Elder Scrolls Online Archives - Page 13 of 41

On The Mend

January 16, 2018 by Belghast

I am mostly among the living. Yesterday was a federal holiday here in the United States and with me being off work… it also mean’t that I largely treated it as part of the weekend for blogging purposes. I am still fighting the same crud that I had last week, but it feels like at some point on Monday I turned the corner. While I still have the vestiges of whatever bronchial mess has inflicted me, I am starting to feel better and less like an appendage of the couch and or bed depending upon the time table. it truly was a miserable weekend and while I attempted to game I was not terribly successful at anything until yesterday. I spent most of the break working on the Tauren Hunter who has now finished the Outland and is knee deep in Northrend just starting the Grizzly Hills area. My hope is that when I ding 74 the bear spirit beast will be up and I can collect it for my pet. Up until this point I am mostly running a Fel Corehound that I got from the Blasted Lands. I took the Beast Mastery talent that allows your pets to shadow step… so it is entertaining watching him leap up on targets rapidly. At this point however I can kill most mobs well before my beast even has time to interact with it… which is the life of running full heirlooms.

Sunday I indulged a really weird whim and decided to reinstall the Arc client and give Neverwinter a spin. I’m on the PR feed still from Perfect Worlds and they are constantly putting out press releases about content releases to this game. It got me wondering what the current state of matters is when I have literally not heard anyone talk about it in almost two years. It turns out the game is in pretty great shape as far as actually logging in and playing it. As far as doing its best to feel insidious from a loot box standpoint… it is also working on winning some awards. I don’t remember much about the game if I am being very serious, but you know that thing that we chastised Call of Duty WW2 for doing at the beginning of the year? Where if you get a drop the game announces to the rest of the world what you just got? That apparently happens in Neverwinter as most of my time spent in the central hub area was a constant stream of people getting loot drop rewards. In the very short time I played yesterday I got somewhere around 25 loot crate drops from random stuff while doing quests. Each one of these crates would require a key which runs roughly $1.25 each without any of the “buying in bulk” discounts applied. Through the quests I wound up getting three free keys to open three sample crates and if the ones that drop in the wild are at all similar to what they gave us as “examples” for why we should buy into this system… they were full of utter garbage. If you can however do what I started doing and just vendoring the damn crates for a few copper each time you saw one drop… and loot past the money grubbing nature of the game… the core feedback loop is actually rather enjoyable. I think when I logged in last night I was around 16 left over from my initial push around launch and I believe I logged out for the evening around 25/26ish. During all of that time I enjoyed the core game quite a bit so long as I completely ignored the multiple currency cash shop nonsense. If you can do the same then you too will probably enjoy yourself.

Last completely random thing I did last night… is patch up and log into Elder Scrolls Online. This game is in fact the same as I remember it and still rather enjoyable. The biggest problem I will have is trying to sort out exactly what I was doing when I was last playing. I am still being insanely stubborn and wanting to finish all of the original three story arcs before doing any of the newer content. As a result I believe I am somewhere in the middle of Malabal Tor during my Aldmerri Dominion play through. From there I will at some point venture forth into Ebonheart where maybe just maybe I can play long enough to see the character that was inspired by me and some of the folks we play with. I think the fact that I jumped around so much last night… but still managed to get a bunch of play in with each jump… is probably proof that I am on the mend. In truth a good chunk of this weekend was spend with me just staring blankly at things without really doing a lot of interaction. There were several times that I would start up a YouTube video that would then cycle through a whole bunch of things before I even realized I was still watching something. Now however I need to go warm up the car and prep myself to venture forth into the frozen tundra (for Oklahoma at least). Tonight will likely either be more Neverwinter or ESO because I had a lot of fun playing both.

Box of Spoons

February 17, 2017 by Belghast

I feel like I was given a box full of spoons. One of my friends said that awhile back and I had no clue what it meant at the time… but after some research… yeah I totally get it. I have been largely functioning on adrenaline and fear for the last several weeks as I had this big looming deadline swinging dangerously over my head. Yesterday however was the day… and we launched… and despite having a flurry of activity and a pretty active bug tracker we largely survived. We had a happy hour yesterday where our boss picked up the tab, and I cannot fully express how awesome it was that he did that… and even more so that I work with a group of people that I enjoy working with enough to go to happy hour. This site had a heavy toll on both myself and Rae who has been the mastermind of its design. By the time we sat down at the pub… I felt like I had several weeks worth of tired crashing down upon my shoulders. Last night I flailed about a bit trying to play various games… and even succeeding in doing a few delves in Elder Scrolls Online. However before long I was back to staring blankly at my laptop and decided it was time for sleep. I slept better than I have slept in a long time… with my periods of waking up being replaced by dreams where I thought I woke up and did things. Apparently Kenzie was going nuts and it woke my wife up… but I seemingly was blissfully unaware.

We still have a hefty list of things to sort out, and bugs to fix… however they all seem so much less significant than the overarching goal of launching. The chief content provider remarked that launching a website was like giving birth, and given that she has a teenage daughter I am going to take her word for it. It is definitely like something, given that yesterday was the culmination of a few years worth of planning and a years worth of furious development and re-development and then ultimately trying to hop up and down on the trunk until the various components fit enough to close the lid. You always start out with these lofty pristine goals, and then as you start managing towards a date you have to sacrifice some of that naivety and start trying to focus on what actually works or will work well enough for the time being. I hate managing to a date… because it feels like you are doing development wrong, especially when you are doing something that you have never actually done before. I mean I have launched plenty of sites… but we essentially threw away most of our comfortable tools this time and launched out into a brand new direction that if we managed to pull it off was going to be amazing. What is also the hard part is this is the first time I was the one actually managing the timeline and making sure things were getting done. I would have been so screwed if like I said before… I didn’t have a really amazing group of people to work with.

The images you are seeing are not from my random screenshot tool, but I would forgive you if you thought that given that up until this point in today’s post I have not actually talked about gaming. Instead these are sort of post cards from the gaming that I did while in this state. I have been playing quite a bit of Elder Scrolls Online, because of the segmented nature of its questing allows me to get in… turn a single symbol on my map from black to white… and feel like I have accomplished something. I am still slowly pushing my way through Malabal Tor, but if I get a full day of questing this weekend I might be able to get through it. Last weekend during the AggroChat podcast I started working on my Warlock in World of Warcraft, and was shocked that it pretty much took the entire podcast to get through the intro scenario, artifact weapon, and class order hall quests. I really should have done what so many of my guildies did and chain ran all of my characters up to the point where they choose the first zone in Legion. In that intro scenario there were two of us… which made it take significantly longer than it was intended. As a result they maybe need to scale that back given that we are reaching a point where no one is running it. Finally at some point over the last week I participated in all four turns of the third section of Alexander and man… is that a thing. I greatly enjoyed the fights so much more than I did the middle section of Alexander, because Voltron sorta broke me. The final boss was sufficiently epic, and both 9 and 12 required a bunch of attempts to finally push through it. I rolled lucky and managed to get two helm tokens and two of the four needed pants tokens… so I guess I will be wanting to run more of this? It was a lot of fun, but was sort of dulled by the stupored state of being in constant stress mode. I am looking forward to feeling like I can actually enjoy the world once more.

Four Screenshots

February 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was another fairly anxiety fraught night, and I simply didn’t feel capable of tanking a World of Warcraft progression raid. I feel bad about it, but by the time I got home… my mind was spent racing through all of the possible things that could fail today. This is it.. the day we launch the new website and I am terrified. In the grand scheme of things I know that we will deal with everything that comes down the pipe and triage issues as they arise. However on the eve of the event I can’t stop thinking about all of the things that could go catastrophically wrong. I need this to launch and I need it to go successful… because honestly I need a few days to simply fall apart. I have been functionally working sick for over two weeks because I knew things had to get done. Granted I have not been running a fever, so I didn’t think I was likely contagious… but that didn’t necessarily stop me from feeling downright miserable. One thing I did do last night was get my little Random Shots project out on GitHub since Scopique mentioned I should do this thing. Since I don’t really have a whole lot that I feel like talking about this morning, I am going to try one out of these random screenshot posts and see what happens.

I have this weird relationship with Rift. I love it or at least I really want to love it… but I have issues playing it. I talked a little bit about my issues with combat over on Syp’s blog yesterday in the comment section, but another huge issue I have is that I simply cannot bring myself to purge things from my vault. I love their housing system… but I also cannot seem to be bothered to actually spend time building a proper house. However I have this long term desire to do so… and because of that my vault is horrible. With Nightmare Tide they introduced the Minion system and for months I logged in dutifully every day hoping to get housing caches with the thought of putting all of this cool stuff to work in building a really great dimension. However what actually happened is it filled up both my vault and inventory with a bunch of items that I never could quite bring myself to part with. I could bring myself to part with the deluge of crafting materials that my minions kept bringing back, but those housing items were just too rare feeling. Sure most of them go on the auction house for a few silver…. but that doesn’t actually seem to alleviate the problem. What I wish is that Rift had a housing system that worked similar to Wildstar in that you chuck items in a sort of housing inventory that you can then place items from. I would happy wander the world collecting housing items, knowing that one day I might actually sit down and devote the hours to building a proper home.

I had honestly forgotten about the events that happened during this screenshot. Back in 2014 the Halloween event included the ability to transform into one of the various signature characters in the game. There were a bunch of different clones running around in Uldah, and I wound up as Nanamo Ul Namo. It was a lot of fun but largely was just an occasion to take funny photos… like there is one floating around of like nine Minfilia’s on a bench sitting beside one Merlwyb who is looking exasperated. That is one of the really cool and frustrating things about Final Fantasy XIV is that each holiday event is unique and will never be repeated. They sometimes put the rewards you could have earned on the cash shop for a pretty cheap price… but each year and each holiday offers something truly unique. Over the years I have missed several, and there will always be a small bit of me that feels a slightly sense of loss over not getting to see whatever content that was.

This is one of those screenshots where I know what it is and what it is showing… but can’t be terribly certain of the sequence of events. Essentially I know that this is a beta test build of Elder Scrolls Online, during one of the most public test weekends and not one of the Psijic Order/Team Akatosh weekends. The screenshot is somewhere in the middle of Stonefalls, because I spent so much time in Stonefalls. By the time the game launched I was pretty sick of both the Daggerfall Covenant starter area and the Ebonheart Pact starter area. The reason why I know it is a public beta client, is because there is no obnoxious watermark that says my email address over and over across the screen. I still have plenty of alpha screenshots floating around that are watermarked to hell and back and this is obviously not one of them. I also know this is not a live screenshot… in part because of the time stamp on the image and also because I have yet to make it to Ebonheart Pact on my main character. The funny part about this shot is that I had been in alpha/beta testing on the game roughly a full year when we reached this point back in February of 2014. I was an extremely dutiful tester, repeatedly reporting bugs every time I played. To the best of my knowledge I never missed a weekend testing event, even if it simply meant that I popped in for a few hours somewhere during it. It just seems shocking that in April we will be coming up on the third anniversary of the Elder Scrolls Online.

This is a screenshot from one of the early alpha builds of Skysaga, a minecraftian sort of voxel building game. The game had a really awesome style to it, in everything other than the character models… and their weird floating arms and legs that were detached from the torso bothered me. I realize that was part style decision and part that they simply didn’t want to have to properly animate arms and legs. I mean if it worked for Rayman… why not for a construction/exploration game? I cannot really tell you why I checked out of this game, but I did… I think in part because it was the sort of experience that handheld you through the process of building by continually throwing new crafting achievements in front of you. Then each time a new build was released… we would get wiped back to square one. I am sure the game has changed massively given that this is a screenshot from February of 2015 and I am still actively getting emails talking about alpha builds of the game. When I just checked the website they list that they are in Alpha 9… and this screenshot is from what I can only term as a 0 alpha build given the version number. If you are still in alpha after two years… something tells me you are using the nomenclature completely wrong. If you are selling a product… you aren’t in alpha. You are just in a buggy release mode.

Chateau Belghast

February 13, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bizarre one. We are still very much under the gun of a release date, and I attempted to do whatever I could to further that goal. However for all of Saturday our building was without power, and I was instead on call just in case something went wrong. The building power went down at 6:30 in the morning, and by the time we started recording AggroChat we had not yet gotten the all clear. I was just hoping that things would cycle off of the generators as successfully as they did cycling onto them, and that I would not end up getting interrupted during the podcast. Sunday was a mixed bag of work and doing all of the other things that we ultimately put off until Sunday like laundry and various errands. The weekend as a whole wound up being a very random mix of games as I played whatever I could during the brief moments of downtime. As you can see by the Chateau Belghast image above, I started fiddling around with Fallout 4 once again, and scrapped my old house and built this one instead. The inside is largely unfurnished but I am digging the outside quite a bit. It took me far longer than it should have to sort out how best to attempt centering the neon text, but in the grand scheme it seems to look okay. The frustrating bit with their neon font is that is is in no way monospaced with the characters all varying pretty wildly in width.

In Final Fantasy XIV I am still very much getting back in the swing of things, and have fallen into the pattern of doing Beast Tribe dailies. In theory I started down this path because I wanted a reliable source of ventures for my retainers, so that I could keep sending out my gatherers on field exploration. However I also really like mounts, and over the course of the last week or so I have been pushing up the Sahagin, not necessarily because I love the mount, but more because it was the next closest faction. For a long period of time, it was the faction I was spending the rest of my daily allowance on while working on the Sylph. Yesterday however I managed to push Sahagin across the finish line and now have my truly bizarre Sapsa mount to ride around on. I figured what better place to take a picture of it than in the waters of The Mists, where the Free Company house is located. Next up should be the Kobolds as once again… they are the next closest given that I had been spending my extra ventures on them while working on the Sahagin. I mean I know there are lots of other things I SHOULD be doing… but I just can’t bring myself to pug dungeons yet. After a string of bad experiences with Palace of the Dead… I don’t much feel like pugging that one either. The problem there is as we talked about on the podcast, is that if you fail… you lose all progress gained which seems deeply punitive for a random group activity.

Finally I spent a good amount of time this weekend playing Elder Scrolls online. I failed to take any screenshots so instead you get an interior shot of my home. I pushed forward the story line in Malabal Tor a bit, but the big problem with ESO is that I tend to wander wildly. I find it extremely hard to stay focused and instead I wind up going after the next object on the horizon that looks interesting, and as a result never seem to end up getting my objectives accomplished. There is always a fallen log to harvest, or an outcropping of ore to mine. Whatever the case I find myself continuing to move steadily towards 160 champion levels, which is the current item cap. Unfortunately I have a feeling this is probably going to change with Morrowind, but for the time being getting there.. and being able to craft a set of gear that will last me for a bit tends to be my focus. The other thing that I am realizing is that 160 champion levels is just a drop in the bucket given that quite literally every build I find expects you to have at least four or five times that amount. There is a part of me that wishes I had never actually faded away from this game, because at this very moment I am so impossibly behind the curve. Then again I think that overwhelming amount of content is what has been drawing me there much in the same way as it did for A Realm Reborn until we caught up. I know there is more to do than I have time to do it… and in some way that is insurance from ever really getting bored.