the old republic – Page 5

Week in Gaming 10/4/2015

October 4, 2015 by Belghast

Moving in Slow Motion

This morning I am having one of those days that feels like I am fighting against quicksand, to be able to accomplish anything. It is the fitting end of the week I have had where so many issues have come up, that I had to deal with. This week was one where my boss was out of the office for most of it, which meant I got to be the boss. This is a concept that sounds fun on paper, but after having done it for years… I promise it is not nearly as entertaining as it sounds. Being the boss means you are the one that has to deal with isssues when they arrise, even when the issues are of a magnitude that makes you just want to pull the covers over your head and forget the world exists. As such my gaming was a bit odd, because I needed to vent my frustrations in the form of shooting aliens. There were many nights this week where I intended to do something else, but ended up playing Destiny all night. As such there really are not a lot of individual games to talk about but here goes nothing!

Star Wars the Old Republic

As of last night during the AggroChat podcast I have officially completed the original Smuggler storyline, and with it… I have a lot of thoughts about what I experienced. When Kodra played through this content I can remember him being extremely disappointed… but maybe I am just more simple minded, but I absolutely loved the ending. It is everything I expected underworld dealings would be… romance, betrayal, and getting revenge on the people who betrayed you. It wraps up everything a good outlaw story should, and like the best ones… ends up with you on the side of justice. Maybe I just grew up with too many westerns, but it felt like it should to me. My character wasn’t necessarily a white hat, but he definitely was not a black hat… and at the same time I got to do enough things that felt like decisions I would make, to keep me hooked on the storyline. Now that I have wrapped this one up, I think I am going to work up faction on Risha and see what that romance option looks like. After that I think I am putting the Smuggler to bed for awhile, no pun intended… and moving on to something else.

While I doubt I will manage to play through the four imperial storylines before the launch of Fallen Empire, I think I am going to make a good college try to do so. It would be cool to go into Fallen Empire with the special perk for having defeated all eight storylines. Last night I swapped over and started working on my Sith Warrior which is the next closest to moving forward. I have to say once I stopped doing side quests and only focused on the character story the entire experience became far more enjoyable. Not that the side quests are not awesome… but when you have done them multiple times… they begin to drag on. As I play my Sith Warrior I will probably keep doing side quests because most of them on the Imperial side I have not actually seen. I wonder how many if any duplicate between the two factions. In any case I am still very much enjoying my SWTOR vacation and I think it has been a great way to spend the lag time between 3.0 and the 3.1 patch in Final Fantasy XIV.

Wildstar

I have to say the disappointment of the week has been the free to play launch of Wildstar. I guess I say “disappointment” in quotes because really… any time you do a major launch there are significant issues expected. Wildstar relaunch has not been smooth by any measure of the word. In theory from what I have heard if you can manage to get things are fine… but that was not my personal experience. I fought through the queues twice this week, and each time moments after actually getting into the game… I saw a message scroll across my screen warning me that the servers would be coming down in 15 minutes. What does not help I guess is the fact that I am entirely focused on the Entity server, which happens to be the most populated. At some point I will get some play time in, but at the very least I was able to go fiddle with my inventory and clear out my mail box. I also gathered up all of my new items, and I am almost tier 6 on the Cosmic Points system. I have premium sub time through next May so I am sure during that time I will play it quite a bit.

Destiny

Week in Gaming 10/4/2015 — Oryx is a badass

Not really sure what I can say about Destiny that I did not already cover this week in my blog post about it. That said I am still having a blast playing, and several of my friends have also rekindled their interests in the game. I’ve been getting snagged into a fire time quite often and as a result we are doing quite a few strikes to help my friend Damai get geared up. Also this week Carthuun joined the game, so I have a feeling we will be doing some lower level content to help him catch up. To some extent I have been working on leveling my Warlock other than doing my daily bounties, and enjoying replaying through the content. This game is just so zen for me right now… nothing quite relaxes me like headshotting all manner of aliens, and in the strikes I have run I seem to get the lions share of the kills because of my focus. I am absolutely in love with the Sunbreaker because seriously…. every game needs the ability to throw flaming hammers at your opponents. I actually even spent some time running crucible skirmishes and enjoyed myself. I didn’t lead the kill count for my team but I did manage to place second, and I didn’t have the negative experience some of my other friends have reported as a result. I imagine that the community for Destiny PVP can be pretty horrible, I am just lucky that I have not seen that yet.

As far as today… I am probably going to spend a lot more of my time playing Destiny as while waiting editing the podcast this morning I managed to knock out most of the objectives. After I wrap those up I will probably migrate downstairs and spend the rest of the day SWTORing on the sofa while watching something on the television. Destiny has for whatever reason been the perfect blowing off some steam game for me this week. My hope is that as I continue to gain light and gear up it will stay just as enjoyable. I have yet to really try any of the true “endgame” content like the Raids and the Heroic Strikes, but I have to say if I have enough friends playing… it might be interesting. I am still just blown away by how much better the game feels to me. Once again if you played the game at launch and found it lacking… I highly suggest you patch up your client and at least give the game a spin. The changes trickle down through the entire game, and you should be able to see if you like the new feel before purchasing Taken King. Thankfully there is the option to ONLY buy Taken King without having to repurchase the entire game… but those options are only available for digital copies of the game. Not sure if you can upgrade a former physical copy or not. The Destiny theme song however is playing in the background as I type this… so I am going to go answer its call. Hopefully we all have an awesome week to come.

Balmorra and Oryx

September 28, 2015 by Belghast

Awesome Wife Update

My wife is always awesome, but every now and then she does something so cool that I have to brag on her. This weekend she was out shopping with a friend when I got a series of excited texts from her about something she found for me. Awhile back I picked up some Star Wars shoes with this “A New Hope” artwork spread across the two shoes. The problem being that they were expensive as shit and I hate the idea of wearing them out in my normal shoe rotation. I wear a mixture of Vans and Airwalk slip on style canvas shoes and I seem to be able to destroy them pretty effectively. My wife however found the above pair that is absolutely Star Wars print but not to the level that I wouldn’t want to wear them constantly. She didn’t end up picking them up, mostly because she wanted me to try them on. We get up yesterday and they were apparently also on sale at Target, so I am not sure how much we paid but I think they were under $20. I just think its awesome that she saw the shoes and immediately thought that I would want them. My wife isn’t necessarily a geek like I am, but she has always “gotten” the fact that I am and supported me in my quirkiness. I am exceptionally lucky, and every now and then I feel like I need to acknowledge that fact publicly.

Starting Balmorra

I had all of these intentions to make a big push yesterday in Star Wars the Old Republic, but in reality I only ended up playing it in the evening while watching television. I did however manage to finish up all of the end of chapter one back and forth for the smuggler. I now have Risha as an official companion rather than just someone hanging out on my ship. Granted I will likely never end up using her, given that the Tank/Healer combo of Treek and I allows me to pretty much take on anything with ease. Overall I do like the character of Risha and it is going to be interesting to see how the rest of the game plays out. I figure she is going to remain being a vocal participant in the content. Now we are going to enter into some spoiler territory, so you might want to stop reading if you have not completed the smuggler story line and intend to do so. One of the absolute best moments in the game so far… was when I finally got to take down Skavak. Up until this point I kept thinking to myself… god why will this game not let me just kill this guy already!

Now that we have moved into Chapter 2 we get a new set of bad guys. At this point I don’t really care much about this Voidwolf character, but I am absolutely all about taking on Rogun the Butcher. Up until this point I have had him looming over my head and he has sent the occasional bounty hunter after me. My hope is that when I finally am able to take him down it will be just as sweet as it was for Skavak. I feel like as a smuggler I probably shouldn’t want to have a stand up fight against these Kingpins, but then again Leia did slay Jabba in rescuing Han… so there is that example to follow. There are moments in this game that I know are traps… but you pretty much have to go through them anyways. The “rescue” mission on the derelict freighter for example, was absolutely going to be a trap and it was. I did not however expect Port Nowhere to be the trap that it ended up being. I guess it makes sense, because pretty much EVERY map you go to that is not on a main world ends up being a trap. Looking forward to pushing through Balmorra because I can tell you right now I am ONLY doing class story quests here. This is the planet that often kills my progress on Sith side, so will be looking forward to getting through it here on Republic.

Heroic Light

Yesterday was a day almost entirely lost to Destiny. After finishing my blog post, advertising the podcast, and finishing up the youtube version we ended up running out to Target to pick up my shoes. We got home around 11:30 and from that point until around 3:30 I was engrossed in this or that activity within Destiny. I wound my way through the Taken King story, largely because I wanted to open up the Dreadnought patrol zone. I have to say Oryx was one of those fights that was probably way worse in my head than it actually was in reality. The entire time during the fight I was tense beyond reason because I did not want to die and have to start over again. So I spent most of my time dodging and running away while trying to regroup and get some solid shots in. I don’t want to go into too much detail for those who have not done the fight, but there is a moment where he goes invulnerable except for a specific moment when you can attack. This phase… freaked me out more than anything I can remember in this game.

I kept trying to time my sunbreaker super attack for when he was becoming vulnerable again all the while dodging taking damage. The only negative about the encounter is that the adds definitely felt like nothing more than ways for you to regenerate your ammunition, and they were less of an issue once I realized this. At first I kept trying to run from them and focus down Oryx, but I quickly realized that if I kept doing this I would get overwhelmed. The big takeaway from the weekend is that I managed to hit 240 light, which is the first heroic level. I did a couple of the Vanguard strikes on the play list, and I am going to keep trying to do those periodically. I also started getting quests to do various “end game” content. My main goal for the week is to regenerate enough Strange Coins to be able to buy something next Friday if Xur has anything interesting. I am really happy that I had enough to buy Hawkmoon since I pretty much exclusively use Hand Cannons on my Titan. At some point I plan on working my way up on either a Warlock or a Hunter, but for the time being I am really enjoying leveling Sunbreaker. I am not sure exactly why Destiny has this renewed life for me… but for whatever reason I am grabbing on with both hands while the fun lasts.

Week In Gaming 9/20/2015

September 20, 2015 by Belghast

Allergies Suck

This week has been a tale of the universe conspiring to kill me… otherwise known as horrible horrible pollen count. When you go to one of those sites that tracks air quality, my neck of the woods has been bright red for the last several weeks. As a result I have been walking around in a bit of a stupor. Friday I felt like I was coming out from behind a fog, but this morning after running around yesterday I am once again feeling miserable. Essentially it seems like my best option is to huddle inside and forget the world outside exists. The biggest problem I have is that the only allergy treatment that seems to really work is Benedryl… which puts me to sleep. So as a result I take a cocktail of other medications in the hopes of blunting most of the things going on… and then combining that with copious amounts of caffeine in the hopes that somehow someway I will be able to function as an adult. Adulting is really damned hard sometimes. In spite of all of my time hunkered down this week, I really don’t have a wide variety of things to talk about.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Week In Gaming 9/20/2015 — Treek is a Badass

Once again this week my primary source of gaming entertainment has been Star Wars the Old Republic. As I mentioned last week during the recording of the AggroChat podcast I started working on my Smuggler, and I have continued that process throughout the week. As of last night I am now on Alderaan and level 34. The extremely level gap that I had on the content is starting to shrink and as a result things are getting more difficult. I need to look up and see when the next upgrades are available because I am starting to feel like I need to spend some commendations on both myself and Treek to get some more gear. I had been trying to do this every other level range, so that I skip one upgrade step but the levels have not been coming nearly as fast as they were on Taris and Nar Shadda. I am however rolling in the commendations because they just seem to keep coming quickly.

I am absolutely enjoying the smuggler storyline because it feels so vastly different than any of the other storylines I had experienced. The Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular stories interweave as you go throughout the game, but it seems like the Trooper and Smuggler don’t really work this way. I am very much on my own mission through the galaxy with my own cast of characters to interact with. I am still really happy I made my choice to go with Treek over Corso Riggs, because even listening to him running Crew Missions is enough for me. I’ve managed to unlock three of the faction story bits with Treek and I am wondering if she has a special mission at the end or not. She just seems genuinely happy to roam around the galaxy killing things, and I am happy to keep her in business.

Tron 2.0

Yesterday I went through the steps outlined in this video link to attempt to get Tron 2.0 up and running on a Windows 8.1 system. It took a little bit of fiddling but I finally managed to get things running. I have to admit right now I am struggling a bit, because quite honestly it feels like a decade old game. The controls are not nearly as responsive as I have come to expect from a shooter, also it returns to an area without functional auto-save. This means that yesterday I died… after playing the game about an hour, realizing that the last time I had saved was during the tutorial when the game specifically asked me to do so. The combination of wonky controls, and not having auto-save to lean on… is going to mean that I have to shift the way I think about the experience. I’ve decided already that when I restart the game I will be lowering the difficulty and skipping the tutorial since I already saw it once. Here is hoping that I can manage to get through it before the AggroChat show next week!

Final Fantasy XIV

This is going to be the first week period that I have not actually logged into Final Fantasy XIV. Allergies and generally feeling like shit kept me from raiding on both Monday and Wednesday nights, which was unfortunate. I’ve been in this holding pattern waiting on the 3.1 release to come in and sweep me off my feet with overwhelming love for the game again. However over the weekend at the Tokyo Game Show they announced that we can expect the 3.1 patch in November. That seems a really long ways away… considering that people are desperate for content right now. The only thing we can think is that maybe the pet battle system might be what is delaying it… but honestly it would seem like a much better call would be to bump pet battles to 3.2 and get some fresh content now. This is precisely the problem we went through at the launch of 2.0 and ultimately why many of us quit playing when we did. We got tired of grinding the same two dungeons over and over. In the mean time I will have SWTOR and Wildstar to entertainment. I don’t plan on quitting the game, but I will probably not be playing a lot of it until November to be brutally honest.

Disney Infinity 3.0

The other thing that I have started playing with yet again is Disney Infinity. I managed to catch a silly deal on the Disney Infinity 3.0 set while only spending $15 out of my pocket on it. This gave me the 3.0 base game with five figures… the exclusive Boba Fett and then Luke, Leia, Anakin, and Asoka. The 3.0 interface itself is much refined from the 2.0 version and features an almost MMO like feel to it where you have various hubs in a persistent main world. Additionally there seems to be some sort of arcade feature that allows you to connect to players around the world and play with them. I have not really explored much other than talking to each of the quest givers off the main hub, and unlocking their specific area. Boba Fett is pretty damned overpowered as he has rockets that pretty much destroy anything they hit. The only negative that I see so far with the Star Wars characters is that unlike Iron Man or Thor none of them seem to have flight abilities. I halfway expected that Boba Fett could use his jet pack, but instead that is just used as a sort of charge attack. I am guessing that also means that most of the play sets will be built in a way where they don’t need flight in any fashion. Right now there are really only the two playsets that I have seen for 3.0 but I am sure more will be coming shortly.

Heading for a Trap

September 16, 2015 by Belghast

Slightly Darker Side

One of the ways I have differed so far from my friends, is that I cannot seem to bring myself to do ONLY the class story line. As a result I am ridiculously over leveling the content, and last night I worked on finishing up Nar Shaddaa. I’ve been enamored with the concept of the vertical city since first experiencing it in Dark Forces. In SWTOR Nar Shaddaa is the darker and more disturbing cousin of Coruscant and provides a very similar leveling experience. You travel through hub sections of the city until you end up in Shadow Town and resolve the central conflict of the story and your class quest. As a Smuggler this setting feels extremely at home, and as you might expect I do in fact get into plenty of trouble with Bounty Hunters and Hutts. Generally speaking when I have played SWTOR in the past, I am extremely light side focused. In fact I generally have trouble not choosing the “blue” option on any quest dialog. As a Smuggler however… I am finding it a little easier to choose that “red” option.

I guess I am ultimately playing my version of Han Solo… the goodnatured lovable scoundrel. When lives of innocents are on the line, I always end up choosing the “right” option and get those light side points. However when I am in a situation where I serve to profit greatly by looking the other way… I find myself “playing the character” and finding it significantly easier to to take those dark side points… and console myself with a pile of credits. Similarly if I have been double crossed… or if someone is doing something truly heinous… I find it oh so satisfying to take that [Attack Them] option. Horrific Imperial Scientist gene splicing people? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! Try and talk my way out of a bounty hunter? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! My weakness seems to be damsels in distress however… because I know right now I am walking into a big trap but I am having to play it off like my character would. It will also likely end up giving me another opportunity for sweet sweet revenge… which I am sure I will be unable to resist taking dark side points for. Thankfully I have diplomacy as a Crew Skill… and even though it is likely at the end of a blaster… it helps to repair all those dark side points.

Cavalcade of Commendations

One of the good changes while not playing the game, is the fact that they standardized the planetary commendation system. Now when you complete anything you have the option of simply taking “basic commendations” instead of the planet specific ones, and at the same time they have increased the total number you get before fifty exponentially. This means that I am constantly swimming in a good supply of them, and I could probably constantly upgrade my moddable gear… but I am finding that I don’t really need to. Since I am using Treek as my tank and she came with a full set of mod gear, and I managed to piece together a workable set from the GTN and the pilot packs… it allows me to pretty much ignore every quest reward and just go for more commendations. Since I am quite overleveled I was 21 before leaving Coruscant, at which point I went to the fleet and kitted out both armor for myself and Treek in the best modifications I could find at the time. This rather easily carried me through until the end of Nar Shadda, at which point I dinged 30 and repeated the same process with level 29 gear. If I can continue this process of upgrading my gear “every other planet” I should be in really good shape to have a pile of commendations for other upgrades.

Last night I spent some of my pile of credits on making myself look cooler. At some point they added in dye slots to the gear, which allows you to “socket” a dye that comes in either single color or dual tone combinations. Most of the really cool combinations are exorbitantly expensive, but I found one I could live with that was black and grey for roughly 40,000 credits. Then I went searching for a really cool gun, and found this one that is originally a cartel item… that folks were selling fairly reasonably on the market. The gun you end up with at the end of the starter zone is functional but not that cool looking… so I was more than happy to cast aside “Flashy”. I dig the fact that it looks like the blaster rifles that some of the troopers have. It fits my shoot first, ask questions later style of playing the “Sawbones” healer. I have long said that “looking cool” makes your character feel cool, and I am pretty happy with my Chiss Smuggler. I am extremely happy that I re-rolled him ages ago as a Chiss instead of yet another human. I am starting to develop this “savior of the aliens” rep in my questing choices, which is kinda awesome since people keep pointing out the fact that I am another “alien scum”. Still having a surprising amount of fun playing through the Smuggler storyline that I ultimately missed at launch.