Survival Archives - Page 7 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Elder Dungeons

April 10, 2014 by Belghast

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

Trials of Ascension

October 24, 2013 by Belghast

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.

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.