In ESO, not necessary at all. None of my characters have a backstory. In some other games (not all), I like to have one. The SP Elder Scroll games, for example. I like to come up with a story for why my character is in prison, or in Skyrim, why they were crossing the border.

I sometimes have to double check what I named some of my characters.

It is subjective for some it is important for others like me it isn't, the most important thing is it is optional.

Same than @SilverBride (post above), plus the fact that ESO is just a "side" game for me, so that I don't really feel linked to my toon here.

One exception: When GW2 arrived, I retook for my chars the same names than those I was using in original GW. So it was like those new toons are the descendants of the GW's ones. However, the reason wasn't to give them a background story. It was more that I so much loved GW, that I needed to build up a link between new and old.

Some more than others, but all my characters have back stories.

Heck my latest Inventory Mule is named Jake Jabs. He holds a bunch of excess furniture. He is or was a famous furniture chain owner of American Furniture Warehouse. He was on ads all the time in Colorado.

There is my Survey Farmer named Fumnog, cousin to Bumnog a character in some quests.

One of other Mules is Carry Burdens who inspired a Companion NPCs life purpose in Skyrim.

Just to name a few.

Not absolutely necessary to start with but it helps guide things along sometimes.

I've been playing RPGs since the 1970s, so my brain automatically starts crafting a story as soon as a name for a character materializes in my mind. It just happens.

I have 11 characters. All have backstories. Most of them intertwine. They practically live in their own pocket universe.
If it wasn't for the bad state the game is in ever since U46, I would have 12.

But as it stands right now, I will not invest a single cent into a game that is getting worse with each patch. I don't mean subclassing, balance or content. I mean the technological side of the game. The connection issues, the stuttering, the sudden fps drops and the fact that they are unable to fix a missing sound file. For MONTHS!

I really miss the ka'ching when I sell stuff. 😫

All my characters have the same backstory.: They are empty shells that are put on by an alien who controls them through a computer.

As an MMO, TESO cannot be placed on the same level as single-player games.

In an MMO, immersion is much less present, so the importance of the character's background is strongly impacted. I always like to imagine a little story around my character but it is not mandatory, I also play TESO for pvp and so it is not very important.

Many of my characters have absolutely no story and are content to have their own style, that's something.

I have a general idea of personality and preferences, but there is no backstory.

DreamyLu wrote: »

One exception: When GW2 arrived, I retook for my chars the same names than those I was using in original GW. So it was like those new toons are the descendants of the GW's ones. However, the reason wasn't to give them a background story. It was more that I so much loved GW, that I needed to build up a link between new and old.

I did the same! Unfortunately GW2 didn't grab me, but when I was giving it a really good try, that's how I thought of my characters.

i tied my main character to all my other characters in the games I played. Its the same person he is always a vampire and like the Deedra but on Nirn,( to explain why he seems immortal at least to himself).

cyclonus11 wrote: »

If you're an Argonian, you don't know what the Hist is.
If you're an Imperial, you don't know who Alessia is.
If you're a Dunmer, you don't know who the Tribunal are.
If you're an Orsimer, you don't know who Malacath is.
If you're a Bosmer, you don't know what the Green is.
If you're an Altmer, you don't know who Auri-El is.
If you're a Nord, you don't know what Sovngarde is.
If you're a Redguard, you don't know who Tu'whacca is.
If you're a Breton, you don't know who the Wyrd are.
If you're a Khajiit, you don't know who Jone and Jode are.

And you can't be from anywhere because you are a stranger everywhere.

so true

and if you're imperor in cyrodiil nobody recognize you, even npc in cyrodiil !!

Good poll. Buckle in, my ADHD meds just hit and I'm awful at time management. This one's gonna be long.

TL;DR: PC depth is complicated, and I'm excited for the potential the industry has to expand the scope of what's possible in game design. I hope it can be done ethically and creatively.

This is a very complex topic when designing RPGs. Especially sandbox games with a high volume of content.

On one extreme you have games like Disco Elysium, where the player character's background is VERY concretely defined. Your arc as an amnesiac is discovering it and choosing to either return to it, grow from it, or reject it. In my opinion, the best written player character in all of gaming with a miraculous hat trick of still giving the player agency in defining the character going forward.

On the other extreme we have games like Oblivion. We are an undefined entity with no evident past whose present is in no way affected or influenced by the past. In the remaster we got backgrounds, but other than affecting our character stats a little bit, they are not relevant to the narrative in any way.

Most creation titles are like this because the game isn't about the player, they're about the world. And the experience of the game is exploring and discovering that world, and overcoming its adversity. In more recent titles, the narrative has expanded to include more meaningful engagement with NPCs, culminating in Starfield, in which the narrative is centered around the characters in Constellation.

But, because Constellation members have to meaningfully engage with a PC that's necessarily shallow by design, most of the weight of the narrative still relies on headcanon, just like in Oblivion and Skyrim. The game cannot possibly express what we, the player, have to say about anything; we have to choose from a list, and no list will ever be comprehensive enough for the depth that the narrative in Starfield was trying to achieve.

So, Starfield's narrative suffered critically, even though it has so much potential to be great. Players engaging with it on a creative level can fill in the narrative gaps the game couldn't convey, and got a good experience from it. Players that engage games with the reasonable expectation that the game should deliver the full experience without offloading that weight onto them had a bad time.

So what can ESO do to make the narrative more engaging to our characters specifically? These new flavored dialogue options are nice, but have the same issue with lists that I mentioned above. In a lot of ways, if the game can't accommodate depth in interaction between NPCs and the player, Oblivion style might be the better approach, since there's no expectation of depth on that front to begin with. The understanding is clear: the PC is a blank slate, it's on the player's headcanon to paint them, and the only thing NPCs can work with will be their quest log and strength.

Alternatively, dump voice acting. Now, that sounds and is awful, we all love voice actors. But the depth they bring to the performance is taken away from the narrative. With pseudo-speak and purely written dialogue, the scope of the narrative expands by orders of magnitude. NPCs could say our names, ad-lib elements of our chosen background, get access to an insane volume of branching dialogue trees that would otherwise be impractical to voice.

Trade-off on that is it's REALLY weird for higher fidelity games to use pseudo speak. There's an aesthetic sweet-spot where read dialogue and pseudo-speak is the right choice, and ESO is not at that spot. Not to mention it'd be just awful to kick all the VAs to the curb like that. Way too high a price. So what else?

New option: AI. Another approach that sounds and is awful for a bunch of different reasons, starting with the plagiarism that's required to make them and the metric tons of energy they consume. On the other hand: with restrained, creatively ethical application, they can fill those narrative gaps that rely on headcanon without cutting into VA work OR creative writing, both of which could even expand to provide a better foundation that AI could build off of to produce dynamic PC / NPC engagement. If AI is applied exclusively to expand the scope of what's possible in game design, nothing gets left behind or displaced.

Cons: while we can be creatively ethical when using AI, it's not at a spot presently where it can be justified from an energy consumption perspective. Megaservers already push what's reasonable for the sake of entertainment; adding AI on top of it is presently out of the question.

Where do we go from here? I dunno. Personally, hope for the best. I can't tell executives that they're squandering AI by displacing creatives, but maybe if some studio makes something that's never been made before using its full potential, it'll become more apparent that creative work is always a good human investment.

Bottom line, PC depth takes a lot of compromise from both the player and designer as the scope of the game increases. It's possible that compromise can be eliminated in the near future. We'll see.

I can't imagine playing an RPG (even one as nominal as ESO) without your characters being, well, characters.

That said, the vast majority of my friends/guildies play that way, so maybe I'm the one who's wrong.