Back to the Sewers

Jonquils say so

Here in Oklahoma we have had more than our fair share of ping pong weather of late.  This weekend I was happily running around in shorts, however when I went for my walk last night that same choice was rather chilly.  I wish the world would make up its damned mind to be honest, and preferably warm up.  I am afraid that once again we will go from cold to hot without much of a middle ground like we did last year.  We have a patch of Jonquils on the side of the house and they seem to think spring time has arrived as they are in full bloom and gorgeous as always.  We had these growing up as well, and they were always the heralds of springtime.  When they bloomed things were going to start warming up significantly.  I really hope the weather gods are watching my flowers, because seriously I am tired of the cold.

This morning I am more nervous than normal, and for good reason.  Our eldest cat has a thyroid problem, and today she is supposed to go into surgery to have hers removed.  This is supposedly going to fix the imbalance that is causing her to be sick all of the time.  For awhile now we’ve done a practice I like to refer to as “greasing her ears”, where I rub some thyroid cream (while wearing latex gloves) into her ears.  This was all to get her thyroid levels stabilized enough to have the surgery.  However I am wondering if this is something we can just do indefinitely now.  I don’t really mind doing it, at least not as bad as trying to feed her a pill.  She doesn’t really like it but she tolerates it well enough.  I am just wondering since she is a fifteen year old cat, if doing this a few times a day would be better for her quality of life than a surgery.

Back to the Sewers

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVYesterday evening some friends and I decided to delve back into the Wayrest Sewers in search of loot, glory… and attempting to avoid the mess.  We had run the dungeon Saturday evening and it seemed much easier than the others we had run.  Thing is apparently this was not the intent of the dungeon, and seemingly in an effort to break the trend of chain running the place… yesterdays patch changed several things about the place.  Firstly there were a large number of packs that previously could be split, this is no longer the case.  There were instances where you had a Rat Feeder human npc in a pack of rats… and you could fiery grip the human out by himself then deal with the rats.  Now when you yoink the human the rats properly come with him, no longer trivializing the encounter.  Similarly there were humanoid pack mobs that you could single pull, or pull without engaging the boss they were attached to.

All of this lead for a much more difficult run than we were expecting.  The above video is still uploading to youtube, so I’ve embedded the twitch broadcast instead.  Several things were happening… firstly I am generally horrible at explaining fights.  Secondly for everyone but myself, this was their first time into the instance.  Thirdly two of our members were slightly under level for the dungeon.  The result meant that at least one of the boss fights seemed far more difficult than it really should have been.  The Garron encounter is rough, but it involves figuring out how best to deal with the adds… and it took us several tries to arrive at a strategy that was working.  Namely killing things in the same order as not to break the CC.  It was a good time had by all, and we got our youngins specifically some tasty loot.

It Runs on a Toaster

My friends and I have joked for some time, that the Elder Scrolls Online engine is so damned optimized that it could probably run on a toaster.  I posted this a few days ago on twitter, but I still find it insanely amusing.  This is from the ESO Reddit, and is apparently Elder Scrolls Online running at the absolute minimum settings which is 320×200.  The game looks oddly playable, even if you can’t really make out who exactly you are interacting with.  It looks oddly similar to a super pixilated adventure game from the 1990s.  Thankfully my machine will run the game in its full Ultra setting 1080p glory…  but I do find it awesome that the game can technically be run on some pretty ancient hardware and perform just as well.  I honestly don’t notice much of a difference running it on my laptop as I do running it on my more serious gaming desktop.

The thing is… so many companies overlook this as an issue.  One of the reasons why World of Warcraft has been so easy to spread as a game, is that it has super minimal requirements.  You can dial back the settings and run it comfortably on a netbook.  I feel like more than likely you could do the same thing with Elder Scrolls Online.  I’ve heard rumors of it running through a virtual pc emulator on various tablets, as well as natively on the Microsoft surface.  The important thing is, since the client is that optimized, it means when you have friends that want to join you… you can likely get them into the experience without them needing to shell out for a dedicated gaming machine.  At the end of the day this is a social experience, and being able to play with your friends will ultimately be the key to longevity.

One of my good friends, Scarybooster is having some real life stuff going on, and as a result he doesn’t expect to be able to play the game again until June.  He jokingly said that he hoped we would all still be playing by the time June rolls around.  Considering the longevity most of us tend to have with games…  that is a fair question.  I really hope that this title is not another in a long line of “three monthers”.  I would love this game to be a much longer lived title, because I feel like it has what so many of them have been lacking…  depth.  The world is deep and nuanced and almost strangles you with lore.  The thing that I have always loved about Elder Scrolls is that it works much like our own world.  There is no one clean lore path through the setting… but instead it is told through little tidbits spread across thousands of books… some of which are directly contradictory.  History is a messy thing, full of partial accounts and factual inaccuracies… and the world of Tamriel gets this right.  Here is hoping we will all still find the world compelling a year from now, let alone a few months from now.

#ElderScrollsOnline #WayrestSewers