For the last few days I have been in a cycle of pretty much playing nothing but World of Warcraft. Now I am not entirely certain why it is suddenly the most important thing for me to be playing. However I have an idea that it is more or less tied to FOMO. Right now the leveling in the game is insanely fast and I know that I have a server full of lower level characters that I would love to catch up. I’ve played on Argent Dawn since the game launched in 2004, but primarily on the Alliance side of the fence. When The Scryers was merged into the server in 2015 I set forth to separate my Horde and Alliance characters so that all of my Alliance stayed on Argent Dawn and I either moved or created new characters on The Scryers.
During the normal course of the Battle for Azeroth expansion, I managed to level both a Demon Hunter and a Warrior. More recently I finished leveling a Paladin Alliance side and leveled a horde Paladin and Hunter as well and have been working on leveling a Druid. This influx of leveling is all thanks to the “Winds of Wisdom” buff that was put into place as a bit of a boon to those folks who were sheltering in their home. Recently it was announced that this buff would in fact stay in place until the pre-expansion patch later this year. This has in turn triggered a strong desire for me to level all of the things. Back during the pre-release events for Legion I managed to pull all of my Alliance characters up to level 100, and I guess in some way I am hoping to do something similar here on the Horde side. I do have a level 120 boost sitting waiting there for me, but I figure more than likely I am either going to use it on my Mage… which is traditionally the character I am least likely to level on my own… or make a Death Knight since I already have a high level one sitting on another server Horde side.
Yesterday the game changed however, and a brand new buff was introduced and it has me shifting around a bit. I’ve not unlocked any of the new Allied Races on the Alliance side, and I really would like to be able to roll Dark Iron Dwarves. The Impressive Influence buff gives you bonus reputation in the Broken Isles, Argus, Kul Tiras, Zandalar and Nazjatar… or essentially this is a way for you to catch up on the last two expansions Pathfinder buff relatively easily. Essentially in order to unlock those Allied races I am missing, I just need to get a bunch of factions to Exalted, which seems considerably more reasonable when I am getting double faction. Were I a smarter man I would have leveled one of my humans and used it to grind out those factional gains.
So now I find myself in the unfortunate place of being split between loyalties of grinding out a bunch of new characters on the Horde side, or using the faction buff to catch up Alliance side and unlock those new races. As of right now I am splitting time between the two. So for example last night I ground through all of the World Quests available that would give me the reputations that I cared about, and then finished the night out working on my Druid. I have a feeling this is going to be what the flow of my game play will look like for awhile. Maybe at some point I will figure out what exactly I want to do with that boost, but for the time being it is sitting there mocking me. I really do actually enjoy going through the process of leveling characters, and as a result the boost sorta always feels like I am ruining that experience.
Mars: War Logs – May 2013 – PC
The earliest evidence I have of Developer Appreciation week is 2010, but it might have been taking place prior to that. Unfortunately the original site of its creator Scarybooster no longer exists, nor does even the social media evidence as his twitter account was hacked some years back. Whatever the case it has been going on for awhile and with Scary’s falling off the blogging wagon, we tried to start integrating the practice of taking a moment out to appreciate the folks that are behind the scenes creating the games we love into the Blaugust proceedings. This has morphed a bit to include content creators since I feel they also need some appreciation as well, but for this very first post of the week I thought I would bring things back to its roots and talk about a game studio that might not be that well known.
Prolific Release Schedule
Spiders is a French Game studio most recently known for the huge sweeping RPG adventure Greedfall that I have written about at length on this blog. However if you have not been reading the blog it is probably likely that you may not know about this studio or many of its games. I originally became aware of them when Technomancer released, because I thought it looked extremely interesting and it happened to be one of the games that Steam suggested to me through its discovery algorithm. However they have been cranking out ambitious games for awhile now, and it is highly likely that you have at least heard of several of them.
Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper – 2009
Faery: Legends of Avalon – 2010
Gray Matter – 2011
Of Orcs and Men – 2012
Mars: War Logs – 2013
Bound by Flame – 2014
The Technomancer – 2016
Greedfall – 2019
The games utilize a custom in case variant of Sony’s PhyreEngine that they call the Silk Engine, and it seems to have allowed them to crank out a pretty prolific release schedule. Until Technomancer they were seemingly releasing a new title every year, which is fairly impressive. I’ve played through four of their games to date and finished three of those four. I ultimately decided that Bound by Flame just was not for me, but I deeply enjoyed Mars: War Logs, Technomancer and Greedfall. In fact Greedfall was on the AggroChat games of the year show and it really was one of the darlings of what was an otherwise packed year of games.
We’re 35 in our team, with 40 at the moment working on the game. We are developing this because we love the type of game. There aren’t that many studios doing this type of games today. I mean, even BioWare have stopped doing it and I’m very sad because it’s what I like to play the most.Jehanne Rousseau, CEO of French studio Spiders
That really is the thing that drew me to the games the most, is that they are in fact creating games in a genre that seems to be dying. There is a blind ambition in each of these titles that is impressive, but the negative side of that is said ambition sometimes outstrips their technical prowess. They seem to constantly be grasping for greatness and often times end up a few steps short of it. There are numerous things about the games that I would consider a bit buggy at best and poorly designed at worst, in each of the games that I have played there is something magical about them that kept me coming back for more. If you take the sequence of games Mars: War Logs, Technomancer (its direct sequel) and Greedfall there is a clear growth and improvement between each of the games.
The stories that they are telling are simultaneously huge and expansive while at the same time managing to include some deeply personal encounters. There is so much world building happening that feels fresh and interesting, and these worlds are populated with characters that are worthy of them. Where the games fall short however is on the technical execution. Combat often times feels a little stilted and control schemes often feel a little awkward. However much like going back to Dragon Age Origins which also suffers from many of these issues when compared against a modern game, the story and the characters are engaging enough to get you to look past those blemishes.
A Bright Future
Greedfall – September 2019 – PC
The reason why I chose to talk about Spiders this morning, is that I am extremely excited for whatever comes next. After having played a sequence of games and seeing the improvements between each of them, I have to say Greedfall was without a doubt their most polished experience. It came extremely close to being a perfect game, at least in my eyes. It had some mechanical issues still, but the amount of improvement made between it and Technomancer for example were impressive. It is like I am watching a studio flirting with greatness so many times and Greedfall really was the show case of those abilities.
This makes anxious for whatever game comes next, because I feel like whatever title that is will be their big commercial break out. Greedfall was still very much a niche title for the people “in the know” about such things, but across the board it seemed to review extremely favorably. In hindsight it was probably my favorite game of 2019, and while based on their current schedule I don’t expect to see another game until 2021 at the earliest, I am pumped to get my hands on it and play it. Spiders is exploring one of my favorite genres of games… the Bioware style action RPG, and sadly it is a genre that not too many companies seem to be making. I think more than anything I want to keep pushing recognition of this studio out there, because they are doing some really interesting things. Over the last year they went from a studio that I knew next to nothing about, to one of the ones I am watching closely for any tidbits of information that might be announced.
If you are curious about some of my other posts related to Spiders games… you can find the various categories associated with them below:
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
This is the first show of our seventh year of AggroChat, because we are apparently bad at tracking time and said nothing about our anniversary last week. We start off with another “Bel was dumb” story as he ventured forth to battle the boxpocalpyse. From there we wind around a bit through a few topics and land on another exploration of levels in video games as a concept being a bad idea. We talk about a bunch of ways that games do this and how some have figured out meaningful horizontal progression. Next up we talk about the effective death of Kotaku with the departure of Jason Schreier and this leads to a larger discussion about the odd place that “video game journalism” finds itself in and the rigors of trying to fill content for the 24 hour news cycle. We go down the rabbit hole that is Star Wars Galaxies crafting system and contrast it against a few other approaches like that of the original Everquest II system. Finally some brief discussion as Tam finds Beat Saber and the shockingly good work out it ends up being.
Topics Discussed
Bel and the Boxpocalypse
We’ve outgrown the concept of levels
WoW’s leveling buff
Marking progression horizontally
The Death of Kotaku
The challenges of gaming content creation
The Brilliant Madness of Star Wars Galaxies crafting
This week of Blapril is a week about introducing yourself to the community and letting us know interesting things about you. I more or less have been dodging this bullet because I am not sure if there is anything left that is interesting to tell about me. However on this the 11th anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog, I am going to talk a bit about myself and its origins. This was in no way planned when I laid out the week structure of this event, and quite honestly until this morning I had completely forgotten that it was my anniversary. Sure I have it marked on the Calendar… but my Google Calendar and not the one I use for work purposes. In the past I have had my act together and commissioned artwork from my good friend Ammo to mark this event, but in the time of pandemic I clearly do not have my act together.
Once upon a time in another life, I was a forum troll. I mean that in the best possible version of that term, because I was not disruptive other than complaining when someone got what I considered to be an unfair ban on the blizzard forums. Some of my earliest memories were making epic long form posts on various game forums. That was sorta my shtick, I would squeeze all of my thoughts about something in a big chunk of prose and unceremoniously place it on a forum that could not care less about my thoughts and feelings. The various guilds I was part of also had extremely active forums, and I too would post a running commentary of events there. This more or less stayed the same until the beginning of this blog, but I will get to that.
In March of 2005 blogging was all of the rage among some of my friends, and it was more or less spread out between three sites: Blogger, Xanga and Live Journal. All three of which are shockingly still in business, because I was almost certain that surely something called Xanga would have died by now. Given that I was very much a google early adopter, I started writing a deeply personal blog on Blogger, and sharing it with only a handful of really close friends. This is a blog that I hope never sees the light of day because everything on it is super cringe worthy. Among various things it chronicled my experiences learning how to RV and being thrust into that world when suddenly my wife decided that we needed to buy one. My wife has a habit of making random decisions like that when we are forced to go through traumatic events. We bought our house in part due to the fact that her childhood home burnt down for example.
The RV thing was a reaction of wanting to be closer with family after the suicide of our nephew. This is also why I played a Hunter as a main in World of Warcraft, because this event happened shortly after the launch of the game and knocked me completely out of reality for a good two months, at which point when I returned to the game all of my friends had out-leveled me by a large margin and Hunter was the only class that I was capable of soloing on at a fast enough pace to catch up. Major life events have some weird ramifications, and I think this blog was a way of me dealing with some of the ones we were going through. I only shared it with a small circle of my friends, because the things I wrote about felt too personal to actually share on something like a guild forum. This is probably the first time that I was introduced to the concept of writing as therapy, which admittedly I have later explored many times with this blog.
In 2009 I was the leader of a fairly active guild in World of Warcraft and one of the leaders of a raid called Duranub Raiding Company. I had things that I felt like sharing about the game in general, Warrior tanking, and the act of leading both a guild and a raid. I thought I had some stuff figured out and wanted to share those thoughts with the world, and in the process of having these feelings I stumbled across a specific blog that inspired me to create Tales of the Aggronaut. The Wordy Warrior was a blog written by a warrior tank that was also a guild and raid leader, and I was enthralled by it. The blog was written by Criss Fowler or @Aeridel who eventually went on to work at both Riot and Blizzard and now works for That Game Company, the folks behind Journey, Flower and recently released Sky on mobile platforms.
It was through this blog that I was introduced to the Blog Azeroth community and so many awesome people that I still have in my greater monkeysphere like @Fimlys, @StoppableForce, and @Saresa (who at some point twitter apparently unfollowed for me and I have only recently refollowed). Funny story… Stop has the honor of being the very first person that I followed on Twitter. This community is ultimately what lead me to create a twitter account in the first place. It was a really exciting time to be a blogger, because it seemed like every week we got to greet a brand new crop of blogs that were springing up constantly surrounding this game we all loved. Ultimately it was the sort of community that I sought to help create with my participation in the Newbie Blogger Initiative and eventually the spawning of Blaugust and now Blapril.
However like so many things, eventually disillusionment set in. I got frustrated with World of Warcraft and with that my posting frequency tanked significantly. When I eventually left the game for the first time with the launch of Rift and shortly after the launch of Cataclysm, I found my readership tanked significantly. World of Warcraft and the Blog Azeroth community were really supportive… of World of Warcraft blogs and bloggers, but once you strayed outside of that fold be it on your blog you would ultimately see just how singled threaded segments of that community were. The day I started writing about Rift instead of World of Warcraft I saw about half of my twitter followers vanish over night, which was a really stark wake up call for someone who thought of a lot of these people as friends.
That has always been a challenge for me when it comes to blogging and social media. I come from the early age of the internet, back when we were crawling around in MUDs and on IRC. In fact I met my wife of almost twenty two years on IRC, so these were people to me and not just pixels. I’ve built so many friendships over the years that have transcended the games we played to the random things that are happening in our lives. AggroChat entirely is made up of people that I met through gaming and that we continued to be friends when the controller was set down or the servers went offline. So it came as a shock to me that people are fickle, and in turn lead me to even post less because this thing I thought I was part of wasn’t really as solid as I originally thought.
At that point it was really cold to be on the outside of the Warcraft community looking in, and while I found new friends out here in the blackness of space, it was a different sort of community. If you existed outside of an established game community, you sorta had to be an island nation that occasionally had treaties with other island nations, but effectively were doing your own thing. There was a great freedom that came with that, and once I stopped sulking around 2012… I began the next era of Tales of the Aggronaut where I was going to regularly post and I was going to be far more open about the things that are happening between the gaming sessions. I was always deeply cagey about sharing my life with my readers until daily posting forced me to be brutally honest at times just to come up with something to fill the page.
I still very much feel like an Island Nation at times, but I would like to think that the ties I have with other Island Nations are stronger than they were in those early years. I would also like to think that with things like Blaugust existing and transitioning into a fairly active Discord, that we have more of a social latticework for new bloggers to find easier footing than I did when I first set adrift from the content life-raft that was Warcraft. It is fundamentally a different time for bloggers and blogging in general now than it was during those halcyon days when this was all new and exciting. There are so many other things fighting for our attention and it seems that now Vlogs and Streaming have consumed almost all of the oxygen in the room… to the point where it is exceedingly hard to sign up for any sort of credentials on a blog alone.
I still however prefer to read a long sequence of thoughts placed painstakingly on a page than to listen through fifteen minutes of rambling in video form that never quite reaches a cogent point. Hell I would rather read fifteen pages of rambling than watch most videos, and unfortunately as a reader of Tales of the Aggronaut you are all too familiar with rambling posts. With that I think it might be a good time to actually wrap this thing up. I feel like I have told this tale multiple times, and each time it ends up coming out a little different. On this anniversary of this blog, I once again want to thank you all for being part of this experience. I could and likely would continue doing this without you, because I ended up turning it into therapy… but it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.
