AggroChat

PAX 2015 (Part 2)

September 1, 2015 by Tamrielo

I talked quite a bit yesterday about PAX as an experience, but I didn’t really talk much about what I saw and did at the show.

I should probably preface all of this by talking about how I go through PAX. I tend to play very few games at the show– I’ll watch screens on a lot of them and sometimes talk to the folks at the booth, but mostly what I do is bookmark games I’m interested in and move on. Part of this is that I don’t really want to know too much about a game before I play it, so I can get the full experience without preconceived notions. I do this elsewhere, too. As soon as I see a trailer or an announcement of a game I know I want, I bookmark it and stop reading anything about it. It’s been great for keeping hype under control, and I enjoy those games a lot more than I did when I devoured every bit of info I could find and created a grand vision of the perfect game in my head.

As a result, at PAX I tend to skim games I already know I want to play. Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, Dreadnought, Battleborn, Gigantic, FFXV, Fallout 3, Dishonored 2, and quite a few others had a pretty significant presence, but I already knew I wanted to play them so I checked out the booths and moved on. I’m going to play them, I don’t need to see more. What I wanted to do was spend more time with games I’d either never heard of or wasn’t convinced I’d be interested in.

Here’s a quick rundown of the games I spent a bit of time with, what I thought of them, and which of the two categories they fell into:

Sword Coast Legends: I didn’t get to play this one, because the line was insane, but it’s one of the games I’ve been the most interested in messing around with. I love the idea of a game with a bunch of players and a DM, where it actually works well for the DM to create and manipulate content as you play; it’s a really neat idea that I’d like to see succeed. The concept looks great, but I don’t know how the game itself is. Still, almost certainly picking this up unless some serious red flags crop up.

FFXIV: Not a new game, but the first time I’ve been at a convention that had a Battle Challenge. Kodra, Ashgar, Paragon (GIntrospection) and I managed to get in line for it on Friday and take on Ravana. It’s the only game I waited more than five minutes to play and it was a ton of fun. The four of us were grouped with four very new players– one who’d gotten a character up to level 30, months back, and three who’d never played the game before. We managed to win, and it was great coordinating with new folks and making sure they got a win (and a cool shirt, too!)

The Magic Circle: I’ve been following this game for a while now, and hadn’t realized it’d launched. At some point soon I’m going to boot it up and give it a shot, because I think the premise is interesting and I haven’t played a super meta game lately. The idea is that you play a character in a video game that’s been in development hell for twenty years, and you fight your way through old junk code and scrapped ideas and bugs as well as pulling from other games that the company has developed to find your way to freedom.

Shadowrun: Catalyst: This is the Shadowrun board game that I’ve heard about, and Kodra, Ashgar and I got to play a demo of it. It’s a cooperative deckbuilding game where you fight Shadowrun-style enemies and get new gear, levels, etc. It’s very reminiscent of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, just set in the Shadowrun universe with a greater emphasis on teamwork rather than exploration. I liked the demo we played a lot, and I’m interested in seeing what else the game has to offer.

The Black Watchmen: The ARG leading up to the Secret World’s launch was incredibly fun, and one of the big groups that featured heavily was called The Black Watchmen. The idea’s since spun off into its own game with similar themes, as an episodic game with fiendish puzzles to solve as a group and a compelling overarching plot. There’s a very real chance I’m going to make it the Aggrochat Game of the Month next time I have the chance, and if that doesn’t work out, I’ll at least see if I can’t talk Kodra into giving it a shot with me.

That Dragon, Cancer: Fourteen sads out of ten, and I just played what they had at the booth. This is an incredibly compelling game that I’m honestly not in a good enough place emotionally to be able to handle, but I’m really glad exists. This kind of thing is Kodra’s bread and butter, and I’m certain we’ll hear him cheerfully describe how brutally it inflicted its misery on him. Also would be a good candidate for Aggrochat GOTM except I wouldn’t be able to play it and I suspect the rest of the crew would be depressed by it. Still, for as much as I’ve commented on games needing more emotions than just “angry” and “sad”, I think this one is a good thing to have tugging at the heartstrings and making you think.

Hob: The next big thing by the Torchlight team, Hob is a metroidvania-style platformer where you play as a robot thing with a grappling hook wandering around gorgeous weird magi-tech ruins and probably other places. It still needs work, but it’s one I’m going to keep an eye on.

Ultimate Chicken Horse: This weird little game is probably my best in show, just for being pure, simple fun. It’s a co-op-etitive platformer in the now-standard Nintendo style, the one where you want to stab your friends to death at the end. It’s an incredibly simple premise: you and up to three other players are put into a mostly blank platforming level with a start and a finish. You can’t get from the start to the finish, but at the start of each round you open a party box where people get to pick objects to place in the level. At first, these are platforms, boxes, things to jump on and otherwise help you get to the finish. Whoever gets to the finish gets a point. If everyone (or no one) gets to the finish, no one gets any points. You’ll play the same level multiple times, until someone’s gotten three points, and as the rounds go on the objects become less helpful and more harmful, spike traps, projectiles, slippery ice, glue, all things to make it harder to get to the finish. As you place traps, you’re betting that you’re a better platformer than everyone else and that they’ll fall into your clever traps, so you’ll be the only one to get points. It’s a delightful party game and the most surprising and fun game I saw at the show.

I am, at this point, utterly exhausted. My sleep schedule is heavily late-night shifted, and I’ve been getting up a solid four hours before I usually do all weekend, but not managing to get to sleep any sooner. I’m good at putting a functional face on it for a while, but I could feel it slipping today. I’m going to sleep for a while.

If I didn’t catch you at PAX, I hope you had a great time, and I’m sorry I missed you!

Paragon Levels with Friends

September 1, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Administrata

Blaugust is officially over… I mean it… put your pencils down and turn in your papers. Now begins the fun part of actually attempting to “grade”, and by that I mean tabulate the results. I started doing this yesterday afternoon with some of the early finishers, and if everyone that was a day away crossed that finish line… we have a pretty huge bunch of winners. Equally impressive as of yesterday we had 76 “Survivors” meaning that during the course of the month they managed to get in at least fifteen posts. Mostly I wanted to say a little bit this morning about just how proud I am of everyone who attempted any length of posts this month. The concept of daily posting is rather daunting and there are still days where I question my sanity as I plunk away at the keys each morning trying to make sense of the jumble of thoughts in my head. So while I will be terming people as “winning” the challenge you are all winners in my book even if you didn’t make it to fifteen posts.

My goal all along has been to get more people creating more content about the things they love doing. After a point folks stop caring so much about what you are writing, and focus in on the fact that it is YOU behind the screen that is writing it. The whole idea behind Blaugust is if you can prove to yourself that you can churn out thirty one posts in a single month… then posting a handful of posts every week on a fixed schedule is really not that terribly daunting. Whether or not they realize it, people crave consistency. I started this blog with a decent boost of readers, but over the years of my lack of posting… I pretty much pissed all of those regular readers away. When I became consistent, folks started tuning in every morning to read all of these seemingly useless thoughts I was dumping out of my head… and apparently enjoying it. Today is my day for calculations, but I wanted to close Blaugust with one thought. Don’t let Blaugust be this marathon that you run once a year and then stick back on the shelf until the next year. Let Blaugust be a spirit that you embrace every day, and an excuse to create regular posts throughout the year.

Boys Will Be Boys

First off I have to say that I have always hated this phrase… but sometimes it absolutely fits. Last night I talked to my mom on the phone, because it had been a few days since I had called my folks. They have had to deal with the fallout of a flood in one of the bathrooms, and this weekend they got into my childhood bedroom. My closet backed up to the bathroom so it was a assumed that pretty much everything in it would be ruined. The funny thing is… my Mom expected me to remember what I had in my closet over two decades ago. Luckily it seems that for the most part all of my comic books, and various sundry cards that I never bothered to “move out” were left untouched. Apparently some plywood seems to have wicked up the bulk of the water that made it through to the closet. As she was pulling stuff out of the closet she kept stopping and asking my dad what various things were. Then she got to an item that threw her for a loop.

I was a little skater kid, and there was a phase in my life where everything that mattered about anything… was skateboard related. She pulled out this baseball bat that was scrawled with all sorts of skater terminology and logos in a combination of sharpie and paint pen. She wanted to know why this bat was all scarred like it had been hitting concrete and “defaced” in such a way. My Dad just said that it looked like “little boys were playing”. So I had to explain to my mother what the bat was used for. We used to go to the tennis court with our skateboards, as much padding as we had, and baseball bats. My friend and I would ride towards each other, each of us on one side of the tennis net like we were “jousting”. At which point we would put as much padding on our left arms as we could and use the right arm to swing the baseball bat at the other person. The goal of course was to knock the other person off their skateboard and the padding was in a vague attempt to block the blows. It is a miracle we didn’t do serious harm to each other. This apparently did not phase my father, because it turns out his childhood friend and he would fire arrows at each other from recurve bows… so I guess in the grand scheme of things getting beaned with a baseball bat doesn’t seem that dangerous?

Paragon Levels with Friends

Since a good chunk of our raid was still doing the whole Pax Prime thing, we were not able to put in any attempts on Ravana Extreme last night. Instead I spent a good chunk of time fiddling with Bitdefender and ultimately uninstalling it. I guess I should have known better when my good friend Wulf struggled to keep it from blocking the Final Fantasy XIV game client, but I went ahead and gave it a shot. This time around it was the Glyph client for Trion Worlds that I could not get it to unblock. I finally uninstalled it and went back to AVG because at least I am used to it. That of course killed an hour, so by the time I finally logged into Diablo 3 it was fairly late in the evening. Grace was already hard at work doing rifts and such so I joined her until she left to go eat dinner. Then there was a block of time when the server was rebooted and patched, and I could not get reconnected to save my life. All the while I am watching The Strain on Hulu, which is a show I would absolutely suggest if you like Horror. The added benefit is you get to see Argus Filch playing a Van Helsing like badass… and yes I know the actors name is David Bradley but he will always be Filch to me.

The big take away of the evening is that we managed to get Mor to 70 on his Crusader, and I managed to get up to 47ish Paragon levels before the end of the night. I still cannot deal anywhere close to as much damage as Grace can at this point so I feel like I need to do some research into how best to gear and spec out a Barbarian. I mean I do respectable damage but I think my gear just isn’t quite at the same level as hers. She is still absolutely carrying both of us hard when it comes to doing group content. Though last night I did manage to stay alive most of the time, I think I took two deaths throughout the night, which is significantly better than previous outings. We spent most of the night on Torment IV, and I can personally solo Torment I pretty effectively… it is just that bosses seem to take forever. I am not sure how long this current addiction to Diablo 3 will last, but for the time being I am rolling with it.

On Fires, Part 3

August 31, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #31

Burning Wheel has probably the best skill system I’ve read as it relates to skill use and advancement. The basic premise is that you don’t get any better by doing things that are easy. Therefore, you’re encouraged to try things that might be somewhat difficult for your character, because that’s the only way you get better. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Burning Wheel rules are long and wordy.

To go along with this, the list of skills goes on for pages. There are the expected skills for weapons and fighting (sword, bow, armor training), an assortment of professional skills (blacksmith, haggling, dye manufacture), sorcery and sorcery-related skills (enchanting, summoning), social skills (intimidate, persuasion, falsehood), and some oddball ones like Strategy Games. There are also open-ended -wise skills that act as knowledge skills. Examples include things like Great Masters-wise, Dirty Secrets-wise, and Poacher-wise, in addition to things you might expect like Forest-wise, Noble-wise, and Tools-wise. (You can make appropriate ones up for your character and take them as non-lifepath skills.)

At low skill levels, you can advance with a few challenging skill tests and a few routine ones, but eventually the routine ones stop counting. If you never push yourself to do difficult tasks with a skill that you’re already somewhat good at, it will never get better. Burning Wheel lacks XP entirely, so this skill progression is how you get better. There are a few alternatives to trying things that you’re going to fail at, however. You can have someone else who is good at a skill teach you, which counts toward the number of skill tests you need to advance.

I’ll probably never actually play in this system, but I have talked to Tamrielo (who is my usual GM) about it. He likes the skill system and the fact that violence is rarely the right answer, but not so much all of the incredibly crunchy bits (that I haven’t actually talked about here). It’s a fun system to build characters in though, so I suspect I might just use it as inspiration for some future characters.

Blaugust Complete

Doing this for the second year was interesting. As mentioned, posting every day is a bit much for me, but this did help me get back into the swing of things. I think I’m in better shape to maintain the 3/week schedule I was in for most of last year. I think I fell into the trap Bel outlined last week, but he’s right, the “epic welcome back post” just doesn’t happen. It’s far more productive to just start writing.

Farewell to Blaugust!

August 31, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 31

It’s finally here, the day we’ve all been waiting for since August 1. Blaugust is ending today, and whether you’re a Blaugust “winner,” participant, or just a regular reader who’s been following me through this month, I wanted to say thank you. Some days were difficult but being part of this huge community of bloggers and readers has made it totally worthwhile.

So how did I do? Well I managed a post for each day so I guess I “win” Blaugust! I’ve had a regular readership of a few dozen loyal folks, with a few days where I got some extra attention. The day of my double post was my best, but there’s no way I will be attempting to post that frequently in the future. Honestly the only way I managed to get through the whole month with daily posts was by making a plan ahead of time with topics, writing prompts, and regular features like Screenie Saturday.

Writing the Shiphand Buddy series in particular was rewarding but also added quite a lot of work since I needed to research and run all of those missions many times in order to write the guides. All that hard work paid off though, since they were featured on WildStar Core!

Time for the money

At the beginning of the month I tried to take stock of my cash savings in WildStar and track it for the month. Unfortunately I got pretty lax about spending money midway through the month. Based on a couple high-cost items I bought, I’m guessing I made a total of around 150-200 plat over the course of the month. Sadly my cash-on-hand is only about 10p. The market has shifted dramatically since the beginning of August with the anticipation of F2P. On the flip side CREDD has gone up a bit in price over this month. Most of my money-making avenues are still functional but are just bringing in far less profit than they used to. Hopefully when the drop lands the combination of lots of new players and changes to gear will help me start churning out the plat again.

Some other game I play when I’m not being a space zombie

I set up my “What I’m Playing” posts in part to have an easy topic for the weekends, but also to try to encourage me to play more games. I succeeded at the first part but not so much at the second, since as the month progressed I played fewer and fewer. Partially that has been due to fatigue and stress, which make me want to stick with easy, familiar games. I may actually try to keep this feature, since it has been fun for me personally to be able to look back and see the record of what I’ve been up to all month.

Blaugust was also a nice experiment in adding some commentary about games other than WildStar here on Moonshine Mansion. I suspect I will continue this. The main focus of this blog will stay WildStar for certain, but I will happily sprinkle in posts about other games once in a while. With F2P coming soon I doubt I will be lacking for WildStar content to talk about for a long time.

At the beginning of the month, I said that all I hoped to get out of Blaugust was to get in the habit of posting more frequently. Since I managed a post every day I guess that was definitely a success. I absolutely do not plan to keep up the daily schedule moving forward, but I do have a lot more respect for the folks that post that often. My new goal is 2 posts per week, which is much more reasonable for my schedule. Thank you all again for taking this silly journey with me. And a very special thank you to Bel for all his hard work organizing this event, wrangling bloggers, tallying votes, and figuring out prizes.

Here’s to a very peaceful and relaxed September!