time to do.

I'm a little unclear whether, when you say "prioritize things like," if you mean that as the poll taker, I prioritize those activities in game, or if I believe ZOS should prioritize that kind of content when they develop the game. My answer to each of those perspectives would be different. Personally, I prioritize combat activities (I've mentioned before that I frequently refer to my gaming habit as "killing stuff") which based on your split I am guessing also aligns with your "MMO" category. However, from a development standpoint I believe everyone is an integral part of the community, and that we need a balance for the game to continue to be successful. As a result I prefer to see ZOS push out content that's equally balanced towards both sides. If one is prioritized too much over the other, not only do people who prefer one over the other have less to do, but those who like to do everything will get bored if content is too one-sided.

Anyway, I'm here because ESO is an MMO, but I've stayed all of these years because of its uniqueness, which likely is due to its TES theme. Based on the exact examples used in the poll options, I can say I never roleplay, I rarely play mini-games, and quest only periodically. I PvE and PvP almost every play session. However, sometimes I will log in only for 15 minutes just to get event tickets, do writs, and/or claim my daily login reward. But I never am driven to specifically log in to, say, play ToT, although once I'm in game, sometimes that happens.

Narvuntien wrote: »

It was originally built as an MMO and so those elements exist but it struggled and nearly died until it started becoming more like TES online.

Early ESO didn’t struggle because it was so MMO focused. It struggled because of design choices. Players weren’t able to play with friends unless they chose the same alliance. Additionally if those players were different levels they would struggle to play together because XP rates would be drastically reduced if there was too much of a level gap. Zones were tied to levels so a lot of zones in the game got out leveled pretty quickly. There were many missing quality of life features and there was much less to do in terms of end game PvE.

All of that could have been solved without straying too far from the game’s MMO elements. Instead the developers decided to pull the rug from under the original playerbase and cater the game to Elder Scrolls casual solo questers.

The interesting thing about ESO today is that it feels way more dead than ever despite having more players than it did in its early days. This is likely due to the fact that many solo questers don’t engage much with ESO’s MMO elements. Things like trial and arena leaderboards look super rough. Almost no one goes into Cyrodiil which used to have multiple full campaigns with over 5 times the player capacity. Queues take a really long time to work as well.

I think that ESO would be better off today if they never rug pulled their original players. Now there’s a massive divide within the playerbase and the game’s direction is unclear and confusing. It seems like no one is getting what they want out of the game.

Matt Firor’s end of the year letter kind of makes it seem like they may rug pull the solo questing casual crowd that now makes up the majority of ESO. This mess could have been avoided by sticking with the MMO elements.

I started playing when I got a beta invite back in january 2014. It was the first "real" MMO that immediately captivated me because of how it was like a skyrim online (Though the game actually had some challenge to it unlike it does now). The quests were more like runescape's where it had actual plot and wasn't your standard collect 15 hooves from an enemy that has a 0.01% drop rate like most MMOs did. I left after beating the main quest because craglorn was mostly XP trains, and I couldn't really get into the other alliance stories.

I briefly came back in 2019 and 2020. I didn't do any questing because that side of the game had all of its challenged sucked out of it, and because I heard that the quest quality was low. What did keep me around was the combat system. I was still fresh at the time, but I managed to have good experiences in base game vet dungeons and normal trials. I fully came back around late 2022 because I liked the combat and wanted to try the DC alliance. It was ok, but felt like a visual novel most of the time. I didn't start building experience until early 2023 when I started playing and reading a lot about the game. In about a year, I got to the point where I felt comfortable doing anything in game.

After that year was when I realized there just wasn't that much to do if you wanted to play this game like a MMO. It was always running the same dungeons and trials, or hopping into BGs and Cyrodiil with the same groups of people and not much to show for it or work towards. Not to mention 2024 being extremely bad in terms of performance which provided less opportunities to participate in the areas I wanted to since players were leaving. All the while, it felt like the game kept trying to move in the direction of a single player game by catering more and more to the solo quester crowd, especially when you looked back at the chapter + dlc release structure. A new big zone in an area of Tamriel TES hasn't explored yet, or one set in a region from previous TES games ladened with nostalgic callbacks. There just wasn't much content or players on the MMO side of the game.

To get with a point with my rambling, the game is both. It just needs to stop starving the MMO side, and it's TES Online side needs to stop being so hand holdy with it's players by reintroducing challenge. I just don't know if that's possible. It's very clear that the game is in a very rough spot at the moment, especially if your a MMO player. There isn't much of a reason to play anymore, and April is too far off to wait for any information on the game's direction to see if it's worth sticking around.

And to further add to the 'TES Online' side, there has not been any meaningful story progression in the game for quite a while now. I mean, the alliance war is still perpetually in limbo even though High Isle was themed around possible peace negotiations. Some might have found the latest chapter to be cool but it will never have a lasting impact on the world at all. The reason people liked Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim is for the world building and story development, and there's none of that in ESO anymore.