Please make an option to... Retcon the quests you completed

Treshcore

Hello there. So, in short words, I'd like to ask ZeniMax Online Studios to add an option to... Kind of "forget" that you've completed some quests. And yes, I know how ridiculous it sounds.

The Elder Scrolls Online is a good game with one really big problem - the lack of continuity. Even though some people who don't even bind "Toggle Walk/Run" button may not notice that, true TES fans... may feel some pain about it.
Even though the game itself is a "true TES game with the freedom of exploration", it's really linear if we're talking about Alliances' story quests. And you know, there would've been less problems if they were TRULY linear: haven't completed Stros M'Kai - no story quests in Betnikh, haven't completed Betnikh - no story quests in Glenumbra. Only side quests, nothing else. However, the game doesn't work like that.
TESO tries to give you the most of the freedom allowing you to "go ahead itself". This is why you can see healthy King Joruun in Windhelm and poisoned one in Fort Amol simultaneously, meet Darien Gautier after his disappearance and... Summerset events. I know that it's useless to ask to fix them, find better solutions for these continuity problems. It's going to be pretty expensive and will give Bethesda no profit.

However, as a dedicated TES player, I notice so many time paradoxes and inconsistency between quests, so I want just one thing: retcon them. And this is why I ask to add that feature.
Please, make some "shrine" or something which will allow you to manage your playthrough. Like, when you interact with it, a tree of quests should appear. Or just a list of these quests. And here you go: you can just retcon quests you don't want to be completed!
There is one problem though: dependences. Imagine if you completed a chain of quests. There are quests A and B. B goes after A - and you completed them both. If you want to retcon quest A, you should retcon quest B first. Like, retcon quests in the order opposite to the order they appear in their chains.
And yes, about the rewards. Players shouldn't have any rewards if they re-completed these quests. Nothing but enemies' loot. It will prevent exploiting them.

If this feature would've been here, I'd retconned the whole Glenumbra story - I decided that my character should stand with Ebonheart Pact like before... and further away from re-appeared Darien. Maybe I'd retconned some quests in Pact's regions too, but only side quests, I guess. Many players would've retconned some quests where they picked a "wrong" choice. And of course, some quests are so brilliantly complicated so many players would like to "refresh" some memories.

I hope that ZeniMax Online Studios are going to see this post, think about this idea and add this feature in the future. Thank you for your attention.

wheresbes

I think I've grasped the main sense of this post but in Mara's name, what do retcon mean??

It would be great if we were still allowed to freely do side quests in zones except for the main one that would need to be done in order - each further stage gets unlocked after you've completed the previous one. I like to have freedom, but as you pointed out, this freedom sometimes equals to 'mess'.

Option two would be to give us the possibility of redoing quests, like erasing (is THIS what retcon means???) zone progress. This would be a good way to redo the whole stuff in chronological order (without the need of an alt) and maybe get some hard to get pieces for the sticker book (I'm looking at you MS staff).

Did I get this right?

Lugaldu

From a roleplay standpoint, I don't understand what this is good for. What is the advantage of "erasing the memory" of my char, who for example played Summerset first and then suddenly meets Darien again in Glenumbra (which happened in my case, because I unfortunately didn't play things in the correct order with my main)? The problem remains the same, things don't take place in the correct order whether my character remembers them or not.

Treshcore

wheresbes wrote: »

I think I've grasped the main sense of this post but in Mara's name, what do retcon mean??

It would be great if we were still allowed to freely do side quests in zones except for the main one that would need to be done in order - each further stage gets unlocked after you've completed the previous one. I like to have freedom, but as you pointed out, this freedom sometimes equals to 'mess'.

Option two would be to give us the possibility of redoing quests, like erasing (is THIS what retcon means???) zone progress. This would be a good way to redo the whole stuff in chronological order (without the need of an alt) and maybe get some hard to get pieces for the sticker book (I'm looking at you MS staff).

Did I get this right?

Well, retcon is kind of "undoing" some events or facts that were done before. In terms of TESO, it's kind of erasing some progress, yes.

You got it very right, I think. There should be an option of erasing some progress because, well, sometimes you really need to do it. Maybe, for really strange, personal reasons. For example, I have a huge sensitivity to continuity questions - this is why I've already written two discussions on this matter and I'm preparing to write the third one. All in all, there is no Save/Load option that can throw you back to the state when everything was more "logical".

Treshcore

Lugaldu wrote: »

From a roleplay standpoint, I don't understand what this is good for. What is the advantage of "erasing the memory" of my char, who for example played Summerset first and then suddenly meets Darien again in Glenumbra (which happened in my case, because I unfortunately didn't play things in the correct order with my main)? The problem remains the same, things don't take place in the correct order whether my character remembers them or not.

Good point, I agree with you. The game itself needs huge continuity fixes and additions to make it logical.
However, even though "Erasing the memory" isn't a panacea for this illness, this feature may still be useful.

Enodoc

wheresbes wrote: »

I think I've grasped the main sense of this post but in Mara's name, what do retcon mean??

It would be great if we were still allowed to freely do side quests in zones except for the main one that would need to be done in order - each further stage gets unlocked after you've completed the previous one. I like to have freedom, but as you pointed out, this freedom sometimes equals to 'mess'.

Option two would be to give us the possibility of redoing quests, like erasing (is THIS what retcon means???) zone progress. This would be a good way to redo the whole stuff in chronological order (without the need of an alt) and maybe get some hard to get pieces for the sticker book (I'm looking at you MS staff).

Did I get this right?

Retcon literally means "retroactive continuity". The essence is to change how something works after the something has already occurred. Elder Scrolls has done this before - there were six separate player-chosen endings to Daggerfall, but when Morrowind came out, Bethesda retconned all six of those and created a new continuity where all six endings happened simultaneously. In-universe, this is the Warp in the West.

wheresbes

Aaah! Thank both of you so much for explaining that!