Good Morning Friends. This weekend you did not get an episode of AggroChat because I was effectively knocked the hell out at the time we would have recorded. On Wednesday of last week I got my second shot of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination and as such I am super happy to be on the downward curve towards at least partial immunity. The first shot was pretty chill and the only real impact is that my arm hurt for a day and a half… but like weirdly it hurt to type sort of every inch of my arm hurt kind of pain. With dose two… my arm hurt almost immediately and then when that faded this weird generic “sick” feeling started to enter in its place. Thursday and Friday were rough and if I didn’t have some pretty important meetings and if I were not remote… I would have absolutely taken sick days.
Saturday I still felt completely awful and it is hard to explain what that feeling is. So imagine you have the flu and that general achy horrible feeling that you have when you have the flu. Then take away all of the symptoms other than that. Because I didn’t have much in the way of symptoms other than this big generic “I feel awful” sort of feeling. I also couldn’t seem to make it through the evening without falling asleep super early. Like I normally get around six hours of sleep and during this little episode I have been getting eleven to twelve hours of sleep. Yesterday I started feeling like myself again so effectively that was somewhere in the neighborhood of three days of awful before the world righted itself.
During this time period I watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier and live tweeted my reaction to the Synder Cut with apparently Tweetdeck auto populating the wrong hashtag. Apart from that and sleeping… I played an awful lot of Elder Scrolls Online and managed to make my way through the Summserset expansion content. Like on initial survey this region is not really my jam. I am not a fan of High Elves and their machinations, but the longer I have spent here the more its natural beauty has grown on me. I mean I guess I understand why they are so highfalutin when your entire world looks like manicured. It would make it exceptionally hard to appreciate the beauty of someplace like Stonefalls.
The thing that I really want to talk about this morning however is Elder Scrolls and the writing behind the numerous side characters that you interact with over the course of the content. Like I have mentioned before how damned good their character writing is when you can become attached to a character after what is effectively a handful of paragraphs of text. What is even more amazing however is how much you will remember that character in the long run. Elder Scrolls has this wonderful history of resurrecting characters that you met during a side mission and then bringing them back into modern context much later.
The thing is… each and every time I remember this character and the adventures that I have been on with them in the past… even though in my case with Summerset and one of the characters some seven real world years has passed since I last encountered them. Often times I don’t necessarily remember the name but as soon as I encounter the character for the first time my brain is like “Oh Shit! It is the Dude from the Place!”. So not only do they make us care about these characters for the course of thirty minutes of quest interaction… they manage to make us care on a level can can be summoned up to add richness to future content.
Sure there are characters like Razum-Dar that at this point we have been on enough adventures with that we should probably reasonably name a child after them. But for ever Raz there are hundreds of smaller characters in the background of each and every mission that leave a similar impression on our brains as we play through the content. Then the Elder Scrolls team has this way of summoning forth these past voices in ways that seem natural and happenstance… and also create this living feel to the world. Characters aren’t just locked within that specific vignette that we first encountered them. They instead have their own lives that often times cause them to cross our path again.
Summerset is the conclusion of a story arc that begin with Vvardenfell and continued through Clockwork City. The multi tiered narrative was new for me and reminded me of some of the things that they managed to weave into the main story for each of the factional areas. This makes me really look forward to the new dragon based content arc because if my understanding is correct it is going to offer a lot of the same story beats spread across multiple content blocks. For now however I am doing another one off, or at least what I think is a one off in the form of Murkmire. I love Argonians and I am super down to be hanging out in their ancestral lands… even if it is a fairly bog standard swamp…. pun intended.
If you have never played the Elder Scrolls Online you should really give it a chance. It is quite possibly one of the best narrative experiences in MMORPGs. I am pushing forward in a hopes of getting caught up on at least one character before the major content drop in June, but even then there is so much content between me and that goal that I am not sure it is humanly possible. I don’t want to rush the content and want to instead spend time wandering around and exploring everything. I doubt I came close to 100%ing Summerset but I probably managed to see at least 90% of the content before moving on. At some point I should probably revisit all of the zones that I never quite completed and see about finishing them off as well.