Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time hanging out in Elder Scrolls Online and talking with my friend Clockwork Bells or Bells as I tend to refer to her more often than not. I realize it is probably confusing given that I am most often known as Bel but I assure you that Bells is a completely different human being that is legitimate and not someone I just made up to entertain myself. Somehow we ended up getting on this kick of talking about the games coming out and release dates and it made me realize just how much of my year is already spoken for. In January I did a post looking forward into the year but at that point a lot of the dates were not necessarily set in stone. This morning I thought I would refresh that post and talk about some of the dates of specific things that I know I am going to be playing.
Outriders – April 1st
On February 25th we got our hands on a demo of this game and I am super engaged with it. I like its particular brand of run and gun looter shooter nonsense combined with a very Diablo 3 style build system. I am fully on board with this game and looking forward to the release date on April 1st. I think the demo was a pretty great call because this is one of those situations where a game is launching into a genre that has some pretty tarnished history with games like Avengers, Godfall and now the mostly cancelled Anthem. Putting a demo out there shows that they were confident in their product enough to let us start playing it ahead of time. The cherry on the top however is that some progress will be carrying over, but I have not gone grind happy like so many have because I don’t want to wear the game out before it even launches.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition – May 14th
I love Mass Effect and over the course of the years since its release I have played through it a number of times. I cannot believe how absolutely giddy I am about the prospect of playing through it once more, but this time with improved graphics and hopefully improved interface on the game that needs it the most… Mass Effect 1. Over the weekend I talked about comfort gaming and how often I revisit good experiences from the past as a way of salving mental wounds of the present, and experiencing Mass Effect all over again with fresh visuals is going to be one hell of a nostalgia trip. I pretty much expect to be doing nothing but playing this when it launches until I have exited the other end and am watching the credits roll on the third game.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood – June 1st
I’ve said this before, but right now I am having this renaissance with Elder Scrolls Online and on June 1st the next major chapter of the story is released with a whole slew of new content and a new zone. That said I am so far behind that I doubt I will actually be caught up by then, but I am going to make an attempt to at least get a little closer to being caught up. If nothing else I am sure there will be some trickle down effect that impacts me and my enjoyment of the game when this batch of content launches.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart – June 11th
This is finally one of the reasons why I actually bought a PlayStation 5 and it is coming out like six months after that purchase. I am hoping for the sake of many that by the time we hit this point in the year that it becomes a little bit more reasonable get a console. I am a huge fan of Ratchet and Clank and I am super looking forward to Rift Apart. Like this is a different sort of experience than playing a “forever game” like so many on the list. Similarly the Elder Scrolls experience is different than a traditional expansion launch because I am effectively at end game gear and have been for years now. So there shouldn’t be much of a conflict of poking my head into this game and playing the hell out of it.
New World – August 31st
This is another game that I am super on board with and looking forward to playing. If you too got caught up in the whole madness of Valheim, then I highly suggest you also put this game on your radar. While it doesn’t have the really cool building elements, it does have a lot of the same exploratory and resource gathering concepts. I played this game last year for the first time and fell in love and have been anxiously waiting to get my hands on it legitimately. There is part of me that wishes it had just launched last year as planned, but I know the game that exists today will be better received than the first version that I played. I am not at all into PVP and this game has so much PVE meat on its bones that I think it will keep most traditional MMO players happy.
The Plan So Far
That friends is pretty much all that I know that has a proper release date. There are lots more games that I am interested in, but for now this seems to be the tentative schedule that I am looking at as I progress into the year. Other bits of information that we know are the fact that Diablo 4 will not be coming out this year at all and it is starting to look like Vampire Bloodlines 2 won’t be either. I am certain whenever Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West comes out that it is going to take up prime gaming real estate. Currently Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis is also slotted for release which I expect will get on this list at some point as well. Right now there is a big gap that is the month of July and most of August but honestly I would probably be perfectly happy just to keep plugging away at Elder Scrolls Online pending we still have a presence in that game.
I’ve never really done this sort of thing, actually tried to plot the course game wise through the year. We will see if in the end my year actually does look anything like this since I am very easily distracted.
The post A Schedule of Play appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends! Over the last few days I have been posting an awful lot about Elder Scrolls Online. The game is in a great state and honestly has been for years, and now that I have a pretty regularly group of friends playing it has improved my enjoyment immensely. However all of this screenshot posting has lead to the inevitable question of “What mods are you running?”. So this morning I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about a few of the ones that I find most important for my personal enjoyment. However before we go down this road there are a few primers that you need to understand about Elder Scrolls Online addons.
Probably the first step if you choose to go down this path is to install Minion which is the addon client of MMOUI/ESOUI. This is pretty much the last remaining viable addon patcher with any real support for The Elder Scrolls Online and it is going to be your best friend for resolving any potential issues you might find along the way. Addons with ESO are way more the wild west than they are in games like World of Warcraft. The addons themselves are not updated nearly as often and as a result you end up using them in an outdated status way more often. The positive however is that the Elder Scrolls user interface does not update nearly as often nor does it have quite the penchant for breaking addons as the World of Warcraft one does.
When it comes to downloading addons, my personal preference is to click the “Find More” tab at the top of the Minion client and then search for the addons I am looking for that way. If your preference is to manually install addons then you are going to need to navigate to your documents folder, wherever that is stored on your system and within it there should be a folder structure that looks like this: “Elder Scrolls Online\live\AddOns”. One positive about the way addons work in Elder Scrolls Online is that you can fiddle with them while the game is loaded safely and then get your new changes by hitting the /reloadui command afterwards. This bit comes in really important when it comes to debugging why specific addons are not working.
From within game you can access a list of the addons that you currently have loaded and this is going to be beneficial because every so often the Minion client does not correctly install prerequisites and dependencies. For example at the suggestion of my friend Accomp, I installed the EasyTravel addon which in theory is supposed to allow you to jump to a nearby guild member in a specific zone and bypass travel fees. However I noticed this morning while sitting down to write this piece that I was missing a dependency, which gave me the ideal opportunity to talk about this problem. How I fixed this was to open up the Minion client and click the “Find More” tab and type in the name of the missing library, aka LibSlashCommander in this specific case. From there I was able to install this library and upon typing /ReloadUI the problem was resolved.
Addons as a whole for The Elder Scrolls Online are a whole lot more fiddly and slightly less predictable than they were in World of Warcraft. If this brings you pause then you might just be better off sticking with the default interface. I’ve installed addons in the most questionable of manners in the past for games that barely supported them, so for me it was second nature to get this up and running. The whole point of all of this is to make sure you are fully aware of what you are getting yourself into. The addons themselves cannot do any permanent harm to your experience that cannot be resolved by simply turning them off or uninstalling them however.
Bandits User Interface
The addon that becomes most noticeable when viewing my screenshots is my general Action Bar/HUD/User Interface replacement. There are a large number of these available and I have tried and probably the two most popular are AUI and LUI with the later being a pretty WoW-Like experience with Deadly Boss Mods style callouts. My personal preference however is Bandits User Interface because it is what I am used to and most comfortable with. For me personally it seems to be the ideal blend of configurability and information with the least amount of distractions. This addon is effectively the spiritual successor to Foundry Tactical Combat which was an addon suite supported the long defunct Alpha/Beta powerhouse site the Tamriel Foundry.
The thing I like about Bandits is just how easily configured it is. When you open your settings menu you will see an entirely new menu item just for this addon that allows you to configure all of the specifics on how exactly this behaves. Generally speaking if there is something that is annoying you, there will be a configuration option to turn it off or at least change it slightly. This addon suite began its life as being PVP focused, but evolved into being my ideal interface for the game in general. It also includes a number of simple automation tasks like the ability to repair each time you hit a vendor and those sort of simple quality of life improvements. It is a little slow to update but so far I have had no problem running it in “outdated” mode.
If you have ever used Gatherer in World of Warcraft to track the resource nodes as you collect them, then you are going to be pretty familiar with the basic functionality of Harvest Map. The idea is that as you roam around the world and collect resources, these nodes are being added to your map filters so that you can find them in the future easily. Going further than gatherer, Harvest Map puts little augmented reality sprites on your map when you get in range of them allowing you to veer just slightly out of the way to get those you would likely run past without paying attention. It might be a bit busy for you personally but I personally like knowing roughly where I have found nodes before in the past. Tamriel Mapping Project gives you a number of prebuilt filters loaded with node spawn information, essentially giving you a head start on finding things in the wild.
This one is an entirely personal preference but I enjoy it greatly so I am sharing it. As this game has grown in size I have personally found it harder and harder to sort out which zone is which on the large overworld map. The end result is this busy nonsense the forces you to vaguely remember which area of the world each zone is in. I did fine for years but wound up having to click into zones anyway to sort out exactly where I wanted to travel to. Votan’s Tamriel Map replaces all of that mess with a nice simple easy to read zone boundary map with the capital city of each zone highlighted below the region name. Sure you still have to click into the zone before you can teleport to a wayshrine, but I was doing this already and now it simply makes it much easier for me to find where I was looking for.
One of the things that I do not love about the default Elder Scrolls Online inventory is that it is menu driven. Years of playing World of Warcraft and Everquest before that have made me extremely visual when it comes to an inventory. Inventory Grid View comes to the rescue if you also suffer from this affliction and it does exactly what the name states, organizes your bag and bank into a grid with rarity coloring around the outside of the icon. This image is also technically showing off Tamriel Trade Center but I think I am going to have to delve into more detail on that one with a close up segment of the screen.
At the bottom of my inventory item tooltip there is a section that starts with TTC Suggested. One of the weird things about Elder Scrolls Online is that there is no centralized auction house. I will probably go into Guilds and Traders in a future post, but suffice to say it is a distributed network of individual Guild Traders. Tamriel Trade Center is a website and series of tools that attempts to glue together all of these independent guild trades into something that is searchable. This functions by relying on both an addon and a system tray application that is constantly feeding Guild Trader activity and receiving updated pricing data. So the ring in question that I am hovering over has had a total of 2688 listings and based on data it is indicating that the sweet spot for moving this item quickly is somewhere between 2274 and 2843 gold. Largely I use this as a general indicator of whether or not an item has enough third party market value for me to mess with trying to save it and sell it on a guild trader or if it is something I should just vendor/deconstruct for materials.
So Many Addons
This is by no means a complete list of addons that I am currently running, but instead I largely focused on some of my personal favorites. My friend Accomp runs significantly more Addons than I do and has an updated list of what he happens to be running at any given time. So if you are curious I would check that out as well. The main reason why I am not posting a complete list is that right now I think I have multiple addons that are trying to fill the same role and as such in the coming weeks I am going to try and whittle those down to the minimum number of addons needed. If I actually do this thing I might post an update to this list with a full accounting of everything I happen to be using. For now however this should be a general starting place.
The post Elder Scrolls Online Addons appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I wrapped up Vvardenfell, which ultimately was the DLC that I had been playing through during my last ESO binge back in June of 2019. At that point I was already well behind the curve in content and they have piled on a significant chunk over the last few years. The thing is I have this habit of purchasing an expansion even if I don’t end up playing it because I know at some point I will return. I’ve talked about this at length before, but The Elder Scrolls as a franchise and I have a long and storied relationship and this involves a significant amount of emotional attachment to Elder Scrolls Online. Up until recently there was still a hidden forum dedicated to the original alpha testers which sadly has disappeared. I am however in a guild that formed from those first folks and we generally use it as a nostalgia bomb every now and then.
Finishing Vvardenfell meant that I would be moving on to the next piece of content. Since I am trying to follow the original content release order, that means the next step forward is to venture forth into The Clockwork City of Sotha Sil. The challenge however is that I had no clue HOW to begin the quest that would ultimately send me to The Clockwork City. I could of course just click on the map and go there through the wayshrine that was unlocked, but I my personal preference is to do the introduction mission whenever possible. When ESO first started releasing DLC content they would end up mailing you an item that took up bag space but ultimately started the quest chain. It seems at some point they evolved past this and now you can accept the introductory quest for any of the “Zone DLC” as they refer to it from your collections interface under Stories.
I have to admit this is the area of the game that I have been looking forward to the most because I love all things Dwemer, and while this is technically not a Dwemer city it shares a lot of the same characteristics. The city itself exists outside of time and space, but you get into it from a hidden location underneath Mournhold. So I spent last night going through that initial mission and then roaming around the Brass Fortress and surrounding area. I have not been disappointed in the least at the splendor of this area or to be truthful ANY of the DLC areas of Elder Scrolls Online. I mean the White Gold Tower/Imperial City area was a little sparse but it was also the very first DLC drop an they were trying to sort things out.
One of the questions I have been asked is if Elder Scrolls Online is still active. This is just a random snapshot of people coming and gone from the main portal in the Brass Fortress area of the Clockwork City. You can go to pretty much any city hub in the game and see a similar flow of people coming in and out of an area, and I’ve yet to be anywhere that was not a solo instance and not run into two or three other people completing the same content. I casually “grouped” with some other players the other night while doing a public dungeon which largely meant we were just following each other around and occasionally talking over say. The world feels alive and vibrant, which is pretty great.
This is hanging out waiting on a world boss to spawn and the folks who gathered in the meantime. Just like in any game you can see a lot of spell effects being fired off ahead of the spawn attempting to get a tag in. However unlike some games that mob seems to have enough health to be able to survive plenty of time for everyone who was paying any attention to get a tag in. From the moment the mob spawned in it was up for roughly a minute before we defeated it. This has pretty much been the case with most world encounters and there are a lot of times I roll up on a fight that has already started and am able to help out and feel like I actually did something rather than simply trying to get a single hit in.
Almost unbeknownst to me, the new champion system rolled in yesterday with a patch and as a result everything has been reset. Technically Zuu gave us a heads up Sunday night after I had already stopped playing for the evening so I was at least a little bit prepared. With the new champion system comes a lot of changes to the way champion points in general work. Most of the abilities now have a threshold of needing to spend a fixed amount of points before you see any benefit from it and some of them taking a massive dump of points to get abilities that have more impact. I think I more or less cobbled together something resembling what my previous build was and I am largely functional. I actually think the new version can burn through content a little faster, but struggles a bit with stamina regeneration.
The cool thing however is that right now and for the next two weeks, there is an event called Heroes Reforged that allows you to reset your Champion Points, Skills and Morphs and Attribute points for free as many times as you like until Monday March 22nd at 10 am. Side note, some of this will require you to travel to a Rededication Shrine and as such here is a link to the various locations. Essentially they are located in the original capitals of Mournhold, Wayrest, Elder Root and then in some of the expansion areas of Summerset, Vvardenfell and Elsweyr. The other big takeaway from last night is it seems like I am gaining Champion Points at a much faster clip than I did before now. Previously I would walk away with four to eight in a normal evening but last night I racked up fourteen in total. Talking with the guild there were folks who were feeling the same as well.
All in all I am still having a freaking blast. I’ve yet to really break into dungeons but I am hoping in the coming days I am going to start dipping my toes into those waters. Ultimately I am super focused on the story content and as such I have not really had room for dungeoneering as of yet. The story has been just compelling enough that I keep wanting to move it forward to see what comes next, but not so driven that there isn’t plenty of time for me to roam around aimlessly between beats.
The post The Clockwork City appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I wrapped up Vvardenfell, which ultimately was the DLC that I had been playing through during my last ESO binge back in June of 2019. At that point I was already well behind the curve in content and they have piled on a significant chunk over the last few years. The thing is I have this habit of purchasing an expansion even if I don’t end up playing it because I know at some point I will return. I’ve talked about this at length before, but The Elder Scrolls as a franchise and I have a long and storied relationship and this involves a significant amount of emotional attachment to Elder Scrolls Online. Up until recently there was still a hidden forum dedicated to the original alpha testers which sadly has disappeared. I am however in a guild that formed from those first folks and we generally use it as a nostalgia bomb every now and then.
Finishing Vvardenfell meant that I would be moving on to the next piece of content. Since I am trying to follow the original content release order, that means the next step forward is to venture forth into The Clockwork City of Sotha Sil. The challenge however is that I had no clue HOW to begin the quest that would ultimately send me to The Clockwork City. I could of course just click on the map and go there through the wayshrine that was unlocked, but I my personal preference is to do the introduction mission whenever possible. When ESO first started releasing DLC content they would end up mailing you an item that took up bag space but ultimately started the quest chain. It seems at some point they evolved past this and now you can accept the introductory quest for any of the “Zone DLC” as they refer to it from your collections interface under Stories.
I have to admit this is the area of the game that I have been looking forward to the most because I love all things Dwemer, and while this is technically not a Dwemer city it shares a lot of the same characteristics. The city itself exists outside of time and space, but you get into it from a hidden location underneath Mournhold. So I spent last night going through that initial mission and then roaming around the Brass Fortress and surrounding area. I have not been disappointed in the least at the splendor of this area or to be truthful ANY of the DLC areas of Elder Scrolls Online. I mean the White Gold Tower/Imperial City area was a little sparse but it was also the very first DLC drop an they were trying to sort things out.
One of the questions I have been asked is if Elder Scrolls Online is still active. This is just a random snapshot of people coming and gone from the main portal in the Brass Fortress area of the Clockwork City. You can go to pretty much any city hub in the game and see a similar flow of people coming in and out of an area, and I’ve yet to be anywhere that was not a solo instance and not run into two or three other people completing the same content. I casually “grouped” with some other players the other night while doing a public dungeon which largely meant we were just following each other around and occasionally talking over say. The world feels alive and vibrant, which is pretty great.
This is hanging out waiting on a world boss to spawn and the folks who gathered in the meantime. Just like in any game you can see a lot of spell effects being fired off ahead of the spawn attempting to get a tag in. However unlike some games that mob seems to have enough health to be able to survive plenty of time for everyone who was paying any attention to get a tag in. From the moment the mob spawned in it was up for roughly a minute before we defeated it. This has pretty much been the case with most world encounters and there are a lot of times I roll up on a fight that has already started and am able to help out and feel like I actually did something rather than simply trying to get a single hit in.
Almost unbeknownst to me, the new champion system rolled in yesterday with a patch and as a result everything has been reset. Technically Zuu gave us a heads up Sunday night after I had already stopped playing for the evening so I was at least a little bit prepared. With the new champion system comes a lot of changes to the way champion points in general work. Most of the abilities now have a threshold of needing to spend a fixed amount of points before you see any benefit from it and some of them taking a massive dump of points to get abilities that have more impact. I think I more or less cobbled together something resembling what my previous build was and I am largely functional. I actually think the new version can burn through content a little faster, but struggles a bit with stamina regeneration.
The cool thing however is that right now and for the next two weeks, there is an event called Heroes Reforged that allows you to reset your Champion Points, Skills and Morphs and Attribute points for free as many times as you like until Monday March 22nd at 10 am. Side note, some of this will require you to travel to a Rededication Shrine and as such here is a link to the various locations. Essentially they are located in the original capitals of Mournhold, Wayrest, Elder Root and then in some of the expansion areas of Summerset, Vvardenfell and Elsweyr. The other big takeaway from last night is it seems like I am gaining Champion Points at a much faster clip than I did before now. Previously I would walk away with four to eight in a normal evening but last night I racked up fourteen in total. Talking with the guild there were folks who were feeling the same as well.
All in all I am still having a freaking blast. I’ve yet to really break into dungeons but I am hoping in the coming days I am going to start dipping my toes into those waters. Ultimately I am super focused on the story content and as such I have not really had room for dungeoneering as of yet. The story has been just compelling enough that I keep wanting to move it forward to see what comes next, but not so driven that there isn’t plenty of time for me to roam around aimlessly between beats.
The post The Clockwork City appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
