ESO's Four Alliances vs Skyrim's Civil War - why one feels epic and one feels stuck

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

I've been thinking about this since I started the ESO main story again. In Skyrim you're basically forced to pick Stormcloaks or Imperials and then the other side is just... bad. Wrong. The whole conflict gets flattened into a binary that doesn't really hold up if you think about it for five seconds.

But ESO's Alliance War actually has three sides with competing legitimate interests. The Dominion wants Tamriel unified under Aldmeri rule (which, yeah, is genocide-adjacent but they genuinely believe it), the Covenant is fighting for independence and stability, and the Pact is just trying to survive. None of them are secretly evil. They're just... opposed. And you can see why each one matters to the people fighting in it.

The weird part is that Skyrim's Civil War should theoretically be way more interesting - you're literally in the country, dealing with the fallout, talking to people who lost family - but instead it feels like the game is constantly nudging you toward one "correct" answer depending on which questline you pick. ESO lets you actually sit with the moral complexity of the thing without collapsing it into good faction vs bad faction.

Does anyone else feel like Skyrim's conflict would've hit harder if it wasn't designed to be so cleanly resolvable? Like if the game just... let it be messy?

 

[NordOfSolitude]

I get what you're saying, but I think you're maybe giving ESO a little too much credit here. The Alliance War works because you're not actually in it - you're a mercenary doing fetch quests and PvP. You can hold all three perspectives at arm's length. Skyrim forces you to live in the country, pick a side, and deal with the consequences, which is messier but also way more personal.

That said, you're right that Skyrim flattens things. The problem isn't that you have to pick - it's that the game doesn't really let either side be fully sympathetic once you commit. The Stormcloaks have legitimate grievances about the Thalmor and Nord culture, but then you get quests where you're terrorizing civilians and the leadership is just... kind of racist and stubborn. The Imperials are trying to maintain order and push back the Thalmor, but they're also occupying a country and executing people without trial. Both have a point. Both are compromised.

But here's the thing - I actually think that is the game letting it be messy. It's just doing it through gameplay and NPC dialogue rather than giving you a quest marker that says "moral ambiguity ahead." You're supposed to feel uncomfortable. You're supposed to wonder if you made the right call. The fact that you can't feel fully good about either choice is kind of the point, imo. It's just not as explicitly spelled out as ESO's three-faction setup.

What questline did you run? Because the Stormcloak and Imperial quest chains do hit differently depending on which one you're actually doing.