Been about a week since I started up my toon (working on a fairly high DPS, self-healing, magicka-regenning solo Templar build). The game is surprisingly different from what it was when last I played around console launch. I didn't manage to last a weekend before bailing out. I ditched that older character and wound up creating a new one, and am now in the low to mid-30s as far as experience level goes. In many respects, it does feel like you're running through a list of chores. But there's a surprising amount of satisfaction to be had in knocking out lists of activities and that old Skyrim standby of converting black map icons into cleared white ones.
Aside from a daily public dungeon run for the nice rewards they net, I've been playing solo only and don't feel like I've suffered too much from it. I can explore at my own pace. I pick the quests and sub-quests that are most interesting to me at that given moment, and don't feel pressured to keep up with a group while dungeon diving or exploring the many world maps. It's irksome that I've had to leave a few map icons here and there uncleared, if they've proven impossible to solo. Mostly out-of-the-way Daedric Anchor Dolmens and World Boss spawns. Some of those are utterly devoid of other players, so there's no real way of clearing them unless you group up. But I hope to get back to them if I ever manage to find a decent group of like-minded overly-thorough completionists to play with.
The main province maps are way smaller than what you'd expect out of a TES game, but it makes sense, since modern TES games tend to focus on a single province and are able to blow them up into great detail. TESO, by contrast, includes pretty much every province within Tamriel, making for a HUGE world to explore. But as a consequence, the individual provinces were scaled down and are, in turn, populated by way fewer black icons to chase.
I will say, however, that the task of flipping those icons from black (discovered but unexplored) to white (explored and cleared), has been surprisingly satisfying. While there aren't nearly as many as in a game like say, Skyrim; unlike Skyrim, almost every single one has a story element, and one or more quests involved, in the icon-flipping process. Dutifully exploring every icon in Skyrim is a largely thankless job. Doing the same in TESO rewards with tons of story (most not terribly great, admittedly), but all somehow contributing to the overall narrative that's at play within that province. And that "provincial narrative" in turn, contributes heavily into the game's MAIN QUEST (or, if it's a DLC location, that DLC's primary story beats). And I love how you can review these cleared locations on the map and get a little line for each one indicating what's changed or improved through your clearing of those events and locations. Skyrim gave you a huge playground, but used very little of it for its various storylines. TESO attempts to fill every corner with something that ties in, somehow, to the world around it.
This does a great, great job of actually motivating you to hit up all of these locations. The Daggerfall Covenant's Glenumbra region was REALLY nicely tied together, and I'm now halfway through the next region, and it's proving to be almost as good. And having gotten to Wayrest, I've also been able to kickstart the Thief Guild DLC storyline without "skipping ahead" via the boat travel system. I also have the Orsinium DLC storyline at my fingertips from this region. As I said, there's nothing amazing about the story or characters or writing or voice acting. But the way they've managed to weave the narrative elements and gameplay loops together makes for a fairly compelling product. The MMO-ification has had a drastic simplification effect on the experience (gone are any hints of dynamicism or simulation elements), but the tradeoff isn't nearly as bad as I feared it'd be. And as a bonus, playing this shouldn't cause any burnout against the next more traditional TES sequel we all know is in development.
No fucking way I platinum the game like I did Skyrim. But I don't see myself dropping it, at this point, before at least clearing the main story, all of the Daggerfall Covenant quest lines, the various guild quest lines, and likely a good chunk of the DLC. I'll probably burnout on the game before I hit up the other two alliances, since this Daggerfall Covenant is proving way longer than I thought it'd be. But... who knows...
