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Media Consumption 10/17/2015

October 17, 2015 by Belghast

Television Lite Week

This week has been one that has seen me absolutely consumed with Destiny on the PlayStation 4, and as such I have simply not spent much time watching television. I have however watched quite an excessive amount of YouTube videos, namely as I try to find information about Destiny. There is this shift that is happening where certain games with certain audiences… simply do not have information blog posts about them. I’ve gotten spoiled in a world with Dulfy.net and WoWHead.com in that I expect pretty much every game I have to have this quality of resources. Instead for many games lately all I am ever able to find is YouTube videos on a given subject. I am sorry to all the YouTubers out there… but I am of a generation where I feel like a video is the least useful way to disseminate information. I will take a written explanation and some good screenshots any day over a lengthy video walk through. At some point in the near future I hope to take some of these things that I found frustrating and attempt to write some blog posts outlining how to do this thing or that thing in Destiny. Granted that is not to say there are not a lot of really good Destiny YouTube channels… but I would still rather have an informational post.

Destiny Lore

The first time around when the AggroChat crew played Destiny… we joked that it was a game almost entirely devoid of story. That apparently is not the case… they just go to strange lengths to hide it from you. The story of the game is told through a series of grimoire cards, item descriptions, quest text, and hinted at in cinematic scenes. In fact there is actually apparently a TON of information about the characters in the game, their background, how they arrived at the tower… and all sorts of legends from the golden age, the city age, and the now tower age. In my search for information about Destiny I happened to stumble across a really awesome YouTube channel called Myelin Game… which is not to be confused with long time friend Mylin1. The channel is chock full of videos where Myelin digs into the lore of Destiny and connects the dots, weaving all of the known information… and speculated information into a narrative around a certain subject. I linked the Black Garden video since the game does a pretty poor job to explain what the hell it actually is… but I also highly suggest the trilogy of videos talking about thorn, last word, and first curse. I have always guessed there was this rich story somewhere behind Destiny… because the dots connected too neatly at times not to be well planned, but now that I am starting to learn some of the actual story I am loving it. I still feel it is a strange choice to make players dig for this knowledge, rather than letting you experience chunks of it through the story. The Fallen King expansion does a much better job of being more forthcoming with information… and it gives characters that previously did not have much of a personality… plenty of chance to show it off. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to these lore videos while doing other things and I highly recommend them.

Star Wars Minute

Another thing that I stumbled across this week is Star Wars Minute, which is a great YouTube channel that takes segments of the Star Wars universe and condenses them into roughly one minute long narrative explanations. Much like the Destiny Lore, this feels as much podcast as it does YouTube video because the narrative explanation is the important part… and the images going along with it are nice to have but not 100% necessary. I ended up finding this as I started doing some googling related to the Star Wars universe, namely for the upcoming pen and paper game that should have its first session tomorrow. The funny thing about this is how much of the universe I already had a full grasp on but have no clue why. I guess even though I have been a sleeper Star Wars fanboy since the prequels… I was still subconsciously hungry for knowledge about this favorite of universes. Star Wars Minute is great to play in the background as you do something else and they release three new episodes a week, so there is a silly amount of content available already.

Arrow Season 3

Be warned I am going to go into some serious spoilers here, so if you have not watched Arrow Season 3 or if you intend to at a later date… you might want to skip this section. Here is the point at which I get really frustrated with this show. Generally speaking I am all for a television show deviating from the source material to make the universe work better for the TV audience. For example most of the Batman movies have worked really well… and they are essentially a condensed soup version of the batman universe… gathering up all the good bits and trying to weave a story out of them. You have a very limited amount of time on television, and what might work fine to slowly build over the course of several years of a comic run… needs to happen in an under two hour long movie. Television shows have a bit more leverage when it comes to pacing something out, and this is also cool. The thing that apparently pisses me off though… is when you take actions attributed to one character and apply them to a completely different character.

What I mean is that this story line that has played out throughout the season around R’as al Ghul didn’t happen to Green Arrow… ever. Essentially this is a Batman storyline, and all of the events that are playing out happened at one time or another to Batman. This caused me to think about Arrow the television show in a different light and realize that essentially… they have been turning Arrow into Batman this entire time. Maybe it is because Batman has been tagged as a “film” universe and is not available to be done in a Television version that they feel the need to create someone that is Batman-like. Green Arrow was admittedly a comic that I did not really follow. I mean I knew that him calling his sister Speedy when that was the character that would ultimately become Arsenal was wrong… and I knew a few other points seemed less than correct. However I lived in this world of relatively little knowledge about the show so I was able to pretty much ignore any differences… until they started stepping foot into the Batman universe. THAT is a universe I know considerably more about, and after a whole lot of research and the council of Thalen… I pretty much determined that nope… Green Arrow has never really interacted much with R’as al Ghul at all. So I am sitting here two episodes away from the end of the season… questioning if I care to finish watching it.

Walking Dead Season 6 Premiere

Thank god Walking Dead is back. “Fear The” was such a pale imitation of Walking Dead, and I am exceptionally happy that they chose to back up the start of Season Six to the end of the first season of Fear. I do have to say though that it makes me extremely happy that Talking Dead has been pulled in officially for Fear as well, because for me at least that has become so much of that experience. This is one hell of a first episode, and I really liked the way they handled Flashbacks in this episode by making them Black and White. That is always the challenge with a show, how to visually tell the watcher that the events they are seeing are not happening in real time but instead an imagined replay. When you are dealing with older characters and younger characters, it works naturally… but when you are dealing with only a few hours or days passing… it becomes much more challenging. So the choice of black and white gave a nice clear demarcation point between the two time-frames. As to the rest of the episode… Rae sent me a text as the show as going on that simply said “Nosh Pit”.

The premise of the show has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg style plot devices I have seen in awhile. To figure out a way to draw the walkers out of the pit and along a fixed path to get them away from Alexandria. The parallels to herding cattle… was extremely strong in this episode. They even managed to draw them down a chute just like you do cattle for a period of time… and then cleared out the farm supply store just to make sure nothing would spook them and draw their attention away… kinda like you do cattle. The slightest noise can distract cattle and get them to move in a different direction, and that apparently is the case with walkers. The thing is… going into this episode… you knew something was going to go wrong. There were scenes in the Season 6 preview show of Walkers in Alexandria or at least the hint of that happening. This show is really good about misleading us, for example the above poster would seem like we are heading towards some central conflict between Morgan and Rick… and in truth… it seems like Morgan instead manages to back Rick down from the ledge a bit.

As far as the walkers… when they are nearing the clear zone… someone sets off a horn in Alexandria, causing the mega horde to turn that direction. So the question is… who did it. At work the popular theory for awhile has been that Enid is a spy from the Wolves, and that the scenes of her in the car with the walker outside… hint that she set off the horn. My personal theory is it is Father Gabriel once again trying to destroy everything around him. He wanted to go out on the mission to herd the walkers, but Rick shut him down immediately. My theory is he is vindictive, and after being shut down by Andrea as well… he is still on some mission to destroy this community and in the process allow himself to be kill in some sort of twisted act of contrition for letting his parishioners die. In truth it could be the wolves themselves, who have been watching everything happening and see this as their opportunity to let the zombies batter down the defense of Alexandria and allow them to come in after they are done… and loot the resources. If nothing else this episode explained why Alexandria had been left fairly unscathed… because the giant pit of zombies had been drawing in more zombies and keeping them away from the town. It is going to be interesting to see how the next few episodes play out, and who we lose in the process.

Titan Mitsurugi

October 14, 2015 by Belghast

Plans Change

Titan Mitsurugi — Opening the very disappointing Chest of Yuul

I had every intent last night of coming home and working on Star Wars the Old Republic, but instead I spent almost my entire evening futzing around in Destiny. I did at least manage to get into SWTOR long enough to re-gear my Sith Sorcerer and claim Treek from my collection vault. So in theory I should be ready to go with a new tank for future shenanigans. What happened last night is ultimately what has happened so many nights lately, that I start working on this bounty or that quest and end up spending the entire evening there. Towards the beginning of the night I decided to step foot into my very first heroic strike. I have to say it honestly went pretty smoothly, and I lucked out that I managed to get one that I had at least done on normal mode. The second strike I got however… was not so smooth. It ended with me being the last person remaining in the strike after the other two guardians gave up. I was slowly working my way through the mobs, but quite honestly it was going to take forever… so I also gave up and left. For some reason they were trying to rush ahead and skip mobs that only served to destroy us as a result when several different groups of mobs came tracking us down at once. A few carefully timed supers whittled down the mess but we still had the final area with five ultras up, and I simply did not have enough ammo to make it through all of that by myself.

In my travels last night I ended up picking up a Key of Yuul, and as I have gotten these various chest keys I have made an effort to try and track down the location. This one is a pain in the ass and is located near the Court of Oryx on the Dreadnought. The problem with it is, that you have to use a series of those invisible platforms to get up to the ledge that the chest is on. I suck at jumping puzzles and as a result I was cursing while trying to do it. As always the chest itself was disappointing, only giving me some materials and some court of oryx tokens. I did however manage to get several legendary items from rare engrams. One of which is the above Fusion Rifle, which has a name that is a bit of an inside joke for anyone who has watched the abridged PlayStation 4 reveal video. Panta Rhei is actually a latest generation rendering system… but in the video the joke is made that it is like a Manta Ray with Pants. I have to think that someone created this gun as a nod to that joke. In truth it is pretty fun to use, and is significantly more enjoyable than the fusion rifle I had. I seem to have incredible luck getting legendary items from rare engrams, because it seems like at least once a night one of them yield something nice. Granted a lot of it just ends up being disenchant fodder, but those are still tasty tasty legendary marks right?

Sword Titan

One of the things you have to realize about me… is that I am bad at actually following content in Destiny. Hell it took me until a few weeks ago when we took Carthuun through it to actually do the Dark Below and House of Wolves content. Similarly I have done shit for making progress on any of the dozens of quests I have. Well in truth that isn’t exactly true, but apparently I was simply focusing on the wrong quests. Last night when Carth logged in he helped me get my act together on the sword quest and as a result show me his Hadium Flake farming route. I have to say… I was skeptical at first but in about thirty minutes of running around we gathered up the fifteen flakes I needed to get my sword. I think I may actually be able to eventually farm the amount needed to get get Touch of Malice the Exotic Scout Rifle. The thing I need to sort out is how to find Calcified Fragments, because I have only actually gotten two of them, and the part of the quest that seems insurmountable is that I will need 45 of them. Mostly I think I just need to do some research because there has to be a similar route to find them.

The most exciting thing that dropped last night was during our manic chest farming route, I managed to get rare ship blueprints. Once I turned in back at the tower it ended up giving me the ship above. I still think I like my teal/grey kestrel better, but I figure I will use this for a bit until I get sick of it then swap back. Ships seem to be one of the harder to get of the cosmetic items available, and I guess I can see why since they are basically the thing that you see when you load into a strike with random players. If you have a really cool looking ship, it is bragging rights of sorts. I’ve seen some really badass looking ones, and I have no clue how to get half of them. The thing about Destiny is that I am making really slow progress, but still having a blast. I had a friend last night send me a message to ask if I wanted to do a Nightfall… and I am not even vaguely close to well enough geared for that. Unlike a traditional MMO though I feel zero rush to get geared to do stuff. At some point I need to grab Carthuun and Euron and do a night full of nothing but heroic strikes but I am really hoping to do this over the weekend, when I have a chance to buy some more three of coins. I want exotics, and I want them pretty bad… but not bad enough to grind my face off to get them.

Steampunk Primalist

October 13, 2015 by Belghast

Primal Goodness

Want a #RIFT Wilds Pack? Grab a code from the image we're about to tweet, and enter it in at https://t.co/FtVqj5OrAq

— RIFT (@Riftgame) October 12, 2015

It was honestly a sheer miracle that I made it through yesterday. As the day went on, it felt like my estimate of three hours of sleep was a bit too high. Luckily around 3 pm I managed to catch a second wind which made the whole “driving home” thing significantly safer for everyone on the road. My general goal was to stay awake long enough to be able to head to bed naturally around 9 pm thinking that maybe just maybe it would fix the problems and give me a good nights sleep. For the most part it seems to have worked and while I am a bit groggier than normal this morning, I am feeling significantly “better”. In my stupor yesterday however I managed to have an insane bit of luck. I happened to be watching my twitter feed at just the right moment, when Rift tweeted that they were just about to give out some Wilds Packs. They posted a photo with I believe six different codes on it, and I picked the smallest one… and started typing. Apparently my fingers were fast enough because much to my shock I saw a note in my transaction history that said the Wilds Pack was added to my account. Also much to my shock… I thought this was the basic pack that just included the new primalist class only, but instead it was apparently the $100 pack that includes a ton of other goodies as well including an insane dinosaur mount.

I think maybe that I violated the intentions of the class when it came to outfitting him. I rolled a dwarf, thinking that a dwarf with a big hammer/axe/thing would be kind amazing. Then when it came to actually setting up the wardrobe and picking a mount to use… things happened. Now I have my goggle wearing, leather clad, aetherbiker Dwarven Primalist. I played a little bit but very quickly realized that maybe when I am half awake is not the best possible time to play anything that requires a significant amount of reading. I did play enough to decide upon the Berserker prebuilt class for the time being. I considered going Titan which was the tanky build listed, but for the time being I think I am just going to be a pewpew hammer swinging dps. The starter primalist weapon looks kinda amazing, and honestly one of the big things that I look forward about playing him is that I will actually collect all of the low level gear appearances as I get stuff to drop for me. That was the negative about going into a major change like the wardrobe system with a high level character… that ultimately I was well past the gearing phase and all that I would end up physically seeing was new gear. Playing a low level character again will see me coming across all of that gear that I had and sold, or at least that is the hopes. However this is a journey for another day, one when I am not struggling to exist.

Questing Guardian

One of the negatives about playing Destiny as primarily an MMO player is that there are certain traits that carry over into the MMOFPS title. Namely that you actually find yourself caring about having quests hanging around in your quest log. Since the whole reading and making sense of things part of my brain was largely malfunctioning, I thought I would instead venture into Destiny and work one some of the things that have been looming over my head. Namely the “High-Value Targets” quest. On paper it sounds simple enough, that you need to defeat several of these High-Value targets… 3 in the Cosmodrome, 3 on the Moon, 3 on Venus, 3 on Mars, and 3 on the Dreadnaught. The problem being that in order to qualify as a high-value target, it has to be one of those special patrol missions that ask you to go kill a given mob somewhere in the patrol zone that is marked with a red star. To make matters more interesting… I learned that these only come from special patrol beacons that are also marked with a star. Theses seem to be largely rare and absolute luck of the draw if you will see them. So as a result I managed to complete the Cosmodrome and Dreadnaught quickly… but struggled with having not found a single high value target patrol on Venus or Mars.

So last night I spent pretty much the entire night wandering around various planets looking for star beacons, and when I did not find them… running as many patrols as I could in the hopes of making them spawn. At about 9:30 last night, moments before we were heading to bed… I managed to complete the quest. Additionally I also managed to complete Taken Assault: Mars which gave me enough Queen’s Wrath faction to finally start opening up bounties on the Reef. This also opened up The Wolves of Mars quest chain for Variks which involves doing a bunch of shit involving the Fallen. From what I have heard this will reward a Boolean Gemini at the end of it… which in truth will probably be a Year One variant… but if it works like Last Word did, it also opened up the Year Two blueprint for me. So in theory I can save up my marks and purchase the 280 version as well. In any case I had a lot of fun last night faffing about working through the various quests and bounties. There is something relaxing and mindless about wandering around and taking things out with an assortment of really fun to use weapons. The other big progress I made is I collected enough data using a shotgun, so I am now on the step where I need to disassemble a bunch of blue or better ones. I had a handful stowed away just for this occasion but it was nowhere near enough. As a result I will be farming engrams in the hopes of getting more, and in theory I need to just start running strikes. I did however manage to make it to 287 light when wearing my “best” gear, which is slow but palpable progress.

Week in Gaming 10/11/2015

October 11, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Week

I am sitting here this morning with my writing buddy beside me. I’ve shown pictures of Allie in the past as she sits on the blanket that I have folded beside my keyboard, and once again this morning she is there purring quietly. She really is the mascot of the week I have had, because honestly other than a bit of an emotional roller coaster surrounding The Beginner’s Guide, I would say that the week as a whole has been one of contentment. I managed to accomplish quite a bit in my quest to push through all of the stories I had not seen in SWTOR, as well as made small bits of progress in Destiny. At work things seem to be largely calmed down, or at least to a manageable madness. More than anything I think it was taking Tuesday off that helped reorient my world to a much better state of mind.

Star Wars the Old Republic

This week was an insanely productive one when it came to Star Wars the Old Republic. As of last Saturday night during the podcast I managed to wrap up the Smuggler storyline, and picked up work on the Sith Warrior. With Tuesday essentially being a day where I did nothing but play SWTOR, I managed to finish up the Sith Warrior. I’ve talked about this already but I have to say at the time the Sith Warrior was one of the most gratifying experiences when it comes to giving you the control to settle all of your vendettas in one ending. Every person that you want to seek your revenge on is laid out in such a way as that you can, and the final events are so damned satisfying. Having played both Sith Warrior and Jedi Guardian… I have to say I am a bigger fan of the Warrior experience namely because it is deeply personal… and not simply the overarching events of the game as a whole.

From there I picked up on my Bounty Hunter, largely because I needed a palate cleanser from playing a force user… and having just wrapped up Smuggler I was not quite ready for another cunning class. I fully expected to not be terribly into the Bounty Hunter experience, largely because I didn’t really enjoy Trooper that much. However I am coming to realize most of my problems with the trooper was the fact that it was my third class within a few months of the launch of games to push to 50… and at that point I was simply bored to tears of all the repeated planet story content. The Bounty Hunter is quite literally the most reasonable person on the imperial side. The game gives you the ability to play the consummate business man, and that is absolutely the path I took. I killed no one for free, and kept my collateral damage to a minimum. As a result people were constantly surprised that no, I was not in fact going to kill them. Generally speaking I almost always took the option to freeze them in carbonite and return them to the client fully intact. I am guessing that quite honestly, Bounty Hunter is probably going to go down as my favorite game play experience in SWTOR.

Destiny

My progression in Destiny has slowed down considerably, with the bulk of my forward movement coming from Armsday packages and any time I level up a faction like the Gunsmith or the Cryptarch. While I am playing the game of equipping my best gear before I decrypt any engrams, I am still ending up with low level blues most of the time that I turn into crafting materials. I’ve developed the nasty habit of buying shaders, emblems, and ships…. and as a result I am generally running low on Glimmer most of the time. I really need to try using some of those glimmer items that increase the drop rates while I work on bounties. My latest toy that I am enjoying playing with is the scout rifle above that came from a package when I leveled up Dead Orbit faction. I had not really played with a scout rifle much since coming back and had forgotten that it was essentially a high payload sniper rifle. Realistically I am to the point where if I want to progress I need to be running Heroic Strikes, and I simply have not messed with getting friends together yet in order to do that. Still having a lot of fun, but trying to keep it super casual so I don’t burn myself out and get bored with it.

Battlefront

Another game this week that I have spent some time with is Star Wars Battlefront. I pre-ordered this game through PlayStation network the moment it was announced because I am super nostalgic about the lineage of Star Wars shooters. This weekend they allowed players to download and play for free in the beta, and I have to say my feelings about it are extremely mixed. The game does an excellent job of giving you the fantasy fulfillment of playing a soldier in the Star Wars universe. Past that however… I think it suffers from the fact that I have been playing so much Destiny lately. The game handles significantly worse in the moment to moment gameplay that Destiny does. The guns feel worse, the movement feels worse, the cover mechanics… feel worse. I think if I spent enough time I could get used to it and even come to like it, but right now I am struggling with the feeling of “I would rather just play destiny”.

The Beginner’s Guide

I’ve said everything I could really ever want to say in my deeply personal post on the game from last week. Last night on AggroChat I to some extent reprised those thoughts in a much more condensed manner. The take away for me is really this. If you are not in an extremely stable position in your life, and if you are at all struggling with your own emotions… don’t play this game. Essentially there are two possible reactions… either you are going to think it is complete bullshit and it won’t effect you in any way. Or it is going to act as a mirror to show you all of your fears and anxieties about yourself. It quite literally took me a few days to recover from the experience of just watching a play through of this game, and not actually playing it myself. I am not unhappy that I went through it, but it is also not the sort of experience that I would suggest lightly to anyone. I know that sounds weird and arcane… but this game does strange things to you. This is honestly the closest thing I have seen to a real life “The Ring”, in that this game will ultimately leave you slightly changed as a result… and not always in a good way.