my stupid compulsion to start "at the beginning" when deciding to play through a series of games is made more stupid by the existence of prequels. Online is chronologically the first game in the timeline, set like a thousand years before the first game i think, presumably so they could do as much with it as they have without having to worry about it messing with the lore of the other games. usually i'd go with release order regardless but this is kind of a special case for a few reasons - one in regard to the point about timeline placement, i can't imagine it mattering much when you play it in relation to the other games; two, it's an ongoing game i will probably not even live to see finished; three the chronological-or-release-order question is easily settled on account of i don't want to play through Arena first. i tried it for a while, it's weird and cool, but it is so heavy on the randomly-generated stuff (even the NPCs), the whole game is essentially a dungeon crawler that extends to outside the dungeons as well. i want a World with Lore that is Crafted that's why i'm here

someone freaking threw doodoo at me while i was checking my map never mind screw this game

sounds like what's going to happen to me here over time

this is a weird PvP thing i didn't really pay attention to, i just heard that if you do the tutorial you get a permanent +30% to your mount speed. PvP in MMOs is a nightmare because it's not humanly possible to care about minmaxing my character as much as the apparently non-human opponents i always get seem to. i think it's just the entire map of Oblivion is now a battleground between factions? sounds cool i guess. i used a trebuchet briefly. it controlled as badly as i expected. my something-rank in this specific battle campaign-whatever is now 3. anyway back to what i was doing

ok. listen

i did a lot of research, because the way DLC works in this game is made to be mathematically as confusing as possible. what i have gathered about this absolute mess of content delivery is, you have "Chapters" and you have "DLC". Chapters are DLC but they are not "DLC" DLC. Chapters do eventually become "DLC" DLC. are you with me. because i'm not and that's why i just bought the stupid subscription service instead to save myself the headache. i honest to god could not figure out what i would need to buy in order to access certain parts of the game, so i will simply spend £9 for now so i'm not constantly hitting feature-walls due to not having some specific chapter/DLC/whatever the hell installed. also with this subscription you get infinite crafting material storage which i've read is extremely tedious to play the game without, as i have already started to see because there are so many materials and so little space and what magnitude of a problem they have manufactured here in order to sell a sub

i reeeeally wanted to not spend any extra money on this game. i'm very adamant on not paying for microtransactions in games, and really what bothers me most about "ESO Plus" is the premium currency you get every month. this game has Convenience Features for days (or minutes if you buy the boost) and including the currency to pay for that, as well as the added 10% XP-loot-boost-double-bank-space whatever that's included really skirts the line of what i'm comfortable with. it is possible to buy all the DLC outright which i would prefer to do, if i knew how for one, and if it apparently wasn't more financially viable to simply pay for the sub and use the premium currency it gives you to buy it all? that sounds like a good plan and all but also what would be the point in buying them all if it's not physically possible to go back to not having the crafting storage. this is how they get you, now what are you going to spend all those "crowns" on big boy, ooh you want that sparkly pegasus mount so bad. man we've come a long way since Horse Armor huh

for my first DLC-venture - this weird excavation minesweeper skill line. it's pretty cool having to track things down and gather information but it marks a general area of where an item could be buried on your map, and it has more than once taken me 10+ minutes of running around looking for a pile of dirt that will give me a button prompt

here's a guy i fought for a couple minutes while looking for a dig site, who even after someone else joined in had taken only one pixel of damage before killing me

finally figured out how being a technically-limited MMO enhances this game and it's that it doesn't let you kill the owls

fast travel is free if you do it from another teleport shrine. i was starting to hurt for money and didn't want to fast travel. i noticed that when i finally figured out how to leave the PvP region, that is using its teleport shrine, it didn't charge me anything. i thought i was being so smart by using the PvP menu to travel there then using its shrine for a free teleport. but no every shrine is free and i was actually being stupid just like when i decided i should start playing another MMO

this is the first human interaction i've had in this game and i cannot tell if it's genuine

so as it turns out? "completing" an area does not include sidequests! i was still running into them and they weren't even being marked on my map!! they kept a little discovery in this game isn't that wild. RPGs should not encourage you to do every little morsel of content, much less track it all for you to remind you of what's left. imagining if Minecraft had progress bars for finding every diamond in a chunk with a reward for completing it. wasn't that exhausting just to read

unfortunately the sidequests themselves still leave little discovery. here's a treasure hunt where most of time completing a step was a surprise to me, because i'd just be walking around trying to figure it out and i'd suddenly get the big checkmark for being in the right general area, then unlock the next hint. but also i looked back on the actual hints it gave and even after knowing where i was supposed to go i did not see how i would have figured most of it out. this sucks too because so many quests have little notes and journals scattered around that are obviously written to be usable in figuring out what to do naturally, but what's the point when a quest to find four items hidden across an entire region immediately tells me exactly where they all are on the map. playing this like an RPG isn't going to get me to endgame faster