August 2017 - Page 2 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Traditions End

August 25, 2017 by Belghast

For the last several years there has been a tradition I have observed… and that is going upstairs and checking to see what is available on Xur for the week. For the unindoctrinated… Xur is an Agent of the Nine… a group that we know next to nothing about in Destiny. He also is somewhat of a garbage collector and brings trinkets for us to purchase each week either in the Tower or Reef social space. Various activities in the game reward a currency called Strange Coins… and these are then exchanged for various items that always include an exotic weapon and a piece of exotic armor for each class. The armor rolls are notoriously bad but it is still a reasonable way to get a jump start in light levels, and I absolutely abused this fact on my Xbox One account when I was leveling it. One of my favorite sources of Xur info is from Patrick Casey, and at the head of this mornings video he made a comment about how he is just about to never have to see this squid faced guy again. Not sure why… but it just sort of finally hit me… our time with Destiny is almost over. Within the next few days the PC Beta for Destiny 2 will begin… and then shortly after that the official launch of Destiny 2 on PS4 and Xbox One. This really is the last weekend when Xur really matters at least for me in particular because starting on Monday I will be playing Destiny 2 on my PC systems… and starting the following Wednesday I will be playing it on my PS4.

Destiny 1 as a whole has been an amazing experience, and I am looking forward to seeing Destiny Item Manager (the first screenshot) updating to start showing me all of my baubles that I begin collecting in Destiny 2. A huge chunk of my experience has been my clan, and it is awesome to see the clan page updated to fly a brand new banner in preparation for what things are ultimately going to look like in Destiny 2. I’ve worn the tag even when it didn’t really matter… like on my Xbox One account… and was proud to see it rise out of the ashes of Axioma. Right now my future in the Destiny universe seems a little up in the air. I am not entirely certain if I will be playing as a PS4 primary or PC primary… and even then I have no clue what my clan situation is going to look like. This is where my various gaming worlds begin to collide. Destiny 2 existing on the PC is going to bring a lot of long time friends out of the woodwork that are interested in playing the game. At that point I am not sure if it is better to flood TQMB… or just start something on my own. I am not even sure if you can have split clans based on platform… or if your Bungie account can only join one period. I would like to remain in Tequila Mockingbird on what seems like the platform that they will be most active on… aka the PlayStation 4.

It seems really weird to be thinking that I might be standing in the Tower for the last time. Sure Destiny 1 will remain in existence for a period of time… and I can always go back and experience things. The problem is… will I actually want to? Destiny 2 looks to be the first game with a ton more things to be doing… and it feels like something worth sacrificing an entire world for. Sure I have gotten used to seeing The Traveler floating just off in the distance… but I will get used to the new visuals of the European Dead Zone. I will miss my vault full of weapons that I have accumulated through hours of grinding… and bending the arm of Squirrel and Jex into helping me do random stuff. Destiny has been a magical time for me… and it feels like I have been away far too long. I am ready to dust off my controller skills and venture forth into the new world when it opens on September 6th. While I feel a little misty about the thought of abandoning the current one… I know bigger and better things are just on the horizon. The challenge I always struggle with in gaming is that I have more friends than I can ever possibly play with at the same time… but I always try and juggle this as best I can. I am certain that as we enter the new game I will figure out a way to balance playing with my awesome friends in Tequila Mockingbird… and all of the new people who will be giving the Destiny franchise a fresh chance.

After the Bomb

August 24, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was one of those evenings when I just straight up crashed. I wound up heading towards bed a bit before 9 pm and as far as I know I largely slept straight through without waking up. I’ve felt like I had been coming down with something for a few days, but what I think instead is just that the allergens are going haywire. The pollen index it seems has been stuck in the “Very High” state for the last few days which can absolutely account for why I have been generally sluggish and miserable. All of this and the work load I am under has somewhat blunted what is generally a magical time for me… convention season. Right now both GamesCom and QuakeCon are happening and in a few weeks it will be Pax West. This is in theory the time of the year when a bunch of announcements get made, but thusfar there has been nothing terribly groundbreaking. At the moment I think the game I am most interested in of those announced this week is BioMutant by THQ Nordic. While I generally don’t go in for the whole “Anthro” thing… this game does however check all the forgotten and post apocalyptic world boxes. I love games that are set in a time where technology is almost treated like magic and you have to scavenge the wastes to fortify yourself. I wasn’t super sure about the game until I watched 11 minutes of gameplay footage that got released by IGN.

I really like that the game has a narrator, and that it chooses to have the characters speak in some sort of native animal language that we don’t understand. Part of what made Bastion so damned infectious was the relationship between narrator and your actions… and I am hoping that BioMutant in many ways will feel similar. Right now the game seems like Horizon Zero Dawn with TMNT style mutant animal people…. and in some what this reminds me a bit of Rage. It is being described as a Post Apocalyptic Kung Fu Fable… and I am generally okay with that notion. The game play seemed really fluid switching back and forth between jumping swordwork and gunplay. I have a lot of love for the concept of this because back in the day I was a HUGE fan of the After The Bomb setting in in the Palladium games Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pen and paper game. It already has a page stubbed out on Steam so I am guessing it will be an early 2018 release and not something we are going to wait a super long time for. The worst part about the game convention cycle is that you see a game well before it is set to release… and then by the time it actually launches the excitement has died down significantly. I’ve long through the Bethesda system of announcing a game within six months of release is probably the ideal window. Sure there are always rumors circulating before hand… but it is damned nice to see a trailer and see a firm release date at the end of it so that you know “this is how many months I have to wait”. The truth is I find it harder and harder to muster the fever pitch levels of excitement that I once had for games… I think in part because we are deluged with so much information about it. Every single rumor or half heard sentence gets dissected and churned into “exclusive” YouTube content…. that then gets copied by a half a dozen places because they are all desperate for eyeballs and clicks to try and pay the bills. I think once you see the strings… or the great and powerful oz behind the curtain… the whole experience is a little less interesting.

Enjoy the Path

August 23, 2017 by Belghast

The first image of the evening is what happens when you catch the daily completion bonus train. I am still floored by the sheer number of people actively participating in events. One of the cool happenings of the night though is that I organically crossed paths with @vbarreirojr who was one event behind me in the progression. I sort of love the concept that happens in this game of the commander… because you can see the telltale icons on the corners of your map and generally speaking are a reasonable indicator of where some manner of activity is going on. I’m also starting to learn to get a bit better at watching chat. Often times as new events are starting up someone will link a waypoint to allow folks to jump to it relatively quickly. Through a combination of follow the catmander and waypoint jumping I managed to knock out the daily completion bonus in what felt like record time. I think part of it as well is I am starting to develop a little ancestral memory, as to which are the best areas to harvest resources and which are the easiest vistas to view to get completion and such. It’s funny how I almost look forward to the daily completion bonus because it ends to give me some focus… and from there while participating in it I come up with some other game play for the evening.

Early in the day I was talking to a friend who is contemplating trying to restart the game, and was questioning what sequence of things she needed to purchase. Firstly I think Guild Wars 2 is either something that feels good or doesn’t… and lord knows it took me five years of trying it to finally figure out the secret to being able to enjoy it myself. You can scan back through the history of this blog and you are going to find a bunch of posts that are pretty negative about this game. I wrote one in particular where I called it one of my five biggest MMO disappointments just so you have an easy reference. You are going to ultimately have to decide if the game works for you or not, because it absolutely did not for me for a very long time. However the truth that I finally landed on is that you have to forget everything you know about how an MMO works to ultimately make Guild Wars 2 work. What I mean by that is for the most part MMOs are very task oriented and involve you completing a sequence of objectives in order to move on to the next sequence of objectives. The quest is the most common version of this and that least to more quests and ultimately provides a ladder for you to traverse a given zone with. When you attempt to play Guild Wars 2 in this fashion… your brain rebels against you. There is no quest structure and the concept of hearts are what I tried to latch onto as the replacement. The end result felt like this grindy busywork as I attempted to complete my way across a zone so that I could then move to the next area, making sure to 100% everything in my path. In doing so I kept getting frustrated each time something took me off path or off whatever my current task was, and as a result I bounced exceedingly hard off of the game.

Instead I personally find Guild Wars 2 works better if you view it like an ocean that you happen to be floating in. If you allow yourself to move along with the current you get to experience all sorts of interesting things that happen along the path. Instead of staying focused on some large overarching goal… I find it works best to focus on whatever is presented in front of you. If there is an event spawning near you, go over there and participate because it often times leads its way to other events in the same zone. Instead of trying to traverse things in an A B C D E F manner… I find it just feels better to let the zone explore itself almost. Sure you end up often times going from A to F to G to C to E and eventually back to B and D… but it is done so in a more organic manner. The only negative to this approach is that I find it completely impossible to stay on task. Ultimately I started playing Guild Wars 2 like I play Skyrim or Fallout… just letting myself wander off into the horizon and check out the next shiny object in my field of view. If there is a commander on the far side of the zone… then I should probably head that way to see what all is going on. Sometimes this has lead me to zone events that I didn’t even realize existed. To some extent at times it feels like the game is playing you… but I think in this case it is probably perfectly okay. This game is full of these extremely intricate micro objectives and feedback loops to keep you caught in their gravity and constantly doing stuff. The fact that everything scales… means that you are never going to be doing stuff that isn’t potentially valuable or lucrative. Basically my advice to learning how to enjoy Guild Wars 2 is to stop focusing on the goal… and start enjoying the path.

Saltines and Weaponcraft

August 22, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was a weird one, namely because everyone seemed to have eclipse fever for lack of a better term. As a group we had largely made a plan to go over to the roof of the parking garage next door, and by the time the festivities actually started there were between fifty and a hundred people that had the same idea. The positive is that everyone was more than willing to share their assorted ways of viewing the eclipse. In Oklahoma we only actually had about 90% occlusion, which made the world feel like a storm front was just about to blow in. The sky darkened, the temperature dropped a very small bit… but for the most part you could have easily not noticed anything going on unless you happened to look up. I took the first image with the selfie cam on my old phone and that was just about the peak of occlusion… and as you can see the day star still seemed pretty formidable. The second shot is the idea of using a saltine cracker to project the shadow, and the third shot is this awesome box that the same coworkers husband had rigged. The last shot is the eclipse through the filter of a pair of those shades… but unfortunately it was hell to get the focus to latch onto it at all. There were so many sets of shades that people were passing them around pretty freely, and I got to take more than a few peeks at the spectacle. The only problem is… my eyes felt really funny afterwards. Like in part they felt like they were strained… or like I had been driving into the sun’s glare for too long. It took about 2 hours for the effect to fully wear off, so I was concerned for a bit that maybe we ended up with some cheap knock off shades and I had done some actual damage. My eyes are super sensitive to light in the best of conditions… so forcing myself to be out and looking up… probably just caused them to strain a bit.

When I made it home for the evening I was still feeling a little off though. So my evening activities ended up leaning towards the chill side of things. Other than doing my daily completion bonus I largely focused on crafting and pushing up my weaponsmithing. I had this weird sequence of events happen where I saw my character hit 402… then somehow was back at 392. Guild Wars 2 has this problem where the UI sometimes freaks the hell out, and in order to fix it I sometimes have to log out and back in. In doing this I went from the 402 I was supposedly sitting at before I logged back to the 392, which is a bit frustrating. However since for some reason I didn’t have the pattern to Orichalcum Ingots… I am leaning to the side of this just being a presentation bug since the UI was acting up anyways. I still had the materials though to push my way through to the 400s and now everything I craft seems to take a ton of time and materials. I need to do a heck of a lot more farming of the level 80 zones because I only had the materials for I believe 64 ingots of Orichalcum. I was in even worse shape in the Ancient Wood department, so I know I will be spending a lot of time in the end game zones doing content. I am largely going down this path because I want to be able to craft my own ascended gear, and be able to craft my own exotics for the purpose of trying to gamble and get that precursor. I realize I should just focus on making a lot of money and buying the damned thing… but I have a long ways to go until I will be able to do that.