MMORPG Archives - Page 90 of 307 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Four Year Mission

July 5, 2018 by Belghast

I realize this is a lot of images to link at the beginning of a blog post… but there is a good reason. For the last four years playing Elder Scrolls Online I had a singular goal… to see something in the live game that I have not seen since one of the last days of alpha. I’ve talked about this before but I have been playing Elder Scrolls Online since February of 2013 when the first Friends and Family alphas began. How I got in is because my good friend Tamrielo was one of the creators of a not insignificant amount of the quest content. Every so often in Alpha we would be lead by him to go see something… that was a reference to one of us or one of our friends. One of the final things I remember is running all of the way across the Ebonheart Pact area to The Rift…. and Nimalten to be specific to see an arrangement of NPCs in that town. The date specifically was October 13th of 2013 as I have a stack of screenshots that I took at that time have have hoarded since.

Last night I managed to push my way through the Eastmarch storyline and upon zoning into the The Rift for the first time… I couldn’t wait any longer and made a jaunt across zone to Nimalten to find what I had been waiting to see all of this time. Granted every one of the NPCs made their way through a bit of a “Nordification” pass by the lore team, but enough survived that it is pretty obvious who they are if you know what you are looking at. First up is my namesake aka Belgrod Sternblade (technically one of two namesakes that I know of) who has a throwaway line about his Stalwart Band of Mercenaries which is a reference to House Stalwart the guild I started in World of Warcraft back in 2004. Next up is Waren the Wolf aka Warenwolf a long time friend of ours from the vanilla World of Warcraft days, phenomenal hunter and the target of my attempts to heal him with arrows in alpha. Then we have Ashvorn Bear-Walker which is the slantwise namesake of Ashgar our perennial bear tank and general friend of anything that transforms into animal form. Lastly we have Autrae Snow-Wing who is playing with her cat Dimi… that represent former AggroChat host Audrae and her then cat Dimitri.

This might seem silly but for me personally… being able to see these characters legitimately in the final release of the game means a lot to me. It also allows me to take stupid photos like the one above with the two Belghast-kin together. Of course the moment I finished doing this nonsense I ported back to the start of the zone because I want to experience it through the natural flow instead of just jumping ahead to this one town. I’ve been having a complete blast playing Elder Scrolls Online over the last couple of weeks and really the game has evolved to a state where it pretty much has all of the things that I think I once complained about it not having. It has a really excellent housing system that I have been collecting patterns for… and still what I would consider the single best crafting system in any MMORPG. While a little costly I am a fan of their cosmetic system implementation as well as the various costumes available through either crown crates or direct purchase on the store. The fact that subscribing to the game gets me access to all of the Expansion and DLC content, a stack of crowns each time it renews, and a magical crafting bag that lets me loot everything and not worry about bag space… is all a “plus” in my book. The full list of features for a subscription goes a little something like this…

Access to all DLC game packs in the in-game Crown Store
Free crowns for the in-game Crown Store
Access to the Craft Bag
Double bank space
Bonuses to progression
Extra furniture space
Costume dyeing
Double Transmutation Crystals

I am very much in my MMO happy place at the moment, and completely oblivious to pretty much anything else apart from the occasional game of Diablo 3. I am super excited that soon… in one zones time I will be starting the first of the DLC content for Elder Scrolls Online. I have purposefully delayed starting literally anything that came out past the original game… because I wanted to have beaten all 150 levels worth of content that the original game had to offer. For the uninitiated that starts with the 50 levels worth of content in your starting faction and works its way through Silver and Gold… the new game plus, and new game plus plus that sees you travelling via Cadwell to the other two factions. Sure it is a little weird to be helping the Ebonheart Pact fight off the Covenant while rocking the Covenant Hero title… but whatever I can hand wave that away.

The thing that makes me the happiest about Elder Scrolls Online is how indistinguishable it is for me personally from playing any other Elder Scrolls game at this point. I love the story arcs for each of the zones that evolve as you work your way around and help the other people… and the little payoffs when you meet up with a character you have already helped out once before. The amount of scripting work that went into making sure that each NPC recognizes you from every time you have interacted with that NPC before has to be staggering. The fact that the final main story quest usually involves weaving in a bunch of characters that you met in the zone and each of them commenting on how you helped them in the past, is just so damned great. The only thing that would push it over the top is if they introduced some Bioware style companions with romance story arcs… because seriously the core story itself is as good as anything I have seen in a Mass Effect or Dragon Age game.

I have an extreme amount of emotional investment in this game, not just for the fact that there are characters named after me roaming its world… but also for the fact that I feel like I helped shape it. I was a very active member of the alpha community and supposedly one of the more active bug reporters. I love that there is still a core of players out there in an alpha-only guild that I am part of that has been playing off and on since the days we first got into the servers and kept reporting bugged doors. I love the fact that there is still a hidden area on the official forums that only those first few testers have access to, and while it isn’t terribly active… feels like a little secret clubhouse that a handful of us have access to. Every time I step foot into Tamrielo in Elder Scrolls Online it feels like coming back home, and each time I forget why I left in the first place. The truth is… I am an easily distracted toddler and I am sure at some point some shiny object with cause me to shift my gaze elsewhere… but for the moment I am loving every moment of roaming this place that is both so familiar to me but still so fresh to explore.

Exploring Deshaan

June 26, 2018 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of a weird week for me personally, and as a result probably a weird week for the blog. My wife has a friend in town for a conference and as a result it is causing us to vary our normal patterns… and also as a result there is probably going to be significantly less gaming to talk about. Now one major exception is that said friend is a Magic the Gathering player and tentatively Wednesday night we have plans to get together and play some casual decks for fun. That will of course be probably something that I write about and I am going to attempt to take some “board state” photos as the matches go. I have built up a box of four battle decks from card kingdom that are all themed and roughly the same power level thinking it would be a quick and easy drop in and play magic option. The grand idea was to bring it up to work for some lunch time gaming, but it hasn’t actually happened yet.

Last night when we got home from Joe Momma’s one of our favorite downtown pizza places, I crashed on the sofa and played some Elder Scrolls Online. I am essentially doing what I always do which is push into the corners of the map that I have yet to explore and complete whatever quests I happen across there. I remember this game had a rather frosty reception… but in truth the longer it lives the less I can distinguish it from a normal numbered Elder Scrolls game. I realize some players approached those games in vastly different ways than I did… but for me it was always about killing monsters, collecting loot, running quests… and ABOVE ALL ELSE… wandering around aimlessly and exploring the nooks and crannies of the map. All of those game play styles are supported in ESO and as a result whenever I pick it back up it sorta feels like returning to an old friend.

One of my favorite parts about returning to the game is something that dates back to alpha. The original alpha players were referred to as the Psijic Order, and on the official game forums there is still a hidden forum area that never got closed out from that area where we occasionally chat back and forth. Similarly there was a guild formed on launch day made up of players from this same alpha pool and in truth it is one of the more active guilds that I have access to. I am super thankful that after all of this time and all of my wandering away and back again that no one punted me from it. I am deeply connected to this title because of my experiences testing it for so long, and I am happy to for some remnant of that early community that I still have access to.

I am cutting off the post short this morning as it is election day here in Oklahoma. I am going to attempt to vote before work, and if you too are having a primary I highly suggest you drag your butt to the polls as well.

Backyard and Banana

May 23, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty chill night and was spent either gaming or hanging out on the patio off our bedroom. Here is a photo from my chair as I waited to top off the pool and played Monster Hunter Generations. There was a nice breeze and it was making the wind chimes do all sorts of happy sounds. My wife was hanging beside me doing school work… because unfortunately it is both hobby and job rolled all in one. I love our backyard even though I don’t spend anywhere near as much time as she does out in it. Last night however was a perfect storm of overcast and cool which is about my sweet spot for outdoors. My eyes are super sensitive to light and there are times where while I am sitting in the shade… the world itself is just too bright for my tastes. The flowerbabies of course are doing okay still, and I need to wrap up this post soon so I can go out and give them all a drink.

As far as Monster Hunter Generations… I am largely playing it over 4 Ultimate because of the impending release of Generations Ultimate for the Switch. Monster Hunter is way too complicated a game for me to really enjoy playing it on a tiny screen with a thinkpad trackpoint nub serving as my second thumbstick. That said I do know that whatever effort I make is going to transfer over to the Switch so it feels like it is allowing me to have a bit of a headstart as it were. There are still three months until the release of Generations Ultimate and that gives me some time to casually work on leveling my Palicos and progressing through the quests to a point where I might not be completely on ground one at launch on August 28th. I am super looking forward to having a newish to me Monster Hunter experience to sink my teeth into… that I will be able to play on my 43 inch monitor upstairs.

The tail end of the evening I settled into playing some Iron Banner in Destiny 2 as I had not honestly played much of that since Curse of Osiris. I am nowhere near as good at Crucible as I once was because I am simply out of practice, but then again I never was terribly good in the first place. I did manage to turn in a couple of packages, one of which getting me the Auto Rifle that looks like Scathelocke. I am super pumped about it because firstly I love Auto Rifles and secondly… I had really wanted to try that weapon out and was afraid that I lost my chance when the season changed. There is another auto rifle available as faction rewards so I am wondering if I want to try grinding out 30 packages… and I pretty much figure the answer is no. I do however want the super high rate of fire weapon because it has auto loading holster and high impact rounds and seems like a much better version of Perseverance/Valakadyn… which are both weapons that I hated on the console but have come to enjoy with a mouse and keyboard.

I have significant problems with Destiny 2… but damn does that mechanical loop still feel fun.

Elves I Don’t Hate

May 16, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I pulled an example from World of Warcraft and after doing so I realized that I never actually talked about the character that was hiding underneath the fold of the Destiny 2 image. I am extremely late to the party when it comes to Allied races, the Horde races were super easy to unlock but the Alliance ones required a level of commitment that I was simply not willing to offer them. They were one of those things that I worked on off and on as I had time or wanted something mindless to do while watching television or a movie. It was a few weeks back when I realized that I was actually getting pretty close to exalted with both of the factions required to unlock them. Even then I largely failed at doing the quests on a daily basis because I really am not a huge fan of Argus.

Nevertheless I managed to push across the finish line and unlock them both a few weekends back and as a result I have been poking around on a brand new Void Elf hunter during the AggroChat podcasts. I’ve found it super relaxing to just roam around and take things down at low levels and for whatever reason Void Elves don’t trigger that “I hate elves” instinct that I have built up over all of these years. In part I think they mostly register as Drow to me, which is something I occasionally played in D&D or the games like Everquest that had decent implementations of them. Honestly it weirdly makes me want to go back and farm the single piece of Dragonstalker that I am missing, because in all of my years of running Blackwing Lair… I never got the boots to drop off Broodlord Lashlayer. The only thing keeping me from soloing it each week is the fact that I really hate doing the Razorgore event.

I realize that I recently started a Tauren Hunter, but the whole being assigned a pet at the start of the game thing still seems a little weird. On the Tauren your start with a Plainstrider which isn’t really my sort of pet, but even then I kept using it for a significant amount of time before taming anything else to replace it. As Void Elf though you start with Voidstalker… that is both my kind of pet and also extremely cool looking. I’ve found myself with zero drive to go out and tame something else, but that might change as I am now interesting Stranglethorn Vale. I might grab something rare if I happen across it but for now I am more than happy to run around with my void pal… even though I have yet to give her a proper name.

It is weird to me that I have lost any forward momentum in World of Warcraft thanks to Battle For Azeroth and the direction they are taking the game. However I still enjoy dinking around on low level characters because to me that is the purest version of the “WoW Experience”. BfA really has been a let down as far as the information coming out about it. Additionally my time playing beta… hasn’t really done anything to hook me on the direction the game is going. For years I thought that maybe Metzen was what was holding the game back… but now I wonder if he was a force of stability keeping the game from dropping off a cliff. Note I loved Legion “for the most part” but the one bit that I could push right into the sea was the factional nonsense that happens in Stormheim. Battle For Azeroth feels like an entire game made out of those factional nonsense moments and I am not really looking forward to it.