elder scrolls Archives - Page 16 of 19

15 Gaming Influences

March 8, 2014 by Belghast

Gaming Influences

A few days ago one of my friends that works in the games industry was talking about a thing that had been circulating around his studio. The idea was for each of the folks to create a list of the fifteen games that most influenced them, or taunt them something new that games could do. While this is a really helpful exercise in the gaming industry I am sure, I figured it would also be pretty fun to do as a lifelong gamer and gaming blogger. The thing I was not realizing while going into it… was just how hard it would be to pair things down to a list of fifteen games. There are so many titles I wanted to include, but I had to come up with a hard rationale for each and every one on the list. So there will be titles that are conspicuously absent, and others that I have included that you wouldn’t think of. However the final list includes titles that I learned some lesson from along the way.

Gauntlet (1985)

I grew up essentially during the beginning of the video game era. There is really not a time I can remember where they did not exist. Early on my parents had a sears pong system, and as I entered elementary we got an Atari 2600. For the most part each and every game I played was a mostly single player experience, or if there was any form of multiplayer it was limited to the kind of interaction you had in pong.

Gauntlet was really the first game to teach me that you could play video games as a team. I thought this was a profound thing and every time my cousins and I managed to squirrel away a few quarters we wanted to spend it on what felt like at the time the “massively” multiplayer experience of Gauntlet. Over the years the game changed, and gauntlet became gauntlet 2 which turned into teenage mutant ninja turtles and later the avengers or simpsons. However the mission was always the same. There were three to four of us, and we wanted to play a game that we could all play together. My eldest cousin and I would help shelter the younger and less skilled players, so it fundamentally changed the way we gamed together.

Mega Man 2 (1988)

For the most part games evolved like I expected them to. While I feel like maybe I should have included Super Mario Brothers in the list, because when I first played it I was absolutely blown away. However it was less about the game itself and more about the massive jump in fidelity. I didn’t really experience a true “mind blown” moment during the Nintendo era until I first played Mega Man 2. Somehow I had completely missed the original Mega Man, in part I think the horrific elementary school quality box artwork was to blame. Seriously take a look at this… nothing about this cover makes a kid want to spend their allowance on even renting it. So it was only after the release of 2 that I started to pay attention to the franchise.

I can remember I got this game when my cousin was over and we proceeded to play the shit out of this game for the next 72 hours. There was something so cool about being able to complete the game in any order you chose. This is really one of my first “sandbox” moments in a game, and we tried multiple paths to the end trying to figure out which was more efficient. Having to determine which weapon worked best on which boss, and finally which weapons were our favorites were completely new concepts to us. While the Mega Man franchise has evolved over the years, and I have to say everything about Mega Man X trumps this one… it is still this original one that brought me into the franchise that I hold above all of the others.

Shadowgate (1989)

Now this one is going to probably seem odd to a lot of people, but you have to understand. I did not get a PC until the 386 16 my parents got during my high school years. So there is an entire era of PC gaming that I mostly missed. I had played Zork and various text based games like that, but mostly over at friends houses and mostly with them at the console. By the time I got to experience the game they had already figured out 90% of it… and were mostly showing off their mastery. Shadowgate was really my first experience with the “adventure” game genre, because it was really the first big one to come out on a system I owned and could play. I remember the first time I played Shadowgate, my friend and I had rented it and we stayed up literally all night trying to delve its secrets.

I proceeded to keep it out overdue for a good few weeks trying to figure out how to beat it. During the day at school my friends and I would brainstorm ways to solve the puzzles, and then that night I would try them all attempting to progress to the next area. Over the course of this we managed to beat the game, and it was one of the most triumphant experiences I have had in gaming. It definitely took a team, because there were so many things that I wouldn’t have thought of doing. Of course I moved on from here to Maniac Mansion, Deja Vu, and eventually became a fan of the Lucasarts PC adventure games. However Shadowgate will always have a special place in my heart as the “first”.

Civilization (1991)

Part of the reason why I buy so many games these days, is in part because there was a time in my life when I had no money and was a pretty egregious pirate. Truth be told ALL of us were, it was just an accepted thing growing up when and where I did. One of my good friends had a brother in college, and every so often he would go up to stay the weekend with him. It was pretty much expected practice for us each to pony up for a brand new box of verbatim 3.5 inch disks and that at the end of the weekend he would return with a bounty of new games for us to play. Our lives pretty much changed the weekend he came home with Civilization.

I had never played a game like this and I wanted more. I spent countless hours and lost entire days trying to conquer other nations, establish trade routes and come up with new ways to win. One of the cooler moments is when we figured out how to hex edit the game and change the names of the nations leaders to whatever we wanted. Each of us had a different strategy, mine centered around two things… 1) getting the chariot as fast as I could, and 2) getting gunpowder as fast after that as I could. This is also the game I learned that I am have extreme nesting tendencies, since I would build everything available for each and every town I conquered. I also learned about my darker side in that I would leave a race alone, making trade with them… up until the point they decided to attack me. Then the next several turns would be all about me pouring war machines from every town I had and completely obliterating that race off the face of the planet. Sadly this is still pretty much how I play 4X style games. I am your best friend until you attack me then it is total obliteration time.

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991)

This game has a weird story, and will always have a special place in my heart. I had some pretty significant sinus surgery, and we picked this game up on the way home from the hospital. Laying in bed playing this game is essentially how I recovered and took my mind off the pain and constant grossness that was having to wear “nasal drip pads” after a sinus surgery. This is now why this game is on this list however. Everything about the game is perfect, it to me will always be the ultimate Zelda game… however not even that is worth putting it on the list for. I remember when I first played it feeling like I was getting ripped off. The original Zelda had taken me months to beat, and here I was sitting at home and it seemed like I was just about to beat the game after only a few days of gameplay. I was getting to the point where I wanted to throw the controller at the screen for getting ripped off.

Then it happened… the game turned the tables on me. Not only was I nowhere near the end of the game… I wasn’t even halfway through. This is the first game that did the bait and switch on me, where I think I am nearing the end only to find out I maybe completed the first act. This has happened so many times with so many games that at this point it has just become a trope. However Link to the Past was my first, and will be the one I always remember. I can remember lying in bed thinking “holy shit, there is a whole other world?”. Few games have had as much impact on me as that original mind blown moment. As a result I will always be able to return to this game and play it happily, each time basking in the warm glow of nostalgia.

Street Fighter 2 (1991)

Obviously 1991 was a big year for me in shaping the way I looked at games from that point on. The local circle K had at one point had Street Fighter, and while I played it and enjoyed it… the game didn’t really feel that much different than Ye Ar Kung Fu… which granted was a favorite of mine in the arcades. However the game play all seemed to revolve around mashing the right button at the right time. You have to understand the street fighter cabinet I played was not the original game that had been in the cabinet, and the operator had not bothered to include the stickers that showed us that something like a fireball move existed. So each of us played the game pretty much like a button masher, with different attack buttons to mash.

When Street Fighter 2 came out, my first experience of seeing it was in a true arcade… not a gas station. The first time I saw someone pull off a fireball motion, I was completely blown away. What the hell was he doing, you could move the controller in a certain way and get a certain move? I became absolutely obsessed with learning everything I could about the game. I bought an EGM magazine… which in those days was a pretty epic 300 page thing. My friends and I memorized every move and tried our best to master every character. When an arcade opened in our town called the “Wooden Nickel” we spent most of our money plugging the machine. What was so cool about SF2 was not necessarily the game, but the culture that evolved around it. Every respected everyone else, and there were simple rules… loser pays, winner stays. Anyone could slap their quarter up on the bezel to reserve the next fight.

Wolfenstein 3D (1992)

This game came to us through another one of those weekend diskette runs, and much like Civ it changed the way we thought about our games. I can remember back then I had no sound card, but instead had a device that plugged into the back of the computer that created the sounds through a speaker. So if nothing else, this was one of the first games I had played that attempted to replicate human voice. Hearing the Nazi troopers yell “Achtung!” freaked me the hell out the first time I heard it. More so than that, this was the first 3D game we had played. Granted I had played some stuff in the arcade that pretended to be 3D with massive rotating polygons…. but this game gave it to me in blazing speed and gorgeous sprites. Of course now I realize just now “not” 3D the game really was, but at the time we were in awe of it.

As cool Wolf was, for being essentially the first 3D FPS I would ever play, this is not why it made the list. Shipped along with our illegitimate version of Wolf was a nifty little program called “WolfEdit.exe”. The first time we cracked it open and saw that WE could edit the levels in Wolfenstien it changed the way we looked at games forever. Up until this point, game creation was a black box. It was a thing that the common man just couldn’t do. Being able to edit and create our own levels and there for extend the gameplay indefinitely was a completely new concept to me. Sure we could edit the track in Excitebike, but this was just fundamentally different and game changing. From this point on, I pretty much dabbled in editing and modding whatever games I happened to play, and this was the point at which I really shifted to being extremely serious about PC gaming.

Final Fantasy VI (1994)

This one I debated about for a long time… do I include Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy IV or Final Fantasy VI. They each had their own influence on me. The first one really was less about the game, and more about “I can finally play D&D on my Nintendo”. The second US release, was less about the storyline and more about “look at how much prettier this is than the original”. When Final Fantasy VI came out I rented it over Christmas break, and when it came time to take it back… I begged the local rental place to let me buy their copy off of them so I wouldn’t have to start over again. They of course declined and I ended up going to Target and picking up a copy and beginning my journey a new. This game was so many things to me, but more than anything I loved the story and the characters.

This game probably goes down in history as the first time I really cared about a character as more than just pixels on the screen. Up until this point, any story being told was just an excuse for me to accumulate interesting loot or kill lots of bad guys. This is the game that got me in the heart, and when a character triumphed or died… I had so many “feels”. I feel like this game was for me what seven was for so many other people. The level of intricacy and the awesome steam punk setting were just gravy. Looking back now, the story feels so primitive compared to massive epic sagas like Mass Effect, but it was enough to make me care about each and every character I picked up… and even make me hate a few of them.

Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996)

With the upcoming release of Elder Scrolls Online, and all my fanboyism about it… this seems extremely relevant. Daggerfall was my entry into the series and the world and lore hooked me. More than any of that the reason why this game stands out is it taught me just how mind blowingly vast a video game could be. You could explore for literally hours, constantly coming across brand new stuff. On top of this it was fully 3D just like Wolf or Doom… but used it in a way that produced what felt like a real world to me at the time. I still feel like this might have been the single biggest game I have ever played. Granted some of the MMOs that came later probably have eventually… after years and years gotten to a size that was larger.

Looking back now, it looks extremely primitive and I have a hard time believing we felt this game was real, but for awhile it absolutely was. At some point I want to try going back and playing it again. Bethesda in all their graciousness offers the full game available for download on their website. This is the game that started my obsession with the elder scrolls, but I fear going back it will not have held up to the test of time the way that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim have. Some games work just fine going back and playing them, like Commander Keen for example. But others like Wolfenstein 3D just have not held the magic because of the extreme changes in what we can do technologically. Luckily I will be able to revisit Daggerfall in a way, since my guild has chosen to go Daggerfall Covenant for the launch of Elder Scrolls Online.

Diablo (1996)

This game… so many hours lost to it. Lately I have been playing the hell out of Diablo 3, and really to me it is the same addiction that came with the first one. My mind was completely blown when I realized that Diablo was a new game each and every time I played it. I could not fathom that a game could be creating levels on the fly, and this was really the first game I realized had procedural generation happening behind the scenes. This game is like the purest version of what I am looking for in any game. Interesting places to explore, awesome loot to earn and lots and lots of bad guys to slaughter. I really am a big dumb monkey, and this at its core is a big dumb beer and pizza game.

At the time I was working as the lab administrator for the Fine Arts lab, and since it had Ethernet internet access… something that was extremely rare at the time… I spent so many hours playing this game off zip drive while waiting for someone to come into the lab and need assistance. What I find funny is that years after the fact people seem to have almost complete forgotten that there was an expansion for this game. Sierra games released the Hellfire expansion that allowed you to play an additional and extremely overpowered “monk” class. For that matter they also released a Starcraft expansion if I can remember correctly. Neither will ever be listed on the Blizzard page, but I can remember both and played the hell out of the modded version of Diablo for years.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)

Metroidvania was not really a thing before the existance of this game for me. Metroid was a cool game, and I remember playing it, but it didn’t really feel that different from any other platformer at the time. I was like a side scrolling Legend of Zelda to me. Super Metroid felt like a big upgrade, but was not that different. Symphony of the Night was just a complete and total gamechanger in the way I felt about the genre. Firstly in addition to gaining gear, you also gained levels. So everything I did felt purposeful, killing easy mobs felt like it was helping me towards reaching my lofty goals. On top of this, the Mega Man 2 non-linear aspect of the game play felt like a 2D roleplaying game to me. It had everything I loved about console RPGs in an action form.

The real hook of the game was just how mind blowingly gorgeous it was, and how great the soundtrack was. Everything about this game screamed awesome, and how cool is it to play a noble vampire as the main hero? I am gushing a little bit here, but Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is pretty much my favorite video game. It exemplifies everything I look for in a game wrapped up in one neat package. On top of this, it has the switcheroo at the end as you can play through the upside down castle vastly extending the gameplay. To date no game has dethroned the title. The Saturn version did not control nearly as well as the playstation, but it had some interesting changes like the ability to control Maria. I keep hoping at some point there will be a version the incorporates the best features of both games.

Fallout (1997)

I have always loved the concept of a post apocalyptic world. As a kid, probably influenced by Mad Max, I used to have dreams about living in a post nuclear landscape. Fallout took all of these fantasies and wrapped them up into one game with an interesting premise and characters I cared about. The big thing about Fallout however was just how “free” and “open” the world felt. There were no hard objectives, you could just wander about the wasteland dispensing justice in any fashion you felt. However there was very much a central storyline to the game, but you were under no obligation to follow it.

I have played this game so many different ways over the years, and each time it has felt as fresh and entertaining as the first. Additionally there were so many secrets that you could only find by wandering around the map and looking for special events. Did you guys find the crashed UFO? I found it by generally faffing about the map looking for secrets. As the series has progressed, I have loved every moment of the games that followed. Well with the exception of maybe Fallout Tactics… that game was a bit too far off the path for my tastes. War never changes… and lets hope the core principals of the Fallout franchise never do either.

PlaneScape: Torment (1999)

Planescape holds a special place in my heart for several reasons, but the biggest is that this is the first game I played that felt like i was reading a good novel, and not just playing a video game. While I cared about the characters from other games… they were “good for a video game”. The story of Planescape Torment felt like it would hold up against the best stories anywhere. This was the first game that made me feel like games could be more. While I don’t always want it, and most of the time I want a big dumb beer and pizza game… I can fully appreciate that a video game can be something phenominal. This game was the game that proved it to me.

Another interesting thing about this game, is it made me deeply care about a Dungeons and Dragons setting that I pretty much ignored to date. I was a huge fan of the Dark Sun setting, but I pretty much completely ignored Planescape. Upstairs I have tons of the source material and world books… and this is all inspired by the fact that this game made me LOVE this setting. I am really hoping the kickstarter sequel to this game lives up to the brilliant of the original. I realize in many ways it will be a new setting… since they do not have the rights to do a direct sequel. I am hopeful, but even if it is perfect… this game will stand out as a special thing to me.

Everquest (1999)

This game was the beginning of the end for me. While I have already told the tale of me starting to play Everquest many times, the game reserves a special spot on this list for showing me exactly what an MMO could be. I was extremely leery of the title, namely because at the time I had a pretty crappy intel graphics card, and an even crappier internet connection. However upon playing this game I was completely enthralled with the fact that a game world that was huge like Daggerfall could exist online, with hundreds of other players and existed 24/7. That concept was a real game changer for me, and gave me something I had apparently craved… large scale social interaction with other gamers.

So much of the way I view online games today came through everquest, and the importance it placed on the social unit of gaming…. the guild. Hell the fact that I run House Stalwart the way that I do is a direct influence of how much I hated the way the guild was run in Everquest. I can’t view the game entirely through rose colored lenses. I remember reading a GDC article from the creators talking about many of the game design decisions being centered around the fact that originally they had planned to charge by the hour for the game. So things were purposefully designed in a way to take large blocks of real time. But for all of the flaws, this game was my first large scale online world. I dabbled in Ultima Online a bit, but it just felt like Massively Multiplayer Diablo. Everquest was the first game that felt like a whole other world to me.

World of Warcraft (2004)

What can I really say about World of Wacraft that has not already been said. After coming from Everquest, Horizon, Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes… playing WoW for the first time… was like watching a movie in High Definition. It was everything I ever wanted a game to be, and more… at a level of detail I simply could not fathom existing to that point. Prior to getting into beta, I was deeply skeptical about the game. I pretty much had the opinion that Blizzard games had just enough storyline to keep them from completely falling down on their asses. Granted at this point I had not played Warcraft 3. That really seems like it was the game changer for Blizzard and a shift from really awesome mechanics to a focus on the storytelling. Prior to that they made really technically awesome games, but super limited storyline. The story arc of Warcraft 2 and Diablo were cool, but nothing really worth writing home about.

World of Warcraft is a game that just raised the bar. They took the best features of every game that came before that and elevated them. They added so many things, both good and bad to the genre. Instanced dungeons was so amazing…. “you mean I don’t have to compete with other groups of players for spawns?”. Then there was the amazing backstory behind each of the enemy factions. I remember at one point I ran my own Everquest emulator server and I tried to do just that. Instead of having generic goblins, I wanted to give each goblin tribe a backstory… then damned if Warcraft didn’t do that. This game will always hold a special place in my heart, but this game is the gauntlet that is constantly thrown down to other MMOs. While niche games have evolved the genre, there has yet to be a game that is just light-years better than everything else on the market in quite the same way that World of Warcraft was simply universally so.

Steampowered Sunday

For most of the week there was a four way tie between Assassins Creed II, Brutal Legend, FTL and Alan Wake. However while writing this post a tiebreaker vote came in and it looks like I will be playing Brutal Legend tomorrow. I really don’t know much about this game other than the fact that it is Heavy Metal, stars Jack Black and is from Double Fine Productions. I am perfectly okay going into this with little knowledge. I got this as part of a humble bundle package, or I am not sure if I would have bought it. When it came out, it looked really interesting, but didn’t really trigger the response of “man I need to get that.” So we will see what you all have gotten me into. I will be picking a winner and contacting them today at some point to give away the copy of Bioshock. I want to thank all of you for voting. Tomorrow we will have another contest at the end of the regularly scheduled game play write-up.

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.