November 2015 – Page 7

Underwhelmed

November 18, 2015 by Belghast

Mixed Emotions

One of the big problems with last week is that quite literally I had too many things I wanted to play. Not only did Fallout 4 release… and give me a franchise of shanty towns to look after…. we also had the launch of Final Fantasy XIV 3.1 patch. Now I have complained a bit that the lag between 3.0 and 3.1 was entirely too long. Basically from 2.1 onwards they kept a schedule along the lines of a major patch every 3 months and a minor patch every month. Instead this patch took about five months to release… and it was a long enough lag to get me completely out of the habit of logging in on a regular basis. That said I knew whenever 3.1 landed I would be back, albeit a bit rusty from lack of playing. Fallout however took precedence and over the last two nights I have finally consumed I believe all of the new quest content. Now we get to the mixed emotions part… because in one way the content was really damned good. It managed to hit us in the feels a few times and introduce a new to this game character… that we are VERY familiar with from Final Fantasy V thanks to Ashgar and his constant cheerleading for the Four Job Fiesta. The problem I am having is it did nothing really to re-ignite my desire to log in on a nightly basis.

The other big take away I had from the story content is it felt like a trickle compared to what we have seen in the past. I know at the very least the quest to unlock Void Ark was significantly shorter and less involved than the quest to unlock Crystal Tower. Similarly the main story line, lacked a big boss fight like they have in the past… because there was no introduction of a new primal. Also part of what I think is the feeling of it being small… is the fact that we did not get a Hildebrand story to go with it. So while I enjoyed the experience of the new quest content… I felt like it was over far too quickly, and took part of an evening to complete in total. That is including unlocking the new Vanu Vanu beast tribe quests and done two rounds of those. I don’t want to have this “let down” feeling but I can’t help it I guess. Maybe it is just that I had built up 3.1 as being this point of my grand return to this game… and like Tam has said in the past we simply lack the huge backlog of content to slowly work our way through that we had during 2.0. Maybe there has always been a very limited amount of content… and I just never actually caught up completely until this expansion.

The Dungeons

All of this said… I have yet to do the two new dungeons, and have yet to run Void Ark, so maybe my feelings will be different after seeing those. Dungeons have always been the lifeblood of the game for me, but I have simply not been sleeping well the last few nights, so I felt more than a little out of it. Also Tam spent time playing Lords of Verminion last night, and I am hoping he writes up a quick guide because what I saw of it… looked like madness, but a fun sort. Mostly I just need to get back into the habit of logging in on a regular basis. I was in last night at least long enough to run my Vanu Vanu dailies before disappearing back into the Commonwealth, and at a minimum I plan to be doing that each night. I want my flying snake and I want my sundrop dance. I spent some of my stockpiled MGP one one of the new dances there as well… the “Gold” dance, which looks hilarious when my Lalafell does it. I also need to get back in the swing of tanking, because I was a complete slacker when it came to esoterics gear, and I need an awful lot of it. I also need to start running Void Ark to get items to upgrade with.

Is it wrong that I feel a little disappointed though? Maybe it just feels like a let down after the amazing ride that Heavensward was, and maybe the patch content is on par with what they have done in the past. Final Fantasy XIV has always been this happy place, and logging into the free company brings that point home. It is amazing that the guild has managed to keep trucking on and being active in spite of a large chunk of us taking an extended break from the game. I was just so ready to hop back in the saddle and be wowed by the experience… and instead I feel a bit melancholy about it. It just feels like the team might be resting on their laurels a bit, and maybe spent too much time working on Verminion that would have been better suited putting in more content for the patch. It really bothers me that there is only two dungeons in this patch cycle, because the whole Fractal/Neverreap thing got super old… super fast. Having only two dungeons means there is the one you enjoy… and the one you don’t… and it always feels like the only thing you get is the one you don’t enjoy. For us it was non-stop back to back Neverreap, and my fear is that once we start the dungeon cycle one of them is absolutely going to be “That” dungeon for us again. It is funny how much of a difference that extra dungeon seems to make… but man it does. Maybe they will add another dungeon in with 3.15 which is supposedly right around the corner. My hope is that they will also be adding more Hildebrand content… with another boss fight, and potentially a new primal. Mostly I guess it just feels like we got half of a patch, which makes me a little sad after the length five month wait.

A Trickle Of Content

November 17, 2015 by Tamrielo

Final Fantasy XIV launched its newest major patch this past week. I only got into it over the last couple of days, because Fallout, but I spent most of the evening futzing about, checking out the new stuff. A patch for FFXIV tends to be surprisingly big, in very subtle ways. For example, here’s what was added in the latest patch:

A new casual raid
Two new dungeons
About two hours of new Main Story Quest content
A (hugely detailed) pet battle minigame
A new set of rep grind daily quests
A new extreme-mode raid boss
A new guild questing airship zone
A bunch of new crafting items
Frankly, more crafting stuff than I can even begin to process
Several new guild projects
Several new micro-games in the Gold Saucer
New Triple Triad cards and opponents
Several new character customization options
New flying mounts
New minipets
New sightseeing locations (I honestly have no idea what this part of the game is)
New emotes
A medium amount of class balancing
A huge amount of refreshment of older content
A new screenshot camera system, complete with synchronized poses (!)

It’s a truly huge list. Individually, any of these things are a fairly small bit of content (except possibly the airship zone?), but as a whole it’s quite a lot of stuff to do. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed with the game– even taking a little short of two months off after catching up in Heavensward, I’m still interested in hopping back in and trying out the new stuff.

One thing that’s struck me, though, is that the way I’m approaching the game is significantly different from my last break. When I came back from my last break, there was a ludicrous amount of catching up to do, to the point where it was several major patches before I’d caught up. In a couple of days, I’ve made a pretty good dent in the “major” additions this patch, those being the story quests and one of the new raids. Another night and I’ll probably have the rest of the dungeons, too. Even after that, there will be a ton of stuff to do, and best of all, I won’t feel like I HAVE to do it to “keep up”.

I tend to check out of a game when I start feeling obligated to play it, which is where I was at before I took my break. I’d hungrily devoured the Heavensward content and had played almost all of the existing new content; what was left was to grind daily dungeons to slowly get a new set of fancy gear, for the hardest of content available. FFXIV has a notoriously punishing leading edge of content, and I’m just not that hardcore anymore. Rather than hopping in once a week, or less, I opted to take a break entirely and come back refreshed. I honestly expected that I would jump in, see the new content, and check out again, and perhaps I still will.

However, I came back to find the guild still humming along fine and happy without me, which was great to see, and I’ve caught up on the content I feel like I “have” to do, for the most part. As a result, I’m finding myself curious about the other fun things out there, and I feel like they’re going to be more fun than obligation. It’s a good feeling, and I’m more enthused about logging in than I expected I’d be. The game feels like home: familiar, and not shiny or new or necessarily flashy and exciting, but comfortable and welcoming. It’s okay that I was gone for a bit; my room’s still made up the way I left it and I can hop back in, no problem.

I’ve consciously tried to keep a moderate pace in FFXIV, playing when I want to and no more, and it’s kept me interested in the game rather than burning myself out. Our raid is still on hiatus– I’m not actually sure there’s much raid for us to even *do*, maybe the new extreme boss or scheduled guild airship zone nights, but I’m okay with that. There’s enough to do and play without the need to try to keep up with “progression content” right now.

Return to Hitbox

November 17, 2015 by Belghast

Streaming Providers

I am a fairly horrible streamer, mostly because I do it so infrequently. Before I jumped to Windows 10 I had Virtual Audio Cables set up and working awesomely to exclude Teamspeak from my stream. Then the upgrade to 10 seemed to bork all of that. As a result I am finding myself less likely to stream random stuff, because quite honestly I don’t want to accidentally catch someone that does not want to be recorded. What ends up happening is that I only actually stream on “special occasions” when I know I have a block of time where i can just leave the mic open. The problem I continue to struggle with is the choice of providers. YouTube gaming had peaked my interests… until I participated in Liore’s stream during Extra Life. Considering I was on voice chat with her, the lag between the stream and what was actually happened seemed painfully bad, and the stream itself would go loopy on us. I would load it up and suddenly it was trying to play what was happening thirty minutes ago instead of what was happening now.

Twitch seems completely ubiquitous but the problem there is that it is equally painful to try and chat with people while using. I get so few people popping into my channel that when a friend does pop by I want to be able to hold a conversation with them. Even when you are running Twitch with the limited delay options… there is still a painful delay when you try and hold a conversation with anyone. I ultimately switched back after some experiments of trying to stream to both Hitbox and Twitch at the same time. When given a choice people always picked Twitch because it was the interface they were familiar with. The truth is however… when someone fires up my stream it is because they are there to hang out with me… not because they really care about what I am streaming. I never get random people popping in my channel because it truth I don’t tend to play the sort of games that people care enough about to go hunting for. For awhile I was using Twitch primarily as a way to export my streams to YouTube, and their interface just works so much better than Hitbox. Now however I record the video separately and then do some minimal editing in Adobe Premiere before uploading, so that functionality no longer matters.

Team Green

I am a Blogger first, Podcaster second… and I dabble poorly in both YouTube and streaming. Those are just not my native mediums and will likely never be, so long as I have a deep aversion to being on camera. So I will never have the sort of followers that would allow me to become a partner and have the better streaming options, nor will it ever really matter… considering I am super adverse to turning on advertisements on even on my YouTube channel. The truth is… I have always liked Hitbox better. The dashboard is significantly nicer, you can have “teams” without being a partner… and the fact that there is little to no delay between the video stream and chat means I can actually have a comfortable conversation with someone watching my stream. I realize that I am essentially exiling myself to the service that no one is really using natively… but really… what is the difference? I have a clear preference towards one or the other, and it is not like I am looking to be some streaming internet celebrity. Streaming for me is a way to share what I am doing with my friends and pretty much nothing more than that, and in a way that is more custom than Forge.gg would offer.

Basically I feel like I am choosing BetaMax over VHS, which is not far from the truth. The experience I have while streaming on Hitbox just feels better than when I use Twitch. In part it is because the Hitbox interface has to be better in every way to get someone to even consider using their service. I realize there are third party tools that I can run that add in a lot of the functionality that the Hitbox dashboard has…. but I don’t want to have to. My favorite stupid feature from Hitbox is the fact that when I get my stream set up and I am happy with it… I can press a single button to have it broadcast my stream to social media. Twitch can do this for you automatically, but the problem I have there is it sometimes takes me a few tries to get things where I am happy with them, which ends up spamming the living hell out of twitter which gets frustrating. I really do want to start trying to stream more… which means I need to sift through the arcane machination that is virtual audio cables once more.. to see what it takes to get it set up and properly working for Windows 10. In the meantime I am probably going to switch my setup over to my Hitbox profile and just accept that I am picking the less popular pony… but its the one I enjoy better.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 – Temple of Death

November 17, 2015 by Thalen

This week we have part two of the Desert Nomads module series, adventure module X5: The Temple of Death. This adventure is a direct continuation of the previous one, picking up at the entrance to the Great Pass which leads from the Sind Desert into the land of Hule, where the Master reigns.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 - Temple of Death

Bright red crab-pincered elephant monsters absolutely
appear in this module.

Where the previous module's Sind was inspired by Hindu mythology, this module is a bit reminiscent of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle. Hule would not seem out of place in the Dreamlands, and a couple of the new monsters have a distinctly Lovecraftian feel to them. The hideous elephant-thing on the cover is a malfera, which is described as being native to 'The Dimension of Nightmares'. This module also introduces the Spectral Hound which is basically a Hound of Tindalos and hails from the 'Dimensional Vortex.' For now that just means they're extra creepy and unnatural, but the Immortals Set will eventually work the Dimension of Nightmares and the Vortex into a cosmology unique to Mystara.

The bite of a spectral hound can cause a character to fade from reality entirely.

The first portion of the adventure covers the trip through the Great Pass. As with Master of the Desert Nomads there are encounters to be used no matter which way the adventurers travel, but there are also a number of placed encounters including a fake dragon head being used to guard the entrance to the pass, a tribe of geonids (small creature which look like boulders), and a mammoth that falls from the sky and has a chance to crush a character (a roc dropped it). Also there's the Well of the Moon. The Well has a number of powers, but the most fascinating is that on nights with a full moon a ladder of moonbeams appears and the characters can climb it to reach the Kingdom of the Moon. Said Kingdom is left to the DM to create and the module states "If you do not want the players to go to the moon, you may ignore this power." It seems to me that travelling to the moon might get the party a bit sidetracked, but what do I know?

Once through the Great Pass, the part reaches Hule which is rather dark and unpleasant. Hule is described as a hagiarchy, ruled by "holy men." The Master is the ultimate ruler, watching over things from the Temple of Death. A group of secret police called the Diviners search for criminals, both of the traditional sort and those guilty of having "wrong thoughts." It's portrayed as a fairly functional country on the whole, although one unwelcome to free thought.

As their mission is to seek out the Temple of Death, it's assumed the adventurers will do that and attempt to find and destroy the Master. If they investigate enough, they can piece together bits of information telling of a holy man named Hosadus who is connected to the Master and may even be able to determine that they are the same person. The Master is actually an avatar used by Hosadus to rule over Hule while his real, ancient and scarred, body lies in a casket in the Temple's mausoleum. To truly destroy the Master the party will have to find and destroy the body of Hosadus. It's possible, though unlikely, that the party could avoid having to face the Master entirely if they figure this out early enough.

Temple of Death is a solid module that presents a challenging foe as well as a new country that can be connected to the existing maps of the Known World (it hooks on west of the map from module X4), and adds a lot of fascinating elements to the cosmology of the world. Hule is also described in sufficient detail to give a good DM a base to work on to use it as a setting for more adventures. It's not surprising at all that Hule and the Master get revisited in a later module, as this one and its predecessor were very well received.