[SPOILER] What are your thoughts on this take?

Oakenaxe

This was posted by "chimpthegreat" on reddit, as a concern for the future of ESO's narrative.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/ykqqzt/firesong_got_me_very_concerned_for_the_future_of/)

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.

Do you agree?

Talosgobrrrr

Well yes, from Greymoor, the narrative is quite disappointing, everything is very predictable, there are hardly any surprises, and they are not original, if even Blackwood is a cheap copy of Oblivion.
My only hope with ESO is that these last few expansions have been content made fast to buy time because they want to reshape the content based on the end of the Three Banners War and move on to something totally new (it's a stupid hope, but let me dream)

psychotrip

The story is getting worse, yes. I think most people have noticed it at this point. But, to be fair, the story of ES has been slowly getting worse for almost 20 years. Its just getting hard not to notice.

BlissfulDeluge

I can agree with most of that, except that bit about Captain Syravaen not being bland. She was incredibly boring, and the way she kept repeating "lordling" like a broken record was beyond grating. I think Stefan Mornard was way more interesting, especially with how he was able to utterly ignore Syravaen's attempts to get under his skin with her petty and immature remarks.

Froil

I have a lot of problems with the writing being so simple and obvious, and the OP from Reddit is completely right.

There was no politics to this, save for the potential peace talks. I was hoping for a whodunit-esque quarrel amongst many Breton houses/druid clans vying for control over the Systres, which would at lease have some political implications, likely with us trying to stop them from small civil war to come together for some McGuffin reason, but instead we got yet another (vaguely) threatening, (laughably) menacing baddy who wants to rule over Tamriel, when we just had that same trope last year.

Syravaen was interesting to a point, but her whole thing was revenge, yet even with her clear hatred for Nalos, she constantly refers to him as "Sealord Nalos", as if the title IS his name. As it's likely a self-imposed title, she wouldn't, shouldn't refer to him by that more than twice, and even then those should be clear sarcasm.

Would've been more interesting if Lady Arabelle were the Ascendant Lord, but still uninspired.

I'm not saying I could've written better, but I know a lackluster story when I read one. If each year will have one as bland, boring and predictable as we've had since 2021, then it's time to perhaps rethink the yearly story cadence. Maybe make it two years, with multiple zones per chapter, two or three dungeons/trials, truly large amounts of content.

I say all of this not out of rage or spite but because I care. I criticize because I care about this game, the franchise and I KNOW ZoS can do better.

colossalvoids

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?

That part already contains all the answers for questions at hand. Can't agree more with the OP btw but one thing about it being not enough people complaining. There's a ton of us and still we're not going back in time when staff cared enough to pull something interesting, they'll be maintaining the game for quite a while for sure but I'd not bet on something exciting over horizon. Glad I still can replay old stories again, wish we had a character reset for a zone quest though as having 18/18 chars isn't helping.

FluffyBird

[snip]

I mean, I agree with every word and this year's update, from bugs to combat to story, completely destroyed my trust in ESO team. [snip]

[edited for bashing]