ArcheAge Column: How ArcheAge Captures the ‘Elder Scrolls’ Spirit Better Than ESO
My most memorable moment playing Skyrim involved Lydia, the dutiful, rarely-speaking companion bestowed upon you as a reward for one of the game’s earliest quests. It was my first playthrough, and I quickly learned that my poorly thought-out destruction mage benefited immensely from her unflinching willingness to charge into the thick of battle and start swinging her sword around.
Beyond that sword, there really wasn’t much to Lydia. No backstory, no personal quests, nothing but about half a dozen options of canned dialogue that revealed little beyond that she was sworn to carry my burdens.
Still, after well over twenty hours of traveling with her, I realized she had become nearly as indispensable to my adventures as I myself was. My player character had grown much stronger, surely, and I had improved at playing the game; but all that learning came with her alongside me, and my tactics in battle heavily relied upon her presence. I don’t consider myself a “role player” in the sense that MMO players use the term – I didn’t construct a narrative to explain her presence, nor assign any personality traits to her that weren’t present in the game’s writing – but nonetheless I developed a kind of attachment to her, born out of the practical value that she provided to my gameplay experience.
One day I was sent to clear out a cave of vampires to complete some quest that I’ve long since forgotten, and quite possibly never paid attention to in the first place. Upon entering the cave, Lydia and I were attacked by a fair number of them, and managed to defeat the rush after a somewhat intense fight. But upon looting the corpses, I came across one that I could scarcely believe: Lydia’s. I was stunned. She had been knocked down in battle countless times, but always came running back. The possibility of her actually dying had not occurred to me for quite some time. Yet here we were, in the middle of some random cave, and she was dead. Dead! Like, permanently dead, with no resurrection potion or graveyard to return to for the penalty of 10% durability loss on her armor.
After recovering from the initial shock, I did the most practical thing I could think of: removed all the materials I had given her to carry – all the “burdens” that she sarcastically referenced - and brought them back to my home in the nearest city for safekeeping. It took multiple trips.
It’s been a year or so since I last played Skyrim, but the memory of making those lonely, shell-shocked trips to and from the cave sticks with me more than anything else I did in the 300-some total hours I ended up investing in the game.
And I think stories like that, more than anything, are the core of the Elder Scrolls experience, at least for many players. The idea that the pinnacle of your adventure is not some scripted point that every player reaches, like Sephiroth running his sword through Aeris, but a moment that is utterly unique to you, derived from your own experiences. The idea that in this insanely popular game that millions of people are playing, I can actually carve out my own story, however small, that has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. It’s almost subversive.
I loved Skyrim for creating the opportunity for moments like that, even while becoming increasingly aware that the game itself was designed with a very different intention in mind. From the rigidly linear guild quests to the straightforward, stock fantasy (at least to my mind) main quest, the game itself seemed to encourage a more traditional approach. The sheer amount of dialogue – all fully voiced! – left precious little room in the margins for improvisation or imagination. Once the player started really engaging with the main elements of the game, the idea of creating one’s own story quickly gave way to completing the heavily-scripted narrative that the developers carefully laid out.
I’m not trying to universalize my own experience, because I am positive that there are players who loved the story told by Skyrim and played the game at face value. But my sense, albeit from entirely anecdotal sources, is that at least a healthy percentage of Elder Scrolls players enjoy playing the world that the game creates quite a bit more than the game itself.
And the inability to recognize this is at the core of why, at least to me, The Elder Scrolls Online is a creative failure.
My experience with ESO is no different than many I’ve read: I played the beta, bought the game (the Imperial Edition, of course), and within a few months have stopped playing entirely. I bear no animosity towards the game, nor do I have any hot takes about the subscription fee, or cash store, or lack of auction house, or any of the various in-game systems.
No, I believe the chief failure of ESO is its inability to capture the spirit of creating your own story, much less incentivize the player for doing so.
During the beta, I was impressed with the number of random treasure chests and crafting nodes scattered around the map, hidden in places that quests wouldn’t take you, as a way to encourage exploration. But what you realize after investing considerable time in the game is just how petty that is, and how little it makes any difference at all to the game’s main objectives.
And those objectives are made crystal clear from the start, in the form of a main quest that progresses every five levels and offers such rewards that you’d be foolish not to partake in it. Upon completion of that quest, you respawn in another faction’s starting zone, and continue to level via that faction’s quests, as well as the “veteran” group content that becomes available.
There is no ambiguity about the intended “goal” of the Elder Scrolls Online: first to complete the main quest, then ultimately to gain power in the form levels, skills, and gear in order to be competitive in the open-world PvP or PvE group content. I’m sure there are people who have the commitment to role playing to make something else their personal goal, which is noble, but also essentially unsupported by all of the game’s systems.
ESO doubles down on Skyrim’s commitment to dialogue, bringing voice-acting to MMOs on a previously unheard of level. It’s certainly impressive, but also serves to reinforce the heavy focus on the story that the game wants to tell you as opposed to the one you create yourself. This sense becomes even stronger once you realize that the nominal choices you are making in dialogue are irrelevant to the long-term goal of accumulating levels, skills, and gear.
My most depressing moment in Elder Scrolls Online involved trying to make my own adventure. On my second character – my first was a Nightblade, which turned out to not be viable at the time by the developers’ own admission – I decided to commit myself to creating my own story in the mid-game. So I started ignoring quest hubs and exploring, picking up only those that interested me, and relying on the experience gained through opening chests, exploring, and killing enemies.
I was particularly interested in “Public Dungeons,” solo-able and often-underground areas resembling the ruins that you’d find in previous Elder Scrolls games. Many quests would lead you to them, but I was confident that through exploration, I’d find some that were well off the beaten path, only sparsely populated by other players, and maybe through that I’d experience I’d be able to create a story somewhat unique to me.
Nope. Time and again, I’d enter a dungeon and fight my way to the boss, only to be greeted by a dozen players camping him, killing him over and over again as soon as he respawns. See, these bosses can drop valuable items, so farmers and smart players alike kill them repeatedly for gold, experience, and crafting materials. I’d join them, of course, because I’d be foolish not to. Levels, skills, and gear, right? But eventually, I realized that I was living the same story as everyone else, decided that story wasn’t worth the time, and quit.
It’s easy to chalk this up to the very nature of MMOs. Good luck finding anything productive to do in WoW that hasn’t been done by a million other people, right? Online gamers have become relentlessly savvy at reasoning out the most efficient ways to achieve a game’s goals and attacking them for all they’re worth, even if doing so decreases the overall enjoyment for everyone involved by, say, requiring them to sit for hours in the same spot and kill the same enemy over and over again. It’s a depressing example of game theory, where each player is doing something because if he or she stops doing it and everyone else doesn’t stop, everyone else will more quickly achieve the levels, skills, and gear required to complete the goals that the game is pushing players towards.
Changing this behavior without disincentivizing it is a losing battle, yet removing the push towards levels, skills, and gear is a non-starter. So it’s hard to blame ESO for failing to capture the spirit of the Elder Scrolls series when it conflicts with the very nature of the MMO genre. Right?
Until last weekend, I thought so, and was more depressed at the state of the genre than the specifics of ESO’s failure.
But then I played the ArcheAge beta, and realized that ESO has just been doing it wrong. If the problem is players relentlessly pursuing the game’s goals to the point that playing is less fun for everyone, then the solution is for the game itself to take a more ambiguous stance towards what its goals actually are.
I’m not here to persuade you to play ArcheAge, or hail it as some kind of revolution. I’ve played it for four days, and upon longer exposure may sour on it myself. I’m not qualified to make any declarations about the quality of the game or its long-term potential.
But I also feel like the conversation surrounding it is obscuring the single most important thing about it, something that is largely independent from the quality of the game or the specifics of its systems.
Gamers throw around terms like “Sandbox” and “Pay to Win” as if they are hard black-and-white measurables as opposed to buzzwords that vaguely refer to situations that are clearly on a continuum, and a heavily subjective one at that. Reading people argue online about computer games is like reading people argue about politics on Facebook, where there’s an entire vocabulary that’s been created or co-opted for the purpose of such arguments, during which the participants bicker about the meaning of words in that very vocabulary. Is this a sandbox? Is that a theme park? I don’t know; but more importantly, when did this become an issue of semantics?
From the ArcheAge beta, the one conclusion I feel comfortable drawing is that the game does not push you towards a particular end-game goal. It certainly encourages you to participate in the main quest, but as gamers are fond of saying, the real game doesn’t begin until you’re at the max level anyway, and hitting the max level (currently 50) in ArcheAge does not seem like a particularly daunting task.
The game does feature a dungeon/raiding structure, but it’s far less robust than WoW or its counterparts. There is no group finder, and dungeon choices appear fairly limited, though they still provide the requisite gear drops. ArcheAge’s most powerful gear, however, is reportedly available only through crafting, and most articles about the game seem to remark on its intricate and wide-ranging profession system. In broad strokes, the conclusion most everyone has come to is: crafting is very important.
Which, based on my limited experience, seems absolutely true. But the more interesting question to me is, important to what end? Because while you can craft the expected swords, armor, and potions, much of the game’s crafting revolves around items not directly related to levels, skills, and gear: furniture, trade goods, ships, songs (songs!), siege weaponry, and hundreds, possibly thousands more.
And these items are far from cosmetic in value. Say you want to be a farmer. You can certainly use what you grow to create potions or food for buffs, as in other MMOs. Or you can focus on growing food with the purpose of bundling your crops into “trade packs,” which can be transported to another town and turned in for a sum of gold or other valuable items. The longer and more treacherous your trip, the bigger the reward you receive. Maybe your goal in the game is to, through trade, become so rich that you can afford to purchase and maintain a mansion, or even a castle, collecting taxes from other players who live on your lands and paying an army of fellow players to defend them.
Or maybe your goal is to prey on those merchant players who are transporting goods. Maybe you pour your resources into building the fastest ship and acquiring powerful gear, then put that gear to use towards hunting down other players who are pursuing their goal of gold accumulation, stealing their trade packs and turning them in yourself. Maybe you want to become the most hated player on your server, not through annoying people over Trade Chat, but through absolutely ruining entire merchant fleets and causing other players massive monetary losses.
Or maybe you do want to raid and beat the game’s biggest bosses with your guild. Maybe you want to work the auction house and build your fortune that way. Maybe you want to gather and help your guild build its castle, or grind enemies for profit and materials. Maybe you want to do a little of all of these things, or maybe you want to do something else entirely. After getting you started with rather routine quests and incentivizing you to embark on the main quest, the game seems to gradually pull back from funneling you in any particularly direction. Whether or not you call that a “Sandbox,” I don’t care; but to me, it’s rather exciting.
My most memorable moment from the ArcheAge beta happened on Sunday night. After a couple days spent questing, our small group of three people (my brother, my friend, and myself) decided to build a ship. This was our goal; there was no accompanying quest, nor any reward beyond the ship itself, which has massive in-game use for trading, pirating, and transportation. The materials were daunting, and given that none of us are yet subscribers, we were at certain disadvantages. But through a combination of making trade runs, choosing the right trees to chop down, a little bit of stealing, hunting for deals on the auction house, and one of us staying logged on all Saturday night, we somehow cobbled together the resources required. At around 10:30 PM Sunday night, after all of us devoted the entire afternoon to the project, our boat touched down in the water, and we celebrated. It felt like an accomplishment, but different than downing a raid boss or winning a roll for a piece of gear. This was something that we decided to do, that we determined the best way to go about doing, and that we judged as being worthwhile. And we accomplished it, through our own means and on our own terms. Of course scores of other people successfully built boats during the beta – and probably much more impressive things, too – but I’m positive that none did it in exactly the same way we did.
In short, ArcheAge provided us the opportunity to create a story outside of the one the game is telling us, the same way that Skyrim did for me years ago. Whatever you want to call that, I feel like it matters.