MMORPG Archives - Page 170 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Sword Coast Chronicles

January 17, 2018 by Belghast

Do you know how hard it is for me to say Neverwinter… and not follow it up with Nights? Like that is hands down the hardest thing about playing the Cryptic made MMO… is just stopping with the first word. Like part of me feels like it would have simply felt better to call it Neverwinter Nights Online, but I am guessing that Bioware probably still has the licensing rights to “Neverwinter Nights”. Regardless of this personal struggle I find myself suddenly unable to stop playing this game. I am not really sure what is going on there but I am having a lot of fun and the content just seems to be flowing smoothly in a way it never did the few other times I tried to play it. Everquest II had this concept of the golden path where a sparkly line of particle effects would attempt to lead you from objective to objective. The problem is it never really worked right and was prone to completely abandon you if the effects clipped through the terrain, or simply route you in a truly bizarre manner. As a result I think when I first saw that Neverwinter had a similar construct… I largely tried to ignore it after all of the bad experience attempting to make it work in EQ2. The main difference is that here it actually works remarkably well, and while it might not be the most optimal path for questing purposes… it does end up giving you a nice path to follow that eventually ends in you getting all of the objectives you need to knock out those quests.

I had so many quests that were either partially completed or not even started scattered throughout a bunch of zones. I am guessing I mostly ran around and killed stuff without really focusing on completing anything. The problem with returning to a game after a significant amount of content has been added is you are never quite certain if something was in the game when you last played… or if you had just been completely oblivious to it. One of these for me is the introduction of the Sword Coast Chronicles tab which shows your general progress through the game, or at least what you should be working on content wise at a given level. The only problem with this is that I am progressing way faster level wise than the content would in theory suggest. I’ve been working on Neverdeath Cemetery still within the confines of Neverwinter proper. If I had to guess I am now entering the second half of the content in that zone and should begin to start ticking off some of the boxes needed for the completion rewards. So far the thing that is making this game stand out for me is just how interesting the locations are and how relatively densely packed they are with interesting vistas. The one gotcha here is that the zones are not really as open as they might seem at first glance but instead in truth are more corridors to move through in a similar fashion to the zone design in something like Destiny 2. So long as you treat the zone as a conduit to do the quests it feels really good… when you start trying to break out off the beaten path and just traverse the zone without a purpose however it begins to feel frustrating and confining.

Another thing I remember about this game is that it seemed really scarce with loot drops and at some point they went in completely the opposite direction. I am getting more than enough gear from just running about to stay constantly upgraded and in the short time I have played I have gotten three different mounts as world drops and two companions. There are entire subsections of this game that I have no clue what is even going on… like I vaguely remember there being some sort of web based component to this game. I keep getting crafters and such from quests but I have no clue how to access it. I attempted to do a little research yesterday but was constantly confronted with several year old information, so I am guessing the game just does not have much of a informational community presence. Reading back through my original reviews of the game… I seem to have thought it was an enjoyable experience each time I have attempted to play it. The problem is I never really stick to it for one reason or another. It already feels like I have gained way more traction in the game than any of my other efforts given that I logged in at level 16 Monday and now am just shy of level 30. There are still a lot of ways that I feel like I don’t really know what the hell is going on, but I am slowly getting acclimatized to the game and feeling like I at least know my way round a bit. The Dungeons I have run have been a mess… but the sort of mess where one person who is grossly overpowered just speed burns through the content and we sorta follow along haplessly looting shit. At some point I want to check out the user created content that I know at some point went into the game. I know my friend Tipa was super into that for awhile, so I am interested to see what playing that is like. All in all I am still having a lot of fun, and probably just as shocked as you are to be seeing more Neverwinter posts.

On The Mend

January 16, 2018 by Belghast

I am mostly among the living. Yesterday was a federal holiday here in the United States and with me being off work… it also mean’t that I largely treated it as part of the weekend for blogging purposes. I am still fighting the same crud that I had last week, but it feels like at some point on Monday I turned the corner. While I still have the vestiges of whatever bronchial mess has inflicted me, I am starting to feel better and less like an appendage of the couch and or bed depending upon the time table. it truly was a miserable weekend and while I attempted to game I was not terribly successful at anything until yesterday. I spent most of the break working on the Tauren Hunter who has now finished the Outland and is knee deep in Northrend just starting the Grizzly Hills area. My hope is that when I ding 74 the bear spirit beast will be up and I can collect it for my pet. Up until this point I am mostly running a Fel Corehound that I got from the Blasted Lands. I took the Beast Mastery talent that allows your pets to shadow step… so it is entertaining watching him leap up on targets rapidly. At this point however I can kill most mobs well before my beast even has time to interact with it… which is the life of running full heirlooms.

Sunday I indulged a really weird whim and decided to reinstall the Arc client and give Neverwinter a spin. I’m on the PR feed still from Perfect Worlds and they are constantly putting out press releases about content releases to this game. It got me wondering what the current state of matters is when I have literally not heard anyone talk about it in almost two years. It turns out the game is in pretty great shape as far as actually logging in and playing it. As far as doing its best to feel insidious from a loot box standpoint… it is also working on winning some awards. I don’t remember much about the game if I am being very serious, but you know that thing that we chastised Call of Duty WW2 for doing at the beginning of the year? Where if you get a drop the game announces to the rest of the world what you just got? That apparently happens in Neverwinter as most of my time spent in the central hub area was a constant stream of people getting loot drop rewards. In the very short time I played yesterday I got somewhere around 25 loot crate drops from random stuff while doing quests. Each one of these crates would require a key which runs roughly $1.25 each without any of the “buying in bulk” discounts applied. Through the quests I wound up getting three free keys to open three sample crates and if the ones that drop in the wild are at all similar to what they gave us as “examples” for why we should buy into this system… they were full of utter garbage. If you can however do what I started doing and just vendoring the damn crates for a few copper each time you saw one drop… and loot past the money grubbing nature of the game… the core feedback loop is actually rather enjoyable. I think when I logged in last night I was around 16 left over from my initial push around launch and I believe I logged out for the evening around 25/26ish. During all of that time I enjoyed the core game quite a bit so long as I completely ignored the multiple currency cash shop nonsense. If you can do the same then you too will probably enjoy yourself.

Last completely random thing I did last night… is patch up and log into Elder Scrolls Online. This game is in fact the same as I remember it and still rather enjoyable. The biggest problem I will have is trying to sort out exactly what I was doing when I was last playing. I am still being insanely stubborn and wanting to finish all of the original three story arcs before doing any of the newer content. As a result I believe I am somewhere in the middle of Malabal Tor during my Aldmerri Dominion play through. From there I will at some point venture forth into Ebonheart where maybe just maybe I can play long enough to see the character that was inspired by me and some of the folks we play with. I think the fact that I jumped around so much last night… but still managed to get a bunch of play in with each jump… is probably proof that I am on the mend. In truth a good chunk of this weekend was spend with me just staring blankly at things without really doing a lot of interaction. There were several times that I would start up a YouTube video that would then cycle through a whole bunch of things before I even realized I was still watching something. Now however I need to go warm up the car and prep myself to venture forth into the frozen tundra (for Oklahoma at least). Tonight will likely either be more Neverwinter or ESO because I had a lot of fun playing both.

Bad Concierge

January 10, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I failed miserably at making any sort of a post. In truth by the time I had realized I had not logged in and created a blog post it was mid afternoon… and figured I might as well just call it a day off. First off this morning I feel like I probably need to update considering my Monday post. I saw a Doctor Monday afternoon but good or bad the pain had subsided by that point. The pain in whole lasted roughly 3 1/2 to 4 hours and without it being “acute” the only way they really had to diagnose things was some scans. Their advice to me is that if the pain comes back at all… go to the Emergency Room immediately. Based on my description they thought it might have been either a kidney stone or my appendix… since I still have one of those so in both cases something dangerous if I allow it to go unchecked. While I was there however they also told me I had a pretty significant sinus infection and prescribed a round of antibiotics to help clear that up. I had been coughing up a storm the last few weeks and apparently I actually had an infection to back that up. The doctor suggested that I not return to work until Wednesday, to keep down the odds of me infecting someone else… which I guess makes sense given this is a sort of work based free clinic thing that I went to. So for the bulk of yesterday I chilled out while something cooked in the crockpot and piddled around in World of Warcraft while consuming Netflix/Amazon shows.

One of my favorite things about ElvUi is the AFK screen thing. Not sure why it makes me happy to see it pop up and I have a directory littered with screenshots of my character sitting down while dancing on the side. At this point I am level 52 on my newish Tauren Hunter and spending time in the greater Gadgetzan area. In truth last night before logging for the evening I got the precursor quest to take me to Ungoro crater, so I will likely be heading there shortly. Being fully decked out in Heirlooms makes the leveling experience really odd given that things rarely last long enough for my pet to even reach the target, let alone need any form of “tanking”. This means that I am largely running a pet for the flavor of it rather than for the functionality. Traditionally when I need a pet to be a barrier between me and the target I tend to favor bears… however for the moment I am running around with a golden brown Owl I picked up somewhere in Feralas that I named Bubo. The hunter is ridiculously relaxing which has been exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for lately. One of the things I enjoy about hanging out in Facepull on the Horde side is that I can be a fly on the wall mostly, that interacts every so often but also has the room to simply not interact at all if the spirit doesn’t move me to communication.

I ended up going off on a twitter tear yesterday talking about guild leadership and being the person in the background that makes sure things are happening. When I first started leading guilds… I was very young and lacked any sort of responsibility apart from just showing up at work and making sure I was getting my tasks accomplished. In fact when House Stalwart hit its stride about a year into the release of the game… I was in quite possibly the worst job I have ever been in. I had a horrible boss and felt like I had no control over my work environment, and as a result having a smooth running community to come home to and spend my evenings with was almost refreshing. During this time my home life was in a bit of a disarray due to the large number of deaths that were occurring in the family, and Stalwart wound up being my stability that I so desperately needed. As we entered Wrath of the Lich King I changed jobs and wound up in a much better place where I had a support structure and actually started taking on more responsibilities. As such I found myself starting to back away from the same sort of things that I did during Vanilla and Burning Crusade and begin placing myself in more of a distant advisory role. By the time Cataclysm launched I had moved up to being a Team Lead, and was responsible with juggling planning and task assignment, and similarly I found myself completely checking out of the guild leadership role and even going so far as to quit World of Warcraft when Rift released. During that time I have shifted from Team Lead, to assumed supervisor, to actual supervisor… to now interim manager of three groups. While I have kept trying to be the social glue for guilds… by the time I get home I just have no social capital left to make things happen.

The truth is that every guild you have ever been in that felt active… had one or more people behind the scenes making sure that things were going smoothly. I used to have a motto among our officers that I wanted our actions felt but not necessarily seen, and so long as I had the focus it worked smoothly. From Cataclysm on Stalwart has changed hands numerous times and as a result has kept going forward without me. While now it takes a more raiding focus, it is still functional and still doing things. However if you take away the people who are actively moving the ball forward… you end up with 30 people sitting in guild chat and nothing happening. That has been the problem with so many of these guilds that I have formed as new games come out.. I don’t have the drive to be the cruise director anymore… and while I gather up the people I don’t have the strength to actually do things with other people. This was extremely noticed in the recent foray into Destiny 2 where I spent 99.9% of my time soloing, all the while people around me were trying to make things happen. Guilds work when they have a concierge making sure needs are being met and I just cannot fill that position anymore. I have transitioned to being one of the players that just wants to log in and have a good evening escaping whatever stresses piled up during the day. The key difference for me at least is that I do most of this through solo play and am completely happy to piddle along with alts. There are times that I miss big group activities… like I wish we had beat Calus in Destiny 2, or I wish we had made a bigger push into Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. Then I sit back and think about the frustrations of having to remember to log in on time with all of the materials needed for raiding on a specific night of the week… and I question if I could ever go back to that. So yes… I play tons of MMOs as single player games and am mostly okay with that, and yes I realize I am doing it wrong. I do like knowing people are out there in spite of me not being capable of actually interacting some evenings, so I will always seek out potential communities because someday… maybe… I might shift back out of whatever turtle mode I have been in for the last year.

Poorly Dressed Hunter

January 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night on a whim after running my Emmisary quests on Horde side I decided to start playing something else. For a long time I have had a level 20 Forsaken Hunter, but I have this major problem playing anything with the “horde hunch”. While I realize that is eventually going to be optionally not a thing… there is also the major problem I have with the Forsaken in that they cannot wear anything but trashed out armor. If I could be an upright walking normal armor wearing Forsaken… that would probably cause me to re-evaluate a lot of my choices in life. However I can’t and I doubt they will ever taken away the iconic exposed bone thing from them so… until that date that is likely never going to happen I am probably going to bounce the fuck off playing one. I wound up deleting my old hunter and re-rolling as a Tauren, which coincidentally was my very first World of Warcraft character back in beta. I got into closed beta shortly after the Tauren starting zone opened and primarily played a Warrior and a Hunter for most of my testing time. That combined with the fact that Mulgore looks not dissimilar from the corner of Oklahoma I live in… has always sorta made that experience feel homey.

The only problem is… first I forgot that my mail armor was a mishmash of nonsense that I got through the Wintergrasp PVP heirloom vendor… combined with the shaman shoulders because apparently at some point I bought those? As a result I am the most disturbing ahn’qiraj era fury warrior looking character to exist. The problem there is that I forgot that I could not ride a mount until 20… which means I won’t have access to my Yak and a transmog vendor to remedy this until then. For now… I just look like a mess roaming around with an awesome purple birb. There is something extremely relaxing about the leveling process and if I actually want to do that in earnest I am left with two options: Roll Horde or Roll Alliance on server other than Argent Dawn. If you notice in the above image… every single Alliance character I have is over level 100, which means I would ultimately have to grind nothing but Legion content and quite frankly that doesn’t sound that fun or relaxing in the least.

Horde side however I have lots and lots of room for expansion and as a result I am experiencing a bit of a renaissance of “monstrous humanoids”. I am however catching shit now from my Alliance guild as every so often tells show up in my timeline saying things like “we miss you”. While I seem to have switched relgion for the moment I am sure at some point in the near future I will play alliance again. I am neither red nor blue but have always been purple, because purple is a great color and also blends the fact that since day one… I have played a little bit on both sides of the fence. The fact that there still is a fence at all infuriates me, which is why I am not nearly as amped as I probably should be about this upcoming expansion. I have different pools of friends that prefer to play one side or the other and as a result I will always be split between the two. It is my hope that I can get a few more characters up before the expansion hits so I have a pretty even stable of characters on either side of the fence. Similarly I will probably start pushing up some of my Alliance characters as well… but there is only so much Legion grinding that one can take. Side note… I have the best Tauren Hunter Bel-Themed name ever… Belgrazer.