The Elder Scrolls Online has a lot of achievements, to put it lightly. We’re talking over 1,000 in the base game and hundreds per DLC, amounting to 59,465 points. I’ve played for nine years, with around 2,000 hours, and amassed 17,000 points, and I’m barely scratching the surface. ch3m_gaming has gone much, much further.
“I finally completed 100 percent achievements,” they posted to the game’s subreddit. But they’re not done yet, even after 18,000 hours of playtime. “Im chasing the goal of achieving a ‘true 100 percent playthrough’ of the entire game, achievements are only a part of that. I also have 100 percent stickerbook, furnishing plans, recipes, book library, motifs, 3600 CP, and so on.”
To put it into perspective, 18,000 hours is equal to just over two years. Granted, ESO came out in early 2014, so that’s only two out of nearly ten years… right? Not exactly. ch3m_gaming got into the game on PlayStation with the Summerset expansion in 2018, meaning that over the past five years, they spent two years playing ESO. Maybe 100 percenting this goliath MMO isn’t the most realistic goal, eh?
According to ch3m_gaming, on their server, they’re the second player to achieve this, but the other completionist did it during Blackwood and High Isle, not Necrom. Each chapter adds more achievements so, inevitably, that 100 percent will trickle back down, leaving more for players to do.
It used to be that achievements were character-specific, not account-wide, so you’d have to get everything in one playthrough. This causes a few problems for those striving to get 100 percent, as certain achievements are class-specific. Luckily, the system changed, paving the way for ch3m_gaming; “I used six different characters to clear content and earn achievements,” they said. “But there are also a lot of other characters solely for doing crafting dailies or for item storage.
“Before account-wide achievements, I was using only one character for everything. After that, I was able to play more flexibly with different characters. I don’t care which character I’ll achieve my trifectas nowadays, I use the class my prog-team needs me the most.”
As for what specific achievements took the longest, ch3m_gaming told commenters, “My Planesbreaker-prog took about four months and my Swashbuckler Supreme took about three months. Other achievements only took that long because you had to wait for a certain event (like PvP events for my Grand Overlord grind) or you had to wait because certain content was bugged and therefore not doable or got significantly harder.”