April 2014 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Life in Castlevania

April 14, 2014 by Belghast

Keep Progress

Last night I popped into Landmark for a bit and continued work on Belgarde Keep. At this point I have burned through around 1 million stone and still have so much more to do. One of my friends chastised me for building with stone. He said that I could do this much more easily with dirt and then come back over and paint in the stone texture. For whatever reason that just feels like cheating. Right now I can carve out bits of detail as I so choose and I still have stone underneath. With dirt I feel like I would be playing a constant game of trying to keep the facade looking right. The irony of my structure is that in a game with a pretty prolific smooth tool… I go out of my way to try and keep from anything getting smoothed. I don’t like the way it mushes up the textures to be honest.

I was feeling pretty good about my progress until I saw this picture… it looks like maybe my structure is a voxel off somewhere when it comes to what is currently the upper tier. So that means I will likely have to rip it out and start over from scratch placing stuff up there. However for the time being I think I will leave it as is until I get the “oomph” to go on another massive stone farming mission. The section I am standing on in this above photo… I am thinking about removing large chunks of it and making it a low balcony. Giving it more of a ramparts feel to it. Right now I am pretty pleased with how things are going, I just need to pull myself away from Elder Scrolls Online more often to do more work on it.

Life in Castlevania

I spent most of yesterday faffing about in Rivenspire, and as was my expectation from yesterday… it is very much Castlevania. Stuff is going horribly wrong in zone, and it is mostly due to the fact that we have free roaming vampires everywhere. There are few things I like more than slaughtering malformed vampires, but apparently one of them is killing Trolls. I remember in Skyrim the first time I was attacked by an Ice Troll. It felt completely epic seeing this lumbering shape charging at me through the blowing snow. That feeling apparently never gets old because I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday avoiding finishing a quest just so I could kill loads more trolls. Fire is traditionally the weakness, and I am not sure if that is still the case… but I as a Dragon Knight I applied loads of it just in case.

Rivenspire in the way it is laid out seems to be designed to keep me moving around in circles. There are so many things I still have to do in the zone to be able to move on… and I have already dinged 30. I am afraid I will be at least 35 before I manage to gather up the presence of mind to focus on the task at hand. This game for whatever reason is almost my kryptonite. There are so many shinnies and rabbit trails that I cannot keep from following. One minute I will be on task riding towards an objective, then a dark tear will open up from the sky and dump things down onto me… then I spend the next forty minutes on a mindless rampage across the country side only to realize I am back where I started and no closer to my objective. Thing is… I might get frustrated over my constant state of distraction, but I am enjoying each and every minute of it.

Faffing About Bleakrock

In an attempt to let people catch up a bit I decided to run around on my little Bosmer Nightblade in the Ebonheart Pact. Nothing terribly exciting but I thought I would stream my adventures. I had not streamed in awhile, and I end up joined by my friend Pazz. Over the course of an hour I make my way through the Bleakrock quests. If you’ve already played through Bleakrock there is nothing terribly exciting to see here, other than me roaming around aimlessly with a big sword. I really like the Bosmer for some reason, they feel more “feral”. In a way I am purposefully rolling things that would not be seen natively in an area. I plan on making an Argonian when I roll a character in the Aldmeri Dominion. You can listen to Pazz and I rattle on for awhile, and since he apparently does not understand how to make a push to talk key you get to listen to his inane water bottle noises that sound rather “questionable”.

You Apparently Like Us?

I am absolutely floored over the support we have gotten so far on the podcast. Embedding it again because it seems like the thing to do. Honestly I expected to post the podcast and then maybe have a dozen listeners that took pity on us enough to download it. Instead I have gotten some pretty positive comments. I know that it is currently pretty low quality, but that is something we can improve on over time. I had a friend ask me what bitrate we encoded at… and I literally had no answer. I just saved it out without really paying attention what I chose. I also want to fiddle a bit with the actual recording next time around. The positive is that I do believe there will be a next time. We all had fun doing it, and even if no one else was listening I think we would still continue recording.

I had a few people offer to be guests, and another few people offer to have us on their podcasts for some cross pollination. I think for the short term we need to lock down exactly what it is that we are doing before changing the mix significantly. I think it would be fun to record a show where we completely open things up similar to my podcasts, but then again that might be a little odd fighting to stay on task with people constantly popping in and out. For the time being what we did works, so I expect to keep tweaking that a little bit to improve the quality. I’ve already worked on a new version of the intro, and hopefully by next week Rae will have our awesome Chibis finished. This is starting to feel like a “real” thing… and while that is odd, it is also pretty damned cool.

#Landmark #ElderScrollsOnline #AggroChat #RIvenspire #Bleakrock

A Wild Podcast Appears!

April 13, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of AggroChat

This mornings blog post is going to be heavily related to what we did yesterday. Firstly… I have long thought that some of the conversations we had on the House Stalwart mumble sounded pretty damned close to many of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. While I did not think we would ever be as polished as Alternative Chat, or as awesomely thematically focused as the Battle Bards… I thought our people had something interesting to add to the mix. This is happening super fast to be honest, but that is probably a good thing. I was afraid that this would end up being yet another idea we had, that we never quite capitalized on.

We first talked about doing this on April 9th, and here it is the 13th and we have our first show up. I am sure at this point it is somewhat awkward of a recording but we will get better. Additionally at some point I will lean how the hell to use audacity and make a better sounding introduction. We have a super ghetto libsyn page up right now, and that will also be changing hopefully over the coming weeks. Rae is working on some really awesome chibi versions of the co-hosts and she would likely kill me if I posted the pencil versions before she has time to pretty them up. If you guys did not know it was Rae that drew the original Belghast chibi that adorns this blog, so the new ones are truly awesome. Since libsyn needed a 1400×1400 square image I threw together a truly obnoxious placeholder image.

A Wild Podcast Appears!

As I alluded to above… last night at 8pm EST we did our very first recording. It was a little awkward starting out, but as the night went on things felt more natural. There was a point at the end where I finally looked at the clock and noticed we had been rambling on for an hour and decided to cut things off. In truth we hang out on mumble damned near every night, so I knew that once we got over the hump of doing this “for real” things would begin to flow again. We covered a pretty wide gamut of topics from ESO Craglorn Adventure Zone, to Heroes of the Storm, to My Little Pony Card game and many many stops in-between. I will leave it up to you guys to determine if it is a worthy pursuit. I am pretty happy with the way things turned out, for it being our very first podcast… and none of us really know what the hell we are doing. Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the end result.

Right now we are very much in a “finding our format” mode. Functionally we have been keeping things really simple. We all share access to a google doc that is a running show topics of sorts. In this first episode we barely scratched the surface of all the things we ended up brainstorming. Mostly I would like to see us keep things pretty lose, but we might start doing a section for news after the what we are playing bit. While the “what everyone is playing” thing is pretty generic, it seems to work really well to break the ice and get things rolling. I’ve seen numerous podcasts and video casts do that one… so I felt not shame in blatantly stealing it.

Rivenspire is Serious Business

Yesterday morning pretty early I finished up the content in Stormhaven and moved up into the Rivenspire area. The transition between Glenumbra and Stormhaven was pretty extreme, but there seems to be an equally steep divide between Stormhaven and Rivenspire. Single pulls are pretty much a thing of the past, and it is very unlikely that I now find smaller than a three pull when I am running around. As a result of this and a result of the fact that I have a really awesome onehander right now… I am back to mostly playing as sword and shield instead of two hander. I am still really enjoying the content, and if you played through SWTOR at all… Rivenspire feels a lot like Alderaan.

You have these competing families vying for control of the land, with one of them having gone completely off the deep end. Additionally there is a very “Castlevania” feel to the zone, which tells me as I get deeper in I will like the content even more. Few things make me happier than slaying Werewolves and Vampires…. and the zone also has a pretty heavy contingent of Daedra to boot. In fact one of the public dungeons I ventured into thinking I could solo it… and ended up getting bailed out by my friend Warenwolf. It easily had to have a dozen different bosses in it including the ones associated with the quest chain. It is truly insane the amount of loot you get in a group public dungeon like that. We both had to resort to “mail banking” where we mail the items to a friend and they return it back to us later.

Tag Team Farming

While recording the podcast last night, Rae and I spend most of it faffing about in Landmark. The thing that has had me high center in my building project is a complete and total lack of stone. My structure is almost entirely made of stone and it took over 200,000 to get to the point at which it is today. Last night I went out into the desert and dug down, as underneath sand is generally a solid bed of stone as far as you can possibly dig. Before I knew it Rae had joined me and we were carving out a massive swath of stone beneath the ground. While recording we managed to harvest up over 300,000 and as a result I went back and added in floors/ceilings to my stone superstructure. This makes me happy as I was getting tired of seeing the grass growing up in the middle of my keep. From here I am not quite sure where I am going next but I have a few ideas.

If you are in game you should totally swing by Liberation/Levee and check out Rae’s adjoining claims. They are located on a hill southeast of the spire, and the low settings I have to run the game on for my laptop to not completely die… are not doing it justice. She has this really awesome garden area, and then down the hill she has a guest house. Her main house is carved out of the hillside and a subterranean area. If you are in need of a crafting hub she also has pretty much all of the machines. She has another super secret project, but I won’t be showing it since i think she is going to try and enter it in the “Landmark’s Landmarks” contest. Here is hoping she does well because it is looking really cool.

Finishing Stormhaven

April 12, 2014 by Belghast

2048: Sign of the Beast

For those of you who are not currently playing this game, I suggest you skip ahead to the next section. I feel like a crack peddler by even mentioning it, and this is from someone who is “lovingly” referred to as the “games pusher” by some of his friends. It was a few months ago when one of my game developer friends stumbled across this simple but deeply nuanced game and it made the gamut of my friends. I suck at number puzzles and even I played it quite a bit. The problem is each time I started down the path towards the mythical 2048 I would get to the point where I wanted to throw my phone across the room. I managed to get 1024 numerous times but could never seal the deal and get the other half of that equation.

It was much to my horror that I awoke this morning to find my wife laying in bed beside me playing this game on her phone. As a math teacher I was honestly surprised how long it took for this craze to cycle around to her, but apparently it is now infecting her “community” as well. The only cure is to NOT play, but that seems to be harder than it sounds. She said some of her students have actually lost sleep trying to reason out how to get to the magical 2048. As a result I have now decided to dub this the devils game… I am sure that Advanced Dungeons and Dragons will be disappointed that it has lost the title. I realize this is just a rework of the existing threes game, but there is something inherently more addicting about it. We NEVER count in 3s, but each time we sit down at a computer everything we do is based around binary… so 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc etc are all numbers we are so damned used to looking at in terms of memory or whatever we happen to be doing on a computer. Threes just looked at the problem from the wrong angle, and this little freeware version is better than it in every possible way.

Finishing Stormhaven

I was absolutely taken aback at just how gorgeous this screenshot came out. Anyone who says something negative about the graphics in Elder Scrolls Online has likely not actually played it. Last night I dinged 27 and am still finishing up the last few things in Stormhaven. I technically should have moved on around 25, but I have a hard time leaving a zone until I have at least made an attempt to turn all of the black icons on the map to white ones. I got the last Skyshard last night, and now I think I just have one quest line to follow before I can happily move on to Rivenspire.

The above armor I am wearing is the tier 3 Imperial heavy armor, and I have to say it looks pretty damned awesome. Right now I am trying to gather up enough orichalcum to craft a new onehander, but I upgraded my two hander last night. I have reached a point where I desperately need Orichalcum, but can’t seem to find much in Stormhaven… whereas before I couldn’t find the High Iron I needed. I have literally dumped a few 100 bar stacks into the guild bank since I don’t really need them. Hopefully it will help out some of the up and coming smiths in the guild. What I am desperately in need of is tempers… especially Dwarven Oil. I feel like I need to farm some of the world bosses in an attempt to get items to deconstruct.

Getting our Asses Kicked

Up until this point my friends and I had managed to make our way through the six dungeons to this point on a mixture of luck, skill and determination. However last night we hit a hard and absolute wall. The Crypt of Hearts is a dungeon in the next zone up… Rivenspire. It is scaled for level 30, and last night we had two at 31, and two at 26. We just did not have enough healing, damage, survival…. to push through the content. We managed to down the first encounter, but got completely gummed up on the second. We put in a bunch of attempts on Archmaster Siniel, and while we improved we always seemed to hit a point where we just could not survive the damage.

There is a lot of stuff going on in that zone, and it involves a lot of adjusting to what is happening. I think we finally had the right way to handle the fight, but just were hitting a gear wall. Can I tell you how damned refreshing it is to completely fail at a dungeon? That might sound odd, but to have a game with dungeons that can absolutely break our group is pretty damned impressive. Normally we steamroll content in these games, and after a few deaths we have figured out whatever “trick” there is to a fight and then from that point on have mastered it. To have our asses handed to us so thoroughly gives us a mission to figure out how to beat the place. This dungeon is going to become our new “sand giant” and we are going to want revenge.

#ElderScrollsOnline #StormHaven #CryptofHearts #2048 #RivenSpire

Cyrodil Bound

April 11, 2014 by Belghast

Prouds, I has them

Yesterday was the second day in a row I managed to hit the default goal of 10,000 steps since I got my fitbit. While I normally clock in at the 8,000 steps range I have actually hit 10,000 four times so far. As I wrote when I got my fitbit, it makes interesting tweaks in the way you look at the world. These last two days I mostly performed a simple tweak to my routine. I spend most of my life pushing as many things as possible to autopilot, and as such… unless it is super important I try and make things absolute routine. As a result I prefer to park in exactly the same place every day, so I don’t have to think about where I parked. The only place that is reliably open is the roof of the parking garage, and while I do try and find a covered place when there is bad weather… it works for me.

Normally speaking I have been going up and down the stairs from the roof for a while now, but I opted to make a slight tweak in this routine. Instead of walking the stairs, I decided to walk the long winding ramp between the 6th and 4th floor. This is a large number of new steps to add to my routine, and I think is really the difference between consistently having 8,000 days and 10,000 days. My other friends that are also using the fitbit tend to skew the results by walking in place at night or pacing the halls to try and finish off their steps. I however wanted to try and tweak my routine to a point at which it was sustainable and repeatable, and slowly over time I am getting there.

A new thing my wife and I have been doing in the evenings is attempting to walk to dinner. Granted we live in the suburbs and it is not exactly designed for walkability… but we are making it function. There are a number of restaurants that are within a mile of the house and Wednesday night we walked a grand total of 4200 steps to RibCrib and back. Last night she got home super late so we didn’t do this, but instead walked around the corner to the grocery store to buy a ream of paper and some advil. It seems that if we are walking someplace with a purpose in mind, it is easier. This is still very new to us, but so far we both seem to be adjusting well. The only negative is that I seem to have developed shin splints which hurt like hell, but hopefully they will lessen over time.

Cyrodil Bound

If you remember some weeks back there was a question as to which campaign to choose. After much discussion we ended up picking Wabbajack, and apparently this was a very good choice. It seems as though the Daggerfall Covenant is doing extremely well there, and when I logged in last night we had the faction wide buff indicating that we had crowned an Emperor. In addition we managed to hold all of the elder scrolls, but as my friend Kodra reported it looked like we were about to lose one of the keeps holding a scroll. I feel a little bad that as cool as Cyrodil seems, last night was the first night since the mandatory pvp testing weekends that I had set foot in it. I completely skipped the tutorial quests, which are apparently really good, and worth a lot of skill points… and jumped straight into combat. I had more fun than I have really had in PVP ever… or at least since Dark Age of Camelot.

We successfully defended the keep, and took several objectives around the keep. What was nice about defending the keep is that we were able to consistently push Ebonheart Pact away from the siege weapons and destroy them, giving our keep time to repair. I died a ton, but also managed to get in my fair share of killing blows thanks to being able to shield charge into targets. I pvp’d as sword and shield and overall I was pretty pleased with the results. I might tweak things up a bit, to add a bit more annoyance to my toolbar. I managed to get three skill points and at the end of the night was halfway through realm rank two. All in all it was a fun little outing and something I could see doing again in the near future.

Podcast In the Air

For some time I have been streaming in the evenings from time to time, and in doing so I hop on mumble and join a channel called “Bel is Streaming”. Folks pop into the channel and we end up chatting about damned near everything but the thing we happen to be playing. When I went back and listened to some of the videos… they almost sounded like impromptu podcasts. This started a discussion among a few of my friends and is slowly working its way towards a real podcast. There is a group of friends that I have been hanging out on mumble with on an almost nightly basis. Over this time we have developed a really good chemistry, and the goal is to take that same chemistry to a podcast.

So sometime in the very near future we will be recording our inaugural episode. I will be joined by my good friends Rae, Kodra and Ashgar. Between us we each have just enough overlap of tastes to make it work, and just enough divergence to hopefully make for differing points of view. Rae is currently working on some really amazing Chibis of us to eventually become a logo. Special thanks to Sypster to answering some questions and helping me pick a libsyn package. We don’t really know what we are doing… but that is okay, we all have to start out not knowing what we are doing. Right now the gameplay is to keep a google doc going with potential topics, and then just see what happens on air. Hopefully it will be something worth listening to.