April 2014 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Elder Dungeons

April 10, 2014 by Belghast

H1Z1 Preview

Yesterday was the big reveal of the new SOE game H1Z1. While it should surprise no one… this is a zombie survival MMO. With the name there is literally nothing else that it could have been. Right now the details are pretty sketchy, but details are being collected on the official reddit. It really looks like it is going to take what Rust and DayZ are doing, to the next level and make it massive and persistent. While all of this intrigues me… I think it is pretty much in the “not for me” camp. I am amped about exploring a zombie filled world, and building bases with my friends to protect against the hordes. Dealing with additional players in a PVP scenario in that same world… pretty much destroys my enjoyment. Ultimately I am all about community and working together, and unless there is some unofficial co-operative server there really isn’t much pull for me.

I played quite a bit of the DayZ mod for Arma 2, but the thing that ultimately stopped me from playing it more was the fact that I didn’t need to worry about the zombies, but instead worry about getting sniped from a massive distance by other players. I realize that it is more realistic to have players be fighting other players for survival, but in these games there are often times far more players in the world than zombies. I feel like ultimately what I am looking for is State of Decay co-operative mode… which sadly is not in the cards. I want to explore a purely PVE world with my friends, and scavenge from potentially NPC factions. I guess the proof will be in the pudding and how things are set up. What would really kill the game for me is if other players can loot your corpse, similar to DayZ.

So long as if I die to players I get to keep my progression and my inventory, I might be okay with this. The other big concern is, that Smedley already talks about players coming along and burning down the bases of other players. As a kid I loved to build with blocks, but it would piss me off when another kid would come along and knock down my intricate structure. That is precisely what it feels like to me, when you have a base building game… that allows other players to come destroy yours. Some time ago Smedley said there was another game on the horizon that SWG players would love. I keep wondering if this is it, because it is supposed to have the whole player created town aspect. Knowing what I know about the SWG community however, I don’t really see them being terribly enthralled by this.

The Evil Within

A game I have been watching with some interest for some time is The Evil Within. Essentially it brings the world famous Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil. During the early days of the playstation, I absolutely ate up survival horror titles. I played the shit out of Resident Evil, its sequel, Parasite Eve, and even Dino Crisis. However for me the genre reached its peak with the release of the original Silent Hill. There was something so perfect about that game and the way it blended between the relatively sedate “normal” world, and the absolutely twisted “nightmare” world. The game absolutely blew me away from the opening chords of its theme song. As the Resident Evil series wore on, it became ever repetitive and boring, as you rehashed the same old t-virus saga again and again.

What The Evil Within does is pair the mind of Shinji Mikami with the publishing might of Bethesda Softworks. Now granted this is not the same team that brought us the Elder Scrolls, or even Fallout… but so far they have managed to prove that when one of the Zenimax studios creates a title… I am ultimately going to be interested in it. The above trailer is brand new for Pax and I have to say I am super interested. It feels far more like Silent Hill than Resident Evil, and this is an awesome thing to me. I want another game where I wander around a nightmarish landscape that I can’t quite wrap my head around. The title is slotted to ship at the end of August, and I am super excited about it. If you loved the original Silent Hill as much as I did, I figure you have reason to be excited as well. If nothing else the trailer is really freakin cool.

Elder Dungeons

I finally put my finger on what exactly I am loving about the dungeons in Elder Scrolls Online. In many ways it feels like a return to the dungeons of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. World of Warcraft did something to MMOs that has seemed unrepairable until now. It was really the first game to begin to treat dungeons as though they were wholly separate from the rest of the world. It walled the dungeons off in instances, filled them with special dungeon mobs, and applied abilities to them that you would see in no place OTHER than a dungeon. The dungeon became its own unique game, that required a completely different set of skills than play out in the world did. Every game since the launch of World of Warcraft has taken this lead and filled their dungeons with “elites” that for the most part require players to focus fire them down, since an individual player could not possibly solo one at level.

This was not always the case, dungeons used to be filled with the same kinds of mobs you might encounter out in the “real” world, just in larger numbers and higher frequency. So stepping into Elder Scrolls Online, I admit I was freaked out when we first encountered and 8 to 10 mob pull. I am only now realizing that this is essentially the same 8 to 10 mobs you would encounter while roaming around the world. What makes this challenging and not just “trash packs” is the fact that these mobs fight smarter. From the moment you step into the dungeon, you encounter “group tactics”. Healers will heal the lowest target, including other healers… Necromancers will raise the dead, melee will go after your squishiest party members. The mobs are treating you like dungeon encounters, and trying to take you down as a team.

What makes this so refreshing is that these tactics are not solely reserved for “dungeons” but the same kind of thing you start encountering as the game ramps up difficulty. In Stormhaven it is getting rare that I am not involved in three or more mobs at a time. Almost always this will include a healer of some sort, a “tank” of some sort and a “dps” of some sort. The first time a mob tried to kite me, it was a really cool moment. Why this is great is because Elder Scrolls is somehow managing to teach players the skills that they will need for later content, in the content they are actually playing. So while yes, there is a massive learning curve… I feel like we will not have the same problems we have with the PUG scene in World of Warcraft in the eventual Elder Scrolls Online end game. If you can make it through the veteran content, you likely can make it through any of the content in the game.

It is refreshing to have a game that does not try to coddle the player. Shit happens, and if you do not react appropriately to it… you get punished and punished hard. The game is not some brutal Dark Souls type experience, it plays fair and within a set of established rules… but even after playing it as long as I have… I still die, and die often. I really look forward to the adventure zone combat, because it feels like it is going to be something akin to the old Everquest planes. I loved breaking the plane of hate and the plane of fear, both of which were unforgiving and brutal… but also immensely rewarding. While Craglorn sounds like it is much more structured than the planes were, it feels like it might offer a similar style of gameplay. It will be a long while before I am Veteran Rank 10, but hopefully when I get there we will be able to wander about the zone finding adventure.

#H1Z1 #TheEvilWithin #CragLorn #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline

Bloodlust Pays Off

April 9, 2014 by Belghast

What’s Wrong with TSW?

There are a couple of really interesting posts by Sypster and Rowanblaze that talk about the problems with The Secret World combat system. Mostly Syp’s post is him trying to articulate the way he feels about it, and then Rowan breaks down those points and tries to speak to each. Combined they provide a really nice bookend and are extremely worth reading. It is really nice to see someone try and put into words what is wrong with the combat other than “it’s clunky”. I have my own love/hate relationship with the combat in The Secret World. For the good I love how flexible the character build system is especially at lower levels, but there seems to be a point where all of that breaks down.

Like always, my little circle of regularly group mates rushed headlong into the content of The Secret World, and were starting in on Nightmare content only a few weeks after launch. For the most part we found normal and elite content in The Secret World to be overly easy. However facing nightmare content felt like slamming our faces into a brick wall at 60 miles per hour. The transition was brutal and unforgiving and seemingly unfairly stacked against melee players. I had managed to stubbornly limp my way through the Gatekeeper encounter with my Shotgun/Blades build, but when it came to nightmares I abandoned it quickly in favor of a pure ranged Shotgun/Pistol build.

The game went from being super forgiving and open to any build you could dream up, to being extremely punishing and narrow focused over night. So yes while the combat is essentially an overly repetitive use of “wow rogue” tactics over and over until you finish the battle, it was the fact that playing melee was a detriment to my groups survival that ultimately did the game in for me. We all return to the game to play the new content every now and then, but Nightmares were the point at which the game stopped being fun for many of us. Our creative builds that were super personalized were force culled into the few builds that “worked well” for nightmare level content.

Bloodlust Pays Off

Last night I had every intention of just quietly questing away in Elder Scrolls Online. However I logged in to a message from my friend Tam, wanting to know if I was down for running some dungeons. What can I say… I am a sucker for spelunking my way through bad guys. At the beginning of the night we were trying to figure out why I was a level ahead of them with the “dungeon” faction… aka the Undaunted. We ended up sifting through our achievements and found that I had already hit the “kill 1000 monsters in dungeons” achievement and they had not. I may or may not have issues with bloodlust, and as a result I have been tanking pretty much any dungeon someone asked me to. We started off the night with Wayrest Sewers again, and honestly I was expecting a rough time. However I found that I was able to split the packs much the same as I did the very first time I had run the dungeon.

I am guessing maybe in the previous group I had someone “helping” me by pulling something other than the one I was yanking with my chain. This is a super important point that needs to be addressed, and while I covered it in my tanking post… I figure it bears underlining here. When you are running these dungeons, let your tank pull and do not touch ANYTHING until you see the mobs run up at the group. The way combat packs work in Elder Scrolls Online is that all of the mobs in a pack will aggro you, but not all of them will actually engage you in combat. Touching them, means they will be doing so and you can quickly get overwhelmed. Let the tank pull and watch to see what actually starts attacking you. Then do not touch the ones that are just standing around cheering on the fighters.

I was not feeling like streaming last night, but I wish I had been… because after finishing off Wayrest Sewers we also ran the other two dungeons in the level 20 range. Darkshade Caverns and Elden Hollow were both really awesome. However in the case of Darkshade Caverns there is a bit of a surprise involved with running the dungeon that I really don’t want to spoil. Darkshade had some of the coolest fights to date, and I look forward to running it again. The loot seems to be improving as well as we go up. Granted it is still fully luck based, but several of us managed to pull out blue set pieces from the dungeon, as well as the normal unique loot drops. The lighting and effects in the dungeons are just superb. Final Fantasy XIV had some really amazing dungeon encounters, but I have to say so far at least Elder Scrolls Online trumps them.

Oddly Oblivious

I guess right now I am simply preoccupied with Elder Scrolls Online, but right now I am pretty oblivious to the news coming out about Warlords of Draenor. I still very much care what happens there, because even though we have this insane guild right now in ESO, there are still a batch of diehard Stalwarts that will likely never leave WoW. I want the expansion to be awesome for them as much as anything else. I have to say that the new Draenei female is nice… but not really the night and day difference that you see with the Vanilla model makeovers. I guess the Draenei and Bloodelves were in a better state already than the previous models, so they were not quite so primitive looking.

I have been phenomenally bad at keeping up with my RSS feed since coming back from my grandmothers funeral. I guess I rushed headlong into ESO, and have simply not come up for air. Things have just been going so well over there that I have not needed additional diversions. I am still listening however, and occasionally things creep into my consciousness about Warlords. Story from yesterday was that MMO Champion got DDoS’d for not giving credit to the folks running the private servers where he collected the alpha zone screenshots. Now all of those shots are down from the site, with a disclaimer saying that Blizzard had asked them to take them down. While I can’t confirm anything about the DDoS, I am guessing the image take down is more related to that instead.

At this point I will be far more interested when someone I know actually gets into Alpha or Beta. The rumors that I am hearing about the garrison sound intriguing and a fun minigame to keep me engaged in the expansion content long after I have finished leveling. My real hope however was that the garrison would be shared among all of your characters. I have an army of tradeskillers, and it would be nice to have access to ANY of their trades, from ANY of my characters. It feels like Blizzard is always one step away from making something really awesome. For whatever reason they always stop just short of what I would like to see from them. Hopefully we will continue to get more official news, since really at this stage in the alpha… anything that gets datamined is mostly bullshit and likely to change before beta.

#ElderScrollsOnline #TheSecretWorld #WoW #TSW #ESO

Back to the Sewers

April 8, 2014 by Belghast

Jonquils say so

Here in Oklahoma we have had more than our fair share of ping pong weather of late. This weekend I was happily running around in shorts, however when I went for my walk last night that same choice was rather chilly. I wish the world would make up its damned mind to be honest, and preferably warm up. I am afraid that once again we will go from cold to hot without much of a middle ground like we did last year. We have a patch of Jonquils on the side of the house and they seem to think spring time has arrived as they are in full bloom and gorgeous as always. We had these growing up as well, and they were always the heralds of springtime. When they bloomed things were going to start warming up significantly. I really hope the weather gods are watching my flowers, because seriously I am tired of the cold.

This morning I am more nervous than normal, and for good reason. Our eldest cat has a thyroid problem, and today she is supposed to go into surgery to have hers removed. This is supposedly going to fix the imbalance that is causing her to be sick all of the time. For awhile now we’ve done a practice I like to refer to as “greasing her ears”, where I rub some thyroid cream (while wearing latex gloves) into her ears. This was all to get her thyroid levels stabilized enough to have the surgery. However I am wondering if this is something we can just do indefinitely now. I don’t really mind doing it, at least not as bad as trying to feed her a pill. She doesn’t really like it but she tolerates it well enough. I am just wondering since she is a fifteen year old cat, if doing this a few times a day would be better for her quality of life than a surgery.

Back to the Sewers

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVYesterday evening some friends and I decided to delve back into the Wayrest Sewers in search of loot, glory… and attempting to avoid the mess. We had run the dungeon Saturday evening and it seemed much easier than the others we had run. Thing is apparently this was not the intent of the dungeon, and seemingly in an effort to break the trend of chain running the place… yesterdays patch changed several things about the place. Firstly there were a large number of packs that previously could be split, this is no longer the case. There were instances where you had a Rat Feeder human npc in a pack of rats… and you could fiery grip the human out by himself then deal with the rats. Now when you yoink the human the rats properly come with him, no longer trivializing the encounter. Similarly there were humanoid pack mobs that you could single pull, or pull without engaging the boss they were attached to.

All of this lead for a much more difficult run than we were expecting. The above video is still uploading to youtube, so I’ve embedded the twitch broadcast instead. Several things were happening… firstly I am generally horrible at explaining fights. Secondly for everyone but myself, this was their first time into the instance. Thirdly two of our members were slightly under level for the dungeon. The result meant that at least one of the boss fights seemed far more difficult than it really should have been. The Garron encounter is rough, but it involves figuring out how best to deal with the adds… and it took us several tries to arrive at a strategy that was working. Namely killing things in the same order as not to break the CC. It was a good time had by all, and we got our youngins specifically some tasty loot.

It Runs on a Toaster

My friends and I have joked for some time, that the Elder Scrolls Online engine is so damned optimized that it could probably run on a toaster. I posted this a few days ago on twitter, but I still find it insanely amusing. This is from the ESO Reddit, and is apparently Elder Scrolls Online running at the absolute minimum settings which is 320×200. The game looks oddly playable, even if you can’t really make out who exactly you are interacting with. It looks oddly similar to a super pixilated adventure game from the 1990s. Thankfully my machine will run the game in its full Ultra setting 1080p glory… but I do find it awesome that the game can technically be run on some pretty ancient hardware and perform just as well. I honestly don’t notice much of a difference running it on my laptop as I do running it on my more serious gaming desktop.

The thing is… so many companies overlook this as an issue. One of the reasons why World of Warcraft has been so easy to spread as a game, is that it has super minimal requirements. You can dial back the settings and run it comfortably on a netbook. I feel like more than likely you could do the same thing with Elder Scrolls Online. I’ve heard rumors of it running through a virtual pc emulator on various tablets, as well as natively on the Microsoft surface. The important thing is, since the client is that optimized, it means when you have friends that want to join you… you can likely get them into the experience without them needing to shell out for a dedicated gaming machine. At the end of the day this is a social experience, and being able to play with your friends will ultimately be the key to longevity.

One of my good friends, Scarybooster is having some real life stuff going on, and as a result he doesn’t expect to be able to play the game again until June. He jokingly said that he hoped we would all still be playing by the time June rolls around. Considering the longevity most of us tend to have with games… that is a fair question. I really hope that this title is not another in a long line of “three monthers”. I would love this game to be a much longer lived title, because I feel like it has what so many of them have been lacking… depth. The world is deep and nuanced and almost strangles you with lore. The thing that I have always loved about Elder Scrolls is that it works much like our own world. There is no one clean lore path through the setting… but instead it is told through little tidbits spread across thousands of books… some of which are directly contradictory. History is a messy thing, full of partial accounts and factual inaccuracies… and the world of Tamriel gets this right. Here is hoping we will all still find the world compelling a year from now, let alone a few months from now.

#ElderScrollsOnline #WayrestSewers

Growing Stronger

April 7, 2014 by Belghast

It Fit… Barely

Yesterday was crazy busy but we got up and around and dealt with all of the things that needed to be dealt with. If you remember yesterday morning I was blogging in a lull between the flurry of activity, and waiting on the folks from Lowes to deliver the new fridge and haul away the old one. We had measured the slot in the wall and the unit in store what felt like a dozen times, and we thought it was going to fit, but just barely so. Turns out yes, we were in fact right, and as you can see from the picture to the right it is a snug fit up against the cabinet above the fridge. Granted this cabinet now becomes completely useless since the only person who can reach it is me… and the stuff that generally got stored up there was for my wife.

It is so tight of a fit that the fridge scraped the top left side of the fridge every so slightly as it was sliding into place. The only problem with the installation is that the hookups we have for the in door water… are from 1980. Meaning the equipment they sent out was completely inadequate to connect it. However it turns that what we have is bad practice anyways… and that you can get much purer water these days. So we are going to call the plumber and have them swap out our connection for something that will take the 10 foot braided cable that they brought with the unit. We have lived for over sixteen years without ice and water in the door… we can live a little while longer. We have been dealing with some issues with the washing machine that we will have them look at the way it is hooked up as well at the same time.

This means however that we are going to need to clean more. Recently we went through our dishes and pots and pans and gave damned near everything we had to the neighbor kid that roomed with us last summer. He got a place of his own, and for years I had been wanting to just get rid of all of that and buy back our pots and pans a single pan at a time. Really there are very few things that I actually need to cook, and I have a really nice deep skillet that I tend to cook everything in already. This way I can buy only the things I specifically need, and of much higher quality than we had back during our college days. The pots and pans we had were the kind you get an entire set of for 15/20 bucks.

They exceeded their lifespan, and all of them were scratched and marred from years of cooking. I figure they are good enough to make spaghetti in for a bachelor pad of a bunch of guys. If we apply that same logic to the rest of our cabinets we should be able to pair everything down nicely. We have stuff that we have never used in all the years we’ve lived in this house. Which tells me it is high time to donate it someplace and get it out of the house. The only real negative is, this means another weekend is going to be taken up by this sort of stuff rather than gaming. This is the unfortunate truth of the summer, we end up either doing little projects… or leaving the house to go wandering about. In either case… not a lot of gaming happens, and similarly I am not sure when I will return to regular Steampowered Sunday posts.

Growing Stronger

This weekend we somehow hit 103 members in the Elder Scrolls division of House Stalwart. One of the things over the years that we have tried to do is grow organically through friends/family and word of mouth. This allowed us to continue growing with tight knit individuals and a shared ethic. The launch of Elder Scrolls has seen our largest guild ever to date. Granted in World of Warcraft we have 265 accounts in the guild, but that since the launch of the game in 2004. At the very least this is our larges game launch. Both Rift and SWTOR I thought we were doing pretty damned well, but in both cases the guilds were only around 40-50 players.

What I find staggering is that we just keep growing. I have half a dozen players already waiting in the queue for me to talk to them about the guild and make sure they are a good fit for our guild ethics. This seems to be one of those games where each person is roping several of their real life friends into playing it. In some ways it reminds me a bit of the way World of Warcraft was at launch, and I am really hoping that reference is not a curse. So far things are going extremely well, and I have to say were it not for the Alliance of Awesome we would still be that 40-50 member guild. I feel like so much of this growth has nothing at all to do with me, and I am okay with that.

So far everyone seems to be getting along just fine. Folks are either swapping stuff freely by dumping it in the guild bank, or posting things on the guild store. In either case everything seems to be peaceful and drama free. Guild chat is constant and lively even at 6:40 in the morning when we have seven people online. I feel like there is a certain contingency of us that log in each morning before work, and I am guilty of specifically that this morning. The real challenge of course is going to be what we look like in three months. However I feel like I will still be chewing away on veteran rank 1 content at that point. So far I am loving the quests and loving the dungeons. Over the last few days I have not been streaming, in part because of how busy my life has been. Hoping tonight I can get back in the swing of things and stream some more, maybe even a Wayrest Sewers dungeon run.

The Big Alpha

The rest of the gaming world that is not obsessing over finding the next skyshard has been obsessing over the slow trickle of news coming out about Warlord of Draenor. With the launch of Elder Scrolls Online, I made a statement over twitter that I thought they would announce the start of Alpha on launch day. I was partially right… it was leaked and verified that the alpha was starting on 4/4 but the official patch notes did not post until 4/5. There is a lot there to talk about, and this was likely a brilliant move by Blizzard to keep themselves in the news cycle competing against the good news coming from the Elder Scrolls Online launch. I would love to be able to say that I will ignore WoD and still be happily playing Elder Scrolls Online at the end of the year when Warlords is likely to launch. I probably will be be honest, but I am also not a “one game guy” any longer. I know I will pop back in and play some Warlords because it lets me hang out with the OTHER half of House Stalwart… the folks that are diehard WoW players.

I can already tell this is going to be a bad expansion for me. Don’t get me wrong… I am amped to return to Draenor and see it in the “un-screwed” state. The problem is that from the weapon art leaks, I basically get to choose from two different kinds of weapons. Either bedazzled with crystals and jewels… or primitive as hell with horns and shit lashed on for no apparent reason. Neither are really things I go for in the weapon department. My absolute favorite sort is the Death Knight starter weapon, and a close second is Ashkandir… so I like well defined and crafted blades. Neither the Draenei or the Orc art styles are really something I have ever liked, so I feel like this expansion is going to involve me constantly transmogging away the offending graphics. Then again… I guess that is why we have the transmog system. I had just hoped to add some nifty new graphics to this mix.

Right now I am just glad that I am not in the Alpha, because I would not wanting to be trying to split time between Elder Scrolls Online and something else. I am thankful that I am wrapped up and enthralled in ESO, because otherwise I would be like the folks waiting with baited breath for the next MMO-Champion data mine extravaganza. That said I am periodically checking the site and seeing things like the weapon graphics, so I am still interested. Warlords of Draenor can stay comfortably “in the future” for me for the time being. I will always have amazing folks like the Godmother of Faff to keep me informed with what is going on. The only thing that I regret right now is not spending more time in Landmark. That game totally deserves more of my attention.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HouseStalwart #WoW #WarlordsofDraenor