Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Understanding the Bounce

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Good Morning Friends. Sometimes I get something stuck in my head and I have trouble letting go of it. For a decade now, Guild Wars 2 has been this puzzle that I have been trying to crack. I’ve fought and spent countless hours trying to sort out why many of my friends enjoyed it, but that I struggled to latch onto it. Now that I have arrived at the moment where it is really clicking for me… I’ve been puzzling over why exactly I bounced so hard for so many years. Last night I think I landed on the very specific reasons, and this morning I am going to take you on a journey as I dive into them. Ultimately like so many problems in my life it has come down to assumptions and expectations.

In 1996 when I got into the beta for a game from then upstart developer Blizzard called Diablo, it was essentially everything I had wanted in a video game up until that point. Suffice to say that I love Diablo with all of my heart and even though the original is rather kludgy by today’s comparisons, it will always right or wrong be up on a bit of a pedestal. There are times when it is important to understand the lineage of a game and I have talked about in the past how Final Fantasy XIV behaves oddly not because it draws its roots to World of Warcraft, but that it ultimately draws its roots to Everquest and that community by way of Final Fantasy XI which was directly inspired by EQ. As we talk about Guild Wars, we have to start with Diablo and ultimately the games that spun out of Diablo like Lineage and Dungeon Siege.

So while Guild Wars and World of Warcraft were technically contemporaries, there was never a time when I actively compared the two games or even treated them like they were in the same genre. Guild Wars very clearly drew its provenance from Diablo and Lineage by reference whereas World of Warcraft was based out of building a better Everquest. As a result the sort of gameplay that Guild Wars had felt like a fresh take on the dungeon crawler genre, or more so expanded upon it by adding much better story and new kinds of networked gameplay. I did not expect anything more from it than a game that let me kill monsters for stacks of loot, and I found the card based skill system to be interesting. I have always been a huge fan of Magic the Gathering and once I made that mental connection to deck building I was set.

Where we run into problems however is with the release of Guild Wars 2. During the run up to the game there was a lot of very lofty bullshit bandied about by the team. Rather intentional or not, they painted a target on their back of having to bear the burden of being the “WoW Killer”. So as a result I stopped comparing Guild Wars 2 to that provenance of Guild Wars dating back to Diablo… and instead started comparing it directly to World of Warcraft. The comparison did not really hold up because as we all know Guild Wars 2 is doing something very different, and as a result was missing a lot of the underpinnings of that traditional World of Warcraft experience. I gave it a shot but it just did not have the same magic I was hoping it would rekindle from those early days of Warcraft. Like I said I am not sure if this really was intention on the part of the developers or if something that some marketing agency decided needed to happen but in truth they should have spent more time distancing themselves from the MMORPG pack than they did.

The problem for me however is that the damage was already done. Guild Wars 1 mentally was ArenaNet showing me what they could do with the Diablo formula, and as a result I had equated the second game to them showing me their take on World of Warcraft. The word “Warrior” means something very specific to me as a result of that connection. Tales of the Aggronaut started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, so I had a very specific style of gameplay that I wanted to experience when I rolled this new character type in Guild Wars 2. The disconnect being that Warrior is no more tanky than any other class in the game because there is no traditional trinity of roles, nor should there really be. I kept trying to force Guild Wars 2 into the mold of my experiences from other MMORPGs when I never thought to take a step back and trace the path back to Diablo.

In Diablo you have the Barbarian and it is no more tanky than any other class in that game. It is instead a class defined by melee combat and short duration largely shout based buffs for your team. Effectively you could swap the word Barbarian for Warrior and have a better understanding of what the Guild Wars 2 class is trying to be. However for me the well was poisoned and Guild Was 2 was a game that was “doing warriors wrong!” even though I had been perfectly happy to play the “Warrior as Barbarian” in the original Guild Wars. It is shocking just how much difference the right frame of mind makes when approaching something, and how our assumptions can be the destroyer of possibilities.

One of the problems that I have is that I get hung up on fetishizing specific weapons. For example in Destiny 2, there is never going to be a point where I am not either actively wielding or have in my inventory an Auto Rifle. That is the weapon for me and I will go through some weird contorted lengths to make sure I am using one. Similarly with MMORPGs, I want to be using a sword and a shield… and occasionally an Axe or a Mace will do but the important part is the shield. That is a deep part of what I consider to be a “tank” and why I play them. While I enjoy the non-traditional tanks like the Warrior in FFXIV or the Demon Hunter in World of Warcraft, I will never feel quite as at home as when I have a large chunk of metal strapped to my left arm. This is what is largely referred to as a “class fantasy” and it is one that is completely unsupported by Guild Wars 2.

What changed is that I had a conversation with my friend Tam about what I actually want from a class and he managed to narrow in on one piece of the narrative that I had not caught myself. I want a character with extremely high suitability. So while it is very much not my “class fantasy” he said I should check out the Necromancer and I did precisely that. There is something about playing a caster which is entirely out of my comfort range, and a pet class specifically… and caused me to completely re-frame the experience of playing Guild Wars 2. No longer was I playing a game that was pretending to be World of Warcraft but instead playing a game that very much drew its roots to the Diablo 2/3 Necromancer, another class that I love. Being forcibly pushed out of my comfort zone has allowed me to completely re-imagine the experience of playing Guild Wars 2 for the better.

For years I have believed that Guild Wars 2 was an attempt to build the WoW Killer, because that is what the marketing told me it was. What the game is instead however is a direct successor to Guild Wars 1, taking a lot of the things that worked well there and expanding upon them and building them into a big open world event based game. It is a game where your class doesn’t really matter all that much, but what does matter is the way you build it and the gear that you equip… which is entirely translatable to the experience I have with builds and Diablo 3. With this frame of context everything about the Guild Wars 2 experience suddenly feels better. I’ve been able to chuck it mentally into the appropriate bin of equivalent experiences and now it is absolutely scratching that Diablo itch for me.

Last night I had a freaking blast running around and doing the big World Boss events. At the suggestion of Bhagpuss in my comments yesterday, I spent the 400 gems on the doodad that auto teleports me to any available events. It is maybe some of the best money I have ever spent on a game like this, and the end result was three hours of mayhem and so much loot. Granted a large chunk of it was salvage fodder, but I did manage to pull a really cool exotic staff and more importantly a ton of gossamer and a handful of high end leather as well as a few more crafting patterns. What Guild Wars 2 does best is the drop in nature of the big zone events, and now that I have tackled the mental obstacles that I had placed in front of my enjoyment… it is a glorious experience.

The Hunt for Gossamer

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Good Morning Friends. I had planned on blogging yesterday but reality got in the way of everything else in my life. Essentially long story short about 6 pm on Monday night our internet went to complete shit. I am not sure what happened exactly, but suffice to say that we could not maintain any sort of a stable connection. I logged into the web page for my internet provider and they indicated that there was an issue in my area and gave a resolution time of after midnight. At this point, I ended up tethering to my phone for the rest of the evening and going about my business of playing Guild Wars 2 and trying not to think about it.

When I got up yesterday morning… the internet was still shit. This began a panic-induced sequence of events that lead me to skip my coffee, skip blogging, and skip breakfast. After several hours on the phone with the ISP, we ended up seemingly isolating the problem to my router. Truth be told for whatever reason we only seem to get a few years out of a router before it flakes out. It might be the sheer number of devices that we have connected to it, the volume of usage… or the fact that my office gets hot as hell during the winter months. Whatever the case “routers going out” is a problem that we have dealt with throughout the years and when I looked the purchase date of my current one up it has been in service for a little over four years. I guess it was due and I have a replacement upgrade on the way, but for the time being, I am limping along hoping that really was the case.

What have I been doing? Playing an excessive amount of Guild Wars 2… and no one is more shocked by this than I am. GW2 and I have had a rough past, and while I know I have recounted the tale many times… I was an alpha tester for the game and in fact, recently I found the copy I kept of the NDA paperwork that I had to get notarized and snail mail to ArenaNet. Guild Wars 2 is also the only game I have ever resigned from testing and in part, there were a few of us as there was a massive thread called something to the akin of “It’s Just Not for Me” on the tester exclusive forums. But more recently after starting the Necromancer… something has clicked and I am not sure exactly what. It might be that my play style has changed and it might be that going into playing the Necromancer caused me to go in without any built-up expectations for what the class should feel like. Whatever the case I find myself reveling in all of the little details about how this game functions and how it fits my current “solo but also want to do drop-in group activities” playstyle.

In that vein, I need to sort out how best to follow along the meta train. Guild Wars 2 has this lovely rotating sequence of World Boss events and zone-wide Meta events so that a player can theoretically hop in and ride the wave of encounters until they are ready to stop for the night. Each one of the rewards a bunch of interesting things before zooming on to the next one. The only negative for me right now is that I do not have a lot of world progress, so moving around is probably going to be a bit more challenging than it would normally be for folks following this train. I spent some time last night working on that since my internet connection was less than stable. I need to look up a guide to the closest part to all of the world bosses and then I could at least make sure I had unlocked that specifically. Ultimately I am in a place where I need a lot of high-end crafting materials and riding the meta seems like a reasonable way to get some of those.

Ultimately I made a decision the other night that if I was going to need to spend a lot of gold on gearing… that I might as well just spend that gold on leveling a trade profession. As a result, then I pushed Tailoring to 400 in a single evening, and I even have the spiffy professional backpack to prove my efforts. Truth be told that backpack was an excellent gear upgrade because it was a customizable item. That is one cool thing about a lot of boss drops in Guild Wars 2 is that you can determine what stats you want on the item by right-clicking on it and choosing “Customize”. This allows you to kit out your character in the right items for the right slots without a ton of hassle, and it seems a lot of the zone metas like those in Heart of Thorns drop these customizable items. When I say “zone meta” what I mean by that is an hour or two long sequence of world events that ultimately culminate in a giant boss fight.

Another thing that I have done recently is to abandon the Braham outfit and venture out to create my own appearance. This is what I have landed on and I look like I have just taken the black and shipped up north to guard the wall. I don’t normally dig “light armor” classes and in truth, nothing about the Necromancer Reaper build FEELS like I am wearing tissue-thin armor. However, for cosmetic purposes, I am limited to only light appearances. I think I have landed on a gear style that looks good together and feels more like I am wearing a set of heavy leather than cloth. I think it fits my Norn very well and seems like something a man of the north would wear.

Now here is hoping that I can put my internet woes behind me in short order.

Waterborne Siege Golem Attack

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It was a very Guild Wars weekend and I am apparently in full swing with this game right now. I spent a bit of time Saturday afternoon running around with Ashgar on his Mesmer knocking out hero points in the Path of Fire areas. Up until this point I had yet to really play the class in the manner that I had originally planned… aka the Shadowknight/Deathknight equivalent called the Reaper. One of the odd things about Guild Wars 2 is that each expansion adds a new specialization… for those familiar with World of Warcraft, think of this as a Talent tree.

With this also comes the ability to unlock a new weapon type that the class previously did not have access to, for example Reaper gives Necromancer access to the Greatsword and with the most recent expansion Harbinger gives access to Pistol. However to unlock a new specialization it takes the collection of 250 hero points… which requires a bunch of running around and completing specific mini activities. At the time of the release of Path of Fire there were a grand total of 904 available in the world so more than enough to get both of the Elite specializations at that time. With the release of Cantha and End of Dragons there are even more Hero Points up for grabs. My focus however has been to unlock Reaper the Elite Specialization that shipped with Heart of Thorns.

Speaking of Heart of Thorns… it only took me almost seven years to do it but I have finally finished that content. When I say “Finished” I mean the story because there are still so many things that I have yet to unlock from those zones. I have to say there was one part that I barely made it through. Growing up I never had any issues with motion sickness and I could happy draw or read in the car while zooming down the road. However there is something that games specifically do that completely triggers a motion sickness in me that is brutal. I first experienced it in Warframe and in Heart of Thorns there is this rotating corkscrew plant tower that you have to climb and fight things as you go up… and the constant spinning and motion of the camera… I barely made it up in one piece. The only other real complaint that I had is that the Mordermoth fight was roughly three times longer than it needed to be.

In other news I am one step away from my Warclaw mount in World Vs World, and quite honestly the only thing remaining is just to push through a lot of reward tiers and spend 8 gold. When we last talked about this I think I was down to just missing a Keep capture and the item that you get at the end of the reward track. Yesterday I managed to get in with a rolling group of blues lead by a commander that saw us take a ton of objectives.

This nonsense friends is roughly fifteen siege golems being piloted through the canal system to “sneak up” on the enemy. It was a purely nonsense sight to behold but we managed to take the two big keeps on this map with this parade of magitech glory. By following other players I am starting to learn the ropes of how to navigate the maps efficiently. I never would have thought to swim my way to the final objective, but sure enough there is a connecting series of waterways that gets you there rather quickly. I have to say after having experienced a bunch of different versions of this… I greatly prefer the underwater combat of Guild Wars 2 because it just works flawlessly. I wish we could use our REAL weapons while underwater but I understand WHY we can’t.

I ended up wasting a fair amount of time on Saturday and Sunday working on the personal story missions… only to realize that I can’t actually get anything of value through the quest sequence. I did however get a wee bit misty when I got to the quests involving “old” Lion’s Arch. I will admit that I greatly prefer the modern layout of that city, but there was something cool about the way it looked before. Lion’s Arch now feels like a proper capital city but previously it absolutely felt like the smugglers den that I think it was originally intended to be. With that… you have pretty much my weekend in gaming. I did not expect to be spending all of it in Guild Wars 2, but I guess the heart wants what the heart wants.

In other news I am starting to sift through the photos I took years ago, but never did much of anything with. My hope is that as it warms up I will get out again and start doing some photo shoots. I am not sure WHY something has triggered a desire to do this again, but whatever the case I am going with it. In order to support this nonsense I decided to spin up an Instagram account devoted to this project. My goal with “Bel’s Confused Fotomat” is to post something each day. I have a mountain of images that I am working through, but in theory new stuff should start flowing in as well. For those of a certain age they will probably recognize the Fotomat concept, but for those who are a bit younger or did not have one in their area.

Fotomat was a chain of film development places… that set up as tiny drive through businesses in parking lots. I remember as a kid being completely enthralled with the concept and wondering how they did all of the development work in such a tiny building. In truth all the “booth” had was a filing system for film and a cashier and everything else got trucked in every night from a professional film development shop. My child brain however imagined an web of pneumatic tubes and a vast underground vault where all of the film was stored and the development processes took place. As with so many things as an Adult you find out the truth is way less interesting than our imagination.

My Horrible Children

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This present fascination with Guild Wars 2 continued last night. I have to admit that I am really enjoying this whole Necromancer thing. The class as a whole is an odd blend of the Warlock from World of Warcraft and the Necromancer from Diablo 2/3. You can see my delightful family of horrible children pictured here. Right now I am running a build that is using three pets… two of which that I can use as walking bombs if I so choose to. My gameplay tends to be running around and picking up a bunch of things and then letting my children and a series of curses decimate the entire pack. There is something stupidly fun about this and I have to say… Guild Wars 2 is far more enjoyable as a ranged character than it is as a melee character.

Last night I went down a different sort of rabbit hole. The last time I was extremely active in Guild Wars 2 was back in 2017, and at that time I used an addon of sorts called TaCO… or Tactical Overlay. It offered a number of things in game that you would normally have to tab out to in order to check, like event timers as well as a large variety of map markers for things like jumping puzzles. I had one of those moments yesterday where I suddenly remembered it was a thing that existed, and set forth in an attempt to find it and install it. It turns out that in late 2020 there was an issue that caused a good chunk of the code base to be lost completely. Then in September of 2021 the project appears to have ceased development and is now largely in a defunct state.

That is fine however because apparently someone has decided to pick up the torch and carry it forward. There is a replacement for TaCo called Blish HUD and honestly… after only a little bit with it I would say it is a sizeable improvement. There are two huge benefits to this over TaCo, the first being that it runs as an icon in your system tray so you don’t have to manually run Blish each time before you launch Guild Wars 2 like you did with TaCo. The next benefit is that it is more Framework than specific addon, and as a result there is an addon repository built into the application allowing you to install one or all of the addons from within game. It also appears to support all of the marker and trial packs from TaCo, but those need to be loaded in before launching the game it seems since they are external files that are being referenced.

The other thing that I suddenly remembered existing is GW2 Efficiency, which is a website that tracks all sorts of things about your account. In both cases Blish and Efficiency require you to set up an API key which can be done as part of the Arena Net Account management page. You can create more than one key, so I have taken the effort of making a new one for each website that I want to use. You can create very granular permissions and give a given site only access to the items that are specifically needed for that tool. As always you can check out a number of different resources in the Game Tools menu above on this website under Guild Wars 2. I vaguely remember using Efficiency to tell me what I was sitting on in the bank that I could sell for large amounts of gold… but I am uncertain what of the many sub tools I was using to do that.

As far as progress goes… I have officially made it further into the Heart of Thorns story than I ever have up until this point. Additionally I have collected enough Hero Points to be able to unlock access to the Greatsword… which is cool and all but without unlocking the rest of the skills there is not a whole lot I can do with it. I did play around for a bit with it and I do think that my future shenanigans involve this class and the power reaper spec. At some point I will need to cajole one of the more seasoned Greysky folks to knock me out a set of Berserker gear. I am also spending some time learning about how to upgrade my Reaper greatsword into the pink version through a long collection, so I might start chipping away at that.

I am finding a shocking amount of joy in this game, so we will see how long that lasts. At a bare minimum I needed something that I could play during the podcast on Saturday nights. I made some strategic keybind changes that seem to work better for me as well.