elder scrolls online Archives - Page 12 of 27

Search for a Voice

May 21, 2014 by Belghast

Not Enough Time

Yesterday is one of those days that I both hate and love at the same time. Two very different games released, but both were games that I had been looking forward to for some time. When this happens, generally speaking I will wait on one of them until I have a lull in game play enough to be able to pick it up and consume it. Problem is, in this case I inadvertedly pre-ordered both not really knowing when one of them would release. So last night I made an attempt to devote a sufficient amount of time to both of them. At the very least we have a long holiday weekend coming up that hopefully I can spend completing them both.

Honestly the pure joy of playing two amazingly crafted games was exactly what I needed to combat yesterday. Everything about yesterday was pure crap. Monday afternoon I remember remarking with joy that I had a completely open Tuesday, then over the course of the day one by one the meetings piled up. So not only did I spend almost the entire day in one meeting or another, we also had a handful of crisis to deal with. So by the end of the day I just wanted the world to burn around me… which is something you can do very easily in a video game. Braxwolf made an interesting post about the nature of gaming, and for me… games are often more than just games. After a bad day like yesterday… games are very much therapy.

Search for a Voice

Since the E3 that they announced it, I have been looking forward to Transistor, the new isometric beat-em-up from Supergiant Games the creators of Bastion. The game company has singlehandedly redefined how I feel about the narrator and how it relates to the action on screen. With Bastion, the narrator was a character in itself, telling you the story of the protagonist you were playing. In Transistor we have a similar setup going on, except this time the narrator is actually the sword you wield named Transistor. As the course of the game unfolds you find that you are Red a famous pop singer, and that some organization called the Camerata killed your boyfriend… somehow transforming him into the blade and stole your voice. The other odd twist is that all of you seem to be computer programs, and after one dies you can pick their core up and use them as a weapon against the evil “Process”.

The entire treatment of the game has a very “Tron-Noir” feel to it, and I am eating up all of the visuals. Your character is gorgeously animated, and the surroundings feel lush and vibrant, with tons of little things for you to encounter that serve no real purpose other than to have the narrator tell you more tidbits of information. The gameplay is… to say nothing else “different”. It is a mix of real time and turn based gameplay that feels fresh and unique. I have no clue what the controls are without a controller, but if you press the right trigger button you pause time allowing you to plot a move and funnel attacks quickly into a target. Pressing the trigger again unfreezes time and executes the attack pattern. The gotcha is that lots of mob types will move out of your way and you will have just wasted all of your energy on an attack that doesn’t land the blow.

The trick of the game seems to be figuring out which attacks work best on which mob types and figuring out which to take out in real time and which to defeat using this pseudo “bullet time”. Executing a sequence of attacks causes you to be drained for a period of time, which means you can do absolutely nothing but run around to avoid mob counter attacks. There are lots of white boxes scattered throughout the levels that you end up using as a buffer to avoid getting hit. These are unfortunately destructible which means you only have so long to faff about before you have no cover to duck behind. The death sequence is a bit odd, in that instead of losing a life it overloads whatever weapon you happen to be using. This weapon then stays down for as long as it takes you to get to the next checkpoint. This means you want to be proficient at more than one weapon in case you are stuck without your attack of choice.

I played the game long enough to clear the first “world” of sorts and am in transition to the next main area of the game. The game has me hooked and wanting more, so I figure over the next few days I will devote the several hours needed to finish it up. From what I have heard the game has around 6 hours of game play in it, which seems like a good amount for an isometric beat-em-up like this. Because of the way you can combine new attacks that you find with your existing attacks to product new results, I feel like there is more than likely quite a bit of replay value. Even if there isn’t the game is gorgeous, and absolutely oozing personality… so more than worth the $20 purchase price. Right now I am very much in the “not as good at this game as I wish I was” phase, so hopefully that will improve as I get more used to the unique control scheme.

Faff About In Cyrodil

Since I am running out of time… and I ended up writing so much about Transistor without really meaning to, I am opting to leave my review of Wolfenstein: New Order until tomorrow morning. I actually ended up playing it quite a bit longer last night, so I am afraid I have even more to say about that. It was a really great day for gaming. Just a friendly reminder that tonight I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online as we have another “Faff About in Cyrodil” night planned. If you have not seen the notice check out the Anook event. If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, you are more than welcome to join along even if you are not in the House Stalwart guild. We are all Daggerfall Covenant so there is also that restriction. I just dinged 50 this week and will actually be Veteran Rank 1 as we do this… so maybe just maybe we won’t get rolled quite so hard out in Cyrodil. I am not holding my breath however. In any case it was a lot of fun last week and we ran around collecting skyshards and doing quests out there as a horde.

#AllianceOfAwesome #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Transistor

Evil Genius

May 19, 2014 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

This weekend I accomplished very little of what I had planned, but I did log into a nice surprise over in Elder Scrolls Online this morning. One of the cooler things about crafting are the tradeskill apprentices… I am using the EQ2 term, because quite frankly I can’t remember the in game name for them in ESO. Once a day they send you a care package of goodies along with a great note about what they had to go through to obtain it. The notes alone are worth the skill points, because some of them are absolutely hilarious. When I opened my care package this morning I noticed that I got a Tempering Alloy, which is the metal temper used to take a purple item to a orange quality one or a legendary. This is still one of the best aspects of the game, the ability to upgrade an item to whatever tier you might want.

Granted this is my first legendary temper, and I am sure it probably takes six or so to get 100% chance of upgrade, but I will squirrel this one away until I manage to get more. I had grand plans of dinging 50 and completing Coldharbor, and while I made progress on both fronts… it simply did not happen this weekend. I blame Ashgar for distracting me with his Final Fantasy 5 draft idea. I would love to say I will ding tonight, because I am maybe 1/5th of a level away from 50. I have a few rather epic quests that I am currently on that I want to see the completion of. Mostly right now I am suffering from too many things I want to play, and too little time to play them. I might have to start bringing my laptop to work and getting in some playtime over lunch again.

Yesterday was somewhat fragmented, in that we had to attend a wedding that evening. I have to say it is one of the more interesting weddings I have been to. The pair are both former students of my wife, and the mother of the bride is another teacher. I knew absolutely no one there, so the entire occasion felt extremely awkward. However it was made significantly less awkward for me when the bride started walking down the isle to a full orchestral version of the Legend of Zelda Fairy Fountain theme. So obviously at least one of the pair was a serious gamer, and in theory they both were, but it made a fairly nice processional theme. At the end of the wedding they queued up the Imperial March, so I feel like I could get along really well with the pair.

Evil Genius

One thing that I did accomplish this weekend was to play through the rest of the Crimson Isle campaign in Wildstar. My hope was to play the engineer enough to determine if this was a class I could get into, and as the gameplay progressed I enjoyed it more than the Warrior. I know without a doubt that I enjoy the Chua far more than I did the Cassian so in theory I guess I have my race and class. I am still not terribly sold on the game, but it is starting to grow on me. Surprising enough I found that I really enjoyed the explorer path. Normally I am not one for jumping puzzles but these felt okay to me. I am sure late in the game they will be as insane as some of the things I did to get SWTOR Holocrons, but even though those were painful… I enjoyed doing them. They gave me something to look forward to in every zone, so I am hoping the explorer path will do the same thing for me here.

Soldier path seems an absolute natural fit for me, but all of the “holdouts” felt extremely forced in that it did not feel like there was a lore reason for starting a ruckus at a specific location. Whereas with the explorer path in Crimson Isle you are helping the Chua scientists place monitoring stations high on the rock cliffs, and this felt cool to me. So far the thing I dig about the Engineer is that it is very much a “kill them all” class as well. You can circle strafe around gathering mobs up and shotgun blasting them down with impunity, or at least that is what it feels like right now. I am sure as the gameplay moves on, there are far more consequences to this gameplay style but I can see it might be fun to tank an instance this way.

Mystic Knights

Yesterday I officially progressed through the roughest part of the game for starting as White Mage. How I did it… is that I basically ground out enough levels to make it easier on myself. Getting to the Water Crystal was a challenge but when I did, the entire game got that much easier. Now I have a party full of Mystic Knights, which while not the best thing in the game are certainly far more offensive than the White Mage. Mystic Knight is a class I have never played in previous plays through the game, and I am kinda digging the way spellblade works so far. It gives me access to elemental attacks, without having to have a true spellcaster. Supposedly the Rapid Fire combo with Spellblade is a super powerful way of delivering elemental attacks later in the game.

I streamed for quite a bit yesterday afternoon as I pushed through the water temple sequence and gained the Mystic Knight. Last night I did not stream since I was mostly hanging out on the couch watching my sequence of Sunday night television shows. I found that watching tv is the ideal time to grind out levels, and that is why I am level 19 currently and have just now finished the fire crystal / karnak castle sequence. I think I did mostly okay in Karnak Castle and got all of the big name items, that I may or may not need later. The only thing I missed was the Main Guache, but since I have no use for daggers with my fixed party comp, I did not worry about that too much. I did pick up Esuna, Ribbon and Elven Mantle so should be fine moving forward. At this point I will have to consult a guide because I cannot remember for the life of me what comes next. I know that I do not get my ranger job until a bit later, so that is really what I need to do next.

Munchkin Mania

May 17, 2014 by Belghast

Too Old for This

Every now and then I will say something like “I am too old for that”, and I don’t really believe that is ever the case. It is just a shorthand for “I am old enough to release that it has consequences and am unwilling to deal with those.” When you get older, you realize that your actions have severe negative effects on your wellbeing at times, and attempt to avoid these at all costs. The funny thing is… staying up until midnight is not a huge deal, I do it all the time. However this usually means that I have had a gradual winding down throughout the evening and am at a super chill place when midnight actually comes. Last night I was out driving through town at 11pm, and it had a vastly different effect, and this morning I am paying for it.

While I greatly enjoyed my evening, I now feel groggy and useless this morning as I sit here attempting to assemble a post. It is a sort of post excitement hang-over of sorts, and as I think about it… it really feels like a mild version of an actual hangover. I am sure I could have slept in more, but my wife brought one of the ferrets in to “play” this morning, and when I looked at the time and felt the grumbling in my tummy I figured it was “good enough”. I can’t be grumpy with my wife for waking me, because in reality it was a good thing I was up at 8 am, will keep my schedule from being thrown off too much. Additionally I wake her up with the ferrets at pretty much any opportunity I get… so turn about is fair play.

Munchkin Mania

So what exactly doing that caused me to drive home last night through the rain at 11:30 at night? Well as I said yesterday a good friend of mine is in town for the weekend to attend the Muskogee Renfaire. As a result Rae decided we needed to have a game night, where we would play board games, eat pizza and generally have a good time. It had been ages since any of us sitting at the table had played munchkin, so we had to relearn the rules. Honestly it probably would have just been faster if we had called up the Munchkin episode of Tabletop on my chromebook and watched it to “grok” the rules a little faster. I am known for being all about the death, destruction and ultimately loot in the games I play, so Munchkin is one of those games that is ideally suited for my sensibilities… even before you factor in that the cards are hilarious.

Our mistake however was the fact that Rae owns both the base set and the Cleric and Ranger sets. We decided to just jumble everything together and play with some massive decks of cards. The problem with this is that in doing so it drags out the game immensely. I should have taken a picture of my hand, but at one point last night I had some dozen bonuses in play and I felt like a little kid playing dressup. I feel like somehow Rae stacked the deck or something, because she managed to win BOTH of the rounds of Munchkin that we played. She is a sneaky one, and kind comes out from nowhere. At one point I was set up to win, and I thought no one could do anything about it. However she was sitting all that time on a card that allows her to right the monster instead of me. Unfortunately my cards were in play, reducing the monster to something we could not buff enough to defeat her.

This is the fun of munchkin, there are no such things as permanent alliances. Essentially anyone that is level 9, just became everyone on the boards enemy. Dallian had the bad luck of drawing a lot of instant level up cards, meaning he became the focus of our aggression early in each game. Like I would manage to sneak in the level up cards every now and then to kinda keep people from noticing that I was gaining power. He on the other hand would lay down 3 in one turn, making folks realize “oh crap! he is winning!” at which point we all turned our guns to bear down on him. I kinda feel bad that this happened since he was the visitor to our fair city and all, but all is fair in love and loot.

Warming Coldharbor

At some point I need to get out and pick up the dry cleaning today, but other than that my key mission is to get through Coldharbor, or at the very least ding 50 trying. At this point I am really amped and ready to move on to the veteran level content. Aldmeri Dominion is the first stop on the veteran content for the Daggerfall Covenant, and this is the faction that I have played the least of. In fact I have not even got past Auridon, or even halfway through it on any character in beta. So I am really looking forward to exploring this area, and killing copious amounts of elves in the process. As my friend said, if you like killing elves… you get to do that more in Aldmeri than any other faction. Unfortunately I kinda wish I could align with the Maromer… angry snake worshipping pirate elves are so much cooler than the Aldmeri.

Other than this I know I want to play some more wildstar at some point. I would really like to see if my Chua Engineer remains fun as I start getting more abilities. Additionally I feel like I have been neglecting ArcheAge, so I will probably be playing some more of that. Basically today I want to vegetate and play lots of games. We have to go to a wedding tomorrow, so today is my one real shot at messing about happily in various games. Hopefully you too can have a relaxing weekend, and I am hoping that Dallian and Rae have a blast at the Renfaire. They really are not my thing, but from everything I have heard says that the one here at the Castle is one of the better ones in the country. One of the absolute best things I have ever heard of is one year when a guy went dressed as Spock, and he kept scanning people with his tri-corder and muttering “fascinating”.

Cyrodil Excursion

May 15, 2014 by Belghast

Turning a Corner

I am still not overwhelmed with excitement about Wildstar, but I am maybe starting to turn the corner on this game. Last night I opted to work on the warrior a bit more, and it turns out the area I was languishing around had no actual quests for me. One of the frustrations with the game is that the quest advisement on the minimap makes zero sense to me. I keep trying to figure it out, but end up just hopelessly lost as I keep opening my main map to find the objectives. I know there is some sort of a golden path system that you can turn on to get advisement but I find that whole process frustrating. All I really want is a blip on the edge of the minimap showing me where I should head to get to the next sequences of quests. Additionally I had mobs that I simply could not find. There was an NPC in town that no matter how many times I moved through an area, never seemed to be where the quest turn in location was marked on the map.

All of this said, in my flailing I happened to stumble upon an instance of sorts revolving around trying to save Outpost M-13. I was woefully underleveled for the content but found it extremely enjoyable anyway. I entered the instance at level 10 and all of the creatures I stumbled across were 13 to 14. You start the mission as a hired shiphand on a cargo freighter delivering crystals. You are boarded and it is your job to try and protect the freight. I did fairly well here until it came time to fight the actual boss, and then I struggled a bit… having to try two or three times to get past him. Finally we land on a planet, that is absolutely gorgeous. You roam around with a 1950s style spaceman helmet, exploring what appears to be an asteroid with minimal gravity. What is awesome here is that when you jump you get hangtime like you would expect in lower gravity. Finally you wind your way around to Outpost M-13.

The next sequence of events plays out like the movie Aliens as you explore the base and subsequent mine looking for either survivors or the cause of the catastrophe. Mostly if more content like this exists in Wildstar… I might be happy to play it. While I simply could not chew through the hive queen boss, and will likely have to return “at level” I had a blast doing it. If nothing else this sells me on their universe, because stuff like that is really fun. The game still feels rather awkward at times, and I still have my problems with the warrior overall, but at the end of the day I am a melee player. While running around as a Chua with a shotgun was fun, it just doesn’t feel like “me”. So while I am still having issues with their UI design a bit, I am hoping I can fix most of that with modifications. I need to do some searching to see if I can find a serviceable mini-map replacement.

Cyrodil Excursion

For roughly a week I had on the Anook Alliance of Awesome calendar an event called “Faffing About in Cyrodil”. The idea was to grab as many guildies as we could and head to Cyrodil looking for whatever we could do. When we pulled together and finally coalesced we had roughly a dozen players, and not the most balanced party… but we worked with it. At first we made a valiant attempt on Fort Glademist, that was currently being held by the Aldmeri Dominion. However we struggled to even take the Lumbermill. This was partially because we mostly just charged in aimlessly and spread ourselves too thin, but even more so that we were a group of bolstered to level 50 characters… and it was being guarded by actual veteran rank players. The problem with bolstering is that it levels you to 50… but the base stats for a 50 without the benefit of armor increases or anything of the sort. This means as a whole we represented a pack of level 50 paper dolls for someone to rip through.

After making a couple of attempts we got tired of the running back and decided to shift focus to what my original goal was… collecting skyshards and beating bosses. The cool thing about Cyrodil is that it is pretty much a normal questing zone in addition to being a zone full of PVP objectives. So we wandered around the zone, often times aimlessly, collecting the various skyshards along the way. At the end of the night I was up three skill points and had dinged 49, and various other folks in the party had dinged as well. The dungeons in Cyrodil are really good experience, not to mention insane amounts of loot. It is somewhat sad that instanced dungeons are rather pitiful experience if you are not completing the quest, however you can gather up a group of friends and roll through the Cyrodil dungeons for hours and almost level exclusively that way. The respawn is fast enough that we were constantly having to fight our way back out of the dungeons as stuff was popping only one or two packs behind what we had just killed.

I was streaming last night and captured almost the entire thing, and as always posted it up on my youtube channel. It seemed like folks were having a good time, even though we didn’t really have any success at the PVP aspect of cyrodil. It is my intent to do this more often, and I will likely be trying to schedule another one of these nights for next Wednesday. However I think I am going to try and start it a little earlier in the evening. As the night drug on, you could tell that most of us were barely holding in there. This is the negative side effect of being a guild almost entirely made up of 30 somethings… and mostly LATE 30 somethings and 40 somethings. Five thirty in the morning comes really early, so I personally try very hard to head towards bed by at least 11. For our east coast folks that had a lot of them staying up til midnight or so. Hopefully with time we will find a happy medium that works for both the east coast and west coast contingencies.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #WIldstar #Cyrodil