elder scrolls Archives - Page 5 of 19 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Farewell to Coldharbor

May 24, 2014 by Belghast

Cleaning Day

Good morning you happy people… I am being forcibly cheery because my body doesn’t seem to want to fully function this morning and I am falling back on the whole “fake it until you make it” methodology. May is a horrible time for me for so many reasons. Firstly the world seems to come alive and fill the air full of pollen and seed pods and all the wonderful things that make life happen. As a result my body tries to kill me as my allergies come into full swing. Additionally with our constant regiment of walking… you would think that at some point I would stop being sore, however that doesn’t seem to be the case. I hit 10,000 steps again yesterday and this morning it feels like every inch of my body hurts. Being fat sucks, but at least I am a much healthier fat that I used to be.

One of the other huge negatives about May is the fact that it is also when the end of the school year happens. Any spouses of educators will agree with me that the two worst times of the year to be their spouse… is the beginning and end of the school year. My wife no matter how much I love her… has been an spastic little monkey in a frantic rush to finish all the things that have to be finished. As a result she is prone to fits of irrationality at 10 pm at night when things are not going like she wants them to, and not much help in taking care of the household chores. Also as a result, I’ve kind of said screw it myself… and our house is a pit right now. So today will be devoted to the cleaning of all the things and trying to get more domicile into a more livable state. Mostly it has been my inner sanctum that has been bothering me… I have been stepping over Amazon boxes for weeks that need to be broken down and taken to the recycling bin. We are considering joining in with a neighbor in a few weeks for a garage sale so some consideration needs to be made about what to actually sell.

Farewell to Coldharbor

Last night my wife was working late yet again, which has been a regular occurrence for most of the month on Friday nights. She had intended to get home earlyish and we had planned to go for our nightly walk and then walk over to Taco Bueno on the way home. At some point during the evening she messaged me saying that she would be working late and to go ahead and eat without her, but at that point I was so heavily into the storyline of Coldharbor that I figured I would just wait. I’ve been Veteran Rank 1 for most of a week now, and have simply not spent enough time in game to push through the main storyline in Cold Harbor which supposedly unlocked access to moving into the Aldmeri Dominion content. Last night I did just that, by finishing not only the end of the main Cold Harbor story but also finishing up the level 50 harborage quest that gets unlocked immediately after that.

I have to say the “end of the game” is equal parts beautiful and epic, and I am trying really hard not to give any unintentional spoilers for those who have not arrived there yet. I figure Coldharbor screenshots all look blue and brutal, so I am trying to pick ones that don’t exactly give away major plot points. There are some interesting choices that happen as you play through the zone, and the game seems to revel in making you choose between bad options. There is a point where you have to pick between a rogues gallery of formerly vanquished enemies, and I am guessing your options are limited if you did not actually finish the quests in the zones they are involved with. I feel like I made the right choice… but you never really know. I still was dealing with a bad bad person, but overall it did not come back to bite me in the butt like I thought it might.

While I have finished the story, I will still be spending quite a bit more time in Coldharbor as I finish the parts of it I skipped while rushing through the storyline. After a point you get tired of everything being blue, purple and grey. I needed to have the ability to move on, especially since I wasn’t really seeing much veteran experience before the Craglorn patch. It seems as though they shifted things around so you could get veteran experience in Coldharbor. I have technically been to Craglorn, but only long enough to zone in and get the wayshrine. I saw mostly Veteran Rank 10 players there, so I figure I have a very long time to go before I am adequate to kill much of anything there. At this point I have a purple VR1 sword and shield, and a full VR1 blue set of armor, so I am doing okay in the Aldmeri Dominion content. Though even with all of that, getting jumped by too many mobs at once becomes a fight for my life in a way that never happened in Coldharbor. I approve of the ratcheting up of difficulty, and it should be fun experiencing the Aldmeri content.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #ColdHarbor #Daggerfall #Aldmeri

Re-Return to Castle Wolfenstein

May 22, 2014 by Belghast

Cyrodil Faffed

It seems like none of the screenshots that I took last night… actually got saved to the disk. Not sure what is up but over the last few days I have had Dxtory flake the hell out on me. I’ve used it lately to capture screenshots while streaming because OBS and Fraps seem to piss each other off. That said something seems to have changed in the mix and I couldn’t get Dxtory working on steam games Tuesday night, and last night it apparently was not taking any screenshots while streaming. Anyways as a result you get a cool screenshot of Coldharbor instead of a screenshot of what actually happened last night. What happened you ask? Well we had our second “Faff About in Cyrodil” night as a guild and while we had fewer people than last time I feel like we got more cool stuff accomplished.

We started off hunting skyshards and that morphed into delving into a whole bunch of dungeons. Along the way we had a few blips of PVP that surprisingly enough we not only survived by dominated. We of course has the numbers advantage, but last week that did not matter at all as I saw a dozen of us get taken down by 3 veteran players. That seems to be the key difference, this week I was a veteran player, and could in theory “tank” the players we were up against. We found a really awesome town full of repeatable quests that just happened to have a dolmen in the center of it. We managed to get two Dark Anchor spawns while we were there, and towards the end of one of the battles we had another guy jump in and try and gank us while we were fighting the demons. Thankfully once again the power of veteran rank won the day.

It is disturbing how much of a difference that makes. Just being 50 out in Cyrodil seems to completely even the playing field. At one point we ended up getting attacked by a Veteran Rank 8 player, and still we were able to dispatch him handily. So the moral of the story is… Cyrodil sucks if you are not at least 50. I have an idea of maybe pairing up into dungeons next week during the same time slot, but if that doesn’t work we will just break out and do more cyrodil. There is still a ton of area left to explore. The map is huge, a point that was not fully driven home until the end of the above video when myself, Delevax, Horli and Scopique attempted to run back to the way shrine. It was a really really long run.

Re-Return to Castle Wolfenstein

First let me get this out of the way… I have a boyish untarnished love for all things Wolfenstein. The original game is on my 15 gaming influences list, because it truly was the game that turned me away from console gaming in the first place. All of that said… I found the last jaunt through the Wolfenstein universe extremely disappointing… even for an admitted fanboy. In theory Wolfenstein: New Order is a continuation of the story arc started with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, continued in the self titled Wolfenstein and finished up in this game. That story arc involves trying to stop the dastardly Wilhelm Strauss otherwise known as Deathshead. Whereas the original game was all about tackling Hitler himself, the modern incarnations have shifted into something more malleable, and it works for the most part.

I am fairly notoriously against game introductions, and prefer the game just to plunk me down unceremoniously at the beginning of a level. That said I have to say the easing into the storyline here in Wolfenstein is one of the more enjoyable introductions I have played through. They manage to pepper just enough action into what would other be a cinematic to make me feel like I am actually part of it. The game starts with us trying to land on the island held by Deathshead, and having to content with both Anti-aircraft guns and the ubiquitous Nazi flying V attack fighters. I am not sure of the specific hardware we are flying into the base but it is some sort of bomber with a forward mounted ball turret, that you actually end up manning at one point during the sequence. When you finally land on the island you are sent ahead to try and break through the defenses and allow the rest of your team to move forward.

All of this works really well, and I found the storming gun nests aspect of it exhilarating. Moments later you are involved in what I feel is the single coolest sequence in a modern shooter. You fire up these really cool grappling hook guns and then walk up the side of the castle as the winch slowly retracts the cable pulling you up with it. As you go up you encounter all sorts of obstacles, not the least of which are German soldiers opening the windows and firing out at you. I am not sure exactly what it is about this sequence, but I wish I could play it over and over. Everything about it just feels really damned epic. Once you get to the top, your job is to unlock the gate so that the rest of the party can come up from the bottom to meet you.

I am not really sure how they pulled this off, but the game FEELS like a spiritual successor to the original Wolfenstein and even to Doom. Sure there is the standard sneaking about trying to knife soldiers before they see you gameplay that all of the modern shooters seem to be riddled with. However there is also a much more arcade “run and gun” feel to the game that works. I don’t have to play it in a style where I duck behind cover every few seconds for fear of taking a bullet. You can ping pong around taking out soldiers left and right in an insane ballet that only works in the movies. I mean you can dual wield machine guns… and it feels amazing, so if it is hyper realism you are looking for… go somewhere else. This feels like a return to the area when these games were actually fun to play, and not simply this seasons multiplayer fodder.

Right now after seeing and playing this for awhile, I have so much hope for what this might mean going forward. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and the eventual Enemy Territory addon… represents the most fun I have ever had playing an online shooter. I hope and pray that they give us a multiplayer DLC that is every bit as brilliant as RTCW and ET were. This is a game I actually want to play online. In the meantime I am going to devote more time to beating the single player campaign as at this point I literally have not talked about anything that is not included in the “introduction”. Things get gloriously strange as you move forward and the entire world is a sort of nod to the book Fatherland, setting up a dark and stranger alternate history for the events of World War 2. Thank you Machine Games, and ID for giving us the Wolfenstein we have wanted for so long.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Wolfenstein #RTCW

Search for a Voice

May 21, 2014 by Belghast

Not Enough Time

Yesterday is one of those days that I both hate and love at the same time. Two very different games released, but both were games that I had been looking forward to for some time. When this happens, generally speaking I will wait on one of them until I have a lull in game play enough to be able to pick it up and consume it. Problem is, in this case I inadvertedly pre-ordered both not really knowing when one of them would release. So last night I made an attempt to devote a sufficient amount of time to both of them. At the very least we have a long holiday weekend coming up that hopefully I can spend completing them both.

Honestly the pure joy of playing two amazingly crafted games was exactly what I needed to combat yesterday. Everything about yesterday was pure crap. Monday afternoon I remember remarking with joy that I had a completely open Tuesday, then over the course of the day one by one the meetings piled up. So not only did I spend almost the entire day in one meeting or another, we also had a handful of crisis to deal with. So by the end of the day I just wanted the world to burn around me… which is something you can do very easily in a video game. Braxwolf made an interesting post about the nature of gaming, and for me… games are often more than just games. After a bad day like yesterday… games are very much therapy.

Search for a Voice

Since the E3 that they announced it, I have been looking forward to Transistor, the new isometric beat-em-up from Supergiant Games the creators of Bastion. The game company has singlehandedly redefined how I feel about the narrator and how it relates to the action on screen. With Bastion, the narrator was a character in itself, telling you the story of the protagonist you were playing. In Transistor we have a similar setup going on, except this time the narrator is actually the sword you wield named Transistor. As the course of the game unfolds you find that you are Red a famous pop singer, and that some organization called the Camerata killed your boyfriend… somehow transforming him into the blade and stole your voice. The other odd twist is that all of you seem to be computer programs, and after one dies you can pick their core up and use them as a weapon against the evil “Process”.

The entire treatment of the game has a very “Tron-Noir” feel to it, and I am eating up all of the visuals. Your character is gorgeously animated, and the surroundings feel lush and vibrant, with tons of little things for you to encounter that serve no real purpose other than to have the narrator tell you more tidbits of information. The gameplay is… to say nothing else “different”. It is a mix of real time and turn based gameplay that feels fresh and unique. I have no clue what the controls are without a controller, but if you press the right trigger button you pause time allowing you to plot a move and funnel attacks quickly into a target. Pressing the trigger again unfreezes time and executes the attack pattern. The gotcha is that lots of mob types will move out of your way and you will have just wasted all of your energy on an attack that doesn’t land the blow.

The trick of the game seems to be figuring out which attacks work best on which mob types and figuring out which to take out in real time and which to defeat using this pseudo “bullet time”. Executing a sequence of attacks causes you to be drained for a period of time, which means you can do absolutely nothing but run around to avoid mob counter attacks. There are lots of white boxes scattered throughout the levels that you end up using as a buffer to avoid getting hit. These are unfortunately destructible which means you only have so long to faff about before you have no cover to duck behind. The death sequence is a bit odd, in that instead of losing a life it overloads whatever weapon you happen to be using. This weapon then stays down for as long as it takes you to get to the next checkpoint. This means you want to be proficient at more than one weapon in case you are stuck without your attack of choice.

I played the game long enough to clear the first “world” of sorts and am in transition to the next main area of the game. The game has me hooked and wanting more, so I figure over the next few days I will devote the several hours needed to finish it up. From what I have heard the game has around 6 hours of game play in it, which seems like a good amount for an isometric beat-em-up like this. Because of the way you can combine new attacks that you find with your existing attacks to product new results, I feel like there is more than likely quite a bit of replay value. Even if there isn’t the game is gorgeous, and absolutely oozing personality… so more than worth the $20 purchase price. Right now I am very much in the “not as good at this game as I wish I was” phase, so hopefully that will improve as I get more used to the unique control scheme.

Faff About In Cyrodil

Since I am running out of time… and I ended up writing so much about Transistor without really meaning to, I am opting to leave my review of Wolfenstein: New Order until tomorrow morning. I actually ended up playing it quite a bit longer last night, so I am afraid I have even more to say about that. It was a really great day for gaming. Just a friendly reminder that tonight I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online as we have another “Faff About in Cyrodil” night planned. If you have not seen the notice check out the Anook event. If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, you are more than welcome to join along even if you are not in the House Stalwart guild. We are all Daggerfall Covenant so there is also that restriction. I just dinged 50 this week and will actually be Veteran Rank 1 as we do this… so maybe just maybe we won’t get rolled quite so hard out in Cyrodil. I am not holding my breath however. In any case it was a lot of fun last week and we ran around collecting skyshards and doing quests out there as a horde.

#AllianceOfAwesome #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Transistor

Evil Genius

May 19, 2014 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

This weekend I accomplished very little of what I had planned, but I did log into a nice surprise over in Elder Scrolls Online this morning. One of the cooler things about crafting are the tradeskill apprentices… I am using the EQ2 term, because quite frankly I can’t remember the in game name for them in ESO. Once a day they send you a care package of goodies along with a great note about what they had to go through to obtain it. The notes alone are worth the skill points, because some of them are absolutely hilarious. When I opened my care package this morning I noticed that I got a Tempering Alloy, which is the metal temper used to take a purple item to a orange quality one or a legendary. This is still one of the best aspects of the game, the ability to upgrade an item to whatever tier you might want.

Granted this is my first legendary temper, and I am sure it probably takes six or so to get 100% chance of upgrade, but I will squirrel this one away until I manage to get more. I had grand plans of dinging 50 and completing Coldharbor, and while I made progress on both fronts… it simply did not happen this weekend. I blame Ashgar for distracting me with his Final Fantasy 5 draft idea. I would love to say I will ding tonight, because I am maybe 1/5th of a level away from 50. I have a few rather epic quests that I am currently on that I want to see the completion of. Mostly right now I am suffering from too many things I want to play, and too little time to play them. I might have to start bringing my laptop to work and getting in some playtime over lunch again.

Yesterday was somewhat fragmented, in that we had to attend a wedding that evening. I have to say it is one of the more interesting weddings I have been to. The pair are both former students of my wife, and the mother of the bride is another teacher. I knew absolutely no one there, so the entire occasion felt extremely awkward. However it was made significantly less awkward for me when the bride started walking down the isle to a full orchestral version of the Legend of Zelda Fairy Fountain theme. So obviously at least one of the pair was a serious gamer, and in theory they both were, but it made a fairly nice processional theme. At the end of the wedding they queued up the Imperial March, so I feel like I could get along really well with the pair.

Evil Genius

One thing that I did accomplish this weekend was to play through the rest of the Crimson Isle campaign in Wildstar. My hope was to play the engineer enough to determine if this was a class I could get into, and as the gameplay progressed I enjoyed it more than the Warrior. I know without a doubt that I enjoy the Chua far more than I did the Cassian so in theory I guess I have my race and class. I am still not terribly sold on the game, but it is starting to grow on me. Surprising enough I found that I really enjoyed the explorer path. Normally I am not one for jumping puzzles but these felt okay to me. I am sure late in the game they will be as insane as some of the things I did to get SWTOR Holocrons, but even though those were painful… I enjoyed doing them. They gave me something to look forward to in every zone, so I am hoping the explorer path will do the same thing for me here.

Soldier path seems an absolute natural fit for me, but all of the “holdouts” felt extremely forced in that it did not feel like there was a lore reason for starting a ruckus at a specific location. Whereas with the explorer path in Crimson Isle you are helping the Chua scientists place monitoring stations high on the rock cliffs, and this felt cool to me. So far the thing I dig about the Engineer is that it is very much a “kill them all” class as well. You can circle strafe around gathering mobs up and shotgun blasting them down with impunity, or at least that is what it feels like right now. I am sure as the gameplay moves on, there are far more consequences to this gameplay style but I can see it might be fun to tank an instance this way.

Mystic Knights

Yesterday I officially progressed through the roughest part of the game for starting as White Mage. How I did it… is that I basically ground out enough levels to make it easier on myself. Getting to the Water Crystal was a challenge but when I did, the entire game got that much easier. Now I have a party full of Mystic Knights, which while not the best thing in the game are certainly far more offensive than the White Mage. Mystic Knight is a class I have never played in previous plays through the game, and I am kinda digging the way spellblade works so far. It gives me access to elemental attacks, without having to have a true spellcaster. Supposedly the Rapid Fire combo with Spellblade is a super powerful way of delivering elemental attacks later in the game.

I streamed for quite a bit yesterday afternoon as I pushed through the water temple sequence and gained the Mystic Knight. Last night I did not stream since I was mostly hanging out on the couch watching my sequence of Sunday night television shows. I found that watching tv is the ideal time to grind out levels, and that is why I am level 19 currently and have just now finished the fire crystal / karnak castle sequence. I think I did mostly okay in Karnak Castle and got all of the big name items, that I may or may not need later. The only thing I missed was the Main Guache, but since I have no use for daggers with my fixed party comp, I did not worry about that too much. I did pick up Esuna, Ribbon and Elven Mantle so should be fine moving forward. At this point I will have to consult a guide because I cannot remember for the life of me what comes next. I know that I do not get my ranger job until a bit later, so that is really what I need to do next.