Some really bad writing in some of these quests...

KontrolledKhaos · April 2015

Just finished Cadwell's Gold, and while I enjoyed the game overall, I did notice some glaringly bad inconsistencies and plot holes in some of the quests I did which seriously impacted my enjoyment of the game. Here are some examples:

The Thunder Breaks - At the end of this quest, you're forced to choose between either chasing after the bad guy necromancer, or talking down the thane from killing himself. You're told that if you go after the bad guy, the thane dies, if you go to talk down the thane, the bad guy escapes. Here's the thing though: why am I forced to choose to begin with? Why can't the thane's daughter just go inside to talk down her father from committing suicide. while I, the hero, go after the bad guy? That way we get to kill two birds with one stone. And if anything, the daughter would be the one better suited to talk to her father seeing as, you know, they're family and all, whereas I'm just some random dude who just came in off the road who he has no relationship with. Surely he would be more likely to listen to the words of his daughter, rather than the words of some random stranger, right? But no, we're forced to choose. It just felt like the writer for this quest was desperately trying to shoehorn in a "tough, moral choice" for this quest without even considering that the so-called "choice" made absolutely no sense whatsoever. SMH

Crawling Chaos - For this quest, you must decide whether or not to sacrifice Shagora so that Seqbar can be freed, or hand both of them over to the daedra to be enslaved. That's all, those are our only options. We're not even given the option of fighting and killing the daedra so that we can rescue the both of them. My question is, why is this the case? In pretty much every other quest, we're given the option of killing daedra to rescue people. So why not this one? I mean FFS, my character defeated the Daedric Prince of Domination in single combat for crying out loud! But we're not allowed to fight and kill a simple spider daedra? Are you for real? We're not even given any plausible reason in the quest as to why that's the case. We're simply not allowed to, just because. SMH

The Lion's Den - In this quest, the captain says he betrayed the entire town because the imperials have taken his daughter hostage. He asks you to go rescue his daughter for him. Now when he says "rescue" I thought he meant I would have to fight my way through dozens of imperial lackeys to get to his daughter. The reality? All I had to do was casually stroll on over, say a few mean words to the Imperial dude and BOOM you've rescued the daughter. That's literally it. Now if it was that simple, why didn't the captain simply go over and do that himself to begin with, and save me the trouble? While I guess it's possible that the captain was just a weak-willed little *** who didnt have the guts to stand up to the Imperial dude to get his own daughter back, I'm thinking this is more likely just another example of lazy hand-waving on the ZOS writers' part. SMH

A Thirst for Revolution - In this quest, the Ufa dude tasks me with finding the grandeya of the city, saying something along the lines of "We have no idea where she is! You must find her as quickly as you can!" I find her and it turns out she was sitting out right there the whole time. In public. In plain view. In front of the palace. In the stocks. For everyone to plainly see. And yet for some reason they had absolutely no idea where she was and she "needed to be found". Either everyone in Hallin's Stand suddenly became afflicted with collective blindness, or the writers screwed up again. I lean towards the latter. SMH

There are probably other examples I can't think of off the top of my head right now, but the ones I've mentioned above are probably the most egregious ones that stuck out to me the most. ZOS seriously needs to hire some better writers for their staff.

nerevarine1138 · April 2015

This is a general PSA:

"Plot holes" are not bad writing. They are generally examples of characters acting differently than you would, which is what makes them characters.

So, in general, if your criticism of writing begins with "Well, why didn't this character just do what I would have done," then you're not criticizing the writing, you're exposing your own lack of imagination.

Phinix1 · April 2015

"Here, take this crowbar..."

JD2013 · April 2015

Still beats a lot of MMO standard "Get me 20 boar tusks! I really like boars tusks!"Or similar.

Think of all those poor dead boars!

KontrolledKhaos · April 2015

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

This is a general PSA:

"Plot holes" are not bad writing. They are generally examples of characters acting differently than you would, which is what makes them characters.

So, in general, if your criticism of writing begins with "Well, why didn't this character just do what I would have done," then you're not criticizing the writing, you're exposing your own lack of imagination.

There's a difference between characters not behaving the way I would, and the writers completely screwing up their job.

This is bad writing. Period. Stop defending bad writing.

LameoveR · April 2015

Okay.

nerevarine1138 · April 2015

KontrolledKhaos wrote: »

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

This is a general PSA:

"Plot holes" are not bad writing. They are generally examples of characters acting differently than you would, which is what makes them characters.

So, in general, if your criticism of writing begins with "Well, why didn't this character just do what I would have done," then you're not criticizing the writing, you're exposing your own lack of imagination.

There's a difference between characters not behaving the way I would, and the writers completely screwing up their job.

This is bad writing. Period. Stop defending bad writing.

No. It's not. Stop conflating bad writing with characters behaving in ways that you see as "weak".

Some people in this world have no willpower (see half the threads in this forum about system advertisements or ignore features). Some people aren't very brave. Some people aren't very smart. Some people can't do the things that they ask your character to do. If they could do them, then they wouldn't be asking for help from your character.

So again, this isn't an example of bad writing. This is an example of you believing that every character in the world has to be at least as skillful as your character, with all the same personality traits. If the game world were written that way, it would be the ultimate example of bad writing.

Dennizon · April 2015

KontrolledKhaos wrote: »

Just finished Cadwell's Gold, and while I enjoyed the game overall, I did notice some glaringly bad inconsistencies and plot holes in some of the quests I did which seriously impacted my enjoyment of the game. Here are some examples:

The Thunder Breaks - At the end of this quest, you're forced to choose between either chasing after the bad guy necromancer, or talking down the thane from killing himself. You're told that if you go after the bad guy, the thane dies, if you go to talk down the thane, the bad guy escapes. Here's the thing though: why am I forced to choose to begin with? Why can't the thane's daughter just go inside to talk down her father from committing suicide. while I, the hero, go after the bad guy? That way we get to kill two birds with one stone. And if anything, the daughter would be the one better suited to talk to her father seeing as, you know, they're family and all, whereas I'm just some random dude who just came in off the road who he has no relationship with. Surely he would be more likely to listen to the words of his daughter, rather than the words of some random stranger, right? But no, we're forced to choose. It just felt like the writer for this quest was desperately trying to shoehorn in a "tough, moral choice" for this quest without even considering that the so-called "choice" made absolutely no sense whatsoever. SMH

Crawling Chaos - For this quest, you must decide whether or not to sacrifice Shagora so that Seqbar can be freed, or hand both of them over to the daedra to be enslaved. That's all, those are our only options. We're not even given the option of fighting and killing the daedra so that we can rescue the both of them. My question is, why is this the case? In pretty much every other quest, we're given the option of killing daedra to rescue people. So why not this one? I mean FFS, my character defeated the Daedric Prince of Domination in single combat for crying out loud! But we're not allowed to fight and kill a simple spider daedra? Are you for real? We're not even given any plausible reason in the quest as to why that's the case. We're simply not allowed to, just because. SMH

The Lion's Den - In this quest, the captain says he betrayed the entire town because the imperials have taken his daughter hostage. He asks you to go rescue his daughter for him. Now when he says "rescue" I thought he meant I would have to fight my way through dozens of imperial lackeys to get to his daughter. The reality? All I had to do was casually stroll on over, say a few mean words to the Imperial dude and BOOM you've rescued the daughter. That's literally it. Now if it was that simple, why didn't the captain simply go over and do that himself to begin with, and save me the trouble? While I guess it's possible that the captain was just a weak-willed little *** who didnt have the guts to stand up to the Imperial dude to get his own daughter back, I'm thinking this is more likely just another example of lazy hand-waving on the ZOS writers' part. SMH

A Thirst for Revolution - In this quest, the Ufa dude tasks me with finding the grandeya of the city, saying something along the lines of "We have no idea where she is! You must find her as quickly as you can!" I find her and it turns out she was sitting out right there the whole time. In public. In plain view. In front of the palace. In the stocks. For everyone to plainly see. And yet for some reason they had absolutely no idea where she was and she "needed to be found". Either everyone in Hallin's Stand suddenly became afflicted with collective blindness, or the writers screwed up again. I lean towards the latter. SMH

There are probably other examples I can't think of off the top of my head right now, but the ones I've mentioned above are probably the most egregious ones that stuck out to me the most. ZOS seriously needs to hire some better writers for their staff.

While I can see your point of view on these issues, I just can't bring myself to make much criticism towards the writing in this game after playing the abysmal story lines and quests that are GW2. One of the great things about the writing in this game is the fact that they force you to make some choices that are actually hard. Knowing that you can't always be the hero, you can't always save everyone, you can't always "have your cake and eat it too" is part of what makes the writing in this game so wonderful. Sure there is room for improvement here and there, but taken as a whole the writing in this game is fantastic for an MMO.

Lord_Kreegan · April 2015

A lot of the plots are weak -- as the OP illustrated -- but I wouldn't necessarily call those weaknesses "holes".

Plot holes are, for instance, when Queen Ayrenn gushes over you as a friend, almost suggestive of a romance, at the end of one zone's mission chain, but when you arrive in the next zone her conversation indicates she doesn't even know you.

What shows up is that multiple writers put various plots together and they didn't necessarily consult with one another beyond using a common outline/framework... probably because they were working on the plots they were assigned simultaneously, most likely to save schedule time, were rushed, and QA didn't review the stories for consistency.

It's a game; I don't expect superb writing. I am a little surprised at the number of grammatical errors, spelling errors, singular/plural context errors, etc. -- not because there are a lot of them, but because they are easy to catch. QA didn't do its job.

asteldian · April 2015

To be fair, the finding the person and rescueing the daughter aren't really poor writing. The issue is the content devs making it a half assed effort to supporting the quest narrative.

Robo_Hobo · April 2015

Lord_Kreegan wrote: »

A lot of the plots are weak -- as the OP illustrated -- but I wouldn't necessarily call those weaknesses "holes".

Plot holes are, for instance, when Queen Ayreen gushes over you as a friend, almost suggestive of a romance, at the end of one zone's mission chain, but when you arrive in the next zone her conversation indicates she doesn't even know you.

What shows up is that multiple writers put various plots together and they didn't necessarily consult with one another beyond using a common outline/framework... probably because they were working on the plots they were assigned simultaneously, most likely to save schedule time, were rushed, and QA didn't review the stories for consistency.

It's a game; I don't expect superb writing. I am a little surprised at the numberof grammatical errors, spelling errors, singular/plural context errors, etc. -- not because there are a lot of them, but because they are easy to catch. QA didn't do its job.

While I do think that is an issue, and it's one that bothers me too, I think the reason in that example, or examples similar to that would be due to how a lot of quests can be done in any order. Like, you can theoretically do some Reaper's March quests talking to Ayrenn and all during that without ever having met her before, so quest dialogue sometimes tries to be ambiguous - some is updated to reflect past quests you have completed, quite a lot are, but it jumps back and forth between ambiguous and acknowledgement and yeah... I guess they also did that to save money on voice acting too.

Like how you can do the quest where you rescue the new Silvenar - Indaenir, as you know, in Malabal Tor, there was a distinctive air in the dialogue that I could tell the developers wrote it so people whom haven't met Indaenir in the previous region storyline, Greenshade, would still be able to make sense of it...even though canonically it shouldn't even begin to make sense since Indaenir wouldn't be the Silvernar yet if you haven't helped him out in Greenshade.

Personally if you ask me I feel the main Zone quest storylines (you know, the ones that always have those 'bridge quests' to take you to another quest starting area to help continue the progressing storyline) should all have hard requirements - as in you can't just waltz up and do the final one in that storyline progression without doing all the ones before it, but I guess a lot of people wouldn't like that - particularly the ones who just see the quests as a means to an end. Might also be a bit technically difficult since world-changing events happen based on area rather than quest progress (Dune will be under attack by Daedra even if you've never even started the Reaper's March storyline, despite the fact that Dune doesn't start to get invaded until a certain point in that storyline)

I'm sure you knew that all already but still, it is something that bugs me.

Gidorick · April 2015

I think you're just overly critical.

ZeldaTetraSheik · April 2015

I think it's cool that some of the quests aren't black and white with stereotypical "This is good choice; this is bad choice." I think it's awesome. The game is so lacking in political correctness that I find it refreshing. It was a step forward, a risk they decided to take. I know that I am relatively new to the game, but I just finished the quest with Bala up a little while ago in the Ebonheart region and was very impressed. It definitely left an impact on me that no matter what I did or told her, the results would still be the same because that is how life TRULY is.

Lord_Kreegan · April 2015

ZeldaTetraSheik wrote: »

I think it's cool that some of the quests aren't black and white with stereotypical "This is good choice; this is bad choice." I think it's awesome. The game is so lacking in political correctness that I find it refreshing. It was a step forward, a risk they decided to take. I know that I am relatively new to the game, but I just finished the quest with Bala up a little while ago in the Ebonheart region and was very impressed. It definitely left an impact on me that no matter what I did or told her, the results would still be the same because that is how life TRULY is.

However...

Your choices really don't matter. They don't affect the plot. Contrast this with SW-TOR, for instance, where your choices make some difference in how NPCs react to your character and will determine whether or not you obtain some supplemental quests.

Not saying SW-TOR is wonderful, just that it's obvious their writing was done in a much different fashion (sequential as opposed to simultaneous). Of course, EA also had to go through a major reboot of that game since BioWare screwed the pooch... [And, IMHO, EA screwed things up in reverse when they did another reboot this last December.]

heystreethawk · April 2015

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

This is a general PSA:

"Plot holes" are not bad writing. They are generally examples of characters acting differently than you would, which is what makes them characters.

So, in general, if your criticism of writing begins with "Well, why didn't this character just do what I would have done," then you're not criticizing the writing, you're exposing your own lack of imagination.

Just wanted to give you props for pointing this out. I see this kind of critique all over the internet, and it drives me crazy. It's as if people expect fiction/entertainment to address all possible contingencies and possibilities, rather than a necessarily narrow set of possibilities, with the outcome of the conflict determined by the personalities and circumstances of the characters within the story.

The dialogue in this game is clever and engaging, and even the characters in minor little slice-of-life side quests are given these little flourishes that render them distinct and memorable, possessing motivations of their own; this is all accomplished within a very short space of time, and it's something that's hard enough to accomplish across the span of a novel. ESO is an exceptionally well-written video game, and the gripes expressed in the OP-- as you said-- have almost nothing to do with writing.