MMO Archives - Page 402 of 430 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Wildstar Impressions

March 13, 2014 by Belghast

The NDA Drop

The big news from yesterday is that Wildstar dropped the NDA and announced an official launch date and that preorders start March 19th. I have been in closed beta testing for quite some time now, and as a result have tried my best to maintain radio silence about the title. I have occasionally referred to it as “that space game” when I absolutely needed to, but generally speaking it is just safer not to say anything at all. Granted I have not played a ton of hours, in part because the game really doesn’t move me to play a ton of hours. Every so often there is a game that just doesn’t feel “right” to me, and Wildstar falls into that category firmly. Of note the other major release that also did was Guild Wars 2 and a few days ago I wrote about my feelings there.

For a long while I simply had trouble playing the game. For whatever reason there was a specific graphical glitch that would cause my frame rate to absolutely tank. So the game itself became extremely hard to play at 5 frames per second. However the last several builds have fixed the issue and I have tried to poke my head in several times to continue to give it the old college try. In part much like with Guild Wars 2, I keep wanting to try and figure out what everyone sees in this game that is so spectacular. For a long while segments of my friends list have been completely devoted to it. Combine that with the fact that a friend of mine now works for Carbine… and I really want to know what it is about this game that makes it special.

The Las Vegas Strip

One of the things that distracts me about the game is just how “busy” it is. The design ethic the Carbine has employed is one where something is going on in every possible corner of every screen. So the above picture is on the Dominion starship, and while you can’t really get the full effect in a still frame, there is literally motion everywhere. While this makes the game feel more dynamic and alive, it also makes the game feel a bit like the Las Vegas strip, with lights and sounds and motion everywhere. While playing I get a sort of sensory overload most of the time. This would be fine if this was just a city phenomena, but even when you are out in the world there are doodads and holograms floating about waiting to be clicked on. The “more is more” design ethic almost gives me a headache at times.

The characters are well crafted, and the voice acting is at times extremely good… and even when it is not it is at least passable. One of the weird disconnects is that the dialog the npcs are voicing, rarely syncs up with what is actually saying in the chat box. So this adds a bit to the feeling of too much going on screen, since I have to watch the chat box and listen to the npc at the same time. Additionally the UI feels like it needs a bit of work, namely in the minimap. I find it hard to determine where I need to go to reach my next objective without constantly opening the main map. There are symbols and indicators on the minimap, but it is simply not clear to me what they mean. I have not really noticed something akin to an arrow off one side of the map to show me where the next quest I have highlighted is.

Confused Control Scheme

The game employs a rather unique combat style, in that the game does not rely heavily on hard targets but instead involves a lot of cone and arc based attacks that fire in front of the character hitting everything in the path. This in itself is really cool, but the experience while playing the game feels really odd to me. I feel as though Wildstar really wanted to be an action combat MMO, but stopped just one step short of doing so. For a long while I was using an addon that allowed you to toggle on permanent mouselook, and it drastically improved my enjoyment of the game. I feel like the game overall would be more enjoyable if it had a control scheme more like Neverwinter or Elder Scrolls Online, where mouselook controls the view and primary attacks are on left and right mouse buttons with a targeting reticle in the center of the screen.

The combat itself feels too busy for the wow style movement interface. Maybe this is not as evident with the games ranged classes, but as a melee class I feel like I am always working at cross purposes to get out of the big red “stupid” on the ground, while still trying to keep my attack facing at the right target at the right time. Controlling the game makes me feel like I should have an extra pair of hands. Last night when I streamed for a bit, I did not bother downloading the latest version of my mouselook addon, and it greatly diminished my enjoyment. Since it is not likely that we will see an action combat interface this far from launch, it would be great if they simply added in the ability to turn on perma-mouselook by default instead of having to rely on a third party addon for it.

Extremely Content Dense

Last night I had all sorts of technical difficulties, so I ended up getting a late start. As a result I did not stream for terribly long… and for whatever reason Twitch decided to stop recording 20 minutes into the stream. However you can see enough footage to get a feel of the game. I feel like I have been a “wet blanket” so far this morning, but I don’t really intend to be. This is just one of the few MMOs that I was not immediately in love with… and like usual I keep trying to figure out why. One of the big positives is that the game itself is EXTREMELY content dense. While this gives the game the busy, almost migraine inducing characteristics… this also means there is a hell of a lot of stuff to do. I was swimming through a lake at one point last night, and ended up engaging a lake race minigame similar to the one in Moonshade Highlands in Rift.

Similarly there are always “hold the line” type events out in the wild where you help the citizens of an area defend against baddies. So the game itself is exceedingly rich and for 100%ers it will take you a long time to unlock all of the secrets in an area before moving on to the next. Problem being, I have not been a “must get all the achievements” person for a really long time. However I do find myself wanting to do the little combat challenges along the way as I unlock them. In the video above I kill a single snail and find out that I need to kill a certain number within a time limit to get a bonus prize. My goal from that point on became finding more snails so I could get the doodad. The bonus prizes are never that good, but just the fact that I get to kill stuff with a purpose is enough for me to enjoy it.

Extremely Torn

Right now I am completely up in the air as to whether or not I will play this game. There are certain aspects I really like, and certain aspects that turn me completely off about it. It is like a pair of ill fitting shoes, that look really cool… but no matter how many times you wear them they just don’t quite fit. At this point I am not sure if I could honestly say what would need to change to make me love the game. I plan to keep playing the beta off and on and seeing if I can reach a point where the game just feels like magic. I think if I can ever reach the housing system, that may in fact be the hook for me. I do love that as I am out and about in the world various housing things can drop. The gameplay is not “un-fun” but it is not the type of thing that just drives me to play more and more of it.

Right now the biggest deterrent to playing is the price tag and the subscription that goes in tow. I have no problem with a subscription model, in fact I tend to prefer them for a game I am really serious about. The problem is, Wildstar is not a title I am extremely serious about. Were it like Guild Wars 2 where I could pre-order my copy and play it at my leisure with no strings attached I would gladly do so and have my order in on day one. However knowing that I have 30 days to decide if I like the game well enough to continue playing, means I really need to time playing the game in the first place during a time when I have a lull in other games. The June launch date is likely too close to Elder Scrolls for me to really get into it seriously. I think they are planning to pick up the people for whom ESO was not that great of an experience, and also grab the people who are tired of waiting on Warlords of Draenor to launch.

Wish Them Luck

Ultimately I wish them the best of success. I still stand by the statement that I have made multiple times that we need a lot more success in the MMO world in whatever form it comes. Specifically we need more stable games that are not named “Warcraft”. When a game launches, specially one with friends working on the staff… I feel personally invested in its success. I feel like they are launching at the best possible time this year. I just hope they have enough time to set their hooks into players because Warlords of Draenor comes along and pulls people back into a new World of Warcraft adventure. I feel like so many games are vying for the same pool of players that has not really gotten much larger over the years. Someone is going to lose as a result of this, and my fear is this game is more likely than anything to pull players away from Rift than it is from WoW.

Being Bad at Mage

March 12, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This coming weekend that leads into Spring Break here in the United States, represents the last public beta weekend before the 4/4/2014 launch of the game. Now the beta client you will be getting to play has a significant number of changes in it. For point of reference the one that was used during the last public beta weekend was from early December, and lacked a ton of the polish changes that have gone in since. As a result even if you had completely written off the game based on past public beta experiences… you really owe it to yourself to patch the game up and give it another go this weekend. While December doesn’t really seem that long ago, what has happened between now and then is what I like to refer to as a “hallelujah” build… aka the one that fixes so many bugs and makes the game feel nice and tight and polished.

So many of the quests that have been perennially bugged out during the beta weekends should now be fixed and working smoothly. In many cases this involved subtle tweaks to the flow of the quest to make it work more reliably. Additionally this build is the one that introduces mob collision and the ability to skip the starter island. The mob collision seems to fix some of the complaints about “floaty combat” that players have made, and the combat animations themselves have tightened up considerably as well. There are still a number of features missing that are in the private test build, but overall I think players will have a more enjoyable experience. The game is very much an Elder Scrolls experience, but unfortunately if you were hoping it would morph into a standard MMO interface… that has not and likely will not happen.

Another cool thing about this weekend is with my dabbling in twitch streaming with my “Bel Faffs About” series, I recieved an email from support saying that I could stream the entire weekend if I wanted to. Granted we likely have quite a bit of things to do over the weekend, and Saturday since it is going to be nice out we hope to go out and do some photography. However as much of the weekend as I can, I will be streaming out my gameplay. I am not sure at this point if I will be starting a fresh character, or picking up where I left off on my Orsimer Dragon Knight from the previous beta. For those who have not already tested the content, they are asking each of us to start a new character and test the new starter experience sans islands. It works pretty well but is considerably more difficult since at the level you fight some of the encounters, you really don’t have a full set of gear yet.

Technicolor Voxels

I am still very much learning this streaming thing… and I feel like I still have so much more to learn. I was having some issues with FFSplit, namely in the inability to stream Trove. So after a suggestion or two from friends I loaded up Open Broadcaster Software overall I like the way it is set up, and it seems more intuitive to me. However it has copious amounts of settings, and I made the mistake of just accepting the defaults. The above video is passable at times, but pixellated as all get out anytime there is action going on. After some tweaking I improved the results with the WoW stream later in the evening. Additionally I am noticing that I really need to drop the volume of the game by about half so that I am not fighting to speak over it. I was honestly being fairly quiet last night… and I need not to do that.

It had been awhile since I had patched up Trove and played around on the server. With all the excitement over “pretty voxels” and Landmark… my enthrallment with Trove’s simplicity fell by the wayside. This is one of those games where if you stop playing for a bit, you are absolutely shocked at just how much has been done the next time you play. One of the coolest things from the above video is when I find a tree fort in a higher tier zone, and go hunting for the mushroom king that rules it. Last time I played they did not have real “dungeon bosses”, and they actually do hurt significantly. I cheat quite a bit in that the community chest was stocked full of rainbow weapons. However in my travels last night I did manage to pick up an upgrade that looks like the gun from Portal.

The gunslinger class is extremely fun, and it feels more responsive at times than the Knight does. Granted the Knight was their “first class”, so I figure at some point down the line they will apply a round of tweaks to make it feel more unique. If you watch through the video, you can tell I am heavily addicted to using the “rocket jump” attack, that shoots your character up into the air. I am one of those players that jumps constantly, so this only adds to my enjoyment when I can hurdle over big obstacles. One of the things I never could find however was the snow biome full of robots. I am wondering if they made robot parts significantly harder to farm, by only making them drop off punch bots and the dungeon boss robots. I will try doing another stream soonish with fixed settings to make sure the pixelization is gone completely.

Being Bad at Mage

So as I said above, by the time I got around to streaming World of Warcraft last night, I had tweaked my settings significantly. While the gameplay in WoW never includes the kind of spastic jumping that Trove does, it seems to be smoother and not pixellated. I continued my quest to push my Mage to 60. Night Elf Mage is pretty much the least possible “Belghast” character in existence. I have always had a problem with Night Elves, and I do not do amazingly well at “Finger Wigglers” as I call them. That said I have this silly idea that I want to get one of every class to the level cap, and I figured the only way I would actually do this is by using my free boost to 90 on a Mage. Traditionally the characters I was least interested in playing were the Mage and the Priest. When I accepted a scroll of resurrection some time ago, I made an instant 80 priest. So that just left the mage, that I have never really managed to level past about 20.

Firstly I am fundamentally bad at playing a Mage. I know this. I had been using Frostfire bolt all this time… because it was “the prettiest”. Really though the animation does look amazing as compared to the stock Frostbolt… so that meant it had to be better right? Wrong… apparently it is a spell that no self respecting frost mage would ever cast except in the rare case of a mob being frost immune. Last night oddly enough I had one of the best mages I have never known watching the stream. Helkim was commenting over twitter, since I fail at using Twitch chat and gave me the realization that I should never press frostfire bolt again. Sure enough my damage went up to respectable levels in dungeons… viva la shorter cast time!

Towards the end of the video someone took the bait. I made this channel on our guild Mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming”, and since my friend Drathis has no self preservation instinct… he decided to join me. Within a few minutes several other friends had popped into the channel, and I think before too much longer we had all pretty much forgotten I was streaming. As a result you guys get a glimpse into what our mumble sounds like on an almost nightly basis. This might be confusing to the listeners because we end up often times playing completely different games, and there will be cross conversations going on about each. Everyone else in the channel that was not me, was playing Diablo 3 torment mode I believe. If I did not have this burning desire to get my mage to 60… I would likely be doing the same. Basically I decided that I would far rather level a character to 60, than level tradeskills to 600.

Booster Gold

March 11, 2014 by Belghast

King of Mondays

As I said yesterday, I struggled with the time change like I normally do. As a result this tends to be the worst Monday of the year. Of course that would be the Monday my wife’s sister decides we need to go out to eat. By the time we finished work both of us simply wanted to go home and crash. However we felt obligated to go act normal and attempt to enjoy dinner. Thing is we don’t get to see my wife’s sister that often. She works this really odd job where she cleans nuclear power plants when they go into shutdown periodically. So as a result she and her husband drag their RV all around the country, and it can literally be years before we see them again.

So I did my best to pretend to be normal and pleasant, when all I really wanted to do was go home… climb upstairs to my office and decompress. Since the night was already pretty much shot we decided to run a few errands when we got back to town. Dinner was at least relatively enjoyable, and by the time we arrived home I had gotten a bit of a second wind. Over the years we have been to three different Ruby Tuesdays. One in our town that just closed this past week, one in Joplin MO and another one in Upstate NY. It seems like they were doing it wrong. The one we ate at last night was really rather nice, and had free biscuits and salad bar. Maybe the one in my town would have survived if they also had this.

Watching Me Sleep

I’m a fat man, and I will likely always be fat. I have reached a point of acceptance with that. However my wife and I have been trying to be “less” fat. Over the course of the last year I lost 70 lbs, and my wife has lost an amount that I have not kept up with as closely… but as much if not more than I did. She looks absolutely great, and I pretty much still look like myself. We have done pretty well with diet and while I have fallen off the wagon a bit in keeping track of my food intake… I have managed to remain the same weight… so the habits seem to have stuck. One of the things we both struggle with is exercise. So for awhile now we have kicked around the idea of getting a Fitbit. Yesterday we picked up a couple and now I am under constant surveillance.

One of the interesting features is that it keeps track of your sleep patterns. When it comes time to go to bed, you rapidly tap your bracelet until it buzzes and it knows you are going into sleep mode. I have often wondered why I feel like shit after getting what seems to be an otherwise good nights sleep. Apparently last night for example I woke up ten different times through the night. Some of these I remember, but the majority I do not. This also explains why the covers on my side of the bed are always fubar. Granted last night it was a bit odd trying to sleep in what is essentially a watch band, but I will get used to it.

Booster Gold

The big news yesterday that I have somehow neglected to talk about until just now… is that while I was off at lunch running errands, it seems that Warlords of Draenor preorders went live. Granted this weekend there was a leak of a boost to 90 trailer video. So we mostly assumed that at some point this week the preorders would go live, as well as the boost to 90. The other thing that caused quite a bit of a ruckus was that a “release date” has been entered into the systems for 12/20/2014. However minutes later Blizzard came out saying that this was not the final launch date, but that the game would be launching sometime during the Fall. So that begs the question… what exactly does “Fall” mean. Some are saying September, and at last years Blizzcon they stated that we would be playing Warlords by the time the next Blizzcon rolled around.

My friends have suggested that we are likely going to see a significantly truncated beta cycle, but even at that… it would be nice if that actually started. I would feel significantly better about the projected launch if I knew that friends and family alpha was at least going on. Not that I am expecting to be in it mind you, but just knowing it is happening is a good sign. Now that I have a free boost to 90 that came with my preorder, I am not exactly in a huge rush to use it. For some time now I had planned to use it to boost up a mage to 90. I figured this was the one class that I was least likely to level on my own. I had been playing my little Warlock, and even streamed the hell out of it on Sunday. Demonology is essentially the “faff about while your demon kills things” spec, and I was perfectly okay with this.

However it is starting to seem like Frost is the “faff about while your elemental kills things” spec. At one point last night I ended up having to afk in a cave to take care of something… and I fully expected to log back in dead and have to run back to my corpse. Turns out my elemental killed everything that got anywhere near me. I am sure this will not last for long, but it was entertaining to watch for a few minutes before I took back control of my character. At this point my plan is to level the mage to 60 and then boost him to 90 with the doodad. Essentially my logic is this… I would far rather level to 60 in the cataclysm old world content, which I enjoy… than level three tradeskills all the way to 600. If you boost a 60+ character you get your primary and secondary tradeskill to 600 as well as First Aid. So last night I proceeded to strip my warlock of all of his heirlooms and am now in serious mage leveling mode.

Another Experiment

Yesterday I talked about my experiment over the weekend with streaming through FFSplit to my Twitch.tv channel. It seemed to work pretty well, and the overall video quality was acceptable. Now it is time to take it to the next level… the one where I actually unmute my microphone. To go a step further, I have created a channel on our guilds mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming” and my hope is to coax my friends to join me in the channel and be entertaining… so I don’t have to. I can’t say I will have the most exciting stream in the world, and I don’t even hope to do it as well as the Qelric… but it might be fun. I decided to name this endevour “Bel Faffs About!” in honor of the Godmother of Faff who raised the consciousness of all things faffing over the last year. My plan is to post on twitter anytime I am streaming something, and just let the chips fall where they may. I’ve heard rumor that this weekend is another big ESO beta event, and if that is the case I will stream it as much of the weekend as I can. In the meantime, expect me leveling my mage to 60 and playing some Diablo 3.

Faffing in the Fjord

March 10, 2014 by Belghast

Losing Time

It seems that no matter what I do to prepare for it, Daylight Savings time still kicks my ass every year. This go round I purposefully started trying to get more sleep from about Thursday onwards, in an attempt to get used to the earlier bedtime. Saturday night I even started referring to things based on EST instead of my normal CST time… to attempt to trick my brain into thinking that was normal. So last night… I hoped above hope that my brain would be able to power down and go to sleep at a decent hour. But instead there I lay in bed trying to get to sleep. I ended up taking some nyquil and playing Bravely Default in bed until I fell asleep.

I am sure Daylight Savings time made sense when we were primarily an agrarian society, however I have no clue why it still exists. Why do we as a country do this to ourselves each and every year. To be honest I do like having a lot more sunshine in the evenings, but since that is the case why not stay offset an hour permanently instead of shifting back in the winter? I mean the days are so short that it really doesn’t matter at all in November if we offset back or not. For whatever reasons even falling back and gaining the hour still seems to screw with my internal systems. I realize that bitching about it will do exactly nothing… but it makes me feel better.

Faffing in the Fjord

So yesterday thanks to the time drain I was feeling a little bit out of sorts. I got up like I do every Sunday morning and played through my Steampowered Sunday game pick for a few hours, then wrote my review of sorts over it. This week was of course Brutal Legend, and if you were interested in winning your own copy… make sure you click the extremely obnoxious vote here button at the bottom of the review. Once I got finished up with all of that silliness I began the massive chore of laundry for the week. Actually in truth it had been a few weeks since we had done laundry, so I knew I needed something that I could walk away from and check on the loads periodically. Generally speaking solo leveling fits the bill perfectly. I am not sure exactly why, but I decided to fiddle with FFSplit and try and figure out this live streaming business.

Normally speaking I always end up leveling my characters through Northrend in Borean Tundra. While it is extremely boring and grindy, it just seems quicker. The zone itself is laid out in more of a hub and spoke pattern and you can progress your way through the zone without a ton of travel time. However since I had not done so in a really long time… I opted to move my little dwarven Warlock to Howling Fjord. A few hubs into the zone I remembered why I stopped doing this… so much travel time. I figured I would share my pain by streaming it so the world could see. The above video is not terribly interesting, but is me spending my afternoon… or at least roughly two hours of it going through the paces of leveling a warlock in Howling Fjord. You can watch me playing video games badly!

More than anything I used this as a way to test how well streaming directly to Twitch.tv works, and then using that to upload to Youtube. So far so good, but I kept my microphone muted during this trial. I was feeling fairly antisocial, but at some point soon I hope to livecast something meaningful. I still need to figure out a good size to put my postage stamp video feed into the stream. At this point I am juggling back and forth between 320 wide and 240 wide, but before I do this for real I want to pretty up my twitch stream a bit with some artwork. Right now this is just stock FFsplit with no real alterations. However credit goes to Scopique, who told me this would be a much easier way to record videos… it just took me months and months to actually fiddle with it.

Belazon Lives!

The other big thing to come from this weekend is that I managed to push my Barbarian to 60 in Diablo 3. The irony of this is thanks to a certain drop, I have completely shifted focus in the way I play it. Previously I had been all about dual wield and cleave, using rend to soak back up some health. However it was either Friday or Saturday night that I got a truly amazing drop that caused me to completely change my build for it. I ended up getting the level 59 version of the “Three Hundredth Spear” to drop, which buffs my throwing damage by 55% and my ancient spear damage by 59%. So as a result I completely rearranged my abilities to be able to use this and now I am more of a hoplite build with spear and shield. Funny how my pure melee class ended up turning into a ranged.

Overall it works extremely well, and I can throw out some truly silly damage on a boss fight. At one point Saturday the trio shown above were working our way through the various bosses in the game, letting Ashgar get the achievement for killing them all wearing nothing but blues. At this point I was using the Boulder Toss rune for Ancient Spear, and it was insane to watch the bosses health move significantly each time a boulder landed. The only problem with this rune is that it changes the functionality of ancient spear significantly. The thing I like the most about it is that it acts almost like a League of Legends skill shot, in that if you can line up a bunch of mobs in a “wave” you can burn through them quickly as your ancient spear will hit each of them in a row.

I was never really a big fan of the Amazon in Diablo 2, but so far my Belazon build seems to be pretty enjoyable. While on a “role”-bending trick, I decided to start a baby mage and attempt to go for the melee mage build. While functional, it just doesn’t feel like a class I would really enjoy. I don’t really like feeling like a glass cannon, and apart from a few shield abilities the class has really weak survival. In my few minutes of playing with my friend Tibuant, I died several times… when I have maybe died twice in total on my Barbarian. I think it might be a class that is enjoyable to solo on, because many of my deaths were simply because Tib and I were not really in sync while playing. He would be off in one direction and I would be off in another, which always ended up with me getting swarmed. I think until the Crusader actually gets unlocked I will mostly piddle around on my Monk and Barbarian attempting to get paragon levels.