house stalwart

Easy Targets

by

Heartfelt Thanks

I want to lead off this morning by thanking everyone that responded yesterday to wish me well on my five year blogoversary.  It still seems a bit strange that I have been doing this that long, well technically I have been doing “this” the whole daily blogging thing only a year.  All the support you guys have given me has been awesome.  I greatly appreciate you all in so many ways.  I still feel like I don’t know what I am doing, but I just keep doing it anyways.  At this point the blogging thing is so ingrained in me that I think I would continue to post daily even if I had nothing to talk about.  Thankfully I always seem to be able to at least incoherently ramble, and that tends to fill a page faster than anything.

While we are on the topic of blogging and thanks, I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  I have touched on this a few times over the last few weeks, but it is approaching quickly.  May First is the official launch of the 2014 edition of the Newbie Blogger initiative, whether you are a veteran blogger or someone who has always wanted to create a blog… we need you.  This year proves to be a really interesting run as things are changing up quite a bit.  There are awards with prizes attached to them for various things.  Additionally we will have a return of the Syl’s ever fun NBI Poetry slam, as well as some event nights.  Right now a massive hearthstone battle royale has been confirmed, and you can check up the sign up information here.  There is also a great idea for a League of Legends night, that I hope gets enough support to make as well.

The thing about blogging is for every one of us that are blogging daily, there are another batch that have either abandoned their blog or are sitting by the sidelines trying to muster the nerve to start blogging.  I was one of those people five years ago, and a similar community got me started.  I implore you to embrace this opportunity and either reignite your blogging passion or light a brand new spark.  Folks are constantly saying that blogging is dead as a medium, but each of us that do so regularly are thumbing our noses at this concept.  We need fresh blood to keep this gaming blogosphere alive and healthy and events like NBI shine a bright light on new talent.  This will be my third year supporting the effort, and I look forward to seeing a new crop of bloggers step up and do a better job than I ever could do.

Lost in the Desert

Since I had not streamed on twitch in a few days I decided last night I would fire it up while I wandered around in the desert.  Alik’r is an interesting zone and almost feels like two zones.  There was a series of frenetic feeling quests in the town of Sentinel as you saved it from a zombie invasion.  All the while doing so there was a call to purpose, a feeling that you had to keep moving or something horrible would happen.  Now that I am out in the desert proper, the feeling of the zone has changed again.  Now as I sift through the dunes looking for various points of interest, the feeling seems to be much more relaxed and similar to the way Stros M’kai felt.  This is good and bad, good in that I feel like I can take my time through the content… and bad in that I am horribly prone to completely lose focus.

One of the things I am really loving are the creatures out here.  The game does a really good job of disguising the fact that you are often fighting the same damned creatures over and over.  The first time I really noticed this was in beta and playing the different starter zone experiences.  In Ebonheart you had the fiery Shalk, Aldmeri you had Thunderbugs, and in Daggerfall you had Assassin Bugs.  They were all essentially the same mob, but each performed slightly differently in the kinds of attacks they would do.  In the desert of Alik’r I noticed that Dunerippers were essentially crocodiles but vastly different in appearance.  They shared quite a bit of similarity in the base model and the sweep attacks, but also incorporated the mudcrab dig attack and a model swap.  Noticed the same thing happening with the Jackals, that look extremely different from wolves but behave almost exactly the same.

All of this give a feeling that the world is related, and that the various creatures of Tamriel evolved from the same core at some point.  I think that is the thing I love more than anything else, that everything in Elder Scrolls Online has a certain “sameness” to it.  It all feels like it is part of the same world.  While a Dwemer ruin in Skyrim might look vastly different from one in the Alik’r desert… they all feel like they were from the same race.  This adherence to a “racial stylebook” makes the game feel amazing.  One of my big fears with Elder Scrolls Online and the announcement of the three factions is that they would somehow destroy the natural diversity of the Elder Scrolls setting.  However thankfully you are just as likely to find a Dunmer or Argonian NPC in the desert as you are to find a Redguard in Riften.  The game has managed to maintain the jumbled mess that is the Elder Scrolls setting.

Easy Targets

After awhile hanging out in mumble by myself I was joined by the illustrious Zelibeli and Jabberant, who decided they were on their way out to Cyrodil.  This was to be Zeli’s first foray into the frontiers, so I decided to halt my questing and tag along.  I warned them that I sucked horribly at PVP, but still managed to love Cyrodil.  In every conceivable way it is the Dark Age of Camelot frontiers.  You have three different realms that border the region, with lots of objectives scattered around the map.  Just like Dark Age of Camelot there are also numerous other things to do out there than just PVP.  We attempted to meet up with one of the bigger conflicts at first, but ended up getting completely rolled by a veteran three player a few times.  One of the interesting things about Cyrodil is that it instant levels you to 50 for the purpose of the content.  The only problem is it bolsters you to the BASE stats of a 50… not a 50 with full gear.  This means that a bolstered character will always be significantly weaker than a true 50… and even weaker still than a veteran rank player.

In large scale siege warfare this really doesn’t matter much since it is mostly a numbers game.  In one on one combat… the difference is extremely noticeable.  I felt like I simply could not deal enough damage to the veteran rank 3 player.  While I out survived both Zeli and Jabb this was simply to my tanky nature more than anything else, and still even after having fought two other players the guy completely wrecked me.  As a result we ended up varying our goals and we set our sights on a skyshard.  One of the add-ons I have apparently shows the locations of all of the skyshards in Cyrodil, so I figured this would be a valuable excursion.  So we made our way to this tower guarded by goblins, with the skyshard very clearly at the top.  It took a few tries to finally reach the goal, as the moment we reached the tower initially we got attacked by several folks from Ebonheart also after the same goal.

Screenshot_20140421_211127

One of the cool things is there at the tower we picked up a quest to deliver a doctors bag to a town there in Cyrodil.  We did not do this however as the town in question was deep within currently Ebonheart held territory.  That seems like a grand mission for another night.  After a lot of faffing about we ended up picking up another guildie, Barose and heading to a dungeon.  I think it is really awesome that there are full dungeons scattered around the map in Cyrodil.  This one was a really nifty vampire dungeon and I ended up getting so much loot that I had to “mail bank” a ton of it to Rae.  Apparently I ended up sending her 9 emails full of it before the night was up.  The PVP dungeons seem to drop loot as though they were a group dungeon, but overall seemed easier in scale.  I am guessing they are rewarding us for the risk of doing PVE content in a PVP zone, where any group of players could hop into the dungeon and slaughter us in the process.

Overall it was a really great night and there is talk of trying to create some sort of formalized guild Cyrodil night.  If nothing else last night proved that there is plenty to do in Cyrodil even if you do not necessarily engage in siege warfare.  While I am not opposed to defending a keep or claiming one for our guild, I also want to explore all of the other dungeons out there and collect more skyshards.  For the longest time I had a point where I simply did not know where to spend points, but having leveled up a lot of abilities I seem to once again have more opportunities to spend them than points to spend.  I had a great time and I hope Zeli and Jabb both did as well.  Was really fun just hanging out and being horrible at PVP together.  You should totally join us the next time.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Cyrodil #PVP #NewbieBloggerInitiative

Groupcraft Revisited

by

Dusting Off Skills

One of the very first features that got my blog noticed years ago was a series I called Groupcraft.  In it I outlined the general theory I take when trying to make a group happen out of thin air.  This was a process I had streamlined since when I first started trying to make groups happen back in Burning Crusade, and still continue to do this today.  This advice predates the existence of the dungeon finder tools, and even in a world where you can push a button and get a group… I still find most of it extremely useful.  Based on a discussion over on twitter yesterday, I feel like it might be time to dust off this topic and revisit it.  The Elder Scrolls online has grouping tools, but once again I find that a custom built group is far more successful as the queue times seem to be pretty extreme for anyone who is not a tank or a healer.

Taking Responsibility

Screenshot_20140404_220734 The very first step in the process is to take responsibility for your own happiness.  You can sit around in guild chat hoping a group will happen upon you and whisk you away to a dream land of epic loot…  or you can make one happen yourself.  Massively Multiplayer games are the refuge of introverts, and since I believe it or not am one of them…  this was a hard step for me to move past.  In other games I have hung out hoping things would evolve into a group… and then wound up disappointed when I pissed my night away waiting for it to happen.  In games like Everquest it was easier, simply going to a specific place in the world meant it was pretty easy for you to get into a group.  However in the post wow world this is just not something that works.

Be Specific

Screenshot_20140407_183815 It is simply unrealistic for you to expect that someone will form a group for you.  As a result you need to be the catalyst that makes sure the groups happen, and it really isn’t as hard as you might think.  Once you’ve decided you are going to step up to the plate and form a group…  you need to know what you intend to do.  This can be a pretty flexible mission of “run a dungeon”, but in doing so you need to know which one and what the requirements for that dungeon are.  The first dungeon you are likely to run in the Daggerfall Covenant is Spindleclutch.  It requires some kind of sturdy tank, some form of a healer, and then the rest of the party is pretty flexible.  By healer and tank, there are many different things that can work but they need to be able to take some damage and heal some damage.  Simply throwing a few points into healing staff is generally sufficient at least for the first tier of dungeons.

Surveying the Scene

Screenshot_20140416_060055 Now that you know what you want to do you need to lock down some people.  With the goal being Spindleclutch the sweet spot seems to be around level 14 with it technically being able to support people in the 12-18 range generally speaking.  While I took this screenshot from my own guild this morning when nobody much was on, you would hopefully see some names lit up and available.  What we are focusing on is the 12-17 section of the screen.  For example in Stalwart we have an entire screen worth of people to choose from.  If you can find at least four people on in the list then bam you likely have the makings of a group.  If you can find two or more, then you can shift focus and go do a public dungeon since those tend to be design for two or more players and are loaded with all sorts of goodies similar to instanced dungeons.

Communication

Screenshot_20140405_224903 This step is absolutely key to making your group work.  So many people simply broadcast to guild a message similar to “anyone want to do something?”.  These are NEVER successful, or moreso are only successful if the person on the other end is also trying to build a group.  Saying “I need one more person for Spindleclutch” is a bit more successful, but that still requires that someone is watching guild chat and comfortable in their own abilities to speak up and sign up for your mission.  What I find instead works so much better is to directly message players.  So if I were to be building this hypothetical group I would start pinging folks in the sweet spot with something like this. “Hey noticed you were in the level range for Spindle Clutch, going to be pulling together a group.  What roles can you fill?”.

At this point the player is going to do one of two things either say they cannot go, which is perfectly cool… or respond back with a list of roles they can provide.  You are already one step closer to a group than you were a few minutes ago.  I tend to just assume players want to run dungeons, and I skip the step of even asking if they want to go.  It might seem presumptuous but over the years I have come to realize that most players are waiting for something interesting to happen.  If you give them the opportunity, they more than likely will jump at the chance… unless they simply do not have the time to do “whatever” that night.

Lock Down the Required Roles

Screenshot_20140405_210040 Now comes the trickiest part.  We know that we need players between the levels of 12 to 18 with a sweet spot being around 14.  We know that we need a tank of some sort and a healer of some sort.  If you are yourself a tank or healer, it becomes a lot easier… as you need to only find the other half of the required roles.  As a more dpsy player you need to find two people before you have a viable group.  An instanced dungeon group cannot really happy before you’ve found both a tank and a healer, so those are the slots I tend to fill first.  Once you have locked down both positions, you have a viable dungeon group and can fill the last slots.  If you cannot find a tank or a healer remember you still have a perfectly viable public dungeon group.  Public dungeons are pretty awesome, and every one I have gone too has been a loot bonanza quickly filling my inventory.

Start Up the Group

Screenshot_20140408_195314 So at this point you’ve locked down the required roles, and identified a three other players who are ready to dungeon together.  One of the nice things about Elder Scrolls Online is that all that really needs to happen now is for a single player to zone into the dungeon.  At that point all of the other players can choose the “teleport to player” option which will pop them into the dungeon as well.  Hopefully your custom group will go smoothly.  However inevitably you will hit a snag, or a boss encounter you simply were not ready for.  I believe in a blame free dungeon environment, where you assess what is going wrong and try and fix it however you can.  Dungeons are hard, and they require complex skills.  Try and be open to assistance and provide blameless advise for what might be going on in the dungeon.  If you do all of these things, I think you are pretty much guaranteed an enjoyable night of dungeoning.

The fringe benefit of all of this is you begin to know more members of the guild, and what each player can bring to the table.  The more you do this, the easier it becomes to pull together groups on the spur of the moment.  You shift from feeling like you are forced to only solo, to being someone who has control over their own destiny.  The truth of multiplayer games is that the players generally would like to group up and do big things.  Not everyone has the time to do this all of the time, but folks come into this genre with at least the intent to do things larger than they can do on their own.  You just have to be willing to take your fate into your own hands and start the ball rolling.  Even today I get super self conscious at times when I step out into a new social environment that I did not bring with me a ton of familiar faces.  But this basic framework for making groups happen has never failed me.

Better than Dungeon Tools

Screenshot_20140414_195115 So I will throw out a final thought for the day before closing this up.  I first outlined my process for making groups happen in an era when we did not really have the grouping tools that exist today.  So this is the way you HAD to get groups, and relied heavily on social channels and guilds.  Now that we have role based dungeon tools… quite simply we have gotten lazy.  Building a group like this means you have to communicate with other players to make it happen.  The one thing that makes “pugging” so generally terrible is that players simply do not communicate freely.  How many times have you been in a pug and it is a silent train careening off the tracks?  No one is talking, and no one is trying to discuss what is going wrong.  The only time anything is said is when it is to curse out the tank or the healer for being “fail” at the game.  By talking to the players to form the group you have already broken down that crucial barrier to success…  communication.

Almost every game that has a “push a button, get a group” type tool also has other tools for you to try and build groups around.  So I always try and fill my groups the “old fashioned” way, and then if we are a single person short go ahead and queue us all together for the dungeon filling that last slot.  Even absolute assholes tend to behave better when they are out numbered in a guild group.  I feel like the modern grouping tools are best used to augment building a group from scratch.  Get as close as you possibly can to a full team, and then use the tool to fill the rest.  You can always pop into a public dungeon while you wait in the queue.  While I have mostly focused on Elder Scrolls Online, this general theory pretty much applies to every game I have played.  The most critical step is really telling yourself that you can do this.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #GroupCraft #Dungeons

Crypt of Revenge

by

Cold Snap

badweatherbrewin The above photo is from this past Sunday evening, taken right before a massive line of storms blew in.  During the day on Sunday it was around 80* outside and Monday morning it was 35 out.  Over the night last night it dipped back down into freezing temperatures.  One of the problems with living in Oklahoma is the constant and ever changing weather patterns.  At this point I just wish it would realize we are in spring and not winter.  When I went out to lunch yesterday… it was snowing.  Not the occasional snowflake drifting down from above, but enough that I had to use my windshield wipers on a pretty high setting.  It was of course melting the moment it touched anything, but it was more than enough to be annoying.

Down the road from Tulsa in Porter they are extremely concerned about this years Peach harvest.  They had been talking on the news about planning on using helicopters to push warmer air down into the fields to keep the crops safe.  That didn’t seem terribly cost effective but I am sure it would at the very least be interesting to watch.  We actually had to turn on the heat again last night, and even this morning in my office that is normally the warmest part of the house it is really freaking chilly.  Can it be spring yet please?

Crypt of Revenge

Screenshot_20140414_200714 When I last stepped foot in the Crypt of Hearts I was level 26, and since then I have dinged 30 and upgraded a good chunk of my gear.  Similarly the healer that was also 26 is now 31 and during the day yesterday we plotted our revenge on the dungeon.  While it was enjoyable to get our asses handed to us the first time, this time around we wanted to wreck the place for taking our candy.  I have to say the levels and the gear helped massively.  In fact there were several moments last night where I ignored proper elder scrolls dungeon etiquette and just charged into the packs pulling everything at once.  For the most part we could mitigate the combat with the fact that we had a 37 and 38 dps with us.  The fights all still required us to pay attention to what was going on, and the mechanics were still very punishing, but they were not impassible.

Screenshot_20140414_202848 The boss encounter above was probably the most brutal thing we had experienced to date.  Even with the slightly overpowered damage it took us a few tries to get through it.  Essentially the skeletal juggernaut alternated between two attacks, the first being a linear charge across the room, and the second being quite possibly the largest AOE attack I have seen to date.  You have to avoid both successfully or you end up getting wrecked.  The area of effect is so large that you have to be running in the right direction AND then dodge out to clear it.  This means you have to save plenty of stamina in reserve to always have a dodge available.  The damage you take seemed to lessen depending on how close to the edge you managed to get before the attack fired off.  While punishing, it was still a really cool encounter to experience.

City of Ash

Screenshot_20140414_203939 After defeating the Crypt we decided to continue our journey into the City of Ash.  This dungeon represents and entirely new kind of dungeon crawl from the other ones we had experienced in Elder Scrolls Online.  The back story for the dungeon is that you are trying to save a Bosmer city that is being assaulted by the forces of Mehunes Dagon.  For those not familiar with the name, he was the big baddie that you were fighting during the course of Elder Scrolls VI: Oblivion.  His plane of oblivion is one of fire and demons… and not surprisingly you end up fighting a lot of flame based Dremora inside the City of Ash.  What makes the encounters interesting is when you reach the city and start the quest proper… you are given the choice of a healer npc or an archer npc to guide you.

Screenshot_20140414_205238 We took the healer, because we assumed that any game that would offer you a healer… means you are just about to start taking massive amounts of damage.  We were for the most part right as the encounters mostly pulled themselves for large chunks of the dungeon.  I am not entirely certain if the mobs were actually linked, or if the healer bot was instead pulling for us.  In either way the crawl through the burning “Ewok Village” was fast paced and frenetic.  Bosmer architecture is really interesting, as they seem to be able to convince the trees to grow in shapes that support their city.  Considering how seriously they take the Green Pact the inhabitants had to be freaking out when the first started around them.

Screenshot_20140414_210056 This is probably going to go down as one of my favorite dungeons, in part because the zone looked amazing… but more importantly because there was a giant burning oblivion gate at the very end.  Oblivion is probably the Elder Scrolls game that I have spent the most hours playing, and gave us the amazing Shivering Isles campaign.  You could drop an oblivion gate in an otherwise boring dungeon and I would still have to go there just to defeat it.  Fortunately the City of Ash is not a boring dungeon, and had some of the more interesting boss fights I had experienced to date.  The games dungeons honestly just keep getting better.  Each of them has a very unique feel and vastly unique mechanics.  What I find amazing is how nothing really feels “recycled”.  The bosses do what you would expect them to do based on how they are and what their environment is.

Arx Corinium

Screenshot_20140414_211149 So during the course of the night, we had started in a skeletal crypt, moved to a burning bosmer city… and finished it in the Black Marsh.  At each tier so far the different dungeon environments have been extremely varied which is a good thing.  At this point in the evening I was starting to get a bit drowsy so might recount of the tales might be a bit spotty at best.  The main mission here at Arx Corinium is to help a Nereid save her sisters from the Naga that control the dungeon.  What this means to the players is that you are going to have to fight a ton of things at the same time.  One of the more interesting things is that there are also huge Lurchers lumbering about the dungeon.  These are not connected to the Naga packs and seem to be non-social.  It gives them the feeling of a Big Daddy from the original Bioshock.  Throughout the night we tried our best to either pull them before or after the rest of the pull.  At one point one of them just wandered up from somewhere unseen, so they seem to have pretty long paths.

Screenshot_20140414_213219 There are many of these “leap of faith” moments where you have to jump off cliffs and waterfalls hoping that you survive the drop.  While we managed to survive each, there definitely seems to be a high chance that you might bounce enough on the rocks to kill yourself.  There were fights in the dungeon that reminded me more than a little bit of Polaris from The Secret World… and not really in a good way.  I am sure that over time we would be able to adapt to the encounters, but there were a few fights that we only made it through because Shiana is 38… and really good at kiting.  On at least two of the encounters he was the last person standing and managed to drag us over the finish line.  I felt bad for Waren and Shiana… because they were essentially just along for the ride and the repair bill.  In Elder Scrolls Online you need to be within five levels of the encounters you are fighting or you no longer get loot.  That said Tam and I managed to walk away with a lot of nice things and I think it was a great night overall for all of us.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #CryptofHearts #CityofAsh #ArxCorinium

Back to the Sewers

by

Jonquils say so

jonquils Here in Oklahoma we have had more than our fair share of ping pong weather of late.  This weekend I was happily running around in shorts, however when I went for my walk last night that same choice was rather chilly.  I wish the world would make up its damned mind to be honest, and preferably warm up.  I am afraid that once again we will go from cold to hot without much of a middle ground like we did last year.  We have a patch of Jonquils on the side of the house and they seem to think spring time has arrived as they are in full bloom and gorgeous as always.  We had these growing up as well, and they were always the heralds of springtime.  When they bloomed things were going to start warming up significantly.  I really hope the weather gods are watching my flowers, because seriously I am tired of the cold.

This morning I am more nervous than normal, and for good reason.  Our eldest cat has a thyroid problem, and today she is supposed to go into surgery to have hers removed.  This is supposedly going to fix the imbalance that is causing her to be sick all of the time.  For awhile now we’ve done a practice I like to refer to as “greasing her ears”, where I rub some thyroid cream (while wearing latex gloves) into her ears.  This was all to get her thyroid levels stabilized enough to have the surgery.  However I am wondering if this is something we can just do indefinitely now.  I don’t really mind doing it, at least not as bad as trying to feed her a pill.  She doesn’t really like it but she tolerates it well enough.  I am just wondering since she is a fifteen year old cat, if doing this a few times a day would be better for her quality of life than a surgery.

Back to the Sewers


Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV
Yesterday evening some friends and I decided to delve back into the Wayrest Sewers in search of loot, glory… and attempting to avoid the mess.  We had run the dungeon Saturday evening and it seemed much easier than the others we had run.  Thing is apparently this was not the intent of the dungeon, and seemingly in an effort to break the trend of chain running the place… yesterdays patch changed several things about the place.  Firstly there were a large number of packs that previously could be split, this is no longer the case.  There were instances where you had a Rat Feeder human npc in a pack of rats… and you could fiery grip the human out by himself then deal with the rats.  Now when you yoink the human the rats properly come with him, no longer trivializing the encounter.  Similarly there were humanoid pack mobs that you could single pull, or pull without engaging the boss they were attached to.

All of this lead for a much more difficult run than we were expecting.  The above video is still uploading to youtube, so I’ve embedded the twitch broadcast instead.  Several things were happening… firstly I am generally horrible at explaining fights.  Secondly for everyone but myself, this was their first time into the instance.  Thirdly two of our members were slightly under level for the dungeon.  The result meant that at least one of the boss fights seemed far more difficult than it really should have been.  The Garron encounter is rough, but it involves figuring out how best to deal with the adds… and it took us several tries to arrive at a strategy that was working.  Namely killing things in the same order as not to break the CC.  It was a good time had by all, and we got our youngins specifically some tasty loot.

It Runs on a Toaster

ESO_MInimumSettings My friends and I have joked for some time, that the Elder Scrolls Online engine is so damned optimized that it could probably run on a toaster.  I posted this a few days ago on twitter, but I still find it insanely amusing.  This is from the ESO Reddit, and is apparently Elder Scrolls Online running at the absolute minimum settings which is 320×200.  The game looks oddly playable, even if you can’t really make out who exactly you are interacting with.  It looks oddly similar to a super pixilated adventure game from the 1990s.  Thankfully my machine will run the game in its full Ultra setting 1080p glory…  but I do find it awesome that the game can technically be run on some pretty ancient hardware and perform just as well.  I honestly don’t notice much of a difference running it on my laptop as I do running it on my more serious gaming desktop.

Screenshot_20140407_183815 The thing is… so many companies overlook this as an issue.  One of the reasons why World of Warcraft has been so easy to spread as a game, is that it has super minimal requirements.  You can dial back the settings and run it comfortably on a netbook.  I feel like more than likely you could do the same thing with Elder Scrolls Online.  I’ve heard rumors of it running through a virtual pc emulator on various tablets, as well as natively on the Microsoft surface.  The important thing is, since the client is that optimized, it means when you have friends that want to join you… you can likely get them into the experience without them needing to shell out for a dedicated gaming machine.  At the end of the day this is a social experience, and being able to play with your friends will ultimately be the key to longevity.

One of my good friends, Scarybooster is having some real life stuff going on, and as a result he doesn’t expect to be able to play the game again until June.  He jokingly said that he hoped we would all still be playing by the time June rolls around.  Considering the longevity most of us tend to have with games…  that is a fair question.  I really hope that this title is not another in a long line of “three monthers”.  I would love this game to be a much longer lived title, because I feel like it has what so many of them have been lacking…  depth.  The world is deep and nuanced and almost strangles you with lore.  The thing that I have always loved about Elder Scrolls is that it works much like our own world.  There is no one clean lore path through the setting… but instead it is told through little tidbits spread across thousands of books… some of which are directly contradictory.  History is a messy thing, full of partial accounts and factual inaccuracies… and the world of Tamriel gets this right.  Here is hoping we will all still find the world compelling a year from now, let alone a few months from now.

#ElderScrollsOnline #WayrestSewers