elder scrolls Archives - Page 7 of 19 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

May 11, 2014May 10, 2014 by Belghast

Graduation Day

I just thought I would start the post off with a picture of two ducks. These are the ducks that we encounter quite often on our evening stroll around the neighborhood. I guess they have decided that we are not really a threat, because shortly after snapping this photo the male duck decided to come up close enough to almost touch. Granted he might have just been putting some distance between me and his mate, but I would like to think we are a recognized thing by now. Now that you’ve had a lovely vignette, let me tell you about my day. My nephew graduated from college today, and being the loving family we are… we attended. This was an experience in both vertigo and insanely uncomfortable seating. For starters the basketball stadium it was held in had some of the steepest seating I had ever experienced. When they asked us to stand for the singing of the national anthem… I literally felt like I was going to topple over the “cliff” and down into the stands below me.

All in all it wasn’t really a bad day, but it was most definitely a tiring one. I did however manage to top 10,000 steps on the fitbit, instead of my usual 8,000 to 9,000. This was in part because we parked four blocks away from the stadium and walked it rather than fighting for parking. The whole side effect of today and what will inevitably happen tomorrow is that I simply do not have the “oomph” to stay up late enough tonight to do a Steampowered Sunday. In fact as early as we are going in the morning to see my mother, I won’t really have a chance to write a blog post in the morning either. As a result I am writing this one Saturday night, and will publish it in the morning. I hate when I have to “cheat” like this, but it is far better to do that than to miss posting something at all.

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

This morning I talked about the little family of robins, that had nested in the white rock. When I came home tonight there were two chicks poking their heads out of the nest until I got close enough to investigate. They instinctively ducked down to try and remain hidden but I was able to get my phone up enough to snap the photo on the side. I feel like each of these photos is somehow softening the blow of what I am about to say. This week you damned near did not get a podcast. Admittedly this is one part miscommunication and one part poor planning on my side. It was Friday during the day when I realized that I would not be home in time to record the podcast. Originally for some reason my wife and I thought my nephews graduation was early in the day. However upon further investigation Friday, we realized that it was at 4 pm in the afternoon. That meant in a best case scenario figuring 2 hours for the graduation, an hour for anything after the graduation, and another 2 hours drive to get back home… this put me being back around 9 pm, and hour after we normally record.

To make things more interesting it seemed as thought both Ashgar and Kodra were not able to record at all this weekend. Ashgar had a similar situation to me and when I spoke with him Friday it was from an airport as he was flying home for his sisters graduation. Kodra on the other hand, I am not really sure what was going on, but he was neither available Friday or Saturday evenings. He would potentially be available very late on Sunday, but that didn’t really give me much time to get things posted, since I normally post our new episodes Sunday. After some scrambling, it seemed as though Tam was also not available. As the day went on Rae and I discussed whether or not we even wanted to record with two people down. I was of the opinion that we would just take the week off, but I guess Rae was really gung ho about going forward. She thought in a worse case scenario it would just be the two of us and we would do a relatively short podcast.

Doctor Hannah to the Rescue

While my wife and I were walking Friday night, Rae was able to get ahold of a good friend of ours Dallian and he was able to fill in for us. I had long thought that Dal might be a really good fit for the show, and him being able to do it on such short notice was almost serendipitous. So we almost did not record the show, but in truth it ended up being one of the more enjoyable ones to make. We talk about a number of gaming topics from Wildstar, to ArcheAge and the obligatory Elder Scrolls Online discussion. We also dip our toes into the world of comic books and Magic: The Gathering and Dallian tells us the riveting tale of how he created the @Doctor_Hannah twitter account. Hopefully the amount of fun we had recording this one translates to our listeners.

Hopefully next week things will be at least partially back to normal. We should have Ashgar and Kodra back, but I believe Rae may not be available. Dallian is coming into town to visit us, and either we will have both Rae and Dallian or neither of them. In any case next week should be interesting as well. At this point I am going to close off this post and crash, as I need to get up super early to make my Mothers Day visitations. I want to wish all the Mother’s out there a very happy day, and I will see you all Monday morning for another early morning post.

#AggroChat #Podcast #ESO #Wildstar #ArcheAge

Coming Home

May 10, 2014 by Belghast

Protect the Nest

As a rule my two favorite times of the year as Spring and Fall, in part because I love how alive the world is during these times of transition. This morning I got up, threw on some clothes and a beanie to disguise my cowlick and get breakfast. On the way back I stopped in the drive way for a bit as I listened to something on NPR wind down. I noticed out in the lawn there were a couple of bunnies and two robin parents out foraging. Our house has an external shell of rock that has been painted white over the years. This leaves huge shelves and little nooks, and apparently this year a pair or robin parents have decided to nest there. Were a proper home owner… I would probably be concerned about this, but for me… I think it is pretty awesome. Robins have always been one of my favorite birds, so the fact that I get to see them on a daily basis makes me happy.

I’ve noticed they have a little chick beak sticking up from the nest so it is going to be awesome to watch the little guy pop out at some point. For having lived around birds all my life… I really don’t know much about them. I am just happy to start seeing songbirds again in the neighborhood. There was a time where I tried to put up a feeder in the backyard and no one seem to notice it. Maybe I will make another attempt at that, because I’ve noticed a little cardinal poking around the bush on the other side of the house. I am also sure someone in the neighborhood is probably cursing our bunnies, but seeing them scamper about the yard makes me happy. I just fear what is going to happen when we open our pool. There was one long hot summer that I had to fish a half dozen of them out of the pool… because they kept trying to get a drink and falling in. Hopefully that won’t be the case this summer.

Coming Home

So first off I want to preface this with that I really did enjoy playing ArcheAge and if I get time this weekend I will completely play some more of it. However last night logging into Elder Scrolls Online after playing quite a bit of SWTOR and ArcheAge, felt like coming home. Everything felt so comfy as I moved around the world. It is funny how in such a short period of time I have gotten used to the way that world feels and controls, and I guess have come to prefer it. The world just feels right to me, and I guess that is a good sign. I know for a lot of my friends the non-traditionally MMO control scheme was a deal breaker. They were looking for something they could control with WASD, Mouselook and the traditional hotbar combat. However as a long time FPS and Elder Scrolls player it was more a shift in mindset than anything else. I was so used to MMOs controlling a certain way, that I just had to shift the abilities that I picked up from other single player games and adapt them to the multiplayer space.

There are so many reasons why people wanted ESO to control differently. Some people mentioned that it was impossible to play the game while holding a child, or doing this or that… and that is totally correct. The reason why I had been playing SWTOR and ArcheAge is that they didn’t require the precision and focus that ESO did. Over the course of this last week my allergies have been horrible, and as a result I have come home after work completely drained and “out of it”. I knew if I booted up ESO, I would die often and die horribly. I love everything about the game, but there are times it just takes too many of my already limited mental resources. My fear was that after being away for awhile that I would get back into the traditional MMO control scheme… and the game would feel odd to me. Thankfully however everything about it still felt right.

Finishing Bangkorai

The last time I played I accidentally followed a quest chain into Coldharbor, so at the beginning of the evening I worked through my backlog of items to deconstruct and then set off for Bangkorai again. I wanted to at the very least finish out collecting the Skyshards and getting zone exploration achievement. At the best I had hoped to make everything black on my map turn white showing that I can completed it. There were still a few issues with some of the world bosses however, so I realized early on that I would not be getting close to 100%ing the zone last night. What I did however do is explore every nook and cranny and find a number of really slick things. The picture in the section above is from this little hidden area that turned out to be a crafting shrine. You have to push through this disguised tunnel in a rock wall, and along a little river, past a waterfall and over a rickety rope bridge…. and then finally you are at the crafting shrine. The whole experience felt very “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to me.

The above image is from some Dwemer ruins that I stumbled into. It ended up that this was the public dungeon for Bangkorai and as I was seven levels over the content… I was able to solo most of it. That said it was still really damned challenging, and for the boss battles especially I had to hang back and wait for another player to get to the same area I was. Thankfully the dungeon is still very well trodden and I was able to complete both of the quests inside. Awesome thing about this dungeon is that at the end of the quest chain, you get awarded a really awesome Dwemer spider cosmetic pet. So if you were wondering where those come from… it is the public dungeon in Bangkorai (and I am sure the other equivalent factions). I managed to collect all of the skyshards and got my achievement for exploring the zone, so I can be happy enough with moving on. At some point I will pop back into the zone when the bugs have been worked out and complete the last few dots.

You can watch the entire adventure in the video above. Shockingly this is the 31st video I have recorded on twitch/youtube for The Elder Scrolls Online. While I would never suggest watching all of them… you can literally see most of my leveling process on the Dragonknight. Having MOSTLY finished Bangkorai I feel okay about moving on into Coldharbor. At this point I am about halfway into 47, so I feel like the journey to 50 is going to go extremely quickly in the higher level content. So far the quests I have done in Cold Harbor seem to be significantly more involved than the ones from the previous zones. Everything about the zone feels epic, as I lead this fight against Molag Bal and his forces. I am going to be really thankful that I have my faction up with the Fighters Guild I feel, because everything I see… is a Daedra. Additionally I am super happy I have my prismatic weapon… that does insane amounts of damage to Daedra and Undead.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Bangkorai #Coldharbor

Take on the Trinity

May 8, 2014 by Belghast

Maypocalypse

This morning I am struggling to get my act together and actually start writing. Why you might ask? Well I have been sitting here dwelling on just how much crap has to get done this month. My wife is a school teacher, which means there are two absolutely hellacious times of the year for their spouses… the beginning and the end. Right now I am trying to make myself available for whatever she might need to be done, which means I am going to miss a lot of regularly scheduled playtime. Additionally we have several landmines in our schedule throughout the month as we are expected to attend various weddings, graduation events, and mothers day all lumped into the mix.

This weekend for example I really deeply need to crash hard in a vegetative state on the sofa. However instead we are going to run all over half of the state as we attend a big graduation event on Saturday, and then attempt to juggle our Mothers Sunday… making sure no one feels slighted in the process. Thankfully I already have my Mother taken care of gift wise, but at some point soon… likely tonight we need to go shopping and figure out what to do for my wife’s two mothers. I expect to end up a rather grumpy man by the time everything is said and done. Right now I am just hoping that I am back Saturday night in time to record the podcast.

Take on the Trinity

Yesterday I spent some time chatting with Syl and among the many topics was scattered in a brief discussion about roles in MMOs and more specifically the trinity. I have long been a defender of the trinity, but even I fully admit that it is deeply flawed in a few ways. The problem is that the game that try to completely remove it… end up with a chaotic mess when it comes to group based combat. Games like Elder Scrolls Online have tried to blur the lines a bit, but it still very much requires a handful of things to get through a dungeon successfully. We have not really landed on an ideal solution to replace the trinity with something else. The moment you replace it however… you more than likely end up with a new kind of trinity.

Somewhere in this conversation I had an idea. In a game like the Elder Scrolls Online you meet along the way a cast of really interesting and varied characters. What if you collected these a sort of unofficial followers within your sphere of influence. Games like SWTOR do this sort of things, but very much in a subservient “pet like” manner. What would happen if you could call upon them for assistance, but instead of them following you around in a zone… you assumed control of them. The idea is that basically you would be able to become any of these characters temporarily, assuming their abilities and hot bars and by extension the role each of them fills. Where I am getting at is if the party needs a tank, you just rummage through your NPC contacts and summon the spirit of the one that is a tank.

In Everquest 2 they have a very similar system to this, but it was put in place specifically for the dungeon maker system. It allowed you to collect a series of avatars by adventuring out in the world and then run player created dungeons as these characters. This would take this same concept but apply it to every place you might need a specific kind of character. The idea is that each of the avatars would be a balanced but not quite optimized version of that role. Essentially just “good enough” to get by with, but nowhere near as good as a player could craft the same role. But it would serve a lot of purposes. Firstly anyone could truly take over and heal, tank, crowd control or whatever role happened to be missing from a party. Secondly they would serve as a kind of “try before you buy” for interesting mechanics.

For players familiar with the MOBA genre, this would be very similar to the Champions that you collect or purchase. Each one would have unique strengths and weaknesses, and be able to fill specific roles in the party. However the idea is that each one of these while interesting to play can be easily improved upon by the player. However each one would be able to showcase a specific game-play mechanic or style, allowing players to see if they like that sort of thing before going through the lengthy and expensive process of recreating it themselves. You obviously would need to have a smattering of character to tail to different player tastes, but it would almost become a new meta game as you go around the world influencing NPCs and collecting them into your “stable”. There is a moment in the original Rift cinematic trailer where they visualize a player switching specs… and I figure switching avatars would have a similar look and feel.

Incoming Obsession

I woke up this morning and saw an email waiting there notifying me that I had been added to the ArcheAge alpha. I have been watching this game evolve with great interest, but have been on the fence about taking the buy in plunge. Right now I have lots of games that I want to be playing, firstly I still have so much that I want to do in ESO. However now that I am in I know I will be playing this as my “off night” game. For awhile I had been dabbling with the notion of joining the Alliance of Awesome people in their Dominion Wildstar guild, however with this new game being piled on I doubt I will at this point. In related news… the transition from Reddit to Anook for the Alliance of Awesome community site has been pretty seamless. Folks are slowly starting to pick up momentum and trickle in. I have done a piss poor job of promoting this on the Stalwart site but that will be changing.

For a bit I was considering just trashing Stalwart Online entirely and going to a Nook for our site, however I have backed away from that notion. For starters I think it might be a bit too traumatic for people to have a second forum ripped away from them in a year. It was around this time last year I think that I made the transition from the original Stalwart forums to the new Vanilla based one. Secondly… I really want people using Anook, but all directed in the same place. As a compromise we have considered carving out guild specific areas on the Alliance of Awesome site, that way we are all in the same shared space and not fragmented off on a bunch of individual sub sites. The big step in unifying the guilds will still be to transition to all using the same voice software… but that has been a hill I was not ready to die upon. However it is still very much one that I need to address.

ArcheAge definitely gives me something to look forward to tonight when I get home. If you are in game and playing, ping me and let me know how to get a hold of you. I feel like there is already a significant population of people I know in game right now. I have severe reservations about the game, but after reading Liores post about what exactly can pvp flag you yesterday… I feel a bit more at ease. I am still a damned dirty care bear, and as such try to stay the hell away from PVP. That said I still very much enjoy my time spent in Cyrodil and want to get more of that happening soon. Now that we have this handy dandy event calendar… thinking maybe about penciling in next Wednesday night for a grand Cyrodil excursion. In the mean time I will be horribly conflicted as to what game I will be playing on a given night.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #ArcheAge #Trinity #AllianceOfAwesome

Shores of Oblivion

May 7, 2014 by Belghast

Mornings Are Hard

This one in particular is extremely difficult for some reason. I guess it could be the fact that I fell asleep at the keyboard last night, and as a result ended up getting to the actual bed far later than I had intended to. Now as I attempt to jump start my brain with caffeine I am realizing how frustrating the act of a morning can be. More than anything I am finding myself extremely easily distracted. Of late several of us have been slowly migrating to Anook.com as a social site. Primarily this is for the fact that it is ideally suited for a multi-guild meet-up site like the Alliance of Awesome. At this point I am wondering if I could simply transplant my folks from the House Stalwart forums to the site as well making the whole experience more fluid.

For those who don’t remember… or were not reading my blog at the time, the Alliance of Awesome is a weird experiment that we have been running. With the launch of Landmark alpha, several of us realized just how many different overlapping groups we were a part of. So we proposed a grand alliance, and since then many of us have been laboring to make those efforts successful. Right now the AofA as we call it, is a combination of Combat Wombat, Dark Religion, Mercy Gaming, Multiplaying and House Stalwart. Elder Scrolls Online was the first game we really went into as a large amalgam guild and so far it seems to have worked extremely well. I have been shocked at just how little drama has been involved, but I guess that is to be expected when most of us are “thirty somethings”.

Shores of Oblivion

Last night was an odd sequence of events. Firstly I was supposed to be doing a pen and paper thing with several of my friends. However I did not want to get into anything too deep because I knew I would need to go do things with my wife when she got home. As a result I ended up piddling around in Elder Scrolls Online while waiting in a holding pattern. As the evening went on, the time of her arriving home kept slipping backwards, so in grand total I ended up playing and streaming my gameplay for a few hours. The mission of last night as always was to finish up Bangkorai. I have finally reached a point where I think there are just two objective areas left in the map. However completely by accident I seem to have moved past the zone and into Coldharbor by following the storyline.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVAt some point soon.. or at least as soon as I can find a wayshrine in Coldharbor I will be venturing back to Bangkorai to finish up the last few things on my map. I find it almost impossible in this game to “skip” content. It drives me absolutely insane that there is still a black skull on my Alik’r map from a world boss that was bugged out. I feel like I have to explore every corner of the map before I finally and reluctantly move on to the next area. At this point I am just a stones throw away from 47, so I figure that I will ding 50 well before I even come close to finishing Coldharbor. That zone looks equally huge as compared to Bangkorai. When I posted the above picture on Anook, someone commented about the Mudcrab. That is “Butter” my faithful companion that has been with me the entire journey. I am not sure why I bonded with the brown mudcrab pet over the Monkey, Bantam Guar or Red Mudcrab… but I did and he has been at my side throughout all of this.

Crush the Resistance

I love the Elder Scrolls Online with every fiber of my being, but the game requires a lot of focus. This past weekend and the last few days I have struggled a bit in trying to maintain that focus. Wandering around the world requires you to be constantly aware of your surroundings, because an afk in the wrong area can end up with a hefty repair bill. As such I need a game that doesn’t quite matter so much. For a long while this has been landmark, but I have reached a point of builder burnout there for the moment. On a whim this weekend I decided to fire back up SWTOR and I have been piddling around on my Caithar Sith Juggernaut. I never really got to see the Sith side of things, so overall it is pretty enjoyable. I opted to go Light Side Sith, which seems to be far more my style anyways. I am this island of honor and nobility in a seething mass of evil.

To be truthful… this specifically is the reason why I logged in over the weekend. On “May the Fourth” they gave everyone that happened to log in an adorable astromech droid pet. I could not pass this up, because of my friends… I am the only one who ever seems to be nostalgic enough to re-up a game subscription and revisit games the guild has moved on past. So while it started out as “get this thing while it was available”, I am actually finding myself enjoying the game again. It is no real competition for ESO, but it scratches the itch that most everyone seems to be satiating with Wildstar beta weekends. Additionally… after all this time I finally have a machine that will run SWTOR on maximum everything. This client is so poorly optimized that even on my laptop with dual video cards… it runs like complete shit. No clue how long I will piddle around with SWTOR, but I might even stream some of my adventures.

From the Desk of Doctor Hannah

Another good friend of mine decided to enter the Newbie Blogger Initiative fray. Dallian, otherwise known as Doctor Hannah from twitter… has had a blog for ages, but for the most part it had lived in a dormant state. I think both the blog and the twitter account started as a joke reference to the now infamous Tabletop episode where Felicia Day creates this massive backstory of Doctor Hannah while playing Last Night on Earth. So while the blog started off as a joke, at some point during its life it morphed into being Dallian’s personal space. With the NBI he is taking the step of rededicating himself to blogging more regularly, and about his gaming side as well. In this post on the forums he mentions wanting to do at least a post a week, but so far he has made like four posts this month. I will do whatever I can to help support this effort, but in the meantime you should totally pop over to his blog and check it out.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #SWTOR #DoctorHannah #NBI2014