Azeroth Needs Gods

Lately as you all know I have been playing an excessive amount of The Elder Scrolls Online, and in doing so it has made me realize one of the things that has always bugged me about World of Warcraft and more importantly the cosmology of Azeroth. There are not actual gods. There are beings that they place in the same position as gods but those largely serve the role of large monsters that we will eventually take down in a raid. This morning I am going to try and explain the difference from my perspective, or at least my particular point of view.

Over my years on this planet there have been a number of games that I have played with baked in pantheons of worship. Likely the first of these was when I got my hands on a copy of Deities and Demigods it seemed both really cool and also extremely natural. I had been studying mythology and the fact that I was also catholic… which sort of has its own pantheon of saints… it all made sense in my tiny brain. I personally was super engaged with the Norse mythology and my deity of choice has almost always been Tyr the Even-Handed. In part because it was really fucking cool that he sacrificed his arm in order to bind Fenrir and in essence stop Ragnarok from happening. It is only as an adult that I tend to feel more for Fenrir in this scenario.

The key characteristic of the gods in a good RPG is that they don’t actually have the ability to directly influence the mortal plane. They can occasionally manifest themselves in the form of an avatar, but for the most part they wage a proxy war for control of territory and the hearts and minds of people. As such various cults spring up that worship a specific deity and generally speaking the only difference between these and the accepted religion of a people is whether or not it actually aligns to their collective morals. As I moved into online games, I found Norrath to be a very believable and vibrant setting in part because it had so many deities vying for power over the world.

In Norrath we had a core pantheon of gods with various alignments and realms of influence:

  • Good Aligned
    • Mithaniel Marr
    • Quellious
    • Rodcent Nife
    • Tunare
  • Neutral
    • Brell Serilis
    • Bristlebane
    • Karana
    • Solusek Ro
    • The Tribunal
  • Evil Aligned
    • Bertoxxulous
    • Cazic-Thule
    • Innoruuk
    • Rallos Zek
    • Anashti Sul

In addition to these there were a whole slew of other minor deities and demigods and general forces of nature that were in various states of activity an influence on the mortal plane. So many of the best storylines in Everquest involve the gods working against each other and attempting to exert influence on one part of the world or group of people. This also ends up creating interesting dualities as different races within the world view the same god in vastly different ways. Brell Serilis for example is the creator of the Dwarves and the Gnomes, but also is referred by the Goblins of the Runny Eye clan as their deity as well along with all of the neutral earthen elemental forces. The gods also work in concert with others for example Cazic-Thule, Ralos Zek and Innoruuk have an unsteady alliance because they all collectively hate Mithaniel and Erollisi Marr and actively seek to do harm to them through their followers.

Elder Scrolls similarly has an extremely rich pantheon of gods and demigods that vie to influence Mundus aka the physical world. In later games this coalesces around an imperially mandated pantheon of the nine divines but there are so many other pantheons present and active in the world. Not the least of these are the Daedric Princes which have a wildly varying number of approaches to their worshipers and motivations. Ultimately what separates a Divine and a Daedra seems to largely be the favor of the government as many of the Daedra themselves took up roles in older Pantheons within the races of Nirn.

Similar to Everquest a large number of the questlines that you find yourself on involve one or more “Gods” moving against each other or trying to exert their influence in a specific sphere of power. The core storyline of the base game of Elder Scrolls Online centers around a plot by Molag Bal the Daedric Prince of Domination and Enslavement attempting to merge his realm of Coldharbour with Tamriel effectively giving him power over both. Meridia another Daedra who is associated with the energies of living beings is aligned against Molag Bal and often times offers assistance to the players in order to fight back against this aggression.

Other deities like Nocturnal are closely tied with specific organizations within Nirn, more specifically the Nightingales are her sworn servants but there has often been a rumored connection between her and the Night Mother revered by the members of the Dark Brotherhood. The keys to both Everquest and Elder Scrolls and honestly Dungeons and Dragons before it is that the gods are alive and well and actively trying to influence the populace. I contend that there doesn’t really seem to be an equivalent of this sort of interaction happening within World of Warcraft.

Roughly five years ago from the time of writing this, Blizzard released a book called World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1 that attempted to take the wildly disparate lore of the World of Warcraft and condense it into a unified world view. This was effectively the equivalent of an ecumenical council and attempted to sift through the various lore and discard the bits that didn’t quite fit while modifying some in order to fit into this neat cosmology. I was fully in support of this notion because Warcraft lore was a complete mess. However what came out of this as well was the fact that this larger world view didn’t have room for dieties really.

In the early days of Warcraft however I thought there was effectively a pantheon of good deities aligned against a pantheon of bad deities. The good represented by the Titans and the bad represented by the Old Gods and this nebulous concept we kept hearing known as the Void Lords. The longer the game has run however it is very clear that the Titans are effectively just a different sort of race of beings birthed out of the core of a world and not really immortal gods. Similarly the things that keep being referred to as “Old Gods” are just sort of this race of elder beings that defy logic and reason but also can absolutely be killed as we have done this to several of them.

The closest thing that we really have to a proper pantheon of deities comes in the form of the Loa that the Trolls worship. However apart from Bwonsamdi and Hakkar we really don’t see a lot of interaction between these individuals and the races of Azeroth apart from the Trolls consistently figuring out ways to “eat” their gods and drain their power. As a result these are also very mortal beings that maybe exist in a different manner but cannot really be thought of eternal forces quite in the same way as a Quellious or a Dibella. The absence of this clear pantheon of power aligned with and against the players has always ended up making the world of Azeroth feel every so slightly hollow. There was always something missing that I never could quite put my finger on until I started to think about it more recently.

Up until this point I could still sort of lean on the Wild Gods of Azeroth as being this eternal force that impacts the world. However Shadowlands even closed the loop there and taught us that what we think of as the Wild Gods are just beings with a different life cycle where they travel to Azeroth, live a cycle there and then return to the shadowlands to regenerate before manifesting again. This makes me not really consider them to be a true pantheon of gods either. There is this new Pantheon of death that we have been introduced to, but they also are very much killable which again makes me question if they represent gods either.

I think the truth is more that World of Warcraft exists largely to create powerful figures and then allow the players to kill those powerful figures. A major force cannot exist for very long without it eventually turning into a raid encounter. Maybe this comes from early frustrations of the folks who shaped the raid content of World of Warcraft being long time Everquest raiders and travelling to the seats of those gods powers… and only ever killing an Avatar and never being able to actually slay the god themselves. I think the storytelling potential of a game is weaker however if you don’t have all powerful beings with their own motivations pulling the strings of “mere-mortals”. World of Warcraft plays at this, but in every case those forces eventually end up on the chopping block as the players end those threats permanently.

I think I like the concept of having endless beings that we can momentarily defeat, but never quite go away and never forget the actions we have taken against them in the past. Everquest has managed to churn out so many expansions in part because they keep relying upon familiar enemies to invent new schemes to take over the mortal plane of existence. Instead World of Warcraft feels more akin to Dragon Ball Z or Bleach where they keep having to invent more extreme versions of cardboard cutout villains for us to eventually knock down in the end. The end result is also a lot of retroactive changes to storylines as new forces and shoehorned into existing events.

That neat cosmology chart that I posted earlier from World of Warcraft Chronicles has already been mostly nullified by the expansion we are going through in Shadowlands. Without a reoccurring cast of Gods, new and more extreme versions of evil need to be invented in order for us to keep prevailing over them.

Bad News Day

Goodbye Everquest Next

Landmark_MeCasa

Yesterday the MMORPG industry received a couple of really bad bits of news.  Firstly Daybreak Games has officially announced that Everquest Next is no more, and that they would be rushing Landmark into “launched” status this spring.  Firstly it really should not come as any surprise that this is happening because in truth we have not had any substantive news about “Next” since SOE Live 2014.  So when Storybricks parted company in February 2015 and SOE was sold to the holding company that renamed it to Daybreak… I fully expected we would never see anything further from Next. Storybricks was going to be the guts of this new approach at how to create an MMO and allow it o almost center around procedural interactions with he various factions and NPCs in the game.  With that core gone… I could not reason how the game would function, and deliver even half of the lofty promises it had made.  The other huge concern was the fact that Daybreak now seemed like a company desperately trying to survive under the yolk of evil overlords.  When a company known for grooming technology for sale purchases a game company…  it seems like creative freedom and the broad daydreaming that got SOE where it is today would be the firs thing to go.

The concerns I have is that it feels like Landmark is getting foisted upon us, in an unfinished state.  It had been a couple of years since I last played the game and I popped in last night to see just how different it is.  In truth it still feels like the prototype game that it has always felt like.  I roamed around and collected items and then logged back out because I wasn’t really drawn to stay. The thing I love about Landmark is the community, and I am just hoping that through all of this transition they can manage to keep that intact.  The problem I have with Landmark is that it is a fun sandbox that lets you build really interesting structures…. but I still wouldn’t really call it a game but instead more of a toybox.  Sure you have the trappings of combat now, but while wandering around in the zone the game dumped me in…. there was actually nothing to fight.  Maybe I need to dig down to find that, but the only thing I actually encountered that was potentially damaging were some exploding shrooms.  I am hoping that in the few months left before the official launch that they can somehow pull together some of the ideas from Next and make Landmark a proper game experience.

Wildstar Falters

WildStar64 2015-08-11 21-56-11-60

The other concerning news from yesterday is that roughly sixty employees were laid off in a “restructuring” within Carbine.  This has honestly been a topic among some of my friends for awhile now, but we were dreading some form of action to be taken.  Wildstar has not been performing amazingly well… in fact they are performing far worse right now than with City of Heroes was shut down by NC Soft.  As a company goes they are notoriously brutal when it comes to closing titles that they deem are not operating as well as they expected.  Wildstar is a significantly better game today than it was at launch, and the Free to Play conversion was more than just a payment model change, but an entire reworking and re-tuning of some of the game concepts.  The game felt fresh and new and was exciting…  for a period of time.  The problem is, that Wildstar is just not my game.  I have good friends who love it above all others, and for them it hurts a lot to see the company struggling.  Every now and then there is just a game that does not for whatever reason “click”, and that was this game for me.  On paper it sounds and looks like everything I could have wanted in a game, and I still think it has one of the best implementations of player housing I have ever seen.  Unfortunately I just don’t ever have the desire to play it, and always seemed to prioritize playing something else over it.

The scariest statement about the whole press release is this line. “These cuts are directly tied to WildStar’s evolution from a product in development to a live title“.  That right there seems to be signalling the end of active development on Wildstar and shifting the title into maintenance mode.  An MMORPG cannot thrive without fresh dose of new content, and while you can do things like add new quests and script events without a lot of active development….  you can’t do things like roll out new zones and raids.  Admittedly the game is getting fresh content with the release of Arcterra, and hopefully this will not effect that.  The other worrying statement is that apparently there were statements floating around that the employees were told to expect more layoffs in the future.  So much happens when layoffs are announced, and there is an internet dog piling of bad blood towards a game.  I have nothing but love for Wildstar and its community and I want it to weather this storm and somehow bounce back stronger.  I am clinging to hope because I know a lot of people who really need this game to succeed and thrive.  All of that said… the cynic an realist in me still keeps saying that this is not going to end well.

 

 

Doubling Down

Still Frustrated

EQ2_000006 Yesterday I broke my self appointed rules and made two posts because I felt the news warranted it.  I said my peace but the problem is… I am still frustrated this morning.  At the time of posting yesterdays blog piece I really only knew about a few of the people who were let go.  As last night wound its way onwards, more names trickled out and at this point I am absolutely shocked by the scope.  While I am not sure about the numbers, it feels like roughly half of the folks I was aware of over there were let go.  Granted the actual numbers could be anywhere, but I am basing it simply on the faces that have shown up on twitter saying they were no longer Daybreak employees, versus the ones that have said they still are.  In any case this will be a massive blow to Everquest, Everquest II, Everquest Landmark and whether or not we will ever actually get Everquest Next.  For awhile on Aggrochat we have joked about Next being vaporware, and that we would only ever get Landmark…  but now I am starting to really wonder if that is closer to the truth.

Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first footsteps into the MMO world.  Similarly I am drawn to Everquest II in ways that I cannot quite understand, and while I go for large swaths of time without playing, I often return to it was the gaming equivalent of “comfort food”.  It is this strange mix of a world that I am absolutely in love with, and a combat system that I hate beyond words.  If I had to create a list of “favorite games that I am not playing” I would put Everquest II at the top of that list…  so I guess I ultimately am part of the problem.  I love this world but I am not inhabiting it on a nightly basis, and as such not giving it money to grow.  I’ve bought into Landmark and H1Z1 but I am not really playing those either.  I remember feeling the same way when City of Heroes closed its doors, that I had so many fond memories… but that I had also ultimately moved past that game as well.  I guess we want the things we once loved and enjoyed to stay protected in a bubble forever, never to change…  but when we move on are we not also ultimately to blame?

Doubling Down

Gw2 2015-02-05 19-08-06-25 Before the events of yesterday I had a topic kicking around in my head about the worlds that we play.  I am not sure how the events of yesterday feed into the narrative, but I am going with it in any case.  I feel as though the era of the “new mmorpg” is all but over.  There will of course be new games that identify with the “mmo” ideals, but they won’t be quite the same as the worlds we have had had in the past.  I feel like we are going to see a lot more games like Destiny, that is “mmo-lite” or another genre with mmo features.  I feel like the worlds that were crafted during the golden age of massively multiplayer online role-playing game launches, are the worlds we will have to live with for better or worse.  When Blizzard cancelled Project Titan, we can look at that in so many different ways.  We could say that it was a sign that MMOs were dying, and that they no longer believed in the genre.  We could however take that as a sign that they believed that the worlds we had already were worth saving.

So many of the games that we love are not broken toys, at least not yet.  Each of them if given the devotion and the development resources could be transformed into a truly magical place.  I am looking at the transformation of Final Fantasy XIV from 1.0 awkwardness to 2.0 and beyond splendor as proof that a game can change for the better.  I’ve played each of the major MMOs for some length of time, and have experienced that each have exactly the same problem.  How do they keep the player engaged on a daily basis, rather than in bursts of activity each time new content is released?  I feel the problem is that games right now are mired in the construct of expansion releases, pooling up major features until they can sell another box of the game.  This means the best features tend to either get bottled up for years time, or never actually make it into the game at all.

The episodic construct is a bit better, but you have to be careful that you are not adding “expiring” content into your game, making players feel rushed to somehow grind through it all before the next patch hits.  The problem I had with the Living Story in Guild Wars 2 was that when I fell behind, I didn’t feel like there was a point to actually try and catch up… since I had missed so much already.  The fact that the content was expiring made it feel less “real” to me… that they weren’t permanently improving the game, but instead running a series of limited time events.  I feel like the shift needs to be moved away from both of these constructs and instead the focus placed on fleshing out the world.  Do you know how frustrating it is to me in World of Warcraft that there are five portals below Wyrmrest Temple but only two of them go anywhere?  Each world we play is littered with these forgotten expansion ideas, and all I really want is for a game world to quit teasing us and start living up to its full potential.  Now is the time for these companies to double down on the content they have, fix the issues with their game systems… and try and make their games worth our copious time and devotion.

A Simple Night

ffxiv 2015-02-11 19-54-39-33 Because of the news yesterday, and because of other events leading me to question myself and my connection to other people… I was not in the best of places emotionally last night when I got home.  I have to say my mood was improved by hanging out with my extremely awesome free company in Final Fantasy XIV.  For a few nights I had promised to help my friend Solaria work on knocking out some stuff, since she was fairly new to 50 and in doing so also spent a good deal of time running dungeons with Thalen and Asha.  I have not had a night where we tore through multiple dungeons in a night, and I have to say it was good for the soul.  Granted I felt a bit wobbly, since I have not really tanked much of anything other than our raids, and dungeon tanking ends up so drastically different.  That said we managed to unlock a few dungeons for both Thalen and Solaria, and in the process get some Tomestones of Soldiery and Poetics.

I’ve missed logging in, getting pulled into a group and then spending the rest of the night tromping through dungeons.  It is like connecting with my most basic instincts of trying to make sure everything in the dungeon hates me equally.  I really enjoy the pace of Final Fantasy XIV, and its particular brand of tanking.  The Warrior just “feels” right, and I am hoping I will be equally at home with the Dark Knight.  If nothing else I will always have the Warrior to fall back on if the Dark Knight ends up not being the class I have wanted all along.  I know Thalen has several more dungeons yet to unlock to qualify for high level roulette, so I am going to try and force myself to build groups more often.  I get stuck in my own little world, and spend most of my time soloing… but I know when I do group content I feel so much better at the end of the night.  While last night did not cure me completely… it did make me feel significantly better.

Night Falls

Unfortunate Bonus Round

This is going to be a bit of an oddity for me, I am breaking my normal one post per day rule.  I feel like the gravity of the situation warrants it, because right now I am feeling so many different emotions at the same time.  By now most of you will have heard the news that I believe first broke over on the newly erected Massively OP website.  Today Daybreak Games, formerly Sony Online Entertainment has chosen to make some sweeping cuts to staff.  Among the individuals caught in this madness were none other than Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson and and Linda “Brasse” Carlson.  I cannot fathom a chain of consequences that would lead to this happening, but I will get into that later.  For me and many others these two individuals along with Scott Hartsman before he left to join Trion…  were the face of the Everquest franchise.  They were the spirit of the game, and the lifeblood that kept the player base constantly engaged, because never once did you question their sincerity or devotion to making the game world awesome.

Last Tuesday when the news broke that SOE was to be no more, and they would be taking up the new name of Daybreak Game Studio I tried to keep things in stride.  After all I had gotten used to Everquest transitioning from Verant to being called Sony Online Entertainment hadn’t I?  When I found out they had been purchased by what seemed to be a cold and faceless financial holdings company, I tried to keep a positive tone in that it seemed that they were holding most of the companies rather than chopping them up into pieces.  I held in the back of my mind the possibility that the future was in fact going to be positive, that maybe out from under Sony they could reach previously locked off markets like the Xbox One.  After all this same company owned both Rhapsody and Fiverr, surely they knew what they were doing right?

Night Falls

Today it seems that my worst fears have been realized, and that things really can’t stay the same.  As online gamers we get lost in the worlds created by the games that we love to play.  Part of that world are the names and faces of the individuals who act as the conduit between our normal mundane lives, and the magical realms we spent our free time in.  At least in a small part they act as civil servants to the virtual cities we inhabit.  As we watch public presentations and read patch notes and press releases, it is amazing just how quickly we can rattle off the names of the key players that are relaying the information to us.  Even though we may never know them, we develop an almost personal relationship as they take the stage to give us tidbits of information about the future state of “our” game.

The problem is…  we get extremely close to these personalities, so that when one leaves either by their own hand, or by circumstances the shock waves reverberate through the community.  Today a mighty shock wave happened, and I am still not quite sure how to talk about it with any intelligence.  For many years, Brasse has been the public face of the Everquest community team, and Smokejumper the face of the future of that franchise.  It was impossible to watch either of them and not see just how excited they were to be representing this game that they too loved.  I find it exceptionally hard to try and imagine a future that does not involve them, and I have to say a lot of my faith that there will even be an Everquest going forward is more than a little tarnished.

The Survivors

This has been the month of senseless corporate action.  First with AOL killing off their blogs, and now the selling of of Sony Online Entertainment.  I am deeply concerned about the future of these games, in part because the gravitas of Sony…  allowed for SOE to be a little “funky”.  They devoted time to building a lot of unique and quirky features that we were not likely to see come out of any other company.  Do you think that any other company would have given us something truly strange like SOEmote?  Sure I never used it, but I thought the tech was extremely cool especially for the roleplaying community.  The tools that I did love, like the robust housing system and the dungeon builder…  likely would not have come to fruition in a company not quite so willing to chase rabbit trails.

All of this said… I think it is important to also think about the people who were left behind.  They are reeling from the layoffs, and seeing their friends gone.  Having been through more than one layoff, it completely changes the feel of the office.  Every action becomes questioned, and every motive suspicious, making it almost impossible to focus on doing the excellent job that the “citizens” are expecting you to do.  It is easy to say you are done with the Everquest franchise, because of these rather rash actions…  but in truth you are just going to punish the people who are still there, still trying to create the game worlds you love.  Hopefully we can all take a deep breath, grieve the loss, and try and figure out how to move on without being bitter.  I really hope this next week gives us some really good news, because this month so far has turned out to be a fairly tragic one.