Too much of a good thing?

A lot of work has gone into the quests in Elder Scrolls Online. But...

Quests. Every MMORPG has them, but exactly what they are and how the player obtains and completes them can vary a lot from game to game. Most of the quests I've done in ESO have had a bit of work put into them - there's not much Kill 10 Rats going on here - and that's laudable... up to a point. It's good that a real effort has clearly been made to give reasons why I'm being asked to do the things I'm doing, and even to justify why the person that's asking me doesn't just do it themselves (a question that most MMOs gloss over more often than not) but the problem with this is it often takes a very long time to get from A to B.

Basically, a typical quest in ESO goes something like this:

"Hello, adventurer. I am [an NPC you'll never meet again], and I serve [someone you've never heard of] of the [organization ditto] from [place you've not been to.] We are here investigating the [enemy group you may or might not have encountered] and my [colleague/friend/second cousin/apprentice] has got lost. I think they went to [place you've not been to] or [other place you've not been to.] Can you go and look for them in [place you've not been to] while I search [other place you've not been to]?"

You: Okay.

"Thank you. So if you find my [colleague/friend/second cousin/apprentice] I will meet you at [another place.]"

You: Okay. I will go and look for your [colleague/friend/second cousin/apprentice] and if I find them I will meet you at [another place.]

And it's all voice acted, which is nice in theory but as I've said before about The Old Republic, voice acting all the dialogue just makes it more noticeable when what's being said isn't interesting in its own right. There's an awful lot of that in ESO.

Peculiarly, despite the hand crafted quest design (longwinded as it is), the game allows you to pick up a lot of quests at once in a manner more suited to the likes of World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online or any other MMO that does go heavy on Kill 10 Rats style questing. When I reached the hub town of Davon's Watch I glanced at my log and saw it was sitting at 3/25 so of course I started loading up on quests, but by the time I actually get around to doing some of them I guarantee I'll have completely forgotten who gave them to me and why, so I'll be working off the immediate to-do prompts and to Oblivion with all that flavor text that I sat and listened to.

Especially since said quests might fast travel you halfway across the continent to entirely new locations, which I'm guessing is something to do with the One Tamriel reworking of the game that opened up the world so you could quest anywhere. Again, nice in theory, but it leads to that barrage of character and place names I alluded to above, and leaves me with very little sense of the geography of the world. It wasn't until I walked into a hub patrolled by friendly (or at least neutral) Covenant guards that I realized just how far away I was from where I'd picked up the quest. 10 minutes earlier I'd been at war with those guys.

MMOs can, at their best, give a real sense of you being on a journey as you travel from one zone to another. In LOTRO, for example, the transition from Bree to the Lone Lands makes you feel that you're leaving civilized lands behind and entering a bleaker, more inhospitable landscape. ESO, by contrast, feels disjointed.