Games | Superior Realities

Feeling burnt out on SW:TOR and having finally cleared out my backlog of single-player titles, I’ve decided to invest some time into Elder Scrolls Online once again. My theoretical goal is to finish the main storyline and the Aldmeri Dominion zones, but before embarking on that, I picked up the Thieves Guild DLC. Being a fan of the game’s justice gameplay, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

Sun and larceny:

The Thieves Guild storyline begins when you are approached by a fellow thief in your local Outlaw’s Refuge. She offers you a lucrative job, but when your perfect heist is crashed by a group of fanatical mercenaries, you and your accomplice find yourselves drawn into a web of conspiracy centered around the Thieves Guild and their crime-ridden home city of Abah’s Landing.

One minor design flaw of this scenario is it means you’ll be dumped into an unfamiliar city full of guards with an active bounty and an inventory over-flowing with stolen goods. Not the greatest situation to be in.

Like a lot of things in ESO, I’d rate the Thieves Guild story as firmly in the category of good but not great. I found it pretty dull at first, but it does evolve into a fairly interesting mystery over time.

It has an interesting structure, too. There’s a sort of cadence where every major story quest is followed by a simpler quest to flesh out the stories of the various cast members, and vice versa. It’s like a Bioware game, but with better pacing.

On that note, the greatest strength of Thieves Guild is definitely its characters. Nearly every character is colourful and entertaining. There’s a quest at one point where you have to infiltrate a fancy party, and you get to choose which character you bring as your “date.” I think it says something that I kept wishing I could bring all of them.

Of course, I still chose Quen without hesitation. If you don’t think I’m going to immediately pick the quirky Elf girl, you don’t know me at all. But still.

The DLC includes access to the small but well-made zone of Hew’s Bane. Next to the characters, the new zone is probably the best feature of Thieves Guild. It has a small but satisfying collection of side quests, delves, world bosses, and skyshards to encourage exploration and provide some content beyond the main story.

Normally I’m not a fan of desert zones, but Hew’s Bane has enough foliage, variety of environments, and interesting geography to avoid becoming the endless smear of gray and brown that most desert zones are. It’s actually quite a lovely place, and I greatly enjoyed my time in it.

It also seems to have an unusually dense concentration of crafting nodes, making it a good place for farming.

Similarly, its main settlement, Abah’s Landing, is one of the more impressive cities I’ve seen in a video game, with beautiful architecture and an incredible level of detail.

However, there is one thing about Thieves Guild that did frustrate me. Your ability to get new story quests is gated behind the progression of your Thieves Guild skill line, and the only way to increase its rank is by doing quests for the guild. This essentially makes it a reputation grind by another name, and we all know how I feel about those.

It sneaks up on you, too. For most of the story, you get enough “reputation” simply by playing through the story normally, but then eventually you hit a roadblock where the only way to progress is to start grinding the guild’s daily quests.

And nothing in the game explains this. I only figured it out after some Googling to find out why I had suddenly stopped getting quests.

Now, as grinds go, this one is pretty tame. Even calling it a grind is stretching the definition of the term a little. Still, “stealth dailies” are two words I never wanted to see combined, and it just kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s unnecessary. Even without the extra padding, Thieves Guild is quite a meaty DLC with far more content than I was expecting from it.

Overall, I think I’d still recommend Thieves Guild, but the daily grind aspect does somewhat dampen my enthusiasm for an otherwise excellent DLC.

Readjustments:

Coming back to an MMO after a long time away can often take some getting used to. I’m still learning how Elder Scrolls Online has changed following recent updates, especially One Tamriel.

While One Tamriel has undoubtedly been a net positive, I am starting to find some things that I’m less than thrilled with.

For example, crafting surveys from writs can now apparently send you to any zone in the game. This might be a positive for someone who’s reached endgame and unlocked every wayshrine, but as someone who’s still leveling and had only ever been to the first few Aldmeri zones up until recently, I’m really not enjoying having ride off to the ass end of High Rock to finish my crafting tasks. The point of something like One Tamriel should be to allow the player to make use of the entire game world, not to force them to.

I got a survey for Craglorn the over day. Craglorn! I mean, I know they nerfed it a bit, and level-scaling means I can technically go there now, but even so…

I don’t know if it was part of One Tamriel or not, but somewhere along the line world bosses also got massively buffed and are no longer remotely soloable. Finding groups for them isn’t enormously difficult, but it isn’t entirely trivial, either, and it just doesn’t feel good to see content get more restrictive. Especially when you consider the rewards for killing them don’t seem to have increased alongside the difficulty.

I have been playing World of Warcraft off and on (more on than off) for over seven years now. That’s a Hell of a long time to play a video game, and in that time, I’ve seen and done almost everything the game has to offer.

Almost.

There are still a few things that, for one reason or another, I’ve never done. I thought it might be interesting to look at those things that I still have never experienced within the world of Azeroth.

Played a Gnome:

Over the years, I have tried every class and every race at least once, and in many cases more than once.

Every class and race, that is, except for Gnomes.

I just don’t like Gnomes. They’re a comedy relief race that isn’t funny. They’d work fine as some background element like the Grummles in Pandaria, but Blizzard’s halfhearted attempts to make them a race worthy of sharing center stage have just created an unhappy medium where they’re still not terribly compelling as heroes but have also lost whatever quirky charm they once had.

Plus, they’re about as deep into the uncanny valley as you can get. Gnomes are so horrifically disproportionate they make Orcs look like beauty queens.

I might have played one if they had their own unique starting zone — completionism and all that — but since they share Dun Morogh with the Dwarves, there’s just no point.

Quested through Bloodmyst Isle or Loch Modan:

As mentioned above, I’m a serious completionist when it comes to story, and as a result, I have played through virtually every zone’s quest content at least once — though a few I haven’t been through since the Cataclysm revamp.

Two zones have slipped through the cracks entirely, though.

The first is Bloodmyst Isle. Despite my disdain for the Draenei, I have played through most of their first zone, but my interest always drops off by the time I get to Bloodmyst Isle. I’ve managed to do the first few quests, but I don’t think I’ve ever even gotten to the halfway point of the zone, let alone finished.

I tend to think of Bloodmyst as the only zone I’ve never done, but in writing this post, it occurs to me I can’t recall having spent much time in Loch Modan, either. I remember riding through there a lot of times, and I’ve probably done a quest or two, but I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and properly played through it.

I don’t really have anything against Loch Modan. It’s a pretty zone, and Dwarves are okay. I guess it got neglected because I like the human and Night Elf leveling zones so much. Shame you can’t do Loch Modan as Horde — it surely must be nicer than the Barrens.

Roleplay:

This entry almost doesn’t qualify for the list, because I have flirted with the periphery of roleplay for a long time. I have fairly strong backstories/personalities for all my characters — the potential to build new stories is a strong contributor to my altoholism — and half my characters are on a roleplay server.

I enjoy watching other people roleplay as I walk by — gives the world some real texture — and I used to attend the regular Thunder Bluff story-circle. Arguably I was RPing then, as I was in-character for the event, but mostly that just entailed walking to my seat, sitting down, and occasionally applauding or offering a brief comment.

I am eternally tempted to give RP a try, but I have no faith left in the WoW community, my experience as an outside observer has been that RP tends to entail a lot of drama, and I don’t think my characters would be accepted by the greater RP community. I’m not interested in playing ordinary people, and I would likely be labelled a Mary Sue and summarily rejected.

Also, most people type much, much more slowly than me, and I am not a patient man. That’s pretty much why I stopped going to story circle.

Pet battles:

Thanks to some bad experiences in childhood, anything resembling Pokemon is anathema to me.

And even if that wasn’t the case, pet battles still wouldn’t much appeal to me. They have no story-relevance, no rewards that I care about, and just nothing at all about them appeals to me. I didn’t even like pets when you couldn’t battle them.

That said, I have a lot of respect for pet battles from a conceptual perspective. They’re a very deep mini-game that offers many, many hours of play for those who enjoy them, but those who don’t care (like me) can ignore them without consequence. All the game’s systems should follow this model.

Rated battlegrounds:

Despite the fact my opinion of WoW PvP runs the spectrum from disinterest to disdain, I have participated in most every kind of PvP the game has to offer at some point.

I even had a brief, disastrous arena career back in early Cataclysm when a guildie roped me into it. You’d think, being a rogue, I’d be good at this sort of thing, but no.

Rated battlegrounds, however, elude me. It’s not the sort of thing you join up with on a whim. It takes a fair bit of planning and organization. And I only pop into PvP once in a blue moon when I’m bored and can’t think of anything better to do.

Faced Jaraxxus:

I had pretty poor luck with Trial of the Crusader back in the day. Every PUG I ever joined for it back in Wrath failed.

Later — I think sometime in Cataclysm — I finally joined a group who managed to finish it, but by the time I joined, they were already on the faction champions, meaning I have never killed the first few bosses. That includes Jaraxxus, Eredar lord of the Burning Legion.

He’s such a famous meme of a boss that I almost feel guilty — like I’m not a true WoW fan — that I’ve never actually encountered him.

At this point I’m sure I could go back and solo him, but it’s just not that interesting of a raid, so I haven’t been strongly motivated to do so.

Superior Realities

Category Archives: Games

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