MMORPG – Page 253

Not First Rodeo

March 8, 2016 by Belghast

The Waiting Game

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country. Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock. My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us. It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle. The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play. I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo. To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy. My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam… which was a process that took over twenty minutes. I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight. The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division. My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around. After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me. It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing. Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit. That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty. This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead… which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp. The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around. This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation. I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay. If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light. Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it. I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley. The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great. At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them. I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions. I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”. While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again… I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game. It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well. Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us. Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two. I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error. As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard. It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile. My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction. In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines… this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option. During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window. It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable. Dear UbiSoft… never do this again… in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu. I mean I get what they are going for… wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game… but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta. So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan. I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue. I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon. The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available. I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land. If the servers stay stable… like will be golden. I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night. However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.

Hellfire Assault

March 3, 2016 by Belghast

Weekends are Bad

One strong constant in my life is that weekends are bad for me when it comes to making plans. This is counter-intuitive since for MOST of the living world… weekends are the time they can regularly commit to doing stuff. The truth is that weekends are really the only time that my wife and I are both together and pointed in the same direction for any lengthy period of time. During the week she has a mixture of responsibilities, commitments, and spur of the moment activities that often times keep her from getting home until eight or nine in the evening. Whereas I tend to have a fairly predictable schedule, that gets me home by 5 pm CST most nights. This means that the only time we actually get to do anything as a couple is on the weekends, and as a result I have tried really hard to be pretty sparse with committing myself to things that occur on Saturday or Sunday. I am already breaking that rule heavily with the recording of AggroChat Saturday nights… but generally speaking by the time our 9pm CST start time rolls around we are home anyway. There however have been a long list of activities that have happened on Sunday and Saturday afternoons that I have flaked like mad on. There was the whole pen and paper role-playing game that happened at 2pm CST, that by some freak occurrence I managed to make four or so of… before life caught up with me and I started being unavailable. Then similarly I thought “Sunday is TV Night” and started trying to raid with my friends Horde side… only to find that I am just barely making it into my chair some nights before Walking Dead. As it gets nicer outside… we push back our range of activity further… so pretty much the entire summer months are a no-go for planned activities on the weekend.

As a result I thought I was pretty much done raiding in World of Warcraft at least until Legion hits. Then my good friend Carth decided to pull together a casual raid group and after everyone voted on the best day of the week… I lucked out and it landed on Wednesday nights. This is pretty much the perfect raid night for me, given that my wife is already committed to church that evening and I can pretty much do whatever I want to do without causing a major imposition. Last night was the first official outing, and we planned on raiding from 7:30 pm cst to 10 pm cst but wound up going a little over due to the overall successes of the group. We absolutely had a few “ringer” dps in the mix, but even accounting for that… I think we did really well. For a bit we would end up having to pug some people… but we managed to pull together a 10+ player team. The roster was super comfortable and included so many long time friends: Carthuun (on Aalis), Tick (on Taavish), Giulietta, Kylana, Edana (@catinglasses), Jasmynne (Carth’s Wife), Bleddwen (@KerynWeylan)…. with myself and Damai tanking and a mixture of ringers that cycled through for which I don’t know all of the mains from Praetorian Guard.

Significant Progress

We did significantly better than I expected on our first outing. We managed to clear up to Iskar in a single evening, and the only boss we really struggled a bit at was Kilrogg. That is pretty much the first fight where the mechanics really start to matter, and as a result it took us two attempts for folks to get the whole visions thing down solidly. On the second go however everything seemed to just work like plan. It was a bit messy at the end, but any kill you walk away from with a victory is a good kill in my book. The awesome thing about all of this as well is that we got a lot of gear for people who needed it. Bleddwen one of the two healers… that was quite literally drafted last night on the spot… walked away with I believe eight pieces of gear. Our other healer walked away with three pieces, but one of those was a tier set piece. I managed to pick up my first piece of tier gear as well, and I am hoping next go round Kormrok will be nice and drop the Warrior piece so I can throw on that two piece bonus. As much as I loved raiding with my Horde side family, I have to say it felt good to be Belghast again in a raid. I mean I have done Gladiator dps for awhile now, and it is really fun… but what I mean is Belghast the tank. It kinda felt good to go back to my roots with the character that was my main through most of those really memorable fights.

It doesn’t hurt that the folks that we raided with… are for the most part the folks I play all of these games with. The two healers we had… have healed me many times in Final Fantasy XIV so it felt natural to see that relationship shift to World of Warcraft. The awesome thing about this as well is that it seems like we have two tanks and two healers locked down solidly. That means we probably need a shift healer and potentially a shift tank to fill in the gap, but otherwise we have a really solid team. There is a certain amount of learning mechanics on the fights, like Iskar… but I forsee us being able to start Heroic before too long. It would be amazing if we could push through it as well and get folks some Moose loving. In any case it was a nice, relaxing and casual raid night, with the folks I probably would have been hanging out with anyways. The only gotcha seemed to be that we were having trouble with our normal Teamspeak server, and as a result are probably going to be migrating to Discord for next week. I had been wanting to give Discord a real world trial, and this seems as good as any time. I love the concept, and I just wish that it were a slack plugin rather than a completely separate application. For text chat purposes, I still like Slack and their notification system just works better… however for voice… at least based on testing last night Discord is seeming to be the new way to go.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Last night was another night that was all over the place. Firstly I decided to reinstall Forge.gg and give it another chance. I have so many mixed emotions about this service, I like the concept that I can grab short clips at the end of my gaming session. I dislike the fact that I can ONLY grab short clips, which are generally too short to show a boss fight for example. I like the always on nature, and that it can just run in the background without me feeling like I need to be entertaining. However I ran into some issues last night where apparently even though I had push to talk set… it was still actively picking up my microphone the entire time as you can see in the above clip. So you get a snippet of a conversation between my wife and I about something I don’t even remember. I like the idea of streaming but I don’t always want to be actively interacting, and forge is this great middle ground. Ultimately I wound up muting my microphone at a system level just to make sure that it was not picking up. I am hoping this is just a bug in the current client, and I will crawl the site to see if I can find out why this was happening.

The other gotcha it seems is that it did not pick up and start recording Elder Scrolls Online. I spent the first part of the evening doing garrison dailies and doing at least one Tanaan objective in World of Warcraft and it recorded all of that perfectly. However as soon as I swapped into ESO, it never came up with the forge icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen letting me know it is recording. I will say that the really really nice thing about the client is sometime in between my last attempt at using the service and this one… it seems to work nicer with Fraps because there is no way I am giving up that just to use the service. I am too used to having a common and centralized screenshot tool for all of the games I play. It is an absolute necessity that I have a fresh source of new screenshots for this blog, and I hate having to try and find the screenshot directory for each individual game. So instead I tend to unbind the screenshot key if it is allowed and just use Fraps for everything. It was awesome last night that I was able to use fraps just fine while still recording on forge…. at least when it came to World of Warcraft. I am going to be a sad panda if that ends up being the issue with it recording Elder Scrolls Online.

Return to Greenshade

The bulk of my time last night was spent wandering around Greenshade in the Elder Scrolls Online. Generally speaking I tend to play this game by wandering aimlessly from objective to objective, but last night I actually seemed to move through the zone with a purpose. That purpose being ingratiating myself to the Court of the Wilderking, a forest spirit that controls the Valenwood and that the local Bosmer worship as a God King. As part of trying to quell the rebellion and steal forces away from the Veiled Heritance, my mission was simple… get the support of the Wilderking to get the support of the local forces…. thus ending the rebellion. I of course did a bunch of other stuff along the way, and I am not entirely complete with the main story sequence… but I am having a blast. I got sidetracked in helping a friend level in World of Warcraft, and then again by the Love is in the Air event…. and finally I am settling back into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. Granted currently I will probably continue to hop games like mad because there is just so damned much stuff that I want to be playing. In Elder Scrolls I have yet to see any of the Imperial City content, or Orsinium… and they are just about to release the Thieves Guild as well. So much catching up to do… but at the same time I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it because I am not playing the game at a serious end game focused level.

The other big happening of the night is that I finally dinged Veteran Rank 4, allowing me access to the next tier of crafted gear. I was doing awesome…. until I screwed up and rushed to get my shield made and forgot to go to the set crafting area. Originally I was planning on having 5 piece Alessia’s Bulwark, and 4 piece Ashen Grip… except I am now sitting at 3 pieces in that set because I got sidetracked and ended up making a non-set shield. Unfortunately I am completely out of the right kind of wood so I will need to do some more adventuring before I can finish things out. For the time being I have opted to abandon my costume and go with the actual armor look because I dig the Imperial armor look. I will probably always favor the Dunmer sword type, though recently I did enjoy using an axe for a bit. The game looks amazing on the laptop, and I am so damned happy with how well everything is performing to be honest. It does get a little hot but then again what gaming laptop doesn’t. My previous one had a SLI graphics card configuration so had insanely hot air venting out of both sides of the laptop. At least this setup isn’t continuously baking my mouse hand. I just need to sort out why exactly Forge was not recording the game.

The Division

Also looming on the near horizon is the launch of The Division. At this point it is absolutely certain that I will be playing it on the PC, at least at first. When the price comes down a little I will probably also pick it up for the PS4 so that I have access to it for any of the friends that happen to be playing there. For the last few days since the end of the beta I have trying to sort out how best to organize folks for the upcoming launch. The game itself does not really have guilds or clans or any structure like that…. at least that I saw in the two betas I have been part of. So as a result this is going to make getting stuff going a little more difficult than in other games. However my friend Sigtric, the man who coined the hashtag #BelEffect is firing up a Discord group and attempting to get it to be the official/unofficial chat server for the game. If you are going to be playing I highly suggest you pop by and join the “Gone Rogue” community. There is a shared general chat and breakout channels for PC, PS4, and Xbox One to make organizing things a little easier. I honestly wish I had something like this for Destiny. Discord is one of those things that is growing on me, and while I still find Slack easier to use… there is a point in the near future where I could see abandoning traditional voice servers and moving to Discord entirely.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast