March 2017 – Page 6

AggroChat #147 – Zoid Hunter Aloy

May 21, 2019March 12, 2017 by AggroChat

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

It always feels like we have a bunch of stuff to talk about the week after we record a game club show. This time is no difference given that a bunch of games released in the meantime… namely Horizon Zero Dawn and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Grace has fallen into a deep Horizon shaped hole and various others have been playing it off and on as well. We talk about how the game is really good at making you feel competent. Similarly Belghast has been playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild… and talks about how that game is coming from a vastly different philosophy and is in turn good at making you feel weak and insignificant. We talk about our recent indoctrination into the world of Gundam building, and finish off the show with some Mario Maker discussion and namely Kaizo style level design.

Topics Discussed: Mass Effect: Andromeda – Horizon Zero Dawn – Zelda Breath of the Wild – Competing Philosophy of Both Games – Building Gundams – Mario Maker – Kaizo Mario

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High Sodium and Paragliding

March 10, 2017 by Belghast

This morning I am going to start the blog out with some tales of high sodium content. It is safe to say that the Final Fantasy XIV “serious gamer” community is grumpy as hell right now. Essentially the downtime on Thursday introduced the return of the Diadem… which is functionally what Free Company airships are used for… and also something that I have never actually gotten the chance to participate. My understanding is it is a giant outdoor timed hunt zone of a sort, that has lots of mini objectives that then can reward chests full of loot. I am always down for Square to revitalize content that has fallen by the wayside… I am looking at you hunt marks. However why folks are super salty about this is that apparently there is a phenomenally rare chance at getting a 280 weapon to drop while doing the content. This is of note 5 item levels higher than either the latest relic step or the weapons from Savage Alexander. Ashgar posted a comment in our podcast slack that I can only assume came from reddit…

Can confirm, am salty.

Then I did some napkin math and if one person of the 72 players who participated wanted to get a specific weapon out of the 13 available, they’d need to do the Emergency Mission 1000 times to have a reasonable (read around 65%) of obtaining it. For a 90% chance of obtaining it, you’d need to put 2200 attempts into Emergency Missions.

If you play the roughly 2350 hours we have until we get early access to SB, you will at one emergency mission per hour, distribute 150 hours of sleep and non FFXIV related over 98 days, lets say you spend 30 min each day on food, personaly hygiene etc. and you will sleep for 1 hour per day. This is, of course, calculated with queue times estimated as 0, which I’m sure they will be. /s

So the thing is… getting one of these 280 weapons is quite literally winning the lottery. It is not something anyone can reasonably aspire to, but serves as enough of a carrot to get people interested at all item levels of gear to start doing Diadem once more. This absolutely fits the modus operadi of Yoshi P and crew… which is largely bribing players to do whatever content that they feel is under represented by placing the big new shiny rewards there. What I don’t get however is the folks claiming they are going to cancel the game over this action. This has been the way content is balanced from the beginning of A Realm Reborn… and nifty things through bribery is a constant theme. This does not however negate the work you put in on either a Alex weapon, or your Relic because nothing can ever tarnish the shine of those memories. If you are playing a game only to have things no one else will ever have… then you are probably playing for all of the wrong reasons. Numerical perfection is a constantly moving target, and one that will be outdated the next time a new patch lands. However if you just play for the joy of playing… and the memories of accomplishing content with your friends… then no one can ever take that from you. What I see instead is a company throwing one hell of a carrot into content that would have easily become outdated the second it launched, and more importantly is a way of getting folks geared in 265 gear which will help their transition into Stormblood.

One again I am super annoyed with having to snag screenshots from the web and use them in my posts when I talk about Breath of the Wild. The Wii U is so cludgy when it comes to posting screenshots, but I suppose at some point I really need to figure out how to make it work. Last night instead of hanging out on the sofa or upstairs… I opted to chill in the bedroom and play some more Zelda. As of the end of last night I have officially left the starter zone, and in truth the biggest thing holding me back… was the fact that I could not figure out how in the holy hell to cook things. My key problem with Zelda is that things just feel grossly un-intuitive. For example… I expected to be able to walk up to a cooking pot… and see a “Press Button to Cook” prompt. However this never actually happened and instead I had to google it… and then google it again until I found someone who could explain it in simple enough terms to treat me as though I understood nothing about this game. There are a lot of steps to this process that are not painfully obvious or were not to me. First off you have to make sure that your cooking pot has a fire under it… so for me that meant taking a branch… catching it on fire and then whacking the cooking pot which then lit the wood underneath it. From there you have to go into your inventory and press X on the materials to “hold” it. That however is not enough… you have to press A to add the item to your arms… and you go through and pick out the ingredients you want to cook doing this.

Finally when you exit the menu… you see the prompt to cook the items link is crudely holding… and you are treated to maybe the most magical tune ever. Like I am already hooked on cooking because I want to hear that tune over and over and over… and I tried cooking damned never everything in my inventory that looked even vaguely edible. There is a completely magical remix that blends the tune with the Carmen Sandiego theme. The cooking gave me access to frost resistance food… which then in turn gave me access to the last two shrines which allowed me to leave newbie plateau. I feel like maybe I am starting to hit my stride with this game, and maybe stopping the comparison with Horizon? Probably the highlight of last night for me was finding the Great Plateau Steppe Talus and then defeating it… after so damned many deaths. One of the things that I like about this game is that the auto save points seem to be sprinkled around just often enough… that you are really never losing too much time in making an attempt. So for the Steppe Talus, the save point was just outside of the little valley it is in so I could quickly run back and keep trying things until I finally defeated it. The trick for me was to try and stay on at all costs which meant sometimes crawling back down into climbing mode, and other times just simply running around on top to make sure I didn’t get knocked off. The hardest part however was once again the fact that no one weapon would ever last more than a handful of swings so I literally killed it… with a single weapon left in my inventory. This made it extremely awkward trying to kill a handful of skeletons that spawned as I was walking out of the valley. Whatever the case… I think I see the potential now for what boss fights might be like and I also sort of get the reference to souls games. That term gets thrown around way too much lately, but in this case I think they largely mean the need to keep learning new tricks to defeat overwhelming odds. In the case of the Steppe Talus, if I got hit once… with a solid enough hit it was simply over. So I very much had to stay ahead of the combat, and only through not making any mistakes was I really able to defeat it.

Docks and Bellowbacks

March 9, 2017 by Belghast

I believe I have talked about one of my side projects before, but for those who are un-indoctrinated… I have been charged with setting up a gaming space at work. For the first pass we decided to go with a Wii U given that it is sort of a universal middle ground between folks who self identify as gamers… and those who do not. Everyone has played at least one round of Wii Bowling, and already since installing folks I never thought would sit down for a game of Mario Kart have done so. Part of the build out involved picking out controller docks because we did not want a bunch of wayward cables. For the Wii U pro controllers I chose the above dock by Nyko… admittedly more on price than anything. However after getting it and setting everything up… I am absolutely in love with the design. Each controller has a boot of sorts that you plug into the USB port, and it fits relatively snugly. Then on the backside is a magnet that holds the controller in place on the dock itself. It just works amazingly well and the magnet is strong enough to not only hold the controller but also serve as a guiding mechanism to make sure that the controller gets docked successfully. Which made me start to wonder… does Nyko make these docks for any other console system? My challenge is that in my office I have a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and am contemplating moving my Wii U back upstairs. That is five different styles of controllers that need to be charged and cradled in a reasonable manner to keep from getting a whole slew of cords tangled.

The tragedy however is that while Nyko makes controller docks for pretty much every system available… none of them work like this one. In a perfect world you could simply buy one base dock tree and then a bunch of connectors for the various controller types that you have. After a few hours of frantic googling… it seems like no one really has a system that works like this. There was however one apparently for the previous console generation that had support for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360… but for whatever reason never carried forth into this generation. What I would love is for Nyko to simply just release versions of this docking system for all of the platforms, or in truth… just sell me docks and then controller boots individually and allow me to mix and match my own system. In part I am writing about this problem today, because often times as soon as I complain about an issue… one of my readers comes out of the woodwork to present a solution. So if you have any ideas… that does not involve access to a 3D printer because I am already thinking along those lines… I would love to hear it. It is honestly the magnets that make this system work so amazingly well and quite honestly… I don’t have the electrical chops to make a magnetic USB connection work. I think part of the problem is that the Wii U pro controller uses the USB connector that the previous generation used… so mini instead of micro. That said… this feels like money left on the table because I know a lot of people like me with multiple console systems all with controllers that need charging.

Last night I returned to the cursed lands and continued my process of roaming around aimlessly. I went a completely different direction than the one I had been heading in… and encountered the Fire Bellowback… or as I think of them Fire Beetles. I ran into a trio roaming around some ruins… and after scanning them a few times to sort out how I was going to attack I went after them with gusto. The thing I didn’t expect was the fact that they essentially throw napalm at you, and have an insane range. I was well into the fields on the far side of the river and they were still lobbing fireballs at me. Essentially I got damned good at dodging while fighting them, and eventually whittled them down using my bow kitted out with extra tear damage. As you can see in the above screenshot they each rewarded an insane 1050 experience, but also provided a hefty amount of salvage. Other than that I actually started working on quests… namely the “Revenge of the Nora” story line. I have been playing this game in short spurts, and prior to last night it largely meant just roaming around and taking down machines. I cannot underline just how much fun that is… and how perfect the game play feels as you bulls-eye a watcher in the eye and watch it explode.

I really like that Horizon seems to reward you equally for aimless roaming and focused gameplay. I essentially had looked at the direction that the game was suggesting I go… and went in the opposite direction and largely… that was a completely fine decision. It was not really until last night that I finally sat down and started following the quests… and that too was a perfect fine decision. I am broke once more however because I bought a purple set of armor, and decided to go with the version that has balanced resistances since… more often than not I end up in melee range before fights are finished. Probably a lot of my success with the fire beetles is due to the fact that I had fairly decent resists going on. What I really want now is some upgraded weapons, because I am still using the Carja bow that you get from either collectors edition or the pre-order bonus. I got a whole slew of items and I am not completely sure which ones came from which thing. I’ve heard that the hunter trials reward items, so in theory I need to focus on doing some of those now. Regardless this game is still freaking amazing… and it serves as part of the reason why I have struggled to get into Breath of the Wild. In many ways the newest Zelda game just feels awkward and cludgy… whereas Horizon absolutely nails smooth and flawless gameplay.

A Good Night

March 8, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was as the post title might give away… a really good night. Lately in Final Fantasy XIV I have been caught up in one of two different grinds. The first being getting everyone to 50 by running floors 51-60 over and over again in Palace of the Dead. The second being leveling crafting through the use of the Ixal beast tribe quests… which is significantly more time consuming that it initially seems. There have been so many nights I have completely squandered the entire evening trying to get that last high quality item needed to turn in a quest. This past evening however we ran group content, and actually had a full team of eight players. Granted at some point during the evening we lost Mor, and Neph is in Iceland and unable to game with us… but we have built back up to a large enough group that we can do things together without queuing in randos. Not that random players in Final Fantasy XIV are ever really a problem… it is just nice to not have to explain that we are hashing things out on a voice chat that they don’t have access to. The prime target of the evening was Zurvan the last of the warring triad. While I was not really a huge fan of Sephirot… I have to say both Sophia and Zurvan are awesome fights. Zurvan is a bit more of a good old fashioned avoid the shit fight… but still very fun to tank at least.

After finishing up Zurvan we got another person keyed for the last part of Alexander by running them all in sequence. I have a feeling we are ultimately going to be doing a lot of this at some point given that both Stormrazor and Muspel are coming up through the ranks. It sounds like at some point we really need to run the early Alex for Storm, which is absolutely a thing we can do. All in all the Alex fights are extremely fun… except for maybe that middle section. There are definitely some memorable encounters, but I simply don’t like it nearly as much as I like the first four and the last four. I actually managed to roll lucky and walked away with an accessory and a belt, which takes my total item level up to 247… which I am simply hoping is high enough to avoid another gear wall during the next batch of content. That has been the problem with Heavensward and one I am hoping they are fixing for Stormblood… the hitting of walls that are not super easy to get to through casual content. I still feel like they need to be doing a round of hunts each item tier to help folks catch up in a solo manner as well as through doing group content. Final Fantasy XIV as a whole is a weird social experiment… of applying pressure in one direction and rewards in another direction to try and influence player behavior. Sometimes it works out perfectly… and other times it feels cludgy as hell. The gear barriers are one of those rare occasions in this game where I feel like they made the wrong choice. That said it was a really great night of running stuff with friends, and now that we seem to have a regular group of eight people… so many other options open up.