Month: August 2015

Liebstered!

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Blaugust 2015, Day 5

liebster-awardOn Sunday I finally caught that infamous blogging disease, the Liebster Award! Thanks Noctua and Mylex at Gamers Decrypted!

11 Random Facts About Me:

  1. I love origami, and can fold a mean shark.
  2. I have never played KOTOR, to my shame.
  3. I have 3 cats and only one of them hates me.
  4. My mom is the one who inspired and enabled my nerdiness. She still always calls me to make sure I don’t miss an episode of Doctor Who or a particularly cheezy made-for-Syfy movie.
  5. I came to MMOs relatively late, and WoW was my first MMO. I never played in vanilla.
  6. My first computer was a Commodore 64.
  7. In school I had to learn typing instead of programming due to my schedule. I hated and resented it right up until I realized that knowing how to type is amazing, and programming I could teach myself.
  8. Hands down, my favorite movie of all time is Pacific Rim. It is like it was made just for me and my childhood kaiju love.
  9. I absolutely hate wearing dresses or skirts. But I always end up playing casters in video games so my characters are constantly wearing dresses even though I won’t.
  10. I love Star Wars and Star Trek equally. Don’t drag me into your arguments, I won’t choose sides!
  11. My favorite food is cheese. If you don’t like cheese I will fight you.

Now to answer Noctua’s questions:

  1. What about writing do you love the most? Writing a blog is great because it forces me to reflect more deeply on what I’ve been doing, and connects me to the world of other game bloggers outside my social circle.
  2. Which is your favorite gaming console of all time? I’d have to say the original Playstation. It marks the point where I was capable of buying games I wanted without having to beg my parents for them.
  3. Do you believe in good and evil? I’m going to go with the sage words of god, or a computerized space probe that collided with god: “Right and wrong are just words, what matters is what you do.”
  4. What are your worst and best qualities? I can be overly competetive sometimes, but I make a mean spaghetti sauce.
  5. Are you an achievement, immersion, or social focused player? I’m definitely achievement focused first and foremost. I enjoy escaping into games, but once I’m there I need some objective to chase.
  6. What is your most beloved character of all times from a game?  If this means my personal characters, it would definitely be my forsaken priest in WoW, so many memories there. In terms of actual written characters, probably Sam from Gone Home. Never before had a game made me just outright weep at the end.
  7. What is your favorite book? This one is almost impossible to answer, there’s too many great ones! My favorite of what I’ve read recently would have to be One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire because it is full of sea fey.
  8. Which is your favorite fictional villain and why? I always love villains that are smart and scheming.  My favorite Disney villain is Ursula, because she’s amazing and because her design was based on Divine.
  9. DC or Marvel? I’m not a comics fan at all. I’d have to answer Marvel to this question though, just from enjoying their movies and playing lots of Marvel Heroes!
  10. What about maintaining your blog do you find the most difficult? Coming up with new things to say, and believing that my opinions are worth posting for everyone to see.
  11. Which is your personality type? INTP, the classic absentminded professor archetype, I guess it makes sense. I most certainly am an introvert.

Now for my questions for my victims awardees:

  1. Why do you blog?
  2. What was your favorite childhood cartoon show?
  3. Fantasy or Sci-Fi?
  4. What’s the most amazing place you’ve ever been?
  5. Pizza: Chicago or New York?
  6. If you could only pick one game genre to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?
  7. What inspired your character name?
  8. What is your greatest gaming moment or achievement?
  9. Do you share your love of games with your real-world friends and family, or keep it to the internet?
  10. Have you ever had a really weird pet?
  11. What is your favorite type of environment/biome in-game and IRL?

Phew that was a workout! I’ve chosen a couple of my Aggrochat buddies who are also participating in Blaugust to answer my questions and share their 11 random facts:

Ash and Thalen consider yourselves Liebster-ed! I look forward to seeing your answers.

I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know me a little better!



Source: Moonshine Mansion
Liebstered!

On the Most Awkward Scene in Videogames

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Blaugust Post #5

Blaugust is pretty good at getting me to finish my drafts. This is a post about That Scene in Final Fantasy 10. It’s fairly early (a few hours in), and the game’s 13 years old, so this is all the spoiler warning you’re going to get. There is a scene fairly early on where Yuna is attempting to show Tidus how to laugh. It’s incredibly, unbelievably awkward, and it’s frequently pointed out as an example of bad writing, or localization. If you don’t believe me about this, see for yourself:

The thing is, I think this scene does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to demonstrate how Tidus is strange, and doesn’t fit in, and isn’t really adjusting well. Spira is not a terribly happy setting in FFX, and attempts to make it brighter are doomed to failure. In case you’re wondering, it’s also not any less awkward in Japanese. What might be worth arguing is the value of this. Tidus is the player avatar (for better or worse), I think and making him look stupid turns some players off the game. This is really part of a deeper JRPG vs. WRPG thing, but I won’t go into that here.

WoW 7.0 Predictions

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I didn’t want to do this as an “official” post, so instead I am making a bonus post today which is a truly rare occasion. With tomorrow being the day we find out what the new World of Warcraft expansion is, I thought I would jot down some ideas. Some of these are in fact serious ideas… others are absolutely not, and I can’t be bothered to differentiate between the two at this point.

  • During this expansion Thrall will have to stay home with the kid, which leaves Aggra to go out on adventures and be the “big damned hero” for a change.
  • Yrel comes to Azeroth from Draenor and deposes Varian Wrynn as the leader of the Alliance.
  • With a strong woman at the helm of both the Alliance and the Horde they realize how childish and futile it is to continue making up wars over essentially nothing… and instead decide to join forces and usher in a new era of peace allowing people to do whatever the hell they want with whoever the hell they want to.
  • Unfortunately our time bending shenanigans have punched a hole in the fabric of space and time, and we have ended up in the world of The Nexus.
  • All of the zones in this expansion as a result will be vaguely square in shape and consist largely of three large fields of play where all the quests will be located. The dungeon for each map will be conveniently located at the far end of the map.
  • Because we broke time we can now have a raid tier consisting of Arthas, Illidan, Diablo, Tassadar, and Sgt. Hammer.
  • Bolivar Fordragon has decided that his butt is cold, and has finally climbed off the Frozen Throne and now begins rampaging across Azeroth with his army of Scourge. The game will become a gritty survival game about fighting for resources in a world plagued by the Zombie Apocalypse.
  • We figured out yet another way to bring Onyxia and Nefarian back… and they are doing something in a dark dungeon with lots of lava and orcs or something… we will figure it out as we go with this one.
  • We are absolutely going to have an Old God in this expansion, because everyone loves crawling through Titan Dungeons right? We’ve had Norse and Egyptian mythology based Titans… now we are just going to remove all of the illusions here and make a H.P. Lovecraft themed mythology… every world needs for nameless tentacled things right?
  • Mentoring will be introduced but you can only do it on patch day while the servers are down.
  • We will have roughly half of our abilities removed so that it can fit on an Xbox controller… which will lead the way to World of Warcraft breaking onto consoles for instant improved relevance.
  • Gnome Druids… kitten form, bear cub form, baby seal form…. and Parrot form. We will make it work lore wise… something about digging too deep and hitting the Emerald Dream or something. Hippie Gnomes.
  • Bards… will not be in the expansion because while it would be awesome… we really don’t want to have to add a fourth role to the holy trinity.
  • World of Warcraft will no longer be a game, but a carefully curated selection of designer snacks… delivered monthly to subscribers.
  • We voyage to the South Seas and discover a kingdom of Murlocs… player character Murlocs! Except they can’t use text chat other than Murloc noises.
  • The Burning Legion… seriously it is probably going to be about The Burning Legion.

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Progression and Achievement

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I used to be a bleeding-edge-of-content type. At various points in my MMO-playing career, I’ve pushed hard against the wall of the most advanced content in various games at various times, and I’ve reached a point where I no longer feel the need to chase that. That having been said, I still love the sense of accomplishment of beating something legitimately difficult, even if I’m not doing it the fastest, or the hardest possible way.

Last night, we beat Turn 13, finishing out the Binding Coil of Bahamut in its entirety. Even at the expansion power level, the final boss isn’t a trivial encounter, and took us more tries to beat than the first section of Alexander (expansion raid content, which we did immediately after T13). Part of this has to do with how shallow the power curve is in FFXIV– we’re not looking at orders of magnitude of power increases for the most part. The other part is that the mechanics of the fight are very, very nasty. Even on “easy”, it will happily wreck you if you don’t know what you’re doing.

What I like about this pace of content is that it keeps everything fun. Sure, we’re not going to be the first to beat everything, but we can and will beat it all, and we’ll do it without burning ourselves out. The only time I’ve been fatigued with the regular raid we run has been when we were bashing our heads against Turn 9, and even that was much less nasty than the severe burnout I was feeling doing Naxx40 in Vanilla WoW, or some of the plane raids as they came out in EQ, or hardmode Soa in SWTOR.

Progression and Achievement

this picture is titled “swtor-soa-bug-fix” which should tell you a lot about the frustrations with that awful, awful fight.

I think a big part of it is that I feel like I’m getting a reward that’s more than an item or a title or an achievement for beating a boss. I’m getting a solid, notable chunk of story. The cutscene following the defeat of Arthas in Wrath of the Lich King is basically par for the course for FFXIV raids; every Coil ends with a cutscene like that, and there are also a goodly number of equally significant ones scattered throughout the progression. I’m getting a big chunk of interesting story that means a lot more to me than a fancy new sword or a piece of armor that will be outdated with the next release.

Indeed, at no point while we were raiding Coil were any of the drops going to be relevant for us. They look cool, and that’s about it; we were never going to see upgrades out of there. I think it helped things, and made our experience a lot smoother and more fun. We did each thing as often as we wanted to, rather than grinding them repeatedly just to get drops to gear up for the next one.

Progression and Achievement

As for myself, I got a little burned out getting my gear level up high enough to take on Alexander, grinding Law tomestones to get upgrades. I haven’t had the desire to log in and grind more dungeons, and I’ve been holding off on raiding Alexander on my own until I can see all the pieces of it with my team. I’m looking forward to new dungeons and new story quests to keep moving things forward, but in the meantime I’m branching out into a few other games. I may make a return to Archeage and muck about with that, although as mentioned before I’ve been fairly deep in SAO: Hollow Fragment.

After a fairly long period of being a bit uninterested in the games I had available to me, it’s exciting to have things I want to play again.