Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 718

Welcome Back System

February 11, 2016 by Belghast

Honey Coated Goodness

Yesterday the topic of Secret World came up on twitter, and as always I give my normal response of that I need to go back and play some more. This will forever be one of those games that I remember very fondly…. so long as I don’t really focus on the end game content and frustrations we felt there. As far as narrative storytelling… I have to say this game probably provided the best experiences I have ever seen in any MMO to date. The mixture of real world and game world puzzles, that required me to look things up in the provided in game browser…. which often lead to “fake” websites about in game companies… was just a level of integration I had not experienced and honestly have not since. The storyline itself was this wonderful blending of so much real world lore, that quite honestly… it blends so well into almost any modern fantasy genre. I remember thinking that this fertile ground should provide for plenty of additional adventures, and in truth it has. Since June of 2012 the game has released 13 major content updates called “Issues” and a handful of smaller packs, which is a far cry from the original goal of “monthly” content releases… but not horrible by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem is… the game has struggled to find an audience that is also willing to pay for the game. One of the best purchases I ever made was the original “Lifetime Subscription” that was available back at launch, that honestly was still available until recently. According to MMOWatcher this officially went off the market on February 5th, meaning that there will be no more new Grandmasters. The problem is…. the Grandmaster system is so amazingly good, that after my initial one time purchase… I have never NEEDED to give them any more money. I have this feeling that a lot of the folks who are actively playing are in this same boat. Now they cranked up the benefits of a monthly membership, because quite honestly…. Funcom has been hurting for a long while. Once again however as a Grandmaster I am “grandfathered” into this system… but the perks are pretty insane.

A 30% increase to all Experience earned. (This replaces the Time Accelerator)

A 50% boost to all Black Bullions gained.

20% extra capacity for Black Bullions and Marks of the Pantheon.

8-hour Mission Cooldowns.

18-hour Raid Lockout Timers.

2 Lockout Timer Resets every 30 days. This item resets all active Cooldowns (Missions/Raids/Scenarios).

A 10% storewide discount for everything in the item shop (20% for Grand Masters).

1200 Bonus Points every 30 days.

Free Anima Leaps!

Then in addition to this there is a reward system that you get various really cool items available to you at fixed points in your subscription much like the Final Fantasy XIV or Everquest II veteran reward systems. This is also on top of getting the monthly items, that have been acrueing on my account since launch. Once again as a Grandmaster… I just get all of them unlocked at once. Some of the rewards available are.

30 Days: Anima effect on sprint and faction jackets
60 Days: Hoverboard and Panoptic Core in faction colors
90 Days: Ur-Draug pet and an additional Agartha Conduit
180 Days: Portable bank and a baller costume
360 Days: Weapon skins and a scooter mount

The Challenge

The problem with being away from a game like The Secret World this long however is that I quite honestly have no idea where to start. I know I completed Issues 1-4, and 6… but all of the ones I missed I have no idea where they even start. Normally speaking in a traditional wow-style MMO you can simply run around until you see exclamations over the top of NPC heads. However in TSW almost every quest can be repeated as many times as you like, so as a result you end up with a sea of possibilities, and several years later I have no clue where to even start. I’ve talked about this before, but games really need a better “welcome back” system, that presents the players with a guess at what they were doing last, and also presents them with five or so items that they should consider doing. Initially I had this idea of starting a new character, like I do in so many other games when trying to ease back into them. The problem being…. that I am already capped on the number of characters I have access to. During the 2014 Extra Life I created the horribly named “Belstream” to stream the Secret World newbie experience, and even then… I have no clue where I left off with him.

The challenge is that I don’t really WANT to play an Alt… I would prefer to just keep trucking along on my Templar main. However the level of investment that I will have to make to get into the game… sort out what I did and where to start doing again…. is ultimately want keeps me logging in and then after futzing with my wardrobe a bit, logging right back out. Similar to Everquest II, the other big challenge for me is sorting through my inventory… which is full of so much crap that I can no longer recognize if it is even useful. All of these candy colored icons mean nothing to me right now, and the fact that I am wearing epic gear in most of my slots makes me doubt if they are even useful to upgrade anything with. I would break stuff down… but honestly I would even have to look up how you did that again. I have the desire to play, but right now there is entirely too much “friction” standing in the way of me doing that. I realize Funcom more than likely lacks the funds to devote to new systems, but this at least is a huge challenge for me. I guess I could simply start by looking up the patch notes for Issue 5 and then going forward from there, trying to go find the quest chain starter for each additional Issue that I missed. But this is the point where I ask myself…. do I care enough to devote a few hours of research, or do I just want to spend my limited evening hours playing something else that I remember how to play?

FPS Evolved Genre

February 10, 2016 by Belghast

Thoughts for Motiga

One of the aspects of Pax South 2016 that felt strange for me, was the complete and total lack of Motiga and Gigantic. I cannot fully express how much of my experience this game was in 2015. I had a great time hanging out with the Motiga crew thanks to Lonrem brokering a connection, and then kept dragging people to the booth to play Gigantic. It felt like the sort of MOBA experience I had been looking for. When I played a tanky character, it felt like playing an MMO tank. When I played a ranged character, it felt like playing a really good ranged shooter. I feel like hands down they were the belle of the ball last year, and when I heard about their layoffs in december, and the fact that they were not on the roster for 2016… I started to get concerned. Since coming back from Pax last year I have been lucky enough to have access to all of the alpha and beta events, but I have to admit I didn’t really play much of it. For the longest time it just played lousy on my then Geforce 750ti video card…. and now that I have at least upgraded to a 960 I am wondering if maybe it would perform a little better. As of yesterday however I am really starting to worry for the folks at the company, because according to a Gamasutra article the just underwent some pretty significant staff reduction in a last ditch attempt to get more funding to finish the game.

Now that the NDA has lifted I don’t have to worry quite so much about how I talk about Gigantic. I really need to reinstall the game and see what its current state happens to be. The biggest problem that the game had was that its back end systems were not quite as polished as the front end game play. Matchmaking was a big issue, and the fact that in order to get valuable feeling matches… you realistically needed to hang out on testing ventrilo and and form some sort of a custom game. The last time I attempted to boot up the game I sat in a matchmaking queue for thirty minutes and then finally gave up. My friend Rae apparently has played it more recently, but ran into a pretty elitist player base… with her catching shit for not doing the right thing at the right time. This is one of those games that is so damned close to really good…. but I worry that maybe they missed their window by a year. I’ve always said that in order for this game to be really popular it needed to be first to market, since it is essentially launching an untested IP. The awesome thing is though, that the characters…. well… for lack of a better term have character. They are interesting and are animated in a way that they spring to life. This game has what League of Legends has… but so many other games in the MOBA genre have lacked… personality. I really hope that they can pull this off, but as always I worry about the folks that were just let go. This game deserves its time in the sun, and I think it will flourish on consoles…. quite possibly more so than on the PC that already has a fairly entrenched first person MOBA genre. The critical date however is that they HAVE to beat Overwatch to launch, or they are pretty much toast. Even thought those two games are vastly different in feel… players are still mentally lumping them all together in this “fps evolved” genre of folks taking the FPS template and doing new things with it.

Overwatch Beta Returns

Speaking of the 500 lb gorilla that Gigantic has to beat to market… as of yesterday the Overwatch Beta is back on, and with it has also returned much gnashing of teeth as more folks failed to get in. At this point I am pretty much resigned that I will not likely get to play until open beta testing at some point. For a brief period of time I thought that maybe I had access, because in the launcher the install button suddenly started showing up for me. The only problem being that it was grayed out, and not clickable. I am guessing this was a temporary glitch because later that evening when I popped into WoW to do my garrison gold farming… it was back to hiding the install button again. The truth is… even if I had beta access I probably would not be playing it much. My recent return to Elder Scrolls Online has taught me that… maybe I am just not a good beta candidate these days. I absolutely blame the almost two years of regularly ESO testing for my diminished desire to play after getting to the veteran ranks. I quite literally had burned myself out on all of the newbie content, so that the thought of alting my way through it again just felt painful. I poured my heart and soul into that testing experience, because I wanted that game to be the best damned game it could be… and honestly judging it today through very clear eyes… I think it turned out pretty great.

I want to be able to walk into Overwatch and have the game feel free and exciting, and be able to experience the new player rush along with everyone else. Sure I would love to be able to play the game when the whim hits me right now, but I am not going to be the sort of hard core tester and bug reporter that they really need right now. In this sort of game, balance and gameplay statistics are key… and they need a sheer volume of data to sift through to be able to shape their design decisions. So for me… who is going to maybe play the game once a month… I am not exactly a great resource and if you replaced me with someone who is going to stream the game every night… you would be far better off in the end. I’ve developed this aversion to playing games before they are officially released. Now granted… I still do regularly…. but I have begun to learn my lesson. Torment: Tides of Numenera for example is absolutely available to me to test because I backed the project…. but I have zero desire right now to do so. I want to play the finished version of the game, when it is “ready for primetime” and not have to sift through crippling bugs. Maybe my tolerance for “broken games” is less than it used to be… or maybe there are just so damned many things that I want to be playing that spending my time on an unfinished product feels like a waste. In any case… I am a bad beta tester, and will continue to be super happy for those who are getting invited and enjoying their time playing games like Overwatch.

Maybe I Don’t Hate Elves?

February 9, 2016 by Belghast

The Thalmor

Today I am feeling a bit more stable, and as a result going to attempt work. I think I could probably use another day of rest, but in truth… yesterday I rescheduled meetings for today… and I don’t want to go through the hassle of trying to go in and reschedule them again. My throat is still insanely sore from all of the coughing, and my eyes were matted shut this morning… but in truth other than these things I am doing considerably better. My eyes are actually clear again instead of the red irritated mess that they have been recently. I also noticed that during the day yesterday apart from a bit of a nap… I actually felt like playing games again. During most of the weekend… I honestly spent more time staring at the screen than I actually did doing anything. I continued my journey into the Aldmeri Dominion campaign on my now Veteran Rank 2 character…. roughly half of the way to rank 3. Throughout the course of the day I managed to work my way around the map unlocking pretty much everything but the handful of Dolmen like the one pictured above. The problem with playing during what is normally work hours… is that there simply aren’t that many people around able to help you out. While I can struggle through most world boss encounters thanks to the hax of Green Dragon Blood. I have heard that it has technically been nerfed several times… but it is still enough of a self heal that I can struggle through most fights on my own.

The harsh realization I had while playing Aldmeri content is that maybe I don’t actually hate the High Elves or Aldmer as much as I though I did? In past games I honestly went out of my way to kill the High Evles when I saw them… but I am coming to realize that these were the Thalmor, and not necessarily representative of the High Elves as a whole. So pretty much all I was seeing was this extremist wing of the elves, that are just as horrible to their own people as they are to anyone else. I mean I have always liked the Bosmer and their Green Pact… I mean who doesn’t think Cannibal elves are awesome? Then there are the Khajiit, and you have to be a horrible ass to not like them. It is awesome seeing them in a light that is not as constant comic relief, even though they are absolutely right up there with the Argonians for most oppressed race of Tamriel. So while I expected to like the occasional merchant and small folk in this campaign… I did not expect to really like the leaders. The Canonreeves and Battlereeves have for the most part been awesome…. as has Queen Aywren herself. I am actually enjoying helping them turn the tide in the battle against the Maormer and the Veiled Heritance.

Epic Battles

Hands down the best part of the zone was the final fight for Firsthold. During this sequence you have to actually breach a number of Oblivion gates, as you push into the Refuge of Dread and try and sever the ties of Mehrunes Dagon to our plane. The irony is… were it any OTHER Elder Scrolls game… I would probably be completing the quests to HELP out Mehrunes Dagon because I would almost certainly be rewarded with a spiffy weapon. Sadly I took zero screenshots while in the Refuge of Dread, so instead you are getting a random dungeon screenshot. That is just how enthralled I was by that sequence of quests, that I kept wanting to move the story forward and get to the final culmination of the zone…. which itself was an equally epic battle. What makes it even cooler is that immediately following the conclusion of Auridon… we are thrust into yet another epic sequence as we try and win back the town of Haven in Grahtwood from the Jackdaw Pirates who have taken it over. I know it is going to shock Tam that I am saying that I actually kinda like the High Elves… but I have to admit it. Sure I like working for the Khajiit or Bosmer slightly better…. but the sad part is that we apparently only get to see the assholes in the form of the Thalmor when we are outside of the Summerset Isles.

All of this said… I still feel a much greater pull to the Daggerfall or Ebonheart Pact. I do have to say I really am enjoying questing through the Aldmeri areas however, in part because this was the last content to go into the game… and also the content I spent the least amount of time playing. I feel though that once I finish leveling through it… enough time might have passed for me to be able to enjoy the Ebonheart areas again. Largely it is just the Stonefalls area that tends to drag on… and if I can ever make it through that area I will be perfectly fine because then I am mostly into undiscovered territory again. I have to admit I am having a lot of fun, but I am mostly playing as a solo player. If you too are playing ESO on the PC, feel free to throw a friend invite to @Belghast my root account. It would be nice to at least have some folks to chat back and forth with while I am playing. Since I still don’t have much of a voice, and it is actually somewhat painful to talk… I am avoiding voice chat like the plague. Otherwise I would be sitting on our teamspeak server, and at least listening to the others as they are playing Warframe. At some point soon I need to poke my head back into that game, but the mood just hasn’t hit me. I also similarly need to play some more Destiny, but I have been spending most of my time downstairs on the couch and not near the PS4. I have to say… it feels pretty good to have things to talk about… other than just how horrible it is to be sick.

Missing Adventure

February 8, 2016 by Belghast

Running its Course

I am sure at this point that you my wonderful readers are getting sick of reading about the adventures of Sick Bel. I promise I am also getting tired of writing about them, because at this point I keep thinking that surely today is going to be that magically day where I start to feel amazingly better. Pretty much the longest a virus will run is seven days, and at this point I started coming down with it last Sunday…. which would in theory make today the day things just start to improve drastically. I am still fairly miserable, and last night I had another night of constantly interrupted sleep. Around 7pm I went to bed, after taking some evening meds that knocked me out. From there I ended up sleeping pretty solidly until around 11pm. Well my wife woke me up twice about the stupid printer upstairs, but those little blips really didn’t effect my overall sleep. After 11pm I wound up waking up every hour on the hour to adjust or get a drink. So in theory I got more sleep than I am used to, but it was super fitful.

This morning I got ready like I was going to work, however I could quickly tell that it just was not going to happen. I didn’t have a lot on my schedule today, so I felt like it would be better served to spend the day chilling out and napping as much as I could, with the hope that come tonight I will start to just be doing better all around. I am taking what feels like a smorgasbord of over the counter meds to try and help with the symptoms. The first line of defense is Mucinex Fast Max, followed up with an antihistamine, and huge doses of vitamin C. This morning I am just worn out… but something already feels slightly different. So here is hoping that by tonight I will be able to get a normal nights sleep. The problem has been that honestly no position seemed comfortable at all, so I just ended up alternating through the bad choices.

Lapse in Gaming

You can always tell how sick I am based on how well I can game. That is always my happy place, and the activity I retreat to when I need to recuperate. The problem is that yesterday and quite honestly the last several days…. I spent a lot of time booting games up but not really playing them much. I mean I got this or that quest done in Elder Scrolls Online, or would pop into Diablo 3 and do a Greater Rift…. but each of those activities would wear me out to the point where I just needed to log out for awhile and do nothing. So over the last few days I have spent an inordinate amount of time staring blankly at my laptop, and television at the same time…. not really paying full attention to either. When in this state…. I really am not functional at all. Which kinda sucks for the whole, writing a daily gaming blog thing. I am hoping that today or tomorrow I will start to get back to normal so I can once again have adventures worth writing about. Thanks to all of you for bearing with me while going through this mess.