Choose My Adventure: Assassinating randoms in The Elder Scrolls Online

It’s weird how attitudes towards death vary depending on the video game and the structure set up. In Saints Row the Third, a friend and I played a madcap duo named Morgan and Ryoko, and I have never once given a second thought to Ryoko’s habit of flinging grenades into the other lane of traffic for no reason outside of the fact that she could. The consequences of her actions would fall under the header of war crimes in any sensible world. Yet it wasn’t really the sort of world where that mattered.

What I’m getting at is that The Elder Scrolls Online made me kind of uncomfortable when it told me that the quest to get into the Dark Brotherhood would start when I killed someone. Just… someone. It didn’t really matter whom, so long as the person I killed was an innocent, arbitrary victim. That seemed wrong somehow.

Still, this was how the vote went, and thus I was off to the Gold Coast. Unfortunately, I didn’t get nearly as much time to play this week as I would have liked, but I made the best use of the time I did have to get in and start doing stuff for the Dark Brotherhood.

With great reluctance, Ceilarene said farewell to Lizardtown amidst a sea of hisses and lizards claiming that it wasn’t what the town was named. (I did not care.) You can helpfully pick up the DLC quests from anywhere without requiring a questgiver, but that doesn’t actually do much more than point you in the right direction-ish, so I had to do a bit of looking about to find out where Ceilarene was actually supposed to go. The layout could be somewhat clearer, let’s put it that way.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about being too weak to get anywhere. I schlepped along happily to some city of another with a boat bringing me right to Anvil, where a woman at the dockside helpfully informs you that the secret order of assassins is recruiting people and tells you to go kill someone.

There’s no lead-up to this, mind you; it’s just “hey, I murder people, if you go murder someone maybe they’ll take you too.” You have no motivation for this beyond liking murdering people and the fact that this is the only way to advance the plot.

Ceilarene swallowed her moral compass and obvious apprehension, then walked a bit away from the woman who gave her the quest and found a person. Then she murdered that person.

Upon returning to talk with the eager future dark assassin, a messenger stopped me and delivered a letter of invitation to the Dark Brotherhood. Apparently, they were impressed by my willingness to murder someone for pretty much no reason whatsoever… which, to be fair, would probably be a positive trait for a guild of assassins. It speaks to either a lack of a moral compass or a willingness to do pretty much anything if someone tells you to do it, and both work well.

Not to my exact surprise, the Dark Brotherhood is kind of ridiculous at face value, but the opening quest was solidly designed. You’re sent out to kill a local noble, and beyond that, the Dark Brotherhood doesn’t actually care about you; you’re not really in unless you prove that you can manage that. Nor does the Dark Brotherhood care how you do it, so if you want to barge through the front door and just kill everyone, that’s fine.

This is also the chance to start exploring the game’s system of crimes and punishment. Essentially, as you commit crimes, you earn a higher bounty and more notoriety with guards, especially as you’re witnessed doing things. This will decay over time if you lie low, or you can pay off fences to lower your notoriety; you can also get caught or killed by guards, which deprives you of stolen items and costs you some money but also wipes your negative reputation.

This is, I’m told, a common system in the Elder Scrolls franchise games. To my eyes, it looks like a simplified version of Grand Theft Auto‘s Wanted system, which is not entirely a bad thing, really. It does have some problems, like how you can never sell stolen items until they’ve been laundered by a fence because somehow a merchant half a world away will just know that you stole that radish. But it succeeds at its basic job, allowing you to steal from NPCs and murder your way through places you shouldn’t be while still carrying a penalty.

There’s also the fact that it opens up an arena of gameplay that is frequently neglected. Most crime-and-punishment MMO systems are more focused on preventing griefers from making other players miserable; this, on the other hand, is more tied in with actual laws and rules of society. I can appreciate that.

I feel less in love with the stealth gameplay; it’s there, and it’s obvious a part of being an assassin, but it doesn’t feel particularly fleshed out. Not that it stopped me from sneaking up on countless guards and servants just to shank them, both to cut down on detection and as a bit of extra experience, which means that my option of sneaking my way in through smuggler tunnels was not exactly the bloodless option, but it felt more surreptitious than just kicking in the front door.

Part of me suspects that killing the innkeeper would have made the process of getting into the basement easier, but that seemed just cruel, so I didn’t do that.

The mission dragged on a little longer than I would have liked, but I finally killed my target with a knife in the back and got out of there, then hoofed it back to the nearest fence to sell an extraordinary amount of stolen stuff along with paying off my bounty. That was enough to get me in good with the Brotherhood itself, which got me a snazzy new costume (that can be worn all at once or not at all, no mixing-and-matching such cosmetics here) and a nice new axe.

I also picked up the introductory Thieves’ Guild quest completely by accident while selling stolen goods and lying low, which was kind of cool. It felt nicely woven together and organic.

Rather than immediately continuing on the Dark Brotherhood story, I took on the daily offering from the local bounty board, which sent me into a dungeon to kill a monster and collect some ledgers. It just so happened that there was a cat there also looking for help in dispatching someone within the dungeon, so that was two objectives for the price of one. Being able to sneak and stealth-kill a few guards here was a notable advantage; it didn’t winnow the opposition to nothing, but it did give me plenty of opportunity to thin out larger groups.

In terms of being better than the main storyline, I’d have to say that the Dark Brotherhood story thus far has not really grabbed me; it’s an order of assassins that seems to exist mostly because there has to be an order of assassins, and I’ve already mentioned the absurdity of the recruitment quest. It still lacks much in the way of stakes, too, and while I chose not to kill the innkeeper, that was really more about my own comfort than any sort of rippling consequence or caring about her as a character.

Still, the combat remains pretty darn fun, and I do like – very much so – that the game makes a good point of stealth as a thing rather than a mechanic for one or two classes. Stealth is just a reasonable approach sometimes, and being able to kill from the shadows is a good way of cutting down on enemies who can fight back. You can bypass it if you want, yet it makes perfect sense if you stay in with it.

Of course, I could continue on with the Dark Brotherhood… but then, that Thieves Guild story is pulling me, isn’t it? And there are other DLC bits out in the world, too. So perhaps it’s time for a poll once more? Yes, of course it is because that’s how this column goes.

Also, as I subscribed for the first month (as I mentioned, this is how the structure of this column goes), I do have a pile of Crowns sitting about. Perhaps I should use that for something?

As with previous weeks, the polls will remain open until noon EST on Friday, December 9th, so get your votes in early if you want to be counted. Until then, I’ll be trying to make up for my slightly lighter time this week with a bit more playing of dailies and random murder. Get those levels, Ceilarene.