I’ve owned The Elder Scrolls Online for about two years now. It’s a really great game; its business model is one of my personal favorites–buy-to-play with an optional subscription that actually feels both worth it and truly optional at the same time–its graphics are beautiful, and, while I still prefer tab target MMOs, the gameplay has really grown on me. I recently decided to pass on the Summerset expansion (there’s plenty of this game I haven’t seen, and jewelry crafting and a new magic skill line aren’t enough to entice me), but I’ve had the itch to play again anyway. So why is it that, every time I try to come back, I never seem to stick around for more than a few weeks?

Depressingness
The first reason is one that I talked about recently: the game is super depressing. In pretty much every quest line, someone ends up dead and everyone is sad. In most MMOs when you hear “My husband is missing! Please find him!” he’s probably just been taken captive by brigands or something. Sure, every once in a while they’re dead, but in ESO you hear a quest like that and you just want to say “Sorry, but he’s probably been fed to demons or something. It’s probably for the best that you just forget about him,” and keep walking. It sounds heartless, but if you pursue the quest, the guy’s wife or kid or someone will probably end up getting themselves killed in a mad quest for vengeance. It’s a world I very much don’t want to live in, which doesn’t make me want to spend my free time there.

Nobody To Play With
I don’t have many friends who play MMOs right now (I had a few for a while, but between Fortnite: BR and real life stressors, not so much anymore), but none of them are in ESO right now. This game’s group content looks really fun to me, but with no friends to play with and really bad luck finding guilds that don’t fall apart within months, I haven’t gotten to see much of it. Also, with level scaling, at what level are you even useful in dungeons?

Lack of an Auction House
I’d really like to mess with this game’s housing and furniture crafting, but unless I want to decorate a hotel room (or at best a one bedroom apartment), I need a decent amount of gold to buy a house. And it’s really hard to make gold when you can’t sell to other players without joining a trade guild that has a vendor in a good city. And to get into one of those guilds, you have to pay a monthly tax or get booted. Given that I’m already not very consistent in playing, I doubt I’d last very long in one of those. I’m sure there are some out there without a tax, but, as I said before, I’ve had a hard enough time finding guilds that last that just to PvE content, let alone ones rich enough to have a trader.

The Usual Suspects
Then, of course, there are the usual reasons why I don’t last in an MMO: Things like all of the classes (and different ways to play those clsases) look fun, and I can’t get one leveled before getting distracted by something shinier. Also demotivating is inventory management. This game throws a lot of crafting materials and deconstructible gear at you, and bigger bags get expensive after a while (see above rant about money). Logging into a character with a full inventory and no quick way to dig it out is a sure way to get me to log out and play something else. And, of course, there are so many other things to play.

One of these days I’m hoping this game will click with me. It’s certainly been clicking for a the last few days, so hopefully that means something. If anyone knows of a good guild (preferably with a trader), let me know! That would definitely go a long way toward making this game stick.