elder scrolls online Archives - Page 23 of 27

Ninja Grouping

March 6, 2014 by Belghast

Content Void

This morning I am completely struggling to find purpose in writing. I suppose I could try and counter point Scree’s post about my post yesterday. But honestly I don’t really feel the need, as he didn’t really shoot down any of the points I had made, but instead provided his own points for why he won’t be playing ESO and moreover why he feels like it never should have been made. They are some pretty drastic points, but they are his points and he has every right to his own opinion. Additionally each and every one of you have the undeniable right not to buy Elder Scrolls Online and not to love it. But again yesterdays post was spawned out of what I felt were some factual inaccuracies about a few points. However after reading his post this morning it also feels a lot like “I really hate this game, and here is why you should too.”

I feel like that is the problem with the community right now. We have so much hatred but very little genuine love for anything anymore. Where is that child like sense of wonder that we can roam around and exist in fully fleshed out 3D worlds? If gaming doesn’t give you that, then really what is the point of playing? There are still moments in each and every game I play where I am wrapped up in awe of some moment that just happened that I was not expecting. It might be something cool over the horizon or it might be some interesting turn of a phrase. I play these games and I write about them because I love them… not because I hate them. Even when something frustrates me to the point of spawning a rant, like I have done so many times about World of Warcraft… it comes from a place of disappointment for not being as good as it could be.

I love the games industry for all of its flaws, and I love all the ways it manages to keep me enthralled and entertained and waiting for the next thing to happen. From the moment I first got a controller in my hand this has been my story, and my “thing”. While sometimes it is pen and paper or miniatures or even card games… I am in love with games at the root of my being. So when I see someone take a crap on something and exclaim that it doesn’t deserve to exist… it depresses me that we have come to a point where that is an accepted stance. All ideas even if you do not like them, deserve their moment in the sun. Yeah I realize this top of today’s post is the equivalent of me responding with a “Carebear Stare” to a rather targeted attack… but fuck it, that’s how I roll.

Ninja Grouping

Last night I really did not do a lot of gaming, which is in part why I am bereft of content this morning to talk about. Over the last few days I have felt pretty crappy, so I am taking the initiative to try and improve things a bit. Namely I am going to try going cold turkey on energy drinks… because while they help wake my sleepy butt up… they also tend to cause me to crash pretty damned hard later. I had gotten to the point where I was starting to drink four or so a day… and that is a bit too much. So last night I went to bed around 8:30 and crashed after a few minutes of playing bravely default. Thankfully I was able to sleep all night long, but partially that was nyquil assisted. The last two nights I have woken up at 4:30 am and 3:30 am… so I was running on a serious sleep deficit.

What little I did play last night was Diablo 3. One of the aspects of the game that I absolutely adore is just how easy and seamless it is to group up with your friends. While the above image is old… because I didn’t think to take any new ones… my friend Rae ninja grouped with me while I was working on the beginning of Act 3. We did about five levels in a really short period of time and had I stuck around any longer I would have suggested popping out and bumping up the difficulty to expert. Hard really is the new normal, and none of us play the game on anything lower than that now even solo. When you add in additional people, it feels like the scaling just isn’t quite enough to compensate for the new gear fountain so we end up bumping the difficulty up a ways.

Rae managed to pull a couple of legendaries during our time grouping, but after getting three in a row last night I think the loot gods were frowning on me. For the most part I got no upgrades, but I am wearing a really nice green suit of crafted gear, so it might be a long while before I upgrade out of Aughild’s Victory. At the close of the night I was just a stones throw away from 50, which means I should be able to push through to 60 on my next big play session. I am really surprised at just how much crusader specific gear I have been getting. I even managed to get a crusader only legendary flail the other night. My only worry is that the Reaper of Souls launch is pretty much happening at the same time the head start for Elder Scrolls is, so I am not sure how much time I will really devote to leveling a crusader until I have hit a lull in ESO.

Plea for Larger Battle.net Friend List

For the love of god… can we please get a significantly larger friends list for battle.net? At this point I am actively or at least semi-actively playing three different blizzard titles. I have friends scattered between them all, some of them playing multiples, some of them playing only one. I am the guild leader of a wow guild with over 900 characters, and have a big twitter/social media community that I want to be able to play with and communicate with while in game. The current size of I believe 200… is just too damned small. It has become a weekly thing to try and prune out people that I have not played with in awhile to be able to accept friend invites from new people. I hate doing this… this goes against every instinct in me to “delete” people that I care about.

At this point we have had multiple upgrades to the battle.net infrastructure… so can we please get a significant increase in the number of people we add? Bumping it up to 1000 seems like a safe place to be, even 500 would be significantly better than where we are currently. I am sure someone is going to post and ask me if I really need that many people… yes… yes I do. Sure I might not talk to each and every person every day, but I am constantly pinging someone I have not talked to for awhile and we end up spending the evening catching up. Gaming for me is a social thing, and anything that helps me in that mission is a good idea. One of my favorite features of Rift is the fact that I can take my entire twitter feed with me. So please Battle.net do something to help out the people for whom 200 is just too small.

Elder Controversies

March 5, 2014 by Belghast

Icy Fire Drill

Yesterday here in Tulsa it was roughly 13* Fahrenheit… aka really freakin cold. About 9:30 in the morning the fire alarms went off, and since we had just gotten chastised for not taking them seriously, myself and another coworker made a brisk pace to the stairwell and descended the 6 flights to ground floor. Problem is… the sidewalks we were supposed to follow as an escape route were an absolute death trap. In Oklahoma we barely clear snow from the roads, let alone the sidewalks and parking lots. At 9 am we had not gotten enough melt to clear them, and what did melt the day before had turned to a solid sheet of glaze ice. As we penguin walked the three blocks to the parking lot we are supposed to meet in, I was certain that any moment someone would fall and hurt themselves… and I was hoping it wasn’t me.

In front of me there was a woman in a walking cast, and as crappy as the traction on those are… I expected that any moment she would slip and go down. So as I walked I was trying to be prepared to grab her if she started to slip. Remarkably she navigated the ice rink just fine, but the lawyers in front of me in slick bottom shoes struggled a bit in a few places. We get to the corner near the parking lot, and one of the floor wardens is there waving us back into the building. Apparently it was not a fire drill but instead a malfunctioning fire alarm on the 5th floor. So I suddenly had to jettison all the righteous indignation I had built up over the course of our ice skating trip around the block. Knowing where I work, I was just absolutely certain that this was a case of a poorly planned fire drill.

Elder Controversies

I spent a good chunk of last night playing Elder Scrolls Online and working my way through the Daggerfall quest chains. While the starter islands are very much optional in the new build, I still plan on doing them just because it gives you a significant level boost. By the time I completed Betnihk last night I was roughly halfway through level 8. As compared to previously when you would be roughly level 6 about the time you completed the starter island experience. I know a lot of people hate Betnihk for some reason, but to me it was a blast. I love “dances with orcs” as I refer to it. It has really awesome Orsimer architecture, plenty of undead, and lots of ancient ruins… all of which are things I look for in a zone. Hell if they put in player housing, I would probably locate myself on Betnihk if possible.

One of the things that is frustrating having played this game for so long, and watched it evolve is to see new players spin up all sorts of tinfoil hat controversies about the game. I watched a back and forth on twitter that left me absolutely baffled, so I wanted to take a few minutes to address a few of the more egregious ones. I am not trying to call anyone out here, because I have seen these so many places from so many different people. So without further ado… lets begin.

Any Race in Any Faction is Lore Breaking

Honestly I have seen two versions of this, firstly that it is lore breaking and secondly that it erodes “faction pride”. I call a massive bullshit on both of these points. I wonder if the players who are saying this have ever actually played an elder scrolls game. In Skyrim, most certainly the Nords were front and center, but you could not go through Whiterun the archetypal Nord town without also seeing at least one Altmer, Bosmer, many Redguard, a Breton or two and the ubiquitous group of Khajiit nomads. The Elder Scrolls universe has always been a melting pot of races, and while there are most certainly groups like the Thalmor that are essentially racial supremacists, they are very much not the majority. It is expected that you will have a Nord fighting alongside a Breton fighting along side a Bosmer, all working to take down a greater evil. While Elder Scrolls has purposefully conflicting lore, just like there are different sides to a tale in real life, there is no place one could ever say that racial exclusivity is a “Elder Scrolls Value”.

Now to the second point bout breaking down “Faction Pride”. If you wanted to play only with your factions races… then quite honestly Elder Scrolls is not a game series for you. The Factions we have in ESO are relatively artificial constructs and most of the alliances do not get along at all. They have banded together to fight greater forces in a bid to try and claim the Whitegold throne. Lets take the Ebonheart… the faction that most people will play…. because Skyrim. The Dunmer view the Nords and country bumpkins that are barely intelligent enough to pick up a weapon, and they view the Argonians in the same way they view Guars. The Argonians view both the Nords and Dunmer as oppressors, and the Nords view anyone that can raise a weapon as a potential enemy… especially other Nords. Granted this is a great over simplification of things… but suffice to say the races do not really like each other, and the alliance they have formed is barely holding together. Alliances in this game series are not racial boundaries but instead political organizations, and the sooner players realize this the happier they will be.

Personally I wish there were not faction walls, because I hate having to decide which group of friends I get to play with, on which characters. I feel like the Horde/Alliance red versus blue bullshit is the absolute worst thing about World of Warcraft. However I realize I am in the minority here. The bonus with Elder Scrolls is that I can at least tell my friends that if they preorder they will be able to play whatever race they want to play in the Daggerfall faction that the guild voted on and chose. After living through the launch of WoW and how it split my friends between two different servers and two different factions… I welcome this olive branch with open arms. While they have not said anything about it, I am sure at a later date you will probably be able to pay to unlock this functionality as well. For the time being however it is a really awesome perk for those players who bet on the game at launch time.

Imperial Edition is Paywalled Content

While I cannot really go into details because some of the testing is still covered under NDA, I can firmly call bullshit on this one as well. While the Imperials are a different race, they are very much a cosmetic one. At least I think I can say that much, if not many apologies to the ESO community staff, but the information needs to be out there. The feeling on the ground however is that Imperial Edition has something that players will not be able to get otherwise. Sure the racial graphic for imperials and all the armor styles are unique… but they are just cosmetic. It is not like you cannot be effective in the game without access to the Imperial race. I personally plan on making Belghast an Imperial but that is for mostly Lore reasons, and the fact that I can make an Imperial look exactly like how I always make Belghast look.

Players with access to the Imperial Edition are not getting anything that you cannot get otherwise in the game other than what amounts to some cosmetic skins. What I don’t get however is why this is somehow more angst inducing than a World of Warcraft collectors edition, or any other MMO collectors edition when you get exclusive items that you cannot ever get any other way. They have already mentioned that you would be able to upgrade to Imperial Edition at a later date if you wanted to unlock the Imperial race and its gear styles. The rest of the argument against the Imperial race seems to go back to point one. While Imperials are in fact native to central Tamriel, they have never been uncommon in ALL parts of continent as you have encountered them in every single game to date. The Elder Scrolls setting is extremely racially diverse, so it makes complete sense that you can be an Imperial anywhere in the world.

Elder Scrolls is Triple Dipping

Essentially this controversy stems from the fact that Elder Scrolls has a box price, a monthly subscription and there has been talk of an in game cash shop. I have no clue why this is a big deal, because until the Free to Play model rode in with its promise of something for nothing… this was pretty much the model of every single AAA game. Even today World of Warcraft is doing this exact same thing. You pay for the game, then you pay a monthly fee and then on top of that they have the audacity to offer additional cosmetic stuff for more money in an easy to use cash shop? Those blasphemers. they should bow down to the god of something for nothing! Pardon me if I get more than a little bit hyperbolic here, but that is generally how I view the cult of free to play, as a bunch of people who are wanting something for nothing. If you are not actively supporting a game, either through a monthly subscription or regularly buying stuff from their “priced to own” cash shop… you are actively a drag on that game.

I realize that is a controversial stance, but these are not charities running the games you want to play. They are companies with staff and that staff has families they need to feed. Everyone gnashes their teeth and laments the death of an MMO, however had they given some monetary support to the game rather than just lip service it might have not died in the first place. Granted sometimes there are situations like Star Wars Galaxies that were absolutely doomed from the start. Lucasfilm wanted their license back, so as a result a game that was marginally successful had to die on the process. However City of Heroes and Vanguard are squarely on the shoulders of players who love those titles but just stopped paying for them. If we love games we have to put our money where our mouths are and show them the only kind of support that keeps the lights on in the building… our cash. Granted this little rant is going off in a completely different direction than I had intended it… but that is the side effect of writing my posts on the fly.

Back to the “Elder Controversy” at hand. Why shouldn’t Elder Scrolls have a cash shop? Everyone else does. So long as they limit thing to cosmetic unlocks and game services like character renames… it seems like business as usual to me. If we accept this as “normal” when World of Warcraft is concerned, I feel like we have no real ground to stand upon when another game wants to do the exact same thing. There are many people who are going to “wait for free to play”, and if it goes that direction I am fine as well. So when a game converts from subscription to free to play I have never felt “robbed” of the time and money I spent on it when it was a subscription. In fact I tend to continue to subscribe to these games after their conversions. While I may not play Rift as much as I have in the past, it is always a game I return to and as such I keep a yearly patron account subscription. I view it as my way of supporting a game that I love, even if I am not actively playing it.

Can of Worms

Firstly I feel like I should apologize for some of the tone I have in this post. It has ended up being a bit more vitriolic than I had intended it to. As a fan of the Elder Scrolls franchise and a fan of Elder Scrolls Online, I can completely accept when someone tells me “meh, it just isn’t for me”. What frustrates me is when someone decides that for some reason Elder Scrolls Online has stolen their puppy. Then decides to come up with a complex lattice of paranoid reasons why NO ONE should play the game. In this post I tried to address a few of these “elder controversies”, but in fact I got more than a little bit hyperbolic myself in the process. I am passionate about gaming, and I am passionate about the games I want to play. Some of that passion spilled out onto the page today.

This gets back to an overall problem I have with the gaming community. We tend to view it as a zero sum game. There are many who view the world in terms of… if I want my game to be successful I have to take a crap on the competitors. While I am 100% on the Elder Scrolls bandwagon… I also really want to see Wildstar succeed and Everquest Next succeed… because quite frankly we NEED more successes in the MMO genre that are not named “Warcraft”. That is not a jab at the juggernaut in the room, because I play WoW as well… but we need to see more equitable sharing of the love if we hope to salvage this genre. I feel like free to play works for games that have already repaid the costs of development, but it just simply does not work for every game… nor should it be the cure all to every gaming ill. Free to Play feels like a death spiral for the genre, and while the fact there is a subscription cost will likely keep me from playing a game I only marginally cared about like Wildstar. It most definitely is not a substantial barrier between me and a game I am passionate about like ESO.

The Anchors Fall

March 3, 2014 by Belghast

Snowbound

Tulsa once again is buried under a thick coat of ice, with a dusting of snow on top. Luckily we were prepared for it, and I did the traditional grocery store run Friday afternoon before the madness really started. Saturday we got out early in the morning and ran the few errands we had to run, and made it in well before the crap started that evening. It was predicted that the ice would begin around 6pm but it started considerably later. Thankfully it was just sleet, and not freezing rain or we would have been in trouble. When we got up yesterday morning it really did not look like we had much accumulation, and as a result my wife was convinced that they would be having school today.

However over the course of the morning, it started in hard and heavy with the ice and didn’t let up until late last night. While we only got roughly 3 inches of accumulation, almost all of that was ice in one form or another. One of the more interesting things is we had what they call “Thunder Sleet” and “Thunder Snow”. Essentially it sounded like a rain storm with lightning and thunder, but as the precipitation fell it turns into sleet on the way down. After a day of this I texted my boss about 9pm saying that I was not even going to try getting out this morning. At that point I was apparently the third person to say the same thing, and he was not sure if he was going to try and make it or not.

I am really questioning if my wife will be having school tomorrow either. At some point today I need to go out and try and clear the vehicles, as I am sure tomorrow morning I will be driving into work. Honestly when a day like today happens work pretty much shuts completely down, and it is their own damned fault. Once upon a time we would work remotely during a snowstorm, and things would continue moving forward. However the current management made a point of stating that there was no official working from home policy, and as a result we all take vacation days and ignore email. I think they were far better off the other way around, because at this point… it damned well better be a crisis for me to deal with it when I have spent a vacation day.

The Anchors Fall

I spent I would say the majority of the weekend in Tamriel. Not that I really felt the rush to play, since I have been part of the private testing group for roughly a year now, but I did want to get to hang out with my friends as they played. By the end of the weekend I think we had 35 members or so in House Stalwart, and for the most part everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. There were a few people who simply could not get used to the “action mmo” perma-mouselook interface but overall I think we are going to have a large and bustling guild for launch. Really that is the most I could hope for. I entered the weekend with grand ideas of getting to the 15-18 range of Spindleclutch… the first dungeon in Daggerfall. However i didn’t even get close, ending the weekend around 9.5.

I am really bad at leveling in Elder Scrolls. There is always this cool thing over here to look at and explore, or this camp of baddies to clean out… or this bit of ore to mine. The Elder Scrolls Online is distraction city, and I am a willful participant. In World of Warcraft, I have learned to “quest grind” and push my way through content extremely quickly. However in the much more immersive world of ESO I tend to stop and smell the roses quite a bit. One of the interesting things about the game is that I actually somewhat pride myself on making my own gear. So the tail end of the night since I was roughly half a level from 10… I was in a mad rush to gather iron ore. Up to this point I have tried to have a full set of the next level of gear ready to go for when I ding.

I realize I don’t NEED to do this, as you can pretty much get by fine in several levels old gear. However I like the concept of making my own stuff. Firstly it levels blacksmithing, but more importantly I always know where my next upgrade is coming from. Granted it usually means I am well over level since wandering around mining ore, tends to mean you are also killing a ton of bad guys and soaking up extra experience. Right now I am just ready for this to launch. It feels like I have been waiting for this to happen for so long, and now we have a month left before go time. I am ready for my characters to finally be permanent and my choices to matter for longer than a weekend. Since I didn’t explain it… the above image is of a Dolmen moments before a Dark Anchor is about to fall. If you see this scene… go somewhere else… because if the anchor falls on you… you end up taking massive damage.

Not on Easy Mode

After my little Steampowered Sunday write up, my friend Ashgar informed me that even though it says “very easy” in the upper right corner… that is apparently a lie. He said he could tell from the things on screen that I was not in “easy” mode, and that I should try that setting. So sure enough I fired up the game a bit later in the day and noticed that I was not in fact on easy mode. In fact when I DID set it to easy, I managed to get through the first level just fine. Well “just fine” being relative, because the game is still maddening at times. However after a few deaths I managed to progress to stage two “Sky Meadow”.

There I proceeded to die rather spectacularly over and over. So while the game is a BIT less abusive on “easy”, it is still maddening. I am probably going to fire this up every now and then, just because at this point I really want to see more of it. I don’t know why I do… but I do. This is like a puzzle that I want to crack, and I don’t understand WHY I want to open it… but I really do. Ash says this is one of his more played steam games, and I can see why. There is just something about it that gets under your skin and makes you want to play more. It is so brutally unapologetic in the way it kills you, that you want to keep getting back up just to try and piss the game off.

Micro Voxel Welding

March 1, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This weekend they seem to have completely opened the floodgates and then some as far as Elder Scrolls Online testing goes. It seems like every person that signed up for beta before a certain point, got their invite this weekend. In addition to that, pretty much everyone who has ever tested got a buddy key. So essentially if you wanted to test the game, you should have gotten your chance this weekend. Admittedly I was more than a bit disappointed to see we were testing on an old version of the client that did not include the changed introduction. In fact it seems like everyone in the test was expecting to see the new and shiny progression. However I love Stros and Betnihk so I am more than happy to play through them again.

I had all these plans of trying to play a caster, but when it came down to rolling one… I just could not bring myself to play one. Instead I am playing “ole reliable” the build I have enjoyed the most up to this point. Dragonknight + Sword and Board and honestly each time I roll one, I perfect my build order a little bit for the next time. You would think I would get bored of playing the same basic character over and over, but instead it just makes me like it all the more. Essentially I have arrived at a point where the very first ability I take is Puncture aka the taunt/armor debuff. Essentially the first ability you place on your bar, means it is also going to be the first skill line you will have available for morphing later on. Essentially my goal in doing this is to get to Ransack the morph of Puncture, which adds a new ability that increases my armor for 12 seconds every time I use it. This makes the ability really good for survival and essentially my opening becomes a combo of Fiery Grip, Ransack… then mostly basic attacks to burn it down the rest of the way.

I just like the feel of playing this specific build, it feels very much like I want a tank to feel. I decided this weekend to cast aside my traditional human builds and go with a proud Orsimer. Normally I rely on swords, but I decided to start crafting him maces… because smashing things seems more fitting an orc…. also I don’t like the orc racial “giant machete” sword graphic. The guild is absolutely insane right now, when I logged in earlier to take a screenshot of my orc, we had 25 members and there are at least five more that have not accepted guild invites yet. Doing pretty great for a beta guild. If you are playing the game add @Belghast to your friends list, and pending we actually know each other… and you are okay with the Three Tenets… I will get you into the guild.

Level 60 Monk Get

I have to say my monk looks pretty badass. I know eventually I will upgrade out of that sword, but once we get the ability to transmog with the expansion, I can totally see dual wielding that graphic. Before the ESO beta weekend madness started, I managed with the help of Warenwolf to push the monk to 60. Really I am happy just knowing I have a character at max level before the expansion, but I can see playing it quite a bit more trying to get paragon levels. Running around in our impromptu groups has really increased my enjoyment of the game… especially now that we are getting some decent loot. It is funny how loot factors into my enjoyment so much, and in many ways the complete and total lack of meaningful loot is what killed my enjoyment of FFXIV once the questing was done.

We tried an experiment that didn’t really work yesterday as well. While I was pushing my way to 60, we had a friend join us in level 60 content with his level 10 character. We thought surely the catch up experience would be amazing, allowing him to fly through the levels. Problem is… he was not alive long enough to really catch the benefit of the xp windfall. Every mob seemed to make a beeline for him, and one-shot poor Banzai. So after getting him three for four levels this way, we opted to switch to our own characters in the teens and play for real. I had not really played my Barbarian much, but playing him I could not think about playing Olaf from League of Legends. At one point I picked up a legendary leaf blade… to which we dubbed him “Growlaf” the plant defender.

Complete and total rabbit trail here… but we started talking about how amazing it would be to have a game like Diablo 3, that instead used the champions we have grown to love from League of Legends. For awhile my friend has talked about how bad he wanted a PVE game set in the League universe… and really this seems like the ideal fit. They really would not have to change the champions that much to make them work in a Diablo setting. Additionally I have already noticed, that post League we all kinda play Diablo like we are laning in League. We move like League players move, especially when we are kiting a bad guy away to try and separate it from the pack. While I enjoy league from time to time, it is really the character design that I like, and not the game itself. If they gave me those awesome characters in a setting like Diablo that I do actually enjoy… I would probably waste innumerable hours playing it.

Micro Voxel Welding

Watch live video from EQNLandmark on TwitchTV

Hopefully this embeds just fine. I wanted to share this because I thought it was really cool. In last Wednesday’s livestream Dave Georgeson showed off a really cool “glitch in the matrix” of sorts that players have figured out. One of the interesting characteristics of the voxel engine that Everquest Next Landmark uses is that it tries to buffer between differences in two objects and naturally fill in the gaps. This can be something really cool or something really frustrating depending on how you use it. Out in the wild, players have been using this to stretch the boundaries of the engine and create something that has been dubbed the “micro voxel” or as Dave calls it in the livestream “pips”.

The idea is to take a single square voxel of the smallest available size and reduce it using the square smooth tool to get a smaller base size to build with. Having a tiny square is not that cool, but what is cool is the behavior you get in the engine when you place two of these beside each other. The engine draws the gap between creating a thin bar. This can then be used to craft really interesting things. In the video Dave Georgeson shows off a steampunky claim that he has created making metal ladders and metal grating in all sorts of shapes. Where I find this extremely cool is what this means for player crafted furniture. In the video he makes a few book cases and desk that looks far nicer than anything I have been able to craft so far.

It does seem like this takes a lot of trial and error… and copious amounts of patience. However at some point I want to get in and start trying to make furniture for my keep. The other really cool thing mentioned is that we will be getting the ability to add on to our claim in the next patch. So at this point I am trying to figure out which direction I want to grow things. I like building large structures, so I was already to a point where I was feeling extremely boxed in. I could very easily grow my existing property out to four total claims. This might be the kick I need to get back in and do more crafting. I am currently hung on a point where I need to farm just truly silly amounts of burled wood to complete all the things I want to complete.