ESO's Psijic Order feels like it's from a completely different era than the College

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

Just finished the Summerset chapter and I'm genuinely confused about how the Psijic Order went from being these reality-bending, tower-hopping time manipulators in ESO to basically just... a college with robes in Skyrim. Like, in ESO they're actively messing with timelines, Loremaster Celarus is doing insane stuff, and then by the Fourth Era they're just the guys who give you a quest about an Elder Scroll and some Daedra?

I get that the College of Winterhold is supposed to be the "fallen" version of what the Psijics were, but ESO makes them seem way more actively powerful and involved in world events. The Skyrim version feels almost neutered by comparison. Is this intentional lore, or did the devs just not connect the dots when they were writing Summerset? Because the gap between "we can literally see alternate timelines" and "here's a guy in the College basement" is pretty wild.

 

[NordOfSolitude]

I think you're hitting on something real, but I'd push back a little - the Psijics in Skyrim aren't really neutered so much as they're just withdrawn. By the Fourth Era they've basically said "nope, not doing this anymore" and retreated to the island. The whole point of their Skyrim questline is that they're reluctantly poking their head back in because the Oblivion Crisis aftermath is still causing problems.

That said, yeah, ESO does make them feel way more active and cosmically significant than anything we see in the actual game. But that's kind of ESO's thing - it's set in the Second Era when the world was still wild and unstable, before a lot of the metaphysical chaos got locked down. The Psijics doing reality-bending stuff in Summerset makes sense for that era. By Skyrim they've had centuries to chill out, maybe get tired of it, and just... be a small mysterious order that occasionally recruits people.

The "College is the fallen version of what they were" angle doesn't quite work though, imo. The College is more like what happens when you take magical scholarship and strip away all the esoteric reality-warping stuff - it's just regular mages doing regular mage things. The Psijics never stopped being weird, they just stopped caring about involving themselves in Fourth Era politics.

What questline were you thinking of exactly? The one where they show up about the Elder Scroll?