Warhammer Online Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fire Soldiers and Elf Beards

August 3, 2020August 3, 2020 by Belghast

Death Stranding - Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire — Death Stranding – Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire

When in doubt folks, lead with the coolest screenshot that you have. This is one of those weekends when I spent a truly phenomenal amount of time playing a specific game… that I absolutely cannot talk about because reasons. I believe I clocked in around twenty hours playing the thing that I can’t talk about over the course of primarily Friday and Saturday. I look forward to seeing more of the thing that I can’t talk about seeing. Instead this morning you are going to get one of those general rundown type posts talking about where I am in various games.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Blood Elf Character Creator — World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Blood Elf Character Creator

I got into Shadowlands Beta out of the magnanimous nature of a friend of mine, so huge props to them for helping me out there. I’ve been piddling around over the last week and I am having a lot of fun. The most important thing to talk about however is the changes to the character creator. I can have a beard as a Blood Elf, which is phenomenal since that was not a thing you could really do well. The best you could do previously was a weak assed chinstrip. The undead models look amazing as well and are pretty much everything I have ever wanted in a rotting corpse. The big thing is it seems like they have expanded the options and decoupled them so whereas things used to be locked to specific sets of choices, but for example Tauren horn and hair and face are no longer combined in weird forced sets.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Intro Quest — World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Intro Quest

As far as the Story itself… I am getting DEEP Wrath of the Lich King vibes here and it is more than just the fact that the Ebon Blade are factoring significantly in everything we are doing right now. I am also greatly enjoying that there has been no faction based bullshit yet, and it is all a big team pulling together to save Azeroth sort of feel. The intro quest reminds me of the storming of the Dark Portal in Warlords, if that even were less on-rails. It has a “we did a thing and we were absolutely not prepared for the ramifications” type feeling to it. As far as the zone content, it reminds me of the best parts of Legion and Burning Crusade in that we are exploring a world that works NOTHING like the one we came from and it is a “stranger in a strange land” sort of feel.

Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server

In more of my usual nonsense, I for some reason decided to reinstall Return of Reckoning which is a thing. I’ve not really done much but I did create a Dwarven Iron Breaker which was my class of choice back when this thing was a live game. I have to say that the quest advisement is not super amazing. Sure this was the first game to do the whole highlight an area of the map, which was cool… but I still cannot for the life of me find a damned book that is supposed to be on a nearby bench. I got in for a bit, played through a few quests and then got frustrated. Hopefully when I am in a different mindset I can pop back in and play some more.

In other random news I have settled on what I feel is the perfect controller for my Retro Freak. I greatly prefer the layout of the 6 button genesis and saturn controllers, especially when it comes to fighting games. I never got used to hitting the shoulder buttons in place of attack keys and spent a lot of my time on SNES playing with the Capcom Soldier Pad. Ultimately I was looking for something that would facilitate my preferred layout but also offer a bunch of buttons for mapping things to. Enter the line of officially licensed Sega Saturn controllers from Retro-Bit. The only negative is the home button appears to be unique to the Switch and is not mappable, but it gives me A, B, C, X, Y, Z, Start, Select, Left bumper and Right bumper to map inputs to which neatly fits all of the systems that are playable on the Retro Freak. I have to use it wired, but I went ahead and got the Bluetooth model for future options.

Death Stranding - The Final Run — Death Stranding – The Final Run

Lastly I have been trying to wrap up Death Stranding, and spent most of the day yesterday working my towards the eventual conclusion of the game. My grand plan had been to be finished with it by the time Horizon Zero Dawn lands next week, and I think that is well within reach… at the very least finishing the story. There are a bunch of miscellaneous side quests that I could be doing, but I have to say the mountain region really killed my joy for running random fetch quests. Hideo Kojima really loves sending you completely out of your way… because there have been three times so far when I have been asked to more or less traverse the entirety of what was then my game map. Yesterday I was asked yet again to traverse from the furthest possible point on the west coast of the map, all the way to the east coast of the map while dealing with extremely ramped up versions of everything I had encountered before.

Death Stranding - Corpse in a Cart — Death Stranding – Corpse in a Cart

At this point… I am ready to be done. I have greatly enjoyed this game and the storyline has wound its way through some deeply interesting lore and world building bits, but I am ready to say goodbye to Sam Porter Bridges. It is a phenomenal game, and pending you have the time to really spend exploring it then I would highly suggest giving it a go. There is a lot that you have to get used to early in the game, but it really is a masterpiece as far as games go. What has been surprising is how much of the stuff I considered to be complete nonsense on day one, has been fully explained and has paid off in a significant way. Extremely impressive.

Death of a Genre

October 4, 2014 by Belghast

Downfall of a Game

One of the problems within the MMO community is that we seem to view each release as a zero sum game. As such when something new comes out, it threatened to chip away at the player base of whatever game we happen to love and are currently playing. When that game falters and begins to fail, with this point of view it becomes extremely hard not to take pleasure in that downfall. The problem is this is an extremely toxic and dysfunctional outlook, and ultimately is what has lead to the current climate in MMOs. For years companies have been chasing an illusive dream of trying to create another World of Warcraft.

This was an inherently flawed vision because really… “mmo gamers” are a rather small niche in the market, and most folks who play World of Warcraft are not actually “mmo gamers”. If you take a look at the size of the market before World of Warcraft, you saw a handful of games with sub-million subscriber numbers. Before the launch of the first expansion World of Warcraft had boomed to be an over 6 million subscriber game. This was not the conversion of all of these other MMO gamers, but instead the conversion of fans of the existing Warcraft franchise into the MMO genre. The thing is… these new gamers are there for a myriad of reasons, but none of them easily translate into a new franchise.

So as these new games launch they are essentially fighting over the same piece of pie over and over. All you have to do is look at my immediate circle of friends. A large chunk of them stuck with World of Warcraft, and it would likely take an apocalypse or the servers shutting down to pry them from it. Another group has wandered away from the game each and every time something new and shiny showed up on the horizon. Very few of these players stick around in any game for longer than three months, and more often they play their free month and then return to whatever the status quo was before the new launch. I watched this pattern play out for both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, and the games industry is finally realizing that this is going to happen for every single new game that releases.

Indictment of the Trend

The cancelling of Titan has been a far more contentious issue in the blogosphere than I expected. At this point my point of view is that this is Blizzard admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players. While there will always be a core group of players in World of Warcraft just like there is still a core group of players in Everquest, Everquest II, and Dark Age of Camelot… that core group continues to shrink as folks either “grow out” of World of Warcraft as they find it no longer suits their interests, or simply run out of the copious amounts of free time it requires as they get that job, family, whatever. I think they have done some really simple calculus here and determined that there simply is not enough of a pool of players to make a brand new MMO from Blizzard successful.

With World of Warcraft they have a decade long buy in from a large number of gamers. They have literal years of memories and hard to acquire items to keep them chained to the game. With a brand new IP, they are starting from scratch in the same position as all of these games that have floundered have been in. Blizzard brand name recognition just isn’t enough to guarantee success, so I feel like it was a pure business decision that it just did not make sense to further dilute their subscription player base by trying to launch a new MMO. As much as I love the clean subscription model, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to launch a new game with it. After watching what happened to Wildstar and to a somewhat lesser extent Elder Scrolls Online, the market does not want any more subscription games. So by launching a new MMO they would be converting at least a portion of their subscriber base of easy month to month money to far more dicey and less predictable free to play money.

No Joy Watching Wildstar

I find it impossible to find joy in the unraveling of Wildstar that I see before me. I am not playing the game, so I am in essence part of the problem. For whatever reason it was an accumulation of all of the things my BC era self said they wanted in a video game. The problem is we gamers are notoriously horrible at trying to decide what we want. “We” said we wanted a hardcore game like Everquest and a return to forced grouping… then when we got Vanguard no one actually wanted to play that. We said we wanted a hard core PVP game like Dark Age of Camelot… and then when we got Warhammer Online no one actually wanted to play that either. So I find it no suprise that when we said we wanted a return to the golden says of World of Warcraft raiding… no one actually wanted that either when we got Wildstar. The truth is we have no clue at all what we want until we actually see it and experience it.

The problem is that the MMO design ethic has been so wrapped up in trying to target what the public is asking for, that it has stagnated into a mire of “wow like features”. A week or so ago there were a series of posts taking point and counterpoint on whether or not WoW has ruined MMOs. In a way I have to say yes, but not through anything that they did on purpose. World of Warcraft has been this juggernaut that everyone else is forced to content with whether or not they actually wanted to. It is a gold standard that every new game is judged by. So you either have games that try and out feature it like Rift, or out lore it like Star Wars the Old Republic… but each and every new release is at least in someway a response to the success that World of Warcraft was. Without that outlier of success we probably would see a much more healthy MMO ecosystem… albeit a ridiculously smaller one.

Death of a Genre

So I cannot take joy in watching Wildstar, or Elder Scrolls Online or any other MMO falter right now, because I see it as all being part of the same shared ecosystem. When one of these games fails, it is in essence taking a chunk of players out of the pool that will likely never return. So many of my friends have simply just checked out of online gaming for one reason or another, but the core thread among them all is they are just tired of the volatility. The choice is either return to World of Warcraft and make due with the status quo, or jump from game to game to game getting a months worth of enjoyment at a time before the ultimate crash. None of this sounds like a healthy ecosystem, and all of this is what is driving triple A studios away from the notion of even trying to do an MMO.

If you think about it right now… there is nothing really on the horizon for gamers to latch onto. There are a few boutique titles like Pathfinder or Camelot Unchained… that are super focused on a specific niche and that may or may not be at least partially vaporware, unlikely to actually launch with all of the features they are touting. Then you have a constant spin of Korean titles as they have their own MMO renaissance that we went through several years ago. However After the launch of ESO and Wildstar… there is really no big western titles on the immediate horizon. Everquest Next is the closest thing but realistically it is still several years from release. The other games that are coming out are more akin to Destiny than they are to a traditional MMO. So I can’t blame World of Warcraft for this current situation, because in truth it is our flighty nature that has salted the fields in our wake. We are the reason why there is no fertile ground for a new MMO to take purchase. It is because of all of this… that I can find no pleasure in watching yet another game fail.

In Memoriam

September 19, 2013 by Belghast

In Memoriam

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of Warhammer Online, and much to the surprise of many people it was seemingly unmarked. I even retweeted a comment from Sypster that essentially said their ignoring the game was disgraceful. That they should either support the game or pull the plug. Well it turns out that is precisely what they had in mind. Thirty Minutes or so later we got this post on the front page of the official Warhammer Online page. They were pulling the plug active as of December 18th 2013.

I can’t say that this shocks anyone really in the gaming circles, because the game has been in a constant state of decline since its very early subscriber peak. A few months back I placed it as the game I was most disappointed in on my list of five biggest gaming disappointments. The game as a whole just had so much potential, and I enjoyed playing it for quite a while, until myself and my friends ran out of PVE content to consume. This was he game I had wanted to see the most rebooted as a free to play experience.

Ultimately they are stating that this is the point at which they are losing the license to Warhammer fantasy, and I believe that the statement can be taken one of two ways. Firstly you could conclude that like Star Wars Galaxies… getting a reissuance of the license by Games Workshop was an unlikely thing. However I tend to take the point of view that they were likely contractually obligated to run the game at least to the point at which the license period ended. Considering the complete and total lack of support shown by EA for the game, I feel like this is more than likely. The game as a whole was just a loss on their balance sheet that they were all to happy to take off as soon as they were able.

Free To Play Wishes

I feel the best case scenario would be for some asian game operator like perfect world to swoop in, buy the game assets, renew the license and resurrect it was a free to play game. I of course find this highly unlikely, but games like Hellgate: London have seen very unlikely resurrections in such fashion. Back in April I took Mythic up on one of their 14 day renewal passes and gave the game a spin again. I have to say overall Warhammer Online held up extremely well. They had greatly streamlined the leveling experience, which destroyed a lot of the originality of the game. Essentially they funneled everyone down either the Empire or Chaos path to try and make up for lack of subscriber numbers.

The world still looked good to me, and the ”stylistic realism” still very much fit the Warhammer world. The game innovated on so many things that have now become part and parcel for an MMO game. The game map was light years ahead of World of Warcraft at the time, and was the first out of the box map that provided a significant amount of information about what your quest objectives where, and where they could be fulfilled. If you like Rifts or GW2 events or even FATEs… we can thank Warhammer for giving us the first viable public questing system. The game still felt like a vibrant modern MMO to me when I played it… which only makes the severe neglect over the years that much more disappointing.

Not Designed For Me

For me… Warhammer Online was a game destined to be something I did not want to play. Everything sold about the game was pushing it into this “hardcore pvp” niche. This was not me at all and not even something I was vaguely interested in. However upon testing the game I found that the PVE experience was extremely good. I loved playing my Dwarven Ironbreaker, and it will go down in history as one of my favorite tank classes. The dual Grudge and Stamina mechanic meant I could regenerate resources as the fight went on allowing me to spend one while the other was recovering. I loved the fact that tanks had physical mass, and that you could in theory create human barricades to protect your team mates.

The only problem for me is that around level 25 the forced PVP started… and I simply did not really enjoy this. Keep raids were entertaining, but it added a level of unpredictability to my game play experience that I just did not enjoy. Could I complete the quests I had for X zone because we had recently lost it? I found myself leveling through an ever decreasing path of content, until there just was no meat left on the bone for me. I had enjoyed the low level scenarios, but as we leveled we kept getting pushed into new tiers of scenarios… and quite frankly the later ones were not as well designed as the first few. My favorite scenario was Mourkain Temple… aka “Kill the dude with the thing”. When I stopped being able to play that, I lost interest in the PVP aspect of the game.

Finality

I guess the most depressing part about this entire experience is that it is now over. Prior to yesterday I could always hold out a sad glimmer of hope that someone would decide to love this game and make it something that players would want to play. I realize this was a wholy unrealistic hope… but it was something I could hold onto. There are always games that I wish I could return to those heady days after launch. This was really the first game that House Stalwart broke out into in a big fashion. So many of us thought it would be our “new wow” and we stormed into the game with at least 40 active players. By the three month mark, very few of us were actually playing the game, and the large majority had slinked back into World of Warcraft.

We were PVE players, so each and every one of us hit the same level 25 wall where the content began to shift drastically. I had some friends that played Chaos that made it at least a year before quitting. However in the end… everyone DID quit, and move on to other things. The launch of Age of Conan was ultimately drew my PVP friends away from the game. However by that time, Mythic had already long since become a neglectful steward of the title. With no real new content being released and no viable hope of it… folks moved on. Ultimately Warhammer will always be an example of why I believe that no matter what players may say… they don’t actually want a PVP centric gaming experience.

No Petitions

Unlike the shutting down of both Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes… I don’t forsee much of a reaction from the community, if there is actually a Warhammer community left at all. Mythic killed this game long ago by forgetting about it. It has just been an animated corpse walking along in a stilted and syncopated rhythm for the last few years. I can’t say it is ever really “time” for a game to be turned off, but if there was this would likely be the poster child. So much of the brilliant things about this game, require massive armies of players to really pull them off… and quite frankly after about the year month mark they lacked that. This feels to me so much like the ending of Old Yeller… when you know the dog has to be put down, but you are still immensely saddened to see it get shot.

Wrapping Up

As soon as the news broke, I realized that it would likely be what dominated todays post. However I did not quite realize that I would ramble on about it for an ENTIRE post. I am sad to see the chapter drawing closed on the game but I guess at the end of the day I understand, and halfway expected this announcement to occur. Just sad to see it happen on the fifth anniversary of the game. I hope you all have a great day, and that whatever game you are really into manages to stay healthy and vibrant.

Mordheim

August 12, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning people out in internet land. I am slowly waking up and drinking my cup of coffee. Usually caffeine makes everything better, so here is hoping it does the trick once again. I had a pretty chill weekend. Yesterday I hung out on the sofa with my laptop and play assorted games while watching the tail end of Hemlock Grove and continuing with Luther. Both really great shows that I would suggest to anyone that is interested. The more I think about it the more Hemlock Grove reminds me of Once Upon a Time meets Silent Hill. I really don’t have a ton of ammunition to write about this morning, so here goes nothing.

Mordheim

I think we all have those games we have a bundle of “what ifs” about, that never quite lived up to our expectations. One of the biggest for me will likely always be Warhammer Online. I loved the intellectual property the game was based on, and I think they did a really good job of bringing it to life. The game introduced so many interesting mechanics like “physical tanking” and “public quests”. They did several things well and I was happy to see other games adapt their ideas.

Ultimately the problem for me was the lack of a viable PVE experience after level 25. I realize this was an attempt at making a PVP centric game… and that honestly is its failing. People just don’t want that, or at least didn’t want that at the time of the release of Warhammer Online. As a longtime fan of the Warhammer setting, there were various touchpoints they hit for me, and various other ones that I would have liked to have seen. There is one thing especially that I have always daydreamed about that I wish they could have pulled off.

Mordheim was released as a stand alone boxed game from Games Workshop that takes place some 500 years before the setting of Warhammer Fantasy. Ultimately the short version of the storyline is that a comet crash lands depositing this new material known as Wyrdstone. Small warbands that the players control have to enter the city and try and uncover as many pieces of this new mineral as they can. Not only do they have to contend with other warbands of players, but they also have to contend with the Skaven that have taken up root in the city.

I have always thought it would have been amazingly cool if they were able to either implement a public quest area that was Mordheim. It would have been a lot like the Darkness Falls experience in DAoC with the ability for one faction or the other to control key points within the city while still having to fend off waves of NPC skaven that will attack the placements. This would give an interesting three way balance between two factions of players and a third npc faction that wants to kill both of them and take the Wyrdstone for themselves. I can’t say that this would have turned the tide of a losing game, but it definitely would have made for some interesting gameplay.

Eloping

After this weekend I am more convinced that we did the smart thing when we decided to elope and opt out of a traditional wedding. One of our friends has decided that she is finally going to marry the guy she has been with for some time. There have been multiple dates in the past but none of them actually came to fruition. However now they decided to set a date two weeks from now… and are trying to pull everything together for a traditional wedding last minute. The end result is complete and utter insanity.

As a result of all of this… my wife literally spent a good chunk of Friday night, most of Saturday and almost all of Sunday dealing with dress shopping. She came hope with a disturbing looking teal number that appears to have come from Florida circa 2000… as it seems to have a number of “hanging chads” along the skirt. It is ugly as hell… my wife knows it, I know it… but it makes the bride happy so you deal with it. But as we watch this logistical nightmare play out in front of me… we have turned to each other at several points and said “god I am happy we eloped”.

Ultimately I am going to end up as the photographer for the wedding… which should be a decent idea… as it will give me something to busy myself during the whole event. I really really dislike weddings, and all the fluffy white wonderland that they seem to be. I try my best not to be a grump about it, because for whoever is having the wedding it is a massive happy occasion. I would just far rather send a nicer gift and hope they don’t mind the fact I didn’t attend. I do find myself bringing a crappier gift when I attend the wedding… because I feel as though my suffering should count for something.

Chasing a Dream

I stumbled across this video while checking into G+ this morning. I thought it was a really cool feel good story about how a guy chased down his dream of owning a video game store. He mentions an IndieGoGo campaign but unfortunately I have not been able to dig up that link. We have a handful of game stores like this in the Tulsa area and I try to frequent them whenever possible to support the concept of the hometown video game store. I guess I find this whole thing extra neat because many times my wife and I have talked about the pipe dream of us building a store that fed off our own passions.

Ultimately it would end up as a educational curriculum, traditional book, video game and pen and paper shop. The franken-shop would have a bunch of only vaguely related things crammed together in one place. Granted we will never actually likely build said store, but it is a fun daydream. Logistically any kind of retail venue would be a nightmare and I feel as though you are always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in this market. I think it would be cool to have an apartment located over the store like the old type general store clerks used to have. There is just something special about a stored owned by someone that has a passion for whatever they are selling. Hopefully at some point I can dig up the IndieGoGo link and post it.

Wrapping Up

This seems like another really short one, but to be honest I did warn you guys that I did not have a lot of ammunition this morning. Hopefully something will happen throughout the day that I deeply care about. Fortunately or Unfortunately depending upon the perspective, I have another one of those NDA bound things going on tonight, so not sure if I will have much gaming to be able to talk about tomorrow. Hopefully you have a great start of the week, I have a lot going on at work that I need to make headway in.