For the Beta-ment of all

Today sees the release of the hotly anticipated Elite Dangerous 2.4 Beta. For those of you who don't know, Elite Dangerous 2.4 'The Return' is mostly concerning the reappearance of those dreaded insectoid extraterrestrials, The Thargoids.

 While the Thargoids are the headline act of this update, I would not expect to see much of them in this beta. Considering past leaks from Commanders who managed to get to where they should not have, I'd expect Frontier to keep these cards hidden firmly up their sleeves.


 However, there are some of the long awaited changes to the crime and punishment system, intended to help crack down on some players' nefarious deeds and bring harsher consequences to their actions. This will require some vigorous and robust testing. Remember: what happens in Beta, stays in Beta so let out your inner space pirate/marauder. Your actions on the Beta server have no influence on the Live server, just make sure you are logged into the correct server before you do anything.

The 'Holo-Me' system, introduced in the last patch, will see the introduction of eye wear and twelve new hairstyles. Now us bespectacled folk can more accurately mold our commanders into our likeness. You could speculate that the eye wear could have future functionality, possibly used for an augmented reality HUD for when we take our commanders for a walk without our helmets on. If you ever wished the sleeves of one suit and the legs of another were with the torso of the one you were wearing, well now your wish can come true. You will be able to mix and match parts from any of the pilot suits that you have purchased. once you have chosen your look, you can now save it to the new save slot system, kind of like a wardrobe for your Commander.



There are many quality of life changes too, expansion of the synthesis recipe system to include heat sinks, chaff, limpet drones and even topping up your emergency life support system. These coupled with the introduction of hull and canopy repair drone control modules, will greatly increase the self sufficiency and sustainability of explorers and combat pilots alike; so long as they have the materials.




You will now have the option to remotely sell a stored ship should you find yourself short on cash at the rebuy screen. changes to the Galaxy map include improvements to route plotting, allowing faster plotting, and routes up to 20 000 light years, twenty times the distance of the previous version. There is also the option to route via neutron stars to take advantage of the jump distance bonus you can gain from fuel scooping from their particle blooms.

The listing of 'Mysterious locations added that we're not going to tell you about', is about as obvious as a neon sign in saying there is much to this beta that is tucked away.

Full patch notes are found on the Elite Dangerous forums here.

Space Face! 2.3 First Look Stream 1, TL:DW Recap

On Tuesday the 14th, Frontier's Senior Community Manager Ed Lewis presented some 'On The Horizon' livestreams to show some of the coming content in The Commanders 2.3 update. Ed was joined on Tuesday by Producer Eddie Symons to present a first look at the 'Commander Creator', the 'Camera Suite' and a couple other extras. 

Holo Me
No, it's not a Dark Souls protagonist nor is it a type of space cheese; it's the name of the Commander Creator system coming in 2.3. This is accessed via the right hand panel, next to the Engineers button, and takes you to the rarely seen back end of your cockpit where it presents the holographic representation of yourself. This view is accompanied by a window with all of your options within the toolset category selected at the bar at the top of the screen.

The options include an impressive array of preset 'space faces', all produced using the same tools you too can use should you not find a preset that floats your boat. The toolsets include Body, Complexion, Hair, Face, Head and Cosmetics.

The Body tools allow for suit customisation with the choice of pattern and then colouration, but also lights,shoulder decals and helmets. For the helmets you can choose whether the face shield is clear or opaque, whether you normally wear the full helm or just the collar and backplate or no helmet at all. Of course in emergencies your character will don their full headgear, it's either that or hold their breath.

With Complexion you choose your commanders skin colour, condition and visible ageing. you can select skin details such as pockmarks, moles and freckles. Perhaps choose some drastic facial scars and even set some asymmetry to your pilots face. after all, we can't all be princess perfect.




For hair there is a variety of short to medium hairstyles since long loose hair is not a good idea in zero G. you also have a rainbow of colours to choose from and also whether or not the eyebrows should match the hair. For the fellas there is also a selection of facial hair available, again coloured to taste.



Both Face and Head come with a plethora of sliders to tweak and menus to select until you get your pilots visage the way you want it. Particular note goes the the eyes where not only can you have mismatched eyes if you fancy a 'Major Tom' look, but there are also cybernetic options available.

Cosmetics didn't have much to show bar the usual make up but Eddie did mention that tattoos are going to be a thing that will be available.

Once set, your avatar is instantly updated and used for both on your ship and your multicrew representation.

Camera Suite

As I said in my analysis of the teaser image, the Camera Suite has a bunch of preset positions dotted around the ship and is equipped with zoom, depth of field and blur functions. However not only will you be able to free fly the camera to over 2km away from your ship but also retain flight control of your ship. This is going to be incredible in the hands of the video making community.

Dolphin Announcement

After many reported sightings of this elusive beast, the majestic Dolphin class vessel has finally broken the surface for all to see. The luxury staryacht will be available in 2.3 but as for further details on it's capabilities, we will have to wait for now.

Mega Ships
First seen in the PS4 announcement trailer, Mega Ships are non player owned giant mobile interactable vessels, some of which you will even be able to dock with. The first of which has been named 'Fisher's Rest', in honour of the late Carrie Fisher. Over time we will be seeing a bunch of Mega Ship variants, what they are or their purpose is being kept close to Frontiers collective chest. 

I Want YOU For My Multicrew: A Digest of Elite 2.3

this post will be updated as further details on 2.3 come to light

Shoot him already!

On the 27th of January, Frontier announced the update 2.3 beta would be coming some where between the 20th and the 26th of Febuary. While The announcement was rather light on the details of what we will be getting our teeth into, it did come with a lovely picture that I'll be look at in another post. Today (31st January) on the Elite forums, they published a new Dev Update that read like a taster menu for what Frontier have been cooking up for us over the past few months.

While the update does cover a great deal, everything is subject to change from now until release so somethings that are mentioned may change between now and then.

Currently Multicrew looks like one ship and its owner with up to two other players as crew members. This is achieved in two ways, first there is an  'LF Crew/LF Ship' kind of deal where if you activate it you are automatically matched as crew to an 'open' ship. The other way is to directly invite your mates onto your bridge until all your spare seats are filled. You'll be able to have two player crew members along with your single AI crew member,

When joining another ship as crew, your ship is logged out wherever it is in the galaxy and you appear on the bridge of the ship you are joining. While there will be those who will probably complain, something about immersion, it is the more fun thing to do. You'll be able to leave when you choose, unless summarily booted out the airlock by the ships owner at the helm. Either way you return to your own vessel quick sharp.

So far, three roles have been announced: Helm, Gunner and Fighter Pilot. The Helm apparently can only be occupied by the owner of the ship and I'm guessing perhaps their AI crew member while guest crew can skip between the latter two at will. I would like to be able to permit someone else to take the Con but have the option to override them as you saw fit. For instance a veteran pilot is riding shotgun with a rookie and they have just been interdicted, the greenhorn is way out of their depth so they pass the Helm over to their more experienced copilot who can get them out of trouble. The Helm will be flying the ship as per usual, with control of power management, fixed and gimballed weapons, navigation and synthesis. I presume they will also have control of utility modules such as heat sinks and chaff.

The Fighter Pilot is exactly that, they pilot the fighters instead of or as well as your AI crew person. only now you can have two people controlling fighters at the same time. This will mean that those dual fighter bays now have a reason for existing as you'll be able to launch both fighters together for twice the fun. I would like to see this role extended to include driving the SRV on a planets surface while the mother ship is flying air support, should make some surface missions more manageable.

WWWWEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

Last and by no means least, The Gunner has every turret weapon on the ship slaved to their control. they do so by a 360 degree third person camera with a targeting reticule and every turret that has line of sight to the target can be fired simultaneously. As well as the usual fire groups, the Gunner also has two 'quick slot' fire buttons that can be assigned to other modules like scanners or missile launchers. Unlike when they are controlled by a solo pilot, missile launchers and scanners have a 360 degree lock on and fire arc. This means the target does not need to be in front of the ship for the warrant/manifest scan or missiles to be able to do their business.

there looks to be other benefits to Multicrew other than yelling instructions at one another. Frontier are toying with the idea of having discounted ship rebuy costs per crew member and having an extra power pip per crew member available in the power distributor, having up to eight instead of the standard six. all bounty or combat vouchers are to be duplicated for each member of the crew instead of split as it is in a wing of ships. However, all fines and bounties incurred are duplicated too. If a crew member is not willing to keep the fines and bounties in their name then they have the option to leave without them, but it means they leave their profits too.

It's amazing what you find on Google

Accompanying Multicrew in the 2.3 update is the Commander Creator where you will be able to put a face to your name. Those of us that were at the Birmingham Elite Meet last September got to see a demo of an early working version of it and also got to see Senior Community Manager Ed Lewis' likeness he'd created for his Commander. There is also facial hair and hairstyles other than buzz cut and polished dome. Not only will we be moulding face putty but also painting our space suits in colours other than black and stencilling decals onto our shoulder pads.


We will be able to admire ourselves and our crew with a new 'fully fledged' camera system. Hopefully more of a camera mounted drone than the 'Selfie Stick' we currently have, if the in game shots from the recent trailers are anything to go by.

Another tidbit that many people seem to have missed is that Frontier are working on implementing 'Ship Naming' as mentioned on a Dev Livestream before the Christmas period. I for one look forward to having 'RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION' stencilled next to the cockpit of my Fer De Lance.

13/02 Update
Confirmation that the livestream on the 14th with heavily feature the Commander Creator, where you personalise your in game avatar for all to see, and the new and improved Vanity Camera. As a teaser to the livestream, Frontier released the following picture onto the forums.

It's a face and it fits!

On the surface, we can see a Commander with an actual face in the pilot seat of her Imperial Eagle. However, if we look closely, we can find there are loads of details to be teased out of it.

If you look to the bottom centre of the image you can see the label 'Ship Cockpit Front'. This suggests that not only is there more that one cockpit camera angle, but there may be internal cameras around other parts of the ship. Around the edge of the above image, you can see various camera effect controls such as zoom, depth of field and blur all with separate controls for adjustments. There is also a '0M' in the top right, possibly a distance reading for when the camera is in an external view and a 'hide UI' command to give you those clean shots. Finally there is the exit command set to 'Left CTRL + Left ALT + Space', the default command to enter the current external camera, suggesting this is a full replacement of that camera.

Now for a closer look at the pilot herself.

Excuse the pixelation, original image is 720.

First thing you notice about the pilot is she is not wearing a helmet. Seemingly a rather suicidal decision given the likelyhood of a canopy breach, however she is wearing a Remlok as labelled over her collarbones. A Remlok was first described in the novella 'The Dark Wheel' which came with the original Elite, as a bulky collar that is worn around the neck. On exposure to vacuum the collar deploys a hood and visor to allow the wearer to continue breathing for a short time using the built in oxygen tank and air scrubber. It works in a similar manner to this new bicycle helmet, but with an airtight visor:

As you can see, you'll be able to customise the suits colour and patterning, including the underlayer if the above trailer and images are anything to go by. The shoulder plates may be where you can place decals on your suit. Whether it'll be just your rank or other decals too, we will see. You can also see the probably customisable lights of the suits haptic interface and those on the torso and arms.

As well as the usual face-moulding slew of sliders, there seems to be quite a few details such as freckles, character ageing, natural variance to the skin tone, make up and fatiguing (dark eye circles). If you look at the hair, you can see individual strands standing slightly proud from the pilots hair do. You can also see variation in the colour tones of the hair, makes a change from the 'freshly dyed' block colour hair that you see in many games. Personally I look forward to seeing what a 'Max Slider' Character looks like before i settle down and replicate my own visage.

Do you know Jaques?

It's Jaques, not Jacques

If you play Elite Dangerous then you may at some point have heard of Jaques and wondered 'Who exactly is he?' Well, Jaques is the sole owner and proprietor of Jaques Station; the system hopping starport of Elite Dangerous. He also may have inadvertently become the saviour of the human race, should the coming months in game prove difficult.

Long Past

What'll it be Commander?

He first showed up in 'The Stories of the Frontier', the booklet that accompanied 1993's Frontier: Elite II. In the year 3200 Jaques was a cyborg bartender, hard wired into the massive dodecahedral Coriolis starport of which he owned half. He planned to buy out the other half, strap some whacking great engines and a hyperspace drive to it, head out to the Frontier of human space and maybe beyond.

Fast forward a hundred years and Jaques is no longer aboard a Coriolis station but has transferred to a newer, relatively smaller Orbis class starport. Starports of this size do not normally come with engines and jump drives, they are often expanded from the main docking bay body that is jumped into system. The engine and jump modules attached to the stations main body are then removed during the construction of the rest of the station. Jaques not only kept the engines and jump modules, but he sourced a few more and had them strapped on too, getting the whacking great engines he always wanted. Who doesn't like a turbo charged ride, eh?

Recent Past

His power plant can't manage all the neon's he had fitted

Jaques Station was finally opened for business in the February of 3301 (2015) and his station was jumped from system to system throughout 'The Bubble' of human space. In June he came to rest in Gliese 1269, a system on the very edge of The Bubble nearly 300 Light Years away from Earth. Here he stayed for just short of a year, whether his planned storyline had been canned due to player actions like the Emperor's Dawn storyline, I do not know. My theory is that Jaques was meant to head to the Pleiades nebula but the players decided to have Obsidian Orbital built instead. Either way, Jaques was brought back to the galactic limelight in May 3302 (2016) when a Community Goal was started to bring him fuel.

A Community Goal is a timed multiplayer mission where rewards are tiered according to individual contribution and total achieved by all participants. As the achieved pool increases, it unlocks progressive reward tiers available to individual participants. the more you contribute, the higher up the contribution table you go and the more you are rewarded once the CG is completed.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Milky Way

Yep, that's a Type 9 at Beagle Point

At this time the Distant Worlds Expedition, an over 1000 strong contingent of player pilots had
reached Beagle Point, the then furthest reachable star system from Earth at 65 000 LY but many were worse for wear from the journey, some with a dire need of repairs. Someone came up with the idea of Jaques bringing his station the 65 Kilo Light Years (Kylies), all the way to Beagle point to provide repairs and to get him away from the star he'd been staring at for the past eight months. The Community Goal was started on the 5th of May 3302 and successfully concluded a week later. However, it was not just fuel that had been delivered to Jaques.

A little something extra

Nope

While hundreds of players contributed towards the Community Goal, there will always be those who just want to see the galaxy burn. These individuals instead delivered a bunch of Unknown Artefacts, probe like objects that led to the discovery of the 'Barnacles' of Merope. These UAs have a damaging effect on nearby technology, degrading the systems of ships that hold them and shutting off services of the stations they are sold at. The only known counter to this effect is copious amounts of Meta Alloys, sourced from the aforementioned Barnacles. No one knew about the sold UAs until the 20th May when a report on GalNet, the in game news reel, listed the stations influenced by the alien objects; including Jaques Station. The report came too late for the needed Meta Alloys to be gathered as the following day, Jaques was no longer in Gliese 1269.

Back at Beagle Point, a small group from the expedition were eagerly awaiting Jaques' arrival. News of his departure was gratefully received and it was considered that given the distances involved, even with the stations jump range, it would be some time before he would appear in system. After four days, it was realised that Jaques was late and on the 26th, he and his station were officially declared missing.

The Milky Way, a fluffy centre with no chocolate

Where's Wa-Jaques?

So began the greatest search party in Elite Dangerous so far, involving hundreds of players. Those players at Beagle Point began searching local systems, making their ways back toward human space while another party worked in the opposite direction. Many independent explorers who were already somewhere in between began searching the systems around them. This went on for a little over two weeks with no sign of Jaques, many gave up in the search and either returned home or continued on their own way. The 13th of June saw a change to that, a broadcast from Jaques was received by various Frontier outposts. However, the signal was heavily fragmented with some outposts receiving more than others. Various players worked on collecting these fragments with the hope of reconstructing the message and finding out where Jaques had ended up. In the end, it was by sheer luck that Jaques was found so quickly.

On the 27th of June, Commander Cly was using the galaxy map to plan a trip going from nebula to nebula when he spotted something unusual. One of the systems in a nebula nearly 22KLY from Sol was showing as 'Independent' when all the others showed as 'None'. Rather than announce his discovery, he wanted to check it out for himself so set off on a 15 hour journey to the snappily named Eol Prou RS-T D3-94. As you can see here, Jaques was almost a wreck. The UAs had caused a 'misjump', making the station crash through hyperspace and veer off course. The news of Jaques' predicament spread quickly and many players took it upon themselves to gather Meta Alloys to ship out to Jaques and nullify the UAs.

Ten Four Rubber Ducky!

Didn't we pass that star once already?

A convoy of various player ships set out from the Maia system on the 1st of July, commencing the longest single stop trade run of over 22KLYs. Estimated average jump range for these vessels would be around 22 light years, meaning that on average it would take roughly one thousand hyperspace jumps to reach Jaques and deliver their precious cargo. Over the following days, the convoy made their deliveries and some turned back to pick up another batch from Maia while others decided to search systems local to Jaques for the Barnacles that produce the Meta Alloys.

The Canonn Research player group have been working hard to investigate all things 'not human' in Elite Dangerous, be that Unknown Artefacts, Barnacles and the new Unknown Probes cataloguing their findings, correlating data and finding other sites where Barnacles could be found. Through this research, more Barnacles had been found not only in other systems within the Pleiades nebula but also the California and Witchhead nebulas. It was hoped that this information would help to find more Barnacles closer to Jaques although to the best of my knowledge, the only Barnacles to be found are on the Pleiades side of human space.

I'm not saying it's aliens, but...

Don't touch it, you don't know where it's been

With the rise of the Unknown Probes, there has also been a increase in mysteriously wrecked ships with unidentifiable weapons damage and log fragments talking of strange noises, myths and devastating weapons. This has got a few players spooked and they made enquiries with Frontier Developments on the possibility of starting some colonies around Jaques and away from the predicted interstellar warzone in the galactic south. At LaveCon, a primarily Elite Dangerous convention held in the UK, Executive Producer Michael Brookes confirmed that Frontier would enable and support colonisation in the area around Jaques but its the players that would have to make it happen. The first step to achieving that is to get Jaques fixed up and get all his services back online if his station is to be the hub of this new 'Bubble'. To this end there is a Community Goal running for particular commodities. Secondly, a surface station is to be constructed to help in the colonisation effort and for that a second CG is running for mined metals.

In response to these recent CGs, players have once again formed a flotilla to run the required goods, this time named 'The August Exodus'. The first group of 261 registered pilots are already en route across the galaxy while a second group, currently at 187 pilots, is due to leave on the 15th of August. So far 7226 individual pilots have made the 22KLY journey to Jaques to deliver what he needs.

Jaques of all trades

From bartender to station owner, wanderer to explorer, attempted rescuer to survivor, pioneer to possible saviour, now what the future holds for Jaques depends on the actions of the Elite Dangerous community. Now when someone asks 'who's this Jacques guy?', you can say 'Jaques, not Jacques' and give them his history.

Or you can give them the link to this.

The Elder Scrolls Online: My weekend Takeaway

If you don’t know already, The Elder Scrolls Online is an MMO set in the early history of the Elder Scrolls universe. The Imperial Throne sits empty after the previous incumbent is betrayed, bringing down the magical barrier that protects the world of Tamriel from Daedric (demon) invasion. All orchestrated by the Daedric Lord, Molag Bal who wants to turn the mortal world into the  extension of his home realm of Cold-Harbour. Infiltrating mortal cultists are influencing everything going on in the world including the tri faction war, using it as cover to gather sacrifices to feed and fuel their Daedric lord and his schemes.

This is where you begin, one of the many sacrifices fed to the powers of Cold-Harbour. Of course it’s not actually your body that is sacrificed, but your soul, sucked out of you like one of those fast food milkshakes. Other sacrificial victims soon lose their minds and humanity after such an event but you, the player, are once again the prophesised hero who becomes more than a mere mortal. Your class skills are based on your apparent career prior to receiving a fancy dagger/straw to the chest and this weaves a bit of daedric magic into them, giving you some pretty awesome abilities from day one.

Escapistmagazine

These magical abilities are class dependant, so a Dragon Knight has differing class skills to a Nightblade, Templar or Sorcerer. These class skills are split into three differing lines that unlock as you use and level up skills from that line. You also have a skill line for the type of weapon you are using, which is either Two handed, One handed and Shield, Duel Wield, Bow, Destruction Staff or Restoration Staff. When you hit level five for a skill you gain the option to morph it in two different ways.  For example, you could morph a stab attack to also have damage over time or a chance to stun.

 There are also three groups of armour; Light (cloth), Medium (leather) and Heavy (plate). There are no restrictions to what armour or weapons any class can use, it is perfectly possible to have a Sorcerer in plate armour wielding a greatsword or a Nightblade in light armour and a restoration staff. I’m not saying it would be incredibly effective but you could do it. Personally I went for a Nord Nightblade for some stealthy stabby hack and slash.

Like most MMORPGs, you just use what you can get your hands on to begin with and such is the case once you get back on to the mortal plane. In the starter area you are soon presented rack upon rack of basic weapons to choose from, so I chose twin one handed axes. I’m a Nord Nightblade remember, Nords use daggers to pick their toenails, not first choice weaponry. However, those axes didn’t last me very long when i soon started to pick up superior equipment as quest rewards. You soon end up the usual hodgepodge of gear, more so in ESO as every race has its own equipment design style. Thats ten different styles for item sets that all can be crafted by players and each can be learnt by anyone that get hold of the relevant rare book.

RockPaperShotgun

Most of the quests in TESO are like the usual MMO fair, NPCs stand around with marks above their head waiting for the next player to come along and do the deed. The quest text is presented in the same way as conversations in other Elder Scrolls games, focusing on the NPC while they present their fully voice acted blurb. Occasionally you will find area quests where anyone nearby can take part, these will repeat whenever someone with the relevant quest comes within range. The problem is that if you arrive just as the final wave ends, you seem to still receive credit but have no idea of the story’s progression. You can just wait for the next person to come along to activate the quest but that’s no guarantee. Other quests will come to you, either by Courier or fleeing civilian if you near the quest area. Often quest lines conclude with a minor boss battle, these battles can eventually be done solo after some trial and error with the mechanics, but would be considerably easier with companions. There is currently no indication in the quest log or from the quest giver to say that you ought to be in a party, so while there is still room for improvement, I enjoyed the quest flow during my play up to level 11.

IGN.com

I am really impressed with the crafting in ESO, it is basically open and accessible to all from the very beginning. Anyone can go collect the relevant materials and craft weapons and armour of their own, its basic but they made it. There are Blacksmithing, Tailoring and Woodworking for making equipment, Enchanting for enchantments, Alchemy for potions and poisons, and Provisioning for food and drink.  Gear scales in the usual colour indicators for rarity; White/common, Green/uncommon, Blue/rare, Purple/epic and so on. Rarer items have greater basic stats so an uncommon weapon does more damage compared to a common of the same level.  A player can take an item and use specific crafting items to upgrade its rarity. Each added upgrade item increases the chance of success but should you fail, you lose both the base item and upgrade items. It then becomes a bit of a gamble; do I use these three Dwarven Oils and go for the 60% chance that i will upgrade my favourite sword from an uncommon to a rare, or get some more because i really like this sword.

gamesgoldenage.com

A more advanced layer to the craft system are traits; constant, permanent enchantments that are part of the very fabric of the item of equipment and cannot be changed. These range from an increase of hit or dodge chance to an increase in the experience gained by exploring new areas. These are done by using certain gems in the crafting of the items and to learn how, you have to sacrifice an item with that ability by researching it. This destroys the item but allows you to replicate that bonus in any you build later. This is done per item; so if you learnt the exploration trait from iron boots you could not then apply that ability to either iron gloves or cloth boots. Only to any subsequent iron boots you produced.

A further advanced layer to crafting is the special crafting areas that you find out in the world. These imbue any items crafted at their stations with a special set bonus. However, you can only craft items with these set bonuses if you have already researched two traits in them. So for instance i want to craft some items to give a three piece set bonus for the chance to belch fire back at attackers (no really, there is one), I would have to have researched two traits on three separate items. Now considering you can research one item per crafting skill to begin with and some of them can take twelve hours, it is going to be some time before these stations see much use.

ElderScrollsOnlineGuide.com

Another point in ESOs crafting is enchanting or glyph crafting. This is done by collecting three different kinds of rune stones while out in the wild and sticking them together. The individual stones affect the power, orientation and effect of the resulting glyph. So you could have a strong lighting attack glyph for your weapon with one combination, or a strong lightning resistance glyph for your armour at the change of a single rune. You can find uncommon and rare runes for extra powerful effects but can only be used if you level and skill up on your enchanting.

Warcry.com

While Alchemy and provisioning are very similar to Skyrims versions, they are also very easy to level up. Provisioning especially, you find ingredients and recipes everywhere if you just take the time to open drawers and baskets. I found a poached egg recipe in the trunk at the foot of a Night-Lady’s occupied bed!

All the crafting skills have a gathering ‘Hireling’ ability that you can skill into, these ethereal minions send you materials for you to use, sometimes rare upgrade items too. These arrive through the game mail with a charmingly enthusiastic and illiterate note attached.

Like other Elder Scrolls games, you can skill up from reading books. There is also the Mages and Fighters guild to sign up to. The Mages Guild are concerned with the recovery of purple glowing books and scrolls hidden out in the world and have a storyline involving The Deadric lord of madness; Sheogorath. The Fighters Guild have been wholly contracted by some mysterious benefactor to defend Tamriel from the machinations of Molag Bal and his minions both daedric and mortal.

After spend a good amount of time with The Elder Scrolls Online, I believe it has legs; at least to begin with.  I did not get to experience the PVP or any of the later PVE content, I have only played as a Nord up to level 11. In this time I had a good taste of some of the various mechanics at ESOs disposal and found it to be quite promising. I look forward to future betas and I hope we get to test some of the later content.

Weekend offline with XCOM

As the title suggests, i have been offline over the weekend. At least as far as gaming anyway. This was because one of the powerline network adapters i use to hardline my rig to my router went kaput. Thankfully Steam now gives the option to start in offline mode if it doesnt detect an internet connection rather than just locking you out, so i decided to continue my XCOM:EU Long War mod campaign.

I was ending my second month after what I thought was a good start, id even managed to do a terror mission without beam weapons. Then I get another terror mission, this time in Brisbane, on the military base map, with over twelve Chryssalids and still without beam weapons. You can guess how that went.

At this point I'd like to say something that will probably turn up some noses; I reloaded the last XCOM HQ autosave, adjusted the squad to be long range heavy then had another go. The Skyranger dropship landed at the police station instead and my squad got swarmed from the front door by the Chryssalids, again.

I remembered that terror missions give you a few days to do them so i decided to advance time & perhaps get some of my higher rank troops off of downtime. All i got was a bunch of my interceptors shot up, Australia withdrawing from the council and an abduction mission in Brazil.

On arriving at a fuel station somewhere Brazil, my squad deployed in good order while approaching the diner and kiosk. Next thing I know, I've lost 2 of my guys to Mutons, leaving the other four to crack at them with their guns. Now against Mutons, I may as well have given them Nerf guns for what it's worth. My guys were dead before they could reach the Skyranger for extraction.

 So I deleted that game, I'd got myself stuck in a corner that I couldn't get out of. Since Mutons had now shown up, they would be in pretty much every mission and I could not hurt them with what I had. I couldn't build laser rifles, despite researching them, as to do so required 15 engineers on staff and I had 12. I couldn't build a workshop as I didn't have the power and construction on my thermogenerator was still 3 weeks away from been completed. Those of you that have played the Long War will understand due to the extended construction times and the rate that jobs come up that my troops would be protein goop long before I could possibly begin to equip them.

I have started a new campaign which i will cover in a series of posts, each post covering a week or two of in game time. I will also be going through the different mechanics of the mod compared to vanilla XCOM. This time around I'll be rushing to 'pew pew lazor' beam tech and also, the steam vent is easier to get to.

If you would like your name, or someone else's, to be given to my soldiers when they have ranked up to squaddie then please list in the comments below. I'm not doing ironman due to the UI sometimes going a bit wiggy  and then I can reload should a misclick happen, however I will accept defeat when it happens for the good of the funnies.

Signing off.

Hello? is this thing on?

Hello and welcome to my first faltering steps into blogging. This blog is intended to be a place where I can have my say on the various aspects of gaming without being restricted to 140 characters. It is to be a place for me to practise my writing, never one of my strong suits, however, training, practise and all that jazz should help me improve. 

For those of you who don't know me from any of the games I play or Twitter (@MaxUrsa), i am the father of three small childerbeasts, husband to a non gamer, at Home dad/Carer and a White Rose Yorkshireman in Manchester (well Stockport to be more accurate but meh, it's all Bandit Country). 

As for gaming, I only really play on PC with some Mobile in there too. I do play a great deal of Planetside 2, I'm an officer in the PC Gamer Outfit (PLUG!) on the Miller server which I spend most of my game time on. I plan to be doing many a post about the game, my experiences and information as to its future.

Other than that I am currently mostly playing XCOM Enemy Unknown using the mod Long War which has added so many more layers of gameplay to the vanilla. Perhaps a post will come of it if I can get my game finished before I pick up the highly anticipated (personally) Enemy Within expansion. 

Talking of highly anticipated, I cannot wait for Star Citizen. I have my pledge, my ships, my hanger and soon be flying around when the dogfighting module comes this December. I can't help but hoover up up every detail I can pick up about it so that will be another thing I will hopefully be posting about at least semi regularly.

I am also dipping my toe into DOTA2, not played an actual live match (bots were enough so far) so I may well be posting as I go with that too. I am already finding it confusing to keep track of everything but like most things, I'm sure it will improve in time.

My rig system setup is as follows:
AMD Phenom II x3 B55 Processor 3.20Ghz
RAM 4GB
HDD 250GB (no not SSD, yet)
Geforce GTX 560Ti (recent upgrade, was a GTX260)
SoundBlaster XFI Fatality Edition
Win7 Home 64

Yes that is the correct processor, it's one of those duel cores that's actually a quad core with two cores offline. Turns out it's because one of the cores was duff so after a bit of trial and error, i managed to get the three good cores on-line, +50% performance is not something to sniff at. I know it is a pretty low end system, however with responsibilities come other, more urgent money sinks. Next thing on my upgrade list is an SSD, some may argue that I should do RAM but with monitoring I found that there wasn't any time where the 4GB was at 100% capacity even with Large Address Aware. For the games that do take a hefty bite of my memory *cough* PS2 *cough* I use Razer's Game Booster which makes a significant improvement to performance.

So there you go, a bit of background for you and a taste of writing a blog for me. I hope to one day look back at this post and cringe, then realise how far i have come and take pride in it. 

Until next time...