AggroChat

Making Fetch Happen

June 15, 2016 by Belghast

A Down Year

Normally at this time on my blog I have lots of things to talk about regarding the E3 proceedings. I have been watching like I always do and have managed to catch Bethesda, Microsoft, Sony, Ubisoft, and the PC Gaming show. I missed the Nintendo show but have caught most of the trailers that might be important to me on YouTube. There is just an overwhelming feeling of blah this year when it comes to the shows. There isn’t a whole lot new that I didn’t already at least know was in the works. There were no shock announcements, and even the ones that were supposed to be… like the Hideo Kojima creepy dude with tiny baby dripping oil on a beach game where just the end of a logical conclusion. We knew in no circumstances was he going to stay out of the game after the whole Konami break up, and I assumed that even though PT/Silent Hill fell through that he and Norman Reedus would work together on something. Basically it feels like all of the secrets were either foregone conclusions or something we heard about months ago. Maybe if I read fewer gaming news sites, or watched fewer YouTube videos I would feel differently about the proceedings this year. It just all feels like an off year to me, with a bunch of predictable games and a very few things that make me extremely excited. In past years I could declare a clear winner but in truth… while I lean heavily towards the games that appeared at the Bethesda show, both Microsoft and Sony seemed to create similarly mediocre experiences.

I think the big problem for me with this show is that I am not that interested in Virtual Reality as a whole. As I have said before this is a technology that has been “within five years” of mass adoption my entire life. There is always a new peddler of these dreams, and while I think that probably we are the closest we have ever been… I just can’t seem to muster any excitement about it. Namely my problem is the massive price point, and realizing that quite honestly I would rather spend that money elsewhere. Currently the cheapest offering is the $399 Playstation VR, and it is going to offer a sub par graphical experience so that it can keep the hardware costs down. The HTC Vive so far seems to be coming out of the show the clear winner, with games like Fallout 4 already being announced for that platform. It seems like the Occulus Rift is behind the eight ball in so many ways right now, with the production problems… and kickstarter folks still not having gotten their units. They also lack a solid 3D controller design, which the Vive already has locked down pretty tightly. Were I single… I would probably be all over this, but as a husband who already feels guilty for isolating himself in a game… spending over $1000 on computer upgrades to give myself an experience that is even MORE isolating just doesn’t seem like something that is going to happen. However it seems like the majority of folks are really excited about these prospects so time will see if they can bring down the cost of entry enough to reach mass market saturation.

The Best of Shows

As far as games I am looking forward to… after the recent play through of Dishonored I am extremely looking forward to the sequel. That game was phenomenal and it looks like they are taking the sequel in some interesting directions with having split characters you can play with completely different tool sets. I am looking forward to the Skyrim remaster, and am extremely pumped that they are giving it to PC users for free pending we had the game and all of the available dlc… which I do. Now a game that I am surprised I am into… is Let it Die for the PS4. I am largely over the whole gore thing… but it has this almost silent hill feel to it as you start with nothing at all and have to kill baddies to gather up weapons and armor as you try and climb a tower. The premise is kinda dumb admittedly, but I watched some game play of it on one of the live stream shows and it looked interesting. Horizon Zero Dawn once again showed well, and I am looking forward to seeing this game launch. That said I think it would be a title I would enjoy playing more on the PC than on the PS4 but time will tell. Recore also showed well once again, and this time I am pumped that they announced that it would be coming to Windows 10… giving me even less reason to care about an Xbox One. The highlight of any show was likely the announcement of State of Decay 2, because the game is finally adding multiplayer support.

From Nintendo I am all about the look and feel and game play of the new Legend of Zelda game and I am thankful that I went ahead and picked up that Wii U. Then of course there are the disappointments. We all go into the Bethesda conference hoping for an Elder Scrolls VI announcement, even though I doubted that would be the case given that last year they launched Fallout 4 and are still working their way through the expansions. I still really don’t know much more about Mass Effect Andromeda than I did going into the show, which is frustrating. I’ve technically seen more of the game thanks to the trailer, but I really don’t know much knew. Then there are all the games that we didn’t see… like Beyond Good and Evil 2 that has been on again and off again for a decade. I guess the problem is that other than State of Decay 2… I really didn’t have any “Hell Yeah!” moments during the show. There was nothing I was seeing that excited me so much as to make me day dream about playing the game I was just seeing. I guess it makes sense… we are just far enough into a console cycle for things to start to feel visually samey… and not far enough for folks to have really mastered the art of pushing this generation to its limits. The problem there being that with the talk of increasing console resources… it makes me wonder if we will ever reach that point with this generation. Consoles seem to be treading upon the realm of PC gaming… where the experience becomes extremely variable based upon how much money you throw at the problem, and I am not entirely certain that is a good thing.

Trailer Dump

Now for a bunch of trailers that I happened to like this time around…

High Center

June 14, 2016 by Belghast

Gear Barrier

For months I struggled to find meaning in MMORPGs and wrote about my feelings a little over a month ago. Then something changed, and I am not exactly sure how or when it did. Now I am suddenly finding myself caring an awful lot… and even more than that thinking about what I am going to be doing that evening. The only problem is… I have found myself struggling nonetheless. Life was going rather peachy in Final Fantasy XIV that is… until I started trying to catch up in the patch content. Last week they released 3.3 patch content and I happily quested my way through both the tail end of 3.2 and 3.3 until I hit a road block. That road block being that in order to do the first dungeon introduced by the new content… I have to be sitting at 200 item level. Now when I took a break several months ago I was sitting at 190 item level and that was just about as good as was humanly possible to get at the time, or more so as good as you could get without the really painful grind. Upon coming back I have been having a blast farming ponies with the guild and slowly working my way through the relic weapon quest. I’ve also attempted to keep running experts but failed miserably at doing them on a regular basis.

The end result is that I have managed to pull my item level up to 195 but 200 still feels like it is a very very long ways off. One of the problems is in the past when they have introduced a new item cap like this to continue the quest, the previous set of dungeons provided gear that was of sufficient level to breach it. However the last set of dungeons in this case only dropped 195 level gear, which were upgrades in a few slots but in no way good enough to bring me up to fighting levels. The answer of course is to run Void Ark over and over until my eyes bleed, however I find myself struggling to do that when I don’t have anyone else to run it with. Tuesday is the night we run group content as a free company, and on that night the guild is active as can be. The only problem is the rest of the week it is a ghost town. So I struggle to push myself to do activities with strangers, which is going to be a common theme in this post. My entire time in MMO gaming I have always had this wonderful social support structure, from the moment I set foot in Everquest to modern times. If I needed something done there was always a ready supply of friends that I could pester to come do it with me. When I am missing that I am finding that I don’t exactly know how to function.

Social Barrier

This brings us to game two that I am struggling with. Over the weekend in a fit of nostalgia and such I dove head first into Rift and am having a really great time. I’ve started participating in the Rift discord community, and picked the brains of several friends as to all of the things that I should be doing now that I am back. The item that kept getting mentioned is that I really should start working on the weekly quests out in the Planetouched Wilds area. So being a dutiful follower of instructions I wound my way through the quest content and hit a big stubborn wall. There was a quest on top of Lantern Hook that involved killing a bunch of mobs essentially before they killed me, and quite frankly I was overwhelmed. I tried it in a few different specs before eventually asking for some help. The only problem is by that time in the Discord community, everyone was busy doing their own thing and not watching chat… so I got nothing but crickets. The challenge with Rift is that it is not that I have minimal social structure in that game like the way I do in Final Fantasy XIV… it is that I suddenly have none at all. Over the years all of that structure has eroded to where I am left with just one single channel that once or twice a night has another person in it with me. The majority of the time when I say hello to said other person in the channel I get no response telling me… that it probably scrolled by so fast on their screen that they didn’t even notice it.

Rift does a great job of providing a ton of things that I could be doing solo, but unfortunately there are still times where I absolutely need other people to do content. What I ultimately did was start watching the level 65 channel until I saw someone that seemed nice enough and that was playing on the same server as me. I pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone and asked them for help… to which I was shot down. However I politely thanked them anyways, and about thirty minutes later while I was still sitting there struggling to figure out a way to do the quest by myself… I got a message from them again saying that they were finished with their raid and that they could come help me. So massive thanks to Domasca from Faeblight for assisting with the quest and pushing me past that obstacle. I continued on about my business and finished another set of quests only to return back to Lantern Hook to be handed yet another quest that I had no way of soloing. It was at this point I gave up for the night and went to bed, frustrated. Basically I am already standing on a precipice with this game and have a handful of choices in front of me. Either I can start rebuilding my social network within Rift a single player at a time, and in doing so force myself into anxiety ridden territory. I can research specs and try and find that one magical spec that lets me solo silly hard content like I have done in the past. Then of course there is always the option to just quit the game again… which is the one that I am trying to avoid as hard as I can. Rift is this wonderful throwback to an era in MMO gaming that I miss greatly… the only problem is that era is one when you needed lots and lots of active friends to support you through all the random things you needed to accomplish. So in truth… I need to figure out how to meet new people in this extremely well established and already stratified community.

Goal Accomplished

June 13, 2016 by Belghast

Memories of Other Times

This weekend saw me succumbing to nostalgia, but not in the method you might think. With all the talk of the Warcraft movie, one would assume that I spent my entire weekend playing that game. However instead I wound up spending nearly the entire weekend playing the game that ultimately first took me away from World of Warcraft in a significant way. There were some events that happened this past week, and I ended up finding out that a friend of mine had passed away suddenly. That friend is someone I first met during the launch of Rift when they were part of the community team, and from that point on we kept in contact through the other games we both moved to. Of note… I am never too far from Rift, and I am rarely more than a patch behind when I inevitably fire up Glyph to peek my head in. I’ve subscribed to the game more time than I have not since it launched back in 2011, and I’ve watched the game evolved through expansions and the shift to free to play and have remained one of the few of my friends that carries a heavy torch for the game. The problem being that in order to do a lot of the things I want to do with the game… I need a body of active players. While we have had several resurgences into playing Rift, the last of which seeing the forming of House Stalwart on Faeblight during July or 2013. The only problem being this lasted a few blissful months and then once again we were all fading away from the game to play other things… myself included.

Something shifted as well with the way content was structured in the old world versus content in both Storm Legion and Nightmare Tide. In the original game I managed to level three classes to 50 happily before finally running out of steam. In Storm Legion I managed to push my warrior up to 60, and a significant time later managed to barely push up my rogue up just before the release of Nightmare Tide. The latest expansion however… for whatever reason I just hit high center and never quite managed to near the level cap. When I logged in this weekend I was sitting at level 62 and had been there for quite awhile. There was something about the way the zones were designed, that firstly greatly increased my inborn tendency to wander off aimlessly. This exacerbated another problem that I have had in the newer content… and that is I seem to be able to completely lose the quest chains in the mix and fail to follow them ultimately finding out I am entire zones behind in trying to follow any semblance of a leveling path. So instead I would wander about and grind mobs, mostly doing carnage quests… which are these kill X quests that appear in the wild as you well… will mobs. This is an extremely slow way to level and after a few hours of doing this… and not really seeing the level bar move terribly much I would wander away like a bored child into some other game.

Instant Adventures

Now a little over a year after the launch of the game, the good folks at Trion introduced a system called Instant Adventures. This was single-handedly the best re-purposing of content I have experienced in a game. There are a number of things that happen while you quest your way through a zone, and instant adventures is essentially taking all of these tasks and placing them end to end… and aiding the flow by offering the occasional teleport to the next area and the next set of objectives. The result is this mindless train that you can hop on and just focus on the mission at hand, and in the process getting a bunch of planar currency and the occasional gear filled chest in the process. I’ve always found these an extremely fun way to level at low levels, because you can just literally hit a button and start getting fed small bite sized objectives to focus on, which is the perfect manner to grind alts. The only negative however is that the gear chests are nowhere near as plentiful as they come be… and you often times wind up significantly behind the curve in equip-able items. Over the weekend while recording the AggroChat podcast for example I started a character on the EU server Zaviel and started leveling through Instant Adventure. I shot up the twenty in no time flat… however I am still largely wearing sub level 10 gear other than a handful of really amazing items that I happened to went through the adventures. That said… this is a fun way to level a character and so long as you are riding the train the gear disparities are largely not that bit of an issue thanks to a bit of a bolstering system in place.

Last year they extended this Instant Adventure system to raids, and released Hammerknell as what they called an “Intrepid Adventure”. The result is something halfway between World of Warcraft LFR, and an Instant Adventure that involves going through the raid and its trash packs… that have been chopped up and fed back to you in neat bite sized chunks. The thing that I find interesting is just how many mechanics have managed to make it into the Intrepid adventures, and that the saving grace seems to be that you can simply zerg your way back to the boss after every death instead of needing to wait for a rez. Roughly a month ago they released the second raid as an intrepid adventure based on the Mind of Madness raid. While I had a blast doing Hammerknell on a whim a year ago, I never wound up sticking around for long. This time around however I had a mission in mind… figure out a way to level from 62 to 65. I’ve felt like a failure for quite a while that I never managed to hit the level cap this time around. So Friday night when I hopped into game I headed straight for the queue for Mind of Madness and found myself enjoying both the content I was participating in and the speed at which I found myself leveling. Both Saturday and Sunday mornings I wound up sitting in one spot for a couple of hours and finally convinced myself to use some of those patron boosts that I had been sitting on for ages. Sure enough when you add in a +160% experience boost to the already good experience of Intrepid Adventures… the levels quite literally fly by. Sunday morning about noon I found myself with a newly minted level 65 character…. wearing a mismash of gear I picked up through the weekly patron crates… but somehow managing to qualify for expert dungeons.

Expert Grind

Now at some point during the weekend I had installed a dps meter because I was curious if I was actually doing okay… or if I was somehow struggling. When it comes to Intrepid adventures I seemed to be doing just fine with my dps usually running around third place or at least within a contentious pack hanging around that spot. I leveled for the most part with a high survival dps build 44 warlord, 32 champion, 0 paragon. This worked great for uptime and the ability to never need to really heal myself, however apparently it is a less than amazing build when it comes to running “end game” content. Being dumb however I just hit the queue button and hoped everything would be just fine. The end result was myself lagging so far behind the rest of the dps that I got called out on it almost immediately. We wiped over and over because we lacked the dps to tackle the encounters the manner in which folks in experts apparently are used to running them… namely in an ignore all mechanics push the boss as fast as you can and always get the speed run bonus manner. I dropped from the party and wished them luck… and in truth in spite of calling me out on the dps they managed to do so in a far more polite manner than would have happened in other communities. From there I went back to the drawing board and found my way once again to the warrior guides section of the Rift forums. Here I cobbled together a 61 Paragon 10 Warlord build that seemed to work okay… out in the world I can burst down most things before they really have a chance to damage me, but if you put me in an extended fight or a multi target fight I struggle. So I will probably continue to swap between it and my “Solo” build just for my own sanity.

The result was immediate and evident that the bulk of my problems in experts were spec. Granted I still grossly under gear the tier 3 raiders that are regularly running experts these days, however this time around I was able to out dps the tanks and healers. Over the course of yesterday I ran five for six experts and managed to cobble together some upgrades. I am still wearing several pieces of otherwise crap gear… but my hope is through running a bunch of experts I will either be able to mitigate that through spending currency or through getting lucky drops. In my very first expert I managed to complete I ended up getting a really nice purple two-handed axe so it seems like the loot gods have been smiling on me. This is not at all how I intended to spend my weekend, but I enjoyed it greatly regardless. Coming back to Rift felt like going to lunch with an old friend that you had not seen in a long time. I am not sure how long I will be around, especially given that there are other things in other games that I also want to accomplish. However for the time being I am really enjoying myself in my renewed resurgence in the game. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Bahmi and it feels good to be flexing those muscles once more. With the multi-core support the game runs amazingly well on my laptop, but unfortunately still struggles quite a bit on my AMD based desktop. The guild in Faeblight is empty, and I was alone for almost the entire weekend so that alone makes me wonder if this is sustainable. However I have the Rift discord channel to keep me company, and if I wind up staying I might end up needing to move Belghast elsewhere to find the support of a more active guild. Regardless it was an enjoyable weekend and I managed to mark one goal that had been bugging me for quite some time off that list in the back of my head.

AggroChat #110 – Conservation of Ninjas

May 21, 2019June 12, 2016 by AggroChat

Belghast, Kodra, Tam and Thalen discuss war in many forms… some crafty others hammery and still others multidimensional

This week we are down quite a few people, since it seems like everyone is travelling over the summer. This week we have Bel and Tam in their correct places, and Kodra and Thalen have been travelling as well but were able to sort out how to join the podcast. This is another one of those weeks where we thought we had nothing to talk about… then wound up podcasting for two hours withou stop. Tam is super excited about the new Mirror’s Edge, and it continues his trend of trying to do ninja things…. Without actually playing a ninja. We talk about how the ninja genre really never quite made a fully successful transition to three dimensional. From there we talk about how Tom Clancy games have gotten more and more paranoid over the years.

Kodra and Tam discuss a new to them miniature game they have been playing called Bushido that sounds suspiciously like the Legend of Five Rings setting. Which spawns a brief conversation about Magic the Gathering and spoiler season. Which leads its way into a discussion about Warhammer and how they went from completely fearing licensing games… to seemingly giving anyone with a heartbeat the right to make Warhammer 40k games. I spend some time returning to Rift and talk about how well they are messaging fights these days. Which leads to a discussion about Final Fantasy XIV in a not great light. I also talk about my experience watching the Warcraft movie and finally we wrap things up with a discussion about he start of the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta.

Topics Discussed