The Elder Scrolls Online
Oh god, I barely have time for this one since it's an MMO, but the storylines are really well-written, with fun combat, and a surprisingly welcoming community for a multiplayer-only game!
If you’re a fan of the world of Tamriel and its associated lore, you’ll have a blast in The Elder Scrolls Online.
Networking is reasonably well implemented, with two megaservers, one each for the North American and European regions respectively, which are subsequently split into smaller shards; characters are tied to a given megaserver, but switching between shards is just a matter of a loading screen, with no meaningful distinctions beyond the state of enemies, and which players are there with you.
Despite a rocky launch, ESO has well and truly nailed the experience of playing with your friends, with the exception of the base game’s main quest; whilst that requires completing the quests solo, any expansions, side content, and exploration can be completed with a friend in your party, which is a fantastically fun experience! I’ve played every expansion (up to Necrom, which I’m partway through) solo, but replaying ESO: Morrowind a few years ago with a friend was an eminently enjoyable experience, so much so that I highly recommend you give a go!
Worldbuilding and lore is presented typically to the mainline games, with various notes and books to provide finer details, and key events are presented through story beats, ingame scenes (though not cutscenes), and dialogue. To that end, these details established in the game are - after a brief rocky start on launch - reasonably well fitting to that established in the mainline games, too.
I find that the community in the game - on the EU Megaserver, at least - is on the whole rather friendly and supportive, which is great! It gels well with the incredibly strong diversity of characters you can meet in the game, with a healthy showing of LGBTQ+ characters - which, being not a general point of contention in Tamriel, are rightly presented matter-of-factly and with no extraneous fluff that wouldn’t fit: a lesbian woman in a world which doesn’t persecute them should just be free to fawn over their wife!
It’s a minor gripe that the game lacks cloth physics (or, really, physics interactions of any sort beyond the basics), as there’s a plethora of outfits available which would really benefit from it. That said, on the whole I find that the game looks fantastic, with a unique art direction from that of the mainline games, but one that works very well in my opinion.
For new players, however, the experience is, admittedly, abysmal: Zenimax is adamant that they do not desire to place players in old content at the start, which is understandable insofar as the newer areas are visually much more impressive than their 2015 counterparts. Alas, that also means that players are introduced to content released later first, lacking the context established in (for example) the base game; whilst I sympathise with Zenimax not wishing to turn away players by having their first impressions set by some of their least visually pleasing areas (even if I still hold that they hold up well enough), I do think that this solution is subpar, and their more recent move to allow players to choose which content they’re dropped into makes the situation worse by demanding players to know which portal to go through. Perhaps it would be better to keep the portal room only for second characters and beyond, and withhold that from new players? Better yet, drop new players in the base game again, and take some time to do an update pass on those areas (even if that might mean a while of no new zones, or reduced output)?
In any case, the order I would personally recommend is:
- The Base Game, which is generally anything relating to Coldharbour (you’ll want to start at Khenarthi’s Roost for Aldmeri Dominion, Bleakrock Isle for Ebonheart Pact, or Stros M’Kai for Daggerfall Covenant)
- Orsinium
- Morrowind (Vvardenfell)
- Clockwork City
- Summerset
- Murkmire
- Elsweyr
- Dragonhold
- Greymoor
- Markarth
- Blackwood
- The Deadlands
- High Isle
- Firesong
- Necrom
- Gold Road
(The Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood DLCs can really be completed whenever you feel like, I think, but were released in the first year.)