Linearity isn't always a bad thing.
When people talk about a game being linear it's almost never intended as a compliment, and you certainly wouldn't expect it to be when we're talking about Elder Scrolls Online, given the famously freeform nature of its single player precursors. Except I've just had a peculiar experience that suggests that perhaps sometimes it's not a bad idea that some things happen only in a specific order.
After a few hours of questing I found myself in Davon's Watch, which feels like a main quest hub. I wandered around and picked up a pile of quests, and then followed up on one of them - more or less at random because there's little indication of how near or far the actual quest locations are - and walked into a building where I was ambushed and... I later found out... sacrificed to some demonic entity.
My subsequent adventure in Coldharbour felt... off. I was freed from a cell by a friendly NPC who accompanied me as I fought a few mobs who died if I so much as brushed against them (rather undermining the idea that this was supposed to be a terribly scary place) and it wasn't until I reached the end of this short, rather underwhelming jaunt through the afterlife and another NPC started talking about how after returning to life I'd washed up on an island shore that I realized that what I'd just done was the original tutorial sequence of the game. Sure enough, when I walked outside I was back on Bleakrock.
The Coldharbour sequence feels like a set up for later story content - the NPC called me 'Vestige' and that sounds like one of those convenient titles that fully voice acted games give the player character to gloss over the fact they won't/can't use your name. I can only assume this is why the sequence is still in the game, but no effort has been put into aligning it with the new tutorial and the narrative didn't even acknowledge that I'd already been to Bleakrock. It's spectacularly lazy.
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