Tales of the Aggronaut

Honor the Green

January 17, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I managed to wrap up Greenshade and move on to the next zone Malabal Tor. The funny thing about “leveling” through content in the post 50 game is that you lose all focus of how far you have actually come. When I started playing again recently I was sitting about Champion rank 115, but at this very moment after doing the introductory quest line in Malabal Tor I am sitting at 141. Both numbers seem like utter nonsense in the grand scheme of things, other than the fact that I am constantly getting incrementally more useful. That said the mobs around me are getting incrementally more crafty at all times as well, but I am uncertain where the theoretical “max level” at least for gear advancement sits. As of right now the highest level thing I have seen on any of the guild vendors is 160, which doesn’t really tell me if that is the actual max, or just the maximum that is reasonable to craft. I have done a shockingly minimal amount of research so far during this return to Elder Scrolls Online, because in truth… I had a path laid out before me already and that is to simply keep questing. It might be madness but I really would like to finish up Aldmeri Dominion and then quest my way through all of Ebonheart before starting any of the DLC content. Considering that the DLC lets you start it at literally any moment… I am guessing this is pure madness and not something most players do.

Back to the whole having no basis on how far I have actually come in progress… I was absolutely thinking that Malabal Tor was going to be the last zone in the AD content, and apparently I was completely wrong. After this zone I still have Reaper’s March which is fine by me because I am actually enjoying myself in this content way more than I ever thought I would. It is not exactly a surprise to anyone who has read my blog for very long… but I am not a huge fan of elves. My friend Tam has this theory that every player is inherently either a Dwarf of an Elf and the two paths rarely cross. I am absolutely a Dwarf and I tend to love all of the normal aesthetically wonderful things about Dwarfdom. That said the Elder Scrolls setting as a whole does some weird things with what is and is not an Elf… since technically both Dwarves and Orcs are elves in this setting. Essentially in Elder Scrolls you have the races of “men”, the races of the “mer”, and then the beastmen which probably have a similar name or at least should. Now in Skyrim… I go out of my way to kill Thalmor on sight… even if it is ultimately going to cause me issues. In The Elder Scrolls Online I find out that the Thalmor are largely a militant group of “Elven Supremacists” that most people don’t like… and often times actively hate. This subtle difference makes it significantly easier for me to actually like the elves while playing through the elf dominated content.

That said… I have also found a certain Kinship with the Khajiit… which was to be expected, but also the Bosmer which I was not entirely prepared for. I mean I have always liked the concept of the Green Pact and the existence of cannibal elves. However while actually questing through the Bosmer centric story content, it has been interesting to struggle with the same weird thin line that they do… of choosing what is common sense and what is honoring “The Green”. It is a testament to just how damned good the storytelling is in this game to get a notorious elf killer like myself… to convert to if not love… but at least a begrudging respect for the folks that don’t belong to the Thalmor. Of note… if given the chance I would still absolutely run around cheerfully slaughtering Thalmor. I am extremely happy though that the game has given me ample opportunity to at least embarrass a few of them for showing them to be the unsteady zealots that they really are. The only thing that I would have liked to have seen the game do… is throw in additional options for acknowledging the fact that you are an outlander while questing through the other two factions content. The highlight of yesterday however was dealing with Hermaeus Mora, one of my favorite of the Daedra… but also one of the more deadly. He presented me with a deal that I could not refuse… that I really wanted to refuse but felt the ramification of not taking it would be far worse. While at some point I know turtle mode will finish… I have a feeling that I will still remain engaged to the storytelling of this game for the near future and this is about to be my “off night” game of choice.

Deep Turtle

January 16, 2017 by Belghast

Lately I have been going through an anxiety ridden period where I just find it super stressful to be around people on a regular basis. This started over the break, and for some extent I pulled myself out of it a little bit around the time I went back to work. However increased stresses in that realm seems to have caused a relapse. As a result I am firmly back in what I refer to as “turtle mode” where I duck my head into my shell and largely forget the world exists. As a result I am taking every possible excuse to avoid doing things that have lots of people involved with them, and I missed both raids this week… both with completely reasonable reasons but reasons that I probably could have avoided were it not for my anxiety desperately clinging to them. Sure I had a window to fix, but I could have probably been done in time for the raid. Sure I dozed off on the sofa, but had I drank a monster or some coffee I probably would have been fine there too. The excuse was too convenient not to take it when the reality was I am simply having trouble processing existing around other human beings.

When I am in deep turtle mode it is all I can really do to exist on a daily basis, let alone have to pretend to be a normal human being. Which I realize is a bit odd given that I am generally a gregarious and welcoming sort, and have become famous for opting people. There are times where I just can’t be “rockstar bel” as one of my friends has referred to it. There is time when I just need to hide out and pretend the other human beings don’t exist. Generally speaking when I am in this mode I play a lot of Minecraft or Skyrim… or in the case of what has happened over the weekend return to playing an MMO that I really don’t have much of a social structure in these days. Awhile back I reinstalled Elder Scrolls Online and this weekend I stared playing it extremely seriously. I am enjoying myself immensely and other than the occasional message from folks who are also dipping their toes in as well and just happy to see a familiar face.

I have to say the game feels amazing coming back to it after a significant time gone. The game has released a ton of DLC/Expansion content since release and there are basically two ways of playing it. Either you buy the DLC outright, where there is a deal that can be had that includes the four major DLC packs for 5500 crowns… which is $39.99. The other option is to subscribe to the game which immediately unlocks all of the content… so long as you keep an active subscription. However there is another reason to go for the ESO Plus subscription option… because it magically fixes your bag situation. At launch one of my key problems was trying to keep enough bag space to be actively looting crafting ingredients, while at the same time picking up gear that drops from things I was killing. With the subscription plan it adds what seems to be a separate bottomless crafting inventory, that items simply go to automatically when you loot them. This means you can finally afford to loot all of those random crates and barrels full of fish and berries because it all gets whisked away off into the ether into a storage bin you never actually have to mess with.

The other awesome thing that has happened in the period of time I have not really be playing is that they have shifted the Veteran Rank system to be the Champion Point system. At first I thought this was a one for one swap over to a sort of Skyrim-esc celestial system based around the Thief, Warrior and Mage. However it seems to be way more than that, in that they are essentially an account wide system of alternate expansion much like the Planar abilities in Rift or Paragon points in Diablo 3. That means if you log into your level 7 alt like I did yesterday… I had 130 champion points to spend making me able to do some pretty insane stuff at low levels. Sure this greatly trivializes the leveling process for alts… but I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. In truth it makes me far more likely to level alts knowing that I have a lot of the same benefits, on them as I do on my main character. That said the collections and cosmetic systems also exist at an account level so you can keep using your favorite mounts and pets… or anything you have unlocked through the crown shop. All in all I have been happy to fade quietly back into a game that I still fine immensely immersive at least from a single player level.

Torn on Switch

January 13, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was of course the Nintendo Switch reveal stream… that seemed to occur for pretty much everyone at an extremely awkward time. For me personally it kicked off about 10 pm, so I was able to tune in as I was winding down a night of running Nightfalls (and sometimes failing) in Destiny with Squirrel and Jex. I talked a bit yesterday about my mixed feelings regarding the Switch and its launch on twitter. Every fiber of my being wants this console, but there is also the logic center of my brain that keeps reminding me of the not amazing track record I have with Nintendo consoles. I will get more into that later, but first to talk about the details we learned last night. The Switch is in fact coming a lot faster than I expected with a launch window of March 3rd 2017, or for those who think in these terms…. if I am counting correctly 8 weeks from the Friday I am writing this post on. In the short term I will be able to play the console personally in a few weeks at Pax South, and there will be a series of demo events happening in “major” cities… which means nowhere event vaguely close to the fly over country where I live. They have confirmed two launch titles… the first of which is 1, 2, Switch which is another one of those Nintendo gimmick games like Wii Sports that while extremely fun is in large part a tech demo for all of the new “innovations” they have woven into the new system. The launch title that matters however is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Now yesterday I said that a lot of it was going to ultimately come down to price. The first leaked price of $250 seemed like a viable option and potentially even a day one and pre-order system for me. Shortly after that another price started circulating which was $350… and that was definitely going to be a wait and see price point. The final reveal targeted things at $299 which is a figure that I am not quite sure about one way or the other. I feel like ultimately… we are going to need to see more details about what actual titles will be available at launch. I am not sure if Zelda is enough to push this console for me at the start. However I also know if the Nintendo track record holds… this means that if you did not pre-order your console it is likely going to be next Christmas before there is a reasonable flow of units to the shelves to allow folks to make that late impulse buy. I remember when the Wii launched in November, it was late February before I even saw one on a store shelf, and even then it was probably mid summer before they were a regular enough occurrence to warrant not noticing. Nintendo is extremely horrible with supply chain management and producing anywhere near the right number of units to meet the current demand. This is evidenced by the fact that you quite literally still can’t find 3DS units on store shelves, from a drought that started around Thanksgiving. Similarly you essentially have zero shot in hell of finding a Nintendo Classic console yet.

Where my brain begins to temper my desire to buy this console is when I think about my general track record with Nintendo. Growing up I was absolutely a Nintendo fanboy, getting my Nintendo Classic shortly after release and my Super Nintendo a few months after launch as well. Similarly I saved up my money and purchased a Gameboy within the first six months. So when the Nintendo 64 launched in college I was similarly smitten with the console, and spent way more money than we should have been spending at the time for the unit given our already strapped college life existence. While enamored with the early titles through Zelda… an event occured that pretty much killed me caring about the later titles. PC Gaming got absolutely amazing, and I got my 3DFX 2 card which made everything that I was seeing on the Nintendo 64 start to look extremely sluggish and primitive. So instead of caring about Goldeneye, I was playing GL Quake. The other problem the Nintendo 64 had was the lack of role-playing game support, and when Squaresoft took the Final Fantasy franchise to the Playstation I followed it. That said I have so much nostalgia for those early days of Nintendo, so I keep purchasing the consoles hoping to rekindle some of that magic. In the end however of my consoles they tend to be the ones that gather dust.

The other huge problem that I have found is that my life really does not fit a mobile console that well. I have both a 3DS and a Vita and they maybe see some play time once a week as I am looking for something to do before falling asleep. The Wii U seemed like an awesome idea, but the limited range on the unit made it largely useless to me. My expectation was that I would be able to play the screen unit wherever in the house I wanted to, and maybe even out on the back patio. The reality however is that I need to remain within roughly 8 feet of the unit to keep a stable connection. So as a result currently the unit is set up in the bedroom so I can play it from bed… but that makes for awkward gaming any other time. Ultimately I think the real problem for me with Nintendo is that they seem to be extremely focused on gimmicks. The Switch as a console is a gimmick, and while I don’t think it will be the frustrating experience for me that the Wii controls were… I definitely think it is going to attempt desperately to function in methods other than your standard game console. This focus on gimmickry also seems to come at a massive cost in processing power and graphical performance. While Zelda Breath of the Wild looked gorgeous in its own way… watching the footage last night it definitely felt like a game that was not quite as detailed as the current generation of console games. While the Switch has courted Bethesda to put Skyrim on their new console… Skyrim is also a seven year old game at this point. In the montage of games… I didn’t see much in the way of modern ports which concerns me that we are setting up for another Wii U situation… where the console is simply not powerful enough to run the style of games that the majority of publishers are creating. That said… you buy a Nintendo console for the first party games and I really want to see some more firm times on when more of those are releasing before committing.

Distant Horizon

January 12, 2017 by Belghast

I've entered this place where nothing really new on the horizon interests me in MMOs. Expansions yes, new content yes… new games no

— Bel 🆚 Pax South (@belghast) January 10, 2017

There was a sequence of events that lead me to make the above tweet on Tuesday, namely reading a similar sequence of tweets from Syl and the resulting blog post. In truth I have felt this way for awhile, where I have been hyper interested in extension content being added onto the games I am already playing, but not extremely interested in anything new coming down the pike. The launch of Elder Scrolls Online was really the last big event that wrapped me up into the hope, hype, and heartbreak cycle that is the launch of a new MMO property. I got swept up a bit in Wildstar but that was never really “my game” no matter how much I wanted to try and make it be for the sake of hanging out and playing with friends. This is not to say that I have not tried a bunch of different games that have released since, but they have all largely left me wanting for this or that feature… or similarly wanting to remove other features. The latest boom in the MMO industry has been among a crop of games largely coming from South Korea and they all seem to share a vision of MMOs that doesn’t set that well with me. Not sure if it is the character design or the focus on eventually funneling players towards a murder box, but whatever the case I tend to bounce pretty hard with ArcheAge being the only game in that larger general classification that I play on a somewhat regular basis.

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As is always the case with our community… when you bring up an issue folks tend to come out of the woodwork to help you with it. I have to say this is one of the most charming aspects of the world I have gotten myself wrapped up in, even if sometimes I am just shooting off my mouth into the void. As is to be expected there were a lot of games suggested on the near horizon, and most of them I had already mentally bounced from for one reason or another based on past experiences with similarly constructed experiences. However buried in that pack of games was one that I had not even heard of… not that I am actively looking for new MMO properties. One of my blogger friends Isarii mentioned a game that he was interested in, and was just about to release an interview with called Ashes of Creation. Like any game I have not heard of I started googling and came across a sequence of videos showing off various aspects of the world, and I am not entirely certain what peaked my interest directly but something did. Yesterday they also released a much more detailed Q&A video answering some questions from the community, that when taken with the interview with Isarii fills in a bunch of details about the intent of the game. I will say off the bat there are a lot of things that give me hope, and a lot of things that give me potential heartache.

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The description of the game weaves a pretty lofty tale, hitting most of the features that I have loved from other games. In the Q&A they talk about the lack of hard faction boundaries, and a part of me almost audibly said “Hell Yeah” at that moment. However they also talk about this dynamic world with ever changing events based on a node system that allows each node in the world to change and effect the nodes around it. They talk about the engine of change being conquest and sieges… and that a guild holding a castle will have ramifications on the land surrounding it. This all sounds amazingly cool on paper but it is also something I am extremely gun shy about. This has been the pitch of essentially every PVP centric open world sandbox to date, that the players make lasting effects on the world. What ends up happening instead is that the game devolves into a PVP gankfest for at least the first six months, because there is a certain player base that the idea of ganking defenseless players seems really exciting to. So while ArcheAge for example is a perfectly reasonable game to play right this moment, it was an extremely toxic game for its first year of life… until said toxic players were either policed away or got bored and shifted to the next shiny object to take a giant crap on. So my big concern is exactly what Ashes of Creation is going to do to ensure this doesn’t happen.

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One of the bullet points talked about in Isarii’s interview is that they have a three phased flagging system, and that they hope it will help mitigate this issue. There will be a non-combatant “green” state, a combatant “purple” state, and corrupt “red” state. The corruption system sounds an awful lot like going rogue in The Division, or the pirate system in ArcheAge. Intrepid Studios talks about PVP being optional, but in the description of what a corrupted player is… they mention something that I stuck on mentally. I am going to quote a section of the interview for the sake of pointing this out a little easier.

Players can kill Combatants without repercussions, and are encouraged to do so, since dying while a Combatant means you suffer reduced death penalties. Where this changes is when a Combatant kills a Non-Combatant. In this case, the Combatant is Corrupt, and acquires a Corruption Score (which is accrued based on a number of different parameters, including the level differential of their freshly slain victim). This Corruption Score can be worked off with effort through a few mechanics, but the primary means of getting rid of it is through death.

The particular phase that is bothering me a bit is “when a Combatant kills a Non-Combatant” because in a traditional MMO flagging system this shouldn’t be a possible thing. “Green” players are traditionally not able to be attacked, and if this is a game where that is not the case we might already have our first stumbling block for me personally. Now of note… there is a lot of nuance here that I may simply not be seeing. Like for example in ArcheAge, as a completely non-combatant player you can find yourself in open pvp flagged zones… that entering will make you able to be attacked. So in the case of Ashes of Creation, if there are certain hostile areas that are openly contested… a player would know that entering there could put them at danger. I don’t however want to see the bodies of helpless players littering the ground in an otherwise peaceful zone like Elwynn Forest because they died at the hand of a ganker on an abusive power trip.

The idea behind this game feels like one that no one has really been able to implement correctly. If it works well it could be amazing, but generally speaking it is the player that is the ultimate unraveller of the best made plans. However all of that said, I am interested enough to have done enough reading and watching to be able to post this post… so I have to say I am curious about the evolution of this game. At this very moment everything is so fluid that I am not really certain if the end product is going to be something that I want to play. If will say that right now it is going to be extremely difficult to implement most of the things they are talking about, but I wish them all the luck in the world at trying to translate the vision into video game. There are a lot of parts of the Q&A session that remind me of the ill fated Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto. The problem with an idea… is once shared it mutates. So when I read the design manifesto it filled my head with all sorts of ideas and dreams of a better game that the reality never came close to living up to. Watching the Q&A session for Ashes of Creation did the same thing… filled my head with a bunch of fevered dreams about all of the things that I wish I could have seen in this MMO or that. It is this whirlwind of “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas that have been collected and carefully curated into the game these folks always wanted to work on. However there is always a chunk of nuance that is lost when you speak your vision, or commit it to paper. In doing so… that vision loses some of the sharp edges and becomes much more hazy. Based on the goals set out… this game could either be literally the game I always wanted to play… or yet another disappointment that cannot quite live up to my technicolor dreams of the way things “should work”. Regardless… in the coming months and years… as likely will be the case… I am going to follow Ashes of Creation as it evolves and see if it can deliver on any of my hopes and is worthy of my hype. All the while of course being extremely afraid of that heartache that often comes afterwards.