MMORPG – Page 256

Zubat Infestation

July 13, 2016 by Belghast

So Many Zubats

I’ve slowed down a bit on the Pokemon Go namely because it is getting harder and harder to find new ones. At this point I have captured 49 different critters out of the 52 I have seen, and I’ve noticed an extreme deficiency in the number of electric, fire and plant types. I’ve spent my lunches roaming around to other areas of town, attempting to sort out where they might be hiding. I would assume that plant types could maybe be found in a park, but as far as Electric and Fire types… I have no clue at all. The single Fire type that I have managed to pick up comes from a Chilli’s parking lot… which I found more than a little hillarious. As far as electric types I have been near the electrical switching station in our neighborhood with little luck, but past that there is really nowhere that streams “electrical types”. I’ve heard rumors that they often times come out during thunderstorms, but considering we have had several and I have not seen any yet I am doubting that one. The reality is there are as many rumors for how to find specific Pokemon as there were for how to summon the Ancient Cyclops in Everquest, and I figure none of them are really true. Given that this is a map based game, in theory everything should be based on some sort of obvious landmark. Following that logic I keep wondering if I can go to a graveyard to find Ghost types, but I have not been willing to cross that line yet.

The huge truism however is that we have an over abundance of Zubats. Right now they are way more common than quite literally any other type of Pokemon. There was a point where I recently had 25 that I had captured and had just been too lazy to hand them in to the trainer. I’ve made six different Golbats, and now am simply just ignoring the flappy critters when I see one. Someone has been pretty much chain summoning lures on one of the Pokestops that I walk past on the way in and out of work… and every single time I get within range it is loaded with nothing but Zubats. As I walk through the parking garage… more Zubats. All of this is hilarious when I hear from Ashgar that he has yet to even catch a single one. Then things that are super common for other people like the Oddish… are next to impossible to find around me. At some point I am thinking I need to make a trip over to Fayetteville because my friend TangerineDada has all sorts of Pokemon that I have not seen anywhere near me. Then I ask myself… is it silly to take a road trip just for capturing Pokemon? Almost certainly but it is nonetheless entertaining.

Necropolis

For a little bit now my friend have been talking about Necropolis, a new dungeon crawler from Harebrained Schemes the makers of the very awesome Shadowrun tun based RPGs. This game keeps getting compared to Dark Souls, but I am not completely sure why the reference. Essentially this is a rogue-like dungeon crawler with procedural generated levels. This is the sort of game where you are not designed to get terribly attached to your character, because more than likely you are going to die quickly and often. Similar to Rogue Legacy it has a mechanic built into the game where your deaths serve a greater purpose in that your actions garner favor with the deity of the labyrinth. You can then purchase abilities at the scriptorium which tweak your experience allowing you to have more health, or hit harder all in an attempt to fine tune your character experience. The concept of the game seems right down my alley, and the art style is reminiscent of Journey or any number of not quite realistic cartoon shaded games of late.

The game however has a bunch of problems, that I am not sure if they are intentional or if they are simply bugs that will be patched out later. Combat feels more than a little bit maddening at times in that there seems to be no limit to the number of things that can be registering attacks on you at the same time. So this means that if you are unlucky you might round the corner and get six or seven mobs swarming you at the wrong moment. Normally speaking in brawler type games this is manageable in that the game gives you invincibility frames in the form of being staggered… so that not every thing attacking you can actually register damage on you at the same time. In Necropolis you can absolutely get surrounded and watch your health go from full to zero in seconds. However for all I know there might be a scriptorium ability that changes how that works. The other slightly frustrating thing is that combat feels a little sluggish. I played with an xbox controller and right bumper is the light attack and right trigger the heavy. Even light attacks are nowhere near as responsive as I would hope them to be, and heavy attacks require near perfect timing because of the extremely lengthy swing animation. All of this said… I enjoyed the little bit that I played and I want to figure out more of the game. There are two kinds of unfair gameplay… the ones that make you just want to throw your controller across the room, and then the ones that make you want to figure out how to avoid the pitfalls of the system. This at least for me appears to be the later, so I fully expect to play a bit more tonight and get a bit further.

Playing Together

July 12, 2016 by Belghast

This has already been an interesting morning so far, and it is only 6 am. I got up and did my normal routine of making coffee for my wife and I. I heard what sounded like rain so I took a peek outside like I often do, because the pool is an amazing indication of rain. All of those tiny droplets breaking the water show up far better than they do on land. As I stared out at the pool I noticed something moving around in it that I could not quite identify, so I took my cup of coffee outside to investigate. In the pool was this poor little field mouse that looked as though it had been swimming desperately trying to find a way out of the pool for awhile. I basically had two options… either help him now, or fish him out of the skimmer basket later once he eventually lost his battle with treading water indefinitely. I of course opted for the first, and started looking around the yard for something I could use as a ramp to help him get up and out of the water. I finally landed upon using a shovel and then began the battle of trying to convince him that I was actually trying to help. Once I finally got him up and out of the water he essentially collapsed on the shovel making it extremely easy to get him up and out of the water and over onto our deck. The little guy sat there for a bit before realizing that he should be afraid of humans, and eventually scurrying off in the general direction of the green belt behind our house. Sure he was what most people would consider a pest, but to me he was cute and fuzzy and in desperate need of assistance. I am absolutely a sucker for such things.

Last night also was a super interesting night. I had talked about events serving as a bit of a catalyst to get a large number of us back and engaged with Final Fantasy XIV. Part of that was “getting the band back together” as it were, and namely that meant reconstituting our raid team. So we spent last night working through some of the things many of us had sitting unfinished namely The Final Steps of Faith and Containment Bay S1T7. Before going into the fight Morehnai had warned us that the Nidhogg battle is little overtuned, and might be a bit difficult given that a bunch of us were sitting at exactly the 205 item level cap. He was really the only one of us that could be considered even the slightest bit over-geared with the rest between the bare minimum and just shy of 210. We also largely insisted on going into the fight completely blind, so this meant a handful of wipes as we started to learn the mechanics. The first wall was the add phase dps check, which we quickly sorted out and figured out ways to optimize our dps including me shifting to Deliverance stance for that big. Other than that it was largely working through the moving parts, avoiding damage that we didn’t need to take and ultimately more optimization before we ended up getting the sweet sweet kill. Sure normal mode Nidhogg is not exactly extreme raiding, but it felt like a good return to working together as a team.

After that we went through the Sephirot encounter, which was not surprisingly an awful lot easier. With that once again mostly being use learning what various things meant and how to avoid the damage. Sephirot being interesting in that there are a ton of non telegraphed attacks, namely the one where he turns to face a direction and then does a potentially platform wide attack. Other than that it was also learning the dance of his knock back attacks, and within a couple of attempts we had a dead member of the warring triad. Finally since we were short on time we popped back into Bismarck and killed us a sky whale earning Thalen a spiffy looking bow and the rest of us more Expanse Totems. Next week we are going to kill us a giant bug and hopefully clear the second half of Alex. Past that the sky is the limit, but it felt really good to be together and working as a team once more. Past that I wrapped up the rest of the story and it very much feels like we are saying goodbye to everything we have known over this expansion. I am seriously beginning to think that when Fan Fest happens in October that we will be getting the announcement of a new expansion, and not only that but that it will only be a few months away. The Deep Dungeon will serve as something for us to play with in the meantime and a vehicle which allows us to catch up all of those jobs that we never got around to leveling. In any case it feels like a really good time to be back in Final Fantasy XIV and back working together as a team.

AggroChat #114 – Purveyors of Fine Pokemon

May 21, 2019July 10, 2016 by AggroChat

This week Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam, Thalen and special guest Inky Discuss Pokemon Go and small bit of FFXIV

This week the world has caught a horrible case of pokemonitis… and our stalwart AggroChat crew have not been immune. Instead of hanging out at home… we seem to have all been roaming our respective neighborhoods looking for invisible critters. So as a result we recorded a show that is almost entirely Pokemon Go talk. Towards the end we discuss our return to Final Fantasy XIV this week and our attempt to “get the band back together”. My Pokemans… Let me show you them!

Show Topics

Pokemon Go
Final Fantasy XIV

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Walking Simulator

July 7, 2016 by Belghast

Gotta Catch Em All

If I had any topic to talk about today, it was immediately erased from my mind as soon as I got my grubby hands on Pokemon Go. I was in fact one of those bastards that went through the relatively simple process of installing it to bypass the region lockouts. First off I want to address something that is frustrating me, is that for some reason people seem to think defeating region lockouts is “hacking”. Region lockouts are dumb, and at least on Android devices, any time you download anything you are already downloading the APK as that is how anything installs. The beauty of the android platform is there isn’t just one app store, in fact on my device I currently have Google Play, Amazon Underground, and APK Pure all installed and living happily together. These are especially handy when confronted with a device that for whatever reason is trying to block the actual Google Play store and instead keep redirecting you to their carrier run store. Anyways with that out of the way, I downloaded the APK and had it sitting on my device while I ran out to lunch yesterday. On my way out of the building I caught my first Pokemon which was one of the original three starters…. Go Team Squirtle! Then before I had even left my building I also happened to encounter a Staryu… things were getting off to a great start.

I had errands to run so I drove out to one of the nearby hubs of shopping that houses a ton of big box stores. I needed to pick up some cat
food and cat litter from Target, and also wanted to pop by Rackroom shoes to see if I could find any sandals that I did not hate this season. When I pulled into the parking lot of Target I opened up the app and noticed several Pokemon nearby where I parked. When you are anywhere, you see critters within the vicinity of you… and when you get close enough to one you can attempt to capture it. Sadly I have no screenshots of the capture process because it goes quickly. Essentially it is playing Skeeball, and for those who don’t have that cultural frame of reference… you are flicking the Pokeball with your finger and trying to hit essentially a target that represents the sweet spot for capturing each specific Pokemon. If you tap on the Pokemon you will see a set of rings with a green spot being the best possible place to land your hit in order to capture. You have a limited number of attempts before the Pokemon runs away and cannot be seen on your map. Of note all of this stuff tries to place your Pokemon in your surroundings using Augmented Reality via your phones camera. I however didn’t really want to see the real world and would far rather have a cartoony Pokemon world to be wandering around in and capturing critters.

So there I was wandering around a Target parking lot, I am sure looking like an idiot… but you know what I didn’t care. I was having fun and capturing all sorts of cool Pokemon. By the time I left that parking lot I had managed to gather up a whole bunch of new critters
including a really nice Eevee. Now each Pokemon you catch has a CP level… which doesn’t mean much to me as of yet because well I just started playing this yesterday. However from what I have been able to tell the higher the number the better, and this factors into what sort of stat package that they have. So my Eevee in question came out of the box as it were with 104 which is significantly higher than any other Pokemon I have seen yet. Ironically the hardest capture yet was my Magikarp, namely because it kept flipping around aimlessly anytime I tried to toss the Pokeball. Not only do you have to try and land the sweet spot, but most Pokemon will move around on you while trying to do this. Similarly I utterly failed at capturing a Butterfree because apparently it is a little stronger willed than others. I captured it three times… and all three times it broke out of the ball… eventually flying away never to be seen again.

The reason why I titled this post Walking Simulator, is because that is a genre name that folks have tacked onto games that are about walking around and exploring virtual worlds… but without any combat to speak of. Pokemon Go however is quite literally a game about walking. The world has all of these objectives out there in the form of PokeStops and Gyms that seem to appear based on the previous Ingress player portal locations according to Thalen who had apparently played that game way more than I ever did. So for me I have one right around the corner from my house in the form of a statue. So last night I convinced my wife to go for a walk… under the guise of exercise but she knew that really I just wanted to go out and capture Pokemon. Now we get into the larger problem of Pokemon Go right now… the servers and uptime. For most of the day yesterday things were crashing in spectacular ways, likely because Niantic was simply not ready for the crush of folks who like me decided to bypass the silly region lockouts. This immediately started a ban rumor floating around that anyone who downloaded the APK was going to get banned from the application. Yet in all of the threads I never saw anyone reporting anything other than normal intermittent service issues.

Pokemon Go is a deeply connected application. Not only do you need to stay in fairly constant communication with the Niantic servers over what I am guessing is some sort of a Web Service call… you also have to have unfettered connectivity to GPS satellites in order to keep your positioning true. This means two things… namely that gameplay can be unpredictable, and that your battery will weep in misery at the drain. When I went out to lunch I had about 85% on my battery… and after about an hour of running errands and capturing Pokemon I was sitting around 52% if I remember correctly. Ingress players are notorious for carrying a bunch of portable battery packs just to make sure that their gameplay is uninterrupted and truthfully that is probably going to be the standard operating procedure with Pokemon Go as well. So in the middle of my walk last night I encountered a Fearow in the grocery store parking lot. When I went to try and capture it however I threw the ball… and the screen locked up with the ubiquitous spinning Pokeball icon in the left corner of the screen working madly on trying to reacquire a signal. I finally had to shut down the application, and reboot my phone… to restore any semblance of connectivity… and even then when I got to the PokeStop outside of my Neighborhood I couldn’t actually retrieve anything from it. While the game has launched officially now… it is very much not without issues.

However what exists is extremely awesome. For me Pokemon was always a game about capturing interesting critters, and the combat and story always took a backseat. When I caught all of the available Pokemon in an area I stopped caring about it and simply wanted to move on to the next area so I could see fresh critters. For me… this game is likely going to be crack, but also going to be an excellent excuse to get out of the house and walk around my neighborhood. Where I work downtown there are a couple dozen different PokeStops within easy walking distance so more than likely I am going to start venturing out at lunch to go find them. What is disturbing is the level of saturation this app has already gotten. There are four or five different gyms located in downtown Tulsa, and by noon yesterday when I went out to run errands… each and every single one of them was already claimed by a player. Now these might be beta players or “Beaters” as the community has taken to calling them, but it might also be folks like me who grabbed the APK and just started playing. There are so many aspects of the game I can’t really talk about yet… because I have not experienced them. There is apparently a whole team mechanic that will happen at some point, but as I am sub level 5 that is not something I have encountered yet. I do plan on going Team Blue, and I believe that is where the rest of my friends are leaning as well. In any case… if you have ever loved Pokemon I suggest at least checking it out. I have this feeling that it will be something I obsess with for a few weeks… and then never touch again… much like the other Pokemon games I have played. However it does at least make walking and running errands a far more interesting experience.