Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Root and Nuke Life

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It is election day for me as my state is part of Super Tuesday, and as a result this post is going to be fairly short and to the point. Last night I did a thing, and that thing was deciding to roll a healer on a new account so that I could at some day sort out how to do the MQ2 thing and have a tiny healing roomba following me. I took a real trip down memory lane and decided to skew the naming convention of “BELG” something and instead recreated my original main from Everquest. Exeteroth the Dwarven Cleric. During the early days of the internet my OG handle was Exeter, and I don’t have a glorious reason for it other than the fact that it would fit into a name slot on the NES version of Ultima.

In D&D I always liked playing Clerics because they seemed self sufficient. You could turn one into a decent melee character, they could wear decent armor, and they had access to spells that could heal themselves in a pinch. My jam was always rolling a Cleric of Tyr because that gave me access to Bastard Swords. So when I ventured forth into Everquest and saw that Clerics could wear plate armor and use two handed maces… I thought hey… I will be able to relive this battle-priest fantasy. Only to find out that the life of a cleric is living in a party and casting the same spell over and over from the moment you get it at 39. The alternative was to find an area where you could control your surroundings and root/nuke until something fell over and repeat this with breaks in between to regenerate your mana.

The EZ Server experience thankfully is way more reasonable than that as they seem to have scaled up combat on all of the epic weapons even the “support” ones. I am effectively just running around and meleeing things down and the noobie item is keeping me alive during the process. Last night I made it to level 10 and started in on Paladul Caverns, which is the alternate zone to Oasis of Marr in their leveling curve. This is a significantly better choice as all of the fungoids can drop the Kunark armor sets as opposed to the Orcs and Crocs of which there are WAY fewer spawns. Additionally by the time Luclin came around, Sony got way better at building hunting camps as opposed to a bunch of randomly roaming monsters.

One thing I an consistently impressed by is just how damned good we had it with it came to third party map support for Everquest. Even though I have map files in game, I still find myself referring back to EQ Atlas and the old grid paper and color pencil maps. I chose to include Butcherblock Mountains given that it is my old stomping ground as a Dwarf Cleric and it also is a fairly square map which would show up here when embedded in a reasonable manner. The map for Paladul Caverns where I was actually hunting last night is a long mess of a thing, which would just translate to a blog post weirdly. I remember having bunch of these printed out and in a binder so I could check them while I was furiously running across a dangerous zone.

The thing is… while I have nostalgia about being weak and small in a large and dangerous world… I don’t find that I actually want to return to it. I like knowing that I am more or less safe to walk away from the keyboard at any point and if I die there will be absolutely nothing lost other than a run back to wherever I happened to be hunting. I like being able to go off and do whatever the hell suits my fancy without needing to somehow convince five to six other people to want to do the same thing. I also don’t miss sitting around and doing nothing because we either didn’t have enough people on or nobody would take the initiative and decide what was going to happen that evening. While I loved Everquest for what it is… what I want now is a modern game set in this rich universe. I also love Everquest II, but it has a myriad of its own problems. Norrath however is too rich of a setting to let it wither away and not take advantage of the IP with fresh new games.

Orc Highway of Loot

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First off sorry for missing a post on Friday. If you don’t follow me on twitter you likely missed my announcement that one was not going to happen. Essentially I have been fighting some nasty flu-like crud and wound up staying home from work both Thursday and Friday. Were I not under the gun for several deliverable I might also stay home today because while I am feeling significantly better I am in no way 100% and it is the stupid stuff like the long walk into the building that I am dreading. This unnamed crud came with a general sense of weakness and an ability to make pretty much all food sound nasty and unappealing. I am hoping that I am back on the mend and can start to get on with life, but at least for a bit I will be moving a little slower and wearing out a little faster.

To go with this need for something slower paced I found it extremely hard to stay alive while playing Wolcen due to my sluggish reflexes and I wound up venturing back into the Everquest Emulator and landing on another server that one of my coworkers had talked about. “EZ Server” seemed like a neon sign calling out to me in a foggy night, and I proceeded to make an Iksar Shadowknight and had a glorious time wandering around the area surrounding Cabalis and leveling normally. It was only when I created a second character, a Halfling Ranger that I realized I was completely missing part of the experience. Instead of Riverdale I arrived in Surefall Glade that was set up completely as a newbie town with a greatly condensed set of vendors and npcs and the ability to port from there to anywhere else in the game.

So I proceeded to set forth about fixing this and ran from Cabalis to Warslicks Woods to The Overthere which apparently is a full pvp zone on the server and flagged me as soon as I entered. From there I took the Plane of Knowledge book and transitioned to North Qeynos and then Qeynos Hills eventually running all of the way to Surefall Glade. This was a run I was fairly unfamiliar with because I was a Freeport kid and had never started anything on the Qeynos side of the pond. Thankfully Allakhazam has a page of directions on how to get between a bunch of locations which came in handy. It was shortly after arriving at town that I decided to start goggling the server to find more information, and trying to determine why it had kept telling me that I really should be using the Underfoot or Rain of Fear 2 client and not Titanium.

During the googling I also found these charming and quirky server tutorials. Essentially EZ Server is exactly the opposite of Project 1999. While 99 wants a pure original game experience and takes actions to stop anyone from being able to run more than one character at a time… EZ Server goes to the other extreme and has added a bunch of new content that effectively requires you to be botting to be able to get through. I am not sure yet if I will be playing long enough to go down that rabbit hole but they support some software called MacroQuest 2 which effectively allows you to remotely control your “roombas” as the server guides refer to your bot accounts. For now I am just enjoying poking around in zones that I remember while being powerful enough to pretty much solo them. It was a trip roaming around Castle Mistmore and soloing my way through it.

They have also done some nonsense of editing zone drops and offer up a specific set of level range bounded quests to lead you to these specific zones. For example the Field of Bone Giant Skeletons for some reason drop a full set of newbie armor, that is way higher statted than anything else you could possibly hope to get at that range and a quest sends you there to kill ten of them. From there they loaded up the Orcs and Crocs in Oasis of Marr with the Kurns Castle era armor set…. and the orcs tend to drop 4 pieces at a time but you are still battling RNG to try and sort out a full set. The chain goes form there to Castle Mistmore where everything is dropping the Kael Drakkal faction armor sets and I managed to hang out there and collect most of a full set of Malevolent gear. Now I am in Dulak’s Harbor and the gear dropping appears to be from the Plane of Tranquility quests from the Planes of Power expansion and I am currently missing only a few slots for a full set of that.

Prior to me figuring out what I was missing from the experience, I spent an awful lot of time roaming around Kunark and a good deal of that killing Forest Giants in Warslicks Woods. There is just something enjoyable about killing Giants in Everquest… and I have been contemplating taking a trip over to Kael Drakkal and seeing if I can hunt there yet. Some of my fondest memories involve hanging out in that zone for hours hunting giants and collecting gear for the Thurgadin armor quests. As a cleric at the time… that meant a lot of me casting the same spell over and over but hanging out and chatting was enjoyable enough. I am trying to decide if I want to create my first “roomba” as a cleric to roam around with and heal me, or if I would rather have something like a druid. In Everquest II my power combo is my Iksar Shadowknight and my Wood Elf Warden, which has allowed me to solo a bunch of just slightly below my level content.

No trip down Kunark’s memory lane would be complete without a trip into Dalnir, to visit the angriest of sperm. I did fairly well in here until I got swarmed by frickin gnomes and died. The joy of playing on EZ Server is that death is effectively meaningless. You port back to your bind point, which is now in Surefall Glade in the Newbie town and don’t have to care about doing a corpse run. The newbie vendor in town sells things like Gate Potions for no cost allowing you to pretty much “hearth” at any time you like. This weekend I found the experience of roaming around and chasing armor sets to be extremely enjoyable, but I have a feeling that once I am no longer quite this sick the pace will feel way too slow for me and I will move on once again. It is making me want to patch up Everquest II and poke my head back in there again however.

Champion of Stormfall

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Last night I managed to get the credit roll for Wolcen and this comes after putting roughly 40 hours into the game. I did not exactly rush through and spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly. I believe I was level 42 when I finally pushed through past the final encounter. Monday night Grace and I were both at roughly the same spot and even though I was insanely sick last night I pushed through to see the end. I’m happy that I did because the very last encounter is a gigantic pain in the butt and we only managed to make it through because I was so damned tanky in the previous build. Any time Grace would go down I could pop juggernaut effectively making me invulnerable and use those frames to bring her back up.

In general I am pretty happy with the gameplay experience and its story. I am sure there will be some folks for whom it was a disappointment, but I would rank the story overall as better than Diablo. There are some interesting factions and some events that I didn’t fully expect. Then again there are other shocking turns that I absolutely did expect. The final battle didn’t play out quite like I had expected it, but did cover some of the story beats I was assuming it would. I am being purposefully vague for those who are not quite there as of yet. The three act structure is pretty solid and the levels themselves take enough time to get through that the feels like a substantial experience. I admit I pushed through the last little bit on Story Mode and the final fight was difficult event then, so I hate to see it on normal.

Throughout the course of the game Stormfall has getting progressively more and more destroyed by the onslaught on the primordial forces. When you finish the game, something has happened to Damaskas and after some back and forth the factions have decided that they need to appoint a new leader of Stormfall to oversee its revival. You are now playing what is called the Champion of Stormfall mode of the game where it largely focuses on running randomized content in order to gain
“productivity” and resources in order to begin the slow process of unlocking a ton of new systems.

In some ways it feels like you are suddenly thrust into a seemingly good version of the World of Warcraft Garrison system. Through choosing projects you can unlock additional skill slots, extra pips of stamina, permanent discounts on vendors and all manner of other systems that have not existed prior to the moment you pushed into the end game. This is ultimately your gold sink for the late game and gives you a purpose for running repeatable content over and over. Now this isn’t going to be for everyone, but so far I am digging what I have seen of it.

So far you seem to have two methods of grinding out productivity. The first is through running expeditions, which are a series of dungeons that block you from returning back to town. At the end of each floor you have the option of exiting the dungeon and going back into town or continuing on to the next floor. There also appears to be a vendor at the end of each sequence allowing you to do some selling of loot because I was tossing away whites to loot yellows throughout the entire run. This seems interesting but also seems like it is going to be a large time sink as well. You can reroll the modifiers trying to get a run with extreme gold find for example or some sort of specific bonus.

The other option is to run Mandates from what appears to be a quest board. These are more straight forward dungeons with some sort of a loot reward that drops at the end. The good folks of Reddit have of course created a flowchart of how the various upgrades work that might be worth looking at to sort of plot your choice to the ones that you want to unlock first. During our play through Grace managed to find an insanely cool looking Two Handed Mace and I have been holding onto it waiting for me to finally hit 40, at which point I swapped from Sword and Board over to Two Handers. I finished out the story with my weird tanky build but last night I opted to respec everything.

My previous build sorta went after any talent that could in some small way make me have higher survival. This time around I have been way more cautious in my picks and am specifically targeting things that increase my damage while still adding a bit of resistance and health. I made a beeline to get the talent in the bottom left hand corner which takes away wisdom completely and makes it so that I passively generate rage instead. This makes a massive difference and now I really can finally be spinning almost the entire time. Right now I am sorta making my way across a bit of green in order to dive down into another red warrior block across the board from where I started.

So far it more or less seems to be working for me as I can just shred things now with blade storm. I am trying to start gemming in a manner that buffs frost damage since a large part of the raw damage of the weapon comes from that. Additionally it procs a freezing effect, so it is probably worth having that up as much as possible just for the crowd control aspect. I am nowhere near as tanky as I was before, and the big monsters can shred me pretty quickly. As a result I am going to have to play way more nimbly than I was before and making sure I don’t end up getting trapped in a corner I can’t dodge out of. So far… I think I am going to like the end game, but I guess after a week of it we will be able to determine that further in another post.

Anthem a Year Later

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Anthem released roughly a year ago at this point. Technically it released on February 22nd and I am writing this on the 26th but for sake of argument a year has passed. I had so much hope going into the release of this game. I had hoped that maybe just maybe it would find a way of uniting my friends who love Destiny with my friends who love Warframe, because the game sorta felt like it shot down the middle of those two fandoms. The awesome thing is that for a brief while it did exactly that because it provided really fun Iron Man fantasy with some interesting quest design and writing representative of what Bioware can do.

The problem is that all of this ended pretty quickly once we entered the end game, which effectively was the same things we had been doing up until that point. At launch we had three strikes… the two you were introduced to early on during the story and one that effectively was the end mission to the game. The Sunken Cell was added in April of 2019, but ultimately the writing was already well on the wall at that point and I am not certain how much it actually added to its hemorrhaging player base. I stuck around for roughly two months of grinding my face against these “strikes” and doing a whole lot of open world exploration in an attempt to keep making my numbers go bigger.

I was an active part of the Discord and participated in friend exchanges through Origin which ended up with my filling my list with hundreds of names. However even taking that into account one year later the only person who has been on fairly recently is Jaedia. The core problem for me was them ratcheting down the drop rate of Legendary items, and sticking to a throwaway loot system like that of Diablo. Diablo is a game that is based on rapid iteration of loot for you to find the one item out of hundreds that works for your character build. Stingy Legendaries means when you finally do get one, it is more than likely trash… but you are going to keep using it because of the item level boost which feels awful. The fact that raids never materialized really drove clear that ultimately there wasn’t much of a point in maxing out your gear in the first place.

The truth is that this mornings post is spurred on by the fact that Bioware is offering an anniversary gift to players and I wanted to make sure anyone out there that still might care is aware. Effectively you have between February 25th and March 24th to log into the game and claim them. They will automagically show up in your vinyls and materials and represent 1 new Wrap for each available Javelin and a new material called Painted Metallic Flake. Other than that the fort has been redecorated from the winter holiday theme to that of a spring one with increased greenery and potted/hanging plants. Bioware is supposedly working on “Anthem Next” a complete rework of the game from the ground up and I hope they can somehow pull off a Destiny Taken King, Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn or a Diablo 3 loot 2.0.

Anthem was a really great tech demo, and I am hoping we can at some point see the game that it ultimately was meant to be. For the time being however you can keep playing the shambling corpse of a game and keep chasing the hopes of seeing lime green appear on your screen. The cataclysm events seem to largely be active at all times, which is probably a good call given that a game in desperate need of content probably should never be removing it. I’ve done a few of them and they are enjoyable enough, if you can actually find a party. The last several I have done however involved me and another player trying to complete them because we were never able to match make a third person. This all depresses me terribly and I hope that maybe just maybe we can see this game rise like a phoenix from its ashes some day.