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Rift Prime Thoughts

January 24, 2018 by Belghast

The launch of Rift was a really special time for me. It was the first time that my “wow tourism” turned into something else. It was the first time that I really immersed myself wholeheartedly into another game and I loved it so much. At the time Rift was giving me everything I had said I wanted in an MMO and I chose to be a giant purple Bahmi warrior. We had a lot of great times in the game and while we didn’t really start to break into the raid scene until the release of slivers… we regularly had huge guild outings to open raid rifts which were an awful lot of fun. At that point it was just a lot of fun to grab some friends and chase rifts for awhile, and in truth I cannot really remember what caused us to initially fade away. For some players they never really grasped it in the first place as player fantasies turned out to be less than what they expected. Others shifted back to the familiar womb of Azeroth, but a group of us stayed true to the cause for quite some time. By the time the first expansion had rolled around however we were down to a shell of our former selves and a series of server mergers saw our little guild scattered. I personally had landed on my feet with another very active guild in the form of Machiavelli’s Cats helmed by fellow blogger Liore, and entered a sort of second golden age of Rift for me personally. I even managed to make my way into their raid rotation as I did my best impersonation of a dual wielding warrior. With the launch of Storm Legion saw a bunch of changes and a bunch of folks wander off, and before long I was once again left as a member of a dwindling guild. I made an attempt to rekindle the interests of my friends with a fresh start on Faeblight and the proper founding of House Stalwart in Rift, and it again worked for a time… but by three months down the line we were once again down to a handful of people actively playing. Essentially the core problem I have always seem to have with Rift is getting anyone other than myself interested in playing it for any length of time. No matter how solo at heart you happen to be… if you don’t have a guild core to organize around it is really hard to keep excited about logging in every day.

Recently Trion announced that they would be creating “Rift Prime” and it is not in fact shipping a temporal disturbance to your house in an hour or less. I realize I am super late to the party in talking about this… but I’ve been largely out of commission due to the flu so cut me some slack. The idea in theory is that they are trying to roll back time, to an era when the game was subscription based and not fueled by loot box purchases and store purchases. We don’t really have a ton to go on as to what specifically this means, but the full text of the blurb released on January 18th goes as follows.

Introducing RIFT Prime

In the Spring of 2018, we will launch a new server, RIFT Prime. We’ve paid a lot of attention in discussions with all of you and within the broader gaming community regarding business models in the MMO and games industry as a whole.

We have the opportunity to experiment with this fresh RIFT server using an oft-requested subscription model and progressively unlocked content. Our goal for RIFT Prime is to provide the experience that many of you have requested: no lockboxes, a significantly reduced store with more of the current store-based items obtained through gameplay (or removed entirely) – plus the excitement of sequential progression through RIFT’s content with monthly milestones and achievements.

So we know whatever it is will be happening in Spring… which is one of those super squishy definitions as far as time goes. It promises a return to a subscription only server, which admittedly is a huge boon as far as I am concerned. During the early days of Rift the community was something I cared about and I regularly volunteered for groups forming up in public channels. With the introduction of the free to play players… I more or less stopped watching public channels because they were full of nothing that I cared to see. I like the idea of starting over again with the core of vanilla Rift and building back out from there. A good portion of my struggle to stay connected myself is that there is just so much competing wrong information that you have to sift through in order to find what is actual good advise. We are lacking the Rift equivalent of Icy Veins to use as a sanity check to see if you are in fact speccing your characters in a reasonable manner. I think rolling back the sands of time might help this a bit, especially if prime sees its own forum infrastructure to support the initiative. Sure I would miss all of the toys I have accumulated over the years, but I also think having a reason to start fresh without having to deal with the baggage and friction of a free to play experience would be positive.

There are two problems I foresee and I am going to talk a little bit about them. Firstly how vanilla are we actually talking? I never again want to return to an era when the “faction as fiction” patch has not been applied. One of the best things to happen in Rift was the fall of the faction wall and I want to be able to run Guardian and Defiant together freely based on user choice. Secondly… if they build it will the people come back? I can be as interested as possible, but if no core upwelling of players want to come back and play… then my own journey through the game will be truncated as well without a guild base to build out upon. I’ve not had the best luck with guild projects lately, and I am not sure if I even have the energy in me to try and organize anything for the purpose of Rift. Destiny 2 was a colossal mess that never quite materialized into any semblance of regular group activities, but admittedly a lot of the problem there was the complete and total lack of guild chat. I still love Rift and I have so many fond memories of the game, but always run into issues each time I attempt to play the modern incarnation. At some point I left the tracks and never quite figured out how to re-rail myself. If I could find an active community to do this thing with me… then maybe just maybe it would work. However similar nostalgic based trips into other games have been short lived in the past, and even the third resurgence of Rift myself was us trying to do a similar “fresh start” that only wound up lasting three or four months. At this point however I am willing to give it a shot. If I am actively playing a game I am already in the mindset where I want to subscribe in order to support it… so flipping that switch is a no-brainier for me personally. The real question however is… will I have anyone else joining me in that madness?

Saving Bleakrock

January 22, 2018 by Belghast

Lets get this update out of the way. I am still struggling quite a bit with this death flu bullshit that has been going around. Here in my home state of Oklahoma there have been 45 deaths since the beginning of Flu Season, and I absolutely understand why. I religiously take the Flu Shot each year when work offers it, but some of the estimates I have seen say it is only 10-15% effective against what is actually out in the wild. Due to my case getting misdiagnosed as a sinus infection early on… it mean’t I lost that time window when something like Tamiflu would be useful. Now I am having to just slog through it in an attempt to get to the other side. This weekend things started feeling worse as it triggered my Asthma in a major way, and instead of podcasting Saturday night my wife was making a mercy run to Walgreens to pick up more medication that the on-call doctor prescribed. This meant that Friday night I wound up having to take six Prednisone pills in one dose in an attempt to shock my system back to normal. It is helping but going way slower than I would have liked, I am now starting day three of a dose pack and I am really hoping that today is the day that I start to feel more human again. Most of the weekend I was in this mode where I felt fairly reasonable so long as I was sitting perfectly still and not doing much of anything. The moment I would get up and attempt to do something simple like get a drink, or swap a load of laundry… and it felt like I had just finished some epic uphill slog through the tundra. I hate feeling useless, and I hate that this has continued to drag on as long as it has. Since the only time I felt reasonable this weekend was sitting on the sofa snuggled into a blanket with my laptop… that mean’t I spent most of my time playing games. With the current state of World of Warcraft feeling fairly awful until they make what is going to inevitably be a balance and tuning pass on World Scaling… I needed something else to hold my attention. I am still playing quite a bit of Neverwinter, but for whatever reason that game feels best to me when played in short focused bursts. It was around Friday that I started playing Elder Scrolls Online regularly and it managed to get its hooks into my psyche.

I have been extremely stubborn in the way that I play Elder Scrolls Online. For the uninitiated, the base game has a really cool feature of having a build in new game plus and plus plus modes. What that means is that as you beat your chosen faction’s content, you walk backwards around the ouroboros taking on the next faction in sequence while you play through all three. I originally rolled as Daggerfall Covenant, which mean’t my new game plus faction is Aldmeri Dominion and then new game plus plus would be Ebonheart Pact. Where we get into the stubborn part is that I refuse to play any of the “expansion” content aka Imperial City, Orsinium, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Shadows of the Hist or Morrowind until I have completed all three of the original factions. Of note each one of these factions is designed to be 50 levels of content and now we get into where I have stalled out… it takes a very long time to work through the original game three times. Aldmeri Dominion originally seemed like pure hell to me because of my severe distaste for all things elves… and that faction has both the Altmer (High Elves) and the Bosmer (Wood Elves). That said… I do have a very deep soft spot for the often times completely feral cannibal Bosmer, and I have always loved the moon sugar imbibing Khajiit… so I thought on those two elements alone I could probably make it through the content. What I was not expecting however was to completely fall in love with the storyline featuring a bunch of elves and their weird struggles to hold together what apparently as a very unlikely alliance. With elements of the Wild Hunt and crazy drug induced visions… Aldmeri Dominion turned out to be a really excellent ride and I am sure Tam is pleased as hell with himself because I know he was responsible for at least some of the content. This weekend I managed to finish up the main storyline in Reapers March, but I will admit there are a lot of side quests that I simply did not deal with over there that at some point I will probably revisit. Ultimately I would love to 100% every one of the zones… but that will take time and I did not want to burn myself out doing so.

As a result last night I finally started Bleakrock Isle and Ebonheart Pact. This is without a doubt the content that I tested most thoroughly over the course of the year or so that I was in various alpha and beta tests. It was the content I could essentially do in my sleep… along with Stros M’kai. The funny thing is… time had clouded my memories and left me with vague idea for how the flow of the zone was supposed to go… but left me struggling to remember how to get 100% of the refugees off the island. I realize I could have easily skipped the intro area and moved straight on to Stonefalls, but in truth I have always found the intro areas to be extremely strong content. I know they were a huge problem for players who wanted to log in and just start running amok, but for me personally… they were this great guided tour into the game. That is one of the things I constantly find myself amazed by is just how damned good this game really is, and how relatively shunned it was by the broader Elder Scrolls community. Each time I return I get immersed completely into the world and am right back where I left off mentally and wandering around completely interesting quests. That honestly is a double edged sword because what ultimately causes me to wander away is that it is almost at times too immersive. Much like playing the story in SWTOR I get engrossed in the game and have trouble doing anything else while playing it. There is always more dialog to listen to and more quest chains to complete, and my ability to binge Netflix and play this game is largely a nonstarter. If I want to Netflix… my game of choice is something like World of Warcraft that is so familiar and almost mind numbing that I can play it almost entirely with muscle reflexes. Elder Scrolls is largely still a game about muscle reflex for me… but still one that I need to accurately read the tells that the mobs on screen are giving me to be able to react correctly to in order to stay alive. I cannot simply blindly run around mashing buttons… or I will end up dead exceptionally fast for someone who has just shy of 200 champion points as of logging out last night. I know I am probably playing less than optimally, but I have a build that works for me and feels reasonably well and I am afraid to dig too deeply into it past that. Optimization is often times the path of misery for me and drains the fun out of the experience. I do however need to perform a little resource to figure out exactly what the gear level breaks are and how soon I should be looking to upgrade out of my 160 CP gear into something else.

World Scaling Thoughts

January 19, 2018 by Belghast

Firstly since I was absent in making a blog post yesterday I feel like I need to address said lapse. I’m dealing with this horrible strain of the flu that has been going around. I was in fact one of those people who had the flu shot early in the season as soon as my work offered it, and still managed to catch it. Last week I went to the doctor and they misdiagnosed me with a bad sinus infection. As the week carried forward and I was not getting any better I went back to the doctor and this time around they thought to swab me for influenza. I feel horrible because I probably infected a bunch of people during that weeks time considering people are dropping at my work like flies. The biggest challenge of this batch seems to be thinking… as in stringing together a sequence of thoughts into something that makes sense. I tried it yesterday and failed… primarily because the topic I want to post about involves a little finesse. However here I go attempting to make a post work in between the coughing spells.

On Tuesday January 15th the World of Warcraft was once again forever changed with the introduction of patch 7.3.5 and World Scaling. You have to understand I have been thought a lot of emotional tinges about this sequence of events and it really has taken me this long to be able to sit down and formulate my thoughts. Now this is something that I had been wishing would arrive in World of Warcraft for so many years before there are lots of games out there that do it really well. Prior to the patch I had been furiously leveling a Tauren Hunter and upon logging in I had the immediate guttural reaction of “Gah! This Feels Horrible! LOGOUT!!!”. The longer I have lived with these changes the more nuanced my opinion has become, and today I am going to try and weave it all together into something that makes sense. Firstly lets talk about what leveling has been like for the last few expansions in the heirloom economy. Putting on a full set of heirloom items turned you into a god and you could pretty much roll though content with impunity. With zero hyperbole… on my beast mastery hunter I could pretty much oneshot every single mob in the game while doing level equivalent content. This had a bunch of positives and a bunch of negatives… the negative being you weren’t actually doing any of the content legitimately. The positive is it allowed you to tackle all of those boss level encounters and made up for the fact that the zones you were leveling in were effective ghost towns and you might never actually see another player.

The other side effect is that you could level exceedingly fast because of the sheer volume of things you could kill in your wake. You could pull big and pull sloppy and shake it off knowing there was virtually nothing the mobs could do to you that would actually kill you. This meant that on a really good night I might be able to do twenty levels of content, and on average something along the lines of ten to fifteen. It was not unusual for me to do literally all of outland in a weekend afternoon buzzing from 58 to 68 in a single sitting. The changes have firmly closed this era of the game. Speed leveling is probably still possible but the definition of fast has changed considerably. In the nights after the patch I have played with many variables but for the most part it is a really good evening if I see two dings. In addition to the lack of speed is the constant fear of death as even wearing a full set of heirloom gear I feel just as weak as if I were wearing greens. I am constantly in peril of pulling too much or the wrong combination of mobs at the same time and maybe not being able to live through the damage. Previously food and bandages had no value at all because you simply did not need them… but I find myself utilizing both again. The big boss encounters however are the problem because once again… there is no native population of players leveling through these zones anymore. There is no one in zone shouting that they need help cleansing ursoc for example… an encounter that is still mostly unsoloable for anyone but a tank with some sort of health regeneration of their own. The island full of all of the boss encounters in Grizzly Hills… I couldn’t even get through one of the mini-bosses let alone the final encounter that requires burning down the boss while also managing large waves of adds. Essentially if a quest rewards a blue item… it is probably off the menu for solo players to ever attempt because due to world scaling there will never be a time when it is far enough beneath your level to comfortably solo.

So do I mourn the old fast and silly leveling with heirlooms? Admittedly a little bit. Because it was fun to feel that powerful and get through the content that quickly. However I also realize it was a bit much and lead to all sorts of problems like being unable to kill something slow enough to complete any of those “use item while weakened” type quests. Level scaling in truth is good for the health of the game because it means everyone will be actually doing the content in the game rather than buzzing past all of it. Essentially everyone will be leveling every alt now like they were leveling their first. I am sure Heirlooms do speed things up still, but it isn’t nearly as noticeable as before. The problem I see however is that in the new economy… the survival capabilities of various classes are likely going to need to be tweaked. I’ve been playing a bit as Survival Hunter… and there are just certain encounters that I cannot handle by myself. I take too much damage and cannot chew my way through the hitpoints before they chew through mine. Survival is a fairly sturdy class, so that tells me lots of other classes are going to have pure hell in this new world order. I am not sure what sliders they have to tweak how the content feels, but this first pass feels like it lands a bit to much on the side of unforgiving brutality at times. There have been several times I have had to log out and walk away from leveling… because it was annoying me too much. Leveling alts was always my moment of zen and my happy place… and now it is stressful. Again a lot of the problems are with the fact that while the world is scaling I am still utterly alone in all of these zones with no help to be had from another player happening across my path and maybe seeing I am in trouble. The general world sorta feels the way that Argus feels at times when you are a little undergeared…. and maybe that is the problem. Heirlooms previously were supposed to scale like you were wearing the best blues you would wear at a given level. There should never be a time when you feel undergeared for the content… but unfortunately that is mostly how I have felt every moment after the patch.

Essentially it is an adjustment period, and I will have to get used to feeling weak again. I think in the grand scheme of things this is probably a good step for the long term health of the game. I just have to learn that I can’t fly nearly as close to the sun as I used to.

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.