Month: June 2013

Telara Tourism Council

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One of the things I was thinking about last night… is how much has changed in Rift since its release.  I know I spend a good deal of my time explaining things to my friends that are just starting the game, but last night I had a friend come back to the game after not playing since shortly after release.  There has been a lot of changes in that time, an almost staggering amount.  I thought I would take a few minutes this morning and outline some of the ones I find important, or think are easily missed.

Rift Mobile Client

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This one is often missed, and Trion itself does a fairly lousy job of promoting it.  Basically there are two applications tied to Rift… the mobile authenticator and then the mobile client.  What the client gives you is access to guild chat, direct player messaging, a handy invasion tracker and the most important feature… the “Lootables” scratcher cards. 

There are three types of cards available by default…  Planar Invasion shown above that rewards planar currency, Crafty Critters that rewards random crafting materials, and Shinies! that well… gives you a chance to win random artifacts from all the sets.  Occasionally there will be a fourth card that is tied to whatever world event happens to be going on, and will reward seasonal event currency.  The cards accrue once every hour, for a maximum of 6 cards stacked up at any time.  I tend to log in sometime during the morning and sometime during the evening and play all six cards at the same time.

IPhone Client Download – Android Client Download

 

Planar Goods Vendors

Now that you a stash of planar currency that you have won from the lootables game… you should probably visit your nearby neighborhood Planar Goods and Rare Planar Goods vendors.  These will be located in all Mathosian leveling zones and sell a variety of goods for that hard earned Planar Currency.  The Rare Planar Goods vendor will sell several pieces of level appropriate gear, and the Planar Goods vendors tend to focus on Planar Essenses.  If you end up with an excess if purple quality currency, there is even a way to convert it to planarite by buying planar caches.  I find the combination of the lootables app and the planar goods vendors an excellent way to keep a character outfitted as you level.

Planar goods vendor listing from Rifthead

Instant Adventures

One of the most interesting features of the game is the ability to jump into essentially a group quest from anywhere in the world.  When you make it to Meridian, you get the option to enter Instant Adventures through a quest giver, however you can jump into them at any point prior to that by clicking the |> symbol on the menu bar and choosing Instant Adventures.  Essentially you can think of them as quest rifts…  in that it is a rolling group activity where you are asked to complete group objectives.  Every so many rounds you will be presented with a boss of sorts, that gives you a shot at planar gear caches.  The Adventure will continue on indefinitely… teleporting you to different areas of the map.  It is the perfect “I want to do something” activity, because you can hop on the adventure train and leave whenever you get tired or bored or decide you want to do something else.  A word of warning… you end up leveling extremely quickly through Instant Adventures.

Cross Server Chat

At some point along the line they opened up the lines of Cross Server communication.  You can talk to players on other servers by addressing them by this pattern  <Username>@<ServerName> so to talk to me, that is Belghast@Deepwood for example.  Additionally you can add people on other servers to your friends list, and see when they are on and in what zone they happen to be in.  Additionally you can join server channels for other servers by typing /join <channelname>@<servername>.

Cross Server Everything

This opened up some new possibilities… and they didn’t just stop with communication.  Basically you can do almost anything cross server these days.  The unofficial Cross Server event channels are CrossRaids@Faeblight and CrossEvents@Faeblight by joining these you can get in on action going on with any server.  If you join up with a cross server group, you can right click your portrait and choose “Teleport to Instance” and this will not so intuitively…  teleport you to the server the event is going on with.  This allows you to freely group with any player on any server at any time.  When you are done with whatever activity you are doing, you can right click your portrait and choose “Leave Instance” to get back to your own server.

Chronicles

At some point over the last two years since launch, they added in a new kind of small group based activity called Chronicles.  Essentially a Chronicle is a 1-2 player version of a raid encounter, designed to give you minimal loot, but let you experience the storyline told through each of the raids without the need for a large raid group.  There is a daily chronicle quest in Meridian, and doing it rewards dungeon currency.  More importantly it is a nice casual activity designed for two friends to complete.  They are pretty quick to complete and offer minimal trash mobs, and you get to fight the various boss encounters of the dungeon… but with far more forgiving mechanics.

Conquest

Conquest is essentially three way faction based PVP in the style of Dark Age of Camelot.  You are teleported into a map with multiple objectives, and you need to seize and hold as many as you can for your chosen faction.  The factions themselves are completely arbitrary, and you will likely end up playing multiples of them as the game tries to auto balance.  This was brought in with the “Faction as Fiction” patch, allowing you to freely group Defiant and Guardians together.  It seems to be on roughly an hour timer, so most avid players queue for this before starting their daily quests.

Faction As Fiction

Since I just mentioned this… and it is a pretty massive change in the game…  I thought I should make its own bullet point.  Defiant and Guardians are no longer diametrically opposed to one another…  you can now freely communicate, group, and join guilds with either faction.  This was a massive improvement, because to me faction walls always feel super artificial and just get in the way of my enjoyment of any game.  Previously Guardians and Defiants would work together by the use of /say to communicate… but this just made it all work better.  You are still restricted in the ability to go into guardian or defiant held areas like Sanctum and Meridian… however you can have both factions in the same guild.

Addons

These were not there at release and it took quite a bit for them to be added in, so I thought I would say a quick word or two.  Rift has pretty solid add-on support but they do it in a way slightly different than World of Warcraft does them.  Essentially you can make an add-on do almost anything, but it has to be an additive process… you cannot overwrite any core game functionality with your own features.  The prime example is Imhothars Bags… it gives you a Bagnon style single bag interface, but instead of overriding what your default bags look like… it simply creates a brand new window.  This admittedly takes some getting used to.

Some addons I use regularly are…

  • King Boss Mods – yup you guessed it… this is the DBM for Rift essentially
  • Rift Meter – simple single player dps meter… only shows your own damage output for diagnostic use
  • RareDar – alerts you when you might be near the spawn point of a rare mob
  • BananAH – this is the quintessential auction house mod, makes posting items much easier
  • CarnageBook – shows you which carnage quests you are missing for a given zone

Server Transfers

Having trouble finding the right server?  Unlike other games… Rift allows the player to change servers freely.  The restrictions are that you have to be level 15 to change servers, and that you can only do it once per character every seven days.  However these restrictions are pretty loose considering the value this gives players.  If they decide a specific server community is not to their liking… or if a guild dries up and they want to go play with some other friends…  this is completely doable and doable for free.

Crafting From Bank

This one was huge for me when it went in.  Essentially when you are crafting, it will give you access to all materials that are in your bank.  So you can stock pile materials in your bank, and craft up items as needed.  This will save most players a lot of bag space as they are roaming around the world.  My only wish is that someday they might segregate the crafting bank off and make it account wide… and do some kind of deposit construct from anywhere in the world.

Auto Sort Bags

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This was another huge one for me when I noticed it existed.  If you look in the image above, there is a little icon that has been added to the right-hand side of your bags.  This basically will sort your bags filling your last bag first, and sort your items by item type.  So it will sort all your gear together, crafting materials together, and other categories together.  This makes life so much better, and there is a similar feature added to banks allowing you to sort your bank bags as well.

Searchable Bags

Also in the above image you notice there is now an icon to the left-hand side of your currency window with a little magnifying glass.  This allows you to search items in your bags for a specific string.  You can also access this by hitting the default windows search hotkey Control+F.  The currency window becomes the search box, and any item that does not match the pattern you have typed in gets greyed out in your inventory, making whatever you are looking for nice and bright.

Wrapping Up

I need to get on the road, but I think these are most of the major items that have changed since patch that at least were extremely important to me.  I hope players that are new to Rift and players that are returning to Rift find them useful.  I hope you all have a great day and a great weekend.  I am extremely thankful that the week is almost over.

F2P Done Right

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This is one of those mornings that I don’t really know what to write for the intro.  I am blaming it on feeling groggy and the excess amount of asthma medication I have been taking to get over this rough spot.  I ended up having to go into work after all yesterday, since there were events happening that I had to deal with personally.  I managed to get through most of the day by taking a double breathing treatment and just dealing.  Ironically it was going to lunch that killed me…  we went to a new BBQ joint around the corner… and I did not factor in the “bbq smoke” factor. 

F2P Done Right

rift.exe 2013-6-13-6-11-14-302

If you have been playing Rift for awhile, then yesterday was like Christmas morning.  Upon logging into the game yesterday I was greeted with so many patron benefits.  There was this huge graphic ticking down all of the loyalty points I had received and an odd burst of onscreen confetti.  Essentially I was roughly halfway through the purple tier of loyalty, and therefor got all the rewards leading up to that.  Additionally I had roughly 32,000 gems waiting on me to spend.  I was like a kid in the candy store looking through all the possibilities that I could purchase.

Essentially it seems like almost everything that required a significant platinum outlay is now purchasable with gems.  This includes wardrobe slots, extra souls, extra bank vault tabs, 2 new extra bag slots, mounts of all speeds, dimension goodies, wardrobes and equipment.  Just through loyalty bonuses, it seems as though I got two extra roles, as I now have my 5th and 6th role available.  One of the coolest rewards that I have yet to get permanently gives your player portrait the circle of red thorns that denotes an elite mob.  Trion has put in so much work on making this something really awesome for all players.

The Store

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One of the changes that I was not fully expecting is the fact that every single vendor UI in the game has been updated.  This has several sweeping effects on the gameplay in general, almost all of which for the better.  The screenshot above shows one of the recipe vendors in Meridian.  You will notice there is now a built in preview window so that simply clicking on an item previews its appearance.  Additionally if the item can be purchased with multiple currencies…  platinum, special currency or store gems the prices are all listed out separately.

The big change I was not expecting is the fact that you can open this store pretty much anywhere in the world, and purchase almost any faction specific item.  If the item requires a specific faction, it will be listed as well.  I have never been able to remember which vendor sold which item, especially when it comes to the various faction locked dimension baubles.  This gives you one extremely powerful, searchable and filterable UI for accessing all of these vendors.  Additionally this also means that you can purchase your raid and dungeon mark gear from anywhere in the world… including inside of that dungeon.

The thing that has overwhelmed me is the concept of just how much stuff is now up on the store.  In the wardrobes section for example…  there are literally several hundred outfits to choose from, including some new premium outfits.  Essentially it seems that pretty much any graphical appearance that exists out in the world somewhere… can be purchased through the store.  The other thing I noticed is that you don’t have to buy just completed outfits…  if you farmed your little arse off to get some appearance but were missing the boots…  you can just pick up said boots.

The Pricing

rift.exe 2013-6-12-17-31-27-54

So far the pricing model seems more than fair to players.  I want to say last night I saw that $20 bought you roughly 3200 gems.  So many of the items I actually wanted were well under 1000 gems.  This included 150% speed mounts, large dimensions, almost all of the wardrobes.  The bank vaults and two inventory tabs were fairly expensive but still within the 1000 gem range.  The one intriguing item to me was the trade skill slot unlocks.  Apparently you can now have up to 9 trades kills on a single character and it is 1200 roughly per unlock. 

I’ve essentially blown through all the gems that they gave me for extended loyalty, but I managed to get so many things that I felt I never could have.  I am horrible at farming currency in MMOs… it is just not a thing I enjoy doing at all.  I have a love/hate relationship with daily quests, and I have never been one to touch the auction house other than to purchase items.  The concept of acquiring money through any way other than the random and constant killing of monsters just feels tedious as fuck to me.  So as a result I always felt like I lacked the cash in game to do the things I really wanted to do.

Last night changed all that…  with the freebie currency I

  • Purchased the Moonshade Pools Dimension
  • Picked up several random Dimension Items Packs
  • Picked up two Large Houses for the Dimension
  • Bought the spiffy black gothic wardrobe outfit
  • Upgraded my mount to 150%
  • Bought the two extra bag slots
  • Bought most of the new bank vault tabs
  • Bought 3 new wardrobe slots
  • Bought an assortment of the Deeps boxes
  • Bought 2 Trade skill slots so I could add on Weapon-smithing and Foraging
  • Various sundry other little things…

I feel like I got massive amounts of quality of life things for the gems, things that I had always wanted but never had the platinum to pick up.  Essentially every thing I saw last night felt extremely reasonable price wise.  There are no $20 dollar pets or horses there… even the most expensive mounts would have been maybe $10 in gems.  This combined with all the nifty loyalty perks… like a 1 hour timer teleport to Tempest Bay made last night an extremely exciting night for me.

Patron Queues

The negative side effect of all this goodness.. is the fact that it has brought back queues for Rift with a vengeance.  Patrons aka subscribers cut to the front of the line… but on most servers there was still a significant queue for Patrons.  On Deepwood we had a roughly 20 minute patron queue, but on Faeblight they were up to an hour and a half at one point according to friends.  This is going to frustrate a large number of players, so I hope there is something they can do to alleviate the server load at least temporarily. 

I think it is awesome that pretty much everyone is coming back.  I have friends who had no interest in the game previously, patching back up their game clients to log in and check it out.  The real test will be whether or not the players stay.  Rift is one of those games that I would absolutely love… if I had a stable group of friends that wanted to play it.  Since our release guild fell apart as folks got bored with the game… I have essentially been flitting back and forth between guilds trying to find a new home.  The group I am with now is super nice, but it just isn’t the same as playing with the Stalwarts.  Fifteen years of assorted friendships cannot be replaced that quickly with new ones.

I feel like these changes however have lit a new fire under players to come back to Rift.  There is so much good happening in the game right now, so many amazing systems to play with.  I am overwhelmed by just how good the store implementation is.  I was expecting Trion to dip their toes in the water, but instead they turned on the fire hose.  The real challenge will be whether or not they can keep adding new and interesting reasons for people to spend money to the already significant catalog of items.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap up and get on in to work.  I hope you all have an amazing day out there… and if you find yourself checking in on Rift, make sure to add Belghast@Deepwood and Belgrave@Deepwood to your friends lists.  I know I will be spending quite a bit of time in game in the coming weeks, and those tend to be the two characters I play the most.  I have a lot of friends starting up or getting back into the game, so here is hoping we can get some grouping going.

Computer Blues

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Over the last few days I have been having what I term as “bad mental health” days.  I’ve been super stressed about various sundry things at work, and combine that with the fact that I just do not handle change well.  Every time my wife goes away during the summer for a conference, I go through this massive adjustment period.  So much of my life is intertwined with hers, that when she is gone… there is just a void.  I try my best to manage this “funk” but now and then it gets the better of me.  I am thankful that I have a lot of friends who are willing to cheer me up.

Computer Blues

It seems like over the last few days… my computers have been betraying me.  I have been having issues with my gaming laptop, where it is intermittently losing its power connection.  Fiddling with the cord brings back the connection for short periods of time, before going out.  I initially thought… this is likely a power supply issue so I did what I always do and went on amazon… found a replacement and got it shipped through prime.  I got the new power supply and it worked even worse.

After much research it seemed like the g73 model has had some issue with the power port getting lose itself.  After watching a few videos… I decided this was not something I wanted to undertake myself.  It involved pretty much a complete teardown of the laptop, de-soldering one port and soldering back in another.  I am essentially a software guy… I build my own PCs but that is mostly just assembling a bunch of parts that were designed to go together.  I have done soldering work before, but it was nothing I was ever extremely comfortable doing.

After digging around I found what appeared to be an extremely reputable guy here in my town that does this sort of thing.  He owns a “Nerds: We Can Fix That” franchise and as such is primarily a mobile pc repair truck, so we agreed to meet so that I could have him look over my laptop.  After doing various sundry tests his though process was that it really was a bad power supply.  After looking around he showed me a spot in the power connector one where of the prongs was most definitely crushed.  His suggestion was to find an original Asus power supply and try that.

After much digging I finally was able to get a real Asus power supply ordered… but unlike the speed I am used to with prime.. it wont be here until Thursday at the earliest.  As a result I am without my laptop and my ability to hang out downstairs while playing games.  I know I have blogged about this before… when I lost my Gateway FX laptop, but I never really appreciate how amazing that is… until I can’t do it.  After a long day it is so nice to just chill out on the couch with my laptop and half play games and half watch stuff off the DVR.  I am nervous however that this will not really be the issue, but I am willing to try it… and it is far less invasive than other possible solutions.

Another Betrayal

Last night I get home, and go upstairs to begin the evening ritual of playing something.  I get on mumble to talk to my friends… and in the middle of booting something up my gaming desktop locks up hard.  In fact at first I can’t seem to get it to boot…  which I later find that it is simply booting exceedingly slowly.  I go into diagnostic mode trying to figure out what exactly is wrong.  Everything seems to be operating as expected… voltage looks good… hard drive tests fine… memory tests fine.  So after much fiddling I am basically at square one as to what might have happened.

A lock up is common enough, but a lock up followed by not wanting to boot afterwards really floored me.  I am not talking windows booting… I am talking slow bios posting.  I am going to have to keep and eye on things, but last night switched from a gaming night… to a do maintenance on all the things night.  I went ahead and patched everything that could possibly be patched, updated all the drivers that could be updated… and did some registry maintenance.  Given my “bad mental health” state… having both machines down at the same time was a state I was almost unable to cope with.

I realize that these are all first world problems… and rather petty…  but having both machines potentially down at the same time sucked.  Luckily through all my fiddling whatever happened seems to be not happening now.  When a problem mysteriously goes away… it bothers the hell out of me though.  I am not sure what happened, have no log evidence of what caused the lockup/slow boot scenario and ultimately no evidence of what seems to have cleared it up.  My desktop is three to four years old at this point, so it might simply be aging hardware issues. 

Now that I think of it… it might be older than that…  I got it when we we were still raiding Wrath of the Lich King content in World of Warcraft.  It has been a trusty machine that has pretty much run anything I have thrown at it for several years.  It might in fact be time to upgrade…  but I would much rather do it on my own time than having a box just up and die on me.  Here is hoping that I have at least temporarily staved off whatever occurred.

Killing Psychos

I finally was able to get my machine in a state I was happy with around 9:30 last night.  At this point I got back onto mumble and decided to join some friends in Borderlands 2.  It was me playing Axton, Ash playing Zero and Rae playing a super bloodlust infused Maya.  Quite frankly the combination of Rae and I riding around in a vehicle together is probably a bad thing.  Especially when it comes to doing quests that have non-standard objectives.  There may or may not have been a few objectives we almost failed at… because we were both too busy shooting things to notice that was not the goal.

When the game first shipped for whatever reason I was not able to hook up with the crew playing it.  As a result I have pretty much only played single player borderlands 2 content.  Last night was an absolute blast, and having players to rez me…  really helped when I tried to play “tank” and bull rush a bunch of mobs.  I need to find some better weapons… because right now my assault rifle is a tap to fire model that seems to always need reloading at the wrong time.  I picked up an amazing sub machinegun last night, but it seems to go through bullets like water… and I am always scavenging to find more.

The combo of Axton/Maya/Zero seemed extremely formidable… but I think if you put ANY combination of different classes together you would have had the same results.  Looking forward to maybe getting back in tonight and finishing the quests we were doing.  Honestly I don’t really care if we even do quests…. I was just in the mood to roam around and kill things to satiate my “computer troubles” induced bloodlust.  Borderlands 2 is a really good game for that kind of mindless violence.  It is like the Saturday morning cartoon of death.

Rift Update

The other big thing going on today is the fact that it is the launch of the Rift Free to Play conversion.  It will be interesting seeing how this improves or damages the community.  My hope is that by lowering the barrier of entry it will be easier to get folks to try the game.  Additionally I am hoping for a path through the cash shop to pick up some dimension goodies… because quite frankly I have been way too poor thus far to really experience the dimension content properly.  In any case it will definitely be a massive change to the game… and as such interesting to watch unfold.

Additionally… it is really hard to type with a cat trying to balance on your arm.  I guess I should take that as a queue to wrap things up.  I hope you all have a great day, and that you are in a better mental place than I have been.  I think my body is betraying me as well.  This morning I am additionally having a “bad lung day” in that my asthma and allergies have decided to make my life hell.  Trying to decide if today will be a stay home and take breathing treatments all day occasion or not. 

Sony: Best Troll Ever

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Last night was a truly odd occurrence for me.  I played a quick league of legends bots game with friends, and piddled around for a bit in Dragon’s Prophet managing to get level 20.  All of this was essentially “busy work” as for my inner circle of friends, the main event of the evening was the Sony Entertainment Pre-E3 stream.  After seeing it… there really is not much else I can talk this morning other than just how amazing the show was when contrasted with the Microsoft presentation earlier in the day.

Throwing the Xbone

 

Thankfully we have a lovely abridged version of the Xbox E3 conference that arrived on YouTube over night so I can link here for you all.  Basically the Microsoft conference was a massive improvement over the reveal event and its obsession with television.  They actually seemed like they might care about games… but then unfortunately they presented me with a bunch of titles I really don’t care about.  All of their big reveals seemed extremely unexciting.  While I am watching this I am desperately scanning the list for that one game that makes me want to own a console system.

Out of all of the games shown… the only title that stuck out for me… was Killer Instinct.  Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a new Killer Instinct game is pretty massive, as the original one was probably hands down my favorite fighting game ever.  I was like a kid in the candy store a few months back when I managed to successfully get the Killer Instinct emulator running and got to revisit the original arcade experience.  The problem is I just don’t feel like this is enough of a reason for me to spend $500 on an ugly black box.

Coming away from the presentation I still got the feeling that Microsoft doesn’t really care about games that much anymore.  I still feel like they intend this to be some convergence device that causes people to change the way they interact with television.  That is fine, but I already have a Roku… and it cost me way less than $500.  Most of their killer features just are not that killer for me.  I could give a shit about sports, and I never really seriously watch live television.  So combined with games I don’t really care about… and making a big deal out of games that have been on the PC for over two years…  I just really do not feel like Microsoft’s vision is where I want to be.

The Next Generation

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I saw a tweet last night that essentially wondered what it was like to be Sony yesterday, having an entire day to soak in the Microsoft E3 presentation… all the while knowing that you were just about to nuke them back into the stone age.  It certainly must have been an amazing day for everyone involved with the PS4 in any way.  For as awkward and confusing at times as the Microsoft conference was… the Sony PS4 event was that much polished and keyed to the demographic that matters to them…  gamers.  There was an obligatory section giving someone floor time from the Sony entertainment division, showing off the movies and music libraries…  but every other component of the show was about their serious line up of games.

For as nonplussed as I was about the Microsoft Lineup… I saw game after game that I want to play right now.  The Order was this amazing steam punk meets diesel punk meets Victorian monster hunter game.  The demo that was shown was an in game engine rendered trailer, and that really doesn’t matter… because it looks far better than most fully CG trailers today.  In fact that was a huge theme with the show as a hole.  Almost everything took painstaking effort to mention that what you were seeing was in game or in engine rendered footage.  The end result is almost movie quality animation and brilliant special effects, there was just an unbelievable amount of eye candy being shown.

The Bumps

This is not to say that the presentation did not have its share of hiccups last night.  Ubisoft decided to go completely blind and do their demos as a person on stage actually playing the game.  They demoed both Assassins Creed VI and Watchdogs this way… and in both cases… AC especially they had some freezes in gameplay.  Watchdogs however that has been in development far longer… had a few moments of slowdown but no lockups.  This is the risk of actually doing anything live, because anytime I have had to demo software…  it never goes 100% smoothly.  I know the feels the guys on stage were going through… so to some extent this softens the blow of the fact that they had lockups.

Additionally there were some pretty awkward presenters…  but nothing nearly as awkward as the Microsoft “trash talk” examples… and the really bizarre rape analogy as the man and woman were playing Killer Instinct together.  Seriously Microsoft… what made you think it was okay to say something like that?  At first I was like man… this is awesome an actual woman on stage playing a game… that is not a super model.  Then you reduce her to a whipping boy as some jackass trash talks her and tells her to lay down and it will be over soon?  Xbox One:  The Console of Choice for Date Rapists everywhere!

Sony: Best Troll Ever

 

Anyways… essentially none of the bumps in the road for Sony were anything nearly as egregious as what we have seen from Microsoft.  The big takeaway for me from the Sony conference is the fact that the games look like they are going to be amazing.  Sony took every possible opportunity to troll Microsoft and make them feel bad for their current choices.  The above is a great video highlighting one of the biggest features announced last night.  Essentially you will be able to trade games for the PS4 the same as you could for any console previously.  No awkward restrictions… you can buy used games and swap titles with your friends the same as you have been up to this point.

This is a huge boon for Sony, as the lack of used game support was likely to completely rule me out of this generation of consoles.  I hate Game Stop probably more than most people, and I refuse to give them any business at all…  however I still buy most of my console titles second hand.  Very rarely is there a title for the consoles that makes me want to go out into the store and spend $60 on it day one.  Instead I love the scavenger hunt that is going to pawn shops, and more equitable secondhand game stores like Vintage Stock, Game Xchange and Half Price Books.  So the ability for a modern console to still give me that hunting for a bargain experience… is a huge boon.

Additionally the PS4 does not require an internet connection to work… however admittedly a lot of the features they were showing off in games were connected features.  The console though has been designed to work in a connection agnostic state, which is again is a huge boon for Sony.  There is no creepy Kinect eye always watching you, and with the recent flood of security concerns…  giving Microsoft a box in your house that was always passively watching what you did was more than a little dystopian for me.  I think Sony embraces the concept that actual gamers really don’t care much about minority report gimmickry… they just want to play the damned games reliably.

The biggest troll of the evening however was announced towards the end of the evening.  The PS4 looks like a better console in every possible way, and have far better developer support with new and interesting titles.  Playstation Plus is still far superior to Microsoft’s crappy gold program.. even after the announcement of getting 2 old titles per month.  All of this goodness… and Sony drops the bomb in that it is $100 less than the Xbox One.  While still expensive… the $399 price tag, and all the games that I want to play on it… really make this a buy for me.  I may not get it new at launch, but I will definitely be picking it up eventually.  I almost felt at the end of the night… that Sony should just drop the mic after the announcement and walk away…  because they schooled Microsoft in every conceivable way.

Best Thing About The Show

 

While I am experiencing a massive resurgence of console gaming right now and am really looking forward to the next generation of console games…  I am still very much a PC gamer at heart, and namely an MMO Gamer.  Last night Sony got a major coup in that they announced that Elder Scrolls Online was coming to the Playstation 4 and would be available Spring 2014.  Almost immediately Bethesda started in with the damage control and released the trailer above… showing that it would be coming to PS4, Xbox One, PC and Mac all within that Spring 2014 time frame.  Elder Scrolls Online is the game I am looking forward to the most of all the titles on the horizon… and we finally have a projected timeframe.

The new footage looks absolutely amazing, and it includes some really solid first person game play.  I’ve never had a problem with the idea of third person… and when playing Skyrim I switch back and forth between first and third regularly depending upon the situation.  Having first never really seemed like a must have… but this is a huge boon for the Elder Scrolls purist crowd.  Additionally the first person graphic for that Dragon Knight chain attack thingy looked amazing.  This only further cements my desire to play one…  I want to be Scorpion from Mortal Kombat.  I wonder if like WoW… I can find an add-on that says “Get Over Here!” every time I press the attack.

Wrapping Up

I really need to get on with my morning.  Today is trash day, and I have to finish gathering it, as well as give my cat some medication… and get on the road.  The broad takeaway for the night is that Sony absolutely obliterated Microsoft.  There is next to nothing they can do to recover in my eyes from the brutal beating they received at the hands of the Playstation 4.  I want to start stockpiling cash now… so that I can pick one up in December when the console launches.  I hope you have an amazing day… and I hope I did not offend any stauch Microsoft fans out there.