Sandbox Archives - Page 30 of 30 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Livestream Rundown

August 3, 2013 by Belghast

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.

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.

Goodbye Granite Falls

July 18, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was night three of good sleep after taking a quick walk before bed. Additionally it has broken loose the log jam that was my weight loss plateau. As of this morning I was down another three pounds since starting the walking. The weird thing about the sleep however is that I am pretty much dead to the world. I didn’t dream, I don’t remember sleeping… I just went to bed and woke up with the alarm and everything between is a void. I seem to be getting rest because I am not absolutely dead tired in the morning… it is just an odd experience since I normally dream and remember the dreams.

Don’t Starve

Over the last few nights one of my friends has been playing the hell out of this game, so last night I decided to fire it up and give it a shot as well. It has been compared to turn of the century film version of Minecraft… but quite honestly I didn’t have that feeling at all. Essentially “Minecraft” to me means taking raw materials and building something permanent. So for me Terraria is a Minecraft game… but Cube World for example is not… regardless of how much it looks like it.

It took me awhile to adjust my expectations… what we have here instead of a building game is a survival game. Something I find far less interesting. Essentially you have to gather resources during the day, and survive the night all while not going crazy or starving. You gain sanity by standing near the fire each night, and as you get more insanity you start to see hallucinations everywhere. I’ve heard that eventually the hallucinations will attack you if it gets bad enough.

I can’t say I really enjoyed myself massively… but the gameplay instead fell into the mildly entertaining category. I think at my core I am a base builder… and the lack of the ability to build a permanent basecamp to go adventuring from really harmed my enjoyment of the game. I have seen screenshots that seem to suggest that later you are able to build fortifications to keep your camp safe. Additionally at least at low levels, it seems like you are almost penalized by trying to keep returning to a central base. Since in essence you can plunk down a fire anywhere you happen to be when night comes.

The other big problem I have with the game is a lack of permanence. The goal of the game is to “beat” each world by solving some puzzle that allows you to progress to the next one. So even if I could build some form of a base, I would be abandoning it every time I moved to the next tier in the game. Even in Minecraft when I decided to venture out and build a new base camp… I know that I always have the previous ones to return to if I so choose. Essentially it seems like the game has all the survival hassle of Minecraft, without the elements that make it fun for me… the wholesale world building.

The game is well designed, plays extremely smoothly and has a great retro look and feel that is immediately appealing. If you really like the survival aspect of Minecraft and similar games than this might be just the thing for you. I only managed to survive 3 nights on my first foray because I kept trying to engage in combat apparently too early. So that throws another money wrench in my enjoyment… to be happy in a game I need to be killing something regularly. My friend is having a blast with it, so it might very well be down your alley… however it goes in the “not really for me” bucket.

Goodbye Granite Falls

Between the laptop lunch fun and the beginning of last night I managed to wrap up the last of Stonefield with Baby Bel over Faeblight. The tail end of that zone is much more enjoyable than I remember. I am sure it was equally epic when I ran it originally… but there have been some tweaks that seem to make it flow better. Firstly I remember there being a gap where I was uncertain exactly where to go… so the transition up to the camp near the Phoenix Gate seems to be messaged better. Additionally the “rumble” with Guardian forces at the tail end of the zone… actually occurs in Stonefield now. Previously it sent you across the bridge into Scarwood Reach… where it was extremely easy to get into mobs way too high for your level.

So major Kudos for them for fixing the flow of this tail end content. Additionally the whole opening of the Phoenix gate felt far much more epic to me after having done the Rise of the Phoenix raid instance. I guess I am in less of a rush this time through the game… and as a result find myself enjoying the content much more. I still have problems with a few things… like Meridian and Sanctum still do not seem worthy of being capitol cities… but there is enough good always to make up for the few frustrating spots.

Has the Must Haves

Essentially when I was working on my MMO must haves list… I came to the realization when a friend asked me… that Rift is the only game on the market that has almost every single bullet point I listed. While I am looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online… it also seems like a vastly different kind of game… much like The Secret World is. So as a result… I feel like even after that game launches… Rift will still be my traditional MMO crush. I feel like I will always be playing rift at least some of the time.

There is just so much to like about the game, and so many different options for things to do. Especially now with the gem store… you can expand your character in ways you never could before. Recently for example I picked up Artifacing for Belghast over on Deepwood. This adds to his already existing crafts of Armorsmithing, Weaponcrafting and the three harvests of Butchering, Mining and Foraging. At this point it is just easier to add additionally tradeskills to that one character than to try and level up new harvesting abilities elsewhere. The one thing I really wish however is that we had cross shard mail between our own characters.

Better Mentoring

One of the sore points right now is that mentoring should be a bit easier than it is. I am not talking about lowering your own level… because that seriously could not be any easier. What I am looking for is the ability to invite any 4 friends to a group… click a button… and have it queue us for a random dungeon to meet our level range. Right now we essentially have to mentor manually to the lowest common denominator… sometimes it lets us queue for a dungeon… other times we have to remember where the hell the dungeon entrance is and run in manually.

One of the most powerful things about Rift is that it is functionally possible to group with your friends regardless of shard or level range. Trion really needs to put some effort into ironing these tools out to make it a much simpler proposal. I want to be able to group a bunch of people together and see a list essentially of things we can do… and then queue for something on that list without having to do much fiddling. When we have done this manually there is usually a lot of trial and error until we get everyone in the right zone at the right time at the right level. Streamlining this process would be a massive boon.

Wrapping Up

Well I have pissed away another morning rambling on about nothing much. Now has come the time for me to gather up my now empty coffee cup, run it to the kitchen and get on with the day. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope mine personally is far more uneventful. While I was on vacation, nothing much happened. But every day this week since I have been back… there has been a crisis. Yesterday for example McAfee decided out of the blue to mark an FTP Server Daemon as a “Potentially Unwanted Program” and in the process quarantined it… taking down a number of automated processes with it. I just want a nice calm day where I can actually remove items from my task list, instead of chasing down fires.

Homeward Bound

July 11, 2013 by Belghast

This morning as I sit at the keyboard typing away… my laptop remains essentially the only thing not yet packed and ready too be loaded into our rental. I have a mixture of excitement and trepidation… excitement because I will be so glad to be home… and trepidation because I detest flying… and know I have to deal with a 3 hour flight from Newark to Tulsa. Hopefully everything at home is just fine, and that our animals are all happy and healthy, and that the house sitter had no real issues.

Holding Pattern

The most frustrating thing about this trip so far has been that while I had all the time in the world to do anything I liked… I did not have stable enough internet to do much of it. Sunday night when we finally arrived at our hotel room, the internet was awesome… while not quite up to what I am used to at home… it was more than sufficient. Monday the cast of an off Broadway show arrived… and from that point onwards regardless of the time of day… most everything has been unplayable if I could even get connected in the first place.

It feels like so much has been going on this week, with the anniversary events happening in The Secret World and a release of a new content update. Then over in Guild Wars 2 there is quite a lot of stuff happening as well. Finally I am still in the thrall of my Rift resurgence… and for whatever reason this is the game that seems to hate the hotel internet the most. I will start off with a decent ping, but very quickly it degrades into completely unplayable. Often times I ultimately just ended up disconnecting and not being able to get back on afterwards.

Very quickly I realized that I would have to just wait to do much of anything until I got home today. As a result I feel like I have been trying to find things that did not necessarily involve an internet connection to play them. Unfortunately while my laptop is loaded full of MMOs… it is sadly lacking in the single player and offline departments. With the Hotel Internet not being super stable… I can’t really download anything from steam that I have in my archives.

A Game of Cubes

Cube World was released last week sometime… but the store went almost immediately offline… and stayed that way for the majority of the week. When the ability to purchase the game came back… they had taken the new accounts sign-up feature offline. So it became a daily activity of checking whether or not this was open for registration, and finally on Saturday night… before we left for Albany… the registrations opened up and I was able to grab ahold of a copy. This game has served as my mostly offline shiny new thing to play with on this trip.

The game as a whole is much harder than I was expecting it to be. Initially I was thinking this would be much more Minecraft than it has ended up being. Essentially you start out in a completely randomly generated world… with little to no ability to actually kill anything. At first you end up following around packs of NPC adventurers that will help you combat the bad guys you encounter in the world. As a result… the process of getting from “I suck at everything” to “I can survive mostly on my own” feels a little tedious.

I am not sure if this is just another game that loathes melee players or not, because generally ranged tends to be easier as a whole than melee in most games like this. I detest finger wigglers. so of course I had to go for sword and board… though over time I have migrated to dual wield. The block mechanic works well enough… but only for insanely short periods of time. When you are dealing with monsters that seem to be able to do non-stop special moves… it just isn’t enough to make the difference.

My biggest complaint thus far is that the torch feels inadequate for illuminating anything really. It creates roughly a 5 block by 5 block bubble of light around you… but when it comes to exploring anything like a cave… it is extremely hard to see where you are going. I am hoping that over time you can get upgrades that increase your radius of light similar to how you can in Terraria. If you intend to craft metal upgrades… you will spend a lot of time looking for caves, fighting bats and destroying iron nodes. As a result the lighting system feels extremely limiting.

The major complaint I have had with the system… is that I feel it would have been better if it supported a building system like Minecraft or Terraria. I like exploring… but I also like having bases of operation that gives me a feeling that I am actually changing the world around me. The exploration aspect of the game is great, and I love encountering monsters I have never seen before… and often times dying to them the first time. But I wish I could be building things in the world as well. If this game could be blended with Minecraft the hybrid would probably be the most addicting game ever.

Fort Belghast

As a direct result of playing Cube World… and this feeling that I wanted to be shaping my world… I have spent a lot of time alternating back and forth between exploring in that game… and building over in Minecraft. I started a brand new world and the seed I chose had a really nice shallow cave system. I started off boxing that in and using it as a prebuilt base until I started constructing a proper fort on top of it. Right now the underground area has a few large chambers, with a structure growing up into the little fort that you can see in the image above.

I created an elevated bridge style entrance, because it allows me to see what is surrounding my base before exiting out into the dangerous world. Also when there are a large number of zombies or similar around me… it funnels them into one single block place for farming. Additionally if I absolutely have to… I can bail over the wall to escape something. Right now I am quarrying stone from below the base to build up the tower system above. As you can see in the above picture… the tower is currently woefully unfinished.

I hope to do some terracing eventually to clean up the area and make the approach to my fort a little nicer looking. I have really not done that much exploration… my focus has really been on building up a solid base of operations. Eventually I will start a mine system below my base where I can hopefully get plenty of ores and other special resources. I mostly play Minecraft to build structures… but for whatever reason it feels more real to me.. if I do it on survival. I could be just as happy playing on creative… since all I really want to do is build nifty things… but the world then feels completely dead.

Homeward Bound

I cannot express in words… how happy I will be to leave this area and get back home. I miss essentially everything… my animals… my comfy sofa… a world that makes sense to me. I’ve found plenty of interesting things to do to kill my time… but it was not really the grand voyage of discovery I was hoping for. I know the workshop my wife attended, has been massively useful for her… and each night she has come home with pictures of the labs and activities they did. So the major focus of this trip was a complete success… and my being here… was just to make sure that happened.

I came on this trip just because I wanted to make sure my wife could attend this workshop. While she is a trooper and an amazing road warrior… she would have struggled with driving in this environment. She doesn’t really like driving period… and Tulsa traffic is far more sane and rational than anything I have experienced here. Her lack of depth perception would have been a major issue in this environment where I am essentially constantly scanning both sides of the street watching for some idiot that is about to dart out into the middle of traffic (as has happened so many times I have lost count). So ultimately regardless of how I have felt about this vacation… I feel like my role in it was a success.

So essentially today I have to check us out of the hotel at noon and then figure out a way to kill 3 hours of time until I pick my wife up from class. We are ferrying two other classmates to the airport… turning in our rental… and catching a 5 pm flight to Newark. We have a 45 minute wait until we catch another flight to Tulsa that should take 3 hours. So hopefully by about 9:30-10ish tonight I will be home in my own bed. After the hotel bed all these nights… our comfy bed at home will be amazing.

Wrapping Up

This has been an interesting experiencing even if it has not been super exciting. Time for me to do some googling to figure out how exactly I will kill the rest of the day. Thinking I will play some Minecraft until around noon… pack up the rental and then set off and do something for the rest of the afternoon. Elo was telling me about another mall with another game store… so I will likely set my sights on that. I hope you all have a great day, and that it is relatively uneventful.