AggroChat

Delving the Sewers

June 15, 2015June 14, 2015 by Belghast

Bloody Happy Place

Last night we were down a handful of people with Thalen and Grace being gone, but by that same token it is mostly a cast of original AggroChat folks. Kodra is back from his traveling and it was awesome to get to spend the night hanging out with him again. We have all been spending quite a bit of time in ArcheAge as we have been taking a break from Final Fantasy XIV right before the launch of Heavensward. We talk about our further impressions of the game, and Kodra talks about his since he quite literally just started today. From there we talk about our expectations for the coming launch of Heavensward and how Ashgar and I apparently have enough faith in the release of this expansion to have taken the day off work. From there we meander into talk about the upcoming Four Job Fiesta, and how all of our listeners should really take Ashgar’s money, since he has put up $5 for every AggroChat listener to defeat the game during the event. There was talk of Wildstar and Tam injuring himself, but we had a grand time just chatting about the games we had been playing.

As promised in the show I also posted a picture of the absolutely amazing Fred from Scooby Doo cosplay by Kodra over on AggroChat so you should totally check that out. The title of the show comes from the fact that I am apparently a sick and twisted bastard. One of the happiest moments I have in video games is when I am zoned out and just mindlessly slaughtering stuff for loot and prizes. This is the reason why I have always been able to grind up levels in video games so effectively and why I so insanely over leveled the various JRPGs I have played. Last night while recording the podcast I found myself cheerfully wrecking undead for a good hour of the time we recorded. I slip into this mode from time to time and just got lost in the motion of combat, and as a result I end up over leveled almost all of the time. It is a happy place… just a very bloody happy place.

Beach Racing

ArcheAge is this collection of really strange systems, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface of figuring them out. Yesterday my friends and I took a trip to Mirage Island, which is this strange second life esc showroom allowing you to buy crafting patterns for all sorts of random stuff. The awesome thing about it however is that you can test drive most of them. So Tamrielo and I went off on a tour of the island on the roadsters. The only problem you have a very limited around of time to use it…. and we did not realize that before running off out into the ocean. There is a giant track around the island… and part of it is a sandbar that cuts out into the middle of hte ocean. The problem is…. this island is really freaking huge. I crashed out of the game that apparently dropped me out of Mirage Island, but poor Tam I don’t think he made it around the sandbar before it despawned the roadster. Luckily we had mounts so at least we didn’t have to walk back home if we got stranded.

The biggest problem I am having with ArcheAge is it seems like there are dozens of currencies that I am accumulating but I have no clue where to spend them. I thought maybe Mirage Island would give me some idea, but I didn’t really find any traditional vendors. Some of the kiosks required various currencies that I had not found yet, but I didn’t find any that took any of the ones I actually had. The takeaway is that ArcheAge is a really strange game. I am still liking it but I don’t feel any closer to actually understanding it. The system I want to try and figure out how is that supposedly you can tame named bosses in the world and turn them into combat pets. There is a tiger in one of the zones I have encountered and I am kinda hoping I can figure out how to trap it. I remember in alpha I got some sort of a fox pet as a drop and it was insanely fun to run around with. Not that it was sturdy enough to tank for me, but it did add some additional damage. Who doesn’t like additional damage right?

Delving the Sewers

A few days ago I stumbled into the first dungeon of the game in the sewers under the City of Towers. I managed to sneak my way through the dungeon, carefully pulling mobs and cleared my way to the first boss… only to get my face rocked. However the trash leading up to that boss dropped some really nice items. Since I have massively out leveled my friends I figured I would revisit the dungeon when some of them got closer to my level. So last night after the podcast we thought we would give the place another shot. Unfortunately after getting Kodra and Tam out there, it looks like the 3 man dungeon had a minimum level requirement of 18. So at this point I was sitting at 27, and Tam at 20… so we decided to try and work our way through it. The first room or so was pretty easy because both of us are dual wielding blenders. The first boss however…. ended up to be just as much of a challenge with the two of us as it was solo. We managed to make it through it however with both of us extremely low in health.

The second boss was significantly easier mechanically, but involved me running around like a madman and kiting him for a bit while Tam finished him off. Then we got to the final boss… and quite frankly it rocked our worlds. It took lots of rethinking the situation and a series of I think ten attempts before we finally just barely managed to defeat the encounter. Quite honestly I have no clue how someone would manage to do this dungeon at 18 with three people, when we technically over leveled the hell out of it. This makes me super anxious however to try the next dungeon, because it was an awesome challenge. The dungeon design like much of the game reminds me of an older era of MMOs. There were moments when I was taken back to the mob density and layout of the dungeons in Dark Age of Camelot. We had to very carefully pick our way through the targets and use line of sight to pull things back in order to make sure we only got the one target we needed. The game is far better than I gave it credit for… and I am hoping to piddle around on the side for awhile.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Delving the Sewers

AggroChat #61 – Bloody Happy Place

May 21, 2019June 14, 2015 by AggroChat

Tonight we are down a handful of people with Thalen and Grace being gone, but by that same token it is mostly a cast of original AggroChat folks. Kodra is back from his traveling and it was awesome to get to spend the night hanging out with him again. We have all been spending quite a bit of time in ArcheAge as we have been taking a break from Final Fantasy XIV right before the launch of Heavensward. We talk about our further impressions of the game, and Kodra talks about his since he quite literally just started today. From there we talk about our expectations for the coming launch of Heavensward and how Ashgar and I apparently have enough faith in the release of this expansion to have taken the day off work. From there we meander into talk about the upcoming Four Job Fiesta, and how all of our listeners should really take Ashgar’s money, since he has put up $5 for every AggroChat listener to defeat the game during the event. There was talk of Wildstar and Tam injuring himself, but we had a grand time just chatting about the games we had been playing.

As promised in the podcast… I now give you Kodra as Fred from Scooby Doo… he does it so perfectly.

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Sequels that were Better

June 15, 2015June 13, 2015 by Belghast

Chris Pratt: Raptor Whisperer

Yesterday I did something fairly uncharacteristic for me and took off a half day from work, just because I felt like it. It was shortly after turning in the paperwork that I realized I should really use this opportunity to go see Jurassic World. So I got my ticket for the 1 pm and settled into the theater expecting it to be largely empty. I was completely wrong, the theater was absolutely packed, so I am guessing I was not the only person with this idea. As far as the movie, I have to say I liked it quite a bit. My initial review was not as good as the original, but better than the sequels, but shortly realized that it sounded like I didn’t like the movie. I actually enjoyed the sequels quite a bit, just nowhere near as much as the original. I remember seeing the original in the theater and being enthralled, and that kind of magic just can’t be captured again.

The movie was enjoyable, but mostly once things started going to shit. The best moments in the movie involved Chris Pratt. He has become this loveable goofball of an action hero, and in many ways he reminds me of he way Harrison Ford played a lot of his action roles. The movie is kind of a big dumb action movie romp through dinosaur land, and I am perfectly fine with this. There were a lot of call backs to the original movie, which played well for a nostalgia factor, but also gave certain aspects of the movie a “been there done that” feel. It was well worth the $5 for the matinee ticket and hell it was probably worth a full priced ticket as well. I have a feeling we will see a reboot of the franchise considering that they left things open in the end for sequels. No one seems to make a one off movie anymore, they have to leave things open to make a desperate ploy for more money later in the form of a sequel.

Sequels that were Better

My initial reaction to Jurassic World being better than the original sequels got me thinking. The concept of a sequel is such that we immediately expect it to be worse than the original. So today I am going to delve into some direct sequels that worked surpassed the original games. Now there are some ground rules here. For example Castlevania Symphony of the Night is a sequel in theory to the original Castlevania… problem being decades passed between those two games so it is a no brainer that SOTN surpasses the original. The same is true for the original Zelda and Link to the Past. It isn’t really fair to talk about those games, because they are not direct sequels and had a lot more to work with than the original did. Similarly I am going to ignore games like Doom 2 and Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny… because they are quite simply the original game with more features added onto it. I feel like in order to declare something a sequel that surpassed the original, it needs to actually go past what the original game offered. I am looking at you Fallout and Fallout 2… because while I enjoyed the second game a lot, it probably should have just been an expansion pack since the engine was essentially the same.

Master of Orion II

I loved the original Master of Orion game, but when the sequel came out it just did everything better. The graphics were higher fidelity, and you could delve into things at a much higher level of detail. The game kept my favorite race the Silicoids and seemed to make them even more badass. Additionally you had the ability to design your own ships, which gave me the fantasy fulfillment of rolling into a star system with a death star and destroying it. The game was far more evolutionary than revolutionary but it surpassed the original in a way that it completely took it off the map. The funny thing is that this game still holds up, and I can still lose an entire afternoon playing it through the GOG galaxy client.

Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest

This is probably going to be the most controversial pick that I make, because people either seem to love this game or absolutely hate it. For me it took a game that I already liked and simply made it matter more. By the time this game came out I was already heavily leaning towards roleplaying games as my primary source of enjoyment. Simon’s Quest took the Castlevania game that I loved and added a persistent component that let me improve over time as I explored the world. Now there were moments in the gameplay where it was not terribly obvious how you should proceed, and these got frustrating apparently in tracking down a couple of draculas parts, but for me at least this is the game that really cemented “Metroidvania”. It was part Castlevania, part Metroid and part Adventure of Link, and melded together in a way that I enjoyed immensely. The critics at the time bashed it because it was not enough like the original Castlevania, and ultimately the third game in the series became more popular, but I still feel like Simon’s Quest was the best of the 8 bit Castlevania games.

Warcraft II

When this game originally came out, I for the most part ignored it. I thought Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans was a boring title, and in truth at the time I would have rather played Dune 2. It was not until the first Battlechest existed that I finally gave this game a chance, and I spent the next three months obsessed with it. The gameplay felt much more responsive and you had so many more options of things that you could build. I’ve always been a base builder when playing an RTS and this game allowed me to go to stupid lengths to build impenetrable fortresses. What really extended the life of the game past the original release however was the fact that you could download all of these user created maps in the form of “PUD” files, which in itself was a bit of a play on the Doom “WAD” file format. After a few months I spent as much time designing new maps for the game as I did playing them. Warcraft 3 really gets credited for the birth of World of Warcraft, but I think this is the game that made us first give a damn about the setting.

Assassins Creed II

First off I have to admit that I am not really a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I have spent a bit of time piddling around in them but quite frankly they don’t offer the mad hack and slash game play that I really crave. Ultimately the game is ruined the moment I need to stealth around and complete a mission. The rest of the time I have a blast killing random guys on rooftops, but that pretty much is ignoring the thing that people seem to like about it the story. I have to give this game credit however because when the first Assassin’s Creed game came out I played it on a friends console, and found the controls to be some of the most frustratingly cludgy things ever. I pretty much ignored the game from that point on until at the urging of Tamrielo I finally gave the game a proper shot. The second game improves on everything that was wrong with the first game and manages to make moving around the world feel natural. If it weren’t for the fact that the game is largely about assassins that like to stealth about and attack from the shadows… I could probably enjoy it. That said I have to give this title credit for eclipsing its predecessor and spawning the franchise proper.

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 took all the bits that worked well in the original Mass Effect and then sanded down all of the bits that never worked that well. The end result was the best game in the Mass Effect series as far as I am concerned. The first game was okay, and upon going back and playing it I can appreciate it for what it was. At the time however I just could not get into it. The combat in that game was maddening at times, and felt like it wasn’t quite certain how to do turn based third person combat. The second game however made it feel fun to duck behind objects and snipe things, in the same sort of way that Gears of War did. The other thing that made the game amazing was the sheer scale of the number of characters you could ultimately recruit into your party. I still think the Mass Effect series would make an amazing television show, that played out over the course of five or six seasons. If I have to play one game in the series though, I will always return to playing ME2. It still has the most enjoyable mission system, because I like the feel of going off on these smaller strikes rather than getting bogged down in the length on rails story missions. I would seriously kill to have a game that was just a bunch of going off on random strikes forever, that was Mass Effect game play at its finest for me.

I Showed you Mine…

I just scratched the surface on sequels that ultimately trumped the original game. Now that I have shown you mine, its time for you to show me yours. What games did you feel outpaced the original, or what games did you not manage to get into the series until the second iteration. I am curious what games you hold a torch for after all these years. Not sure why I was feeling particularly nostalgic today, but ultimately I decided to just run with it. I am hoping that this post spawns other posts or at least some comments below.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Sequels that were Better

Depth vs Breadth

June 15, 2015June 12, 2015 by Tamrielo

In one of the very early computer science courses I took, the concept of a “depth-first search” vs a “breadth-first search” came up. It’s something that stuck with me, not because I’m deeply invested into search functions, but because it struck me as a good metaphor for how to approach life.

I am not highly skilled at terribly many of the things I do. I’ve very frequently been second- or third-best in competitions I’m serious about, rarely cracking the top of the charts despite the effort I put in. In my FFXIV raid, I am not the best healer, or the best DPS, and certainly not hte best tank; there are people who are far more focused than I am in all of those categories. I can, however, competently do all three. I have regularly swapped between the healing and DPS roles so much that I’ve lagged behind in gear quality compared to others, simply because I’m splitting my focus. Despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I’ve tanked Coil raid content and extreme-mode primals; my avoidance of the tank role is more an affectation at this point than anything. I’m not the best at any of these roles, or even necessarily great, but I can do all of them and I lean on my breadth of knowledge to give me shortcuts.

Kodra sometimes likes to talk about his experience trying to surpass me as a rogue in World of Warcraft, while we were raiding. I was able to regularly and easily put out the most damage of the group at very low risk. This has (not incorrectly) been attributed to my weapon choice– having done some testing, I used a dagger in my off hand as part of a sword-based specialization; counterintuitive at best, suboptimal at worst. It was a specific dagger I used, that essentially let me exploit a particular effect that was rather redundant if the dagger was the primary weapon, but unlocked some obscenely powerful chains if it wasn’t. Where I got the idea from was a discussion I’d read about warriors, a class I didn’t even play, that was talking about the value of accuracy (+hit%) for generating their combat resource. If I could hit more often, I could deal significantly more damage, and one of the special properties of the dagger is that it could, on occasion, cause me to hit perfectly for a very brief window. I focused on my accuracy, getting more of those hits to land and getting the dagger to work its magic more often, and I skyrocketed to the top of the charts, not by becoming a better rogue, but by becoming a better warrior.

Kodra is nodding right about now, but there’s a second half of this story. One of our other rogues spent months trying to imitate my playstyle and finally got the (admittedly extraordinarily rare) dagger to drop. For him, it was a disaster. His damage spiked, but it was unreliable and he would do too much damage, pull the attention of whatever enemy we were fighting, and wind up in the dirt… or the dagger wouldn’t trigger often enough to be worthwhile. He found it very frustrating, and fairly quickly shoved the dagger in the bank and never looked back. What he wasn’t doing was the other half of my strategy. Even though I didn’t play other classes, I made an effort to understand what they were all doing in various fights. I knew when our tanks had plenty of control over the fight and when they had less, I knew when our healers had spare cycles for raid healing and when they didn’t, and I knew which transitions were touchy and which weren’t. I ruthlessly exploited these, often taking unnecessary damage or stacking a debuff further than I should have, pushing harder when I knew it was safe and pulling back (and often, slightly to the side if there were other overzealous rogues around) when it wasn’t. A statistic that was frequently brought up was the number of deaths in the raid– how many times someone had pushed a little bit too hard and failed. What was much less frequently checked on was the amount of damage taken per death. I very rarely died, but I took enormous amounts of damage: far more than almost any other rogue in the group. I knew when healers could afford to heal me and when they couldn’t, and when they could I put myself in harm’s way to keep on the enemy.

I never mastered rogue rotations or timings or specific boss strategies. I relied in instinct and a wide breadth of knowledge about when and how to run risks. Often, this breadth of knowledge acts as a surrogate for depth of experience, letting me pull ideas from many unrelated places to solve a particular problem.

One of my favorite games is Infinity, which makes it easy for me to amass a wide breadth of experience. I’ve rarely if ever played the same list twice, never spending the time and effort to master a particular build, but being able to draw upon a very broad knowledge of the game has given me the ability to take almost any list I run and perform fairly well with it. I still fall short when I face players who are highly skilled and focus and refine a single list to a honed edge, but I’m not so far behind them that I can’t acquit myself respectably.

It’s a large part of the reason I don’t have a lot of patience for bullet hell shooters. They demand a tight, specific focus, that you memorize patterns and execute them. There’s no room for instinct, no room for ad-libbing, and no way for me to draw a breadth of skills in. They’re the antithesis of how I learn and operate, and I have a huge amount of difficulty with them. Fighting games are similar, asking for a very specific focus and a certain amount of depth in specific skills.

When I’m in charge of a group, I tend to surround myself with people who focus on depth. They’re almost always better at me at the things they choose to do, and it gives me opportunities to learn from them. I benefit both from the depth of their skill and the shortcuts I learn that add to my breadth of experience. Little things fascinate me: how gestures in other countries differ from the ones I’m used to; which turns of phrase in English have analogues in other languages, and how the meanings change; how a tank builds threat and when; where healers prefer to stand relative to everyone else. These little things all give me perspective, so that no matter what I’m doing I can pull in *something* to build on whatever I’m working on and imitate depth.

This habit is something that’s bothered me a lot in the past. I would look at any individual thing I did and be frustrated that I wasn’t better at it. I could be good– good enough that people would respect my abilities, but rarely the best. It took me years to see the bigger picture, that I was good at a lot of things, and that even if I wasn’t the best in any single one, in aggregate I had a very broad skillset and knowledge base. I’ve never been a depth-first person; until something hooks my interest or makes its value apparent, I don’t drill down and focus on something (though on occasion I have done this).

I’ve caught myself thinking this.

I don’t have a particular conclusion to draw from here, just a meditation on how I think and the kinds of things I focus on. I think a source of frustration for me lately has been that I’ve had few opportunities to expand the breadth of my knowledge, partly due to a lack of resources and partly due to a lack of opportunity. I have a new appreciation for the classwork I’m doing and the perspectives it exposes me to; it’s an opportunity that I relish, and in this lull between quarters I quickly find that I miss it.

Source: Digital Initiative
Depth vs Breadth