I'm having fun with the game. No the best game evah, lots of important TES game features missing (no crime/steal system, no thives guild, no Brotherhood, etc.), but it's promised to be added in the future patches.
Good things:
+ I like the character system, depsite having 4 strict classes there is still so much freedom and skillpoints available, that I'm OK with that. If you think and plan, evey base class can fulfill most of the traditional MMORPG roles, in different ways
+ Crafting gear is a viable option! In MMO! Love it! Crafting system is nice too.
+ You have to make hard decisions (at least in the low/mid levels) if you want to put skillpoints in various crafting skills, active abilities or passives
+ You have to managed your inventory, it's really easy to fill iy out completly in 10 minutes after leaving town if you collect everything that it's not nailed down
+ Graphics are nice
+ Gear is breaks on death
+ The best thing I kept for the last bullet: Exploration is cool and rewarding! It's cool to just wander around, find quests/treasures/special crafting stations (allow to craft you an armor set if you meet crafting skill requirements)/skill boosters/etc. It's really hard to find everything even if you check every corner in the area. In the 1-15 level area on my own I manged to find 11/16 skyshards (finding each 3 of them gives you one skill point) and do 60/69 quests. Exploration is the best part of TESO, if you are exploration-fag, you'll like the game.
+ Solo content is not trivial. I actually manage to die in public dungeons, boss fights in the main quest and some longer quest chains are quite hard! Yesterday I needed 5 attempts to win boss fight in level 20 main quest solo instance. That's cool! Can't remember when last time I was sweating to win in MMORPG solo content. If you do not block/dodge special attacks you will sorry. Trying to facetank boss special attacks will kill you or bring you to the minimal level of HP.
Mixed feelings:
* So far C&C in quests is pretty much cosmetical. Quest chains are OK as for MMO, definitely above standard. As for TES cRPG - nothing too impressive.
Downsides:
- A lot of bugs (broken quests, rollbacks, some passive skills do nothing, etc.). It's the first time I play MMO at launch, so it may be the norm, dunno.
- Public dungeons have weak design. All have very similar pattern - in fact it's just curved corridor to the boss lair, guaranteed skyshard and shurtcut to leave the dungeon. In fact the corridor part is harder than the boss, since when you move through the dungeon alone you have to fight 3-6 group of mobs and the larger ones are quite hard if your build is not CC/AoE oriented. My Assassin Nightblade has to be on toes. And that's cool. But than the boss room... 8-15 people camping on boss respawn spot. When boss respawns, he dies in 2-3 seconds because of concentrated attacks. Don't know if the bosses in PD have any interesting mechanis, they die too fast to notice, lol. In fact it's hard to score a hit if you do not use an instant attack - boss is dead before you are able to hit him. It's just stupid. People farm PD bosses cause he very often drops blue item and filled soul gem is guaranteed I think. Stupid design!
- Full map of area/dungeon are visible when you enter it. Of course point of interest are not marked, but I'd prefer to reveal the map as I move through the area
- Traditional instanced group dungeons... So far I have visited one, design was better than public dungeons, but nothing really memorable. I fully agree with the movie posted a few posts ago. Chests are looted by the frist person which opens them, no loot rolls. Bosses drop junk most of the time. Don't understand why it's designed like that. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Heaven for trolls/l00t N1Nj4z.
My summary: if you are casual player (but not a retard, you have to accept some challange but on the other hand it's not Dark Souls) who likes exploring regular solo questing areas, completing achivements for doing all the quests, finding secrets, have fun with crafting your own gear then TESO is something to consider.
If you like group dungeon crawling then so far it's not the game for you. This may be different in end game content, but I suspect that philosophy of the dungeon design is the same, from the hardcore raider it's probably shit.