elder scrolls online Archives - Page 13 of 27

Farmer Belghast

May 14, 2014May 14, 2014 by Belghast

Server Overload

One of the key parts of the preorder process for Wildstar is the ability to reserve a player name and a guild name. Since I am still up in the air about this game I figured I would go ahead and do this. The process theoretically opened yesterday morning and could be completed by going to the name reservation page and logging in. The only problem here is that their servers crumpled under the crushing weight of folks hammering this single page. I tried off and on throughout the day with no luck, and as I moved into the evening I still was not getting to a working screen. Moments ago I finally connected in and completed the process reserving Belghast and House Stalwart just in case. Far as I know you aren’t required to use the guild name, but I figure if nothing else I will create an alt guild or something so that the name lives.

Last night I decided to try something different and logged into the little Chua engineer I had created at some point during the beta. I am not sure if it was the difference in starter zone or the difference in playing a ranged tank, but for whatever reason I found myself enjoying the game last night. I embraced the cute and deadly aspect of the game and ran around blasting everything with my shotgun. Considering I tend to shy away from playing ranged in any form, this was the first I had really played one in Wildstar. I am wondering if this is the Guild Wars 2 effect, and that melee is just unsatisfying in this game. Also with this character I opted to go with the Explorer path, which more than anything involves a lot of jumping puzzles. Normally I cannot stand these, however they felt manageable with access to double jump.

The game still feels very much like a trip to Six Flags, but the Crimson Isle area feels far less busy. Maybe I could enjoy the game more starting here rather than Leviathan Bay. Now I feel like I owe the game a play through long enough to see if I like the third area better. This has been the case with most games I have played, there are certain starter experiences that I simply do not like. I am looking at you Night Elf areas, whereas I can seem to do Dun Morogh happily over and over. There are things I like about playing the Warrior that I don’t get to do on the Engineer, however I just don’t really like Ellevar as far as zones go. I was mostly okay with the Leviathan Bay route until I got there. I am wondering if I can shift course and go to Deradune, without having to reroll.

Farmer Belghast

After getting to 6 in Wildstar I opted to log back into ArcheAge for a bit and see what trouble I could get into. Last night I finally reached a point in the quest chain where I started getting quests asking me to craft certain items that required vegetables. This meant that I needed to grow them, and also introduced me to the concept of a public farm. During an earlier quest I was given a scarecrow that apparently allows me to claim a plot of land for my own, however the area surrounding where I was working seemed to be all claimed. As a result I just opted to plant my veggies in the public plot and pray. See interesting thing about this game is that pretty much every aspect of it… allows for other players to grief you. Pretty much anyone can come along and harvest your crops from the public plot if you do not collect them within a certain period. Farming is a real world time sink, in that I planted the crops and it took thirty minutes actual time for them to grow. I of course went off throughout the world and completely forgot about them. Thankfully upon logging back in this morning they were still there waiting for me.

What ended up distracting me, was a series of quests in the next zone over that involved slaughtering tons of critters to collect parts for a suit of armor. It seems as though through this quest chain you will be able to collect a full set of blue quality gear for whatever armor class you choose. I of course am going plate, because really… there is never an answer that doesn’t end up with plate armor. In Elder Scrolls Online I’ve tried a few times to play something OTHER than a plate wearer, but always end up dropping it and dumping myself in full plate. I also managed to pick up a really amazing green quality sword that is letting me cut through the mobs like butter. I am still very much enjoying myself, but I am wishing I had a few more abilities. Right now I have shield charge, shield bash, 3 hit combo swing, AOE root/damage, self heal, and channeled drain life. It is a pretty robust kit, but I really want another attack to combo with the charge/bash/strike thing I have going on.

One of the things I really want to try and figure out is smithing. Right now it all seems to be dependant upon me going into some cave somewhere and grinding mobs while waiting on Iron Ore pops. In theory I am fine with this, but I keep thinking there has to be a more efficient way to get ore. However almost every cave I have been in, has one or two higher level players lurking about, so I am beginning to wonder if that is in fact the only real way. At some point I need to sort out why I could not stream the game and get that going again. Dxtory boggles me because it seems like for some people it works great, however for me it never seems to produce the sort of results I actually want. On a positive note it does seem to be a better generic screenshot program than Fraps, or at least cause far fewer issues. If nothing else I am using the hell out of it for that purpose, but I want to solidify how to record games full screen with it and actually get OBS to stream them to twitch.

Faffing in Cyrodil

I am a horrible person because last night, yet again I did not participate in the google hang out pen and paper game. Honestly I just wasn’t feeling up to dealing with people. I need to get to the doctor soonish, because I fear something is wrong. For about a month now, when I breath in deeply there is a sharp pain on the right side of my lung. It started as a dull ache, so I thought maybe it was a muscle pain or something of the sort, however over the last few days it has become more sharp. Last night when we did our walk, I struggled a bit to keep going and got pretty dizzy. I hate going to the doctor, because I spent a good chunk of my childhood sick and in the doctors office. It has made me try and avoid them like the plague as an adult, the only problem is… I have actual medical issues that I probably should be going for. Last night I had just reached my fill of human contact so I did my own thing, because I really couldn’t handle needing any additional interaction.

I also knew I would need to be sociable today as we have a guild event scheduled in Elder Scrolls Online. Right now we have a handful of people signed up for it, but I am hoping we will get a bunch more people who didn’t know about the Anook event. I am not sure exactly how well this is going to work, as Delevax said most nights our PVP Campaign is locked by that time in the evening. Worse case scenario we end up guesting on another campaign, since functionally there is really nothing we cannot do while guested. The primary goal is to grab skyshards, the secondary goal is to get into trouble whenever we can. If in the process we happen along some quest objectives, it would also be cool to complete those. I know I have an objective out there from the last time I was running around with Zeli and Jabb, but it was not feasible for us to go get it. I am sure it will be fairly rough, but I am hoping if we stick together as a group we will be able to compete with the various veteran rank players.

Too Themepark

May 13, 2014 by Belghast

Crazy Fox-Wolf-Thingy

I find myself enjoying ArcheAge far more than I had really expected to. I have not really even gotten to the “open world” aspect of the game, but I find the questing and combat systems really enjoyable. At some point I managed to pick up the animal to the side of me that is some sort of a fox-wolf-thingy. I am not sure if it was from a quest or if I looted it from a mob, but in any case I have a pet now. My friend Errn informed me that this is my battle pet, but I had reasoned that much by noticing that it was fighting for other players. Thing is… when I got it, it was already like level 30. This means the thing probably kicks more ass than I do to be honest. One of the weird things about the game is that you can either have a mount or a pet out, but not both.

As a result I tend to run around with my battle pet out, and then use the glider poorly to manage to get around quickly. I really have no clue what I am doing when it comes to the glider. No matter how I try and control the thing, it seems like I am just falling through the air gracefully. I’ve watched various streamers be able to control where they want it to go, and I am completely in awe of their skill. Right now the closest I can get is to hover over the area I want to go and then fold up the glider by hitting R, causing me to plummet through the air. Obviously this works grand if you are close to the ground, but not so much when you have leapt off of a huge cliff with it. In the later case, I end up cursing the screen as I seem to flail around in midair on the glider.

I feel bad that I have almost entirely ignored anything going on with any of the quests. Since all of the cinematic are in Korean still I just end up skipping thing, which has lead me to feel like the quest dialog itself is completely meaningless as well. So I have zero clue what is going on in the world other than I am helping a series of villages defend against all sorts of things, and I am perfectly fine with that. The more killing I get to do in the course of the leveling the better, and right now I am really enjoying the “Over Achieve” and “Hidden Quest” options gained by going on a murderous rampage. While I seem to be swapping out gear pretty frequently, it doesn’t really feel like I am progressing my character along that easily. I’ve yet to figure out the rhyme or reason behind getting skill points, but I could really use a lot more of them.

Too Themepark

Firstly I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression from this title. I love Themepark MMOs, for what they give me… a carefully curated trip through an interesting world. I find that I enjoy both Sandbox and Themepark MMOs equally, at least generally speaking. However there is just something about Wildstar that maybe takes it a step too far. While playing this game, I literally feel like I am at Six Flags with so many things fighting desperately for my attention. When I walk into an area that I just explored and hear the “Challenge!” sounder it reminds me too much of a midway barker trying to get my attention. I’ve compared the visuals of the game to the Vegas Strip before, but really it reminds me a lot more of an actual real world Themepark. Everything is bright and polished to a shine, with every single inch of space covered with something designed to get my eye to look there. The above screenshot is of one of the rare sparse moments, and when the game is like this… I actually enjoy it. However I had to wait for a few minutes to take this shot for various mobs and players to move out of the way.

I am basically in the same place I have been for a couple of months. I recorded the above video on March 13th and I have had zero forward momentum since then. I’ve gotten on each beta weekend so far to play for a bit, but just found the overall experience lacking. There is a lot about the game that I think I would like, but something just doesn’t sit right with me each time I sit down to play it. The last game I felt this conflicted about was Guild Wars 2, and the end result of that experience is a game that even though I have free access to play it… I never have any desire to do so. With Wildstar I put in my pre-order in part to lock in my goodies for if I ever decided that I DID want to play it. Each day I consider cancelling it, because I am just not “feeling” this title. It isn’t the setting or the races or the goofy character models, but something more deeply set into the game itself. The funny thing is, I have been back playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and enjoying the hell out of it… but Wildstar that is a very similar experience just feels really odd to me. Time will tell if I shun the internet zeitgeist and sit out of this one.

Blue Water Land

I am still working my way through Coldharbor in Elder Scrolls Online, and last night I hit 48. The quests out here feel more epic than the ones leading up to them, in part because everything in Coldharbor seems to be absolutely dripping in lore. One of my joys in any Elder Scrolls title has been killing the various Daedra, and here I have an entire zone full of almost nothing but them. What is interesting is finding all of the inhabitants of the zone that have been tricked into the service of Molag Bal in one fashion or another. Last night I had a really cool moment where I helped out some Argonians and their Hist tree, and another where I gained the trust of a feral pack of Bosmer. This section of the game feels very much like Mass Effect 3, where I am wandering around this zone building an army to fight the daedric prince.

I am trying to decide if I am going to hold out with my level 44 gear until I ding 50. I have a really good daedric shield that just dropped, as well as my prismatic weapon that I am unlikely to replace until I leave cold harbor. Wondering if I can limp along until 50 and then craft an entire set of nice gear then. As of the close of the night I managed to make it roughly halfway to 49, and I still have large swaths of Coldharbor that have been completely unexplored. Still very much loving the experience of the game, but I am definitely finding that I need breaks from playing it. The gameplay towards the end of the game gets really intense, and if I am not feeling 100% I end up taking a lot of un-needed deaths. As a result I have been perforating my long play sessions with trips into ArcheAge, SWTOR and now a little bit of Wildstar. So far I really seem to be enjoying this mix.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #ArcheAge #WildStar #Themepark

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

May 11, 2014May 10, 2014 by Belghast

Graduation Day

I just thought I would start the post off with a picture of two ducks. These are the ducks that we encounter quite often on our evening stroll around the neighborhood. I guess they have decided that we are not really a threat, because shortly after snapping this photo the male duck decided to come up close enough to almost touch. Granted he might have just been putting some distance between me and his mate, but I would like to think we are a recognized thing by now. Now that you’ve had a lovely vignette, let me tell you about my day. My nephew graduated from college today, and being the loving family we are… we attended. This was an experience in both vertigo and insanely uncomfortable seating. For starters the basketball stadium it was held in had some of the steepest seating I had ever experienced. When they asked us to stand for the singing of the national anthem… I literally felt like I was going to topple over the “cliff” and down into the stands below me.

All in all it wasn’t really a bad day, but it was most definitely a tiring one. I did however manage to top 10,000 steps on the fitbit, instead of my usual 8,000 to 9,000. This was in part because we parked four blocks away from the stadium and walked it rather than fighting for parking. The whole side effect of today and what will inevitably happen tomorrow is that I simply do not have the “oomph” to stay up late enough tonight to do a Steampowered Sunday. In fact as early as we are going in the morning to see my mother, I won’t really have a chance to write a blog post in the morning either. As a result I am writing this one Saturday night, and will publish it in the morning. I hate when I have to “cheat” like this, but it is far better to do that than to miss posting something at all.

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

This morning I talked about the little family of robins, that had nested in the white rock. When I came home tonight there were two chicks poking their heads out of the nest until I got close enough to investigate. They instinctively ducked down to try and remain hidden but I was able to get my phone up enough to snap the photo on the side. I feel like each of these photos is somehow softening the blow of what I am about to say. This week you damned near did not get a podcast. Admittedly this is one part miscommunication and one part poor planning on my side. It was Friday during the day when I realized that I would not be home in time to record the podcast. Originally for some reason my wife and I thought my nephews graduation was early in the day. However upon further investigation Friday, we realized that it was at 4 pm in the afternoon. That meant in a best case scenario figuring 2 hours for the graduation, an hour for anything after the graduation, and another 2 hours drive to get back home… this put me being back around 9 pm, and hour after we normally record.

To make things more interesting it seemed as thought both Ashgar and Kodra were not able to record at all this weekend. Ashgar had a similar situation to me and when I spoke with him Friday it was from an airport as he was flying home for his sisters graduation. Kodra on the other hand, I am not really sure what was going on, but he was neither available Friday or Saturday evenings. He would potentially be available very late on Sunday, but that didn’t really give me much time to get things posted, since I normally post our new episodes Sunday. After some scrambling, it seemed as though Tam was also not available. As the day went on Rae and I discussed whether or not we even wanted to record with two people down. I was of the opinion that we would just take the week off, but I guess Rae was really gung ho about going forward. She thought in a worse case scenario it would just be the two of us and we would do a relatively short podcast.

Doctor Hannah to the Rescue

While my wife and I were walking Friday night, Rae was able to get ahold of a good friend of ours Dallian and he was able to fill in for us. I had long thought that Dal might be a really good fit for the show, and him being able to do it on such short notice was almost serendipitous. So we almost did not record the show, but in truth it ended up being one of the more enjoyable ones to make. We talk about a number of gaming topics from Wildstar, to ArcheAge and the obligatory Elder Scrolls Online discussion. We also dip our toes into the world of comic books and Magic: The Gathering and Dallian tells us the riveting tale of how he created the @Doctor_Hannah twitter account. Hopefully the amount of fun we had recording this one translates to our listeners.

Hopefully next week things will be at least partially back to normal. We should have Ashgar and Kodra back, but I believe Rae may not be available. Dallian is coming into town to visit us, and either we will have both Rae and Dallian or neither of them. In any case next week should be interesting as well. At this point I am going to close off this post and crash, as I need to get up super early to make my Mothers Day visitations. I want to wish all the Mother’s out there a very happy day, and I will see you all Monday morning for another early morning post.

#AggroChat #Podcast #ESO #Wildstar #ArcheAge

Coming Home

May 10, 2014 by Belghast

Protect the Nest

As a rule my two favorite times of the year as Spring and Fall, in part because I love how alive the world is during these times of transition. This morning I got up, threw on some clothes and a beanie to disguise my cowlick and get breakfast. On the way back I stopped in the drive way for a bit as I listened to something on NPR wind down. I noticed out in the lawn there were a couple of bunnies and two robin parents out foraging. Our house has an external shell of rock that has been painted white over the years. This leaves huge shelves and little nooks, and apparently this year a pair or robin parents have decided to nest there. Were a proper home owner… I would probably be concerned about this, but for me… I think it is pretty awesome. Robins have always been one of my favorite birds, so the fact that I get to see them on a daily basis makes me happy.

I’ve noticed they have a little chick beak sticking up from the nest so it is going to be awesome to watch the little guy pop out at some point. For having lived around birds all my life… I really don’t know much about them. I am just happy to start seeing songbirds again in the neighborhood. There was a time where I tried to put up a feeder in the backyard and no one seem to notice it. Maybe I will make another attempt at that, because I’ve noticed a little cardinal poking around the bush on the other side of the house. I am also sure someone in the neighborhood is probably cursing our bunnies, but seeing them scamper about the yard makes me happy. I just fear what is going to happen when we open our pool. There was one long hot summer that I had to fish a half dozen of them out of the pool… because they kept trying to get a drink and falling in. Hopefully that won’t be the case this summer.

Coming Home

So first off I want to preface this with that I really did enjoy playing ArcheAge and if I get time this weekend I will completely play some more of it. However last night logging into Elder Scrolls Online after playing quite a bit of SWTOR and ArcheAge, felt like coming home. Everything felt so comfy as I moved around the world. It is funny how in such a short period of time I have gotten used to the way that world feels and controls, and I guess have come to prefer it. The world just feels right to me, and I guess that is a good sign. I know for a lot of my friends the non-traditionally MMO control scheme was a deal breaker. They were looking for something they could control with WASD, Mouselook and the traditional hotbar combat. However as a long time FPS and Elder Scrolls player it was more a shift in mindset than anything else. I was so used to MMOs controlling a certain way, that I just had to shift the abilities that I picked up from other single player games and adapt them to the multiplayer space.

There are so many reasons why people wanted ESO to control differently. Some people mentioned that it was impossible to play the game while holding a child, or doing this or that… and that is totally correct. The reason why I had been playing SWTOR and ArcheAge is that they didn’t require the precision and focus that ESO did. Over the course of this last week my allergies have been horrible, and as a result I have come home after work completely drained and “out of it”. I knew if I booted up ESO, I would die often and die horribly. I love everything about the game, but there are times it just takes too many of my already limited mental resources. My fear was that after being away for awhile that I would get back into the traditional MMO control scheme… and the game would feel odd to me. Thankfully however everything about it still felt right.

Finishing Bangkorai

The last time I played I accidentally followed a quest chain into Coldharbor, so at the beginning of the evening I worked through my backlog of items to deconstruct and then set off for Bangkorai again. I wanted to at the very least finish out collecting the Skyshards and getting zone exploration achievement. At the best I had hoped to make everything black on my map turn white showing that I can completed it. There were still a few issues with some of the world bosses however, so I realized early on that I would not be getting close to 100%ing the zone last night. What I did however do is explore every nook and cranny and find a number of really slick things. The picture in the section above is from this little hidden area that turned out to be a crafting shrine. You have to push through this disguised tunnel in a rock wall, and along a little river, past a waterfall and over a rickety rope bridge…. and then finally you are at the crafting shrine. The whole experience felt very “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to me.

The above image is from some Dwemer ruins that I stumbled into. It ended up that this was the public dungeon for Bangkorai and as I was seven levels over the content… I was able to solo most of it. That said it was still really damned challenging, and for the boss battles especially I had to hang back and wait for another player to get to the same area I was. Thankfully the dungeon is still very well trodden and I was able to complete both of the quests inside. Awesome thing about this dungeon is that at the end of the quest chain, you get awarded a really awesome Dwemer spider cosmetic pet. So if you were wondering where those come from… it is the public dungeon in Bangkorai (and I am sure the other equivalent factions). I managed to collect all of the skyshards and got my achievement for exploring the zone, so I can be happy enough with moving on. At some point I will pop back into the zone when the bugs have been worked out and complete the last few dots.

You can watch the entire adventure in the video above. Shockingly this is the 31st video I have recorded on twitch/youtube for The Elder Scrolls Online. While I would never suggest watching all of them… you can literally see most of my leveling process on the Dragonknight. Having MOSTLY finished Bangkorai I feel okay about moving on into Coldharbor. At this point I am about halfway into 47, so I feel like the journey to 50 is going to go extremely quickly in the higher level content. So far the quests I have done in Cold Harbor seem to be significantly more involved than the ones from the previous zones. Everything about the zone feels epic, as I lead this fight against Molag Bal and his forces. I am going to be really thankful that I have my faction up with the Fighters Guild I feel, because everything I see… is a Daedra. Additionally I am super happy I have my prismatic weapon… that does insane amounts of damage to Daedra and Undead.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Bangkorai #Coldharbor