Elder Scrolls Online: The ambassador MMO

Passing along a couple of interesting links to posts discussing irrelevant complaints about Elder Scrolls Online as well as legitimate concerns.

ESO is not going to be my thing for so many reasons.  I’m not a fan of the game world, but more than that, the game itself looks so incredibly dull.  There’s precious little innovation here and I’m deeply concerned that ZeniMax/Bethesda doesn’t really understand the MMO industry and is perhaps stubbornly ignoring lessons of the past by assuming that ESO will succeed by the virtue of its name alone.

However, I am certainly not rooting for it to fail.  I actually would love to see it flourish, not just because I have friends who will be playing it and I like seeing folks have a good time in their MMOs, but because ESO is uniquely positioned to be what I think of as an “ambassador” MMO.  The Elder Scrolls IP and massive fanbase is an immense starting advantage, and done right, ESO could introduce MMO holdouts among the gaming population and even make converts among them.  Folks who either have ignored or resisted MMOs will be poking their heads into ESO because it’s Elder Scrolls, and that’s an important opportunity to win them over.

But if it follows the SWTOR path of opening big then crashing hard and fast before hastily slapping together a F2P plan, then this is going to be the example that the mainstream will use as to why MMOs suck, why they’re a bad business model, why they should continue to be treated with contempt.  I seriously do not want to see that happen, not again.  I’m tired of journalists who only seem to know of four MMOs, tops, when they talk about them and continue to use the same small sample size for their points of contention.

I wouldn’t have chosen ESO to be such an ambassador, not with how it’s being made and positioned, but I don’t have a say in that matter.  So instead, I’m hoping for all of our sake that it does well enough to avoid the type of downfall and backlash that some love to perpetuate.

Ultima VII: Chasing ghosts

(This is part of my journey playing through Ultima VII. You can follow the entire series on the Nostalgia Lane page.)

I’m embarrassed to admit that when my party went to leave Minoc, I totally forgot where I had parked my magic carpet.  There’s one of those sentences that I don’t get to type very often.  Anyway, long meandering journey through the countryside later and our bedraggled group boards Flight 001 with nonstop service to Paws.

We chatted up Weston’s wife at the shelter there, who tells us that the guy was pardoned and given employment by Lord British.  Seems the least the ruler could do, really.

Worse news on the whole Elizabeth and Abraham front.  Looks like I just missed them.  Again.  This is the game actively messing with me.  That’s all it is.

At least once I make the long magic carpet ride to Jhelom, I’ll finally

MOTHER PUS BUCKET.  Really game?  Really?  Is this how you devs get your jollies when you’re not coding dead bunny rabbits and Kilrathi references?

Jhelom is an island town all the way to the southwest.  Every town in this game seems to have a “thing:” Paws is being poor, Cove is being about love, Minoc is about industry, and, apparently, Jhelom is about fight clubs.  Well, dueling.  The citizens seem a little unnerved by this but what are you going to do?

During my routine course of pillaging and looting the locals, I made a stupid mistake.  Usually what you need to do is to dump goods into your companions’ backpacks, since the game doesn’t blink at this.  But what happened is that my crew was hungry (again), I found a barrel full of apples, and I started to feed everyone straight from the barrel instead of transferring the food to the backpacks first.

The game went BANANAS.  My team started shouting that I wasn’t virtuous, as if I hadn’t just robbed every other town we’d visited.  The locals and guards started swarming me, all yelling, and even the Guardian made one of his rare voice cameos to chastize me.  I was given a choice to fight or surrender, so I surrendered to see what would happen.

Jail.  Jail happened.  The game carted me off to I do not know where, stripped me of all of my possessions, and left me to rot.  I love how there’s a skeleton casually decorating up the place, as if the jailer couldn’t be bothered to remove a stinking corpse from the next room over.

Getting out wasn’t hard, as the skeleton had some gold on him (her?) and I used that to buy the keys off of the jailor.  Then I saw the enormous pile of my belongings in the next room over, thought about how I parked the magic carpet on some tropical island, and thought… RELOAD.

The apple incident never happened, do you hear me?

Short post today for U7, so I’ll send you over to Casual Aggro who explains the (spoilery) subtext of the game as a slam against EA.  Elizabeth and Abraham?  E&A?  Whoa.  Mind… blown.

Pictures of the Day: Bridge over Rohan

Side Diversions

When one can’t decide between two classes in a game, one should break the rules and go to a third class.  Excelsior!

So anyway, I spent a really great evening with my Ranger in Guild Wars 2 doing nothing special.  Initially I logged onto her to do some cleanup of her inventory and whatnot, but that led to selling stuff on the trading post (hello 18 gold!) and then idle killing in the countryside.  Before I knew it, I was hip-deep in clearing out another zone and mulling over whether to peek my head into Lion’s Arch to see what’s going on with the new patch.

The answer to that, by the way, is “I have no idea?”  Looks like roaming-and-killing while doing various events.  I did have fun swapping between weapons and spending some quality time with my shortbow for a change.  I have an 80 exotic shortbow sitting in the bank, so I figure I might as well get used to it.  I do wish that GW2 allowed to save three weapon sets instead of two, because I would very much like to be able to swap between my longbow, shortbow, and greatsword without having to choose just two.

As a pleasant treat, I both dinged 72 and completed my daily achievements without deliberately trying to do either.

RIFT isn’t getting much of my time as of late — but it’s not getting deleted, either.  I’m really intrigued by the news that there are four new souls (one for each calling) coming with 2.7, giving every class an option to play every role.  I also noticed that the anniversary carnival is going on right now, which means that there’s a special lootable on the mobile app that hands out glass beads like candy.  So even though I’m not logging into the game, I’m checking the app every six hours to stock up on beads.

Ultima VII: An invisible murder

(This is part of my journey playing through Ultima VII. You can follow the entire series on the Nostalgia Lane page.)

Ugh.  Bugs suck.  They really, really do.  Back before the internet they could literally be game-breaking with no chance of workaround, unless you knew a friend who could help or logged onto a BBS/Usenet forum somewhere.  I remember playing games with horrible bugs — and I endured them, because what other choice did I have?  Nowadays I’m a lot less patient as is most of the civilized, online world.

So why bring up bugs?  Because of this empty room in Minoc:

You see, there’s supposed to be another grisly murder there.  Two of them, actually.  But due to a well-known bug in this version, they don’t show up and I’m left wondering why the townspeople are freaking out over imaginary murders.  If you’re curious, I did some image searching and found what it should look like:

Charming, is it not?  Egads, if my mom had seen this screen when I was a kid I would have been banned from all video games until the end of time.  Fortunately, they’ve gotten a lot less graphic since then.

The murders aren’t the only thing going on in this strange town, as the people are making a monument to a shipbuilder.  That’s… odd.  Where’s my statue?  Oh.  Britain.  I forgot.

Our group leaves the sawmill and heads up to the town proper, where we stop at the inn for a drink and some chat with the colorful locals.  Man, these descriptions are so dang great sometimes.  Feels a bit like a dungeon master reading them aloud to you.

The local Fellowship bigwig says that we JUST missed Elizabeth and Abraham, two of the leaders that I’ve been tracking.  Are we playing a fantasy version of phone tag?

This lady is a jerk, by the way.  She’s very dismissive of the murders, saying that the two gypsies killed were “antagonistic” toward the Fellowship.  Between the implied racism (hm, connection with the gargoyle?) and cult-like exclusion of outsiders, I’ve had it up to here with these nitwits.  Can I start slaughtering yet?

We also bump into Owen, AKA “Monument Guy.”  He’s having a monument made to himself, which isn’t something I thought you could do while you were, y’know, living.  I guess shipwrights are just as popular there as vapid, unaccomplished celebrities are in our universe.

In the artist’s guild in Minoc is a barrel.  Inside that barrel is a bag.  Inside the bag is a dead, mutilated bunny.  Inside the bunny are 35 starburst weapon-throwing stars-something.  It’s like a Russian nesting doll of awfulness!

Before heading out of Minoc, we stop in to see yet ANOTHER one of my former companions and ask her to tag along because I figure that the more the merrier.  Plus, if we get hungry, I can toggle cannibal mode and pare our party down by one.  I have full faith that Ultima VII has thought of a cannibal mode, I just haven’t looked for it yet.

Pictures of the Day: Retro fun

First up, a picture shared with me by MMOgumbo as a suggestion for a mouse replacement:

And then this awesome Commodore 64 spread of 1984′s Elite, courtesy of StiGGy’s Blog that I found yesterday:

A shocking announcement

Well, this is a first in many years of gaming.

So last night I’m playing Guild Wars 2, do be do be do, and it’s cold so I’ve wrapped a fleece blanket around me like I’m an old lady.  That’s a good mental image for you to get.  Anyway, I get warm, cast off the blanket, and grab my mouse…

…and a large burst of static electricity arcs out and fries my Naga mouse.  Fries it dead.

I sat there stunned for about two minutes.  Did that just happen?  That totally just happened.  Crap, there goes a $60 mouse.

Battle Bards Episode 22: Guild Wars

A long time ago the Battle Bards gave their frank analysis of the immense Guild Wars 2 soundtrack.  While that podcast won several awards and is now being used as standard class curriculum in all primary schools, the original Guild Wars has remained untouched… until now.  Join the crew as they travel back to 2005 to see how the original OST stacks up against its sequel!

• Follow Battle Bards on iTunes
• Follow Battle Bards on Stitcher
• Episode 22 show page

Episode 22 show notes

• Introduction (including “Prophecies Theme” and “Resplendent Makuun”)
• “First Light”
• “Ashford Abbey”
• “Over the Shiverpeaks”
• “Under the Dark Span (Asura theme)”
• “Eye of the Storm”
• “Factions Theme”
• “Festival of Lyss”
• Which one did we like most?
• Mail: Joseph’s speakpipe (JVT Workshop)
• Mail: Rory’s speakpipe
• Mail: Doone
• Outro (“Alternate Theme”)

Composed by Jeremy Soule

Listen to episode 22 now!

Special thanks to Tesh for the Battle Bards logo!

The waiting game

Even with a bounty of games to play, right now I feel as though I’m in a holding pattern, playing a waiting game.

I’m waiting for WildStar to announce a release date and get here already.

I’m waiting for Lord of the Rings Online to come out with Update 13.

I’m waiting for The Secret World to drop in new missions and open up Tokyo.

I’m waiting for Guild Wars 2 to get done with the Scarlet Briar storyline and do something else for a while.

2014 may be shaping up to be a significant year in terms of releases, but so far it’s been a wasteland.  We haven’t had anything significant since SWTOR’s spacefighter expansion in December — and it’s been a long, long winter.  Studios going on vacation for a few weeks there definitely slowed the works down, and nobody seems too eager to put anything around the April launch window for Elder Scrolls Online.  I think ESO is really going to benefit from so much quiet before it, because I can’t be the only MMO gamer who is champing at the bit for something new.

I guess I just want something to happen, already.

Ultima VII: Looking into my future

(This is part of my journey playing through Ultima VII. You can follow the entire series on the Nostalgia Lane page.)

Believe it or not, this series going through Ultima VII is already the second-longest playthrough I’ve done so far.  Guess that’s something in favor of this game!  Part of me would like to move on (because so many games left) but I’m still very much enjoying it and haven’t hit a point where it’s become frustrating or anything.

Cove may be the town of love, but it’s sitting on a lake of putricidy.  The Lock Lake is insanely polluted, which is kind of an incredible achievement for a pre-industrial civilization of about 56 people.  Some developer obviously had a good time festooning the landscape and water with all sorts of garbage.  The banana peels amuse me as well.  How are they getting them from the tropics?  Oh.  Magic moongates, probably.

Just north of Cove a giant cyclops comes stomping by my party — so big, in fact, that he shakes the screen.  Even though he’s not hostile, we double back and kill him because there’s got to be a nugget of XP in that beefy body somewhere.

We find the cyclops cave just a little further away, but the second we step inside the screen becomes incredibly dark.  Yes, I’m spoiled by MMO “nights” that are basically days with a soft blue light overlay.  But it’s too dark to adventure in here unless I get some light going, so I make Spark carry a torch for us.  It’s not SUPER-illuminating, but it does the trick.

Normally I’m all for a good dungeon crawl, but this becomes a little annoying.  Again, combat in Ultima VII is probably its weakest aspect, as characters run all over the place doing God knows what while I’m left crossing my fingers and saying “don’t die don’t die don’t die.”  At one point the screen goes black and the Guardian starts laughing and saying “POOR Avatar!  POOR Avatar!” which made me think I lost someone.  I didn’t, so what the heck was that?  Anyway, once my torch goes out there’s no reason to put myself through more of this, so the crew packs up and heads out to the next town on our quest chain, Minoc.

Scoobies!  Back into the Mystery Machine!  Rut-roh!

The second we land, we’re attacked by… headless guys?  Yup, those dudes really do not have heads.  Congradulations, Ultima VII, you continue to surprise me.  That is a new one.

We arrive in Minoc and I immediately bump into someone I dub the Exposition Gypsy.  She’s the fortune-teller that the jester from Lord British’s castle said I should talk to, so talk I do.  She unloads just an immense amount of info and hints and to-dos on me, including the revelation that there’s Something Bad in the land that’s affecting magic, that I need to join the Fellowship, that I should probably find the guy with the hook-hand, and so on.  Nothing too new so far.  But the part with the planets and the observatory is, as is this:

Time Lord?  As in… the Doctor?  Oh please tell me that this is an Ultima-Doctor Who crossover!  I will be ever so happy if it is true!