Title pretty much says it all. I don't think they are bad and from all that I've read about how free form character improvement (for lack of a better word) is, I don't think we will be prohibited from having the playstyle we want... but the classes still seem odd. I'm not a lore junkie by any stretch, but the only class I associate with the Elder Scrolls is the Nightblade. I know that was a class selection in Oblivion. I feel like the Dragon Knight is a deliberate ploy to nab Skyrim players. I guess what I'm driving at is: if building your character is so much in your control, why didn't they just give us warrior, mage, and rogue archetypes and let us improve from there?

Probably just to give us a smaller change from other traditional mmorpgs.

I'm a bit disappointed there isn't an archer class.I will just have to see how being a night blade gets me where I want to go.

Don't worry, that's all I can say atm

Bow skill line, there's you're archer class.
Combine with Nightblade for a stealthier approach or combine with Sorcerer for a type of dark ranger who summons pets.

I want a ranger with an Sabletooth tiger pet. Negotiation are still on going. They want to give me an boar and I want the tiger. I think we meet in the middle and make dogs our ranger pets.

Most likely there will be no rangers with pets and they will be sorely missed

Dragon Knight is actually the class with the most lore reasoning for its inclusion. Sorcerer and Nightblade have both been classes in past Elder Scrolls game. Templar is new, but makes perfect sense as a warrior of the divines.

There's no archer class because there's no reason to have a class defined solely in terms of its weapon... since every weapon has its own skill line.

Classes have to be orthogonal to weapons, and that, I think, is why they stayed away from the archetypes. But bear in mind that in another sense, ESO is a game that has NO classes, or custom classes only, since if you define a class in terms of all the skills a player has available, class only determines a minority of those (three lines out of a dozen or so).

You can do bow with any of the other classes; personally I'm planning to be a leather wearing bow sorc with summons for tanking and dark magic for snares.