eso Archives - Page 10 of 22 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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

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.

Cyrodil Excursion

May 15, 2014 by Belghast

Turning a Corner

I am still not overwhelmed with excitement about Wildstar, but I am maybe starting to turn the corner on this game. Last night I opted to work on the warrior a bit more, and it turns out the area I was languishing around had no actual quests for me. One of the frustrations with the game is that the quest advisement on the minimap makes zero sense to me. I keep trying to figure it out, but end up just hopelessly lost as I keep opening my main map to find the objectives. I know there is some sort of a golden path system that you can turn on to get advisement but I find that whole process frustrating. All I really want is a blip on the edge of the minimap showing me where I should head to get to the next sequences of quests. Additionally I had mobs that I simply could not find. There was an NPC in town that no matter how many times I moved through an area, never seemed to be where the quest turn in location was marked on the map.

All of this said, in my flailing I happened to stumble upon an instance of sorts revolving around trying to save Outpost M-13. I was woefully underleveled for the content but found it extremely enjoyable anyway. I entered the instance at level 10 and all of the creatures I stumbled across were 13 to 14. You start the mission as a hired shiphand on a cargo freighter delivering crystals. You are boarded and it is your job to try and protect the freight. I did fairly well here until it came time to fight the actual boss, and then I struggled a bit… having to try two or three times to get past him. Finally we land on a planet, that is absolutely gorgeous. You roam around with a 1950s style spaceman helmet, exploring what appears to be an asteroid with minimal gravity. What is awesome here is that when you jump you get hangtime like you would expect in lower gravity. Finally you wind your way around to Outpost M-13.

The next sequence of events plays out like the movie Aliens as you explore the base and subsequent mine looking for either survivors or the cause of the catastrophe. Mostly if more content like this exists in Wildstar… I might be happy to play it. While I simply could not chew through the hive queen boss, and will likely have to return “at level” I had a blast doing it. If nothing else this sells me on their universe, because stuff like that is really fun. The game still feels rather awkward at times, and I still have my problems with the warrior overall, but at the end of the day I am a melee player. While running around as a Chua with a shotgun was fun, it just doesn’t feel like “me”. So while I am still having issues with their UI design a bit, I am hoping I can fix most of that with modifications. I need to do some searching to see if I can find a serviceable mini-map replacement.

Cyrodil Excursion

For roughly a week I had on the Anook Alliance of Awesome calendar an event called “Faffing About in Cyrodil”. The idea was to grab as many guildies as we could and head to Cyrodil looking for whatever we could do. When we pulled together and finally coalesced we had roughly a dozen players, and not the most balanced party… but we worked with it. At first we made a valiant attempt on Fort Glademist, that was currently being held by the Aldmeri Dominion. However we struggled to even take the Lumbermill. This was partially because we mostly just charged in aimlessly and spread ourselves too thin, but even more so that we were a group of bolstered to level 50 characters… and it was being guarded by actual veteran rank players. The problem with bolstering is that it levels you to 50… but the base stats for a 50 without the benefit of armor increases or anything of the sort. This means as a whole we represented a pack of level 50 paper dolls for someone to rip through.

After making a couple of attempts we got tired of the running back and decided to shift focus to what my original goal was… collecting skyshards and beating bosses. The cool thing about Cyrodil is that it is pretty much a normal questing zone in addition to being a zone full of PVP objectives. So we wandered around the zone, often times aimlessly, collecting the various skyshards along the way. At the end of the night I was up three skill points and had dinged 49, and various other folks in the party had dinged as well. The dungeons in Cyrodil are really good experience, not to mention insane amounts of loot. It is somewhat sad that instanced dungeons are rather pitiful experience if you are not completing the quest, however you can gather up a group of friends and roll through the Cyrodil dungeons for hours and almost level exclusively that way. The respawn is fast enough that we were constantly having to fight our way back out of the dungeons as stuff was popping only one or two packs behind what we had just killed.

I was streaming last night and captured almost the entire thing, and as always posted it up on my youtube channel. It seemed like folks were having a good time, even though we didn’t really have any success at the PVP aspect of cyrodil. It is my intent to do this more often, and I will likely be trying to schedule another one of these nights for next Wednesday. However I think I am going to try and start it a little earlier in the evening. As the night drug on, you could tell that most of us were barely holding in there. This is the negative side effect of being a guild almost entirely made up of 30 somethings… and mostly LATE 30 somethings and 40 somethings. Five thirty in the morning comes really early, so I personally try very hard to head towards bed by at least 11. For our east coast folks that had a lot of them staying up til midnight or so. Hopefully with time we will find a happy medium that works for both the east coast and west coast contingencies.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #WIldstar #Cyrodil

Farmer Belghast

May 14, 2014May 14, 2014 by Belghast

Server Overload

One of the key parts of the preorder process for Wildstar is the ability to reserve a player name and a guild name. Since I am still up in the air about this game I figured I would go ahead and do this. The process theoretically opened yesterday morning and could be completed by going to the name reservation page and logging in. The only problem here is that their servers crumpled under the crushing weight of folks hammering this single page. I tried off and on throughout the day with no luck, and as I moved into the evening I still was not getting to a working screen. Moments ago I finally connected in and completed the process reserving Belghast and House Stalwart just in case. Far as I know you aren’t required to use the guild name, but I figure if nothing else I will create an alt guild or something so that the name lives.

Last night I decided to try something different and logged into the little Chua engineer I had created at some point during the beta. I am not sure if it was the difference in starter zone or the difference in playing a ranged tank, but for whatever reason I found myself enjoying the game last night. I embraced the cute and deadly aspect of the game and ran around blasting everything with my shotgun. Considering I tend to shy away from playing ranged in any form, this was the first I had really played one in Wildstar. I am wondering if this is the Guild Wars 2 effect, and that melee is just unsatisfying in this game. Also with this character I opted to go with the Explorer path, which more than anything involves a lot of jumping puzzles. Normally I cannot stand these, however they felt manageable with access to double jump.

The game still feels very much like a trip to Six Flags, but the Crimson Isle area feels far less busy. Maybe I could enjoy the game more starting here rather than Leviathan Bay. Now I feel like I owe the game a play through long enough to see if I like the third area better. This has been the case with most games I have played, there are certain starter experiences that I simply do not like. I am looking at you Night Elf areas, whereas I can seem to do Dun Morogh happily over and over. There are things I like about playing the Warrior that I don’t get to do on the Engineer, however I just don’t really like Ellevar as far as zones go. I was mostly okay with the Leviathan Bay route until I got there. I am wondering if I can shift course and go to Deradune, without having to reroll.

Farmer Belghast

After getting to 6 in Wildstar I opted to log back into ArcheAge for a bit and see what trouble I could get into. Last night I finally reached a point in the quest chain where I started getting quests asking me to craft certain items that required vegetables. This meant that I needed to grow them, and also introduced me to the concept of a public farm. During an earlier quest I was given a scarecrow that apparently allows me to claim a plot of land for my own, however the area surrounding where I was working seemed to be all claimed. As a result I just opted to plant my veggies in the public plot and pray. See interesting thing about this game is that pretty much every aspect of it… allows for other players to grief you. Pretty much anyone can come along and harvest your crops from the public plot if you do not collect them within a certain period. Farming is a real world time sink, in that I planted the crops and it took thirty minutes actual time for them to grow. I of course went off throughout the world and completely forgot about them. Thankfully upon logging back in this morning they were still there waiting for me.

What ended up distracting me, was a series of quests in the next zone over that involved slaughtering tons of critters to collect parts for a suit of armor. It seems as though through this quest chain you will be able to collect a full set of blue quality gear for whatever armor class you choose. I of course am going plate, because really… there is never an answer that doesn’t end up with plate armor. In Elder Scrolls Online I’ve tried a few times to play something OTHER than a plate wearer, but always end up dropping it and dumping myself in full plate. I also managed to pick up a really amazing green quality sword that is letting me cut through the mobs like butter. I am still very much enjoying myself, but I am wishing I had a few more abilities. Right now I have shield charge, shield bash, 3 hit combo swing, AOE root/damage, self heal, and channeled drain life. It is a pretty robust kit, but I really want another attack to combo with the charge/bash/strike thing I have going on.

One of the things I really want to try and figure out is smithing. Right now it all seems to be dependant upon me going into some cave somewhere and grinding mobs while waiting on Iron Ore pops. In theory I am fine with this, but I keep thinking there has to be a more efficient way to get ore. However almost every cave I have been in, has one or two higher level players lurking about, so I am beginning to wonder if that is in fact the only real way. At some point I need to sort out why I could not stream the game and get that going again. Dxtory boggles me because it seems like for some people it works great, however for me it never seems to produce the sort of results I actually want. On a positive note it does seem to be a better generic screenshot program than Fraps, or at least cause far fewer issues. If nothing else I am using the hell out of it for that purpose, but I want to solidify how to record games full screen with it and actually get OBS to stream them to twitch.

Faffing in Cyrodil

I am a horrible person because last night, yet again I did not participate in the google hang out pen and paper game. Honestly I just wasn’t feeling up to dealing with people. I need to get to the doctor soonish, because I fear something is wrong. For about a month now, when I breath in deeply there is a sharp pain on the right side of my lung. It started as a dull ache, so I thought maybe it was a muscle pain or something of the sort, however over the last few days it has become more sharp. Last night when we did our walk, I struggled a bit to keep going and got pretty dizzy. I hate going to the doctor, because I spent a good chunk of my childhood sick and in the doctors office. It has made me try and avoid them like the plague as an adult, the only problem is… I have actual medical issues that I probably should be going for. Last night I had just reached my fill of human contact so I did my own thing, because I really couldn’t handle needing any additional interaction.

I also knew I would need to be sociable today as we have a guild event scheduled in Elder Scrolls Online. Right now we have a handful of people signed up for it, but I am hoping we will get a bunch more people who didn’t know about the Anook event. I am not sure exactly how well this is going to work, as Delevax said most nights our PVP Campaign is locked by that time in the evening. Worse case scenario we end up guesting on another campaign, since functionally there is really nothing we cannot do while guested. The primary goal is to grab skyshards, the secondary goal is to get into trouble whenever we can. If in the process we happen along some quest objectives, it would also be cool to complete those. I know I have an objective out there from the last time I was running around with Zeli and Jabb, but it was not feasible for us to go get it. I am sure it will be fairly rough, but I am hoping if we stick together as a group we will be able to compete with the various veteran rank players.