MMO Archives - Page 391 of 430 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD

May 4, 2014May 3, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #12

This weeks episode of Steampowered Sunday is chock full of self indulgent cheatery. Firstly we have plans on going out and about Sunday morning, so I am technically playing the game and doing this review Saturday night shortly before recording AggroChat. The second bit of cheatery is that normally I play through a game in my steam back catalog. That however is not the case this week as currently steam is having a sale on all Activision titles. Among the list was one that caught my eye. I had noticed it a few times in the past but was never at a price point I was wiling to snap it up for. However yesterday for $5 I figured it was well worth that just for a trip down memory lane.

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-32-02-65 Something you need to know about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise is that I played the hell out of it. I was one of those little skater kids, and I even went so far as to have the “Tony Hawk” style “hangover” haircut. As a result when this came out for the original Playstation I latched onto it with both hands. One of the things I always wanted was a really good skating game, however we were stuck with either Skate or Die that at least had a free style ramp mode, or 720* which lacked any kind of free skate option… and if you took too long you were chased by an angry swarm of bees. No game gave me what I wanted, which was the ability to faff about without a timer ticking and do all sorts of nifty tricks. This game franchise had exactly that, and I spent countless hours playing and it and it’s higher resolution cousins on the Dreamcast.

Memory Lane

When the I got my Playstation 2 one of the first titles I picked up was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. So I knew one of two things was going to happen. Either I would have a wonderful romp down memory lane, or I would be severely disappointed by the crappy remake. Thankfully the game is pretty much a 1080p remake of the original playstation title, and this is a good thing. Playing the game with a XBOX 360 controller on my PC feels almost exactly like I remember playing it on the PSX. All the tricks worked essentially the same, and I struggled with the same problems I ever did. The game works the same way, each map has a ton of objectives and as you move your way around the area you get bonus scores for collecting them. As always the first objective I generally go for is for grabbing the letters S K A T E scattered around the room.

Additionally all of the old secrets are exactly where I remember them, and accessed through the same kind of tricks. I really was not expecting anything more than a graphical update, so I was not terribly disappointed to find that literally nothing had changed. I got the same enjoyment crashing through the room on top of the ramp as I ever did. One of my favorite things about the series was trying to find all the named “gaps” and a lot of these work the same as they always did. The only thing that is confusing really is that the game is like a remix of all of the Tony Hawk titles. There are maps from the early THPS games as well as the later Underground games. Overall this gives you a good mix of things to go and explore, and Free Skate mode is just as much of a guilty pleasure as it ever was.

Stripped Down Game

My biggest complaint about the game is that it is greatly stripped down. Gone is the ability to create custom skaters, and also gone are the weird unlockable characters like the Neversoft eyeball guy, and Spiderman. The lack of ability to create your own skater really hurts my overall enjoyment of the title. I liked creating a skater that was a reasonable facsimile of myself and customizing his stat package to be only the things I cared about… namely street skating. I found that overall Eric Koston has the closest stat package to what I would want, so I have been using him. The game has been out for two years, so I doubt that we will be seeing any kind of DLC that adds in the missing functionality. My only hope is that maybe just maybe someone cares enough to create a mod that lets you do the same thing.

The other missing feature is the skate park creator. I spent hours building interesting skate parks to go explore, and I remember THPS 2 for the Dreamcast had a wide variety of items you could choose from. I realize this title was released not only on the PC but also tablets and phones… so there is a limited amount of stuff they could realistically squeeze into the game given those constraints. Even with these missing features, I have definitely gotten my $5 worth of fun. Sure I still have my playstation, playstation 2 and dreamcast… but I am not going to go dig them out of the closet and hook them up just to play Tony Hawk. This little download has allowed me to relive some of those memories without having to do that.

Watch Me Suck at THPS!

As has been the trend lately, I recorded the entire play though of THPS, or at least a good chunk of it. You can see just how bad I suck at the game these days, and how many jumps and tricks I miss. I had a blast doing it, and I need to figure out a better option for a push to talk key while playing a game that requires a controller. As a result there are huge blocks of time where I say nothing. But it is fun nonetheless. If you had good memories of the game like I did, you might check out the sale while it is still going on. Well worth the few bucks, and the game performs extremely well. I didn’t notice anything glitchy about it, so it seems like a pretty solid experience.

Episode 4: Mentors for Everyone

Last night we recorded Episode 4 of the AggroChat podcast, and once again we had our regular cast in place. Kodra was back from his business trip, and Rae was no longer trying to join the circus. I tried a little experiment last night, that I probably won’t repeat again. I had been concerned that I had been overly directing the flow of conversation, so I tried to take a step back and let the rest of the hosts introduce topics. The end result lead me to do way more editing and massaging on this episode than normal as I deleted a ton of awkward pauses. The end result is still fairly interesting. We ended up talking about the current state of Elder Scrolls Online with its launch and remaining bugs. We talked quite a bit about ArcheAge and how intrigued I am by it. Finally I nudged the rest of my panel into talking about League of Legends. They had been threatening for weeks to derail the podcast, and I encouraged it… and the end result was not terribly derailed after all.

#SteamPoweredSunday #AggroChat #TonyHawkProSkater #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

A Path Not Taken

May 3, 2014 by Belghast

A Question Answered

I am getting a super late start today, or more so I am sitting down to write my blog post this morning later. I dropped the dry cleaning off yesterday morning, and then shortly after decided I felt entirely too bad to exist in the real world. So I went home and took breathing treatments throughout the day, in an attempt to convince my lungs to stop being assholes. It has mostly worked, but this meant that I needed to get up relatively early this morning and go pick up the dry cleaning so we would have it for Monday morning. I still have plenty of shirts in the closet to cycle through, but my wife had reached the limits of her wardrobe.

It seems like at least once a year a new social media technology is released, and the internet zeitgeist all flocks to it. I generally sign up for these the moment they happen in an attempt to stake my claim flag and then they sit dormant for years until I finally decide that I want to start using it. One of these is Anook, and I asked a very simple question last night on twitter.

While I was expecting someone like Maeka who has been posting on the site for a good deal of time to chime in, I did not expect to be drawn into a length conversation with the Community Lead. As you can see, we talked a lot and I started to buy into the vision. The problem that they see it is that there are all these services, that you load up with content once… and then forget about. Facebook is this way for me, I have a profile because I know that certain people would rather be notified of my content through that vehicle… but I don’t actually USE facebook. I hate the service, I hate the way it feels, so I feel bad each time someone sees the content that somehow got set up to syndicate from twitter… and thinks I am actually using that as a means of communication.

I know going into this that Anook is not what I have been longing for. I would love to have a gamer focused site that acts as a social glue for everything else I have content on. A single point of syndication for G+, Twitter, Steam, Raptr, Battle.net, Glyph, Playstation Network, Xbox LIve… whatever services I happen to have accounts on including my own blog and podcast. I think this is a niche that if someone fills it, will be amazing. What Anook is instead is trying to focus on creating a community with the ability to talk about disparate topics. I see this as trying to be a social network, but almost from a guild website type of approach. In the short time I am going to start populating it with my content, be it youtube vids, the podcast or my daily blog posts.

In the long term I could see maybe starting to try and use this for some of our other ventures like Stalwart Gaming or the Alliance of Awesome. When I first signed up for the site at launch, it felt fairly primitive, and I really did not grasp the concept. It just felt like Raptr or Steam without the nifty automation and game tracking functionality. Now I can see what it is trying to be, and while I may not be 100% sold on it, I definitely appreciate their goals. More than that I appreciate the kind of specialized attention this Community Lead gave me in trying to win me over to their vision. Hell that along is going to make me loyal to the cause more than anything. I will always reward amazing service with my patronage.

A Path Not Taken

This morning is going to be a bit “gaming lite” again, but with the hustle and bustle of the Newbie Blogger Initiative I’ve sat on a tale for a few days. I wanted to make sure I got the posting underway proper before taking a lot of screen real estate for something personal. My wife is a teacher, and this year her schedule aligned just right to allow her to attend the junior assembly. This is one of those deals where someone inspiration comes and talks to the kids about the dangers of the world. This is the sort of thing I as a teenager used to ignore, taking a sketch pad and doodling up in the bleachers instead of actually listening. I am sure for some of the kids there this will definitely be the case.

As the speaker was introduced, my wife thought the name sounded familiar but shrugged it off. Then he started talking about living in a town of 3500 in Northeastern Oklahoma. At that point she started to wonder if maybe he lived in her hometown. Finally when he started talking about his son… it hit her like a sack of bricks. Growing up I was best friends with two other guys, and for the most part we were inseparable. The man on the stage telling his story was one of those two boys father. He had been almost a surrogate parent to me, as much time as I had spent over at their house throughout Middle School and most of High School. When we first got together in College I was still telling stories about him and his son with fondness.

The thing is something changed along the way, and his son was getting into some pretty bad stuff. Alcohol changed to Marijuana changed to Cocaine binges… and eventually I had heard he was even dabbling in Heroine… not that you can actually dabble in that. Two things happened my junior year, one I started distancing myself from him… and two I got really sick. The combination of the two ended up with me picking up some new friends, ones better for my well being… and while we had no falling out or anything… we just faded apart. At some point after graduation we had managed to get back in contact. He was running a record label out of Ohio, and prided himself in sending me lots of indie recordings of the bands he was working with.

Every so often he would call and we’d end up talking for a few hours. When he moved back to town he got married, had a couple of kids and settled down as the director of an area Arts festival. I thought that things were going pretty well for him, or at least on the surface he seemed to have gotten his shit together. I visited him at least once at his office, and we went out to lunch, and then at our ten year reunion we of course hung out. So it was with complete shock that a few years later I hear that he was not okay at all. At some point the drugs had returned, and one day while driving home at lunch to get a fix he hit a special needs kid who had been riding his bike along a busy thoroughfare. The report is that my friend didn’t even stop the car, and the cops followed him to his house an arrested him on the spot.

They say he was going fast enough when he hit the kid, he practically exploded. They had to cremate him because there simply was not enough to bury. So as my friends father was retelling this tale, my wife is sitting there in shock because she knows the other side of a lot of the tales he is telling. She has this cold realization that had I not made a change and distanced myself… that it could have very well been me. I hung in the same circles, but there was just a point where their behavior was getting a bit too risky for my tastes. My friend deserves his fate, he did not get there over night, but over a course of multiple years of bad decisions. However I feel horrible for his parents, because as parents go… they were awesome. They were always so good to me, and treated me like another member of their family.

Once the assembly was over, my wife rushed up to the stage and introduced herself to his father, and apparently he just gave her a huge hug. Then asked how I was doing and how things were in our lives. He really was like another parent, and I feel like I need to get a hold of him. He lost his son, in ways that he will never get him back, but maybe I can reach out and be a little closer to him and his wife. They were always so good to me, that I want to be there for them however I can be. So what makes the whole situation that much more odd, is that I was one of those kids who didn’t pay attention to this sort of thing. I ignored more than my fair share of drug assembly, and ditched them whenever I could. However I am living proof that changing the path you are going down can make all the difference in the world. I could have easily been my friend, and that alone is pretty sobering.

Bangkorai is Huge

Last night I spent most of the night streaming some Elder Scrolls Online gameplay. Bangkorai is freakin huge. Each time I feel like I might be nearing the end of the zone, I keep finding a pocket of stuff that I have missed. At this point I am extremely overleveled for the content at level 45, and the highest mob I have found at all has been 43. This is a thing that keeps happening to me, I seem to move extremely slowly through content. My whole general approach to Elder Scrolls Online is to kill every single thing in my way. This means I probably kill far more badguys than the average gamer. I have watched my friends play through content, and they go out of their way to skip combat. This game gives you really good ways to skip combat in the form of “disguises”, however I NEVER use them. The only time you will actually see me wearing one is when the quest literally cannot be completed without one.

A good chunk of the night was spent working on a series of quests in an occupied town. I could have skipped almost all of the combat entirely by wearing the disguise. However I ignored the fact that it was in my inventory and proceeded to lay waste to everything with a red diamond on it. Which is a big funny considering my character is racially imperial… but apparently I like killing my own kin? I am still enjoying the hell out of the game, and while I am super interest in ArcheAge I keep telling myself… to wait until I reach a point in Elder Scrolls Online where I am not quite so in love with it. The game keeps giving me sufficient reason to log in every night and play, so until it stops doing that I will keep playing it. ArcheAge will always be there when things start to get dull and I want to do some full on sandbox… however as time consuming as it seems based on the few streams I have watched… maybe I am better off with Themebox or Sandpark.

Contest Entry

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVToward the end of the night Rae pulled me over into Landmark. She has been working on the big contest that they have going on and wanted some feedback on her building. So far I think it looks pretty great, but this has been where she has spent all of her effort of late. Personally I still have so much to do on my temple complex that I am almost mired in a building funk because of it. Towards the end of the video I end up traipsing back into my own claim. I am not really sure where I am as far as the game is concerned. I like the game so much, but right now there is not something about it making me to want to log in regularly. I think maybe once there is combat or something other than “Lego mode” I might feel more strongly about the game. Quite truthfully lately I have enjoyed Trove more… and it is far more primitive. The reason behind that seems to be that there is more to “do” in trove. Definitely going to be active in the Landmark community, but right now past the initial rush of wanting to build something… there just isn’t much “stickyness” to the community.

#PathNotTaken #ANook #Landmark #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

Class of 2014

May 2, 2014May 2, 2014 by Belghast

Class of 2013 Revisited

Now that we are officially underway in the Class of 2014, I thought it would be interesting to look back and see just how well the fruits of our efforts with the 2013 have paid off. I have to say based on past experiences I was expecting to see about half of the blogs either no longer resolving or not having been updated in months. However it appears that the class of 2013 was one of the most productive to date. Looking up my blog post from the close of NBI 2013, I counted 23 blogs that finished the event. Out of those fifteen are still updating fairly recently, or have at the very least had a blog post in the last few months. A handful have even been updated semi-weekly for the past year. I think this is pretty cool that the Initiative was able to create some really dedicated bloggers.

Here is a quick rundown of the folks who beat the odds and have kept up with their blogging habit on a regular basis.

All of you out there that are still updating your blogs regularly… take a well deserved bow. There are some massive lapses in posting in the history of this blog, so the drive to keep making content is something I truly respect. Last year seems to be the most successful year to date, and here is hoping that going into 2014 we can top that.

Class of 2014

It is still pretty early in the process but I wanted to get some link loving started already to the folks who signed up right out of the gate. I expect as the month rolls on we will have significantly more participants, but already we have an extremely impressive crop. So if the group we have gathered already are any indication for what we are likely to see in 2014 as a whole… I feel like this is going to be a really great year. One of the big challenges when the Newbie Blogger Initiative was rebooted last year, was to not only get new bloggers into the community, but also to retain them. It seems to be working and I tip my hat to the folks who have been making sure this happens. Without further ado… on with this years list of blogs.

A few of these folks I have already engaged with via Twitter, and I am hoping to be able to do the same for the others as well. If you are not already there, twitter is somewhat a vital too for maintaining the sense of community as a whole. Generally speaking that tends to be how the majority of the gaming blogosphere communicate with each other on a regular basis. My contact information is at the top of the right side bar and I welcome anyone to approach me in any venue I happen to be using. If there is anything I can do to help make your blog more successful, please let me know.

Gaming Lite

The last few days I have been all over the place as far as gaming goes. I recorded a new Trove video the other night as I tried to figure out all of the changes… which are pretty massive. Adventuring now seems to revolve around the creation of portals that take you to various tiered worlds. Additionally there seems to be a system now that prevents you from equipping too high of level of a weapon. I end up screwing myself over by upgrading the one set of weapons I could equip… too high to actually equip them. So now I am back at square one, working on leveling up my Knight and finding weapons to do so with it. The pace of the game seems to be significantly slower, and I am going to have to figure out exactly what all has taken place since I last played. I still really dig trove in that it is a funky and friendly little world full of random adventure.

Another random thing I did the other night was decide to record a walkthrough of our guild hall in Rift. I still love what she did to the place and how awesome it looks. I have been pining for Rift lately, so I will likely start poking around over there again. I wish I could get some elite groups honestly, but the random dungeon finder queue is insane. I might end up working on my tank spec and doing some streams of me tanking for random pugs. I am just not sure if I really want that kind of stress. Surely as long as the queues are… folks will be appreciative of tanks right? At least that is the theory and I hope they don’t rip me to shreds. There are a few other streamers that I might be able to connect with that also seem to want to do elites, so maybe I can get that going. Right now both my Warrior and my Rogue are geared almost entirely through the free patron chests that we get every week.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVLastly I am still playing a ton of Elder Scrolls Online on a nightly basis. I streamed for about an hour last night as I wandered around in Bangkorai trying to finish up objectives that I still have out there. I ended up completing a few major quest steps, and generally faffing about killing lots of imperials. I show off my new armor and my new fast pony. I finally gathered up the 42,700g needed to buy the +25% speed mount, and while it is not necessarily the color I would have chosen… I am happy enough with it. It seems like the campaign against bots is actually working, as the few places I went last night with bosses… the traditional gathering of bots was absent. I feel like Zenimax is trying hard to combat the gold spammers and botters, but it is a constant and ever changing battle. Right now they have shifted almost entirely to using the email system… which is a bit more manageable. I am religiously reporting each and every spam email I get, hoping that over time they can lock down on these accounts. I am super interested in ArcheAge, but right now honestly I am still having a ton of fun playing ESO.