The writing has become a bit too...family friendly

spartaxoxo

You know this thread made me think more about I like both Rada al-Saran and Molag Bal so much but dislike so much of the current writing. Yes, Rada is more complex than most of the newer villains which makes him feel like a high point for ESO. But, Molag Bal isn't. He's just an irredeemable evil and force of nature. There's nothing particularly complex about him.

And I think this Disney thing really hits the nail on the head. I think villains that are just extremely evil can be really fun to kill in video games. But, if you're not going to go complex than you need to go much darker than they've been willing to go lately. Molag Bal has done stuff so awful that we can't even properly speak about it here because it's a different age rating on the forums. He's done like all the things. So, when you slap his arrogant and evil daedric behind down in the main quest, it feels impactful.

Lately they've been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want the one dimensional evil villains you can feel good about slapping down. But the narrative merely tell us they are evil because they blew up a statue, or combatants who are trying to kill the villain are slain. Or maybe it is unrelated innocent but you get told that it happened, you don't actually meet them or see them. It's all watered down and sanitized.

Nemesis7884

They are evil because they do evil things is never compelling...what makes any villain interesting is that you can relate to his motivation to a certain degree.

GloatingSwine

It's not really a time thing, it's more "Ebonheart Pact storyline vs Everything else".

katanagirl1

MrGarlic wrote: »

karthrag_inak wrote: »

<hrrrumph> khajiit still wants to know where these beheadings are occurring.

Three that come straight off the top of my head,

1. Story in Fungal Grotto 1 where the goblin king loses his head and it gets mounted on a stake.

2. Craglorn, Exarch's Stronghold where you are required to put a head on a stake outside the delve. (Something about goats and stones.)

3. Rivenspire public dungeon (Obsidian Scar) where you get to decapitate the heads of two orcs in a revenge plot and plant their heads on a stake.

There may be more I forgot.

I don’t recall the game actually showing any decapitations, just implying that it happened, correct me if I’m wrong.

I think the only family friendly stuff would be the scribing quest luminaries, they were essentially cartoon characters and I struggled to believe they would fit into the game I had played for so many years. They were hugely popular here in the forums for some reason unknown to me.

EDIT: I just remembered that one of the Bolgrul Undaunted delve dailies has you collect heads. When you kill one of the mobs it just shows up as an item to collect like gold and gear. There is no actual decapitation there.

HalfDragoness

I agree. I also think it is possible to explore darker themes and keep it to a 16+ rating. The key is in not being specific in grisley details but allowing the player to fill in the details themselves. You can also leave clues and hints to darker aspects without being obvious e.g. villains don't have to be overtly evil necromancers with a literal underground lair.

That's one of the reasons I loved the Murkmire storyline. The villian isn't who you think it is initially and their motivation for their actions is

because she can't hear the hist and the hist doesn't talk to her so she feels deeply excluded from somethingall other argonians take for granted

.

I've generally enjoyed the storylines of all the smaller map areas compared to the larger ones. I don't know what it is but my favourites are:

• Murkmire
• Southern Elsweyr (so much better and nuanced than Northern Eslweyr)
• The Reach (Depth and exploration of celtic themed nords, strange customs etc)
• Galen (uniting druid clans, finding Frii the non-binary nature spirit was infinitely more interesting than the High Isle story)
• Fargrave (I like the Blackwood area but the story was so basic and predictable. By comparrison the story that unfolds in Fargrave was unpredictable and just crazy.. learning about Dremora life and customs was fascinating)

I don't want the whole of ESO to suddenly gete dark, I think it's stronger when there's lighter stories and darker stories. But I do hope the Dark Brotherhood story matches its name sake. I also hope you get to explore and set up a Dark Brotherhood xanmeer sanctuary. I really loved that quest where you go with Green-Venom-Tongue to his previous sanctuary, I wanted to set it up into a functioning place again.

Heren

Maybe not entirely related but since I just noticed it : do you really think you will 'invoke the gravitas of Vanus Galerion with the mage guildmaster garb' ? Like, the outfit look overall nice, but with these colours ? Gravitas wouldn't be the first qualificatif coming to my mind when seeing it, sorry.

https://images.uesp.net/a/af/ON-crown_store-Mages_Guildmaster_Garb.jpg

JustLovely

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

All the quests and the writing have become extremely ...family friendly... and its kinda breaking with immersion; also compared to the single player elder scrolls games which are darker and more realistic in tone... if the 2026 season will be centered around the dark brotherhood especially, it would really be nice if we get a few more darker quests with gritty realistic writing...

How do you feel about the softness of the writing? Do you feel different?

Agree. ESO is supposed to be rated M for mature. It says on the box ESO is for mature audiences so why don't we get treated like adults?

NotaDaedraWorshipper

Maitsukas wrote: »

Didn't Galen's and Sharp-as-Night's quests get a bit altered (in dialogue and found books) due to explicit references?

@Maitsukas Galen had dialogue removed of some npcs idle banter where one of them feared the maormer would come and do not nice things to them that Molab Bal would approve of.

Sharp had a whole interactive flashback removed, which showed his slave master used his magic control over Sharp to forcefully make him do things. You had to like use and move a water bucket and stuff, nothing that was exactly harmful itself but the intent was clear and really told he really liked making Sharp do anything he wanted. To the degree some people who have trauma with such things had a strong reaction to this. But instead of adding a skip option with maybe a warning, they removed it completely.

I've seen people bring up Sharp's quest as an example of quest that has more mature and dark content, but it's really not a good quest for it. Even if the flashback wasn't removed, it still wouldn't be good with its odd stereotypes and how it mainly focuses on the abuser, not the abused.

LootAllTheStuff

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

Maitsukas wrote: »

Didn't Galen's and Sharp-as-Night's quests get a bit altered (in dialogue and found books) due to explicit references?

@Maitsukas Galen had dialogue removed of some npcs idle banter where one of them feared the maormer would come and do not nice things to them that Molab Bal would approve of.

Sharp had a whole interactive flashback removed, which showed his slave master used his magic control over Sharp to forcefully make him do things. You had to like use and move a water bucket and stuff, nothing that was exactly harmful itself but the intent was clear and really told he really liked making Sharp do anything he wanted. To the degree some people who have trauma with such things had a strong reaction to this. But instead of adding a skip option with maybe a warning, they removed it completely.

I've seen people bring up Sharp's quest as an example of quest that has more mature and dark content, but it's really not a good quest for it. Even if the flashback wasn't removed, it still wouldn't be good with its odd stereotypes and how it mainly focuses on the abuser, not the abused.

Removed when? I remember doing that memory sequence just last year.

KiltMaster

Even past the quests and dialogue if you look at how they handle things like character names or forum posts it doesn't feel like it's an M rated game at all IMO

spartaxoxo

KiltMaster wrote: »

Even past the quests and dialogue if you look at how they handle things like character names or forum posts it doesn't feel like it's an M rated game at all IMO

Forums are not M rated. They are different age rating than the game. Character names are part of your interactions with other players and have some rules designed to maintain a civil environment. Pretty much same rules as zone chat where you're interacting with people you don't know

LootAllTheStuff

spartaxoxo wrote: »

KiltMaster wrote: »

Even past the quests and dialogue if you look at how they handle things like character names or forum posts it doesn't feel like it's an M rated game at all IMO

Forums are not M rated. They are different age rating than the game. Character names are part of your interactions with other players and have some rules designed to maintain a civil environment. Pretty much same rules as zone chat where you're interacting with people you don't know

This ^, and especially on console. (Not sure how picky Steam is)

gc0018

I think the problem is that nowadays the writers don't even know what them want to achieve and don't know how to tall a story with logic. I just begin the quest of U46 and finished the prologue. TBH, the prologue story is really terrible, fail to achieve the goal of prologue or at least making the story logically correct.

Mian goal of prologue should be introducing new bad guy and setting the motivation for players to kick his ass.
What the actual prologue show:
1- worms has new weapon, yet no single piece evidence shows how powerful this soul reaper is, except that if you hit it with sword, it will explode... well, an oil tank can do so...
2- Two guild master is defected by a minor boss using tricks which is killed later easily by player. The real bad guy doesn't show up.

After the prologue, I only remember the joke-like death of the guild master. Why I care the worms and soul reapers, wasn't that "big bad snake" did everything (did sth thing even Molag Bal can't ...)? If Mannimarco asked the "big bad snake" to join his last fight, he could have already won.

No wonder the content pass sells so bad.

Islyn

Soarora wrote: »

I like dark, realistic writing. But I’d be careful asking for more adult themes given what happened with High Isle and it’s endless dubious consent with sexuality.

I do not recall *endless dubious consent with sexuality* at all. Do you have a (general, non problematic) reference?

josefcifkaeb17_ESO

At this point the original game story, which used to be heavily criticized for landing flat, feels better and more meaningful than anything post the release of high isle, you even have some good/evil choices in the original story. High isle with its politically correct, HR, propaganda writing and characters actually pushed me away from the game for many months. I recently downloaded the game again only to find myself in the same stuff, PC writing that feels about good enough for a kindergarten class, hand holding, horrible, unlikeable characters and a horrible, ugly new UI that makes the game look like a free slop... I haven't started the Seasons of the Worm Cult yet, but I do not expect it to be any better. Please let me know if it's better and worth getting.

Northwold

It does also depend on studio organisation and development processes / priorities to be fair. Elder Scrolls games (the main single player series) have overall really quite bad writing (there are very few examples of genuinely good writing that spring to mind -- only really Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion leaps out; Skyrim main quest feels conspicuously cobbled together on napkins like most of the rest), and I think though scattergun earlier additions to ESO featured writing very noticeably better than the main games.

If, BGS style, your first priority is gameplay experience and player wish fulfilment, writing always has to be hammered out to fit that rather than dictating the shape of the game. In ESO we saw this in a different guise with the switch to stories in two halves because you were left having to force the story to reach a mid point, stop, then crawl to a limp and dramatically unsatisfying conclusion because the second content drop was smaller, not delivered at the same time, and had to be capable of being played without the first(!!!), so you had forced tension --> damp squib, no time/space to rebuild tension--> damp squib.

There's also the problem that so many players click straight through every line of dialogue who need to be accommodated. Although if that is pulling the writing in its current direction, there's a danger of this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people click through because they know the writing is poor, and developers then respond to that by making the writing even more babyish, then players will click through even more.

And then there are engine / game structure issues. Environmental storytelling seems to be very difficult to pull off in ESO since it seems to be hard to make the world dynamic (or not allowable because every player needs to see broadly the same thing at all times). The statue in High Isle felt like a huge deal for a game like this, whereas other games routinely adapt the environment as story notes progress to contribute to the storytelling. It allows for much subtler storytelling.

Finally, there's the sheer pace of the turnaround in ESO. I'd guess that early on the broad shape of Dlcs such as Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild were capable of being planned much further in advance than is now the case. They may well have been planned during development of the base game given the speed with which additional content was released. But that is less likely to be the case now. ESO has been trapped in a very intense schedule of releases for years now and, like a TV show, if you're on a very tight clock writing will often suffer and you don't get the chance to go back and do glow ups.

This is not to say poor writing is fine. Just the process / priority pressures may very well affect its quality and this will vary studio by studio (eg Larian / CDPR absolutely prioritise writing and make the game fit the writing, BGS it's completely the other way round).