So if anyone is playing this in 2024, what’s the deal?
It's fun, I compare it to Guild Wars in certain aspects with using a limited skill bar and armor sets to make builds. It even has a popular builds site just like Guild Wars. After all of the updates, this game is the biggest Elder Scrolls game imaginable and my assumption is that they will stop once they have mapped out the entire planet of Tamriel.
Is this a really good game now?
Yes, as long as you don't expect an online Skyrim. I will repeat this in every thread about ESO, this game
does not play like Skyrim. So don't set that expectation. Just hope that the next game the ESO team is working on will play more like Skyrim.
Is it basically mega TES V on steroids?
No.
The only frustration I've had in my 7+ years of playing is the fact that character quest dialogue is too wordy. It makes it very tempting to skip through it when you're getting paragraphs of dialogue for something that could be explained in two to three sentences. That's something that Skyrim did better in terms of pacing and it helped immensely.
And for any Morrowind fans, no this isn't the good type of wordy where they explain how to get to a location, this is the bad type of wordy to where they will sometimes repeat a statement or an objective twice in the same paragraph or overly explain a simple point of 'go get this to help ____' etc.
I also agree that the level scaling probably wasn't the best idea in the long run but I get why they did it, so you can have the freedom to explore anywhere and start that area's quest chain. However, they could have solved this difficulty problem by introducing a 'hard mode' version of the world itself.