MMOs have come a long, long way, and we have WoW to thank for bringing questing back to the forefront of advancement. The Elder Scrolls fits with that very well too, and the progression in the early single player games is (I think) mirrored about as well as it can be in a MMO. But what does it take for that experience to be particularly good these days? Players are getting that, "I've done this routine before..." feeling; especially those who cut their MMO baby teeth on WoW.
It takes something totally new; the kind of thing that comes along rarely. I agree that innovation in the early game is something needed now in MMOs. I don't agree that ESO doesn't innovate in general, as their class and role system is the first I've seen to bring freedom to Trinity by making it cartesian. Axis 1: the familiar heal, tank, DPS. Axis 2: melee, magic, stealth. I do agree that there is no innovation in the early game, aside from the way that the story is told.
Let's talk about innovation now. It means doing something new. Change. Well, change means risk. Change everything, people hate it. Change nothing, people hate it. It's just a symptom of WoW syndrome: too much like WoW, "Great another WoW clone," too little like WoW and people complain because it's not what they're used to. Now, back up through these pages and check other sources of opinion too. What they have done differently, they've taken risk with. And predictably, as many people seemingly hate it as love it. So, RvR, phasing, Cartesian Trinity class building... How many risks should one game take?
The quest mechanic of WoW is not something I would praise. I thought it was a step down. There is perhaps one quest sprinkled in with 100 tasks. It also made the game into a path based experience. Sure, EQ had that too (in maximizing your exp gains), but that was more of an alt thing (or later on in EQs lifecycle when things were mapped out). It was a large world, with lots of stuff to do, but you had to look for it. In EQ I remember people studying the lore of the items to get hints on possible quest lines. WoW removed all that with a !. I am strongly opposed to the sentiment that easier, faster or more accessible automatically means better.
I'd say that The Secret World is the benchmark MMOs should follow in terms of quests. It is head and shoulders above anything else on the market when it comes to that. Should note that my own definition of quests is lore driven content. Collecting items with no story, or a very poorly written reason to do something, is not a quest. It is a text based exp gain you get after killing X number of mobs. It is a task. WoW nailed that kind of progression. A zone layout with hubs that you naturally follow because you rarely kill much more than the quests tell you to, so you end up with close to exactly the amount of "quests" you need to go to the next zone +-1 or 2 levels. Last "quest" is usually to go to the next level appropriate zone to start a new hub. Sadly this seems to be the standard formula now.
Biggest difference between EQ and mmos following it though has been the community. EQ didn't try to do it, it was a fluke. It naturally formed due to the nature of the game. Inter connectivity between the classes was a must, and so you had to talk to people. You had to group. Death mechanic forced you to learn your class, or else you would have difficulty getting groups since mistakes you made could impact others as well. This is something every mmo since then has tried to go away from, making it into "your" experience, which is far from the point of a MMO in my opinion. Scripted experiences that make "you/everyone" the hero is best left for single player games.
Seems the focus on "innovation" I see in mmos are more and more ways to do just that, make the games into "your" experience. You are the hero, with a long initial questline identifying you as such (never mind that everyone else you see is one too). New features that make grouping easier (read: enable tools to let you join and leave groups without uttering a word to anyone). Everything to make it so that interaction with others are kept to a minimum. Instancing/phasing, etc, are all just tools to let you experience your content at your leisure. MMOs are hardly MMOs anymore and the worlds seem smaller because of it.
Or as I have said before, EQ was a MMOrpg, everything since then has been more on the mmoRPG side. Which is why so many fail I think. It is nearly impossible for single player games to compete with MMOs, but when MMOs turn into single player game experiences the competition is huge and rarely can a MMO deliver scripted content to match a single player game. The Secret World coming closest in terms of their quests as the detail and lore in them were genuinely interesting. In the end of EQ, it was the guild and the people I knew that kept me subbed, not the gameplay. There has been lots of good things happening to MMOs since EQ, making them better "games", but seems an equal amount has been lost, especially when it comes to forming an actual community in the game which is something MMOs should have.
Simplest fixes I can think of for that is to bring back the risk in risk vs reward and let the community form around it and bring back the interconnection between classes in terms of resurrections, summons, corpse finds, travel, buffs, etc. At this point, I'd say innovation would be to require interaction with someone else within the first 10 levels. That seems unheard of in the MMOs of late, including ESO.