I've talked three different friends into trying ESO over the years, and every single one asked me the same thing first: "But I don't really do MMOs. Is there an actual single-player RPG buried in there?" Short answer, yes. Longer answer is where it gets complicated, so here's my honest take after years of mostly soloing it.
The story content is genuinely enormous
If you treat ESO as a buy-once solo game, the sheer volume is almost absurd. The base game alone gives you all ten alliance zones plus the Coldharbour main quest, and that's before you touch a single chapter. Then you've got Morrowind, Summerset, Elsweyr, Greymoor, Blackwood, High Isle, Necrom and the rest. Each one a self-contained story arc that you can play start to finish without ever grouping up. Necrom in particular let you walk through Apocrypha, Hermaeus Mora's realm, which is the kind of thing lore nerds wait a console generation for.
What surprised me most is how good a chunk of the writing is. The quest design leans hard on the old Daggerfall-era "every choice has a downside" philosophy more often than you'd expect from an MMO. The Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild lines hold up against the Skyrim versions. The Clockwork City zone is some of the best Sotha Sil material in the entire series. You can absolutely sink 200+ hours into ESO and barely notice other players exist except as scenery in town.
And mechanically, soloing is more viable than ever. Overland content scales to you, most delves and public dungeons are clearable alone, and the Companions system gives you an AI buddy if a fight gets spicy. You are not forced into a single group dungeon to finish a story.
The always-online cost is real, though
Here's the catch nobody mentions in the "it's basically single-player!" pitches. It isn't single-player. It's a solo experience inside an online game, and that distinction bites in specific ways.
You need a connection every time you play. No offline mode, no pausing mid-fight by hitting Esc. The world keeps moving. If ZeniMax has a rough patch day or the megaserver hiccups, your "single-player RPG" is simply unavailable, which is a genuinely weird feeling when you just wanted to do one quest before bed. And someday, years out, these servers will go dark, and unlike Oblivion or Skyrim you won't be able to reinstall and replay. You're renting the story, not owning it. For some people that's a dealbreaker on principle, and I respect that.
The other tax is the interface. Town hubs are full of other players bunny-hopping on mounts and spamming guild-store chatter, which can puncture the immersion that the writing works so hard to build. Mileage varies a lot on how much that bothers you.
The FOMO is mostly a paper tiger
The seasonal/event anxiety is the thing I'd most want a new solo player to relax about. Yes, ESO runs limited-time events with exclusive cosmetics, and yes there's a Crown Store happy to sell you horses. But the actual story content does not expire. A chapter you skip this year is still right there waiting whenever you buy it, fully playable. You are not missing narrative by starting late. If anything you're winning, because you get years of polished, patched zones in one go instead of waiting between releases.
My honest recommendation: grab the base game on a sale, ignore the subscription at first (ESO Plus is mostly a crafting-bag and DLC-access convenience, not a story gate), and buy chapters individually when they're discounted. Play it like a slightly social Elder Scrolls game and you'll get your money's worth several times over.
So I want to hear from the people who actually did this. If you came to ESO purely for the single-player story and never seriously grouped up. Looking back, was the always-online trade-off worth it for you, or did the lack of a real offline, own-it-forever version end up souring the whole thing?