Tales of the Aggronaut

Short, Linear and Lacks Replayability

Yesterday I stumbled across a good video from Jasyla of Cannot be Tamed.  In it she questioned exactly when the terms “Short”, “Linear” and “Lacks Replaybility” became negative monikers for games.  It all stems back to her looking up a review of Parasite Eve from when the game was actually released and expands out from there.  She makes the point that games that have a tight and direct narrative are often preferable to long messy open world games for her.  She makes some really excellent points, but the main point  I was reminded of is the fact that “game reviews” are only really useful if it is a person very much like yourself that is reviewing the game.  There are no objective measurements for a video game, or quite frankly any other piece of entertainment.  What is a negative to one person is a positive to another person.  When I review something I try and touch on a bunch of the points because I realize not everyone is wired quite the same way I am.

Personally I tend to favor those long rambly open world games, and do pretty much everything I can do to avoid actually progressing the storyline.  In the video she mentioned Witcher 3 which turns out is a game very much in my wheelhouse, in that it has allowed me to pretty effectively ignore the narrative of the game and revert back to my base state of wandering around aimlessly and enjoying the world.  I’ve put in around twenty hours and I just now moved to the next zone.  I prefer games that I can lose myself in the random bits of neatness that the game has to offer, and if you allow me to jump off the path…  chances are I am going to do it as soon as possible.  My first playing of Skyrim for example…  I had to back track later to find the stones that allowed you to choose your “path” because from the moment I got control of my mouse I was off on my own ignoring what the NPCs were telling me to do.

Steam Devaluation

All of this said I am coming to appreciate more narrative “ride” games that present a clear concise “movie like” experience.  It is not the sort of thing I want to play on a regular basis, but if a game is elevated to a point where everyone seems to be playing it I will give it a go.  The irony is one of my biggest praises of Final Fantasy XIV is for its clear and concise storytelling.  The difference there is that this main storyline is a “feature” of the game and not the entirety of the game itself.  There are absolutely times I want to sit back and be told a story, but there are other times when I want to be out in the world making my own… and I guess in part I expect a game to give me both experiences, at the very least if they are going to earn my $60.  So while “short”, “linear” and “lacks replayability” seems like an odd admonishment … I do find myself paying attention to it, simply because it helps me file a game into one of several bins.

I have talked about this in the past, but for me to be willing to plunk down $60 and pre-order a title when it comes out… it has to be offering pretty much the total package.  Jasyla has this great series of videos called “Short Games for Busy People” but they also all have one thing in common other than the duration.  They are all relatively cheap titles, and I am more than willing to spend $5 for a four hour game experience, but I may not be willing to pay $60 or even $30 for that same experience.  One of the biggest disappointments over the last several years was in the ID Software game Rage… not because the game did not provide me a very interesting experience, but instead that it was too short of one.  Granted I went into the game mostly expecting “Fallout” by ID, so that was strike one… but the game itself provided this really interesting game world that I wanted to roam around in…  but trapped me in a super short story arc that felt abruptly ended.  Had I spent even $10 on that game… I would have been completely happy with my experience, but I was frustrated that I spent that $60 preorder on it.

Value Proposal

In order for me to be happy with spending full price on a game I need to be able to milk at least  30 hours out of it, and that is actual content…  not just chasing achievements.  This means I tend to lean towards big open world “exploration porn” type game experiences.  My favorite “modern” games are those of the Fallout Series because they let me wander around aimlessly and explore the world at my own pace.  While I am getting used to the narrative train ride, I still have this instinctual frustration anytime I am locked into a length intro story cut scene.  I remember the first time I played God of War III I kept thinking to myself “why won’t they just let me play the damned game?”.  There are times I need to temper this instinct, when I know if I allow myself the time I will enjoy the story.  For example I am trying to go back and play the modern Batman games because I think I will ultimately like the story arc.  Similarly I really want to play the Uncharted games, but I struggle with their “on rails” sequence of event based game play.

Ultimately all of this said… I will never damn a game and treat it as worthless just because it does not align to my personal preferences.  This is why I guess I struggle with writing “game reviews” because really I tend to focus on the positive aspects of most games because I know going into it… that my particular preference in gaming, does not necessarily represent anyone other than myself.  In truth the fact that I surround myself with a group of fairly diverse gaming tastes in the form of AggroChat on a weekly basis drives this home regularly.  All of this said I still do find reviews like this valuable in that they help me decide if I am willing to plunk down my dollar at release, or instead wait until the first, second or third steam sale to offer the game.  The Steam Devaluation is a real thing, in part because at this point we all have such a back log of games that we are NOT playing.  Then again the ability to actually “beat” a game has never ranked very hire on my meters.  What I look for is a bit of escapism and the ability to wallow around in a world that is not my own for awhile.  For me personally nothing beats an experience that lets me explore new places while harmlessly venting my bloodlust.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Steam Devaluation

Last night I got a little piece of advice from Syp, who said that I should take care of myself and that no one would care if I took a few days off.  I greatly appreciate the sentiment, and while I feel like this is probably the most brilliant idea…  I am not likely to do it.  In part this “every morning” thing is a much needed routine in my life.  Much like dreams are a way for us to sort through the days events, in many ways this morning blog post is a way to reorder my thoughts before I start a new day.  While it started with the goal of “write more content” It has wound up somewhere in a therapeutic space.  Getting up every morning and writing something…  is important to me in ways I don’t fully grasp.  Additionally I have now done this two and a half years roughly, so another part of me simply does not want to “break the chain”.  I am however likely to fiddle with my format a bit until my wrist is fully healed.

Extreme Whales

Right now we are in this limbo area where people are still in the process of gearing in order to be able to do higher level content.  To do Alexander the first raid you must be ilevel 170, which means you need to have a full set of Tomestone of Law gear with at least one upgraded item.  Since I only hit 60 a few days ago I am not quite there yet.  As of last night I managed to hit ilvl 166 and in theory should be able to upgrade another piece of gear tonight if I manage to get any play time.  For awhile now I have filled in for the Wednesday night raid group, which was admittedly a bit of an imposition when I was still raiding in World of Warcraft…  but now is not so much.  Wednesday night is generally speaking a pretty good night for me to raid considering that my wife is off at church for a large chunk of it.  So as we move forward into Heavensward I am probably going to offer myself as a more permanent part of that group.  Since we could not do Alexander we set our sights last night on Bismarck Extreme, which only has a requirement that individuals be level 60.

The fight is in essence a series of dps checks, because apparently the island we are standing on gets more and more battered as the fight goes on.  At a base level the fight works pretty much the same as it does on hard, except for the fact that you realistically need to get down the back scale during the first chain phase.  I feel like Wulf and I made a lot of progress on learning this fight as tanks, with the hardest part being the elemental snake swap.  The snakes send out a debuff that makes it so that players need to be dpsing the snake of the opposite color of the buff they currently have.  This means tanks also need to swap targets, and at first we were trying to meet in the middle and trade off, but it seems that quite honestly this is a job for provoke.  Right before a potential swap Wulf and I would target each others snakes and then hit the taunt if we saw that we needed to.  Thankfully it seems to work magically, because normally speaking “just taunting” has minimal effect in this game when it comes to swapping targets.

While we beat the first dps check, we consistently failed at the second one… which is burning down the elemental snakes before hitting the point of no return where the skies to dark… and Bismarck nukes us into oblivion.  Thankfully each of us still has a lot more gear we can get so we are simply hitting a gear wall.  I think if we get enough upgrade pieces in the next week we will totally rock this fight and down us the first extreme primal of the expansion.  Then we will move on to Ravana Extreme… that happens to drop the best weapons in the game currently.  I have to say I had a blast with the fight, and it was awesome working with Wulf.  The few times I had tanked for the WoW raid, it was when he happened to be out for the night, so I think this might be the first time we have actually worked together in progression content.  In part I somewhat hope we have the people to pull this together for an attempt on Saturday during the pre-podcast raid block.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Extreme Whales

False Starts

Yesterday I made an attempt to go to work, but ultimately was told to head home by my boss.  Over the last few days I have been pretty much living on the couch with my leg slightly elevated and alternating icepacks on it.  The problem being that I don’t exist like this in the real world, where sitting at a desk generally requires that your feet be on the ground.  While I love the arrangement of my cube at work, it really does not allow for me to elevate my leg at all.  Not surprisingly within an hour of being at work my knee was swelling something fierce.  So I headed home and started the process of icepacks over again until it started to behave somewhat normally.  The positive is however that the area that is actually swelling is rather small and contained as compared to the day the fall happened, so I guess I am recovering quickly.

The biggest problem, the one that effects this blog is the fact that my wrist has hurt an awful lot.  After struggling through yesterday mornings post, I was pretty much typing one handed for most of the day.  I wore a brace most of yesterday and as of this morning it is feeling much better.  It is still extremely tender when I move my wrist too quickly or to any extreme of motion…  but overall it is more functional.  Hopefully this means I can return to normal typing instead of this frustrating one handed mess that I dealt with yesterday.  Since it is also my “mouse hand” that is effected I have been surprised that really using a mouse doesn’t hurt much at all.  I guess in general I am used to keeping my mouse sensitivity so high that I barely have to move my hand at all to send the cursor flying across the screen.  Hopefully today will be a much better day and I will continue to mend quickly.

The Gearing Game

Like most players in Final Fantasy XIV, my life revolves around the acquisition of Tomestones of Law.  To get a full set of “law” gear it takes roughly 3500 and they have given us many options on how to get them.  Firstly there are three dungeons that reward 80 tomestones each, and an additional 40 if you can manage to catch someone who still has their first time bonus or “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it.  In addition to that you get 100 tomestones for both a low level roulette and a high level roulette each day, and an additional 60 for a trial roulette.  The one that surprises me however is that Expert Roulette is only worth 80, but I guess in theory it has a face value of 160 to 200 since you are getting stones from the dungeon proper as well.  In order to get into Alexander, the raid that just opened players need to reach a combined ilevel of 170 which also happens to be the level of the tomestone gear.  So in theory you need a full set in order to step through its doors.

Where you can cheat a bit is through those ubiquitous “Clan Hunts” that I have been using as filler leveling.  It turns out all of the items needed to upgrade your gear from 170 to 180 come from Centurio Seals.  Hopefully you have been doing these religiously because in order to get a full set of gear upgraded to the next step it is going to take a grand total of 2795 seals.  Now granted you can hop on the hunt train like you could in the previous expansion and in theory grind this out in a weekend.  Personally I happen to find the daily hunt mechanic rather relaxing, as I can log in… fly around the gorgeous zones and pick off the mobs one at a time.  Right now I have four pieces of gear… chest, helm, ring, and weapon.  Currently I have upgraded the weapon and ring to 180, and am saving enough hunt marks to upgrade the chest piece next.   There will come a time when I stop messing with anything other than three star and elite hunt marks, but for the time being they also serve to help level my dragoon for the lower level ones.

Dragoon Dungeoning

Right now if there is a moment when I am not engaged doing something else, or tanking something that can gain me law stones…  I am pretty much in the dungeon queue on my Dragoon.  Right now the dps queue seems relatively manageable sitting around the 10 minute mark for “leveling” dungeons.  As a result it is my hope to ride this queue for as many classes as I can manage.  After running a couple of max level dungeons, I settled into a couple of quick runs on the dragoon who is now up to “Sohm Al” level.  I have to say I find this pretty relaxing as well, because I can just sit back and poke things with a stick.  I opted to go ahead and record my dungeon run to add it to the stack of dungeon videos I have on my youtube channel.  I had not actually recorded any when I was not currently tanking, so it gives a slightly different perspective of the fights.  I have to say I am really digging the “tribal” look that comes from Sohm Al.  That helmet is freaking amazing, and is likely going to go in my glamour bin for future usage.  At this point I am roughly halfway through 53 so I figure it will take two more dungeon runs to hit 54, and then five to six past that before I can do the next dungeon at 55.  Embedding the video and cutting this post short today without a second paragraph.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
The Gearing Game

Strange Dreams

For the last few nights I have had the strangest but at the same time most vivid dreams.  The problem is that they are for the most part utter nonsense.  For example this morning I woke up from a dream involving writer Beau Hindman.  He had reached out to me to ask if I had any gmail invites…  and for those of you for whom that makes zero sense…  Google mail was once upon a time invite only and invites were rationed and carefully guarded.  I told him that I had a couple that I could hand out, and he asked me to send one to someone.  Turns out the person in question was an old man that lived in the small town my wife grew up in.  Apparently Beau really needed to get ahold of this person… and apparently using the phone was just too cumbersome?  Trust me…  I fully understand a lack of wanting to call someone… so I too would probably go through strange lengths to avoid it.

When the guy didn’t accept the invite, I had to drive up to the small town and talk to him in person.  He was afraid that the internet would steal his soul, and by having an email account he would be supporting the terrorists or something.  So I spent the next hour talking him into accepting the invite, all so Beau would be able to contact him.  Sure it is madness, and honestly Beau and I are not even in contact that often, but somewhere in my brain it made all of this make sense.  That is the crazy thing about dreaming… is at the time none of this seems as irrational as it does when you are trying to break it apart later.  I guess Beau got pulled in because I know that he is originally from Oklahoma, and my wife often gets a staring role in my dreams…  so it is strange the way the mind weaves this seemingly plausible tapestry out of bits and pieces of leftover memories.

Nael in the Coffin

Monday nights is traditionally our Final Fantasy XIV raid group night, and last night was no exception.  For months… literally… we have been working on learning the dance on Turn Nine of the Coil of Bahamut.  For a long time now we have been super close to pushing over the edge, and held up on the madness that is the dive bomb phase.  Last night we wanted to defeat Nael by any means necessary so we could move on with our lives.  Not sure if it was true for all of our group, but I have developed a love and hate relationship with this fight, and was more than ready to put it behind me.  One of the features added with Heavensward is the ability to queue for something as an undersized group.  What this does in theory is zone you into a place without scaling your level down to the appropriate place.  What this means in practice is that you can now wreck certain zones for the purpose of collecting those dungeon drops you missed in the past.  Since several of us were sitting at level 60, we decided to give this option a shot on turn nine and see what would happen.

The truth is the very first attempt out of the gate we straight wiped to mechanics and over confidence.  After that it still took us a few tries to get the dance close enough to being correct to be able to finish off the encounter.  The funny thing is… that even with 20% echo and 10 more levels… the fight can still straight up eviscerate you.  I think we managed to down it on our fourth attempt last night, and can now move on with our lives into Final Coil.  On one level it bums me out that we didn’t “do it for real” by facing this encounter at level 50.  On the other hand however I am happy to be done with being in there.  There comes a time when you just get sick of seeing the same encounter over and over, and I remember our group reached that same place back in WoW’s Blackwing Lair with the Firemaw encounter.  It is going to be interesting to see what the next few weeks bring us as far as content goes.  Today is the official launch of Alexander, but as it stands right now… none of us are even vaguely closed to “geared enough” to tackle it.

Ice Packs and Grinding

Yesterday I stayed home from work because I was struggling to walk around.  So my key focus in life became making sure I was ice packing every hour or so for maximum effect.  This meant that most of the day I spent it hanging out on the couch with my leg propped up a bit.  It also means I spent a lot of time piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV.  Throughout the day I worked on getting all of my Clan Hunts for maximum upgrade token goodness, and did all three of my bonus law roulettes, which left a lot of time to work on my Dragoon.  Now previously I had managed to get it to level 51, which is key because that unlocks access to the dungeon Dusk Vigil.  So yesterday I spent the majority of my in game time queueing for Dusk Vigil over and over.  Before raid time last night I was but a sliver away from 53, which should grant me access to the second dungeon… Sohm Al.  The only problem with Dusk Vigil is that technically nothing in it other than the jewelry are strictly upgrades from what I had been wearing.

Sohm Al on the other hand… everything in there should be full of upgradey goodness other than maybe the weapon.  The other good thing about running all these dungeons is that I am able to soak up gear for my alt jobs for when I finally get around to leveling them.  I like that pretty much every dungeon in Heavensward offers an item set, which is unlike the old world where only every so often did a dungeon actually drop something cool looking.  I really want to finish the Dragoon set from Dusk Vigil because it looks kinda amazing.  It is a blue set of armor that looks just like the one that Lucia is wearing in the cut scenes.  In the news of me… well I am largely functioning better thanks to the constant ice packs.  At this point the swelling is down significantly and I am hoping I can function today without a lot of pain.  I am sure come this evening I will need to ice pack once more but for the time being… life seems to be grand, or at least getting there.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Nael in the Coffin