I absolutely LOVE the idea of gameplay mechanics like respawning mobs and the fact that every player experiences the main quest being explainable through lore and narrative. The thing is... I don't think it needs to be.

I have always viewed ESO as a sort of "Living Lore" where we are experiencing something that occurred.

We have all escaped Coldharbour, in our own way, and are now running around Tamriel being adventurers. Only I am THE Vestige, the one called to action to take on Molag Bal. However, we are all vestiges, similar to a daedra. Once daedra die their bodies are reformed in their respective realms of oblivion. We are all linked with Coldharbour, so we are supposed to reform there. However, our vestige is snared by the energies of the wayshrines before we make it back to Coldharbor and we reform at the wayshrine. Technically... when we use a wayshrine our vestige is destroyed and we are reformed at another location. When we travel to a wayshrine without being at another, I think we are, in essence, committing suicide.

If we didn't all eventually get our souls back we would turn into soulshriven. Once The Vestige defeats Molag Bal and retrieves their soul, all other escaped vestiges also retrieve their souls back. Even so, the ability to use the Wayshrines remain since our physical selves have been "attuned" to that magic. We are forever changed. We have our soul, and that will prevent us from becoming soulshriven (or worse!).

In your experience, only you are The Vestige and you save the rest of us. I am just another soul-less adventurer trying to do my best in Tamriel.

A good way to think about it is that the character you play is just an adventurer... you (the player) are The Vestige and you playing through the main quest is sort of like you recanting your experience to that adventurer. The same with visiting other alliances. It's not that your character actually joined another alliance, they just get the experience the lore of doing so.

Living Lore... that's how I reconcile a lot of what ESO is. Don't think of ESO as being events that are occurring right now, but as something that DID occur. What we are playing is sort of the retelling of those events. That's how come we can have inconsistencies and game mechanics, because it's not "currently" happening, it's just said to have happened this way.

But this is totally a weird perspective that I have taken on ESO. It's not really supported by anything other than my own perspective on the game.

I think a dragon-break seems a bit too easy, I guess. It's The Elder Scrolls catch-all deus ex machina... literally!

Gidorick wrote: »

Living Lore... that's how I reconcile a lot of what ESO is. Don't think of ESO as being events that are occurring right now, but as something that DID occur. What we are playing is sort of the retelling of those events. That's how come we can have inconsistencies and game mechanics, because it's not "currently" happening, it's just said to have happened this way.

But this is totally a weird perspective that I have taken on ESO. It's not really supported by anything other than my own perspective on the game.

I think a dragon-break seems a bit too easy, I guess. It's The Elder Scrolls catch-all deus ex machina... literally!

I find the dragon-break theory quite pleasant according to the game mechanics that many have mentioned so far.
It allows fulltime roleplay in a way. Then you have to make real choices while playing your chara not to make him/her another uninteresting everything-thief-ork-vestige-cooker-murderer-vampire-templar superhero ! That's how rerolling allows me to explore the lore without cheating on what my characters are, from what i designed them to be in the story.

There's a long-lost snow elf (Altarya), bind to Meridia, who lived some aspects of the main quest in a way, but, who is not intended to be "that Vestige" herself.
There's also a bosmer spinner (Angelith), experiencing the world and the stories of the NPC she meets as a whole - what allows me to deal with the main quest as well.
But some alts (Ajaxandriel, Hjarnar...) have nothing to do with that Couldharbour soulless stuff, so I'll just try and avoid these parts of the game.

I like the idea of ESO being set in another Dragon Break so. But I prefer not to consider it for its "magical god-mode deus-ex-machina phenomenon", but rather a telling mechanism itself, not so far from what you said.

The lore creators themselves have played with this idea in some in-universe theories about Dragon Breaks, like "the loveletter from the fifth era". Some i.u. scholars have considered Dragon Breaks as date issues and mere inconsistencies into i.u. recorded lore, and that was supposed to be refuted by documents "coming from the future" - but for an in-universe perspective, such documents could be pure inventions like our irl S-F stories...
Then if you consider the powers of magic and these goddish daedra thing it makes all this even more concrete, of course. Just less "realistic"/"mature" for our brains maybe.

Anyway, as far as I understand the core concept of the elder scrolls (as the name of the series) it is playing around "retelling something that did occur" indeed.

The whole bosmer lore about spinners is based on this, and their quest stories proves us that "telling a story" in the Elder Scrolls universe is not simply...telling a story