It depends. People have to realize that there's only so much you can do in a open world RPG (which MMOs basically are). There's fighting, finding, fetching and talking. If you have a more singular storyline then you can do some more linear pathing quests (SWTOR, Secret World and Guild Wars 1 & 2 have this).
An outdated rendition of this basic MMO/open world quest is approaching a NPC with a ! and the NPC asks you to kill ten Mugwugs and 15 Death Bunnies. There's some small excuse for why you're doing it, but the contextualizing is poor and the approach simple. The current WoW version of this is having some story NPC tell you a tale and asking you to bring his letter to some battllemaster, and you go to the battlemaster and fight 10 goblins along the way, and then the battlemaster asks you to get his axe so they he may break a seal on a door, and you go after the axe and there's ten or so Nagas along the way, and then a Naga drops a quest item and you bring back the axe and the quest item, and you get rewarded for all that and killing the ten nagas and ten ninja monkeys.
So you're going to have combat, and you're going to have a lot of things to fight in the world because you're sharing the world with a lot of people, and you're going to run into NPCs and maybe have to go find NPCs and gather things for them or do odd tasks to help out the world. It's really how the game contextualizes and presents these multiple activities that matters.
From what I hear, I don't think ESO is going try to present things in a busted, old way and instead look for a more story-driven more modern way of having you kill things other than some NPC asking you to kill ten crabs. They were going to try the Guild Wars 2 way of doing things, but bailed on it. (It's actually really hard to go full dynamic system like GW2 does.) Like Defiance and Rift, it may be a mixing of the two systems. Will you be able to solve a quest in different ways? Perhaps. I think they talked of that here and there. I seriously doubt you will have a quest text on your screen saying kill ten crabs because Timmy hates crabs.
