Start Me Up - A Character Start Overhaul

Starlock · January 2020

Beginning with the Morrowind chapter, the developers of Elder Scrolls Online created a fresh tutorial quests for newly created player characters. Instead of beginning in Coldharbor, players instead began on a ship sailing to Vvardenfell that is shipwrecked. Captured by slavers, our hero must then liberate themselves and their fellow slaves in a daring escape from Firemoth Island. Each subsequent chapter for Elder Scrolls Online, including Summerset and Elsweyr, has brought its own new take on the tutorial quest. Customers who own the most recent chapter are able to start new characters who experience these quests. The reasoning behind this decision is simple: customers who are new to the game and purchased it to start playing the current chapter expansion will be able to start with that new content immediately. When Greymoor releases in 2020, customers will be treated to another new tutorial quest for their player characters. This brings the total tutorial quests developed for this game to five in total, yet when each chapter releases, customers are only permitted to experience one of these startup quests. The others are forever locked away, never to be seen by them again.

This is a missed opportunity.

Elder Scrolls Online is a game that is many things to its diverse customer base, but it is inarguably an RPG. What precisely an RPG constitutes is debatable, but giving the player some control over character creation and development is a critical component. It is time for customers to be granted the ability to experience any and all of the tutorial quests they have purchased access to. When creating a new character, customers will be presented with character start options for where their hero begins their story. Each option will come with a bit of information about their choice and the tutorial for the latest chapter will be highlighted by default. Options that the customer has not yet purchased will appear in the menu, but be greyed out with an unobtrusive link providing easy access to purchase information. This is a win-win-win: providing customers with more of the Elder Scrolls RPG experience is good, allowing customers access to goods they already paid for is good, and unobtrusive advertising of chapter expansions is good. It also would not require much development time, as the quests already exist in the game files.

This is not a new suggestion. It has been made many times before by various denizens of Tamriel. Will 2020 be the year of choosing our own start to our adventure? With a fifth starting tutorial coming, the time is now! Thoughts and comments welcome. Is there a character you've started (or want to start) that you really, really wish could begin with a now inaccessible tutorial quest? Could you not care less about those darned tutorial quests and skip right through them? Do you have ludicrous pipe dreams of what an ideal character start overhaul for this game would look like that go well beyond the scope of this simple suggestion?

Inspiration for this thread's title is definitely not borrowed from a mod for a certain game that some of you may or may not recognize (bonus points if you do).

Sylvermynx · January 2020

Heh. I have friends on another forum who play.... so I got it!

I REALLY like this idea. When I first started ESO, I bought the Gold Box.... which included MW. So instead of starting where I thought I would, I started with MW. So I had to go to google to figure out what to do.... *sigh*

Nerouyn · January 2020

This is obviously a great, simple and value adding idea.

It's just as obvious - to me at least - why it's not that way already and why the devs will probably resist this.

ZO dogma is that new players to the game can jump at any point and content can be enjoyed in any old random order.

Ergo tutorial area being dictated by the most recently released big DLC you own.

Ergo the psijic skill line being locked 1 quest into the Summerset main story line.

Ergo the thieves guild and dark brotherhood events requiring you to at least be one quest into those storylines.

The dev fantasy is that having forced players 1 step into each of those storylines, players will immediately finish them. But player time is not unlimited and they're not slaves to dev fantasy. Instead players / characters end up starting all these storylines, forgetting about them, and then an extra barrier to coming to finish them is having to research on the internet what the beginning of the story was.

For my necromancers - with me not generally being a fan of necromancy and it having being represented as entirely evil in every respect in Elder Scrolls except for the widespread use of soul gems for enchanting - I opted to make their practice of necromancy not a choice but rather a function of having had their soul ripped out. In the same way that players come to master soul magic.

So I ran them through the Elsweyr tutorial without purchasing any skills. It's slightly but not immensely gimped to kill things with just weapon attacks. Then took them to the Coldharbour tutorial to have their soul ripped out.

Even putting aside the issue of taking 6 months to get the dreaded horse feeding out of the way, even if I had immediately played through the base game's content, it would still take quite some time to get back to Elsweyr. In the meantime courtesy of having done the Elsweyr tutorial, I have been aware all of that time of a dire threat to Elsweyr and not done anything about it.

Doesn't leave me feeling heroic. More like apathetic or lazy.

Nestor · January 2020

I think we should have a generic start area/dungeon/prison. Then when we exit, we choose the Starter Area that we get transported to in some lore like manner.

bethsheba · January 2020

100% total agreement. It is not even hard to code. Upon character creation you get an option to begin the original tutorial, or one of the subsequent ones, in list form that is clickable @ZOS_JessicaFolsom we really really would like this if possible.

amapola76 · January 2020

Nerouyn wrote: »

Even putting aside the issue of taking 6 months to get the dreaded horse feeding out of the way, even if I had immediately played through the base game's content, it would still take quite some time to get back to Elsweyr. In the meantime courtesy of having done the Elsweyr tutorial, I have been aware all of that time of a dire threat to Elsweyr and not done anything about it.

Doesn't leave me feeling heroic. More like apathetic or lazy.

Absolutely.

I do have a little bit of head canon that I've developed for this very reason. When I start a new character... whether it is in Morrowind, Summerset, or Elsweyr... and then run to a wayshrine right after the tutorial, and head to their capital city to pick up the original tutorial, I imagine that they are standing there at the chapter wayshrine reminiscing about their early adventures beginning with Coldharbour. In other words, in my character's personal chronology/timeline, all of their other early adventures have already happened, and as I live through them for the first time, it's actually just a memory they are experiencing. Then when they finally advance enough to proceed to the pertinent chapter, I have them travel back to the same wayshrine, and it's as if just a moment has passed while they are reliving everything else before that point.

It's a bit of a convoluted way to look at it, but it's better in my perspective than feeling like I've just told Razum Dar or whoever to peace out while I go off and follow my bliss.

But I would very much prefer to just plain have the option to choose which tutorial to start with.

Starlock · January 2020

amapola76 wrote: »

Nerouyn wrote: »

Even putting aside the issue of taking 6 months to get the dreaded horse feeding out of the way, even if I had immediately played through the base game's content, it would still take quite some time to get back to Elsweyr. In the meantime courtesy of having done the Elsweyr tutorial, I have been aware all of that time of a dire threat to Elsweyr and not done anything about it.

Doesn't leave me feeling heroic. More like apathetic or lazy.

Absolutely.

I do have a little bit of head canon that I've developed for this very reason. When I start a new character... whether it is in Morrowind, Summerset, or Elsweyr... and then run to a wayshrine right after the tutorial, and head to their capital city to pick up the original tutorial, I imagine that they are standing there at the chapter wayshrine reminiscing about their early adventures beginning with Coldharbour. In other words, in my character's personal chronology/timeline, all of their other early adventures have already happened, and as I live through them for the first time, it's actually just a memory they are experiencing. Then when they finally advance enough to proceed to the pertinent chapter, I have them travel back to the same wayshrine, and it's as if just a moment has passed while they are reliving everything else before that point.

It's a bit of a convoluted way to look at it, but it's better in my perspective than feeling like I've just told Razum Dar or whoever to peace out while I go off and follow my bliss.

But I would very much prefer to just plain have the option to choose which tutorial to start with.

I ended up doing something similar for my psychopomp. I wanted to see what the Elsweyr tutorial was like, so I played it through as if it was her telling some story about her first heroic exploit. It was, in the proper orc fashion, a highly exaggerated tale with her taking down a dragon single-handedly. Then, cut scene to where things actually started, which was in Wrothgar...

Forced starts do provide some opportunities for creativity, don't get me wrong, but alternate start mods are my all time favorite mods in Fallout/ElderScrolls games for good reason - it provides a lot more narrative flexibility. If we could even have a little bit of that in ESO with the ability to select which tutorial we do, that'd be amazing. It would further complement the de-linearization of the game as well, which began with One Tamriel.