teso Archives - Page 6 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Rise of the Trade Cartel

February 25, 2014 by Belghast

Starter Islands Optional

I hinted about this yesterday, but I have since checked in on the NDA and everything is cool to talk about. Currently up on test is a number of changes to designed to improve the game play experience for those who felt that it was simply too “tutorial” for too long. It would not be an Elder Scrolls game were it not for a prison sequence introduction. So you still spend your few moments in Cold Harbor but instead of being deposited on a “starter island” you are deposited in the city of Daggerfall, Davon’s Watch or Skywatch depending on your faction. Once again I use the term “starter island” but each faction has a slightly different setup. In this city you have the option of starting quests there, venturing out into the country side to kill random stuff or going back to the docks and returning to the starter island experience.

The end result definitely feels more like a traditional Elder Scrolls experience, as when you exit the prison introduction you are usually dumped out to decide your own fate. I will also say however that fending for yourself in Daggerfall for example, is significantly more difficult than working your way through Stros M’Kai. I worked my way through a series of the city quests, but several of them were rather difficult considering at this point you really do not have much by way of gear having just finished Cold Harbor. I will likely always do the Starter Islands, because I really like the experience… but for those players who were expecting a much more “manifest destiny” experience the way is now open.

I have to caveat all of this with “subject to change”, because this is still on the test servers and nothing that we are seeing is absolutely guaranteed to happen. However the complaint about the on rails beginning has been a constant thread throughout the various tests I have participated in. Zenimax is taking this criticism to heart and tweaking the game as a result. Really they have been extremely responsive to critique, and I’ve watched as a number of things have changed based on tester input. They do have a few holy grails that I wish they would abandon, but most of these are fixable with addons. I am not a huge fan of minimalistic user interfaces, so I know I will be modding the crap out of mine to display more information more clearly.

The Market Economy

I recently watched the latest of Beau Hindman’s series of Gamer Hangouts in which the show focused on Elder Scrolls Online. Actually he had asked if I wanted to join in, but since I do not have a webcam I opted out… something that should be resolved this week. One of the big concerns late in the show was what exactly the player driven economy would look like. While I am not auction house wizard, and I generally only have enough gold to keep my armor repaired… I can already see that Elder Scrolls as a whole is going to have a very craft centric economy. Firstly this game has probably the most detailed crafting system I have seen anywhere. This is primarily due to the heavy research component in the game. While Maevrim talked a bit about enchanting in the video, the bulk of my experience is with Blacksmithing.

As you move about the world you will get various dropped items, sometimes these items include a trait. For example you might get a dropped axe with the word “Precise” on it that means it increases melee and spell critical. Now you can deconstruct every item in the game for raw materials, and this is going to be key for getting some of the rarer crafting components, however there is a special kind of deconstruction you can do called research. This allows you to learn the trait from the item, and it takes a significant amount of time… namely the first trait you research for each weapon type takes a minimum of 5 hours, and increases from there. Since traits are unique to a weapon type, and there are currently eight for each type… it takes an extremely long amount of time to learn them all.

What this means is that by nature crafters will be forced to specialize, working on learning the traits that matter the most to them… or if they are purely motivated by profit… learning the ones that players want the most. So I fully expect to see people advertising themselves as a master axe-smith, or a master sword-smith… instead of a general purpose smith. Granted the game does not distinguish between the two, and given enough time and resources the same person could learn every single trait in the game. Additionally each player starts off crafting only their own racial style, but through the acquisition of dropped books they can learn to craft items in any style available. So basically the ability to craft specific items with a specific stat is predictable… but requires a huge amount of work on the crafters part.

What makes the system even more interesting is that the best gear can only be crafted in certain places. I talked about this awhile back, but this also factors into the economy. Essentially players will likely be paying that master sword smith to go with them to some forgotten crafting station so that they can have crafted the best item for their specific chosen build. Additionally since you can improve a crafted item from white to green, blue, purple or orange quality, I imagine there will be a brisk trade in the reagents needed for that. Trying to improve an item with limited resources gives you a very slim chance of success… and if you fail you end up destroying your shiny new bauble in the process. As a result players at the end of game will be wanting to make sure they pour enough of these reagents into every attempt to give them the highest chance of success. These reagents are likely going to be among the most frequently traded items, and folks who farm them will likely be a pillar of the player driven economy.

Rise of the Trade Cartel

One of the more interesting things of note about Elder Scrolls is that as far as I know there is no Auction House system. What they do have instead is an interesting system called the Guild Store. Once you have at least 10 members (someone correct me if I am wrong on the number) you can start to list things to sell to your guild members. Since guilds are account based, and you can be in multiple (current limit is 5 guilds) I have a feeling that we will be seeing a whole new kind of player driven economy. I fully expect we will see a rise of large Trade Cartel guilds that allow players access to a larger marketplace to sell their wares. This is a different line of thinking on how an economy should work, since these trade guilds would essentially be part tradechat and part auction house rolled into one.

I also feel like similar to games without auction house systems, we will see players congregating in cities offering up their wares. This happened in Everquest and most recently I saw this happening a lot with crafters in Final Fantasy XIV. Since gear is so granular and specific to however a player chooses to build their character, I really don’t see a huge market for “premade” items. I think the real money will be made doing custom order crafting, and these trade cartels will be the way to find crafters for those purposes. In every game I there have existed various groups that colluded to control segments of the economy… so it will be interesting to see exactly how this plays out in a game that supports entirely player driven markets. I don’t really have the knack for this sort of thing, but I do hope I have some friends that do, because it will be interesting to see played out.

Of Bel and Grudges

Today’s factoid came to me in an interesting fashion last night. I had been playing Belganon my little Warlock, and was just about to shut down for the night when I saw a shout from a player name I recognized. He was trying to get people to run all nine challenge modes in one night for the purpose of getting gold in each. His message was a little oddly worded, and while I doubt he intended it… it sounded a bit like he was wanting to be carried through them. Granted my personal feelings towards the individual likely colored my interpretation. Thing is, once upon a time I raided with him in Vanilla, and while I thought he was a bit of a jerk… I always figured he was just mostly misunderstood. When he came back to our server during Wrath of the Lich King, he joined one of the uber guilds at the time… but since he was not well enough geared to raid with them, he pestered me for an invite to Duranub Raiding Company. During the middle of the raid, he was talking in a social channel about us… and said that he was slumming with us until he could get a real raid.

I punted him from the raid and have not talked to him since. He desperately tried to back pedal in tells, but the damage was already done… he was worthless to me. Just seeing his name come across chat brought up this boiling cauldron of anger. I still hold a grudge against him for his actions, and while he may have matured or changed… I will never know, because I will never give him another chance. The weird thing is… had he just done something that was only against me… I would likely be waiting to forgive him over and over. When you do something however that negatively effects a person or group of people that I care about… my protective instincts kick in and I will forever hold a grudge over it. I realize this is not a healthy behavior, but it is just something I have never been able to let go of. So I have a catalog of people that have wronged my guild or my friends, and every time I see that name or someone mentions one of them this flood of anger washes over me that I have to force back down. So while I cannot seem to root this instinct out of me… I can do my best not to act upon it.

Bad Warlock

February 24, 2014 by Belghast

Vampire Wife

For awhile I have talked about my rockstar teacher of a wife and the forensics class she is pioneering with another teacher this year. Yesterday I got drafted into helping her make various kinds of fake blood. Essentially we needed to find a ready simulacrum for the real thing, that could be produced cheaply and efficiently. So for awhile yesterday I kitchen turned a little horror show. I was employed in the mixing part, since I could shake the bottles fast enough to get them to mix. This is my preferred way of mixing almost anything, including the constant flow of cherry pomegranate drink mix that I imbibe. Some of the mixtures were winners and some were very much not.

Of the various recipes available we tried three primarily. The first one I had experience with in the past, and I didn’t think it would be the kind of blood she was wanting. I used to work in a fundraiser haunted house and we mixed buckets of water, karo syrup and red food coloring to make gore to slop on everything. This of course is way thicker than human blood and as a result doesn’t perform in any way similar. Next we tried a mixture of sweet condensed milk, and red food coloring. This was a little better but still way too thick, but it was a big grizzly to watch my wife eat spoonfuls of the red ichor. Apparently she thought it tasted good.

The final winner was evaporated milk and red food coloring. Granted all of these produced pinkish blood but apparently adding a little bit of green will correct the color. She tested the products against a vial of simulated lab blood that she got from a forensics supply house and the evaporated milk performed similarly. Today over lunch I have an errand to go pick up a pint of fake blood from a local party store. We had tried this earlier but the only place that had it was in gallon size… and extremely expensive. We wanted to test it out before committing to buying it in bulk. My hope is that the premade stuff will be best so we don’t have to mix anymore at home. But at the very least it lead to an interesting evening.

Bad Warlock

Among other things, lately I have been poking my head onto my little Dwarven Warlock a bit. I am still phenomenally bad at playing casters, and the warlock is no exception. However having a Felguard makes up for a lot of my own mistakes. He just quietly kicks everything’s ass while I flail around trying to mash the correct buttons. Something I find interesting, is that in the past I have tried my best to skip outlands entirely… I am actually enjoying the content. Maybe it is the idea that I know I will be revisiting everything in Warlords, but the entire expansion somehow feels fresher. I have a feeling with this guy that it will be Wrath that becomes pure skull drudgery.

I am not really sure I landed on this character to level, after all I have both a Discipline Priest and a Hunter within striking distance of 90. Ultimately I would still like to get everything up to 90 before Warlords but my Mage. The mage is my intended boost target, because while I struggle playing a Warlock, I would be an absolute disaster playing a Mage. Characters that can be described as “glass cannons” have never appealed to me in the least. However I hear that frost provides a much sturdier alternative, given that they now have a permanent pet to watch after them. To say the least I have been enjoying being bad at warlocking.

Interesting Changes a Brewing

I am honestly not sure how much of this I can talk about, so I will have to get some clarification on the NDA I am presently under before delving into it too deeply. However I will say that there are some significant changes in the starter experience in the works that will hopefully make a lot of people happy. One of the big complaints from the various test weekends is that it feels too on rails for too long. While I said you can hop off the rails at any point you like and level away. I have done a fair bit of my leveling by just killing random mobs out in the world and mostly ignoring the quests, it still feels like you are lead down a slowly widening tunnel until finally at some point you get dumped into what is the “real” game for the rest of the 50 levels. One thing I have to say is that overall… the Zenimax folks have been extremely responsive to feedback.

That is one of the aspects of this testing process that most people just won’t understand. The game has changed a lot over the last year, and for the better. While there are features missing that I would have liked to see, almost all of those are User Interface based and have been successfully added back into the game with addons. The core game itself is extremely clean, and if you play the game on a server that is not screaming because they are purposefully stressing it to the maximum… the game performs admirably and combat feels great. The negative is a lot of the clunky combat comments that people have are during weekends where they are purposefully trying to break the systems, and combat fluidity decreases under extremely stressed situations.

I think a lot of people are going to be happy with the proposed changes. I however have been in the minority and felt that the starter island experience for each of the races was an extremely good experience. Each of the islands, and I use that term loosely since each faction starts slightly differently… is chock full of interesting things to find and quests that you would not receive if you did not go out and explore off the beaten path. I still cannot say with any certainty that I have ever gotten 100% of the content on any one of the islands, let alone all of them. But I can understand the complaint that it just doesn’t feel Elder Scrollsy to exit the prison sequence and be dumped into another controlled setting. Cold Harbor does a good job of teaching you the basics, and a prison intro is one of the key requirements of “being an Elder Scrolls Game”.

Belghast the Band Geek

The title pretty much says it all, I was a band geek. For those not familiar with the American education system, the term Middle School refers generally to grades six through eight, and is some what of a transition period to get students used to having specific classes with different teachers, rather than a single teacher doing everything. As part of this time period we were essentially funneled towards various electives. During that sixth grade year we had to take a number of elective classes including vocal and instrumental music. While I did manage to get a lead role in one of the musicals… which I did horribly at, I was far more comfortable behind an instrument in a much larger group.

I began my musical career, if you can call it that.. playing the trombone, because face it… trombones are cool. I did well enough to be second chair, and I was fine there… good enough to be recognized as being decent, without having to deal with the pressure of leading the section. This was fine and good until I had a major sinus surgery in seventh grade, and buzzing sound needed to play trombone was something the doctor said would be extremely painful for me for quite some time. As a result I ended up transitioning to the percussion section. To be honest… I had always wanted to be a drummer, but my mother played percussion in high school and told me that by far the short end of the stick as far as band goes. I should have listened, but of course I was smarter and knew better.

She was absolutely right… when you march a several mile parade route with a woodwind or a brass instrument you spend most of the time carrying it by your side. If you march as a drummer, you end up playing a cadence non-stop the entire route. Being a big guy, I somehow ended up being picked to play the cymbals during parades. Sure you are thinking… cymbals are a joke of an instrument… but imagine marching for miles while carrying a 20 pound cymbal in each hand… attached by a leather thong that makes it impossible to get a good grip on it. Then having to bang them together… all the while not dropping the beat of the cadence. It was absolute hell, and by the end of a parade route like that I literally could not feel my arms for hours.

Luckily however parade routes like that were few and far between, and namely during the Christmas season only. After coming back from Christmas break I finally got to have some fun. It began concert season and somehow I managed to get picked to play the Timpani drums. I loved the sound of them, and it felt so primal to bang on them with my tiny felt donut covered sticks. This was the part of band that I really enjoyed. I finally felt like I had a real purpose. I got good at tuning the Timpani drum, and as we did the various contests that came with concert season I became a critical part of the setup crew. Some kids are truly gifted in band, but I did just good enough to be respectable without ever really shining. I managed to make all district several times, but never really pushed hard enough to make all state. While I played drums for a few bands, I never really kept with it… apart from occasionally drumming on my steering wheel while driving.

Belghast and The Ark

February 17, 2014 by Belghast

Horribly Sidetracked

Saturday when I wrote my little impressions piece on the Elder Scrolls Online, I managed to get horribly sidetracked in the process of explaining the questing section. At one point I said “Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes” but only actually managed to give you a single purpose. I managed to get myself on a tangent and forget what I was saying. So let me take another stab at explaining the questing system. Generally speaking when you go into an area there is a critical path that you can take to go through it with the least number of quests. If you want to piddle around and carve your own path this is a good thing.

For example in Stros M’Kai the Daggerfall Covenant starter zone, you are asked to find one of three crew members before continuing on. You can literally just find one crew member and be just fine, and the game will allow you to continue forward. However you can find all of the crew members, and each one will do something for you in the final quest before leaving the desert island. Additionally your choices matter going forward. If you choose to kill someone, or fail to save someone… they won’t be there later on at a critical time when you could use your assistance.

That is one of the things I like most about the questing system. It works much like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, in that you get introduced to a character that keeps popping back up in later quests and even later zones. Failing to save a character, means they will no longer exist in the later stages. Occasionally the game will force you to make a hard choice, between two sets of NPCs. When this happens one of those paths will forever be sealed from you. I you choose to help this person, the other person will either die or be so infuriated that they will never help you again.

Basically your decisions matter, and they matter a lot. So while it might not seem that the immediate consequences are all that bad, they will have future ramifications. So while the first purpose of side quests is to get gear, the second purpose is to unlock future story points. You never know when a person you have helped will show back up and lend assistance later. Often times this is in the form of making a future quest a little easier as they lend some unique ability to the fight. However in a few cases this means you may have missed out on a really cool quest chain because the NPC was not there to give it.

Turret Orchestra

After my little write up yesterday about Portal 2… I got a whole lot of responses that amounted to “no wait, you haven’t even gotten to the good part”. Then that they apparently couldn’t tell me about the good part without massive spoilers. Sure enough I managed to play through to the beginning of chapter 5, and the game has changed once again ever so slightly. Now I think I want to know what is going to happen enough to continue playing. I have my assumptions of the end result, but who knows they might be completely wrong. For the most part I have managed to stay blissfully unaware about the ending of the game to this point.

There were a few really annoying levels, but now I am in a part that is more freeform. The coolest thing I have seen to date is the Turret Orchestra. While roaming around in this new free form area, I kept hearing this music playing that sounded kind of like a bunch of accordions. Finally I was able to see what it was, and it was several of the turrets playing in unison. I have a feeling that I will somehow be freeing the various robots under the control of GlaDOS, or at least that seems like a potential subtheme for the game.

Like I said right now I have no real idea where exactly I am heading apart from following what seems like an obvious path carved out for me. I am sure at this point I will plan the game to its conclusion, so it managed to get its hooks into me. While I am not sure if I would call it a truly great game yet, it is enjoyable. I am sure there is some grand reveal to happen down the road, that will make me shift my opinion again. However I stand by my original assessment. Fun game with a cool gimmick.

Belghast and The Ark

It will come as no real surprise to anyone who has ever followed me on the various social media platforms that I use… that I am a pet person. That said there are probably few people who really know how deep that particular rabbit hole goes. As it stands right now, neither my wife nor I plan on having children. My wife swears that teaching high school is the strongest form of birth control known to man. This is not to say we don’t have children, they just happen to be covered in fur. I personally have always had a close affinity with pets, and even if it is something I would not want for myself… I seem to be able to befriend animals quickly. While I would never have a bird, each time I went over to a friends house one of his birds would hop up on my shoulder and stay there until I finally placed him back on his perch.

kitties_sunning Currently we have three cats, all of which are pictured above sunning themselves in the afternoon light of our stairwell. On the left is the mammoth monster cat Chloe, in the back is our mostly black Calico Allie, and if you have been reading these factoids you have already met little shit. Each of them is a rescue, because I believe all animals deserve a second chance at a great home. Each rescue especially has its own personality, and comes with its own quirks. These “quirks” can be frustrating at times, but they make up the complex personality of each animal… so even the annoyances you come to love. Chloe for example obsessively licks anything and everything… which can be sweet at times until she hops up in bed with you at 3 am and licks your arm. Seriously there is nothing freakier than waking up to that. She however is the most amazing snuggler, when you can succeed at the complex game of keeping your arms and hands away from her mouth.

Similarly we also have three ferrets, and they are some of the most adorable animals you could ever have. Here they are snuggled together under a blanket in their playpen. At this point I have woken two of them… and moments later they will be bouncing around the cage like mad. This is the problem with ferret photography… you get one chance to take a shot before they go super sonic. From the left we have our old man… Smokey that came to us as part of a rescue pair of littermates. His sibling Bandit passed away some time ago, and he himself is nearing the end of his journey as well… but we are trying to make him as comfortable and happy as we can while we have him. Next to him is Shiloh, that was a returned to a local pet store and put back up for adoption. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever return her because she is so adorable, and has a little badger face. Finally we have miss “Bella” which is short for Bellatrix, the name her original mommy gave her. She had a much older ferret named Judah that Bela apparently upset regularly, so it was with many tears that she gave her over to us.

Over the years we’ve had lots more animals, including a hamster, a guinea pig, and a pair of sugar gliders. All of them have been our babies while they have been with us, and we have sought to give them the best home we can. Often times it is these little guys that are the reason for me getting a slightly later start than normal. When one is begging for attention… and they are damned good at giving you a guilt trip… how can you possibly say no? The best at begging has to be Bela. She will run over to the edge of the playpen and press her body against the ground sticking out her snout in his pouting “poor pittiful me” look. You would think she NEVER got played with ever. The moment I reach down into the playpen she will bolt over to me and wait to be picked up. All she really seems to want is to be picked up and carried around for a bit before finally going back into the playpen and snuggling up for a nap.

Elder Scrolls Online Impressions

February 15, 2014 by Belghast

Feels Good To Talk

This is one of those posts that I have been waiting to make for quite a long while now. Over the last few months there have been various naysayers, and with the lift of the press beta there was quite a bit of negativity towards The Elder Scrolls Online. As usual when someone has something bad to say, they seem to be willing to defy all the rules to do it. However those of us who have been anxiously awaiting the release of the game and been abiding by the rather strict NDA have had to sit and watch silently as all the negativity circulated. Finally this morning they announced that we were free to talk about any experiences from the Beta Weekend content. This means I can now talk as much as I would like about the 1-17 game as it stands which is quite a bit of content.

The Conundrum

Firstly let me start off by saying, that The Elder Scrolls genre is a really difficult one to make into an MMO. Over the course of the beta while listening to player complaints, I have come to realize that there is no one way that people play these games. To some people TES might be a game about stealth and carefully stealing goods out from under the shop keepers nose. For others it may be the grand narrative experience or the lore. For others still it might be about wielding arcane magicks or making deals with Daedra. All of these things are gameplay styles that are possible in the excessively moddable single player experience. However through all of these years the Elder Scrolls setting has felt somewhat lifeless.

The one thing I wanted more than anything else… was the ability to experience all these grand settings with my friends. But as you craft a cohesive mulitplayer experience, how do you make all of these things work with hundreds of players participating in the same experience. This game will not be for everyone, and as I have learned from social media and the forums… the game itself is very divisive. However for me at least the experience is something I am just not getting from other games. At its core this is in fact The Elder Scrolls… Online. This game lives and breathes the Elder Scrolls Lore and settings, and is immediately recognizable the first time you see a creature made famous by the series out in the wild.

Questing

At its core the game has a questing system very familiar to the Elder Scrolls setting. As you move around the compass rose at the top of your screen will highlight points of interest that are near you. You have the option to go over there and engage in the quest, or continue onwards on your own. The very first time I sat down to play the game, I completely ignored the quests wandering off on my own exploring the island of Stros M’Kai in the Daggerfall Covenant. This is completely supported as far as a play style goes. In general there are a handful of quests that are required for you to progress to the next area, however in addition to these there are many side quests that are completely optional.

Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes. Firstly they give you a chance at gear, and point you in the direction of places that you might want to explore. For example… above is an image of the amazing Dwemer ruins of Bthzark, which I might add looks and feels like a Dwemer ruin should. You can gain access to the ruins through a quest chain, but in most cases these small dungeons and ruins can be explored by simply clicking on the front door and going in. The game is chock full of hidden places that contain treasure chests and skyshards and all sorts of neat things to find along the way. There are books to read, satchels to root through, and crates to crack open. All of which can have really nifty things.

So while you can play entirely without questing, and there are times I do this… there are also a lot of really epic stories in the game that can only be accessed by questing. One of the things that makes this so enjoyable is the fact that everything is the game is fully voiced. Lyris Titanborn is a character that you will see a lot of through the course of the game, and especially with these signature characters they have spared no expense. Lyris for example is voiced by the ever popular Jennifer Hale of “Femshep” fame. You come to love the characters over time, I cheer inside each time Sir Cadwell as voiced by John Cleese appears in the storyline. The characters live and breathe and you really care about them. The Elder Scrolls series in general has had some really amazing characters, and this just continues the lineage.

Crafting

Over the course of the time I have been participating in the testing process, the crafting system has gone through a number of changes. The current version is probably my favorite crafting system to date in any game. If you are familiar to the way crafting worked in SWTOR, it is somewhat of a cousin. The difference being that while learning all of the really nice patterns in SWTOR involved silly amounts of random chance, everything in ESO is completely logical and predictable. Smithing for example in its most basic form requires you to go out into the world and gather ore and then take it back to a blacksmithing station and smelt it into bar form. From there you need an item purchased from a vendor that relates to the style of gear you are crafting. Redguard require star metal, Dunmer obsidian, so that each racial style requires a unique reagent. These are purchased for 21 gold, which is not a huge sum of money.

The quality and level of an item is determined by a number of controllable factors. Firstly the level is determined by how much of a given material you add. Whereas 3 iron bars might create a level 1 item, but 6 iron bars a level 4 and so on throughout the level range. Additionally you can add a reagent of sorts to improve the quality of the item, shifting it from white to green or blue and upwards. Finally you can add a statistics package to the item, and these are learned through research. When you get a drop out in the world there are a number of things you can do to it. Firstly of course you can sell it for gold, but as a crafter you are generally better off taking it to the crafting station. There you can either extract resources from it, or if it has a stat package on the item you can research that trait.

Researching takes a significant amount of time, generally a number of hours to as much as a number of days. However in the end you are granted the ability to apply that trait to that item type. The traits that daggers can have are different than the traits that a chest piece can have for example. The rewarding part about it however is that once learned you can reliably add that trait to level of that item. Another really cool thing is that you can improve your items at a crafting station similar to how you could in Skyrim. In doing so you have a chance of losing the item, but you can increase the amount of reagent you are using to greatly improve the chance of getting your item successfully.

I feel like I am not really doing justice to how cool the system works. Generally speaking when I roll a new character I can piddle about gathering iron ore and craft a full set of gear far faster than I could earn one from questing. The biggest bonus is that you can craft helm and shoulders at level one, whereas you do not begin to receive these until pretty far into the content. I highly suggest you check out the crafting simulator that is on the newly released esohead.com. I could talk about the nuances of the system for paragraph after paragraph, but it makes more sense if you can actually see how it works by fiddling with the widgets.

Welcome to the Frontiers

I am not normally a fan of player versus player in any game. However Elder Scrolls has me more than a bit excited to be honest. We are finally returning to the most successful pvp set up that any game has had… the Frontiers of Dark Age of Camelot. Essentially the factions each control their own completely sealed territory, and this represents what the players quest through on their journey to level 50. However in the center connected to these realms lies Cyrodil. The map is absolutely huge and would take you significant amounts of time to run across it even mounted. The overarching story of Cyrodil is that the faction that can take the keeps bordering the Whitegold tower, can then place an Emperor on the throne, giving that faction special benefits.

This however really sells what Cyrodil is short. This zone is a living breathing questing destination with all sort of things hidden for players to find. Just like the frontiers in DAoC, there are reasons for crafters, explorers, adventurers to go out here. The excitement is that in doing so you risk getting rolled by one of the packs of players trying to take the keeps and other objectives. Cyrodil of course can be completely ignored if you so choose, but I look forward to going out there with my friends and trying to find out fortunes. From what I have seen in action, PVP in Elder Scrolls Online works just as well as it ever did in Dark Age.

The video above is from the mega guild Gaiscioch, and it shows their guild taking over a keep. Unlike the zergfest that we have seen in the past years brought on my World of Warcraft, this is slow and sustained warfare. If you cannot hold a keep you are of no benefit to your faction, and holding a keep is an extremely difficult proposition. At one point in the video they are being sieged by two different factions at the same time. This is going to be something that is extremely common, but if you can take and hold a keep… there are benefits to your guild for doing so. I am not really sure if House Stalwart will ever pvp enough to hold keeps, but I can definitely see myself helping out as another group does.

Only Scratched the Surface

There is just so much that I want to tell you, but at this point I have rambled on at length about the game for a bit now. I am sure the moment I publish this, I will think of another dozen things to say. Like I said at the beginning… this is not the game for everyone. Elder Scrolls single player purists will be frustrated by the addition of all the people around them. Hardcore MMO players will likely be frustrated with the minimalistic user interface. Personally I admit I have that problem a little bit, but since this game is to support a WoW style LUA add-on system, pretty much all of my woes with the Spartan interface can be corrected easily. I’ve already seen add-ons in various states of progress that will let you have all the bells and whistles you could want.

This is the type of game that grows on you over time. The biggest problem is you cannot go into playing it with the expectations of it being something else. I feel like this game is trying to start its own little genre. There is more than enough meat on its bones to allow players to happily explore it for hundreds and hundreds of hours. I can’t talk about it much but there is an extremely extensive post 50 game that adds more content than I can really even wrap my head around yet. This is not going to be a game that we can “finish” in a few weeks time. Getting to 50 is only part of the journey, there are months of content waiting you after that point. That is not to say that someone who is absolutely crazy will not make it to the absolute end within the first month. But the average serious player will be chewing on this one for a long while.

It feels extremely awesome to finally be able to talk about it. At this point we have been cleared to talk about the first 3-4 zones per faction. So if there is anything you would like to see me talk about, please drop me a comment and I will try and work it in during a future post. I am happy to see the veil lift so we can hopefully start getting a positive buzz going among all the players who are out there enjoying themselves. The beta weekends have been full of players happy to be in the test and happy to be exploring the world. The game is still charting extremely well in its presales. If you plan on getting the game, I highly suggest you put in your preorder. The ability to play any race in any faction is going to be a huge boon going forward.