It'll partly depend on what any given person is looking for in a zone or story, but for me Greymoor was definitely the most underwhelming main questline in any zone in the game. I loved Fennorian, and enjoyed Lyris' involvement and didn't mind Svana, but there wasn't a lot of substance to the overall plot. We spend a lot of time investigating the threat and then figuring out how to deal with it, and a lot of that just feels like busy work. Greymoor also suffers from having to be the first major chunk in a story that has to remain largely unresolved so there can be more to do later in the year. (This is also the case to some extent with Elsweyr and Blackwood, the other chapters that are part of year-long stories, but Greymoor's ending felt particularly unsatisfying.) I have some other gripes, but they're probably spoilery for you so I'll save them until after you've finished the zone if you'd care to hear about them then.

On the plus side, Fenn is great and sometimes it's easy to forget that he wasn't even in the game before the Dark Heart storyline. I like the snowy northern Skyrim terrain, and although I'm not a vampire aficionado, the darker gothic ambience of some of the underground locales is pretty cool.

For what it's worth, I found Markarth much more rewarding and story-dense, largely because it focuses on characters that I already had reasons to care about and doesn't spread its plot so thin. So if you can get through Greymoor, the rest of the ride will hopefully be worth it.

I found Greymoor to be the worst overarching story in a Chapter, but I haven’t played Blackwood yet. I’ve been very whelmed by it, especially by the redundant and regurgitated king + daughter storyline.

Greymoor didn't go down too well with the community, no.

If I recall and I can give my own personal thoughts:
- The story line was predictable and rather childish
- The zone is rather small and not very interesting in regards of content
- The launch of Greymoor was extremely buggy and everyone had access on launch (mistake by producer)
- Harrowstorms are just another dolmen type activity

The nostalgia route was a hard one to tackle as this content was already covered in previous games of the franchise and was done, well..better. It's true. I haven't finished Blacwood yet. I only bought it to retry raiding again, but that hasn't really gone that well either, but that's just me perhaps

They gave us a technicolour glowing cave instead of Whiterun. Seriously, remember how tough that Blackreach was in Skyrim? And we got a place that looked like a nightclub that even had a town in there.

Greybore and Blackwood were so awful, I am not buying the new chapter or subbing again.

I didn't mind Greymoor's storyline too much. I'm not a big fan of vampires, so that part of the story wasn't a huge draw for me, but at least there was some focus on the divisiveness between eastern and western Skyrim.

As for the human community in Blackreach, I thought they were down there because of the vampires? It's been a while since I played through the zone questline, but did I misunderstand how they came to be down there in the first place?

In any case, I think Blackreach itself was well done; I enjoy running around down there. If it were pitch black (which was not the case in TES5:Skyrim), it wouldn't be as much fun to get around in.

I also enjoy running around in Western Skyrim. I'm not able to solo harrowstorms the way I can solo dolmens and geysers, and I find them to be less fun to do with other players than dragons are, but I enjoy the delves and overland enemies as a whole.

Lyris just felt off as well.

Vevvev wrote: »

Ilsabet wrote: »

For what it's worth, I found Markarth much more rewarding and story-dense, largely because it focuses on characters that I already had reasons to care about and doesn't spread its plot so thin. So if you can get through Greymoor, the rest of the ride will hopefully be worth it.

Agreed, Markarth and Greymoor (Western Skyrim) are complete night and day experiences. I was so shocked playing through Markarth I felt like it was written by someone completely different.

I actually hope that a given year's chapter and its concluding zone DLC would feel like distinct entities, as opposed to "More of the Same, Part 2." The zone DLC should conclude the story that began in the chapter-- although it shouldn't necessarily tie up every loose end-- but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have its own, unique identity.

Sylvermynx wrote: »

I don't ever want "recurring personalities". Everyone I "met" in the main game MQ drove me bonkers. And people like Eveli - oy, gag me with a spoon for chrisakes! I hated her from the beginning in Orsinium (and I've never finished that DLC because I can't ever get by "whosis frozen ass" whose name I don't now remember....) and having her pop up in Blackwood was almost enough to cause me NOT to do that questline. Such an annoying stupid git of a bosmer.... (Yes I did get through the questline, and except for Eveli, I enjoyed it.... But why should I have to put up with some total git of an npc? Is this some dev's alter ego or some damn thing? *gag*)

/grumble

I should just go back to writing my own fiction.... At least I can SELL that....

Usually the best storytelling one can hope for in a game is good battles, good characters and the occasional plot twist. ESO met that standard at launch, IMO.

• The Main Quest hit on all cylinders for me. It was pretty epic.
• The DC starting quests (especially Stros M'Kai and Daggerfall principal quests) had good characters.
• Then, since I was playing primarily on my DC characters, I soon got to Darien, Gabrielle and Emeric.
• A lot of DC side quests had little mysteries and minor plot twists.
• Occasionally there was real pathos, e.g. in the failure at Alcaire Castle.
• I thought Rivenspire was very good from beginning to end. Good characters in the main questline, with pathos at the end: Some good lesser characters and/or side quests (all of House Ravenwatch, the public dungeon, the group dungeon, a hilarious side quest (the bad poetry), etc.
• There were some good things later in the DC as well.
• I also liked a fair amount of stuff in the AD, and a small amount in the EP.

Some early expansions had good characters and quests too, e.g. the whole Thieves Guild (although the actual mechanics of thievery could require some teeth-gritting to get through).

But I think things have gone far downhill more recently. Worse, they've diminished what they already had. The returned versions of significant characters are commonly jarringly different from who they used to be, and those changes aren't good ones. Newer players don't get the same epic feel in the main quest earlier ones did.


And by the way, that's just one of multiple ways in which they've torched character identity. Our past experiences are now partially invalidated by the storytelling. The skills we'd mastered of course were changed and made blander.

Taking away character history via the account-wide achievements catastrophe may, for many of us, prove to be the final straw.

Sylvermynx wrote: »

I don't ever want "recurring personalities". Everyone I "met" in the main game MQ drove me bonkers. And people like Eveli - oy, gag me with a spoon for chrisakes! I hated her from the beginning in Orsinium (and I've never finished that DLC because I can't ever get by "whosis frozen ass" whose name I don't now remember....) and having her pop up in Blackwood was almost enough to cause me NOT to do that questline. Such an annoying stupid git of a bosmer.... (Yes I did get through the questline, and except for Eveli, I enjoyed it.... But why should I have to put up with some total git of an npc? Is this some dev's alter ego or some damn thing? *gag*)

/grumble

I should just go back to writing my own fiction.... At least I can SELL that....

The worst part about Eveli for me is that by the end of Orsinium, she grows as a character. The events knock off the rose-colored glasses. She's still idealistic, but less blindly optimistic about it.

By Blackwood, the writers seem to have decided that she was back to her extremely chipper self.

Every time I pop in to Northern Elsweyr, Murkmire, Hew's Bane, Wrothgar, I remember what new content used to be like -- imaginative, creative, and with new stories. And if you didn't like one, something different would happen with the next.

But things started to go wrong from southern Elsweyr onwards.

Greymoor and Blackwood, thereafter, were both diabolical. Nothing at all looked new, the design work and attention to detail appeared to have received an actual downgrade, and the writing and much of the acting was plain awful.

On the acting, in the Reach the Scottish accents were execrable and I had to turn the sound off (I'm not joking; it may not matter if you're American but to a Brit the voices were so bad they were excruciating -- some of the actors sounded like they imagined adding some Irish mid-sentence into a heavy Russian-Canadian accent would produce a Scot; no, it produces Mrs Thompson from number 42 playing Violet in the village play).

I cannot bring myself to finish Deadlands not just because it is monotonous but because the Anchorite, who appears to have grown up in a middle-class south London suburb rather than Tamriel, sounds like she's reading a telephone directory on her last day at work. And I just can't take it any more. To be fair, that probably isn't the actress's fault because the words that come out of her mouth would sap anyone's will to live.

Worse, whatever is happening with the voice direction, actors appear to be taking the approach that if in doubt they should make readings slow and portentous. When their dialogue is 95% inane exposition that doesn't appear to have gone to a second draft or, indeed, a line reading of any kind, and has been written in the writer's rather than the character's voice, having to listen to that is close to torture.

And if an actor does not know how to pronounce basic English words like "minotaur", for the love of God the voice director needs to step in and tell them. I mean, what would the game be like with Michael Gambon calling us "vesteege", or John Cleese wittering about "plain mould".

But there is a more fundamental problem. In their writing, the year long stories simply do not work.

No one, plainly, has worked out a way of fashioning interesting story arcs that can cope with being chopped up. So we have had increasingly lazy recourse to "generic elder scrolls big threats" that cannot hit on a personal, character level because they are too nebulous. They feature villains whom we rarely meet and hold no interest because they start off PURE EVIL and are still PURE EVIL at the end.

And the stories have no stakes, for two reasons:

(1) you know that if the big bad doesn't die then there is no ESO;

(2) you know you won't even get a spectacular finale instead because the game's engine can't cope with it (in the same way that Oblivion's invasion of Tamriel featured eight monsters onscreen while the frame rate crashed into the single digits -- it was ridiculous).

The bigger part of each story (the chapter) also can't be resolved properly because of the gap between chapter and autumn zone.

Meanwhile, with no human-level stakes to pin the storytelling to, the vacuum gets filled with writing that treads water with pointless busy work and extremely poor, one-note characterisation (girl guide Princess Svana in Solitude would only ever have been a good idea if we got to watch her writhe in agony for an exceptionally prolonged period of time as she was consumed by vampires and died -- Final Destination understood this and created a similarly insufferable character for the sole purpose of smashing her into a bus).

I think it was so much worse for Greymoor and Blackwood than Elsweyr because they lazily dialled up nostalgia for two games that already existed.

And then there is the exhumation of previous "stars" of the game.

If you are going to revive characters, they need not to be the dullest people in the entire experience. Sai Sahan is extraordinarily tedious, it's like spending your time with a mirthless grandpa. Lyris has nothing at all to work with because her whole character is stoic above all else (their romance, presumably, has an influence on nearby people and objects similar to that of a black hole). The sharp arrow girl is ESO female type 2. And the forthcoming comic relief Khajiit was plain not funny while trying too hard first time round, so why would we want a second helping?

These people are boring; they are annoying; they are badly written so that they always do the right thing, have no flaws except faux flaws that make them that little bit sweeter, and have literally one personality trait each. I'm sorry to say that they are the kinds of characters you see in children's books for 5-year-olds, and you could hire Anthony Hopkins or Meryl Streep to play them and they would still be unbearable.

The way things have gone, I'm starting to wonder if they're going to mess up Jakarn, who is one of the very few characters in the entire game who has been fully realised as a functioning human being.

I get that they are running out of map. I get that they have listened and that this year's story supposedly will be different. But I really think they need to ditch the year of X format and really do something to bring the writing back to what ANY engaging writing is about: relatable characters doing relatable things.

The two (IMO) best pieces of storytelling in the whole game are about a betrayed thief trying to get revenge on someone who tricked her guild (Thieves Guild) with no global consequences at all and a Khajiit who was raised as an orc, with even less global consequence, for God's sake.

Both those stories, one the entire premise of a DLC, one a mere side quest, felt significantly more dramatic than Vampires Want To Take Over From Some Characters You'd Prefer Were Dead Anyway Because They're So F***ing Boring or Daedric Prince Number 12 Wants To Take Over The World But Don't Worry They'll Be Gone By Tuesday After A Short Trip Into A Plane Of Oblivion With A Peculiar Colour Scheme. Why? Because you could invest in the characters.

ESO can do this. It can and has in the past come up with writing and characterisation that are at times noticeably better than the main Elder Scrolls games (I literally cannot remember a single character from the main series except Lucien Lachance, because that was the one time when the games really went all out on decent writing, and I still remember him 15 years later).

But the year of X wrapper has ended up an exercise in overblown, badly thought out filler and has resulted in some seriously, seriously lacklustre content. It does not work.

PS A long time ago, ESO knew how to write women. We had Naryu, we had the thieves guild woman, we had the psyjic lady. They had depth and more than one character trait. What the hell has happened that we now get two female character tropes, over-eagre ingenue and charisma-bypassed responsible lady, over and over again?

Northwold wrote: »

I get that they are running out of map. I get that they have listened and that this year's story supposedly will be different. But I really think they need to ditch the year of X format. It has resulted in some seriously, seriously lacklustre content.

We aren't even running out of map if the damn map was accurate and less of a giant mess. BroughBreaux's thread "I remade the map - this time, everything is perfect" is an easy and good way to see this for those who are not familiar with it.

Northwold wrote: »

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

I get that they are running out of map. I get that they have listened and that this year's story supposedly will be different. But I really think they need to ditch the year of X format. It has resulted in some seriously, seriously lacklustre content.

We aren't even running out of map if the damn map was accurate and less of a giant mess. BroughBreaux's thread "I remade the map - this time, everything is perfect" is an easy and good way to see this for those who are not familiar with it.

I do sympathise, though, that there are a limited number of cultures in the game's world and a limited number of geographical environments.

So not every DLC can be a Northern Elsweyr or a Murkmire (and, varying opinions on their content aside, the design work in those two really stands out as being different and carefully thought out), and Greymoor and Blackwood were always going to look similar to things we have seen before.

And to be fair in both they still made obvious effort, with Blackreach and Fargrave, respectively, but both felt completely suffocating whereas the world above was just... Bland.

Blackwood shouldn't have looked so bland and similar to things we have seen before. Instead of repeating issues and problems from before they could try fix them and do better. Like the generic-medieval-european-fantasyitis TES:IV Oblivion suffered from, and was then repeated in ESO's base game everywhere, and repeated again in Blackwood, and looks to be repeating more with High Isle, because from just the trailer it's looking way too similar to Imperials and Leyawiin. Like we are back to base game and they are just recolours of eachother style-wise.

Don't get me started on the portrayal of the Niben River.

Malthorne wrote: »

Narvuntien wrote: »

Greymoor story is considered the weakest in most people's opinions, but keep in mind that it was written in the middle of the worst of the COVID pandemic, I feel like it was just a tough time for people to just be creative.

Greymoor released in what, May 2020? The story was likely written months before lockdown even happened…

Yep. The entire Chapter was maybe done before the pandemic became severe. So that’s really not an excuse.