Adventure Time

The lighting effects in ESO are superb

My Saturday night this week was spent gadding about in the new shiny on my list of currently played games, The Elder Scrolls Online. I've got a small static group on the go in there with my RL friends and neighbours Welshtroll and his good lady wife. We get together on one of my nights off and spend a pleasant few hours questing through Tamriel with our Aldmeri Dominion characters, helping the needy, fighting monsters, exploring dungeons and generally fulfilling our destinies as great heroes of the age.

It's a very nice game. The quests are well put together and unlike most MMOs it doesn't feel like you are traipsing from one quest-hub to the next. The quests are nicely spread out through the world and there are plenty that are just out in the wild, waiting to be stumbled upon by adventurous explorer types. Best of all I've yet to come across a typical "Kill 10 rats" type quest. It's all fully voiced and the quest objectives are nicely varied, meaning we can spend several hours just chaining quests together without getting bored.

We seem to have accidentally put together a fairly synergistic group of classes. We've got a Khajiit Dragon Knight who is quite tanky whilst still being able to deal a good amount of damage; a Wood Elf Nightblade who does lots of stealthy sneaking about and has high point damage DPS; and I'm playing an Imperial Templar with a nice mix of damage and healing. So far we are able to pretty much burn through any foes we come up against before they have time to do any serious damage to us, but for the trickier ones our individual abilities often mean the difference between succeeding and the group wiping. We've had a few deaths along the way, but way less than I would have expected by now. In keeping with the differentness of the quests in ESO, similarly the characters feel different to most other MMOs. The limited hot bar and the directional FPS style attacks make for much more involved combat than in something like LOTRO or WoW. The combat feels solid, and while individually characters can sometimes feel a little underpowered, as part of our little group I do feel like something of a badass, which is always good!

The main thing the game has going for it though is it's graphics engine and world design. It is quite simply the best looking MMO ever released. We often find ourselves stopping mid quest to take in the scenery and the level of detail in the world is simply mind-boggling. Combined with a really good score and subtle but atmospheric ambient sounds the Tamriel of Elder Scrolls Online feels like a fully realised and lived in world. I can think of far worse places to spend a Saturday night.

I love the smell of Veldspar in the morning

Pew-Pew lAz0rs!!!11!

Working the night shift can make finding time for gaming difficult. My post work relaxation time, or evening as normal people would call it, is usually a couple of hours either side of eight o'clock in the morning. That means that all of my gaming friends are in bed or in work, neither of which is ideal for grouping up in an MMO. As such I have to make an effort to get online for an hour or two in the evenings, before I go to work, to catch up with my outfit mates in PlanetSide 2. But what about that post work period? I don't really want to come in after a hard shift and go straight to bed! I need to relax a little first.

It's in these early morning hours that I tend to get most of my single-player gaming done. Typically, this has been on a console, but in recent months it's seen me more and more turning to solo play in an MMO. For a while I was spending my time sauntering around Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings Online, but since returning to EVE, I've not spent a single second staring at the arse-end of a Bree Pony. The way I play EVE means it is fantastically suited to my early morning needs. The semi-AFK nature of asteroid mining in EVE means that I can catch up on the nights Twitters, check my clan's forums or even watch some telly on the second monitor while I'm doing it, but also keep an eye on what's going on in case some belt rats or gankers decide to show up. As I'm typing this, EVE is on the main monitor and my Mackinaw is sat in space, strip mining the hell out of some Rich Plagioclase asteroids. When the ore hold is full I'll scoot off back to the station where I'm based and refine it into the Pyerite I so desperately need to feed my production line. But while that is going on it gives me time to make blog entries! The main reason this blog is so patchy update-wise is that generally I'd much rather be playing games than writing about them, and if I've got the time to write then that is time I should be spending playing! Only with EVE, I can do both at the same time and as such I'm hoping that for a little while at least, I can keep to some sort of regular update schedule.

Now I just need some topics to write about I suppose...

Farming the Farmers

An NC Sunderer

I joined up with my outfit mates in PlanetSide 2 for a couple of hours last night. We were fighting on Indar as usual and hopping around from fight to fight, winning a few, losing a few. Nothing out of the ordinary. Eventually the fight lead us, as it usually does given enough time, to The Crown. As we were getting closer to our target we could see that the Vanu Sovereignty had a fairly formidable air presence around the base, groups of Scythe fighters whizzing about the place and a couple of Liberator gunships looking for easy targets. Our merry little band, trundling along in an almost defenceless Sunderer, was one such easy target.

Usually, we would just try and run the Sunderer in as close as we dared, deploy it, and head into the base on foot, but with the amount of VS air in the area we wouldn't have got very far. So, instead of hiding our little bus in an inconspicuous corner, we first suited up with Anti-Air MAX suits and AA lock-on rocket launchers and then drove our tempting easy kill right into the open valley below the enemy aircraft. A liberator spotted us first. As it angled in for an attack run on us, our defenceless little bus suddenly sprouted seven tooled up and ready AA monsters. The Liberator's heavy guns and thick armour were no match for us and within seconds it was little more than a burning husk falling from the sky. Flush with success, we all piled back into the Sunderer and trundled off again. It wasn't long before we attracted the attention of a keen eyed Scythe pilot, eager to stick a few rockets into our lonely and defenceless Sunderer and gorge on all the lovely XP within. "Scythe incoming, lets get him!" came the cry from our driver over TeamSpeak, again, our defenceless slow moving brick suddenly became a pilots worst nightmare. This one used the speed and manoeuvrability of his craft to try to escape, but he'd taken too much damage before he realised what was happening. Just as he afterburnered away for the safety of the hills a lone lock-on missile streaked through the sky after him. Boom! Goodnight Scythe! Before we could get back in the bus a Lightning tank sprang up over a sand dune next to us, spotted our Sunderer and started firing, fortunately the Sunderer was deployed so I switched out my MAX's flack cannons for a pair of Falcon Anti-Vehicle launchers. Combined with the power of half a dozen dumb-fired AA rockets, he didn't last long. The driver bailed out, but was quickly chased down.

A VS Liberator Gunship

This went on for the next half an hour or so before I had to go to work and I have to say, it is the most fun I've had in that game for quite a while. Our group may be small, but when we can stick together and have a common cause, it's surprising how much of a difference we can make. We managed to keep the whole area clear of enemy air for a while, and even had time to fall back and scupper an assault on the base behind us. It was a really fun evening, and a reminder that despite it's flaws, PlanetSide 2 is THE best game on the market at the moment for having a laugh with a bunch of mates. I think I might even pop back in this evening for another go!

Return to New Eden

My Miasmos ore hauler leaving a station

Where was I?... Oh yes, video games! Jon over at How to Murder Time has recently re-posted all of the old Van Hemlock podcasts and I've been slowly working my way through them. The early ones are quite heavily EVE based, and being of a highly suggestible nature I am of course now playing EVE again.

Eve Online is a strange beast. It can be utterly impenetrable to the newbie, yet has the scope and scale to allow it's player driven content to make its way onto international mainstream news. Massive battles with hundreds of thousands of real-world dollars worth of ships being destroyed; intrigue and espionage allowing a single player to destroy a massive player alliance from within. EVE is the epitome of multiplayer. The vast bulk of its content is derived from players interactions with each other and yet here I am, soloing it and soloing it hard. I've only been back a few weeks but I've easily put in 100 hours in that time and all of it has been solo.

My Thorax, bristling with rail-guns

I'm kind of intrigued by the prospect of joining up with a big corp or alliance and heading off into the wilds of 0.0 security space, but it feels to me like I'd need to make a commitment to the game I just don't think I want. I think the added pressure of that would make me burn out on the game altogether more quickly than I would do otherwise. So here I am, treating one of the most hardcore PvP MMO's as a kind of relaxation aid. I load up into my Mackinaw mining ship, head out to a nice quiet asteroid belt in high sec and start mining some big juicy space rocks. Since getting a nice new 27" monitor my old 20" Samsung has been given a new lease of life as a second monitor. Most EVE players in this situation would have a second account running to provide assistance to their main account, a hauler maybe, so the mining vessel never need leave the asteroid belts. However, as is fairly obvious, I'm not most EVE players. I'm using my second monitor to browse the web, read and write blogs, catch up on missed TV or power watch a series of something on Netflix. EVE is my perfect companion to a few hours of idle surfing, happy to get on with something by itself and only requiring occasional input from me. And all the while the ISK, (in game currency), keeps trickling in, be it from the sale of unrefined Blue Ice or from my little Catalyst, (a Destroyer class spaceship), production line that most of my asteroid grazing goes towards supplying. If I fancy a change of pace I can hop in my Rifter or my Thorax and run a few Agent combat missions, pew-pewing against AI controlled drones and pirates. I'm in the process of training up to be able to fly and kit out a Battleship in order to do some higher level agent missions and really start making some money off them, but for now they are a fun way of mixing up my more sedate industrial activity.

I'm 100% sure that if any real EVE player was to read this they'd sadly shake their head before calling me a n00b and telling me I'm playing the game about as wrong as it is possible to play it. I'm well aware of that, but you know what? I'm really enjoying it the way I'm doing it for now, so sod off!

World of Tanks

Since my last post I've encountered the delights of tear-arsing around Ibiza in Test Drive Unlimited 2, I've finally prestiged in CoD Blops and I've tentatively dipped a toe into the 14 day free trial of Star Wars: Galaxies. But it is World of Tanks that has really captured my imagination, and hoovered up hours of my gaming time. I bought L.A. Noire, but it sat unopened on my shelf for three days because I was having so much fun pottering about in my little tank.

World of Tanks (WoT) is described as an MMO, but it isn't like any MMO you will have come across before. It's 100% PVP for a start, and instead of an endless roam-able world the gameplay is limited to short instanced battles of 15 a-side. In fact it seems to have more in common with the Battlefield's and Call of Duty's of this world than the Everquest's and World of Warcraft's. The main difference I can see between WoT and Modern Warfare 2, for example, is that everyone is on the same server so you never have to worry about finding a populated server with a good ping playing the game-type you want etc, etc... You just select the tank you want to use from your garage, make sure there's ammo in it and click join battle. Hey presto, 29 other folks who have also just clicked Join Battle will be thrown in with you and off you go!

When you think of a tank, you think of a huge armour plated behemoth with a massive gun on the front, so when you jump into WoT you expect to be this invulnerable machine of mass destruction and while you sort of are, you really aren't at all. I shall explain. The tanks, even the little tier 1 vehicles that are little more than an upturned tin bath with an air-rifle stuck on top, feel big and powerful. The sound effects of roaring engines, creaking and clanking tracks and thundering guns, coupled with the lovingly recreated models of WWII era tanks really do make you feel like you are driving this hulking metal monster of death. The fact that everyone else is also driving one however, kind of brings everything back down to the realms of your normal FPS, it's very rare, at least until the heavy tanks are introduced at around tier 5, that you end up sat slugging it out for ages with an enemy tank, bouncing shells off each other. Two or three good hits are usually all it takes to finish off a tank of a similar level to you, and the fact that you are often in matches with tanks two or three levels higher than you can often make you feel very squishy indeed! Killed within the first minute of the battle? No matter, you can choose to wait until the battle ends, spectating the action from the viewpoints of your surviving team mates, or you can hit Escape, select leave battle and go back to your garage. The tank you just lost will stay in that instanced battle until it finishes, meaning you still get any XP or credits awarded during the fight, but leaving you free to pick one of your other tanks and jump straight back into the action.

And best of all, this fantastic diesel-powered destruction is absolutely free! WoT is calling itself an MMO, and as is the current trend with that genre it has adopted the free-to-play cash-shop model. This means that all you have to do to play is go along to www.worldoftanks.com and download the client. The whole game is free and can be played fairly unimpeded without ever spending any money at all. The game uses two kinds of in-game currency, the first are called credits and are accumulated in game by participating in matches, the better you do, the more you earn. These credits can be spent on upgrading parts for you tank, and eventually buying new tanks, tank destroyers or artillery. The second type of currency is Gold and this can only be bought from the online store for real money. Gold can then be used to buy premium tanks, none of which are particularly better than the regular tanks, but it removes the need for you to grind out loads of credits if you fancy trying your hand at a higher tier. It can also be used to buy premium ammo, which I'm not so sure is a good thing, as it is definitely more powerful than regular ammo, and I'm not happy about anyone being able to 'buy' an advantage on the battlefield. However, ammo soon runs out, and it would prove very expensive to keep re-supplying with premium ammo! There are a few other uses for Gold that I feel are far more useful:
Extending your garage - allowing you to have more than four vehicles to your name at once.
Converting XP to 'Free XP' - You gain XP in battles which can be used to research upgrades for your tank, once everything is researched the tank keeps gaining XP, but can't do anything with it. You can use Gold to convert this tank-specific XP into 'free XP', allowing it to be spent on any vehicle, very handy later on when research starts needing loads of XP even for the most basic of upgrades.
Purchasing Premium Gametime - Increases the amount of credits and XP you earn in battle by 50%. It may not seem like much, but this boost really makes a difference, especially when saving up credits for your next tank!

A few downsides for balance, and the main one is, ironically, balance. Tier 1 is fine with everyone roaring around in tier 1 light tanks and the occasional tier 2 medium tank, but when you get to tiers 3 and 4 you often find yourself in with tier 5 and 6 heavy tanks, and as a general rule, a tier 3 light tank can't damage a tier 5 heavy tank no matter how many times it shoots it, and a tier 5 heavy tank will one-shot a tier 3 light tank almost every time. This does get annoying, but you find ways around it, becoming more of a scout, picking out heavies for your artillery to take out, whilst simultaneously hunting down the enemy artillery yourself. My other bug-bear is that it can feel a bit grindy, especially when you are trying to get the credits together to buy a tank from the next tier up. At the moment I'm enjoying the game, and it's still fresh and new enough for me to not really care, but I think as I near tier 10 it could become more of an issue. Also the fact you can only play with friends in groups of three, or full platoons of 15 seems a bit restrictive, but I haven't gotten involved in that side of things too much yet to be able to say properly how it works, maybe being in a clan enables the game to put several groups of 3man teams from the same clan into a match together, I don't know.

On the whole then, I'm having a blast in World of Tanks, and at the recession busting price of FREE there's no reason why you shouldn't give it a go as well. Just remember to buy some gold if you enjoy it, games like this still need to turn a profit, and the cash-shop model seems to fit this title like a glove.

A Quick Catch-up

Hello blog. Yes I know, six months without an update is probably not the best way to build or maintain a readership, or even be able to remember which password I need to get in to you. Let us never speak of it again.

So, a lot has happened in my little corner of the gaming world since I was last here, not least of which would be my involvement in the open beta and subsequent release of Trion Worlds grand new MMO 'Rift'. The game that went into open beta was a finely honed and polished product that appeared to have already been tested to within an inch of it's life. So good was it in fact that even before it was released it was of a far higher quality than many games that had already been running for a number of years! I used the time in beta to try out some of the different classes in the game, and to familiarise myself with, (and test the limitations of), the
new Souls system of class building that the game introduced. At first glance it would appear to make for an incredibly flexible way to get the balance of Healing, DPS and Tanking ability that anyone could want. You start off by choosing your base archetype, Warrior, Cleric, Mage or Rogue. Each of these classes then gets to pick three Souls (basically skill sets) from a list of eight with which to build the character you want to play. Warrior souls are mainly defensive tanking or strength based offensive DPS, Clerics are mainly healing with some ranged or melee DPS, Mages are mainly ranged DPS with some healing, buff/debuff options, etc, etc... To start off with I chose a Warrior with Paladin, (classic sword & board tank type skills), Voidknight, (a kind of resistance tank, vulnerable to melee but impervious to magical attack), and an offensive soul which i can't remember now. I figured this would give me a nicely rounded offensive tank with plenty of resist and block ability, and it worked, to a degree. What actually happened though was that out in the wilds versus trash mobs I was a one man wrecking machine, but in really tough fights I wasn't offensive enough to kill the mobs before they killed me, and I wasn't defensive enough to withstand their attacks for very long. Fortunately there is another really nice mechanic in the game which means you can run several different soul combinations at once, with a button on your hot-bar to toggle between skill sets. You can also clear out any of these 'roles' at any time and slot in different souls as you see fit. Eventually I gave up on the all-rounder tank and went for a more traditional setup, with Paladin and Warlord as my main souls and the recipients of most of my skill points. When the game launched and I joined up with my clan mates I decided to roll a healing biased Cleric and have been steadily slogging away ever since. I think being involved in the beta for an extended period before the game actually launched my have shortened the games lifespan a little for me, because even though my Cleric is only in the mid level-20's ,(out of a current maximum of 50), I've started to drift away from Rift, even though it is a fantastic game that I'm really happy to have been involved with from such an early stage. I still enjoy my time in there, but the times I'm in there are becoming fewer and farther between as the months go on. I'm determined to reach level cap with at least one of the 10 or so characters I've got in there, (DAMN YOU, accursed alt-itis!), but it may take a little while yet as there are so many other games to play at the moment! I look at my shelf of unopened Xbox games and despair!

But, rather than opening one of those, i've decided instead to get back into the multiplayer side of Bad Company 2, still a fantastic game, if a little frustratingly one sided at times. As with all online FPS's you are only as good as the rest of your team, and I do seem to end up surrounded by useless muppets a lot of the time in that game. Still, it's good fun, especially on Team Speak with friends, and I've finally unlocked all of the weapons so can now just relax and play whatever class I fancy at the time, rather than constantly chasing the next unlock.

There's also been a little PlanetSide action recently, following the announcement that a PlanetSide sequel is well and truely on the way! Will it be the saviour of gaming as me and my outfit mates have been praying for these past five years or so? Only time will tell. Until then though a few of us have ventured back into the creaking husk of the original for one last hurrah. The strain is beginning to show to be honest. It's still a damn fine game, but the low, frequently drastically unbalanced populations make it an often frustrating and thankless chore rather than the sweeping epic it once was.

Console wise there's been Assassins Creed Brotherhood which I'm yet to finish, the massively disappointing Homefront , which i'm probably never going to finish, and the outrageously excellent Bulletstorm which I did finish and thoroughly enjoyed. There's also been a fair bit of jumping about like an idiot after getting Kinect for my birthday, but that seems to have been a fairly short-lived fad as I haven't used it in a good few months now.

And that, I think, brings us about up to date. Hopefully the next update won't take another six months as I intend to do more frequent "What I've been playing" type posts just to keep my hand in and to get me used to writing again. And with that I think i need a lie down. My brain hurts.

Like a kid in the worlds most expensive sweet shop

All summer long there was barely a single game release that made me feel like I had to have it. Now, it feels like the pre-Christmas floodgates have been flung open and all the goodies that should have been gently trickling into my shopping basket throughout the year are pouring out in a tumultuous cascade. I'm swamped in triple-A releases that I have no way of keeping up with.

I've plucked a few choice items from the swirling torrent over the past few weeks, mainly 'Halo: Reach', 'Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock' and 'Castlevania', but so much else has gone sailing by! Games like 'Enslaved: Odyssey to the West' and 'Vanquish' have really piqued my interest, and if they'd been released back in the great game drought of the summer I'd have snapped them both up on release day. But when I'm having to leave games like 'Medal of Honour' and 'Fallout-New Vegas' on the shelf because I simply can't afford to buy any more games this month, what chance do the smaller, less well known releases have?

Yesterday was a prime example of launch scheduling gone mad. Three of the most anticipated games of the year (for me at least) were released on the same day. 'Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II', Fable 3 and of course, the one I've been waiting for with bated-breath, Rock Band 3. Just the games alone would set me back somewhere in the region of a hundred and twenty quid, but when you consider the fact that the big selling point of RB3 is of course the instruments then things just start getting silly! Amazon is selling the Keyboard peripheral bundled with the game for £99.99, the new multi-buttoned guitar controller is going for £109.99 and the new souped-up cymbal-bedecked drumkit goes for another £99.99. So just for Rock Band I'm looking at £309.97, add to that another eighty quid for the other two games and I'm looking at a layout of almost FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS! For COMPUTER GAMES! IN ONE DAY!!!

Thank you games industry, your infinite wisdom has decreed that no-one is going to buy games in the summer, but everyone is willing to shell out hundreds of pounds every week in the run-up to Christmas; and as a result, many of the games I've been waiting months to play will now have to wait many more months. Hell, I may even be tempted to start shopping second-hand.

What a bunch of jerks.