Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 764

War Against Demons Never Changes

August 15, 2015 by Belghast

Tales of WoW Tourism

Once upon a time in another life I was a thoroughly devoted World of Warcraft player. Thoroughly devoted in that it was my home base of operations, and I would go off on these short jaunts into other titles. The term “WoW Tourism” was apt because when I ventured out I would often go on these excursions with a large chunk of my House Stalwart friends and raiders. We would set up temporary bases on the shores of these new game worlds and then within a month or two we were all back thoroughly devoted to Warcraft again. To be truthful I think this constant flow of games to keep going off and exploring helped keep us planted in Azeroth for as long as we did. It gave us the opportunity to go out and see what was available, only to fall back into the comfortable rhythm of the familiar. There were so many different games that fell into this bubble like Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online, Champions Online, Star Trek Online…. I am seeing a pattern here that apparently during the 2000s you could just graft the word Online onto anything and make it sell a couple of million copies. The jaunt that I was most likely the most devoted to however was Hellgate London. The story behind the game is something of legend, as a bunch of folks parted ways with the Blizzard mother ship and set out to build a better mousetrap. It had an awesome storyline, and great futuristic MMO meets Diablo gameplay. The problem being is it had a bunch of issues at launch.

As was our usual fashion we had like fifty people in the House Stalwart guild at launch, and then a month later only a handful of us were still regularly playing. I was one of that handful and I actually subscribed to the game for quite a while. Its key problem however was it had some extremely messy network infrastructure. At this point I am not sure if it was bad code or lack of servers, but in any case its key promise of massively multiplayer diablo… never really panned out. In our experience if you grouped with more than one other player, the game started to lag to a point where it was completely unplayable. Since we were an MMO guild, the fact that we could not regularly group together pretty much killed our experience, and before long everyone was back in World of Warcraft. The thing is I have always held a torch for this game because you would be hard pressed to find an experience that was more “me”. Killing random zombies and demons that drop all the colors of the rainbow in loot rarity? Fuck yes sign me up. The tragedy of the tale however is that by the time Hellgate launched, Flagship studios was already in trouble and news of that was starting to leak out around the seams. The studio closed around a year later and with it both Hellgate London and the unreleased game Mythos went up in smokes. Throughout that year I was still playing my characters on a semi regular basis in single player mode, but I took got pulled back into the draw of World of Warcraft as I started raiding more seriously as a main tank for the group NSR.

Travelling Through Time

Over the last few days I have felt that itch of nostalgia about this game, and I had known for awhile that the original was purchased by the Korean developer HanbitSoft that later got gobbled up by T3 Entertainment. I had also heard that they released an expansion of sorts for the game called Hellgate Tokyo, and that more or less the game was playable for free. I’ve known for a bit that there was a Steam Greenlight page for Hellgate but to the best of my knowledge that has gone no further in actually getting it onto steam and making it a viable modern experience. Instead I found my way out to the T3 Fun Hellgate download page, where you are given a selection of awkward methods to get the client. The first option was one of two torrent links, that no one seemed to be seeding. The second option was the download of four RAR files directly from T3, or a series of mirror sites…. none of which seemed to actually work. The only real option seemed to be to download the RAR files and hope everything completed successfully as they were each roughly 2 gig in size. The first archive was a self executable but there was no way in hell I was going to run that, so thankfully 7zip was able to extract the whole package safely to a sub directory. From there we get to the client install which took a truly excessive amount of time for a roughly 6.5 gig game. From there I started running into problems with the game launcher itself, which had some of the most curious engrish I have seen in awhile. You run again little patcher, you run to your heart is content! I am still thinking we need to make the above statement into an inspirational poster. After letting it close and reopen a few times it finished patching up and I was able to get into the game.

I have to say if I did not know that this was in fact a legitimate version of the game I would assume I was running on some sort of emulator server. When the game first loads you are thrown into a sort of tutorial room that has vendors allowing you to use TCOINS the cash shop currency to pay your way past some of the obstacles. You are given an assortment of freemium items to try out, which mostly is an assortment of boosts and convenience items that you don’t really need. Once I got through the awkward lobby it joined the game proper that I was most familiar with, and started questing through the first few areas. It seems like some of the scripting is broken, in that I got a series of quests that rewarded me the exact same item over and over which was the equivalent of “Wirt’s Leg” from Diablo. There is also a strange amount of Engrish going on in some of the messages, largely strange because it seems like this game was translated from English to Korean… and then back to English when they launched the client here. I mean all of the quest dialog was originally in English, so it makes me wonder if no one actually saved a backup of that dialog when localizing it? All of the awkward patches aside the game runs remarkably well, and while it is a decade old it still looks passable. I am notorious for not really reading dialog messages, and apparently one of them told me that none of the changes I made would take effect until I restarted the client. As a result most of the screenshots that I took have exceptionally muddy textures, and for the most part that was my big complaint. However it seems that after restarting the client as the game suggested the textures don’t look half bad… once again considering the ages of the client. The above screenshot is with all of the sliders set to max, and I can accept the way that looks.

War Against Demons Never Changes

The game for the most part plays just like I remember it playing. I started a Templar Guardian which is their tanky class and proceeded to wander around killing demons and getting a silly amount of loot. The primary difference that I remember from the original is that HanbitSoft seems to have inexplicably decided to code it so that these insane named epic spawns happy called “Messengers of Hell”. You get a broadcast when it happens and more often than not they spawn in right beside you and proceed to start wrecking you. The very first one of these that I fought I barely survived, and there have been a few other close calls. The positive however is that they are essentially giant loot bags. When you kill one they erupt into a shower of gear and I have managed to pick up several orange quality upgrades off of them. At any given point they are dropping several tiers higher gear than is available from the surrounding mobs, so I make a beeline to get to them and take them out as quickly as possible. The other thing that I had forgotten was the mingame. If you look in the screenshot above there are three icons hovering above my secondary weapon attack. I never quite figured out how they worked back when we were originally playing, but if you get a certain combination a random shower of loot spawns and places a nifty sound effect. There was apparently a guide on Massively that is still available through the Engadget site that does a pretty good job of explaining how it works. If nothing else it adds for momentary excitement when the loot explosion happens.

The funny thing is… the game still does it for me. It triggers all the happy endorphin releases that a video game should, and it has made me lament what might have been. Hellgate London was just such a cool franchise, and with it spawned a series of novels that were actually enjoyable reads. Really it was like roaming around in a MMO Doom universe where the world has been sacked by demons and the survivors all struggle to exist in the remnants of the abandoned subway system much like the Metro series of games. It scratches all of the right itches as far as an post apocalyptic game goes, and I would love to see what Hellgate would be like in a modern context. The problem being… that is never going to happen. It seems as though HanbitSoft/T3/Redbana don’t really care much about this game. From reading on the forums it seems like exploits are common and widely used, and they don’t much care one way or another about it. I had a lot of fun playing however and I managed to spend roughly three hours in the game last night. I know this because there is a little warning that kept popping up explaining each time another hour had passed that “Excessive game play may affect your lifestyle.” The other glimmer of hope is that there is apparently something called the Hellgate Revival project, which attempts to take the original Single Player mode and decouple it from needing a server and update it. I am going to try and apply all the necessary patches to the original game to get it to a state where I can test out the revival mod and see how well it works. Hellgate really was a damned fun experience, and I am happy that I am able to play it in any form. Excuse me while I continue to wallow around in nostalgia for a bit longer.

Exploring Draumheim

August 14, 2015 by Belghast

Great Sell-Off

Normally this morning I would go into my new game picks for the coming week to serve as alternate writing fodder to Blaugust. However that is not going to happen because I am not really feeling like writing that post today. I am struggling right now with a mix of allergies and asthma that have conspired to make me miserable. One of the things about being sick is that you tend to surround yourself by things that feel comfortable or nostalgic. Just as there is comfort food, there is also comfort gaming… and when I feel like shit I find myself wandered off into games I have pushed to the side. Essentially when I am feeling my worst I am lease capable of dealing with the stress of interacting with other people. As such yesterday and last night I ventured into a realm where almost nobody knows my name anymore… Telara. Rift was one of my games of the week for this past week, and with it comes a series of problems. Namely when I log in I am staring at a bag and bank full of dimension items and crafting materials. I am not sure if you are the same as me in this aspect, but if my bags are a mess there are so many times I will log in and then log right back out because I cannot be bothered to fix that situation. Honestly if I don’t do something quickly in Final Fantasy XIV I will be nearing that point as all of my retainers are clogged and my inventory continues to get more and more semi-permanent additions.

With Rift however I finally did something drastic. Last October Rift released the Nightmare Tides expansion, and I still don’t have a character to the new level cap of 65. During this time I have been accumulating crafting materials from doing the Minions minigame, and quite honestly I have more than I will ever actually use. By the time I actually get around to hitting the level cap I will more than likely have just as much materials I do now. So instead I decided to reinstall BananAH and post every single crafting material on the Auction House. It cost a lot of plat to post everything, but luckily by the end of the night I had managed to quadruple the amount of plat I had going into this experiment, and there are still a bunch of auctions up there that may or may not have sold over night. The money gained was a side benefit, the real mission was simply to clear the shit out of my inventory. At some point I will do the same with the various housing bits, because there are some things I will quite literally never end up using in any design. With the bags clear however I finally felt like I could actually go out into the world questing, and it improved my outlook on the game considerably.

Figuring Logistics

While the great sell-off took care of one issue keeping me from playing Rift, I still had another big one standing in my way. Rift has quite possibly one of the most complicated character creation systems, namely that for a given class you can have any combination of three different souls from a pool of ten potential souls for each slot. If my math is correct… and I would seriously question that… but I believe that gives us 120 possible combinations with a pool of 76 talent points to distribute between your three trees. What I am trying to say is that basically every time I decide to play the game it requires a bunch of research on my part to determine what the current “viable” builds are and what purposes they serve. To say that Rift changes a lot is an understatement… they are constantly patching the game and tweaking things and often times these have ramifications have effects that trickle out and make or break the last patches specs. The class that I tend to care about the most however is the Warrior, and while I have a level 60 rogue and a level 60 cleric… I tend to mostly focus on Belghast first and foremost. So over the last week I have poked around the Class Guide forums and stumbled onto one that looked promising titled: Warrior Solo Leveling (61-65). Luckily it was not too far off from the build that I had tried leveling with before, so I was able to tweak out my hot bars without much issue.

One of the big strengths of Rift is also one of it’s great weaknesses. The macro system is excellent and allows you to do some really interesting things with it. The problem being the game also gives you so many sideways and optional abilities that you feel like you are required to macro everything together for fear that you miss some opportunity for not having 32 fingers to hit abilities with. The big thing I like about this incarnation of the soloing build is that essentially I am really only using one macro, and all that does is chain a series of high cool-down single target abilities onto Empowering Strike. The combo point dump abilities are on my bar separately, as is the main reactionary ability that I hit after using one of them. The feeling is that things are less random than they have felt before when I have played a suggested spec. I am hitting buttons largely because I know what the effect is going to be, and because I want to use it at that moment. Sure I still have one single mixed bag ability, but it feels like it is less important than the things I am not macroing. The other big thing is that it seems like my survival has gone up significantly, which was a huge problem I had previously. I am still under level for the region I am hunting in, but I am wondering if that just means that I missed something important in the previous zone.

Exploring Draumheim

At this point I had a spec and I had clean enough bags to be able to venture out into the world. I had two ports available in Draumheim so I grabbed one and hoped that I had picked the right one. It seems that I did as when I landed there were numerous quests available. The zone is extremely cool with all manner of nightmarish abominations wandering around in the midst of the ocean that is being drained away. The coolest thing about Draumheim is that it seems to be a nightmarish echo of Telara. There are numerous places in the zone that represent areas from the game, for example there is absolutely a version of Meridian and Sanctum as well as a nightmarish version of Port Scion. Similarly I ran into a copy of the great toad-like Greenscale, who represented the aspect of hunger. When I first attempted to play Nightmare Tides I was not sure if I liked it or not, largely because I am not the biggest fan of underwater settings in MMOs. Now almost a year later the subtlety of the expansion is starting to sink in. It is less about us traveling to the physical plane of water, and more about us traveling into the physical manifestation of dreams and nightmares. Nothing in the zones are quite what they seem, and last night I ended up helping out a series of existentially confused hay bales… and I am not making that up… they are quite literally named that.

I still wish we had a more directed questing experience similar to the old world. I know they went in this direction as a way of distancing themselves from the standard questing format of MMOs, but personally I find it somewhat lacking. The story that is there is really good, but there just doesn’t feel like there is enough of it. Mostly it feels like you can’t get through the content by only following the quests. Instead of feeling like questing is optional it feels like I have to do every single quest, and do every single carnage quest that pops up when you kill any mobs… and still do some dungeons or instant adventures or you run into the situation I am in… where I am one to two levels below the content I am trying to do. The leveling experience is much less directed, and this is a change that went in with Storm Legion… but the end result in both expansions was me constantly wondering what I am supposed to be doing next. For most MMOs the leveling experience gets better over time, but I feel like Rift went in the opposite direction. I get it that quest content is fairly expensive to create, and without the subscription model they don’t have that stable source of monthly income to keep said quest content coming. The quests that are here however are really good, and one I did last night took me through a series of “computers” that showed little recorded vignettes from the past, all of them fully voice acted. I like all of the things they have done to make finding quests more interactive… but I wish we had more hub based quests as well to fill in the gaps in content. I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t enjoy myself however, because I absolutely did. I needed a game where I could be anonymous and lose myself in the experience of playing an MMO, and that is precisely what Rift gave me yesterday. I still very much love Trion and the team behind Rift, and it is one of the games I will continue to suggest people check out on a regular basis. I feel like they did the absolute best job of a free to play conversion that I have experienced to date, and I am willing to keep giving them more of my money. I am just nostalgia for the way that questing used to feel in Rift is all.

Tam’s Liebster Questions

August 13, 2015 by Belghast

I posted yesterday a bit about the backlog of posts that I have had that I wanted to make. Yesterday I was also called out by Tam about not responding to his Leibster post, but in truth I just had not gotten down to it. Since tomorrow will be another Blaugust Games of the Week post, I had planned on getting his Liebster post either out today or Saturday, but since he is getting antsy I guess I am going to make sure it happens today. For those who don’t know the Liebster is this well intentioned “award” that is essentially the blogosphere’s version of a chain letter. Normally it is supposed to float around with a cover page full of rules outlining how you are supposed to proceed, and explains things like that you are supposed to choose a candidate that has never been Liebstered. This seems to go around once a year, and based on some of the questions I have seen… I am guessing this is a continuation of last years “strain” because at least one of the questions I have seen floating around is one I came up with. All of this said I am absolutely not down on the concept of the Liebster. I think it is a pretty awesome way to introduce people to new folks, but at this point this will be the third time I have been Liebetered. I am going to ignore the “rules” of the award and not name any successors because by the strictest of rules I should not be getting this again.

Onwards to the Liebster Questions

1 — What is the best spell to cast?

Anything that buffs my melee ability or causes me to take less damage. In truth however… I have to say Resurrection would be the best spell to cast most of the time. Considering how much death I have had to deal with in my life, I have a feeling that is the one I would end up using the most.

2 — What food item(s) from a game do you want to eat above any other?

Nothing from any Fallout game ever… In truth I am not sure if I have ever salivated over any in game food, but I will say I have always wanted to eat a Tel’Abim Banana since they are supposedly sentient beings from another land. Wondering if they taste significantly different than a normal Banana.

3 — You’ve got an infinite supply of one consumable, and can never carry any others. Which consumable do you choose?

That one is simple… Health Potion. Seriously there is no reason for any other consumable if you have an infinite supply of health.

4 — You have to choose a race and class that you’ve never played seriously before. What do you pick?

Honestly this one is hard because I have played most roles seriously in the past. The one class that I always thought I would like but could never really get into was the World of Warcraft Warlock. At face value it seems like a very “Bel” class summoning demons and shit, but the whole damage over time aspect has always baffled me. After starting to get used to the Arcanist a bit, I am going to say that Warlock is something I have been interested in giving a more serious try. I have one somewhere in my 60s in WoW but I largely got there because the leveling curve in that game is laughable and I just made my demon beat things up for me. I would like to try playing it as a proper dot dropping madman.

5 — What game did you think you would hate but actually loved?

This one was a little tough, but I finally came up with an answer I am happy with: The Saints Row franchise. You are thinking… but Bel it is a crazy game where you get to beat everything up with dildo bats… that absolutely sounds like a game you would be interested in. Sure but you have to understand something key here… I really do not like Grand Theft Auto games. Well I take that back, I found one and two good mindless fun, but I could not stand GTA 3… and then each of the games afterwards that I played I also found frustrating. In all fairness I have never really given GTA 4 a fair shot, which I need to do at some point. I am getting off track here, but essentially I always thought of Saints Row as a GTA Clone, and I guess in truth that is precisely how the series started out. What it has morphed into is this insane “no rules” sandbox, and THAT aspect I absolutely love. Saints Row 3 and 4 are both amazing, and I really need to devote more time to playing them.

6 — What game did you think you would love but actually hated?

Citizens of Earth… which coincidentally ended up being our first AggroChat game club game. Everything about that game sounded awesome… until we actually started trying to play it. Hate is a strong word, but really… I never want to play that game again. It was just the worst of smarmy repetitiveness and laughing at itself jokes I have experienced in awhile. Additionally the combat really was not fun at all. I was so amped going into that game, and those hopes were dashed within the first hour.

7 — Pick a zone from any game to live in. Why?

Moonshade Highlands from Rift without a doubt. Gorgeous storms, awesome Dwarves, and big mountain highlands full of little pools and rivers. The crazy woods filled with murderous Fae I could deal without, but the rest of that zone… absolutely perfect for me. Again other than the whole nightmare demons thing I would absolutely love to live in Hammerknell.

8 — You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why?

Probably anything with a stealth mechanic. It is probably going to surprise people that I did not say “Mage”, but in truth I find stealth mechanics to be among the most frustrating experience I have ever had in any game. The truth is I like the “rogue” archetype, I just don’t want them to be stealthy. I am all about the swashbuckler type character slashing away at things furiously with two swords. Probably the best stealth mechanic as far as I am concerned is that of the Nightblade in Rift because they just used it as a limited time opener, not something to stay in for long periods of time.

9 — What’s your favorite story?

Hmmm this question is so ambiguous. My favorite set up for a game has to be Hellgate London. In fact yesterday was lamenting how awesome the opening cinematic for that game and the subsequent story was. The problem is the game was not really worthy of it, and I would love to see it rebooted into a movie or a television show with its own new game. I have to say though of all of the game stories I have played, the one I most want to see made into a television series is Mass Effect. Imagine that story told over the course of five or six seasons of a high budget television show? Would be amazing.

10 — What hobby does no one (yet) know you have?

The problem with having a blog for as long as I have had… everyone pretty much knows everything about me at this point. In fact I did Factoid February a few years back where I spilled the beans on a lot of these details. I really don’t have any hobbies that would shock someone. The hobby that I need to get back into doing more of however is Photography. It has been a few years since we were regularly going out on photo shoots each weekend, and that needs to change.

11 — What is your favorite secret shame?

Again I can’t really think of something that I have not already talked at length about here on the blog. I am a sucker for John Hughes films, so that would probably be about the closest thing to a “guilty pleasure” that I have… that and I love 80s pop music. It just reminds me of my childhood, when everything seemed possible. As a kid I thought John Hughes films were about the underdog getting their way in the end, but as an Adult they have a much darker theme, namely you can have whatever you want so long as you change everything about yourself in the process. Think back to the Breakfast club… you have Ally Sheedy playing this girl that just wants to be loved by hear parents… and everything is set right in the world by a make over turning her into Molly Ringwald 2.0. Even with the darker interpretation… I still can’t help but love those movies.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I am breaking the chain here and not naming a victim. I still think the Liebster is a good idea and something pretty cool, but at this point I am getting tired of doing them myself. However Tam put a lot of thought and effort into his questions, so I felt obligated to answer them. In fact I think his questions would make a pretty great Blaugust prompt if anyone else wants to answer them. For now I am signing off because I spent way more time writing this out than I expected to, and am now late for work!