MMO – Page 301 – AggroChat

Lost in Infinity

September 21, 2015 by Belghast

Upgrade Day

For whatever reason I have been putting off the upgrade to Windows 10, even though all of my machines have been asking me to do it for some time now. Essentially I keep telling myself there is always something looming on the horizon that is way to important to risk having a machine down. It is either the Monday or Wednesday raids or the impending Saturday session for recording AggroChat. However this week I told myself… that as soon as I finished with the AggroChat festivities Sunday morning that I would exit out of everything and upgrade. So roughly 9:30 in the morning yesterday I took a leap of faith and performed a Windows 10 in place upgrade. I have to say I am shocked and amazed at just how smoothly things went. The only major issue that I have run into so far is the fact that I had no sound… which isn’t terribly shocking because I use an Asus Xonar sound card. After some quick digging I found out that the Unified Drivers that I had been running all along updated to fix this issue.

The best surprise however was something that I had been concerned about for some time. The account that I use to log into windows, and have used for awhile is my outlook.com account. I like using this… as it makes more sense than my previous windows account. That said my Xbox 360s as well as the old Games for Windows are configured to use a completely different account that is based on one of my second gmails. So my biggest concern was how the Xbox Windows 10 app would work. However it seems like Microsoft has thought of this problem and allows you to sign in a different account. When I did this bam… my Windows login account is now bound to my Xbox Live account and cross linked allowing me the best of both worlds. I don’t have an Xbox One, but if I did I am sure it would be handy to have this set up in such a fashion.

Lost in Infinity

While upgrading Windows I ended up playing Playstation 4 pretty much all day long, and inadvertently falling into a Disney Infinity shaped hole. This time around the hub world feels much more interactive than it did in 2.0. Additionally you have all of these really cool sidekicks to collect, and I am guessing the majority of which are gained through doing side quests. While working on the Twilight of the Empire playset I managed to find four younglings that I could then use as sidekicks when I got back to the toybox. I of course chose the Wookie youngling because who doesn’t want to be followed around by a tiny Wookie. I’ve spent a lot of time playing both Asoka and Boba Fett, but Asoka is by far the furthest progressed. Namely I don’t think I have Boba Fett as an option for any of my playsets that are available yet.

There are so many aspects of this game that are absolute crack for me, like collecting bits to decorate my house. I added on a bit to my house which is basically a combat arena that lets you fight level appropriate baddies while in there. You talk to a tiny side kick form Agent Coulson and bam he spawns a whole bunch of stuff for you to jump down and fight. At this point I have only actually made it through a few areas of Twilight of the Republic, but I am now on Coruscant and just checked into the Jedi Temple. I am just shocked that I quite literally lost from about 9 am until 3:30 pm yesterday afternoon playing this game. The gameplay is pretty damned fun, and much in the same was as I enjoyed running around in Ratchet and Clank beating things up for bolts… the same sort of mechanic is in place here for Sparks that can then be spent on items for the toybox.

Waiting for Sleep

Last night when it came time for bed I was getting choked up again from my allergies. So I took some Benedryl and went upstairs to wait for it to kick in. Since I did not really feel like futzing with my PC I opted to fire back up the PS4 and piddle around on it. Would you believe that until last night I had never actually played a Rayman game? I mean they always looked interesting enough, but there was something about the arms and legs floating in the air that bugged me about the character. There was a recent flash sale and I managed to pick up Rayman Legends dirt cheap for the PS4, and since I had always wanted to give it a shot… it seemed like an awesome idea. So far it seems like a fun game, but for whatever reason didn’t hold my attention for long last night. I made it through one level before popping out and trying something else.

Instead I settled into a game of Destiny and spent my time fiddling with gear and trying to sort out the things that had changed. It seems like most of the really cool stuff is already available to me which kinda shocked me. I’ve not picked up Fallen King and was not really planning on doing so any time soon. However when I started working on leveling my character with their much streamlined system… all of this loot flagged with a Taken King icon started dropping. I spent a lot of time on Mars working on a few bounties and kept running into fallen corruption zones where corrupted Vex and Cabal would spawn in. These things were extremely nasty but had a chance of dropping some pretty nice stuff. The biggest thing I noticed is that it seems like the drop rates are greatly increased when it comes to pretty much everything you can do. I walked away with more weapons than I had seen in a very long time… since maybe launch. Also it seems like engrams are more true to their color… if I got a blue engram I pretty much got a blue item out of it. Maybe I was just exceptionally lucky last night, but it did not seem like I was pulling greens out of them like I did before. I need to spend more time playing Destiny, I enjoy it still and I have a lot of fun running around with my Hand Cannon. I still have yet to play any of the expansion content, so I need to do that at some point.

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!

Final Fantasy XIV

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.

Heading for a Trap

September 16, 2015 by Belghast

Slightly Darker Side

One of the ways I have differed so far from my friends, is that I cannot seem to bring myself to do ONLY the class story line. As a result I am ridiculously over leveling the content, and last night I worked on finishing up Nar Shaddaa. I’ve been enamored with the concept of the vertical city since first experiencing it in Dark Forces. In SWTOR Nar Shaddaa is the darker and more disturbing cousin of Coruscant and provides a very similar leveling experience. You travel through hub sections of the city until you end up in Shadow Town and resolve the central conflict of the story and your class quest. As a Smuggler this setting feels extremely at home, and as you might expect I do in fact get into plenty of trouble with Bounty Hunters and Hutts. Generally speaking when I have played SWTOR in the past, I am extremely light side focused. In fact I generally have trouble not choosing the “blue” option on any quest dialog. As a Smuggler however… I am finding it a little easier to choose that “red” option.

I guess I am ultimately playing my version of Han Solo… the goodnatured lovable scoundrel. When lives of innocents are on the line, I always end up choosing the “right” option and get those light side points. However when I am in a situation where I serve to profit greatly by looking the other way… I find myself “playing the character” and finding it significantly easier to to take those dark side points… and console myself with a pile of credits. Similarly if I have been double crossed… or if someone is doing something truly heinous… I find it oh so satisfying to take that [Attack Them] option. Horrific Imperial Scientist gene splicing people? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! Try and talk my way out of a bounty hunter? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! My weakness seems to be damsels in distress however… because I know right now I am walking into a big trap but I am having to play it off like my character would. It will also likely end up giving me another opportunity for sweet sweet revenge… which I am sure I will be unable to resist taking dark side points for. Thankfully I have diplomacy as a Crew Skill… and even though it is likely at the end of a blaster… it helps to repair all those dark side points.

Cavalcade of Commendations

One of the good changes while not playing the game, is the fact that they standardized the planetary commendation system. Now when you complete anything you have the option of simply taking “basic commendations” instead of the planet specific ones, and at the same time they have increased the total number you get before fifty exponentially. This means that I am constantly swimming in a good supply of them, and I could probably constantly upgrade my moddable gear… but I am finding that I don’t really need to. Since I am using Treek as my tank and she came with a full set of mod gear, and I managed to piece together a workable set from the GTN and the pilot packs… it allows me to pretty much ignore every quest reward and just go for more commendations. Since I am quite overleveled I was 21 before leaving Coruscant, at which point I went to the fleet and kitted out both armor for myself and Treek in the best modifications I could find at the time. This rather easily carried me through until the end of Nar Shadda, at which point I dinged 30 and repeated the same process with level 29 gear. If I can continue this process of upgrading my gear “every other planet” I should be in really good shape to have a pile of commendations for other upgrades.

Last night I spent some of my pile of credits on making myself look cooler. At some point they added in dye slots to the gear, which allows you to “socket” a dye that comes in either single color or dual tone combinations. Most of the really cool combinations are exorbitantly expensive, but I found one I could live with that was black and grey for roughly 40,000 credits. Then I went searching for a really cool gun, and found this one that is originally a cartel item… that folks were selling fairly reasonably on the market. The gun you end up with at the end of the starter zone is functional but not that cool looking… so I was more than happy to cast aside “Flashy”. I dig the fact that it looks like the blaster rifles that some of the troopers have. It fits my shoot first, ask questions later style of playing the “Sawbones” healer. I have long said that “looking cool” makes your character feel cool, and I am pretty happy with my Chiss Smuggler. I am extremely happy that I re-rolled him ages ago as a Chiss instead of yet another human. I am starting to develop this “savior of the aliens” rep in my questing choices, which is kinda awesome since people keep pointing out the fact that I am another “alien scum”. Still having a surprising amount of fun playing through the Smuggler storyline that I ultimately missed at launch.

Universal Patronage

September 15, 2015 by Belghast

Account Social Systems

One of the things I have been spoiled on by playing quite a few Blizzard games is the existence of Battle.net as a common backbone. When RealID was originally released, I have to admit it bothered me quite a bit. I don’t actually use my real name very much online, and it isn’t necessarily because I am trying to obfuscate who I am… but more that I come from an era in the internet when everyone was their “handle”. Someones handle is more distinct and meaningful for me… than telling me their real name and oddly enough I have a much easier time remembering it. For example… I know several dozen folks with the last name of Smith… but I only know one Scopique. As Blizz took a step back they created the Battle Tag system and since then I have been happily known as Belghast#1752 making it significantly easier to meet up with people regardless of what Blizzard game they happen to be playing. This has been the case with most modern game releases, that they have some underlying account based system that allows me to quickly meet up with my friends by giving them a single idea that relates to all of my characters.

The problem is… when this system is missing I really notice it. It has been a recent struggle while playing Star Wars the Old Republic and the various Trion Worlds games. Sure it is nice to have disconnected alts that you can go hide on… but I have been willing to give up this for the convenience of being easily available. The thing that I find confusing with both SWTOR and Trion is that in both cases they have an underlying system that they could rely on for communication purposes. For SWTOR you have Origin chat… which is pretty horrible, but could at least serve as some common connective tissue. In the same of Trion Worlds though you have a shared account structure that through the use of the Glyph client gives you access to all of the games on your account. All that really seems to be missing is a single “Glyph ID” and a chat infrastructure built around it. The best feature of Blizzard games right now is that you can take your friend list with you into any game you go. So while I am not playing World of Warcraft, I can still keep touch with my WoW playing friends while I am in Diablo or Heroes of the Storm. It would be so nice if I could do this same thing while playing Trove, Rift, ArcheAge or eventually Devilian. Please make this a thing Trion Worlds!

Universal Patronage

While I am asking things of Trion Worlds this morning… I thought I would go ahead and throw in another thing. One of the features of the old Sony Online Entertainment games that I really enjoyed was the concept of the “All Access Pass”. Where you could pay one premium account price and get subscription level access to all of their games. I think back in the day it was something like $25 per month for an All Access account, instead of the individual $15 a month for each game. I loved this concept because it allowed me to pop back and forth freely between their games when I was in the mood to actively play them. The problem there is that for SOE and now Daybreak games… they are all titles that I play in spurts. However since the launch of Rift there has never been a time when I was not at least sometimes playing this game. While I may not play it seriously most of the time, I still keep poking my head in it. Similarly I am really enjoying the current state of ArcheAge, and I love poking my head into Trove. With the addition of Devilian to their lineup… it seems that I am ending up with a situation much like that of SOE where there are lots of different games that I wouldn’t mind playing.

The problem being that I simply cannot justify Patron access to ALL of them. So I have to pick and choose which game I want to activate at a given time. However if there was some sort of universal patron account that allowed me to pay one fee and gain patron access to all of their games… I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat. In the long run I think it would be a net win, since I doubt there are many people out there who are actively maintaining multiple patron subscriptions. You get a little bit per month out of the folks who were already subbing, to give them access to your entire library of games. This also allows you to do cross promotions between them, allowing the achievements in one game to maybe grant you something nifty in another game. This is again one of the strengths of Blizzards stable of games is that they are all interconnected at least to some extent. I feel the same sort of loyalty towards Trion Worlds as others do towards Blizzard, and I just think it would be awesome for something of this sort to happen. I realize Trion is a weird case in the fact that ArcheAge and Devilian for example are not developed in house… but my hope is that there is enough control on the back end systems to be able to implement a sort of universal patronage account.

Gigantic Codes

I have been sitting on an email that I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with it. Gigantic is finally leaving its Alpha process and entering Closed Beta, and with it they are loosening the restrictions a bit and handing out friend codes to a lot of the folks who have been in the closed process for awhile now. There are some constraints on these however and I think it is important to mention that. Right now Gigantic is exclusive to Windows 10 and Xbox One, which I find mildly frustrating since it ran perfectly fine on Windows 8 up until this latest push. This however is a listed requirement, and since I have not been actively testing of late… I have to assume it is probably a legitimate requirement. If you are interested in checking the game out you have to hit the link below and redeem one of the codes I am posting. This is of course a first come first served sort of deal, but I figured the best option was to share them with my readers.