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.