August 2015 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blaugust and Nephalem

August 31, 2015 by Belghast

Last Day of Blaugust

As the subheading says, it is in fact the last day of Blaugust and as such very soon I am going to begin tabulating the results. It has been an interesting month, but also a very quick one. It seems like just yesterday I was kicking off this challenge, and now we are staring at the finish line. It has also been interesting just how many people have participated in one way or another. Even if you did something as simple as retweet a Blaugust post, you are part of this and I thank you. In truth I was not really sure how the turn out for year two would end up looking. The biggest surprise honestly was just how many year one folks came back for this year. You’d think that they would have learned better by the time the second event rolled around. As I sift through the results it is going to be interesting to see just how many folks have completed both years at this point.

The big take away this year is that we have already reached a point where we are just too big to be planned somewhat “on the fly”. Up until July I was still questioning if I would actually go through with a second Blaugust. I was somewhat shocked at the number of people who were looking forward to it. So I pulled things together and we ended up with this year, that went significantly more smoothly than the first. As a result I think for the 2016 Blaugust I will be starting to pull things together about four months in advance. Folks offering to sponsor prizes was a brand new concept to me, and this year we had Anook and KingsIsle Entertainment both chipping in prizes. I greatly appreciate them both, but I am hoping if I start the wheels moving several months ahead I will be able to get a few more people to come on board. It would be awesome to get some game keys donated for a sort of “Blaugust Game Club” like our AggroChat Game Club. Where every Blaugust writer has the opportunity to play a specific game and write about it, because it is super interesting when you collect a bunch of opinions on the same title. I realize we are just how wrapping up, and folks are I am sure sick of it for the time being… but I am already thinking about how to make next year better.

Nephalem Ascended

Friday night when I got home from eating with friends I started a brand new Female Barbarian, and as of last around 8 pm I managed to hit 70 securing at least some of the Season 4 rewards. While I managed to get drug along for a handful of levels, this is still the fastest and most dedicated I have ever leveled in Diablo. In part a huge chunk of it has been that I have largely been leveling with my friend Grace, who keeps pushing me to go do content rather than just piddling around like I normally do. Pushing is the wrong word because she was not even insistent… she just gave me a reason to keep grouping up and doing interesting things. The other big change this season is that I pretty much completely ignored the story line. In Season 3 I attempted to level my way through the story, which is apparently the worst possible way to level these days. Instead I largely started adventure mode from the moment I created the character, and the result is as I leveled I tended to always have legendary weapons that I could craft for my character.

One of the big changes that came with Season 4 was the introduction of the “Season Journey” interface that serves as a way of unlocking the various rewards. Just for hitting level 70 on a seasonal character I unlocked the transmogrification pieces, but in order to get the Portrait Frame and the Pet I have to complete all four Chapters of the Season Journey. As of last night I have completed the first three and they were honestly all pretty easy. The final element that I needed was to defeat one of the major bosses on Master difficulty or harder. Since Belial is the fastest to get to on Adventure mode I popped over there and took him out with relative ease. Now I have to do some of the more grindy things like taking out each of the key masters on Torment difficulty. I also need to finally use the Kanai cube to extract a Legendary power, but I am trying to sort out what sort of power I want to keep. Honestly I feel like I need to read up on how exactly that process works before making any decisions surrounding getting powers from it. I know that once you do this you can choose at least one power as a permanent buff, and I have a few that are really nice.

I really did not spend much time playing Reaper of Souls, and as such I had never actually done a Rift of any sort until this weekend. Grace on the other hand is an expert at such things and as a result I spent some of my “post 70” time last night with her working on Rifts and then the Greater Rifts that follow. I have to say they are crazy amounts of fun, and I am trying to sort out how best to use my legendary gems. Right now I have two of them, and I need to run more Greater Rifts to power up the second one. The first one is now at level 6, but once again I think I need to do some research in how best to utilize them. The game is so much more intricate than I remember it being, and in truth I have never played Diablo 3 seriously. I am having a blast so I guess that is really all that matters. My hope is that tonight our Final Fantasy XIV raid can down Ravana Extreme… but after that… I hope to put in big ole dent in some of these Chapter IV objectives.

Week In Gaming 8/30/2015

August 30, 2015 by Belghast

Stressed but Still Here

This week turned out to be a shockingly stressful one, but thankfully all of said stress happened at work… and I could more or less leave it there as well. There has been a twinge of sadness as well because months ago I had hoped to be able to attend Pax Prime and get to hang out with friends there. However that didn’t quite work out, and since I lacked tickets to go there… because AggroChat was not apparently qualified as a media outlet, I stopped pushing quite so hard. The beginning of the school year is especially rough on my wife, and it would have been even more stressful to be travelling during this time. As such I am doubting that Pax Prime will ever really be in my cards unless for some reason they decide to move it either earlier or later in the year. I will always have Pax South however, and I fully intend to go this coming year. I am going to be trying to talk as many people into attending as I can, and hopefully can organize a meetup or something while there. There were plenty of people at Pax South last year but I was completely overwhelmed by it being my first real convention, and the internet was pretty horrible… so I missed most of them. Anyways… on with what is I hope becoming a Sunday tradition, where I review the games I played over the past week.

Final Fantasy XIV

Currently “The Rising” event is going on in Final Fantasy XIV that marks the yearly anniversary festival. This year the quest that goes along with it is one of the most touching quests I have experienced in a game before. I don’t want to spoil too many details about it, but suffice to say there is a little bit of fourth wall breaching going on. Diehard Final Fantasy XIV fans have this hero worship for Naoki Yoshida and the rest of the team, and it is absolutely well earned. It feels like there is very much a symbiotic relationship going on there, and they understand fully just how important the loyal fans are to the continued success of the title. The game is in this interesting place where it is extremely humbled by the fact that it launched in 2010 and failed to capture hearts and minds. They are putting everything into the game and leaving nothing on the table, and it shows. Other than the anniversary event we worked on Ravana Extreme attempts, and I have every hope that we will be able to down him this coming Monday. Past that I have honestly been taking a bit of a break from Final Fantasy XIV, or at least not really logging in every day.

Diablo 3

If you are wondering where the bulk of my game time was spent, you can look no further than Diablo 3. I am not sure if it was my time playing Hellgate London, or the fact that I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized there was such a thing as a “season”. Whatever the combination I have been pumped to be playing Diablo 3 again and have been spending a lot of time with my friend Grace was we worked on pushing up our seasonal characters. At the beginning of the week I managed to get my Crusader from last season to 70 with the help of Grace and her crazy torment farming ways. Then Friday when the new season opened I started work immediately on a female Barbarian. As of last night I am now level 60 and making the final push to 70. That is really what I intend to spend most of my time today working on, and hopefully by tonight I will be sitting at 70 and starting to work on gearing up for doing torment and beyond. I am having a blast, and I am not sure whatever mental block cleared that has allowed me to get involved once more with the click to attack madness.

Wildstar

I can’t say that I have made stellar progress since last week, but I am continuing with my new tradition of trying to play Wildstar Tuesday nights. At this point I am level 25 still in Whitevale but I think maybe I can see the end of the zone. My hope is to move on past it this week and hopefully into something less desolate. I feel about Whitevale the way I feel about most desert zones in MMOs. I have come to realization this week that it is never the biome necessarily that I like or dislike, but instead the zone design. I was warned that Malgrave is coming up, and a desert… but from what I have seen of the imagery inside it seems like something I will enjoy. I want to devote more time to this game, but for now I am going to settle with making it a Tuesday night thing.

Hearthstone

The game that I played that shocked me the most this week was Hearthstone. I have not really spent much time playing it since release, and with the addition of a new expansion of cards I decided to poke my head in. This is where I found a brand new game mode called Tavern Brawl. Apparently you have a different weekly challenge, and this week was essentially playing with a randomized deck. I played hunter and had a good amount of success. Playing with a random assortment of cards, including many of the brand new Grand Tournament cards gave me a nostalgic feeling much like the early days of Magic the Gathering. I used to love the days when I was limited based on the cards I physically owned and as a result made some odd decks to try and weave in my favorite elements. In truth I would probably play Hearthstone more often if this random brawl option thing was a fixed item. I know this coming week there will be a completely different Tavern Brawl, but I will likely poke my head in to see what it is and give it a shot. This might breathe new life into the game for me, and for that I am kinda pumped.

Fallout Shelter

My week in review would not be complete without at least talking a bit about Fallout Shelter. Now I have been technically playing this game for awhile now but since I do not regularly use my iPad, the sessions were limited and I went weeks between opening the app. With the release of Fallout Shelter for android I have been playing it far more often on my phone, and it has now become my default “moment of downtime” game as I check in on my little post apocalyptic ant farm. All things said I learned a lot of lessons playing it on the iPad that I have now applied to this new vault. Where Vault 999 was a relative failure, Vault 861 is pretty damned idyllic. Through a bit of luck of drops, and some careful planning I have managed to create a pretty safe environment that can absolutely shred raider attacks. I had a random person show up at the vault that was fairly warriorly, and once I equipped her with power armor and a plasma pistol she has been roaming the wastes dispensing justice. At the same time she has become a major source of income and the gear she brings back I am slowly outfitting all of my settlers in. I have jokingly started calling the restaurant on the first floor Cafe Death, because the raiders always go there…. only to get shredded by all of my shotgun toting vault dwellers. The only thing that I feel bad about is that I essentially have one couple that is slowly populating my vault. I have left them in the room for weeks now and they have half a dozen offspring roaming around as a result.

Hatoful Boyfriend

The last game that I played a significant amount of this week was of course Hatoful Boyfriend, and last night we recorded the AggroChat game club show for it. This was Grace’s pick and I think a lot of us went into this assuming that we would end up hating the game. We were mostly wrong as the vast majority of us had lots of good things to say about the game. To make it even crazier this is the first game that the majority of us have actually played through more than one… but given that an individual play session tends to only be around the hour long mark that makes sense. If you want to hear our length discussion about dating “Birbs” after the apocalypse you should totally listen into the show.

[AggroChat] [Direct Download] [iTunes] [Stitcher]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Second Winds and Diablo

August 29, 2015 by Belghast

Desi Wonderfulness

Last night was a bit unusual as far as our Friday nights go. Generally speaking we come home from work, and I play video games while my wife attempts not to fall asleep… always failing that battle around 9/9:30 ish. Instead we went out for dinner with some friends, and I got to eat at one of my favorite restaurants… Desi Wok. I generally refer to it as an “Indian restaurant” but in truth it is a “Desi” restaurant as the name implies, focusing on an amalgam of traditional Indian cuisine mixed with some more Chinese inspired dishes. My wife got the always tasty Chicken Tikka Masala, and I went with my most recent favorite an ambiguous dish called “Chicken Desi Fried Rice”. The dish comes out bright red and spicy as hell, pretty much the way I like it. The problem is it is way more food than you can eat in one sitting so I always end up taking home about half of it. My wife decided to order a Mango Lassi which she had never actually done from Desi Wok, and in my confusion I wound up getting one for me too… but no actual other drink. This meant I consumed a lot of water in my vague attempt to control the spice of my dish.

By the time we finally got home last night I was drained. We made a stop off at Target, and all the while I was moving around the store at a snails pace. I literally think my wife would have been dragging me through the store if I had a rope tied onto me. She kept having to stop periodically and look back at me to see if I was keeping up. I am guessing it was the beginnings of a tasty food coma. But in all honesty it could simply be the weight of this week crashing down upon me. Each and every day there has been some major crisis that I had to deal with. We had a production database get wiped one day, and another day we were trying to diagnose why a piece of software built in Visual Basic 6 wasn’t working any more. For starters I had no clue that anything built in VB6 would run on a Windows 7 machine. Visual Studio 6 was the brand new technology…. when I was in college almost two decades ago. All the while during each of the issues I acted as the manager and facilitator, which is a bit of a new role for me. I am not used to being the one directing the action rather than the one with my hands buried deep in the guts of the software trying to sort things out manually. Putting your faith in someone else to fix things for you, is way the hell more stressful than being under the gun to fix something yourself.

Second Winds and Diablo

Yesterday was the beginning of the brand new Diablo 3 fourth season, and this time I wanted to get in on the ground floor instead of creating a character a few days from the end. Earlier in the week I had talked about my plans on what exactly to create for this new seasons and I finally settled on rolling a Femme Barbarian. I have an absolute love of Sonya in Heroes of the Storm so any attempt to recreate that character seems amazing to me. However I spent the first half hour or so of gameplay complaining to my friend Grace about her lack of armor. She was awesome about it and I am sure was just patting me on the head as I complained about something that every woman on the planet has complained about at some point… the shitty armor options they give female characters in video games. Yes I realize the male barbarian starts in essentially a furry diaper, but that changes pretty quickly as you find gear and at this point at level 37 I am still wearing a bra of some sort. I finally learned to ignore it mostly and got on with the game play.

Grace had started her traditional Wizard earlier in the night, and was about five levels ahead of me by the time we both managed to get on at the same time. We proceeded to spend the rest of the night running bounties and rather quickly I was able to catch up in levels. I am not sure what it is about Diablo right now but it is really hitting the spot. The only negative being that the Barbarian starts out in a fashion that I don’t really enjoy that much. The first attack and the first secondary attack… are both not really my thing. Thankfully you get Cleave pretty quickly, and before the end of the night I finally was able to pick up whirlwind which serves as not only a great group attack but also a decent way of getting out of things since you seem to ignore slowing effects when you are spinning. My hope is that at some point today we can hook back up and start leveling again. Other than that I am looking forward to tonight’s AggroChat show because we are finally going to talk about Birb boyfriends and why that game is pure madness.

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.