eqn Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Micro Voxel Welding

March 1, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This weekend they seem to have completely opened the floodgates and then some as far as Elder Scrolls Online testing goes. It seems like every person that signed up for beta before a certain point, got their invite this weekend. In addition to that, pretty much everyone who has ever tested got a buddy key. So essentially if you wanted to test the game, you should have gotten your chance this weekend. Admittedly I was more than a bit disappointed to see we were testing on an old version of the client that did not include the changed introduction. In fact it seems like everyone in the test was expecting to see the new and shiny progression. However I love Stros and Betnihk so I am more than happy to play through them again.

I had all these plans of trying to play a caster, but when it came down to rolling one… I just could not bring myself to play one. Instead I am playing “ole reliable” the build I have enjoyed the most up to this point. Dragonknight + Sword and Board and honestly each time I roll one, I perfect my build order a little bit for the next time. You would think I would get bored of playing the same basic character over and over, but instead it just makes me like it all the more. Essentially I have arrived at a point where the very first ability I take is Puncture aka the taunt/armor debuff. Essentially the first ability you place on your bar, means it is also going to be the first skill line you will have available for morphing later on. Essentially my goal in doing this is to get to Ransack the morph of Puncture, which adds a new ability that increases my armor for 12 seconds every time I use it. This makes the ability really good for survival and essentially my opening becomes a combo of Fiery Grip, Ransack… then mostly basic attacks to burn it down the rest of the way.

I just like the feel of playing this specific build, it feels very much like I want a tank to feel. I decided this weekend to cast aside my traditional human builds and go with a proud Orsimer. Normally I rely on swords, but I decided to start crafting him maces… because smashing things seems more fitting an orc…. also I don’t like the orc racial “giant machete” sword graphic. The guild is absolutely insane right now, when I logged in earlier to take a screenshot of my orc, we had 25 members and there are at least five more that have not accepted guild invites yet. Doing pretty great for a beta guild. If you are playing the game add @Belghast to your friends list, and pending we actually know each other… and you are okay with the Three Tenets… I will get you into the guild.

Level 60 Monk Get

I have to say my monk looks pretty badass. I know eventually I will upgrade out of that sword, but once we get the ability to transmog with the expansion, I can totally see dual wielding that graphic. Before the ESO beta weekend madness started, I managed with the help of Warenwolf to push the monk to 60. Really I am happy just knowing I have a character at max level before the expansion, but I can see playing it quite a bit more trying to get paragon levels. Running around in our impromptu groups has really increased my enjoyment of the game… especially now that we are getting some decent loot. It is funny how loot factors into my enjoyment so much, and in many ways the complete and total lack of meaningful loot is what killed my enjoyment of FFXIV once the questing was done.

We tried an experiment that didn’t really work yesterday as well. While I was pushing my way to 60, we had a friend join us in level 60 content with his level 10 character. We thought surely the catch up experience would be amazing, allowing him to fly through the levels. Problem is… he was not alive long enough to really catch the benefit of the xp windfall. Every mob seemed to make a beeline for him, and one-shot poor Banzai. So after getting him three for four levels this way, we opted to switch to our own characters in the teens and play for real. I had not really played my Barbarian much, but playing him I could not think about playing Olaf from League of Legends. At one point I picked up a legendary leaf blade… to which we dubbed him “Growlaf” the plant defender.

Complete and total rabbit trail here… but we started talking about how amazing it would be to have a game like Diablo 3, that instead used the champions we have grown to love from League of Legends. For awhile my friend has talked about how bad he wanted a PVE game set in the League universe… and really this seems like the ideal fit. They really would not have to change the champions that much to make them work in a Diablo setting. Additionally I have already noticed, that post League we all kinda play Diablo like we are laning in League. We move like League players move, especially when we are kiting a bad guy away to try and separate it from the pack. While I enjoy league from time to time, it is really the character design that I like, and not the game itself. If they gave me those awesome characters in a setting like Diablo that I do actually enjoy… I would probably waste innumerable hours playing it.

Micro Voxel Welding

Watch live video from EQNLandmark on TwitchTV

Hopefully this embeds just fine. I wanted to share this because I thought it was really cool. In last Wednesday’s livestream Dave Georgeson showed off a really cool “glitch in the matrix” of sorts that players have figured out. One of the interesting characteristics of the voxel engine that Everquest Next Landmark uses is that it tries to buffer between differences in two objects and naturally fill in the gaps. This can be something really cool or something really frustrating depending on how you use it. Out in the wild, players have been using this to stretch the boundaries of the engine and create something that has been dubbed the “micro voxel” or as Dave calls it in the livestream “pips”.

The idea is to take a single square voxel of the smallest available size and reduce it using the square smooth tool to get a smaller base size to build with. Having a tiny square is not that cool, but what is cool is the behavior you get in the engine when you place two of these beside each other. The engine draws the gap between creating a thin bar. This can then be used to craft really interesting things. In the video Dave Georgeson shows off a steampunky claim that he has created making metal ladders and metal grating in all sorts of shapes. Where I find this extremely cool is what this means for player crafted furniture. In the video he makes a few book cases and desk that looks far nicer than anything I have been able to craft so far.

It does seem like this takes a lot of trial and error… and copious amounts of patience. However at some point I want to get in and start trying to make furniture for my keep. The other really cool thing mentioned is that we will be getting the ability to add on to our claim in the next patch. So at this point I am trying to figure out which direction I want to grow things. I like building large structures, so I was already to a point where I was feeling extremely boxed in. I could very easily grow my existing property out to four total claims. This might be the kick I need to get back in and do more crafting. I am currently hung on a point where I need to farm just truly silly amounts of burled wood to complete all the things I want to complete.

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.