The Elder Scrolls® Online
Fair · RPG · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 47.9h
- Value
- $0.42/hr
- Reviews
- 81% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 65% over the last 30 days against 81% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 150 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Every legend starts somewhere and in The Elder Scrolls Online, it starts with you. Join millions of players in an online, fantasy RPG set in a vast living Elder Scrolls world.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.99, set in March 2025. Its cuts run 67 percent off as a rule. There have been 93 in the 12 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 7 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 15 percent on value. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 77 percent. Among the games that feel like it, EverQuest II (free, scores 53) beats it on value, while it beats Vindictus (free, scores 19).
Players rate it 81 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 65 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 9 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written May 2026 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 42 percent of the 4,597 reviews written there were positive, against 81 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it. It carries the aggressive kind of in-app purchases, and the score already docks it for that. The sticker price is where the spending starts.
47.9 hours to finish it, 606 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 13 times the campaign.
Still 16.0K concurrent players, 9 years in.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
Players
16.0K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
If you love the world of Elder Scrolls, this is for you, if you love the rich lore and stories of this world, this is for you. For me this was my first MMO ever back when it first released in 2014 on console before moving to PC 4 years later so ESO has a special place in my heart, With that being said I think I've finally burned out on this game after so many years and it's taken me 2 years too late to realize it...
Went to Sheeet hard! About the 6 years mark, as soon as they lowered the bar so Limp Wristed Gimps could clear content with BS gear and builds.
With this many hours in the game, I don't think I could NOT recommend it. In it's current state it's harder to stay actively involved in what's going on in the game though. The Elder Scrolls Online has entered it's "next stage in life", which isn't the same experience that I have had, when I first started the game. The game still have roughly infinite amount of content, but with the halt on new expansions to the...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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The Elder Scrolls® Online scores 52/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/306130/the-elder-scrolls-onlineThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 3, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.