I find it difficult to stay invested in MMORPGs. They quickly become a chore as you grind for rare loot, obsessively chasing metas to stay in the rat race of trials, dungeons, and PvP. By nature, they’re designed to eat away all of your time with incredibly repetitive styles of play, butThe Elder Scrolls Onlinehas been a breath of fresh air.
Last year’sHigh Isle expansionaddeda fully-fledged tabletop card gamecalled Tales of Tribute. It feels like a tangible part of the world with tournaments spanning across the continent and friendly casual games being held in local inns. But you can also face off against real people in a ranked mode with unique rewards, adding another way to earn loot and XP beyond combat. I spent months in ESO just playing a card game of all things.
The Endless Archive was added for free as part of Update 40.
New expansions brought with them new decks, keeping it from going stale. But ESO didn’t stop there. As of this week, it added a new roguelike mode to the game called the Endless Archive. It’s a randomised dungeon with different boons rewarded for each level, reminiscent ofHades(AKA the new ‘just likeDark Souls’). And once again, it’s ingrained into the world itself, taking place in Hermaeus Mora’s realm of Apocrypha, the plane of knowledge.
The future isn’t just baked in expansive stories and new land masses with yet more dungeons, trials, and bosses for yet more loot and shifting metas, it’s baked in experimental gameplay, offering creative ways to keep a wide breadth of players interested regardless of their commitment levels.
ESO has always played with genres in ways that other MMOs simply do not, with fleshed-out housing mechanics that let you indulge in what is essentiallyThe Sims, tying into the extensive crafting system. There’s also the Imperial City, a PvP mode blended with PvE that tasks you with completing daily quests and fighting bosses while fending off other players, taking over different districts in the process.
All these different genres come together to make a world that welcomes so many different kinds of players without clashing. If you dig into the guilds, you’ll find those who spend most of their time trading goods to make money, while others support each other in making homes more impressive than even some of the most beautifully designed locations in the base game. The Endless Archive will no doubt carve out another audience for the game, one I’m excited to see run with the mode to unpack all of its secrets and find the best ways to push through its unending waves.
It would be all too easy to dilute ESO and overcomplicate it with so many features, but the ways in which each mode flows together while standing separately keeps things interesting rather than overwhelming. None of it is mandatory, so ESO still feels welcoming to those who stick with the basics.
I spent years doing nothing but quests, playing it like a singleplayer TES, while these days I spend most of my time maximising my damage potential as I learn the ins and outs of each dungeon. Being able to bounce around depending on my mood has kept me from abandoning my character and the hundreds of hours I’ve invested.
The game will turn ten years old next year, and I can’t wait to see what the team has cooking. I never thought, back when this was a maligned TES entry that most swore off, that we’d still be playing nearly a decade past, but so much of that support has come from its willingness to take risks. Maybe one day we’ll get anAnimal Crossing-like mode or platforming puzzles to appease a Daedric God. A few years ago, I’d have said that was farfetched, but these days, it’s clear ESO is willing to branch out beyond convention.
