Elder Scrolls Launch Day

Steampowered Sabbatical

Normally this morning you would have been reading about my misadventures playing a new to me game from my steam backlog. However we are taking a week off from that feature, mainly because I knew I would be busy this morning with something else. However we will get to that later, and the reasons why I got up at 5 am this morning to be prepared for it. Instead today we are going to talk about a few games and the highlight of my day yesterday. For awhile now I have been doing the “Bel Faffs About” thing where I stream a game as I play it, and invite people into my “Bel is Streaming” mumble channel. The usual suspects are my guildies who come online and are entertaining so that I don’t have to.

Yesterday I got to hang out with some of my favorite people from twitter, namely @Gypsy_Syl, @NexusRangers, @GameByNight and after awhile the very awesome @TipaDaKnife. I got to hang out the longest with Syl and it was a blast. The only problem is I am so used to listening to her talk about video game music thanks to the amazing Battlebards podcast… it was a little weird to be talking about anything else. Everyone was great and it made for a fun afternoon, even though after getting up at 4 am I was quite a little slap happy as the night went on.

Mithril or Bust

Yesterday we played a lot of Landmark as we hung out, and the missions of the day were really two fold. Firstly I wanted to try and finish my work on gathering the resources for the Mithril pick. Currently this is the highest in progression you can go as far as mining, and thanks to the changes they made to the Founders Pick being able to harvest ANY tree… there is not a resource mining or wood that I cannot consume. The other mission was to be able to craft the rest of the basic machines for my claim so that others can use them. One of the odd things that was different from alpha is that there are both public and private machines. The private machines are labelled as “Refining stations” and allow you to work resources at a progressively better rate, returning more finished materials than went into creating them.

For some time now I have felt a little bit bad for grabbing such prime real estate, but not having done anything on it but clear the ground. In the above screenshot you can see the foundation for Belgarde Keep from the spire, so it really is a very short run away. The problem is as I progress through the crafting tiers I am in constant need of stone. Yesterday at one point I decided to dig down in the desert for as long as I could and harvest as much stone as I could. Unfortunately that happened to be exactly the same time @GameByNight decided to use the “teleport to friend” option. I had been down there long enough that the ground above me was respawning leaving us essentially trapped underground. Thankfully the evac to safety option works remarkably well.

What you are seeing in the pictures represents roughly 350,000 stone worth of building. I managed to gather 200k doing my “big dig” and poured another bit into it over the course of several trips. Sometime soon I will have to do another one my grand harvesting missions and try and make some more progress. Essentially I am building a greatly scaled up version of the building I created in alpha. I am changing up the design significantly but not the overall building type. I like big open air temple like spaces. Essentially I am building much the same type of structures that I used to build in Minecraft. The smooth tool and the ability to craft curved shapes is nice, but I really prefer straight and chiseled edges.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVLast night I went to bed seriously early for me, after having gotten up at 4 am the day before. I had heard rumor that the servers would be opening this morning for the Elder Scrolls Online slightly early, but was not certain that was going to be the case. I ended up waking up about 4:45 and by the time I made coffee and got upstairs, there were a few other guildies also sitting on mumble waiting for things to open. Sure enough a little bit after 5 am CST I was able to log in and create Belghast Sternblade for real. Thing is… it did not take me terribly long on the character creator because I have created this character literally a dozen times now throughout a years worth of testing. I am a simple person, and tend to create the same basic character in each game that I play. So I managed to get in extremely quickly and create the guild long before anyone else logged in.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVSince early this morning I have been hanging out in the “Bel is Streaming” channel as lots of other people have popped in to join me. Honestly far too many to list here, but it has prove to be a really enjoyable and entertaining day. I will be exporting the stream to youtube eventually but here I am posting the various twitch links. If nothing else they are fun to open up and listen into our conversation in the background like it was a podcast. I am for the most part live streaming all day long. While this is a headstart, this is one of the smoothest launches I have participated in. THis folks is why they had us stress test the hell out of stuff during the weekend betas, and every indication shows that they learned a lot of information. The mega server tech seems to be holding up and scaling well.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVRight now I am having a blast, so if you have access to the House Stalwart mumble server, pop by and say hi. I plan on going right back to the game, that is open in the background and continuing my odyssey. However I wanted to take a moment and make my post before it got any later in the day. Hopefully you all are having as great of a weekend as I am.