The Elder Scrolls Online Preview
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My primary goal in this two-hour playthrough of the game was to explore as many sidequests as possible. The main storyline starts you off rescued by a ship leader. She says she needs help with a heist, and wants you to gather some useful hands. So you basically set out on a Mass Effect-like mission to gather followers. When you meet a new companion, you'll need to help them out with a favor first, just like in Mass Effect.
Sounds fun enough, and it was. But we were promised that we'll have more than just the typical fetch missions to carry out, and my personal mission was to find out if that was true. After all this is a huge world I'm meant to explore, and I want to be sure that there are compelling reasons to explore it.
And, so far, there are. Most role-playing game sidequests that ask you to gather items and materials for generic reasons are aimed at making you feel like you're in some way helping the people who made the request. They wave their arms in puppet-like motion and off you go to do a good deed. There's some sob story about a sick son or a poor child or something. But really you're just hankering for some more experience points or that sweet-looking staff the NPC said they'd give you in return.
In ESO, sidequests you accept feel like stories you're jumping in the middle of. The disabled husband had just had his camp raided by those pirates that kidnapped his wife. And when I return with her, he plans on healing up before plotting his revenge. His story existed before I met him, and it will continue to carry out afterwards. NPCs have lives of their own. They have interests of their own and personalities of their own. They don't feel too much like generic NPCs (though some tropes are certainly still there). You're jumping in midway, helping them out with one task, and wave goodbye, knowing that it won't be the end of their story. Whether or not they'll reappear later in the game, having progressed about their journeys, is something I can't tell you for sure yet. I haven't played long enough. For all I know, these could just be cases of smarter storyline writing.
