A repeating pattern in storylines.

offfroze

I apologize for the clumsy English.
Indirect spoilers are possible.

I had just completed the second quest of the Blackwood storyline and was suddenly overwhelmed with very strong frustration with what was happening. This effect was so strong that I was not too lazy to come to the forum to cry about it. It is unlikely that anyone will hear and understand me, but I really want to express myself.

With this post, I would like to express my indignation at the repetitive patterns in the storylines of chapters and DLC. First you come to a new location, some hints of danger occur in it, you investigate these hints, and at the moment when you understand who is to blame for everything, the worst happens, and you, of course, will never have time to prevent everything. What were all these investigations for? Why create 10 new story characters and then kill 9 of them? Why must everything be bad and tragic for the development of the plot at the very beginning?
And at the end of the storyline, everything that the enemy wanted to do has already been done, and he is incredibly strong. And only at this moment the story begins to take unexpected turns and diversity occurs.

This is how events unfold in almost every chapter, I think. Will it be the same in the next one? Two dungeons where we will stop the strongest enemies. Prologue, where we find out who is behind all this, and understand what they need. And then in the middle of the chapter, they reach their goal. And what we did to stop them will not hurt them in any way.

etchedpixels

Elder Scrolls is a set of tropes. Every Elder Scrolls game is of the form wake up confused in prison, work out what is going on, badness, save world from (usually daedric prince) doom. ESO is a bit more radical nowdays in that you no longer start as what is probably a deluded daedra in a prison cell thinking it is a human but a lot of the chapters are variants on the Elder Scrolls tropes.

The other reason it's inevitable is simple game coherency and mechanics. Every player occupies the same game world with a few shards where it's instanced by quest. Imagine trying to do even the Skryim level of deciding who wins the war if half the players picked the other side and simultaneously lived with you in a world with a majorly different outcome. Beneath the surface ESO is just a multi-choice choose your own adventure story book. Having all the significant outcome variations occur in the end story avoids the choices exploding into an overwhelming number of different possible storylines to be written, voiced and debugged, and also lets a lot of them hide entirely within a solo story which doesn't long term affect the main world.

In a single player game characters can make world changing things happen mid story (games like Pillars of Eternity for example). In an MMO not so much. How would Elsweyr work for example if you were able to push Tharn over a cliff and stop the prologue from ending the way it did ?

Jarogniewa

Small spoiler alert!

Got to agree with e pixels, boss. It is like that from Arena times... But the end of all story was cool. I mean when you do all 6 quests of Deadlands from zone guiade there is real good questline after that to end this chapter story. In few moments it was frustratimg ("She knows something, let's just rip that stupid mask and end it!") but I think whole questline of the year is starting not interesting, but is ending realy good. In total is +