Month: April 2015

AggroChat 52 – FFXIV Story Spoiler Show

Since August 2013 Final Fantasy XIV has been a fairly significant part of our lives.  While we had a break in there, we have been in place for at least the last eight months soaking up every ounce of content that Square Enix can throw at us.  Throughout this game the story of the game has been a constant topic of conversation among the aggrochat crew and friends.  Each time a new tidbit of story was released it would start rampant speculation as to where the story might be going.  As we made our way through the current patches content, I think it is safe to say that none of us could have guessed how this would have ended.

As the credits rolled on the conclusion of the 2.0 storyline… the first reaction is that you absolutey have to talk to someone about it.  This week we do a complete no holds barred spoiler filled romp through the Final Fantasy XIV storyline to date, talking about its conclusion and some of the elements from previous patches that might play into the future of the Heavensward expansion.  If you have not reached the climax of this story arc, then I highly suggest you file this show away and return to it later.  During most shows we try really hard not to directly spoil any content, and we will be returning to that next week.  This week…  we need to get this out of our systems, and if you have finished the storyline, chances are you do too.

Dark Knights and Brayflox

We talk about this a bit at the end of the show but yesterday they had a big live letter at like 3 in the morning my time, going over more details about the Heavensward expansion including some concrete details about the new jobs and how they would be starting.  For some time they had said that they would not be starting at level 1, and that they did not have classes backing up the jobs.  We speculated what that meant, and started to wonder if this would mean like other jobs they would start at level 30.  Sure enough as per the slide above this has now been confirmed that new jobs will in fact start at 30, which means these new classes will be cutting their teeth on the likes of Brayflox.  Another interesting tidbit is that apparently in order to experience these new jobs, or the new Heavensward content…  you are going to have to have completed the main story through the conclusion in 2.55.

This is quite honestly a shocking devotion to their storyline and one that I stand behind whole heartedly.  One of the things that frustrated me about the Warlords of Draenor launch is the fact that it felt like they were essentially abolishing everything from the previous expansions from both a class standpoint by giving everyone a free level 90, and from a crafting standpoint in that you can level from 1 to max level through the garrison system.  Sure this is going to create a barrier between new players and the content that players are now playing…  but I have a feeling that Square Enix like always is going to find a way to make the old world content relevant.  One of the slide bullet points that I have not been able to find much explanation about says something to the effect of “2.0 content adjustments”.  So I hope this does in fact mean that we will have reasons to keep returning to older stuff.

Decisions Decisions

One of the slides that I saw that made me the happiest was that there are apparently eight new dungeons with the launch of the content.  Now I have no clue how many of these will be “leveling” dungeons and how many will  be “end game” dungeons.  We also know that the expansion will be launching with the Alexander raid, and two primal encounters Ravana and Bismark.  I know that over the course of 2.0 they introduced something like 18 new dungeons and I believe 16 trials.  So I feel like eight dungeons is a pretty good place to be launching considering how much content gets added over time.  Right now I am finding myself pretty torn in that I am not sure which direction I really want to take.  I have waned to play a Dark Knight since the moment my friends first started trying to convince me to play Final Fantasy XIV.  Now that I have it however…  I am just thinking about much much fun I have running content as a warrior.

I know without a doubt that I will have both at 60 and well geared, but I am not really certain which one I am going to push up first.  So quite honestly right now… a lot of this is going to depend on how much enjoyment I get out of the Dark Knight once early release starts.  I doubt we are going to get any sort of a test realm to play with them on.  I wish that were the case because I feel like Dark Knight is eight going to be a class I immediately love, or a class that I can’t really stand to play.  The whole spell tank thing can go in either direction, but if it ends up being more akin to the Shadowknight or the Deathknight…  then I am all a bout it.  If the end result feels very casterly… then I will most likely just stick to smashing things with my axe.  Basically I feel like either this is going to be the class that I have always wanted to play… or the class that Tam has always wanted to play.  However I feel like one of us is going to end up disappointed.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Dark Knights and Brayflox

Beating Games

This week I did another one of my “Bonanza” posts over on MMOGames.com and in it I linked to one of Tams post about why he plays games he doesn’t like.  This came from a conversation that we were having awhile back about how none of us could fathom how he can push on to beat games that he doesn’t even enjoy.  The problem I have been having of late is that I don’t even bother to beat the games that I am enjoying the hell out of.  The funny thing is that I was not always this way.  I have always been a collector, it is part of me buried deep down inside me.  I’ve collected star wars figures, comic books, Legos, and now more importantly awesome people as I stuff them into my free company.  There was however a time in my history when I used to collect video game victories.

During late elementary / early middle school it was the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System and I was completely enthralled by it.  Thankfully all of my friends were also engaged, which acted as a serious enabling force in my life.  There was one friend however in particular that matched my level of obsession, and going to break one of my cardinal rules and name him directly… since this post is going to get super contorted quickly without some name of reference.  Wade was always significantly better at me when it came to video games, and this created a friendly competition between us as we attempted to defeat as many of the cartridges as we could.   We both kept these intricate lists of what we had defeated, and often times swapped notes and strategies over lunch.

Summer of “Free” Rentals

We were enabled by the fact that the grocery store in our small town has a special deal during the summer months.  You could pay $20 and get a card that would allow you to rent as many games and movies as you could like during the three months of summer.  There were some stipulations on it of course, and you could only have one title out at any given moment.  But you could keep said title out as long as you liked.  Wade and I both got these cards and started trying to burn through as many titles as we could.  He had a significant lead on me in part because he lived within walking distance of the grocery store, and for me I was out in the boonies on the other side of town so required a special trip to go swap games.  There were many times he would start with one game in the morning and go swap it out that afternoon for something else.

We were also enabled by the fact that for some unknown reason our grocery store seemed to have a far better selection of games than would be reasonable for a small town grocery store.  I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the owners was a Nintendo junkie.  I don’t know where exactly we ended the summer at, other than the fact that Wade was leaps and bound ahead of me.  I think I managed to get somewhere in the 80s.  I would like to think that this was totally due to the fact that he had easy access to the store and could swap games at any point he liked.  That said I feel like he was just a much better gamer than I ever was, namely because his favorite game was Milon’s Secret Castle…  a game that to the best of my knowledge broke me.  I don’t think I ever managed to beat it, or at least not that I can remember.

Fighting Games

The games we played changed after that summer.  We both got addicted to Street Fighter 2, and then Mortal Kombat 2, and later Killer Instinct.  Fighting games were “beatable” but that aspect didn’t really matter any more.  It was more about could we beat each other, and honestly if he was playing Ryu I didn’t have a shot in hell.  We still played lots of JRPGs on the side, since those were now a thing… and sure we beat them, but they were a much more prodding experience.  I personally preferred to wallow in the games and spend as much time faffing about killing random stuff and earning currency as I could.  It took me over a year to beat Final Fantasy 6 for example because I spent so much time messing with the coliseum.  The dynamic changed… when a game started taking hundreds of hours to beat…  you wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any details before moving on to the next area.

Then we graduated High School and I mostly lost touch with Wade.  I moved on to college, got married, got a career…  and rarely ever spent much time back in my home town.  When I moved to college I was just “gone”, I never came home on the weekends because I was working at an internet service provider.  So when I moved out of home I literally left home permanently.  There was none of  that transitional period where I still hung out with friends from High School.  The sad thing is that Wade is one of the half dozen people that I actually really am still interested in from my High School days and I don’t have much in the way of contact with any of them.  One of them died in a surfing accident, another one quite literally joined the circus…  the rest of them are busy with lives and families.  The only one I know next to nothing about is Wade, which is truly unfortunate.  Before sitting down to write this I think I found him in facebook, so we will see if I can actually reconnect.

Massively Multiplayer Online

In 2000 I first played Everquest, and it completely shifted my focus away from console gaming for a good period of time.  If I was playing a game I was playing an MMO because it gave me this constant stimulus of other people to play with, and short term goals that felt like I was building towards something bigger.  This is really the point at which I stopped beating games, because I got used to playing games that continued on forever.  The thing is this shifted my mindset significantly, because so long as I faffed about and never actually defeated a single player game… it could continue on indefinitely like the MMOs I was playing did.  So games like Fallout 3, or Skyrim… in essence became single player MMOs for me.  There is a certain amount of let down now for me when I finally do beat a game.  The experience is over, and sure I could start up a new character…  but that notion is somehow tarnished.

When I play a single player game I am building this character in my head and this story as I go along with it.  That story, that character… dies the moment I do that final turn in, or defeat that final boss.  If I start a new game it is a new character, with a new story.  This is in part why I struggle playing deeply narrative games… because they ask me to play some other character that isn’t inherently mine.  At this point it is almost like I have a phobia of finishing games, because it means the joy is over.  When I leave one unfinished it is like that game is always on pause, and the enjoyment and happiness that I had in that moment never goes away.  While I so rarely pick up an old save and continue it…  I know that it is there waiting on me to continue the journey that I started.  I lack that competitive drive that makes me feel like I have to beat the game.  I am no longer collecting wins… but instead collecting nuggets of joy in these games that I can remember fondly later.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Summer of “Free” Rentals

Perplexed

Roughly a month ago I wrote a piece about the WoW Token, when it was officially announced and seemed to be something coming into the game “Soon ™”.  There are a number of websites that index the price of wow gold, but I don’t plan on linking to any of those for reasons.  At the time of writing those sites seemed to indicate the going rate for gold was something along the lines of $15 for 30,000g.  Now the strange thing was that there were some absolutely insane outliers, like sites offering nearly 100,000g for $20.  Now this week the WoW Token has launched, and I have been watching it thanks to an extremely excellent market website showing the current token price.  Firstly I expected the token currency to drop in gold value, but not this fast and not for this long.  I expected there to be a significant rebound once players started snapping them up in lieu of making subscription payments… and we may still see that towards the end of the month.  The token started at 30,000g, raising to 35,000g and then tanking quickly down to as low at one point as 18,000g before coming back up and hovering around 25,000g.

All of this while more volatile than I had expected, doesn’t really shock me.  What does shock me is the reaction from the third party gold sellers.  Those same gold index sites seem to be painting a bizarre story.  Gone completely are those 100,000g outliers, and they have been replaced by values that are almost lock step in line with the legitimate wow token pricing.  I expected that as the wow token gained traction that the third party sellers would start offering more outrageous deals trying to tempt players into taking that risk.  Instead if anything it seems like the WoW Token is now setting the standard operating price for gold regardless of how you obtain it.  This is just puzzling to me, and I cannot fathom why this would be the result.  Now as far as the WoW Token goes, I still think we will see a significant climb in price as folks subscriptions start coming due.  For me personally the WoW Token still is not “worth” the price.  Now if I could buy one or two of them and immediately purchase some big ticket items… I might be enthralled.  For the time I already have access to the sorts of gold that it is currently worth so it is not a huge draw.

A Better Night

Tuesday night was unequivocally horrible.  I am still not sure what was wrong, but for whatever reason we were completely off our game.  We started as we often do with Heroic Blackrock Foundry, and downed Hans and Franz without much issue.  Then we moved on to Gruul and wiped until we had lost our will to live.  Finally towards the end of the night we moved on to Darmac… and squeaked by with a victory by the slimmest of margins.  Last night once again we started with some attempts on Heroic Gruul, only to end up wiping over and over once again.  I am not sure what has happened to us, or happened to the encounter… but it went from something we can do fairly easy to being damned near impossible for us.  Thankfully we chose to shift gears and take on Normal instead after a handful of wipes last night, and in a large part that made for a more enjoyable evening.  We went on to clear all of the content we have cleared before in the past, and since we were used to bashing our skulls against heroic… it seemed pretty simple.

The problem is we still have yet to touch the Iron Maidens fight, make any real progress on the Heart of the Mountain encounter…  and then there is still Blackrock.  I really want to make some traction on those fights and get to a point where we can at least say we are clearing normal.  This piecemeal heroic work is nice, but it feels like right now we are doing it in lieu of forward momentum on actually beating the instance.  This is one of those places where I am torn, because by god I really really want my heroic sword from Gruul.  Once again I am pantsless, and I am trying to keep from going through the bullshit required to craft a comparable pair.  I know the second I do… I will get a heroic drop, or mythic pair from my bi-weekly garrison crate.  I simply don’t want to deplete all the money I have to make it work.  Maybe the effect of the WoW Token will drive the price of Savage Blood down…  with people trying to sell them in order to make the gold to “make rent”.

Elder Scrolls Online Console Pre-order

One of the cool emails that I received yesterday was to notify me that for the next thirty days I had the option of purchasing a digital copy of Elder Scrolls Online for my console of choice for only $20.  This was one of the big selling points that they made several months back when they announced the official launch date of the console version.  If you purchased the game prior to April 9th 2015 on the PC you could then get a cheap copy on the console, as well as the ability to transfer your PC characters to the console version as well.  Since I was a long time alpha player, and ultimately a launch day player this was no major incentive but I am absolutely taking advantage of it.  I honestly wish more games would give you a significant discount on other platforms when they re-release the game.  For example I have purchased State of Decay on Xbox Live, Steam, and will more than likely purchase another copy when the Year One Survivor Edition comes out.  It just feels nice to have at least some sort of a break here.  As such I have already pre-purchased and am hoping that it offers a preload of the game as well.

From the day the game came out it always felt like it would potentially work better with a controller.  I will tell you the real reason why I am picking it up with the ps4 is that I hope to play it through my vita.  I spent a fairly significant amount of time faffing about in Destiny while playing on my Vita, and I cannot imagine a better experience than hanging out in bed and playing some Elder Scrolls Online.  Similarly it gives me something to do while waiting on other things to happen in other games.  Upstairs I have my ps4 set up beside my computer, and in the living room I have a PSTV so I have four places I can comfortably play some Elder Scrolls Online.  I am amped for this release and I am hoping  the game finds its true potential with the console audience.  Right now the console players really do not have that many “meaty” mmorpg options, with Final Fantasy XIV pretty much being the absolute best choice.  Elder Scrolls Online should cover a very different niche of players, and I think it will ultimately be extremely successful.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
A Better Night