This post contains all kinds of spoilers for the Firesong DLC and its conclusion.

This "Legacy of the Bretons" year started with the promise to focus on a nuanced political story by "going back to ESO's storytelling roots", and obviously a strong focus on Breton lore.

After finishing Firesong and all related content, I'm left to wonder where all those promises went.
Is Druid *** threatening Tamriel with a magical supervolcano supposed to be a nuanced political story? Where was this Breton lore we heard so much about?



The devs and the marketing team hyped this year up with the Ascendant Lord, the Ascendant Order, and their "morally gray" quest for peace.
We've known this since the get go in High Isle, but they're blatantly evil cartoon villains with no hint of nuance to them, and Firesong has made this worse.

The Ascendant Lord himself is only interesting in the way he appears in the cinematic trailers. There's no real interaction with him when he's not being Lord Bacaro. He's just another madman who wants to nuke all of Tamriel to claim his supposed birthright. That's all there is to him.
Why did he create the Society of the Steadfast, which genuinely helps people? It's just a front to conceal his evil identity, nothing more.
That cool knight's armor and big sword? You barely see him with it.
When you end up fighting him, he's turned into a giant demon-plant guy spouting mustache-twirling villain things in a hilariously deep voice. Not gonna say anything about the boss fight itself because everyone already knows how stupidly simple they are.

The attempt to keep the Ascendant Lord's identity a secret honestly gave me second hand embarrassment for the writer, who thought they were pulling an Agatha Christie with this.
It got so shameless that at one point the player character and Druid Ryvana stumble across Lord Bacaro's super secret basement, where you find the Ascendant Lord's armor, and Ryvana says something along the lines of "That's odd, why does Bacaro have the Ascendant Lord's armor in his basement?".
And you, the Vestige (who apparently lost brain cells alongside your soul), do not connect the dots, and have to read Bacaro's journal, where he explicitly states that he is indeed the Ascendant Lord in order to understand what's going on here.
After that, you have to listen to every other character (including the "great" investigator Lady Arabelle) react to your shocking discovery.



The actual political stuff, aka the "peace talks" involving the Alliance leaders? We don't see them.
They got into a room to talk at the very end, and that's the end of the DLC.
I figured this would happen because the implications of the three Alliances suddenly coming to terms with each other in a zone DLC about druids would be an odd creative choice, but it was still an underwhelming moment.
The peace talks are the very first thing you hear about during the first prologue quest of the year, and you never get a conclusion to it. Will we even find out what the result is next year?



And then the Breton lore. I don't know how this could've possibly changed anybody's perception of the Breton race. They're still relegated to being your average medieval knights.
The only addition we got was finding out that First Era Breton druids traveled to the isles and settled there.
It doesn't help that Chris Redfield/Sonic the Hedgehog ends up selling you the tagline "Legacy of the Bretons" by literally saying it out loud and claiming that the real Breton legacy is being proud of their dual heritage. A dual heritage that has barely been mentioned up until that line of dialogue.



All this to basically say that Firesong (just like High Isle) has an incredibly bland and generic story featuring equally bland characters (except for Captain Syravaen). Sadly, I can say the same about 2020 and 2021's DLCs too.
Content is at an all time low, and story is quite literally the only selling point of this DLC, so I find it very annoying that what we get is just content for the sake of being content.
It's very frustrating because I know ZOS and its writers are more than capable of telling good stories with interesting characters, so it feels to me like there's a lack of interest on their behalf.

Is it only the writers' fault? Is it the yearly story formula? Is it because ESO is discreetly being put on the sidelines while the main team is working on ZOS' new IP?



This is long and I hope it didn't come across as too disconnected of a rant.
Not enough people are complaining about the decline in writing for my taste, so I felt this to be neccesary.



TLDR: If 2023 is the Telvanni Peninsula and my wife Naryu Virian returns, I do not want her to be boring and bland. I want to be excited about the story and the characters again.
ESO still has so much potential, but as it currently stands, the cinematic trailers tell a more entertaining story and they don't even contain a single line of dialogue.