Ashgar

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AggroChat #70 – Calibrating “Main Gun”

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massEffectGarrus

This week we are joined by Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen, with Kodra having to deal with some family stuff.  I was not certain how much we would have to talk about, but like always we managed to fill a show full of all sorts of games that we had been playing.  Thalen starts it off talking about his further adventures into the Magic Duels free to play game.  Similarly with the launch of Fallout Shelter for android he has started playing that as well.  Finally he talks about the recent Fantastic Four event in Marvel Heroes and how The Thing is the tankiest of tanks.  Tam spent the day at an Infinity Tournament and talks about just how awesome the Seattle minature gaming scene has been.

Grace talks about her recent swap to spending most of her time in Wildstar and the excitement surrounding the impending free to play drop that is now on the public test server.  Additionally she talks about her recent foray into the PVP system, and how generally cool the community seems to be surrounding it.  While board games are normally the territory of Kodra, Grace mentions the Exploding Kittens card game and how much fun she has had with it since receiving it.  Ashgar has followed in Tam’s footsteps and talks about his experiences playing Sword Art Online Hollow Fragment.  Ash has also started on a brand new playthrough of Mass Effect with the intent of carrying one save game from one all the way through three.  This of course spawns a conversation where we talk about our experiences with the Mass Effect series.  

Finally I talk about my recent return to Rift, and my obsessions with Hellgate London.  Additionally we talk about next weeks show, where we plan on talking about the storyline of the Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward expansion.  We have purposefully kept discussion of plot points to a minimum, but we feel it is generally safe enough to start talking about where we think the game is going.  We are announcing this ahead of time for the purpose of letting our listeners and readers join in the fun.  Do you have any interesting theories or are there parts of the story that you didn’t quite grasp?  We are taking in questions via email for this coming show, and we will go over them on the air.  I should be a lot of fun and it is our first real attempt to do something like this.

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On Tam’s 11 Questions

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Blaugust Post #14

I realize this isn’t how this is supposed to work, but I found his pretty thought-provoking.

1. What is the best spell to cast?
If I were to be practical, a healing spell, but that’s boring. My actual answer is Shapechange. I feel like there are a lot of problems that have easy solutions if you can turn into a dragon, you just need to watch out for hero-types that get the wrong ideas.

2. What food item(s) from a game do you want to eat above any others?
Dirge’s Kickin’ Chimaerok Chops seem like something that has to be tried. It took me a lot of work to get the recipe for those, and chimaeroks went nearly extinct with the Cataclysm, making this an incredibly rare delicacy. The only part that bothers me is that it requires Goblin Rocket Fuel.

3. You’ve got an infinite supply of one consumable, and can never carry any others. Which consumable do you choose?
Teleport Scrolls seem like they would be handy, especially if it’s one of the types that lets you go to any familiar place, not just somewhere you mark as “home”.

On Tam’s 11 Questions

4. You have to choose a race and class that you’re never played seriously before. What do you pick?
I pretty much only play humans in games where there are no other options at all, and I tend not to play straightforward mage-types, but I really don’t see either of these changing anytime soon. I haven’t really ever played Orcs, so I might give something like an Orc Bard a shot.

5. What game did you think you would hate but actually loved?
It took a lot of convincing to get me to play the first Borderlands, as it released when I was in a state of thinking I hated First-Person Shooters. (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 came out the same year, and I wasn’t a fan of that series.) Borderlands was amusing, and fun to play, and the wide variety of weapons made it awesome for me (even if Vladov is the best manufacturer). Co-op also helped in a big way.

6. What game did you think you would love but actually hated?
Darkest Dungeon. This seemed like it should be the kind of game that I liked, being a party-based roguelike with a unique art style, but I couldn’t stand actually playing it. In addition to my other problems with it, it bothers me on a few levels that characters develop mental afflictions from stress.

7. Pick a zone from any game to live in. Why?
I’d probably get annoyed by the elves eventually, but Gridania seems like it would be a pretty nice place to be. It’s nice and foresty without being quite as potentially lethal as the non-city shroud zones.

On Tam’s 11 Questions

8. You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why?
I believe Thalen and Tam are correct in identifying that Warriors are an issue, but I think the class that needs to go is Barbarian/Berserker because classes like that limit what warriors can do. Making a class that is “like warrior, but gets mad” doesn’t do anyone any favors, just give warriors actual options, one of which might include “gets mad”.

9. What’s your favorite story?
The Odyssey. This is one of the few pieces of classic literature that High School English didn’t make me hate.

10. What hobby does no one (yet) know you have?
A few people do know this, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it to a wider audience. I’m a bit of a musician and played trombone throughout most of high school and all of college. I’m currently in a location where practicing that is something that just isn’t going to happen, and I’m (slowly) learning to play bass.

11. What’s your favorite secret shame?
I have a general fondness for musicals. I have the soundtracks to several (including Rent, Wicked, and Starlight Express) in my music library. This has resulted in some really odd reactions from roommates and family members.

12. Why can’t Ashgar count to 11?
I’m a programmer, and off-by-one errors are one of the 2 hard things in computer science.

On Tam’s 11 Questions

On Comic Market

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Blaugust Post #13

Starting today (August 14), the 88th semi-annual Comiket starts in Tokyo. This event, held twice a year in August and December, is one of the major times that Japanese indie games release, and this one looks to be no different. Edelweiss (The developers of Astebreed) put together a trailer of all of the games at this summer’s Comiket; it’s over an hour long. Astebreed itself came out at Comiket 83, about 3 years ago.

Japanese media has a bit of a different relationship with fan works than American media tends to, with games and other media based on preexisting characters existing in a sort of “official unofficial” state. I mention this because the start of that video is about 15 minutes of games using the characters from the Touhou series, itself an example of a Doujin title. The “team” behind the Touhou series, Team Shanghai Alice, is really just one person. The next main game in that series is also coming out at Comiket.

On Comic Market
To go along with this, Steam is having a sale this week on a variety of games out of Comiket in years past. It’s also worth mentioning that Playism tends to pick these up earlier, and is even responsible for bringing some of them to Steam. It’s currently the only place you can pick up an actual Touhou game without importing (it’s still in Japanese). Prior to digital distribution, there was almost no way for most of the games shown to cross the Pacific, as actual physical CDs are sold at Comiket. Mostly this has meant piracy is the only way people get to play, but I’m hoping the modern internet can change that. After all, more people are lazy than cheap.

On Class Selection

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Blaugust Post #12

Q: You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why?

A: Warrior. Replace with something more interesting than ‘guy who hits people with sharp objects’.

Thalen wrote the above this morning, and it inspired this post. A while back, the developers of Mass Effect revealed various statistics about how people play their games. (Some spoilers for ME3 at that link.) It turns out that a very large number of people play the game as the basic Soldier, which was somewhat disappointing to me. In a game that has 6 class options with varying unique abilities, the one that “just shoots people” struck me as utterly boring. It remains one of two classes I haven’t played a Mass Effect game as (at least single-player).

Unexpected Brilliance

Mass Effect 3 wasn’t just a single player game; it has one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve ever played. It wasn’t quite so good at launch, but by the time I actually got into the game a year later, they’d added so much to the multiplayer that it was nearly unrecognizable. You have the same selection of classes from the main game, with a stripped down selection of abilities at the start (and honestly I don’t think I like most of the starting ability sets). What later patches brought was the ability to unlock additional characters with varied power sets. They’re still divided into Soldier, Engineer, etc., but some of them are different races with different strengths and weaknesses, and even the human unlockables tend to be pretty non-standard. The differences are pretty extreme in some cases, with the N7 Shadow infiltrator having a shadowstep and being more about murder with a sword than a sniper rifle (although it can do that too).

This brings me to my earlier point: Some of the soldiers in the multiplayer bring variety and interest to what would otherwise be the most boring class. (They’re still the class about shooting things.) There are two variations on slow, unstoppable powerhouse types in the Geth Juggernaut and the N7 Destroyer. The Juggernaut is large and slow with well above average health and shields, but comes with an immunity to instant kills and the highly damaging Siege Pulse power . The Destroyer is a mobile weapons platform, with the ability to slow its own movement in tradeoff for increased damage and accuracy, while also launching homing missiles at things that come too close. At the other end of the spectrum is the jetpack-equipped Turian Havok, capable of using its stimulant pack ability to run around the battlefield faster than any class that can’t teleport (i.e. the aforementioned Shadow and almost all of the Vanguards).

Lessons to Learn

I feel like certain other games are learning from examples like this. D&D5 comes to mind immediately, with subclass-like options for all of the base classes. Even Fighters get in on the game, with options I’m going to call “Standard”, “Battlemages are fun”, and “I liked 4e’s Warlord”. (On a semi-related note, there are a bunch of ways to make a character that can both hit things and cast spells, which one is primary mostly depends on what class you’re using to start.) I’d kind of like it if other games could use a bit of this, and make the “basics” not always so basic.