AggroChat

On Honorable Mentions, 2015

April 18, 2016 by Ashgar

This is the other backlogged post I have, then we’ll be into more recent things. At the end of January we did a Games of the Year show, and there are a few things I really enjoyed in 2015 that didn’t get much time on that one. Some of these made brief appearances on the blog, and some of them in the podcast; I consider all of these worth trying if you get a chance.

Evoland 2

The subtitle of this game is “A slight case of spacetime continuum disorder”, and it does live up to that. It takes probably the best segment of the first Evoland (the time travel section where you’re moving between 3D and sprite graphics) and uses it as the central premise of the game. For most of the game you are moving between the past, present, and future, occasionally messing things up enough that it affects a later era. Where Evoland mostly stuck to pretending to be Zelda or Final Fantasy, Evoland 2 is less restricted, and borrows from things ranging from Street Fighter to Puzzle Quest (in addition to a core that is mostly Zelda). It also has a card game that isn’t a triple triad knock-off, and I really enjoyed it. This just barely missed the cut for top 3 last year.

Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon

The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games have generally been pretty good, and I would call the DS series (Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky) some of the best games with pokemon in them. The previous title, Gates to Infinity, was much less outstanding, but this one’s a return to form. For those unfamiliar, the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games involve playing as a pokemon, working through a series of randomly-generated dungeons towards some goal. This tends to be save-the world-type stuff, and a lot more story (and more serious story) than the main series. This one features all of the pokemon revealed at its release (all 720 of them) and features a story that is far better than the main games. It eliminates the random element of pokemon recruitment found in previous Mystery Dungeon games, which is nice, because there are plenty of other random things to worry about. This is my top 3DS game from last year.

LBX

I mentioned this a bit earlier. LBX is a solid mix of RPG and Robot Fighting game. Even though the actual robots are only about a foot tall, the battle system most de-emphasizes this by placing you on artificial terrain, so it feels like you’re still piloting giant robots. It has an obligatory tournament arc, and is full of other cliches, but it’s not really any worse for it. The story also goes a few places I wouldn’t expect for a kids game. Add in the large number of postgame activities, and there’s a lot here. Give this a shot if you like Level-5, action-RPGs, and/or customizable robots.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

This got revisited when I was going Star Wars crazy right before The Force Awakens came out. The Knights of the Fallen Empire content is one of the best pieces of narrative I’ve seen in an MMO, and some of the system revamps that go along with this (allowing you to use any companion for anything) were really appreciated. Changes to the leveling content also mean that you don’t need to do all of the (generally lower quality) side quests when levelling a character, and it gave me a chance to see some of the class stories that I did not have the patience to complete when the game came out. I’ll admit that other than the story content, there’s not a whole lot here that interests me, and the F2P model is still “please subscribe”, but it’s still worth checking out. The next chapter came out somewhat recently, so I’ll pop back in at some point to check that out.

Old School New School

April 18, 2016 by Belghast

Doomed

Firstly if you didn’t check it out I highly suggest you read yesterday’s blog post if for no reason other than the amazing custom artwork by my friend @Ammosart. As far as this weekend went, it was a bit of an odd one. I once again played a lot of Destiny, but this morning that is not one of the shooter experiences I am going to be talking about. I really hate it when game companies gang up on each other, because this weekend there were “special” beta tests going on for Overwatch, Battleborn and Doom. While at first they might not seem all that related, they are each chasing a multiplayer experience that they would really love you to care about. Battleborn is not even on the list of games I was interested in, thanks to a really bad alpha experience causing me to pitch it to the curb. Doom however… I really want to like and keep giving it ample attempts to sell me on its regressive notion of what first person shooter multiplayer should be. Now please note… I’ve had access to the alpha for quite awhile now thanks to a strange presell deal that they had for Wolfenstein The New Order. I have not really talked about it before now however due to the NDA it has been wrapped in, but with this weekends big beta event… that has been dropped.

Doom Multiplayer is a game that really hopes that you remember Quake 3 Arena fondly, and have been craving that sort of gameplay with marginally better graphics. The gameplay honestly gives flash backs to playing Rocket Arena… during a time when even then I thought the Quake Arena experience was far inferior to Unreal Tournament that I tended to play more often. If you miss the days of being shot across the map from someone you can’t even see as you spawn in… then this is going to be the game you have been hankering for. The big problem I had was in all of the matches that I have played… I never really found myself having fun. I mean I did okayish, but it very much felt like wandering around the same claustrophobic hallways that we used to in Quake. The worst sin however is the movement… it feels completely unrealistic and the same sort of stiff speedy running that those original Quake games had. What it is trying to be is fast paced run and gun action, but in an era when we can do that without sacrificing animation and design aesthetics. I’ve now played several different PC alpha tests, and installed it on the PS4 to give it a go there… and no matter what I keep coming up with the same impression. This is not a fun multiplayer experience.

Molten Core!

The general “unfun” nature of Doom was only drilled home thanks to also being in Overwatch this weekend. It feels like both games are trying really hard to deliver something similar, at least in the department of a faced paced shooter department. Also both games really want you to want to watch them as some sort of an e-sports extravaganza. However Doom is a world that traded the drab green and brown nothingness of Quake for various shades of orange and blood red… whereas Overwatch is almost more game world than it actually needs to support the combat. As you wander around the world there is a constant barrage of tiny details. Posters on the wall, images up on computer screens… advertisements for murloc themed restaurants. The world is vibrant and feels alive, and almost begs you to inhabit it, and what makes it even better is that every single character is just as vibrant and well designed. Playing Torbjorn feels unique and completely different from playing Pharah or Reaper or Reinhardt. The only negative here is that at times they almost feel too unique, in that the control scheme of one champion doesn’t begin to map up to playing another one. It is fairly normal for “league” style champion design to differ wildly, but at least in League you are always going to be using QWE, but for Overwatch champions there is essentially an array of hotkeys that get used… and not all champions use all hotkeys. The most confusing aspect of this is how some champions have a movement key and others don’t… and even among the ones that do they don’t always sync up to exactly the same key.

So what ended up having to happen is that I started to compartmentalize “this is how I play this champion” from “this is how I play overwatch”. The only unfortunate thing about this game is that you can see how much effort they put into building the world, and personally I get a little nostalgic about “what might have been”. Titan was supposed to be Overwatch the MMO, and I would have loved that. Even if they had given me a game along the lines of Destiny or Division I would have eaten it up completely. So as you are playing through the levels you see signs of what might have been. As far as the game play itself it centers around running multiplayer matches, to rank up… to unlock loot crates… to get sweet skins and other cosmetic stuff… that improve your game play experience for those champions that you really love. At its core this game is a really tight multiplayer team based shooter, and if that is not the experience you have been looking for… this probably isn’t the game for you. It plays like a modern version of Team Fortress 2 and feels tighter than that game ever did. Every aspect of the experience seems like it has been painstakingly planned and the awesome thing about it is that for once Blizzard is probably being more forthcoming with information than any other multiplayer game has been. For example they went into more detail about the netcode behind the game play than any company I have ever seen. The only unfortunate thing is that I am going to have to likely wait until May 3rd to get to play the game again, given that is when the pre-launch open beta period begins. The game lived up to all of my expectations, and I am amped to get to play it with friends.

Seven Years

April 17, 2016 by Belghast

Interesting Journey

It feels so immensely strange to be sitting down to write this post. As of this morning it marks the seventh year of Tales of the Aggronaut. I am not exactly sure why but seven years seems like a significantly more auspicious number than five or six or even eight. Culturally we place a strange importance on the number seven as either lucky or magical, and I have to admit that I fall for this same trap myself. As a web developer by trade, I started this blog with a purpose and had all of the trappings of a proper website. One of those is of course Google Analytics integration, and I spent some time this morning going over the numbers before sitting down to write this post. In the Seven years I have published 1260 posts, and they have been read a grand total of 235,304 times at the moment of pulling the stats. Over the course of this blogs lifespan I’ve had 110,359 unique readers from 182 countries, and roughly 40% of them are return readers. What I found shocking was that there are a little over 4000 of you out there that have read my blog more than 200 times. As far as my readers go it seems that the bulk from from the United States as one would expect, but the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Australia also make up large chunks and round out the top five countries with France coming in a not too distant sixth. The web developer in me was also curious to find out that the vast majority of my readers are using Google Chrome (go them!) with the next highest batch using Firefox (also good choice)… and then unfortunately a large block are still using Internet Explorer and I was shocked that it actually beat out Safari.

The thing is… these numbers are utterly meaningless because at the end of the day it still very much feels like I am a little kid pretending to make a newspaper or sitting in a cardboard box pretending to tell the news. Every day I get up and make my post, and mentally I feel like I am talking to myself. I have a hard time reconciling that there are people out there reading each and every day without fail. I know there are mentally, because when I am late getting a post up… folks will come out of the woodwork to check on me. However emotionally I cannot quite comprehend that I have people that are that interested in the boring things that I do each and every day. I am not a terribly interesting person, and most of my life is spent going to work, trying to be a good husband, juggling family and friends… and attempting to get in as much game time as humanly possible. The truth is I share a lot of my life with you my readers, and if I didn’t feel like I was talking to myself… I am not sure if I would have the courage to say some of the things I have said. I’ve shared my high points and my low points… and attempted to be honest with my struggles and frustrations. The result has been more support from my friends and readers than I ever thought possible. When am feeling down, you all reach out to me and lift me back up… and in truth you are a huge part of why I keep going each and every morning.

Evolution of the Aggronaut

I still look back on the early days of this blog and wonder what exactly caused me to start it in the first place. I guess in truth I was always a blogger, I just didn’t realize it. I was one of those folks that haunted game forums, and was prone to writing huge wall of text posts about this subject or that. As to what prompted me to make the switch from forum goer to blogger, that one is a bit harder to nail down. I know I was ultimately prompted to start thinking about it by WoW Insider and their focus on a single blog called The Wordy Warrior. Since I was a Warrior trying to lead a raid, I felt a certain kinship with this blogger and that lead me to start my own “warrior blog”. Aggronaut itself has gone through so many changes over the years. It was originally a Warrior Tanking blog, and then shifted to a general warrior blog… to a raid leadership blog… to a general World of Warcraft blog… to a Rift blog… until finally it was rebooted in its current form which is MY blog. For so long I kept trying to make it into something more than just an open discussion I was having with my readers about whatever happened to be on my mind. I was told that in order to be “successful” you had to find a niche and then exploit the shit out of that niche… and that never really did feel amazing. The end result after all of this back and forth is that Tales of the Aggronaut is a blog about me and whatever the hell I happen to be doing. If you are going to read me for long at all, you have to be interested in me as a person because I am not always going to be all that interesting.

The strangest thing to get used to over these years is that once you have made a post it often times develops a life of its own. There have been many times I have written something and then someone came along behind me and got some other meaning from my post that I never intended or even thought about. Sometimes this is good… and other times it just serves as fodder for someone else’s rant blog. The one harsh reality is that the posts that become popular, are never the ones you actually thought were worth reading. Looking back through my analytics… here are the top five posts in the seven years of Aggronaut. At least one of them completely makes me cringe these days.

Of those the only one I am actually proud of in any fashion is my GroupCraft series of posts. The Keyboard Turning one I am actually actively embarrassed by largely because I don’t even recognize the “me” that wrote that post because I guess I have mellowed out significantly since I first started this blog. However I feel like it would be dishonest to remove posts from the annals of time, so I leave them… even the ones that make me cringe. If nothing else this blog charts my evolution as a player and a decent human being. However I admit that a lot of that evolution didn’t really start until I began my mad mission of blogging every single day. In a few weeks it will mark the third anniversary of blogging every single day, and it is funny how I have gone from being one of the least prolific bloggers to being among the most. In the first four years of my blog I made 148 posts… in the last three years I made 1112 posts, so a huge difference.

Faces of Bel

Like I said in the start of this very long and probably self aggrandizing post… seven feels like a special number. For years I have joked that I really only play one character, and then try and recreate that character in every single game that I play. I’ve even posted pictures of my various characters to drill home that point. This got me thinking, and since I am really good friends with the amazing artist @Ammosart I decided I would try and commission her to create a special graphic to commemorate this occasion. The idea was to have an image that showed off several of the “Faces of Bel” and I have to say I was completely blown away when I saw the end result. She went above and beyond anything I could have hoped for, and now I will have to be tempted to have her create something for every anniversary… if I can afford that. I absolutely wanted this on a shirt, so at my suggestion she has throw it up on her t-shirt store. I wanted every last penny of the proceeds to go to her, so instead of me creating a “Tales of the Aggronaut” store this seemed like the better option. For I believe the first 72 hours it is only $14 and then after that they go up to the normal price of $20 and $22 for bigger sizes. Once I finish writing this post I plan on ordering one for myself because I am so floored at just how well this turned out. I am super thankful to have awesome friends like Ammo, that I can pester to do little side projects like this.

I feel like I need to wrap things up, because this post has gone on quite a bit longer than I thought it would. I am very thankful to have all of you out there reading my words, and without you I am not sure I would have the strength to get up every single morning and commit text to page before I have finished my cup of coffee. Through this blog and the awesome community of folks that I have met through the various social media accounts connected to it… I have forged a family that I will take with me for the rest of my life. It doesn’t matter if we have only interacted one time… you’ve left an impression on me and given me the will to keep going. Sure there are mornings where I question myself why the hell I keep doing this, but all of you out there that ping me over twitter or slack or countess other methods… give me that drive to keep moving forward. I realize this post has sounded a little bit like a farewell at times, and I haven’t meant it to. Seven is a magical and special number, but so is Thirteen… so as I top the hill of this goal I set my sights on the next one. Thank you for joining me in this journey, and hopefully we will have a lot more of them before I decide to call it quits. Also side note… please take some time to tell @Ammosart just how damned amazing this image is! I’ve had it for about a month now… and it has been pure hell to keep it under wraps because from the moment I got it I wanted to share it with the world!

AggroChat #103 – Reboot Done Right

May 21, 2019April 17, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen celebrate two years of AggroChat and discuss more games!

This past week marked the second anniversary of the AggroChat podcast. For two years we have been coming together every week to discuss whatever we happened to be playing. So this is a great time to thank you our listeners for putting up with our rambling. We still very much feel like we don’t know what we are doing, but keep doing it anyway. This week we discuss the Overwatch Beta weekend that finally some of us managed to get into. Belghast contrasts his experiences in Overwatch with the Doom multiplayer weekend as well. Grace talks about the Wildstar Faction changes and how they are essentially the worst of both worlds. Ash and Bel talk about the Ratchet and Clank reboot, and how this is the way that all reboots should work. Kodra has continued to dig further into the world of Dark Souls and has some thoughts about it as it relates to learning Raid Boss encounters. We all get sidetracked on a discussion about good movie ports, and how we probably need to have an entire show about good Star Wars video games versus bad ones. Finally we wrap things up more or less with a lengthy discussion about how important it is to like the way your character looks in a game.

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