Everyone who gets to know me, knows that I am in love with The Elder Scrolls’ universe (Bethesda Softworks). I consider it, without a shadow of doubt, one of the most elaborated universes ever created in fiction.
Differently from other texts that I wrote before this one – introductory, critical and almost philosophical, this time it is going to be an analytical discussion of Game Design and Creative Direction.
You, dear reader, can expect a long text. A pretty long text.
In the last few years, this passion was directed towards The Elder Scrolls Online (Zenimax Online Studios), a MMORPG released in 2014 as a spin-off of the main franchise, having a disastrous launch. With a rarely seen competence, Zenimax Online Studios was able to transform a mediocre MMO, filled with progression and economy problems into one of the best ones in the market, winning in the category of best MMORPG during the last editions of The Game Awards show.
Nowadays, due to the quantity of quality content available for The Elder Scrolls Online (nicknamed ESO by its playerbase), I consider it, easily, the best MMORPG in the market.
With that said, the focus of this conversation will gravitate towards one of the content available in the game: The Hew’s Bane region, Abah’s Landing city and the Thieves Guild expansion, released in 2016. Even though this is one of the earliest expansions for ESO, I only interacted with it recently and in doing so, I felt the necessity to write this article.
Next, let’s talk about ESO’s gameplay, explaining it in more detail so we can dive into the juicy details that makes Abah’s Landing and Thieves Guild expansion so special for the players.
First of all, ESO can be classified as an Action MMO that became famous in the 2010s. Differentiating itself from the traditional point ‘n’ click that had cooldown and status management as the game’s main focus, ESO has a faster dynamic during combat, with action game elements.
Less skills. More emphasis on movement, distance and timing.
Besides that, the game also integrates different secondary mechanics present since the base game, such as Sneaking – a skill that allows players to hide from enemies, NPCs and players, so they can act in the shadows in order to rob their targets, pick locks or enter restricted areas.
This dynamic is profoundly similar to The Elder Scrolls, taken into consideration the MMO aspect, therefore a stealth action, for example, do not take into consideration the presence of other Player Characters, observing what is going on during this furtive state, which is appropriate for this situation, making each one of them unique for each player.
A quick reminder: This does not work on PvP, as stealth makes Player Characters completely invisible to one another in case they are adversaries.
The world of ESO is familiar to most players. Being part of a fantasy universe, it is populated by forests, swamps, savannahs, deserts and, surely, cities.
These cities range from small villages with three or four houses at most to huge metropolises – ranging from a medieval english aesthetic to whole cities nested inside treetops – around the world, in different dimensions.
Each one of these spaces are designed with a specific mood in mind that is transmitted through NPCs, the city’s architecture and narrative that the missions in these cities provide. Thus, each hub presented by the game is not only a glorified menu consisting of banks, stores and teleport stations. Each place is filled with personality and, by its own historical and geographic motives, can provide the player with other places to explore and utilize, such as temples, forts, graveyard, etc.
That said, it is easy to understand that ESO is, although an extremely competent MMO, a game that may look generic. If the game was not situated in such a rich world, its primary mechanics would fall in line with other famous games such as Neverwinter (Cryptic Studios) and New World (Amazon Game Studios).
As a player that has the Explorer profile (To further understand player profiles, please refer to Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types), the experience that I have with ESO is really satisfactory during the dozens of hours that I sank in the game. ESO has a strong narrative and a strong cohesion between the game’s content that makes you feel the cause and effect of your actions throughout the adventure and different methods to explore the game’s mechanics, being in PvP or PvE.
And that’s how Abah’s Landing enters the game as a magnificent example.
The Thieves Guild expansion was released in 2016, but I’ve just started to play its contents recently, in 2021. My most played character, a Shining and loyal Knight, is not interested in illicit activities, which contributed to me not engaging in any content of the game that dealt with the criminal system, like the wanted levels and rewards.
Recently I’ve created a new character, an assassin Khajit. At the moment, he is a delinquent with dubious morals, a strong sense of opportunism and simply can’t resist any proposal for picklocking, theft of precious objects and sacking some safes belonging to any distracted noble in the city.
My kitten in its natural habitat
Naturally, he became the perfect candidate for exploring this, until this far, unprecedented new area, the port city of Abah’s Landing. The city’s commerce is its strongest point and the city receives any kind of commodities -legal or illegal-, housing some of the richest merchants of the realm, a number of mercenaries and, of course, the thieves guild.
Imagine my surprise to find out that when I chose to begin my adventure in this city, I was, in actuality, putting in motion a totally new way to play ESO.
I didn’t install anything different on my PC, nor did the game change its mechanics, no, but Abah’s Landing is irrefutable proof of how a conscient game design project manages to transform the game’s experience and create immersion, meaning and context without the need to explain anything further.
To understand this, let’s begin with the most obvious: I became a thief… Officially.
I was a criminal and this implies, immediately, in exploring a mechanic that I wasn’t accustomed to until now, as knights with shining armors and huge warhammers are not very subtle in the way they approach things in life.
Using stealth as a necessity was the very first adaptation that I needed to make in my gameplay in order to invade homes and rob people without getting caught by one of the many guards present in Abah’s Landing streets.
The gameplay flow, thus, had changed. The necessity to understand other characters positions – from the patrol to my target – had become the most important gameplay factor for me, coupled with the memorization of character’s daily routines in the game, just like other games of the stealth genre such as Deus Ex (Eidos-Montreal) and Dishonored (Arkane Studios).
With the experience being like this, it makes an interaction that would require just a few seconds for the player using a knight – as all that is needed to do in this case is to chop a head clean off with your axe – into a meticulous study that can take minutes and is solely dependant on the player’s care and dedication to be successful or a huge failure.
If this action is not successful, an alarm is sounded and the player receives a bounty for their head. In receiving this bounty, the guards will immediately be on the player’s way each time they are spotted, stopping them in order to charge the fine needed for the character to be released from the city’s dungeon.
If your crime is hideous enough, or the bounty for your head is high enough, then, congratulations! Guards won’t even stop you from charging fines, they will, instead, attack you immediately to punish your character for their transgressions with death. Well… All the guards on ESO are immortal (yes, they are literally immortal!), so you cannot even fight back against them.
To help the player escape this fate, Abah’s Landing has a pleasant surprise for them. A surprise devised with great care and perfectly integrated into its level design: The city’s own architecture.
Abah’s Landing is a classic Redguard city, inspired by Agrabah, from Aladdin (Disney) and medieval Baghdad. The city is rich, multicultural, magnificent – filled to the brim with gardens, palaces and luxury – alongside with beggars, rovers and bandits.
The city has an architecture that establishes a principal avenue – very wide and without any obstructions – giving the players a feeling that a big caravan of merchants can parade in its whole length at any time. Abah’s Landing offers the player little roads, alleys and alternative routes as well.
ALl the buildings in this city are connected through it’s roofs, forming little mezzanines and hanging gardens, with stairs giving the player at least two more escape routes, if needed.
While all other cities in ESO are created with a central building, surrounded by other facilities, such as a castle, a fair or a dock, Abah’s Landing subverts this perspective with its interconnected buildings and a topology never seen before in the game, presenting verticality to exploration.
Abah’s Landing concept art, in the Hew’s Bane region.
This verticality has two important components; The mechanical/interactive aspect, regarding the how it governs the player movements from point A towards point B and the narrative/symbolic aspect, regarding the intrinsic sensation that the city brings to the player through its architecture.
Speaking of the first aspect, Abah’s Landing, while creating all these connections and verticalism, allows the player to develop many strategies to be used while escaping dangerous situations, if necessary.
Avoiding the busy streets of the city and instead exploring alleyways is a clever way to escape the always watchful guards, not to mention it is also easier to pickpocket that way.
Likewise, after committing a crime, it is way easier to follow these alternative routes to hide and lay low for a while, as waiting without being seen is essential for guards to lower their aggressiveness towards the player.
The labyrinth-like Abah’s Landing favours players that know how to use it and it is very punishing for those who don’t plan their escapes ahead, as it is really easy to see newbie thieves trying to escape the guards, just to corner themselves in a dead end, just to face their own deaths.
If the player happens to be in one or two floors above their target, it allows them to have a panoramic view of their target’s daily routine and their main vulnerabilities, picking the perfect timing where there are no guards around.
Abah’s Landing in one of the many elevated places that allows panoramic view.
Abah’s Landing port and one example of the city’s verticality
The way these vertical spaces are built in the game is part of an impeccable level design. In normal conditions, ESO’s jumping skill is completely irrelevant, as the vast majority of scenarios presented by the game does not require the player to jump. In Abah’s Landing, though, the jump skill is required for navigation due to the irregularities that roofs and different floors present to the player. Besides that, it is not uncommon for the player to encounter obstacles such as fences to jump while escaping the guards unscathed.
This doesn’t mean that these elements are not present in other places in ESO, but it is a fact that jumping, for instance, was privileged way more in Abah’s Landing, making the experience of being a runaway thief much more rich and interesting in the city.
The same can be said about all the other elements previously mentioned in this text: Abah’s Landing is the pinnacle of your experience as a thief in ESO.
Beyond the mechanical aspect, we also have the narrative and symbolic aspect, one more time where ZO’S Creative Direction has proven that they know how to present a concept and valorize it during the whole design project;
For purposes of contrast, it’s interesting to show how other games work with the narrative dimension of verticalization.
Dishonored, for example, utilizes this aspect to literally stratify its social classes of its universe. In it, the poor and the diseased can be found next to the ground, victims of aggression and plague, while the noble and the rich are in the higher levels of the Dunwall city, giving a deep perspective that the dominant class is indeed above the dominated class.
The same goes for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, where the city of Prague works with a distribution where people with cybernetic enhancements, considered to be from a superior kind, segregate those who don’t have these enhancements – guess how – through the verticalization of the space. Cybernetics improved above, normal people below.
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Many other examples could be given in pop culture as a whole of this kind of use of space. Cyberpunk narratives usually work with the elite in skyscrapers and flying cars, while the streets and lower levels are populated with the most despicable and poor human beings.
Even the way the medieval fortress and castles were thought reflects it. The lower levels, closer from the walls, were destined to the common and smaller bourgeois, with intermediary levels for those who have socially ascended and the top being the home of the blue-blooded nobles and wealthy.
The Elder Scrolls franchise also used this gimmick while elaborating the city of Whiterun, in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. There are the Plain District, for the merchants and common residents; the Wind District, where the richier live and where are the sacred places; and the Cloud District, where Jarl lives in his castle, Dragonsreach.
That said, a wise man once said that the power lives where the men believe it resides and this phrase is exactly what plays with the form which Abah’s Landing works its notion of verticality.
Diferente dos exemplos citados acima, a cidade de Abah’s Landing joga com a inversão de valores. As ruas são ricas, os telhados são pobres. No nível do solo os nobres dançam em pátios com fontes, ouvem música e comem frutas exóticas, enquanto que nos andares superiores o máximo que vemos são artistas de rua se apresentando para desocupados.
Unlike the examples above, the city in Abah’s Landing plays with the reversal of values. The streets are rich, the roofs are poor. On the ground level the noble dance by courtyard’s fountains, listen to music and eat exotic fruits, while what we see in the upper level are street artists presenting themselves to a disinterested crowd.
Yes, in Abah’s Landing the rich are below and the poor are above.
But why?
Well, if the power resides where the men believe where it resides, where is the power in Abah’s Landing? In those who have the gold or in those which have the power to take it?
The inverted verticality of Abah’s Landing was one of the most surprising things for me when I realized that. In this place, you, a Thief Player Character, is a predator. The noble, rich and powerful, although they think they rule the city, are your prey.
Be on the wooden footbridges, in this case, in not a sign of poverty, but yes an act of a hunter on his mark. Have a full sight of your surroundings, follow the moves of your target and being able to analyse the arrival and departure routes much before executing the action is something that only can be done with this spatial setting, from above to below, and for that is pretty valid to invert the space logic.
Ok, I believe this was enough about the Level Design and the Urbanism of Abah’s Landing, Of course, there is much more to talk about, but there is another aspect about the Thieves Guild Expansion which is worthy mentioning, because it modulates, in great part, the sense of immersion and the moral compass of the player during this journey.
This aspect is how ESO presents to you a characterizer of your targets while you are getting ready to steal them. This characterizer is a word that presents what he is in that world.
It can go from “Commoner” or “Beggar” to “Noble”, “Sellsword” and “Outlaw”, passing through many others. This one word is enough to deeply change the game’s experience.
Again, we have two possible levels of analysis: mechanically and narratively
Mechanically, this characterizer comes along with a chance percentage of success in the theft. While doing the action, the result is returned to the player in the form of a stolen object or the NPC being aware of the action.
In the second case, the reward is added or increased in your Player Character, guards will be more alert or will chase you and so on. Waiting a little longer to attempt a theft creates gaps where the chances of success increases, representing the patience to take the best moment.
In this moment, the NPC characterizer will affect some factors.
When you are about to commit a crime and be a victim of one
First of all, some characterizers are easier to steal than others. Beggars and Common People, for example, are way simpler to steal than other Thiefs, what becomes explicit through the base percentage chance for each one of them – with the Thiefs having a base percentage chance lower than the other two mentioned before – and through the visibility level, represented by the eye in the mouse’s reticle, which can go from fully open to fully close, respectively when the Player Character is totally hidden, representing the perception of the target and its surroundings.
At the same time, different characterizers will return with different rewards in a successful steal. Beggars will have a little, or almost nothing, to offer to a thief while they regret their life on Abah’s Landing, while Nobles have pockets full of gold and precious items.
It is important to say that is pretty common that the Noble would be extremely easy to be stolen while alone, but they have the annoying habit of being close to some guards or being escorted by mercenaries, which is a sign that they are too careless by nature and need someone that keep an eye and guard them.
Stealing a Beggar has up to 90% Chance of Success, but is it worth it?
Now, the narrative aspect of the case.
Here we get into a group of moral and ethical values, and about world construction.
The ESO Thieves Guild preaches, among its beliefs, that you may not steal from the poor. The Robin Hood logic helps to construct empathy for a group which, in other situations, could be considered just an ordinary gang.
There aren’t any systemic rules that stop the theft in these cases, even the opposite, with higher percentage being an invite to the crime, literally, and Beggars being strategically positioned in isolated spots and far away from any guards.
Many beginner Players could even take these opportunities, since many Thieves Guild missions place you to do a number of thefts, regardless of the quality of the results.
On the other hand, as it becomes clear to the Player and his Player Character evolves as a Thief, with more abilities and resources available to attempt more daring thefts, the Player also starts to assimilate that crimes like these, against the least favored, not only are they not worth your time, they are offensive.
This kind of situation, when the game opens up to the Player its superiority in front of a certain challenge , is extremely discouraging. Hitting a punch bag that does not react isn’t fun, in the same way that pressing a button to do a theft that wasn’t challenging in any matters also isn’t. From that comes a valuable design lesson: The end is not interesting, but the way yes.
Doesn’t matter if you stole something or defeated an enemy presented by the narrative as a menacing and strong one. If it doesn’t create engagement, doesn’t present a decent challenge or promote an interesting interaction, it’s just an empty win, something discouraging that makes the game lose its substance.
It doesn’t have to be extremely difficult either, before they accuse me of saying this is the only case and think I should only like games like Dark Souls, but it needs to be consistent with the Player’s expectations and the mental image he built for it . That’s why there’s Flow’s logic, but that’s another story.
Going back to Abah’s Landing, these characterizes also have a huge storytelling potential. From them it is possible to create emerging narratives, simulate situations, imagine journeys, all of this without the game having to write a text line about it,
There are several situations like this present throughout Abah’s Landing. There are NPC’s that get together on a mat to dance or play some dice.
There are Mercenaries that walk in more distant districts, like they are in a hunt for a target they were hired to capture.
There are Thieves that are found on the tops of buildings that are clearly on the lookout for their next target, not unlike the posture of the Player Character.
There are even more exotic situations, such as NPCs with visual models of common people who, when approached, are characterized as Nobles. Were they disguising themselves as someone normal to hide? Trying to get out of the restrictions that the life of nobility imposes by distancing you from the world? We will never know.
One of my favorite cases is that of a High Elf named Ferlulril who walks calmly every morning through one of the central areas of the city. He reads his book in a chair under a palm tree, then goes to a performance by a snake charmer and even some local merchants.
Imagine the surprise I got when I approached to snatch him and found he was featured as a Cultist.
Felulril sitting in the shade of a palm tree, reading his book and probably thinking about how to open an interdimensional portal
What kind of questions does this “discovery” spark? Felulril passing through Abah’s Landing? Is it part of a larger plan that involves the infiltration of Cultists into the city? Is he a resident of the city, but who secretly has an altar to Prince Dahedric? I came to realize that not only he, but other NPCs were characterized as Cultists and performed common actions such as throwing dice, buying fruit, and transporting goods on the docks.
Whether or not there is a conspiracy in Hew’s Bane, only the future will tell.
This kind of realization changes the perspective on the game environment a lot, offers depth and feeds the Player’s imagination with so many options that it would be impossible for the Designers to elaborate all the possibilities beforehand.
This, of course, is a well-executed Design practice, which returns to playing with the way the Player sees the game and provokes him to think not only about his targets from an approach point of view, but also from an ethical perspective.
Is it right to steal from a common Worker? And a Cultist, does he deserve to be ripped off because he is obviously a villain, even if he hasn’t done anything? A Noble, by being a Noble, is he always a target or do those who are disguising themselves among the less favored deserve special treatment for being more “human”?
Each of these questions, each facet that the game offers to the Player feeds immersion, creates a more organic environment and presents significant choices in different dimensions, which effectively promote playful interaction, of playing, experimenting and experiencing something.
And with that we close this little case study on Abah’s Landing.
Through it, I hope, it was possible to understand a little more about how a Design project aware of its objectives can add value to a project, emerging meaning and enhancing the resources created to make the product more efficient in its objective.
This mission is done on both a systemic and a mechanical and narrative level, with all the components that permeate that stage or situation being oriented to provoke the Player in a specific way.
There’s still a lot to talk about Abah’s Landing and several other areas of The Elder Scrolls Online. We didn’t touch on Sound Design, which equally contributes to immersion, or how the game works with its HUD, Diegese and VFX, all again oriented towards a common goal.
There are also Heists, individual or group game modes that aim to carry out a robbery in the shortest time possible and punish participants for carrying out murders on the way. A complete reversal of standard ESO logic.
Finally, I’m pleased to have done this text, taken this weight off my heart by talking about something that surprised me in a game that, although I liked it a lot, it couldn’t seem to impress me or teach me anything about Design besides the basic things we often see.
Fortunately, I was positively surprised and Abah’s Landing has become, for better or worse, one of the areas I spend the most time on ESO today, whether it’s doing Dungeons and defeating World Bosses the old-fashioned way or planning my next theft for several minutes until I get caught in one. Slip past a guard and have to make a cinematic escape across the city’s rooftops.
