rift

Week In Gaming 9/6/2015

September 6, 2015 by Belghast

The Long Weekend

This week was pretty crazy, and involved a whole heap of work related stress. That said it is also the week before the labor day holiday here in the United States. With that in mind the stresses seemed to be more manageable knowing that I had a four day weekend waiting for me. The funny thing about doing these review posts is that I don’t realize I played quite as many games as I did until I actually sit back trying to sort it all out. I am not sure how effective of an adult I am going to be today, because a combination of allergies and exhaustion are settling in and leaving me groggy as hell this morning. Yesterday we did one of our whirlwind circuits of Walmart stores looking for back to school clearance… and of course for me… clearance Legos. During the course of the day we hit six different stores in several towns just outside of the Tulsa Metro area, and I managed to get a Lego Star Wars Snow Speeder and Tie Interceptor which made me pretty damned happy.

Destiny

Week In Gaming 9/6/2015 — Bel Failing at Destiny

With all of the talk of the Destiny expansion, I decided to give the game a spin again since there are several content packs that I have yet to even touch. That said a combination of lack of gear, and lack of skill kept me from really progressing. I am not sure what sort of gear levels they are expecting players to have upon starting the new story content, but at 22 light it felt like I simply lacked the punch needed to chew through it. I did have several nice weapons waiting for me when I logged in, so I guess that was awesome. One of which was a nice hand cannon, which when I last played Destiny was the weapon I really enjoyed running around with. I want to get in and figure out how best to increase my light score, and throw on a few levels before trying this out again. Supposedly right now Xur has a night Titan helm available so I might boot this up after the blog post and see what that does for my total light bonus.

Grow Home

While on the subject of PlayStation 4 games, this week also saw the release of a whole batch of brand new PlayStation Plus free games. If you own ANY Sony products… and are not a PlayStation Plus member, I highly suggest you do. One of the big positives about the PlayStation platform is how well the various products ultimately interact with each other. One nifty trick that my friend Ashgar showed me is that you can log in via the web interface and quickly “purchase” all of the free games even if you don’t happen to own a given platform. So for example for the longest time I only had a PS3, but I was still picking up Vita and PS4 games every month so that when I finally broke down and bought the consoles I had an existing game library. $50 a year ends up getting you a minimum of six new games each month. You cannot beat that anywhere.

This month saw something slightly different for the PS+ process in that they allowed the subscribers to vote between a choice of three games for one of the September slots. I personally voted for Armello, but it seems like the community as a whole really got behind the game Grow Home. These is by the UbiSoft branch that does more “indie” titles, and quite honestly… it is not ready for prime time. In my short period of time playing the game it locked up and froze numerous times on me. It is in theory a quirky exploration game where you play a robot that has been dropped on a planet to explore it. You collect crystals, climb surfaces, pick up items… all in an attempt to explore more. It has some strange controls but I got used to them pretty quickly. The only problem I have is the whole open world blocky exploration thing doesn’t quite hook me the way it used to… seeing as I have now played Minecraft for half a decade.

Teslagrad

While Grow Home didn’t really grasp me… Teslagrad absolutely did and I made the mistake of booting this up late one night… and then ending up playing for over an hour before realizing just how late it had gotten. The story of the game is that you live in the Kingdom of Elektropia and find yourself being hunted by the King’s guard. You feel from them and find your way into Teslagrad the massive tower fortress of the technological wizards. The game of course does not tell you all of this, but instead asks you to piece things together from bits and pieces of information you see in the levels of the game on tapestries and through little animatronic theaters. The gameplay itself is simple and brutal at the same time. The core mechanic of the game centers around polarity… hitting certain objects with your left trigger button will shift it “blue” and with your right trigger button shift it “red”. This simply mechanic is used throughout this metroidvania puzzler to complete levels. There is also a level of twitch gameplay as you have to use other abilities at just the right moment to get through the levels. The challenge being that ANY damage taken will kill you. Much like Ori and the Blind Forest the game employs a really nice checkpoint system so very rarely do you have to repeat much gameplay, allowing you to quickly learn your way through a given puzzle element through rapid succession. The art style is this lovely hand drawn, hand painted feel that works really nicely. I highly suggest you check it out even if you don’t have access to Playstation Plus.

While I did not really play a lot of it, I did spend time in Rift. I ended up getting a code for the fourth anniversary aethercycle, which prompted me to want to return and play the game some more. Funny how cosmetic items can do that. I mostly spent time working on the “Intrepid Adventures” which sends you through a series of “Instant Adventure” style interactions deep within otherwise Raid only zones. The experience was fairly slow going, but it might be an entertaining way to get to the level cap. Right now I am 62.5 and I would really like to reach the level cap on at least one character before the next expansion lands. I am not sure why but I have really struggled leveling in the post vanilla Rift game.

Final Fantasy XIV

With folks at Pax Prime, it ended up being a bit strange as far as raiding weeks went. We did not have the Monday raid and with tomorrow being a holiday I don’t think we plan on raiding that night either. By the time we get back to work on Ravana Extreme we are going to be rusty as hell. Wednesday night also lacked the people to meet, so instead we worked on Alexander for folks. The 2nd anniversary event is going on in game and I highly suggest that you check it out because I think it is going away quickly. Easily some of the most touching content I have completed in any game, because it breaks the fourth way in a good way. Still going through a bit of a Final Fantasy XIV break, but poking my head in periodically to check and make sure everything is still going well.

Diablo 3

Once again this week I spent the vast majority of my time in Diablo 3. At this point I am completely decked out in legendaries… thought not really the right ones. I am also at Paragon 91 which makes my seasonal character far and away my most progressed character yet. I think on the normal servers I am only something like Paragon 19. At this point I am working on bounties and then grouping up with friends whenever folks are around, mostly for the highest chance of seeing set pieces drop. I currently have a charge build, which helps me keep up with my wizard friends and also as soon as I can get one more piece of gear… deals a silly amount of damage. I am having a blast, but still completely baffled that for some reason the game has just “clicked” with me where it did not for so long. I am one achievement away from getting my season four rewards, and after I wrap this blog post I am probably going to pop in and work on just that. It was a fun week, and I am really starting to enjoy doing these posts, hopefully you all my readers also like them.

Hammerknell and Keywardens

September 4, 2015 by Belghast

Nightmare Larva

I had a strangely disconnected evening last night essentially happened in two distinct parts. My great niece was in town doing a track meet, and we had arranged to meet up with the family for dinner. Initially I thought I would get home and we would essentially leave right away. That wasn’t quite the case and we ultimately did not walk to dinner until around 7ish, which left me with a fair amount of time to kill. I have once again been feeling the Rift itch lately, as I go through every few weeks. The shiny new mount that I talked about yesterday may or may not have been the catalyst. So I poked around Meridian for a bit and ultimately decided to do an Instant Adventure. For those not familiar with the concept, Rift has this really cool thing where you hit a button and get thrown together with a raid group of people and teleported to a specific area of the world. There you complete a series of objectives, and get teleported to a new place where the process starts over again. Each time you complete a segment you are rewarded loot just like in a Rift, except this time they are generally caches of gear for your class.

Last night I noticed there was a new option called “Intrepid Adventures”. I say this is a new option, but I really mean it was new to me… because I had not noticed it before. That said I have not really run any instant adventures since the launch of Nightmare Tide. What it appears to be is a Instant Adventure style tour of raid encounters. I got teleported into the caverns under Hammerknell, where I fought all sorts of tougher but still manageable monsters leading up to several “boss” fights. I have to say it gives a nice flavor to leveling especially as I have not actually seen any of the raids since Vanilla. I had a lot of fun and will probably use this option when I return to leveling again. I am right now about halfway through 62 and the grind to 65 has been slower going than I had hoped. I honestly have problems with the layout of content since vanilla, or more so I just liked the feel of leveling in Vanilla better. This is of course personal preference, and since Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides feel really similar… I am guessing they have done the market research that tells them that the Rift demographic wants that style of content. Anyways… I have contemplated trying to set up at least one night a week to play Rift. The problem there is that I am not sure there are enough nights in the week to go around for all of the games I want to be regularly playing.

Hunting Keywardens

When I got home from dinner however it was all about Diablo 3. Before dinner I had managed to pop in shortly and get my good friend Neph invited to our Stalwart Diablo clan that makes finding folks to group with significantly easier. My friend Shandrah popped on and started the leveling trail for Neph, Damai and Ashgar which was a full group so I happily worked on Season IV objectives. Right now I am working on the fourth and final chapter of objectives, and I spent most of the night tracking down the various Key Wardens which I had to defeat on Torment I or better. After a significant rearrange of my abilities I am finding that Torment I is actually fairly easy. I am essentially doing a variation of the classic “spin to win” Whirlwind build. I am using Frenzy with the added fury bonus of Berserk as my builder, for the purpose of being able to build fury as fast as humanly possible so I can spend the most time in whirlwind. From there I use Whirlwind with Blood Funnel which heals me every time I crit, which is often. From there I have Overpower with Killing Spree, Threating Shout with Falter, Ignore pain with Ignorance is Bliss, and Wrath of the Berserker with Insanity. For passives I take Boon of Bul-Kathos, Rampage, Ruthless and Weapons Master.

The end result is a built that can chew thing mobs pretty effectively, but the most important part is that it has really solid “sustain” which seems to be the most important thing as a melee character. None of my gear is ideal at the moment, and I am not using the right legendary procs because I simply haven’t gotten them to drop. That said it is a good start and better than the previously build I was working with. I am still relatively new to the whole Rifts and Greater Rifts thing, and at this point I have two objectives standing in the way of my spiffy portrait and pet. One of which is “Reach Greater Rift Level 10 Solo” which I find really confusing. Last night I attempted to do this one and completed a Greater Rift… albeit without getting the bonus. But I am not sure if this means that I need to complete the rift with the bonus or if I physically need to manage to get to dungeon level 10 within the Rift. The last one however will take some doing considering I am in a mishmash of gear right now, and it is to have a level 70 legendary equipped in every slot. I have been spending my blood shards on gear slots that I am currently missing in the hopes of slowly knocking this achievement out. In any case… I am close and I am having a blast just killing stuff for loot and paragon levels!

Needing Purpose

September 3, 2015 by Belghast

Of Bad Ass Mounts

This morning I suffered some pretty major technical difficulties on the blog. Several months back I had a nasty DDoS attack against my blog from as far as I can tell some nasty video game extremists. It happened the day after I made a post, so I have always linked the two. As a result my ISP threw in a few rules to block access to the guts of my wordpress installation from anyone but me. This morning apparently in the middle of writing a post my IP address changed on me, and I immediately lost access to do any of the things that wordpress does through Ajax… which is apparently nearly everything. My good friend Hiawani however once again is to the rescue and he got me fixed in a matter of moments. I love this man so much, and in truth he is the only reason why I have stayed with my web host for as long as I have. In the coming weeks I need to actually get off my ass and allow them to migrate me to a different server. I mostly wanted to get through August before that happened, because I did not want any potential interruptions during Blaugust.

What you are seeing above however is a bad ass mount I just got in Rift. It is slowly creeping up on Extra Life time, and yesterday I finally went through the paces and created the AggroChat team. Last year we had tag teamed this even through the Alliance of Awesome group, and it was fun… but this year we kinda wanted to do it as AggroChat since we are a fairly large ensemble cast. If we managed to pull in all of the folks who have appeared on the show with any sense of regularity we should be able to get more than enough people to cover all the slots. All of this was pushed into motion however when Liore posted a link saying she was giving away the 4th Anniversary Arclight mount that she got from Pax. She was going to give the mount to the next donation she got on her own Extra Life page. Now while I am doing my own thing, I try and help others out as well, and over an hour had passed since she had posted the link so I figured I was out of luck. Turns out that nope… apparently folks were either feeling stingy yesterday afternoon or I am just lucky because I now have a really amazing mount in Rift. I buzzed around on it for a good hour last night not doing a damned thing other than riding… it is pretty amazing. Absolutely my favorite of the various Arclight rider designs.

Back to Eorzea

The last couple of weeks I have been on a fairly extended vacation as I took a break from Final Fantasy XIV and played lots of other games. Normally I would have been back on Monday but due to Pax that raid didn’t actually happen. Similarly we were down a significant number of people for last nights raid, but instead we opted to help a guild member through Alexander. She had managed to do the first turn only, and we helped her get through the last three. I know at the very least she got a ring from it, but I am hoping she managed to gather up some various bits as well. While waiting around on the raid however I spent time hanging out with guildie Tatafelo Rurufelo, who was doing his best warrior of light dark knight bad ass pose. My biggest problem right now is I am just feeling absolutely no drive to accomplish something. I should be out grinding Esoterics, but I am happy enough with my gear levels… and that is frustrating. I should be striving to get better, but instead I would rather just pop into another game like Diablo and grind there.

I feel like 3.1 is going to jump start my enjoyment of the game, because I am so tired of Neverreap. My biggest concern is that the next set only includes two dungeons… so will we be right back into the situation of always getting one of those two dungeons? My hope is that they make expert roulette be a combination of the first two plus the new two… giving us a pool of four dungeons. One of the biggest selling factors to me to date has been that we got three new dungeons each patch cycle. Them trimming it back to two per patch cycle kinda concerns me a little. Are we just going to see less content as a whole throughout Heavensward? Is this evidence that they are starting to work on a new expansion to follow Heavensward? Listening to Soken this weekend at Pax, it seems like “Hellsward” as they call it took a lot out of the team, so it might simply be that they need a smaller patch to recuperate from the grind that was getting Heavensward out the door. I guess only time will tell if we see a similarly small patch come 3.2. For the time being… I just need to find a new goal in game.

Pax Prime Hopes

August 28, 2015 by Belghast

The Big Show

It feels like we live in this world where there is always another big games show around the corner. I remember when quite literally all that existed was the Consumer Electronics show, at least for the United States. Now we have dozens of shows sprinkled throughout the year, all of which vying for exclusive announcements. As a result companies have to trickle information out so that everyone that attends one of the shows feels like they are getting to see something unique or special. This weekend of course is Pax Prime, and I had hoped this year I would be attending. The truth is however that Pax Prime will likely never be in the cards, as the husband of a teacher… August is a HORRIBLE time for me to be travelling. During this month my wife is in full on panic mode as she gets adjusted to another school year, and while for a bit I was bummed at not being able to attend, I am realizing it was ultimately for the best. As a result I will be a loyal yearly Pax South attendee and pretty much brush aside the thoughts of doing the Pax Prime thing. Instead at some point I will just go out to Seattle to meet my friends that seem to be pooling there, instead of trying to make one big combo trip. Having been to a Pax, I have to say in truth the folks at home have a much better view of what is going on there through the live stream. As a result I am looking forward to spending much of the weekend watching as much as I can. Which gets to the point of this mornings post. I thought I would talk a bit about the various things I am hoping to get out of Pax Prime 2015.

Final Fantasy XIV

The thing that I want this weekend… is a release date for 3.1. I know we are getting close, but I want to know a firm release date so I know just how long I am going to have to wait. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is going through a bit of a content lull much like it did after the release of A Realm Reborn. Quite frankly at this point I am tired of running Neverreap… since that seems to be the dungeon I get most often. Two dungeons in a roulette rotation simply is not enough, and I am honestly a bit concerned with the news that 3.1 is only going to add two more as well. My hope is that they create a four dungeon expert roulette instead of moving Neverreap and Fractal to Hard Roulette and making expert just be the two new dungeons. The other piece I am really looking forward to is the next 24 player dungeon the Void Ark, aka the creepy airship you sometimes seem flying around in the Sea of Clouds. The game needs a shot in the arm of content, because folks are starting to slow down… myself included. More so than this… I would like to see some future vision type stuff for 3.2 and beyond. In the past we have usually had this list of things that Yoshi P had promised for “future” patches and we are a bit low on that right now.

Wildstar

Similar to FFXIV… and honestly a lot of the things I am going to talk about this morning…. I just want a date for when the Free to Play conversion will happen. They keep putting new patches on the test server and it is starting to feel like maybe they are close, but what I need from them is a date. I am enjoying Wildstar so much more than I have at any point in the past, and a lot of the changes that are coming in with the free to play conversion are going to be generally good for the game as well. Past the free to play conversion… I would like to see some information about what their long range plans are. I don’t even know if they have a presence at Pax Prime this weekend, but even if folks don’t they tend to time announcements around major shows as well.

Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Since the expansion announcement at Pax South, I have had a strange connection with this title. Traditionally speaking I do not really enjoy Guild Wars 2 that much. That said I have to say the revenant looks more interesting than any of the previous classes. I fully expect that I will be picking this title up when it launches if for no reason other than the fact that it is once again “buy to play” and I have gotten my original purchase out of the game. This has been the year of announcements completely unfettered by timelines, and it is starting to get frustrating. Once again we have a big title looming on the horizon with zero date announced for when we will be expecting to play it. I am expecting that this one is going to be a lot like Heavensward was, where they announce the launch date and it is only a few months away. My hope is that Pax Prime finally is going to be the show where they talk about this at. Give your fans some firm dates.

Blizzard Titles

I am honestly not expecting anything new to come out of this conference from Blizzard. They did their big reveal of the World of Warcraft expansion at Gamescom, and I fully expect that with Blizzcon coming up in November that they will be holding everything else closely waiting on their big show to reveal it. I fully expect that they might announce a new Overwatch champion at Pax Prime, and potentially some more Heroes of the Storm champions or maps. What I am really wanting from them is an announcement for when Overwatch testing will begin and a beta key delivered in my mailbox. Everytime I launch the patcher and see that Overwatch button at the bottom of it… I get a little sad in side. I really want to play this game, and I sincerely doubt I will be doing so anytime soon. Over the last few weeks I have come to the realization that I still very much love Blizzard games… it is apparently only World of Warcraft that I am on tentative terms with. I would love beyond love them to announce something for Diablo 3… like maybe another expansion? They have already hinted that they might be doing a Warcraft RTS after they wrap up with Starcraft II… so that alone has me pretty pumped.

No Man’s Sky

I am so irrationally hopeful about this title, even though I keep telling myself that there is no way it can deliver on everything it has been promising. I love exploring new areas, and I love killing strange and interesting creatures. No Man’s Sky promises to give me a procedural generated world where I can do this… over and over again throughout the galaxy. On top of that the graphics are kinda cool as well with their hyper saturated version of reality. Again… all I really want from Hello Games is a release date. I have a feeling that we will have an announcement for some sort of beta testing to begin soon. Supposedly Amazon UK is already taking pre-orders so hopefully we will get a date this weekend.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

At this point I just want more information on this title. We saw a short trailer from E3 and I have been wanting more information since. Once again I have no clue if there will be a presence at Pax Prime, but I am hoping! I want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how this title is actually going to work. I want to know if there is going to be a multiplayer aspect, or if this is just one big single player skyrim-esc sandbox. I also want to know more about the world that surrounds the game.

Devilian

With my recent foray back into Diablo 3, it has made me extremely interested in Devilian a Diablo like Korean game that Trion is going to be publishing. I know Trion is going to have a good presence at the show so I am hoping we find out when the beta process is going to begin. I ended up with a key from Gamescom and I keep checking my Glyph launcher expecting it to show up in the list of games that are playable at some point soon. While on the topic of Trion Games, it is too soon to hope for a Rift expansion but I would still like to get more information about where that game is heading, and some more detail on the future plans for ArcheAge. The folks at Trion Worlds are awesome so I am always interested in what they have to say.