Qagh wrote: »

I vote always for cats.

This one agrees! As Sir Cadwell points out, cat people are lovely!

I chose Wrothgar, purely based on the "main quest storytelling".
Morrowind I loved for nostalgic reasons, but I found some of the zone's other questlines far more involving and interesting than the main quest.

I'm not sure what year it was (possibly Wrothgar) but I rank Thieves Guild / Hew's Bane as by a country mile the best storytelling in the game. It's proper writing, where everything is led by character, character, character, not video game "let's make X, Y and Z happen so you get A, B and C gameplay types" writing. Massively helped, of course, by characters who aren't blandly nice.

We’re pass 100 votes! This one expected Summerset to be winning, but is surprised to see so much love for Khajiits and dragons!

I have played through Cadwell's Gold and all the DLC zone stories. I tend to run several alts through the current zone story, because I often see things on the second play through that I missed somehow on the first. My first alt ran into some bugs progressing through the Solstice story quests, but I just finished taking another alt through the Solstice story and it seems to me like bugs have been patched.

I tend to prefer the latest DLC story, so last year I probably would have voted for West Weald.

reazea wrote: »

This poll appears to have shown another indicator of player decline and why. Almost nobody is voting that the newest content is better than the old.

Well, to be fair, Solstice received more votes than the 3 expansions prior to it combined as of this post (1 vote each for TP/WW, 2 votes for HI). So while few voted for Solstice, that is a significant upswing. Although, it's impossible to say if that still be the case if people were only allowed to vote from those options (and Blackwood, I guess).

I remember there was a lot of talk about what a wonderful chapter it was when Telvanni Peninsula came out. And where are all those voices now? Oh right — I guess they’ve already stopped playing…

Wrothgar takes first, although if Clockwork City were a standalone option it would have some competition. (Wrothgar would still probably win - it’s twice the size and the side quests are more interesting - but Clockwork City would be a worthy runner-up.)

Vvardenfell was a little too reliant on nostalgia and being a copy-paste of Elder Scrolls III, and a good chunk of the foreshadowing for it never pans out or makes no sense. (Looking at you, Fate-Bearers!)

Summerset made the Psijic Order into idiots, and grossly simplified Altmer settlements in contradiction to the previously existing lore. (I still haven’t forgiven the ‘if magic disappeared tomorrow no one would notice’ nonsense!) The island is very same-y looking no matter where you go, and a good chunk of the Altmer culture gets forgotten or barely touched on. (Nothing about the stars! One whole note about the Altmer obsession with numbers! Phynaster barely comes up in the only quest that involves him at all! Syrabane got…a song, I think…?) There have been worse storylines since then, but for a long time Summerset held the title for my least favorite zone and storyline.

Elsweyr…I think I’d have liked Elsweyr better if the ‘Dragons, Dragons EVERYWHERE!’ hadn’t been obvious nostalgia bait to hook in more Skyrim fans, when they could have done something more Khajiit-specific like going into depth on the dro-M’Athra. And the politics were a little nonsensical (I recall some frustration among the locals that the Dominion hadn’t intervened when Euraxia invaded…except that chunk of Elsweyr was part of what passes for the Empire at the time and Euraxia invaded a chunk of her own country. 🤨) But I did like that we finally, finally got more Khajiit furstocks.

Greymoor was mostly okay as long as I ignore the whole, ‘and all these bloodthirsty Reach people who have been kidnapping children and murdering travelers from the surrounding territories were miraculously raised from the dead, happy ending everybody!’ Harrowstorms are still kind of backwards.

Blackwood was a copy-paste of Elder Scrolls IV with more cameos than locals and poor Keshu - who could and should have figured prominently - barely showed up. And we had to put up with Eveli again, minus her character development from Wrothgar. 😐 Blackwood is currently tied for my least-favorite zone right now. On the flipside, Fargrave was fun and interesting, just not enough to save the overarching story.

High Isle should have been better. The villain was too obvious, the detective lady was too clueless, we never got to see if ‘processing’ is even a real thing or just good marketing, and while I usually like to see Stibbons and Lady Laurent their quest in this zone made me really uncomfortable. 🤮 Galen is worse, being smaller, emptier, and focusing on the annoying tree boy who…takes…for…ever…to…talk for most of the questline and walks like he’s recovering from being recently impaled. Raz’s character got assassinated sufficiently well he still hasn’t recovered in my eyes. Which Druid cult is supposed to be the bad guys got switched after High Isle with barely a handwave. Galen is tied with Blackwood for my least favorite zone presently.

The Telvanni ‘Peninsula’ mostly suffers from the main plot having vague stakes that are badly drawn out. ‘We’re doomed if X happens! Oh no, X happened! But we’re okay as long as Y doesn’t happen! Oh no - !’

West Weald was overhyped for the amount of impact it ended up having but mostly not bad as such. The Burn is cool - both in that it has interesting aesthetics and that it really helps sell the amount of destruction the bad guys are doing. The Outcast Inn’s quest is probably one of my favorite quests in the entirety of ESO. Being able to do the quests out of order was an interesting concept but a little clunky in practice. Ithelia’s design looks wildly out of place but that horse has been beaten into glue at this point. The biggest flaw is that everything is tied up too neatly at the end. There should have been massive repercussions from this, and there was nothing.

Solstice feels like pieces were glued together from different puzzles but they still don’t fit together well. It’s empty, and the main quest is generic and forgettable. The epilogue quest was more fun than most of the rest of the region combined, and there were a few other interesting pieces, but really, it’s been over ten years at this point - ESO should be reaching a higher bar than this zone managed.

randconfig wrote: »

Controversial opinion, but I have to say Necrom/Gold Road. In addition to the Infinite Archive and the incredible zone Apocrypha, they added an entirely new daedric prince and had daedric princes war against one another. It was an incredible storytelling with lots of potential... The disappointing parts where the Bosmer filler content at the start of Gold Road, the lack of any real meaningful dialogue options (e.g. being forced to agree with Mora/see Ithelia as a bad guy when it's more so the reverse), and the fact that everything ended with cliff hangers/all the steps forward in TES lore were basically undone by the ending...

Also side note, why do we bring back Razum-dar 10x, I want more Leramil the Wise

Necrom/Gold Road isn't my favorite, by far, because I hate Herma-Mora since the first time I saw him in Skyrim, I hate everything about him, but I completely agree with what you say. Everything around Ithelia feels unconsequent and useless because it's almost like they brought up a new Daedric Prince only to explain why we had never heard of her before.
So... what's the point ? She has no place in the Elder Scrolls lore anyway. I know that TESO needs to fit in a certain continuity but still, there are greater or more interesting characters to deal with, than "the one who never new had temporarily existed long ago".


For my vote, I hesitated between Legacy of the Bretons and Summerset. I love the setting of the former, the fact that it deals with consequences of the Three-Banners War, that we see the faction leaders again, the druidic plot and the Breton nobles are interesting too, but I prefer Summerset.

Since Skyrim (I barely have memories of Daedric Princes in Oblivion), Nocturnal is one of my favorite Daedric Princes (along with Meridia and my very favorite loved Azura since TESO) and I found really interesting her tendancy to plot in Summerset. I'm not really into Sea Sloads, but ok, good background for the isles, but the rest... there's nothing I don't like or love.
The intimate family story entangled with the Psijic Order evolution, the three Daedric Princes alliance that suddenly become two versus one, the Summerset mood toward foreigners and the urge to shift during the Three-Banners War, the return and loss of a certain character... everything is one point, captivating or touching.

Summerset and Murkmire had some of the strongest writing imo.

DinoZavr wrote: »

nothing beats Orsinium in my humble opinion

also, dear OP, i can not agree with your formulation
1. CWC is apparently NOT Morrowind pt.2 (like in further "one-year stories"), though it continues Daedric Wars Arc
2. 2018 also includes Murkmire, despites it is a small zone, the story is also very solid, where the heck is Murkmire?
3. TG and DB (both 2016) stories are rather disconnected from the rest of the game, but both storylines are done well
4. Gold Road is technically Necrom pt.2 so it should be 2023-4 Necrom + Gold Road, not two separate entries

100% I agree about the story arcs and I thought about doing that again rather by year/zone separation. Unfortunately, I tried that once and that poll didn’t get nearly as much traction as this. Players are much more familiarized with the immediacy of the zone and main zone story rather than the totality. This I feel is largely due to the fact that the questing can be played in any order. This leads players into a narrative experience that can feel disjointed rather than an actual arc as they jump from zone to zone. Which ultimately led me to the decision of framing the poll into year and zones rather than arcs. I also would have preferred to use story arcs instead. It would have given me more options too!

If I ever make a this kind of poll again, I might revert back to story arcs instead.