Month: March 2016

And now back to The Elder Scrolls Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

No sooner had a snuggled down into the warm embrace of Black Desert Online than my friends got pumped for The Elder Scrolls Online. Well hell, I’m down with that, I love TESO! But one small fly in the ointment…they all wanted to play on Xbox One and I play on PS4.

Once more into the breach! Because I am crazy, I already owned the game on XBox One, but I took advantage of a sale on Crowns to pick up the new Thieves Guild expansion, as well as the older Orsinium expansion.

My only character on XB1 was a level 7 dude that was just a random mash-up of race, class and stat points. My goal now was to get to grouping level (say 12+) ASAP and ideally to catch up with Talyn who was in his low 20s. I decided to roll a Daggerfall Alliance character since I’m nost familiar with that faction, and followed one of Deltia Gaming’s builds (a stamina templar).

At first I felt a slight bit of resentment for “having” to start all over to play with these folks but y’know, I just love TESO and before long I was in love with my new character and enjoying myself all over again. It didn’t hurt that the Xbox One community seems very healthy; there were people all over the place.

One of my favorite aspects of TESO is that it is so group-friendly, and I mean group, not Group. In other words, there’s no kill stealing or anything, so you can and often do find yourself working with another player without any formal announcement that you’re going to do so. That happened to me several times over the weekend when I found I was working on the same questline (apparently) with another player and we just started traveling together. I started hanging back and throwing heals (not that my spec is a dedicated healer) and DOTs and I let the other player(s) lead the charge while I kept them from worrying about their health levels. After some variable amount of time we just drifted in different directions. Never exchanged a word.

That’s my kind of multiplayer gaming, honestly. Sometimes someone will cheer or something (using the emote system) but that’s about it for communication. TESO has proximity voice chat on consoles (no text chat yet) but I find people rarely use it out exploring and mostly just use it to be annoying in towns.

Since I was being pretty determined about leveling I wasn’t constantly over-level for the areas I was in (something that often happens in the game thanks to me roaming around gather crafting materials and stuff) so some of the open world mini-bosses were a real challenge. After dying I’d just hang out and wait for another player or two to come along and I never had to wait long. Again, working together without entering in a Grouping contract. I love it.

Of course in spite of promises to myself not to do so, I started crafting because I am incapable of running past mats without gathering them, or running past a crafting station without poking it.

Anyway it was a good weekend and I ended up somewhere in level 14. We’re tentatively doing our first dungeon next Monday so I’m comfortably prepared for a level 12 dungeon, but it’ll be nice to hit 15 and get the 2nd weapon slot open (bow and dual wield for me).

I haven’t forgotten BDO but it’ll be there when I’m ready for it. That’s one of the joys of subscription-free MMO gaming. You can play when you want without feeling like you’ve wasted your cash. So I’ll continue to be an MMO vagabond and go wherever the winds blow me.

Black Desert Online Day 2: Stuff I’ve learned

Posted on by Nimgimli

I promise I’m not going to write boring blog posts about Black Desert Online every day, but I did want to share some stuff I learned in case any other newbies stumble onto my blog.

1) Thanks to a friend of Stargrace I learned how to disable those annoying ‘banner’ announcements. In settings -> game if you scroll down there’s a big swath of checkboxes for Notifications. These are all “opt-out”; in other words you check the ones you DON’T want to see. I turned off most of them and now instead of seeing constant adverts for in-game stuff I don’t care about, I can see Black Desert Online’s beautiful world.

2) I finally noticed the “Edit UI” option in the main menu. In my defense it doesn’t seem to be there when you’re very low level, but I’m sure I’ve overlooked it a few times. That let me hide that odd palette of suggested key strokes that floats around the middle of the screen.

3) I took the time to write down controller button bindings because they are non-traditional (and yet work well). So for example one of the face buttons is bound to Left Mouse Button, but the left trigger is bound to Right Mouse Button. The right trigger is bound to Shift. Pushing in the left analog stick is the same as hitting the frequently used R key, while pushing in the right stick is Q. And so on. So my Heavy Attack that is performed by pushing both mouse buttons is X+L2 (on an Xbox controller) while I have some kind of shield charge that is Shift-Q which winds up being R2+Right Thumb Depress. It sounds odd but it all works pretty well since the timing isn’t super-precise.

Once I had these bindings written down so I could glance at them to refresh my memory, combat with a controller got really fun. For me, who is primarily a console gamer, fighting in BDO with mouse and keyboard felt like a random button-pressing activity and I didn’t care for it. But fighting with a controller, dancing around enemies and unleashing devastating (well, for level 10) attacks, is super fun.

Next I need to write down my skills and the combos needed to activate them. I still think they throw too many skills at you too quickly and I know I have some I just never use.

At one point last night (and I only actually played for about an hour) I was down to a single quest given to me by the evil black cloud (who has grown an alarming set of teeth) that had me fighting a level 15 mob with a group. I was level 11 and me+groups=avoid at all costs so instead of following the bread crumbs to my inevitable death, I set that quest aside and just wandered around practicing combat. Eventually I wandered into a village and all kinds of things opened up. I now have quests that will teach me about gathering and crafting, I got some storage space, and a bunch of other things I need to play around with next time I’m in game. I also spent my first Contribution Point unlocking (is that what you call it?) a farm that I recognized the name of from reading my friends’ posts. I guess I can grow some taters there.

(I have real problems with place-names in this game for some reason. The first two villages are, I think, Olvia and Velia and for some reason my brain constantly confuses them. So I can’t recall which one I was in, but there was a dock there and I assume lots of AFK fisherfolk.)

So things are coming along. I’m really happy that I tried combat with the controller. It changed the combat system from “Meh” to “OMG SO FUN!” for me. Now I feel like I just want to go hit things with my sword instead of doing all the crafting and farming that I initially signed up for!

Actually playing Black Desert Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

After my self-inflicted morning of pain trying to get Black Desert Online to run via streaming to the Steam Link, I finally got to play the game yesterday afternoon and evening. What a feeling of d�j� vu I had! Not because BDO is similar to other games, but because my initial reaction was just like that of so many other bloggers. I feel like I could steal someone else’s Day 1 post and paste it here and it would reflect my experience almost perfectly.

I was overwhelmed and kind of confused. The UI was an abstract painting done with letters and symbols splattered across my screen. The combat system confused me (still confuses me) but so far seems redundant anyway since you can just spam attacks and kill early game enemies. There was an evil cloud bossing me around making me feel like I was playing the worst kind of theme park MMO (y’know the kind of game where you never have to make a decision on your own) but it was dragging me through maps strewn with icons that have to mean something to someone.

Honestly if BDO was truly free-to-play AND I hadn’t read a lot of blog posts about it, I might’ve just given up on it. But everyone is now writing about quest logs stuffed full of things to do, and lots and lots of systems that completely ignore quests. I know this stuff is out there but I guess I just haven’t gotten to it yet. I’m only level 10-ish, and you go from level 1 to level 5 in your first 10 minutes or so of playing.

My new character is a warrior, which means (for now at least) sword and board. He’s learned a bunch of combat skills and as best I can figure, some of them get bound to hot keys and others are bound to key-combos. I say ‘as best I figure’ because I haven’t used most of them. Even his most basic attacks are bombastic spectacles of flames and sparks, and early game enemies are tiny woodland creatures. Usually I can’t see them or their health bars and I often keep attacking long after they are dead. Then I loot their corpses, one by one, hitting R to open the corpse and R again to take what is in it. No area loot feels so old-school. It’s like I’m playing BDO on my abacus!

My initial feeling is that combat looks badass but feels pretty trivial, though again, I’m level 10, and anyway I have a zillion MMOs with good combat. I didn’t come to BDO to fight things, I came to become a capitalist or something. I came for the crafting/strategic parts of the game that I know will show up before too long. Combat felt a lot more fun using a controller than the keyboard and I’m glad I have that option.

I did stick a toe into the Amity system since I was kind of at a loss as to what else to do when I got done button-mashing my way through beetles, foxes, wolves and imps. The Amity system is kind of like a CCG only the ‘cards’ are bits of knowledge you find through exploring and talking to people. It seems like something that will be quietly fun once I get a good collection of knowledge to work with.

I also need to use a Contribution Point (which I think came from questing) to unlock a Node. I’ve read a lot about Nodes but for some reason I can’t figure out how/where to go to unlock one. I thought I’d open the map and do it from there but the map intimidates the heck out of me. I need to come to grips with the iconography of it because aside from the icons of people on it, nothing makes a lot of sense to me.

One of my problems is I have no sense of place. You initially spawn into the game in a tiny village (I think it’s tiny), but the tutorial system has you almost immediately ‘auto-run’ to a quest. Surprisingly that quest takes you to the next town/hub/place and since I auto-ran to it I feel a little bit adrift. It’s like the difference between driving to a new place and taking a cab there. In the cab you’re just kind of idly looking out the window and not really paying attention to where you are. There were people in that spawn-in village so I guess at some point I should go back there, if I can figure out where it is. I didn’t take note of the name of the place but I think it’s NW of where I am now (the Western Gate something).

Another goal is figuring out how to turn off the ‘banners’ that pop up across the top of the screen telling me that two guilds I’ve never heard of have gone to war somewhere, or that something is for sale on a market I have no access to, and even more importantly find a way to turn off the random key prompts that constantly tell me I can use Q to sit down (as I’m running through a forest) or that CTRL switches between mouse cursor and movement (something you pretty much have to learn in the first 2 minutes of playing).

Anyway, there’s time. Now that I plunked down my $30 I can play forever without spending another dime if I don’t want to. Coming into it I knew BDO wasn’t going to be a game I mastered in the first day (or the first week or month, for that matter).

Oh! I almost forgot two super-important (to me) details. First, aside from gold spammers, chat has been decent. Not that I pay a lot of attention to it, but when I have glanced at it what I haven’t seen is people flaming each other over nothing. Second when you encounter another player there’s an option called “Intro” or something like that. I peeked at a few of these and twice what I found was an invitation to role-play! That delighted me. Not that I’m much of a role-player myself, but I’m something of a role-play fanboy. I’ll happily skulk around the periphery of an RP session just to hear what folks come up with. Crikey I’d almost forgotten roleplaying existed in MMORPGs, so I was really happy to see that.

This map hurts my brain!
This map hurts my brain!

Black Desert Online and Steam In-Home Streaming

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last week I ranted about how I wished I could play Black Desert Online on my TV in the living room. Then a few evenings ago I stumbled on a Reddit post about getting the game running through Steam and then using In-Home Streaming to pipe it elsewhere.

And so my willpower crumbled. Yesterday I purchased a copy of Black Desert Online. So far I’ve mostly had headaches. First I couldn’t get the store to work in Chrome. Switched browsers and bought the game. Then I started patching and left for the afternoon, and the patcher crapped out about 3 seconds after I walked away from the system, as far as I could tell. It was late last night by the time I got a chance to play. I built a Berserker who looked rough but OK in the character creator, but stumbled around like a muppet in game. So I deleted him, only to find out it takes a DAY to delete a character. He’ll finally be gone sometime after midnight tonight.

This morning I created a new character (at least they give us 4 slots) and got him logged in, then I set to work getting the game running through Steam following the steps in that link above. Unfortunately Step 2, “Make sure you enable the Steam Overlay. This is required to recognize the controller.” isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. I bounced around a bunch of links before I found a system that worked for me, outlined in another reddit post.

So at that point I could launch BDO from Steam, open the Steam overlay and close it again, and everything seemed peachy. Going back to reddit post #1 I proceeded to the final step. I started streaming from the Steam Link. I’d already attached a bluetooth keyboard, wireless mouse and a PS4 controller so I was set for controls. I minimized Big Picture and alt-tabbed over to BDO and the game was running. I could move around as expected but… I had no audio.

Three hours later and about 40 trips up and down the stairs, I still have no audio. I’ve found posts where people claim they don’t even really use Steam. They start the stream, minimize Steam and just launch BDO normally. That works for me too but still no sound. Basically Steam refuses to transmit sound to BDO or the desktop or, I suspect, any non-Steam game.

[Update: I should point out that when I stream bona-fide Steam games, sound works perfectly. It just seems to be when I get outside of the Steam ecosystem that I have problems.]

So I’m stumped. I’ve found plenty of posts from people who say that they have this working in a number of ways but I just can’t get it to work. When the stream starts, Steam mutes sound on the host computer and is supposed to pipe it to the client. It does do the mute thing, and I’ve even tried unmuting sound on the host but it doesn’t help. I just want a straight pipe to the Steam Link; I don’t care if audio continues to play on the host.

I figure there’s a setting somewhere that I’m not finding but like I said… 3 hours of trying different things. Life is too short. I guess I just flushed $30 down the toilet, at least until someone smarter than me comes up with a solution.

Anyone have any experience with this? So very frustrating (though in fairness I’m trying to do something not officially supported by Steam or BDO).

[SOLVED: OK this is embarrassing. I discovered the problem and it was all me. I mentioned I hooked up a wireless mouse to the Steam Link. When I did that, I picked the Link up to plug in the wireless dongle for the mouse, and I guess I jarred the HDMI cable loose. It FINALLY dawned on me, after hours of messing around, that the Link wasn’t making any clicks or anything while I was moving through menus, even before I connected to the host PC. Which finally led me to think about why it was totally silent and finally went to what should’ve been Step 1: check the cable connections.

Boy am I embarrassed but at least it is working!]

A couple of nights with Playstation Vue

Posted on by Nimgimli

Earlier this week Sony opened up Playstation Vue, its streaming TV service, to everyone in the US. This isn’t quite the full bundle that they offer in a few select markets (where they offer live network TV) but it’s also cheaper, starting at $30/month for 55+ channels (there are also $35 & $45 plans offering 70+ and 100+ channels, respectively). You can access Playstation Vue through a PS3 or PS4, an iPad or iPhone, an Amazon Fire TV or Fire TV Stick, or through Chromecast from an iOS device. Sadly neglected are Android and Roku users, for now. Also it seems odd to support iPad and iPhone but not Apple TV. At least not yet.

In fact let’s keep on with the bad news first: what’s not offered on the service. Notable gaps include CBS, though I won’t blame Sony for this since CBS doesn’t seem to share their content anywhere except on their own CBS All Access service. ABC, NBC & FOX are available in “On Demand” form, meaning you can’t watch live. The CW seems to be missing, as is BBC America. Also at least some shows are held back from the big 3 On Demand channels. Notably I couldn’t find Marvel’s Agents of Shield on Vue.

Personally we were bummed about BBCA and the fact that Nat Geo Wild is only available on the most expensive tier, but otherwise we felt like the service covered most of what we watched. The mid-tier adds a ton of random sports channels that we’d never watch (ESPN and ESPN2 are included in the base $30 plan) while the highest price plan doesn’t add enough that we watch to make it worthwhile. You should definitely check the channel lineups for yourself though. (I found browsing the channels was much easier on my PS4 than on their kind of crummy website.)

When you first log into Vue you’ll be able to watch whatever is currently on across all of your channels (minus ABC, NBC and Fox), and on the PS4 at least you can pause live TV if you’re willing to devote a chunk of hard drive space to that feature. You’ll also have “On Demand” access to the most recent 5 or 6 episodes of many (possibly all) shows. It seems to offer whatever the last 5 aired episodes were, meaning you’ll get a random selection if a show is heavily repeated, like my Food Network favorite “Diners, Drive-thrus and Dives.” In most (possibly all) cases this On Demand content plays exactly as aired, complete with commercials that you can’t skip.

To be fair this is exactly the way On Demand works on my Time Warner Cable service. There too you can’t fast forward and there’s a limited number of episodes available for many shows. So it’s no worse than cable TV, but no better either.

Now here is where it gets strange. If you mark a show as something you like, it goes into a category called “My Shows.” These shows automatically get ‘recorded’ to a cloud DVR where they are kept for 28 days. When you watch a show from your ‘DVR’ you can fast-forward through ads. [I should emphasize that all these details can vary from channel to channel or even show to show; I’m just reporting what I’ve experienced in a few evenings.] In my opinion, this is the way to use Playstation Vue, with the caveat that the Fast Forward system isn’t as smooth as it is with a traditional DVR. For instance my TWC-provided DVR kind of ‘bounces back’ a few seconds when I stop fast forwarding. So I see the ads have ended, the show has resumed, I stop FFing and the DVR backs up a few seconds so I don’t miss any of the show. Vue’s Cloud DVR doesn’t have that kind of functionality and it feels a little laggy. Also the image is lower resolution for a couple of seconds when playback resumes.

I feel like I’m saying a lot of bad stuff about Vue but I’m fairly pleased with it, really. I’ve been talking about canceling cable for a long time, but was hesitant because we do enjoy watching TV and a lot of the shows we watch are on History, Discovery, Syfy, the Travel Channel and similar cable channels, all of which are on Vue. Network shows (barring CBS as always) we could catch on Hulu, particularly with its new “Ad Free” option which is SO worth the extra couple of bucks/month to me. I think a combination of Playstation Vue ($30) and Hulu w/o Ads ($12), coupled with an OTA antenna for football season, would pretty nicely replace cable TV, which is costing me something like $80/month for pretty no-frills service (and that price is only after calling them every year to bitch about pricing, which gets old). It’s hard to say exactly how much I pay for cable since it’s bundled with Internet service and the bill isn’t itemized, so I’m guessing a bit.

You can also stream Vue on several devices at once, so I could be upstairs watching one show and Angela could be downstairs watching another, without any additional cost (TWC charges per set-top box for anything but basic channels). And of course with both Vue and Hulu, it’s easy to stop/start the services anytime without any headaches. So maybe in summer when we’re outside all the time we could just cancel one or both for a few months. I hate the cable company almost as much for how hard they make doing anything as I do for their pricing.

You can get a 1 week trial to Playstation Vue, but it does require a credit card and if you forget to cancel they’ll bill you after that week. It won’t be right for everyone (we happen to own 2 PS3s, 1 PS4, 1 Fire TV, and 3 iPads so we have pretty good coverage for Vue!) but for us it seems like a pretty good fit and one more reason to cancel the cable TV service.

I curse you, Black Desert Online!

Posted on by Nimgimli

ALL my friends (OK, a few of my friends) are playing Black Desert Online, the new MMO from some company or other. I haven’t followed it much, wasn’t the least bit interested. Then they started talking about it.

And I’m intrigued. I hear about how complex it is, which interests me. That it’s Alt-Friendly and I love me some alts. That there are rewarding systems that go far beyond just combat. From the outside looking in, it seems to be the best ‘virtual world’ game available now if you want modern graphics. (And yeah, I like me some nice graphics.)

I held strong for a while because my friends tend to be very attracted to the new shiny. Blade & Soul was hot for maybe 10 days. Figured the same would be true with Black Desert Online. Plus there seems to be altogether too much excitement about AFK activities. The game literally plays itself I guess. That seems like an odd thing to be excited about but then, I haven’t experienced it.

But there seems to be so much to like about the game, and as a bonus it’s really pretty, at least in theory. I’m not sure how pretty it would be on my old machine, but it’s sure pretty on other peoples’ gaming rigs.

I came so close to caving and buying the $30 starter package (there’s no free lunch here, you have to buy something to get started).

But then I thought about spending hours sitting in front of my PC playing a game and I realized this was not the right move for me. I work from home. I sit in front of my ‘gaming PC’ for 40-50 hours a week working. Sitting here for another 20 just no longer sounds like fun. Most days once I ‘quit’ work for the day I walk out of the office and don’t return until the next morning.

Sadly I can’t even imagine a game as complex as Black Desert Online ever coming to consoles. So for now I guess Black Desert Online gets filed away with EVE Online; the kind of game I love to read about, but that I don’t really want to play. At least not until I get a kick-ass gaming laptop or some other way to play it in front of the big screen in the living room. Maybe it’ll come to Steam some day and I can play it via Steam In-Home Streaming….

My wishlist for The Division

Posted on by Nimgimli

Now that I am a complete and total expert at the game (that’s sarcasm, just to be perfectly clear) I decided it was time to let Massive know what they need to make their game even better. I have only one real gameplay item on my wishlist; the rest is about new content:

1) Give us the option to play in a more open world in what is now the PvE areas. I know I can matchmake, but when I’m roaming around solo it’d be great to just stumble on another agent and be able to work together to take on a mini-boss or something. I know this isn’t an MMO, and it certainly isn’t anything like Destiny despite a weird compulsion in the press to compare the two (which I think is based primarily on the fact that both games start with the letter D), but I do wish they would borrow this one feature from MMOs and Destiny. Of course they’d have to add some random tough content in the PvE areas to give these ad-hoc groups of players content that would challenge them.

We know they have the tech to do this since it’s exactly how the Dark Zone works, and the Dark Zone can be fun but it can also be stressful and some days you just want to chill and shoot baddies without worrying about someone stabbing you in the back. So expand the Dark Zone PvE mechanics to the whole world but leave the PvP in the DZ and I think the game would be even more compelling than it is now.

2) I hope we see the map expand over time. I’d love them to extend it south into Soho. Get it far enough south to encompass NYU and Washington Square and all the narrow streets around there and I think that area would have a unique feel as compared to the rest of the game.

3) When The Underground DLC comes out, I hope it isn’t limited to known public subway tunnels but that it extends into the semi-mythical labyrinth of forgotten tunnels. We know some of these exist for sure, but there have always been rumors of huge secret areas down there (if you remember the old TV show Beauty & the Beast, it capitalized on these rumors). If you’ve ever taken the LIRR into Manhattan you know how vast the underground area is and you see all these mysterious openings leading to who knows what? That could be really cool to explore.

So that’s my short list. In the intro to the game they flash a map of the world showing dollar flu outbreaks scattered all over the place, so I doubt The Division II will remain in NY, but I’d be happy to spend a long time in this particular city…

Day 1 of The Division

Posted on by Nimgimli

At long last, Tom Clancy’s The Division has launched and in spite of what some of the gaming blogs are saying, it was a fairly smooth launch. Let’s talk about the bad stuff first.

At midnight the Ubi servers struggled a bit. Folks were getting random connection errors trying to get in, but a tad of persistence would see you through. At worst I had to try 3 times to log in. By Tuesday instead of getting an error I was being put into a short queue, so they either implemented that or fixed something to help with the initial rush of players.

A bigger problem was that they never beta-tested the intro and so didn’t notice an easy griefing technique. Early on you have to go into a small office and when you come out you’re in a social space. Grief issue #1 is that people would stand in front of the door out of that office, preventing you from getting out (avatars are solid in the social spaces). The solution to that problem was sprinting…eventually you’ll pass through another character if you’re in a sprint. The next step is to sign into a laptop on a desk. Again, it’s easy to disrupt everyone’s fun by standing right in front of that laptop. You need to be in front of it to use it so 1 or 2 people can cause this:

The solution here is to log out and log back in and hope you log back into an asshat-free instance. Hopefully this issue will be patched very soon. If the intro area had been in the beta I’m sure this would’ve been caught.

For me at least, those were the only two issues. I jumped back and forth between playing on the Xbox One and the PS4. I prefer the game on PS4; it just feels crisper somehow. I’m not sure if the framerate is a little higher or that the controller is tighter or what, but I feel like I play better on PS4 (another example of how The Division isn’t a shooter…I’m better at shooters on Xbox). I also like the gimmick of having radio chatter coming from the PS4’s controller (you can disable that if you don’t like it).

All that said, many more of my friends are playing on Xbox One and Microsoft has purchased a 30 day exclusivity window for the first two DLC packs, so for now I’ll probably focus on the Xbox One version.

Over the course of the day I played solo, which is pretty easy aside from a few bosses, and a lot of time as a team of two, which isn’t much harder. You can tweak the difficulty of “story missions” to make them harder but the various “encounters” are what they are and at least in the low-ish level stuff (I got to level 8 of 30 on day 1) it’s really easy unless you wander into higher level areas. The game is supposed to scale content in response to team size but that wasn’t really apparent to me in a team of two.

Then late last night we added a 3rd player to our team and that’s when things went crazy. We were doing a side mission (I think) and we were just swarmed with baddies. I was quickly over-whelmed and killed, but luckily my team-mates were much better players than I am and we carried the day. But that was a hell of a lot of fun. I can’t imagine what the game is like with a team of 4!

Overall it was a really good first day. No real surprises since much of what I was doing I’ve already done several times in the beta tests. The intro area, as expected, is Brooklyn and it was a tad disappointing just because there’s not much to do there. It’s a fairly large area but you do a few quests and move on. Maybe we’ll return at some point and have more of a reason to explore.

My biggest challenge now is deciding what to do with surplus loot. Do I sell it so I have $$ to buy better gear, or do I break it down into components for crafting? Decisions, decisions!

Needed a hit of fantasy, so back to The Elder Scrolls Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

For the last few months I’ve been playing games that take place in a modern setting. First it was Watch Dogs, then it was Dying Light, with a few The Division beta tests mixed in. Last weekend I found myself craving some good old fantasy gaming. With the launch of The Division so near, it didn’t make sense for me to start in on some 50-100 hour RPG so I turned to good old dependable The Elder Scrolls Online.

I have a curious relationship with TESO. I really like it, but I never make any progress in it (and I sometimes forget about it for months at a time). I started playing when the game launched. When the console versions came out I moved my characters to the PS4, which is where I’ve been playing lately (I own the game on PC, PS4 & Xbox One for some crazy reason). Last weekend when I went back to the game my highest level character was…. 23! I’ve seen videos of players who go 1-50 in under 10 hours and over the course of a few years I’ve managed to get to level 23!

But that’s OK because what I enjoy about TESO is just being in the world. I know the aesthetics of the game are somewhat divisive. I believe a lot of people find it all kind of drab. I find it believable. Adventurers wear armor that seems reasonably practical (though I question some of the helm designs) and villagers seem to have quests that make sense. To me the world feels like it could be real and there aren’t zany comedy bits to constantly remind you its a game (I’m looking at you, Wildstar with your guitar riffs and announcer voice going crazy whenever something happens).

Oddly I think it’s the food that best encapsulates this aspect of TESO. Instead of making a dish of, y’know, spider venom glands with troll spleen sauce, you’re making Alik’r Beets with Goat Cheese or Ginger Wheat Ale. The food I make in TESO sounds like food I would actually enjoy eating.

I know it’s silly and it doesn’t impact gameplay in any way but it just helps me to become (yes I’m going to go there) immersed in the world. I don’t make a lot of progress because I spend so much time roaming around reading books, talking to NPCs and picking flowers.

But last weekend something different happened. I got frustrated after losing a fight I should’ve won, several times in a row. For the first time I decided to research builds and boy did I ever go down a rat hole. I’ve watched so many videos from Deltia’s Gaming this week that I feel like maybe I need to put him on my Christmas card list.

What I learned was that my race/class combo just isn’t viable. (And I later learned that’s not really true.) And in fact most of my characters were awkward combos. That led to a shake-up that saw me deleting characters, creating new ones, and re-speccing one to rebuild him in one of Deltia’s images.

My (I thought) non-viable main, I decided, would become my crafter, doing all skills except alchemy (since fighting characters should learn alchemy for one of the passives). Of course to do that, he needed some skill points. I decided I’d just run around collecting skyshards for some easy skill points. So I started doing that but got side-tracked by some quests and…

Spent the last week playing him. My new and re-specced characters sit idle and my non-viable main is doing just fine now that I’ve tweaked my skill bars and re-learned2play a bit. Turns out the difference between a good class/race combo and a poor one is something like 8-10% damage at end game (don’t quote me on that, but the point wasn’t that you couldn’t play these ‘poor’ combos just that there are combos that were more efficient).

But man have I been hard-core into the game for the past week. I’ve been doing little else besides work and playing TESO. I have been taking notes to make sure I don’t miss anything. Like on paper with a pen like I’m some kind of dinosaur (hush you, no old man jokes). Progress is still slow because I still play my way, but my crafting progress has been good and I hit level 27 last night. Just finishing up Stormhaven and finally ready to move on to the next zone. And all my time spent with Deltia wasn’t wasted because the character feels SO much more powerful now that I have a better grasp on how to use the skills he has available. So no regrets for the time I spent doing that.

The Thieves Guild DLC hits PC tomorrow (I think) but us console players have to wait until March 22 or 23rd. That works well since I’ll probably be in The Division for a solid few weeks before I’m ready to mix things up. So after Monday night TESO will go back on the shelf again, but it’s comforting to know it’s always there waiting to scratch my fantasy itch.

Oh and it’s worth noting that the game seems to be doing well, on PS4 at least. There’re always people around; even when I started new characters there were plenty of other fresh avatar-faces entering the realm for the first time. I was happy to see that!

The Division: Something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Posted on by Nimgimli

I haven’t talked about Tom Clancy’s The Division here on the blog but I’m super stoked for it and have talked about it so much on some social media services that people have asked me to please shut the f- up about it (in a much nicer way).

I had the game pre-ordered on the PS4 mostly because I had $100 in PSN credit and because these days, I generally gravitate to the PS4. But a few of my friends had pre-ordered on the Xbox One. Well, I’m socially anxious enough that I don’t often have the gumption to join in on MP festivities (though the few times I have done so I’ve had a great time) so I was fine with being the odd man out over on PS4.

Then this morning CoutureGaming caught The Division bug and if you don’t know Aaron from CoutureGaming, let me tell you that guy’s enthusiasm is INFECTIOUS. So that got my Twitter feed rolling along about The Division. Blowing up, really.

And it turns out there’s maybe 10 people I know who seem really excited for co-op-ing their way through the streets of Manhattan together. I was starting to doubt my decision to go PS4 on this one. Then not one, but two people offered to buy me a copy of the game on Xbox One so I could join in with the gang.

Now let me tell you something about myself. I’m an old geek. In other words I was a geek when being a geek meant being picked on, shoved around, and generally shunned. I was also a fat kid. I was never wanted for any kind of team activity. I was the guy who was picked last. I also lived far from any other kids, so I spent most of my childhood doing solitary activities. Even though that was 45+ years ago, I think it really set a path for my life to follow. I tend towards doing everything alone. I can overcome this; I spent a few years tending bar back when bartending was 1 part drink mixing, 1 part therapist. And I was well-liked as a bartender too. But as I get older I return to my solitary ways.

So when a couple of people actually wanted my company to the point where they offered to buy me a copy of the game, I was sincerely moved. Of course I couldn’t take them up on their offer; I wouldn’t impose on such kindness unless I was in dire need. But it did convince me to order an Xbox One copy of the game.

We (and by we I’m referring to my social media circle of friends and acquaintances) talk about gaming a lot, but we don’t actually get around to playing together very often. There are a couple of duos that get together frequently (I admit I’m basing this all on outside observation) but getting 4 people together for a team event seems pretty rare.

But somehow I think The Division is going to be that special snowflake of a game where there are enough people interested and playing on the same platform that we might have full groups playing together rather frequently, at least during those heady early days of launch.

Now all I have to do is overcome my anxiety and take that first step to join them, and playing The Division could become a very special experience for me. I have to admit I’m even more excited about the game now.

Oh, and to any PS4 owning friends that might read this, I still have the game pre-ordered there too. I have Destiny on both platforms and have played it on both. I’m content to cross-own The Division as well.