Multiplayer

AggroChat #199 – Four Years Complete

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

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In a human sense AggroChat just turned 5 years old this last Friday…  but in a more correct sense we have now completely four entire years of this podcast.  I still feel like we really don’t completely know what we are doing here. As the patron saint of bad decisions…  Belghast journeys back into Everquest… not EQ2 but the original and talks a bit about how many of those systems have changed drastically.  Grace and Bel talk a bit about their Mythical Nonsense journey in World of Warcraft as they reached Mythic +10 this past week. We go into a lengthy conversation talking about encounter decision with several examples including Monster Hunter World and Dark Souls.  We talk briefly about the Dominaria expansion for Magic the Gathering and the release of Standard Ready Challenger Decks. Finally we wrap up with a little bit of discussion about the MegaMan event happening in Monster Hunter World.

Topics Discussed

  • Four Years of AggroChat
  • Original Everquest
    • Changed Systems
  • Mythical Nonsense
  • Encounter Design
    • Single Player Encounters
    • Multiplayer Encounters
    • Variable Number Encounters
    • Dark Souls Encounters
    • Monster Hunter World Encounters
    • Guild Wars 2 Mistakes
  • Dominaria Magic Expansions
    • Challenge Decks
  • Monster Hunter World Megaman Event

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AggroChat #178 – Games and Monetization

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Tamrielo

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We admittedly had grand plans and a whole list of things we were originally going to talk about this week.  However once we opened the monetization can of worms it sort of dominated the show and a hour and a half later we decided it was probably just best to leave things to being a weird single topic show.  This week we are down a Grace and a Thalen and Kodra is recording on different hardware while travelling himself.  As a result there are a few rough spots that we attempted to clean up in post production, but corrupted audio is corrupted audio.  All in all I feel like this is a really important show because it talks about the whole monetization thing from a series of different angles.  I highly suggest you fight through the few rough spots because we unpack a lot of things during the course of this show.

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On Triple-Carting

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If you’re aware of Monster Hunter, you’re probably also aware of Dauntless, a very similar PC game that’s coming “soon”. Dauntless was on display at PAX South, where I got a chance to try it.

Unfortunately, my first chance was pretty short. Like Monster Hunter, too many defeats for your team means your hunt can come to a premature end. This number seems to be 5, which sounds less punishing than Monster Hunter’s 3, but came extremely quickly. When you lose all of your health in Monster Hunter, you get a nice long while to think about your mistakes as you get sent back to base camp (in a cart, hence, “carting”) and have to run back to the party. Dauntless allows you to revive teammates on the spot, which leads to two problems: you can go down while attempting this revive, and the newly-revived, not-at-full-health teammate can go down again almost immediately. It sounds like getting back into the action faster is an improvement, but it doesn’t go well with the game as currently structured.

On Triple-Carting

It’s not all bad. Areas seem to be a lot more open than Monster Hunter, the hunt area is contiguous instead of divided into subzones. Weapon selection is very limited right now (the demo only had 3 options), but more are on the way. The dodge roll has a lot more invulnerability, so it’s easier to use aggressively. Monster design is excellent, which is probably one of the most important parts.

I think Dauntless has the potential to be a good game, but in a demo setting with absolute beginners it didn’t feel great. I’m curious to see if they stick with this format, or adopt something like Monster Hunter Online, where downs only count against you personally (you get kicked out of the hunt if you go down 3 times). We’ll see what develops.

On Triple-Carting

by

If you’re aware of Monster Hunter, you’re probably also aware of Dauntless, a very similar PC game that’s coming “soon”. Dauntless was on display at PAX South, where I got a chance to try it.

Unfortunately, my first chance was pretty short. Like Monster Hunter, too many defeats for your team means your hunt can come to a premature end. This number seems to be 5, which sounds less punishing than Monster Hunter’s 3, but came extremely quickly. When you lose all of your health in Monster Hunter, you get a nice long while to think about your mistakes as you get sent back to base camp (in a cart, hence, “carting”) and have to run back to the party. Dauntless allows you to revive teammates on the spot, which leads to two problems: you can go down while attempting this revive, and the newly-revived, not-at-full-health teammate can go down again almost immediately. It sounds like getting back into the action faster is an improvement, but it doesn’t go well with the game as currently structured.

It’s not all bad. Areas seem to be a lot more open than Monster Hunter, the hunt area is contiguous instead of divided into subzones. Weapon selection is very limited right now (the demo only had 3 options), but more are on the way. The dodge roll has a lot more invulnerability, so it’s easier to use aggressively. Monster design is excellent, which is probably one of the most important parts.

I think Dauntless has the potential to be a good game, but in a demo setting with absolute beginners it didn’t feel great. I’m curious to see if they stick with this format, or adopt something like Monster Hunter Online, where downs only count against you personally (you get kicked out of the hunt if you go down 3 times). We’ll see what develops.