Good Morning Friends. I am what I would prefer as a buzzer-beater. I get things done, but almost always end up doing them right before the deadline. I am the sort of employee that drives their managers insane when it comes to compliance items. If you tell me something is due on a specific date, I interpret it as being done at the close of business on that date and will hand it in without fail at the last minute. It is this way with seasonal events in video games, and last night I finally got around to checking out the Halloween event in New World. You technically can receive the quest at 35, but given how fast I got my ass handed to me by the roaming 60s I decided I would come back later. The problem is that “later” never really happened until last night.
When the fight begins properly you have a big boss called Baalphazu and a few types of smaller adds that spawn around it. The most common are these little pumpkins, which you can destroy and get a pumpkin bomb that you can throw at the boss. Essentially I think the plan is for those who are lower level to be picking up the pumpkin bombs and chucking them at the boss, which lowers its defenses and starts a burn phase. The larger challenge with that however is when it is doing a burn phase, it is also dealing massive AOE damage. The strategy seems to be to dogpile everyone on the boss and throw down enough healing circles to allow everyone to effectively shrug off the damage. When it worked it went well and 30-40 players showed up at the spawn point. When it did not go well, we struggled to burn down the boss until reinforcements arrived.
There were a number of rewards for the event that now makes me wish I had started this a bit earlier. There were three helmets, the one shown above, a pumpkin head, and a witches hat. There was also an armor set featuring a chest piece and helm that are designed to make you look like Baalphazu, as well as a “pumpkinling” that you could get for your home. The bigger reward is that after you had completed the event a few times you got enough faction with the vendor and could start buying item-level 600 weapon patterns. I ran enough of the event yesterday to pick up the cosmetics and greatsword, sword, and shield crafting patterns. Doing the event drops bags of loot that contained the lower-end versions of the weapon patterns, and I believe I managed to get one of those for all the other slots. All told it was a good event and I wish it was sticking around a bit longer, and that more level range variety could have easily participated.
Other than that I continue to quest my way through the game. Right now I have a few competing goals the first of which is to continue harvesting up all of my banks full of material so I can do another massive crafting session. The next is to gather up gold and territory standing so that I can purchase a Tier 4 house in either Brightwood or Mourningdale. Weirdly on my server… the guild that controls Brightwood seems to not care much about leveling up that territory so I am starting to lean heavily toward Mourningdale. Whatever the case I have to hit 30 faction in that territory in order to unlock that max-tier home. I think I am about to wrap up questing in Mourningdale, and not certain where the game will send me next. I would assume more than likely it would be Ebonscale Reach.
In other news… I lost yet another lottery in Final Fantasy XIV. I know a while back I said I was hopping off the lottery train, and I did for a few rounds… but alas I am back to doing the four-day wait. I do not understand why Square did not seize the opportunity with the Island Sanctuary to give us all an instanced housing plot. That seems like it would have been perfect to just have those hidden among the island somewhere and function essentially like a housing district for one. Right now on my server at least, it seems we are all vying for the same plot each week, so the likelihood of me ever winning one is pretty minimal.
If nothing else I guess it gets me logging into the game every week, though I almost always stay parked at the placard awaiting the sad trip back into the game when the results are posted.
Outdoor cat has officially been fed so I can now sit down and start trying to compose my feelings about Anthem Demo weekend number two. The first “VIP Demo” weekend was for folks who had pre-ordered the game and I will assume a certain batch of influencers that were brought to that special EA event to record footage. You can scroll through my thoughts about that weekend in a post I made last week, but for me and most of the AggroChat crew it was a buggy and often times unplayable mess. However there was enough good there laying just underneath the covers to make me interested and quite honestly miss playing the game. So while I was not on nearly as much as I could have been… I played a significant amount of Anthem this weekend. I managed to get in a Stronghold… this games version of a Strike and spent a significant amount of time just roaming around and doing World Events and the little mini-dungeons that are available off the segment of the map we had open to us. It galvanized my desire to play this game… and largely reinforced my decision to keep playing the “shootymans” class the Ranger… who appears to be a really amazing single target dps class.
What I want to talk about the most however is what a difference there was between the first and second weekends. During the first weekend it was a constant struggle to be able to play this game… and in the second…. everything just sorta worked flawlessly. Sure there were some minor glitches like for some reason our javelins would not load on the “reward” screen. Additionally I have never actually seen the full suit prep sequence because the game kicks me over to a loading screen when I assume that sequence is designed to make us ignore how generally long loading into an area takes. However what was gone was the need to keep closing the game with task manager and loading back in to successful get into a mission. I could just play the game as it was intended to play and this made me way more open to grouping up with friends given that it was a predictable sequence rather than a struggle to get all four players into the same instance.
I’m very impressed with how communicative Bioware has been during this whole sequence… and more than that I feel heard. We all for the most part universally complained about how bad Mouse and Keyboard Flight/Swimming felt…. and they acknowledged that yeah… it feels less than optimal. These changes are apparently already in the “live” build of the game, but what is even better is that they have started giving us a run down of things that will be fixed before the initial EA Premier launch on the 15th and what will be in place by the 22nd.
UI Clicking on visible options in menus fixed for 15th Feb (except social which is 22nd Feb)
Navigating Menu tabs with Q and E instead of old keybindings fixed for 15th Feb
Forge rotation speed with mouse improved – 15th Feb
Scrolling with mouse wheel wont zoom your javelin AND scroll the menu (will be contextual based on where your mouse is) – 15th Feb
D-Pad will show as keyboard bindings – 15th Feb
Turning off Motion Blur in settings now works (decoupled from post processing) – 22nd Feb
HDR toggle available – 22nd Feb
Camera Shake slider added – 22nd Feb
I’ve said it before but I believe that Bioware feels the pressure that this launch has to go fairly flawlessly, given the perceived failing that Andromeda was. The whole multiple launch dates thing does not do it any favors, especially considering that a lot of the issues that plagued Andromeda were fixed by the end of that first week. EA has a bad habit of shredding game studios, and the whole teasing a Dragon Age game… I think is more insurance than anything else to try and keep delaying that decision. If launch goes like last weekend however I think we are going to be just fine, and what I really want is the same level of communication that they are giving the community to continue into the first year of the game.
I really do think that Anthem might be the game that can finally blended the different looty shooty genre players together. There is enough here to intrigue the Destiny players with a rich and interesting lore and the Ranger class being essentially a “Destiny” class where it is mostly gun play with a few abilities. There is also something here for the Warframe players that want move movement and ability spam… and the Storm and the Interceptor fill those roles nicely. Then there is a class for the player who just wants to be a big freaking mech in the form of the Colossus. What is better is that gameplay feels more enjoyable when you are running with a pretty decent mix of the four classes. Ranger as far as we can tell is going to be the class that has the highest single target damage… so great for boss killing. Storm is the battle tactician that takes an overwatch position over the battlefield and can effect large swaths of it with its abilities. Interceptor is the fact melee shredder that is probably going to be excellent at grabbing objectives and avoiding taking damage. Then you have the colossus which is the king of staying alive… as was seen this weekend when Ashgar absolutely saved the day by surviving long enough to start bringing us all back up during a stronghold. They all have their key niche and all feel great when played together.
Ultimately I progressed my character as far as it probably could have been during the Demo. I managed to upgrade every slot to a level 19 rare item and my final build was an Light Machine Gun for my main weapon… a Marksman Rifle for my secondary to melt anything at a distance like snipers. Then I would run poison darts to act as my primer… that also doubles as a debuff that causes me to just deal extra damage to that target. Frag Grenades after trying a bunch of different options seems to be my detonator of choice, and also a decent crowd sweeper. Then muster point is what I was running as a damage boost for helping to burn down those big mobs. As far as components I was running one to increase Frag damage and another to increase LMG Ammunition, and it was a build I was pretty damned happy with. I could in theory go for a max damage build by picking up the devastator sniper rifle, but I never got one of those to drop for me and did not see it in the crafting tables. I also settled in on the above paint scheme which is pretty much the colors I tend to choose in any game that gives me the options.
Towards the end of the weekend they started an event that caused Primals to spawn in large numbers and frequency… so I managed to get in and take down a few of the bigger ones. In fact I was fighting one of the big primals when the servers went down, so no clue what loot might have dropped. Weirdly the game let me keep fighting, so I am guessing part of the world is cached on the client itself? This gives me concerns when it comes to what hackers are going to be able to do to the game… but without a PVP element I am not entirely certain how much it will effect me. I am a little saddened that it sounds like while my weekend was smooth and flawless… others that had a flawless previous weekend… started encountering disconnect problems during this test. I’ve now played 16 hours worth of the Anthem demo and can say that I am looking forward to starting on the 15th. If you have not already picked up the game… you can pony up for a month of Premier… which gives you a discount that you can then apply to your preorder… and will also give you access to the full game on the 15th instead of the 22nd.
So my awesome readers… are you picking up the game? Will you be joining me on the 15th or are you waiting on the 22nd… or are you just going to take a hard pass?
Tomorrow is the official launch of Blaugust and I am pretty freaking excited about it. I think last I checked we had something in the vicinity of 52 blogs signed up and I am hoping once the first topics start rolling in that number will keep incrementing upwards. July 25th through July 31st I have dubbed the Blaugust Prep Week, and what you can see from me and hopefully the other mentors is a series of posts talking about how to get started. These may range from technical discussions of WordPress vs Blogger vs Tumblr to more general discussions of picking a format for your blog or coming up with a name you won’t immediately outgrow. For the participants however, they should view this as a time to stretch their legs a bit and prepare for the month ahead. Get some of those early posts in so that you can sort out your own personal blogging rhythms.
Since we had a few more folks sign up I figure I should link their stuff here as well.
Once again if you have not taken the time to sign up, please do so. Considering we have all been there before deciding if we should be blogging at all… I promise you can do this thing. When you have signed up make sure you pop by the discord and come hang out as we chat about bloggery things.
One of the weird disconnects thematically that I have in Elder Scrolls games has always been the Dark Brotherhood. For the uninitiated, the Dark Brotherhood is a group of assassins that answer the call of the Night Mother. Around the game world individuals perform a ritual known as the Black Sacrament that calls on the Night Mother with a very specific prayer “Sweet Mother, sweet Mother, send your child unto me, for the sins of the unworthy must be baptized in blood and fear.” This prayer is heard by the Night Mother and relayed to the Listener of a specific sanctuary which then goes and seals the contract. We as players traditionally carry out these contracts that involve taking the life of someone who has generally speaking wronged someone else.
So you would expect that from within the Dark Brotherhood everyone would effectively be blood thirsty assassins ready to kill at a moments notice. While the last bit is true… the Sanctuary has a very different feel on the inside. The Dark Brotherhood represents some of the most weirdly sweet content in an Elder Scrolls game. The members all take care of each other like a family, and when you return home the various other assassins are generally happy to see you. There is something almost weirdly wholesome about the whole situation, and ultimately I think that is what makes the experience all the more unsettling.
Ultimately every tale of the Dark Brotherhood tends to end in the same manner, and I am wondering if the tale told in Elder Scrolls Online will be the same. There are several characters that I genuinely like… like the Nord who sheltered a scared werewolf girl and adopted her as his sister. Every game seems to have some characters that you just feel protective over… in spite of the fact that they are legitimately cold blooded killers. It is a bizarre juxtaposition that makes me completely uncertain how to feel about any of it… but it is also one of those guilds that I always look forward to seeing the storyline. It is progressing much slower than the Thieves Guild did, and I can’t say I am any better at getting a kill in without being noticed. That said it doesn’t really seem to matter much in the grand scheme of things as I can simply hide out until the heat and my bounty clears. The thieves guild and dark brotherhood skill lines are amazingly complimentary… and my only complaint so far is that I cannot assassinate folks during the thieves guild dailies without triggering “being seen” and reducing my timer.
This weekend the Discord was super active with folks talking about their blog and various related topics. I am traditionally super bad at following any sort of social media or chats over the weekend. I barely respond to instant message or text either because I am generally engaged in something that takes all of my attention, either that or running around. This weekend we went out junking for a bit which was extremely fun, and got this amazing ice cream at a “from scratch” sort of place a town over. I had English toffee and my wife had cotton candy and both were phenomenal to eat while we roamed around looking through the various junk shops. I mean they are all labelled as “antiques” but really… if it isn’t a junk shop I am not terribly interested in looking at it.
We had a few more people sign up for Blaugust which is awesome. If you have not done this and are at all considering it… please fill out the form link and join us in this madness. Onwards to the new blogs… one of which has yet to get complete set up but we are going to mention her anyways.
Alli – To Be Determined… but think the name “The Parent Trope” was chosen via the discord this weekend.
One of my favorite things this year is seeing us spread out. We’ve got several sign ups that listened to either the Massively OP Podcast or Geek to Geek and then I am seeing other interesting references showing some word of mouth from folks I am not sure if I even know who they are completely yet. The other thing I find interesting is several of the comments are written in a way as though they think maybe I don’t know who they are. If you are a long time reader of my blog and a regular favoriter or commenter regardless of the venue… blog, twitter, wordpress reader… I promise I know who you are and am super happy anytime I see you pop up in my notifications.
It isn’t often that I link my podcast from the weekend in my Monday morning post but maybe that is a thing I should do more often. This weekend it is directly related to the sort of weekend I had, namely it is a show where we largely talk about Elder Scrolls Online and our recent renaissance with that game. At this moment myself, Ash, Tam, Kodra, Void, Neph, Thalen and Lyle are playing it more or less in various states of “active”. I believe ToadChild and Eliyon are also playing as well but I have not really seen them online… either that or not as a name I would recognize them as. We have a pair Miko and Uldane14 that seem to be leveling together in Morrowind because their levels stay synchronized but never respond to guild chat so not sure who they are.
One of the things you have to realize about House Stalwart in Elder Scrolls Online… is this represents the last great guild that I tried to build. That is not to say that I have not done my fair share of recruiting for various guilds and continue to do so to this day. Stalwart on ESO however was my last guild building experiment where I attempted to get all of the people who know me and all of the people they know together in one room… and over night blossom into a guild of like 150 people at the launch of the game. We had folks that I knew from various games I had played, folks who worked on said various games… lots of members of the blogging and content creation community including Dulfy for a bit because we had bumped into each other during the alpha. It was a massive thing and so long as folks were willing to abide by the three tenets they were welcome.
The only problem with that is there are a large number of people in the guild that I do not remember at all. In fact there was at least one person I kicked recently that was the ex-husband of a good friend of mine who left her under some seemingly shady conditions. When there is a situation like that I tend to punt the spouse as a precautionary measure just so at some point in the future there isn’t a moment when they are both online and forgot that they were both in that same guild. Anyways this is not at all what I intended to be talking about this morning, but suffice to say there are a lot of people in the guild and since you can technically be in five guilds at once… not many have left. I have two guild slots left, and in truth one of those could be easily pruned in a pinch because I think we only used it as a private extension of the guild bank.
The thing I actually wanted to talk about this morning is how my opinion has shifted in relation to a topic from this game. When it first rolled out I remember myself being extremely frustrated by their version of the Auction House system. I had gotten used to games like World of Warcraft that had overarching global Auction House systems that allowed you to within moments search everything that was available for sale. It felt extremely efficient, but in hindsight it also has lead to practices that I am not quite so down with like the various gold making schemes that involve playing the Auction House and looking for bargains. This isn’t my jam… because I don’t really have that day trader instinct and as a result it always just seemed to unnaturally inflate the price of things making it harder for me to get what i wanted. I remember receiving threatening messages in game from a bag making cartel when I dared to break their agreed upon price point and sold some bags for less to move them quickly. I told them if they didn’t like it… buy my bags and relist them but otherwise I will do whatever the hell I want.
So for the uninitiated instead of an Auction House system, Elder Scrolls Online has a series of Guild Traders that are located throughout the world and in clusters that can be found in most towns. I tend to personally refer to these areas as Traders Row and in most cases they are fairly close to the Wayshrine making it easy to pop over and check them. Now each Trader is bid upon by various guilds in a blind bidding scheme for a fixed bid cycle, and then that guild is charged a weekly rate to maintain the guild store. I have no real first hand experience of this other than one of my guilds regularly has an active trader somewhere in the world. When your guild has a trader you have the ability to sell items on the guild store to anyone who happens across your trader and decides to open the inventory and purchase something.
This has a lot of interesting side effects… namely that all traders are not created equal. The traders that are in higher rent districts for lack of a better term… areas of that have higher churn from the player base tend to have much higher prices. So I am sure over in Summerset, the brand new expansion the prices of items on those traders would be artificially inflated to account for the fact that in order to win that trader… the blind bid that guild had to put up was likely extremely significant. Now the inverse is true as well… if you find some trader in a backwater area that isn’t even a main city… the items you find on that vendor are likely going to be extremely cheap. This creates a cycle of being able to find bargains… if you are willing to go do the leg work. There is technically a search engine for items… but it isn’t very complete and requires that people be running an addon that updates the pricing.
Instead what I did on Friday night was spent roughly two hours popping around from town to town looking for deals. I was ultimately trying to complete the Dwemer crafting set, but in the process I also completed the outlaw weapons and the rest of my mercenary armor pieces. This process involved taking a way shrine to what I thought I remembered as one of the main towns in a region, making my way to the traders row and searching each of the vendors looking for any of the items I currently was hunting for. What should have been tedium… honestly felt pretty enjoyable. Each region has its own feel and its own group of people that prefer to frequent it. For example like I have talked about how Shornhelm is my home in this world… there seems to be people that feel that way about almost every city.
Over the course of several trips to various guild traders, I found myself noticing a lot of the same names hanging out around them. It feels like a trader may anchor a guild to a location and with it gives the world a tangible destination feel that has been lacking from other games. The world is massive, but it also feels lived in… populated with players who happen to prefer one area to another and go there to deal with their “upkeep”. Just like I preferred Iron Forge for years… and later the Dwarven Quarter… you can prefer Elden Root to Daggerfall and it is perfectly okay because there is nothing that you can get in one location or other other that makes one superior. I guess that isn’t entirely fair… given that you need to go to a faction Capitol to get your Undaunted dailies but that really isn’t that big of a deal.
In a game with instant travel… it has been interesting to see how many things are there to keep you connected to one location over another.
