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[Greiger]

I am currently playing.   It is definitely improved since launch and my biggest gripes seem to all be gone now.  Including that infinite loading bug it seems.

Something seems to be bringing me back to try this game out every now and then at least.  And this current attempt is more fun than my previous tries.

I'll admit the dev team's ambitions do seem to have been scaled back a bit since the game went f2p there is still decent DLC and free added content being worked on (claiglorn being entirely reworked and the entirety of One tamriel being notable examples of free significant content).  And the DLC that is there, is quite good.  Thieves guild, and especially the dark brotherhood dlcs are more than just 'mission packs' and add more options and depth to the game.  Next major free patch will apparently be including player housing, the houses were already placed on the map last patch, they just aren't accessible yet.

Crowns (premium currency) are a bit pricey for my taste.  But sales happen often.  Crowns themselves are something like half off at time of this writing.  5500 crowns is about $25US at the moment*.  Which is enough to buy anything on the store.  Nothing from the crown store is really 'required' outside of arguably the dlcs and the incredibly convenient access anywhere craft bank you get from the ESO Plus sub. 

Some people complain that you can buy a mount with crowns before you have the gold to buy one, but tbh 20k gold is not hard to get anymore like it was near launch.  I made that in 15 levels on a new char.  Admittedly I know what sells, but If I can get it in 15, a newbie can get it by 30 surely.

So at this point I'd say if you are an elder scrolls fan, it's worth a try.  And if you like mmos with smaller skillbars to keep track of as well (like GW2) it's also worth a shot. 
Also if you plan on getting DLC I would recommend thieves guild and dark brotherhood first, those add the most to the game. Including to vanilla areas outside their DLC zones. Followed by imperial city next, then the rest.

--------V EDIT V--------
http://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/crownstore
^ That is a link to the website version of the crown store for if you want to see how the cost of crowns compare to content.  Everything in style parlor, mounts, pets, and costumes are entirely cosmetic.
Utility are your standard xp gain + style things
 

• Ignore respec scrolls.  You can do that for ingame gold easily enough by the time yer high enough level to consiter a respec.  At worst (max level) a respec will cost 10k gold. Significantly less at lower levels.  That should be mostly chump change.
• The things under supplies are also similarly not worth it. None of that is hard to obtain with a decent provisioner or alchemist.

Crafting is mostly just things called 'motifs' which allow you to choose what your gear looks like.  Pretty much all cosmetic, and a little passive searching will give you a good chunk of the pact covenant and dominion races fairly quickly in just normal dungeon delving.  Mimic stones simply replace a (usually not hard to get) materiel cor crafting in certain cosmetic styles and are mostly pointless.

Upgrades are mostly DLC. 

• Don't buy vampirism or werewolf.  Players will give it to you free, (though it is nice to give a reasonable tip, as the player bite has a week long cooldown. I'm usually tipped between 500 and 1k for biting folks) and even without players vamps and werewolves in the higher end alliance zones will infect you when you fight them at night.
• You can buy bank space and bag space for gold. cheap.  At least until the space is reasonable.  Get expensive when it gets excessive.
• The assistants seem pointless, and overpriced. They just summon a banker or merchant near you anywhere.  You are never far from either.  I may consider it if they added portable crafting stations in there instead. Those are more often what you go back to town for.
• The adventurer pack lost much of it's charm with 1T. It's some cosmetic stuff with the ability to create characters that are not native to the alliance you choose.  Since you can now go anywhere, much of the novelty is lost outside pvp.
• Imperial is like the adventurer pack, except it just gives you access to humans- er...an extra flavor of human.
• I have spent far too many crowns on riding lessons, one of the most useful things in the crown store in my opinion.  Normally you will gain 1 point in a riding stat per day. each of those gives you 10 points in the particular stat.

[Greiger]

I haven't played skyrim in a bit, but hopefully I can give some insight.

It's kinda half es and half mmo.  It definitely shares much of the feel of an elder scrolls game, especially when you play the game in first person. But there are also many clear allowances for an mmo format.

Zones, while you can indeed travel between them freely, are typically surrounded by mountains or water or walls in typical mmo fashion, requiring you to find a zone transition gate or mountain pass or something to go between zones on foot.  Instead of combat being a straight up hackfest you do have a skillbar to use special abilities, but like I mentioned it's a smaller easy to manage one, unlike the wall of icons you have in WoW.

Enemies telegraph attacks with red circles, and cones and whatnot like a traditional mmo.  Classes exist but are less important to your build than traditional mmos.  Every class can tank heal or dps in a reasonable capacity if built for it, though there are classes that are better made for it.  Templar have a lot of class based heals available to them, making a restoration staff optional(though still recommended) for them, while other classes would struggle hard at being healers without being equipped with a restoration staff.  Your choice of weapon tends to make your role than your class does.

Finishing blows are gone, though I hear not everyone liked those anyway.

Mods exist, but with the nature of an mmo they are typically along the lines of UI elements. Instead of significant game changers. and like skyrim the game is gorgeous.

Example screenshot: https://img.ie/image/0Mn That picture is south of Windhelm looking north with UI elements shown.  The minimap, status effects(Lycanthropy/Boon:The Thief), and the little grey box with numbers above my health are addons.  Everything else is the vanilla UI.   Under the health you can see the combat skillbar for an idea how big it is.

[Ygdrad]

I have to ask: In general, compared to Skyrim, how does this game feel?

Because it may wind up on my to-buy list at some point if it's good enough.

I ended up buying and playing the game and I'm having fun. Compared to skyrim, I'd say most of the voice-acting I ran into was better and I've enjoyed the quests and characters more. Gameplay-wise, you are more limited in build than in other elder scrolls game, but I'm enjoying the combat more than I did in skyrim. Combat in elder scrolls games has always been a bland affair unless modded.

While you are limited build-wise, everything seems to work acceptably outside of pvp. For example I decided to be weird and made my character be a stamina-based unarmed nightblade despite there being no unarmed skills and nightblade abilities being mostly magicka-based. And it works, doesn't hurt as much as dual-wielding daggers, but it kills things quickly and reliably nonetheless and I save some skillpoints along the way. I'm planning on keeping that character unarmed no matter what and see just how much of the content it can handle.

If anyone wants to group up, I'm on the NA servers under the userid @ygdrad

[Wiles]

How is the leveling up experience? The last MMO I played was Black Desert and I got tired of the grinding before I could hit max level. How fun of a game is it solo? I know it's a silly question to ask about an mmo but I usually end up playing through a lot of the non dungeon content by myself when I play mmos.

Also how is the community? Is the game new player friendly?

[Ygdrad]

Thanks to their latest big update that made all the content scale to your level and remove race restriction on zones the leveling experience is pretty nice. I find myself not caring too much about my level and just exploring and questing wherever strikes my fancy at the time. I've been playing solo so far and having fun. Leveling/build-aside, the game feels much more like an elder scrolls game than an mmo for now and that's the way I've been playing it. The community has been pretty nice to me so far but I haven't been to a dungeon yet. I'm guessing at least some people will take offense at my unusual choice of weapon.

I like ESO's take on crowd-control. You don't need special skills/spells to prevent/remove them. Most can be stopped by blocking, roots/immobilizes can be broken out of with a dodge roll and the rest can be broken by mashing left and right click. Interrupts are something everyone has easy access to with the bash move which is nice too.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

-snarp-

TOR is really fun solo actually. The story system is one of the better ones.

[smirk]

One more vote here for the game being pretty fun; I haven't played it for a few months now but it does drag me back in eventually. Combat system is more enjoyable than your standard MMO; fewer skills and more focus on movement, positioning and timing interrupts. My main character is Stealth-Archery-n-Daggers class and I can solo a surprising amount of dungeon bosses as long as I'm paying enough attention.

It is pretty fun solo and the story elements are good (It's ES! There are so many lore books). My only real complaint there is with some of the voice acting, especially Bosmer and beast races. I'd swear about half the Khajiit voice actors thought they were supposed to be Russian >_<

[Ygdrad]

There have always been weird accents in TES, and russian khajiits are nothing unique to ESO.

[Teneb]

There have always been weird accents in TES, and russian khajiits are nothing unique to ESO.

My only complaint is that it is sometimes not consistent. Nords in particular. Some speak with a heavy accent, some with basically none.

[Wiles]

Does it use the same voice actors as other ES games? I swear there is one guy that they've been using since Morrowind who has a very distinctive voice that does a lot of their voice acting. I started playing the Elder Scrolls card game a while ago and instantly recognized his voice work on quite a few of the cards.

Anyway I've been convinced! It sounds like the type of mmo I would enjoy so I picked it up.

[Ygdrad]

There have always been weird accents in TES, and russian khajiits are nothing unique to ESO.

My only complaint is that it is sometimes not consistent. Nords in particular. Some speak with a heavy accent, some with basically none.

I know it's due to the lack of voice actor variety, but it's normal for people to have different accents, especially if they haven't been living in their homeland for a while.

Sad fact: hour for hour, voice acting is the most expensive part of game development. There's only so much of their budget they can throw at it. Why do you think the old republic cost so much to make?

Does it use the same voice actors as other ES games?

I'm not sure for most, haven't been noticing familiar voices, but one of the random secondary norn npc's in a quest sounded the same at Ulfric from skyrim.

[Shadowlord]

Claudia Christian had developed a british accent from living in england, yet managed to do a neutral/american accent for skyrim. Of course, she was playing a nord, so... Of course, a bunch of other nord-voice-actors didn't use the accent the rest did, either.

From a watsonian perspective, it's possible some folks are "nords" who immigrated back from Cyrodiil, and lost the accent while they were there. Or nords from the south near Cyrodiil are more likely to have a neutral accent (except that because most of the voices are generic, used everywhere in skyrim, there's no indication of that).

From a doylist perspective, presumably Bethesda made the mistake of hiring people who couldn't actually do the desired accent.

[smirk]

I'm all for the different peoples not having monolithic accents, but it often sounds (to me) like the voice actors are straining to do the accents at the cost of, well, actually making the dialogue sound good. That's not really an ESO-specific complaint, though, really, especially since:

Sad fact: hour for hour, voice acting is the most expensive part of game development. There's only so much of their budget they can throw at it. Why do you think the old republic cost so much to make?

I did not know this. I guess I can see where that makes sense, though. Ah well; I'll just continue turning the sound down whenever Khajiit want to give me quests.

I'm not sure for most, haven't been noticing familiar voices, but one of the random secondary norn npc's in a quest sounded the same at Ulfric from skyrim.

I've noticed Ulfric's voice and one of the other standard Nord Male voices from Skyrim hanging around the place, yeah.

[Putnam]

Ulfric's voice is... actually one of their star voices, though Bethesda showed a bit of restraint in that case by not having Patrick Stewart or Sean Bean or some crap.

[Ygdrad]

Derp I suck at remembering names so I had the wrong one. Balgruuf, the jarl of whiterun is the voice I hear all over the place. It's like that one voice actor just doesn't know how to sound the slightest bit different. To make things worse, he voices the ghost who gets bound to you in the mage guild questline so not only do I hear him everywhere now he's also in my head.