Elder Scrolls Online Archives - Page 17 of 41

Missing Adventure

February 8, 2016 by Belghast

Running its Course

I am sure at this point that you my wonderful readers are getting sick of reading about the adventures of Sick Bel. I promise I am also getting tired of writing about them, because at this point I keep thinking that surely today is going to be that magically day where I start to feel amazingly better. Pretty much the longest a virus will run is seven days, and at this point I started coming down with it last Sunday…. which would in theory make today the day things just start to improve drastically. I am still fairly miserable, and last night I had another night of constantly interrupted sleep. Around 7pm I went to bed, after taking some evening meds that knocked me out. From there I ended up sleeping pretty solidly until around 11pm. Well my wife woke me up twice about the stupid printer upstairs, but those little blips really didn’t effect my overall sleep. After 11pm I wound up waking up every hour on the hour to adjust or get a drink. So in theory I got more sleep than I am used to, but it was super fitful.

This morning I got ready like I was going to work, however I could quickly tell that it just was not going to happen. I didn’t have a lot on my schedule today, so I felt like it would be better served to spend the day chilling out and napping as much as I could, with the hope that come tonight I will start to just be doing better all around. I am taking what feels like a smorgasbord of over the counter meds to try and help with the symptoms. The first line of defense is Mucinex Fast Max, followed up with an antihistamine, and huge doses of vitamin C. This morning I am just worn out… but something already feels slightly different. So here is hoping that by tonight I will be able to get a normal nights sleep. The problem has been that honestly no position seemed comfortable at all, so I just ended up alternating through the bad choices.

Lapse in Gaming

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You can always tell how sick I am based on how well I can game. That is always my happy place, and the activity I retreat to when I need to recuperate. The problem is that yesterday and quite honestly the last several days…. I spent a lot of time booting games up but not really playing them much. I mean I got this or that quest done in Elder Scrolls Online, or would pop into Diablo 3 and do a Greater Rift…. but each of those activities would wear me out to the point where I just needed to log out for awhile and do nothing. So over the last few days I have spent an inordinate amount of time staring blankly at my laptop, and television at the same time…. not really paying full attention to either. When in this state…. I really am not functional at all. Which kinda sucks for the whole, writing a daily gaming blog thing. I am hoping that today or tomorrow I will start to get back to normal so I can once again have adventures worth writing about. Thanks to all of you for bearing with me while going through this mess.

Modding Tamriel

February 7, 2016 by Belghast

Struggling to Record

Last night was one of the worst ideas I have had in awhile. I am still extremely sick, and for the most part don’t really have a proper speaking voice. The problem being, that Saturday night is the night we record AggroChat. This seemed to be an off week for most people. Grace was busy, and Ashgar was being worked to death in the “on call” rotation. The smart and adult thing to do would have been to simply apologize to our listeners and take a week off. However I am hopelessly chained to this notion of not missing an episode… either in my daily blog posts or weekly podacsts. I guess there is a part of me that is afraid that if I ever go by without making a post, that all of this will fall apart. That people will go their own separate ways and whatever thing we have called AggroChat will just cease to exist. I mean I am deathly afraid that if I miss a day of posting on this blog… that day will turn into six months before I start posting again. So there was what I should have done…. and then what I did. The end result is me today not really being able to talk, and afraid that I won’t be magically better by tomorrow morning for work.

The show itself went pretty well, I just felt like I struggled to try and maintain a voice that could actually be heard and understood. Quite literally I sound like I am going through puberty, where my voice cracks and squeaks at uncontrollable times. My vocal cords I guess have been ravaged by the congestion and the constant coughing. To make matters worse yesterday my eyes started watering uncontrollably and are all bloodshot. Basically I feel horrible, and will probably end up taking a sick day Monday as a result. The worst part has been trying to get any rest in this state. I’m taking NyQuil but it doesn’t seem to actually do much. My night felt like it was perforated by getting up every hour on the hour to readjust myself. I am hoping after staying up all day today I will be tired enough that I just simply collapse tonight and don’t much care what position happens to be comfortable. I realize this is just a cold…. but my god is it one of the worst ones I have had. I swear I have had the honest to god Flu and it has effected me less annoyingly.

Questing Auridon

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It wouldn’t be me if I went too terribly long without adding some interface addons into Elder Scrolls Online. Right now I have Dustman, a mod that auto sells junk items and allows you to auto sell other items that you don’t really want, which is one of those things that I end up trying to find in any game I play. I also have Lore Books and Skyshards that simply mark the location of any books or shards that you have yet to collect. I also found a really cool mod called Undiscovered which marks areas that have some sort of a POI that you have yet to visit, which makes completing maps much easier. The best of the mods however is the Minimap I am using which is ultimately something I complained about not having back in early testing. I love the compass rose, but it doesn’t really replace the minimap… and I found myself spending too much time with my map open when I lacked the minimap. Having this makes the overall experience of moving around the world so much more enjoyable for me, because quite frankly…. I have gotten used to always being able to see that top down view. The only negatives are that most of the really awesome interface mods that I ran during the first days of the game…. seem to be long gone. I guess I should probably check the non-curse sites just to make sure that they might not be still lurking out there. I realize that I am essentially “Wow-ifying” Elder Scrolls by adding these mods in…. but quite frankly I don’t care. It makes my experience more enjoyable.

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The biggest improvement so far is that the Veteran system was replaced by the Champion system, and it finally feels like I am making forward momentum again. I like that doing a few things here and there ends up earning me a point that I can spend on improving my character. It also feels like they have put some serious polish in place, because in playing Friday night and most of the day yesterday… I really didn’t encounter any bugs. All of the deeply scripted events went off without a hitch, and while I had gotten used to having to log in and out to get things to trigger during those first days of the game…. all of that seems to be a thing of the past. The other really positive thing is that the community seems to be pretty cool. I’ve gotten a lot of impromptu help, or folks asking if I wanted to join in for this world boss or that anchor. I’ve not really seen anything that made me cringe, which is a huge plus given that there were plenty of cringe worthy happenings during those first months. I am not sure how long I will remain playing the game, but I gotta say I am enjoying myself…. which is huge given the funk I have been in lately of not really knowing what to play.

Tamriel Revisted

February 6, 2016 by Belghast

Point Click

Yesterday I kept being reminded by co-workers of just how horrible I sounded, so after I finished with my critical meetings I took off and headed home around 12:30. After eating a hastily grabbed lunch of convenience store pizza… I collapsed on the sofa trying to force fluids while finding something comforting to watch. I guess my version of comforting is a little different than most people, because I wound up watching the entire first season run of Rick and Morty. Granted I have watched a lot of this show, but it turns out there were a handful of episodes that I missed when they originally aired. Whatever this thing is that I caught down south, it is very much kicking my ass. Blogging has been a real struggle because it is very difficult to string thoughts together into enough of a cohesive mass to make into a blog post. It is my will along that I am committing fingers to keyboard and producing words… because I simply do not want the streak to stop. I am a couple of months away from my official three year anniversary on the whole daily blogging thing, and the seventh anniversary of my blog. So until I hit that at the very least, I will keep up doing the daily thing even if I have to struggle to make words happen.

Lately my crutch while sick has been Diablo 3, but I feel like I am running out of things I care to do right now. I’ve gotten the seasonal rewards, but more than anything I am farming content in the hopes of getting the last few items I need to drop for the build I am working towards. Clearing regular rifts and doing bounties is the sort of mindless interaction that works well when I am sick, but I am quickly reaching the point where I am questioning why I am bothering? The other side mission has been to gear my monk, but once I found out from several folks that you only get one set of gear per season…. a lot of my gusto was lost. I thought I would be able to go kill the bosses I needed to get my first set of gear, on my second character and be up and running and clearing content pretty quickly. Alas that is very much not the case, and my best option is to ride along with Rae who is regularly clearing TX stuff… but honestly after being able to participate, going back to just having to pray to stay alive… makes it pretty uninteresting. Yesterday my big problem was the fact that I had a very needy game install going on in the background, that kept slowing down my teleportation to the point that the battle.net would disconnect me before actually ending up in zone with Rae.

Worst Install

On a whim yesterday afternoon around 1 pm, I started installing The Elder Scrolls Online. I guess I had forgotten just how painful the install process was, because it took until roughly 8 pm for it to finally complete. During the last hour of that time I was pretty much unable to play anything else on my laptop. The thing is… I have installed much larger games in far less time…. so I have to fault the launcher for just how painfully slow it was going. I mean I say this as someone who was installing to a laptop that is using a AC Wireless card capable of 650 MB connection on a total internet connection that generally runs around 150 MB down. I should have been able to completely saturate my pipe and had this game down in short order… but it took quite literally 7 hours to finally get installed. Now for a good chunk of that time I was still playing Diablo 3 so that could have been slowing things down… but the total download was tortuously slow. The last hour or so it was thrashing my hard drive badly enough that I really could not do anything else functional on the machine, so I wound up mostly fiddling around on my phone while watching television. The problem with ESO was that I honestly can’t remember why we stopped playing, other than the fact that one by one we just stopped until I was one of the last four or so people still active. For me I guess the Veteran game system was so bloody boring because it felt like I was no longer making reasonable process. I made it roughly two zones into the Aldmeri campaign, when finally my desire to keep playing petered out.

I guess recently I had been curious about what was going on in game, and they have done a few high profile DLC releases. So around 8:30 last night I finally was able to log in and poke around. Firstly I have to say I guess playing this game for roughly two years in testing… means that I have some serious muscle memory going on. While I had to reset all of my talent points, I can still for the most part remember exactly how I played it. All of the little things like dodging, and blocking attacks… came back without any effort and before long I was up and running and questing again. I feel like maybe this is the speed of game that I need right now. What I am struggling the most with in my current state is interacting with other human beings. I have been pretty much oblivious to twitter and slack since coming back from Pax South, and as a result I am kinda cocooning in my own little world again. Much like SWTOR…. ESO was a great single player game… and as a result I found myself really enjoying questing around last night. That is of course until the nyquil kicked in and I simply couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer. I figure I will put in some more time today playing and maybe talk a bit about my experiences on AggroChat tonight. That is of course if I have any voice left. Right now my voice is pretty damned squeaky so I am thinking we might have to rely on someone else to do the bulk of the talking this evening.

Games I’m Not Playing

July 17, 2015 by Belghast

Too Many Games

Right now I am suffering from a problem, in that there are just too many games that I want to be playing and simply not enough time in any combination of lifetimes to actually play them. Last night I downloaded and installed Skyforge, and gave it a quick spin this morning… and as interesting as it seems I just don’t know when exactly I am going to fit it in. For the first time in years I have been relatively monogamistic in my gaming, and with the dropping of World of Warcraft I pretty much have all of my focus on Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I ran dungeons with the guild and after doing my hunts managed to push my Dragoon to 56. As a result the desire to get that job to 60 is real, because I desperately want to be able to fill more than one roll when it comes to grouping.

By the same token I really would like to give some time to Skyforge so that I can give it a shot for free, before plunking down any money on it. I watched a bit of the MMO Show stream the other day as Jabberant played the game and I have to admit it peaked my interests. Playing this morning it feels like a better version of Neverwinter, because the janky control scheme of that game was always a major detractor. So now I get to juggle competing desires and figure out how to spend my weekend. So this morning I thought I would write about the games that I am wanting to play but just can’t seem to find adequate time to devote to them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have this strong desire to go back and experience the storyline that I have not yet. Essentially I have not really played my main in this game, a Jedi Guardian… since launch. Each time I go back I always end up playing alts because I am finding it really hard to get back into the swing of playing a level 50 character. I know there have been numerous expansions since launch, each with their own storyline content… and I am struggling to get back into the swing of doing it. Instead I mostly spend time playing my Light Side Sith Warrior, who has been stuck in the hell hole of Balmorra for at least two years. So one of my gaming regrets is that I have not figured out how to make progress on my main and see the Makeb and beyond storyline. Additionally I have this nasty habit of paying for a month, and then playing one day and never returning to it. I’ve gone through this sequence at least a half dozen times since we left this game. The draw of Final Fantasy XIV is always too strong to keep me playing there for long.

Wildstar

On my second attempt at playing this game I reached a point where I really was enjoying what I was doing. In fact there was a stretch prior to the launch of Heavensward where I was playing this one more than just about any other game. I have an awesome group of friends in this game and I love the Black Dagger Society guild that I am in. I had a blast roaming around the zones and taking down world bosses with them on a few occasions. For whatever reason however I am just not logging in right now. Once again the draw of Final Fantasy XIV is too strong, and maybe I just love our guild there too much. This is on the list of games I absolutely want to keep returning to, but I doubt I will until a bit more of the shiny has warn off from Heavensward. Right now I am in this push to reach a point where I have multiple useful jobs to help people with, and I think until I get there I won’t be happy playing much else.

The Secret World

I am woefully behind in my Secret World content, because the last update I think I played was the whole “Last Train to Cairo” sequence. I know there have been multiple updates since then but I am just not logging in and playing them. There are problems I have with this game that preclude me from really digging into the end game content. However I have loved all of the story mission content that I have played and I keep meaning to poke my head in and do them. I’m a life time subscriber, and I should have tons of goodies waiting on me… but generally speaking what happens is I log in and buy a nifty new outfit… then log right back out. Of all of my gaming regrets this is one of the strongest because I really would like to find a way to play this game in addition to whatever game I am “maining”.

ArcheAge

Just prior to the launch of Heavensward there were several of us on the AggroChat cast that had a brief love affair with this game. I want to find a way to return to playing this game on a regular basis because I don’t feel like I have consumed all of the good that I can get from it. This is the game that I was told once I reached level 30 I would be in forced pvp areas. While we are playing on Tahyang the supposed roleplaying server, I am 38 and have yet to encounter even another enemy player. There is a lot of great PVE content in this game, and we found the dungeons to be among some of the rougher we had experienced since say Dark Age of Camelot. I’ve logged in a few times since the launch of Heavensward, but never for terribly long because I keep feeling like I really should be in FFXIV gearing or helping other people gear. I still have things I want to do here, so I need to figure out a way to play it as well.

Skyforge

I talked about this as the start of the blog post, but I really do want to spend some time getting to know this game. At face value it didn’t seem like it was going to be anything I would be interested in. However after playing a brief few minutes this morning I think I might dig it. It is action combat that still feels like an MMO. Honestly I put Neverwinter in that same category, however there the combat just felt forced and janky. The proof will be in the pudding as to how the Paladin feels once I progress it a bit further. I admit the whole “switch roles at any time” thing is a huge draw for me, after getting used to that in Final Fantasy XIV. I doubt this would ever be a primary MMO for me, but it might be a fun weekend diversion. Ultimately I keep looking for a solid secondary game to have the duality that I did with Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I have yet to find the game that seems like the perfect match, but who knows this might be it.

Elder Scrolls Online

The game that I least understand why I am not playing it… is The Elder Scrolls Online. Everything about this game should be squarely in my wheelhouse considering the number of hours that I have spent playing games in the Elder Scrolls universe. I have access to it both on PC and on PS4, and I had this idea that the console client would somehow revitalize my interest in the game. The problem is… it hasn’t at all. I feel like the problem I have with this game is that even though I have people moving around me… I feel like I am ultimately alone. The other players are just a backdrop in part because I never see their names. I think in part I am experiencing Beta regret, because after testing this game for a year there are previous incarnations of the game UI that I just enjoyed more. If I could go back and play THOSE incarnations… I would probably be enjoying myself still. When names over the top of mobs went away… the world felt like it shrunk for me, and the game became more or less a single player experience. I still would love to find a way to make this game that at one point I was so devoted to still feel enjoyable, but I just have not found it.