Games Archives - Page 471 of 690 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fixing Everquest 2

March 15, 2016 by Belghast

Tale of Two Games

Last week we had the somewhat bittersweet news that Everquest Next was officially being cancelled. For those who were utterly confused about what Landmark, Next and the rest of the EQ games actually are… here is a quick rundown. Everquest of course is the granddaddy of the big hit MMOs. Then mere days before the launch of World of Warcraft…. Everquest II came out as an attempt at rebooting the world. Everything in that setting happened after a huge calamity that saw Luclin the moon shattering and sending shards to earth. The world was changed, the land fractured, and in many ways it allowed for a much larger scale game world than the original. Everquest Next was the concept for what was ultimately going to be the third Everquest MMO… so in truth you can just think of it as Everquest III. Landmark on the other hand is ultimately the tool that they were using to build the world of Everquest Next. After playing around with it the folks decided that this was actually a really fun thing to play with in itself, in the Minecraft style. Landmark was really never a fully fleshed out game, but more of a sandbox toy that players could fiddle with. Since its launch they have made it more “game-like” but it still is missing a lot of the core features folks expect in an MMO.

Now in the above paragraph I mentioned a key fact… that Everquest II launched on November 8th of 2004… and then was completely overshadowed by the launch of World of Warcraft on November 24th of that same year. The two games took significantly different paths, and produced really different results. Everquest II was this rich tapestry of cultures and game systems that provided a really deep game play experience that worked on so many levels. World of Warcraft was a much more streamlined experience that asked less of the player, but ultimately became easier to pick up and play without an excessive amount of research. We all know how the tales goes… that WoW becomes the juggernaut of MMO gaming and EQ2 becomes this sheltered garden with an excellent community and lots of great content… but always treated as a second tier experience. Right now Everquest II feels extremely dated, like an artifact of a different era whereas World of Warcraft feels somewhat evergreen. The major difference there is that each time WoW releases an expansion they do significant systems overhauls that cause some sweeping changes to not only the fidelity of the game client itself, but also the back end systems. Everquest II on the other hand has been this “Weasley House” of MMOs with content constantly being tacked on top of the older foundation. The new content feels like modern content, but you experience a sort of whiplash as you shift between the different layers of the content and see just how drastic and inequitable the improvements have been.

Renovation Is Due

The above image has been floating around for a few weeks now and represents some work that the Everquest II team is doing to update the orc model. It seems that the newest expansion content that they are working on heavily focus on orcs, and as a result they are just updating the base model to bring them up to modern standards. Seeing this however made me realize just how bad the old models look. I mean it has always been one of those things in the back of my mind, but when you see what the team is capable of producing today… placed against something that has existed since 2004 it is staggering. Now that Everquest Next is no longer a thing… I would love to see them pour some of those resources into producing a graphical upgrade to Everquest II. The big problem with the game are just how dated the models and the animations look, and going back there is always an adjustment period and largely just hand waving off a bunch of details that get under my skin because the content itself is so amazingly rich. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and it is the sort of thing that could be rolled in over time. If you remember the original Everquest went through the same problems and with the release of Luclin they released new and updated character models. Unfortunately in the case of EQ2… we need a lot more than just characters. I would love to see this great game get a second life, because for so many of my friends that I have tried to get to play this game… the ugliness of the assets was a barrier they simply could not get past.

Now fixing the graphics isn’t going to fix the game entirely… but it would go a long way into making it feel more playable. Next up however we really need to talk about the user interface, that has always felt a bit cludgy. I’ve not played the game in the last decade without first installing some sort of third party addon user interface. For years I played with Fetish Nightfall, and within the last six years or so I switched over to being a Drums UI guy. With these UI extensions the game becomes rather good, but the whole process of acquiring a UI and keeping it updated… feels needlessly arcane in a manner I have not experience in any other game save for maybe Dark Age of Camelot where they had no official support for addons. So the entire User Interface could use a bit of a facelift. Finally we have to talk about the way combat works in this game. I feel like this is the step that would actually cause rioting in the streets by diehard Everquest II fans… but I also feel like it is the point that is the most needed. The game really really needs to simplify combat in a way that does not require me to use 30+ abilities in a combat rotation. The above picture is of my Shadowknight, and at least 30 of this abilities are ones that I pretty much used in every single round of combat. It was even worse on my Dirge and I had these super complex patterns memorized… that even today I can sit down at the keyboard and automatically cycle through them.

The problem is… it doesn’t really feel fun. I feel like I am playing some sort of a musical instrument instead of actually experience reactive combat in a video game. Now I am not saying water it down to the level that single hotbar games have done… or simplify it to the point of an action MMO. I just would love to be able to have one primary hotbar of abilities that get used every round… and then a bunch of optional abilities that throw in for flavor or when special conditions are met. The cooldown of EQ2 abilities is so long that you need something… anything… to fill in the gaps so you quite often are simply mashing the next button that is off cool down. Please understand that I am a huge fan of Everquest II… but every time I leave it is the cludgy combat system that eventually drives me away. For several months I can overlook it and just blend back into the rich and vast game world… but I always reach this point where I need to play combat that simply “works better”. I think maybe this is a ship that has already sailed, and after doing several combat passes early in the game… I am not sure if they have the intestinal fortitude to attempt another. All of this aid… simply making the game look better would go a long way into making this a more attractive experience to new players, but in doing this post I am talking about all of the things that I wish were different. Combat will always be a huge part of that.

Savior of New York

March 14, 2016 by Belghast

Mostly Done

Yesterday we continued on out in the garage and did a much more prodding and tedious detail pass. This meant sitting down and sorting through old boxes that we had not seen in nearly a decade. Among the treasures I uncovered was my Gameboy SP as well as pretty much all of my Gameboy Advance cartridges. I literally had no clue where that was, and the last time I remembered having it was in a car that we traded off long ago. I had feared that I simply forgot to remove it from under the drivers seat… because for a long while it was my “waiting on my wife to finish at school” from a time when we regularly drove in together. Apparently we did in fact pull it out of the car, and it sat in this trash bag filled with lots of other stuff we hurriedly pulled from that car before we traded it off. This is apparently a tradition of ours because not only did we find a bag for when we traded off the Pontiac Grand Am… but also a bag from when we traded off like two other vehicles as well. I also found entire boxes of stuff that I apparently packed up when leaving previous jobs and never bothered to go through. These boxes were full of countless pay stubs and health plan documents… so a good chunk of my yesterday was sitting down listening to podcasts and shredding all the documents.

One of the gems of the day was the above image… a box of essentially all of our ancient cell phones. These pretty much represented our pre-smartphone era and those Nokia 5160s were our very first phones that we used for ages. We also found a bunch of extra face plates… since you could swap them out so easily. The positive about these ancient phones is the fact that we didn’t even really have texting plans on any of them, so there isn’t really data worth harvesting so we can dispose of them pretty easily. My friend Squirrel suggested that he would love to have them, for target practice. Unfortunately by the time he posted that I had already disposed of the entire box. Probably my favorite of that era was the weird white LG flip phone, largely because it had a clock visible on its face without actually opening it. Another interesting find was my “art box” which is a big wooden box that was crammed with all of my watercolor and pen and ink stuff from college. Another strange thing was the truly insane number of World of Warcraft trading game cards that I found stuffed pretty much everywhere. For awhile it was habit to pick up a pack anytime I needed to go to the store… and apparently they just sat around everywhere. At some point I will sift through them all and gather up all of the leftover in game codes to give away to readers or something. They are mostly the “toy” variety, like Path of Cenarus or Illidan or maybe some Pet Biscuits. Still the sort of thing is fun to have if you don’t otherwise have access to them. The strangest thing about the weekend… is I think because we were so tired anyways from the cleaning, I can’t say that losing an hour has really had much effect on me.

Don’t Panic

I spent essentially the rest of the weekend playing The Division. At this point I have logged about thirty four hours since launch, and am sitting just a little past level fourteen. The game still feels very fresh, and it is funny how much my play style has changed as I have moved into the game. Early on I thought I would be super tanky and focus on things that let me survive in an open firefight, but in truth the longer I play the more sniper I become. Right now I am running around with a Covert SRS for sniping purposes and generally dealing lots of damage quickly to targets that are far away from me, and then when they get into closer range I swap to a Police M4 which can whittle down enemies with focused bursts. This works amazingly well against pretty much every enemy type but snipers. Those guys… are pretty much the bane of my existence because they are trying to play the same game I am, and generally the computer is better at it. So I spend a lot of my time trying to get out of line of sight from the snipers while mopping everything else up… and then play this game of chicken popping in and out of cover and trying to quick scope them before popping back down like a prairie dog. The worst snipers so far are the Rikers because they just seem more brutal in every possible way. That said it might simply be that they are the highest level enemies I can encounter currently.

On the podcast Saturday night we got into this long discussion about the morality of The Division, and how it made the other AggroChat folks feel uneasy. I can’t say that I am experiencing this at all, because like always I am writing my own narrative of my character as I go… and the fact that this is a silent protagonist game really helps that for me. So as i move around the city, I am the big damned hero cleaning up the city and saving people. I am absolutely the good guys in my tale, but then again as they said Saturday so are the Cleaners, who absolutely think they are doing what is right for the city. I guess for me I just love how rich this setting is… all of the little details like the graffiti that I am showcasing in the photos for today’s post is just amazing. I think the key difference is… that I never really fully immerse myself into a game setting. It is always a game that I am playing, and always a story where I am the hero. Even if I am not supposed to be… I am building a narrative compatible with my notion that in spite of whatever actions I am taking, I am doing it for some greater good. In the Division I absolutely rush to save hostages, or citizens being held up by looters, because it makes me feel like the hero I am trying to be. When you do a random encounter on the street you are given bonuses for various things… and when I see that survivor bonus it always makes me happy. I also spend a lot of my time going through abandoned buildings so I can make sure I always have whatever item citizens ask for when I come across one in need. I am the one making the city a better place, and I am comfortable with that stance. I guess that might be why I like the post apocalyptic genre so much, is because the world is in such a screwed up state… that there are so many ways for me to help fix it. Even if fixing means simply hunting down the biggest baddest warlord… and putting a bullet in his skull.

Bad News Day

March 12, 2016 by Belghast

Goodbye Everquest Next

Yesterday the MMORPG industry received a couple of really bad bits of news. Firstly Daybreak Games has officially announced that Everquest Next is no more, and that they would be rushing Landmark into “launched” status this spring. Firstly it really should not come as any surprise that this is happening because in truth we have not had any substantive news about “Next” since SOE Live 2014. So when Storybricks parted company in February 2015 and SOE was sold to the holding company that renamed it to Daybreak… I fully expected we would never see anything further from Next. Storybricks was going to be the guts of this new approach at how to create an MMO and allow it o almost center around procedural interactions with he various factions and NPCs in the game. With that core gone… I could not reason how the game would function, and deliver even half of the lofty promises it had made. The other huge concern was the fact that Daybreak now seemed like a company desperately trying to survive under the yolk of evil overlords. When a company known for grooming technology for sale purchases a game company… it seems like creative freedom and the broad daydreaming that got SOE where it is today would be the firs thing to go.

The concerns I have is that it feels like Landmark is getting foisted upon us, in an unfinished state. It had been a couple of years since I last played the game and I popped in last night to see just how different it is. In truth it still feels like the prototype game that it has always felt like. I roamed around and collected items and then logged back out because I wasn’t really drawn to stay. The thing I love about Landmark is the community, and I am just hoping that through all of this transition they can manage to keep that intact. The problem I have with Landmark is that it is a fun sandbox that lets you build really interesting structures…. but I still wouldn’t really call it a game but instead more of a toybox. Sure you have the trappings of combat now, but while wandering around in the zone the game dumped me in…. there was actually nothing to fight. Maybe I need to dig down to find that, but the only thing I actually encountered that was potentially damaging were some exploding shrooms. I am hoping that in the few months left before the official launch that they can somehow pull together some of the ideas from Next and make Landmark a proper game experience.

Wildstar Falters

The other concerning news from yesterday is that roughly sixty employees were laid off in a “restructuring” within Carbine. This has honestly been a topic among some of my friends for awhile now, but we were dreading some form of action to be taken. Wildstar has not been performing amazingly well… in fact they are performing far worse right now than with City of Heroes was shut down by NC Soft. As a company goes they are notoriously brutal when it comes to closing titles that they deem are not operating as well as they expected. Wildstar is a significantly better game today than it was at launch, and the Free to Play conversion was more than just a payment model change, but an entire reworking and re-tuning of some of the game concepts. The game felt fresh and new and was exciting… for a period of time. The problem is, that Wildstar is just not my game. I have good friends who love it above all others, and for them it hurts a lot to see the company struggling. Every now and then there is just a game that does not for whatever reason “click”, and that was this game for me. On paper it sounds and looks like everything I could have wanted in a game, and I still think it has one of the best implementations of player housing I have ever seen. Unfortunately I just don’t ever have the desire to play it, and always seemed to prioritize playing something else over it.

The scariest statement about the whole press release is this line. “These cuts are directly tied to WildStar’s evolution from a product in development to a live title“. That right there seems to be signalling the end of active development on Wildstar and shifting the title into maintenance mode. An MMORPG cannot thrive without fresh dose of new content, and while you can do things like add new quests and script events without a lot of active development…. you can’t do things like roll out new zones and raids. Admittedly the game is getting fresh content with the release of Arcterra, and hopefully this will not effect that. The other worrying statement is that apparently there were statements floating around that the employees were told to expect more layoffs in the future. So much happens when layoffs are announced, and there is an internet dog piling of bad blood towards a game. I have nothing but love for Wildstar and its community and I want it to weather this storm and somehow bounce back stronger. I am clinging to hope because I know a lot of people who really need this game to succeed and thrive. All of that said… the cynic an realist in me still keeps saying that this is not going to end well.

Sleeper Awakens

March 11, 2016 by Belghast

Real World Rifts

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Yesterday I took the day off to manage getting a dumpster delivered. This was one of those odd situations where they would not really give us a time of day for it to be delivered, but instead wanted to call on their way. As a result I felt like I was pretty much in a holding pattern until that event happened, largely because we wanted it dropped off in the yard… not in the drive way. So I treated yesterday like a normal work day, except instead of shuffling off to work after posting a blog post… I booted up and played The Division for a bit. I had been months since I attempted to stream anything, and I was also kicking the tires of the new OBS Studio… which seems to obfuscate a bunch of the settings. So the first few minutes of the stream were apparently a slide show narrated by my voice. After that I fiddled with some settings until I finally landed on a combination of levers that seemed to produce a nice watchable streaming experience. The thing about The Division is that I feel like I am constantly doing something… even if it is not the thing I intended. One of the aspects of Rift that I loved was the fact that the world was constantly spawning rifts and invasions that I had to deal with. It felt new and fresh… up until the point that it didn’t anymore. The happenings in The Division are varied enough that I hope they remain fresh, but I worry that there will be a time where I start avoiding the little things going on around me… just so I can complete the thing I am actually trying to focus on.

The other potential issue due to the dynamic interactions is that most of the time I feel like I am not actually making any progress. I might set off in search of this or that… and get distracted by six things that happen along the way. For example last night I was trying to do one of those missing agent location quests, where you pick up on their trail and follow them to what unfortunately usually ends up being a log book. While on the final step of one of those chains… I also got the shout over the radio that looters were attacking a supply drop. Instead of going over and defending I tried so hard to keep following the trail of clues. All the while I was actually feeling like a horrible person for not helping those NPCs. The game makes me feel the weight of my decisions in a way that most games don’t, and I think it is because this game bridges the uncanny valley gap so damned well. The world I am wandering around feels so real to me… that I could step out of the screen and into the real Manhattan and not really notice the difference. It also makes me wonder how amazing a game like City of Heroes would have been… if it were rendered with this level of detail. Right now I am feeling so completely behind in everything I am doing, but I am currently knocking on the door of level 10, whereas lots of other folks are hitting the level cap. I am not really going to worry about grinding my way up, because really… I don’t want to burn out on this title.

Completing Quests

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The strange thing about yesterday was that I had the entire day to play The Division, but instead I largely focused on working on stuff in Destiny. I have been a slacker when it comes to completing any of the end game content, especially if it requires tedium. For example one of the big goals is collecting Calcified Fragments, and they are hidden damned near everywhere on the Dreadnaught. Most of them can be obtained “in the open” while doing patrol missions, but a handful of them are only exposed during strikes or story missions. Even others involve doing events like Skyburners Deployment Code or Wormsinger Rune. The other night while doing the Kings Fall raid, the nice folks made sure that I got all of my fragments from there, which took a big obstacle out of the way. There is a long drawn out quest called “Hunger Pangs” that involves doing a bunch of silly stuff for Eris Morn. Several of the steps are gated by the number of Calcified Fragments you happen to have collected at that point. To do the final part of the quest you have to have found 45 of the 50 total fragments that currently exist in the game. So yesterday during the day I managed to solo most of the quest line, including a rather tough version of the Undying Mind strike. I was however stuck on the final quest, which is a pretty insane version of the Phobos quest that starts the Taken King. Thankfully Squirrel and Jex helped me out last night, and I now have a shiny new Touch of Malice which will come in handy during the raid.

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Since they were looking for something else to do… I coerced them into also helping me out with my Sleeper Stimulant quest. I had been on the final stage of this quest since I believe last October, but didn’t have a ready group of people to talk into helping me with it… and had zero luck pugging it. The quest requires you to run a Nightfall level version of the Saber strike, which is somewhat insane to survive given that you get bombarded by Fallen ships at the start. I had always heard that if you could simply manage to make it through the first sequence… that the rest of the strike was really not that bad. I agree at least in part, that is until you reach the final boss. That encounter was absolutely insane… but we managed to take it down pretty easily. Then feeling our Wheaties turned around and attempted the exact same strike as the weekly Nightfall. The combination of Match Game and Fresh Troops made it so much worse. Towards the end we were ping ponging around the room trying to stay alive long enough to resurrect the next fire team member, usually only ending up getting wrecked ourselves in the process. Through a bit of dumb luck and perseverance we managed to pull out the victory on our third attempt at the final encounter. After that I was needing to log, because in truth I only really intended to do the Malice event but ended up staying upstairs on the PlayStation for like three hours. Was a pretty great night and I feel better having knocked a couple of big goals off of my list in the game.