If I had to pick a highlight of my time with the console versions of The Elder Scrolls Online:

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Granted, the launch week has been hounded by server instability and lag (that seems to be clearing up in the wake of a couple of patches), and I'm still not a big fan of the console versions' voice-only approach to socializing. But at the same time, The Elder Scrolls Online feels at home on the Xbox One and PS4, as though it were made for them from the start. Developer ZeniMax Online has generally done a good job of transforming it into one of the best MMORPGs currently available on consoles. It also doesn't eat at your wallet. TESO scrapped its subscription free earlier this year, which means you can play all of its content without having to pay a dime beyond the initial purchase price.

There's a cash shop called the "Crown Store," yes, but it largely focuses on cosmetic items like guar mounts and costumes, and you could get the few buffs it grants by cooking or buying player-made food. At no point should anyone who chooses not to use the Crown Store feel at a disadvantage. In fact, I'd say the Crown Store is disappointing compared to what you find in fellow buy-to-play MMORPG Guild Wars 2, as the costumes are usually dull and there's no option for much-required services like appearance or faction changes.

I'd like to acknowledge that this is a relatively quick review for such a massive game. It took me close to 100 hours of to reach the level cap when I originally reviewed TESO on PC last year, but I've never really stopped playing in all the time since. Because the console versions really bring no new content that isn’t present in the PC version's latest patch, I've spent most of my time seeing how the same experience translates on the Xbox One and PS4 – and that experience has been a good one. I’ve seen no sign of the infestations of bugs and bots that marred the first months of the PC version, and earlier this year ZeniMax Online introduced some much-needed features that make the experience of playing Elder Scrolls Online feel more like, well, Elder Scrolls.

You can now kill and pickpocket non-essential NPCs, for instance, which makes you a fugitive until you pay off your bounty, wait out the debuff, or get killed by guards. It's a fun system, and it's a shame there's currently no PvP component in which you're allowed to hunt down players with a penchant for theft and murder (but the rumor mill suggests that may come in a future patch). I've noticed, however, that the system makes goofing around a lot more precarious than in most MMOs. I'm of those mildly ADD players who's constantly slashing swords and jumping for no real reason, and I tend to keep the feature turned off as it greatly improves my chances of accidentally cleaving a peasant. Loading

Such slip-ups are uncommon. For such a massive MMORPG — filled with a sprawling PvP zone, four-man dungeons, and 12-man raid-like Trials — TESO is uncommonly suited to gamepads because it doesn't burden you with a truckload of abilities, as does Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Here, there's only an action bar for five buttons, which you can extend to 10 by swapping weapons almost instantaneously beginning at level 15. It makes combat fun and fluid, and the option to manually block and slash with the left and right triggers respectively grants a sense of interactivity that's usually missing in MMOs.

The benefits of playing with a gamepad especially show up in lockpicking, which always kind of annoyed me on TESO's PC counterpart, but here the rumbler helps me realize when the springs are at just the right position, thus resulting in fewer broken lockpicks. Alas, not everything works so well. While the mapping setup is generally intuitive, the Swap Weapon and Crouch/Sneak buttons feel like they should be swapped themselves. You'll currently find Swap Weapon mapped to the "west" button on the D-Pad, which is a pain when you're using the left thumbstick to run away and want to swap on the move. Sneaking is achieved by pressing in the right thumbstick — which would be a more effective mapping for in-combat actions like weapon-swapping. Loading

The rest of the buttons belong to the action abilities, and that's where TESO best reveals its Elder Scrolls-like freedom. In contrast to almost every major MMO out there, you can use any weapon and any weight of gear you want with any of the four character classes, thus allowing for a wide range of custom playstyles. The only limits are the abilities associated with the class-specific abilities of the Dragonknight, Sorcerer, Templar, and Nightblade, which lend each one a useful combat personality with powers that range from leaping toward enemies with dragon wings as a Dragonknight or summoning Daedra as a Sorcerer. The upshot of all this is that you can be a heavy-armored sorcerer who wields a double-bladed axe if you so wish, so long as you level weapons and gear by wearing them in combat and while turning in quests.

When I first reviewed TESO, this freedom was only a reality for the initial leveling process. That's all changed now thanks to the Champion Point system that appears once you venture past the nominal level cap of 50 and into the 14 "Veteran Ranks," as you can put points into constellations that can affect factors such as the stamina cost of abilities or the power behind crits. There's essentially no cap on these, though, and I worry that they'll leave newer players hopelessly behind months after launch. For now, though, they've done much to fix one of TESO's most glaring stumbles for its longevity. Loading

Exploring the world generally feels like playing a game like Skyrim, even though it breaks with the open-world tradition of Elder Scrolls by ushering you through zones in a linear fashion. These are massive areas, though, and they're filled with ad-hoc group activities such as world bosses or the comparatively ho-hum dark anchors that occasionally dropped down from the sky in fixed areas. After having experienced each of the three factions stories twice now, I'm convinced that which one you choose to play first could greatly affect your perception of how good TESO's storylines are. To this day, I love the Ebonheart Pact's mix of lightweight puzzles and slaying, and the way its basis in the unique settings of Morrowind and Skyrim does much to break its adventures out of standard fantasy expectations. On the other hand, The Daggerfall Covenant and its focus on the predictable kings and castles of traditional fantasy bores me to tears every time, even with a somehow disappointing jaunt into the Alik'r desert. The elfy Aldmeri Dominion makes a good showing, too... but if you'll pardon my preferences, it's a little too pretty for my tastes.

That's all good for the a solitary, single-player-style experience, but nothing makes me worry about TESO's multiplayer future quite like its approach to communication. It's entirely based on Group and Area voice chat, the latter of which allows you to listen to jerks playing Carly Rae Jepsen in the middle of Riften or little kids squabbling over a can of Coke in Mournhold. That background noise doesn’t do much to immerse me in the fantasy atmosphere, and there's apparently no option to mute specific players. To be sure, there are a few areas where this system shines: Automatically forcing random dungeon groups to use voice chat instead of typing, for instance, has resulted in much smoother first-time dungeon runs than I ever saw in the PC version. When you're able to immediately describe the cause of a problem in combat without having to stop to type or read, there's a much smaller chance for error. This is also true in the sprawling PvP zone of Cyrodiil, where I was better able to lead small missions into enemy bases by speaking to random comrades rather than typing. Loading

But here's the problem: there's no option to use text chat. At all. That means that, so far, it's almost impossible to get groups together in the group-focused endgame zone of Craglorn since you can't call out for more people in zone chat. That means it's hard to invite people to or join one of the five guilds, which especially sucks because guilds and the associated guild vendors throughout the world form the backbone of TESO's economy. It's even more annoying when playing PvP in Cyrodiil, as it's almost impossible to find out where the bulk of the fighting is upon entering aside from subtle hints on the map. Some form of text entry is essential for this type of game. Neverwinter and FFXIV: ARR both wisely let us use peripheral keyboards if we wished, and the latter even allows a wide range of pre-programmed text macros for console players to describe what they need. TESO has none, and I can't help but feel that its multiplayer experience will suffer for it.

Perhaps it doesn't need to. I've discovered that I enjoy the console versions of TESO precisely because of their comparatively leisurely pace, and that pace has helped me uncover a touch of that Skyrim feeling I sometimes struggled to find on the PC. I've also, oddly, discovered that I appreciate that TESO on consoles allows no addons, as it encourages active Elder Scrolls-style exploration. Here, there's no voice at the back of my brain screaming that finding all those lorebooks and skyshards for ability points would be a lot easier with a plugin. Experimentation with alchemy is more fun, too, since I don't have an add-on that tells me all the right combinations. (But man, I sure do miss instant gear and ability swapping.) Were it not for the problems with communications — and ZeniMax's decision to make distracting gamertags visible in the world instead of lore-appropriate character names — I'd easily say this was the superior version of TESO. It's relaxed version of an feature-rich MMORPG that originally seemed meant to butt heads with the like of World of Warcraft, and here on on consoles, here on our couches — perhaps this is where it was meant to be all along.