Belghast – Page 763

Savior of New York

March 14, 2016 by Belghast

Mostly Done

Yesterday we continued on out in the garage and did a much more prodding and tedious detail pass. This meant sitting down and sorting through old boxes that we had not seen in nearly a decade. Among the treasures I uncovered was my Gameboy SP as well as pretty much all of my Gameboy Advance cartridges. I literally had no clue where that was, and the last time I remembered having it was in a car that we traded off long ago. I had feared that I simply forgot to remove it from under the drivers seat… because for a long while it was my “waiting on my wife to finish at school” from a time when we regularly drove in together. Apparently we did in fact pull it out of the car, and it sat in this trash bag filled with lots of other stuff we hurriedly pulled from that car before we traded it off. This is apparently a tradition of ours because not only did we find a bag for when we traded off the Pontiac Grand Am… but also a bag from when we traded off like two other vehicles as well. I also found entire boxes of stuff that I apparently packed up when leaving previous jobs and never bothered to go through. These boxes were full of countless pay stubs and health plan documents… so a good chunk of my yesterday was sitting down listening to podcasts and shredding all the documents.

One of the gems of the day was the above image… a box of essentially all of our ancient cell phones. These pretty much represented our pre-smartphone era and those Nokia 5160s were our very first phones that we used for ages. We also found a bunch of extra face plates… since you could swap them out so easily. The positive about these ancient phones is the fact that we didn’t even really have texting plans on any of them, so there isn’t really data worth harvesting so we can dispose of them pretty easily. My friend Squirrel suggested that he would love to have them, for target practice. Unfortunately by the time he posted that I had already disposed of the entire box. Probably my favorite of that era was the weird white LG flip phone, largely because it had a clock visible on its face without actually opening it. Another interesting find was my “art box” which is a big wooden box that was crammed with all of my watercolor and pen and ink stuff from college. Another strange thing was the truly insane number of World of Warcraft trading game cards that I found stuffed pretty much everywhere. For awhile it was habit to pick up a pack anytime I needed to go to the store… and apparently they just sat around everywhere. At some point I will sift through them all and gather up all of the leftover in game codes to give away to readers or something. They are mostly the “toy” variety, like Path of Cenarus or Illidan or maybe some Pet Biscuits. Still the sort of thing is fun to have if you don’t otherwise have access to them. The strangest thing about the weekend… is I think because we were so tired anyways from the cleaning, I can’t say that losing an hour has really had much effect on me.

Don’t Panic

I spent essentially the rest of the weekend playing The Division. At this point I have logged about thirty four hours since launch, and am sitting just a little past level fourteen. The game still feels very fresh, and it is funny how much my play style has changed as I have moved into the game. Early on I thought I would be super tanky and focus on things that let me survive in an open firefight, but in truth the longer I play the more sniper I become. Right now I am running around with a Covert SRS for sniping purposes and generally dealing lots of damage quickly to targets that are far away from me, and then when they get into closer range I swap to a Police M4 which can whittle down enemies with focused bursts. This works amazingly well against pretty much every enemy type but snipers. Those guys… are pretty much the bane of my existence because they are trying to play the same game I am, and generally the computer is better at it. So I spend a lot of my time trying to get out of line of sight from the snipers while mopping everything else up… and then play this game of chicken popping in and out of cover and trying to quick scope them before popping back down like a prairie dog. The worst snipers so far are the Rikers because they just seem more brutal in every possible way. That said it might simply be that they are the highest level enemies I can encounter currently.

On the podcast Saturday night we got into this long discussion about the morality of The Division, and how it made the other AggroChat folks feel uneasy. I can’t say that I am experiencing this at all, because like always I am writing my own narrative of my character as I go… and the fact that this is a silent protagonist game really helps that for me. So as i move around the city, I am the big damned hero cleaning up the city and saving people. I am absolutely the good guys in my tale, but then again as they said Saturday so are the Cleaners, who absolutely think they are doing what is right for the city. I guess for me I just love how rich this setting is… all of the little details like the graffiti that I am showcasing in the photos for today’s post is just amazing. I think the key difference is… that I never really fully immerse myself into a game setting. It is always a game that I am playing, and always a story where I am the hero. Even if I am not supposed to be… I am building a narrative compatible with my notion that in spite of whatever actions I am taking, I am doing it for some greater good. In the Division I absolutely rush to save hostages, or citizens being held up by looters, because it makes me feel like the hero I am trying to be. When you do a random encounter on the street you are given bonuses for various things… and when I see that survivor bonus it always makes me happy. I also spend a lot of my time going through abandoned buildings so I can make sure I always have whatever item citizens ask for when I come across one in need. I am the one making the city a better place, and I am comfortable with that stance. I guess that might be why I like the post apocalyptic genre so much, is because the world is in such a screwed up state… that there are so many ways for me to help fix it. Even if fixing means simply hunting down the biggest baddest warlord… and putting a bullet in his skull.

Someday Arrived

March 13, 2016 by Belghast

Ameristralia

Yesterday was somewhat of an insane day, for so many different reasons. Firstly we had to get up and around rapidly because we had a 10 am wedding to attend, and all the while every bit of technology of my website seemed to be rebelling against me. I struggled to upload any images because apparently their were going through a FTP attack that was busying things out. I managed to limp by and get a post up in spite of the problems. The wedding itself was located out in the middle of nowhere, but that in itself is not what makes it an interesting occasion. One of my wife’s friends met a man from Australia through their social channels, and over the last few years they have been travelling to the two countries to meet family and such. Finally getting married here in America where they intend to live. What is just so flabbergasting about this whole thing… is just how many members of his family attended. I lost count but there were somewhere between sixteen and twenty folks from Australia at the wedding… and all I could think about was just how expensive those plane tickets must have been. Just doing some quick googling it looks like roughly $1300 per flight… which means… well for lack of a better phase this family really loves him.

The wedding was charming, and the bride was beautiful and all that… however the focus of at least my entertainment was this adorable free range kid. Her mom and dad were family of the groom that were acting as photographers for the event. I am guessing that the kid wanted to emulate mom and dad so they gave her a small digital camera… which she then proceeded to go around and take photos of everyone. It was adorable to see her walk up beside my pew, pause for a second and snap a photo before moving on… all without saying a word. She obviously was not having any of the service and wanted to roam around while the wedding was actually going on. I’ve always disliked weddings, I think mostly because for a period of time in my past I worked them with my father. My dad was a portrait and wedding photographer on the side… and I was his assistant and ended up operating the long angle photos set up in a balcony or whatever was available. It is always awkward attending weddings where you don’t really know anyone… and yesterday was absolutely one of those situations. I ended up getting a very strange hug from the grandmother of the bride, thanking us for attending. Thankfully it was over in about an hours time, and we ducked out shortly after the reception started.

So Much Sore

If the yearly bullshit ritual of daylight savings time were not today… I am sore in places I don’t even remember working yesterday. A few months ago we set the goal of tackling our garage over spring break, and to facilitate this we got a dumpster. You have to understand… we don’t use our garage and it has largely been a catch all over the last several years. Anytime we simply wanted something out of our sight… we threw it in the garage thinking “someday” we would take it to the dump, or donate it to goodwill or whatever. Apparently that someday is finally here and on Thursday night when we started… the overwhelming nature of the amount of crap out there was real. I somewhat wish I had taken a before picture but the above image is after a few nights and a half day worth of cleaning. Yesterday was the day we got the bulk of the big things out of there… either into the dumpster or in the two trips I made to Goodwill. About five years ago we had this strange summer when the spider population quadrupled… and apparently their base of operations was our garage. This made it even less appealing to go out there and try and reclaim the space because quite literally you were likely to walk into bits of cobweb spun from wall to wall. We however tried our best to ignore the eight legged infestation that was everywhere… and pushed forward only lamenting later the number of bites we are certain to have gotten… and the constant unshakable feeling that something is crawling on us.

The first photo may not look that impressive, but imagine every single corner of that place packed so that you could not move anywhere without crawling over something first. We had two benches, a dresser, a ferret cage, a hamster cage, and a truly silly number of electronics boxes that I felt for some reason I needed to keep in case something went wrong. On top of that we still had the remnants of the last time we attempted to clean the garage with several boxes, that were neatly sorted and full of obviously important things to us at one point. Then there were the number of things that were inexplicably in the garage and brand new still in package… like an Iced Tea pot, Smoothie Blender, and a tower fan… all neither of us remember having but were probably given to us at one point or another. It had quite literally been a decade since we last actively used our garage and it was like delving into a time capsule. As I said the brute force stuff is mostly taken care of, and at one point we had to make a trip to Big Lots to go purchase the cheapest vacuum we could find… because we decided we would rather not have the good house vacuum full of spiders and for some strange reason dead earthworms. Today we can at least sit down with boxes of stuff and try and sort things out. I think the first mission however is to look at some shelving for one of the walls so that we can neatly stow things out of the way rather than just have boxes laying around everywhere. Needless to say…. Yesterday and Today will both be gaming lite days.

AggroChat #98 – Sociopath or Savior?

May 21, 2019March 13, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen talk about a lot of games, and get into a moral debate about the world of The Division.

This evening we had a pretty strange show as far as subjects go. It feels like we can never just talk about how much we like this or that game without delving into deeper subjects. First up we talk Stardew Valley and how it has seemed to take the internet by a storm… or at least most of our social circles. Next up we talk The Division and instead of getting into a discussion about what we liked about it…. we ended up getting into a discussion about the morality of dispatching extrajudicial executions. Eventually we do however get into a thread about the things we really enjoy about the game. We also talk a bit about the bad news of the week relating to the cancellation of Everquest Next and the severe layoffs at Carbine for Wildstar. This spawns a discussion about MMOs in general and their viability for the future. Finally we talk about the new Flamestrike event going on in Infinity allowing players to participate in a larger campaign through the internet.

Topics Discussed:

Stardew Valley
The Division
Wildstar News
Everquest Next
Infinity Flamestrike

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Bad News Day

March 12, 2016 by Belghast

Goodbye Everquest Next

Yesterday the MMORPG industry received a couple of really bad bits of news. Firstly Daybreak Games has officially announced that Everquest Next is no more, and that they would be rushing Landmark into “launched” status this spring. Firstly it really should not come as any surprise that this is happening because in truth we have not had any substantive news about “Next” since SOE Live 2014. So when Storybricks parted company in February 2015 and SOE was sold to the holding company that renamed it to Daybreak… I fully expected we would never see anything further from Next. Storybricks was going to be the guts of this new approach at how to create an MMO and allow it o almost center around procedural interactions with he various factions and NPCs in the game. With that core gone… I could not reason how the game would function, and deliver even half of the lofty promises it had made. The other huge concern was the fact that Daybreak now seemed like a company desperately trying to survive under the yolk of evil overlords. When a company known for grooming technology for sale purchases a game company… it seems like creative freedom and the broad daydreaming that got SOE where it is today would be the firs thing to go.

The concerns I have is that it feels like Landmark is getting foisted upon us, in an unfinished state. It had been a couple of years since I last played the game and I popped in last night to see just how different it is. In truth it still feels like the prototype game that it has always felt like. I roamed around and collected items and then logged back out because I wasn’t really drawn to stay. The thing I love about Landmark is the community, and I am just hoping that through all of this transition they can manage to keep that intact. The problem I have with Landmark is that it is a fun sandbox that lets you build really interesting structures…. but I still wouldn’t really call it a game but instead more of a toybox. Sure you have the trappings of combat now, but while wandering around in the zone the game dumped me in…. there was actually nothing to fight. Maybe I need to dig down to find that, but the only thing I actually encountered that was potentially damaging were some exploding shrooms. I am hoping that in the few months left before the official launch that they can somehow pull together some of the ideas from Next and make Landmark a proper game experience.

Wildstar Falters

The other concerning news from yesterday is that roughly sixty employees were laid off in a “restructuring” within Carbine. This has honestly been a topic among some of my friends for awhile now, but we were dreading some form of action to be taken. Wildstar has not been performing amazingly well… in fact they are performing far worse right now than with City of Heroes was shut down by NC Soft. As a company goes they are notoriously brutal when it comes to closing titles that they deem are not operating as well as they expected. Wildstar is a significantly better game today than it was at launch, and the Free to Play conversion was more than just a payment model change, but an entire reworking and re-tuning of some of the game concepts. The game felt fresh and new and was exciting… for a period of time. The problem is, that Wildstar is just not my game. I have good friends who love it above all others, and for them it hurts a lot to see the company struggling. Every now and then there is just a game that does not for whatever reason “click”, and that was this game for me. On paper it sounds and looks like everything I could have wanted in a game, and I still think it has one of the best implementations of player housing I have ever seen. Unfortunately I just don’t ever have the desire to play it, and always seemed to prioritize playing something else over it.

The scariest statement about the whole press release is this line. “These cuts are directly tied to WildStar’s evolution from a product in development to a live title“. That right there seems to be signalling the end of active development on Wildstar and shifting the title into maintenance mode. An MMORPG cannot thrive without fresh dose of new content, and while you can do things like add new quests and script events without a lot of active development…. you can’t do things like roll out new zones and raids. Admittedly the game is getting fresh content with the release of Arcterra, and hopefully this will not effect that. The other worrying statement is that apparently there were statements floating around that the employees were told to expect more layoffs in the future. So much happens when layoffs are announced, and there is an internet dog piling of bad blood towards a game. I have nothing but love for Wildstar and its community and I want it to weather this storm and somehow bounce back stronger. I am clinging to hope because I know a lot of people who really need this game to succeed and thrive. All of that said… the cynic an realist in me still keeps saying that this is not going to end well.