MMORPG Archives - Page 367 of 400 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Cyrodil Bound

April 11, 2014 by Belghast

Prouds, I has them

Yesterday was the second day in a row I managed to hit the default goal of 10,000 steps since I got my fitbit. While I normally clock in at the 8,000 steps range I have actually hit 10,000 four times so far. As I wrote when I got my fitbit, it makes interesting tweaks in the way you look at the world. These last two days I mostly performed a simple tweak to my routine. I spend most of my life pushing as many things as possible to autopilot, and as such… unless it is super important I try and make things absolute routine. As a result I prefer to park in exactly the same place every day, so I don’t have to think about where I parked. The only place that is reliably open is the roof of the parking garage, and while I do try and find a covered place when there is bad weather… it works for me.

Normally speaking I have been going up and down the stairs from the roof for a while now, but I opted to make a slight tweak in this routine. Instead of walking the stairs, I decided to walk the long winding ramp between the 6th and 4th floor. This is a large number of new steps to add to my routine, and I think is really the difference between consistently having 8,000 days and 10,000 days. My other friends that are also using the fitbit tend to skew the results by walking in place at night or pacing the halls to try and finish off their steps. I however wanted to try and tweak my routine to a point at which it was sustainable and repeatable, and slowly over time I am getting there.

A new thing my wife and I have been doing in the evenings is attempting to walk to dinner. Granted we live in the suburbs and it is not exactly designed for walkability… but we are making it function. There are a number of restaurants that are within a mile of the house and Wednesday night we walked a grand total of 4200 steps to RibCrib and back. Last night she got home super late so we didn’t do this, but instead walked around the corner to the grocery store to buy a ream of paper and some advil. It seems that if we are walking someplace with a purpose in mind, it is easier. This is still very new to us, but so far we both seem to be adjusting well. The only negative is that I seem to have developed shin splints which hurt like hell, but hopefully they will lessen over time.

Cyrodil Bound

If you remember some weeks back there was a question as to which campaign to choose. After much discussion we ended up picking Wabbajack, and apparently this was a very good choice. It seems as though the Daggerfall Covenant is doing extremely well there, and when I logged in last night we had the faction wide buff indicating that we had crowned an Emperor. In addition we managed to hold all of the elder scrolls, but as my friend Kodra reported it looked like we were about to lose one of the keeps holding a scroll. I feel a little bad that as cool as Cyrodil seems, last night was the first night since the mandatory pvp testing weekends that I had set foot in it. I completely skipped the tutorial quests, which are apparently really good, and worth a lot of skill points… and jumped straight into combat. I had more fun than I have really had in PVP ever… or at least since Dark Age of Camelot.

We successfully defended the keep, and took several objectives around the keep. What was nice about defending the keep is that we were able to consistently push Ebonheart Pact away from the siege weapons and destroy them, giving our keep time to repair. I died a ton, but also managed to get in my fair share of killing blows thanks to being able to shield charge into targets. I pvp’d as sword and shield and overall I was pretty pleased with the results. I might tweak things up a bit, to add a bit more annoyance to my toolbar. I managed to get three skill points and at the end of the night was halfway through realm rank two. All in all it was a fun little outing and something I could see doing again in the near future.

Podcast In the Air

For some time I have been streaming in the evenings from time to time, and in doing so I hop on mumble and join a channel called “Bel is Streaming”. Folks pop into the channel and we end up chatting about damned near everything but the thing we happen to be playing. When I went back and listened to some of the videos… they almost sounded like impromptu podcasts. This started a discussion among a few of my friends and is slowly working its way towards a real podcast. There is a group of friends that I have been hanging out on mumble with on an almost nightly basis. Over this time we have developed a really good chemistry, and the goal is to take that same chemistry to a podcast.

So sometime in the very near future we will be recording our inaugural episode. I will be joined by my good friends Rae, Kodra and Ashgar. Between us we each have just enough overlap of tastes to make it work, and just enough divergence to hopefully make for differing points of view. Rae is currently working on some really amazing Chibis of us to eventually become a logo. Special thanks to Sypster to answering some questions and helping me pick a libsyn package. We don’t really know what we are doing… but that is okay, we all have to start out not knowing what we are doing. Right now the gameplay is to keep a google doc going with potential topics, and then just see what happens on air. Hopefully it will be something worth listening to.

Elder Dungeons

April 10, 2014 by Belghast

H1Z1 Preview

Yesterday was the big reveal of the new SOE game H1Z1. While it should surprise no one… this is a zombie survival MMO. With the name there is literally nothing else that it could have been. Right now the details are pretty sketchy, but details are being collected on the official reddit. It really looks like it is going to take what Rust and DayZ are doing, to the next level and make it massive and persistent. While all of this intrigues me… I think it is pretty much in the “not for me” camp. I am amped about exploring a zombie filled world, and building bases with my friends to protect against the hordes. Dealing with additional players in a PVP scenario in that same world… pretty much destroys my enjoyment. Ultimately I am all about community and working together, and unless there is some unofficial co-operative server there really isn’t much pull for me.

I played quite a bit of the DayZ mod for Arma 2, but the thing that ultimately stopped me from playing it more was the fact that I didn’t need to worry about the zombies, but instead worry about getting sniped from a massive distance by other players. I realize that it is more realistic to have players be fighting other players for survival, but in these games there are often times far more players in the world than zombies. I feel like ultimately what I am looking for is State of Decay co-operative mode… which sadly is not in the cards. I want to explore a purely PVE world with my friends, and scavenge from potentially NPC factions. I guess the proof will be in the pudding and how things are set up. What would really kill the game for me is if other players can loot your corpse, similar to DayZ.

So long as if I die to players I get to keep my progression and my inventory, I might be okay with this. The other big concern is, that Smedley already talks about players coming along and burning down the bases of other players. As a kid I loved to build with blocks, but it would piss me off when another kid would come along and knock down my intricate structure. That is precisely what it feels like to me, when you have a base building game… that allows other players to come destroy yours. Some time ago Smedley said there was another game on the horizon that SWG players would love. I keep wondering if this is it, because it is supposed to have the whole player created town aspect. Knowing what I know about the SWG community however, I don’t really see them being terribly enthralled by this.

The Evil Within

A game I have been watching with some interest for some time is The Evil Within. Essentially it brings the world famous Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil. During the early days of the playstation, I absolutely ate up survival horror titles. I played the shit out of Resident Evil, its sequel, Parasite Eve, and even Dino Crisis. However for me the genre reached its peak with the release of the original Silent Hill. There was something so perfect about that game and the way it blended between the relatively sedate “normal” world, and the absolutely twisted “nightmare” world. The game absolutely blew me away from the opening chords of its theme song. As the Resident Evil series wore on, it became ever repetitive and boring, as you rehashed the same old t-virus saga again and again.

What The Evil Within does is pair the mind of Shinji Mikami with the publishing might of Bethesda Softworks. Now granted this is not the same team that brought us the Elder Scrolls, or even Fallout… but so far they have managed to prove that when one of the Zenimax studios creates a title… I am ultimately going to be interested in it. The above trailer is brand new for Pax and I have to say I am super interested. It feels far more like Silent Hill than Resident Evil, and this is an awesome thing to me. I want another game where I wander around a nightmarish landscape that I can’t quite wrap my head around. The title is slotted to ship at the end of August, and I am super excited about it. If you loved the original Silent Hill as much as I did, I figure you have reason to be excited as well. If nothing else the trailer is really freakin cool.

Elder Dungeons

I finally put my finger on what exactly I am loving about the dungeons in Elder Scrolls Online. In many ways it feels like a return to the dungeons of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. World of Warcraft did something to MMOs that has seemed unrepairable until now. It was really the first game to begin to treat dungeons as though they were wholly separate from the rest of the world. It walled the dungeons off in instances, filled them with special dungeon mobs, and applied abilities to them that you would see in no place OTHER than a dungeon. The dungeon became its own unique game, that required a completely different set of skills than play out in the world did. Every game since the launch of World of Warcraft has taken this lead and filled their dungeons with “elites” that for the most part require players to focus fire them down, since an individual player could not possibly solo one at level.

This was not always the case, dungeons used to be filled with the same kinds of mobs you might encounter out in the “real” world, just in larger numbers and higher frequency. So stepping into Elder Scrolls Online, I admit I was freaked out when we first encountered and 8 to 10 mob pull. I am only now realizing that this is essentially the same 8 to 10 mobs you would encounter while roaming around the world. What makes this challenging and not just “trash packs” is the fact that these mobs fight smarter. From the moment you step into the dungeon, you encounter “group tactics”. Healers will heal the lowest target, including other healers… Necromancers will raise the dead, melee will go after your squishiest party members. The mobs are treating you like dungeon encounters, and trying to take you down as a team.

What makes this so refreshing is that these tactics are not solely reserved for “dungeons” but the same kind of thing you start encountering as the game ramps up difficulty. In Stormhaven it is getting rare that I am not involved in three or more mobs at a time. Almost always this will include a healer of some sort, a “tank” of some sort and a “dps” of some sort. The first time a mob tried to kite me, it was a really cool moment. Why this is great is because Elder Scrolls is somehow managing to teach players the skills that they will need for later content, in the content they are actually playing. So while yes, there is a massive learning curve… I feel like we will not have the same problems we have with the PUG scene in World of Warcraft in the eventual Elder Scrolls Online end game. If you can make it through the veteran content, you likely can make it through any of the content in the game.

It is refreshing to have a game that does not try to coddle the player. Shit happens, and if you do not react appropriately to it… you get punished and punished hard. The game is not some brutal Dark Souls type experience, it plays fair and within a set of established rules… but even after playing it as long as I have… I still die, and die often. I really look forward to the adventure zone combat, because it feels like it is going to be something akin to the old Everquest planes. I loved breaking the plane of hate and the plane of fear, both of which were unforgiving and brutal… but also immensely rewarding. While Craglorn sounds like it is much more structured than the planes were, it feels like it might offer a similar style of gameplay. It will be a long while before I am Veteran Rank 10, but hopefully when I get there we will be able to wander about the zone finding adventure.

#H1Z1 #TheEvilWithin #CragLorn #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline

Bloodlust Pays Off

April 9, 2014 by Belghast

What’s Wrong with TSW?

There are a couple of really interesting posts by Sypster and Rowanblaze that talk about the problems with The Secret World combat system. Mostly Syp’s post is him trying to articulate the way he feels about it, and then Rowan breaks down those points and tries to speak to each. Combined they provide a really nice bookend and are extremely worth reading. It is really nice to see someone try and put into words what is wrong with the combat other than “it’s clunky”. I have my own love/hate relationship with the combat in The Secret World. For the good I love how flexible the character build system is especially at lower levels, but there seems to be a point where all of that breaks down.

Like always, my little circle of regularly group mates rushed headlong into the content of The Secret World, and were starting in on Nightmare content only a few weeks after launch. For the most part we found normal and elite content in The Secret World to be overly easy. However facing nightmare content felt like slamming our faces into a brick wall at 60 miles per hour. The transition was brutal and unforgiving and seemingly unfairly stacked against melee players. I had managed to stubbornly limp my way through the Gatekeeper encounter with my Shotgun/Blades build, but when it came to nightmares I abandoned it quickly in favor of a pure ranged Shotgun/Pistol build.

The game went from being super forgiving and open to any build you could dream up, to being extremely punishing and narrow focused over night. So yes while the combat is essentially an overly repetitive use of “wow rogue” tactics over and over until you finish the battle, it was the fact that playing melee was a detriment to my groups survival that ultimately did the game in for me. We all return to the game to play the new content every now and then, but Nightmares were the point at which the game stopped being fun for many of us. Our creative builds that were super personalized were force culled into the few builds that “worked well” for nightmare level content.

Bloodlust Pays Off

Last night I had every intention of just quietly questing away in Elder Scrolls Online. However I logged in to a message from my friend Tam, wanting to know if I was down for running some dungeons. What can I say… I am a sucker for spelunking my way through bad guys. At the beginning of the night we were trying to figure out why I was a level ahead of them with the “dungeon” faction… aka the Undaunted. We ended up sifting through our achievements and found that I had already hit the “kill 1000 monsters in dungeons” achievement and they had not. I may or may not have issues with bloodlust, and as a result I have been tanking pretty much any dungeon someone asked me to. We started off the night with Wayrest Sewers again, and honestly I was expecting a rough time. However I found that I was able to split the packs much the same as I did the very first time I had run the dungeon.

I am guessing maybe in the previous group I had someone “helping” me by pulling something other than the one I was yanking with my chain. This is a super important point that needs to be addressed, and while I covered it in my tanking post… I figure it bears underlining here. When you are running these dungeons, let your tank pull and do not touch ANYTHING until you see the mobs run up at the group. The way combat packs work in Elder Scrolls Online is that all of the mobs in a pack will aggro you, but not all of them will actually engage you in combat. Touching them, means they will be doing so and you can quickly get overwhelmed. Let the tank pull and watch to see what actually starts attacking you. Then do not touch the ones that are just standing around cheering on the fighters.

I was not feeling like streaming last night, but I wish I had been… because after finishing off Wayrest Sewers we also ran the other two dungeons in the level 20 range. Darkshade Caverns and Elden Hollow were both really awesome. However in the case of Darkshade Caverns there is a bit of a surprise involved with running the dungeon that I really don’t want to spoil. Darkshade had some of the coolest fights to date, and I look forward to running it again. The loot seems to be improving as well as we go up. Granted it is still fully luck based, but several of us managed to pull out blue set pieces from the dungeon, as well as the normal unique loot drops. The lighting and effects in the dungeons are just superb. Final Fantasy XIV had some really amazing dungeon encounters, but I have to say so far at least Elder Scrolls Online trumps them.

Oddly Oblivious

I guess right now I am simply preoccupied with Elder Scrolls Online, but right now I am pretty oblivious to the news coming out about Warlords of Draenor. I still very much care what happens there, because even though we have this insane guild right now in ESO, there are still a batch of diehard Stalwarts that will likely never leave WoW. I want the expansion to be awesome for them as much as anything else. I have to say that the new Draenei female is nice… but not really the night and day difference that you see with the Vanilla model makeovers. I guess the Draenei and Bloodelves were in a better state already than the previous models, so they were not quite so primitive looking.

I have been phenomenally bad at keeping up with my RSS feed since coming back from my grandmothers funeral. I guess I rushed headlong into ESO, and have simply not come up for air. Things have just been going so well over there that I have not needed additional diversions. I am still listening however, and occasionally things creep into my consciousness about Warlords. Story from yesterday was that MMO Champion got DDoS’d for not giving credit to the folks running the private servers where he collected the alpha zone screenshots. Now all of those shots are down from the site, with a disclaimer saying that Blizzard had asked them to take them down. While I can’t confirm anything about the DDoS, I am guessing the image take down is more related to that instead.

At this point I will be far more interested when someone I know actually gets into Alpha or Beta. The rumors that I am hearing about the garrison sound intriguing and a fun minigame to keep me engaged in the expansion content long after I have finished leveling. My real hope however was that the garrison would be shared among all of your characters. I have an army of tradeskillers, and it would be nice to have access to ANY of their trades, from ANY of my characters. It feels like Blizzard is always one step away from making something really awesome. For whatever reason they always stop just short of what I would like to see from them. Hopefully we will continue to get more official news, since really at this stage in the alpha… anything that gets datamined is mostly bullshit and likely to change before beta.

#ElderScrollsOnline #TheSecretWorld #WoW #TSW #ESO

Back to the Sewers

April 8, 2014 by Belghast

Jonquils say so

Here in Oklahoma we have had more than our fair share of ping pong weather of late. This weekend I was happily running around in shorts, however when I went for my walk last night that same choice was rather chilly. I wish the world would make up its damned mind to be honest, and preferably warm up. I am afraid that once again we will go from cold to hot without much of a middle ground like we did last year. We have a patch of Jonquils on the side of the house and they seem to think spring time has arrived as they are in full bloom and gorgeous as always. We had these growing up as well, and they were always the heralds of springtime. When they bloomed things were going to start warming up significantly. I really hope the weather gods are watching my flowers, because seriously I am tired of the cold.

This morning I am more nervous than normal, and for good reason. Our eldest cat has a thyroid problem, and today she is supposed to go into surgery to have hers removed. This is supposedly going to fix the imbalance that is causing her to be sick all of the time. For awhile now we’ve done a practice I like to refer to as “greasing her ears”, where I rub some thyroid cream (while wearing latex gloves) into her ears. This was all to get her thyroid levels stabilized enough to have the surgery. However I am wondering if this is something we can just do indefinitely now. I don’t really mind doing it, at least not as bad as trying to feed her a pill. She doesn’t really like it but she tolerates it well enough. I am just wondering since she is a fifteen year old cat, if doing this a few times a day would be better for her quality of life than a surgery.

Back to the Sewers

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVYesterday evening some friends and I decided to delve back into the Wayrest Sewers in search of loot, glory… and attempting to avoid the mess. We had run the dungeon Saturday evening and it seemed much easier than the others we had run. Thing is apparently this was not the intent of the dungeon, and seemingly in an effort to break the trend of chain running the place… yesterdays patch changed several things about the place. Firstly there were a large number of packs that previously could be split, this is no longer the case. There were instances where you had a Rat Feeder human npc in a pack of rats… and you could fiery grip the human out by himself then deal with the rats. Now when you yoink the human the rats properly come with him, no longer trivializing the encounter. Similarly there were humanoid pack mobs that you could single pull, or pull without engaging the boss they were attached to.

All of this lead for a much more difficult run than we were expecting. The above video is still uploading to youtube, so I’ve embedded the twitch broadcast instead. Several things were happening… firstly I am generally horrible at explaining fights. Secondly for everyone but myself, this was their first time into the instance. Thirdly two of our members were slightly under level for the dungeon. The result meant that at least one of the boss fights seemed far more difficult than it really should have been. The Garron encounter is rough, but it involves figuring out how best to deal with the adds… and it took us several tries to arrive at a strategy that was working. Namely killing things in the same order as not to break the CC. It was a good time had by all, and we got our youngins specifically some tasty loot.

It Runs on a Toaster

My friends and I have joked for some time, that the Elder Scrolls Online engine is so damned optimized that it could probably run on a toaster. I posted this a few days ago on twitter, but I still find it insanely amusing. This is from the ESO Reddit, and is apparently Elder Scrolls Online running at the absolute minimum settings which is 320×200. The game looks oddly playable, even if you can’t really make out who exactly you are interacting with. It looks oddly similar to a super pixilated adventure game from the 1990s. Thankfully my machine will run the game in its full Ultra setting 1080p glory… but I do find it awesome that the game can technically be run on some pretty ancient hardware and perform just as well. I honestly don’t notice much of a difference running it on my laptop as I do running it on my more serious gaming desktop.

The thing is… so many companies overlook this as an issue. One of the reasons why World of Warcraft has been so easy to spread as a game, is that it has super minimal requirements. You can dial back the settings and run it comfortably on a netbook. I feel like more than likely you could do the same thing with Elder Scrolls Online. I’ve heard rumors of it running through a virtual pc emulator on various tablets, as well as natively on the Microsoft surface. The important thing is, since the client is that optimized, it means when you have friends that want to join you… you can likely get them into the experience without them needing to shell out for a dedicated gaming machine. At the end of the day this is a social experience, and being able to play with your friends will ultimately be the key to longevity.

One of my good friends, Scarybooster is having some real life stuff going on, and as a result he doesn’t expect to be able to play the game again until June. He jokingly said that he hoped we would all still be playing by the time June rolls around. Considering the longevity most of us tend to have with games… that is a fair question. I really hope that this title is not another in a long line of “three monthers”. I would love this game to be a much longer lived title, because I feel like it has what so many of them have been lacking… depth. The world is deep and nuanced and almost strangles you with lore. The thing that I have always loved about Elder Scrolls is that it works much like our own world. There is no one clean lore path through the setting… but instead it is told through little tidbits spread across thousands of books… some of which are directly contradictory. History is a messy thing, full of partial accounts and factual inaccuracies… and the world of Tamriel gets this right. Here is hoping we will all still find the world compelling a year from now, let alone a few months from now.

#ElderScrollsOnline #WayrestSewers