MMORPG Archives - Page 359 of 400 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Why Multi-Gaming Works

May 27, 2014 by Belghast

Monday on a Tuesday

I’ve sat here and started this paragraph five times now, and keep backspacing away the results. The day coming back from a three day weekend is always rough, but this one for whatever reason seems particularly painful. All in all we had a pretty busy break, and last night we managed to get in a long walk between the thunderstorms. The rain is needed, since Oklahoma is deep in drought conditions, but it managed to ruin a perfectly good Memorial Day. For the last several years the weekend has been marked by doing little projects around the house, but this year those projects mostly consisted of cleaning and organization. As a result our closet is more organized than it has been in years and our dresser drawers are not overflowing with clothing we no longer wear.

While I feel like we had a productive break, I am really wishing I had managed to get more sleep because I feel like that is coming back to haunt me. For whatever reason I slept roughly this weekend, almost every night. Each morning I would reach a stalemate where I simply got tired of tossing and turning and was hungry enough to get dressed and go find breakfast. Here is hoping that tonight my sleep patterns can get back to normal and I will sleep through the entire night. Last night I was doing mostly well until at some point one of our cats started banging against the closet door. After that I felt like I never really got to sleep soundly. God forbid we have a door in the house that is shut when a cat wants to go through it.

All of Your Eggs in One Basket

Lately there has been an undercurrent of folks on twitter talking about planning to leave World of Warcraft when Wildstar launches. I assumed we would be seeing quite a lot of this, because we saw quite a lot of this when Rift launched and when SWTOR launched. Both of which are games that directly appeal to the wow playing audience. I am watching people go through the same agonizing process I did when I got tired of Warcraft shortly after the launch of Cataclysm and devoted myself entirely to Rift. When you have been playing a game for years, shifting to another game is somewhat like making a religious decision. One of the things I didn’t expect was just how many social friends I would lose in the process. There are a lot of people out there that only care about the one game they are playing, and are all too happy to put in blinders to try and blot out any evidence that there are other games.

The problem is, in doing this you are placing your fates in the hands of this one title. When times are good they are awesome, but when times are bad or decisions are made that you don’t agree with… they can seem so oppressive. Almost all of the angry rants that I spun up on this blog during the early years were because I felt that Warcraft had somehow betrayed me, by not living up to being the game I wanted it to be. I am here to tell you that this is just a bad way to think about anything created by someone else and entirely out of your control. Admittedly when I left WoW I took this same sort of devotion and poured it into Rift, and got the same kind of frustrated when it didn’t quite turn out the way I had hoped it would. Ultimately games are what they are, and while we the players can provide feedback… there are always decisions behind the scenes that dictate the way the game ends up.

Why Multi-Gaming Works

For me at least the cure for this constant sense of dread and angst over upcoming patches… is that at some point in the past I just started accepting games for what they are. Enjoyable but often transitory experiences that will have a beginning a middle and an end as far as your personal enjoyment goes. I present that World of Warcraft and Everquest before it were anomalies and not the boilerplate that all gaming experiences should follow. As a result I am no longer looking for the next five year game, I am just looking for a game to enjoy while I enjoy it. Additionally I am looking to enjoy multiple games at the same time. While I don’t update it as often as I should… my games played list is fairly accurate. I play a lot of MMOs at the same time, because they each scratch some itch that I have inside of me.

When one of them starts to get stale I simply hop into another one and play it for awhile. While this is greatly booned by the fact that free to play games exist, I still maintain subscriptions to many of the titles that I play. I realize that is not something that most players can do freely, but I feel like even if you can’t… it is healthy to mix in several single player or free to play games into your mix. In doing this I am basically protecting myself from the doldrums…. those moments when nothing seems to be moving in the game you wish you were into, and are somehow remaining artificially cheery about. World of Warcraft for example is notorious for having a massive long slog between the last patch and the next expansion. If I were ONLY playing WoW right now I would be a ball of anger, pensively hanging on ever word about the potential of getting into Alpha and eventually Beta.

Instead I am happily playing everything that crosses my desk in the meantime knowing that when Warlords of Draenor does launch I will give it the devotion it deserves before booting up something else and enjoying that too. Elder Scrolls Online has been the proof that this method works for me. I still very much want to play the game, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface, but I am not forcing myself to play it every night. In fact this weekend I don’t think I played it any at all other than while we recorded our podcast on Saturday night. Instead I played a mixture of single player games, namely Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order and had an absolute blast doing this. To some extent I think when we pay a subscription we feel like we HAVE to play the game or we are somehow missing out on some value. I propose that the value is what you make of it, and if you don’t feel like logging in, you are not necessarily losing anything in the process.

Why This Makes your Blog a Mess

I realize I am somewhat rambly this morning, but I am going to blame the lack of solid sleep… and am just hoping that at least some of my message gets through. For the last year I have purposefully and unapologetically played whatever game happened to catch my fancy even if for a single weekend. As a result my overall happiness has been improved by not feeling like my fates are hanging on the whims of a group of developers. As a blogger however this is not necessarily a great thing. People love to be able to classify you as this thing or that thing. If you are super into World of Warcraft, they like to be able to classify you as not only a “WoW Blog” but also as a “Warrior” blog or a “Tank” blog or even a “Raid Leadership” blog. When you play so many things at the same time you become classified as “other” and this makes it hard for people to grasp quickly what your blog is about.

I am sure my constant wanderlust has cost me more than a few readers, because I did not live up to their expectations for what a blog they want to read should be. My hope is that I can show just enough of myself in whatever I happen to write that folks will stick around for the long haul because I am trying my best to be genuine. There was a time when I tried to pigeon hole people into neatly organized categories in my blogroll, and I simply stopped trying to connect a specific person to a specific game. Now I simply having one big “Gaming” section and another big “Geekdom” section for things I am interested in that are not necessarily game blogs. After a point I find I care far more about the person on the other side of the screen than what they happen to be saying on a given basis. I just hope folks get to the point of caring about me, and not necessarily caring that I am cycling through a long list of games at the same time.

Farewell to Coldharbor

May 24, 2014 by Belghast

Cleaning Day

Good morning you happy people… I am being forcibly cheery because my body doesn’t seem to want to fully function this morning and I am falling back on the whole “fake it until you make it” methodology. May is a horrible time for me for so many reasons. Firstly the world seems to come alive and fill the air full of pollen and seed pods and all the wonderful things that make life happen. As a result my body tries to kill me as my allergies come into full swing. Additionally with our constant regiment of walking… you would think that at some point I would stop being sore, however that doesn’t seem to be the case. I hit 10,000 steps again yesterday and this morning it feels like every inch of my body hurts. Being fat sucks, but at least I am a much healthier fat that I used to be.

One of the other huge negatives about May is the fact that it is also when the end of the school year happens. Any spouses of educators will agree with me that the two worst times of the year to be their spouse… is the beginning and end of the school year. My wife no matter how much I love her… has been an spastic little monkey in a frantic rush to finish all the things that have to be finished. As a result she is prone to fits of irrationality at 10 pm at night when things are not going like she wants them to, and not much help in taking care of the household chores. Also as a result, I’ve kind of said screw it myself… and our house is a pit right now. So today will be devoted to the cleaning of all the things and trying to get more domicile into a more livable state. Mostly it has been my inner sanctum that has been bothering me… I have been stepping over Amazon boxes for weeks that need to be broken down and taken to the recycling bin. We are considering joining in with a neighbor in a few weeks for a garage sale so some consideration needs to be made about what to actually sell.

Farewell to Coldharbor

Last night my wife was working late yet again, which has been a regular occurrence for most of the month on Friday nights. She had intended to get home earlyish and we had planned to go for our nightly walk and then walk over to Taco Bueno on the way home. At some point during the evening she messaged me saying that she would be working late and to go ahead and eat without her, but at that point I was so heavily into the storyline of Coldharbor that I figured I would just wait. I’ve been Veteran Rank 1 for most of a week now, and have simply not spent enough time in game to push through the main storyline in Cold Harbor which supposedly unlocked access to moving into the Aldmeri Dominion content. Last night I did just that, by finishing not only the end of the main Cold Harbor story but also finishing up the level 50 harborage quest that gets unlocked immediately after that.

I have to say the “end of the game” is equal parts beautiful and epic, and I am trying really hard not to give any unintentional spoilers for those who have not arrived there yet. I figure Coldharbor screenshots all look blue and brutal, so I am trying to pick ones that don’t exactly give away major plot points. There are some interesting choices that happen as you play through the zone, and the game seems to revel in making you choose between bad options. There is a point where you have to pick between a rogues gallery of formerly vanquished enemies, and I am guessing your options are limited if you did not actually finish the quests in the zones they are involved with. I feel like I made the right choice… but you never really know. I still was dealing with a bad bad person, but overall it did not come back to bite me in the butt like I thought it might.

While I have finished the story, I will still be spending quite a bit more time in Coldharbor as I finish the parts of it I skipped while rushing through the storyline. After a point you get tired of everything being blue, purple and grey. I needed to have the ability to move on, especially since I wasn’t really seeing much veteran experience before the Craglorn patch. It seems as though they shifted things around so you could get veteran experience in Coldharbor. I have technically been to Craglorn, but only long enough to zone in and get the wayshrine. I saw mostly Veteran Rank 10 players there, so I figure I have a very long time to go before I am adequate to kill much of anything there. At this point I have a purple VR1 sword and shield, and a full VR1 blue set of armor, so I am doing okay in the Aldmeri Dominion content. Though even with all of that, getting jumped by too many mobs at once becomes a fight for my life in a way that never happened in Coldharbor. I approve of the ratcheting up of difficulty, and it should be fun experiencing the Aldmeri content.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #ColdHarbor #Daggerfall #Aldmeri

Search for a Voice

May 21, 2014 by Belghast

Not Enough Time

Yesterday is one of those days that I both hate and love at the same time. Two very different games released, but both were games that I had been looking forward to for some time. When this happens, generally speaking I will wait on one of them until I have a lull in game play enough to be able to pick it up and consume it. Problem is, in this case I inadvertedly pre-ordered both not really knowing when one of them would release. So last night I made an attempt to devote a sufficient amount of time to both of them. At the very least we have a long holiday weekend coming up that hopefully I can spend completing them both.

Honestly the pure joy of playing two amazingly crafted games was exactly what I needed to combat yesterday. Everything about yesterday was pure crap. Monday afternoon I remember remarking with joy that I had a completely open Tuesday, then over the course of the day one by one the meetings piled up. So not only did I spend almost the entire day in one meeting or another, we also had a handful of crisis to deal with. So by the end of the day I just wanted the world to burn around me… which is something you can do very easily in a video game. Braxwolf made an interesting post about the nature of gaming, and for me… games are often more than just games. After a bad day like yesterday… games are very much therapy.

Search for a Voice

Since the E3 that they announced it, I have been looking forward to Transistor, the new isometric beat-em-up from Supergiant Games the creators of Bastion. The game company has singlehandedly redefined how I feel about the narrator and how it relates to the action on screen. With Bastion, the narrator was a character in itself, telling you the story of the protagonist you were playing. In Transistor we have a similar setup going on, except this time the narrator is actually the sword you wield named Transistor. As the course of the game unfolds you find that you are Red a famous pop singer, and that some organization called the Camerata killed your boyfriend… somehow transforming him into the blade and stole your voice. The other odd twist is that all of you seem to be computer programs, and after one dies you can pick their core up and use them as a weapon against the evil “Process”.

The entire treatment of the game has a very “Tron-Noir” feel to it, and I am eating up all of the visuals. Your character is gorgeously animated, and the surroundings feel lush and vibrant, with tons of little things for you to encounter that serve no real purpose other than to have the narrator tell you more tidbits of information. The gameplay is… to say nothing else “different”. It is a mix of real time and turn based gameplay that feels fresh and unique. I have no clue what the controls are without a controller, but if you press the right trigger button you pause time allowing you to plot a move and funnel attacks quickly into a target. Pressing the trigger again unfreezes time and executes the attack pattern. The gotcha is that lots of mob types will move out of your way and you will have just wasted all of your energy on an attack that doesn’t land the blow.

The trick of the game seems to be figuring out which attacks work best on which mob types and figuring out which to take out in real time and which to defeat using this pseudo “bullet time”. Executing a sequence of attacks causes you to be drained for a period of time, which means you can do absolutely nothing but run around to avoid mob counter attacks. There are lots of white boxes scattered throughout the levels that you end up using as a buffer to avoid getting hit. These are unfortunately destructible which means you only have so long to faff about before you have no cover to duck behind. The death sequence is a bit odd, in that instead of losing a life it overloads whatever weapon you happen to be using. This weapon then stays down for as long as it takes you to get to the next checkpoint. This means you want to be proficient at more than one weapon in case you are stuck without your attack of choice.

I played the game long enough to clear the first “world” of sorts and am in transition to the next main area of the game. The game has me hooked and wanting more, so I figure over the next few days I will devote the several hours needed to finish it up. From what I have heard the game has around 6 hours of game play in it, which seems like a good amount for an isometric beat-em-up like this. Because of the way you can combine new attacks that you find with your existing attacks to product new results, I feel like there is more than likely quite a bit of replay value. Even if there isn’t the game is gorgeous, and absolutely oozing personality… so more than worth the $20 purchase price. Right now I am very much in the “not as good at this game as I wish I was” phase, so hopefully that will improve as I get more used to the unique control scheme.

Faff About In Cyrodil

Since I am running out of time… and I ended up writing so much about Transistor without really meaning to, I am opting to leave my review of Wolfenstein: New Order until tomorrow morning. I actually ended up playing it quite a bit longer last night, so I am afraid I have even more to say about that. It was a really great day for gaming. Just a friendly reminder that tonight I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online as we have another “Faff About in Cyrodil” night planned. If you have not seen the notice check out the Anook event. If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, you are more than welcome to join along even if you are not in the House Stalwart guild. We are all Daggerfall Covenant so there is also that restriction. I just dinged 50 this week and will actually be Veteran Rank 1 as we do this… so maybe just maybe we won’t get rolled quite so hard out in Cyrodil. I am not holding my breath however. In any case it was a lot of fun last week and we ran around collecting skyshards and doing quests out there as a horde.

#AllianceOfAwesome #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Transistor

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.