Wildstar Archives - Page 2 of 16 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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

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.

Bounties and Newness

September 30, 2015 by Belghast

Shiny Newness

Right now the bulk of my social infrastructure is on fire with people returning to Wildstar. September 28th at Midnight EST was the official launch of the Wildstar Reloaded free to play experience. They are going through the same sort of growing pains that everyone goes through when they launch a game, or in this case relaunch it. When I got in last night, and managed to fight my way through the queue, I was greeted with a “server going down in 15 minutes” message as they were needing to do some sort of emergency maintenance. This is absolutely par for the course for an event like this, but nonetheless disheartening. I absolutely get why they were bringing the server down however because the tiny bit of time I was able to play the lag was horrific.

I did however manage to do what I had intended to do this morning, which was rifle through my bags… dump everything that was not needed in my bank, and start to clean out my mailbox. With the change to the way the crafting system works, a lot of the old crafted items were consumed and instead we were mailed a stack full of equivalent materials. I had seven or eight of these messages from Protostar, all containing things I have no clue what to do with them. Thankfully however pretty much everything seemed to fit just fine in my tradeskill bag so I don’t have to care for this very moment. I was able to consume all of the perks that I got through the whole cosmic points system. I am one step away from tier 6, and as of last night I got some perk that causes me to gain omnibits faster which is kinda cool. With new toys comes a new outfit, which I cobbled together this morning before sitting down to right a blog post. For the time being… I think I am going to stay off the servers until things calm down a bit.

Daily Bounties

One of the things I am still enjoying quite a bit is my daily routine of logging into Destiny and getting new bounties. I am not sure how a game goes from feeling oppressive and grindy, to fun an exciting in a single patch… but whatever the case Destiny did just that. I think more than anything it is the increased drop rates that make things feel interesting, because when I know it is highly likely that I will get something for my time spent, I don’t mind spending time doing something. I love the random chance of finding something cool, and maybe once I am geared enough to no longer care about drops… it will feel different. However every single engram that I see glowing in the distance is a chance at finding something to increase my overall light and as such make me more formidable. Largely my key goal this week however has been to try and stock pile strange coins again in the hopes that on Friday Xur will bring me something awesome and exotic.

I still have so much story that I have yet to complete, and I have barely scratched the surface of the strikes that are available to me. For the time being however I seem to get the most enjoyment from grabbing my bounties and going to some planet to whittle them down. There is just something relaxing about this process, and in many ways it reminds me of the way I felt about the daily hunts in Final Fantasy XIV… that is until I no longer really needed the currency to improve my gear. There is something calming about having a routine and right now popping into Destiny is pretty much the first thing I do each night. In the above video I decided to record a bit of me working my way through my daily quests, and that is actually my second attempt given that I had been recording for a bit only to realize that it was not picking up my mic. Essentially I changed the way I am recording so that I could pull my boom mic out and be able to capture audio while I am playing on the PS4 easily. The video itself was recorded through my Elgato HD, which I have hooked to a switch so that I can record any of my consoles. The end product just looks better than the default video recording options on the PS4.

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

Too Much of a Good Thing

August 26, 2015 by Belghast

Viva Proactivity

Yesterday I suffered from a bit of a dilemma and could have used the assistance of Hermione and her time turner. Sometimes the stars align just perfectly, and a sequence of patches hit at precisely the same time. This happened once again yesterday with the Final Fantasy 3.0.7 patch and Diablo 3 2.3.0 patch. This also conflicts with the fact that lately I have been trying to make Tuesday my Wildstar night, as it is the raid night of my guild and I am sure to see lots of people on as a result. In truth at some point I would like to get into a rhythm of Tues/Thurs being Wildstar nights much the same way as they were previously World of Warcraft nights. As a result I game hopped a bit. First up I poked my head into Final Fantasy XIV but did not really stay very long. At first glance I didn’t really see the people that I needed to pull together a full guild group expert, so instead of hanging out and waiting I moved on to the next thing. I could have easily relied on the Duty Finder, but since my passions were already deeply split last night I figured I would not really press my luck.

I will be raiding tonight so I figured that I would get plenty of time to explore the changes, which mostly for me included the addition of a TP bar in the party interface. This could be a huge thing if it means that Bards, Machinists and Ninjas start proactively feeding their tank TP when they are starting to get low. I know when I play ninja I always find it hard to time when is the best use of Goad. Traditionally I try my best to time it so that I use it at the mid point in a fight, figuring by then especially if the tank is a warrior they will be struggling a bit. As a Bard I rarely if ever played Army’s Paeon unless specifically asked by a tank because there was no real viable way of knowing when best to time it. Mage’s Ballad on the other hand… I could time easily when I saw that both healers were starting to hurt for mana. As silly as it sounds I think the addition of the TP bar to the party interface is going to drastically change the way the game feels for tanks at least.

Whitevale is Huge

WildStar64 2015-08-26 06-09-41-33 — They keep threatening to hug me.

Last night I continued to chew away on Whitevale in Wildstar. I managed to ding 25 which technically would have been a historic level for me… if not for the kitty hoverboard and the snarflex. Those have given me a nice mount to use since the moment I started playing this character, and have honestly spoiled me more than a little bit. I am hoping that there will be similarly purchasable mounts from the in game store when the free to play conversion happens. That would honestly be the number one thing stopping me from alting in this game, is the thought that I will not have my stable of mounts to carry over with me. While I started upstairs last night, I ultimately crashed on the sofa working my way through the various quests in zone. I keep hearing that all of the zones after Whitevale get significantly better but this zone serves to be this endless and impassible white wasteland. I’ve remarked before that ultimately on my Chua Engineer it was the zone that stopped me in my tracks and kept me from progressing forward and I am remembering why now.

I am not entirely certain what it is about the zones design but something just feels bad about it. If you were to ask me what my favorite biome is… and I think I have answered this question as part of the Liebsters… I would probably say snowy zones. If I think back to all of my favorite zones in games, most of them are places like Iron Pine Peaks in Rift. The problem here is it feels like a white desert more than a snowy climate. Maybe it is the fact that the entire zone has a purplish/bluish overtone but there is just something off with the lighting. It has this feeling of vastness that makes me feel like I am making absolutely no progress. That said I have put a big dent in the zone and have whittled down the available quest hubs to only a few left. If I actually devote some time I think I can push through it in a few more hours. I am anxiously looking forward to putting it behind me and never returning again.

Insomnia and Demons

Diablo III 2015-08-25 23-38-00-77 — Big demon spider thing, going down!

I had every intent of just saying that last night was a Wildstar night and being done with it. I had patched up Diablo 3 earlier in the evening but had not actually popped in to check it out. When I wife decided it was bed time around 9 pm I attempted to lay down with her. Problem being my body intervened and decided that even though I was sleepy… I was not sleepy enough to actually sleep. I have this nasty habit of catching a second wind just as soon as my head hits the pillow. I waited around a bit, attempted to watch some television and lull myself to sleep… but that didn’t actually work. Instead I finally got up and decided to mindlessly kill demons until sleep claimed me. Now that Season 3 is over the pressure is mostly off, and my Crusader is just another normal character that I will eventually get to maximum level. Since it was a Seasonal character, I feel somehow obligated to continue the storyline that I started and I pushed through the never ending series of staircases to get to Azmodan. On Hard difficulty the game is still exceptionally easy, which is fine because I didn’t really want to think much last night.

The real question I guess is that in two days the fourth season starts. Will I finish the Crusader first or start a new character for the season? Honestly I am leaning towards making another Crusader for Season 4 because I really love some of the abilities. The other option is to make another warrior, because while I like my monk… I don’t think I like its game-play enough to run up another one. Crusader seems to hit all of the finer points I love about classes and gives me a highly tanky and defensive character with some ability to damage lots of things at the same time. I might end up making a female crusader just to keep from feeling like I have a duplicate character in my stable. The problem there is I am notoriously unmotivated to play female characters in games. I tend to project myself on every character that I play, and for whatever reason I struggle to get the same “this is me doing this thing” experience when I am playing a female character. Diablo on the other hand… there really isn’t much “you” in the characters that you create. You are playing a stock character and dressing them up in cool armor, but other than that there really is little “personal touch” to them.