Okay, who thought this all the way through?

"Bother," said Pooh.

There's a lot that's interesting about the Elsweyr expac for Elder Scrolls Online, but one big part of the expac is, to be quite frank, a head scratcher: the new class, Necromancer.

It was as if the devs had never heard of the Main Questline, or Molag Bal for that matter.

I mean, the devs do know that you're fighting the undead (among other Daedric nasties), right? Why on earth would you want to create a class that is exactly what you are currently trying to remove from Tamriel?

And what would the (so-called) "Good" Daedric Princes (among them Meridia and Azura) think about your devotion to re-animating corpses?

At least if you cast Necromantic spells in cities you're going to run afoul of the law, but that's a minor consolation to throwing a monkey wrench to the entire game's storyline.

You Know What this Game Needs....

...A Battle Royale mode!!

No, not WoW or SWTOR or any other game I've played regularly, but rather Black Desert Online.

Of all the complaints that I've heard about BDO --mostly centered around the Pay2Win nature of its cash shop*-- I haven't heard the need for a Battle Royale mode. About the closest there is to a Battle Royale mode in any MMO is Outlaw's Den in SWTOR, and you can tell when someone is trolling for people to show up in Outlaw's Den just to gank them by the wheedling they do in zone chat.

But this, in BDO? Really?

If there's a game whose setting almost directly implies Battle Royale, it's Age of Conan's Hyborea. "Every man for himself" is pretty much a credo that you find in a lot of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and by extension a Battle Royale mode would work well there. You'd also need to add a few extras, such as Mad Wizards or Atlantean Artifacts, to make it more truly in Conan's vein, but at least the game world/players would be receptive of the idea.

This announcement, however, just implies "cash grab" and I can't see it lasting very long.





*Which seems to be much more of a theme on Asian MMOs (and Rift) than on Western MMOs, which focus primarily on accessories or clothing.


EtA: corrected a grammatical error.

News and Notes for the New Year

I haven't intentionally gone silent after the New Year's Day, but work and family conspired against any updates until now. It's not like I've stopped playing games --I've played quite a bit, thankyouverymuch-- but my traditional blogging time has been taken up by other items. However, I did want to mention a couple of items that were MMO related.

***

Bethesda had a major announcement on January 15th, announcing the next ESO expac to be the home of the Khajiit, Elsweyr. I kind of expected the expac to be a homeland territory, given that Summerset and Morrowind covered the Altmer and Dunmer, and I also knew that Black Marsh was already covered as a purchasable DLC. The addition of dragons, however, did catch me by surprise.

And, to be honest, I was really amused.

Although the name Elsweyr is pronounced "Elsewhere", it's a space away from the name of a settlement of Dragonriders of Pern*, whose places are known as weyrs. Between the obvious naming similarities and the references to dragons, I can only imagine that we might see a surreptitious homage to Anne in the expac.

***

After the brouhaha at BlizzCon with the Diablo mobile game announcement, I noticed that a ton of "Blizzard is dying" "WoW is dying" "Activision is killing Blizzard" videos popped up in my YouTube feed.

I'm not one to say that the sky is falling, but I'm sure that to some hardcore fans, Activision is the new EA.** Between the disaster of the Fallout 76 release and Blizzard's internal and external problems, it seems that no AAA developer is immune these days. I've said for a while now that a lot of these problems are brought on by the incessant need to post upward trending quarterly results for investors, forcing development houses to push out games that aren't ready.

Another way at looking at the drive for more profit is to view Bungie's split from Activision in that light. Bungie feuded with Activision over the "annualized schedule" of releasing major expacs/updates annually --the annual CoD release concept brought to the Destiny platform-- and by maintaining complete control over the game Bungie can release new content when they feel an expac is ready. Why the annualized schedule in the first place? Well, Activision wanted to keep profits up, and annual release schedules guarantee (more or less) steady sales. Activision blamed their latest slow quarter on Bungie, which Bungie didn't take too kindly toward. And now that the split with Bungie has been announced, investors have launched an investigation into whether Activision engaged in securities fraud.

From a developer's standpoint, Bungie's split with Activision made perfect sense. From an investor's standpoint, however, a company they invested in --and expected to generate regular profits-- is losing a major franchise after having shuttered another major franchise (Skylanders), along with (supposed) poor performance of one of the jewels of the company (WoW). So it's not a big surprise that investors are now upset.

If this were any normal publicly traded company, I'd start to expect layoffs to "stabilize the bottom line". But this is still Activision Blizzard, so I have no idea whether the Blizzard side will finally start standing up for itself against Bobby Kotick. I'd not necessarily count on it, but I'm surprised that Activision let Bungie go, so you never know.

As 2019 rolls on, stay tuned. I'm sure this isn't the last we've heard from these events.




*By Anne McCaffrey. Some of the behavior behind the first two books, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, don't hold up in today's world vs. the early 70s when the first two books were written. Dragonflight was, in fact, three novellas published separately and then put into a single book.

**And we'll have someone pop in with a comment about how much worse EA is in three... two... one...


EtA: Corrected the name of Elsweyr. That's what I get for typing while tired.

Two Down, One to Go

I finished the Daggerfall Covenant questline playthrough on my main last night, making that two of the three factions completed in Elder Scrolls Online. While I still have another entire faction's quests to run through, I found the following interactions between factions interesting:

• Ebonheart Pact -- Attacked/invaded by Daggerfall Covenant, Attacked by strike teams of Aldmeri Dominion
• Daggerfall Covenant -- Attacked by strike teams of Aldmeri Dominion

And that's it. A slaver ship that sells slaves to House Telvanni is involved in one localized quest location, but Telvanni isn't part of the Ebonheart Pact. There's also another "spy" episode in which House Telvanni is implicated, but again the Ebonheart Pact again comes up clean when it comes to interfaction fighting in the questlines.

I have to wonder whether this observation holds up with the Aldmeri Dominion, so we'll see.

One last item of notice: High King Emeric came off as a conniving asshole in the three faction meeting that leads to the Coldharbour section of the questline, and I was willing to bet that he looked much better to a member of the Daggerfall Covenant itself. After having played through the entire Daggerfall Covenant questline, I can conclude that yes, he does come off much better in that questline, but he also still comes off as an asshole in that cross faction meeting.

Oh well. Some people never change.

A Musical Friday Post

In case a prior post didn't make it plain, I'm a fan of Stardew Valley.* Therefore, when The Doubleclicks posted this cover of the Stardew Valley Theme, I knew I had to post this.

*Who did I marry? Penny, although I seriously considered Leah.

The 16 Year Itch

The oldest mini-Red is back home for winter break after her finals*, and practically the first thing she did after arriving was to get together with some friends to go play SWTOR.

Although this isn't the Smuggler I've heard
so much about, I've been told that the Mini-Red's
friends created toons that would qualify for the
Fashion Hall of Shame on the Hawtpants of the
Old Republic blog.

I must have done something right.

***

Our main PC, the one I use for gaming, is over six years old now. At the time, the i7-3770 was pretty much the best processor you could buy, and while I skimped on a few other parts of the build I definitely made sure the processor would last. And last it has.

However, that also means that the hard drive and other components are six years old as well, and I've grown a bit nervous about the hard drive in particular. Sure, I back up data to an external drive on a regular basis, but if you've ever had to deal with a hard drive crash it's not what I'd call fun. Therefore, I'm looking at replacing the hard drive with an SSD and adding another HDD for the pictures/movies/whatever storage.

That ought to keep the PC active and running for a while.

However --and you knew this was coming, right?-- I'm planning on building a replacement over the course of the next year or two. Not to replace the main PC in general, as it'll be perfectly fine for what my wife uses** for the next 4-5 years at least, but a separate PC that I'll be able to use for gaming going forward.

I have a small confession to make: I've not built a PC from scratch since Windows XP was the current version of Windows.

I used to build and rebuild PCs back through the 90s, mainly to keep our old 386/SX20 486DX33 486SX66 going, and yes, I was one of those people who would spend hours perusing the telephone directory sized Computer Shopper on a monthly basis. However, after the Windows XP machine's motherboard failed in 2007 I priced out the cost of replacing it directly with a prebuilt vs. building it myself, and I was surprised to find that it was more cost efficient to just buy a computer with Windows and MS Office already installed as opposed to building one myself.

Yes, I know that in general this is still the case, but after dealing with the HP Phoenix for the past six years, I think I'm ready to go back to building one myself. The reasons are pretty straightforward:

• I control what goes in the machine.
  
  I didn't realize just how much I missed controlling the hardware when I was trying to see if I could tweak the system. The machine has all the prerequisites for handling overclocking, except for the motherboard. If it were me selecting the components, I'd have bought a motherboard that could handle overclocking. I might not have tweaked anything, but I prefer having the option to do so.
  
• The price of MS Office isn't a limiting factor any more.
  
  Since Microsoft is pushing people into MS Office 365 as a subscription service, I've been moving in the direction of using either OpenOffice or Google Drive. I've no reason to get a new version of MS Office when Office 2010 on the main PC still works and I've got free options.
  
• The cost versus performance of the components hasn't changed that much over time.
  
  Back when I last built a PC, the performance of the components kept changing drastically on a yearly basis. In 1999, I bought one of the first AMD Athlon PCs, and for a brief period of time I owned one of the fastest PCs in the world. Three months later that was no longer the case. After 2-3 years, the Athlon was showing its age to the point where it wasn't keeping up with the new games at all.
  
  The i7-3770, however, is in a different situation. Three years after it was built, it was still a fine performer. And now, six years after it was built, it has finally slipped off the recommended requirements for the latest games. We're not talking the minimum requirements, but the recommended requirements. By contrast, that old Athlon was off the minimum requirements for a lot of games by 2005-6.
  
  Why the change? Advances in processing power have come at a more incremental rate, especially the last several years, and AMD's Ryzen architecture has propelled them back into the performance game with Intel and given PC builders a good alternative to Intel at a great price for performance. Intel may still be the gamers' processor of choice, but AMD is now a viable option, particularly once their 7 nm Ryzen 3rd Gen architecture ships in 2019.

Given all this, I've started getting the itch to build a PC once again. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start perusing the enthusiast web sites/YouTube Channels while I dream a little.

*Finals are stressful for anybody, but for a Music Performance major, the jury cranks the stress levels up to 11. For the uninitiated, a jury is a performance you give before either the entire department or a significant number of them that determines whether they believe you fit enough to continue progressing in your music career. Think of it as a Masters' Thesis defense, but every semester, and you get the idea.

**And for gaming in general.

You're Almost Old Enough to Drink

Twenty years ago on December 21st, 1998, a computer RPG by a little known software company named BioWare was released to the world. That computer RPG would go on to revolutionize and revive the Western style RPG.

Happy birthday, Baldur's Gate!

One of the many classic lines from Baldur's Gate.

And another....

And the source of the best quotes in the

game, Minsc (and Boo)!