Is every expansion so boring story-wise going forward?

Necrotech_Master

Northwold wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

Writing has definitely been on a downward spiral in the last few years. A pessimist would say that ESO is just a cash cow now so they stopped caring about the quality of new content. But the amount of development we see every update says otherwise. We wouldn't have companions, armory, antiquities, or even that stupid upcoming card game if ZOS wasn't spending money on development.

So why has the quality of the stories declined so much? How does the same company that wrote the Sweetroll Killer quest then launch that complete yawner of a year like Greymoor?

Side quests are 99% formulaic (Talk to A, Talk to B, perform X on Y, Talk to B, Talk to A) and main quests are just pages and pages of boring dialog.

Seems like a few freelance wanna-be fantasy writers could come up with way better stuff for $50/hr.

I think one part of it is that the year of X format plain doesn't work. It forces you to tell flabby, overblown stories that can't be resolved properly in the main chapter and then end up rushing to resolution in the second bit. The bigger the threat, the more absurd the threat, the more difficult it becomes to have characters relate believably to it and do believable things and thus the writing falls apart.

The preexisting lore of Elder Scrolls is also, i assume, quite difficult to navigate unless you have a wholly new territory you've never heard of before. There's too much baggage. And let's be honest when they sketched things out way back for Elder Scrolls Arena they basically wrote it on the back of a napkin leading to problems later on. I mean, the original Khajiit were basically a race of strippers "descended from" cat people and belonged in Vegas.

i agree, the year of content doesnt necessarily make sense either

for example blackwood and deadlands story are connected, what if you never had blackwood, but did have deadlands, started with the deadlands story? that wouldnt really make much sense and the full blackwood expansion would seem more like a "prequel" if you did them out of order, the same issue could be said about north/south elsweyr, greymoor/markarth, they are completely separate dlc/expansion but have connected story so playing 1 without the other, either you get a incomplete story, or you are missing why all of this is happening to begin with

whereas something like murkmire or orsinium were both self contained stories that had no connection to other dlc

etchedpixels

I did Deadlands/Blackwood backwards on one character out of curiosity and the story actually does hold together surprisingly well in that order too.

It all seems now to be built around the model of making people who buy a chapter then have to buy something else to get the other half of the story. Thankfully the newer DLC stories are so short you can do each one in an evening during an free ESO+ week.

Ilsabet

Keep in mind that the end-of-year epilogue can feel like part of the Q4 DLC when you've done everything in release order, but it's actually a separate story chunk that's only available after doing both the chapter and the DLC (in whatever order). You can see how they make an effort not to connect the chapter and DLC until they hit the epilogue.

For example, with Blackwood/Deadlands:

The Ambitions are not mentioned at all in Deadlands, even though those who have done Blackwood have a pretty good idea who the Fourth Ambition is going to be (and you'd think that a big part of the agenda would be finding the Fourth Ambition so we can protect them). ZOS needs to keep the entire Ambitions thing hush-hush in Deadlands because people who haven't done Blackwood yet don't even know what the Ambitions are.

So Blackwood is mostly about the Ambitions project, and Deadlands is mostly about the cataclyst project, without much crossover. Then things come together in the epilogue and you get the big reveal of the Fourth Ambition and things go from there.

Finedaible

Elsweyr was ok, not as great as Summerset but it was original, and it felt great to finally explore Khajiiti culture; Lyris and Sai were redundant though. Greymoor and Blackwood "chapters" were both overall boring with some rather disappointing plots and character writing, yet the follow-up DLC to both of them were far better by comparison to their chapters... Which begs the question of why there is even chapters in the first place if all the effort is put into the finale DLC which doesn't even include the "major feature" of the Chapter. Feels kind of weird to ESO+ subscribers to be honest, who already feel like their sub doesn't give them much value. Heck, if it weren't for the craft bag no one would be subscribed to ESO+, but that's probably why they keep inventory management such a chore as it is. I wouldn't even mind buying a chapter every year if it had the quality of the follow-up DLCs but these last two chapters just didn't feel worth the buy.

The only things I even remember of Blackwood is the Four Winds quest, Zenithar's Abbey, and the atrociously-written Dark Brotherhood segment where our character break the tenets and betrays our brothers and sisters without batting an eye. Like, that seems like a pretty illogical character choice given we have joined the Brotherhood and are deliberately sabotaging Elam's orders to establish a sanctuary in Blackwood.

Ragnarok0130

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Yeah, one of the reasons I simply stopped doing quests (I am somewhere in the middle of summerset) was that overland content is a joke in terms of difficulty.

Also, It seems to be the same half a dozen voice actors doing all the dialogue these days (I mean the main quest had John Cleese and freaking Dumbledore).

What you are left with amounts to basically a sub par audiobook coupled with fetch quests that require no skill whatsoever on the part of the player to complete. There is no challenge in the combat, and decision making in said quests is virtually non-existent and completely irrelevant to the story on the occasion you do have to make a choice. I get far more out of a good book. One nice thing about COVID, read a lot of books in the last 2 years.

The best advice seems to be, well hey, how about you dont use gear or CP to make it more difficult? Well, two things. One, this is an RPG at heart, and character development is why a lot of us play the game in the first game. Turning that off is a bad solution. Two, it really doesnt make things more challenging, just more tedious. Even nude, overland is a joke outside a handful of World bosses in the DLC zones.

Looking at your sig you're a min/maxed raider so all content will always be exceedingly easy for you because you've got a solid build and know your classes very well. On the other hand ZoS has to balance general overland story content around people without builds who aren't running set pieces and probably don't use more than 1 or 2 skills and ZoS will always err on not scaring the normies away with difficulty.

You're right, about the only thing people who are good at the game can do in such cases is make a "story mode build" in the armory and nerf yourself by not using CP, using low quality non-set piece crafted armor (or nude as you say), etc. It's not an RPG, it's an MMORPG which has a different set of restrictions on player agency such as far reaching player decisions or higher difficulties in general story than we'd get in a mainline TES entry (and let's face it in single player TES games there's not a lot of agency either). Sometimes I wish that there was an offline mode where we could play with modifiers such as difficulty etc that wouldn't count for achievements/titles, etc to please both types of players.

ectoplasmicninja

Finedaible wrote: »

The only things I even remember of Blackwood is the Four Winds quest, Zenithar's Abbey, and the atrociously-written Dark Brotherhood segment

The quest where we meet Alchemy again is the best one in the chapter IMO.

VaranisArano

ectoplasmicninja wrote: »

Finedaible wrote: »

The only things I even remember of Blackwood is the Four Winds quest, Zenithar's Abbey, and the atrociously-written Dark Brotherhood segment

The quest where we meet Alchemy again is the best one in the chapter IMO.

I appreciated that one because there were several times when just reading the dialogue and looking at the quest markers wasn't enough to figure out what was going on. There's a spot in the quest where you investigate a play fort, and even though I spotted all the obvious clues, I missed a lot of the ones I was supposed to pick up by observation before Alchemy pointed them out.

ESO tends to catch some flack for quests that handhold. The Face of Change was a nice change of pace.

Jusey1

krachall wrote: »

So why has the quality of the stories declined so much? How does the same company that wrote the Sweetroll Killer quest then launch that complete yawner of a year like Greymoor?

Because it's impossible to keep a perfect streak. Even the best writers will fall short sometimes. Greymoor is honestly the first time where they massively fell short if you ask me. Blackwood had a few issues but they brought back a lot of good classic writing in it, plus despite the mess that Greymoor created, Markarth and the Reach tried to pick up the pieces and was a huge improvement despite still being stuck with a horrible story.

ZOS has been an upward climb since Greymoor in terms of writing.

Jusey1

Finedaible wrote: »

The only things I even remember of Blackwood is the Four Winds quest, Zenithar's Abbey,

I honestly enjoyed most of the side quests in Blackwood, and had a good run with the expansion. I also like how the entire expansion had a central theme of reminiscing the past in some way to make the present better in one way or another, which is honestly always a great theme to play around with as you can do a lot, be it to prove the innocent of a past "criminal", learn an ancient love story to break a curse in the present, to prove to the world that your ancestor existed and was a hero, and much more.

etchedpixels

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

You're right, about the only thing people who are good at the game can do in such cases is make a "story mode build" in the armory and nerf yourself by not using CP, using low quality non-set piece crafted armor (or nude as you say), etc.

It really doesn't work. I agree entirely there is a problem in some ways with doing the story when there is this huge build up and you walk up to the evil overfiend and burn him to ash in 5 seconds. Unfortunately wandering around in underpants with a level 1 axe doesn't fix it. It merely makes the overfiend take 60 seconds to die and and even more boring.

The problem is actual difficulty is about how the opponents respond. A vet-mode overland wouldn't be any good if you just gave everything a million health and double resistances, it would need actual gameplay. Someone would actually have to craft Elden Ring grade encounter versions and that's simply not going to happen.

It makes no business sense - most ESO players arrive, do the story, leave and for those who want hard mode content there is the ESO end game content - and well there's Elden Ring and games like it instead.

IMHO you need to simply accept that at a certain point you've beaten ESO overland and move on to something different in or out of game, just like the point you reach in Skyrim when you take out Kaarstag for the lolz.

DreamsUnderStars

Caupo wrote: »

I liked the base game a lot. All three main storylines and especially side-quests. They were kind of different, I guess, werewolves, vampires, rivalries of kings, undead monsters, etc. Orsinium and thieves guild/dark brotherhood were interesting too, but beginning with Morrowind (now at the end of Summerset), almost everything is about Deedra and cultists, and Deedra again and cultists again... Kind of boring tbh. So what about Elsweyr DLC and onwards, same deal, Deedra and cultists? Or do I have something interesting to look forward to?

I'm not telling you to leave, but it sounds like you're bored of the game in general and should take a break. Nothing wrong with that. Go play something else for a while, cleanse you palatte so to speak. Come back when High Isle releases. That's supposedly not going to be about dAedra and cultists and such (which I agree, get's boring after while).

SirAxen

Having an interest in the lore of Elder Scrolls makes a lot of the questing a lot more satisfying to go through. There are a ton of quests that have references to things, and if I didn't have a decent knowledge of the lore, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the quest at all. Also, the same goes for expanding it. Many side-quests add new little things to the mythology, which is just as dope as the story being told itself.

DagenHawk

Hurbster wrote: »

I wonder how many shocking betrayals we are going to get in a chapter full of political shenanigans?

I reckon at least three.

Maybe a Betrayal that tunrs into a double cross?

#flipthescript

goatlyonesub17_ESO

No, indeed. The expansion that puts the city of Whiterun in the game will certainly be very exciting. I wonder why this part of Skyrim has been left out of the game so long. There's bound to be a dragon-catching quest where you put Dragonreach to use.

ArchMikem

Caupo wrote: »

Ok, seems like I have Greymoor to look forward to, especially since its also located in the snowy areas I really enjoy, oh well, fingers crossed that at least Bretton isles are not cultists and daedra exclusive.

High Isle is going to be focused on political intrigue, so that will be a change of pace.