Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 676

Game Changer

August 16, 2016 by Belghast

In Another Castle

Last night was my raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, but before hand my key focus was trying to get my Mage to 100. I am not exactly sure what has lit a fire under me, but I am on this mission to have at least one server full with level 100 characters. As you can see in the above image, I am actually extremely close to getting there. Now granted I have the OTHER side of my linked server to start working on… but Belgaoh my Monk remains the only sub-100 character I have on Argent Dawn. The only problem there is he is SIGNIFICANTLY behind the curve sitting at only level 53 right now. I keep thinking that if I can get on at the right time, and have at least one easy to get to invasion event I will be able to push him through to 60 so that he can fly, which is going to be the key to getting more events on him. As of yesterday I thought I was nearing the end of the gear grind and even created a spreadsheet as an attempt to track progress in outfitting my characters in level 700 gear. The take away from that process seemed like I was going to spend the next several days working on my leather wearers to catch them up in progression.

Then this happened. I opened I believe 34 chests that I had gathered up on the mage in leveling from 90 to 100, and out of those chests seven different items came up as warforged. Apparently yesterday during the day at some point they patched in the ability for chests to spawn warforged gear, meaning that all of those characters I thought I had finished with really have only scratched the surface. I still think however my core mission is to get all of my characters outfitted in at least 700 gear, and if some of them get more trips to the candy shop in the hopes of finding warforged… then that is fine too. Ultimately I realize that all of this gear is going to be replaced within the first few minutes of questing in the Broken Isles. However for the time being I think this is probably a brilliant idea. The longer they can keep players actively participating in this event the better, because for the time being it is an amazing source of leveling and gear for everyone involved. I somehow doubt I will be able to get my monk all of the way to 100 in the short time available without focusing ENTIRELY on the monk, but I am definitely going to ride the elevator for as long as I can.

End of Expansion

One of the things I am realizing is that I apparently love the end of expansions. Cataclysm was the expansion that broke me and my desire to be playing World of Warcraft, causing me to fade away and go play other games. However I remember clearly that towards the end of the expansion I came back and really enjoyed myself. There was so much to be doing, and everyone had a great casual attitude about it all. For me personally I knew that nothing I was doing really mattered in the grand scheme of things, because as soon as Pandaria was released every last piece of gear I gathered would be replaced with greens. So in this low pressure environment I allowed myself to piddle around without purpose and had a complete blast. Similarly I remember coming back at the end of Pandaria and having the same fun experience, running around aimlessly on the timeless isle and doing all the little things that were fun but served no major purpose. Here I find myself once again in a similar pattern with Draenor, and I feel completely in my zone. The problem is that I wish I knew how to bottle this feeling and keep it alive during the rest of the expansion.

I am not sure how to take the joy that I feel at the end of an expansion when I am unfettered by expectations and pressures…. and keep that alive during the rest of the game. There is a switch that flips in my brain when an expansion launches that says “okay Bel, you need to be useful… go grind your face off”. I wish I knew how to turn that switch off completely because I think that is the thing that keeps getting in my way when it comes to enjoying an MMO for the long haul. I essentially burn myself out, over and over… game after game… by focusing on some lofty goal that I cannot accomplish without significant help from others. I end up ignoring the goals that are entirely up to me to complete, and those are probably the things that I technically enjoy more. I have had a blast alting my way to 100 over the last few weeks and bringing my own personal army up to snuff. As I look towards Legion, and Starfall Prophecy and whatever the Final Fantasy XIV expansion ends up being… I need to figure out how to keep this magic from the end of an expansion alive every single day I play the game.

Elevator to Top

August 15, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a weekend for many things, not the least of which was some interstellar exploration in No Man’s Sky. However an even larger portion of the weekend was spent with the Legion invasion event in World of Warcraft. I am not exactly sure why Warcraft is so sticky for me right now… but whatever the case it absolutely is. I am probably having more fun playing this game than I have since long before Cataclysm… and potentially even before the launch of Wrath. I am actually looking forward to coming home and playing, and this event is a large part of that. At face value the event is an easy way to get characters decked out in item level 700 gear, and additionally a source of a new pet. However the way this invasion works makes it so much more enjoyable for me than the previous ones. I’ve already talked about this in previous posts but two zones open up around the world and every four hours these swap. The only somewhat negative part of this is that I have apparently swapped logging into all of my characters to fiddle with the garrison, to logging in all of my characters to try and get both invasions in before the zone timer runs own. There however was an eventual end to this madness and that was collecting a full set of gear on every character. Friday however the game was patched and it all changed.

Now in addition to getting two chests worth of gear… you also get a significant experience boost every time a phase completes. In the high 90s each zone invasion is worth roughly half of a level, so each set of two invasions is a little more than a full level of experience. As a result I have been using and abusing this event to level up those characters that I was never likely going to level on my own. In this case that is my Priest and my Mage, both classes I have not had a whole lot of interest in playing, but would still like to add to my stable of 100s. When I started this process my priest had seen enough leveling in Draenor to unlock the Garrison, and then from that point onwards was nothing more than a profession character. I managed to get to level 92 through doing the various XP missions that came available as part of the daily Garrison queue. Over the course of the event it took 14 full events to go from 92 to 100, and I literally dinged moments before sitting down to write this post. Now as I ran this event I held onto every chest, apart from one I opened just to see if my theory was going to be correct.

The chest loot is assigned at the moment you open it. That means by holding my chests I was able to open them as soon as I dinged 100 and get a fast infusion of item level 700 gear. In the bags I had 3 weapons, 5 chests, 3 boots, 4 gloves, 4 helms, 2 pants, 2 shoulders, 1 belt, and 4 bracers… as well as two of the weapon infusion items and 657 Nethershards. So I was able to level up without worrying about my gear at all… and then go to instant reasonable levels upon dinging. I am absolutely going to use this elevator for as far as I can take it to push up some of the character that I never really got around to leveling. Once I finish off the Mage I am probably going to try and see where I can get with my sub level 60 monk, and at least push it levels out of the old world. If you have some of those characters that are sitting in the 90s that you never really got around to leveling in Draenor I highly suggest you take advantage of this. If nothing else this has been an amazing way to pull up those gear levels for the various characters that I leveled to 100 but never really raided much on.

Regularly Playing: July/August Edition

August 14, 2016 by Belghast

I just realized the other day that it had been a long while since I had done one of my regularly playing posts. The general idea is to true up my sidebar list of games and bring it into alignment with the games that I am actually playing on a fairly regular basis. Some of these might not be every day occurrences but they represent the regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. At some point however I fell off the wagon and went the entire month of July without any form of an update. As a result I am doing this to cover both July and August and get me up to date.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

I am legitimately playing World of Warcraft more actively than I have in years. More than likely this is the most seriously I have played since before the launch of Cataclysm. I am really enjoying the game, and the changes to the various specs… and even enjoying the Legion launch event more. Over the last few days I have been using this event as a bit of a springboard to help level up some of my sub 100 characters because every two events you participate in seems to be roughly a levels worth of experience, even in the 90s. So I took my Shadowpriest last night for example from 92 to 94 in two full rounds of the event. As far as the rest of the game there is still a ton of stuff I want to do, that mostly centers around running older content and collecting appearances. To say I am looking forward to the Legion Launch is a bit of an understatement.

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand has fallen a little bit by the wayside. It is that game that I am logging into only to raid… which ironically is traditionally my stance with World of Warcraft. I am loving the Monday night raid team, and we are now starting to do more serious content. I still have little to no drive however to level or gear, at least until the content we are doing requires it. That might be a thing that happens soon because we have pretty much defeated all of the “easy” end game content and are now starting down the path of the more difficult stuff. However it feels amazing to have “the band back together” and doing raids together as a team.

Rift

At the very least right now I am logging in every day to participate in the Starfall Prophecy launch event, which is namely collecting prophecies that I can then later turn in for rewards. The pre-order bonus means that we will get access to some awesome stuff like the artifact finding mount, and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any of that. Otherwise I need to really hunt for a group of players that are more active. I don’t want to disband the House Stalwart guild or anything, but I might consider moving Belghast off to another guild, because I would like to see Comet of Ahnket before the expansion lands since the lore seems like it will give me a headstart into understanding what is going on. Additionally I want to spend a sleepy afternoon at some point doing more Intrepid Adventures. Those things are just absolutely fun as hell and it is a style of “LFR” that I wish more games would look into implementing.

To The Returning and New

Diablo 3

As stated when I originally removed it from the list, I knew that it would be a limited time thing. With the beginning of this month came the launch of Season 7 of Diablo 3, and a return of several of us to actively playing again. This time around we do not have nearly the throng of players that we did with season six, but myself, Grace and Thalen are all fairly active. This time feels a little cheap though because we all seemed to opted for the fastest possible clearing class… or at least our view on that. The Demon Hunter is a powerhouse and one that you can get up and running insanely quickly. By the time we dinged 70 we were already pushing content hard and fast, and after roughly a weeks time I am now clearing greater rifts in the 50s like they are a cakewalk. The only question now is just how serious I am going to be on trying to get that extra stash slot. Right now there is so much going on, that I am afraid Diablo 3 is going to fall by the wayside.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is something that did not even exist on my radar when I did the last “Recently Playing” and has been something that has dominated my life since. I have gone through the stages of grief with this game, and have reached a point where I continue to play it without really understanding why. I wrote the other day about some of my frustrations, and they are very real. However still… anytime I leave the house I check for nearby Pokemon each time I stop and get out of the car. As the heat starts to chill the hell out… and we no longer have 100 degree days I will probably start resuming my evening pokestrolls. However when it is 100 degrees at 9pm at night… it is just too damned hot to go out roaming too far. I hope this game gets some much needed changes, because the ones thusfar feel like they are taking it in the wrong direction. Niantic Labs still does not seem to understand that they made a MMO.

No Man’s Sky

This one is seriously brand new… but I have a feeling that over the coming weeks it is going to be a new obsession for me. I called it Interstellar Skyrim, and it invokes the same sort of feelings in me. The problem being… all of this is pending you can actually get it running on your machine. There are lots of problems ahead of this title before it reaches serious mass adoption, and I hope that in the coming weeks they can push through them. To say it has performance issues is the understatement of the century right now, and I am questioning my original plan to get this on the PC. That said I am committed at this point and still very much enjoying the experience.

To Those Parting

Destiny

I have so much love for Destiny, but for whatever reason I have drifted away from it in the last few weeks. In both the month of July and August I have not really played much, so I am temporarily removing it from the list. I know without a doubt in Mid-September when Rise of Iron hits, that I will be back and actively playing it again. In the meantime however I feel like I have gotten it out of my system for the moment. However if my friend Grace suddenly decides to start playing again, I will likely be right back there with guns a blazing. I think a huge part of it is that I really have not been spending all that much time up in my office where my Playstation 4 is, and instead hanging out on the sofa playing on my laptop. Much like when I remove Diablo 3 from the list… this is absolutely going to change in the coming months and I am sure I will have yet another resurgence.

ArcheAge

I feel like ArcheAge is a casualty of simply too much other stuff going on right now. At the beginning of July I had a bit of a renaissance with this game and managed to push through to fourty six… and then the content seemed to dry up a bit. The quests are still there, but they seem to be generally less plentiful, and the progress I was making felt a bit bogged down. As a result this sort of just fell by the wayside, and I am sure at some point I will reignite my fires for this game because at the end of the day I still very much like it. The biggest thing that came from this last journey is that I realized that PVP isn’t as big of a hurdle as I was expecting. I have technically spent the last dozen or so levels in pvp enabled areas… and really did not run into a single issue. Flagged players avoided me, and I avoided them and we continued questing along happily. At some point I am sure I will return, but for the time being I am removing it from my list of “active” games.

No Man’s Sky Thoughts

August 13, 2016 by Belghast

This morning was an absolutely glorious morning, in part because of a massive cold front that blew through over night. It is suddenly 70 degrees outside with a lovely breeze, rather than the usual over 100 degree madness that has been happening for weeks. As a result we decided to get up and walk over to daylight donuts for breakfast and then take it into the backyard and eat it on the patio. After the generally shit week that I had, I needed this little bit of respite to maybe start to recover. It is not that anything really went wrong… just the stress of entirely too much maximum level adulting. The week was one with several adulting raid bosses, and the progress made on them were mixed. However I am now happy to chill out on the sofa with a cat precariously balanced between my arms trying to find a way to snuggle while I type. So far it is working but I have a feeling at some point she will wander off because my hands are engaged in something other than serious petting action. Other than all of this… yesterday a game was released that I had been waiting anxiously for since it was first announced at E3 during the Sony PS4 reveal show, or at least I think that was when I first saw it. No Man’s Sky promised to be the space exploration game for me. Elite Dangerous looks awesome, but it is entirely too fiddly for my tastes. I don’t want to have to care about learning to pilot a ship through the vast expanses of space, or learning how to dogfight when there is no “up”. I just want a Star Trek away mission simulator that lets me wander around the cosmos and land on interesting new planets to explore. No Man’s Sky seems to be exactly that, but before I get into the good parts I need to talk about the bad.

Lots of folks are having trouble playing this game on the PC now that it has been released. I am not sure what happened during the process of the launch but the “minimum” listed specs seem to have been thrown completely out the window. I know Tamrielo has already returned his copy through steam because on his pretty hoss machine it simply would not give him more than 10 fps. First lets go over the minimum specs that were released for the game.

OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel Core i3
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 480, AMD Radeon 7870
Storage: 10 GB available space

I’ve played it on two of my machines… first on my Laptop

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: 4th Gen Intel Core i7
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 960m

On this machine I had to bump it down to 720p/medium to get stable framerates in the range of 30 fps, with the occasional dip into 15 territory. However nVidia experience claims that this machine does not meet the minimum requirements to play the game, whereas instead every single category above technically outstrips what the suggested minimums are.

My upstairs gaming machine has the following specs…

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: AMD fx-6300 3.5 ghz
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 980

As one would expect the beefier graphics card means that I am getting significantly better performance, but not massively so. I am running the game at 1080p/medium and I get severe dips from the 60fps to 30fps and it is extremely erratic. What this feels like to me… is a game that was rushed to make last minute changes and is extremely poorly optimized for the PC. From the sound of it… everyone that chose to get the PS4 copy seems to be just happily playing away. Those of us on the PC are trying to find that precarious line where the performance to pretty balance is reasonable. The biggest confusion point that I am seeing thought is having a big badass system doesn’t necessarily make a difference. It is almost totally random who can and cannot run this game. As a result I highly suggest you purchase the game through steam, that way if for whatever reason it does not work for you… you can return it to get a full refund. I believe GOG does the same thing, but I have never actually returned a game there so I am not sure how fast or easy that process is. Essentially this is definitely a “buyer beware” title… and if you simply want to play it without much fussing then I suggest you check out the PlayStation 4 copy.

Now that all of that is out of the way…. the game is really pretty and feels like you are exploring alien worlds. It has this feeling of minecraft, starbound and elite all throw together in the a mixer and some weird hybrid came out of the process. The key thing that stood in the way of me playing Elite or Star Citizen… is that my player fantasy has nothing to do with flying a ship. I could give a shit about actually flying anything… and would be perfectly happy just taking “taxis” between planets. What I want is the exploration of new and interesting places, and that is the fantasy that NMS hones in on. There are going to be folks that complain that this title is entirely too “walking sim” for them, but the couple of planets have all been filled with rich and interesting environments for me to explore. Right now my biggest problem is the lack of inventory, and lack of understanding how to increase said inventory. There is just so much I don’t know how to do, and so many items I pick up that I don’t have a clue what they are even for. What is the most interesting to me is the fact that when you encounter an alien race, you don’t know how to communicate. You learn language through finding these knowledge stones, and each of them teaches you a single word in another language. Now I have yet to see what actually happens when you know some words… because I absolutely lost faction with a race by patting them on the head.

The coolest moment so far has to be when I finally repaired my ship, and decided to lift off of the planet and out into space. I watched as the horizon got darker and darker until all of the sudden I broke through the atmosphere and could see the stars around me. Similarly awesome was the moment when I realized that landing on this planet… I had to be super careful about my angle of entry. If you come in too straight you absolutely start to burn up in the atmosphere damaging your shields in the process. So that mean’t I had to skim along carefully descending slowly enough to avoid taking damage, but that also meant that this was no means a quick process. There are consequences of pushing off planet, and I burned through all of my fuel on the first planet using my ship to explore. Each time you thrust off the surface it takes resources, ones that you cannot easily replenish without significant time spent exploring… which in itself costs resources because the environments are usually hostile and stress your life support systems to where they need recharging as well. There however is a central loop that I find enjoyable of exploring and gathering and exploring and gathering. In fact last night I absolutely lost two hours of time playing this game. Not that I was aware that I spent time… but I thought I had maybe spent fifteen minutes playing, until I looked up and realized that two hours had passed. So if the issues of the launch can get ironed out, I have a feeling that this is going to go down as one of those Minecraft like experiences that just keeps building upon itself.

So final advice is… pick it up definitely. However if you have a Playstation 4, you might lean towards that for your purchase. Otherwise definitely purchase it through a provider that is going to allow you to return the game on PC if for whatever reason it does not like your machine.