fps – Page 18 – AggroChat

Archon’s Forge Love

October 27, 2016 by Belghast

This morning I am going to talk a little bit about my love of the Archon’s Forge area in Destiny, and we will see where things go from there. I know I have talked a bit about this in the past, but the Archon’s Forge for me personally alone is worth the price of the expansion. You have to understand that I love milling around in patrol zones, as in that is pretty much my default “I want to play some destiny” mode because it allows me to putter around. So far my favorite patrol zone to date has been the Dreadnaught, because in many ways it felt like an old school MMO dungeon. Back in the days of Everquest and Dark Age of Camleot, dungeons were these sprawling places with no clear path that you were supposed to travel. As a result the community developed designations to break apart an otherwise huge zone into “camps”. The Dreadnaught was similar, with various sections of the map labelled as you zoned into them, with the coolest area being the Court of Oryx. This was an area where you could summon groups of Hive and Taken in the form of mini-boss fights, with the chance of there being decent rewards at the end if you were the person that summoned it. What I liked about it was the fact that three or four players who were not actively grouping, could work together on a shared objective and get pretty reasonable rewards as a result.

Archon’s Forge is very similar but also manages to work in one of my OTHER favorite areas of Destiny… the Prison of Elders. The backstory behind the area is that this is the place where the Fallen come to prove their worth in combat. We as players collect Siva offerings, that you can get by doing various things including Public Events, Patrols and occasionally off Majors. It is a random chance sort of thing, but I wound up getting one pretty quickly. From there you go into the Archon’s Forge area, and there is a terminal that you use the offering on. These come in Green, Blue and Purple varieties which denote how difficult the mobs are that are going to spawn as a result. Unlike the Court of Oryx, the Archon’s Forge actually locks down while the event is going on, so you have to be fairly quick to duck inside in time to participate. Essentially you end up fighting waves of mobs, culminating in some sort of a boss like encounter… generally centered around a major or handful of majors. The two things of note that make this extremely awesome are that first… it seems to be equally rewarding for the players just hanging out and participating and those that are actually giving up the Siva offerings. Secondly it seems to be self perpetuating, in that the encounters themselves drop a fair number of new SIVA offerings… allowing you to pretty much keep the process going indefinitely so long as you have three or four people. Essentially everyone keeps key trading, summoning the next round to keep the loot machine rolling.

The other night after the Final Fantasy XIV raid, I poked my head into Destiny and then spent the next hour and a half at the forge doing short events. What is awesome about it is that not only is this a flood of greens and blues, but I managed to pick up eight legendary engrams during that time period. Additionally I’ve gotten several pieces of armor, ghost shells, artifacts and I am pretty sure at least one of my recent guns dropped in the forge because I have no recollection of getting it otherwise. The big loot comes from killing the mini-bosses and just appears in your inventory much like the end of strike/crucible items do. My only concern is that I believe there is a limit of 20 items in the mailbox… meaning I really need to head to orbit more often while doing the forge. I am probably loosing a ton of loot as a result. I also probably should strip down myself to only the items I need to participate to create more room for said loot, and spend time between matches deconstructing greens. In any case regardless of those logistics… this is one of my favorite places to hang out because it is so simple to just hop in and start doing stuff. I SHOULD be doing strikes… and I managed to finish one of those last night that I had two quests for. The problem is right now my Destiny time is pretty sporadic, and Archon’s Forge seems to fit the perfect amount of “engagement” for me.

Regularly Playing: June Edition

June 29, 2016 by Belghast

Back in May I decided to make a monthly ritual of “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” widget on the sidebar to more closely represent the games I quite literally was playing on regular rotation. Given that it is that time again… here is the list of things for June. I added a few new games into the mix and also removed a few more… even if one is really only temporary. Doing the thing where I write a blurb about what I happened to be doing in each of them.

Rift

In a weird bit of nostalgia, I decided to come back to Rift and give it another push. There has never really been a period of time when I have not actually at least dabbled in this game, but so many times I failed to gain traction. This time around I somehow managed to push from 61 to 65 and have started on this mad mission to raise all of my tradeskills. Now having almost accomplished that I will be pushing into the Planetouched Wilds and giving it a real amount of effort. On top of this I am focused heavily on my crafting dailies, which often times means I need to venture out into the world in search of Sarleaf and Thalasite. With the shift of WoW to the Garrison for most of your farming needs… I had forgotten just how much I really did love going off and ore farming. There is just something relaxing about wandering around a zone with a purpose, looking for the next ore pop and trying to get to it before anyone else notices. It is this weird game within a game that actually seems to work well for me. I spent many an hour flying circles around Icecrown or Sholazar Basin in Wrath… and now am loving doing the same thing for Gelboro Reef. Largely I am focused on that zone since, firstly I know it pretty well… and secondly the mobs are low enough level that I can go afk as needed and make it back to the keyboard before something actually kills me. I am certain that I could be farming ore while wandering around the Planetouched Wilds, but the mobs out there are truly brutal. Whatever the reason… I am deeply invested in Rift and its community once more and loving it.

Destiny: The Taken King

While I have slowed down considerably in this game, there are still regularly sessions of it… namely because I have been trying to get fellow AggroChat member and good friend of mine Grace settled in game. Monday night we managed to get her to level 40, and pushed through the Taken King quest content… which means that there is an entirely new world waiting for her of endgame stuff. With Iron Banner going on this weekend, I highly expect that the two of us will be working on that or at least attempting to show her the ropes of the event. We also have several more steps in the recruit a friend process, but as we get her gear level up there it should get easier to do cooler stuff. Other than that other games have taken priority over the last few weeks, namely with my return to active duty in FFXIV and running stuff in Rift. Hopefully the Iron Banner will be a good event to get me back into focus and moving forward in Destiny once more. I feel pretty disconnected, and I miss the Thursday night Challenge of Elders stuff horribly, I just had a few crazy weeks with the St Louis trip, and Kansas City trip… and a bunch of other random occurrences that knocked me out of my schedule. Hopefully I can start to rebuild said schedule and get moving forward once more.

ArcheAge

In a similar fashion to Rift, I have suddenly become involved and attached to the ArcheAge community as well. Right now I am largely focused on leveling, but at some point I plan on doing all the tradeskilly things in this game as well. Last year the AggroChat crew made a serious push into this game, and while we faded into the background… I still found it extremely enjoyable. Additionally like I said yesterday, many of the early toxic aspects of the community as a whole seem to be gone. Right now I am trying to get back in tune with the game and try and remember how the hell to do half of the things. On the positive as I grind away at questing I seem to keep getting really nice drops for weapons and armor… however I remember that most of the best stuff I had was crafted. I just happened to time my return to coincide with some welcome back campaign, and I keep accruing rewards into my inventory that at some point I will figure out how to use. Mostly I would like to hit the level cap before worrying too much with them, but I believe some of them are xp bonuses that I might as well use now. If you are actively playing I am Belglaive on the Tahyang server, but I am not sure what all it requires to actually friend someone in game. I am not sure if cross server friends lists are a thing there like they are in Rift.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

I spent most of the month deeply frustrated with this game, namely because I was sitting at what felt like an artificial gear cap and being prevented from progressing in the story. Since then however I managed to get a Void Ark run with some friends and got over whatever anxiety I happened to have about tanking it. As a result I am now sitting at 205 gear score, and bumping up against the Nidhogg trial in the story. It is my hope that at some point this week I can get a few friends together and run this and hopefully complete the 3.3 patch story. I am still enjoying the game, but I lack the drive to play it… that I have in say Rift or ArcheAge right now. For at least the foreseeable future my activity in game is probably going to be limited to our Tuesday night activities, or the occasional expert or other event that I organize with friends. I love playing this game… but right now I only seem to love playing it with a group of friends logged in at the same time. It is still an amazing game, but it has shifted into the sort of role that World of Warcraft has been in the past… that game that I only played when there was an organized activity.

World of Warcraft

This one admittedly is barely making the list, and keeping its space on my sidebar. Right now I am occasionally logging in to run Garrisons and get my free gold, but not doing much more other than that. There has been talk of myself, grace and a few others doing random old world content for transmoggy bits and honestly… that right now is about all I am interesting in World of Warcraft as a whole. I feel like I am in a “desperately waiting for the Legion pre-patch” mode. Largely because I am tired of not having any bank space, and removing any of my outfits is simply not an option. I am not joking when I say that right now the only important thing to me in this game… is looking cool with my collection of old raid gear littering my bank vault. If the new transmog system were actually patched in… I would more than likely go through a flurry of activity as I once again do awesome old world content for cool threads. However I quite literally have hit a point where I maybe have 15 bag slots total between inventory, bank and void storage…. so I simply cannot play Belghast anymore without risking removing something. So instead… I run the occasional garrison mission as I alternate through my army of alts… and then log out once again.

Things Removed From List

Overwatch

Zero clue why on this one… but the game released and I just have had no desire to really play it. I am amped about just how excited everyone else seems to be about this game, but honestly it feels like I am more interested in talking about the world and the characters… than actually playing it. If the player versus bots game were more compelling I would likely play it more often, but right now it feels like to enjoy it I need a group of friend to play it. Ironically I have a huge group of friends playing it… but I think I am going through a “quiet time” phase where I just want to piddle around on my own in games rather than do a lot of organized play. The few nights I rode along with people… I lasted 3 to 4 games before feeling the need to run and hide again. I am certain at some point I will once again get the Overwatch bug, but the truth is I am just not that into competitive games.

Diablo 3

Removing this one again temporarily because well…. the season is over. I have accomplished everything I could ever hope to accomplish, and now is the quiet time until the next patch. This will be returning once again as another season starts and we all go through the crazy happy madness that is a season launch. For a bit I was still farming for pets and such, but with the addition of several games this got removed from the docket. I still very much love this game and look forward to adding it back to the list, but for the moment we are in the off season and the game for me at least is dormant.

AggroChat #109 – The Dishonored Show

May 21, 2019June 5, 2016 by AggroChat

Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen talk about the May AggroChat Game Club game… Dishonored

After taking a break for the Memorial Day weekend, AggroChat is back with the slightly belated May Game Club show for Dishonored. This was a Belghast pick and in part due to a conversation between he and Tam about stealth mechanics in games. This is the only stealthy game that Belghast has managed to complete, and in truth the game is really even more amazing on a second play. This is as usual a complete spoilers show where we talk about the various endings and choices that the game gives you for both high and low chaos modes.

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E1M1

May 14, 2016 by Belghast

Doomed

Awhile back I wrote about my feelings regarding the Doom multiplayer tests on both the PC and PS4. It felt so much like they had missed the mark, and it seemed very much like someone trying to recreate the experience of the original Doom… without realizing that certain parts of that experience were due to a limit in the ability of the technology at the time. The experience just was not fun, and that is the most scathing indictment you can honestly give any game. So as a result I had for the most part decided to ignore that there was ever a Doom 4… or in this case a weird reboot. Then yesterday I started seeing the first impressions of the single player campaign come in, and they were positive enough that I thought I would take a look for myself. Even though at this point I have only really played an hour and a half of the game, I am glad I wound up grabbing it. The impressions I had of the multiplayer were correct, in that this is an attempt to boil the game down to its original roots. While this doesn’t really work for a multiplayer experience, it does work really well for single player. The game functions in a way that you don’t really see games function in recent years, in that the game is not open world. It is a series of closed loop levels that are designed to be approached as a single map. The first one is quite literally E1M1 as the title of this blog post suggests, borrowing the same naming as the original Doom. They are a closed puzzle that needs to be solved and involves opening a familiar series of Blue, Yellow and Red key card areas to progress through.

The combat itself is also really interested and reminds me of the way these games used to play, where you would have a truly frenetic amount of enemies spawn in on you and have to deal with them rapidly. However once you dealt with that room you were granted time to roam around the area freely before moving ahead and engaging the next set. In many ways it reminds me of the way that the Painkiller games felt, where each room is this challenge to survive and then you restock your ammunition and health in an attempt to prepare for the next such room. What helps make this manageable is the games “Glory Kill” system. When mob is near death it will glow slightly and stagger around letting you know that you can sweep in and with the F key engage a sequence where you do an almost Mortal Kombat like fatality. Sometimes you rip the head off of the monster, other times you rip the arm off and beat it with it. Other than just being a carnal ballet, they serve the purpose of giving you life or ammunition back allowing you to keep up the killing streak a little longer. I found it very needed for getting through some of the later rooms. Often times the mobs will spawn in with such number that you have to keep running around the room to avoid getting wrecked. The imps are also more frustrating than they have ever been with their ability to hang off the edge of things and gun you down with their fireballs.

Nothing Will Save You

Unlike the original Doom, there is no “save game” that you can rely on. Instead there are a sequence of Checkpoints that unlock as you go through the level. When you die you either fall back to the last check point or restart the level in its entirety. These checkpoints generally coincide with the various lulls in the action that I talked about. The only frustrating thing is that they sometimes encompass several rooms worth of encounters. I ultimately stopped last night playing because I died and rolled back to a check point a few rooms back… and simply didn’t have the strength to deal with the shit storm I had just waded though to get there. Even on normal difficulty that game is really tough at times, and you find yourself having to keep glory killing just to maintain your health long enough to push through to the next room. Ammunition also feels like a constant problem with both the 20 round shotgun and the 50 round or so Heavy Machinegun. Similarly the Chainsaw this time around relies upon gas tanks that you find scattered throughout the levels. What was surprising is just how fast you get into the action, similar to the original doom you are planted in a room with mobs that you have to chew your way through with only a pistol. The secret areas that can be found feel every bit as meaningful as they used to in Doom, with them often granting access to a weapon before you would find it in the normal flow of the game.

One of the more interesting aspects of the gameplay is the weapon modification system. Each gun has an Unreal Tournament style alternate fire system but these are unlocked by finding weapon kiosks scattered through the levels. Each mod package changes the way your right mouse button interacts, and once you have unlocked multiple modes you can change between them with your R key. For example with the shotgun its two alternate fire modes allow you to choose from what is ultimately a grenade launcher and a three round burst that can both be accessed by holding the right button for a charged shot. I personally tend to favor the grenade launcher because it allows me to bounce a grenade between several different mobs taking out the entire pack. However for boss fights or tougher enemies I could see how the three round burst would be extremely beneficial. The problem there however is that when you only have 20 rounds in the weapon, chewing those up 3 rounds at a time means you empty the gun quickly. The big takeaway is that the game is very much a 90s shooter, with 90s shooter sensibilities… remastered for the 1080p and beyond world. Some of these work amazingly well in single player, but not in multiplayer. However I might change my tune once I see how the snap map system works. In any case I am definitely enjoying the single player campaign, and it has just enough story and intrigue to keep the game moving forward…. but not so much that you get bogged down in character development. This is in no way the rich narrative environment that Doom 3 was for me at least, but it has enough atmosphere to keep my interested. If you want a good shooter, give it a shot… but if you are looking for a deep storyline… this is not the game for you.