Tales of the Aggronaut

Wall Jumping

World of Warcraft feels really damned weird when you have not logged in for over a week.  What I mean by this is that some is strange with the perspective of that game as compared to most other games.  I have noticed this a few times when swapping between the various games I have been playing, but never quite so strongly as last night.  I have no clue what it is, or how to describe it better but something is just “different” with the way the world spreads out around me.  It always takes me a few minutes to get adjusted to the perspective as my eyes freak out a little bit.  I am really hoping someone out there understands what I am talking about… because otherwise I just sound like a mad man.  Life had conspired against me, and for various sundry reasons I missed the last two raid sessions, and even more troubling was that it had been two weeks since I had actually taken a shot at Blackhand.  I would really love to be able to close the Blackrock Foundry chapter of my raiding life with a a kill, and last night we got close.

The biggest adjustment for me is the fact that we were really short on melee dps… which is an odd problem for our group to have.  This meant I got to be on the wall group during phase two.  Every so often Blackhand smashes the current tank, and the wall jumpers need to get behind the tank… but also in the circle of impact so they get knocked up in the same direction the tank is going.  This works similar to the Bladefist crowd group, and the end result being kill as many things as you can and then jump down when your health gets low or you have cleared the entire group.  In the grand scheme of things I guess I am a decent choice for the job because of my self regen and tanky cooldowns.  We have phases one and two down solidly, and right now it is just phase three where everything is falling apart.  On our best attempt we managed to get him to 11% so I am thinking next week given another full night of attempts we might kill us a Blackhand, and there will be much rejoicing.

Storm Surge

Since it had been over a week since I had actually logged into WoW last night, I had to go through the song and dance of making sure I had consuming and collect my “disappointment tokens” to allow me to re-roll on the loot that will never actually drop.  After doing all of that I parked my butt at the entrance to the raid and took up the offer of Damai and Mor to join them in some Heroes of the Storm fun.  Last night my quest was to play two matches as a Starcraft Hero, and at that point I realized… that quite honestly I don’t play a lot of Starcraft heroes in this game.  Probably my favorite of all of the Starcraft Heroes is Sergeant Hammer, but unfortunately I do not “own” her yet because she is a truly silly amount of gold.  Instead I have Raynor, a Hero that I played quite a bit in early alpha so I opted to use him.  The problem being he no longer plays quite like I remember him playing.  Just like my disconnect I had with Muradin, they have changed the way he feels and made him significantly less sturdy.  The end result was me taking a lot of deaths and doing a generally piss poor job playing the game.

Part of the disconnect also was that last night we were playing with actual human beings, and the night before we were playing bots.  Essentially one of our trio had been playing quite a bit that day and managed to cap out on the amount of gold you can earn from bot games, thus pushing him into the solo queue to keep slowly earning gold.  Our first match we managed to win, and then in our second match… we ended up with a team that actually knew how to play together.  This is probably a side effect of the fact that three of us queued together.  Even though we were on voice, this really didn’t make much of a difference in the outcome because we are all not exactly amazing players yet.  I took a screenshot of my defeat screen because it was my very first so far in post release play.  Unfortunately before I had a chance to switch back to my beloved Sonya…  it was time to log out for the raid.  Even though we made a lot of progress on Blackhand I have to admit I probably would have rather been playing Heroes of the Storm.

Who Needs Sleep

Shockingly last night I did not log into Final Fantasy XIV at all, in part because of the other things I had going on like the WoW raid.  Lately I have had two real world friends of mine start playing Wildstar again, and this has caused me to want to try and sort out exactly where I was in questing.  It had been several weeks since I had logged in and I could not remember the level or even what zone I was in, so I wanted to know at least that so I could adequately communicate it.  I am apparently seventeen and in Galeras, in fact as of last nights play session I have just made the transition to the second area of the zone and have picked up that taxi point.  I want to play this game some more, and I am thinking next week while my wife is travelling I might stream it off and on throughout the week.  Last night unfortunately I managed to get sucked into questing and once again did not end up heading to bed until midnight.  I had not played the game much since the last drop, and I think a few of my addons might have broken because I was suffering from all manner of UI issues last night.

All of this aside I had quite a bit of fun running around and causing mayhem on my warrior.  There is part of me that wonders about going over and completing Celeston instead of digging too far into Galeras, but I am managing to stay a few levels ahead of my quest mobs right now so there isn’t much of a problem yet.  I kinda feel bad for joining the Black Dagger Society and then simply not being terribly active.  They seem like a really great guild lead by a great group of people.  This is the problem when you are pulled in so many different directions, and with playing a game that is ultimately not your “main game”.  Right now Final Fantasy XIV is the game I care the most about, and I am absolutely in love with the guild we have there.  They keep me logging in on an almost daily basis if for no reason other than to see them.  Wildstar I feel could be a similar environment, but with the sensory overload that is the world and the user interface… I find it exceptionally hard to follow the chat window.  There is just so much stuff going competing for my attention that I have not figured out how to dial things down enough to where I can actually watch chat.  I hope to get to know more of my guildies however because they really do seem like awesome people.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Storm Surge

Chaos in Motion

Last night I had no real intentions of doing anything serious.  I started off the night on my gaming machine upstairs, but had every plan to eventually filter downstairs to the sofa with my laptop for some more casual gaming while watching television.  For a period of time I was spending my Wednesday nights helping out the second free company static raid, but as they started getting more people interested I became scarce by intention.  I never really wanted to be part of two different raid groups, but was willing to help so long as my presence was really needed.  Last night however they had four absences, so while I did not intend to do anything I stepped in to help out as best I could.  What made last night all the more important is that it was the inaugural raid night of my good friend Wulf, the paladin tank from our World of Warcraft raid.  The only problem being that even with me being pulled in we were still sitting at only five players.

So we shifted around our sights on simply knocking out some early content and opted to queue for Garuda Extreme instead.  It is at this point I realize that while I know how to do these fights…  I suck at explaining them.  Wulf is very much a tank that likes to know all of the information about something before going into the fight.  I on the other hand tend to be very much an “adjust to things on the fly” player, and as a result I only ever have a vague cliffs notes versions of fights in my head.  There are a lot of things I “know” about a fight, but I don’t really “know I know them”.  This makes me the least reliable source of information for someone who craves to make order out of the chaos.  To make matters more tenuous we were pugging in three players on each attempt, and Wulf was being hit by the dreaded instance server lag that sometimes hits me in FFXIV.  All things considered we had a great night and managed to take down Garuda Extreme for him as well as Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn Four.  I am hoping he enjoyed himself at least a little, even though most of the night was pretty much unbridled chaos.

Playing as Women

Over the last few months I have come to a bit of a realization, that apparently my brain works slightly differently than I thought it did.  For years now I have thought that I simply did not like playing female characters in video games.  When I attempted to do so I felt like I just could not get into playing the characters as much as I could the male counter part.  All this time I thought it was simply me favoring a character that was “more like” me personally, much the same way as I tend to create all of my MMO characters as some sort of idealized version of my self.  It turns out I am apparently completely wrong about the motivation behind this.  Granted when it comes to a character like Sheppard in Mass Effect I will always still prefer the one that is more like me.  I’ve come to the realization after a series of tests of this theory…  that I simply have a problem playing female characters with horrible armor and weapon choices.  If you give a female character proper armor and really good weapons then I seem to be perfectly happy bashing things in the face as them.

Admittedly the trend of placing women in video games in ridiculous outfits has always bothered me on some level, but I had no clue it was my actual impediment for enjoying playing women characters.  The realization of this slowly started creeping in when I found myself really enjoying the newest Tomb Raider awhile back, after never really being able to get into the original during college.  Since I am not really big into narrative game play, I was trying to figure out what made the difference all the sudden… and the only thing I could land upon was “because she is a badass”.  The original one always bothered me because it seemed to focus more on showing off her pointy polygon boobs more than anything else.  Then when I was presented with a character like Zarya, I immediately thought…  “I would  totally play as her, she is a badass” and I had a similar reaction yesterday upon seeing Johanna in Heroes of the Storm.  Give me a woman decked in armor and wielding a badass weapon… and I will happy play as her any day of the week.  Give me a wilting flower in what is essentially a bra and panties… and you can have all of my “NOPE!”.

Finding my Groove

Last night after the raid in Final Fantasy XIV I decide to poke my head into Heroes of the Storm to check out what Johanna looked like in game.  I had intended to do the “try” option to poke around as her for a bit, when Damai asked if I wanted to play for a bit.  Now I have been poking around in this game since alpha, and played a significant amount when the game went into beta and I finally had people to play with.  That said over the last several months I have not played at all, and was completely out of touch with the current state of the various heroes.  Previously my champion had been Muradin because I could build him tanky or I could build him extremely “murdery”.  The problem being that I was just “off” on playing him because it feels like maybe his survival got a whack from the nerfbat.  I was spending more than my fair share of time running back in from the nexus because I kept dying to stupid crap that I would have been able to survive when I played the game last.

Damai mentioned that he wanted to switch to playing support so that he could work on one of his quests… and I had honestly forgotten this was a thing that Heroes of the Storm had.  I had the quests “Play 3 Games as a Warrior” which I was already doing and “Play 3 Games as Diablo Character” so I opted to play some Sonya.  This was a champion that I got through a hero bundle that I purchased, and had never really spent much time playing her.  My god..  I think I have found my champion because upon switching over to her I started having a blast last night.  I went ahead and ponied up for the more armored “Wrath” set look from the store, and it is pretty badass that she is wielding Ashkandi in one hand and Quel’Serrar in the other.  What I like the most about her is that she quite literally uses “Fury” as a mechanic meaning you are not gated by running out of mana, but you are instead gated by having to earn fury through combat just like a World of Warcraft Warrior.  We played a half dozen games or so before I decided to head on to bed.  I could have easily stayed there playing another half dozen more.  The state of the game is extremely fun, and I need to grab Damai and do this more often.  At some point I am absolutely going to have to also pick up the Shatterstar themed skin since I am a sucker for all things New Mutants/X-Force.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Playing as Women

“Last Hit” Builds Contention

Yesterday Heroes of the Storm officially launched around the world.  As a result there has been some gnashing of teeth lately discussing how HotS is essentially a “dumbed down” version of League of Legends.  The complaints I am seeing revolve around the lack of complexity in the individual champion builds, and the team focus rather than the single player focus.  All of these things I see instead as positives.  I have spent more than my fair share of money and time on League of Legends because I have a significant number of friends who really enjoy it.  It is one of those game experiences that I find enjoyable only when I am playing with and against friends.  When you put me out into the community as a whole, the toxic environment surrounding the non-ranked community is a massive turn off.  I have heard that as you move up through the ranks the community starts to get better and more professional, but I lack the desire to play that game or any game for that matter “competitively”.

The big problem I had with League was the fact that it felt like I was not only competing against the players on the other team, but also competing against my own team mates for resources.  The concept of last hitting feels so divisive that I am shocked it exists in any team based game.  The fact that a team mate can either purposefully or accidentally snipe the last hit on a minion and gain all of the gold just seems like a horribly selfish tactic to introduce into a supposedly “team focused” game.  While I feel like the higher tiers of competitive play more than likely focus on the team effort and winning games, the low tier players tend to focus entirely on making themselves look good.  The best way to that end result is to feed heavily in lane and go on a murder spree, which means the other player in that lane is going to be starved out of resources and won’t be able to help the team later in the game.  Essentially all I am saying is that I think the concept of the “last hit” breeds contention between team mates more than it ever supports positive play.

Item Build is Too Fiddly

While the first problem I have with the game I consider a fundamental design flaw, the second big problem I have with League of Legends is a “me” thing.  I detest the item build system, in part because it asks me to care far more about that game than I actually want to.  League is never going to be a game that I play on a serious level, but instead a game I play with my friends when they decide that they want to play it.  I want to play just good enough not to shoot my team mates in the foot.  The problem is doing the item build system well, requires you to have actually research your champion and what sorts of things they need.  What I want is a more universal path to “this item adds more awesomeness” so I struggle to find items to build that make sense for whoever I am playing.  Now on champions I have played a lot like Garen, WuKong or Darius I have finally figured out how I want to build each of them for my own play style.  The problem being this was something that happened over lots of trial and error.  Quite frankly I don’t want to have to devote the processing cycles to figure that out, I just want a sequence of choices that add some flavor but in which there is no real “wrong” choice.

Essentially the system I am describing is the system that Heroes of the Storm uses, and from the moment I saw it I immediately felt at home.  I know that I can make small tweaks to the way my Hero performs, but at the end of the day no single choice is going to make or break the game for me.  Essentially even if I just blind pick abilities to get back into the action there is nothing that I can do to screw it up.  Someone described it as MOBAs with training wheels, and I am completely fine with that.  Essentially the MOBA audience is already solidified around either League of Legends or DOTA 2, and there is nothing that will change the fact that those two audiences are extremely devoted to their chosen game.  I see Heroes of the Storm being the game for the rest of us, the folks that are mildly interested in MOBAs but simply don’t want to have to memorize the amount of information needed to play either of the other games effectively.  I still play League with friends but HotS is the only game I would consider solo-queuing in.

Champion Design

The big area where I have to crown League the king however is in the area of Champion design.  They have managed to create this extremely malleable mythos that allows them to quite literally create a champion that can do ANYTHING and make it work thematically.  The reason why I keep returning to the game is to keep playing these new and interesting champion designs.  HotS I feel does a better job than most of the other competitors with making champions feel like fully fleshed out beings, but the key problem there lies in the fact that they can ONLY draw upon Blizzard characters.  League of Legends can create brand new characters on the fly without having to worry too much about them not fitting into the lore of their world, because said world is ridiculously open ended.  Right now every single champion in Heroes of the Storm has to fit into the Diablo, Warcraft or Starcraft universes.  Given time I can see them also adding in Overwatch, but even then those are very specific genres that they can draw on, whereas League tends to take inspiration for designs from other pop culture iconography.

Lucian for example is a blending of Morpheus from The Matrix and a Grammaton Cleric from Equilibrium.  Twisted Fate is absolutely Gambit from X-Men, and Draven is extremely influenced by Kraven the Hunter from Spiderman.  Volibear is absolutely Iorek Byrnison from the HIs Dark Materials trilogy.  League essentially has free reign for what they can adopt and adapt to fit into their world.  Granted in each case they have absolutely made the champion into their own thing, but that initial inspiration still sits there oh so thinly veiled.  Heroes of the Storm on the other hand is forced to eat its own, as it can only consume characters that are already in the existing Blizzard Intellectual Property Universe.  I feel the end result is going to always mean that League feels far more fresh and interesting, and HotS to some extent will always need to rehash nostalgia to inspire its player base to keep playing.  The positive is however that Blizzard players have proven time and time again to be deeply susceptible to fits of nostalgia.  I am happy that both games exist, but the only one I actively want to play on my own is Heroes of the Storm.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
About League and HotS

Lego Open World

On an absolute whim yesterday I popped onto the steam website to check out what had been released, or was impending release this morning.  One of the titles listed was something I quite literally knew nothing about called Lego Worlds.  After some research, the consensus seemed to be Lego meets Minecraft.  It has the same pedigree of the other Lego games out there as it is also created by Traveler’s Tales.  Right now the game is on Steam Early Access for $14.99 and I figured for that price it was worth the risk.  I was seemingly one of the few people who actually through Lego Universe was a pretty cool game.  Similarly I have really enjoyed my time spent in Lego Minifigures Online, and will more than likely pick up the Lego portal based game as well.  I may or may not be a Lego Maniac to borrow the 80s commercial catch phrase.  As I sit here typing up my blog post I am sitting in an office surrounded by a mountain of Lego sets.

If you have ever played any of the Lego franchise titles like Lego Harry Potter or Lego Star Wars, this game will feel extremely familiar to you at least as far as movement and gameplay goes.  Ultimately this is a game about destroying everything in sight, because when you destroy an object it erupts in a shower of “coins” which are represented by the 1×1 round plate pieces in various colors to denote denominations.  Essentially as you roam around the world every new object you encounter, you collect its appearance.  You can spend your coins to unlock the ability to build with these prefabs.  This means that if you are running through an area and there is a neat lamp post along the trail, you can bump into it and collect its appearance and then build with these lamps from that point on.  There is a truly overwhelming number of these prefab objects out in the world and in the three hours I spent yesterday playing I collected what seems like hundreds of them.

Custom Minifigures

  When you start the game you are given a very limited choice of appearances in the form of either a Male or a Female explorer.  As you roam around the world however you encounter lots of other minifigures.  Some of them are friendly and simply walking up to them allows you to collect their appearance, and others are more aggressive and you have to defeat them to collect theirs.  In either case these minifigures that you have met go into the same “coin store” as the prefabs you encounter, and from there you can spend your coins to unlock their appearance items.  At any point while playing you can swap around your look by changing out the various parts that make up a minifigure including head, body, arms, hands, legs, hat, cape, and assorted hair slot options.  So far while roaming around I have managed to run into twenty one different figures, ranging from Yeti to a Surfer Girl.  Each of them gave me various unique bits to add to my assortment of appearance items allowing me to assemble some fairly strange looks.

This for example is the caveman beard and hair combination, with the wizard cape, skull head and outlaw body parts.  I got tired of this look pretty quickly but the beauty of the system is that you can swap things out on the fly and incorporate new pieces you might find as you are roaming around.  I feel like that is this games strong point is that it really rewards exploration.  While roaming around you encounter all sorts of vehicles and animals that you can ride on.  Like everything else once you encounter it, you can purchase it in the coin store to permanently unlock it’s appearance.  Once you have paid for an vehicle or mount like this, you can then summon it to your location at any point.  This means if I want to ride around on a polar bear I can on a whim, or summon a racing bike, or even an airplane.  The more you explore the easier exploration gets as you have all sorts of modes of transportations to get you where you need to go.  Also while you explore there are special large chests that have items that you can collect like weapons and other items to help you in your adventures.  Since I favor melee I am right now using a big club to bash things, but there is also a rifle and a bow that I have managed to find as well to allow you to attack things at range.

Interesting Exploration

One of the most interesting vehicles that I encountered was this Ninjago inspired drill car vehicle.  With it comes the special ability to hold A while driving it to drill the terrain.  There are a few pitfalls with this vehicle, namely that it always seems to want to drill directly down.  That said I had quite a bit of fun tearing up the terrain and drilling under a mountain.  Now getting back OUT of that area was more of a challenge.  This vehicle from what I can tell only appears in the similarly “ninjago” themed Biome, meaning the one with the cherry blossom trees and the huge pagoda like buildings.  Other vehicles similarly spawn in unique biomes, like the Airplane appears to only be in the snowy biome, and the “Monster Fighters” style Roadster only appears in the desert/Egyptian biome with the free roaming Mummies.  Essentially each biome seems to be based on a popular family of Lego sets and generally contains creatures that you might also find in that set.  The only one that seems to make zero sense so far is that Cavemen and Cavewomen seem to spawn damned near everywhere.

The game right now is very “early access” and I do not mean necessarily that the game feels “beta” and buggy, but more so  that the game feels like it is missing a lot of features that will be in what I hope is the final version.  Right now there does not seem to be much purpose to the exploration other than to unlock items to build with.  The problem there is that there seems to be little to no reason to really build anything.  There are certain biomes where skeletons spawn infinitely during the night cycles, but building a structure does not really seem to present you with much shelter against the endless waves of them.  For the time being the  game is strictly single player, but I know multiplayer is in the works.  Right now the list of things planned from the Steam page includes…

• Like/Dislike system for tailoring World Generation
• Procedurally Generated Underground Cave Networks
• LEGO ID integration to allow for sharing and uploading of in-game builds
• Additional Biomes
• Painting Themes
• Pre-Generated Towns/Villages/Settlements relevant to the Biome
• Updated AI Behaviors to provide organic feeling to free-roaming creatures and characters
• Red Brick Extras
• Full liquid behaviors
• Additional Minifigure Characters and Creatures
• Additional Vehicles and Pre-Built Models
• Additional Weapons
• Cut/Copy/Paste chunks of landscape
• Underwater Gameplay (including Vehicles, Creatures and additional sea life)
• Character Customizer
• Online Multiplayer”

So as you can see they pretty much intend to flesh this game out to be competitive with the Minecraft genre.  For $14.99 it was more than enjoyable enough roaming around and interacting with things.  However if you are looking for a complete game, keep moving on.  There really is not much “game” to be had here and in that aspect you are far better off for the time being playing Trove because it offers a lot of the same fun and exploration gameplay, while also offering an actual game that creates reasons for your exploration and combat.  This is planned to stay in Early Access throughout 2015, and by the time it launches next year it is probably going to be an awesome experience.  The biggest suggestion I have if you plan on giving it a try is to hook up a controller, because the keyboard and mouse control options are pretty frustrating.  The user interface has been designed for a controller and that experience seems to be the most enjoyable.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Lego Worlds Impressions