Guild Wars 2

AggroChat #305 – What Makes Game Value

June 28, 2020 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have an assorted topic type show, but the main discussion ends up centering around games and game value. What makes one game feel like a valuable experience and another game just seems like a waste of time. We talk a bit about the Phantasy Star Online 2 America Day holiday and how they have a really strange impression of our country. Kodra talks about his adventures in the deeply edge case Sudoku. We also have a discussion about when the right time to group is in a game versus largely solo play. In the middle of all of this there are several references to Guild Wars 2 and Destiny 2 for reasons.

Topics Discussed

Phantasy Star Online 2 “America Day”
When to play a game with friends
- What point do you transition from solo to group play
Kodra’s adventures in edgecase Sudoku.
What makes up game value
- Getting the most out of a game
- The length of AAA Games
Side Discussion about Guild Wars 2
Side Discussion about Destiny 2

The post AggroChat #305 – What Makes Game Value appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition

June 22, 2020 by Belghast

I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal. It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.

To Those Remaining

Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.

Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.

To the New and Returning

So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.

I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.

I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.

I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.

World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.

To Those Departing

Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.

You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.

I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.

Summary

During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing. The post Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Livingroom Rain

May 27, 2020 by Belghast

For whatever reason years ago when I leveled Mining and Botany to 50, I neglected fishing. As a result I spent most of last night chilling out and fishing in a video game, which is fine because I needed some heavy chill. As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, neither my wife or I really got much of a good sleep the night before. This is largely due to the fact that sometime between 8:30 and 9 pm that night it started raining in our living room. We didn’t pick up on it at first because something was on the Television, but the cats were freaking us out which lead us to notice the droplets coming down from the central rafter in our main living area. This has happened before and through much trail and error we have had the roofers out in an attempt to figure out what was causing it. Up until this point we thought it was the flashing at the top of the roof line that was the issue, and they would come out and tamp that down and caulk it, which would in fact cause it to stop for awhile. However this time while up on the roof the guy noticed an entire segment between this raised area of the roof and our chimney that appears to have no flashing at all. All we can figure out is that maybe when the folks put on the siding, that they failed to put back the flashing in that area. This will of course lead to minor surgery on the roof at some point in the future, but we have temporary flashing and caulk install in a hopes of getting us through the next few days of severe rain.

As far as gaming goes, I am all over the place right now. I am still spending a little bit of time each day in World of Warcraft, but I think I have petered out when it comes to pushing alts to 120. During the course of this run I now have on the Horde Side my Paladin, Hunter, Druid, Warlock, Death Knight, Mage and of course the original Warrior and Demon Hunter that were previously at 120. On the Alliance side right now I have everything at least to level 100 and so far the only 120 is my Paladin. For the moment I am mostly cherry picking World Quests each day when one shows up with an upgrade to any of my army.

Over the weekend I spent some time in Guild Wars 2, and that is something I would like to revisit in the coming weeks as well. I am not sure why it happened, but I logged into voice chat and everyone seemed to be in the game, so I like the dutiful toady I am patched it up to join in. I left the game with my Warrior in a fairly good spot, I just need a lot more points to finish getting Berzerker and Spellbeaker. I did some significant changing around of things because it appears that my Hammer/Greatsword is no longer in the “meta” and instead the money build is Greatsword/Mace and Shield preferably with Spellbreaker which I do not have… but there is another built the uses Discipline in its place. I had some fun fiddling around in Fractals and would like to do more of this.

Minecraft Dungeons released yesterday and I have been spending some time playing with it. I’ve not gotten terribly far in part because I mostly played it prior to heading to sleep last night. I tried it out first on Xbox One through game pass and then ultimately purchased it for Switch which seems to use my Microsoft account. I like it quite a bit but it reminds me way more of Gauntlet Legends/Dark Legacy than it does Diablo. It is quite a bit of fun though and I am interested to see how the game evolves as I level up and move through bigger areas.

Lastly Phantasy Star Online 2 released for Windows 10 PC today and I have it downloading in the background. This is more than likely going to be consuming the majority of my time for the remainder of the week as I try and catch my CAST Ranger to Ash and Tam who have been playing considerably more often on the Xbox One. This game looked horrible on a base Xbox and as a result I just found it a struggle to get into it considering I was also having to learn how to play it with a controller. I had experimented with the Japanese client and it completely spoiled me towards anything other than the Windows release. What have you been playing lately? Drop me a line below and let me know. The post Livingroom Rain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Games of the Decade: 2012

December 13, 2019 by Belghast

Last week I started this series where I am talking about the games that were particularly important to me during this decade. The end of the year generally makes me introspective about such things, and with this being the first “decade” I can really observe on this blog I figured it was a reasonable series to dive into. I’ve already covered 2010 and 2011, but today we are diving into 2012 which wound up being a pretty significant year for various reasons.

Diablo 3

At the time it released I would have had no idea that this game would become as important for me as it has. In fact I am not entirely certain if I actually managed to get a character all of the way to 70 before the end of 2012. The initial release of this game had some problems, namely when it came to any sort of loot drops that you actually needed. To make matters worse this initial release also had the real money auction house and it would not be until the release of Reaper of Souls in 2014 that a lot of this got sorted out. It was a game I dabbled with and I know that at the very least I had “beat” the story of the game within that initial month.

However in the years since its launch, I met my good friend Grace and with that I got indoctrinated into the tradition of running seasonal content… which also released significantly later. We’ve gotten into this cadence of every three months we return to Diablo 3 with excitement and spend a week or two of serious playtime before fading away again until the next seasonal launch. It mimics the behavior that we have towards any sort of a new MMORPG release and also manages to capture that same excitement every three months like clockwork. Due to all of these peripheral reasons… Diablo 3 has become one of my favorite games of all time, so it most definitely reserves a slot on this list.

The Secret World

Every so often there are games that mean an extreme amount to you on a personal level… but that you also just don’t really play anymore. Secret World is definitely in that camp and I cherish all of the moments we experienced during the launch of this game. It is firmly set in one of my favorite genres… occult fantasy, and saw me being able to mangle together a character I enjoyed that was not quite like any other standard character build. I ran around with a Sword and a Shotgun and had an immense amount of fun figuring out how to make penetration damage combos. It was a glorious time for many of the AggroChat crew as we each got to build our own very custom and tailored version of the character we wanted to play.

Then unfortunately all of that joy came crashing down around us as we entered what represented the end game… the Nightmare difficulty dungeons. We had an amazing time with the Story mode and the Elite mode… but when we moved up to that highest tier all of our fun and custom builds started to fall apart. At that level you needed very specific tank builds, healer builds and any sort of melee damage was punished to extreme levels and not really viable. It was around this time that the magic faded from the game and we all sorta went our separate ways. I would attempt to return periodically to gobble up the story content, but even that only lasted through episode 8. I have fond memories of Secret World but they are also deeply tinged with regret.

My experience with Guild Wars 2 is deeply fraught. I’ve told the story a dozen times now, but this is the only game I have ever resigned from an alpha process for. I remember being extremely excited when through my connections I managed to score a seat in the testing process. It also represents the most thorough NDA I ever had to sign, involving so much detail that it felt like I was signing away my first born. It was one of those testing processes where they forced everyone to join one massive all hands Ventrilo server, and gave us very focused testing directions. I was so excited for that first four hour testing session that I was nearly vibrating… and then I also remember the crushing “wtf is this shit” feeling I had moments later.

Guild Wars 2 was not the game I was expecting or the game that I wanted it to be… but by the time I reached launch I managed to push a lot of that beside me. However it still took years before I finally reached the point where I understood what people enjoyed about it. Now I get it… it is this weird casual sandbox that allows you to roam around and feel like you had an effect on the world with extremely short play sessions. It is a game of more or less checking things off lists, and if you are a list maker and a list completer I am sure it is an amazing experience. For me who was still very much in the rush to end game and raid all of the things mentality… I found the dungeons to be an extremely frustrating experience and the game play experience to largely be pointless. I’ve since found the joy in this game and the things that I apparently was missing, but in this first year it was a lot of confusion and frustration.

Borderlands 2

I am not really sure how much I actually have to say about this game save for the fact that it is important. The style of dialog and story was something unique at the time, and the slick package that it was all wrapped up in lead to some thoroughly enjoyable game play experiences. I played an awful lot of the original Borderlands, and this game took everything that was good about that game and iterated upon it. It truly is a masterpiece that still holds up extremely well by today’s standards. Unfortunately this is also the beginning of the end of the magic for Gear Box. I’ve not played Borderlands 3 at all, but the “pre-sequel” felt like they were phoning it in. When BL3 comes out on Steam I will likely use that as an excuse to pick it up and see where the game has gone. So far it has given me twinges of the same disappointment I felt playing Rage 2 just based on the trailers and such.

Dishonored

Dishonored is a game that deserves not only its spot on this list, but a spot on a “best games of all time” list as well. I have a bad relationship with stealth in games, and often times when I encounter a forced stealth sequence it causes me to nope the hell out of the experience. Dishonored is this weird game that works perfectly well for Tam on his desire to get “clean hands” and “ghost runs” where he is never spotted and never has to kill a single person… or for me where I murderate every single person I encounter. The game does an amazing job of allowing you to play however the hell you want to play… and then brutally judges you for your actions.

The first game is a masterclass in level design and how exactly you bring a brand new IP to market. I love everything about Corvo Attano and the setting of Dunwall. I love the weird mix of Steampunk, Magic and Chthonic monsters of the deep that come together perfectly in a single tight package. I also love the way that this game and its two DLC perfectly feed into the experience of playing Dishonored 2 and give the player backstory about the events that take place between the two games. The entire series is a phenomenal and I highly suggest that everyone play the entire thing through just to experience it. This is one of those settings that could be made into a television series on Netflix and would be almost universally loved. It is the type of game I feel comfortable suggesting because it allows you to largely carve out your own game play experience with so many different ways to be able to complete it.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2012

It was an extremely rough year for me. We had a bunch of deaths in the family and I was still more or less recovering from events that happened in 2011. One of the high points of the year however was recruiting my friend Rae to come work for me. I miss having her at work because her excitement and the unique way she viewed the world was infectious. 2013 would be a banner year, and 2012 was sorta this weird doldrum between the horrible year that was 2011… and me finally starting to come out of that storm.