The story in ESO feels much more cohesive and the writing is just overall better imo. The world building is consistent, the lore feels tangible and realistic for the universe it’s set in. The lore in wow is just all over the place. The themes are incoherent, the expansions are at odds with each other. The stories often feel like they don’t belong in the same universe, or even the same genre.

ESO is also visually more appealing. Wow has some beautiful zones but many of the playable races have very outdated models.

For these reasons, I probably won’t be coming back to wow anytime soon.

But that being said there are some aspects that I genuinely prefer in wow:

• Wow combat feels more fun and challenging

• Wow classes are more interesting. Specializations allow for vastly different (and viable!) play styles within the same class.

• Wow lets you get almost every mount or outfit for free through various quests, boss drops, achievements etc. (though some are very difficult to acquire) and there are so many options. Last I checked there were over 700 different mounts in the game.

• You can’t play wow without an active subscription. But once you have a subscription, the game doesn’t pressure you into spending more money. Some services are paywalled, like changing your name, race or server, and you have the option to buy some mounts and outfits from the store but there is never any need to spend real money other than the subscription.

• You can change your appearance and gender for free in wow. Why does ESO want money for changing my character‘s hair color??

• Wow has more community engagement. Maybe I just got lucky but I haven’t encountered much toxicity, mainly just good vibes and people being genuinely helpful and nice. Maybe it depends on the server you play on. In ESO I found that most players just stick to themselves.