ArcheAge Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tremors in the Force

October 13, 2014 by Belghast

Glorious Weekend

The entire weekend was pretty crummy outside here in Oklahoma, so as a result we spent most of it inside. I curled up on the couch with a brand new fuzzy blanket and spent it gaming on the laptop while watching stuff on television. It had quite literally been a few months since I had last watched television really. Granted there was a bit of television each night and each morning while going to sleep and waking up respectively, but I had not actually sat down to watch anything of any importance in a very long time. As such I had a bunch of shows stacked up that I wanted to catch up on. The most important of these was this seasons Doctor Who. I had watched the premiere several weeks back, but had not seen any of the episodes since.

I feel like the jury is still out on how I feel about the new Scottish Doctor. I guess I am just used to the normal fun loving slightly insane Doctor, and this interpretation just feels strange. The dynamic between Clara and the Doctor also feels a bit strained. Granted the companion that survives a regeneration I guess is always a bit odd, but this one seems more so. It seems in part that the Doctor still has a crush on her, and as he is watching her get on with her life… it feels a little awkward. As far as the stories have gone, I think I like the “Time Heist” episode the best. Trying not to go into much detail for fear of spoilers… because I am sure there are others out there that have not caught up yet. In fact public television here in the United States tends to be one full season behind.

Tremors in the Force

Other than Doctor Who I finally got around to watching the first two episodes of the new Star Wars animated series “Rebels”. What amazes me is just how well both of the animated series have managed to get the feeling of the universe, whereas the prequels failed so miserably. Star Wars Rebels is pretty much the perfect Star Wars show. You have a scrappy group of fighters, and interesting relationship between reluctant Jedi Master and a force sensitive padawan… all after the fall of the Republic in a super scary time where being a Jedi means being hunted. There are just enough call backs to the original series to let you know when exactly this adventure is set. In the first episode Ezra the main character happens to open a Jedi Holocron with the message Obi Wan Kenobi left for all Jedi during the events of Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith. Then in Episode 2, you encounter C-3PO and R2-D2 who are on their way to the Tantive IV. With those two little vignettes it tells you that the events are sometime in the gulf of time between episodes 3 and 4, which is a super fertile place to base a new series.

The characters are likeable from the start. They are just “scoundrel” enough to come across as being selfish… but quickly transition into a cell of rebel fighters trying to survive however they can. The entire series has a very “Firefly” vibe too it, and honestly I am just wishing there was more of the show to watch already. So far you have Hera Syndulla the Twilek Pilot/Engineer, Sabine Wren the Mandalorian Weapons Expert, Garazeb Orrelios the Lasat Muscle, Ezra Bridger the Street Kid Force Savant and finally Kanan Jarrus the leader of this group and a former Jedi Padawan at the moment Order 66 happened. The mix of personalities and skill sets makes for a really good viewing experience. Since Star Wars meant so much to me growing up, I am always happy to watch the fires get reignited for new generations. I just wish that it was still on Cartoon Network rather than Disney XD, since I seem to be far better in keeping up with Cartoon Network than any other channel. If you have not watched any of the show and are an old school Star Wars fan I highly suggest you check it out.

Eating some Crow

I finally decided to start giving ArcheAge a chance this weekend, in part because I have realized that so many people I know happen to be playing all in the same place, and same guild to be more specific. Other than ventures into Final Fantasy XIV this was the ideal game to sit on the sofa wrapped in my blanket cocoon and watch television while playing. The game itself is still intriguing and intricate, but the thing that turned me off of the game in beta was just how horrible the community had been. So far the launch servers seem to be far better than they were before. I was able to complete the early quests without much attempt at griefing. The place where I had so much frustration during alpha was when you are asked to take a rowboat across a bay. In alpha there were tons of high level ships waiting there to capsize players as they attempted to cross. This time around there was just a single high level ship and they seemed to be loading up for a trade run and completely oblivious to the fact that I was trying to do something.

Similarly I have actually had some decent random grouping experiences. So while the community is nowhere near as nice as say Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV… it is at least up to WoW Standards… which admittedly isn’t saying much. I did have a really positive experience in doing an elite quest. There is this event that happens in a fallen fortress where between the hours of 2am and 2pm in game time hordes of undead spawn with a boss and you are given quests to kill multiple undead. I noticed that it was nearing the spawn so I wandered up into the hills and decided that I would just kill undead while waiting. There were numerous people up there waiting, and it was moments later that I was invited to a raid team. Folks were relatively well organized and the leader made sure that everyone had gotten all 20 kills before we downed the final boss. Granted this might be an aberration, but it seemed like a pretty reasonable response to the situation.

At this point I am still not terribly certain how often I will play. Right now I have a level 16 Doomlord on Naima Western Continent. This seems to be where most of the people I know are playing, and white honestly I HAD to play Nuian because they were the only race that offered anything even closely resembling proper facial hair. Additionally the Western faction is supposedly going to get dwarves whenever XL Games decides to give the North American servers the expanded racial options. I’ve applied to be in the same guild as Liore, Zelibeli, and several others from both the Machiavelli’s Cats and Multiplaying/Alliance of Awesome communities. I have to say being patron seems to make all the difference in the world because as a true free to play account you have next to no labor points. I am not declaring this game the “best ever” or anything like that, but it seems to no longer be nearly as toxic as it was in early testing. I still prefer FFXIV, but right now I just haven’t had the oomph to grind up another character. So mostly I am working my way through my book quest and doing my daily elite dungeon. However since my friend Eliyon is now a newly minted 50 I can see myself probably playing a lot more in the evenings there. It was a fun weekend nonetheless and I look forward to piddling around in it some more.

#DoctorWho #StarWarsRebels #ArcheAge

Death of a Genre

October 4, 2014 by Belghast

Downfall of a Game

One of the problems within the MMO community is that we seem to view each release as a zero sum game. As such when something new comes out, it threatened to chip away at the player base of whatever game we happen to love and are currently playing. When that game falters and begins to fail, with this point of view it becomes extremely hard not to take pleasure in that downfall. The problem is this is an extremely toxic and dysfunctional outlook, and ultimately is what has lead to the current climate in MMOs. For years companies have been chasing an illusive dream of trying to create another World of Warcraft.

This was an inherently flawed vision because really… “mmo gamers” are a rather small niche in the market, and most folks who play World of Warcraft are not actually “mmo gamers”. If you take a look at the size of the market before World of Warcraft, you saw a handful of games with sub-million subscriber numbers. Before the launch of the first expansion World of Warcraft had boomed to be an over 6 million subscriber game. This was not the conversion of all of these other MMO gamers, but instead the conversion of fans of the existing Warcraft franchise into the MMO genre. The thing is… these new gamers are there for a myriad of reasons, but none of them easily translate into a new franchise.

So as these new games launch they are essentially fighting over the same piece of pie over and over. All you have to do is look at my immediate circle of friends. A large chunk of them stuck with World of Warcraft, and it would likely take an apocalypse or the servers shutting down to pry them from it. Another group has wandered away from the game each and every time something new and shiny showed up on the horizon. Very few of these players stick around in any game for longer than three months, and more often they play their free month and then return to whatever the status quo was before the new launch. I watched this pattern play out for both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, and the games industry is finally realizing that this is going to happen for every single new game that releases.

Indictment of the Trend

The cancelling of Titan has been a far more contentious issue in the blogosphere than I expected. At this point my point of view is that this is Blizzard admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players. While there will always be a core group of players in World of Warcraft just like there is still a core group of players in Everquest, Everquest II, and Dark Age of Camelot… that core group continues to shrink as folks either “grow out” of World of Warcraft as they find it no longer suits their interests, or simply run out of the copious amounts of free time it requires as they get that job, family, whatever. I think they have done some really simple calculus here and determined that there simply is not enough of a pool of players to make a brand new MMO from Blizzard successful.

With World of Warcraft they have a decade long buy in from a large number of gamers. They have literal years of memories and hard to acquire items to keep them chained to the game. With a brand new IP, they are starting from scratch in the same position as all of these games that have floundered have been in. Blizzard brand name recognition just isn’t enough to guarantee success, so I feel like it was a pure business decision that it just did not make sense to further dilute their subscription player base by trying to launch a new MMO. As much as I love the clean subscription model, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to launch a new game with it. After watching what happened to Wildstar and to a somewhat lesser extent Elder Scrolls Online, the market does not want any more subscription games. So by launching a new MMO they would be converting at least a portion of their subscriber base of easy month to month money to far more dicey and less predictable free to play money.

No Joy Watching Wildstar

I find it impossible to find joy in the unraveling of Wildstar that I see before me. I am not playing the game, so I am in essence part of the problem. For whatever reason it was an accumulation of all of the things my BC era self said they wanted in a video game. The problem is we gamers are notoriously horrible at trying to decide what we want. “We” said we wanted a hardcore game like Everquest and a return to forced grouping… then when we got Vanguard no one actually wanted to play that. We said we wanted a hard core PVP game like Dark Age of Camelot… and then when we got Warhammer Online no one actually wanted to play that either. So I find it no suprise that when we said we wanted a return to the golden says of World of Warcraft raiding… no one actually wanted that either when we got Wildstar. The truth is we have no clue at all what we want until we actually see it and experience it.

The problem is that the MMO design ethic has been so wrapped up in trying to target what the public is asking for, that it has stagnated into a mire of “wow like features”. A week or so ago there were a series of posts taking point and counterpoint on whether or not WoW has ruined MMOs. In a way I have to say yes, but not through anything that they did on purpose. World of Warcraft has been this juggernaut that everyone else is forced to content with whether or not they actually wanted to. It is a gold standard that every new game is judged by. So you either have games that try and out feature it like Rift, or out lore it like Star Wars the Old Republic… but each and every new release is at least in someway a response to the success that World of Warcraft was. Without that outlier of success we probably would see a much more healthy MMO ecosystem… albeit a ridiculously smaller one.

Death of a Genre

So I cannot take joy in watching Wildstar, or Elder Scrolls Online or any other MMO falter right now, because I see it as all being part of the same shared ecosystem. When one of these games fails, it is in essence taking a chunk of players out of the pool that will likely never return. So many of my friends have simply just checked out of online gaming for one reason or another, but the core thread among them all is they are just tired of the volatility. The choice is either return to World of Warcraft and make due with the status quo, or jump from game to game to game getting a months worth of enjoyment at a time before the ultimate crash. None of this sounds like a healthy ecosystem, and all of this is what is driving triple A studios away from the notion of even trying to do an MMO.

If you think about it right now… there is nothing really on the horizon for gamers to latch onto. There are a few boutique titles like Pathfinder or Camelot Unchained… that are super focused on a specific niche and that may or may not be at least partially vaporware, unlikely to actually launch with all of the features they are touting. Then you have a constant spin of Korean titles as they have their own MMO renaissance that we went through several years ago. However After the launch of ESO and Wildstar… there is really no big western titles on the immediate horizon. Everquest Next is the closest thing but realistically it is still several years from release. The other games that are coming out are more akin to Destiny than they are to a traditional MMO. So I can’t blame World of Warcraft for this current situation, because in truth it is our flighty nature that has salted the fields in our wake. We are the reason why there is no fertile ground for a new MMO to take purchase. It is because of all of this… that I can find no pleasure in watching yet another game fail.

Outside Looking In

September 18, 2014 by Belghast

Game Launches

This is going to end up sounding like a strange topic for me to talk about, especially since I have raged at length on this blog before about bad game launches. However that said, it seems odd to be on the outside looking in at a game launch going horribly awry. For the first little bit I could fall back on the statement of “have these people never seen a game launch before?” but at some point we crossed the threshold into silly territory. There was a report on twitter that I read earlier about someone waiting in a 10 hour non-subscriber queue and waking up this morning to find they were still 115 in line. Then when the queue finally ticked down to 1 person remaining, they got disconnected. Similarly I have heard all sorts of nightmares about the amount of Patron time for a game showing at one moment that they have a full year of paid time, and then the next moment showing that they have 30-60 days.

Of course this is all anecdotal evidence since I am not playing the actual game. I feel like this launch however has a whole host of issues that may or may not be entirely Trion’s fault. The thing that folks need to keep in the back of their head is that ArcheAge is not their game. They might be promoting it, and bringing a localized version to America… but they didn’t build the game and there are lots of things that are quite simply out of their control. I feel like there is a bit of a massive cultural disconnect between Trion and XL Games that likely only exacerbates any issues that might be happening. Similarly there seems to be this new trend of Denial of Service attacks against companies servers when they launch a new game. It happened with Wildstar to some extent, and over the last few months has been happening regularly to various game providers. Reports have Trion fighting off a DDoS while trying to launch this new game… and quite frankly as someone who has experienced one of these… there is often times little that can be done other than hoping the perpetrator gets bored and moves on.

Outside Looking In

The strangest experience is watching this all unfold as a spectator. Generally speaking I am almost always on the front lines as a new game launches. I’ve got my limited edition collectors deluxe vip section seat ready to go and have already explored the world during the head start. So generally speaking I view these launches through the eyes of someone having to deal with the issues, and getting frustrated with the folks parroting “just play something else for a bit”. Now I feel like I am on the verge of being one of those folks to spread the same wisdom. After a weeks time, the servers will stabilize either through a obsessive interest or because Trion has added a good bit of resources. In either case life will return to a normal pattern in relatively short time.

As a gamer I would always fall back on the argument that a game company had “sold access” to the game, so they should know just how many people would be playing. That is like me saying that I know a Tornado is coming, so my house should be prepared to brace for impact when it actually hits. Game launches are this industry’s version of natural disasters. Players are this insane wave that comes crashing down on the servers hard and fast and with relentless and obsessive repetition. When Final Fantasy XIV launched we resorted to making hardware macros to try and log into the game, and as a programmer I KNEW that I was essentially adding to the weight of the problem by constantly spamming the servers… but as a gamer I didn’t give a shit, I just wanted to play my shiny new toy that I rightfully purchased.

Were I interested in ArcheAge I would likely be right there with all of you gnashing my teeth and rattling my sabers about the bullshit situation we were having to endure. As an outsider, the whole ballet feels very predictable. All of this said I am not trying to be apologetic for Trion, because at some point a company needs to learn from the mistakes of their peers. That said when a game launches blissfully smoothly like The Elder Scrolls Online, we tend to not even notice. We only seem to care when we are inconvenienced from playing the game. While a bad launch might signal doom for a game, if it goes beyond a certain threshold… a good launch doesn’t actually really predict long term success. As such it likely doesn’t really benefit a company to over prepare for a launch, when they can just ride out the first few days and the relatively short attention span of the internet zeitgeist will have forgotten about the rough spots.

Hoping for Better

I have lots of friends playing this game, as I always seem to have lots of friends playing every new game. For their sake I hope things improve by the weekend so that they can enjoy some relaxing game time. I played quite a bit of this game in Alpha and later Beta and it has so many interesting ideas. The problem for me more than anything else was the toxic community, and the griefer culture that seemed to evolve around various aspects of the game. Go afk in a relatively safe town, and when you walk back to the screen you might end up dead on the battlefield somewhere because a player thought it was funny to push you out of town with a tractor. That sort of game play is not compelling to me other than the fact that I find it interesting that someone, somewhere thought that was a good idea.

At my heart I am a Care Bear and at its heart ArcheAge is a serious open world player versus player game. So while it was interest to experience, just like with Eve Online… I don’t feel like this game was really designed for me. Had Trion created a Co-Operative server I would have been there with the rest of you on day one being frustrated by the events. However from my understanding it was XL Games that was completely against the concept of a non-pvp realm. The game has a lot to offer for those willing to put up with the other players, and put up with these issues at launch. It has one of the most interesting and detailed crafting systems I have experienced in any game. The biggest strike against the game for me personally however is its almost complete and total lack of proper beards. Thankfully I was able to get around this problem in Destiny by playing an awesome looking robot, ArcheAge sadly has no robots.

#ArcheAge

Follow the Shiny Bauble

July 19, 2014 by Belghast

Too Many Things

So for whatever reason this weekend has conspired to have a bajillion competing things happening at once it seems. Firstly this weekend is like the prep weekend for the conference that I will be taking off from work next week to help my wife with. Three years ago her and several of her twitter buddies decided to make a conference appear out of thin air, and this year it is being hosted here in the Tulsa metro. As a result I am being a dutiful husband and helping out however I can. That means today I will be moving things and testing out the various technology in each of the classrooms that will eventually host random speakers.

Right now my only fear is that the systems are designed to be hooked up to a VGA out and 3.5 mm jack. Some of the newer laptops only actually have HDMI out… especially the Mac laptops. So here is hoping those people bring their own hookups because otherwise we might be pantomiming some of the power point presentations. Needless to say my entire day today will be spent running around like a madman trying to get things set up as much as we can. The problem is there are lots of other things going on this weekend. Honestly I think game companies do this shit on purpose… where they should time their events to be on opposite weekends as a thank you to the fans.

Destiny Beta

This weekend is the return of Destiny to my PS4. I wish I could embed some video from my play sessions to date, but alas the Hitbox export to Youtube is still on the fritz and I have not figured out how to embed videos directly. But if you are so inclined you can check out the first and second videos. At some point this weekend I want to record some more footage in the hopes that someday I can upload it somewhere meaningful. The second video is especially hilarious because I did not realize that it was picking up teamspeak while I recorded as well as my PS4 chat. However once again it seems like the PS4 only picks up MY side of the conversation even though I am picking it up from an external capture card. I really wish I knew a way to hang out on teamspeak, but have my voice from teamspeak get transferred as mic input to PS4 party chat. I have some ideas but it involves a massive rube goldbergian effort.

I have to say I still very much love this game, and compared to the Alpha weekend… it seems extremely polished now. A lot of the issues with voice acting are gone and the end product feels really good. Similarly I seem to get items that are way over my level a lot less, so I am actually able to use and equip the various ingrams I find. Ingrams for un-initiative are basically like unidentified loot from Diablo or similar games. You get them while out in the field and you have to take them back to town… or in this case Tower to have a scribe identify them for you. Most of the time the items you get are way better than anything you have access at that level, and they often have the side effect of “leveling up”. When an item reaches a certain point they unlock special abilities that you can purchase on the item. I have a pair of gloves for example that greatly increases the striking power of my grenades.

Everything about this game is awesome if you really want to get down to it. You take a really good shooter, probably one of the best I have played in years and wrap it in a warm blanket of MMO style progression… and you have a game that is right in my wheelhouse. My only question is just how many of the traditional Call of Duty/Battlefield crowd will be jumping ship. I really don’t feel like the game is for that demographic, but instead for the players that absolutely love Borderlands 2. While the loot doesn’t drop quite as frequently as it does in BL2, all of the leveling options feel really good. The one thing I wished from BL2 was that I would have a persistent character that existed on the server, instead of one that existed in my local save game, with all of the things that come along with that. Destiny gives me that, and I really think we are looking at the new model for MMO gaming. Player Interaction light, action oriented co-operative and competitive environments. That is not to say that grouping is not key in Destiny, but it is on a scale that is much more casual friendly in that you only need two other people to really tackle the most intense of situations.

Once again I am playing a Titan, because it fits my personality. I want to be able to rush in, gun things down and throw them the hell back with a shockwave. I don’t remember the name of the attack but you get it around level 5 or 6 and it is executed by pressing left and right shoulder buttons at the same time. There are few more satisfying things in a game than jumping up in the air and watching everything fly away from you in brilliant slow motion ragdoll physics. This class makes me feel powerful and mighty, and about as subtle as a nuke. All of which fit me perfectly in how I like to play. Kodra was playing through Wolfenstein last night… and to make a point Tam asked if I could remember what the crouch button was. Kodra immediately chimed in “you mean the most important button?” and I was like “Nope! I have no clue what crouch is… I just baited the enemies to come attack me in the open and gunned them down.” Subtlety feels like a complete waste of time when you could just kill every last thing that moves.

An Old Friend

Another thing going on this weekend that is fighting for my attention is that they are having a free weekend for Final Fantasy XIV ARR. For whatever reason lately I have been missing the game, and I feel like it is one of those games that I parted on good terms with. I simply ran out of things that I wanted to do. Right now the biggest problem I have with the game is that the people I know that are still playing it… are spread out in various tiny puddles scattered across a long list of servers. When I first connected to the game it had me choose my Data Center, which temporarily gave me some hope that they had done something to consolidate the long list. Apparently that is not the case and each server is still its own little island as far as grouping and guilding, but instead the Data Centers serve the purpose of the Battle Groups in World of Warcraft. They are essentially your pool of players for doing anything that requires a group.

The game is just as enjoyable as it ever was. The hardest thing so far was remembering where the hell I kept my abilities and getting my hotbar back in order. I think I got most everything to a place where my fingers can return to muscle memory for hitting. I am sure a few things are out of place but the key combos that I hit constantly are all in the right places. The main thing I did last night was participate in a hunt, which is a kind of daily event that appeared in a patch while I was out. Basically each day you got to a hunt NPC and they give you this card… which is a physical item in your inventory with a bunch of wanted posters for the day. These involve wandering around the world and killing specific mobs that appear in specific places. The first three were pretty easy, and then the tedium set in for the last two. Apparently these mobs were part of rarely occurring FATEs so I had to just sit around waiting for it to spawn. For the most part it wasn’t too bad except one of them occurred in a level 3 area… so I couldn’t even work on leveling my chocobo while I waited. I am not sure if there is enough here to keep me for very long, but I am enjoying playing for the time being.

The Path Not Taken

Another big thing happening this weekend is the beginning of ArcheAge closed beta. Up until this point there were only two ways to get into Alpha testing. Either you had to know someone like I did, or plunk down your $150 and buy the most expensive founders pack. This weekends the floodgates have opened letting everyone in that has bought even the cheapest of founders packs. The problem is I feel like I have been burned by my experiences in Alpha. The community was so heinous and toxic that I just don’t want to have anything to do with it. At this point Glyph is running in the background right now downloading the 21 gig patch that is needed to get it up and running in closed beta, but that said I am not sure if I will play it much. There are a lot of problems I have with the game, not all of which can be improved.

I still have a fundamental problem with the character design. While I managed to find one I could live with, I am still not terribly happy with it and the lack of “real” beards in most Korean games. I do want to give it a try to see if letting in all of the closed beta players may have fixed some of the problems with the community. One of two things is going to happen… either the super toxic voices are going to be drowned out in the sea of not so horrible… or they will adapt to the “young eating” culture that is the Alpha game. I know Trion is working hard on trying to find ways to moderate the toxicity, but I am just not sure if it will be enough for me. At the end of the day I am a huge carebear and want to spend my time collaborating with other players… and not competing with them.

Follow the Shiny Bauble

The thing that frustrates me the most about this weekend and weekends like it when it seems like every single company is fighting to steer the hype train, is that it trains us to be flighty. I feel like what is happening right now is that each of these companies is trying to fight for front page presence against any news that might be coming out of QuakeCon. The problem is… your player base is nowhere near as loyal as you might want them to be. By constantly dangling shiny baubles in front of our faces… all it really does is train us to constantly be on the look out for the next shiny bauble. So many weeks when it comes to gaming I feel like the James Woods character from Family Guy “Oooh a piece of candy”. Ultimately I feel like the constant vying for our attention is only serving to make us less interested in staying any one place for terribly long.

Look at me for example… I already play a long list of games with no real signs of landing in any one place for terribly long. This weekend I am looking at playing three more games that I was not really playing before. But I didn’t start out this way, because I played Everquest for 3 years, Dark Age of Camelot for 3 years, and then World of Warcraft for a solid 7 years before the launch of Rift and the beginning of my rampant nomad phase. Now I just follow whatever happens to suit my mood, and as a result I am popping between games on a weekly basis. I feel like in part I was trained to be this way by the game industry constantly dangling an every tastier steak in front of me. So I feel like stacking all of these events on the same weekend is just the highly of how frenetic things have gotten. I decided long ago that life was too short to be playing something I was not enjoying, so I doubt I will be changing my nomadic ways any time soon… but folks have to stop and thing that the constant fight over the hype cycle is only serving to make more people nomadic in the process.

#Destiny #FFXIV #ArcheAge