April 2017 – Page 3

Liberating Provinces

April 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I played what I would consider a truly excessive amount of Skyforge on the PS4. There was even a point where I left my office upstairs… and logged into laptop downstairs to play more Skyforge over Remote Play. I am not entirely certain why this game is so damned sticky for me right now… when arguably better games like Horizon are not at this moment. My working theory however is that I can only really handle playing one deeply narrative experience at a time… then need the gaming equivalent of celery to clear my palate. Skyforge makes an awesome version of celery… which is probably not at all what the folks behind the game would want me saying about it. However what I mean by that is that it presents a sequence of bite sized interactions and does so in a fairly enjoyable and no nonsense manner. Functionally in the past this is always what I used Destiny for, but with the impending death of that game and the release of Destiny 2 in September… that has really harmed my joy about spending a whole lot of time over there. I mean sure I want to do all the raiding stuff in the new and improved 390 light versions… but that also requires a lot of personal investment in trying to figure out what my clans schedule is like and how I can manipulate my own schedule to somehow be playing Destiny in the nights they are doing the things I need to do. That was one long contorted sentence but it fairly adequately represents how I am feeling about raiding in general right now regardless of the game.

I think one of the big improvements that happened at some point… and is probably not directly tied to the console release is the campaign map. When I last played the game you functionally went to the Aeleon observatory and would be presented with a number of chicklet sized images that represented missions you could run. It felt like there was no real clear order to which you should be taking the content… and as a result I wound up skipping around something horribly and subjecting myself to things that were probably much harder than I should have. The campaign make takes the game and attempts to make a clear narrative, so instead of playing a god answering 911 calls from various parts of an entire planet… you are on a campaign to liberate your people from the invading monsters. Functionally right now I am about halfway through the first fourth province in the sequence of nine provinces, and as of last night… I had barely just left the first one. There are what seems to be four types of content that you can encounter during this process. First there are solo missions that largely involve killing a bunch of mini bosses until you reach the end and ultimately drive the monster influence from an area. The next type is solo boss fights, and these have been pretty rare… but occasionally you are sent up against some sort of “big bad”. Thirdly there are large open world zones where you are ultimately dumped in with a random assortment of other players to complete a bunch of mini objectives. Lastly there are actual proper dungeons that require a group of adventurers to complete… and unfortunately as of yet I have not actually done one of these.

Last night I focused entirely on the solo mission/bossfight types along the main path of the campaign map, and completely ignored the dungeons and large open world areas… because they simply take a bunch of time to get through and don’t actually serve to unlock new areas of the map. I had a purpose in mind, and that single focus was to get to a temple for a class that I had not already unlocked. The reasoning being that I wanted to know just what madness was involved with getting something other than the base three classes unlocked. Sure enough by the time I hit map three I had access to the Archer temple… where I was prompted with two options [Purchase] and [Donate 3,000,000 Credits]. I tried the purchase option and it acted like it was sending me to the Sony store… only to error out a short period of time later. As far as Credits go… at first I thought that was sheer madness but by the time I finished the night I was sitting at around 1.5 million Credits. Sure it is going to suck to unlock all of the classes you might want to play, but it seems like there is going to be a time in the near future where 3 mil credits is no big deal. The purchase option however has me confused because it seems like at least on some level the game is wired to let you buy your way into a specific class. However for whatever reason this does not seem to function on the console… which is making me want to fire up the PC client just to see how the hell it works there. Whatever the case however… I am finding this game extremely enjoyable at the moment and if you can get past its flaws… atrocious boob jiggle and being limited to 3 classes at the start… I am hooked.

Pretentious Magitek

April 20, 2017 by Belghast

This morning my cats are being little butts. The normally sweet one is prancing back and forth on the keyboard… and the one that is normally a butt just wants me to keep flinging a rubber band for her to chase. None of this is really conducive to sitting down and writing a proper blog post. The sweet one has now taken to sitting on the cabinet to the left of the computer and staring… occasionally meowing. She is likely afraid that she will waste away to nothingness in the time it takes me to write a post, and believes that I really should stop doing whatever it is humans do and go feed her. On top of this I am having some hardware issues… with a box that is not connected to this one but it is frustrating me to the point where I am constantly reaching over to the other keyboard and fiddling with stuff. This also is not super great for writing a fully functional blog post. However I still need to somehow push forward and come up with some form of brilliance… even if that is dollar store brilliance that is on clearance for only 50 cents.

Last night I did not really do much in the way of gaming. I finally finished watching the last episode of Iron Fist, and while doing so I worked on my baby machinist. I managed to get back over the 60 barrier and turned my weapon red in the Palace of the Dead… which makes no difference when it comes to the speed of leveling but feels like it does significantly for your ability to burn things down quickly. I hit a string of parties with a tank and three dps…. and all things considered they tend to go pretty smoothly. The only rough spots are when the group decides to fan out and split down different pathways. In theory this is not a horrible way to approach the dungeon as a whole, but if anyone ends up pulling a mimic it is a certainty that someone will get pox. As I have spent more time in the dungeon, my focus has shifted to trying to avoid pox at all costs… at least until we have a pomander of purity waiting to be used. Most of my wipes in Palace of the Dead have revolved around a bad pull combined with folks having pox. The absolute worst moments are when a tank attempts to tank…. without having a healer. I mean I get it… as a tank our instinct is to run in and gather everything up. However that is just not really a viable option for running Palace of the Dead unless you have a pocket healer going in there with you.

Another thing that has happened that I have not really talked about is that I crossed the 500 commendation barrier and now have my giant pretentious golden magitek armor. I admit I was a little disappointed when I found out that the tune it plays is exactly the same as the normal magitek armor. The weird thing about the commendation system is that it pushes me to be friendly even if I am not really feeling like doing so. I tend to open every dungeon with a “hey folks” and close every dungeon with something along the lines of “thanks for the run, have a good one”. I am not sure if this matters but I usually can at least steal a single commendation from each run. Now my friends who random queue more often have been at the 500 mark for a very long time… I largely pushed through the last 150 or so while dungeon the deep dungeon. It feels like “strategic niceness” is a thing, and I feel sorta dirty admitting that sometimes I am just doing it for the sweet sweet comms. The only problem is… even after having gotten the mount I am still keeping up the practice. I think at some point it just began to feel normal to greet people when you join a dungeon and thank them when you finish… so while this largely started out as a way to leech commendations from folks it has apparently become a ritual now for me. This in part is why I wish other games would implement something like the commendations system. I’ve noticed that while a lot of groups are completely silent… that practice of the greeting at the beginning breaks the ice enough to get people discussing things if we run into problems. Folks seem far less likely to sit on a mimic chest and try and solo it down for example, when they have talked at the start of a run. It is like the act of a simple greeting makes it perfectly okay to say other things later, and while I tend to zone out… it is nice to have the occasional line of dialog flying by in party.

Chasing Aloy

April 19, 2017 by Belghast

It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.

The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.

Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.

Set Dungeons Round 2

April 18, 2017 by Grace

To finish off my second conquest for the season I’ve been working toward clearing 8 different set dungeons. Last night I finally finished this off. I wrote about my experiences with the demon hunter dungeons here already, so now I want to discuss the wizard ones. Well, I mostly want to complain about the wizard ones.

The set dungeons are all incredibly uneven in difficulty. Overall, the demon hunter ones were pretty easy. The worst of those four was probably the Marauder’s, because you had to find and trigger all the rock worms but still avoid being in melee with them. In contrast, that dungeon was probably on par with the easiest of the wizard ones.

The first wizard dungeon I tackled was Tal Rasha’s. I love the mechanics of that set, but the dungeon was not super fun. It is very similar to the Marauder’s dungeon, complete with annoying worms you have to avoid. Keeping up stacks of the Tal Rasha buff isn’t too bad, the biggest challenge in this one is avoiding all the worms while still finding and killing everything within the time limit. I’d say this was one of the two easiest wizard dungeons.

Next up was the Firebird’s set dungeon. The layout was easy enough to memorize, but I struggled a bit with the objectives. You essentially have to group up mobs and let them “kill” you to spawn the meteor from Firebird’s set bonus, and hope you have collected enough to meet the objective. Since there’s a long cooldown timer on the meteor you only get a few chances over the length of the dungeon to finish this. The other objective, causing enemies to burn, was much easier. This dungeon is weird since to achieve both of the main objectives you have to artificially weaken yourself, so enemies can kill you and so they live long enough to catch the burning effect. It made clearing the whole place within the time limit a challenge, and it took me quite a few tries to finish.

The third wizard dungeon I attempted was Vyr’s, and honestly it was the worst of the four. The two objectives were actually fairly simple: getting stacks in archon form and killing enemies in archon form. Those things happen almost automatically in the normal course of clearing the place. What makes this dungeon awful is the size of it, combined with the number and type of enemies. Contrary to the Firebird’s dungeon, here you need to be as powerful as possible, to increase your archon uptime and to quickly kill all the enemy swarms so you can move away at high speed. The map is a maze and absolutely requires you to spam teleport to clear it in the time limit. Making things worse are the fallen-type enemies. The little guys run away which makes it hard to track down everything for the clear, and the shamans keep summoning more so they’re hard to keep track of. I spent an entire evening working on this one, and by the end every failure came down to one or two enemies that I had lost somewhere on the huge sprawling map.

Nervous after the rough time I had with Vyr’s, I put off the last dungeon for a couple days. Finally, last night I finished up with Delsere’s dungeon. I had a hard time finding written guides for this one for some reason, so I had to resort to watching a video guide, which I do not usually like. It turns out I really did not need to worry about it at all, it was by far the easiest of the wizard dungeons. Delsere’s is one of the set dungeons with a weird requirement that doesn’t seem to stem directly from the set bonus itself. In this case it means that you have to reflect 200 projectiles using wave of force. Luckily this can be done very early in the dungeon by finding a big group of bees and standing in a slow time bubble until they shoot a ton of tiny horrible bees at you. As long as you don’t get murdered by evil bees the only other thing you have to do is catch a few large groups of enemies in your slow time bubble and your main objectives are done. The map layout has some awkward spots that require a bit of backtracking but it is small enough and the enemies are generally grouped enough that it wasn’t a problem to finish in time.

Finishing the last wizard set dungeon netted me some achievement spam, finishing up my second conquest and completing the Conqueror tier of the season journey. I’m not sure it has been fun exactly, but mastering all eight of these set dungeons has at least been an interesting challenge. And I’ve learned which ones are easy to do for future seasons. Now I’m debating whether I want to try to finish the final, Guardian tier of the season journey. I have never actually completed that tier before, but I suspect I could make it this time around if I don’t burn out on the game first. I’ve already finished GR70 solo, extracted 40 cube powers, and leveled three gems to 70. That leaves a 4 minute (T13) speed run, a 15 second Adria (T13) kill, and one more conquest to do. We will see if I stay motivated long enough to finish those off.