Hey Doc-
I am playing ESO. I went through WoW burnout, and let my son pick the next game. It was ESO. He had low expectations and by the time he went back to college he was fully in love with the game. I have continued in his absence.
BDO is a great game. I loved the fishing. I loved the trade routes. But sadly like many games, the end game involves PVP, and you can not toggle off the PVP flag, and I think there is a bit of pay to win involved to level the field in PvP. I forget what level you are automatically flagged for PvP, but prior to that level you could set up to fish all night, and after that level you might find yourself dead, boat destroyed, etc. So instead of looking forward to the end game, I dreaded it. They also had sort of a grindy end game involving pulling off combos that involved multiple simultaneous keystrokes on your left hand. It did not work well for me, although I did really love the empire building and fishing.
Like BDO, the world of ESO is beautiful and large. It also has zone based PvP in Cyrodiil and battlegrounds, so you can be a nice peaceful carebear until you want to go on a rampage in those zones. There is no cooldown management on skills, and there is no builder/spender mechanic. You can hit the same skill as many times as you want in a fight, although it usually helps to load them up with DoTs and then use anytimes after that.
There is a massive world of player housing you can get lost in. So far I have avoided that tank trap!
The game is very alt-friendly, encouraging you to create an alt and train its riding skill over time, and offering things like daily crafting to make money with a once a day login.
If you do this game, I recommend subscribing as it gives you an infinite crafting bank among other goodies.
I like the stories in the quests. I like the voice acting on the quests. I like the zone completion thing where you do all world bosses, shards, delves, dolmen, quest hubs, and points of interest.
There seems to be a good balance between crafting and dropped items. While you can craft training sets for alts, you still need it in the end game to reforge? items to the desired trait (even the dungeon dropped ones), or upgrade the quality of it. I think this was very good implementation, as most other games either make it a net gold sink or reduce its utility in the end game.
There is a whole fun thieving game in ESO, where you can pick pockets, rob houses, unlock chests, evade guards etc. There is also DLC (you get all DLC if you subscribe) for assassination which has a good story line.
Cyrodiil is like PvP in GW2. There are strategic goals and keeps that you bring down with siege or defend with siege. You can go large scale and run with the zerg, or you can go for small scale encounters across the world. Cyrodiil is a gigantic area, and to really get around you need to use the PvP specific tactical gate system to go from one place you control to another.
We have a good chapter in ESO, with coffee runs on the weekend, as well as other events all week long. I found everyone there helpful and friendly, and they were more than happy to talk me through all my questions on Discord.