Everquest Next Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Too Many Games

May 30, 2014May 29, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Cheater

Once again I am doing what I consider cheating… which is writing up a post at night that I intend to post in the morning. Basically tomorrow is another one of those “ride in together” days, because directly after work we have a big end of school cookout thing to go to. So I simply won’t have much time to do my faff about verbally thing tomorrow morning. As such I am staging a post tonight, and doing the same thing everyone else… but for whatever reason I feel like I am somehow betraying the ritual by doing. Today’s topic I have been kicking around for awhile, so I figure this is as good of a time to spring it on my adoring readers… look I like to pretend I have adoring readers okay.

Too Many Games

Right now things have reached a sort of critical mass with me, and there are entirely too damned many games right now that I want to be playing. This could not have hit at a worse time considering how busy the tail end of school is combined with the fact that we have weddings and graduations and such to attend. Normally I feel like I can reasonably juggle three to four games at a time bouncing back and forth between them. The other day I posted saying that multi-gaming was even an awesome thing to do… considering it kept you from getting bogged down in the decisions a game company makes that you don’t necessarily agree with. However for me, I am spreading myself super thin with a ton of different activities that I want to be doing. So today I am going out outline each of the games that I am playing and lament the things I would love to have time to do in them.

Elder Scrolls Online

Right now I still consider Elder Scrolls Online my primary game. At roughly two months since headstart I am still very much loving this game. It has some problems, namely with difficulty of grouping, but as far as the game itself goes I dig it massively. I’m working my way through Auridon and slowly creeping up on Veteran Rank 2. I have so much that I still want to do in this game, but lately my schedule has limited my time in it. This is the type of game that I can only really play if I am fully focused on it, and this is doubly so with the veteran content. Shit can go wrong in a heartbeat if you are not doing all the right things, so it means on the nights I am not feeling all that… I end up playing something else.

Wildstar

This game is the new hotness it seems and it launches tomorrow, at least for the headstart folks. I mostly preordered this game in case I decided I was in love with it, and I wanted to make sure I secured the preorder bonuses. I really dig the pre-order house, and I did not care for anything in the Collectors Edition pack… so I went with the normal. I am still so up in the air about this game… there are things I like and things I don’t like. Right now I am simply not sure who is going to win out, however since everyone is playing it, and it scratches the same itch that World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic do… going to give it a good college try.

ArcheAge

Speaking of games I am conflicted about… welcome to ArcheAge. I find so much about this game intriguing and repulsive at the same time. It is this fusion of one of the most interesting games system wise and class wise… combined with one of the worst communities I have experienced. This game has invented new ways for you to grief your fellow players… and this is the sort of thing I have zero interest in. That alone would be enough to make me go running and screaming into the night… but the class system is so damned interesting to me. I love the concept of “Rift without Restrictions” and that is pretty much what the open class system seems like. It reminds me so much of the way the class system for Horizon worked… and that is a great thing.

Heroes of the Storm

I want so badly to be playing this game right now… but I also want so badly to not be playing this game with strangers. The MOBA thing is one of those things that I really only enjoy if I am queuing with people I know. That said supposedly the queue times are greatly improved with the new client. If you are in the HoTS alpha… please let me know! I need more people to queue with, and I feel horrible for being in this game when so many people want in… and not playing it much.

Defiance

The last few nights I have been playing this game again and really enjoying myself. The whole shift in how I approach it has really helped quite a bit. I would love to see more people playing it because I think it would be far more enjoyable to run around as a group. I still have yet to really scratch the surface of any of the story content, and feel like I should do that. Really enjoyed the first season of the television show, and would love to get caught up on the in game content before the next season starts.

Final Fantasy 5

At this point I am behind my friends in this game, and quite honestly I am struggling to get the oomph to play it. That said I feel like I should really finish this game as part of the FF5 draft thing we did. I feel like I would be a horrible person if I didn’t finish it. That said I also know I am going to get talked into doing the Four Job Fiesta in a month… so not sure if I will finish before then either.

Trove

There is something about this game that makes my inner child squeal with glee. Things are just so damned much fun, and the mob design is amazing. That said I have been out so long and so much is changing on what seems to be a near weekly basis that I feel hopelessly lost. At some point I need to resort to reading through all of the patch notes starting around the time I last played in the hopes of understanding how things have changed. The combat in this game is just enjoyable, I only wish I could play it with a controller. I guess in theory I could use one of the keypad mappers but I have been lazy.

Landmark

Oh Landmark… how I love you and am completely bored with you at the exact same time. Right now it is less a game and more a toybox for you to build in, with a ruleset wrapped around it. This was really fun while I had giant things to build… and while I was progressing through the ranks of collecting the next best mining pick. Now that I have topped out, and have fleshed out most of what I wanted to build… I log in pretty much only to mine copper and pay my upkeep. What I need to make me care about this game is the combat system. Here is hoping I will fall back in love with it when I can run around the world killing things.

Diablo 3

I still don’t have a character to 70, and I feel like I have somehow failed for not doing this. Basically this released way too close to the launch of Elder Scrolls Online… and I never gave the game the attention it deserves. At some point soon I really want to work on leveling my crusader, since I have technically beaten the game on my Monk. I am struggling with the desire to simply grind the last two levels to ding 70. I figure at some point I will have a renaissance of caring about d3… but it might be awhile before I cycle around to it again.

Rift

The new souls were released and I have yet to even check them out. I really would like to level my cleric to 60 before the 3.0 patch hits, but I have no clue how long that is. Right now I am logging in on a weekly basis to get my patron gifts and that is about it. I thought it would be really cool to do a streaming series where I try and remember how to tank, and do a public service of tanking elites. I’ve heard the queue times are absolutely insane, and I know personally I have waited over two hours without getting a DPS queue. I still love this game, but at the same time don’t really know what I want to do in it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

A few weeks back I was playing the hell out of SWTOR and enjoying myself. While I have let my subscription lapse again… I would love to pick back up on my Sith Juggernaut and see what happens after Balmorra. I have never actually made it off this planet imperial side, but I was really damned close to doing this when I was last playing. The real challenge will be if I can manage to play the game without subscribing… or will I re-up again only to cancel a few weeks later.

World of Warcraft

Finally there is good ole World of Warcraft. Once upon a time I had a grand idea of getting everyone to 90 before the expansion. I have failed miserably at keeping up with this ambition, but who knows if I will actually do this or not. Right now all I have left are the Priest, Monk and Warlock… all of which are over 60 at the least. The Warlock and Priest are both in Pandaria content, but at the very beginning. I might get a wild urge to play again and push these guys across the finish line. Either that or I might completely abandon this until the release of Warlords of Draenor. In any case the account is still active, because I pop in periodically to dink around with stuff for the guild.

Nothing at All!

Tonight I will be playing…. nothing more than likely. We have an end of school cookout and by the time we get done there… we will likely crash, or walk… or walk then crash. If anything I launch Wildstar and create my characters. Right now I am planning on having my Chua Engineer and an Exile Warrior of some sort… just not sure if that will be Human or Granok. In any case I have nothing exciting to report about my master plan for the evening other than hanging out in the real world and eating some good food.

Comfort Gaming

March 22, 2014 by Belghast

Classy Defined

This morning I got up like I do most weekend mornings, and threw on enough clothing to make myself presentable. Generally speaking I don’t shower until later in the day, so generally this means I have to throw on a skull cap to tame my hair that is sticking straight up. In the winter this makes sense… in the summer not so much. Honestly in the morning anytime I see someone in a skull cap or baseball cap… I pretty much assume they are doing precisely what I am doing. As always I went to QuikTrip to gather up sustenance, and walked away with chocolate donut holes for the Mrs. and a jalapeño sausage roll for me.

While there… I saw the definition of classy. This woman walked in, who looked like she was already three sheets to the wind. What was she buying you ask? Well she planted an “Olde English” 40 oz malt liquor on the counter. Granted this is 8 am in the morning, most of the people in the place are buying donuts or juice or something more breakfast appropriate. In addition she had a package of twinkies and asked the guy at the counter if he sold single swisher sweets. After some fumbling around he found her a three pack, and I guess that was “close enough”. So yeah… I guess that is how some people roll. I am guessing this is not breakfast but a “night cap” of sorts. Just not something I normally see in the neighborhood QuikTrip.

Comfort Gaming

I think I grieve differently than most. Since the news of my grandmother, all I have really wanted to do is “turtle”… aka pull my head inside my shell and forget that the world exists. One of my chosen ways of doing this is to go off and play games that have always made me happy. One of the games I always cycle back to eventually is Everquest 2. It is like an old friend that I have spent so much time with, that I don’t even need to talk anymore… and I know that it understands me. Yeah I am sure it is odd that I personify a game like that, but really EQ2 was a thing I did for “me” and no one else. All the while raiding in WoW I would steal private time by logging into Norrath and wandering around aimlessly on my army of alts.

Just as a coincidence, right now my absolutely favorite event is going on in EQ2. Once a year Chronoportals open up allowing players to revisit areas from the original Everquest. Some of them are rather funny, like the Ancient Cyclops event in Sinking Sands. Back in the day there were all sorts of “theories” for how you get the ancient cyclops to spawn. Some of these involved killing all the madmen, spiders or mummies… and none of them really worked. It was a fairly random chance that you would get him to spawn. Why did players care? Well the Ancient Cyclops dropped the item needed to start the Journeyman Boots quest line, which of course provided the player with their own personal way of casting “Spirit of the Wolf”. SoW Plx!

Basically they are a really awesome way of getting account bound gear for your alts. I am not sure when I will actually level an alt again, but sooner or later I always seem to, and having these weapons and gear makes a bit difference. On my Shadow Knight I am still using the sword that comes from the Lower Guk chronoportal event. It is precisely the kind of mindless nostalgia that I need right now. The above video has me running through several of the events, or at least the ones I could remember off the top of my head. However if you are looking for a full listing, the place to check is Zam as always the amazing Cyliena does a great job as always with updates.

The Great Wipe

The end of Alpha is I believe next Wednesday morning, and the beginning of Closed Beta begins Wednesday afternoon/evening when the servers come back up. What this means is everything we have created along the way… will be gone. The only thing that will be kept are your characters, and the various entitlements like things that came from the trailblazer packs and things purchased from the store. This means all of the claim data will be wiped. I have a big mixed opinion about this. I don’t mind the idea of losing the work I have done on my claim, but I really don’t like the idea of losing my claim in general. I like my claim, I like where it is. My frustration is that there will be a massive landrush Wednesday evening… which is going to suck.

My plan will be to try and get a spot similar to where I had it before on Liberation/Pingo, but if I cannot… who knows where I will end up. Basically the acquisition of goods begins a new. So that means we will have to go back to square one with only our extra special trailblazer axe to start and work our way through the gearing tiers again. Here is hoping that with the addition of heartwood the grind for stuff is far less painful. As a result I got in for a bit yesterday, but I didn’t really feel like doing much. I made a few claims extension flags to see how well that worked, but really with everything going away, I don’t feel much like screwing with it. I have a bit of my stuff templated, but really I found using super huge templates really awkward so I will probably build everything back from scratch.

The cool thing about closed beta is that each of us trailblazers are getting friend keys. The notice from the other day says these are no longer going to be time limited keys… but instead permanent access to the beta from this point onwards. I know a few people who wanted them, so I will be trying to hand mine out that way. However there should be a lot of them up for grabs as I know a lot of people in the blogosphere who are Trailblazers. My hope is that they pretty much limit the closed beta access to just the friend codes for a bit, at least until the great landrush is over. My goal is to get another claim somewhere in a forested area and then start over from there. I really liked being in the forest, especially since the later item grind ends up being wood, and not ore.

What About Wildstar?

December 20, 2013 by Belghast

4.4.14

It as been roughly ten days since Zenimax announced the official PC/Mac release date of Elder Scrolls Online. In doing so they either knowingly or unknowingly threw down the gauntlet to the other developers with their own tentative release dates. The success and fail of an MMO has become so much more than whether or not it is a good game, but instead how distracted the gaming populous is at any given moment. I remember a time in the not too distant past where major PC releases were truly few and far between. However it currently seems like there is always something bigger looming on the near horizon. Like it or not every single one of these releases is competing for the same relatively small pool of players, subscribers, and even money in general.

Yesterday Massively voted The Elder Scrolls Online… the MMO most likely to flop in the coming year. While I personally think this is deeply cynical and maybe even more than a tiny bit inflammatory, I think more than anything it is short sighted. Quite frankly the success and failure of Elder Scrolls Online has nothing to do with the PC gamer, and that is more than a tiny bit humbling. We will no longer be the king makers for these online games. With ESO and games like it, that torch is being passed from PC Gaming to the much larger pool of console gamers. I have to say the console market is rabidly waiting for a new Elder Scrolls Experience, and especially a multiplayer one at that . I think it might be a bitter pill to swallow to realize that the success and failure of these titles may very well be out of the hands of the “PC Gaming Master Race”.

3.25.14

Being the master tacticians that they are, yesterday Blizzard announced the release date for the Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls expansion. With this they are releasing roughly four weeks ahead of Elder Scrolls Online, and as a result giving themselves plenty of time with the sole attention of the PC Gaming market. Similarly however they are also hungrily eyeing the console market, and you can bet that they will be timing the release of the PS3/PS4/Xbox360/XBone release against the June release of Elder Scrolls Online to the next gen consoles. I feel like a four week buffer is more than safe and should play well to the gamers that may not have the ability to purchase every title they want. I know I am personally amped about this version of the game, because it fixes a lot of the loot problems I had with the initial release. Additionally I am holding out hope beyond hope that they manage to roll in the console “controller” features as well.

There is no way to look at this release date as anything other than business strategy. Elder Scrolls started this ball in motion, and now each game company will have to decide when the most opportune time is to deploy their own “forces” on the game board. While the Diablo 3 demographic is not exactly the same as the Elder Scrolls demographic… there is more than enough overlap to have caused issues for either game. As a result two major juggernauts have been placed on the “game board” and as a result the new year is less open than it was. Now the launches of so many titles will have be strategized to figure out when the most opportune time to release will be.

Warlords of Draenor

Since the title Blizzard announced was the release of Diablo 3 for the tail end of the first quarter, my assumption is that Warlord of Draenor was simply not close enough to ready to be able to launch against Elder Scrolls Online. As a result I am guessing this means that WoD will be another last quarter of 2014 release much like a few other World of Warcraft expansion launches. If this is the case that bookends the year up pretty nicely. Diablo 3 first quarter, Elder Scrolls Online second quarter and Warlords of Draenor closing out the year. You can already see the 2014 release calendar starting to tighten a bit and this will make it increasingly difficult for game companies to find a “clear window” to release against. I personally thought I had written off the WoW franchise completely, but nostalgic can be a pain sometimes.

As a result I imagine there will be a lot of players that either intentionally or un-intentionally come back for the release of Warlords. The lifespan of a WoW expansion rush seems to be roughly three months, so an end of the year release will also make the 2015 schedule some what slippery as well. The problem is there are lots more pieces to be placed on the board. Games like Titanfall and Destiny will also be chipping away at the pool of players that would h

ave normally played an MMO. Additionally we still have EQ Landmark and EQ Next that have not committed to any release schedule and will likely be just as large of a force on the Calendar as the games that have already been confirmed.

What About Wildstar?

I will be the first to admit… I am actually not that excited about Wildstar at all. By all rights I should be, but for whatever reason there I have not followed it. I do however have a lot of friends who have, and as a result I want it to be a success for their sake as much as anything else. Up until this point we have heard a tentative “spring 2014” release. As I have just outlined however the “spring” timeframe is extremely packed as it is. Wildstar is in a really precarious place right now, and I do not envy them. They are launching a new MMO, with a subscription model into a world that seems to have fallen out of love with subscriptions. Additionally it is an unproven IP, and there are additional issues on selling a new player on “the vision” for this world. Finally it is releasing against some really powerful forces.

The safe bet will be to release Wildstar in the July/August timeframe. As much as I myself hate it, the players who are likely to leave a game will have done so by the time three months have passed. July would be the beginning of a window where generally the “locusts”, a group I have been a member of so many times in the past… will have consumed what there is to consume with ESO and be looking for a new target to move to. Plotting a course for this opening in the schedule seems like the safe choice for them. However all it would take to make this more treacherous, is for the other pieces that are unplaced to fall into this window. Releasing against EQ Landmark would be enough to make the fate of Wildstar uncertain, and we have yet to even discuss the potential for the upcoming and as of yet unnamed Rift expansion.

My money is still on Wildstar penciling in a July release date, and EQ Next as a game being a spring of 2015 release. I just don’t see Carbine being confident enough to release Wildstar without a good opening in the schedule. They are in a much more tentative position than Zenimax, since the entirety of their fate rests upon the shoulders of the PC Gaming market. Elder Scrolls Online could realistically release against another big game, since they will be gaining a bunch of “new to genre” players coming in from the console market. Additionally they have a well established and well loved IP… and even if folks are not completely sold on the game… they are likely to at least dip their toes in the water for awhile. I find myself caring far more about the people at the companies… than the companies and games themselves. With several friends in the “industry” I honestly hope that they can stack the schedule in a way so that all of these titles fine at least limited success. If we see another crop of relative failures, I think this year might be the last hurrah of the triple A MMO market.

Evergreen Content

August 9, 2013 by Belghast

After some technical difficulties caused by the fact that my upstairs computer appeared to have come back in a half alive state after what I can only assume was a power blink caused by last nights storms… aren’t run-on sentences awesome? I am finally sitting down at the computer to write this mornings post. Additionally I am drinking the sweetest cup of coffee ever… because in my half awake state… I dumped the Splenda designated for my wife’s cup into mine. The end result is a cup of coffee with like six packets of sugar in it.

Evergreen Content

One of the things that has always frustrated me with MMO design is the fact that the higher up in level you are, essentially the fewer options you have for where to spend your in game time. What I mean is that usually games spend a good amount of time to provide alternate starter zone experiences, and then those usually funnel into shared zones for your faction before dumping you out into a ladder of zone progression towards the “end game”. Once you arrive at the end content you experience the same thing… everyone is pushed towards the same few content items.

When an expansion is released the same thing happens again but even more limiting. You are pushed out of the “old world” content and into a much smaller new world with the same very vertical progression path. Everything about the old content becomes completely disposable as it is immediately replaced by the shiny new things from the expansion areas. Not only is the new content separated by distance usually, but it gives players absolutely no incentive to ever return and revisit the older content. As a result each time an expansion is released the players are ultimately throwing more and more content in the dustbin.

A Better Way

Granted some games do a much better job at addressing this problem than others. In Rift when mentoring down you receive xp and rewards as though you were doing content at your level. The same is more or less true with Guild Wars 2 and its always mentored system of scaling the player down to the content level at all times. But in neither system do you really address the problem of lost dungeon and raid content. Ultimately you can get rewards similar to what you could earn at level, but you will never actually be able to progress your characters in the same way unless you are always doing the latest and greatest content.

With the advent of systems like StoryBricks that allow for smarter AI encounters, I keep wondering if this is now the time to have a much better system. Ideally this would work better in a system without hard level ranges, and more a “tiers of gear” approach like The Secret World has in place. What if a mob could perceive you as a greater threat based on your “tier” and ultimately fight “smarter”. This would make the old content scale to whatever level you happen to be at the time. The old encounters would be evergreen in that beating them at Tier 1 would be significantly easier than beating them at Tier 4.

Horizontal Progression

As a result you could continue to “pay out” the best tiers of gear, because all content would essentially scale up to meet the level of the players taking it on. In a mixed level group it would get far more tricky. You would have to do some sort of an average level for the encounter, but ultimately the base idea is that as you level your character you continue opening new doors to experience, rather than constantly closing permanently the doors behind you. I feel in part that this is so enticing as no amount of hard worked content provided by the designers would ever be considered “throw away” or “leveling” content again.

This of course is a massive pipe dream, and I am sure there are all measure of technically limitations to what I propose, but I have always wanted a world that scaled to me that I never outgrew. We can have this concept in single player games like Oblivion, I just think its time that we see a proper implementation in the MMO world. One added benefit is that being able to progress regardless of the content you are doing… incentivizes players to do the right thing socially… and assign their friends and guild members through that “old world” content.

Socially Beneficial

Being one of those players that regularly helps out the “young-ins”, it can be frustrating knowing that you will not actually progress your character while doing this thing that was “socially” the right thing to do. Games like Rift or EQ2 provide alternate advancement paths that make it much more enjoyable, since you know you are ultimately still making your character better in the process. However… would it not be that much cooler if you could provide a system that allowed for both the low tier player and the high tier player to receive the best type of rewards they could get… together in the same group?

It is always awesome watching a new player get their first really awesome item, because you grouped up with them to help them through a challenge. Would it not be equally exciting for them to watch you getting the same because you chose to help them? I have had a mantra for awhile… “anything that prevents me from playing with my friends is bad” and this is exactly the opposite of that. It makes sure that playing with my friends will always benefit me in the same ways it benefits them. Sure the content might be ultimately more difficult when you have 3 tier 1 players and 2 tier 4 and the end difficulty level is something in the middle… but as group you will be able to work through the challenges.

The Problem

As I sit here to write this post, it feels like it is coming out super esoteric… and as a result I am hoping to place it more firmly on the ground. In my office on the wall are lots and lots of maps, and many of them are from MMOs. There is one above my monitor that came from the Kunark expansion to the original Everquest for example. As I look at the glorious landmasses that are all these games… I am bit sad thinking that so many of those zones I will never have a valid reason to return to. They will never again be truly important to me, the same way they were when I was first leveling through them.

I would just like to see a design scheme that makes it always valid for us to return to the content we know and love and have conquered and find completely new challenges. This goes double for dungeon and raid content. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could zone into Blackwing Lair in WoW with a group of friends… and get an encounter tailored to fit YOUR level… and not a “roflstomp” soloable mess? The worst part about the “e-sport-ification” of raid content, is that we are constantly having to throw away fun experiences for whatever the newest tier happens to be. Sure you can always return to the older stuff, but it has been trivialized by the progression you have made since then.

I would just like to see something that fixes this. So that a zone stays epic regardless of when you tackle it, and that there will always be new and more exciting challenges and rewards to be found there. With the construct of scalable AI and encounters… I think that maybe finally this concept is ready to be explored. I have no desire to stay in the starter zone, grind boars, and become amazing like they did in the South Park spoof… but it would be awesome to be able to go back to that low level content and have a reason to be there.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap up and get on the road. I feel as though I have laid out a huge rambling mess. Hopefully this will make sense to someone. It has been a concept bouncing around in my head for awhile and all the talk of Storybricks and EQ Next and Scaling Mob intelligence has dislodged it enough that I wanted to try and put it down into words. I feel like I am fairly grossly unsuccessful at doing so. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope you can grasp the crux of what I was trying to say.