Horizon: Zero Dawn – Page 3

PlayStation Show and Shaman to 60

August 7, 2020 by Belghast

So yesterday I made a post that is a bit out of the ordinary for my blog. Largely it was a thought experiment about whether or not we would actually get consoles this season. In a normal year I would take that both companies had announced a Holiday launch to be a done deal. However 2020 is the year when everything has been cancelled, sometimes rescheduled and often times cancelled again. We are not playing under normal circumstances and there are likely unforeseen supply chain issues that are being impacted by Covid-19. However regardless of that a Sony show happened yesterday and as they suggested there was no major PlayStation 5 news, but instead some discussion about things that had already been announced.

If you are curious about the entire show, then you can check out this link that should forward you right to the beginning of the broadcast. Of the things shown, I think Crash Bandicoot 4 was probably the most interesting to me. We have been in this time of reboots and re-imaginings, so I find it extremely interesting to get an official sequel to Crash Bandicoot: Warped from 1998. The gameplay looks to have evolved as well and I am pretty excited to get to play it. Additionally it appears that the game will be coming out for PlayStation 4 and won’t actually be a PS5 launch title. Availability to more players is always going to be a good thing, especially considering I think the PS5 will be in extremely short availability this year.

We also got to see more information about Godfall and while it still sorta looks like if Skyforge and Destiny had a kid, it appears there are also elements of Warframe factored in with your ability to find and unlock new “suits” with their own unique abilities. The designer giving the demo went out of his way to state that there would be no micro-transactions and that the game has all of its content on day one. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. I am hoping that means the game is something more akin to Diablo 3 in the way it grows and progresses, but even D3 released a Reaper of Souls expansion and a Necromancer DLC pack. The combat looks fun, so I will likely be checking this out on PC, because it doesn’t seem like the type of game I want to play on a console.

Other than watching the Sony show, I spent the majority of the night piddling around on the Shaman in World of Warcraft. I managed to ding 60 and say goodbye to the old world and move my way into Borean Tundra. I contemplated starting over in Howling Fjord because I like that zone significantly better, but the last character I ran over there seemed to level significantly more slowly. The quests are spread out and the hubs are less conducive to batching things up. I am still really enjoying the Elemental Shaman and up until this point I don’t feel squishy, which really helps the enjoyment of a caster.

All of that said… forward momentum on the Shaman is probably going to grind to a halt given that Horizon Zero Dawn complete edition releases on PC at some point this morning. I was able to log in and pre-load last night and I can see this more or less eating the rest of my free time. I played through the original game on PlayStation 4, but never really touched the DLC. My hope is that by replaying the experience of transitioning into the DLC will feel more seamless. I also think playing with a mouse and keyboard is going to make the bow combat feel significantly better. I’ve heard some weird issues with performance, so I am hoping that gets patched quickly. I’ve been running Death Stranding which uses the same engine so my hope is that I can at least get it to look as good as a PS4 Pro. So… what does your weekend look like? Will you be dipping your toes into Horizon Zero Dawn? Drop me a line below with what you have planned. The post PlayStation Show and Shaman to 60 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #301 – Sega is Bad at Launchers

May 31, 2020 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen… also featuring special guest Nephsys

Tonight we welcome our good friend Nephsys along for this ride because she more or less got kidnapped into the podcasting channel. We start the show with some discussion about being back in Final Fantasy XIV and the current event where they bribe us to do unpopular content. One of those content types is Rival Wings, and Bel talks about how it is PVP that he actually enjoys. From there we break into a discussion inspired by a conversation that happened while watching the cutscenes of Praetorium, which is what games would you like to forget so you could experience them fresh again for the very first time? We talk for a bit about the afterglow of watching your friends get into something that you really liked. Finally we nestle into the main topic of the week which is the somewhat awkward North American PC launch of Phantasy Star Online 2.

Topics Discussed

Mogrocks for Mounts in FFXIV
- Rival Wings is Fun
Forgetting a Game to Play it Fresh again
- The Afterglow of Friends Experiencing Games
Phantasy Star Online 2 NA PC Launch
- The systems within systems
- Figuring things out

The post AggroChat #301 – Sega is Bad at Launchers appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Games of the Decade: 2017

December 26, 2019 by Belghast

Once again I am continuing down the path to 2019 as I talk through the games of this decade that were important to me. Going back this morning and assembling my picks for 2017 made me realize what a freaking phenomenal year for gaming this was. There are so many games that would have been game of the year… were they not up against other competition. Once again a preface of that this is my personal list of the games that were important to me during the year. Your list probably looks a bit different and there are a few games that were left off because I never quite got into them the way that I should.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Lets be honest… this is the game that sold a bunch of switches. This is absolutely the reason why I bought mine and even managed to start out on the WiiU and then rebought it and restarted from scratch when I ultimately purchased my Switch. I have issues with one gameplay mechanic, and that is the breakable weapons. However even taking that into account there is no denying how good of a game this is. I ultimately greatly prefer playing it now on Cemu running the WiiU game on emulator so that I can apply a mod that removes weapon durability. There is just something about this game world and the pacing that make me want to get out and explore. The fact that through climbing and stamina you can both gate your progress but also feel like you can get anywhere if you try hard enough kept me pushing forward and trying to find the next secret. If I could remove the gyroscope nonsense and the weapon durability this would have been the perfect game.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

I’ve made attempts in the past to break into the Assassin’s Creed series but there have ultimatley been two obstacles. Firstly they are games that were designed for the console in mind and seem to be way more reasonable when played with a controller than a mouse and keyboard. Secondly they were games that felt defined by a bunch of mini games and things like rooftop chases, which some sneaking around that felt forced and limiting. AC:O pushes the Assassin’s Creed game into a full open world experience where you explore large swaths of the Ancient Egyptian countryside and get a real sense of place and setting that make it feel like you are part of something much larger than effectively being trapped in a single city. The combat itself also seems to be way more forgiving of my desire to rush into combat and not stealth at all, which makes for a better experience personally. I love this game and at some point I will get around to playing the follow up Odyssey.

Night in the Woods

While there are significant issues surrounding the co-creator of Night in the Woods, I cannot write the game off because it is extremely powerful. It spoke to me on such a primal level because it effectively could have been my story. I grew up in a tiny town much like the one depicted in the game, and was one of the few of my friends who successfully transitioned into college… but the fact that I lived at home for the first two years commuting back and forth made for a bizarre experience. I was living in two different worlds… the world that remained the same as High School where I saw the same people I did then on a regular basis… and this new fledgling world of experiences as I took my first steps into college. Like Mae I reached a point in my Junior year where I came perilously close to dropping out of School entirely. This game means so much to me, and nothing is probably ever going to change that.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

While this game was universally panned by critics and social media… I loved it and will be forever saddened by the fact we wont see more of this setting. This is the game that YouTube killed because of some pretty bad issues in the early release candidate that were more or less fixed in the first patch. However by that time all of the damage had been done and all of the demo real of horrific facial contortions was shot giving it an endless stream of memetic images. I liked what this game did to Mass Effect by opening it up and bringing us to an entirely new galaxy with its own issues, while at the same time providing hints of the conflicts from the original game that ultimately lead to the splintering of the Andromeda project. I want to see more of this setting and I am hoping at some point EA allows Bioware to revisit it.

Destiny 2

I love Destiny as a franchise, and while I would have greatly preferred that Destiny 2 didn’t exist from the standpoint of that I would have rather seen the first game transition to the PC and get the necessary upgrades it required, I was okay with the reset because it meant I could finally play the game on my platform of choice. Destiny 2 had a rocky road but today we are experiencing a renaissance of some of the best content that has ever existed in a game of this sort. All of that ground work comes back to the transition from the first game to the sequel and the subtle changes that were made to the way the game functioned. It has been an interesting ride but one that began back in 2017, and for that it will always deserve a space on these sort of lists.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn was easily my game of the year for 2017, and would be a heavy contender if I was trying to make a game of the decade. I love the setting and how it takes the post apocalyptic genre into some very new and interesting directions. I love Aloy the protagonist because she represents a new kind of character that we really haven’t seen much of to this point. I am absolutely hungry for more of this series and I fully expect to see a new game in this sequence release as a launch title for the PlayStation 5. I would love to see this release simultaneously on the PlayStation and the PC at the same time, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to ever be a thing. If you have yet to play this… it is worth the purchase of a console just for this game alone.

Trapping Anjie

March 13, 2018 by Belghast

Watch PSO2 Nonsense because Sol requested it from Belghast on www.twitch.tvLast night when I got home I fired up the stream and played a little Phantasy Star Online 2. Over the weekend Sol made a comment over my Stream discord that I really should be streaming as I played… I assume so she could see what the game was about. The core problem with that is I am guessing based on some of the things I have seen is that the early game is very much not entirely like the late game. One of the reasons why I loved PSO back in the Dreamcast days is that it was essentially “Space Diablo”. Essentially you had a randomly assembled corridor dungeon crawler set on a series interesting tilesets that involved killing everything and getting loot drops as your reward. This core design loop seems to be in place in PSO2, and while I absolutely knew what I was getting myself into… I am not sure if most other gamers would view the title the same way I do.

There are certain aspects of the game that feel very dated from the relatively chunky terrain to the fact that everything is essentially a tightly closed in circuit. Sure you can do more with your terrain than you used to be able to do… like jump… I don’t think you could jump in the first PSO. This is actually used in many cases to hide secrets in the verticality of the level design… but as is also seen in a sequence in my VOD from last night it adds to frustration because the jumping mechanics are also relatively low fidelity. There is a point where I am trying to jump between the individual islands of rock in a chain surrounded by lava, and I am constantly failing to hit the terrain at exactly the right spot allowing me to hop up onto the surface. While the game is only five years old at this point… but in some ways it feels older.

One thing of note… it took me a bit to realize that my microphone was muted so for the first little bit of the VOD I am completely silent. I was talking up a storm, describing the various things I was encountering… all wondering why the folks watching were not responding. Then I noticed the blinking red light on my Yeti telling me that I had muted it at some point. I think I have this revelation about ten minutes into the video where I correct it and apologize. I am not really sure how often I will be playing PSO2 but I am nonetheless glad I went through the process of installing it. It is a fun game and the core mechanical loop of killing sci-fi monsters for fun and profit is one that I enjoy greatly. Just not all that sure how fun it is to watch me doing this thing.

The tail end of my evening was spent in Monster Hunter World hanging out with my friend Grace and working on getting her the last few tickets needed for The Proving quest. I had originally hoped to grab Thalen as well and help him out, but he was nowhere to be seen last night. Generally speaking I am assuming he had pressing family matters, which I hear is a thing when you are a parent. I mean I sometimes have pressing family matters too with my cats, but they are on I feel a completely different plateau of general needs. Usually what I am dealing with is Kenzie prancing around in front of me trying to make sure I see the rubber band that she just dropped on my desk… that she wants me to fling out into the hall so she can chase it. If you ever hear the sound of a rubber band zinging through the air while I am streaming… then I am doing precisely that.

The whole Anjanath farm thing had a side benefit in that I had really wanted to create Flammensucher the crazy flame axe that passes for a sword and shield. During our final run of the night I managed to get the last of my fangs allowing me to craft it… and I have to say while I love it… I am having a little bit of buyers remorse. The problem is not the negative affinity, because it deals more than enough fire damage to make up for that. The core problem so far is that it has completely horrible durability and I got down to orange sharpness while killing ten Gajau for an investigation. I am used to being able to fight the boss through two changes of venue before dropping out of blue sharpness… so this is a significant change for me to get used to. The positive however is that the fire damage is still potent regardless of the base sharpness.

At some point I need to get back on the wagon and work towards downing the final boss of the game. I’ve been sitting on that step since this weekend and have yet to really give it an attempt. I think that is in part because I have a screenshot directory full of things that look like the above… with me failing various elder dragon fights. Granted I tend to fail upwards and learn from my mistakes, but it also takes a lot out of me. This combined with the fact that I have zero burning desire to “finish the game” means I tend to languish around in the doldrums leading up to final boss fights most of the time. My friends like Void/GrnMushroom have a deep burning desire to defeat games that propels them forward into throwing themselves against fights until they eventually batter them down. Me… I just like to wander around and constantly find myself actively avoiding finishing things… even in a situation like this where I know it is just the beginning of a whole new playstyle.

I do however want to uncap my level… at least until 49 where I have to fight another roadblock… and start farming elder dragons for bits and pieces to make interesting sets and weapons. I really need to start throwing myself at Nergigante until he is no big deal and something I can down regularly. The weird thing is… I would far rather throw myself into the nonsense that is SOS Roulette most of the time than actually solo something in this game. I am not sure what it is about soloing that feels bad to me, even though my palico does an amazing job of tanking the bosses and keeping me alive with a constant string of vigor wasps. It just somehow feels better when I am running around at minimum with another player, and at best with a full party of varied weapons.

Sure it gets frustrating when folks are fainting and there is nothing you can do about it… it even causes me to curse very loudly sometimes… but the fights are interesting because I am having to deal with all sorts of random elements. This weekend when I was attempting Teostra I was starting to feel like I needed to stop calling myself a positivity gamer given how much I was cursing. However Sita hung out with me and we Duo’d the fight… but even that took a few attempts. Basically Monster Hunter World feels best when it is a game played with other players be they friends or completely random strangers. As a result I doubt I will stop the madness of SOS Roulette any time soon.