Tamriel-Foundry
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Tamriel Infinium: A hitchhiker's guide to The Elder Scrolls Online
I believe we can all agree that The Elder Scrolls Online is not a sandbox in the MMORPG sense. However, the game starts to branch out as your level increases. Although it will never be an MMO sandbox, it does start to resemble the single-player sandbox, except there are tons of other people playing at the same time. Just like those single-player sandboxes, ESO allows us to do pretty much whatever we want when we want to. It's an explorer's dream, if you ask me. Of course, we might be able to find some of those explorable items on the in-game map, but many of them remain hidden until we just land on them. Today, I'd like to talk about a few of the items that I think every ESO explorer should be aware of.
Tamriel Infinium: What to do in The Elder Scrolls Online besides PvP
As a part of my series of articles that explain some of the core features of The Elder Scrolls Online, I want to talk about what most people would consider obvious activities in the MMOs, but because of the way ZeniMax has advertised the game up to this point, many casual followers have come to believe that ESO will not have much in the way of PvE activities. Of course, players will level up via PvE, but beyond that, is there anything to do? What about group activities while you're leveling up? Are there endgame group activities? Is there raiding? Although I like PvP, much of my focus in MMOs is PvE-related. I enjoy story, exploration, and group activities. Save for the group activities, that's what The Elder Scrolls is to me. Exploring every ruin and cave or finding a hidden cult or hearing the NPCs talk about how they each took arrows to their knees defines the series for me. I don't think I could call a game Elder Scrolls without attaching defining PvE moments. I believe the developers at ZeniMax understand this, which is why they have hired some amazing voice actors to the game and why much of the website advertising revolves around the lore of the game. But is it enough to tell us what the game is about, and will ZeniMax finally show us?
Tamriel Infinium: An Elder Scrolls Online community connection
The primary reason I play the MMOs I play stems from the people I play with and the community as a whole. The Elder Scrolls, being a well-established intellectual property, already has a well-established community. MMO players, like many of you who read Massively, have their own culture and community as well. With the Elder Scrolls Online, we see a melding of these two communities, but not necessarily in the same places. Some sites tend to be MMO-focused, as I try to be in this column; others focus on the Elder Scrolls. I've mentioned Tamriel Foundry from time to time. This site started in August last year as a theory-crafting and mechanics site for ESO. But it's blossomed into a large community that focuses on many parts of the ESO landscape, from lore and classes to guilds and armoring. Although founder Andrew "Atropos" Clayton and his team have been writing articles for well over a year now, the recent articles have touched on some solid mechanics and gameplay issues. But given the growth and nature of the community there, the team has branched out to cover more than just the mechanics of the game and has covered a bit of lore as well. Let me highlight a few of my favorite bits, and then we will tackle a statement from a Massively community member.
Tamriel Infinium: The Elder Scrolls Online holiday special
While scouring the interwebs to find different stories and trending topics, I ran across an older article on Tamriel Foundry that asked a question about events in The Elder Scrolls Online. MMOs and events go hand in hand; that's one of the amazing perks of playing a game with active developers. Usually these events coincide with real-life events, Halloween, and winter holidays are usually the most active among the various MMO developers. Of course, since most MMOs take place in a fictional universe, you can't come right out and say "World of Warcraft celebrates Easter!" Besides alienating all those people who don't happen to celebrate Easter, you'd also blatantly break the imaginary fourth wall. So instead, WoW celebrates the feast of Noblegarden, which contains many western springtime traditions without explicitly calling the event an Easter event. Of course, World of Warcraft isn't the only one to do this. Guild Wars 2 has Wintersday for a pseudo-Christmas and the Shadow of the Mad King for Halloween. Both of the Star Wars MMOs (Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars Galaxies) celebrated the much-detested Wookiee Life Day. Inspired by the Tamriel Foundry article, I set out to find my own holidays that I think would be fun to celebrate in in ESO in conjunction with real life holidays. Here are my top five that were not mentioned by the other article.
