Guild Leadership Archives - Page 61 of 108

SweetFX and ESO

July 15, 2014 by Belghast

Fallout and HDR

Last night when I got home I continued down the dark journey of messing about with Fallout 3 mods and trying to achieve that look I had seen in many screenshots. As of last night I had gotten a “better” looking experience but I wasn’t quite there. It seems like the thing I was missing was one of the many post processing shader injection tools out there. Apparently to get the best possible appearance you need to actually tag team them and use both SweetFX that seems to work with damned near any game, and one called ENB that seems to work with a much smaller subset of games. The above shot was pretty much my first test after turning both on and going with pretty much the stock settings. It is okay but feels a little technicolor, and the sky still seems to be a grey mess.

After trying a few more presets I settled on this one because it feels far more realistic. It is insane to see this game in action with all the shaders running. I am not sure if I can actually record footage and have it capture it in full glory since the screenshots come out a bit darker than it feels on screen. I might do some tests tonight with streaming some gameplay to see if it translates well. For those who are curious I am going to attempt to rattle off the mods that I am using to achieve the look and feel. It is pretty damned impressive that a game from 2008 feels so cool to play. Granted I need to do all the same things to see if I can get a version of Fallout New Vegas that runs this cool, because that game has far more bells and whistles available than Fallout 3.

The Mods Used

When someone posts their spiffy pictures of a modded up Fallout or Skyrim… they never seem to post the absolute list of what they used to get there. It is almost like the special sauce at your favorite restaurant that no one quite wants to give away the trade secret to. It annoys the hell out of me so as I dabbled into modded games I plan to do a complete list with links if they are available to exactly what I am using to get the effects. Here is the total rundown of everything I am using… and compared to a lot of the listings I have seen… this one is fairly spartan. Namely because I am only using graphical mods and none of the various game enhancement ones other than the unofficial patch which ultimately just fixes a bunch of bugs left in the final release of the game.

The only puzzle that still has yet to be solved is that I cannot figure out why I am not seeing the brilliant skies that I have seen in some screenshots. I feel like maybe this is just a problem with the area surrounding Megaton, and as I have not really ventured out further I am not sure if the sky clears up significantly out there. I am pretty happy with the results of this combination of mods and post filtering however. While I enjoy my consoles, this is the reason why PC gaming will always ultimately be superior in the long run. I’ve taken one of my favorite games that just happens to be over six years old… and brought it up to something modern feeling. You just can’t do that with a console game, ultimately because you have to wait for the company to do it… and not the army of dedicated fans.

SweetFX and ESO

The cool thing about SweetFX is like I said before it works with damned near any piece of software. Since you can use a third party software called Radeon Pro to “Inject” it into your video drivers… you can make it work without any actual modification to the original game files. In spite of the name, Radeon Pro works perfectly well with Nvidia cards and I am running it with my 750 ti 2 gig card without issue. This is awesome because it means you can apply it to things like MMOs with some fairly anti-modding terms of service. All you are doing is basically wedging some extra shader work into the rendering pipeline between the game itself and your video drivers. So after some fiddling I found a preset that I liked and am up and running with SweetFX in Elder Scrolls Online. There is talk that you can use one of the versions of ENB designed to work with Skyrim to process the graphics even further, but I have not had the chance to test that out.

So far I am pretty happy with the results… there are times when especially where flame is concerned that some of the lighting gets a bit trippy. But overall I am enjoying running around in a post processing world. The big thing that changes is that the world feels more realistic to me, with far better lighting and shading. The impressive thing is that I really see no noticeable hit to my framerate. In fact it might actually have improved it since I have completely turned off all anti-aliasing because SweetFX is ultimately taking care of that now. I am guessing their processing routines are a bit more efficient than the standard ones that the games seem to use. One of these days I am going to try the trick of running at 1440p and scaling the viewport down to 1080p instead of actually using post processing, but I have not gotten around to trying it yet.

Depths of Madness

When I was not fiddling with graphical settings… which in truth ended up to be most of the night. You can ask PKdude, but I was popping on and offline for damned near all of the night trying out various settings. When I finally got around to questing I completed one of my favorite Auridon quest chains called Depths of Madness. What is cool about it is that you are essentially trying to free three people that are trapped in dimensional sub pockets that have them bound by fear, rage, lust etc. Each one is a little mini adventure that you complete to free the spirit so they can move on. I guess to some extent the quest sequence reminds me quite a bit of the whole madness of king pellagius quest chain from Skyrim. It happens in a super secluded are of the map called Glister Vale and the first few times I played the Auridon content I didn’t actually find it.

I feel like maybe the time away from the game has helped my enjoyment, because the last few nights I have been running around in Elder Scrolls Online I have really enjoyed myself. I am not sure if I am ready to return to group content again, but I am definitely enjoying the slow pace of poking my way through the veteran levels. They still feel super grindy mind you, but so long as I focus on completing quests and not leveling I seem to be doing just fine. As silly as it sounds, I am really enjoying seeing the game with the SweetFX shaders. There are times where Elder Scrolls Online felt a little technicolor for my tastes and this version feels a bit more realistic and gritty. Fallout and Elder Scrolls in general have both been very gritty games… and while I don’t think everything needs the “quake palette” I do think the game feels more realistic with darker tones.

#ElderScrollsOnline #Fallout3

Wandering Auridon

July 14, 2014 by Belghast

Cheating on AggroChat

I don’t believe I said anything about this beforehand, but once again I was invited to guest host on Game On the MMORPG.com podcast hosted by @GameByNight and @Liores. I guess this means I didn’t make an ass of myself the first time they had me on. I have a lot of fun doing the podcast with them, because since I have known both for quite some time… it just feels like having a conversation with friends. This time around they also invited @AppleCiderMage so it was awesome getting to properly meet and hang out with her as well. The two of us have operated in the same circles for awhile, but never really had any direct interaction other than through twitter.

The podcast generally releases around Wednesday and I will post a link when it is up and ready to go. I feel like we maybe derailed the podcast, because they had this long list of things to talk about and I think maybe we got through three of them in the allotted time. Then again anyone who has listened to AggroChat should know that I can ramble on about nothing at length. AppleCider held up her end of the rambling as well, and I feel like the two of us combined pushed the train good and solidly off the rails. That said it was a blast to do it, and I look forward to maybe filling in again sometime in the future. I have to say though that since we record AggroChat on Saturday nights, it was weird to get up the next morning and prepare to do another podcast.

Wandering Auridon

While waiting around on podcast time I decided to stream a little Elder Scrolls Online. The other day I was absolutely shocked that someone posted on my youtube channel asking why I had stopped playing. It made me realize just how much time had passed since I had streamed anything, let alone Elder Scrolls Online. I guess maybe I am poking my head out of turtle mode, because streaming didn’t seem that bad yesterday. I am still poking my way around Auridon working on the quests there. In the video I play for roughly an hour and complete a couple of different quest chains. Most of my morning however was spent trying to sort out my addons. It seems like recently they had a patch that broke several of the addons that I was using. The weird thing about it is that several of the addons were apparently working, but being suppressed by other addons that were not.

While I still really enjoy Elder Scrolls Online, it had been quite some time since I had logged in. I of course logged into a mail message from my research assistant, but the one prior to that was from 19 days ago, so that means I had been offline for at least that long. The pace of the veteran content is a bit of a problem to be honest. While it is enjoyable to quest my way through the Aldmeri content that I had not seen… in the video I complete a handful of quest chains and my experience bar makes no noticeable movement. It gets frustrating to feel like you are making no forward momentum as you quest your way around the world. I talk about that a bit on the Game On podcast but when you move into veteran content it feels like you get stuck on high center. There are some rather sweeping changes coming in August, so here is hoping it improves the feel of the veteran experience.

Modding Fallout 3

The other day I stumbled across a series of pictures of a completely modded out Fallout 3 install. This combined with me playing some FO3 on the PS3 made me want to try playing the game with the same visual effects as shown in those photos. While I am getting closer, I can’t seem to get the visual splendor shown there. Right now I think I have all of the mods mentioned in the description installed and it looks much better than a default install, but something is still missing. Namely the sky is still the ominous grey blob that it has been on previous plays of the game. I am wondering if this is just a side effect of being in the Megaton area, and as I move out into the game proper maybe that changes. In any case I am going to keep trying to mod it until I can achieve the kind of clarity that you see in the images.

Other major change this play through is that I am trying to stick to using the Xbox 360 controller. Basically I have reached a point where I feel like the mouse and keyboard artificially limit me in the number of games that I can play. Right now the consoles seem to be the primary target for game developers, and the PC market gets ports namely, and that means all of these interfaces are designed with a controller in mind… and then later retrofitted to work with a keyboard and mouse. I feel like at this point I need to teach myself to be better at using a controller or ultimately there will reach a point where my chosen way of gaming is no longer supported. Hell to be honest it feels like the keyboard and mouse thing is already a rarity among anything that is not an MMO. With games like Destiny looming on the horizon, I feel like training myself to get by with only the controller is going to be a good thing… and I will go through the growing pains with games that I am already very familiar with before branching out on new titles that I am not.

#Fallout3 #ElderScrollsOnline

Happy Strain Day

July 1, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Dargon!

Last night I had every intent of playing World of Warcraft, but that didn’t actually happen. One of my good friends decided to re-up WoW for a bit, and since we had not played in ages we made tentative plans to hang out on horde lowbies over on Scryers. July 3rd The Scryers is merging with Argent Dawn the server that I have 11 Alliance characters on, and this will give me 11 Horde characters as well. I’ve always had friends on both side of the fence, but had trouble choosing to roll a character over there and give up a potential character on the alliance side. The merger of the two servers solves all of this. However last night didn’t actually happen and while I logged in a few alts and loaded them up with the few heirlooms I had laying around, I didn’t actually play them much.

Instead I fired up Divinity II again and continued questing my way through their extremely interesting world. Apparently none of the screenshots that I took actually recorded, which is a problem I am noticing more and more with Dxtory. If it has been open for any period of time, it seems to forget how to work. So as a result I am pretty much going to have to start shutting it down and reopening it every night before I sit down to play. I thought I had recorded quite a few nifty things, but in reality it is probably best that they didn’t record given that they probably were spoilerific. A lot of interesting stuff happened last night and I am not entirely certain how I feel about some of the choices the game made me choose. When a game makes me feel like that, it is probably doing a good job.

Happy Strain Day

This morning the first “Ultra Drop” as they call it is now available for Wildstar. This big patch weighs in at well over 3 gig and includes two new max level zones, a slew of new housing options and various cosmetic customization. While I am nowhere near high enough level to appreciate any of this I am amped to see it happening. Basically I am always happy when a game releases content for free to its players that expands the footprint of the game. So many companies have promised a progressive patching schedule but to date very few of them have actually manages to keep up the promised pace. The holy grail seems to be a patch a month, but the problem is that real life gets in the way, and things often don’t work out quite like they intended. So far the only company that has come close to this sort of schedule is Guild Wars 2, with its bi-monthly story updates. The problem there is that it didn’t actually expand the game, and was just a sequence of self expiring quest content.

The funny thing is that apparently some of the player base considers this too soon. I was floored to read on twitter when a friend of mine lamented that she was not even close to finished with the current content, and was frustrated that she already felt “behind”. Me personally I want to be flooded with content, so I can pick and choose what I want to complete without feeling the need to actually play every little morsel that comes out. Now my tune will change completely if I find out that this is some sort of limited time or expiring content. For the longest time Rift had done an amazing job of pushing out little content patches, but over the last year they have put in a number of limited time events that have caused me to really want to stop playing entirely. We talked about this a few weeks back on Aggrochat, but when a company tries to force me to log in every day for a period of time… I ultimately get frustrated and just stop playing entirely.

Day One DLC

The early patch like this is really designed to give the player base confidence at the end of the 30 day trial period. It essentially is a way of stringing the player on and making them want to renew their subscription that should be expiring around the time the patch lands. The thing is… this is so commonplace now that it is literally meaningless. The patch landing at almost exactly the one month mark, is really the equivalent to a brand new game shipping with day one DLC on the CD. This is content that was in the works and ready to go at the time of launch, that was essentially held in reserve to land right at the one month mark and reinforce player loyalty. That is not to say that it is actually content that COULD have shipped in the game, generally speaking it is done but not stable or untested, and requires a month or so to incubate and get ready for prime time.

Even games as notoriously slow at patching as Star Wars the Old Republic, had their one month in patch that introduced a brand new dungeon “Kaon Under Siege”. The real test is going to be if we see a similar “Ultra Drop” timed for August 1st and September 1st as well. No company has really proven that they can continue to expand their game content on a month by month basis, thereby justifying the expense of a subscription fee. I would love to think that Wildstar is going to be the exception here, but when no one has actually managed to accomplish it once the subscriptions start slipping… I just don’t have much confidence. That is the unfortunate reality is that a number of players are already “done” with this game, as evidenced by a string of tweets saying as such. Will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out once all of these people flake off.

I’m Around Awhile

I personally am subbed for at least another six months, but I am hoping that this will be my new MMO for a long while. There are a number of players that are showing extreme commitment and subbing for an entire year at a time. Right now I want to be playing, I just can’t handle the large scale social interaction at the moment. Coming home and crawling into my own private single player world is just too comfortable at the moment. However within a few weeks I will get tired of being alone and will happily return to Wildstar. Here is hoping that there are still a large number of people playing it then. If not I might end up switching factions to Exile. I feel as though we probably picked the wrong side to play on Evindra since every person on my twitter feed seems to be playing Exile there, and since they are locked to only 6 character slots are not wanting to play Dominion as well.

I don’t feel like Wildstar is going to be a game that I stop playing just because my current circle of friends stops playing it. I played Rift for most of a year successfully by relying on the good graces of other circles of friends with their established guilds, and I figure I can do the same with Wildstar if it comes down to it. The sad truth is that unless the game is World of Warcraft, House Stalwart and the Alliance of Awesome so far don’t have the best track record of actually staying in any game for any period of time. I think this is mostly a multi-gaming thing, and I am just as guilty of it as anyone. Right now I want to play Elder Scrolls Online as well… but I just don’t end up logging in and doing it on a regular basis. So I feel bad for the folks that are over there and playing in relative silence. Once my current crush on Divinity 2 wears off a bit, I will likely return to ESO and try playing that since it is a much less frenetic game.

#Wildstar #DivinityII #Evindra #ElderScrollsOnline

Stormtalon’s Lair

June 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping Soundly

When my wife travels I always have trouble sleeping. You get so damned used to having another person laying in bed beside you, that something just feels off. The cats try really hard to make up for the fact that there is another person missing from the bed, but it doesn’t quite work the same. When my wife is gone I end up with one cat pushed up against my face on my pillow… another one burrowed against me on the side my wife would normally be, and a third pretending the bed is lava by standing elevated on my legs. The end result feels like I am trapped in place for fear of upsetting some crazy version of kitty jenga.

Last night however I picked my wife up from her latest trip, which should be the last of the season. So when I hit the sack around 10:30 I conked out soundly and sleep that way for the majority of the night. Its funny how amazing a good nights sleep feels when you haven’t been getting them. I am still a bit groggy, but things feel like they just function better. I should try getting this sleep thing more often. By the time I finish this Monster Zero Ultra I should be feeling right as rain. However it will never cease to amaze me what an effect having my wife home can have on me and my overall happiness and well being.

Nipplegate

So yesterday blizzard released the images of the new Male Human model as part of the reworking coming with Warlords of Draenor. Overall I have to say they seem to have done a pretty good job of translating the original look to a more high fidelity version. It has been compared to Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as well as the “Human” Shrek from the second movie. I can definitely see the human shrek thing, but overall it doesn’t really bother me. Belghast is a human male warrior, and I can see being just fine with the look and feel of the new model once you slap some facial hair on it. The only thing I don’t get are the nipples. What the hell is going on with those… like I sincerely hope this is a texture mapping issue deforming them and not the intended final look. They remind me somewhat of a pair of pepperoni slices glued to the canned ham like pectoral muscles.

It makes me wonder if the Dwarven male had the same issue, but we just didn’t notice because there was always a beard covering them up. So I did some digging and the emotes manage to allow us to see the nipples on the Dwarven model. Maybe it is just that they are smaller scale but they look less like something pasted onto the chest. Yes I realize the irony here in pointing all of this out… because this is precisely the same sort of thing that women have had to go through every time a game releases a female model of anything. Hell Wildstar as much as I love it… I am convinced the animators have never actually seen a female form, because the proportions for the waists especially are anatomically impossible. Anyways… twitter is freaking out. Since I don’t tend to run around shirtless in an MMO, at the end of the day it doesn’t really effect me much.

Stormtalon’s Lair

At this point we had run Ruins of Kel Vorath a few times, but there is a completely different level 20 dungeon that we had yet to touch. So last night we managed to pull together a workable team and run Stormtalon’s Lair. After the mess that was the last time I tried to tank one of these things wearing something other than tank gear, I opted to craft a bunch of new gear and augment it with a few careful auction house purchases. The end result was that I had what felt like enough support power to do the job, and sure enough I had none of the threat issues that I had the last time. It seems like if you are in tank gear, you will do just fine controlling the mobs in an instance, which is somewhat of a cool thing. For awhile we had heard this dungeon was considerably harder than Kel Vorath, and by the difficulty we had with the first boss and some of the trash mobs I would have agreed with those people.

However once we got used to the trash, it felt far more manageable than that of Kel Vorath. While there were quite a few annoying things they did, there seemed to be far fewer of the “Random group wiping” type effects. The first boss honestly was probably the hardest boss in the instance for us. We managed to down the second boss in one try and the final boss I think took us two, and we finished it up with only three people standing. As far as a dungeon to run multiple times… I would honestly far rather do Stormtalon now that I am used to it. I don’t really want to give away any of the fight mechanics, because for us at least that is one of the most enjoyable things about going into a new MMO is hitting the fights completely cold and trying to figure out the mechanics on the fly.

That said we did encounter an optional boss that completely beat our spirit down. We made five or six attempts and never could quite land on the right strategy for dealing with it. During the encounter he summons some adds, and if I try and tank both the boss and the adds I get absolutely wrecked. I am wondering if this is going to be one of those situations where I have to kite the boss around while everyone burns the adds. The problem is… the adds don’t go down terribly easily, and he summons more waves rapidly. While we don’t have the answer yet, I look forward to going back in another night and trying to figure the encounter out. Right now I am loving the feeling of the boss mechanics in these dungeons, because whoever did their encounter design is really doing some interesting stuff.

For the longest time I have wished there was such a thing as 5 man raiding, and really the type of mechanics we are seeing are the level that normally accompany raid encounters. I would say that the 5 man normal dungeons here are at least as difficult as LFR is in WoW. I can see these encounters being an absolute nightmare to try and PUG your way through them. There are moments where the entire group has to pay attention and do something or they die in almost every boss fight I have come up against. While World of Warcraft tended to recycle boss mechanics from one expansion in the next expansions dungeon content… this is something wholly different. It is introducing a raid level of responsibility into encounters that I have not seen before. The existence of Interrupt armor is going to be the death of many a PUG group.

#WoW #Warcraft #Nipplegate #Wildstar #StormtalonsLair