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When I look back on my 90 hours with The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, I think of constellations rearing gossamer heads over the hills near Whiterun. I think of sunken cities grown copper-green with age, of flipping through books for mention of long-extinct civilisations, and snow licking the path to the summit of the Throat of the World. OK, so I also think of dragons that fly backwards and that time I had to Fus Roh Dah a bug-stricken Lydia across a mountain range, but these are stray notes, hiccups in an otherwise blissful aria. When I look back on my 20-odd hours with The Elder Scrolls Online, meanwhile, I think of crowds. Crowds of potato-faced adventurers clad in scraps of gaudy felt and tinfoil, loitering at stalls and forges, lost in menu screens. Crowds of ostensible Chosen Ones gamely waiting their turn to lay the smackdown on an area boss. These aren't altogether unpleasant memories - say what you like about ESO's world and quest design, but it offers customisation layers aplenty, atypically ferocious real-time combat, and in the shape of poor, embattled Cyrodiil, a distinctive take on the concept of PvP. But where the thought of Skyrim still fills me with yearning, the thought of ZeniMax Online's Tamriel leaves me scratching my head.
ESO has, in fairness, come an awful long way. What was once a late-to-the-party World of Warcraft knock-off is now a reasonably slick one-time-payment offering, buttressed by optional monthly subscriptions for premium content, lashings of new areas and a challenge scaling system introduced last year, which ensures that adventurers of all levels can quest together. These changes have apparently had a significant effect - according to game director Matt Firor, one and a half million additional people have played ESO since E3 2016, though he avoids the subject of how many are still active (at the time of writing the Tamriel Unlimited edition has 9,368 players on Steam, as against 19,848 for the vanilla edition of Skyrim). But for all the improvements, and for all the husky reminiscing over this summer's Morrowind expansion - which revisits or rather, previsits the setting of The Elder Scrolls 3 - ESO still feels like it's struggling for air.
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