Final Fantasy XIV

Misery and NDAs

September 24, 2015 by Belghast

Broken

Over the last few days I have felt run down, and I am grasping at straws to figure out exactly why. There seems to be something going around the office, but so far I am not really showing any signs of whatever it is other than simply being exhausted. Last night I largely struggled with a Migraine that kept me in a pseudo hibernation state, but this morning as I sit down to the keyboard and attempt to drink my coffee I am just feeling generally lousy. One of my co-workers has been out for three days with something, so I am hoping I am not coming down with whatever that was. Last night was the night of restless gaming. I attempted to log in and be present in Final Fantasy XIV but only wound up AFKing outside the guild hall. It made me appreciate just how much I love our free company house. It really is in just about the perfect location that seems to be close to just about everything in The Mists neighborhood. The only problem is… it is small. We have talked for a bit about potentially trying to pool our resources and getting a bigger house, but the problem there is we would have to move and likely out of our neighborhood.

One of the things that I like the most about where we are situated is that we actually know a large chunk of the neighbors surrounding us. While it has not been nearly as busy since the launch of Heavensward as everyone has fallen into this pre 3.1 lull… it is still nice feeling like you are part of something larger. While idling in FFXIV I attempted to play some Destiny and managed to complete a few bounties. However my aim was constantly wonky, and I knew I should not be attempting anything serious. As the night wore on the headache got worse and ultimately I ended up retiring to bed for awhile… the finally ending up on the Sofa. I hate those days where you have the will to play something… but cannot struggle through the “bad feels” in order to actually make any headway.

NDAs are Back

I am using Trove as the screenshot for this little section because it was one of the first “who needs an NDA” alpha games that I can remember playing. Everything about that game process was so out in the open that development discussions were openly happening on Reddit. For a period of time it seemed like every new game coming down the pipe was sans NDA so that folks could stream it freely and generate buzz. I was shocked when I managed to get into the Warlords of Draenor friends and family alpha for example… and was told that I could talk about it freely. The problem being… this open transparency bit more than a few games in the ass. Development is a messy time and as things are changing… you end up with features in “partially finished” states that look like a finished product to the gamer. The big problem with open and “pay to join” Alphas is that they no longer feel like testing. Instead you have simply released a broken game.

As a result lately I’ve noticed a significant number of games bringing back the NDA. Hell some of them seem to be almost unwilling to let the NDA go, as they have been in fairly prolific testing for a couple of years. As of right now I am in a handful of NDA bound alpha processes, and each of them seems to be trying to return to the era when Alphas were actually that. The problem with this is, I am finding myself far less interested in playing something that I can’t actually talk about on my blog. So generally speaking I install the Alpha client and play every now and then, but I am not actually playing enough to be a proper tester. I feel bad for this because I have always been the type to bug note the hell out of things as I see them. While I think it is probably a good thing for Alpha processes to regain some of their previous closed nature, I also feel far less invested in a game until it is actually hatched and ready for public consumption. So many things over the last years have blurred the lines between finished product and testing, and the current era of incessant and constant “early access” games just makes me leery to invest too much of myself in a game until I know that it is nearing its finished state.

Titans and Skywhales

September 22, 2015 by Belghast

Two Worlds

Titans and Skywhales — Badass New Speeder and Armor Theme

Last night was a bit of a mixed night, in that I logged into Final Fantasy XIV early in the evening… and then spent most of the night with my chair turned to the side playing Destiny instead. I largely logged in when I did to be available for any raid shenanigans later that evening and also be available for various folks who were wanting to get friends invited to the guild. So I sat there with my headphones on attempting to monitor both games at the same time and doing a fairly poor job of paying attention to guild chat. I gotta say I am enjoying the Titan again now that I gave up on the whole defensive thing and went back to striker. There is something gratifying about doing Fist of Havoc in the middle of a pack of mobs and walking away to tell the tale. Largely I spent my evening working on quests and bounties. There are a handful that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to complete… what the fuck is an “attachable grenade”? I thought at first it was the lightning grenade that “sticks to any surface” but after a bit of reading this morning apparently it is the FIRST grenade option… which I don’t think sticks to anything.

At this point I am level 30, which I have to say really quickly how much nicer it is to have a simply leveling curve instead of that light bullshit. Having to sift through items and find the one with the highest light amount… was maddening especially when it often meant you were maybe turning down an otherwise superior item. The only thing I question at the moment is the fact that all of this “leveling” gear is upgradeable… whereas I am swapping out gear pretty much every single time I go out into the world, so upgrading it really is meaningless. The only thing I am still holding onto right now is my exotic gun, and that is simply because I have not found anything with higher damage. The moment I find a hand cannon with better stats, this exotic will likely get chunked in the bank for nostalgia reasons and I will happily use the next gun with better stats on it. I am still fairly firmly attached to a Hand Cannon as my primary weapon… or as they for some reason occasionally refer to them as “Sidearms” instead. As far as secondary and heavy… I am pretty partial to the Sniper Rifle and the Machine Gun because that combo gives me a strong way to pick mobs off at range… with a heavy with some serious stopping power. Stopping power that you need for the Taken invasions that seem to spring up at random in every single open world zone in the game. I stuck around on Mars long enough last night while working on a “kill champions” bounty last night, that I got to fight the same event several times in a row. The giant Taken Vex Minotaur thing… is freaking brutal. I don’t think it is quite as bad as a spider tank, but still pretty horrible to content with especially when there are not a ton of players around.

Taking Down Skywhales

While fiddling around with Destiny a large gathering of folks started showing up in Final Fantasy XIV. After a bit Kodra being the awesome person that he is, took it upon himself to try and make a group happen. I am super thankful that he did… because I was absolutely not paying a whole lot of attention because I was busy trying to headshot Taken. It turns out we had a few people who had not managed to get Bismarck Extreme yet, so that set our course for the evening. Learning nights are interesting when you are teaching a handful of people a fight, because it ends up shifting the balance for the rest of the group as well. Players who were the newbie last time, step up and become the experts and I saw that happening quite a bit last night. Bismarck Extreme is still serious business even though we have downed it several times now, and I went into it knowing that it would take a few tries before we finally got it down. On our first attempt we predictably missed the back on the first try, but after that we adjusted and started hitting that first hurdle pretty reliably.

The hardest hurdle as always is getting down the two snakes in time. The challenge there was simply a matter of keeping all of our dps alive and busy killing sky snakes because during that phase if you lose a single player it is highly unlikely that you will be able to pull it out. We are quite simply not geared enough to be able to carry that objective too hard. In truth we downed the boss the try in which we kept everyone alive. That just happened to be about 15 minutes before the instance timer ran out. I think it was a pretty great night though all things consider and we broke a few more players into the rigors of end game Final Fantasy XIV content. For the time being Monday night raids are on hiatus until November when the 3.1 patch lands, and I think in the mean time we are going to use Monday nights as a sort of “get stuff accomplished” night for whatever anyone happens to need. I would not mind farming more Bismarck or even getting a group back into Binding Coil of Bahamut. Cosmetic gear is always a strong draw to get me back into a place.

Week In Gaming 9/20/2015

September 20, 2015 by Belghast

Allergies Suck

This week has been a tale of the universe conspiring to kill me… otherwise known as horrible horrible pollen count. When you go to one of those sites that tracks air quality, my neck of the woods has been bright red for the last several weeks. As a result I have been walking around in a bit of a stupor. Friday I felt like I was coming out from behind a fog, but this morning after running around yesterday I am once again feeling miserable. Essentially it seems like my best option is to huddle inside and forget the world outside exists. The biggest problem I have is that the only allergy treatment that seems to really work is Benedryl… which puts me to sleep. So as a result I take a cocktail of other medications in the hopes of blunting most of the things going on… and then combining that with copious amounts of caffeine in the hopes that somehow someway I will be able to function as an adult. Adulting is really damned hard sometimes. In spite of all of my time hunkered down this week, I really don’t have a wide variety of things to talk about.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Week In Gaming 9/20/2015 — Treek is a Badass

Once again this week my primary source of gaming entertainment has been Star Wars the Old Republic. As I mentioned last week during the recording of the AggroChat podcast I started working on my Smuggler, and I have continued that process throughout the week. As of last night I am now on Alderaan and level 34. The extremely level gap that I had on the content is starting to shrink and as a result things are getting more difficult. I need to look up and see when the next upgrades are available because I am starting to feel like I need to spend some commendations on both myself and Treek to get some more gear. I had been trying to do this every other level range, so that I skip one upgrade step but the levels have not been coming nearly as fast as they were on Taris and Nar Shadda. I am however rolling in the commendations because they just seem to keep coming quickly.

I am absolutely enjoying the smuggler storyline because it feels so vastly different than any of the other storylines I had experienced. The Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular stories interweave as you go throughout the game, but it seems like the Trooper and Smuggler don’t really work this way. I am very much on my own mission through the galaxy with my own cast of characters to interact with. I am still really happy I made my choice to go with Treek over Corso Riggs, because even listening to him running Crew Missions is enough for me. I’ve managed to unlock three of the faction story bits with Treek and I am wondering if she has a special mission at the end or not. She just seems genuinely happy to roam around the galaxy killing things, and I am happy to keep her in business.

Tron 2.0

Yesterday I went through the steps outlined in this video link to attempt to get Tron 2.0 up and running on a Windows 8.1 system. It took a little bit of fiddling but I finally managed to get things running. I have to admit right now I am struggling a bit, because quite honestly it feels like a decade old game. The controls are not nearly as responsive as I have come to expect from a shooter, also it returns to an area without functional auto-save. This means that yesterday I died… after playing the game about an hour, realizing that the last time I had saved was during the tutorial when the game specifically asked me to do so. The combination of wonky controls, and not having auto-save to lean on… is going to mean that I have to shift the way I think about the experience. I’ve decided already that when I restart the game I will be lowering the difficulty and skipping the tutorial since I already saw it once. Here is hoping that I can manage to get through it before the AggroChat show next week!

This is going to be the first week period that I have not actually logged into Final Fantasy XIV. Allergies and generally feeling like shit kept me from raiding on both Monday and Wednesday nights, which was unfortunate. I’ve been in this holding pattern waiting on the 3.1 release to come in and sweep me off my feet with overwhelming love for the game again. However over the weekend at the Tokyo Game Show they announced that we can expect the 3.1 patch in November. That seems a really long ways away… considering that people are desperate for content right now. The only thing we can think is that maybe the pet battle system might be what is delaying it… but honestly it would seem like a much better call would be to bump pet battles to 3.2 and get some fresh content now. This is precisely the problem we went through at the launch of 2.0 and ultimately why many of us quit playing when we did. We got tired of grinding the same two dungeons over and over. In the mean time I will have SWTOR and Wildstar to entertainment. I don’t plan on quitting the game, but I will probably not be playing a lot of it until November to be brutally honest.

Disney Infinity 3.0

The other thing that I have started playing with yet again is Disney Infinity. I managed to catch a silly deal on the Disney Infinity 3.0 set while only spending $15 out of my pocket on it. This gave me the 3.0 base game with five figures… the exclusive Boba Fett and then Luke, Leia, Anakin, and Asoka. The 3.0 interface itself is much refined from the 2.0 version and features an almost MMO like feel to it where you have various hubs in a persistent main world. Additionally there seems to be some sort of arcade feature that allows you to connect to players around the world and play with them. I have not really explored much other than talking to each of the quest givers off the main hub, and unlocking their specific area. Boba Fett is pretty damned overpowered as he has rockets that pretty much destroy anything they hit. The only negative that I see so far with the Star Wars characters is that unlike Iron Man or Thor none of them seem to have flight abilities. I halfway expected that Boba Fett could use his jet pack, but instead that is just used as a sort of charge attack. I am guessing that also means that most of the play sets will be built in a way where they don’t need flight in any fashion. Right now there are really only the two playsets that I have seen for 3.0 but I am sure more will be coming shortly.

Predictions for Heavensward 3.1 and Beyond

September 18, 2015 by Thalen

So this weekend we will be getting some sort of update regarding the next content patch for Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward. Most people are expecting to get a release date, and we will presumably find out more about the new raid and so forth. In the spirit of my previous prediction, I'm going to spin some wild theories about where things are going to go from here.

So first let's take a look at my previous prediction. I theorized that we would be facing the Scions in tempered form and collecting dark crystals after defeating them. Well, we've rescued one of the missing Scions now and, while definitely changed by the process, Y'shtola was not tempered and we didn't have to fight her. Also, rather than collecting new crystals the initial story had us restoring our connection to the existing crystals over the course of our adventure.

Predictions for Heavensward 3.1 and Beyond

Getting lost in the Aether gives you a kicky new hairstyle. Who knew?

That said, we still haven't found out what Urianger and Elidibus were talking about and we still don't have any clue to the fate of the remaining four Scions. Also, the Warrior of Dark appears to be entering the fray at Elidibus' urging. So where might things go from here?

At first when faced with a new female Ascian (Igeyorhm) in the Heavensward story, I thought the body she had possessed might be Minfilia. Especially when our old friend Lahabrea showed back up at her side, consdering he was using Thancred as his body last time around. In the end though, we killed one of them and Thordan took out the other and neither body remained afterwards. I can't imagine we just unknowingly killed Minfilia and Thancred without realizing it afterwards, so I have to assume the Ascians were using some poor nameless saps who don't matter enough to leave corpses when killed.

At this point I'm expecting us to track down one more Scion per content patch. I would expect Minfilia to be the last of those given her leadership status. I'm guessing Thancred will be rescued in 3.1. First, Y'shtola's cast Flow in an attempt to rescue Thancred so now that we have Y'shtola back that gives us a link to follow to try and find Thancred. Second, Y'shtola and Thancred seemed to get less development in the Realm Reborn story, so bringing them back first and second gives us opportunity to work them more one on one without the others around to steal the limelight. Finally, an FFXIV event went live last night in Record Keeper featuring two of the Scions as recruitable characters. Those two Scions? Y'shtola and Thancred. Using Thancred there makes me believe they'll bringing him back into the game fairly soon.

He's back baby.

I still expect Dark crystals to come into the story in some way. At this point I'm guessing the Warrior of Darkness has a similar connection to Dark crystals of Zodiark as we do to the Light crystals of Hydaelyn. It's worth noting that the concept of the Warriors of Darkness originates in Final Fantasy III and you didn't fight them, you sought their aid against the Cloud of Darkness. We still don't quite know what Elidibus' deal is; he hasn't been as belligerent as the other Ascians. It's entirely possible that there's some greater awful out there that will need our combined effort to defeat. If that's the case I would expect that to be the final big fight of the expansion.

Finally, we still don't know what sort of deal Urianger and Elidibus have made. I still suspect that Moenbryda's death is going to have repercussions. It has occurred to me that Elidibus may be trying to offer Urianger a similar deal to what was offered to Tiamat. I just don't see Urianger falling for it. Perhaps he'll do something ill-advised thinking he can outsmart the Ascians? While considering Primals we haven't yet seen in FFXIV I did think of Brynhildr from FFXIII. I suppose it's possible Urianger could end up creating her in an attempt to bring back Moenbryda. Primals usually retain the name of the being they mimic though, so I don't know. If they did use Brynhildr I'm sure they'd heavily redesign her to better fit the FFXIV aesthetic.

I would expect less Transformer, more valkyrie.

Finally, I fully expect us to end up going to the moon. Possibly that will be a later 24-man raid after the one going in this patch that takes place on the Void Ark. The Void Ark seems like a reasonable method of transport to the moon. 24-man content is usually fairly divorced from the story content though, and with the moon seeming to be linked to the Ascian threat and the Warrior of Darkness I would expect it to be part of the main storyline. Maybe Cid's next fabulous invention will be the Lunar Whale. That would be pretty fantastic.