Elder Scrolls Online

I never played Skyrim beyond a day or two of game play because it didn't offer a co-op option so that Jason and I could play together.  Jason talked on and on about the game and played the livin' shit out of it when it came out so I was really looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online's release as it is an MMO version of Skyrim so we'd be able to play together again.

We've played it a couple nights now.  I like the look and feel of the game.  The character create was very fun to play with.  The tutorial was pretty straight forward although I definitely relied a lot on Jason to show me how to do things since he'd already played before I started. The quests are interesting and not grindy which is very nice.  The world is engaging.  Transportation makes sense.  Dying/rez is intuitive except for the soul trap thing that you don't realize you need to figure out until after you are sitting there over a corpse that is your buddy.  Ooops.

The crafting system is freaking awesome although since it's subscription based and not ftp/mtx (free-to-play/micro-transaction) based, it is a bit of a grind to save up resources to effectively gain the xp needed to craft something of true value. The combat and skills usage in-combat is simple and effective although I wish I had more than 5 skill slots active at one time. The skills management hud is not particularly intuitive at points as learning you can split an already selected skill to augment it isn't something that you see before it's available so you don't really know to plan for it..

I liked that I could buy more bag slots early on. And that I had access to buy an MTX horse early.  I don't like that I have to manually map my keyboard/mouse controls for each new character created.  I also don't like that I can't auto follow Jason when I need to go to the bathroom (he has to stop wherever we happen to be and defend me until I get back, stupid). I wish the bank and the merchants were located closer to one another so I am not running to and fro repeatedly due to poor planning.  I wish there were an auction house or a means to do micro-transactions so I can buy crafting components instead of harvesting them in-world because I don't have the hours and hours to play that others do. Maybe this isn't allowed to prevent a pay-to-win infrastructure, but I don't PVP so it just limits my ability to enjoy the game a bit. There is enough variety in game content to keep busy and not feel like anything is seriously repetitive, well, except for this one quest early on where you go around and talk to all these people all over town and you just want to jump off a cliff, it's so boring, and there is not action related to it at all. But other than that.

For most of the first 10 levels , I felt pretty over powered when paired with Jason, so it never felt like I was worried I might not make it through a fight successfully. Then we logged in one night to fight Doshia.  We had problems just logging in that night and that should have been the first red flag.  We were already grouped when we logged in which definitely seemed not right, and then we couldn't see each other's characters and our names were grayed out on our group list.  We both logged out and back in, even restarted our computers but nothing helped.  Eventually Jason figured out that he could right click and travel to me and that fixed the problem, so apparently we were not the same instance of the game.  But we're on the same server so it didn't make sense that we wouldn't see one another.  Something was clearly broken.

So later that night we get the Doshia quest and when we enter the instanced zone we're separated.  Since in some MMOs group members have to do instance zones alone, so we groaned but went about our separate instance fighting our way to the boss.  That's when things got ugly.  I am a tab targeter and Jason is a point and click targeter.  He has a heal.  I don't. He likes ranged attacks and complex positional combat. I like to open with big booms and then up close and personal  in-our-face melee  Our preferred game play styles are extremely different, and usually that doesn't mean we can't play together, in fact it works out quite well for us.

But my way of playing did not fair well with Doshia and I could not hit the orbs before she got them and healed or without her beating the ever living shit out of me.  It was retarded.  I died like 20 times and paid way way more on armor repairs than seemed fair.  Jason died a bit too but he finally prevailed.  Eventually he was hanging behind my chair watching me deal with Doshia and saying he didn't know what I could do differently, so I decided I was just so disgusted that I'd abandoned the quest and moved on so we could at least continue to play together.  Not long after that we ended up at a timed race quest. I'm not the most observant person in-game and Jason was running behind doing something else (it's usually the other way around) so I started the quest but didn't realize I was being timed so by the time I got my shit together there was no way I was going to complete the race in the allotted time. I failed it so I went back to the quest giver and tried to restart it.  Nope.  It wouldn't let me.  I was again dead-ended. It was the straw that broke the camels back. That night I learned a new term.  Rage Quit.

Yes, indeed, that was my reaction.  I was so pissed and fed up and disgusted with the fact that I'd felt over powered all this time and then to be placed in a quest that was basically not winnable the way I play and the way that I'm spec'd out, so I realized that I had probably FUBAR'd my character spec. When I looked at respecing, it was super expensive in terms of in-game gold (it's per skill point) and you have to travel to some high level zone to do it (which means I'd be killed by NPCs way before I could possibly reach my destination).  And I had no idea that I had spec'd poorly until then because I'd not been challenged at all with any of my quests prior to Doshia.  I felt like I was sold a false bill of goods, tricked and trapped, and now left with an irreparably broken character and would now have to start over with a new character at level 1.  Considering how little time I have to play with Jason, I was pissed, seriously pissed.  I walked away and had little interest in coming back.

The next day, Jason told me his co-worker told him that the Doshia instance was a group quest and we were just experienced the same zone bug we'd experienced when we first logged in and that he should have just right clicked and traveled to me again. Are   You    Fucking    Kidding   Me?  Since Jason had already completed the quest (so likely couldn't join me to win mine) and I was dead set that I needed to respec we decided to start new characters but that really just took the wind out of my sail (beside the fact that I'd opened all the one-time perks mails from my early buy and bound them to this character).

I've only played one night after that.  Really quite a bummer when I think about how stable this game is, how polished it is, how cool it seems on a lot of levels.  It hasn't crashed, not once, for either Jason or me since it launched.  That is virtually unheard of in a freshly launched MMO.  It's amazing actually.

Jason has had some issues with broke quest lines and has submitted trouble tickets but he's never even received an automated response back let alone a resolution for any of the problems he's submitted.  Not the most stellar customer service apparently.

Not sure if I'll go back and play but I'd better decide before my free 30-days is up.

Borderlands 2 Resurrected

I don't seem to have as much time to game as I used to, what with trying to write a book and all the classes I take. Or it could just be that Borderlands 2 ruined me. Nothing really compares after having played that game. Hell, I even got out of a speeding ticket once because I said I was late for work because I stayed up so late gaming that I over slept. The officer asked me what game.  When I said Borderlands 2 he said he couldn't very well give me a ticket for that, issued me a warning, and muttered "I wish MY wife played video games" as he walked back to his squad car.  I loved, loved, LOVED that game and played the shit out of Maya. We did also play Warframe's open beta which was very very fun especially in large groups, but it wasn't something that I enjoyed playing solo.  Borderlands 2 however was something I could play with or without Jason, I loved it that much . The writing, the art, the game design, the balance, the weapons, the loot and it's co-op feature. Shit, it was about as close to nirvana as I've experienced in gaming.

To be fair, while working at Trion Worlds, I played a fair amount of Defiance too and really had a genuine blast playing that game.  Still not sure why it got such bad reviews, I think it tried to be too much to too diverse a group (trying to deliver a sci fi MMO shooter to both the console FPS crowd AND the PC MMORPG  crowd).  Funny how both groups complained about the exact opposite shit.  LOL

A while back Jason asked me to play Guild Wars 2 again, since we'd like playing it initially when it first came out. We did play it again and I got bored pretty quickly. So this girl that once adored MMORPGs and found Battlefield 2 to be mass chaos was now underwhelmed by the RPG and wanted more game-play action than simple key-mashing.  Hmmm, I wonder if target practice at the range for realz had anything to do with that? Prolly.

The problem for me now is that most First Person Shooters are PVP and I'm just not willing do deal with the ever-present 15 year old jack-ass that is going to following me around in game fucking with me once he finds out I'm a chick.  Nope, not happenin'.  So I wait for co-op shooter games to play with Jason and those are few.  Diablo III was awesome.  Borderlands 2 was legendary.  Some of the other games have "some" co-op content but Jason and I can burn through that shit fast which leaves with nothing to play.  So I just stopped playing.

Until last night.  Jason informed me that he needed reference of Maya doing her phase lock ability in Borderlands 2 and that he wasn't able to find any images online that weren't first person and he needed to actually see Maya. Which means....yep, you got it....I had to play Borderlands with him again. Unfortunately, he deleted the game off his gaming system but I hadn't off mine so I ran the patch and was in game last night. Steams says I had 92 hours logged on Borderlands 2.  That's a lot of time for me.  It was cool playing again.  I was just running around in the world, not questing or anything, but there was stuff to shoot. In a recent shooting class they were talking about the importance of muscle memory.  That point was illustrated to me when I was running along and monsters tried to gank me.  I didn't really think about it.  I turned and zoomed to reticle and shot, running backward, circle-strafing the enemy, reloading, and shooting some more.  I wasn't oh no, what key do I press, it was pure muscle memory.  Someday I want to be able to do that with my target practice with REAL guns!!!

Point is, Jason was able to get me back playing games last night using some excuse about needing art reference that was rock solid.  Of course I had to help him.  And since he didn't get it loaded and patched last night, we're going to have to play here again real soon.  Oh man that's sooo hard to take! LOL

I just don't understand why GearBox up in DFW isn't working on Borderlands 3 yet.  They need to get on that shit and quick!!!

Clueless Behind the Video Game Wheel

Recently my husband started commuting to work with me.  He noted, after a few weeks experiencing my driving during Austin rush-hour traffic, that he thought I'd really enjoy auto racing video games.

Okay, I don't want to evaluate what that says about how my husband thinks of my driving, but I found the proposal interesting.  We started looking into current racing games and two of them stood out to us: GT5 and Forza4.  

There was only one problem with my getting into these games.  I absolute hate console controllers.  I've gone so far as to by a Xim so I can use my keyboard/mouse when a game isn't offered on PC.  But for this particular application, I don't need a keyboard but a steering wheel and foot pedals.  

I thought it would be a relatively simple task to find a steering wheel.  There are a couple guys at my office that play racing games, and they said hands down the G27 was the way to go. That wheel is specific to GT5 and as I learned more, it became obvious that GT5 is a race car simulator program much more than it is a racing game.  I'm not interesting in tweaking out my car's suspension or gear ratios or other such non-sense just so I can advance to the next level. 

So that had me looking hard at F4.  Everyone I talked to that played Forza 4 said it is a FUN game and not a overly complex simulator like GT5. So I started looking for a steering wheel that worked on the Xbox.  G27 is a PS3 wheel and the Xbox adapter offered for it has received ugly reviews.  So I obviously looked at  the wheel built for F4, made by Fanatech, the Forza Motorsport CSR Wheel Value Pack.  Great reviews on this wheel/pedal set so I go out to buy it but it's not available.

So I looked at the Forza elite wheel that they do have in stock. Um, well, that was a no go.  It's $600 and that doesn't include the $150 pedal. WTF.  This is for Forza 4 so it isn't like I'm playing a high-end simulator like GT5 so this just seems ridiculous to me.  

Oh, then I go back and look at the out-of-stock wheel. First I realize that the value pack sold at $249 is no longer available. Then I realize that the non-elite wheel alone is $200  (the one that 's out of stock) and the pedals are now sold separately for an additional $80.  Why you'd sell a wheel without pedals is just plain bad form in my opinion.  Sure, offer upgrades for the other higher-end pedals, but sell the base wheel with base pedals for goodness sake.  Separating them, when you need both to play, is just a transparent way to increase profits. 

At this point, I simply gave up, abandoning the whole quest.  Sure I'd like to try out F4, but if it's going to be such a pain in the ass just to find a highly rated steering wheel that won't cost an arm and leg, then it is not longer fun.  And I'm doing this because I want to have fun.  

So I'm a bit clueless, a bit disappointed, and ready to leave it all in my rear view mirror.

AOC...RIP at least for us.

Today I received an email notification that my AOC subscription was ending. That brought me to reminisce about the good ol' days. I was astounded by the quality of Age Of Conan those first days of game play. It was incredible. The breathtaking vistas. The cobblestone details. The seasoned feel of an MMORPG in a brand-spankin' new game hot off the virtual shelf. I had thought I'd found virtual utopia.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just a casual gamer. I've never so much as reached end-game content in WoW, EQ2 (sorry, mom!), etc, etc. But I really loved AOC. My partner, Jason, and I quickly moved through the noob area and spent some time playing the different races/classes before settling on a combo that we both found compatible and balanced. What fun it was, never a grind. It was the first time we stuck with this sort of game for as long as we did. We were nearing level 50, a definite milestone in our gaming relationship.

But as we pushed that envelope, we found quests harder to come by, didn't know where to go next, and it was apparent that game play was not as planned out, transitions not as smooth. We literally scoured the game for zones where we could play as a couple without needing to join a larger group for a heroic zone (our preference was to play as a solo pair). It was tedious and ultimately we abandoned it. I was disappointed but not as much as I was frustrated. Jason, being in the game dev industry, has a pulse on these things far beyond mine. He said we weren't the only ones having problems with the upper level game play, particularly with those diligent souls that had reached end-game content and run out of things to do.

I'm not sure if they've rectified the content/game play issues but in the end, they'd already lost us...we moved on to the next game. Kinda sad. But I guess that's the lesson I learned....don't go gold with a game before it's done...not just the noob zones.

Elderly Gamers

I just saw this article about the change in demographics of gamers and I had to laugh. My mom is one of those granny gamers. She had some health issues that had her unable to get out a lot, so I put together a gaming computer, bought her a copy of EverQuest2 and away she went. It wasn't long before she had surpassed me in levels and experience. She's pretty hardcore as a matter of fact. When she went in for hip replacement surgery, she was transferred from the hospital to the rehabilitation center afterward, and one of her first questions upon admission was if the center had high-speed internet and wifi access...so she could bring in a wifi gaming laptop and play EQ2 in bed while she recuperated. You should have SEEN the look of shock and confusion on the admission nurse's face. It was truly a classic moment. I hope to be as hip in my elderly years!
http://www.electronichouse.com/article/girls_elderly_boost_gaming_market/?utm_source=EHWeeklyNewsletter&utm_medium=email

Almost Level 50!!!!

I've been playing MMORPGs with Jason for nearly 4 years now. Jason doesn't usually stick with any game for any lengthy amount of time, and, if he does, he creates new characters frequently because he's bored with them or doesn't like the class. So here I am having never experienced end-game content on a single MMORPG that I've played, while my mother has several maxed out characters in her favorite MMORPGS: EverQuest2.

It's looking like this may finally change however. We're still playing Age of Conan. Not only are we still playing, but we're still playing our original characters and tonight we hit the all time highest levels we've both ever achieved in game...47 (see Tazriel on her steed at level 47 at left). It's amazing really. In spite of the fact that AOC has some serious issues with having enough quest content to keep a single pair of players busy in the relevant zones without scratching their heads wondering where in the heck they're supposed to go NOW or if it's intended that you must group in larger groups or grind your way to the next level...yes, in spite of these tedious facts, we are loving are characters, feeling very compatible, love the art and game design, with enough balance between our classes that neither of us feels like the other is carrying us along, and we're effective while still having plenty of opportunities for challenge (aka we still die a lot). I am so excited to think that I may actually get to see end-game content and with Jason no less!!! wOOt!!.

The Gamer

I love MMO RPGs. My boyfriend introduced me to my first MMO in 2005, City of Heroes. Since then we've played many games together: EverQuest2, GuildWars, City of Villains, World of Warcraft, Battlefield 2, Lord of the Rings, Tabula Rasa, Battlefield 2142, Age of Conan, and Warhammer. I'm sure I've forgotten a few in this list. Currently we're playing Age of Conan as time allows. I'm very goal driven so these type of games are seriously appealing to me...more things to check off my list than I can ever possibly hope to accomplish before they're no longer worth XP. I've tried a few times to get into First Person Shooters but I can't seem to get beyond my performance anxiety...I find it too stressful to be fun at present. I'm hoping I can change that once I get more familiar with them and learn how to play better, but first I need a keyboard & mouse solution to replace those horrid game controllers. This is one thing I do that is totally frivolous, something that serves no purpose but to have fun with my best friend. I used to feel guilty playing games, particularly because they can suck up an incredible amount of my personal time. Now, I see it as something I do for me. No guilt. No regret. Just some R&R.