Real Talk Zenimax has made a more competent and enjoyable Elder scrolls game than BGS proper.
Well, I certainly wouldn't go that far, but I do enjoy ESO for the most part. It has some fantastic questing, full voice acting, and amazing additions to TES lore. But it's also very hit and miss.
Systems-wise, the build diversity is fantastic, and they never raise the level cap. That means your gear is never made redundant after an expansion, and devs are challenged to make new gear appealing through new set piece effects which further bolster build diversity options. On the other hand, combat is
fucking atrocious, and most of us who are used to the game have just become numb to how bad it is. It makes Skyrim's combat feel weighty and impactful by comparison, and they even had to full-on embrace an animation-cancelling glitch because they couldn't fix the underlying issue - you can cancel an attack animation before your character has even begun to raise their weapon to swing it, and the damage from the attack will still instantly be dealt, allowing you to transition immediately into a second attack. That's laughably bad, but is now embraced as a "feature".
Environment-wise, you get some zones like Elsweyr which are handled spectacularly well, with amazing attention to lore about various Khajiit breeds, and with the zones being focused on one or two cities per DLC/Chapter so that the scale is large and the cities have time to be developed properly with unique architecture. And then you also have zones like Summerset, which butchered existing lore entirely, and had a pathetic scale where they tried to create the entire island in a standard zone size, meaning all the Altmer cities are comically close together and all share identical architecture, so there's no sense of unique history and personality to any of them, even Alinor.
And finally, I'd put a massive disclaimer out to everyone and say
THIS GAME HAS PERFORMANCE ISSUES. They called 2020 the year of performance and dedicated monthly news articles to explaining the steps they were taking to improve performance and reduce the embarrassingly bad server latency. 12 months later, very little has changed for performance, and they're once again promising 2021 will be a year of performance focus. It's definitely a "buyer beware" situation, especially if you live somewhere like Australia which doesn't have a dedicated server, so you'll be dealing with 300+ ping in a combat system that requires timed blocks and dodge rolls.
