ESO: “Where am I and What am I Doing?”
The other day, I was undertaking a daily mission for the Undaunted in The Elder Scrolls Online. I do these to level my companion’s associated skills line. The mission required me to go to a particular delve, set some soul traps and defeat the boss. Nothing unusual there, so off I went. Whenever I go into a delve in ESO, I usually do the quest associated with it. It provides a story and some additional experience points. Thus I arrived in the vicinity of the delve in question and found a note not far away. I read it and accepted the quest assuming it to be the one associated with the delve. To cut a long and confusing story short, it turns out it wasn’t. I discovered this about 20 minutes later when I found myself running around, confused with three separate lots of quest markers on my in-game map. Not for the first time I found myself pondering “where am I and what am I doing”.
I have subsequently discovered after conducting some research that the quest I picked up outside the delve was in fact the prologue for the Blackwood expansion. A quest that I would have undertaken at some point but one that I wasn’t specifically intending to do at the time. I’m a bit picky regarding questing in ESO and I’m trying to do the content in narrative order on this particular alt. However, I believe this situation highlights a flaw in the way quests are presented to players in the game. The most obvious problem from my perspective is that there was nothing to indicate on the initial quest bestowal text (which in this case was a handwritten note) that it was for this specific quest chain. Because content scales in the game now, you can travel Tamriel and pick up missions from the original story, regional quests and faction specific missions. Unless you check every quest offered against one of the various ESO Wikis, you’ll find yourself involved in multiple stories and it all gets confusing.
ZeniMax have given quest bestowal a great deal of thought in ESO, as you can pick up the major ones in several different ways. If you miss one NPC you may subsequently receive a letter to prompt you. It’s all rather clever. When you start playing the MMO for the first time, the way some NPC will run up to you to ask for your help is quite exciting. But it gets old very quickly and Stuga, Bera Moorsmith and others soon become very irritating. Another issue I have with ESO is managing quests via the in-game journal. Even when using an addon, it is still difficult to filter and order them in a way that I feel is logical. The easiest way to avoid confusion is to undertake just one quest at a time but that is hardly practical. And don’t get me started on the game’s inability to abandon the redundant Cadwell’s Silver and Gold quests. For a game that excels in many other ways it’s odd that they have fumbled the ball on this basic aspect of MMO gameplay.
I do not have this problem in other MMOs. In The Lord of the Rings Online quests are level specific and there is no scaling of content. Hence you cannot accidently stray into a new zone and pick up a major quest in error, if you’re below the level of content in that area. Star Trek Online has an interesting quest bestowal system where most content is offered by senior leaders of your faction. The player is hailed via subspace communication and the bestowal dialogue is clear regarding which storyline the mission is associated with. The ingame mission journal also has a tab showing what story arcs are available and all of their subsequent missions. It is a far less confusing system and much easier to stay on top of. However, what cannot be cured must be endured, so in the meantime I shall have to be more cautious about what quests I do or do not accept in ESO. I shall also see if there’s a more comprehensive addon for the quest journal.
