ESO's Necropotence vs Skyrim's Necromancy - why does one feel so much darker?

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

been replaying through some ESO content and hit a storyline where you're dealing with necromantic stuff, and it just struck me how sanitized it all feels compared to like, the Conjuration questline or even just raising thralls in Skyrim. In Skyrim when you're messing with corpses and binding souls there's this genuine wrongness to it - the game treats it like you're doing something genuinely transgressive. People react to it. It's weird.

but in ESO it's just... another school of magic? there's flavor text about it but it doesn't feel like you're crossing any actual moral line. even the Daedric questlines in ESO that involve necromancy don't have that same weight. compare that to like, Conjuration in Skyrim where you're literally enslaving souls and the game never lets you forget that's messed up.

is this just a difference in how single-player vs MMO storytelling works, or did ESO's writers genuinely decide necromancy wasn't supposed to feel transgressive anymore? because the lore-wise they're in the same universe but it feels like two completely different takes on the same magic school.

 

[NordOfSolitude]

I think you're hitting on something real about the design philosophy difference, but I'd push back a little on the lore side of it. Skyrim's Conjuration questline (the one with the Black Star and Azura's Star, right?) works partly because you're dealing with a specific moral dilemma - the Magister's choice about trapping souls. The wrongness isn't inherent to Conjuration itself; it's about what you choose to do with it. Skyrim just makes those choices feel heavier because the game is structured around player agency and consequence in a way MMOs can't really be.

ESO can't do that the same way because it's not your character's story in the same sense - you're following a narrative path. Necromancy in ESO probably feels more "normal" because the story isn't asking you to make a transgressive choice, it's just asking you to participate in a questline. That's a structural thing, not necessarily a lore retcon.

That said, I do think Skyrim leans harder into necromancy as genuinely taboo. The way NPCs react to you if you're openly using Conjuration, the whole "souls belong to Sithis" undertone in Dark Brotherhood stuff - there's this sense that you're violating something fundamental. ESO might just not care about that framing as much, which is fine, but yeah it definitely reads different.

What questline were you doing in ESO when you noticed this? Curious if it was specifically a Daedric thing or something else.