elder scrolls online Archives - Page 26 of 26

Free To Play Budget

January 30, 2014 by Belghast

The Arrival

Well yesterday was the day that The Elder Scrolls online officially announced its pricing and opened up the preorders. This honestly has been a day I have waiting for anxiously for some time. I realize that lately there has been a lot of hostility towards the Elder Scrolls because it is trying to be a traditional subscription model game in a market gone completely gaga over the “free” in free to play. I personally do not mind paying for a box and then later paying a subscription fee for a game, especially not this one. Unfortunately my NDA is firmly in place so there is not a whole lot more I can say about the reasons why I am so into this game. I am anxious for it to fall so I can properly gush over it. Honestly at this point I am shocked that it is still in place, considering the April launch date. Hopefully the coming weeks will see that change.

I love the preorder launch trailer above, because it takes place seconds after the original cinematic launch trailer. Whereas the first trailer focused on the player versus player conflicts being set up in the world, this one is more focused on the other conflict. You know the one where a giant Daedric Prince is trying to take over Tamriel. Since I am not PVP centric, this is the conflict I am most interested in and the cinematic like always does not miss a detail of showing this tension. If you have not already seen the original cinematic… you should really watch it first to get the full effect. I would love to see them release one that edits the two together into one seamless sequence.

The Pricing

The above image is the shot across the bow that started the madness. It seems that ahead of time Amazon staged the image and it got leaked. From that point it was off to the races with speculation and complaint about the benefits or lack thereof. Honestly when I look for a Collector’s Edition all I care about is access to in-game goodies, a soundtrack and the traditional head start weekend. As far as in game stuff, I generally expect some form of an in game boost item that becomes meaningless by about level 10, and some sort of an in-game mount… since having a mount becomes so insanely important in these games. So by those criteria this CE is lacking the soundtrack, but instead making up with an additional playable race… The Imperial. More than likely Belghast will be an Imperial, because that is fitting his character.

The real benefit however is not even mentioned here in the image that started it all. Apparently if you preorder before launch you get an additional set of bonuses called the “Explorers Pack”, that will allow you to create a character of any race in any faction. That right there is pretty huge. Imagine if you could have an Alliance Tauren, or a Horde Dwarf? I would have totally done that many times in my time playing various faction centric games. So far only Rift has really allowed me to create faction bending characters, and even then it is only through the use of race swaps. You also get an additional pet, but next to the rest of that pack it seems meaningless. All of this comes for the relatively reasonable prices of $50 for digital, $60 for physical, $70 for digital CE, and $100 for physical CE with the statue and book and all the miscellany that you see above.

Yesterday we were absolutely shocked at how reasonable the box was to be truthful. Based on recent examples a collectors edition I was honestly expecting this to be another one of those $150 Star Wars: The Old Republic style boxed sets. So while I find it pretty reasonable… there are a lot of folks who are chafing under the pricing. To be truthful were I outside of the United States I would too. For starters it seems like Zenimax simply changed the currency symbol rather than setting a realistic price point. That means for all my British friends, these prices end up being $80, $96, $112, and $160 respectively. Eighty bucks is a bit too much to ask someone to pay for a brand new non-super happy magical edition of a game. Granted by the time I post this, those prices will likely change as I just did them based on a quick google of converting dollars to pounds… but still they are more than a little out of whack. The end result is a lot of my euro friends simply saying “nope”, and quite honestly if I had to pay those prices… even as much as I love the game I might also be in that boat.

Free to Play Budget

Remember the other day me talking about how our perspective matters. This is yet another case of this happening. Had the free to play explosion not degraded what we are willing to pay for an MMO… then this is another launch that would have gone off without a question as to the price to value. At this point however so many MMOs are either outright free, or some sort of a “buy the box” model. Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and World of Warcraft remain the last bastions of the “pay for the software and pay for the game” era. So we can quickly rush to bashing them for this decision… but the problem is they were built for a era that may or may not be over. These games were started in a time when the reality was that players would happily plunk down their $60 for the client software and just as happily plunk down $15 a month for the maintenance fee. I mean this model works in the IT world, since damned near every big money software package comes chained to a maintenance agreement.

What has changed is that players now have an option. Similar to the open source movement, folks can now say “Nope” and opt to avoid playing the new and shiny games and instead retrench in games like Rift that have a much lower barrier of entry. As much as I want to play Elder Scrolls, I can’t necessarily say that they are wrong. I am pretty intimately connected to the success of this title, so I was going to play it long before they announced the pricing. I knew from the moment it was announced that I would be leading a branch of House Stalwart in this game, and having a lot of fun along the way. For me buying Elder Scrolls Online was a foregone conclusion, but I can completely see especially with the really poor currency conversion skills… why folks would opt not to buy into this franchise. Granted this games success really doesn’t lay within the MMO community… frankly I don’t think they “need” us. This game will be a test of whether or not the console player has an appetite for a large scale multiplayer version of a game they have bought tens of millions of copies already.

Stalwart Ebonheart

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014 by Belghast

Small World After All

Yesterday I had a pretty interesting chain of events happen, that have left me all warm and fuzzy. At some point yesterday I tweeted a general complaint about how steam seems to be incapable of flagging on a machine level that we have already installed the various pre-requisites like DirectX. This tweet seemed to develop a life of it’s own as it got re-tweeted around a bit and favorited. Most of the people were extremely familiar to me, but one of the folks retweeting was completely new. In my current mode of trying to reach out more to help foster the community I followed Maevrim.

It turns out the two of us have been running in the same circles for years spanning two different games and two different servers. For the bulk of her time playing World of Warcraft, it seems as though she was in the guild Gnomes Will Eat You on Argent Dawn… a guild House Stalwart folk are very familiar with. During the old days our two guilds did quite a bit together, and these days my raid has the very amazing Frosti… that has a sort of dual citizenship with characters in both House Stalwart and Gnomes Will Eat You. Turns out she also plays on Faeblight where the House Stalwart Rift branch is located.

To make things even more awesome, she is looking for a new guild home. Of course my guildmasterly ninja instincts started kicking in and I have been trying to welcome her into the Stalwart fold. Its true… we are kind of like a cult but I promise that our koolaid isn’t poisoned much. Scan a few hours later, turns out she was on a podcast and I somehow got mentioned. Now I seem to have missed the reference or it was said before or after the started recording. But all of this makes me realize just how small and relatively tight knit a community we have. Like I said the other day, it is all a matter of perspective. We might think we are alone in the void, but then something happens to make us realize just how connected we are as a whole.

Stalwart Ebonheart

Since April 4th 2014 will be here before we know it, I figure it is time to start planning for the House Stalwart Ebonheart Pact branch in Elder Scrolls Online. For some time I have known that I would be playing this game at release, and my hope is to successfully weave in time of both it and World of Warcraft. The goal is to play a few nights a week, because really I am a sucker for anything Elder Scrolls… and you would have to cause a real cataclysm to keep me away from it. For a long time I have also known I would be aligning with the Ebonheart Pact, in part because my three favorite races are the Nord, Dunmer and Argonians. After an impromptu poll of the folks who signed up on the brief Tamriel Foundry site we had… it seems like that is the case for most of the guild.

Since House Stalwart has always been a social guild… and more family than anything else… I thought I would open things up this time to my blogger family as well. I know Maric and some of the Mercy Corps folks will be joining Stalwart in this endeavor, and my hope is to gather up as many good people as I can before the launch. I am sure a good chunk of the current and former Stalwart members will be joining us as well. Basically all sociable folks are welcome spending they are agreeable to the standard House Stalwart Three Tenets. While I founded House Stalwart in World of Warcraft, the ethos that I helped foster has spanned so many games and will likely move into even more in the future. My hope is that we will keep creating a connection that transcends the games we happen to be playing at the time.

If this type of environment sounds like a good fit for you, then please follow this link to our forums. I created a brand new forum thread this morning, trying to gauge how many people we will have at launch. If you have any issues setting up a forum account either drop me a line here, or ping me over twitter and I will see what I can do to assist you. Also of note, we are primarily a Eastern Standard/Central Standard time zone guild, but have members with a pretty wide variety of playtimes.

Nightblade Finishing School

This weekend I also dipped my feet back into Rift spending a bit of time Saturday and Sunday working on my Nightblade. I am not sure if I will ever make a third level 60, but I really do want to finish my rogue off who is currently sitting and 70% through 58. While I enjoy the Storm Legion content on one level, on another it feels extremely grindy. As such during the course of leveling Belghast to 60 I stalled out no less than four times. Similarly Belgrave has stalled out quite a few in the process of getting this far along. Maybe I am just spoiled by the brisk pace of leveling in games like World of Warcraft or even Final Fantasty XIV… but getting through Storm Legion feels like an absolute chore. I do however really want to spend some time pushing through it.

This weekend I spent quite a bit of time doing Instant Adventures and they made the process feel a little less painful. At some point I also want to spend some time in dungeons… but for whatever reason I seem to always get Stormbreaker Protocol… which for those not familiar with it is the Rift version of Oculus. Essentially it is that one dungeon that makes almost the entire party disappear. I feel like I really need to get adjusted to the Rift controls a bit more before stepping foot into a dungeon, though honestly I was killing things in Argent Domain last night as efficiently as I ever was. More than anything with the impending release of 2.6, I want to dust off my Rift account and finally push the Nightblade across the finish line.

What About Wildstar?

December 20, 2013 by Belghast

4.4.14

It as been roughly ten days since Zenimax announced the official PC/Mac release date of Elder Scrolls Online. In doing so they either knowingly or unknowingly threw down the gauntlet to the other developers with their own tentative release dates. The success and fail of an MMO has become so much more than whether or not it is a good game, but instead how distracted the gaming populous is at any given moment. I remember a time in the not too distant past where major PC releases were truly few and far between. However it currently seems like there is always something bigger looming on the near horizon. Like it or not every single one of these releases is competing for the same relatively small pool of players, subscribers, and even money in general.

Yesterday Massively voted The Elder Scrolls Online… the MMO most likely to flop in the coming year. While I personally think this is deeply cynical and maybe even more than a tiny bit inflammatory, I think more than anything it is short sighted. Quite frankly the success and failure of Elder Scrolls Online has nothing to do with the PC gamer, and that is more than a tiny bit humbling. We will no longer be the king makers for these online games. With ESO and games like it, that torch is being passed from PC Gaming to the much larger pool of console gamers. I have to say the console market is rabidly waiting for a new Elder Scrolls Experience, and especially a multiplayer one at that . I think it might be a bitter pill to swallow to realize that the success and failure of these titles may very well be out of the hands of the “PC Gaming Master Race”.

3.25.14

Being the master tacticians that they are, yesterday Blizzard announced the release date for the Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls expansion. With this they are releasing roughly four weeks ahead of Elder Scrolls Online, and as a result giving themselves plenty of time with the sole attention of the PC Gaming market. Similarly however they are also hungrily eyeing the console market, and you can bet that they will be timing the release of the PS3/PS4/Xbox360/XBone release against the June release of Elder Scrolls Online to the next gen consoles. I feel like a four week buffer is more than safe and should play well to the gamers that may not have the ability to purchase every title they want. I know I am personally amped about this version of the game, because it fixes a lot of the loot problems I had with the initial release. Additionally I am holding out hope beyond hope that they manage to roll in the console “controller” features as well.

There is no way to look at this release date as anything other than business strategy. Elder Scrolls started this ball in motion, and now each game company will have to decide when the most opportune time is to deploy their own “forces” on the game board. While the Diablo 3 demographic is not exactly the same as the Elder Scrolls demographic… there is more than enough overlap to have caused issues for either game. As a result two major juggernauts have been placed on the “game board” and as a result the new year is less open than it was. Now the launches of so many titles will have be strategized to figure out when the most opportune time to release will be.

Warlords of Draenor

Since the title Blizzard announced was the release of Diablo 3 for the tail end of the first quarter, my assumption is that Warlord of Draenor was simply not close enough to ready to be able to launch against Elder Scrolls Online. As a result I am guessing this means that WoD will be another last quarter of 2014 release much like a few other World of Warcraft expansion launches. If this is the case that bookends the year up pretty nicely. Diablo 3 first quarter, Elder Scrolls Online second quarter and Warlords of Draenor closing out the year. You can already see the 2014 release calendar starting to tighten a bit and this will make it increasingly difficult for game companies to find a “clear window” to release against. I personally thought I had written off the WoW franchise completely, but nostalgic can be a pain sometimes.

As a result I imagine there will be a lot of players that either intentionally or un-intentionally come back for the release of Warlords. The lifespan of a WoW expansion rush seems to be roughly three months, so an end of the year release will also make the 2015 schedule some what slippery as well. The problem is there are lots more pieces to be placed on the board. Games like Titanfall and Destiny will also be chipping away at the pool of players that would h

ave normally played an MMO. Additionally we still have EQ Landmark and EQ Next that have not committed to any release schedule and will likely be just as large of a force on the Calendar as the games that have already been confirmed.

What About Wildstar?

I will be the first to admit… I am actually not that excited about Wildstar at all. By all rights I should be, but for whatever reason there I have not followed it. I do however have a lot of friends who have, and as a result I want it to be a success for their sake as much as anything else. Up until this point we have heard a tentative “spring 2014” release. As I have just outlined however the “spring” timeframe is extremely packed as it is. Wildstar is in a really precarious place right now, and I do not envy them. They are launching a new MMO, with a subscription model into a world that seems to have fallen out of love with subscriptions. Additionally it is an unproven IP, and there are additional issues on selling a new player on “the vision” for this world. Finally it is releasing against some really powerful forces.

The safe bet will be to release Wildstar in the July/August timeframe. As much as I myself hate it, the players who are likely to leave a game will have done so by the time three months have passed. July would be the beginning of a window where generally the “locusts”, a group I have been a member of so many times in the past… will have consumed what there is to consume with ESO and be looking for a new target to move to. Plotting a course for this opening in the schedule seems like the safe choice for them. However all it would take to make this more treacherous, is for the other pieces that are unplaced to fall into this window. Releasing against EQ Landmark would be enough to make the fate of Wildstar uncertain, and we have yet to even discuss the potential for the upcoming and as of yet unnamed Rift expansion.

My money is still on Wildstar penciling in a July release date, and EQ Next as a game being a spring of 2015 release. I just don’t see Carbine being confident enough to release Wildstar without a good opening in the schedule. They are in a much more tentative position than Zenimax, since the entirety of their fate rests upon the shoulders of the PC Gaming market. Elder Scrolls Online could realistically release against another big game, since they will be gaining a bunch of “new to genre” players coming in from the console market. Additionally they have a well established and well loved IP… and even if folks are not completely sold on the game… they are likely to at least dip their toes in the water for awhile. I find myself caring far more about the people at the companies… than the companies and games themselves. With several friends in the “industry” I honestly hope that they can stack the schedule in a way so that all of these titles fine at least limited success. If we see another crop of relative failures, I think this year might be the last hurrah of the triple A MMO market.

5 Settings Prime for MMOs

October 28, 2013 by Belghast

I know there are several folks out there that really hate it when an franchise gets turned into an MMO. This is not a post for you in the least, so I will probably only serve to frustrate you this morning. For me… I love MMOs, it is my favorite type of game, and comprises of the vast majority of games I play. If you check my Raptr profile you will see that the majority of all the high consumption titles are massively multiplayer online games. However every now and then there is a setting that feels like it screams to be an MMO. These are the five settings I want most in MMO form.

5 – Rifts

For those who have not been hanging around game shops most of their lives… this title could go completely unnoticed. It never really had the big money marketing that for example Dungeons and Dragons had, but it represents a good chunk of my childhood. I love the palladium system, not because it was some great feat of gaming. Quite frankly the rules are pretty lousy if you get down to it and and extremely cumbersome. What always drew me to the system was the promise of being able to create damned near anything you can think of. Rifts took this earlier concept of the palladium system and infused it with so much personality.

Rifts sets up an earth where the magic has returned and caused leylines to blaze open across the planet. When two intersect there is a chance of a dimensional rift opening and spilling forth all manner of crazy into our world. This alone would be enough for me… but additionally they have set up all sorts of great opposing forces… the Splynn, the Coalition, the Federation of Magic, the Triax, the NGR, the list literally continues on and on as there are over 30 separate sourcebooks each filled with its own list of opposing forces. Additionally there are some pretty amazing character classes like Glitterboys, Juicers, Cyberknights, Techno Wizard, Ley Line Walker, Psi-Stalker, and again these go on and on. There is just so much world to wrap a game around, and almost unlimited content to explore for expansions.

4 – Shadowrun

This is another long time dream of mine to see Shadowrun in a massively multiplayer setting. This was a huge system as I was growing up, and while I never actually played a lot of it, I owned most of the books. Similar to Rifts it is a setting of an alternate earth, where magic and technology clash. Drawing upon the William Gibson novel Neuromancer it adds the element of the Matrix and cyber warfare. I thought this could lead to some really interesting gameplay. Where part of your party is physically running a dungeon while your decker is going along with you in cyberspace trying to remove obstacles from your path.

Recently the Shadowrun console games have been revitalized in the form of Shadowrun Returns… which is cool but I would much rather have a huge living and breathing world to explore than to do so in a top down tactical setting. Once again there are tons of source books over the run of this system that could be drawn upon to keep the world going for years. There is also a similarly long list of really interesting classes to play, with lots of different gameplay styles to explore.

3 – Mass Effect

This one will likely never happen after the tale of Star Wars the Old Republic and how it struggled to find an audience. But I think we all can admit that Mass Effect as a whole is a much better universe to explore than that of SWTOR. The ME saga, or at least up until the very end is one of the better science fiction storylines I have experienced. I would love to see a serialized television show chronicling the exploits of Shepard. As far as an online universe would go, we would have to set the game significantly earlier than the events of ME1. Essentially from that game forward there is an apocalyptic destiny set in motion, and that really does not give much room for growth.

In order to make this work we would need to set the game either before or after the main trilogy, and really don’t think ANY of the endings to ME3 gives us enough room to move within game wise. As a result I would set the game a few years before the events of Mass Effect. This should allow the game to evolve along the normal course of events that happen in the main trilogy. Similar to the LOTRO game, you would be different characters in the same universe watching the events play out around you. There are so many different cultures and opposing viewpoints that it just begs for a MMO to be wrapped around it.

2 – Fallout

War, War Never Changes. Every time I hear Ron Perlman utter those words I get this massive nostalgic wave of feels was over me. I love everything there is about the Fallout setting, and have been a series diehard since I saved up the cash in college to buy the first one. I missed the boat on the whole Wasteland thing, so I am hoping the Kickstarter will give me a taste of what that world would have been line. I want a Fallout MMO so badly, but more than anything… I want one that CONTROLS like Fallout. I want so much to like Fallen Earth, but I just cannot get past the control scheme, and it destroys the game for me.

The whole post apocalyptic wasteland is such fertile ground for an MMO. Especially a huge sandbox setting like Fallout. As far as classes go, I think you would have to do the same sort of open ended treatment that you already have in Fallout. Mainly I would be happy with just allowing a persistent and co-operative version of the existing Fallout games. There are already so many different competing interests in the wasteland, and I feel like you could pretty much plunk another game down at any point during the current storyline. Mainly I just want to join the brotherhood of steel and wander around the wasteland in power armor like I always do.

1 – Elder Scrolls

Okay I admit it… this is absolutely cheating since we all know there is already an Elder Scrolls MMO on the way. However until it releases sometime next year, this one stays at number one with a bullet. There has never been another series that has captured so much of my imagination as has the Elder Scrolls Series. I love literally everything about the world. The absolute vastness of it all, the lore, the Aedra and Daedra. Nothing inspires me more than having a game with a fully fleshed out world and its pantheon of gods. I think that more than anything is what glued my attention to Everquest and Norrath, and the complex relationship between the various gods in Tamriel makes that setting seem simplistic.

More than anything, I love the freedom of the Elder Scrolls settings to completely abandon my quest chain and wander off into the world exploring freely. I love that there is always something to find hidden in this nook or cranny. I love almost more than anything that there are tons of books in the games, each with their own story that only serves to make the world more rich and three dimensional. You have some amazing races, each with their own deep background and other races that no longer exist like the Dwemer have have littered the landscape with their former greatness. I just hope that the MMO version can gather up all this great lineage and give me vast tracts of interesting to go off and explore. This is the game I am most looking forward to, and you can bet that when it releases I will pretty much forsake everything else at least for awhile.