Star Wars: The Old Republic Archives - Page 14 of 16

Five Favorite MMOs

June 19, 2013 by Belghast

Tomorrow is going to end up being a super busy day for me, as I need to run a few errands for work… so I am doing this post a little differently. I don’t feel like I will have enough time tomorrow to bang out a post like normal, so I am working on this topic tonight. I thought it would be interesting to do a post about my top five favorite games and why I like them so much. I figured i would do this in count down style with fifth leading down to number one… of course you can just cut ahead but lets pretend it is a surprise!

#5- World of Warcraft

I went back and forth several times on what should be my 5th spot, but as I thought about it… for sheer longevity of me playing the game, I had to give a nod to World of Warcraft. I have essentially outgrown the game, but it does a lot of things well. I feel like WoW is the junkfood of MMOs… so long as you do not think about what you are doing… it is extremely enjoyable. I played WoW as my primary game for roughly 8 years, and during most of that was the leader of a large social guild. I have so many amazing memories and have met so many life long friends out of the game. All of these reasons are why it at least had to make my list.

Best Features

People – WoW is still the game that most of the people you know are playing.
Colorful and friendly graphics and a world that matches them.
Lots of systems that allow solo players to engage in group content.
Game overall is extremely polished, they provide a consistent experience.
Roughly a decade of content and a wide variety of activities to do.

#4 – Lord of the Rings Online

Lord of the Rings Online is one of those games that I really enjoy every time I get the bug to play it. It is extremely immersive and brings the player into the setting surrounding the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I love the way that you are set up in the game as characters that just happen to be in the background of the activities of the fellowship. Each step of the way you are doing events that are helping out the world, but also keeping tabs on the activity as the fellowship moves through the novels. They do an amazing job of bringing the world to life and filling it with copious amounts of LOTR lore.

Best Features

One of the best communities – Landroval is amazing
Music system… you can play instruments in game, and players give performances regularly
Simple instanced neighborhood housing system
Hands down the best horses in any MMO… they move right
Breathtaking landscapes straight out of the novels
Intricate system within system… I admit it… I love deeds
Subscribing for one month permanently unlocks most features

#3 – The Secret World

The Secret World is such a unique experience that I feel like everyone needs to play it at least once. Not only it is a unique system, but it also has extremely different game play mechanics. I have always been a fan of the whole occult and Cthulhu mythos, and this entire game is essentially a love song to H.P. Lovecraft. It also has some of the best writing and storytelling, and additionally some of the most imaginative quests. The only negative to me, is that it lends itself to very periodic and episodic gameplay. Each time new content is released, I run in like a locust and gobble it up. I believe enough in this game however that before its release I became a lifetime subscriber.

Best Features

Unique setting and amazing storytelling
Unique classless game play
All players can learn all abilities in the game
Nightmare modes are some of the most challenging content I have experienced in an MMO
Does not hold your hand… almost to a cruel end. Very difficult quests.
No Subscription Fee – buy the box play forever
Single Server Infrastructure – play with anyone on any dimension freely

#2 – Rift

Rift is likely going to be one of those games I always cycle back to playing. Essentially it is WoW, but improved in every conceivable way. That is probably a massive disservice to the game to say that… but unfortunately that is usually what I think of in my mind. Since the release on a monthly basis they have improved the gameplay so that it includes some extremely innovative features. It has really engaging content that varies from epic quests to quick fast food push a button and get into the action features. Additionally it just went free to play, and it feels like one of the better implementations. The cash shop has a truly staggering number of things to purchase, but all of it is completely optional. You can pretty much experience every bit of the content apart from the Storm Legion expansion… completely free.

Best Features

Most customizable out of the box UI that I have seen
Awesome non-intrusive add-on support
Awesome passive grouping content like Rifts and Instant Adventures
Most detailed housing system – you can literally build anything
Extremely flexible class system with ability to have more than 6 different specs
Great Wardrobe system allowing for tons of custom outfits
Extremely interesting and challenging raid encounters
Really fun holidays and in game events

#1 – Everquest II

The world I will always be the most nostalgic about is Norrath. Everquest was my first real MMO experience, and it bit me hard with a vengeance. The big negative however is it was very unfriendly to players, and caused a massive commitment of time to get anywhere. However with the release of Everquest II, it took the world I loved and brought it into a much more player friendly frame of mind. This is one of those games that I have played off and on since release.. and no matter where I am mentally… this is the one game I can always play even when I don’t really feel like playing anything. I feel like EQ2 is the most underappreciated game on the market and has so much to offer players. It just doesn’t look as shiny as other games, and the engine definitely feels dated at times. The game takes of commitment to understand its systems, but you will not find a more intricate and rewarding game on the market (except maybe Wurm Online).

Best Features

25 unique classes
20 unique races
Massive scale zones, dungeons, and raids
More content than I have seen in any other game period
Massive epic quest lines… one I worked on off and on for 6 months
Extremely detailed housing system with the ability to have 10 per player
Extremely unique crafting system
Guild housing that actually supports guild activities
Antonia Bayle is one of the best RP communities – Tons of Live Events

The Runners Up

There were several games that almost made the list. I contemplated Star Wars: The Old Republic… because quite honestly it had some really engaging content. It however has probably the most egregious free to play conversion I have seen, so its exploitive nature knocked it off the list. I thought about Guild Wars 2, because there is something undeniably enjoying about the game. However there are an equal number of issues I just cannot get past to really find it something I want to play on a regular basis. Dragon’s Prophet is a game I am really enjoying these days, but I don’t feel like I have played it long enough to really give it a spot on the top five list. Additionally Vanguard is a pretty amazing game, but I just have not played it enough to really know its ins and outs.

Essentially I picked the five games that have shaped me the most as a player. I hope you enjoyed my little rundown and even more so I hope it inspires someone to give one of them a shot. Of my list only World of Warcraft lacks a free to play option. So I guess this is really telling about where we are currently in what is a viable payment model. I find myself cycling between the two four on a regular basis. Right now I am mostly in a Rift mode… but I am sure I will cycle back to the others before too much longer.

I hope you have a great day, and I hope you don’t mind the change in format. I wanted to create this post, and I knew I would not have enough time tomorrow morning to complete it all. Additionally I am busy tonight downloading things to load up my new laptop full of games. So essentially I had time to kill and devote to this. I hope I get all my errands in the morning done, and get to work on time.

Dam Impressive

June 3, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was another of my infamous “you no can has sleep” nights as my brain absolutely refused to shut down. I really need to get some melatonin and give it a shot when that sort of thing happens. I was extremely tired, but my brain was spinning on some completely useless project, and like the software you have to manually close when restarting your machine… it kept gumming up the process. As a result I am borderline catatonic, and find myself getting sidetracked by the simplest of things this morning. It is going to be a not so enjoyable day.

General Celes

I spent most of the morning playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6 on my PSP in an attempt to catch up to where I had gotten previously with the native PSN version. Taking screenshots is a bit more of a pain in the ass… so I did not take very many. As a result you get something I found from Google image search of the same basic spot I am at currently. Apparently the above example chose to rename their General Celes to Moghan… for whatever reason I have never really renamed my characters. I prefer to just accept the name they are given by default, since that tends to be how they are referred to out of game.

Yesterday I had encountered an odd glitch, where I was unable to talk to Kekfa and start the “Figaro Submerge” sequence. I had a previous save luckily, so I could load that back up and sure enough the second time it worked just fine. The big negative so far of playing the GBA version, is that you only have 3 save files. As a result you keep having to round robin your way manually through the saves. I pretty much save every time it is possible, and hate saving over whatever my latest game is, so this process just becomes more cumbersome.

I made my way back to the Mog screen that allows you to pick which batch of adventurers you will follow. As a result I picked Locke first, as he is generally my favorite character in FF6. It took me a bit to remember how this whole sequence worked, but after some trial and error I managed to get into the underground passage, rescue Celes and make my way out of South Figaro. When we needed to shower and get ready yesterday, I was standing just ouside South Figaro on the world map. So I will head my way back to Narshe and that should be the end of that sequence. I will likely play the river journey next… for whatever reason I tend to save the Sabin for last always.

Dam Impressive

Yesterday we had plans to eat dinner with my wife’s mother at 4 pm in Grove Oklahoma… which is on the edge of the Grand Lake of the Cherokees about an hour and a half from Tulsa. There are multiple ways to get there, none of which extremely straight… and some of them way more contorted than others. Since we had not really been out on one of our photo jaunts in awhile my wife suggested we take one of the extremely contorted ways so we could look for interesting scenery. As a result we took this hour and a half trip and extended it to be a little over three hours long.

The weatherman said that the day would be clear and sunny.. but the end result lead us to constantly check the weather on our phones as the sky was pretty much filled with rain clouds the entire trip. As a result the lighting was less than favorable, and especially so as we travelled past places we would normally stop. To the weathermans credit, it never did rain… just looked like it was going to at any moment. While we had been along the route at various segments of our planned trip, we had never actually been the totality before.

I am hoping this actually works… because I have never really attempted to create a linkable Google map for something. But this is the route that we ended up taking to get from 169 to Grove via Highway 20. When we got in the Spavinaw hills we encountered the extremely cool Spavinaw lake dam. Basically Spavinaw lake is where the bulk of the water for the City of Tulsa comes from. In the 1920s the City realized it would need to draw water from outside of the immediate area and as a result created this massive waterworks that spans from Lake Spavinaw, through other smaller lakes and ultimately ends of at the water treatment facilities inside of Tulsa. As we drove along the road it took us right beside the extremely cool looking spillway pictured above.

Luckily the sky had cleared a bit by the time we got there, so we pulled off into the parking lot and roamed around. Normally I have a no trespassing rule when taking photos… I will not cross any fences or barriers… however if there is a way around said fences that do not involve actually crossing one… I am game. As a result I ended up walking around a fence that was locked over at the power station near the spillway… and this allowed me to get some interesting shots close up to the water flow.

When I go out and take photos I end up uploading them all in bulk to Google+ albums, then create what I call a keepers album for sharing. I had not dumped my memory card in awhile, so I had photos from mothers day, the house work, and then these of Spavinaw… so the end result was that I uploaded 182 photos. After I did my culling and singling out the ones I really liked the most… that became whittled down to the 42 keepers you can see in this album. I think there are some pretty good shots in there, and it has honestly been awhile since I have felt like uploading what I shot… so I think this is a good thing.

Gaming Restlessness

When we got home from our little jaunt, I had to fight with the Google+ photos system for a good deal of time. They have changed something, so that it does not work nearly as well for bulk uploads. As a result I was pretty pissed by the time I finally finished with that mess. I ended up flitting back and forth between several different MMOs… never quite finding the fit for my mood. I played my Melee Mage in Rift for a bit, but ended up getting frustrated because I had not kept up my butchering… and was going to have to go back into Silverwood and grind wolves until I raised it enough to do Gloamwood. This is the negative side effect about leveling through the instant adventures system… you end up in a bad place skill wise.

After logging out frustrated, I went over into SWTOR and tried to play my Sith Warrior. Right now I am knee deep into Imperial Balmorra yet again… and that kind of frustration just made things worse. I managed to complete three or four quests before ultimately logging out again. I patched up Guild Wars 2, because for whatever reason… the fact that I have real internet and can patch things quickly. that would have taken me leaving a game running over night… still amuses me. That more than any other change has meant the most to me… the fact that we have real internet finally! There have been some negative side effects however… I used to host a small web server out of the house, and with Cox blocking port 80… we have lost access to most of that content.

I played GW2 for all of ten minutes before remembering why I don’t really play the game much. The gameplay choices they have made just are not that enjoyable to me. No matter how much I have tried to play it… I still find the lack of quests off putting. So I feel like I am running around aimlessly with nothing of any importance to do. Once that sets in, everything I do feels extremely grindy… since very little of it actually matters other than your world completion score. I wandered around in the 40-50 zone near Hoelbrak but quickly logged as the game almost immediately bored me.

I would have gone upstairs to the loft and played some PS3 or XBOX, but I fear that they would have had the same result. I was just in a restless and frustrated frame of mind… that was only made worse when I actually attempted to go to sleep. For whatever reason my mind latched onto the nettop computer I am building for the loft. I started going over all the things I would need to do, evaluating what the best emulator and video front ends would be… all of which were not at all important. Especially since I have yet to even move the computer out to the loft from my office. I was just restless in every sense of the word… and as a result am paying the price today as I struggle to keep my eyes open.

Wrapping Up

I am hoping that I survive the day as one of the sleep deprived masses. I will be mainlining five hour energy shots in a vague attempt to be alert and responsive. Right now I am honestly not sure what has to get accomplished today, but I am hoping by the end of my web service staff meeting I will be able to determine that. I hope you all have a productive start of the work week… and that you are not going into it nearly as tired as I am right now. Hope you all have great days.

Best Fantasy Ever

May 31, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I just said “fuck it” and hit the snooze button. This is not a practice I normally do, since I usually end up feeling far more tired after doing so… but today is Friday… and last night was another one of our Oklahoma “watch the skies” nights. I feel like as a whole today may just be a “fuck it” day in general. I feel like I don’t have much of anything to really talk about, but by god I am going to do it anyway.

Chaos Reigns

Last night I started the evening attempting to play some Star Wars the Old Republic. However ultimately the constant distraction of the tornado cells coming through our area lead to nothing but me getting killed over and over by afking in the wrong place. Basically I needed to play something with a pause button last night, and that ruled out all of my MMOs. Last week a discussion with Syl about Jesters ended up bringing up one of my favorite video game villains of all time… Kefka. She mentioned that her favorite rendition was in the game Dissidia… and I thought to myself… man I wonder why I never played that?

Sometimes you see a game so often, that you develop this picture in your head of what the game will be like to play. For the case of Dissidia, I had built up this image in my head of a this massive fan service JRPG that comes up with a loose excuse to involve all your favorite characters from vastly different final fantasy games. So while the fan service part was definitely correct, the rest of the game resembles almost nothing of a traditional Japanese RPG game.

The game as a whole is about Chaos over throwing Order… and that is precisely what playing it felt like to me. It works absolutely nothing like I expected. Essentially you pick one of the cast of characters, the engage in a series of game boards… that you have to move across by clearing obstacles in your way. When you encounter an obstacle… you have to fight them in this truly bizarre behind the back view fighting game. All of the fights so far have been repetitive and essentially a time waster, but I have this feeling that when I actually encounter a boss fight it will be like the floor dropping out from under me.

Essentially it feels like an extremely flimsy excuse to pack a game with a bunch of cinematic of characters you know and love interacting together. Each time you clear one of these game board, you are treated to a 3D cut scene of your character doing whatever they do best… usually brooding. Along the way you pick up gear that slightly improves your ability to knock down these straw men villains that get put in your path. I am sure on the boss fights you will have to have the best of all possible gear to make it through them.

There is some kind of weird mini-game involving a chocobo and carrots that I have not quite figured out what is going on with it. I am sure it is important, but I have yet to notice anything happening other than every so often a pixelated chocobo shows up on screen and eats a carrot. Additionally there is an absolutely insane unlock system that allows you to play as other characters, unlock other costumes and even character voices. The most confusing of these is what looks almost like a cash shop… but I don’t see any RMT hooks in the game at all.

Basically after playing Dissidia for 2 hours… I am still not really sure if I like the game or not. There is so much of it that is the epitome of repetitive gameplay, however I found myself continuing to play it in spite of this. I made it through the tutorial… that didn’t really teach me anything… and a few game boards into the Cloud storyline before I decided to give up. This is definitely going to be a game I return to, because it is like this super confusing puzzle that is going to annoy me until I solve it. There is so much going on in this game, and it has such a devoted following that I feel like I have to figure out why.

Best Fantasy Ever

Another title I had dug up for the PSP was the Super Nintendo turned Gameboy Advance turned Playstation turned PSP remake of my favorite of all JRPGs… Final Fantasy VI… or as I played it originally Final Fantasy III. I was really late getting turned onto this game, it was not until Christmas break that I ended up giving this game a spin. I rented it from the local video store… and then when it came time to turn it in… tried valiantly to purchase the cart from them so I could maintain my game saves. I gathered up all the cash I had gotten over Christmas, and picked up the game at Toys R Us… then spent what felt like the next 4 months playing it.

There was just so much going on in this game. It had a great cast of characters, awesome steampunk meets magic theme… and for the time the graphics were truly amazing. This to me is the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy experience, and everything since has been a downhill ride for me. Much like me being able to replay Symphony of the Night over and over… this is on the same list… but I have never really done so. I’ve never been that big into the various mobile gaming systems post green and black gameboy. So I have essentially be relegated to playing this title on emulators for the last decade.

Now that I have it on the PSP, I am really looking forward to a proper play through again. I started it back up last night, but only really made it towards the end of Narshe before sleep claimed me. Previously I had been taking my laptop into work, and going upstairs and gaming over my lunch hour. Right now my plan is to just bring my psp in with me, and play it while everyone else is on their laptops. I just wish I had a proper way to take screenshots from my psp… because I would love to be able to chronicle my journey through the game. I might have to research that… since I have custom firmware… wondering if something like that exists.

Wrapping Up

A friend of mine finally got around to using the free game and expansion codes I gave him over in Rift. I told him that he needed to do so soon, because anyone with Storm Legion would get grandfathered into a bunch of stuff when the F2P conversion hits. He said he might be around tonight, so I will be breaking out of of my lowbie characters and hanging out with him. Looking forward to listening to him discover that game as we play together over mumble. Already there have been a bunch of excited IMs traded back and forth… and he has only played the game for about 20 minutes.

This weekend we have a double whammy of my mothers birthday on Saturday, and my wife’s mothers birthday on Sunday. I am sure that will ultimately dictate what our weekend is like. Additionally tonight is supposed to be another bad tornado night… and potentially worse than last. So we will be watching the skies and hoping for the best. I hope you all have much better days than what mine sounds like it is going to be.

Fatman Blues

May 29, 2013 by Belghast

Another morning, another day closer to the weekend. Yesterday I was just absolutely struggling to exist in the world. I felt like I was walking around in a daze all day long, and nothing ever quite snapped me out of it. I took that long nap on Sunday afternoon, and ever since my schedule had been somewhat out of whack. I am convinced my body and mind goes to shit if I get too much sleep. So long as I get 4-6 hours I seem to be able to functional like a normal human being, but when I get over that… my body goes haywire.

Restless Gaming

As a result of this haze, I was super restless last night. I flitted from activity to activity never really finding much traction in any of them. I managed to hook up with my friend Del over in SWTOR at one point in the evening, and he made me a bunch of moddables so that I could outfit a set of orange gear I had my eyes on. I am hoping that if I now start always choosing commendations… I will be able to keep up with keeping the suit of armor outfitted.

I am now on the last section of Dromund Kaas on my Sith Warrior, and I pushed through a good chunk of it… but seemed to lack the focus to actually finish. When I would attempt to quest, I would find myself super sleepy and almost unable to keep my eyes open. Unfortunately last night my wife washed the bed sheets, so we had to wait for the current load to finish drying, and then for them to finish as well. This gave me no real option of just going to bed early. So I wandered about the house like a zombie, looking for something to occupy my time.

Fatman Blues

I finally settled back down in my office upstairs, and set to trying to unravel a mystery. The goal of this search was to be able to find a way to upgrade my PSP to firmware 6.60… aka the latest revision and the one required to couple your device with your ps3. There is more to the tale than this however, as there always is in a mystery. It is a tale of intrigue and suspense… stay awhile and listen!

Back in 2007 I picked up a used PSP 1000 model, aka the “Fat” design as the modding community calls it. It was just the latest device in my eternal search for way to play retro console emulators on a mobile device. Turns out through a truly arcane process, you could install a custom firmware, that would allow you to boot emulators from the memory stick. When I say arcane, I am not being facetious… you literally had to have just this one right version of the original release of the grand theft auto UMD to be able to execute the firmware loader.

I jumped through all the hoops with the constant fear of “bricking” my device all for the glory of being able to play all my favorite Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Genesis games on the go. Thing is it worked, and worked amazingly well. I could boot into an emulator, but also be able to play just about any UMD based game I came across. Additionally through dark science, I was able to take my Castlevania Symphony of the Night playstation disc and rip it into a format capable of running on the device. So quickly this became my favorite toy. Not only could I play Super Metroid, but I could also play SOTN… my favorite game of all time.

The only problem with this notion is that the world evolved around me… and I was essentially stuck on this custom flavor of firmware 3.01. I can remember that the Final Fantasy II remake was the first game I purchased, but was unable to play on my psp. With the realization that I was stuck on this firmware, with no real upgrade path… and no real time to research said upgrade path… my device became something I only really broke out on road trips. Since I tend to be the one driving… it didn’t even make it off the shelf that often.

Resurrection Game

With my resurgence in console gaming, I had noticed there were all these games I had sitting on my PS3 harddrive that claimed to be capable of copying to the psp. I had a renewed fire to try and figure out a way to get my 3.01 OE-A firmware device up to 6.60 the latest revision and the one required to connect to the playstation network. While waiting on the cable guy last Thursday I had nothing better to do than research how to fix the problem. The problem with an underground community… most of the information listed is speculation and mythos.

After following down several rabbit trails to find nothing, I finally found a tool that would supposedly allow me to restore my firmware back to a stable version. The highest I could get with the tool was 6.20, which was technically high enough to run almost anything… just not enough to connect to the PSN. I executed the process and sure enough it worked restoring my device back to 6.20. The only problem is… it worked with an Asterisk.

Apparently in the process of restoring the device it somehow corrupted something known as “IDStorage”. Anytime I attempted to patch up to 6.60 from there I got a pretty arcane error message with an error code of “drnffffffd7”. Seems as though the root of it is, that my physical hardware and my firmware version do not match exactly based on this region code chart. The latest versions of the official firmware check this before applying the update, and as a result I am pretty much hung once more on an older version of the firmware.

Pandorica Opens

There is a fix, but it involves something called a Pandora Battery. The further and further I get into this process, the more and more it sounds like an episode of Doctor Who. Turns out “Pandora Battery” is just the publicly traded name for a special device called a “Service Mode” battery. Apparently this was device that was handed out to PSP service centers, that allows the technicians to essentially flip your device into a kind of debug mode so that they can fix various bits of software and load new firmwares without software protections.

This is apparently paired with something called a “Magic Memory Stick” which also seems to tie its roots back to the official service centers. Both of which are apparently created through using a certain tool on your device. Ironically… in order to run that tool… I have to apply a custom firmware patch again. So last night I went through the process to turn my 6.20 official into 6.20PRO-C2. Unfortunately the aftermarket batteries that I picked up do not have the required eprom needed to convert them into pandora batteries.

After some digging online I found a place that sells the Pandora battery for roughly 10 bucks after shipping. The only problem… it is coming from china, and as a result will take between 17 and 24 days to get here based on Amazon estimates. So for the time being I have a custom firmware psp that can run pretty much any game on the market, but just not be able to connect to the playstation network… and let me copy games from my ps3 to it. I guess while I wait I will enjoy the concept of playing emulators on a mobile device again.

The Takeaway

The moral of the story is… do not venture down the custom firmware path unless you want it to forever dominate your future. From what I understand… I would have had issues going from 3.01 official to 6.60 official anyway. But that would have just meant downloading a bunch of intermediary firmware’s and stepping through the process. However these firmware are only really available on the mod community sites, so I would have been traipsing down a lot of the same alleyways. From my understanding, a good chunk of what made my transition so hard is the fact that I applied a custom firmware back when they had not quite figured out how the device worked.

Anyways… I thought someone might at least find the tale entertaining. I have a Pandora Battery on the way, have made a Magic Memory Stick… and in a months time when it finally arrives I will attempt the IDStorage fix and see if I can go all the way to 6.60. Basically throughout this entire process you walk a super fine line of trying not to “brick” your device. I hope you all have a great day… and don’t venture down any trails that lead to dead ends. Each day brings us closer to the weekend!