wildstar – Page 3

Player Housing Wishlist

August 19, 2018 by Grace

A few days ago Alunaria asked me in the comments what my ideal player housing in WoW would look like. I figured it would be more fun to answer with its own blog post, because I’m also curious how you folks would answer this question.

There’s a lot of things I love about WildStar’s housing, and would definitely steal those for my perfect player housing.

Full control over item placement. Great player housing must allow for player creativity. For me that means lots of cool housing decor, and the ability to move it, rotate it, and scale it in any way I want. “Hook” systems are frustrating. Let me place all my decor freely.
Multiple ways to acquire decor. WildStar’s decor can be crafted, earned through repeatable activities, dropped from mobs, and gained through quests. Decor should drop in pretty much every type of player content so there are always new items to discover or chase.
Some pre-built set pieces can be nice. WildStar gives you choices for when you didn’t feel like building your own buildings from scratch. Having some modular pieces like pre-built houses is great for people who want housing but don’t want to micro manage every inch of their space.
A reason to go back there. Like WoW’s garrisons, WildStar lets you earn some resources through your house. Unlike garrisons, the amount of resources never completely removed the need for gathering in the world. Also WildStar lets you choose other useful things for your plot, like portals to zones you like, or mini-dungeons you can run for fashion or more housing decor. No matter what, there should be some benefit to having a house.
Social controls and social events. I love that WildStar lets you choose who can enter your house, and what they can do there. For example, you can let your friends harvest your resources, and you can set it so you split then so you both get a benefit when they visit. I would also steal WildStar’s use of housing during seasonal events. Visiting different housing plots to trick-or-treat at Halloween is something every game should do!
Housing should be accessible. You don’t have to be anywhere near the end game to unlock housing in WildStar, and it doesn’t cost very much to get started. I know WoW loves to add features specifically for new expansions at the level cap, but housing should be something like pet battles, that everyone can hop into right away. Save some fancy decor until higher levels if you have to, but at least let folks get their foot in the door early.

There’s also some housing ideas I like that aren’t stolen directly from WildStar

The ability to have both guild housing and player housing. This one is basically taken from FFXIV. Have a guild space that also lets players have a small personal section in it. This way folks who don’t want to mess with housing can still have a cool place to hang out for RP and guild events.
Dynamic neighborhoods. This is my dream feature. I’ve got no idea how to make the tech work, but what I would like is something like FFXIV’s housing districts, but without the crazy prices and housing scarcity that is so annoying in that game. I’d like an instanced zone with 20 – 50 houses set up in a reasonable neighborhood that you can wander around. Unlike FFXIV, all the plots would be the same size, and you’d just pay to upgrade your house or the number of items you can place on your plot. Your neighbors would be semi-permanent, but to keep it feeling lively if someone hasn’t logged in for 60 days someone active or new would get moved into their spot. Maybe you could bypass this for people on your friends list, or in your guild. And if your neighborhood is feeling lonely you could request a new spot near a friend. You would never lose your house from inactivity, and people wouldn’t have to wait for someone to move out to find a plot. You’d just end up with a new neighborhood if you’ve been gone for a while.
Housing districts in lots of different zones. Don’t just give us one size fits all housing. I want to spent hours agonizing over whether I want a fancy apartment in Suramar, a peaceful treehouse in Moonglade, or an underwater grotto in Vashj’ir. There should be lots of different housing districts to fit lots of different player tastes.
A choice to link alt housing. I have lots of characters, but not a lot of time and energy to make an awesome house for each of them. Let me choose if I want to let them share a house. Maybe my main wants to have her own big fancy place with all her raid decor, but everybody else could share one cool house instead of each having a mostly empty space.

Most importantly, I would want assurance from Blizzard that if they add proper player housing they aren’t going to abandon it at the start of the next expansion. Garrisons and Order Halls are neat, but it was sad to leave them behind as soon as the next new thing arrived. If they want players to get invested in housing and be creative, the players have to trust that all their hard work isn’t going to get swept away.

Expedition Buddy: Quiet Downs

August 4, 2018 by Grace

Note: This post was originally published on the now-defunct Wildstar-Core. Although it will be a while until Shade’s Eve starts back up again, I wanted to archive this here for posterity.

Quiet Downs is the Shade’s Eve seasonal expedition. It is a great way to earn seasonal goodies like decor, costumes, and mount flair! To get the most enjoyment of the spooky ambiance, I’d recommend trying it once before reading this guide. Spoilers ahoy!

Spoooooooky!

What: Escape from a spooky forest, and discover the spooky mysteries of the town of Quiet Downs.

When: Only during Shade’s Eve, available at level 10.

Where: Thayd/Illium

Gold Timers: No overall timer, but there is a 5 minute timer to find the fountain in the first section.

Expedition Buddy Says: This expedition has 3 major sections. First, you need to escape the woods, then investigate the town, and finally wreck up an evil lair. Let’s get started!

If you are doing this for the daily quest you currently need to enter through the portal in Thayd/Illium for it to count. Otherwise you can use the group finder to queue like any other expedition. After the cutscene, you will spawn in a very dark wood. There are multiple different spawn locations, which are chosen randomly. If you enter with a group you will likely all spawn in different places and have to find each other. Your goal is to make it to the fountain, which is roughly in the center of the map. To make it extra difficult, your minimap works but doesn’t highlight the fountain, and pressing “m” to bring up the full map will show your location but not any of the details of the terrain.

This dark ominous path actually leads directly out of the woods

This is the part where you’d probably like me to tell you exactly how to find that fountain, but since the starting locations are always changing and everything is super dark that’s very difficult! I will tell you that you are aiming for the center of the map, and that the fastest path is often slightly hidden or small. The fountain is also slightly higher up than the starting points, so keep an eye out for changes in elevation. There are a few places where the “correct” path might involve a switchback up a small hill. If you start running into bear traps you’re getting close! It will probably take you a couple runs to learn the maze, and that’s ok! The other helpful thing is that after the 5 minute timer expires, the Angel will start helping you. Just follow the big glowing will-o-the-wisps and they’ll lead you to your destination.

Your flashlight, Anti-shadeling flare, and signal beacon

You’ll also lose access to your normal abilities for this section. Instead, you have 3 new ones, a flashlight, a small anti-shadeling flare, and a signal flare/beacon. The flashlight is your best friend. It will illuminate a small region in front of you and help you avoid the many many traps and dangerous plants on the ground. It will only last for 20 seconds, and then you’ll be stuck in 5 seconds of darkness waiting for it to recharge. The flare will stun shadelings and buy you time to escape from them (more on this in a moment). The signal beacon places a large pillar of light that in theory should help your companions find you. In practice it is still pretty difficult to see from a distance.

Shadelings are jerks.

Shadelings patrol the darkness, and you need to avoid them as best you can. If they catch up to you they’ll turn you into a shadeling too, and you’ll need to use your one ability to attack one of the ghostly humans wandering the woods. Placing an anti-shadeling flare will stun them, but use them wisely since you only get two. Yes, there are more boxes of supplies scattered about, but they are generally not worth the time to open versus just getting the heck out of the woods.

Mayor Goodthorpe. He’s a very bad man.

Once you make it to the fountain, you’ll get your normal abilities back and the rest of the instance is much more normal. Talk to the mayor and two other citizens of the town, and then you’ll be presented with a choice. You can either help the villagers prepare for their “celebration” or you can help Eva Courtly investigate the town. Your choice determines your tasks in this section of the instance. In order to get the achievement for killing all the villagers you will need to do both, and specifically you’ll need to get the attention of all of the patrolling villagers in the “Investigation” pathway.

Your four potential “guests of honor”

The objectives of both pathways are very clearly marked on your map. As you near the end of this section you’ll have to fight some townsfolk and also the Mayor for the “Helpful” pathway. Once that’s done you’ll be heading down into the underground bunker at the northwest edge of town for the final portion of this expedition.

The last phase of the instance is a straight up dungeon crawl. You need to kill 22 cultists, and have optional tasks to kill the 3 plaguebearers and destroy their equipment. If you’re lower level or undergeared, be sure to pull carefully. The groups of cultists can spawn in slightly different locations and it can be a bit easy to catch too many of them at once. Bringing lots of interrupts is definitely helpful too. If you are alone or with only one friend they will not have interrupt armor which makes things simpler.

Stay away from those bubbling pools of green goo.

You may notice bubbling green puddles on the ground. These will spawn shadelings if you get too close. Most of them can be avoided if you are careful. There’s also plenty of lore to be found on your first time through, so be sure to check out all the hallways if you are interested in filling your lore log!

Jack Shade himself.

Once you’ve completed your objectives, it is time to enter the morgue and finally face down “Jack Shade”. The fight has 3 phases, with bits of dialog in between. If you manage to interrupt most of his abilities the fight is nice and easy. If not, fortunately the Angel will sometimes turn his spells against him and help heal you. After you kill him, he has one last trick in store for you. The whole underground lab is rigged to explode and spread the shades. You’ll have to run straight down the hallway as fast as you can while avoiding the clouds of disease spreading around. Once you reach the end the Angel helps you escape and you’re all done!

Differences between normal and vet: None! There’s currently only one version of this instance. If you’re below level 50, you will get scaled up based on the ilevel of your gear.

I love the epic feel of the plague tanks exploding around you as you run down this hallway!

Other Thoughts: This expedition is quite a lot of fun! While it is technically soloable even on lower level characters it can be difficult to do so. You are much better off grouping below 50. You can run the instance as many times as you like to keep earning goodie bags and shade silver. A gold run will earn you 50 shade silver (62 with the subscriber bonus). Even if you get turned into a shade, as long as you find your way out of the woods in the time limit you can still get gold. You’ll be riding that Shade’s Eve hoverboard around in no time!

Random Screenshots #4

March 7, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is one of those mornings when I am super thankful that I cobbled together the random screenshot tool. Last night I sort of failed at doing any measure of directed content. I tuned into Spiral’s stream as she continued to push forward into Final Fantasy V and spent most of the night alt tabbing between twitch and Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been on this mission to make sure that I complete the Ixal quests each day, and they take significantly longer than your average quest. In truth the bulk of the slowdown is all of the swapping back and forth between classes and having to craft items over and over until I get X number of high quality baubles for the turn in. Sometimes I just get unlucky, and the higher crafting gets the harder this seems to be. So while I might only need 4 items for the turn in… I might end up with a stack of 15 normal quality items that I had to craft to get those four HQs. Needless to say when I finally finished up with the quests it was around 9 pm last night… and I was feeling largely done with Final Fantasy XIV for the night. So instead I popped into the bedroom where I have my Wii U connected and played some more Zelda. It is growing on me, but I still find a lot about the game frustrating, or at least non-intuitive. As a result I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, and definitely no screenshots so… once again I crawl back into the vault and do a random sort.

Random Screenshots #4 — Chua Starting Area – Wildstar

While I may have issues with Wildstar… it will always be a gorgeous game. This is I believe a screenshot from the tail end of Crimson Isle, the Chua/Draken starting zone. There are times I miss my little Chua, and I went so far as to create a new one awhile back as a Warrior. The problem is the game of Wildstar itself just never quite clicks. There is just too much going on visually for me, and the style of targeted directional abilities with hotbar combat never seems to feel as good as I think they hoped it would. I feel like the game would feel a lot better on a console where you can bind your main attacks to the triggers and bumpers and control movement and aiming with both analog sticks. In theory you could emulate this… but keyboard to controller emulators never quite work as flawlessly as if you set the controls up for that purpose out of the box. Just like running a console with a mouse and keyboard… you are trying to fake out the hardware while using out another control scheme under the hood.

Funny thing that I get a World of Warcraft image in this search because I really have not talked about the game lately much. I am admittedly on a bit of a break right now, and in part I am simply just not forcing myself to log in when I don’t really want to. For three or four weeks the real world got in the way of my raiding… and then I just got out of the habit of logging in regularly. As it stands I have this meeting on Wednesdays that usually lets out about 6pm which leaves me an hour to get home.. find food and log into the game for the raid which is simply too rushed for my tastes. So for the moment I am on extended leave, until the spirit drives me to start playing again. This image is from me finding the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker… aka the Protection Warrior alternate appearance. This is probably the moment in Legion when I was playing the most intently, and every single day I made a trek out here to see if the shield was up. The day it finally was… I took lots of screenshots and I so happily used this appearance until I got something newer unlocked recently. The Legion launch and the first few patch cycles will always be a happy memory… even if I have sort of fallen out of the habit of playing the game.

Another happy moment in a game… at the end of a long grind is when I finally got Turquoise on my Chocobo in Final Fantasy XIV. For those who are unfamiliar… your base Chocobo can be dyed through an insane process of feeding the chocobo various fruits. What makes the process maddening is that one set of fruit alters the RGB values… and another set of fruit seemed to instead alter CMYK. When we first started doing this it was largely trial and error before the calculators came out… and even when they existed it never really was an exact science. At the time we were doing this… the fruit for dyeing was prohibitively expensive. While we were trying to keep an active stock of seeds growing in the garden… it never quite met up with the desires. If you find yourself interested in this process, check out this calculator because it seems to be the best. I remember towards the end I teetered back and forth between three colors until it finally clicked and gave me the Turquoise that I was hunting for. All of this… was simply to make sure that it matched my Leviathan Barding.

Random Screenshots #3

February 23, 2017 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about. Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm… when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30. Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch. As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3. That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching. It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show… be prepared for some disturbing content. That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode. Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about. I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar. I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners. Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is. The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion. For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt. Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable… but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked. Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me… where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home. I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams. This is one of those games that I root hard for… just from a distance.

We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do… but still don’t end up playing that often. I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype. I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized. I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed. I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content… let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne. I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point… they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing. I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing. This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World. To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character. To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create. However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it. Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on. When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed. I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long… and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it. This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp. If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender… you wind up with Blood Dragon. If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory. It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry… nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.