elder scrolls online Archives - Page 8 of 27

Disappointment of the Year

December 29, 2014 by Belghast

Elder Scrolls Online

Since we are drawing close to the end of the year, I feel like it is probably time to start making sweeping posts to summarize my feelings about the year. The one today is a bit of a touchy one for me, but I feel like I still need to make it. Mostly I feel like by posting the “bad” one first it will be like ripping off a band aid and I can end the year on a more positive note. As such lets get on with the ripping and talk about my biggest disappointment of the year. For that dubious honor we have to give it to Elder Scrolls Online, and during the rest of this post I intend to explain myself a bit more. I feel like in part this is a case of extremely high expectations that were impossible to meet. When I first heard about this game, it was the end of an extremely long session of subterfuge where my friend who was in fact working on the game refused to give us any information about what he was actually working on. He kept us in the dark until the official announcement, but given we knew who he worked for… and the fact that it seemed like it was a fantasy based game he was working on… many of us had put two and two together and gotten four.

When the friends and family alpha started, I was lucky enough to be in that first wave. From tell of the community team I was among the top 1% of bug note reporters, and I never stopped doing it. I took it up like a mantle to try and help Zenimax create the best game possible. The problem is the direction of the game kept veering into a place I thought was going to be bad for the game. We gave copious amounts of feedback on the forum, most of which seemed to be unheeded. The early UI was a glorious thing, that felt just about perfect. It let me set up the game work the way I wanted it to, and could see all the players swarming around me. The problem is things took a turn towards deep minimalism that never quite worked. Even in alpha the game developed this “alone in a crowd” feel that never quite was remedied. By the time the game was launched I had been playing it for roughly a year at that point, and retread the early content more times than I can count through constant character resets.

What Went Wrong

I feel the games Achilles heel is that it became entirely too hard to group with your friends. For starters because of the super minimalistic user interface it was impossible to identify the people you knew when they were roaming around the world with you. You could of course form a group, but the group size was rather limited to only four players. I have way more than four friends that I wanted to be able to keep tabs on in the world around me. The Mega Server was a triumph of stability but it also destroyed the quaint familiarity that a server infrastructure has. On a traditional server when you go to the blacksmithing trainer… you see the same people there day in and day out. After awhile you end up striking up a conversation with someone sharing the forge… because after all you are doing the same thing over and over. This sort of interaction was completely absent. Every person in the world is a nameless faceless entity, and as such the only ties you really make are through public chat channels or the folks you brought into the game with you.

Functionally it became extremely difficult to group with people at all since there was a very tight range in which you could gain experience together. I believe it was something like a four level difference meant you were just running it and not going to get any benefit from it. This meant that unless you were leveling in a strict duo that was not going to play other than as a pair… it became nearly impossible to try and stay in sync with other players. We mentioned this numerous times during the testing process, that the game was badly in need of a mentoring system. It seemed since they had the tech to “bolster” players to 50 for the purpose of pvp content, that surely they could do the reverse and make it work for dungeons. So far the best game I have played that does this is FFXIV in that it auto lowers your level to that of the dungeon when you zone in. Content remains evergreen, and this game was definitely in need of something like this because it had really great group content… that was completely inaccessible because getting in that level sweet spot was difficult.

Alone in a Crowd

The biggest problem that we personally had was the fact that we had folks of all level ranges wanting to do content together. That meant that our only option at all was to go out into Cyrodil. The problem with this is that most of us wanted to play this game because of its amazing PVE storyline… but Cyrodil became the consolation prize that I simply got tired of opening. I am not a PVP player in my heart, and while there is plenty to do out there that does not involve PVP… it is not that engaging. The big problem is that we would bring 20+ people out into Cyrodil with on or maybe two of us actually being veteran rank players. When we encountered actual PVP… a single VR2 player could easily take down 20 folks faux leveled up to 50. The veteran levels just made too much of a disparity between survival of the level 50 folks and the non 50 folks making it sheer futility to do anything out in Cyrodil other than Skyshard farming…. and there really is a finite amount of that you can do.

The answer to the enigma of the game seemed to be to rush through the PVE content solo, because it was nearly impossible to try and actually do on level content with your friends. Then maybe just maybe at level 50 you could actually participate in content together again… but only then if you did all of the content for your faction and manages to “beat” the game allowing you to progress into the Veteran ranks. This was too long range of an outlook for most of the people we brought into the game. At launch House Stalwart had over 100 players of different play styles and differing amounts of play time. The one constant was that the majority of us were social gamers… knowing each other from existing guilds or social media. We wanted to group up and experience content together, and this was just something we could not do. Within a month our numbers had dwindled down to about 20… and by the time Wildstar launched the guild was almost completely empty.

What Went Right

This game is a pinnacle for me of quest content. The story is amazing and they managed to make it feel exactly like playing an Elder Scrolls Game for me. I felt like I was in the same settings that I have known and loved over the years. In testing I got to experience all of the starter zones, and each of them had a unique feel but at the same time felt like you were very much in Tamriel. There was a loving attention to detail that you just don’t see in most games. There are still several quests that I will remember and hold up against any quest content out there. I loved the “single player” experience of the game and I managed to get through all of the Daggerfall campaign and part of the way through the Aldmeri Dominion. All of it made me want to keep playing, and were it not for the launch of Wildstar I probably would have kept playing it. The problem was that I just didn’t feel like I had anyone to play with.. and it became increasingly harder to justify a subscription fee for what was in essence a single player game to me.

In spite of me declaring that Elder Scrolls Online was my biggest disappointment of the year… I still feel like I parted with this game on good terms. The disappointment comes from the fact that I had really hoped this game would be the new permanent home for me, when I have so desperately wanted a game that I would want to play for more than a few months at a time. I have longed for the next “WoW” not in terms of feature set, but in terms of gravity and ability to keep players stuck in its orbit. Elder Scrolls Online sadly was not that game, and likely never will be. That said I absolutely intend on playing it again when it comes out on the console and transferring my characters over to it. This game from the start felt like a game that would be better served with a controller, and I look forward to being able to play it remotely through my Vita on my PS4. I will always have love in my heart for this game… I just stopped wanting to play it. I felt like I beat the game, and will return again when there are new experiences to be had.

Familiarity in Proximity

September 23, 2014 by Belghast

Mega Servers Continued

A few days ago I made a post on about launch issues and game servers, and the problems and solutions that come from various server scenarios. In my post I presented some discussion about the various styles of servers and the weaknesses that each have. Mega Servers are an awesome technology but there are problems with it, namely that it reduces the casual proximity of players. In my post Doone made a comment, and while I normally would have simply posted it as a reply… I am thinking that maybe I need more space to go into my thoughts. For sake of not having to make you jump through a bunch of hoops I am going to repose his comment here.

Im not sure why anyone thinks Megaservers make it difficult to build community? Do you mean that it’s too many people to build intimate connections? Because if thats the case, then we’re just talking about social tools, not megaserver tech. Players just need a reason to interact and that doesnt change because of megaservers.

AA’s current situation is embarrassing. Theres not any good excuses for their current situation. This isn’t the first MMO launch, not even the first MMO with land and other features that complicate server flexibility. Theyre simply unprepared for deliberate reasons. There’s just no way they didn’t know what they needed for a smooth launch.

It’s worse that people who shelled out hundreds of dollars to support development are reporting not getting that 4 day advantage they were promised. That’s a serious charge.

Should AA have gone Megaserver? I don’t see how this wasn’t mandatory given the kind of features it has. You need a vast server community that’s STABLE. And you can’t have that when your system is as inflexible as the one they’ve adopted. I think they’re sinking their own ship right now. — Doone

While I agree with the bulk of what he said, I thought I should maybe clarify my points about mega servers. At first glance they look like a magic bullet for the problem. At the very least I thought they were a magic bullet for launch day woes, however they have their own problems that do not always show up early on.

Informal Community

There is a certain kind of community that happens spontaneously by just being around the same players each and every day. For example the above picture is that of one of the late game hubs in Final Fantasy XIV Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona. Upon arriving at the Aetheryte crystal I am immediately seeing some familiar places that tend to frequent it. You can see a name marked in orange as someone I have already friended. However more than that I recognize if not the names, but the guild tags of many of the players surrounding me. There is a sense of familiarity in seeing the same players day in and out, and when one of them is in need you are more likely to step in and help out. This is the way friendships in MMOs used to be formed through shared activity, not just shared guild tag.

In Final Fantasy XIV it has instanced housing wards, where you purchase a house and in theory become neighbors with lots of other players. Our house is across the street from a Market Board which is the way that you access the auction house economy. Over the course of weeks of being in close proximity with several other players, we have struck up a bit of a friendship. One of which is the name in orange in the above Mor Dhona photo. There is lots of spontaneous interaction that happens just by being around other players and gaining that sense of common goals. This picture is when we just spontaneously put on our brand new Dragon Warrior inspired Blue Slime King hats and started dancing together. But the interaction has spread much further than that, and I’ve helped these players out in the world beyond our neighborhood, as well as had my heart warm each time I happened to see one of them out in the wild.

A Server of Strangers

I’ve played many games so far that have some form of a blended server environment. World of Warcraft for the last several years has blended the leveling zones for the entire battlegroup to make each server feel more populated. The most recent poster child for Mega Servers however was the Elder Scrolls Online. Before launch they made several promises about creating a situation that grouped like minded players together into virtual servers, while still all being part of a much larger farm. While we had one of the smoothest launches since they could easily scale up the hardware temporarily, and reduce it later as needed… there are a lot of problems that came from not being with a fixed set of players. Admittedly some of the issues are due to the poor decisions made with the user interface.

In the above image, can you easily tell where my group mates are? Can you tell the names of players surrounding me? In both cases the answer is a huge nope, and this poor design choice of obfuscating information about other players only served to make the mega server concept feel that more alienating. Everyone that was not you became another nameless faceless person taking up room and competing for your resources. While this is the extreme, I’ve had the same thing happen in World of Warcraft when I encountered players from other servers. It was like that they were somehow less important to me, since they didn’t share the same server lineage. I knew that I would likely never see them again, so why even bother trying to be friendly?

Familiarity in Proximity

In a traditional server structure there is familiarity in your actions. You end up noticing players that do the same things as you do. It might be farming a specific location on the map because you like the look of it, or crafting at a specific machine. In hub based MMOs like World of Warcraft, you spend inordinate amounts of time milling around whatever your faction end game city tends to be. I would spend hours running circles around Dalaran while dealing with raid and guild business over text. While doing this I used to favor certain areas of the town and vendors, and I started taking note of who else seemed to like milling around these same places. Over time I would start up conversations and get used to seeing the same people. If they were gone, I would wonder what they were up to and hope that they were okay. Over the years there are so many contacts that I have made… that ultimately turned into later guild members that I made only because I noticed they were in the same place as me and decided to strike up a conversation.

The problem with the mega server is that it destroys this kind of familiarity through proximity. I feel like Elder Scrolls Online was the absolute worst case of this, because not only did it rob you of being around the same people all the time… it also took their names and guild tags from you. One of the important aspects of a guild is it becomes far easier to recognize than individual player names. Over time you start to associate a certain kind of behavior with a certain guild tag, and then when you see one of those people leading an event you have an informed decision as to whether or not this is going to be a good thing. As a guild leader, my people were amazing and the absolute best advertising I could ever have created. I would get random messages from players who ended up running a dungeon with one of my people, and they wanted to take time to compliment me as guild leader on how nice they were. It is this kind of interaction with others that I hope to preserve with whatever ends up being the next server model.

The Happy Medium

As I said in my first post, I think there is a happy medium somewhere. I think the ultimate version of mega servers, allows you to checkmark certain characteristics that you favor and then creates essentially a virtual server populated with the same players every time. Similarly I think there are ways for games to maybe more easily identify players that you have interacted with in the past. The biggest problem with Elder Scrolls Online is that every player felt anonymous. Even my own guild members, I struggled to locate them in a mob. This should never be the case, you should always be able to pick your friends and guild members out of the biggest sea of names and faces. Similarly I think it is important to be able to identify players, because it allows you to form those connections in your mind that if I saw this player in my crafting hub and they are out here doing the same action… I am invested in maybe going that next step and inviting them to a group. I want us to keep the best aspects of the traditional server structure, and find new ways to scale them as we go forward.

I want to leave with an excellent post from Sig of Crucible Gaming called “How WoW Ruined MMO Gaming”. While the title is hyperbole, there are some really good thoughts contained within, and it seems like Sig mourns the interconnectivity of the previous era of gaming. Once upon a time we needed players, and as such generally treated them better. As games have removed the need for having other players we have eroded that base of civility. While in many cases I think that World of Warcraft has poisoned the well in doing away with some things that were absolutely normal previously, I don’t think we are in an unredeemable state. Final Fantasy XIV has proven to me that there can exist a game that is both social and modern at the same time… and that has a thriving and cohesive community. I think the ultimate trick will be finding ways to take what they have done there and scale it to other games.

SweetFX and ESO

July 15, 2014 by Belghast

Fallout and HDR

Last night when I got home I continued down the dark journey of messing about with Fallout 3 mods and trying to achieve that look I had seen in many screenshots. As of last night I had gotten a “better” looking experience but I wasn’t quite there. It seems like the thing I was missing was one of the many post processing shader injection tools out there. Apparently to get the best possible appearance you need to actually tag team them and use both SweetFX that seems to work with damned near any game, and one called ENB that seems to work with a much smaller subset of games. The above shot was pretty much my first test after turning both on and going with pretty much the stock settings. It is okay but feels a little technicolor, and the sky still seems to be a grey mess.

After trying a few more presets I settled on this one because it feels far more realistic. It is insane to see this game in action with all the shaders running. I am not sure if I can actually record footage and have it capture it in full glory since the screenshots come out a bit darker than it feels on screen. I might do some tests tonight with streaming some gameplay to see if it translates well. For those who are curious I am going to attempt to rattle off the mods that I am using to achieve the look and feel. It is pretty damned impressive that a game from 2008 feels so cool to play. Granted I need to do all the same things to see if I can get a version of Fallout New Vegas that runs this cool, because that game has far more bells and whistles available than Fallout 3.

The Mods Used

When someone posts their spiffy pictures of a modded up Fallout or Skyrim… they never seem to post the absolute list of what they used to get there. It is almost like the special sauce at your favorite restaurant that no one quite wants to give away the trade secret to. It annoys the hell out of me so as I dabbled into modded games I plan to do a complete list with links if they are available to exactly what I am using to get the effects. Here is the total rundown of everything I am using… and compared to a lot of the listings I have seen… this one is fairly spartan. Namely because I am only using graphical mods and none of the various game enhancement ones other than the unofficial patch which ultimately just fixes a bunch of bugs left in the final release of the game.

The only puzzle that still has yet to be solved is that I cannot figure out why I am not seeing the brilliant skies that I have seen in some screenshots. I feel like maybe this is just a problem with the area surrounding Megaton, and as I have not really ventured out further I am not sure if the sky clears up significantly out there. I am pretty happy with the results of this combination of mods and post filtering however. While I enjoy my consoles, this is the reason why PC gaming will always ultimately be superior in the long run. I’ve taken one of my favorite games that just happens to be over six years old… and brought it up to something modern feeling. You just can’t do that with a console game, ultimately because you have to wait for the company to do it… and not the army of dedicated fans.

SweetFX and ESO

The cool thing about SweetFX is like I said before it works with damned near any piece of software. Since you can use a third party software called Radeon Pro to “Inject” it into your video drivers… you can make it work without any actual modification to the original game files. In spite of the name, Radeon Pro works perfectly well with Nvidia cards and I am running it with my 750 ti 2 gig card without issue. This is awesome because it means you can apply it to things like MMOs with some fairly anti-modding terms of service. All you are doing is basically wedging some extra shader work into the rendering pipeline between the game itself and your video drivers. So after some fiddling I found a preset that I liked and am up and running with SweetFX in Elder Scrolls Online. There is talk that you can use one of the versions of ENB designed to work with Skyrim to process the graphics even further, but I have not had the chance to test that out.

So far I am pretty happy with the results… there are times when especially where flame is concerned that some of the lighting gets a bit trippy. But overall I am enjoying running around in a post processing world. The big thing that changes is that the world feels more realistic to me, with far better lighting and shading. The impressive thing is that I really see no noticeable hit to my framerate. In fact it might actually have improved it since I have completely turned off all anti-aliasing because SweetFX is ultimately taking care of that now. I am guessing their processing routines are a bit more efficient than the standard ones that the games seem to use. One of these days I am going to try the trick of running at 1440p and scaling the viewport down to 1080p instead of actually using post processing, but I have not gotten around to trying it yet.

Depths of Madness

When I was not fiddling with graphical settings… which in truth ended up to be most of the night. You can ask PKdude, but I was popping on and offline for damned near all of the night trying out various settings. When I finally got around to questing I completed one of my favorite Auridon quest chains called Depths of Madness. What is cool about it is that you are essentially trying to free three people that are trapped in dimensional sub pockets that have them bound by fear, rage, lust etc. Each one is a little mini adventure that you complete to free the spirit so they can move on. I guess to some extent the quest sequence reminds me quite a bit of the whole madness of king pellagius quest chain from Skyrim. It happens in a super secluded are of the map called Glister Vale and the first few times I played the Auridon content I didn’t actually find it.

I feel like maybe the time away from the game has helped my enjoyment, because the last few nights I have been running around in Elder Scrolls Online I have really enjoyed myself. I am not sure if I am ready to return to group content again, but I am definitely enjoying the slow pace of poking my way through the veteran levels. They still feel super grindy mind you, but so long as I focus on completing quests and not leveling I seem to be doing just fine. As silly as it sounds, I am really enjoying seeing the game with the SweetFX shaders. There are times where Elder Scrolls Online felt a little technicolor for my tastes and this version feels a bit more realistic and gritty. Fallout and Elder Scrolls in general have both been very gritty games… and while I don’t think everything needs the “quake palette” I do think the game feels more realistic with darker tones.

#ElderScrollsOnline #Fallout3

Wandering Auridon

July 14, 2014 by Belghast

Cheating on AggroChat

I don’t believe I said anything about this beforehand, but once again I was invited to guest host on Game On the MMORPG.com podcast hosted by @GameByNight and @Liores. I guess this means I didn’t make an ass of myself the first time they had me on. I have a lot of fun doing the podcast with them, because since I have known both for quite some time… it just feels like having a conversation with friends. This time around they also invited @AppleCiderMage so it was awesome getting to properly meet and hang out with her as well. The two of us have operated in the same circles for awhile, but never really had any direct interaction other than through twitter.

The podcast generally releases around Wednesday and I will post a link when it is up and ready to go. I feel like we maybe derailed the podcast, because they had this long list of things to talk about and I think maybe we got through three of them in the allotted time. Then again anyone who has listened to AggroChat should know that I can ramble on about nothing at length. AppleCider held up her end of the rambling as well, and I feel like the two of us combined pushed the train good and solidly off the rails. That said it was a blast to do it, and I look forward to maybe filling in again sometime in the future. I have to say though that since we record AggroChat on Saturday nights, it was weird to get up the next morning and prepare to do another podcast.

Wandering Auridon

While waiting around on podcast time I decided to stream a little Elder Scrolls Online. The other day I was absolutely shocked that someone posted on my youtube channel asking why I had stopped playing. It made me realize just how much time had passed since I had streamed anything, let alone Elder Scrolls Online. I guess maybe I am poking my head out of turtle mode, because streaming didn’t seem that bad yesterday. I am still poking my way around Auridon working on the quests there. In the video I play for roughly an hour and complete a couple of different quest chains. Most of my morning however was spent trying to sort out my addons. It seems like recently they had a patch that broke several of the addons that I was using. The weird thing about it is that several of the addons were apparently working, but being suppressed by other addons that were not.

While I still really enjoy Elder Scrolls Online, it had been quite some time since I had logged in. I of course logged into a mail message from my research assistant, but the one prior to that was from 19 days ago, so that means I had been offline for at least that long. The pace of the veteran content is a bit of a problem to be honest. While it is enjoyable to quest my way through the Aldmeri content that I had not seen… in the video I complete a handful of quest chains and my experience bar makes no noticeable movement. It gets frustrating to feel like you are making no forward momentum as you quest your way around the world. I talk about that a bit on the Game On podcast but when you move into veteran content it feels like you get stuck on high center. There are some rather sweeping changes coming in August, so here is hoping it improves the feel of the veteran experience.

Modding Fallout 3

The other day I stumbled across a series of pictures of a completely modded out Fallout 3 install. This combined with me playing some FO3 on the PS3 made me want to try playing the game with the same visual effects as shown in those photos. While I am getting closer, I can’t seem to get the visual splendor shown there. Right now I think I have all of the mods mentioned in the description installed and it looks much better than a default install, but something is still missing. Namely the sky is still the ominous grey blob that it has been on previous plays of the game. I am wondering if this is just a side effect of being in the Megaton area, and as I move out into the game proper maybe that changes. In any case I am going to keep trying to mod it until I can achieve the kind of clarity that you see in the images.

Other major change this play through is that I am trying to stick to using the Xbox 360 controller. Basically I have reached a point where I feel like the mouse and keyboard artificially limit me in the number of games that I can play. Right now the consoles seem to be the primary target for game developers, and the PC market gets ports namely, and that means all of these interfaces are designed with a controller in mind… and then later retrofitted to work with a keyboard and mouse. I feel like at this point I need to teach myself to be better at using a controller or ultimately there will reach a point where my chosen way of gaming is no longer supported. Hell to be honest it feels like the keyboard and mouse thing is already a rarity among anything that is not an MMO. With games like Destiny looming on the horizon, I feel like training myself to get by with only the controller is going to be a good thing… and I will go through the growing pains with games that I am already very familiar with before branching out on new titles that I am not.

#Fallout3 #ElderScrollsOnline