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

International Cupid

February 13, 2014 by Belghast

Short term commitment

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if it would be okay if she played Elder Scrolls with the House Stalwart group. She was not sure how into the game she was, so might only be around for a month or so. She wanted to make sure no one would be upset with her not staying terribly long. She was afraid that House Stalwart were more dedicated members and might take offense to that. I of course assuaged her fears, since Stalwart as a whole is super casual and primarily a social guild. However what came next was a realization that I am not sure I had actually admitted to myself.

When I go into one of these games I don’t really expect folks to last more than a few months. That has been the track record with new games and our guild especially. This was so much the case with Final Fantasy XIV that I even started what I feel is going to be a new thing for me. When I subscribed to that game I chose to do so for three months and then immediately went into the back end and cancelled my account. That way it would essentially self destruct after three months unless I made some form of manual intervention to renew it. While you might think this is me not having faith in the game… it is more that I am not having faith in myself.

Other than World of Warcraft, each game I have played has been a three to six month encounter. While there are still games that I play semi-regularly, the tempest of activity has usually died down into a spring breeze at or around the three month mark. It feels to me that we are inherently either gaming lifers, or game jumpers. If you look at my own guild our I would say we have roughly sixty players that have only ever played WoW and cannot imagine playing another game. Then there is a pool of forty or so that tend to play whatever happens to be the next great game in the internet cultural zeitgeist. This experience has lead me to the new stance of giving a game three months of subscription and then evaluating where I stand after that.

Cash Shop Expansion

Yesterday the big 2.6 patch went in over in Rift and I have to say I have been watching this one with a bit of excitement. There are a ton of new features going into the game and you can read highlights of them over on this little info blurb created by Trion. This is the point at which I am going to be a bit of a downer, because after logging in last night I realized… the things I am most interested are really freaking expensive. A big thing they added in was the ability to start applying cosmetic skins to your pets. This has been one of my key frustrations with the pet classes that unlike the WoW Hunter we had no real control over what our pets looked like. There have been some really ugly pets as well… I am looking at you emaciated beastlord blue tiger thing. Most of these have improved to where the base pet is at least passable, but I would never turn down the opportunity to tweak the appearance.

Problem is that they are really expensive, in order to get all of the new skins… something that admittedly not everyone is going to want… they are running a special on them for roughly $70 worth of in game currency. Once the special is over however that price quadruples for the full unlock. Individual class based unlocks are more reasonable at around $7 per class. These are of course guesstimates based on the fact that in the $20 bundle it breaks out to be 160 credits per dollar. I feel like the whole budgie mount thing has maybe unfairly colored my opinion of the cash shop as a whole. Once upon a time it felt extremely reasonable, but now everything just seems more expensive than I want to pay for it.

The biggest thing I was interested in during this patch was the Dreamweaving profession. Once again however I was hit by the realization that in order to play with that it would involve me plunking down some cash to buy another trade skill extension. I don’t want to roll a brand new character just to be able to play with the profession, and I don’t really want to unlearn any of my already max level professions from my characters to pick up this new one. I realize it is a first world problem, and in a game like WoW we would have no choice at all but to do just that. However last night I was being irrational and felt extremely frustrated by having to make that choice.

Basically the only thing left that really made me excited after having the other two shiny baubles behind a paywall I didn’t feel like crossing… was the bounty system. I will admit I am pretty excited about this. One of the features that I loved from Dark Age of Camelot that no other game has really gotten right was the ability to create trophies of certain mobs out in the world. Our guild hall was full of these because I was constantly going out and collecting the “remains” needed to craft them. Rift seems to have finally created a version of that system that looks like it will work in modern terms. However after the frustrations up until that point, I just didn’t feel like sinking in the needed research to figure out exactly how the system worked.

I am sure at some point soon I will revisit it and be happy as a clam hunting down trophies. I just fear that this is he new reality for a game like Rift. When we get a patch, it will involve a little bit of free content and a lot of content you will have to hit the cash shop button to be able to truly enjoy. My frustration mostly is due the fact that I am a patron and have been one since the transition of that program. I feel like overall that is a “bad deal” since the loyalty accrual is excessively slow, there is no monthly credit allowance, and we still end up having to buy the new baubles when they come out. Sure the various daily buffs are nice, and I likely would not have made it to 60 on my rogue without them… but it feels like there should be at least some regular allowance of credits that can add up over time to be able to buy stuff from the store.

International Cupid

Today in light of Valentines being tomorrow, I have a factoid that I rarely tell. It is really weird how chance, fate, kismet… whatever you want to call it works sometimes. My wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart from each other in neighboring towns. It turns out that we knew several of the same people, went to several of the same places, and were probably in the same room multiple times during our lives. We would not have met however were it not for a mutual friend in Belgium. During the early days of the internet, we were both IRC junkies. Internet Relay Chat opened up a door to a world much larger than our own, and let us converse with people around the world… breakout out of our very limited small town upbringings.

Chatrooms in truth were a lot like we view guilds today, as a little social family that you hung out with. People shifted back and forth between them freely, and much like running content with some friends guild you hopped back and forth between channels freely. I’ve always been interested in programming and for awhile I got really into writing IRC bots. I would build little games into them, with dice rollers, character sheets and combat. It was through one of these bots that I met Hans. He asked me to come help him out with one of the bots on his channel, and it was one of the nights I was in his channel working on it that I saw a familiar address pop into the channel. Back in that day, you could see what internet service provider someone was connecting from, and over time I learned to immediately recognize all the local ones.

Out of the blue I messaged the new person who had entered the room saying something dumb to the equivalent of “not often that I see a local”. Apparently I freaked her out a little, since at the time I was logged into the bot. Observational skills were never a strong point. Hans apparently verified that I was a nice guy, and non-stalkerish because over the course of the next few weeks we struck up a friendship. Over Easter weekend she was heading back to her hometown, and we decided to meet up and go to the movies together. At this point it was just two friends hanging out and meeting in real life. We got along just fine, but neither of us was really looking for anything at that point so dating didn’t even dawn on either of us I don’t think.

As fate would have it, I was planning on transferring to the university she was attending, so at the very least it would be awesome to have some friends on campus. It was not until I had actually transferred that sparks really happened. To be honest we moved very quickly from “dating”, to being essentially inseparable from that point onwards. There were no long drawn out courtship rituals for us, we were far more practical than that. I still marvel at just how odd it was, that we had grown up so close to each other, but that it took someone half a world away to introduce us. Years later as we talked about our childhoods we have come up with several points at which we were likely in the same place at the same time. Thankfully we have an international cupid to thank for finally connecting us.

Free To Play Budget

January 30, 2014 by Belghast

The Arrival

Well yesterday was the day that The Elder Scrolls online officially announced its pricing and opened up the preorders. This honestly has been a day I have waiting for anxiously for some time. I realize that lately there has been a lot of hostility towards the Elder Scrolls because it is trying to be a traditional subscription model game in a market gone completely gaga over the “free” in free to play. I personally do not mind paying for a box and then later paying a subscription fee for a game, especially not this one. Unfortunately my NDA is firmly in place so there is not a whole lot more I can say about the reasons why I am so into this game. I am anxious for it to fall so I can properly gush over it. Honestly at this point I am shocked that it is still in place, considering the April launch date. Hopefully the coming weeks will see that change.

I love the preorder launch trailer above, because it takes place seconds after the original cinematic launch trailer. Whereas the first trailer focused on the player versus player conflicts being set up in the world, this one is more focused on the other conflict. You know the one where a giant Daedric Prince is trying to take over Tamriel. Since I am not PVP centric, this is the conflict I am most interested in and the cinematic like always does not miss a detail of showing this tension. If you have not already seen the original cinematic… you should really watch it first to get the full effect. I would love to see them release one that edits the two together into one seamless sequence.

The Pricing

The above image is the shot across the bow that started the madness. It seems that ahead of time Amazon staged the image and it got leaked. From that point it was off to the races with speculation and complaint about the benefits or lack thereof. Honestly when I look for a Collector’s Edition all I care about is access to in-game goodies, a soundtrack and the traditional head start weekend. As far as in game stuff, I generally expect some form of an in game boost item that becomes meaningless by about level 10, and some sort of an in-game mount… since having a mount becomes so insanely important in these games. So by those criteria this CE is lacking the soundtrack, but instead making up with an additional playable race… The Imperial. More than likely Belghast will be an Imperial, because that is fitting his character.

The real benefit however is not even mentioned here in the image that started it all. Apparently if you preorder before launch you get an additional set of bonuses called the “Explorers Pack”, that will allow you to create a character of any race in any faction. That right there is pretty huge. Imagine if you could have an Alliance Tauren, or a Horde Dwarf? I would have totally done that many times in my time playing various faction centric games. So far only Rift has really allowed me to create faction bending characters, and even then it is only through the use of race swaps. You also get an additional pet, but next to the rest of that pack it seems meaningless. All of this comes for the relatively reasonable prices of $50 for digital, $60 for physical, $70 for digital CE, and $100 for physical CE with the statue and book and all the miscellany that you see above.

Yesterday we were absolutely shocked at how reasonable the box was to be truthful. Based on recent examples a collectors edition I was honestly expecting this to be another one of those $150 Star Wars: The Old Republic style boxed sets. So while I find it pretty reasonable… there are a lot of folks who are chafing under the pricing. To be truthful were I outside of the United States I would too. For starters it seems like Zenimax simply changed the currency symbol rather than setting a realistic price point. That means for all my British friends, these prices end up being $80, $96, $112, and $160 respectively. Eighty bucks is a bit too much to ask someone to pay for a brand new non-super happy magical edition of a game. Granted by the time I post this, those prices will likely change as I just did them based on a quick google of converting dollars to pounds… but still they are more than a little out of whack. The end result is a lot of my euro friends simply saying “nope”, and quite honestly if I had to pay those prices… even as much as I love the game I might also be in that boat.

Free to Play Budget

Remember the other day me talking about how our perspective matters. This is yet another case of this happening. Had the free to play explosion not degraded what we are willing to pay for an MMO… then this is another launch that would have gone off without a question as to the price to value. At this point however so many MMOs are either outright free, or some sort of a “buy the box” model. Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and World of Warcraft remain the last bastions of the “pay for the software and pay for the game” era. So we can quickly rush to bashing them for this decision… but the problem is they were built for a era that may or may not be over. These games were started in a time when the reality was that players would happily plunk down their $60 for the client software and just as happily plunk down $15 a month for the maintenance fee. I mean this model works in the IT world, since damned near every big money software package comes chained to a maintenance agreement.

What has changed is that players now have an option. Similar to the open source movement, folks can now say “Nope” and opt to avoid playing the new and shiny games and instead retrench in games like Rift that have a much lower barrier of entry. As much as I want to play Elder Scrolls, I can’t necessarily say that they are wrong. I am pretty intimately connected to the success of this title, so I was going to play it long before they announced the pricing. I knew from the moment it was announced that I would be leading a branch of House Stalwart in this game, and having a lot of fun along the way. For me buying Elder Scrolls Online was a foregone conclusion, but I can completely see especially with the really poor currency conversion skills… why folks would opt not to buy into this franchise. Granted this games success really doesn’t lay within the MMO community… frankly I don’t think they “need” us. This game will be a test of whether or not the console player has an appetite for a large scale multiplayer version of a game they have bought tens of millions of copies already.

Stalwart Ebonheart

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014 by Belghast

Small World After All

Yesterday I had a pretty interesting chain of events happen, that have left me all warm and fuzzy. At some point yesterday I tweeted a general complaint about how steam seems to be incapable of flagging on a machine level that we have already installed the various pre-requisites like DirectX. This tweet seemed to develop a life of it’s own as it got re-tweeted around a bit and favorited. Most of the people were extremely familiar to me, but one of the folks retweeting was completely new. In my current mode of trying to reach out more to help foster the community I followed Maevrim.

It turns out the two of us have been running in the same circles for years spanning two different games and two different servers. For the bulk of her time playing World of Warcraft, it seems as though she was in the guild Gnomes Will Eat You on Argent Dawn… a guild House Stalwart folk are very familiar with. During the old days our two guilds did quite a bit together, and these days my raid has the very amazing Frosti… that has a sort of dual citizenship with characters in both House Stalwart and Gnomes Will Eat You. Turns out she also plays on Faeblight where the House Stalwart Rift branch is located.

To make things even more awesome, she is looking for a new guild home. Of course my guildmasterly ninja instincts started kicking in and I have been trying to welcome her into the Stalwart fold. Its true… we are kind of like a cult but I promise that our koolaid isn’t poisoned much. Scan a few hours later, turns out she was on a podcast and I somehow got mentioned. Now I seem to have missed the reference or it was said before or after the started recording. But all of this makes me realize just how small and relatively tight knit a community we have. Like I said the other day, it is all a matter of perspective. We might think we are alone in the void, but then something happens to make us realize just how connected we are as a whole.

Stalwart Ebonheart

Since April 4th 2014 will be here before we know it, I figure it is time to start planning for the House Stalwart Ebonheart Pact branch in Elder Scrolls Online. For some time I have known that I would be playing this game at release, and my hope is to successfully weave in time of both it and World of Warcraft. The goal is to play a few nights a week, because really I am a sucker for anything Elder Scrolls… and you would have to cause a real cataclysm to keep me away from it. For a long time I have also known I would be aligning with the Ebonheart Pact, in part because my three favorite races are the Nord, Dunmer and Argonians. After an impromptu poll of the folks who signed up on the brief Tamriel Foundry site we had… it seems like that is the case for most of the guild.

Since House Stalwart has always been a social guild… and more family than anything else… I thought I would open things up this time to my blogger family as well. I know Maric and some of the Mercy Corps folks will be joining Stalwart in this endeavor, and my hope is to gather up as many good people as I can before the launch. I am sure a good chunk of the current and former Stalwart members will be joining us as well. Basically all sociable folks are welcome spending they are agreeable to the standard House Stalwart Three Tenets. While I founded House Stalwart in World of Warcraft, the ethos that I helped foster has spanned so many games and will likely move into even more in the future. My hope is that we will keep creating a connection that transcends the games we happen to be playing at the time.

If this type of environment sounds like a good fit for you, then please follow this link to our forums. I created a brand new forum thread this morning, trying to gauge how many people we will have at launch. If you have any issues setting up a forum account either drop me a line here, or ping me over twitter and I will see what I can do to assist you. Also of note, we are primarily a Eastern Standard/Central Standard time zone guild, but have members with a pretty wide variety of playtimes.

Nightblade Finishing School

This weekend I also dipped my feet back into Rift spending a bit of time Saturday and Sunday working on my Nightblade. I am not sure if I will ever make a third level 60, but I really do want to finish my rogue off who is currently sitting and 70% through 58. While I enjoy the Storm Legion content on one level, on another it feels extremely grindy. As such during the course of leveling Belghast to 60 I stalled out no less than four times. Similarly Belgrave has stalled out quite a few in the process of getting this far along. Maybe I am just spoiled by the brisk pace of leveling in games like World of Warcraft or even Final Fantasty XIV… but getting through Storm Legion feels like an absolute chore. I do however really want to spend some time pushing through it.

This weekend I spent quite a bit of time doing Instant Adventures and they made the process feel a little less painful. At some point I also want to spend some time in dungeons… but for whatever reason I seem to always get Stormbreaker Protocol… which for those not familiar with it is the Rift version of Oculus. Essentially it is that one dungeon that makes almost the entire party disappear. I feel like I really need to get adjusted to the Rift controls a bit more before stepping foot into a dungeon, though honestly I was killing things in Argent Domain last night as efficiently as I ever was. More than anything with the impending release of 2.6, I want to dust off my Rift account and finally push the Nightblade across the finish line.

What About Wildstar?

December 20, 2013 by Belghast

4.4.14

It as been roughly ten days since Zenimax announced the official PC/Mac release date of Elder Scrolls Online. In doing so they either knowingly or unknowingly threw down the gauntlet to the other developers with their own tentative release dates. The success and fail of an MMO has become so much more than whether or not it is a good game, but instead how distracted the gaming populous is at any given moment. I remember a time in the not too distant past where major PC releases were truly few and far between. However it currently seems like there is always something bigger looming on the near horizon. Like it or not every single one of these releases is competing for the same relatively small pool of players, subscribers, and even money in general.

Yesterday Massively voted The Elder Scrolls Online… the MMO most likely to flop in the coming year. While I personally think this is deeply cynical and maybe even more than a tiny bit inflammatory, I think more than anything it is short sighted. Quite frankly the success and failure of Elder Scrolls Online has nothing to do with the PC gamer, and that is more than a tiny bit humbling. We will no longer be the king makers for these online games. With ESO and games like it, that torch is being passed from PC Gaming to the much larger pool of console gamers. I have to say the console market is rabidly waiting for a new Elder Scrolls Experience, and especially a multiplayer one at that . I think it might be a bitter pill to swallow to realize that the success and failure of these titles may very well be out of the hands of the “PC Gaming Master Race”.

3.25.14

Being the master tacticians that they are, yesterday Blizzard announced the release date for the Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls expansion. With this they are releasing roughly four weeks ahead of Elder Scrolls Online, and as a result giving themselves plenty of time with the sole attention of the PC Gaming market. Similarly however they are also hungrily eyeing the console market, and you can bet that they will be timing the release of the PS3/PS4/Xbox360/XBone release against the June release of Elder Scrolls Online to the next gen consoles. I feel like a four week buffer is more than safe and should play well to the gamers that may not have the ability to purchase every title they want. I know I am personally amped about this version of the game, because it fixes a lot of the loot problems I had with the initial release. Additionally I am holding out hope beyond hope that they manage to roll in the console “controller” features as well.

There is no way to look at this release date as anything other than business strategy. Elder Scrolls started this ball in motion, and now each game company will have to decide when the most opportune time is to deploy their own “forces” on the game board. While the Diablo 3 demographic is not exactly the same as the Elder Scrolls demographic… there is more than enough overlap to have caused issues for either game. As a result two major juggernauts have been placed on the “game board” and as a result the new year is less open than it was. Now the launches of so many titles will have be strategized to figure out when the most opportune time to release will be.

Warlords of Draenor

Since the title Blizzard announced was the release of Diablo 3 for the tail end of the first quarter, my assumption is that Warlord of Draenor was simply not close enough to ready to be able to launch against Elder Scrolls Online. As a result I am guessing this means that WoD will be another last quarter of 2014 release much like a few other World of Warcraft expansion launches. If this is the case that bookends the year up pretty nicely. Diablo 3 first quarter, Elder Scrolls Online second quarter and Warlords of Draenor closing out the year. You can already see the 2014 release calendar starting to tighten a bit and this will make it increasingly difficult for game companies to find a “clear window” to release against. I personally thought I had written off the WoW franchise completely, but nostalgic can be a pain sometimes.

As a result I imagine there will be a lot of players that either intentionally or un-intentionally come back for the release of Warlords. The lifespan of a WoW expansion rush seems to be roughly three months, so an end of the year release will also make the 2015 schedule some what slippery as well. The problem is there are lots more pieces to be placed on the board. Games like Titanfall and Destiny will also be chipping away at the pool of players that would h

ave normally played an MMO. Additionally we still have EQ Landmark and EQ Next that have not committed to any release schedule and will likely be just as large of a force on the Calendar as the games that have already been confirmed.

What About Wildstar?

I will be the first to admit… I am actually not that excited about Wildstar at all. By all rights I should be, but for whatever reason there I have not followed it. I do however have a lot of friends who have, and as a result I want it to be a success for their sake as much as anything else. Up until this point we have heard a tentative “spring 2014” release. As I have just outlined however the “spring” timeframe is extremely packed as it is. Wildstar is in a really precarious place right now, and I do not envy them. They are launching a new MMO, with a subscription model into a world that seems to have fallen out of love with subscriptions. Additionally it is an unproven IP, and there are additional issues on selling a new player on “the vision” for this world. Finally it is releasing against some really powerful forces.

The safe bet will be to release Wildstar in the July/August timeframe. As much as I myself hate it, the players who are likely to leave a game will have done so by the time three months have passed. July would be the beginning of a window where generally the “locusts”, a group I have been a member of so many times in the past… will have consumed what there is to consume with ESO and be looking for a new target to move to. Plotting a course for this opening in the schedule seems like the safe choice for them. However all it would take to make this more treacherous, is for the other pieces that are unplaced to fall into this window. Releasing against EQ Landmark would be enough to make the fate of Wildstar uncertain, and we have yet to even discuss the potential for the upcoming and as of yet unnamed Rift expansion.

My money is still on Wildstar penciling in a July release date, and EQ Next as a game being a spring of 2015 release. I just don’t see Carbine being confident enough to release Wildstar without a good opening in the schedule. They are in a much more tentative position than Zenimax, since the entirety of their fate rests upon the shoulders of the PC Gaming market. Elder Scrolls Online could realistically release against another big game, since they will be gaining a bunch of “new to genre” players coming in from the console market. Additionally they have a well established and well loved IP… and even if folks are not completely sold on the game… they are likely to at least dip their toes in the water for awhile. I find myself caring far more about the people at the companies… than the companies and games themselves. With several friends in the “industry” I honestly hope that they can stack the schedule in a way so that all of these titles fine at least limited success. If we see another crop of relative failures, I think this year might be the last hurrah of the triple A MMO market.