elder scrolls Archives - Page 3 of 19 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Happy Strain Day

July 1, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Dargon!

Last night I had every intent of playing World of Warcraft, but that didn’t actually happen. One of my good friends decided to re-up WoW for a bit, and since we had not played in ages we made tentative plans to hang out on horde lowbies over on Scryers. July 3rd The Scryers is merging with Argent Dawn the server that I have 11 Alliance characters on, and this will give me 11 Horde characters as well. I’ve always had friends on both side of the fence, but had trouble choosing to roll a character over there and give up a potential character on the alliance side. The merger of the two servers solves all of this. However last night didn’t actually happen and while I logged in a few alts and loaded them up with the few heirlooms I had laying around, I didn’t actually play them much.

Instead I fired up Divinity II again and continued questing my way through their extremely interesting world. Apparently none of the screenshots that I took actually recorded, which is a problem I am noticing more and more with Dxtory. If it has been open for any period of time, it seems to forget how to work. So as a result I am pretty much going to have to start shutting it down and reopening it every night before I sit down to play. I thought I had recorded quite a few nifty things, but in reality it is probably best that they didn’t record given that they probably were spoilerific. A lot of interesting stuff happened last night and I am not entirely certain how I feel about some of the choices the game made me choose. When a game makes me feel like that, it is probably doing a good job.

Happy Strain Day

This morning the first “Ultra Drop” as they call it is now available for Wildstar. This big patch weighs in at well over 3 gig and includes two new max level zones, a slew of new housing options and various cosmetic customization. While I am nowhere near high enough level to appreciate any of this I am amped to see it happening. Basically I am always happy when a game releases content for free to its players that expands the footprint of the game. So many companies have promised a progressive patching schedule but to date very few of them have actually manages to keep up the promised pace. The holy grail seems to be a patch a month, but the problem is that real life gets in the way, and things often don’t work out quite like they intended. So far the only company that has come close to this sort of schedule is Guild Wars 2, with its bi-monthly story updates. The problem there is that it didn’t actually expand the game, and was just a sequence of self expiring quest content.

The funny thing is that apparently some of the player base considers this too soon. I was floored to read on twitter when a friend of mine lamented that she was not even close to finished with the current content, and was frustrated that she already felt “behind”. Me personally I want to be flooded with content, so I can pick and choose what I want to complete without feeling the need to actually play every little morsel that comes out. Now my tune will change completely if I find out that this is some sort of limited time or expiring content. For the longest time Rift had done an amazing job of pushing out little content patches, but over the last year they have put in a number of limited time events that have caused me to really want to stop playing entirely. We talked about this a few weeks back on Aggrochat, but when a company tries to force me to log in every day for a period of time… I ultimately get frustrated and just stop playing entirely.

Day One DLC

The early patch like this is really designed to give the player base confidence at the end of the 30 day trial period. It essentially is a way of stringing the player on and making them want to renew their subscription that should be expiring around the time the patch lands. The thing is… this is so commonplace now that it is literally meaningless. The patch landing at almost exactly the one month mark, is really the equivalent to a brand new game shipping with day one DLC on the CD. This is content that was in the works and ready to go at the time of launch, that was essentially held in reserve to land right at the one month mark and reinforce player loyalty. That is not to say that it is actually content that COULD have shipped in the game, generally speaking it is done but not stable or untested, and requires a month or so to incubate and get ready for prime time.

Even games as notoriously slow at patching as Star Wars the Old Republic, had their one month in patch that introduced a brand new dungeon “Kaon Under Siege”. The real test is going to be if we see a similar “Ultra Drop” timed for August 1st and September 1st as well. No company has really proven that they can continue to expand their game content on a month by month basis, thereby justifying the expense of a subscription fee. I would love to think that Wildstar is going to be the exception here, but when no one has actually managed to accomplish it once the subscriptions start slipping… I just don’t have much confidence. That is the unfortunate reality is that a number of players are already “done” with this game, as evidenced by a string of tweets saying as such. Will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out once all of these people flake off.

I’m Around Awhile

I personally am subbed for at least another six months, but I am hoping that this will be my new MMO for a long while. There are a number of players that are showing extreme commitment and subbing for an entire year at a time. Right now I want to be playing, I just can’t handle the large scale social interaction at the moment. Coming home and crawling into my own private single player world is just too comfortable at the moment. However within a few weeks I will get tired of being alone and will happily return to Wildstar. Here is hoping that there are still a large number of people playing it then. If not I might end up switching factions to Exile. I feel as though we probably picked the wrong side to play on Evindra since every person on my twitter feed seems to be playing Exile there, and since they are locked to only 6 character slots are not wanting to play Dominion as well.

I don’t feel like Wildstar is going to be a game that I stop playing just because my current circle of friends stops playing it. I played Rift for most of a year successfully by relying on the good graces of other circles of friends with their established guilds, and I figure I can do the same with Wildstar if it comes down to it. The sad truth is that unless the game is World of Warcraft, House Stalwart and the Alliance of Awesome so far don’t have the best track record of actually staying in any game for any period of time. I think this is mostly a multi-gaming thing, and I am just as guilty of it as anyone. Right now I want to play Elder Scrolls Online as well… but I just don’t end up logging in and doing it on a regular basis. So I feel bad for the folks that are over there and playing in relative silence. Once my current crush on Divinity 2 wears off a bit, I will likely return to ESO and try playing that since it is a much less frenetic game.

#Wildstar #DivinityII #Evindra #ElderScrollsOnline

Packaged Chaos

June 25, 2014 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

Last night I had every intent of coming home and playing Elder Scrolls Online all night long. It felt like it had been ages since I had done so, and since I won’t likely be around tonight I thought it would be cool to play last night. My wife is coming back into town from her second conference and I have to pick her up this evening around 7ish when she gets into town. So that is going to minimize what time I have to do anything tonight. Last night I technically logged into Elder Scrolls Online, but only managed to play for about thirty minutes before my mind wandered elsewhere. To be honest the game looks even more beautiful than I remember it being, but I just was not in the right frame of mind to play it.

The pace of ESO is extremely slow compared to the games I have been playing lately, and I didn’t really want to force myself into playing it just for the sake of doing so. So I did a bit of crafting and queued up more research since I had long since completed what I was working on for all of the slots in Blacksmithing, Woodworking and Outfitting. I think mostly last night I was feeling overwhelmed by not remembering what the hell I was actually doing last time I had played the game. The last several times I had logged in, it was just to do some Cyrodil with the guild. As far as where I was in the actual completion of Auridon I had no real clue, and to make matters worse… apparently the recent patch broke every single mod I had installed. So more than anything, I didn’t feel like playing the game with the stock interface.

Packaged Chaos

I have to admit, somehow I completely missed playing Saints Row 3. Now I have seen video of my friends doing completely batshit insane things… and have it on multiple platforms, but for whatever reason I never actually played it. I did however play Saints Row 2, and while I enjoyed myself it just felt like a “better” version of Grand Theft Auto 3. It was charming, but for all of the same reasons why I never really cared for GTA, it didn’t just inspire me to go out and play Saints Row: The Third when it came out. That said everything I have heard about the franchise has been amazing, so when Saints Row 4 went on an extreme sale yesterday I opted to pick it up and give it a shot. So while I was playing Elder Scrolls last night, my mind was wandering to giving this game a shot as I had it remotely install to my main gaming machine. That still is a great feature, I just wish that you could stay logged into steam on all of your computers and remote install to one or many.

For starters… where has this game been all my life, and why did I not do this sooner. Basically Saints Row 4 scratches so many itches all at once it is silly. Some of my favorite games are open world non-linear titles like the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Just Cause 2 and this game is firmly in that wheelhouse. You play through a rather long intro sequence, but it is so silly that it is wildly entertaining to me. This sequence of events might somehow connect to the events at the end of Saints Row 3, but I have no real clue having not actually played it. Essentially through a series of illogical leaps… you end up the president of the united states. Then like a sequence out of Duke Nukem, these very familiar looking aliens invade the planet capturing all your friends from the previous game. All of this is just enough plot to set up for the fact that you become trapped in a matrix like simulation and have to work to escape it.

I Know Kung Fu

Remember the crazy shit that Neo did in the Matrix where he “pushed” off the ground to leap insanely high up into the air… well gratz we get to do that here. So on some level it feels a bit like running around City of Heroes at times as I have both Super Jump and Super Speed. The system is familiar to anyone who has played GTA, that the more mayhem you cause the more attention you get from the police… and in this case eventually the alien invaders. The escalation is pretty slow actually, but the it becomes extremely hard to “get away” long enough to let the system reset and for the police to stop chasing you. I reached a point last night where every few minutes there were more aliens arriving on the scene and eventually they called in this insane gunship that I just simply could not take down as I did not have access to a rocket launcher yet.

Another cornerstone of the series is the insane options to dress up your characters. While I did not purchase the above outfit… I came really close to doing so. The only thing I wish is that I had the ability to change outfits on the fly, but that might be in there that I just haven’t figured out. I seem to alternate between various steampunk and futuristic fusion looks. I am really thankful that overall the costumes seem to be really cheap. You tend to be rewarded several thousand “cache” each time you complete a mission, and I have yet to find a costume more than a few hundred. The ability to play “dress-up” definitely helps out with the enjoyment of the game. As is the ability to customize your base weapons to look insane. Right now I am wielding Deckard’s pistol from Blade Runner, the heavy bolter from Aliens, and a Thompson machine gun… all of which make me extremely happy.

Driving Funtime

So my Grand Theft Auto experience pretty much is limited to GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas. But in all of those games a major detractor for me was that when you boosted a vehicle that it performed like crap. It was a struggle to get the vehicle to do what you want it to do. Saints Row 4 does an amazing job at making the different vehicles feel awesome. Above is a picture of me zipping through the city streets, and it feels like I am really hauling ass thanks to a really good use of motion blur. I was able to zip around the city at max speed and still be able to make my turns when I needed to. I also really like the variety of vehicles I have found so far. I’ve even hijacked a garbage truck and it was equally fun to control, albeit a bit more unwieldy to maneuver.

I think one of the problems I have had with the Grand Theft Auto universe is that increasingly it has seemed like a felony simulator. The game seems to favor a more realistic depiction of crime, while still maintaining a sense of gallows humor about it. This makes me feel like a complete and total asshole while playing the game, and generally speaking I feel like the characters I am playing have little to know redeeming human values. Saints Row goes in a completely different direction, making absolutely everything about the game over the top cartoony violence. So playing it makes me feel like I am watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon from my youth. This game goes one step further by telling you that you are just trapped in a simulation. So when you blow away a pedestrian… they were just polygons in a simulation right? The game lets me run amok without feeling horrible about it, and that works for me. At this point I have just scratched the surface of the game, but I can see this becoming something I play quite regularly for awhile.

#SaintsRow4

Super Grape Stomper

June 11, 2014 by Belghast

Silent Observers

So far the issue of Wildstar Attunements has been a fairly polarizing one in the community as a whole. So when I posted my write-up yesterday about why I didn’t think they were a horrible thing… I expected it also to be polarizing. If you look at my statistics for the day, that single post got more unique viewers than anything else by a large margin. However surprisingly even though it got forwarded quite a bit, I really didn’t end up with much commentary. I expected someone out there to tell me how wrong I am, but that surprisingly didn’t happen. I had a friend send me a private message about it however, thanking me for keeping my post “fair” and not adding to the vitriol.

So is it because I approached the post from a calm place talking about my own experiences with bad attunement systems that folks didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to tell me how horrible I was? I am not so deluded to think that the majority of folks actually agreed with me. One of the things I see sometimes in the blogosphere is when one blogger posts about another, telling them just how wrong they are. I’ve done a few of these during my early days of blogging, but it really is not the type of thing I am interested in any more. There is more than enough negativity out there, that I really don’t need to add my own. I really hope that I can be a positive voice and talk about the good in things more than dwell upon the bad. Ultimately I appreciate every voice, even the ones I don’t agree with.

Super Grape Stomper

One of my favorite things in Wildstar is one that has surprised me. I normally have this odd relationship with mini-games in MMOs, and generally try to avoid them. However when I put the Moonshiners Cabin in my skyplot, I found the “This Aint No Bathtub Hooch” challenge to be insanely fun. Most of the housing challenges can be completed every 30 minutes, and often times I will stomp grapes to make moonshine four for five times a night. In part it is the rewards, or at least my attempt to collect all of them. The high end reward is the purple quality bed I wrote about the other day, which is cool but I already have one. The common rewards are either a neon beer sign or 150 reknown, and the rewards I am currently going after is the dye chest. It contains within it one of five random dyes, and I believe I only have three of the five currently. As a result I complete this quest over and over trying to get the last ones.

As a side effect I have a truly silly number of beer signs, and I am basically covering the side of my ship in them. I am not sure if they are tradeable, but if you need beer signs… I am your man. The funny thing about it is there is zero market for them, because the Moonshiners Cabin is pretty much constructable by anyone who chooses to plunk down the gold it takes to build it. The question is… will I still care about it once I have collected all of the dyes available. It is a fairly easy and fun way to farm reknown, but I am just not sure if it is worth paying the weekly upkeep. That is the dirty secret that no one really talks about in the housing system. These cool things we can place, have to be repaired weekly to keep functioning. So far all of the ones I have placed have had a 1 gold repair cost, which at this point is still a fairly significant amount of money. So I have a feeling many of my things… including the crystal jumping puzzle will go away at the end of this week. My mission however is to find the upgrade to my mining plot, because that is one of those things I have found massively useful.

Return to Cyrodil

As much as I have loved my time spent in Wildstar, I do feel bad that I have been horribly neglecting Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar is the new shiny, and as a result is getting my attention as I have a strong desire to level and get all the shiny baubles that come with it. However this really doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Elder Scrolls Online, because the games literally could not be any more different. Things is I enjoy both immensely and hope to continue playing them both for some time. As a result I am really looking forward to tonight. For some time we have had these semi-regular “Faff about in Cyrodil” nights, and after taking last week off I am ready to get back into the swing of things. The event should give me the focus to sit down and really enjoy Elder Scrolls for an evening. I am not sure exactly what we will do yet, but I had a ton of fun at that Nord town we stumbled across with the Dark Anchor, so if nothing else I would love to head back out there.

Playing Wildstar and Elder Scrolls at the same time is an odd contrast. The one failing of ESO, is that it is extremely hard to group with other players. I really hope this is something they address in future updates because the game is in desperate need of better social systems to allow players to do content other than Cyrodil together. Ultimately we do it… only because that is what we CAN do as a large group. Without a mentoring system, we are pretty much limited to PVP content because it allows multiple levels to blend together and get bolstered up to level 50. I am mostly a soloist when it comes to questing, but the various folks who have tried to quest as a pair have found it extremely difficult to stay in sync while leveling. It has mostly worked for the folks that are always on at the same time, but for those who are not… if the partner gets even the slightest bit ahead it becomes extremely difficult for the other player to catch up.

After seeing how cleanly a game can manage disparate levels grouping together, my hope is that Elder Scrolls adds in some functionality for this. The game is awesome, but other than PVP it is a largely single player experience. That said the game does have some of the most enjoyable dungeons I have experienced, but I wish they had taken a queue from Final Fantasy XIV and simply scaled players down to the dungeons level. After seeing this work in Wildstar I am shifting to the opinion that this is the way all dungeons should work. A dungeon should have a fixed level and it scales the player to that level for the purpose of the content. Sure give the players rewards for their own level… but scaling down blows away some of the problem with “out leveling” content, and makes it easier to help guildies out when the content has “grayed out” for you.

Elder Scrolls Online

As stated above I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online and if you are Daggerfall Covenant I invite you to join in the fun regardless if you are in the guild or not. The plan is we will meet up at Northern High Rock Gate in Cyrodil around 8:30 CST. The guild is aligned to Wabbajack, and if we can manage to get people through the queue, it would be awesome to actually do this event on that campaign. The fallback to this point has been Volendrung, and I hope to be online early to try and assess the feasibility of Wabbajack for the evening. From there we will pick an objective for the night and wander off into the Cyrodil countryside in search of mayhem. If you are not a member of the guild, just add @Belghast and we can get you into the fray.

#Wildstar #ElderScrollsOnline

Ramble About Content

June 5, 2014 by Belghast

Story Content

I was having a discussion yesterday with some friends about whether or not the MMO player actually wants carefully crafted story driven content. When you look at the lackluster support that Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World have gotten overall, you could easily come to this conclusion… since each of them are deeply story driven and carefully constructed experiences. I think we are maybe seeing something else at work. If you look at a game like World of Warcraft, some of its deep story arcs have long been heralded as some of players favorite content. However the vast majority of the content is nothing like this, and I think it is simply a case of not everything has to be “art”.

It is in essence the filler content, that is just good enough to keep you from throwing up your hands in frustration, that make you appreciate that gem in the rough of a quest. Games like ESO, SWTOR and TSW attempted to infuse deep story and meaning into almost everything you do, therefore shifting story driven content to the status of a commodity. I suggest that games need busy work, to make you appreciate the transcendent content when it is placed in front of you. The “kill ten rats” quests are there to cleanse the palates so to speak, so that when a deeply engaging story arc is put in front of you… you actually take notice and don’t resign it to more content to grind through.

Epic Crafted Content

When I think about epic custom crafted experiences I think of the Mass Effect series. I have gushed on this game so much, and watched friends play it over and over. As much as I enjoyed the entire trip through the series… it is not the type of game that I would want to play every night. That ultimately is the problem with MMOs, you are asking players to come in and inhabit your space… hopefully making it a nightly traditional to log in and play with their friends. As much as I might like a Mass Effect or a Transistor… I wouldn’t want to play these games on a nightly basis. I want a space that is much more malleable, and doesn’t require so much of myself to play it. Essentially one friends assessment that MMO content “needs to be exactly good enough to be passable” is really not too far off the mark.

One thing that the busy work tasks excel at is helping drive your own personal narrative forward. The players who inhabit an MMO and really live there on a night by night basis, whether they realize it or not, are crafting a custom narrative about their character based on their own actions. Each time you kill some baddies, save a villager, or deliver a package to some far away mountain… these actions are complementary to whatever narrative you have in your head about your own character. When you ask a player to participate in something longer, more story driven… the end results are predetermined and may or may not be complimentary with this personal narrative. When you have a few of these long epics scattered throughout the game, they are welcome interludes. However when everything you do is based on some narrative that you don’t necessarily fully control… it can be jarring.

Grouped Content

While I would not want to play Mass Effect every single night, I still want to play it often… so there sets up the paradox. Right now I find myself compartmentalizing games as either “fun to play with other people” and “fun to play by myself”. Elder Scrolls Online is very much fun to play by myself, with brief flurries of playing with friends when it comes to dungeon and pvp content. This is part the game and part me. Firstly I hate questing as a group, and it has been something I have tried to avoid like the plague since the early days of World of Warcraft. I’ve always found the experience to be generally frustrating since someone is always a step behind or a step ahead of where you happen to be. Trying to keep people in sync is madness… but Wildstar and its focus on leveling the guild through grouped content is trying to change this.

They’ve given me a hook, a reason to group up that so many other games haven’t. I greatly prefer to experience “content” by myself and then group up to do “group content” whenever I can. But the fact that the only real way to level your guild is through players grouping up together and doing content, makes the entire concept of group questing much more friendly. They’ve given me a shiny bauble for my troubles, and also given me tools to make the entire grouping experience more meaningful in the way the various “paths” interact with one another. So this construct is making me re-evaluate the way I think about content in general, and start looking for ways to group up to accomplish things rather than solo everything.

In part my reluctance to group comes from my Everquest roots where your ONLY option was to group for everything. When MMOs gave me the option to be self sufficient, I took it and ran with it and have simply never looked back. So in a game like Elder Scrolls Online, I greatly prefer to be wandering around by myself. I go AFK frequently, often have to take my headset off to respond to my wife, and am generally not always super engaged with what I am doing. In short I feel like I am a liability for grouping, and in those cases I try and solo the entire night. The problem is this becomes a pattern with me, and I simply NEVER group unless it is content that I can’t do by myself. I find it interesting that Wildstar is somewhat successfully making me re-evaluate that point, and seeing that grouping is something that is beneficial to me, the guild, and the players I am grouped with.

Room For Both

Another thing I have learned about myself is that I seem to always need a “WoW”. I am talking about this in super generic terms because the game has shifted at various times… but I always seem to be playing one. Traditionally this has been me shifting back and forth between playing World of Warcraft and Rift… while at the same time playing a game like The Secret World or Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar seems to be my new “WoW” game in this equation, and it speaks to my desire to play that type of themepark/themebox type experience. The thing is there is always going to be room for an Elder Scrolls Online as well. I find myself right now wanting to pair down to just those two games, even though I have a ton of other games that I somewhat want to play. It is like I have various itches that need scratching on a regular basis, and no one game ever quite covers them all. However between a combination of those two games it might get close to covering all the bases.

The more I play Wildstar and enjoy it because it is new and shiny and exciting… the more I want to spend my weekend delving into Elder Scrolls Online and exploring Auridon and more of the Veteran level Aldmeri content. I functionally need both experiences, because so far I have not been able to get both from the same game. However after seeing the lackluster reception that Elder Scrolls has received versus the glowing recommendation of players for Wildstar, it is pretty clear that most players just want a better “WoW”. There is no shame in this, because to some extent that has been what I have been looking for as well. I want to visit these worlds with rich story, but I want to “live” on a nightly basis in one that is more of a “choose your own adventure” novel. Wildstar inundates me with choices of things to do… and there is a never ending list of achievements and things to explore, giving me a constant stream of adventures to be had.

League Beginner Night

I realize this mornings post has been an odd rambling one… without much of a firm point. I blame a clear lack of sleep on my part, and a measure of exhaustion on another. Hopefully there is something worth reading up there in that big mess. Tonight is the Alliance of Awesome League Beginner night again, and if you are a member of the AofA community I highly suggest you check it out. The start time is 9pm CST, but if we have a critical mass of players on mumble beforehand we might start a little early. Last week we had enough time to play a 3v3 Twisted Treeline and a 5v4+bot Summoners Rift. We had a ton of fun in the process.

If you have never played League of Legends before, and have been interested in getting into it… now is the ideal time to try it out. Last week we had several first timers, and to make things easier we broke apart into separate mumble channels to help tutor the new folks in what they should build and where they should be focusing their efforts. This in part involved me barking orders to Maric quite a bit, but he seems to have survived just fine and is signed up for this week again. I am still very much a newbie myself, but as a whole it is a really fun time to be had and presents a wild divergence from the types of games I normally play. I wish we had enough people in Heroes of the Storm to be able to have a similar night for that game.