The Elder Scrolls Online is a Wonderful Short Story Anthology
The Elder Scrolls Online’s approach to small-scale storytelling makes it unique in a genre of behemoths
I’ve always been fascinated by MMOs. Over the years, I’ve dipped my toes into countless entries in the genre, always fascinated by their massive worlds populated with real people going about their virtual lives and the fact that these places have existed and will exist for years to come, always busy and bustling with life. But MMOs are also a massive time commitment— they often demand cumulative days, even weeks of investment to see just their main stories through — so I ended up settling on only two that I’ve remained dedicated to, on and off, for years: Final Fantasy XIV and The Elder Scrolls Online, arguably the two most popular games in the genre behind World of Warcraft. In the more than five years I’ve played them, I have yet to reach the endgame in either, but for very different reasons.
Final Fantasy XIV is daunting. It’s a behemoth of a game, one that grows by the size of a mainline Final Fantasy every couple years due to their huge expansions. Narratively, it’s a lot to keep up with as well; every new story is building on the foundation of the last, feeling more like a sequel than a whole new storyline. This kind of long-running storytelling gives the game an incredible sense of scope, of being involved in something so much bigger than yourself that will continue for years to come, but it’s also just… a lot. I get the same feeling jumping back in after a break that I get from coming back to a TV show for the newest season — “okay, what happened last? Who is that? Oh yeah, I remember that subplot now, guess that was setting up this new storyline.”
The Elder Scrolls Online takes the complete opposite tack to its storytelling, and because of this becomes a completely different kind of MMO experience, one that I don’t think any other game in the genre delivers. But let’s rewind to 2014, when The Elder Scrolls Online first launched. Back then, it was chasing the sort of grand, multi-year storytelling of its genre siblings. The fight against Molag Bal led to the Orsinium DLC, an explicit continuation of the main quest from the base game. At that point, the game had also not been retooled into its current “One Tamriel” form — a sort of flat level scaling that allows players to explore at their leisure rather than get level gated out of certain zones — and so there was a set order and progression to these stories and the way one was forced to approach them.
Over the three years following The Elder Scrolls Online’s release, a number of DLC packs trickled out, adding new zones and factions to the game. Some — like the Imperial City DLC — were rooted in that massive main quest, while others — like the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild — were decidedly standalone in nature. There would be nods here or there to potentially previously met characters, but these stories felt contained and cordoned off from the huge timesink of the main quest, nice little ten hour chunks of life in different parts of Tamriel.
In May of 2017, The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind, the game’s first major expansion, released. This release marked a sort of shift in the way Zenimax Online Studios released content, as well as how they wrote and structured that content within the existing framework of the game. They now had a set release schedule: a set of dungeons teeing up the story for the year would release in the winter, a “Chapter” — a major expansion featuring a new zone— would release in the spring, another set of dungeons loosely following that story would release in the summer, and then the year’s story would be tied up in a final DLC featuring a new zone in the fall. But the biggest change was where players could come into this story — anywhere. If they wanted, they could start from the very beginning, fighting Molag Bal and his grand scheme, all the way through the game’s many DLCs up to Morrowind. But they could also just step off the boat in Morrowind and get going there. The choice was theirs.
This year’s storyline — kicked off in the Greymoor Chapter — focuses on Skyrim and a vampire threat that has cropped up there. In November, a new DLC called Markarth will release wrapping up that story, and new players can either start with Greymoor or Markarth. If they play Greymoor first, Markarth will acknowledge that, but if they jump straight into Markarth they’ll be brought up to speed quickly. And if they want to start with neither? That’s fine too, they can go wherever they want once they’re out of the tutorial. It’s interesting to see such a massive game, one that spans over 75% of Tamriel’s entire landmass and hundreds of hours of stories, be so willing to let players simply skip it all to get to what they want, even going so far as to write their stories in a way that allows for that sort of freeform exploration of the world.
The Elder Scrolls Online absolutely started its life as a game chasing the grand, massive storylines of many other MMOs and RPGs, but it’s morphed into something so different and unique to the genre. It’s not daunting or impenetrable; I always feel like I can jump back in, start up a new story, and just go. The fact that these storylines are written to be standalone might feel, to some, as though there is no larger purpose to them, like they’re scattered bits of writing strewn across a landscape, but I think that’s what makes the game so wonderful. You can dip into any province of Tamriel, any town, and get an idea of what life is like there without dozens of hours of leadup. The game is content to let you exist in Tamriel and take it in at your leisure, in the order you want to, to learn this place, populate it alongside thousands of other players, call it home. No pressure. Where so many other MMOs strive to be long running book or TV series, The Elder Scrolls Online is content to be a nice little collection of short stories.
