November 2015 – Page 11

Post-Apoc

November 10, 2015 by Tamrielo

Here comes the first of what will probably be a LOT of posts about Fallout 4. I’ll try to curb things, since other people are playing it. Full spoilers to come in the Aggrochat podcast.

In general, I don’t love post-apocalyptic settings. They’re kind of a study of what happens to people when civilization is totally destroyed and everything sucks, and honestly the answer is “nothing all that great”. It’s really easy for your post-apocalyptic setting to just become a joyless, bleak world, and without joy, there’s not a lot of motivation to do much of anything. It’s the same problem I have with the Warhammer 40,000 universe– it’s a massive, joyless universe and I’ve never heard anything convincing that explains what anyone in that universe is fighting for.

For the most part, I like my futuristic games to be a bit more optimistic. I tend to believe that the future is pretty much going to be better than the present, and a terrible post-apocalyptic setting doesn’t really mesh with that. I don’t even necessarily have anything against post-apoc per se, I’ve seen the occasional dark future where things are actually pretty okay, even if the world has been ravaged. Maybe we’ve got a cool colony on the moon, or some nice high-tech living spaces away from the devastation. Something to point at and say “this is worth fighting for”.

So, Fallout. I played through Fallout 1 and 2, but they don’t make my list of favorite games, and I didn’t really explore them much; I didn’t feel motivated to. Fallout 3 didn’t grab me– it felt like the exact sort of joyless future that I’m not interested in experiencing. It made things worse by making most of the actual civilized settlements pretty villainous, with Megaton, the Town of Terrible Ideas, being this sad bastion of hope. New Vegas was the first Fallout game to really capture my interest. It showed me the same dark future, but there was civilization, and the civilized people weren’t all utterly awful human beings. There was technology, and places I might actually want to live. It wasn’t just all suck all the time. Indeed, one of the big things I did was rebuild, and establish a bastion of actual civilization in the desert. It felt good.

Fallout 4 feels like it’s continuing the trend. It’s now the second area I’ve lived in that’s been the focus of a Fallout game, and truth be told I’m more partial to Boston than Washington DC. It also lets me rebuild, not just a little bit, but actually put together my own settlements and build real homes. It’s satisfying, and exciting. I’m also operating in real cities and towns. Damaged, certainly, but recognizable as places that people live.

Fallout 4 is a post-apoc world that isn’t scrounging the remnants of a technologically advanced society– it’s possible to get new, fancy technology and not just hope that the one working laser pistol I’ve found stays functional. I don’t have to hope that I run across a place that seems like a decent place to live– I can actually build one from scratch.

It’s pretty exciting, and lets me enjoy the Fallout world without the crushing pessimism that I see in other settings. Now, time to find some aluminum so I can build a new reactor core (!) for my laser pistol (!!).

Waiting for Apocalypse

November 10, 2015 by Belghast

Seasonal Hunter

Last night was the tale of me doing a bunch of things to avoid thinking about the fact that I was not yet playing Fallout 4. Throughout the day people were unlocking it through either legitimate means of happening to be in the right time zone… or through some chicanery. If you have access to a VPN tool, you can in theory make your system look like it is from a time zone where a game has already unlocked. This means however that you have to stay connected to said VPN the entirety of your time playing the game… either that or go completely offline. Thusfar Steam seems to have turned a blind eye to this practice but my fear is that someday… they won’t. I ultimately value my Steam account far too much to risk losing it just to play a game a few hours early. So as a result I was like the rest of the nation waiting on midnight eastern time for the game to unlock here. The problem is when you want to be playing one thing… and can’t… nothing else really seems that much fun.

I instead decided to work on some things that I had been meaning to do. Since the BlizzCon madness of the weekend I had been poking my head into Diablo 3 periodically, and before the season 4 crunch had played out for us… I managed to get a Demon Hunter within a stones throw of 70. In fact I was sitting at 68… which ironically is exactly the point at which I got my non-seasonal Monk. I oped to work on grinding out that last little bit so that I could at least say that I finished both the Warrior and Demon Hunter during the season. While I had some fun with the Hunter, I doubt I will play one again because in truth… it really just is not my style. My final play style centered around using whatever ability generated a ton of hatred… and then using that to fuel the fan of knives attack and rapid fire, and through a combination of those two I could pretty much burn down anything. I dinged 70, crafted a ton of gear…. and now my hunter is probably going to sit in this state for eternity. At some point I would really like to finish up the Monk just so I can check that one off the list. That leaves only the Wizard that I have never gotten close to capping.

Pre-loading is a Lie

The tale around Fallout 4 is a little bittersweet for me. Months ago I was happy as hell to have managed to get one of the rare elusive Pip-boy edition pre-orders. The problem being… it was silly expensive, but was going to be a one time only type thing. I have long wished I had gotten the bobble head version of the Fallout 3 collectors edition with the metal lunchbox. Fallout is one of those franchises that really gets me as a player… and since saving my pennies in college to buy the first one at Wal-mart… it has been one of those games that will just consume all of my time for a period of months. The problem being… in the meantime we have had a whole slew of unexpected expenses, not the least of which is the home renovation that we are going through. As such I ended up doing the adult thing… cancelling my Pip-boy pre-order and going with the significantly cheaper Steam version of the game. The positive is however that I was able to pre-load the game… and in theory play it last night.

I say “in theory” because while I struggled to stay awake until 11 pm central… when I finally was able to hit play a whole other process started of “unpacking” the game. At times this said it was only 13 minutes away… at other times 4 hours… because in truth the system had no clue how long this would actually take. After about ten minutes the progress bar was less than an eighth of the way through so I finally gave up and went on to bed. This morning however I got in and played through the first little bit of the game allowing me to create a character and at least get my family into the vault. This game is so damned pretty… but more than that the motion and movement just feels better. One of the many things I did last night to pass the time was to start a new game of Fallout New Vegas… and I had forgotten how much NOT a shooter that game was. I still love it immensely but the movement and motion felt pretty damned stilted. This however controls beautifully, and I was shocked to see my fairly old machine being able to run it on what it suggested as Ultra High. We will see just how well that actually works once we leave the vault and venture out into the world. But alas that will have to wait until after work tonight.

Mystara Monday: Module X4 – Master of the Desert Nomads

November 10, 2015 by Thalen

This week we're returning to adventure modules with a well-loved classic, David Cook's Module X4: Master of the Desert Nomads. This is actually the first half of a two-part adventure which is continued in module X5. There's also a sequel adventure, Red Arrow, Black Shield, which was written a couple of years later, albeit by a different author.

Mystara Monday: Module X4 - Master of the Desert Nomads

While the party can fight a juggernaut in this adventure,
it's a really terrible idea.

Master of the Desert Nomads was published in 1983 and adheres pretty well to the formula of previous Expert level modules; wilderness adventure punctuated by a few dungeon crawls. In this case the wilderness is the Sind Desert, a massive wasteland west of the nations shown in the world map included in The Isle of Dread. A great army has been making its way through Sind intent on attacking Darokin (here simply referred to as the Republic) and the PCs are assumed to have answered the call for mercenaries to help fight. After reaching a village near the front lines, the party are charged to find the Temple of Death far to the west and destroy it.

To reach the Temple of Death, the party first has to find the Great Pass; that's the focus of this module. The party must sail a raft up a river and through a swamp to reach the desert. There they have the option of joining a caravan to head west, or trying to go it alone. Eventually they should reach the monastery which guards the pass and will have to deal with the creatures which have taken over the monastery and masquerade as helpful monks to lure in travellers.

Also they will encounter a nagpa, which is totally
not a skeksis why would you even think that?

Unlike in The Isle of Dread, where each wilderness encounter was keyed to a specific hex, the encounters in this module are to be used when the party is in the appropriate terrain without concern for their specific location. Given the size of the wilderness map provided, this is pretty much necessary. The party isn't expected to exhaustively explore the area, instead they have a destination to reach and are expected to be focused on that.

Sind is a barren waste, but the adventure does imply that it was populated at some point in the past. Many monsters in the adventure are drawn from Hindu mythology such as the juggernaut, and the bhut (here a sort of were-undead that seems human during the day but sprouts fangs and claws at night and attempts to eat human flesh). The overall impression is that the culture that once existed here was based on that of India, but not a lot of detail is given. Eventually, nearly a decade later, Sind would be expanded on in the Champions of Mystara boxed set and established as being a current nation on the border of Darokin. For now though, we're not given any reason to believe that there's any civilization here.

This adventure was the one that taught me more than anything about the dangers of railroading your party. As written, the adventure states that an NPC near the beginning will cast the quest spell on a PC to have them seek and destroy the Temple of Death. The player of the PC in question was a bit annoyed by that and was adamant that, while they would go on the quest, they would then come back, find the NPC, and beat him senseless. Seriously, unless your players are just being contrary they'll probably go on the adventure. If they won't, trying to force them will not make things any better. It'll just make them ornery.

Next week we'll take a look a the second part of this adventure, Module X5: Temple of Death. We'll find out what's actually going on with the Master, explore the land of Hule and learn why it's not a nice place at all, and meet a few new monsters including what are bascially the Hounds of Tindalos by another name.

Rune Woes

November 9, 2015 by Grace

Runes. They’ve never been the most fun part of WildStar, but Drop 6 totally revamped the system and unfortunately made things worse instead of better. I griped about this a little on Twitter this morning, and realized that I’d be better off venting here where I can vastly exceed the 140 character limit. I will state right up front here that I’m a relatively casual raider. My guild raids twice a week, with a flexible attendance policy, and have not completed GA yet. I can’t even begin to imagine how much more frustrating this system would be to someone who was at the peak of raiding progression. I spent a very long time and a lot of plat (and some service tokens, to my dismay) working on my runes last night and I have a lot of thoughts.

Here’s some issues I have with the current system and some suggestions for how to improve things.

Cost: This is pretty much the biggest gripe that people seem to have right now. The costs for rerolling rune slots and removing runes are being updated, so I don’t have a lot to say or suggest here. Requiring service tokens for these actions and not providing an in-game currency method for them was a terrible idea and thankfully it is being addressed.

Item Level Restrictions: This honestly is the thing that makes me the most unhappy with the new way that runes work. Previously I could get the benefits of some end-game rune sets no matter what kind of gear I had. The new system splits up level 50 runes into multiple different categories depending on the item level of the item you want to slot them into. I can see how this made sense in development, since runes now account for such a huge fraction of your overall stats. But in practice it is incredibly frustrating and confusing. It means checking and double checking that the rune you are making or purchasing is not only the correct element, set, major/minor, but also that it is the highest that you can use for a specific piece of gear. It also means silly things like using multiple runes that are identical except for the ilvl to complete a set, requiring stacking element types that means lots of rerolling and expense. It also means that getting an item upgrade might mean having to completely ditch all your old runes in favor of newer, even more expensive ones of higher ilvl.

Fusion Runes: Fusion runes are the way you add a “special” to your weapon or armor now. Most slots have a selection of different fusion runes available. For me personally the changes to fusion runes weren’t communicated very well. It took a bit of hunting on external sites to find out the details. I actually like how this works now that I understand it. Having leveled a few alts recently I also now see how they are handing you these early on in the leveling process so hopefully people have a better understanding of how the system works. I do wish there were less ilvl restrictions on some of the more interesting ones.

Set Runes: Rune sets were changed from working across all of your gear to only working within one item at a time. For example if you want the 4-piece Onslaught bonus, you need all 4 runes (or 2 major runes that count double) in the same piece of gear. Again I like this idea in concept, but in practice it doesn’t work so great. For most classes there’s just 1-2 sets that are best to focus on. In the old system, you might not have to reroll rune slots so much if you could be creative in how you filled in your different set runes. Now you absolutely need the specific elements for your best set on every single item you have. This is super expensive and not engaging or fun.

Class Sets: The class rune sets all add something that ends up changing the way you play completely. Specific sets are available only at 1 item level. It took me a while to wrap my head around this, but it finally makes sense to me. This is exactly the equivalent of having a tier gear set from raiding, but it lets you choose which item you want to slot it into. Once I understood that it was easier to make my peace with the fact that I’ll never finish any class set outside of PvP. I can’t even use my leftover PvP set focuses to help, because they don’t overlap with the ilevel of the raiding sets.

What I’d Suggest: Ditch most of the ilvl categories. They are confusing and frustrating. Maybe keep 50-100, 100+ if you want to keep a distinction for end game gear.

Ditch ilvl requirements for fusions. Give them a flat bonus or a percent that scales with one of your other stats.

Alternative to the ilvl issues: let rune bonuses scale with the level of the item they are placed in. It gives the gear more of a central focus instead of the rune and it makes the whole thing way less complicated.

Either vastly decrease the cost of rerolling rune slots, or give us better reasons to want different mixes of elements on our gear. Rerolling everything to have 2 earth slots last night was boring and expensive. Fix at least one of those things!

Increase drop rates for rune fragments and set/class foci. I can not begin to tell you how underwhelming it is to go into a raid with 20 people and see one major class focus drop. Worse, just because someone won the roll on that pure focus doesn’t mean they’ll have enough pure rune fragments to even make a complete rune. Winning something in raid and having to run to the auction house and fork over tons of money to be able to use it feels awful. The drop rate for fragments needs to be vastly increased, or there needs to be more alternative ways to earn them.

Final Thoughts: I know some changes are in the works and will hopefully be here soon, but they won’t be enough. I also have no idea how the devs can possibly make things up to the folks who spent 100+ plat on trying to get runed properly at the start of this drop. I hope they are spending a lot of time listening to feedback and figuring out ways to improve this system. As for me, my dreams of raiding with an alt, or learning to heal on my spellslinger will be staying dreams until I can actually afford to rune more than just 1 set of gear.