June 2016 - Page 2 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

MMOs and Steam Sale

June 24, 2016 by Belghast

The Sale is Here

It is that time once again, for the Steam summer sale… one of two major sales that seem to happen each year on the Steam platform. Over the years however it has changed significantly. The first one I actually participated in was just a bunch of bundles, that allowed you to get the entire game library of a specific company for insane discounts. I remembered I picked up the entire THQ library at the time including something silly like 40 games for $30 dollars. As the years have gone by the sale has morphed multiple times, often times incorporating mini-games into it, and even saw the introduction of the trading card product. The other thing that has changed… is that the discounts are nowhere near as insane as they once were, but instead the same basic price throughout the entire week. So instead of catching a four hour window of a game being 75% off, it might simply be 50% the entire duration of the sale. I guess this is both positive and negative, in that those flash sales inspired a ton of impulse buying… but also a ton of frustration in that if you didn’t happen to be watching the site at 3 am you maybe missed that one game you really wanted to pick up. Instead now it is just a good time to pick up those games that you had on your wish list, but for one reason or another never got around to picking up. Last night for example I picked up The Witness and Firewatch, because both are games we have kicked around as possible AggroChat game club titles in the future. Neither were really things I was in a rush to pick up, but I might as well catch a bit of a break in doing so.

How About MMOs?

Over the last several years a good number of MMORPGs have filtered their way onto the Steam library as a method of expanding their base, so while you won’t find Star Wars the Old Republic, or any of the Blizzard products because they are locked behind their own digital distribution systems… you will find a good number of other games. I thought I would poke my head around this morning and see what kind of deals are out there for those who heavily favor MMOs like myself. The result is a pretty mixed bag, and to be honest I just clicked on some of the games that interest me. There are likely deals out there for titles that I have never even heard of because Steam has been the great equalizer in expanding this genre. Additionally the term MMO has become utterly meaningless… which means you have everything from a MOBA, an Area Shooter, a Creative Building Game, and traditionally MMORPGs all sharing the same generic banner these days.

Final Fantasy XIV

I figured I would start this off with what I consider to be one of the better deals. Final Fantasy XIV is a huge game, and right now you are able to pick it up for half off the already fairly low starting price these days. You can pick up the base game for $9.99 and the Heavensward expansion for $19.99. The collectors edition version of the game is also available but you are only going to get a %20 break there.

Base Game and Expansion 50% off

Elder Scrolls Online

A similarly good deal is ESO which offers both the base game and the Imperial Edition at 50% off currently. The thing that I did find surprising however is that none of the DLC is actually sold through steam, which means you will have to watch the Crown Store if you want a break on those. The way to skirt all of the DLC issues is to of course subscribe, and still with only the base game you have a bunch of play time there. You can pick up the vanilla version for $19.99, but I would highly suggest just going ahead and grabbing the $29.99 Imperial Edition because it has enough perks to make it worth the little bit extra.

Base and Imperial Edition 50% off

Warframe

Warframe is of course a free to play title, and you can grab it from Steam at any point you like and start playing. However at some point you are going to want to spend some money, and in our brief experience playing the game… the Steam bundles seem to be a phenomenal deal. There always seemed to be some little perk that pushed them ahead of what you could get for the same amount of money from the in game cash shop. During the summer sale all of these bundles are 50% off making them even better deals. Generally speaking you get some in game currency, a bunch of really nice weapon and armor mods… and then some boosts which I never actually used. Well worth checking out if you play Warframe.

Currency/Mod packs 50% off

The Secret World

The Secret World has morphed payment models over the years and is now a “Buy to Play” title, which the base game being extremely cheap, and every few months them releasing a new “Issue” that includes new content. I ended up getting in on the ground floor of this game and purchased a lifetime subscription account, and as a result there is honestly no reason for me to ever buy anything else. That has been a double edged sword for Funcom, because it got them quite a few big purchases in the beginning… but a good number of the most devoted players these days are also Lifetimers so not really adding much cash flow to the product. All of this said… this game goes on sale rather frequently and each time I make a big production of spreading the word because it is a really amazing game. It has some of the best storytelling I have experiences in any MMO full stop. Right now you can pick up the base game for roughly $10 and the Ultimate edition that includes a ton of the Issue based DLC content for $20. If you do not own this game stop what you are doing and buy it now… that is all.

Base and Ultimate Edition 66% off

Wildstar

Wildstar has been down its own rocky road lately, and it is pretty new to the steam platform. As a result there are a lot of the offerings that are not participating in the summer sale. However if you missed out on the madness that was purchasing cheap retail boxes of the game to turn them in for subscription time and bonus goodies… then I highly suggest you check out the Cute and Cuddly pack. This includes both the Glitterkitty Hoverboard and the Snarflyx mount… and several other things. The discount is only 20% but right now Wildstar needs your love so if you are at all interested check the bundle out.

Cute and Cuddly Bundle 20% off

Eve Online

I have tried to play EVE and it just doesn’t click with me. It is the best asteroid mining simulator ever created, but I can never seem to break myself out of doing just that. It is one of those games that is extremely interesting to read about, but just not that interest for me to actually play. Once upon a time I was supposed to write a four part article series on this game, but I failed miserably to get past part two. All of that said… if you are an EVE player there are some extremely interesting deals during the Steam summer game. The base game is 75% off and the premium edition %50 off… but in addition since this game requires an active subscription steam apparently sells those too. It is hard to tell if those subs are actually on sale, or if they are just showing you the traditional “buy 12 months” discount. In any case it is not a bad time to buy into the game if you have always wanted to give it a shot.

Base 75% off, Premium 50% off

Rift

Rift is another one of those games that has seen wild mood swings in the payment model department, however as it currently stands the game is entirely free… with a few caveats. Each time they add new content as in zones and dungeons and systems… those are completely free and you can go from level 1 to the currently cap of 65 without spending a dime on the game. They do however offer you a plethora of methods for giving them money for little incidental things. Where the DLC packs come in is that you enter the game with a base set of souls, and over time they have released a new set with Storm Legion, Nightmare Tides, the recent Ascended Pack and entirely new class with the Planetouched Wilds. These are not included in the base game and have to be added on piecemeal, and this is largely the sort of thing that is being offered on Steam. There is also the grand daddy of all DLC packs the Rift Ultimate edition that packages up and includes everything you can get from the other packs. During the Summer Sale these are all 25% off, so its a good time to catch up on whatever souls you might be missing like the new Ascended Pack which is currently $26.24.

All DLC 25% off

YMMV

There are also a bunch of games that are not participating at all, like the Perfect World titles Neverwinter Nights and Star Trek online for example. While Rift and Trove are participating, ArcheAge does not appear to be. Basically this morning I wrote this post because at least for me personally… I rarely think of using the Steam sale as a way of catching up on my MMO content that I might have neglected. For those who only have the base game of Final Fantasy XIV for example… right now is a damned fine time to pick up Heavensward even if you have not gotten to that point in the story. Similarly like I said above if you were going to pick up various souls packs from Rift, you might as well do them now at a cost break. The Steam tagging system is often times a pretty horrible thing, but you might check out the Massively Multiplayer tag because it shows most of the deals that I was talking about above and much more. MMOs are kinda the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to gaming, and all of them you will be playing for months and potentially years ahead. It is well worth checking out during the madness that is the Steam sale.

Getting Unstuck

June 23, 2016 by Belghast

Not-Castlevania

It has been an up and down week for kickstarter games. Namely I am talking about just how bad Mighty No. 9 has been received. I own this on the PS4, and while the gameplay itself is not too horrible… the biggest problem that I have is that it feels like an odd throwback to the GameCube. Which I guess makes sense given that the game has released on a silly number of systems including the 3DS, which makes me think that quite simply all console versions… are the 3DS version. The saddest part about this is at various points during its development cycle the game looked really good, but the end result is this lifeless mess of flat color. Now earlier in the day I had commented that this whole debacle over the “Not-Megaman” game made me extremely concerned about “Not-Castlevania” which is my not so subtle jab at the fact that so many of these kick-started games are simply recreations of whatever game made the developer famous in the first place. Almost as summoned from the abyss… I got an email with a key to the E3 version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which I didn’t even remember being part of the funding level I backed the game at.

It was a little late and I only played the demo long enough to get up to the first boss… I failed miserably at even coming close to defeating it namely because I entered the fight after a lot of backtracking. There are certain things that work extremely well, then there are others that I was largely confused about. The primary point of confusion is that for whatever reason I could not seem to get the game to do jump attacks… which are of course a staple of the Castlevania gameplay. I was playing on my PS4 controller which I happened to have hooked up at the time to my PC, and notoriously it tends to map things oddly, so I might give it a shot with the defacto Xbox 360 controller. As far as every other aspect of gameplay… this is very much the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night, but done with cell shaded 3D models instead of 2D pixel art. It works, and it works well.. and gives you the feeling of the Castlevania art style. The game has some really strange creatures that you end up fighting, which is cool and something vastly different from the standard zombies and werewolves and vampires oh my genre. I am assuming that the demo leaves off after the boss fight that is pictured above, but nonetheless I am really happy to see this game at least appears to be still on the rails.

Catching Up

Last night I got drug into Final Fantasy XIV by Ash and Grace… and admittedly they didn’t have to pull too terribly hard. Largely they wanted to run some Void Ark, which is the thing that I needed to do to get caught up in gear levels. I am not sure why this was such an impassible obstacle mentally for me, because I had some serious anxiety about solo queuing for it. Memu had made an offer to help me out, but we failed miserably at coordinating a time to run it together… mostly because I fell into a Rift shaped hope and wasn’t around all that often over the last week. In any case all of my concerns were essentially for naught, because Void Ark is extremely easy…. but unfortunately not the gear bonanza I had hoped it would be. Over the course of the night I ran the Ark three times, two times with Ash and Grace and one time by myself later after getting back from a walk. In all of those boss kills I managed to get two pieces of gear… only one of which actually replacing a slot I had something lower in. I did however get plenty of Esoterics which allowed me to keep upgrading jewelry until a combination of the that and the Mhachi Farthings pushed me over the item level 200 barrier.

Ultimately I am probably going to keep running this place until I run out of slots to upgrade, and even then…. it is still a decent source of gear to help pull my Dragoon up in item level. I guess I am officially off high center, and soon I can pick back up the quest chain and at least be expert viable once more. My hope is that tonight, I can get together with Grace and run the new dungeons who now also needs them since she too broke the 200 barrier last night. I feel better about the game in so many ways considering how frustrating it was to hit this gear wall in the questing. I guess in truth this is something that never happened to me during 2.0, or at least once we got back and started really moving forward. We were always just good enough to keep pushing into the next set of dungeons, but at the same time I was also spending a ton more time grinding out tomestones to make sure I was the best possible tank I could be at all times. That is the piece that has been missing, because I really have not been able to push myself to do that the way I once was. As our little rag tag Tuesday night group is contemplating doing more “Real” content I guess that will start to matter significantly more in the coming weeks and months. Time to get over the hump and gear up a bit, and for the moment Void Ark seems like an easy place to do just that.

Tech Triage

June 22, 2016 by Belghast

Last night went a bit off the rails early on. Traditionally I participate in the Final Fantasy XIV pony farm night on Tuesdays, and every since I showed up and won two mounts on my return… I have felt committed to be there and help more folks get theirs. However last night something else happened that precluded that obligation. When I got home sitting on the coffee table was my shiny new GTX 980 graphics card. I managed to make it through dinner successfully, but as soon as that was over I was upstairs tearing into my case to install it. First however I had to clean said case out… it is shocking just how damned dusty a computer can get so I had to drag my vacuum upstairs. I could have of course done the canned air thing, but firstly it would have choked me up horribly and secondly… said dust would just eventually end up right back inside the computer case. So for a period of time that was probably way shorter than it seemed I meticulously cleaned off the vans and interior surfaces of the case with the vacuum wand.

I get the card seated and tightened into place, and the only real frustration was the two 8 pin connectors. My power supply doesn’t actually have 8 pins… but instead it has six pin connectors with this little two pin that you sort of wedge in beside it. Trying to guide two different connectors in at the same time is extremely maddening but with some effort I finished the job, all the while anxious to boot things up and see purty graphics. Now this is the point where things start to spin out of control. Firstly I am bad at doing windows updates… and in rebooting my computer I had a whole slew of them apparently queued up to install and thanks to the glory of Windows 10 you don’t really get a reprieve. You reboot your computer for any reason and by god they are going to take that moment of weakness to install every fucking thing under the sun. After a sequence of three or four reboots, Windows decided to do two things that were maddening. Firstly it decided to uninstall the lovely Nvidia drivers that should have worked just fine since I was going from a 960 to a 980… and instead installing its completely useless stock driver. Secondly after a sequence of reboots I loaded into a game… and quickly realized I had no audio.

Some time ago I purchased an Asus Xonar DG audio card, and I really have enjoyed it. It sounds significantly nicer than the default Realtek on-board audio, with the only negative being that on my current motherboard it is sandwiched right up against the video card. Windows jettisoned the drivers, and I didn’t even get a little angry “no audio device found” message when it tried to load the tray icon tool. The tray icon tool for the Xonar drivers was simply gone. I guess in the grand scheme of things this probably makes sense, because the Xonar drivers I was running were some unified third party drivers that fix the faults in the card that the default Asus drivers still seem to have. In any case… I had no audio… which is the point at which I start trying to configure my damned onboard card once more. This of course took another series of reboots… the first being that I didn’t remember what the hell the MSI bios hotkey was. The second being me actually managing to mash the delete key at the right time to enter the bios, and finally the third being to install the damned drivers. Life was more or less peachy, until I once again began fiddling to try and make the on-board sound, sound considerably less horrible.

I started this process around 6 pm, and finally got to a point where I could start playing something around 9:30 pm. This is always what happens when you decide to open up your case and do quite literally anything. One thing leads to another, which leads to a desperate sequence of events… which finally leads to success but several hours past when you expected. I hopped on Teamspeak to sort out if the audio was set up properly and thankfully both Ashgar and Tam were there to help me test. Then I did what you do anytime you upgrade literally anything in your machine…. you start launching every game you have installed to tweak the settings. The new card does not of course make everything magically better. I still have a woefully outdated Motherboard and Processor, which I will have to address at some point, however I have more than enough graphics card to be able to run damned near anything I care to throw at it. The fun thing I learned last night is that Nvidia Experience is woefully confused as to what my system can actually run. I’ve often used their optimization as a baseline to then go in and further tweak until things are a good mix of pretty and performance. However thanks to the outdated CPU it just sort of throws its hands up and chooses low at times. Whereas pretty much everything I have thrown at it since last night has been able to bump on up to ultra settings regardless of the outdated processor.

So that is my fun evening and I have peppered the post with various screenshots taken in the games I loaded up… and happened to think to take a screen shot. I am sure I will likely tweak each of them further, and also try flipping various games to Dynamic Super Resolution which seems to work awesome now, when it only barely worked before. Huge apologies to my friends in FFXIV, but thankfully I did warn them that it was a possibility yesterday. Hopefully everything went off over there without a hitch and I will join them next week like normal. In the meantime… I am probably going to continue spending the next several days… launching games and logging out of them just to see what the difference is. I am also wondering if somehow when I installed the Video card… if I managed to unseat the audio card. I will probably give that a shot tonight, but I made that realization way too late in the evening for me to venture back inside of my case that night.

Scrap Collector

June 21, 2016 by Belghast

The Wastelands

The Rift resurgence continues and this time around I find myself working on tradeskills. Every so often I find myself stuck in a loop, that winds up with me leveling one thing like mad. The focus currently is pushing as many trade-skills up as I can manage… and honestly afford. I went into this little mission with roughly 1600 platinum, and as of last night I had dropped under 500. Please not this is just on reagent costs and pattern training costs, as I have been going out into the wild to gather materials on a pretty regular basis. The above image was taken on one of these many trips, this time to find Rhenium nodes in the Steppes of Infinity. I am not sure if this is even the best place to look for these, but I figured the highest level zone in Storm Legion would probably have the highest chance of these nodes. Currently I am working on Artificer which as of last night is I believe sitting at 360 of 450, but thankfully it was one of my lowest trades. When the game went free to play, one of the things that I spent a bunch of my “free” currency on was adding tradeskill unlocks to my main. The goal is to eventually turn Belghast into an omnicrafter, which is a term that is common in FFXIV but not possible in most games. Currently my trade-skill load-out looks a little something like this…

Armorsmith – 450
Butchering – 450
Foraging – 450
Mining – 450
Outfitter – 450
Runecrafter – 450
Weaponsmith – 450
Dream Weaver – 390
Fishing – 375
Survival – 375
Artificer – 370

So like I said Artificer is the lowest of my skills or at least the last of my “make gear” skills so I have been focusing on it. Fishing and Survival hopefully I will be able to level in tandem as I have done in the past. Dream Weaver I probably have more than enough material to start pushing it up there in level given that I salvage every single artifact that I get that I already have…. which at this point is a considerable number. The worst part of the artificer grind right now is trying to acquire gemstones which is namely why I am out in the Steppes farming Rhenium for those every so lucrative Heavy gem nodes. The only problem I foresee however is that a some point soon I am simply going to run out of money, probably long before I actually hit the goal of leveling all of these things. I am also lacking one tradeskill on this character, and that is Apothecary the one I have never actually successfully leveled on any character. At some point I will end up picking up one more tradeskill unlock and start working on that, but I think that will ultimately happen at a later date. The only real disappointment so far is that apparently this awesome 38 Slot Cosmic Bag pattern that I picked up can only be crafted with a drop from Tier 3 raid bosses, with no other way to acquire it. That is a bit of a kick in the pants…. but hopefully they will add it to the cash shop or something at a later date.

Low Key Activity

I think that after coming back from our whirlwind birthday weekend… I have just needed something super chill to do and crafting became that activity. The biggest problem is that if I keep on this course I am going to ultimately bankrupt myself. Tonight is going to be a night of fiddling with my desktop upstairs, because in theory I should have a shiny new graphics card to install. If I can manage to get that done in time I will probably end up participating in the FFXIV pony farm and miscellaneous activity night. If I do not get finished with machine upgrades until after the start time, I will likely just piddle around in Rift. I need to get back to doing some Intrepid Adventures because it turns out that they are still a pretty damned good source of upgrades. I also need to get some more Expert dungeons in, as in a perfect world I would do at least seven a week so that I get all of my currency bonuses. As far as raiding goes I am still up in the air as to what I want to do there. There are supposedly a good number of pick up raids, and I would love to see some of the content at least once… namely the new Comet of Ahnkhet raid. I would also love to get some of those bag reagents to craft up a few 38 slotters… but I would imagine that even now those items are in high demand. I wish they dropped form the Mind of Madness bosses in Intrepid Adventure, but as I have not seen one yet… I would assume that is not something that happens. For sheer gear acquisition Hammerknell seems way faster for getting cache drops, but then again that could simply be that people are just more used to those encounters.

At some point I also want to begin leveling my rogue, but in the past my key reason for doing this… was to have a bag maker. Since going all omnicraftery that reason went out the door so ultimately I need to find a spec that I can really enjoy. I somehow down the “grandpa build ” is still as effective as it once was for soloing content. For doing Instant Adventures I am currently running around as Marksman, because standing back and plinking tends to require less focus than getting up close and personal with the mob encounters. Similarly at some point I do want to level a character on the European servers, and I have gotten my Zaviel character up to 22. Right now I am largely just opening patron caches on him every day in the hopes of getting extra loyalty, but at some point I want to start pushing him in levels again. At some point I left the tracks and entered the Instant Adventure zone and it is unlikely that I will ever return to proper leveling with quests on that guy. The IA is a bit of a trap… in that the experience you gain seems so much faster than anything you can get while questing… but as a result it ends up with you being severely under-geared for your level. It also make sure that your tradeskills are woefully behind, and at some point I will have to go on a gathering binge to even begin to catch up. In any case… its been a little over a week now since my return to Rift and I am still finding so many of the things compelling. Even more so I have dove back into the community and am hanging my hat on discord, so if you have any interest in Rift I highly suggest you check it out as well.