woensdag 25 april 2012

Good Morning Dragonborn.

Just when you think you can have a quiet day relaxing at your private home (Riverside Lodge), you go outside in the morning, unarmed, to enjoy the view and this is what greats you.
What a way to wake up and make you stumble for your weapons and armor :)

Yeah good morning to you too..

dinsdag 24 april 2012

Immersion in a RolePlayingGame

After a hard day travelling it is always good to wind down at the inn.

It is not always like that for me, i mean i enjoy my "chainmail bikini's" and skimpy armors, although i tend to get bored with them pretty fast and start looking for some armor that actually fits within the game/lore.

I mean after a while i start feeling like something isn't right, like i don't belong.

I am probably one of the very few, i mean just have a look around on the Nexus sites, my guess is that 80-90% of the armors there are very skimpy looking or hentai "inspired" armors.
Don't get me wrong though i am not critisizing those mod makers, hell some of those armors look amazing, but to me they just look like they don't belong in Skyrim.

So eventhough i will play around with those armors, i will eventually return to somthing more "lore friendly".
Some might consider the above armor to be skimpy, but i think it definitely fits within the lore, this armor is named Barbarian Armor and really fits it's name, and skimpy.. well there's the Forsworn armors or some fur armors that show even more :)

OMG, you mean you actually Roleplay in an RPG??
Well yes i guess i do :)
Not always, i mean i do use fast travel by clicking on the map markers, but there are times where i really try to roleplay. Last nights session for example i started like anyone would by fast travelling to a quest marker.

However this time my quest target was an actual moving target and seemed to avoid me, everytime i fast travelled the target had moved the opposite direction.

I actually started to enjoy that, so i jumped on my horse and started the chase, eventually catching my target.
I decided to move back to the questgiver by horse, eventhough it was half way accross the map.
Luck had it that as soon as it went dark i came across an inn, so i decided to spend the night there.

Heading out at first light to continue my journey, of course during the day i got jumped by bandits and my horse got killed, so now i am on foot.

The screenshot was taken while i travelled through Rorikstead and eventhough the day was far from over i decided to stop here and rest and stay the night for relaxation, food, drinks and a good night rest, before continuing my journey towards Whiterun.. on foot.
And with that i mean actual walking ingame, so not running, no fast travel, just walk.

And that's where i had to quit to get some IRL sleep.
So yeah i am (sometimes) roleplaying in a RolePlayingGame :)

I do sometimes try this in an mmo, but it's pretty hard to stay immersed in the game when a person runs by, jumping up and down like the next incarnation of frogger named ipwnedurmom.
Or when there are 20-30 people on top of a questgiver trying to get the same quest.
There is no, waiting in line for your turn anymore. RP servers are really just a name/categorie and mean nothing anymore.
They are probably just there so publishers can say we have them so shut up you RPers.

Sometimes i wonder if RolePlaying is just dying out because of the gimme now instant reward easy mode generation.

Oh well at least i have my sanctuary of singleplayer games where i can RP as much as i like without anyone annoying the hell out of me.

Now: GET OF MY LAWN!!


zondag 22 april 2012

vrijdag 20 april 2012

I wanna play my own game.



I often use Evernote to just write random stuff down, thoughts, opinions, comments or whatever, some long, some just a few words, with the intention of writing a blogpost about it.
However more often than not these notes don't turn into blogposts and stay just notes on Evernote.. For some reason i get stuck on just a few notes and hit a wall..

However this time i thought to try something new (to me) and just post a few of these notes "Bullet Points" style.

Most of these notes were about why i love the open world RPG games so much lately (been playing a lot of Skyrim) and especially games like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Oblivion and Skyrim that feature mod options.
I even prefer to play them over MMO's lately, which hasn't happend in a long time.


  • I especially love these games because pretty much anything can be modded.
  • It gives me an almost unique game, i mean what are the chances of someone having all the same mods installed as i have.
  • I really like being able to customize a  game to my liking, being graphical, gameplay or even complete overhauls going as far as almost giving you a complete new game.
  • I'm never really done playing the game as i enjoy trying out new mods just as much as playing the game.
  • I am often amazed at  some of these mods, especially those that improve on graphics,  gameplay or overall experience. When you see what some of these mods can do to the game you start thinking the original developers where lazy or didn't care, there are mods out there that are way better than what the developers themself made in these games, making me really think that some of these modders should be hired to work on these games, i mean these modders are making this stuff in their spare time, just for fun and it looks way better than the vanilla stuff the designers made.
  • Despite being (often) negative about the devs/designers i still think they deserve a lot of credit for designing and creating such a great open world (playground) to play in and for releasing the creation tools they used to make the game so the community gets a chance to improve and expand an allready awesome game. (Note to this note: i actually intended to write a "Developer Appreciation Week" post about this but unfortianatly never got around to write this post. But who says we can only thank the devs for one week.. So there you go!)
  • I am getting more and more into the mindset of wanting to play games the way i want to play them and not how developers decide i have to play them.
  • When the game does get boring there are always new mods to try out that will sometimes even give you whole new lands to explore, new quests to do, adding a whole lot more gameplay.

Now i know this is pretty much imposible to do in MMO's/multiplayer games, however take a look at WoW and their addons. A great way to being able to customize your game close to what you'd like it to be.
And i would even go as far and say that i probably would not be playing WoW today if it wasn't for the addons.
When i started playing WoW i did not know about addons, took a 10 day trial and played for maybe 2 days and then didn't touch it for a long time, when i learned about addons  i tried it again installing some addons that installed some stuff i wanted to see in the game and i have been playing since.

See now i actually managed to turn a couple of these notes into a blogpost, maybe i should do this more often, whether or not this post makes sense.. well i'll leave that up to you :)

dinsdag 17 april 2012

Slaying Dragons

Just a little update on what i am playing right now.
Skyrim and that's pretty much it :)

I've been installing lots of mods and doing lots of exploring, eventhough i have finished the main story i am still amazed at how much there is still left to discover. I guess fast travel is not always a good thing.

The pic up there shows my current character i am playing Skyrim with and thanks to a bunch of mods she looks awesome :)

Ok well i am off slaying dragons!! afterall what else is a dragonborn to do?

maandag 9 april 2012

Developer Appreciation Week: inXile Entertainment

Last year i participated in this DAW "event" and so i figured i should this year :)

So when i sat down to start and think who i should write about, i pretty much came to the same conclusion as last year: BioWare.
The way they interact with their fans/players through media like twitter and of course their awesome games.
I am, as you probably know, or can tell a huge fan of BioWare.

However as i thought about it a little bit more, it came to me i really love this new kickstarter thing :)
The idea of fan funded games, making games the fans want instead of making them the way publishers want them.
I wrote about this in yesterdays post: Kickstart my heart.

For this DAW post i especially want to go with inXile Entertainment, who started the kickstarter to get Wasteland 2 going.



I am a huge Fallout fan and as such i love the idea of playing a sequal to the predecessor of the Fallout series or the Godfather of post-apocalyptic RPG's.

Eventhough i have to admit i never played the original Wasteland (yet), i played games back then on my C64 and Atari 2600 but for some reason i wasn't interrested in RPG's that much at that time, my interrest in RPG's only started when i started playing games like KOTOR.

So with Wasteland 2 this is my opportunity to redeem myself, as this game is being developed by a lot of the same people that brought us the original Wasteland.

I want to thank Brian Fargo and inXile Entertainment for reaching out to the fans for funding to get development of this game started and involve the fans in the making of this game to try and make the Wasteland sequel into a game the fans want.

Now of course this development has hardly started so maybe it is to early to praise them as there will be a development cycle of at least 18 months so there is still a long road to travel, but i guess this post isn't about that, it's about inXile reaching out to the fans to get a game made that apperantly publishers were not interrested in having made and reaching out to the fans to get the game development funded.

Now i know inXile is not the first nor the last who is using kickstarter to get their game funded, but they are making the game i am most interrested in.

So thank you Brian Fargo, inXile entertainment, Chris Avellone and Obsidian for making this happen!

zondag 8 april 2012

Kickstart my heart.

As you may have noticed kickstarter has become quite popular to get old games back to life (or breath new life into old games).
Wasteland is one of those games that got me excited, Wasteland is basicly  what brought (the awesome) Fallout series to life, so needles to say the Wasteland 2 kickstarter got me all worked up :)



Another one of those classics is Shadowrun, coming back to life as Shadowrun Returns through kickstarter.

I think it is a great idea to get funds this way, screw publishers, let's make games the fans want and not what publishers want, all they are interrested in is money.
It is pretty amazing to see the internet/fans come together and get things funded, i really hope we are going to see more like this in the future.
No longer are we told what to play by publishers, we fund and play the games we want to play.

Publishers are probably going a bit nervous now with this kickstarter trend going on :)

Anyways needless to say i was very happy to take part in these kickstarters and did help by funding both Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns (i went for the $100 options) and can't wait to see what the games are going to be like.

Links:
Wasteland 2 kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2
Wasteland 2 Paypal: http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/pledge.php
Shadowrun Returns kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-returns
Shadworun Returns Paypal: http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/paypal/

I was also very happy to see they both added Paypal options, since kickstarter only accepts creditcards and i don't use creditcards.

zondag 1 april 2012

Azaroth, such a familiar place


It's amazing how much fun it is to be back in WoW.
I had not touched the game, well basicly since SWTOR launched, but the moment i started playing again it felt really good.
I am still amazed at how much fun this game actually is, right now i am basicly going for the loremaster achievement (been working on that for some time now) which means completing all quests in the different parts of the world and after Cataclysm quite a few zones, that i didn't finish before Cataclysm released, got reset for me.
Mostly these are (very) low level quests, but i find them to be very entertaining, there is definitely a lot of lore to be discovered and eventhough i mostly kill mobs with one shot it is still a lot of fun going through these quests.

It is also funny how quickly you get back into things, before i knew it i was once again doing my daily quests :)
It is really awesome that despite being at level cap for so long there is still so much to do in this game as there is so much content you are actually skipping when leveling.

And with Mists of Pandaria on the horizon it looks like it will be quite some time before i am finished with WoW.

For the Horde!