Tales of the Aggronaut

No Love For Tanks

August 4, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out in the verse… yeah I just got finished reading a post about Firefly… ignore me. This is another one of those “doing things under NDA that I can’t talk about” weekends… so as a result I usually am pretty scant in what I feel I CAN blog about. Thankfully SOE Live is still giving me news to react to so that is mostly what I will be doing. Additionally I seem to be down another couple of pounds as of this morning which would make 54 total since I started this latest foray of sensible living. I am fairly proud if I do say so myself.

No Love For Tanks

I have so much gratitude for Curse gaming for having the forethought to record all of the SOE Live sessions that Sony themselves did not have the foresight to live stream over twitch.tv. As a result of their work I bring you the Class Panel video 1 and 2… and my commentary on it. I watched this last night along with a few other friends and we pooled our comments over a shared chat channel. My rabid fanboyism from Friday quickly turned into quiet terror when they started unfolding their vision for the game as a whole. I have to say most of it sounded almost word for word like the pitch we heard leading up to the launch of Guild Wars 2.

To preface the part that scares me… they talk about a concept of “everyone taking care of themselves” and “No tanks or healers”. Which always seems to read to me as the pipe dream of every dps that has ever played a game and been bitter that they are not treated as seriously as the tank and healer characters. I am totally fine with not having a strict reliance on tanking or healing… but it scares me that they plan yet again to abolish these roles. My mind is filled with nothing but visions of the giant chaotic mess that grouping in Guild Wars 2 was.

Tanks LIKE Tanking

The component that designers bent on this path seem to completely miss… Tanks enjoy tanking and Healers enjoy healing. We do not feel like we are forced into those roles… those are the roles we assign ourselves happily and willingly. I LEVEL as a tank because I enjoy tanking mobs, it feeds off my protective nature and I know many tanks that feel exactly the same way. Additionally I have lots of friends who are extremely nurturing people, that will always gravitate towards playing whatever the feel to be the most supportive healing class because they want to in equal parts “nurture” their friends.

These are not some artificial roles that we have been forced into by bad game design… these are roles that fill our need to protect or nurture or support in a game. Not everyone wants to wildly mash buttons and destroy the targets as fast as they can. I feel as though there is a certain kind of game designer that just fundamentally does not get this drive. At one point in the video one of the designers describes the gameplay as “one person is forced to focus all the damage on them, another is forced to heal that person, then everyone else pretty much gets to do whatever they want and have fun”. It is almost as if the designer does not realize that tanking and healing ARE fun for the players that really like to do it.

I don’t view tanking as a sacrifice, I view it as feeding into my most primal nature and my inborn need to protect my friends. I would be willing to expect that all of the amazing healers who have supported me over the years did not feel forced into that role. Game design like this makes me think that these folks simply do not understand the amazingly symbiotic relationship between a tank and a healer, and how awesome it is when you get to a point that both players can predict the actions of the other. Maybe I am just lucky that I have had a long line of healers that I got to this point with… and I simply wish designers understood this better.

Granted there are definitely times where I don’t want to tank… and I am sure there are times where the healers don’t want to heal. That is completey cool and why we have modern gameplay that allows us to switch the roles around freely. However I do not feel that the problem is the roles themselves. Without roles combat feels like a chaotic mess, and simply something I do not enjoy. I was on board with Guild Wars 2, until the moment I did my first dungeon and saw that zergging a boss down from the resurrection point was a completely valid tactic. There is nothing fun about that kind of gameplay for me… and I am scared now that after seeing this amazing concept that we will end up with that sort of haphazard grouping.

A Solo Experience

Right now I feel as thought I will still enjoy playing Everquest Next, so much about the game seems completely amazing. I just fear that it might be a completely single player experience for me. If Landmark provides a random world with random storybricks encounters that I can explore freely… that might be seriously enough to keep me happy regardless of how the larger gameplay evolves. If EQ Next is nothing more than Minecraft evolved I will play the hell out of it and be exceedingly happy to do so. I just am not a huge fan of what sounds to be their design mantra of abolishing roles again… since that went so tragically wrong with Guild Wars 2.

I am extremely amped to get into the beta experience and build all sorts of nifty things in Landmark. I still go on massive Minecraft binges where I will do nothing but that game for a weekend and build entire cities… only to abandon the map and start from scratch again when the next creative urge hits. All I have ever really wanted is to have the Minecraft freedom with a better game wrapped around it. Having that kind of randomly generated and ever changing world, with awesome MMO controls mixed in would keep me happy for hundreds of hours of gameplay. I could not be happier if I logged into my email and saw a beta invite right now.

So I am very much still on board with the notion of EQ Next… but I just heard the first things that deeply concerned me. Here is hoping that this turns out to be more marketing spin than actual gameplay. I feel as though there are a lot of dps out there with chips on their shoulders against tanks and healers… and that every so often one of these design schemes that tries to undo the roles of teamplay comes along. Here is hoping they will dial it back before release. They did mention that they would support “defensive” gameplay, and depending on what that means I would be happy with the protector role in another fashion even if it is not gather up all the hate and soake the damage. I guess only time and subsequent releases will tell how this shakes out.

Wrapping Up

Well I have the lore panels to view, and that might be fodder for tomorrows posts. Additionally we need to pick up the house today and I want to get that done sooner than later so I can piddle around in Rift and the thing that must not be named. I hope you all have had a great weekend and are prepared for the work week ahead of us. Additionally I hope you have been as amped as I am to see all the yummy footage coming out of SOE Live, Quake Con and the Rift stream. I love Norrath, so no matter how frustrated I might be with a given direction they seem to be taking… I will always give the game a shot because of my love of the world.

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.

Everquest Current

August 2, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning everyone, hopefully you got a bit more sleep than I did last night. I ended up with another minor round of panic attacks and as a result did not actually make it to bed until after 1 am. However I seem to be mostly functional. Thanks a ton for all the warm wishes I received yesterday through either the blog, twitter, google+ or in game. We didn’t do anything really insane… just went out to dinner and then came back and chilled out downstairs. I piddled around a bit in Rift and eventually made my way over to the SOE Live twitch stream.

What Happens in Vegas

Normally we think of what happens in Vegas… stays in Vegas… however at SOE apparently what happens gets live broadcast over Twitch.tv for free. Having been a long fan of the SOE franchises, namely Everquest 2 I figured I would tune in last night for a bit and see if there was anything interesting happening. I have been immensely curious to find out what is coming down the pipe with Everquest Next. I have so many fears about how the game will turn out… sandbox can mean so many things and not all of them good for the long time survival of a game. So I like many tuned in thinking I might see a teaser for EQNext before the official unveil at Noon PST today.

You could tell that pretty much the only thing the crowd wanted to hear about WAS EQ Next and when Smedley took the stage… he did a pretty thorough job of baiting and teasing the crowd. However he did bring out the very famous Jeremy Soule of Skyrim fame to showcase his work on the Everquest Next theme. Within moments of it happening in the live broadcast the above theme was available on Youtube. I have to say… I am more than a little disappointed. Granted this is “sketch” as they called it, an early synth only version of the theme… but quite honestly it feels a little generic for lack of the better word.

If you listen to the Everquest 1 and Everquest 2 themes… there is definitely a shared lineage there. I expected this theme to carry on in a new way with the original “Everquest Notes” much in the same way that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim take the same skeletal core of “TES Notes” and make them their own. But what we have is something vastly different and really does not feel at all like “Everquest” music to me. It feels way too ethereal, and not bombastic enough to represent an over the top franchise like Everquest. Apparently however gauging opinion from twitter and Google+ I am in the minority of my opinion.

I listened to the track over and over trying to find some shared lineage back to the original themes… and I think maybe just maybe I figured out what Jeremy Soule was trying to do. In the original Everquest theme… there is an odd little segment that always felt a bit out of place… that starts at roughly 0:46 and continues to 1:06. The more I listen to the EQNext theme the more I think he chose this odd little section to expand into a larger theme. I guess my hope is that Soule was starting with this segment and fading his way into the “EQ Notes”, and that the part that did the unfinished fade down is where the theme would pick up and grow into something we recognize.

I have a lot of faith in Jeremy Soule, I have a 4 disc set of Skyrim music that I listen to at work on a pretty regular basis. I was just shocked at what I heard and how little it represented “Everquest” for me. It also makes me afraid that they are really distancing themselves from the past, and kinda abandoning the Everquest lineage that came before. I love Norrath and probably always will, and while I don’t think I could ever return to playing Everquest 1 I am still a huge fan of everything that Everquest 2 has become. I want Everquest Next to draw upon this pedigree and not just completely abandon it.

Everquest Current

So much emphasis has been placed on Everquest Next, but last night was really about showing off Everquest Current. Both Everquest and Everquest II are seemingly unstoppable juggernauts of content. In the video above they announce the 20th expansion for the original Everquest, Call of the Forsaken. It is completely staggering to think of any MMO in todays climate making its way through 20 separate expansion packs. That is really one of the things that the SOE model has done… is allow aging communities to survive and be nurtured by what seems like extremely dedicated product teams.

I don’t really play Everquest other than occasionally logging in to my station account and remembering just how primate the old days were, so the first half of this trip down “everquest current” was interesting but had no real meat on its bones for me. I started to get a little excited when the EQ2 portion came up. While I am knee deep in Rift and living it… I will always have a deep nostalgia over EQ2 and all that it represents. As a result I want it to be awesome, and I want to to successfully draw players. In the above video they announce the 10th expansion for EQ2, Tears of Veeshan.

I remember spending a lot of time farming the North Temple of Veeshan for rep and gear back in the original game… and to some extend I always knew that EQ2 would take us back there. Additionally they will be opening up High Hold Keep, a zone that I travelled through numerous times on my way to the Karanas but never actually leveled in the area surrounding it. Apparently in the storyline we have dug too deep below the keep… and uncovered a band of Goblins that have taken it over. As a result it looks like similar to Kaladim, it will be a former city turned dungeon as you “retake” the keep.

What I found extremely interesting in the talk of going to the “Nexus Core” supposedly an area that powered the Nexus on Luclin. I have always hoped that one of the expansions would take us back to moon and see what remains of it, so maybe this will open the door to that actually happening. I really loved Luclin, I guess in part because this was the first expansion I was actually a loyal player for the release. I started playing Everquest just shortly after the release of Velious, and there was something magical about experiencing my very first MMO expansion pack.

The big reveal it seems was the addition of a 26th character class The Channeler, which is apparently on the SOE Live floor. The shots they showed of the class looked pretty cool, but it also seemed extremely confused. It is a priest archetype, but has a giant mage like elemental construct but wears leather and wields a bow. It will be interesting to see what the class plays like, and whether it feels like a ranger turned pet class or not. The unique mechanic is that the construct is customizable with the ability to swap abilities and appearances to make it into whatever the player wants. Again it will have to be something I see in action to be able to make sense of it.

Finally at the TAIL end of the video Holly Longsdale teased what was coming for expansion eleven. Based on the images shown… I would guess that the Everquest 2 timeline will be discovering the lost continent of Taelosia as see in the Gates of Discord expansion to the original game. I could be wrong… namely because I was not actually playing EQ at that time, but based on some of the artwork I remember… these odd tribal lizardish men look to fit that theme. I am not sure but I believe Taelosia is the last major landmass that has not made an apperance at least in part in the broken world setting. It is good to see that they have a long range plan of where to take the game next. I still would love to get a trip back to the moon however.

Wrapping Up

I am looking forward to seeing the actual Everquest Next announcement today around noonish pst. Additionally from Quake Con there is supposed to be a live demo of Elder Scrolls Online at 1:30 EDT so that should be awesome as well. I will likely be listening to both in the background as I work on various things today. I really hope that both are as awesome as I have built them up to be in my head. I hope you all have a great Friday, and that it leads to a great weekend. Hopefully other than picking up around the house and doing a few chores mine is pretty relaxing. Tonight at 8pm CDT House Stalwart is hosting a League of Legends beginner night for anyone that wants to get their feet wet, so that should be enjoyable. It has been so long since I have played that I am really looking forward to doing it for a few hours.

Fifteen Years

August 1, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I am struggling a wee bit to figure out what exactly to write about… so as a result I am just starting typing hoping something good comes out in the process. Yesterday was a fairly rough day as we were dealing with the fallout of rolling out a major system at work. As a result I spent most of the day grinding away trying to fix a few issues that had sprung up in the process. I rolled out one of the fixes, with another one for today that needs a lot of involvement from the customers. I decided it was far too big a can of worms to delve into late in the day.

Raincheck

I will admit yesterday during the day I had some seriously grand designs on what Wednesday night would look like. I had intended to pull together hunt rifts or even break up into 5 man teams and do some dungeoneering, but none of that really happened. For whatever reason my dinner last night just was not really sitting with me all that well, and I as a result didn’t really feel up to rallying the troops in some grand adventure. So as a result no real overarching mission for the night really occurred and I feel like I failed the guild a little bit.

What did happen however is that we knocked out two “kill 1000 planar creature” guild quests. So while we were not all in the same place, guild members were all over the world assisting in that purpose. I know Rae and I were camped out in Cape Jule at one of the source wells and we decimated what felt like thousands of fire elementals over the course of a few hours. Additionally there were little pockets of guild members in other places working away on invasion mobs all of them contributing to the total kill count.

So while we may not have been doing what I had intended, the guild as a whole did end up working towards a specific mission it seems like. After we knocked out the second of the planar creature quests, I joined up with Thalen and helped ferry out the lower level Rae and Tibuant to Steppes of Infinity to do an advanced crafting rift. I am hoping that someday we can do an entire night of these. They really provide a massive amount of materials for the crafters, and I can remember going out to Ember Isle before the expansion and doing entire nights of various people summoning thing.

The Best Loot

Since I was insanely busy yesterday… I really had zero time to catch up on my RSS feed. This morning when trying to figure out what to write about I ended up flipping through a few posts. One of them that caught my attention was from Keen and Graev posing the question… where should the best loot come from? I have some very specific thoughts about this honestly, so I figured it would be a good thing to rattle on about for a few. Ultimately I don’t think there should be one single place to get the best loot. I feel as though that has been part of the problem all along in these games is that there is generally one specific place to get all the best gear.

I feel as though there should be multiple paths to obtain really good gear for your character. Even if you are not raiding, you want to feel like you are constantly progressing your character to being able to doing bigger and better things. So I feel as though there should be viable gearing options from raiding, pvp, questing and crafting. Each path should provide similar quality rewards but involve vastly different activities. I see Raiding and PVP as the brute force approach to gearing.. you get in… kill some stuff and get loot quickly. Whereas the crafting and questing routes take far more time and commitment but you get to the end goal of nice gear eventually.

I remember how mystical the original Epic quests were in Everquest 1, and how they involved pulling together your entire guild to try and help one player get an item. Similarly in Everquest 2 they rolled out the heritage quests and eventually epic weapon quests that involved going on these amazingly drawn out adventures to obtain a mythical item. Why did this design stop? Why are there not entire sets of gear that you can quest for that involve multiple steps, figuring out riddles, solving puzzles, and eventually collecting another piece of a fabled gear set. This is really the gearing route that has been missing in games.

Additionally I see that crafting would be very similar but take a slightly different spin. To get the “end game” gear you would go through a series of quests to gather and refine the best materials, learn recipes from ancient trainers, and maybe factioning up with some kind of crafting guild. The end result would be the guild helping you craft the pieces that you could not yourself. Again however the final result is a long process that lets a player build up to end game gear. My biggest concern with crafting as the key to end game gear is that generally it means that a few crafters have access to the best patterns and the server as a whole suffers in the pocket book from that. I feel a more personal crafting path would benefit players more, like this NPC crafting guild approach.

Ultimately in my perfect game I would see all four of these paths to glory. Raiding and PVP provide the quicker and easier way to the good gear, whereas crafting and questing provide a much longer and more arduous approach but still provide the same payoff in the end. It is not to say that a player cannot mix and match these processes as well. One of the biggest frustrations as a raider is when that one slot that you have needed for months refuses to drop. If you had a way to embark upon a quest or rally crafting resources to fill that slot, I am sure most raiders would do so in a heartbeat. I think the real challenge is to treat all players as equals, instead of giving the development nod to one specific segment of them.

Fifteen Years

Today is a fairly auspicious occasion, and I figure I will close out todays posting by sharing it with you. Fifteen years ago today my wife and I got married in a very untraditional fashion completely fitting the two of us. It boggles the mind to think it is that long ago. We got together in 1996 and spent the last two years of college together, eventually moving in together when I woke up one morning to find my rat fink of a room mate moving out on me… because he had not been paying his half of the rent. Me, my wife and her roommate all moved in together and I literally spent the end of my college days living out an episode of threes company.

My family and hers were like oil and water… with the primarchs of each family constantly butting heads. I was raised Catholic and she Baptist… and my Mother and her Father nearly came to blows each time they were put in the same room. We wanted a simple wedding, outdoors… which quickly became insane as my mother started wanting to invite all sorts of bizarre guests like my fourth grade teachers. Additionally my mother wanted us to have TWO weddings… one with a priest in the Catholic church… and then the outdoor wedding.

Then there was the issue of which father would actually walk her down the aisle. Her step father was a quiet and loving man, and was one of the most amazing men I have ever known. Her biological father I have come to love, but at the time was extremely showy and overbearing… and would have made a very public spectacle if he did not get the honor. Whereas her step father would have likely been extremely hurt were he not the one to do it… but never would have let on or shown it. Essentially we had a logistical nightmare on our hands and no matter which way we turned… we were going to hurt someone.

Fifteen years ago today we took our first act of defiance as a couple and decided to piss everyone involved off and elope. We gathered up all the necessary bits of information needed to get married in the state of Oklahoma and found a wedding chapel in town. I jokingly say we were married at the House of Vacuums, because the chapel was a fairly nondescript building directly around the corner from there. I called my cousin and my wife called her best friend, and they stood as witnesses, and after a short service with a very nice female minister we were wed.

While this is a fairly untraditional beginning it fits the two of us extremely well. Neither of us are terribly showy people, and both of us rather severe introverts. I’m a geek and she is a nerd and together we have made a pretty amazing life together. I love her dearly and cannot imagine having spent the last fifteen years any other way. I hope the next fifteen years go as easily as these last ones have. There are times when I sit back and think to myself… man you have an awesome life, and in a huge part it is entirely because of her. She helps me stay grounded and is the voice of reason behind all my potentially poor choices. We make a pretty great team.

Wrapping Up

Well I have a ton of things to do today, so I need to be getting on the road. I have no clue what we will be doing for our anniversary, quite honestly it all depends on how both of our days go. She is already back to school and working every day since she wears a bunch of administrative type hats. At the minimum we will probably go out to eat together but not really do much celebration until the weekend. I hope you all have a great day… and to my wife who I know will be reading this later… I love you and happy anniversary.