The One (and the Many)

"The Second Era needs a savior. I believe the Gallery - perhaps even the Adamantine Tower itself - chose you."

That's what I was told at the end of the tutorial sequence in Elder Scrolls Online, but if I'm the Chosen One then who are all these other people?

There are relatively few MMORPGs that really embrace the multiplayer part of the genre in their narrative. City of Heroes stands out as one that does, building its entire world around the idea that there really are that many superpowered heroes and villains running around Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Similarly in Secret World Legends it's not uncommon for NPCs to comment on how the player character is only one agent among many. They were chosen - by the Bees - but they weren't the only one.

At the other end of the scale there's Final Fantasy XIV, which is in near total denial about the existence of other player characters in the world. You are the Warrior of Light, and the presence of other players in group content like dungeons and trials is often not even acknowledged, let alone explained. It's probably no worse in this regard than Star Wars The Old Republic but it's far more noticeable in FFXIV because of that game's emphasis on group content as an integral part of the singleplayer story.

Elder Scrolls Online seems to be gearing up for a Chosen One narrative, at least judging from the tutorial. Admittedly that sequence is so disconnected from what follows that this might never come up again, but this is an Elder Scrolls game, and it wouldn't be out of character for this series for me to not just be a hero of Tamriel but the hero of Tamriel.

I play these games almost exclusively solo, but even so I still think that this kind of story is a bad fit for an MMO.

MMOs tend to require a lot more suspension of disbelief than singleplayer games, but most of the signature story/gameplay disconnects of the genre aren't really that big a deal. Yes, named enemies who you 'killed' will respawn, but unless your character goes back to that specific location you'll never see them again, and outside of repeatable content you don't usually have any reason to go back. Player characters also respawn, and some MMOs try to explain why that happens, though whether or not it's a good explanation is another matter. Some games just shrug it off. Others probably should have.

There's no getting around stuff like this - respawning is a core mechanic in any MMO so you might as well just go with it - but there is a way to get around the problem of you-are-the-chosen-one-and-so-is-everyone-else and that's to not do it. MMOs are by definition shared worlds and it pulls me right out of the story every time I venture into The Place No One Goes to do the thing that Only I Can Do and there's half a dozen other people already in there doing the same thing.

Now it's not like I don't have memories of standing around in World of Warcraft waiting for a named enemy to respawn so that I could take my turn killing it to complete a quest. Been there, done that, got the severed head to take back to the questgiver. It's standard stuff in MMOs but it's still been jarring when it's happened in ESO, for several reasons.

The first being that for all that this is common in MMOs it's not nearly as common as it used to be. Interior adventure locations and story sequences are often instanced in modern games in this genre, so the all-open-world-all-the-time approach that Elder Scrolls Online has taken thus far feels oddly retro, and it's really at odds with the modern storytelling techniques the game otherwise makes use of.

Added to that is the fact that there's a LOT of other players around. For years now I've spent most of my MMO time in older games, and in lower level zones which the majority of the playerbase have long since moved on from, so I'm not really accustomed to seeing large numbers of other players outside of major hubs. In ESO there were other player characters everywhere I looked on Bleakrock Isle, which I guess is due to this being a high pop game with a single megaserver.

Finally, Elder Scrolls Online leans toward a realistic visual style, with a fairly muted art style and highly detailed environments, and this can create a kind of uncanny valley effect where reminders that the world runs on game logic are far more noticeable than they would be in a more stylized setting. The carefully crafted atmosphere of these locations can be easily shattered when several other players run by in a place where the story is insisting other people shouldn't be. Stepping through an Oblivion Gate should have been a big moment, but I was still taking in my surroundings when two other players charged past me and killed the scamp lurking at the end of the hallway.

It remains to be seen just how much ESO will lean into this narrative. I doubt it will go as far as FFXIV - hard to imagine how it could - but it's unlikely I'll ever be convinced that I'm the chosen one.

How could I be? Everyone knows that Keanu Reeves is the One.