Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Azeroth Needs Gods

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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.

Life Without the Auction House

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Morning Friends! If you have been reading this blog you will know that I am on somewhat of an Elder Scrolls Online kick right now. This tends to be a thing I go through where I latch onto a game and obsess over it for a few weeks/months and then get it out of my system and move on to other things. I would love for Elder Scrolls Online to be more of a permanent addition to the roster but I also know my personal faults which sorta stacks the deck against that happening. This morning I am going to talk about one of the weirder quirks with the game, the lack of a centralized Auction House. I am by no means an expert in this topic and as a result take pretty much all of my advice with a grain of salt. Traditionally speaking I am not the sort of person that plays the auction house in these sorts of games.

One of the things that I am getting used to slowly is logging in and seeing messages like this sitting in my mail box telling me that I sold something. This morning I am going to do my best to explain how selling items with other players works in Elder Scrolls Online given that I just stated that there is no auction house. I am still very much figuring all of this out myself and I am certain that somewhere in this post I am going to make factual errors just due to lack of experience with the system. What I do know however is that yesterday alone I made around 150,000 gold in sales and I am starting to get a little better at figuring out what to price things.

So when I say there is no such thing as an Auction House, what I mean by that is there is no vendor in the world that serves as a universal gateway to buying or selling merchandise. What exists instead is a series of Guild Stores. If you go to the banker one of the many options will be to access the Guild Store, which by default allows you to buy and sell items from members of your guild. This in itself is not super useful unless you are in a giant guild exclusively populated with traders. What most folks actually want is the ability to buy and sell items from effectively all of the other players playing the game. Here is where we start to get more complicated with the system, but ultimately it is one that I dig.

Scattered throughout the world are a number of vendors physically located in specific cities that are flagged as “Guild Traders”. Since I spent so much of my time in Shornhelm, these are a couple of the guild traders available there and you can see the guild that owns the vendor beside the trader title. Each week guilds throughout the game bid on specific traders in specific locations, and if they win that trader exposes their guild store to anyone who physically walks up to that location and attempt to buy an item. These traders are all clumped together somewhere in the city, and there are absolutely better locations than others. Mournhold for example tends to be a pretty hot location given that its trader stalls are all clumped around the Wayshrine for the city. Shornhelm where I am taking a photo tends to be one of the lower rent areas given that you have to exit town quite a distance away from the Wayshrine before you encounter the traders.

Given that players can be a member of up to five guilds at once, this has lead to the creation of trade guilds that act as cartels and make sure that they have a guild trader vendor each and every week. The above is a screenshot from the guild recruitment tool in game and just a handful of guilds listed under trading guilds that actively have a guild trader. Many of these guilds have trade requirements in that you need to make a certain dollar amount of sales every single week in order to guarantee your slot. However as a result they also tend to be the guilds that are furiously bidding on the highest traffic areas of the game. Many have a way of buying your way into the guild as well through buying weekly raffle tickets, which is a system that I have yet to really sort out.

I personally was looking for something a little bit more chill and ended up going with the Pilfering Peddlers which currently has a guild trader in Solitude. The challenge with being a more low key guild is that last week they failed to secure a bid on a trader meaning that we were effectively locked out of public sales during that time period. Right now I am mostly using it as a way of selling anything that I happen to get out in the world that has any value. Generally speaking I don’t sell anything that is less than 2000 gold on the trader, with the exception being patterns which are all pretty cheap but also sell super fast. The benefit of this system is that it is extremely cheap to list an item on the guild trader and since the default time period is 30 days you can mostly just set it and forget it.

The question obviously then is… how do I know if something is worth money on the guild trader? I lean heavily on an addon called Tamriel Trade Centre, that I spoke about the other day. Essentially it is a combination of a search website, an in game addon and a TSR that runs in your system tray and is constantly updating a list of prices in the background as well as announcing anything that you are selling. I combined a series of items that I have up for sale currently and you can see towards the bottom you will see a series of values in Avg/Min/Max format. Right now that is mostly what I am working off of because it tells me what items have been listed for on traders. Over time I am getting better at guessing what a reasonable amount because the first items I posted sold almost instantly telling me I had put them up for far too little.

My items are hosted on a Guild Trader located at Solitude in Western Skyrim, and anyone who happens to be wandering along can go up to that vendor and buy things directly from them. When this happens the item is delivered to the person via in game mail and then I get a chunk of gold delivered to me in my inbox minus the guild trader cut. What is more likely however is that someone will have gone out to the Tamriel Trade Centre website and done a search on one of the items I was listing and then purposefully ported to that city and bought the specific item they were looking for. The above is an example of a search that includes one of the items I am selling.

Right now I am the most expensive vendor because I sorta took a chance on this item specifically and am testing the waters. Were I a smart trader I would pop around to the cities where folks are selling something similar cheaper and relist those as well. In each listing shown above it indicates the player selling the item, where the trader is physically located at, the guild in question, the price and how long ago the item was last seen. Right now the TTC website is only showing you things that someone has physically witnessed, but given how prevalent the addon is and how active trading is in Elder Scrolls Online it ends up being a pretty reasonable resource.

Tamriel Trade Centre relies not only upon you installing the addon but also running the thin client that hangs out in your system tray. I opened mine and it has all of the things that I currently have listed and my internal database of items last synchronized at 6:23 am which is around when I started writing this blog post. This TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident process) hangs out and is essentially the glue that makes the whole process work. This is ultimately how WoWhead also worked back in the day in that you would install the WoWHead addon and then have a piece of software that was ferrying any information you collected during your WoW Play Session back to the website. There is a mutual benefit here in that I get the pricing information I need to be able to confidently place things on the Guild Trader and they get the benefit of effectively being the centralized auction house search engine that the game is missing.

At this point you are probably saying… “But Bel isn’t this just needlessly arcane?” and on some level yes. On another level however I really appreciate this particular brand of nonsense. Using World of Warcraft is the equivalent of electronic trading in the stock market. The person with the best tools and is capable of executing the fastest trades wins. Elder Scrolls Online is more like a Flea Market where there is absolutely money to be made in flipping items, but it requires effort to root around through the dross, physically go to a location in the world, make the purchase and then post the item for an updated price on your own guild trader. Earlier I said I should go snap up the cheaper version of an item, but in doing so that requires time and effort on my part to physically drop down into a city, find that particular trader and make a purchase.

The end result for me personally is the right amount of friction both on selling of items but also on buying of items. Do I go out into the world and farm an item or do I purchase it off a guild trader knowing there is a bit of friction in that interaction as well? Right now I am turning my proclivity for being a murder hobo and collecting loot into profit, given that items retain value in this game far more than any other game that I have played in the past. Some of the items that I have been selling have been in the game since launch and are still viable gearing options. There is so much content in the game and so many different item sets that no one can really corner the market on a specific type of item. The end result just works and the player based economy in Elder Scrolls Online seems to be thriving as a result, with the only barrier of entry being joining one of the hundreds of trade guilds.

A Cog in the Machine

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Good Morning Friends! I have been playing an excessive amount of Elder Scrolls Online and it appears that others have as well. This is pretty much a familiar site that goes away quickly, but it is still very much there almost every time I log into the game. To me that is the sign of a healthy interest in what is going on, which makes sense given that we just had a dungeon content drop and have a major expansion story drop in June. On top of that a number of my friends have been poking their head back into the game and House Stalwart ESO edition is once again relatively hopping with a blend of old timers and brand new folks as well. I am very pleased to see it once again turning into a melting pot of friends and friends of friends.

Over the weekend I finished up The Clockwork City and it was extremely enjoyable. Like from the moment I saw this content I knew that it would be my jam given how much I love the steampunk elements of the Elder Scrolls setting. What I was not expecting however is for there to be a longer term story being told through these expansions. Orsinium, Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood were largely independent story vignettes dealing with certain regions or factions of the world. Starting with Morrowind/Vvardenfell something different has started happening. Through the course of Vvardenfell, The Clockwork city and so far in Summerset we seem to be moving a larger narrative forward and I am very interested to see where it is going. Each expansion or story drop seems to be laying the groundwork for the next and we as the player know more about this conflict each time as we move the tale towards an eventual conclusion.

This makes me all the more happy about my dogged insistence on following the content release order. That is not to say that I am certain the game will weave together a narrative that makes sense if you start in another place in the broader tale, but I like to see the ground work spread out in front of me in the manner originally intended. For example I wish I had played Witcher 2 and read the novels before finally getting into Witcher 3 because the final experience would have been all the richer were I to better understand the source material. Similarly the best experiences with Mass Effect have been when I started over with the first game and played all the way through the series to completion. Each game works fine as a standalone but the experience is just more beneficial if you know all of the content that set up the ground rules.

One of the things that continues to impress me about The Elder Scrolls Online is just how well written their characters are. A number of them are effectively throw aways that you are likely only ever going to encounter in a specific region. However each of them is written in a way as they have an entire character arc, often times with rich development… over what is actually only a couple of paragraphs worth of dialog. It is an exercise in expressing the most emotional impact with the absolute minimal amount of words. It is just enough to make you as the player care about these sometimes companions that you have along with you in your journey. It is because of this ability that I am really looking forward to the companion system coming with Blackwood in June.

Summerset is lovely but it is having to grow on me quite a bit because it combines two things that I do not really love: Mages and Altmer. High Elves are my least favorite race in Tamriel and this is an expansion completely chock full of haughty elven nonsense. Combine that with a cloister of super secret mages that are also similarly full of themselves and you have a recipe for a sad Bel. That said now that I have gotten into it… there are definitely some interesting stories being told and I am far enough in to start watching the events playing out that are echoing what happened in Vvardenfell and Clockwork City. Once again… expert storytelling because they are making me care about things that I generally “nope the hell out” of on a regular basis.

With all of the beautiful and pastoral scenes there are also more than a few that are twisted and brutal. Like for example I got stuck in what I can only describe as a “meat dungeon” the other night and I had to snap a picture of it. I could almost smell the place. For now however I am wandering around Summerset and being the liberator of the Bosmer which are an elven people I can get behind. There are also returning characters like one of the best written in Elder Scrolls Online, Razum-dar. So in spite of my hesitations, this expansion is shaping up to be a damned good time as well. I sincerely doubt I will be close to caught up by the time June rolls around but I am going to keep plugging forward because if nothing else the champion levels are a nice addition.

Fixing Up Beltopia

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This weekend I spent a significant chunk of time working on my bases in Valheim single player. On my original save game of Beltopia, I had been slowly migrating everything over to a new area where I had set up two buildings. One served as a sleeping quarters and portal room and the other a big crafting pavilion and storage. The above is a screenshot from this phase of development but ultimately this doesn’t really jive with my current sensibilities in game. As such I set forth to expand this into more of a vision of the type of base that I want to keep for the long run.

This is now what my base looks like while approaching from the ocean. From the outside it is a pretty nondescript wall with roofing along it and a portico that leads inside across a custom draw bridge. Essentially I have landed upon a style for my bases where I build a stone wall around the perimeter and then erect an inner sheltered area that contains all of the important bits of the base. Essentially my first step in this process was to dig a moat as far down as the game would let me and this ultimately would inform what the perimeter of my base would look like. The moat thing seems to be an ingenious way of protecting your base from raids and random monster encounters. While working on my plains farm for example I got raided by trolls and they could not figure out how to get into the base and eventually de-spawned without actually causing any damage.

So for reference this is a picture of the inner courtyard of my base. The building in the foreground is the same building in that very first picture. I’ve made some significant changes to the roofline, but structurally it is effectively the same. Instead of serving as a sort of inn with multiple beds, the top floor is now basically just my master bedroom. The ground floor is entirely dominated by portals to lots of different far off places that I found with my boat. One of which is the area where I set up my farm in the plains biome. What I did some time ago was craft a number of portals and named them after various norse gods, and then I keep a spreadsheet of what each connects to. That way when I go travelling I take portal materials with me and can craft my way back to the main spawn no matter how far I might stray.

The other building that still stands from my original structures is now the mead hall. There isn’t a whole lot of that original crafting pavilion left, but it did sort of inform the overall shape and structure of the building. While I don’t necessarily use this as a multiplayer map I did build additional beds into the attic of this building. I’ve recently started trying to switch everything over to using coal based braziers instead of torches because I personally find it way easier to renew the fuel source than to farm a copious number of Grey Dwarves for resin. What I want to do at some point is set up a Surtling farm in a swamp in the hopes of getting enough trophies to start adding those in as well for a permanent light source. There are few things more disheartening than logging in to a completely dark base and then trying to haphazardly fuel all of the light sources in the dark.

The base of course has a fully kitted out crafting area with a lot of specific dedicated storage. I wish had gone with this sort of scheme when I built my giant wall of chests in “Fort Belghast” on the multiplayer server. Honestly the hardest part was trying to come up with some generic taxonomy for the items that makes a reasonable amount of sense for storage purposes and easily finding whatever you might need. What I eventually landed on was this… which is by no means flawless but works for now.

  • Gear – storage for any spare armor or tools, most specifically things I have outgrown
  • Treasure – things that sell for gold at the vendor or things that are just more rare than others
  • Forage – tree saplings, feathers or other things largely picked up off the ground
  • Trophies – so many grey dwarf and deer heads
  • Metals – mostly finished ingots because I have another batch of chests by the smelters where I keep raw ore
  • Wood – some of each of the types of wood, but I have bulk wood storage elsewhere in the base for just mass amounts of plain wood
  • Flint and Stone – this is where I keep my flint, obsidian and stone but I have bulk stone storage as well elsewhere in the base
  • Cloth – I have a feeling that this category will expand over time but right now it is just my linen refined from my flax
  • Eyes – Yes I dedicated an area just to Grey Dwarf eyes because I end up with so freaking many
  • Bones – Skeleton bone fragments and wolf bones mostly but I end up with a lot of the former because of skeleton attacks
  • Leather – catch all for the various kinds of leather including troll hide and lox hide.

There are a few categories missing but those are actually located elsewhere in the base. For example in the Mead Hall I have two separate sets of dedicated storage with one representing anything I need to craft mead and the other any raw food for cooking. I also have storage there for finished potions/mead and cooked food. As I mentioned above I have separate storage over by the smelters for Coal and then some catch all boxes for ore that is waiting to be smelted up. Given how much time smelting takes I try my best to batch this up and then shorten the total time of smelting by sleeping.

Another tweak that I have learned over time is that I am now keeping my hives up on my roofline because it allows for them to have plenty of open space around them. You can access my roofline by the tower in the corner of my property which is cool but largely useless to actually use as a perch to fight much of anything from. For most fighting I do better just hanging out on my roofs and plinking things below with arrows.

The only things that are really missing from the main base, can be found in my outpost in the plains biome. One of the tricks of this game is that the two most valuable crops you can grow can only be grown in the Plains biome… aka Barley and Flax. As a result I have set up ALL of my farming efforts over in the Plains. I dug a similar moat around an area in a pretty safe region, not near any goblin camps and not really likely to get a lot of goblin roamers. It is right up against a mountain biome but not close enough to that to really get random wyverns or wolves either. Essentially this area exists solely for me to have a safe space to grow lots of crops. In the main courtyard I have smaller beds for each of the four crops: Flax, Barley, Carrots and Turnips.

Then beside that courtyard I have a larger farming area with just bulk crops or a place to also grow back seeds for carrots and turnips when my reserves are running a little low. I have crafting machines at this outpost, but really I am not expecting to do much here other than pop over and fiddle with crops and as such the overall footprint is much smaller. Largely I wanted to get my house in order given that I have so many bases in multiplayer but had started to lag behind in functionality of my solo bases. This way regardless of what might happen in the future with the server I plan on, I still have a stable base that I could keep playing if I want to.

Over the weekend I did a base walk through video, but at that point I was still actively working on the outpost in the plains and did not actually go there to show it off. It does however walk through all of the areas of the base that I showed off pictures above.