Skyforge

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.

AggroChat #153 – Incoming Tank Shortage

May 21, 2019April 23, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo

One of the things that gets edited down before you get your hands on the podcast is any long gaps between topics. This week we were seemingly a little bit out of it, and the pauses were significant. When I sat down to start editing I had 2 hours and 15 minutes worth of recorded audio, and after doing my normal compression pass… we are down to just a little over 1 hour and 30 minutes. The result was a pretty wide gamut of topics that we discussed, and between the pauses some of the more interesting conversation about a few things that we had never quite delved into. Among the topics a lengthy discussion about what is wrong with Warhammer games as a whole, and our fears regarding what is absolutely going to be a crushing tank shortage with Stormblood.

Topics Discussed:

Star Wars the Old Republic
Skyforge PC
Bomberman Creepy Characters
Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap
Hollow Knight
Eternal Crusade
Warhammer 40,000
Games Workshop
Pips are Important
People Don’t Understand NDAs
Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood
Tank Shortage
Dark Souls III
Variable Difficulty in Games
Persona 5

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Liberating Provinces

April 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I played what I would consider a truly excessive amount of Skyforge on the PS4. There was even a point where I left my office upstairs… and logged into laptop downstairs to play more Skyforge over Remote Play. I am not entirely certain why this game is so damned sticky for me right now… when arguably better games like Horizon are not at this moment. My working theory however is that I can only really handle playing one deeply narrative experience at a time… then need the gaming equivalent of celery to clear my palate. Skyforge makes an awesome version of celery… which is probably not at all what the folks behind the game would want me saying about it. However what I mean by that is that it presents a sequence of bite sized interactions and does so in a fairly enjoyable and no nonsense manner. Functionally in the past this is always what I used Destiny for, but with the impending death of that game and the release of Destiny 2 in September… that has really harmed my joy about spending a whole lot of time over there. I mean sure I want to do all the raiding stuff in the new and improved 390 light versions… but that also requires a lot of personal investment in trying to figure out what my clans schedule is like and how I can manipulate my own schedule to somehow be playing Destiny in the nights they are doing the things I need to do. That was one long contorted sentence but it fairly adequately represents how I am feeling about raiding in general right now regardless of the game.

I think one of the big improvements that happened at some point… and is probably not directly tied to the console release is the campaign map. When I last played the game you functionally went to the Aeleon observatory and would be presented with a number of chicklet sized images that represented missions you could run. It felt like there was no real clear order to which you should be taking the content… and as a result I wound up skipping around something horribly and subjecting myself to things that were probably much harder than I should have. The campaign make takes the game and attempts to make a clear narrative, so instead of playing a god answering 911 calls from various parts of an entire planet… you are on a campaign to liberate your people from the invading monsters. Functionally right now I am about halfway through the first fourth province in the sequence of nine provinces, and as of last night… I had barely just left the first one. There are what seems to be four types of content that you can encounter during this process. First there are solo missions that largely involve killing a bunch of mini bosses until you reach the end and ultimately drive the monster influence from an area. The next type is solo boss fights, and these have been pretty rare… but occasionally you are sent up against some sort of “big bad”. Thirdly there are large open world zones where you are ultimately dumped in with a random assortment of other players to complete a bunch of mini objectives. Lastly there are actual proper dungeons that require a group of adventurers to complete… and unfortunately as of yet I have not actually done one of these.

Last night I focused entirely on the solo mission/bossfight types along the main path of the campaign map, and completely ignored the dungeons and large open world areas… because they simply take a bunch of time to get through and don’t actually serve to unlock new areas of the map. I had a purpose in mind, and that single focus was to get to a temple for a class that I had not already unlocked. The reasoning being that I wanted to know just what madness was involved with getting something other than the base three classes unlocked. Sure enough by the time I hit map three I had access to the Archer temple… where I was prompted with two options [Purchase] and [Donate 3,000,000 Credits]. I tried the purchase option and it acted like it was sending me to the Sony store… only to error out a short period of time later. As far as Credits go… at first I thought that was sheer madness but by the time I finished the night I was sitting at around 1.5 million Credits. Sure it is going to suck to unlock all of the classes you might want to play, but it seems like there is going to be a time in the near future where 3 mil credits is no big deal. The purchase option however has me confused because it seems like at least on some level the game is wired to let you buy your way into a specific class. However for whatever reason this does not seem to function on the console… which is making me want to fire up the PC client just to see how the hell it works there. Whatever the case however… I am finding this game extremely enjoyable at the moment and if you can get past its flaws… atrocious boob jiggle and being limited to 3 classes at the start… I am hooked.

Chasing Aloy

April 19, 2017 by Belghast

It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.

The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.

Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.