February 2017 – AggroChat

Aloy and Horsebirbs

February 28, 2017 by Belghast

We live in trying times… and what I mean by that is right now there are entirely too damned many great games coming out in a very short period of time. I was already woefully behind in my progress in literally everything, and when compounded by the fact that I am apparently bingeing the hell out of Final Fantasy XIV you end up with a lot of stuff simply not getting accomplished. For example… this month the AggroChat game of the month is Final Fantasy XV. It is in fact MY pick… but I have been high center in the game for a long time and last night I attempted to fix that. I kept telling myself that I would only do the main story quest, and that lasted for a little while but not long. Firstly I wound up bumping into a bunch of ridiculously higher level mobs on the way to my next quest objective. One of which was freaking Midgardsormr… just hanging out chilling on the river bank. When I made a tactical retreat and pushed forward into the cave… I found that pretty much the mobs inside were also going to kick my ass. So that means I have hit the wall that my gear and level seems to be able to get me to… so as the evening went on my purpose seemed to disintegrate and I was once again wandering aimlessly and doing all of the side quests in a vague attempt to catch up level wise.

Ultimately I am suffering from the exact same problem that I had when we were doing Fallout 4 as a game of the month. For many of the folks in our podcast… winning the game is the goal and seeing the story to its conclusion. For me that really isn’t a thing… and instead I like doing all of the little objectives and inhabiting the world, participating in it. So in many ways moving the story forward… defeats that purpose because I keeps moving me past things that I kinda want to get out and roam around and explore. When it comes to trying to push a game like this… it ends up making me miserable. Ultimately I am not going to be even closed to the end of the game when we record the podcast this weekend, and largely I think I am going to be okay with it. Final Fantasy XV is still one of my favorite games from last night, and I really don’t much care about story spoilers in the first place. That was never why I was playing the game, and never why it clicked with me. It clicked because it was finally a Final Fantasy game that embraced my desire to roam around and get off the beaten path… and then actually rewarded me for doing so. Now I wish I had been playing the game all of this time, because last night I really enjoyed myself. However I end up getting caught up in wanting to be around actual living breathing people… and for me that means MMOs. Getting bit by the Final Fantasy XIV bug hasn’t helped lately either in my push to get everything to 50. However this is still a game that I am enjoying moving through, albeit slowly.

The game that is going to be the death of me right now however is Horizon Zero Dawn. During the mishap with my account and a bunch of others getting compromised on PSN, I ended up getting $50 funded to my Playstation wallet. They were unable or unwilling to reverse the charges on my credit card, so I had this pot of cash that was sitting there needing to be spent on something. As a result I ended up pre-ordering Horizon and when I checked my PS4 yesterday morning it had already installed and was simply waiting on the magic moment to launch. This is going to fall down into the “bel knows better” category… but by now I should have learned not to attempt to play a game at 11pm central when things generally officially launch for me. However I did this thing… and as a result I wound up getting to bed significantly later than I would have liked. Also as a result I am groggy as hell sitting down this morning to write this blog post. That said I need you to marvel at how adorable babby Aloy is… and that you end up playing as her for a bit and not just through a sequence of cut scenes. I’ve barely scratched the surface and not even really made it through the tutorial section… and this game already has me hooked in both game play and its world.

Admittedly this game did not really have to try terribly hard to hook me given its theme. Awesome bow lady that fights zoids for fun and profit. What I didn’t expect was just how damned good the controls feel and how responsive combat actually ends up being. Things have happened already in the story line that I did not expect to happen… and I am super intrigued as to how they end up playing out in the long run. I don’t want to get too much into my thoughts about story events, because literally the game just unlocked last night and I don’t want to spoil anything really. What I do find interesting is that so far this game has confirmed my theory about something. Several years ago I would have told you that I simply did not enjoy playing female characters in games. I now know that is completely wrong… and I do absolutely enjoy female characters so long as they are the equivalent of the sort of male characters I enjoy. I like warriors… I like playing badasses that are armed to the teeth and more importantly armored. Over the last few years there have been a long list of characters that I have really enjoyed from the modern reboot of Lara Croft, to Zarya in Overwatch, to Sonya in Heroes of the Storm. Aloy is just another in a long line of these characters that I enjoy playing, and apparently it was never a gender thing… and just a warrior thing. I will be anxiously watching the clock today at work, so I can get home and play some more Horizon and see where the game takes me. I know that Tam stayed up late last night to go ahead and start playing, and he seems to be enjoying it as well.

Falling Crows and Ghost Moose

February 27, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend I largely set out to do one sequence of things… but instead of actually accomplishes it I spend a good chunk of the weekend piddling around in the Palace of the Dead. For those keeping score at home I am on a mission to get all of my classes to 50. Last week I pushed Summoner/Scholar and Black Mage and as a result this weekend I started in on my Dark Knight in an attempt to shift things up a bit. Originally I was not super keep in Dark Knight as a tanking class, but I have to say after having played a lot of it during this grind it is definitely growing on me. Last night while watching Talking Dead I managed to hit level 46 which means I have roughly 8 more runs of floors 51-60 before pushing this class to 50 as well. Up until around 42 I seemed to still be getting most of a level every single trip into the dungeon, but at that point it shifted to getting roughly half of a level so I guess that is something to note as you push your own characters. After the Dark Knight I am more than likely going to start up with the Ninja given that it is my next highest class sitting at 38. That will leave Monk, Astrologian and Machinist… the later two I still have yet to even accept the introductory quests. In part I am focused on the goal of 50, because up until that point the levels in PotD seem completely reasonable. The 50-60 grind however seems to take almost as much time as the 1-50 does, so in theory… when I actually pick up doing that side of the equation I will begin with my Bard who is already sitting at level 55.

In other weird weekend news… I apparently am now in the Crowfall pre-alpha? I talked a bit about it on AggroChat this week, if you are interested in more of my thoughts. Normally I would be posting a “Crowfall Impressions” post, because that seems to be the sort of thing I do when I get my hands on a new game. Unfortunately I am not really sure if I have a full post worth of feelings about the game. It is very alpha for start, so it feels like it isn’t exactly fair to really give the game anything resembling a review. That said… they are doing an alpha with zero NDA so I feel completely free to at least talk a little about the game. As I described it to my friends… Crowfall is in fact a piece of software that I installed and that offers the ability to launch when I click in the patcher. Past that I am not exactly sure what is going on in the game, and I am not really sure that I felt anything close to fun during the hour and a half that I spent grinding away to make a basic set of armor and weapons. It doesn’t really feel like there is much game yet, and maybe the murder box that is the PVP servers are more enjoyable. However based on the apparently cross shard server chat, it sounds like there is just a lot of spawn camping and ganking going on there. The big challenge I had was that there was simply not much to actually fight in the PVE server, and when I did find a boar or a bizarre crystalline cat my hud would lock up on loot allowing other players to come swoop in and harvest the leather and meat on the thing I just killed. Right now the game feels less fleshed out than Landmark did when it opened its doors to early access. It feels like it is trying to do a lot of things but I am not entirely certain if those things blend all that well.

Now in the “I want my Sunday back” territory… I logged in yesterday morning to work on my Archaeology questline in World of Warcraft. Of note… it has been 181 days since the launch of Legion according to the handy google “days since” query ability. The last two weeks have been the very first occasion to actually complete the Laying to Rest archaeology quest that rewards the Spirit of Echero mount. The last thing I really wanted to do was go grind arch nodes until I collected 600 moose bones… but then again I thought to myself if I ever wanted this mount I should probably do it now, since who the hell knows when it will be available again. I am not really sure how long it took in minutes… but I started watching Sword Art Online again somewhere during the first 100 bones… and I was able to watch three episodes in their entirety and started the fourth before I collected number 600. It was a slog of a grind, and while I am happy it is done… it feels like maybe a waste of time given that I am never likely going to ride the mount anyways. I chock this one up to simple and honest fear of missing out… because if I didn’t get it there might be a version of myself someday that wishes I had. Regardless it is done, but the second I turned in the quest I stuck around long enough to take the above screenshot and then bolted quickly from the game. In other happenings at some point during the grind I hit 800 Archaeology so that was at least something cool that happened as well as finishing up the Handle With Care achievement.

AggroChat #145 – I’m a Hufflepuff

May 21, 2019February 26, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have another big rambly show where we start out having zero clue what we are going to talk about… and then wind up recording for a couple hours. Edited down the show ends up being roughly another hour and a half experience. Tonight we talk at length about our addiction to Final Fantasy XIV and the Palace of the Dead. Grace and I talk a bit about the blah feeling this latest patch cycle has given us in World of Warcraft. Bel talk about getting into the Crowfall pre-alpha and how it is in fact a piece of software that he installed on his system and does in fact launch. We talk a bit a bit about the weird City of Heroes nostalgia game wave and how there really is only room for one of those titles in the market. We also talk about the drought of MMOs on the horizon and how instead it seems to be the Golden Age of expansions for existing games. Bel gives an update on the gaming at work thing, and his first steps into God Eater. Finally we have a weird offshoot into talking about building Gundams before wrapping things up.

Topics Discussed: Final Fantasy XIV – World of Warcraft Blahs – Crowfall Disappointment – City of Heroes nostalgia – Drought of New MMOs – Golden Age of Expansions – Elder Scrolls Online – Work Gaming Space – God Eater – Gundam Kits

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Tiny Black Mage

February 24, 2017 by Belghast

My madness continues… and last night I joined in with Grace and eventually Storm and Muspel to do some Palace of the Dead. Essentially PotD is the new FATE grinding, and while it can be sort of repetitive, I never seem to get tired of it. I mean I thought Tam was insane when he went through his own period of time where he lived in dank dungeon, but now I finally get it. What I am loving about it is that I can just hop in… run a bunch of Palace of the Dead… mentally be somewhere else like watching a movie or a television show and then still feel like I made significant progress at the end of the night. The first goal has been to catch up my classes to 50, because it is going to allow me to have a massive house cleaning of everything that has been clogging my retainers. I have a problem with gear, because I know that eventually I would love to have every single class to the level cap. That is just the sort of person I am. In World of Warcraft I actually achieved this goal prior to the launch of legion and had at least one of every alliance character sitting at 100, and three horde characters as well.

Currently I have my Warrior sitting at 60 and he is my only viably geared character for doing big kid stuff. Then you have my Dragoon that I also leveled to 60, but promptly abandoned because playing that class in Heavensward was just so much less enjoyable for me than it was in ARR. When I was last furiously playing the game I was working on my Bard, which had become my defacto dps class for awhile and I managed to get it up to 55. Then we drop down to my 50s which are Paladin that I have not touched since Heavensward because I simply don’t really like playing a Paladin tank. We have my newly raised trio of casters in the form of the Scholar, Summoner and Black Mage all sitting at 50. Then we drop down to some 30 somethings with Ninja at 38, Monk at 33, and Dark Knight at 33. I have yet to even pick up the quest to be a Machinist or an Astrologian but at some point I probably need to do that so that I can weave those into the rotation as well. Now I am sort of torn as to what I should pick to level next, but for the moment I am leaning towards either the Dark Knight because I miss playing heavy armor classes… or the Ninja because they are just really fun to play.

The other set of goals that is staring me in the face is that when I last left my crafting… I had managed to push everything up to 21… with mining and foraging sitting at 50. At some point I really want to start this grind again and push everything up to at least the point where I can make glamour prisms. In theory I should be doing my beast tribe dailies to use those to level my crafting, but I just haven’t reached a point of getting back into the game enough to sort everything out to be able to do that. Once I finished with the Sahagin I sort of let the beast tribe thing die once again… but in theory should be doing the Ixal at least for crafting levels. Whatever the case it seems like I have been assimilated back into Final Fantasy XIV, and have more goals than I can realistically accomplish. My Warrior gear could also always be improved, but I am just finding PotD a relaxing way to spend my evenings… but sadly one that is not terribly interesting to write blog posts about.