Star Wars – Page 11

Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Misfortune Mordren

November 16, 2015 by Belghast

Boring Post Material

This morning I am struggling a bit to remain conscious. Neither myself nor my wife managed to get much sleep last night, because in our partially finished state… the rain kept dripping off a metal plate just outside our window. Which meant either try and sleep through this loud irregular dripping pattern, or sleep with the television loud enough to hopefully drown out the noise. We did the later which means we never really slept that deeply, kinda like we do when there is a tornado warning and we end up with the weather blaring all night hoping we would wake up if we needed to take shelter. As a result I am struggling a bit when it comes to stringing together thoughts into a sentence. This is absolutely the sort of day that I would just say screw it and not blog… but after several years of this madness I don’t really want to break the chain. That’s the funny thing about doing the daily blogging thing… is after a point you really don’t want to do something to break the pattern of posts. It is like the pattern itself becomes the important thing and not so much what I am writing about.

This weekend also was one where I did a surprisingly small amount of gaming. We recorded the latest episode of AggroChat on Friday night this week, and during that I piddled around in Fallout 4. Then as usual I stayed up way the hell too late wrapping up some minor details on the podcast. Then Saturday we had the very first of our family “Christmas” activities, I say it in quotes because it is technically a dual purpose Thanksgiving and Christmas that we have with my wife’s dad and step mom. They are snow birds and spend the winter in warmer climates… so for the last decade or so we have had this dual holiday day around Thanksgiving. Thing is they keep pushing it up so they can get down South “before it gets cold”, and admittedly they have a really nice place down there so I don’t blame them. It just ends up making for a strange holiday get together… when I am absolutely not even in Thanksgiving mode yet. When I got home from that… I had every intent of taking a nap, but instead the contractors were banging on the wall of the bedroom which would have made sleep impossible.

As a result I pretty much sleep walked through the day until we went to bed that evening relatively early. This is the point at which we realized that the drip was a thing… which woke us up about 4 am Sunday morning. My wife just stayed up, and I attempted to sleep through it… which I am guessing I eventually succeeded because it didn’t wake me up again until around 7:30. Over the last several years we have pretty much ignored we had a back yard. The siding had gotten bad and honestly everything back there was just overwhelming in that it all needed attention. With the bedroom door thing leading out there, my wife has become determined to fix the problems back there and reclaim it as usable space. Since we had a dumpster thanks to the construction folks… she was damned determined to use that to take care of some stuff. We had a few hour break in the rain, so my wife and I were trudging through the muddy back yard picking up things and carrying them to the dumpster. I am surprisingly sore from this, even though all I really did was act as the person moving stuff from the backyard to the dumpster, and she did a lot of the brute force gathering stuff into piles for me to move.

Star Wars Pen and Paper

The highlight of yesterday has to be our Star Wars pen and paper game. The AggroChat crew and a few friends have been doing a fantasy flights Star Wars system game through Roll 20. The way that game integrates with Roll 20 is amazing, and quite literally if you fill out your character sheet correctly all you have to do is push a single button when you want to do an attack. I am assuming there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that Tam is doing to run the game, but for the most part… this is the best possible remote pen and paper experience. Essentially we are a group of force users during the A New Hope era, with one significant monkey wrench thrown in. My character is the one that does not fit… I am not a nice person… I never claimed to be. My character has pretty much spent his entire life working as a Bodyguard/Hired Gun/Enforcer for one Hutt cartel after another. The problem is… I get these “bad feelings” and often times my employers don’t heed my warnings and end up dead. As a result I’ve developed this persona in the underworld of “Misfortune Mordren”, and it has been interesting to see how that is working out.

I built this persona because I thought it would be interesting to play… but apparently I am some sort of underworld bogeyman. We had an instance yesterday where our craft was about to get boarded by some pirates, and the mere mention of my name…. and some really high deception rolls on the part of Kodra… caused them to back off because they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Apparently I am considered to be so “Bad Luck” that even after interdicting our ship… it was not worth their time to try and take us on. Then again there is a whole other side to this tale, because I am racking up quite the body count. While I am playing a character from Edge of the Empire, we decided to make things easier and put me on the Force and Destiny conflict system. I feel like I am not understanding this system… because every time I take conflict I cheer out loud. Much to the horror of my otherwise party of “goody two shoes” that are trying desperately to avoid the Dark Side. We walked into a gang base yesterday, and I opened fire before they had time to even speak. To my defense though… I figure if you are in a gang on Nar Shadda you have made some poor life choices anyways. Also to my defense Kodra did ask me to create a diversion… so yeah I was just doing that.

Essentially I am becoming somewhat of the conflict sponge for my party, and I am perfectly fine in that role. The thing is… I never said I wanted to be a light side character… and additionally I never said I was a “good guy”. My character has spent his entire life living in Hutt territory, and in truth I am turning over a new leaf. As a Hutt enforcer I would have been expected to torture every single one of these people I took down… just for good measure, because that is what Hutts do. I have yet to feed a single one of them to some bizarre creature we are keeping in a pit to entertain the boss. So simply taking them out cleaning… is a bit of a mercy from what I have been used to. It is going to be interesting to see how my character and the rest of the party play out… as they so carefully use their stun settings… and mine has dust on it because it has never been used once. The game usually runs for several hours… and by the time it wraps up I just have enough time to grabs some food and head downstairs for my Sunday evening television time… including Walking Dead, Talking Dead… and now maybe Into the Badlands. I watched the first episode last night and I have to say so far I am digging it heavily.

Media Consumption – 10/31/2015

October 31, 2015 by Belghast

Happy Halloween

This was another week where I mostly just watched things on YouTube. That said I did dig up a few gems that I feel are worth sharing. My weekend is going to be a bit odd because last night we recorded AggroChat so the members of our podcast that have social lives… can go out and do social things. I on the other hand plan on playing the new Funcom single player game “The Park” in honor of the holiday. I am not 100% sure if I am going to stream it or not, but I will likely record it. I have heard it is honestly not that long of a game, but it seems just about right for Halloween fun time. Other than that… I have this fear that because of the cold snap I am starting to also get a cold… I know it doesn’t work that way but still. So I am starting to preemptively medicate myself, because I really don’t want to be sick again… after having recently spent entirely too much time sick.

The Book of Sorrows

This is absolutely amazing… and you should stop what you are doing and spend the next hour and a half listening to this. I may or may not be a bit obsessed with Destiny and its oddly coherent… but insanely difficult to find Lore. This lore has traditionally been pieced together in a manner that can only be fully represented if you imagine a basement somewhere… with newspaper clippings, photos, scribbled writings… all connected together with red string with various bits and pieces circled and text scrawled on it that says “this means something”. Seriously to understand Destiny lore is to lose a significant part of your sanity. With the Taken King release…. they made things a bit easier in a way that peeling an orange with your bare hands… is easier than trying to do it with a pair of those weird mechanical lab arms that you see in science fiction labs. Throughout the new items there are some items called Calcified Fragments… and each one you collect unlocks another tidbit of a tome called the Book of Sorrows. This actual book… outlines the progression of the hive from being this tiny race that lived only ten years… to the immortal monster that it is today. This shit is really good… and at some point I will listen to it again. The channel I linked is pretty damned amazing… because it is voice acted in a manner you would expect an audio book to be done. Extremely worth your time… seriously listen to this now.

Star Wars Original Trilogy – Force Awakens Mash-up

Another thing I am also completely enamored with right now is Force Awakens and anything else that seems like Force Awakens. The measure of hype and love that I am feeling for Star Wars right now… is insane. The awesome thing about it is that right now I am rocking a R2-D2 beanie… and it is insane the amount of friends I make because of it. I had a long conversation about Star Wars Battlefront last night with the grocery store cashier because it all started with a “Man I love your beanie”. If you want to be crushed with feels…. watch this above video. The creator took scenes from the original trilogy, and cut it to fit the thematic elements of the Force Awakens trailer and that soundtrack. Seriously… I felt shivers when I watched this thing… and then was just overwhelmed with emotion upon its conclusion. I am probably overselling it… but you know I get super excited about things so… watch this too.

Detroit Trailer

A few years back there was this amazing tech demo running on the Playstation 3 hardware called Kara, about this android that feels more emotional than it should. We wondered for years what would become of it…. if anything would come of it. It was this great experience of trans-humanism and my friends and I all sort of hoped it would be more than just a tech demo someday. Turns out they are in fact working on a game surrounding that same universe, and they are setting it in Detroit. Not sure exactly what the appeal of Detroit is for non-American developers… but apparently it has some because there seem to be an awful lot of games set in this city. The game looks pretty awesome, and it is going to be interesting to see what ramifications come from being a “free range android” of sorts. Reminds me quite a bit of the show Humans, which deals with similar issues.

Destiny re-cut to Force Awakens

I said I was obsessed with Force Awakens right now… and also Destiny… and this video connects the two. Similar to the original Star Wars trilogy trailer, this takes the sound and voice over associated with the Force Awakens trailer and edits it to Destiny footage. I think it works pretty great, and I felt the same sort of warm fuzzies watching this as I did the other… I was honestly shocked at just how well it worked. The strange thing is… the guy that did this apparently almost exclusively re-cuts movie trailers to Destiny footage… but honestly most of them don’t work nearly as well as this one.

Walking Dead

I thought I would throw a footnote in here really quick… just to say I am not going to talk about this episode. Mostly because I don’t want anyone to accidentally have it spoiled. Some shit happens… some major shit… and Monday morning we tried to sort through all of it. We were seriously distraught because we were uncertain what the events of the show meant for the franchise as a whole. Then… one of us found some leaked information… which makes me even less likely to write about it. Right now… I am just not sure how I feel about it… what happened… what supposedly will happen. As a result I just am not going to talk about it other than what I have just said here. Since however I have gotten in the habit of running down each new episode, I thought I would at least leave a footnote.

Week In Gaming 10/25/2015

October 25, 2015 by Belghast

The Sickly Bel

This week was an odd one in that I managed to catch some flu-like chest crud. I felt pretty awful most of last weekend, and then struggled to exist Monday and ended up coming home halfway through Tuesday. I chained Wednesday as well, and found myself in that place where I wanted to play something… but anything seemed to require too much concentration. This was after all the week I had early access to Star Wars Fallen Empire, and I did exactly none of the content. I poked my head in a few times to attempt to play my Sith Sorcerer and failed miserably at it. I have a few comments to make about my experiences, but the majority of my gaming time was spent playing Destiny. Apparently that game is largely muscle memory, and I can play it without having to think too much about it.

SWTOR: Fallen Empire

As I said in the intro, this week was the early launch of Fallen Empire the massively game changing expansion for Star Wars the Old Republic… and I barely touched it. I did pop in enough to get sorted out how some of the new systems work. Namely the way companions now exist as being independent of the abilities they use. This means if you no longer have to deal with companions you cannot stand just because they fill the role you want. As a result I swapped to using Andronikos Revel on my Sorcerer, because he loves it when I shock the shit out of NPCs that are not giving me my way. Similarly I would probably never run with a companion that is not Vette on my Sith Warrior, or always run with Kira Carsen on my Jedi Guardian. There is seriously nothing cooler than running around with Kira and feeling like a Jedi strike force, and having her also be a healer… just icing on the cake. As you can tell this is a super important change for me, and I am damned happy to see it go in.

Other than that the other big change for me is the fact that the NPCs are actually labelled as to what type of quest they give you. For example in the above image you can clearly see that this NPC is going to give you the Belsavis planetary quest. This makes it easy to ignore things like the non-soloable heroic quests or flashpoint quests you are not quite ready for… to keep them from cluttering your logs. The other big thing that I noticed was the way that the level scaling works. It seems like when you land on a planet you are scaled to the maximum level for that area, somewhat like Final Fantasy XIV scales dungeons. This means you can overlevel content… but just barely making it a bit easier if you wait for awhile to do a quest rather than doing it when it is on level. However there is never a point where content ever becomes useless to you, which means you can easily go back and farm early content if you are struggling a bit to progress forward. The loss of 12x class experience however means that pretty much to stay current you are always going to have to do your class quests as well as the main planetary story arc. In any case I think the expansion content is going to be enjoyable… if I ever actually play it.

All-Saints Wake

I don’t have a lot to talk about when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV this week, but I did poke my head back in for a few hours. This week was the release of the All-Saints Wake event that serves as Halloween for the game. As we talked about last night, holidays in Final Fantasy XIV are largely the tale of incompetent villains and in this case it is a repeat appearance of the Impresario the mastermind behind the Continental Circus. Over the years we have learned that this is really a group of voidsent that are trying to cause mayhem each year, and we the player finds new ways to thwart them. As cute as the story line is… the reason why you do holidays in games is to get stuff. This year we get the purple outfit that my character is showing off above, a new Pumpkin Butler minion, and for the first time this year an actual mount. We get to ride around Eorzea on a flying broom… that actually does fly if you have unlocked flight in a given zone. The thing I love about Final Fantasy XIV holiday events is that they are adorable, provide awesome rewards… and end up taking only a few minutes to complete rather than being a grindy mess that brings out the worst in players. If you are subbed you should definitely check it out, because while the quest is more enjoyable if you have done the previous years… it is still fairly easy to follow without that ancestral knowledge.

Devilian

I have some issues with this game, but since I am now in alpha/beta/whatever phase it is and the NDA has dropped I thought I would talk a bit about it this morning. My number one issue is the gender locked classes and the fact that they have very specific styles to them. The Berserker is a guts clone, the Shadow Hunter is a bare chested Bishi-elven alucard like character, the Evoker is spilling out of her dress, and the Cannoneer is a Loli. Out of those options… there is exactly one I can stomach playing as, which is the Berserker. The thing is…. all of these design decisions unfortunately have nothing to do with Trion Worlds which is the company bringing the game to non-Korean markets. As fraught as the classes are… the game is actually rather enjoyable once you get past its slightly odd control scheme. By all looks it is a Diablo clone, but it controls vastly different… and honestly reminds me a bit more of the way skill shots in League of Legends feel. You use your mouse for character facing and then use your number keys to fire off abilities. You can bind an attack to your left mouse button, and I am probably going to do that with my basic attack to make it feel more Diablo-like. What I have seen of the combat is kinda interesting, and the dungeons are really enjoyable. I am just struggling to get past the art direction decisions, because honestly… they make me really sad. This could be a really great game, if it didn’t have gender locked classes and the art design did not seem to be from a thirteen year olds “tee hee hee boobs” mindset. It will be interesting to see if I am still piddling with it by the time the next beta comes around or if I have decided that the game is simply “not for me”.

Destiny

Week In Gaming 10/25/2015 — Magical glow of an Exotic Engram… only to be dashed moments later when you find out its a damned helmet.

This week has been almost entirely devoted to Destiny. As I said before this was the game that I could play without having to apply much thought to it. A good chunk of the week was spent working on my Hunter who is now I believe 270ish light level, and all of the way through the TKK content. I cheated a bit and jump started the character to level 25 using the item I got from purchasing the Taken King. I have to say if they want to sell something on the cash shop… I would absolutely buy a second one of these. Going from 25 to 40 was not that bad, but I am just not looking forward to taking my Warlock from 1-25 to get there. This week has also been the resurgence of my appreciation of Auto Rifles. I completely the third Gunsmith faction quest and it ended up giving me an exotic rifle called the Fabian Strategy. This thing is just a blast to use and I love the way it sounds and feels as I rip through mobs. This has also caused me to dust off the auto rifles I had in my vault and I found a few others that I really like, one of which my hunter is currently using.

The other key activity for this week has been running level 36 strikes in an effort to get exotic engrams with three of coins. I found out today that I could be just doing level 20s, but honestly I kinda enjoy the slight effort the 36s provide. They go so much quicker than the heroics, but don’t feel like I am simply steamrolling them in quite the way that the level 20s do. Essentially my pattern has been to run strikes using coins until I get an exotic, then take a break for a bit and do something else. I am also attempting to keep both characters up to date on bounties each day, and my regular farming runs on the dreadnought manage to pay off big time… as I had more than enough Hadium Flakes to get my Hunter his sword almost immediately. The big chore is still trying to increase my light levels, and the most 290 grind is extremely slow. That said it still feels enjoyable because I am seeing a ton of drops in the process. Even though half of the things are going to turn out to be something I cannot use… it still feels good to see drops. Its like the game is giving me hope… even though moments later it is just going to dash them once again when I find out the exotic is another damned helmet.