Daedric Pacts - my concept for a lore-friendly difficulty mechanic

SirIronclad

For a long while now I've been thinking about an immersive way to implement difficulty options in ESO, especially for overland content. I was kinda expecting ZOS to reveal something substantial regarding overland difficulty in this year's big announcement, but it seems like it's still in early development, so I decided to make this post to reach out to the community and devs.

My idea is inspired by the limiter mechanics that are present in Supergiant Games' titles. They all feature a mechanic with a list of activatable limiters that make the game harder while also providing benefits.

Adapting this to ESO, I would call this mechanic "Daedric Pacts" and it could look something like this:

You start a quest that involves "friendly" Daedric cultists in search of an artifact. This could for example be tied to Hermaeus Mora. At some point of this quest or questline, you get the choice of taking the artifact for yourself, but by doing so enter a bargain or pact with Mora which also results in gameplay consequences. In Mora's case, you could for instance have one of your skill slots on each bar locked, but also gain bonus XP. At that point you get a repeatable quest where you either try to get rid of the item and the effect again, or you equip the item and can strengthen your bond with Mora by accomplishing corresponding tasks to increase the effects.

Eventually, you could have a questline like this for all Daedric princes and if you really want to challenge yourself, equip as many of these cursed artifacts as possible.

Let me know what you think! I'm also curious what kind of effects for the other princes people can come up with.


I also crossposted this on
- the ESO subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1k92clt/daedric_pacts_my_concept_for_a_lorefriendly/
- and Steam ESO discussions: https://steamcommunity.com/app/306130/discussions/0/599651004551587089/

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This makes me feel that ESO needs more variety in their daily quests, we need Daily Daedric Quests where we approach a Daedric Shrine, Summon the Daedric Prince and do a quest for them and we could do it daily.

Vaqual

A while ago I was thinking about something similar flavor wise , although I was rather thinking of using minute buffs and PvP features to make it appealing. But I like your perspective on this. Overall I just wish we had more meaningful ways to interact with the divines/daedric princes in a main-quest independent mechanic.

This was my concept: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/656042/future-content-idea-patronage