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The Contest

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Hello Self Conscious

I have officially finished my novel, and I say that in jest because really the hard part has yet to begin.  The whole NaNoWriMo process was extremely draining.  I almost viewed the past year of daily posts on aggronaut as training for the marathon that was Nano.  The thing I was not at all prepared for however was just how draining coming home each night and writing a chapter of original material was.  My blog is pretty much me just reacting or regurgitating “found material”.  Nano on the other hand was me giving birth to characters, plots, settings and for all intents and purposes a big unique world of my own making.

Now that it is over it is time for me to return to the normal daily blog posts… and quite frankly I find myself a little self-conscious.  For the last 29 posts I have simply dumped what I wrote the night before in private out onto the screen for you guys to read (or more than likely not read).  Now I find myself sitting here having to come up with things to write that are relevant and timely.  It is not that I find myself with writers block, because there are a month worth of topics backed up inside of me.  I just find myself a little nervous about the entire process.  I have to get back in the pattern of just dumping my innermost thoughts out onto a page for you all to pick over.

The Contest

 

During the month of my absence from morning posts a thing happened.  Well actually if we are most truthful about it a lot of things happened.  In this case two particular things happened.  Firstly Trion announced the existence of Trove their new game that melds Minecraft, Cubeworld and MMOs.  Secondly I somehow managed to get into the first wave of alpha invites.  Thirdly when I realized that I was one of only a handful of people in the game, and that the alpha process had absolutely no NDA… I thought I should probably do something to show off the game.  As a result I did a thing that I had thought about for some time… I recorded my very first lets play video.

  1. Test Video
  2. Episode 1
  3. Episode 2
  4. Episode 3

So far I have recorded four videos in total, the first of which only being a super short test video in which I was trying to figure out the kinks of using youtube.  I am completely new to this whole experience but so far the videos have been well received.  An interesting thing happened however over the extended holiday weekend.  I ended up getting a second alpha key.  So I thought about what I should do with it, should I offer it up to my friends over twitter or g+?  Then I came up with a constructive idea…  hold a contest.   The idea is to get people to provide feedback on features they would like to see in the game, so that I can compile this list in blog post form to present to the Trion folk.

The Rules

Since the video series is a youtube thing, I will be hosting the contest there.  The basics are this… go to the Episode 3 link.  Do the standard subscribe/like/comment youtube bs.  In your comment describe a feature you would like to see built into Trove.  The sky is the limit as far as features go since this is a melding of the traditional building game and an MMO.  I will only be accepting comments that actually provide a suggestion in them, and will be ignoring all “begging for the key” and otherwise trolling posts.

I will be accepting comments through 12/3/2013 and Wednesday morning I will be pulling together a list of all of the comments and the posters name.  I will be dumping this in a google doc and then using a random number generator to pick the winner.  Everyone’s comments will be featured on my blog and I will cross post that on the trove reddit as well.  Wednesday evening I will announce the winner over the various social platforms that I use.  May the random number generator be in your favor!  I just thought this would be a fun way to give away a key and hopefully provide some useful suggestions back to Trion in the process.

Trials of Ascension

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Computer Crash

This morning I really don’t have the time to devote to a proper post as I got upstairs, ate my oatmeal, drank my coffee and then noticed one of my computers was stuck in a booting up loop.  As a result I spent most of my normal blogging time trying to resurrect it.  It appears to be gone now, and I will have to figure out what happened over the weekend.  But in the meantime as I play a somber rendition of taps for it… I need to get a post together today. 

Trials of Ascension

 

File this in the “Yet Another MMO Kickstarter” category.  Trials of Ascension came across my RSS feed this morning so I felt like I needed to check it out.  Their claim is that they plan to build a “truly innovative MMORPG” and some of the things they mention wanting would definitely be different.  The tech demo they posted looks pretty spartan, but then again so did the Pathfinder tech demo. Hopefully given resources they will clean that up a bit.  In it’s current state it reminds me quite a bit of the old Atari published MMO Horizons.  Some of the features they mention wanting are…

  • Perma Death – 100 deaths and the character stays dead
  • Random Everything – no static spawns or dungeons
  • Hardcore Gameplay – video talks about wanting to challenge the players a lot
  • No Fast Travel – feels it shrinks the world too much
  • No Global Chat – whisper and shout only work within a radius
  • No Names – can’t see character or npc names
  • Magic Difficult – magic is hard to acquire but extremely powerful
  • GM Team – live GM events and interaction
  • Cooperative Crafting – players have to work together to craft items
  • No Minimap – world map but no way to tell exactly where you are
  • No Con System – no way to determine the level range of a player or mob

Not For Me, But Maybe You

So what they propose is a drastically different game than what is available currently.  I am posting this on my blog because I figure there are several of my readers who would be excited to play something like this.  The problem is… I am not.  I read the list of features they want to implement, and I remember the fervor that was whipped up before Vanguard released about it being a return to hardcore gameplay.  The problem is… players will say they want this sort of a game but they never seem to show up with their pocket books when one is released.

Maybe Kickstarter is a viable vehicle for this sort of niche vision, and potentially it can get built and find a quiet following to keep the lights on.  Mostly I am just shining a light on this existing to let folks who might want to support it know about it.  Personally nothing they are describing sounds like “fun” to me.  I like my modern conveniences and I tend to rebel against the games that don’t have them.  However that is not to say that there are not players out there who have been craving this more hardcore and primitive gaming experience.  In that case support the hell out of this game and hope it makes it through to fruition.

The Grand Freakout

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Good morning you happy denizens of the interweb tubes.  It is the beginning of yet another week, one which I have numerous meetings and projects to hopefully wrap up.  In fact I guess you would say I am stressing out over them a little bit.  Additionally this coming Wednesday is my grandmothers birthday, and since we did not make it there yesterday for cake… we are planning on taking a trip up in the evening of the 11th.  Essentially… I have a pretty busy week ahead of me.

Quest for Relief

sinex-01As I have said in the last handful of posts… my allergies are in complete and total overload right now.  It literally feels like my head is full of concrete, and breathing has been various stages of difficult throughout it all.  As a result I have been trying to find something over the counter to help with the symptoms.  The first attempt was Alka-Seltzer allergy sinus… and it most certainly worked… just a little too well.

Twelve hours after taking a doze… both myself and my wife were still experiencing the drowsy haze that it induced.  We figured that was not a medication we should ever use again… so while out running errands yesterday we picked up a couple of other options.  DayQuil is something we had taken many times in the past for colds, so as a result we picked up some of their Sinex daytime sinus relief formula.  The first dose seemed to work like a charm without any mental fog.  So when the first dose was seeming to begin wearing off I took a second one around 8 pm last night.

The Grand Freakout

Everything seemed to be going fine, and around 11 pm I decided it was time to go to bed.  Upon laying down… I started having a fairly major panic attack… or at least what I have determined is a panic attack.  I was having constant heart palpitations, and the general feeling that my pulse was just running away insanely fast.  However upon taking my pulse it was both steady and only around 76 beats per minute which seems okay for a resting, albeit freaked out heart rate.  So after tossing and turning in bed until 12:30 I decided to get up and try and take my mind off of it.

Normally I would have logged into an MMO and played a bit… but my phone was on the charger upstairs… and I was feeling entirely too lazy to do the walk up to get it.  As a result I was stuck doing something that didn’t require an authenticator.  As a result I surfed the web a bit, and caught up a bit on both my RSS feed and some forums I had neglected.  Towards the end I even played some Minecraft, which seems to be my usual go to for calming down.  I was getting extremely drowsy at this point.  So I started wrapping things up.

Itsy Bitsy Spider

As I was starting to wrap things up… I kept noticing that Allie my calico cat kept acting pecular.  She was moving around the other end of the living room in a stalking manner.  The finally settled down on curiously examining my sandals.  Every so often she would reach a paw out and bat the sandal and then return to her contemplative watch.  I knew this was generally her behavior for stalking some form of a bug… and since crickets and June bugs are both epidemic right now I was wondering if one had managed to sneak into the house.

I lifted one sandal and nothing was there that I could see.  I lifted the other sandal… and then with much shock unfurled this roughly 3 1/2 inch long grass spider.  Without thinking I used the shoe I had in my had and thwapped it.  Yes I know… spiders are good critters… but I have always had a life long mixture of fear and hatred of them.  I guess it comes from growing up in a house full of brown recluse.  The problem is… having had the shock of seeing the spider… and the action of instinctively whacking it…  my heart was back to pounding mercilessly.

Insignificant Sleep

At this point it is roughly 2:30 in the morning… so I returned to bed desperately trying to find a direction or orientation I could lay and not feel like my heart was trying to jump out of my chest.  I finally decided upon laying on my back.  I know at some point I fell asleep, because I startled away at roughly 4:30 in the morning for some reason unknown to me.  I spent the next 45 minutes trying to get back to sleep… all the while fighting the sensations I had fought all night.  At  5:15 I decided to just give up and go take a shower.

So at this point I have maybe had an hour or sleep… sitting here still in a mildly freaked out state.  Upon waking my wife had a suggestion that it was potentially some medication I had taken.  So upon reading the Sinex warning label I see the following phrase “Upset stomach, nausea, dizziness, trouble sleeping, or nervousness may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly.”  So here is hoping as the drug fades from my system that all the negative effects will go with it.  I definitely think my night seems like a textbook case of that warning line.

Struggling Through

So now at this point… I am hoping I can make it through the day on only a tiny bit of sleep.  Had I not missed part of Wednesday and Thursday due to a pretty big asthma attack… I would take a least a half day.  I know at some point… I am going to crash and crash hard.  I might try and take a cat nap over lunch.  I have several things that I need to take care of today… so here is also hoping that I can remain clear headed enough to take care of them.  When I have had a night like this… I generally tell my immediate coworkers to fact check whatever I tell them… because I may or may not be lucid.

Thankfully these nights are somewhat rare… and this is the first panic attack I have had in a good while.  In part it might be due to the fact that with the start of the school year… our nightly exercise routine has fallen to shit.  I think the exercise was helping out the panic attacks, so we need to find a way to be able to return to doing that regularly.  However I think the bulk of last night can be directly attributed to the medication.  I took my pulse a few times last night, and each time the rate was something I would expect as normal… and the beat itself was regular… so I feel as though more or less it was “all in my head”.

Wrapping Up

I hope I can make it until at least 4 pm and home safely before the big crash happens.  If I am too drowsy to drive… I will likely try and take a cat nap in one of the conference rooms before coming home.  I feel like at this point I need to psyche myself up… because ultimately I know today is going to be pure hell.  Having a second cup of coffee this morning, to hopefully act as jet fuel to start the day.  I hope you all had a much better night than I did… and I hope that you have a really good start of the week.

Livestream Rundown

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Yesterday feels like a really odd occurrence, with three different major live streams…  that were in no way actually connected.  Currently SOE Live is going on right now in Vegas and QuakeCon is going on in Dallas.  From those two we had the huge EQ Next reveal and some really sweet live gameplay footage from a dungeon in Elder Scrolls Online.  Then adding to that stack we had the normal Friday afternoon live stream from Trion worlds announcing a bunch of nifty things coming up in Rift.  As a result I have so many things to say… but it is almost difficult to organize my thoughts around them…  I guess for simplicity sake I will just start in chronological order.

Fungal Grove

 

First up in the stack was some sweet live demo footage of The Elder Scrolls from QuakeCon.  Up to this point we had seen a lot of recorded footage of the game but to the best of my knowledge this is the first real live demo of a player just poking around in the game.  Instead of just having a guy on stage moving around they took it up a notch and decided to run a live dungeon, in this case apparently one in the Ebonheart faction area called Fungal Grove.  All in all the dungeon looked really cool…  it seemed to be story driven as they moved through it providing simple objectives that the group followed.

One of the cool things is that at some point one of the players died and Paul Sage the person moderating the game play mentioned that any player can resurrect any other player using a soul gem.  This should be handy as it removes the need to have resurrection being a class specific skill.  I have to say the first person mode looks exactly like it should… seeing them playing in that and all the animations looking right made me extremely happy.  Additionally the bows seem to work like Elder Scrolls bows should.  Bow sniping from stealth totally appears to be a thing, and that should make a lot of diehard Elder Scrolls players extremely happy.

Ultimately the game looks exactly like what it is supposed to be… Elder Scrolls but Online with other players.  Additionally it does not seem like they are trying to be any of the other MMOs on the market.  The problem I had with SWTOR was that it felt and looked like World of Warcraft in space.  The storyline was awesome, but ultimately you were left playing a vanilla era WoW experience apart from that.  This looks like Skyrim with people… which is all I really wanted while playing the previous Elder Scrolls games.  I am definitely looking forward to seeing this in person.

Pixar EQMinecraft

 

Okay if you did not have a chance to watch this all yesterday… stop what you are doing and watch it right now.  This is some seriously amazing stuff and I do not want to be the one that blunts the impact.  Watched the above videos?  SOE Trolled us… and trolled us hard yesterday.  If you watched the videos… there was roughly 20 minutes of filler ahead of the meat of the demonstration.  So much frustrating and bad jokes were flying over twitter as we all experienced it in person.  A lot of us, myself included started to feel like maybe they were putting up filler because they really did not have that much to show.  We all remember the filler content from Blizzcon a few years back that clearly were meant to be Titan presentations.

Once the trolling subsided… Dave Georgeson… quite possibly the happiest man on the planet EVER…  came on stage and started easing into the presentation by showing us some concept art.  Then like a master showman… he drops the bomb on us by showing us a bunch of screenshots that look almost exactly like the concept art.  Just to prove that the game really looks like that, he does a flythrough of the very painterly zone of Ashfang.  The world honestly feels like it is made out of clay… has a very claymation appearance to it.  I was pretty questionable about how the world would look until later when he got into demos that involved motion and characters.

EQNext_HumanFemale_Emotions

If you were like me… a year or so ago you were perplexed when all the sudden SOEmote was introduced into Everquest 2.  It seemed like an extremely detailed system to build…  but made zero sense that they did it when they did it.  Apparently EQ2 was a test for what they were planning on doing with EQ Next.  The above shot shows a Human Female Caster going through all of the range of emotions.  The amount of squash and stretch in the faces gives it a very Pixar quality that I am amped to see in person.  Ultimately that was the only real aspect I was interested in about Wildstar, so EQ Next has completely blown that out of the water.

Additionally they went into detail to explain why the world looks like it does.  Apparently everything is made out of voxels, and as a result every single object in the world is destructible.  That means as you are going through a battle… you can knock out a bridge to keep forces from getting to you… or pound a mob into a column and the column breaks from the motion.  They did a few demos to show this off and it looks really cool.  The only concern I have is how jarring will it feel when the world heals itself over time (which was mentioned as a footnote in one of the demos).  I would hope that the healing occurs over a large expanse of time and gradually instead of everything magically flying back into place.

Additionally I have concerns about how this will lead to greifing.  There was a demo of the Kerran Warrior and Human Mage fighting a rock elemental… and it does some kind of giant slamming attack knocking a hole in the ground and dropping all three to a cavern below the main forest floor of Feerott.  Will players get pissed at each other and knock them down below eventually into the lava on the bottom level of the world?  Fully destructable world is awesome… but I realize there will always be a player willing to grief you, and this seems like an amazing mechanism for doing so.

I could go on and on for hours about the cool features of the game… but like I said at the start you really should just watch the video reveal for yourself.  If you believe the marketing spiel… EQ Next seems like it is going to be the game everyone has ever wanted to play.  Allowing you to just go adventuring in the world and respond to things as they happen around you.  The mobs apparently have storybricks style likes, dislikes and motivations… and the ability to grow a camp to a city over time.  So the world should be  constantly changing around you based on the influence the players have placed upon it.  There are several awesome demos that explain this concept.

The biggest part of the reveal for me is that December of this year we will be getting a taste of Everquest Next with the release of Everquest Next Landmark.  It essentially will give the players an ability to adventure through a procedurally generated world and the ability to build structures on their own private plot of land.  The details were a bit fuzzy but it sounded like they were essentially planning on crowdsourcing much of EQ Next through a series of contests that let them call out to the EQ Next Landmark builder community to help design various constructs of the game.  If they really use EQ Next Landmark as an incubation chamber for new content for EQ Next in general… they might solve the “not enough content” problem that plagues every game.

Essentially over the course of the demonstration I went from annoyed, to interested… to eventually TAKE MY MONEY NOW!!!  No matter how hard I threw money at the screen it never actually seemed to work.  If you are as intrigued as I am… you too can head over to the EQ Next homepage and sign up for beta.  I am really hoping that the fact that I am a long time EQ2 subscriber and a Station Access level member will influence when I get picked in the process.  I want to be playing EQ Minecraft now!  Ultimately I am not sure if this game will completely replace the Rift like games for me… but having a game like this would definitely replace Minecraft for me.

Rift Livestream

I am lazy and since the editor I use to write my blog posts doesn’t support twitch tv… you will just have to click the link here.  Like every Friday, yesterday Trion did their normal live stream, this time about Rift again.  As always they are a glorious rambling mess of Rift gameplay and conversation with the folks in game and on the twitch live chat.  Additionally like always there are little nuggets of information that slip out about what is coming down the pipe.  If you want to see a fully summary, head over to Rift Junkies as they have a pretty good rundown.  Be warned the stream is well over 2 hours long.

One of the cool things coming down the pipe is that they plan on revamping all of the level 50 elite dungeons to update them for level 60 players.  While I have so many mixed feelings about this, because of the crap that WoW continually did in recycling content…  it sounds like they may be doing it the right way.  The new dungeons will be treated like completely unique versions, and as a result the old dungeons will still exist in their former state.  The first of these will be “Twisted Realm of the Fae”, which is a darker more twisted version of the original dungeon.  They were pretty scant on details but I definitely like the direction they are going.

Additionally it sounds like there will be a number of new Chronicles coming out in 2.4, the first of them announced is apparently going to be a 2 man version of Infernal Dawn.  I absolutely love the Chronicles concept because one of the frustrating things about no longer being a raider… is that so much of the storyline content in these games is told over the course of a raid.  Chronicles allow two players to get in and experience the key storyline of a specific raid instance.  Apparently this one will be roughly the same difficulty level as the level 60 Queens Gambit one.

I was kind of disappointed that no more information was mentioned about the Rift 3.0 expansion and when it was slotted to arrive.  It was hinted that we might be seeing a level 60 set of Guild Quests and that would be extremely awesome.  I just hope these open up another three or so quests available to players instead of making it you do the early ones or you do the late ones.  I am still very much in love with Rift again.. and really enjoying the guild and everything it has become over the last few weeks.  So many proud feelings about seeing House Stalwart ride again in all its glory.

Wrapping Up

I got a super late start on the morning… didn’t end up waking up until 10 am… so as a result this came out extremely late as well.  I need to get on with my day and get up and around.  Here is hoping your weekend started a little bit more smoothly than mine.  I had a great night doing our first every guild League of Legends Beginner night.  While there were not that many people who partook, I am hoping if we do it again we will be able to drag more players in the moba madness.  It had been roughly 2 months since I had played, so it was fun breaking back into it.