elder scrolls Archives - Page 4 of 19 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Rocket House

June 3, 2014 by Belghast

Beard Reset

Last night I went after work to get my hair cut, as I was in pretty dire need of one. While I was there I did something rather drastic, I hit the reset button on my beard. Usually during the winter I grow my beard out to combat the cold, and then during the summer I trim it back up… sometimes even trimming it down to a Vandyke. This time I opted to keep it a full beard but just bring it down to something more manageable. Over the last several weeks as the heat has risen, our evening walks had become more and more frustrating. Sunday night I had reached a sort of critical mass as I got so freaking hot during the walk that I took a dip in the pool the moment I got back to the house. While I may mourn the loss of my big bushy beard… I realize that it was only about six months of growth and by the time winter rolls around again it will be back with a vengeance. One of the good and bad things is that I grow beard hair extremely quickly.

Rocket House

The highlight of last nights play time was finally unlocking the ability to have a house. I have long been a sucker for housing in any game that happens to have it, and the Wildstar model seemed extremely intriguing in beta… but I never actually managed to get a character high enough to unlock it. Apparently you can get your housing quest completed at level 14, and after running around all night myself, Tam and Ashgar all went off to Illium to do just that. I’ve not really spent much effort and more importantly money on the house yet, but I am sure it will become quite the gold sink for me. At this moment I have the Rocket Ship house that came with preordering the game, as well I managed to pick up a few decor items in my travels and mostly have just wanted a place to stash all of it.

One of the more interesting things that I have managed to pick up is a Meteor Crater kit. I added it to my plot but I am not really sure if I will keep it. Honestly I have no clue what I will be doing with my place at all to be honest. Right now it is mostly a dumping ground of various decor items I pick up in my travels. The cool thing is that already I have access to several rather nice buffs, including a 5% quest and monster xp one that I will likely start using while playing. At this point my goal in life is to get 2+ more gold I need for a mount at level 15. At the end of the night I was roughly 1/3 of the way into 14, so I don’t really have a ton more time to accumulate it. My theory is that I will go find some mobs that drop good stuff and blow them to smithereens.

I wish I had done a better job of documenting our travels last night, because we ended up doing several really cool things. Firstly the three of us did the level 13ish ship mission where we investigated the asteroids and what was killing the miners. I had managed to do this in beta and it was one of those points that made me re-evaluate how I felt about the game. The mission is extremely cool, and really shows off what the game can be. While wandering around Ellevar we managed to stumble across a world boss that was unlocked by the explorer path. Both Tam and I are explorers so ran around this circle unlocking the six locks on the cage. What spawned as a result was this massive void walker looking thing that was extremely difficult. I have a whole new respect for their encounter design after seeing this guy.

I have no clue what this guy was even called, because the shit hit the fan almost immediately after starting it. For starters he dealt massive damage to me as the tank, and kept dropping this crazy latticework of laser beams on the ground that I would have to dodge out of quickly. It seemed as though he was also leaving a green mist on the ground. The main problem was that none of us were really prepared for a dungeon style encounter, as no one was really set up to be the primary healer… and I honestly was not really configured to be the primary tank. I had to self rez about halfway through the fight but we managed to hold on long enough to take the guy out. As the fight continued he split into two, that became four, that finally became eight individual mobs. All I know is the overall experience was insane… and makes me want to find more of these unlockable bosses.

Growing On Me

I have to say the game is inexplicably growing on me. We were talking last night, and really Wildstar is like Guild Wars 2… but with a purpose. The big problem I had with GW2 was that nothing I did felt like it actually mattered. I wandered through the zones completing mini objectives, but nothing really felt that important. Wildstar feels like taking the Guild Wars 2 “so many things to do” model and wrapping it around a solid questing model with interesting storyline. The entire world feels so feature rich that it was absolutely overwhelming during beta after coming from the much more sedate and Spartan Elder Scrolls Online. I feel completely inundated with things to do, and little side missions to complete, especially when you factor in all of my explorer path content.

The content density is crazy, but as I am starting to get accustomed to it… I am enjoying it more and more. The overall game feels like a love song for Vanilla and Burning Crusade era World of Warcraft, but updated and modernized and packed with an insane number of features and baubles and widgets. As much as I don’t think there really is such a thing as a “WoW Killer”, this game probably has as close of a shot as any. There have been so many players that have lamented the changes that World of Warcraft has made over the last several years, and this is a game almost entirely for them. After fighting the summoned world boss last night… I am actually looking forward to seeing what their dungeon and raid content looks like. I don’t think I will ever again be a serious raider, but this game might make it happen more than anything I’ve experienced to date.

Not Leaving Elder Scrolls

While I have spent a lot of time talking about Wildstar lately, because it is shiny and new and I am finally starting to see what other folks have seen… this does not mean that Elder Scrolls Online has been tarnished at all for me. The two games are so drastically different that they don’t even occupy the same space for me. I am slowly working my way through the Auridon content, and I even logged in last night for a few minutes. I have a feeling since today is the official launch day for Wildstar, that it will likely be completely unplayable… and as a result I may just take the more relaxing route and play some Elder Scrolls. On twitter there has been a lot of talk about leaving Elder Scrolls, and this is definitely not me. In fact I am probably bumping my subscription up from 3 months at a time to 6 months at a time. I tend to play all the games at the same time… but there is a point where I could see myself maybe setting down to just Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and Landmark (if the landmark combat ends up being great). As it stands now however I am not abandoning anything for the time being.

#Wildstar #WorldBoss #Housing #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

Coconut Hunt

June 2, 2014 by Belghast

Insanity Continues

This morning we woke up a little bit before our alarm normally goes off, and instead of getting up and starting the morning process… I opted to simply lay there in bed waiting for it to go off. When I got up moments later to turn off my 25 year old alarm clock, I heard a loud boom and saw a flash of lights out the window. Upon further investigation there was a fire truck pulling into our neighborhood. The rain had been coming down for awhile, so I found some shoes and wandered out to see what the commotion was. There across the street from our house, the neighbors jeep wrangler was on fire with flames shooting high out of the engine compartment. At this point I am trying to figure out what exactly happened in my head, because far as I know Jeeps just don’t spontaneously combust.

I would have tried to snap a photo but I figured that would be extremely crass… and also with the rain coming down I didn’t want to endanger my phone. So many things about this weekend have been absolutely bizarre. There was a point yesterday that while driving around we stopped at an intersection. Normally in Tulsa we have a lot of panhandlers that work intersections, but I was not prepared for what I saw when I looked to my left. There standing on the corner was a man in a Leatherface mask from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a suit with a cup out taking money. I am not sure if his shtick was working but he definitely seemed to be freaking lots of motorists out in the process. I am wondering what exactly was up with this weekend, because so many strange and unusual things happened. Is there some weird alignment of the magnetic forces going on or something… because at this point I am almost expecting a plane engine to come crashing through my roof or something.

Coconut Hunt

Over Mother’s Day weekend we happened to pop into a Walgreens for something on our way out of town and my wife found these Margaritaville drink packets in Pina Colada flavor. Since my wife’s mother loves Pina Colada we picked some up, and it turns out they are pretty amazing. They taste as close as you can get to the actual thing without having the alcohol in them. A few days passed and we went right back to the same store and they had none of them. At which point we checked the other stores in our suburb and were only able to find a few boxes. These went far quicker than I had expected, and that lead to our mission from yesterday. It turns out that by our estimation roughly 20% of all Walgreens seem to have gotten this product in. We went out yesterday running from store to store hunting for the illusive product. All told we managed to gather up 16 packages of them.

That means we are okay for 96 bottles of water before we have to go on another hunt. I feel somewhat like I am in a zombie movie foraging for supplies. I would think this was absolutely insane, but I might have to start doing the same thing. I have a similar obsession with this Cherry Pomegranate drink mix that seems to have gone out of production. The grocery store around the corner from me used to stock it, and now Dollar General seems to get it in as a seasonal item. So I figure at some point soon I will be making my own trip from store to store looking for it. In both cases we have been unable to find it online to just buy in bulk. I guess in the case of the Pina Colada that is not entirely true. You can get it online for $2.35 a box… whereas in the store it is $1 a box. For the time being I figure we will continue foraging, but what concerns us is that my wife’s sister stopped at every Walgreens from South Carolina to Oklahoma and only found 8 boxes.

Laugh it up Fur Ball

I did not expect to like Wildstar very much based on my frustrating experiences in Beta, but what can I say… it has grown on me. I am finally starting to feel like I grasp the interface and especially the mapping system. I would still like to see the ability to set a waypoint similar to other games and have a little thing blink on the side of the mini-map for which direction to go. I still don’t really care for the giant temporary arrow thing… but I am getting used to using it. My army of bots delights me constantly, as does my chosen character. I feel like I tried to make as close to the traditional “Belghast” appearance as I could with a fuzzy rat thing. It is the animations and movement that makes me happy. I streamed for a bit yesterday, and you can see me constantly bouncing and double jumping around.

I have to admit… double jump is a big part of my enjoyment. It is my firm belief that every game is better with double jump. I guess this is helped by the fact that I chose the Explorer path, which is essentially the “I like jumping puzzles” path. Thankfully you get path abilities like “Safe Fall” that have already come in extremely handy as I bound off the edge of things. The other thing I am loving is the fact that I seem to be able to solo a lot of the group content with my robot armada. Sure it takes a lot of concentration, and careful use of cooldowns and stuns… but I’ve managed to solo almost all of the 2+ boss type encounters. Bascially I need to come up with a verbiage to describe them… because right now I am calling them “Angry Skulls” and “Angry Skulls with Horns”.

As much as I might not want to… I really do enjoy the over the top nature of this game. There is absolutely nothing subtle about any of it… and I feel like starting in Crimson Isle and then moving to Deredune has made all the difference in the world for me. I rolled a new Chua Spellslinger and I plan on taking it the Levithan Bay to Ellevar route to see if it is somehow better now that I grasp the game concepts a little bit better. It might simply be that I have gotten used to the visual bombardment that is Wildstar. Compared to Elder Scrolls Online it still feels like trying to make sense of the Las Vegas Strip… but I am finding it enjoyable nonetheless. I can see why people are so fanatical about this game already, because it is very much like a “better” World of Warcraft. I remember being just as fanatical with Rift proposed being the same kind of thing. Basically the real challenge is going to be getting players to stick around for more than 1-3 months, but that seems to be the same struggle everyone is dealing with. For the time being I am switching back and forth between this and ESO, and trying to mix in as many other titles as I can in the process.

#Wildstar

Too Many Games

May 30, 2014May 29, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Cheater

Once again I am doing what I consider cheating… which is writing up a post at night that I intend to post in the morning. Basically tomorrow is another one of those “ride in together” days, because directly after work we have a big end of school cookout thing to go to. So I simply won’t have much time to do my faff about verbally thing tomorrow morning. As such I am staging a post tonight, and doing the same thing everyone else… but for whatever reason I feel like I am somehow betraying the ritual by doing. Today’s topic I have been kicking around for awhile, so I figure this is as good of a time to spring it on my adoring readers… look I like to pretend I have adoring readers okay.

Too Many Games

Right now things have reached a sort of critical mass with me, and there are entirely too damned many games right now that I want to be playing. This could not have hit at a worse time considering how busy the tail end of school is combined with the fact that we have weddings and graduations and such to attend. Normally I feel like I can reasonably juggle three to four games at a time bouncing back and forth between them. The other day I posted saying that multi-gaming was even an awesome thing to do… considering it kept you from getting bogged down in the decisions a game company makes that you don’t necessarily agree with. However for me, I am spreading myself super thin with a ton of different activities that I want to be doing. So today I am going out outline each of the games that I am playing and lament the things I would love to have time to do in them.

Elder Scrolls Online

Right now I still consider Elder Scrolls Online my primary game. At roughly two months since headstart I am still very much loving this game. It has some problems, namely with difficulty of grouping, but as far as the game itself goes I dig it massively. I’m working my way through Auridon and slowly creeping up on Veteran Rank 2. I have so much that I still want to do in this game, but lately my schedule has limited my time in it. This is the type of game that I can only really play if I am fully focused on it, and this is doubly so with the veteran content. Shit can go wrong in a heartbeat if you are not doing all the right things, so it means on the nights I am not feeling all that… I end up playing something else.

Wildstar

This game is the new hotness it seems and it launches tomorrow, at least for the headstart folks. I mostly preordered this game in case I decided I was in love with it, and I wanted to make sure I secured the preorder bonuses. I really dig the pre-order house, and I did not care for anything in the Collectors Edition pack… so I went with the normal. I am still so up in the air about this game… there are things I like and things I don’t like. Right now I am simply not sure who is going to win out, however since everyone is playing it, and it scratches the same itch that World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic do… going to give it a good college try.

ArcheAge

Speaking of games I am conflicted about… welcome to ArcheAge. I find so much about this game intriguing and repulsive at the same time. It is this fusion of one of the most interesting games system wise and class wise… combined with one of the worst communities I have experienced. This game has invented new ways for you to grief your fellow players… and this is the sort of thing I have zero interest in. That alone would be enough to make me go running and screaming into the night… but the class system is so damned interesting to me. I love the concept of “Rift without Restrictions” and that is pretty much what the open class system seems like. It reminds me so much of the way the class system for Horizon worked… and that is a great thing.

Heroes of the Storm

I want so badly to be playing this game right now… but I also want so badly to not be playing this game with strangers. The MOBA thing is one of those things that I really only enjoy if I am queuing with people I know. That said supposedly the queue times are greatly improved with the new client. If you are in the HoTS alpha… please let me know! I need more people to queue with, and I feel horrible for being in this game when so many people want in… and not playing it much.

Defiance

The last few nights I have been playing this game again and really enjoying myself. The whole shift in how I approach it has really helped quite a bit. I would love to see more people playing it because I think it would be far more enjoyable to run around as a group. I still have yet to really scratch the surface of any of the story content, and feel like I should do that. Really enjoyed the first season of the television show, and would love to get caught up on the in game content before the next season starts.

Final Fantasy 5

At this point I am behind my friends in this game, and quite honestly I am struggling to get the oomph to play it. That said I feel like I should really finish this game as part of the FF5 draft thing we did. I feel like I would be a horrible person if I didn’t finish it. That said I also know I am going to get talked into doing the Four Job Fiesta in a month… so not sure if I will finish before then either.

Trove

There is something about this game that makes my inner child squeal with glee. Things are just so damned much fun, and the mob design is amazing. That said I have been out so long and so much is changing on what seems to be a near weekly basis that I feel hopelessly lost. At some point I need to resort to reading through all of the patch notes starting around the time I last played in the hopes of understanding how things have changed. The combat in this game is just enjoyable, I only wish I could play it with a controller. I guess in theory I could use one of the keypad mappers but I have been lazy.

Landmark

Oh Landmark… how I love you and am completely bored with you at the exact same time. Right now it is less a game and more a toybox for you to build in, with a ruleset wrapped around it. This was really fun while I had giant things to build… and while I was progressing through the ranks of collecting the next best mining pick. Now that I have topped out, and have fleshed out most of what I wanted to build… I log in pretty much only to mine copper and pay my upkeep. What I need to make me care about this game is the combat system. Here is hoping I will fall back in love with it when I can run around the world killing things.

Diablo 3

I still don’t have a character to 70, and I feel like I have somehow failed for not doing this. Basically this released way too close to the launch of Elder Scrolls Online… and I never gave the game the attention it deserves. At some point soon I really want to work on leveling my crusader, since I have technically beaten the game on my Monk. I am struggling with the desire to simply grind the last two levels to ding 70. I figure at some point I will have a renaissance of caring about d3… but it might be awhile before I cycle around to it again.

Rift

The new souls were released and I have yet to even check them out. I really would like to level my cleric to 60 before the 3.0 patch hits, but I have no clue how long that is. Right now I am logging in on a weekly basis to get my patron gifts and that is about it. I thought it would be really cool to do a streaming series where I try and remember how to tank, and do a public service of tanking elites. I’ve heard the queue times are absolutely insane, and I know personally I have waited over two hours without getting a DPS queue. I still love this game, but at the same time don’t really know what I want to do in it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

A few weeks back I was playing the hell out of SWTOR and enjoying myself. While I have let my subscription lapse again… I would love to pick back up on my Sith Juggernaut and see what happens after Balmorra. I have never actually made it off this planet imperial side, but I was really damned close to doing this when I was last playing. The real challenge will be if I can manage to play the game without subscribing… or will I re-up again only to cancel a few weeks later.

World of Warcraft

Finally there is good ole World of Warcraft. Once upon a time I had a grand idea of getting everyone to 90 before the expansion. I have failed miserably at keeping up with this ambition, but who knows if I will actually do this or not. Right now all I have left are the Priest, Monk and Warlock… all of which are over 60 at the least. The Warlock and Priest are both in Pandaria content, but at the very beginning. I might get a wild urge to play again and push these guys across the finish line. Either that or I might completely abandon this until the release of Warlords of Draenor. In any case the account is still active, because I pop in periodically to dink around with stuff for the guild.

Nothing at All!

Tonight I will be playing…. nothing more than likely. We have an end of school cookout and by the time we get done there… we will likely crash, or walk… or walk then crash. If anything I launch Wildstar and create my characters. Right now I am planning on having my Chua Engineer and an Exile Warrior of some sort… just not sure if that will be Human or Granok. In any case I have nothing exciting to report about my master plan for the evening other than hanging out in the real world and eating some good food.

Faffless Wednesday

August 7, 2015May 29, 2014 by Belghast

Banging Doors

Well it happened again last night, I was woken up by one of our cats banging on the closet door. The problem is after I finally got her crackhead self settled down and up into bed with us… I once again was completely wide awake. Problem is this time it was at 12:45 when it started, so there I lay in bed at 1 am completely unable to get back to sleep. So I sat there for a bit, finally deciding to get up and go upstairs and play something for awhile to hopefully tire myself back out again. The game of choice was Defiance, but I will go into that more later. I managed to get to a state where I thought I might sleep around 2 am, but the rest of the night was extremely fitful.

According to fitbit I was awake 9 times during the night. I have no clue what is going on with me that my body keeps thinking I am fully awake at any point I wake up. I have always struggled with sleep, and as a result cannot nap for fear of not being able to sleep that night. This whole waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep thing that has plagued me the last two nights is brand new however. Right now this morning I feel mostly normal, albeit a little sluggish… I just fear for what this will mean as the day wears on. Yesterday was rough since I had been up since 3:45, especially about 2 pm or so it became torture to try and do anything productive. I might have to start resorting to taking a sleep aid, but I hate how groggy they make me feel in the morning.

Faffless Wednesday

Last night for whatever reason we simply did not have a good turnout for our normal “faff about” in Elder Scrolls Online event. It could be that people were just busy, or it could be that the Wildstar servers were up for some reason yesterday and folks are anxious for the head start coming Friday. In any case there were just three of us that showed up with the purpose of doing the event, so we decided that it was really too few to do a dungeon, and too few to really do anything meaningful in Cyrodil. As a result we just kinda piddled around doing our own thing and chatting back and forth. PK and Delevax joined the rest of us on mumble and we hung out while playing. I have not really as much time to play Elder Scrolls Online that I would have liked.

Lately my weekends have been scattered with little landmines of not being able to play anything, and then last weekend the amazing single player games Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order got my devoted attention. At this point I think I am about two hours away from finishing Wolf, and transistor was a punch in the gut… but a very good one. I had been looking forward to Wednesday because I knew I would devote myself to playing nothing but Elder Scrolls Online, even if the “event” didn’t happen. I have to say I love the veteran content, and more importantly I love that mobs are once again difficult. There were always a couple of types of encounters that were painful for me… I am looking at you Harvesters… but for the most part I had reached a place where I could steam roll in entire packs of mobs. There were several late game public dungeons that I solo’d my way through, so my skill level with the game had reached a point where it was simply greater than the challenge.

Veteran content reset that equilibrium. I literally can get my ass kicked by a mudcrab if I happen upon a pack of three, and even in the case of two at a time I have to use Green Blood to heal myself while dealing with the second one. I like that the game instantly became a challenge again the moment I completed the storyline. The result is that while I do the Aldmeri Dominion content, the game feels fresh to me since I am having to relearn how to manage tough encounters. Last night I finished up Kenarthi’s Roost and moved on into Auridon. Since this is the content I have done the least, I am really enjoying winding my way through elfland. I’ve decided that I really like the Bosmer… I was talking last night with Euron that they remind me quite a bit of the Witch Elves from Warhammer Fantasy. As much as I want to dislike her, I have to admit that Queen Ayrenn is pretty awesome as well.

Figuring out Defiance

I wrote yesterday mornings blog post at about 4 am, and then proceeded to faff about in Defiance for the next hour until 5:30 when the alarm normally goes off. During that time I think I finally figured out how to enjoy the game. There was always something I liked about it, but the experience just felt lacking in some way. Like I didn’t quite grasp how the questing system worked or how the world exploration worked. The first change I made is that I started playing the game with the Xbox 360 controller. While it controls competently with the keyboard and mouse, everything feels like it just works better with the controller. I guess this is the side effect when you develop a game for consoles, but I am slowly getting used to playing an FPS with a controller. I find the lack of focused aiming to be far less of a detriment that I thought it would be.

Secondly I had a major epiphany while playing as I stumbled across and Arkfall. I started treating this game like it was Rift, in that so many times in Rift I just spend my time ping ponging from tear to tear closing the Rifts. Doing this so far has been worth a ton of experience and my Ego rank is slowly climbing. Additionally you seem to get some really good rewards for doing it, and I am starting to bump into other players as well which makes the experience overall more enjoyable. I always felt like the thing that was lacking was that I didn’t really have anyone to play the game with. I am hoping as this game transitions from “buy the box” to “free to play” that folks will start filtering back in. It might just be the recent time spent playing and FPS, but I am enjoying the game quite a bit. Therein lies the problem however… I simply have too damned many games to play.

League Beginner Night

Tonight I’m Playing League of Legends. Once upon a time in House Stalwart we did these league beginner nights, when we coaxed new players to League of Legends onto mumble and did some vs bots or custom 5v5 gameplay. The purpose was to ease folks into the game and let them soak up some of the knowledge of a few of our more veteran players. When the Alliance of Awesome folks started talking about League, I figured it was a good time to try and resurrect this concept. So tonight I will be playing some league and hanging out on mumble with folks while doing it. I am just hoping to get in some practice playing Braum, but if not I will probably default back to Wukong, Garen or Darius. I would actually love to play some Varus since I have yet to do so since picking up the PAX skin. If you are interest in joining up check out the Anook event, the goal is to start around 9 PM CST to make it doable for the West Coasters. There are technically only a couple of people signed up, but I know we will have a lot more just from word of mouth.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance #LeagueofLegends #LoL