H1Z1 Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bel Folks Stuff #4 – An Evening with Petter

This month the Bel Folks Stuff podcast focuses on the amazing Petter Mårtensson. Petter has been an extremely busy man, and has had a ton of side projects over the years. In his normal fashion he even offered to guest on Aggrochat if we could ever work out the time zone issues. Our listeners could know him from any number of places. For several years he worked for the european gaming magazine GameReactor both as a writer and as an on-air anchor. Similarly while dormant for several years, he is the man behind the Don’t Fear the Mutant blog. On the podcasting front he has been extremely active in the CSICON network serving as a host on several different shows including Claims the Normal, Three MMOSketeers, Enochian Frequency and most recently Who’s Who.

In addition to all of this he was involved in creating the A Tale of Internet Spaceships documentary talking about the culture behind EVE online. Now he is also writing a monthly Final Fantasy XIV column for MMOGames. Like I said… he is an extremely busy man and I am thankful he took the time to sit down with me and have a length conversation… mostly about non-gaming stuff. I think the most interesting thing about the conversation was the delve into Futurism and the things we would love to see. We also geeked out a bit about Doctor Who, which apparently is something that happens on every podcast now that he hosts the Who’s Who show. Definitely was an interesting conversation, and I hope you all enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

H1Z1 Early Access

Yesterday Sony Online Entertainment launched the H1Z1 early access. This was originally supposed to go live on Steam around noon, but various delays pushed it back into the late afternoon. When I got home from work it was available and I figured $20 but satiate my curiosity was a fair price. However the game apparently is very much “not quite ready for primetime”. The above screen is what greeted me when finally after my World of Warcraft raid I fired the game back up. Early in the evening I was not able to get into the server select screen at all so I guess in a way it is progress? I am sure this is another case of “underestimated demand” and I seriously cannot blame them. Throwing a game up on Steam early access as your initial forray into alpha… is pretty damned daring. Right now the game has roughly 2000 reviews, roughly half of those are positive and half are negative, so if only a small fraction of the population comments… that means they sold a ton of early access copies.

I love the concept of a zombie survival game… the problem is I don’t want to have to deal with the world pvp aspect of games like Rust and Dayz. So when this game was announced I had zero interest, until it was confirmed that there would be PVE only server environments at launch. Hell I didn’t even mind that the original icon in the server browser list was a teddy bear. I am a carebear, and I am okay with this notion. While it is immature to taunt the player base that has proved to make up the overwhelming majority of MMO players… I can deal with it. I am sure H1Z1 is going to be a mess for the near future, but hopefully at some point it will be playable and interesting and allow me to play a base building game in a walking dead style world. If it gives me that… then I am largely going to be happy with it and will consider it $20 well spent.

Mar’gok Attempts

Early in the week on Tuesday we had a really phenomenal night or raiding, meaning we cleared 6/7 on normal and 2/7 on heroic. This freed up last night to work entirely on Imperator Mar’gok. While we got a bit of a late start due to key players running a bit behind, we accomplished just that, an entire night of attempts. Mar’gok is one of those fights with a lot of moving parts, and it is simply going to take a lot of repetition before we have our “click moment” when everything falls into place. We however did make good strides in that direction. Essentially there is one transition that is wrecking us… that we need to figure out how to do more smoothly. Once we have that transition down I think we will down the boss. All of that said we did manage to start getting him down into the 40% range each time, which tells me we are likely on the cusp of victory.

It feels really good to be doing current content in World of Warcraft. During my time back in Pandaria I attempted to raid with a group that was in theory several content patches behind. There is just something demoralizing about doing that, and especially since we never seemed to make any real forward momentum that would lead me to believe that at any time we were likely to get to current content. When LFR served as my primary source of upgrades… I had to ask myself why was I even bothering with the constant nights of wiping. This expansion however has been a completely different experience. I really want to kill Mar’gok but I have the utmost confidence that we will, and likely before the Blackrock Foundry raid opens. I am just bummed that I won’t be around Thursday night next week… because more than likely after reviewing the logs we will make some tweaks and finish this raid.

H1Z1 Preview

Yesterday was the big reveal of the new SOE game H1Z1. While it should surprise no one… this is a zombie survival MMO. With the name there is literally nothing else that it could have been. Right now the details are pretty sketchy, but details are being collected on the official reddit. It really looks like it is going to take what Rust and DayZ are doing, to the next level and make it massive and persistent. While all of this intrigues me… I think it is pretty much in the “not for me” camp. I am amped about exploring a zombie filled world, and building bases with my friends to protect against the hordes. Dealing with additional players in a PVP scenario in that same world… pretty much destroys my enjoyment. Ultimately I am all about community and working together, and unless there is some unofficial co-operative server there really isn’t much pull for me.

I played quite a bit of the DayZ mod for Arma 2, but the thing that ultimately stopped me from playing it more was the fact that I didn’t need to worry about the zombies, but instead worry about getting sniped from a massive distance by other players. I realize that it is more realistic to have players be fighting other players for survival, but in these games there are often times far more players in the world than zombies. I feel like ultimately what I am looking for is State of Decay co-operative mode… which sadly is not in the cards. I want to explore a purely PVE world with my friends, and scavenge from potentially NPC factions. I guess the proof will be in the pudding and how things are set up. What would really kill the game for me is if other players can loot your corpse, similar to DayZ.

So long as if I die to players I get to keep my progression and my inventory, I might be okay with this. The other big concern is, that Smedley already talks about players coming along and burning down the bases of other players. As a kid I loved to build with blocks, but it would piss me off when another kid would come along and knock down my intricate structure. That is precisely what it feels like to me, when you have a base building game… that allows other players to come destroy yours. Some time ago Smedley said there was another game on the horizon that SWG players would love. I keep wondering if this is it, because it is supposed to have the whole player created town aspect. Knowing what I know about the SWG community however, I don’t really see them being terribly enthralled by this.

The Evil Within

A game I have been watching with some interest for some time is The Evil Within. Essentially it brings the world famous Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil. During the early days of the playstation, I absolutely ate up survival horror titles. I played the shit out of Resident Evil, its sequel, Parasite Eve, and even Dino Crisis. However for me the genre reached its peak with the release of the original Silent Hill. There was something so perfect about that game and the way it blended between the relatively sedate “normal” world, and the absolutely twisted “nightmare” world. The game absolutely blew me away from the opening chords of its theme song. As the Resident Evil series wore on, it became ever repetitive and boring, as you rehashed the same old t-virus saga again and again.

What The Evil Within does is pair the mind of Shinji Mikami with the publishing might of Bethesda Softworks. Now granted this is not the same team that brought us the Elder Scrolls, or even Fallout… but so far they have managed to prove that when one of the Zenimax studios creates a title… I am ultimately going to be interested in it. The above trailer is brand new for Pax and I have to say I am super interested. It feels far more like Silent Hill than Resident Evil, and this is an awesome thing to me. I want another game where I wander around a nightmarish landscape that I can’t quite wrap my head around. The title is slotted to ship at the end of August, and I am super excited about it. If you loved the original Silent Hill as much as I did, I figure you have reason to be excited as well. If nothing else the trailer is really freakin cool.

Elder Dungeons

I finally put my finger on what exactly I am loving about the dungeons in Elder Scrolls Online. In many ways it feels like a return to the dungeons of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. World of Warcraft did something to MMOs that has seemed unrepairable until now. It was really the first game to begin to treat dungeons as though they were wholly separate from the rest of the world. It walled the dungeons off in instances, filled them with special dungeon mobs, and applied abilities to them that you would see in no place OTHER than a dungeon. The dungeon became its own unique game, that required a completely different set of skills than play out in the world did. Every game since the launch of World of Warcraft has taken this lead and filled their dungeons with “elites” that for the most part require players to focus fire them down, since an individual player could not possibly solo one at level.

This was not always the case, dungeons used to be filled with the same kinds of mobs you might encounter out in the “real” world, just in larger numbers and higher frequency. So stepping into Elder Scrolls Online, I admit I was freaked out when we first encountered and 8 to 10 mob pull. I am only now realizing that this is essentially the same 8 to 10 mobs you would encounter while roaming around the world. What makes this challenging and not just “trash packs” is the fact that these mobs fight smarter. From the moment you step into the dungeon, you encounter “group tactics”. Healers will heal the lowest target, including other healers… Necromancers will raise the dead, melee will go after your squishiest party members. The mobs are treating you like dungeon encounters, and trying to take you down as a team.

What makes this so refreshing is that these tactics are not solely reserved for “dungeons” but the same kind of thing you start encountering as the game ramps up difficulty. In Stormhaven it is getting rare that I am not involved in three or more mobs at a time. Almost always this will include a healer of some sort, a “tank” of some sort and a “dps” of some sort. The first time a mob tried to kite me, it was a really cool moment. Why this is great is because Elder Scrolls is somehow managing to teach players the skills that they will need for later content, in the content they are actually playing. So while yes, there is a massive learning curve… I feel like we will not have the same problems we have with the PUG scene in World of Warcraft in the eventual Elder Scrolls Online end game. If you can make it through the veteran content, you likely can make it through any of the content in the game.

It is refreshing to have a game that does not try to coddle the player. Shit happens, and if you do not react appropriately to it… you get punished and punished hard. The game is not some brutal Dark Souls type experience, it plays fair and within a set of established rules… but even after playing it as long as I have… I still die, and die often. I really look forward to the adventure zone combat, because it feels like it is going to be something akin to the old Everquest planes. I loved breaking the plane of hate and the plane of fear, both of which were unforgiving and brutal… but also immensely rewarding. While Craglorn sounds like it is much more structured than the planes were, it feels like it might offer a similar style of gameplay. It will be a long while before I am Veteran Rank 10, but hopefully when I get there we will be able to wander about the zone finding adventure.

#H1Z1 #TheEvilWithin #CragLorn #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline