At the moment, (after a weekend of play) I'm treating it as a single player game, and bits of Morrowind are fantastic – I'm really enjoying the world exploration, and the crafting isn't bad (although my nightblade has moved to heavy armour because I can't get enough leather by whacking deer and other defenseless woodland creatures, but can get loads of iron). Enchanting takes a bit of getting used to, but I think I like that too. The character development is pretty interesting, although I keep getting to level 7 or 8 and wondering what a different class/race/style would be like. But then, I had that problem with Skyrim too.

Inventory is limited to 60 types of thing (max stack of 100), so if you collect all the things, you can run out of space pretty quickly. The lockpicking minigame is quite interesting, especially when you know there are other players sitting next to you waiting for you to fail so they can have a go.

The zone chat uses your ACCOUNT name, not your character name, so if you should pick an account name that you're happy to be public.

Note of warning: you can't use your free month subscription unless you activate a subscription with a credit card, a paypal account, or a time card. There are tales of people being billed the first month using a credit card. I used a paypal account instead. I am still getting billed in Euros, but I don't know if that's a consequence of Paypal.

In summary, it's eating my spare time at the moment, and I think I'm enjoying it more than Guildwars 2, but I haven't got round to trying the PVP yet, and I'm not sure it will hold my attention more than a couple of months.

Good gameplay and such with some interesting features.. As my first character I am a blacksmithing, tank, dragonknight, chef. It's been good thus far, the tanking is pretty tough.. Especially for a start with the mage getting mad cause you only attracted 4 out of 5 enemies xD The issues with this game I haven't found with the game play though, the installation itself took a long time with many patches I expected to be fixed with beta tests.. I had to install as much patches as I did for the actual game. If that wasn't enough I had problems with crashing, I had to do many things to stop it only to have the same problem a further 3 times. My pc is algood with 12 gb memory and decent i7 processing, can be difficult dealing with this all cutting into my subscription time rather unfairly. All in all it's a pretty good MMO; it just doesn't have the feel of an Elder Scrolls game though. TES has more in the story department and decent side quests that lead to unique treasures and such; especially that gem Morrowind! But TES Online doesn't seem to offer the same sensation of finding hidden or quirky items that had been offered in previous Elder Scrolls. I would still recommend this game, I do really enjoy the gameplay (though it's tough single player). I would just add that you may need to be patient for the first few days to try work the kinks out and such. 4/5 due to the atrocious installation/pat­ch/crash experience and kinda lacking feel of the amazing Elder Scrolls series. Still good game though!!

Be warned: Retail version installer deletes EVERYTHING in the folder you install to. I installed to c:\games (rather than the default location), because that's where all my games are installed. The installer automatically deleted EVERYTHING from c:\games prior to installing. i.e. Wiped all my games. No confirmation, just gone. Thanks.

It's still a good game though.