Rift
On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.
Rift
Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.
Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.
Rage
Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it.
I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.
The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim
My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.
What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.
Star Wars the Old Republic
I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.
This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.
Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011
I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game.
So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.
For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!
To Those Remaining
I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.
Magic the Gathering Arena – PC
While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.
To The New and Returning
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC
I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.
Destiny 2 – PC
With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.
The Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.
To Those Departing
Grim Dawn
I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.
Marvel Future Fight
I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.
Mortal Kombat 11
Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.
Outward
This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.
Star Wars the Old Republic
I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.
Honorable Mentions
Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.
Crowfall – PC
While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.
Dragon’s Dogma – PC
I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.
Rage 2 – PC
I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.
World of Warcraft Classic – PC
And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.
Last night I largely spent the night playing Rage 2 and doing a really poor job of driving around the wasteland. In theory I should use this as an opportunity to test out the little 3D Printed controller wheel that I have… but instead I am just suffering through the mouse and keyboard controls. It is funny how even when they do not feel amazing… I will still gravitate towards mouse and keyboard in part just to keep from having to switch between controller and keyboard all the time. I will always be of the firm opinion that shooters are just better with a mouse… and then many of those shooters also want you to control vehicles which work best with a controller. So either I suffer with the shooter gameplay or I suffer with the often side content that is driving. The problem with Rage 2 however is you spend a lot of time in your vehicle as you cross wide swaths of territory between missions.
So while I did not get a screenshot of this because I was enthralled by the combat… one of the random events that happened in the world is that I encountered an enemy vehicle convoy… which I followed around trying to take out. There were roughly 3 car type vehicles, 3 or 4 motorcycle type vehicles and one giant Semi sort of hauler vehicle that was the primary objective. I managed to whittle down the convoy to just being this big massive vehicle… and chased it around through the landscape for a good fifteen minutes slowly plinking down its health. Often times I would drive poorly and get way off track forcing me to jet booster thrust my way back into gun range. Unfortunately I only managed to know it down by about half health before I got a verbal warning that I was almost out of ammunition. I am guessing I need some of the vehicle upgrades to realistically fare well in vehicle to vehicle combat… but I gotta say… I was completely hooked by the experience.
Every town seems to have a major problem that you need to deal with for them… before they can turn around and help you. Last night I made it through one of those missions… which unlocked another sequence of events that I am going to need to do before they can actually help me. That is fine… like I said yesterday there isn’t a lot of back and forth in the dialog so I more than expected to keep going on fetch and assistance quests until the storyline culminates in a battle with the big bad of the world. It is the moment to moment game play and the exploration of new areas that make the game interesting to me personally. I like checking enemy camps off of my list, especially when they happen to be hiding an ark full of goodies.  As I move forward into the game I keep encountering newer and tougher groups of enemies… and I have to say… Authority soldiers are already a pain in the butt because I don’t have an amazing answer to their energy armor yet.
Last night during the quest I was speaking of in the previous paragraph, I picked up my first new weapon… which is a really amazing shotgun. Shotguns are a weapon that I always find deep kinship with, because they are sort of the no-nonsense killing machine option that have been pretty much something I gravitated towards since Doom. The most recent Doom game had an awesome design as far as shotguns go with some interesting mode switching, and Rage 2 does something very similar. If you are firing the weapon blindly you end up with a fairly rapid fire short ranged blast option. However if you hold down the right mouse button and aim the weapon, according to the in game dialog, the weapon melts together all of the shells into one large high powered slug that knocks targets back and has a satisfying thump when it fires. When it says it knocks things back… you can get some interesting situations where you hit a single target and it ends up knocking a whole line of enemies down if they are approaching single file through a choke point. So far this weapon really is my only answer to the Authority troops, and you end up getting it in a mission where things are constantly leaping out of the walls so it also does a great job of twitch reflex killing.
I’m still very much enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it as the week goes on. However there is one more topic that I want to bring up. I will be over the next few weeks moving all of my sites from my current host over to a different host. I’ve been with my current host for the entire decade during which Tales of the Aggronaut has existed. Initially I used them because a good friend of mine was one of the system admins, and I could always poke him if I needed something weird done. However after he left the service has not exactly been that stellar. Additionally there has been a pretty constantly series of blips in server up time and I am getting tired of it. I needed to find a good host to use for another purpose… and instead of doing a single one off… I bought a big enough hosting account to hold everything of mine and even do MP3 hosting if I choose to do so and move away from Libsyn. I will go into more details later as I move everything over depending on how positive or negative the experience is. I’ve moved a single non-gaming site over and it went pretty smoothly. This weekend I plan on moving AggroChat and depending on how well that goes might move Aggronaut as well.
Mostly I just wanted to give my readers a heads up that some changes will be coming in my infrastructure and it might wind up with me being down more than I intend to.
Last night I had a bit of a pleasant surprise, in that I came home and noticed that Rage 2 in my Bethesda launcher had 30 minutes left on the countdown to being ready to play. I was fully expecting it to unlock somewhere around midnight, meaning that I would not be playing it last night at all. However in theory the Bethesda launcher unlocked the game at the earliest playable time instead of Steam which I believe unlocked it at Midnight Eastern Standard time. Quake Champions alpha was the game that got me to install the Bethesda Launcher so when Fallout 76 forced me to use it… it was no big deal given that I already had it installed on my system. For Rage 2… it just seemed like a decent idea to go ahead and order directly from the company for fear of there being some last minute storefront shenanigans like there have been recently with the Epic Games store. One thing that you have to know going into this discussion… I loved the original Rage, just felt that it was too short of a game that felt like the opening act of a story and not a complete experience.
So going into Rage I was already familiar with the basic story of how the world went wrong. That said… I do think they did a good job of prefacing the major points through some slightly unreliable narration. Given that if you have not played Rage yet you like area not going to… so here goes my quick rundown of the events as I remember them. Essentially a planet-killer scale meteor named Apophis fell and destroyed the world… and you are one of the representatives of mankind’s best hope that were buried in Arks underground in order to survive the impact. However on the way to earth the meteor bounced off of the moon causing a large chunk to break off… and also causing the impact to not be quite as devastating as originally predicted. So in the first game you encounter survivors of the old world both good and bad… and fight your way through the paramilitary power of the time called the Authority and trigger all of the other Arks to rise to the surface in the final events of that game. However at some point between those events and that of Rage 2 some terraforming satellites have fallen to earth and caused pockets of the world to become a lush oasis… as was in theory the goal of Project Eden to help reclaim the broken world.
There is a thirty year gap between the events of Rage 1 and Rage 2 and in that time a number of major settlements have arisen and solidified their hold on the world. You play as your choice of a male or female character from the Settlement of Vineland. Within moments of starting the game you are thrust into a battle with the Authority that is now returning after a lengthy absense to begin reclaiming the wastes for themselves. Through a somewhat creepy sequence you scavenge a set of ranger armor from a dead body and that is apparently all it takes to make you one? You are sent out on a mission to make contact with three other city states and start something called Project Dagger going. And thus begins the first of the comparisons to Fallout… in that from the moment you leave that tutorial sequence you are no longer fettered by any constraints as to what you should or should not be doing.
Just like your first footsteps out of the vault… you can roam the world freely and do anything that suits your fancy. You have markers on your map directing you to each of these major settlements but also a bunch of other micro objectives that will gain you favor with various entities. The original Rage was essentially “what if Fallout were more like Quake”, and this game is more like “what if Fallout were a better shooter”. I am somewhat cautious on the Fallout comparisons however because Bethesda games are massively different for each of the players that choose to play them. For me that core Fallout experience is going off into the wilderness to be a murder hobo and bring back stacks of blood drenched armor to sell for caps… and then repeating this over and over until I have explored every bit of the world that suits my fancy and done all of the quests associated with them. In those terms Rage 2 feels very Fallout to me, because I can roam around the map and tick off objectives while looking for tasty loot.
Much like the first game you have a trusty steed in the form of a Mad Maxian road war vehicle… this time around it is something called Phoenix equipped with an Alexa style AI that talks to you as you do things. The game also gives you a decent waypoint system that shows up in game as a series of neon pink chevrons directing you towards your target. While on the road there are a number of random encounters… bandit camps of sorts or other vehicles that might try and run you off the road. One of the first objectives that you encounter is a bridge that has been blocked off by bandits and you need to clear the camp and flip a lever to raise the roadblock. That is more or less the sort of level involvement you should expect from the encounters in game… more or less go to an area… murder everything… search for hidden loot boxes and then profit. If Fallout was a deep role-playing experience for you… then maybe Rage 2 won’t feel like a reasonable simulacrum.
For me however the world is interesting and filled with quest givers that want me to help them out either to retrieve items or get much needed revenge on someone who did them or their family wrong. The feel of the world is also excellent, and not at all what I was expecting given the trailers and neon punk aesthetic leading up to the release of this game. Sure there are hot pink flares burning in the distance at times, but the world itself feels significantly more subdued and is filled with the sort of broken people you would expect from a broken landscape. There are no dialog prompts… just click on an NPC and get their story as well as a quest showing up in your journal… which admittedly is perfectly fine for me. I am always going to be the hero and help everyone out… so it isn’t like I need a red or blue option to the dialog to make me happy. That said for some the game will feel like it isn’t giving you any options other than killing everything… but again… it is a shooter first and anything else second.
Probably the most interesting aspect of the game is that each Ark can teach you a super power of sorts. From the first Ark located in Vineland you learn the ability to dodge out of the way of things… which comes in handy in many places. Last night before I shut down for the evening I found an Ark that effectively taught me the ability to double jump, and before that another one that taught me how to take my dodge and turn it into a body slam that can break armor off enemies. All of the abilities have their own skill tree of sorts that allows you to pour resources find in the wastes into leveling them up. As you start gaining these the game begins to feel really interesting and unique in that you are given was to both traverse the world but also interact with its combat. Now so far it is nothing in the way of the types of movement Tam generally craves… but double jump should at least make Ash as happy as it does me. I deeply appreciate the fact that the game has a ledge system that allows you to pull up if you get close enough to it… meaning that traversing areas that at first glance that you might not be able to make becomes a little bit more reasonable.
All in all I am deeply pleased with the experience so far, and all I really wanted in truth was more of the first game. Rage 2 however gives me enough tweaks to make that prospect significantly more interesting. The challenge the game has in front of it however is that so far… the game plays NOTHING like the trailer. The trailers were all so over the top and filled with Neon Punk aesthetic and thus far at least… I have seen very little of it apart from the occasional colored flare. The trailers would make me expect that a rainbow shat on my screen… and so far at least that isn’t exactly the case as you can see from what is a pretty common vista of junk strewn across a wasteland. This might be a turn off for folks expecting the former… for me personally I am completely fine with this as like I said before I loved the original.
I mean I guess the screenshots get a little more over the top when you factor in the photo mode that you can apply to things and add all sorts of neon nonsense to the sides. However that same aesthetic doesn’t really carry over to the gritty world that I have been experiencing. If you like playing murder hobo in Bethesda games… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you like post apocalyptic gopher mission shooters… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you want deep role-playing choices and feeling like you have some effect on the story… then Rage 2 might not be a game for you. If you were expecting a carnal bullet ballet in a neon punk wasteland… then it is probably a coin flip if this game will be for you because there are definitely those elements but as I said before it is nowhere near as over the top as the trailers would lead you to believe. For me personally… this is a positive but it won’t be for everyone.
I will say that the latest trailers for the game are playing down the elements from the earlier ones… so MAYBE the style changed over time? It is a really fun game that I am definitely enjoying, and if what I talked about seems interesting to you then maybe check it out. I am not about to say the game is going to be for everyone, but for me… I am completely down for this nonsense.
