Love The Witcher But Hate Your Friends, Family, Career Advancement, & Hobbies? Try Elder Scrolls Online Gold

Can I, in good conscience, suggest that anyone play any MMORPG? It feels as though telling you oxycontin and Russian Roulette are exciting. I started playing ESO after moving to Los Angeles throughout the two worst many years of my life and I prefer to show you my PornHub search history than the number of hours I’ve spent playing Farmville. But also, I own a $100 in-game boat, and they’re paying me $25 to create this, so I might as well start to climb from the hole.

If you liked the gorgeous open worlds, creatures, and magical lore of The Witcher, you’ll probably enjoy ruining your lifetime in The Elder Scrolls Online.

In The Witcher, you stare at Geralt’s chiseled butt because he swans around the Continent stabbing monsters and bagging sorceresses. The butt you stare at in ESO can be the race and class you select. Will you be a Furry Khajiit assassin? Or a Nord necromancer? Mix and match when needed.

As an MMO, ESO is broader than The Witcher—there’s more content, and also the storytelling is less specific. Quests and characters vary more widely in quality. ESO can also be quite a bit more inclusive: you encounter equal amounts of men and women on quests, including Big Bads. Gwent-heads rejoice, ESO even comes with an in-game deck builder called Tales of Tribute now (which I like, even though it has not been broadly popular).

If your favorite areas of The Witcher are summoning Roach and running over random hills, then you're in for any treat with ESO. Tamriel is big and beautifully detailed, in the carnivorous swamps of Murkmire within the south towards the mushroom towers of Morrowind. If the stories are occasionally broad, the places feel totally specific—the world is filled with hidden nooks and visual jokes.

The $10 base game can get you more content than the usual human with any semblance of the life could reasonably finish: save the planet for a blind guy, join a guild, protect against a bunch of pirates, and slaughter a seafood buffet’s price of mudcrabs. You can go almost anywhere having a low-level character. You can build and decorate houses (I built a comedy club throughout the pandemic and immediately ran from gold).

If you believe you’re likely to spend any real-time playing, the $15/month subscription is worth it for that improved inventory space alone. Plus it reveals the map.

The real price of ESO isn't the money, but the time. During several many years of my life when I hated everything, I didn’t hate Tamriel. Enter at your own risk.

Try ESO if:

You love playing around huge, cool fantasy worlds

You hate anything else, in general

Don’t try ESO if:

You’re bad at moderation and don’t wish to lose too many years of your life

You have kids and therefore are afraid they may become ESO orphans