Moonrise Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 3

April 2, 2015 by Belghast

Over the last several days I have been rattling off a series of studios and game teams that I appreciate. Today will mark my final day of this process, but I am hoping that it has inspired some of you out there to make your own posts about the developers you appreciate. The person I really appreciate is Scarybooster for getting this thing started back in I believe 2010? Scary has a way of coming up with these great ideas, like he is the person who decided the Alliance of Awesome needed to happen as well. Unfortunately he no longer updates his blogs, and has deleted more of them in the past than I can count. So if you know Scary tell him he needs to stop doing that shit and keep coming up with interesting and awesome ideas.

Blizzard – Heroes of the Storm Team

I talked about League of Legends yesterday, and there is no denying it’s market domination in the MOBA arena. The problem is League is far more complicated of a game than I care to play. I get frustrated trying to figure out what I should build when, and then Blizzard comes along and creates an MOBA for someone like me. This game does what Blizzard does best, boil a genre down to its most basic essence and polish it until it shines. This is precisely how I feel about HoTS and its impact on the MOBA genre. Through a series of quick this or that choices you can build out your character and get right back into the action without constantly being afraid that you built the wrong thing. While friends have pointed out that this greatly limits what you can do with any given champion… I am fine with this and in fact welcome it. As much as I enjoy a “Tanky Darius” I would rather just have some clear messaging on what the intent of every champion was, and Heroes of the Storm gives this to me. On top of this the map design is awesome, and each one feels equally enjoyable with its own specific mechanics. I think the entire world is tired of playing Summoner’s Rift.

SOE/Daybreak – Landmark Team

Every time I talk about the company formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment, I do so with a little bit of heartbreak. Daybreak is not the same company, but I feel like the people that are still there are trying their damnedest to make this situation work. There is a lot of negative press that I could be talking about on my blog, about the poor decisions of the company managing Daybreak but for the most part I have tried not to. I feel like there is plenty of negativity out there already on this subject, and that the people who are still there need our support now more than ever. With that said this post goes out to everyone who has ever been a part of the Landmark game. While I am not playing it right now, I still think it is an extremely cool concept and I keep meaning on jumping right back in. Landmark is essentially the ultimate building game in every possible way, and the amount of stuff that the community has been able to create because of the excellent toolset developed by this team is phenomenal. This game blew me away, and I am still constantly amazed by the sort of things I am seeing built. So bravo to the folks who are no longer with the team, and bravo to the folks still there fighting to keep the ship going forward.

Undead Labs – All of the Them

For most of these I have singled out an entire team to talk about, but this time I am breaking that trend and instead talking about an entire studio. I love Undead Labs. I love their spirit, and I love their dedication… and quite honestly I love the way they interact with the public. I remember when State of Decay was about to release on the XBox 360 I was completely pumped for it. I went home that night played the game for several hours and then wrote a pretty gushy blog post the very next day. Within moments of posting the blog I had it being retweeted by Annie Strain the wife of Undead Labs Founder Jeff Strain, who then proceeded to engage with me in a back and forth about my blog post and the game in general. That sort of genuine interaction is just so damned refreshing, and it seems to extend to every single team member. I was lucky enough to get to hang out and talk to several of them during Pax South, and they all had this infectious joy over the games they had created and were creating. While I still desperately want a multiplayer version of State of Decay, I have faith that sooner or later the team will give me something akin to that experience. In the meantime they just seem like a really damned cool studio, and I look forward to watching as their latest game Moonrise progresses to launch. Additionally I feel like I am probably buying yet another copy of State of Decay as the special Year One edition should be landing shortly.

Motiga – Gigantic Team

This is another tale of me just really liking a game studio. I went to Pax South knowing next to nothing about this game other than the fact that it existed, had a cartoony art style and used a teal and orange color scheme it all of its marketing. I walked away from Pax South being both a fan of the game and of the team behind it. I was lucky enough to participate in several plays of the game, and got some time to talk to several members of the development and community staff. They all seem just as amped about this game as the players did, and it was awesome to be coached by the folks who built the game… or have them marvel when I apparently found a bug that nobody had actually found yet. The game is just really damned fun, and that seems to be the focus on making sure the various champion interactions are enjoyable. I have no clue what the timeframe for this games launch is but I look forward to it anxiously. Playing it with two other members of the AggroChat crew against a minor YouTube celebrity, and defeating him… was pretty much the highlight of my Pax South experience. So keep up the awesome work and I look forward to playing this game with my friends when it releases.

Every Single Game Developer

While I have singled out a handful of individuals for specific games that I really love playing… I feel like for this final day of my #DAW2015 love fest… I want to change things up a bit. Basically this goes out to every single game developer out there, regardless of what you are working on or for what company. You guys are living the dream of so many of us who did not choose to chase it. While there are absolutely days I’m thankful I am not in that industry, especially as another studio decimates its staff to realign for this or that reason, there are other days where I pine over the path not taken. You folks are my rockstars, and even if you are making a game that no one will ever play… you are being awesome. Games bring me so much joy, and there is a cast of often nameless and faceless people who struggled through crunch time to get that product into my hands. As I talk about the games I talk about, I try my best to always be aware of the folks behind the scenes that made it happen. So to all the game developers out there… keep making awesome stuff and I will keep playing it. Thank you all.

Cleansing Lunari

March 15, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #48 – Ori and the Sad Sads

Last night we embarked upon another journey through that weekly tradition we call the AggroChat podcast. Things are a little different sounding this week because I finally got a proper microphone. Positive is I can have my fan on me while we record without it picking that up… however it seems to pick up my mouse clicks like insanely bad. Last night we dedicated the show to the ultimate Pi day, and Kodra was celebrating with a bunch of tiny pies. The first game we talked about in depth is Ori and the Blind Forest which is so many sads out of sad. The game is a gloriously animated and beautifully done…. but has the saddest intro I have ever experienced in any game. We talk about how the hopeful tone of the rest of the game, doesn’t really fit with the intro sequence. From Ori we move into the pitfalls of the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system, and why all of us are trying to become Omni crafters for the sake of our free company Airship. This makes Tam exceptionally sad because all he really wants to be is a good goldsmith.

I talk about my guilds progress in Blackrock Foundry and some of the drama that happened as a result of us needing to pair down our dps in order to conquer the content. Most of the guilds I know have been struggling with keeping enough healers this expansion, and because we are habitually short that limits the number of dps we can realistically bring on fights. Since we are getting into harder content we had to bench a few people, and one of them took offense enough to rather dramatically guild quit during the middle of the raid. Tam went into a interesting discussion about the new Infinity rules and how they will change the way gameplay happens, by shifting focus away from combat to instead be focused on objective completion. Finally I talk at length about my experiences playing the Steam beta of Moonrise… but I will go into that in more detail below.

AggroChat Dot Com

A few weeks ago I had a bit of a brain storm… or at least a slight drizzle. The revolved around the idea of trying to apply to get press passes for the AggroChat folks to Pax Prime. It made me realize that between all of us that do this podcast on a weekly basis there is quite a lot of content that we are producing on a regular basis. I write Tales of the Aggronaut daily, Tam writes Digital Initiative, Ashgar writes Ash’s Adventures, Kodra the Keen Gamer, and Rae does Little Rae of Sun. What if we pulled all of this content together in one place, and then augmented it with some of our other friends that maybe don’t want to take the time to maintain a full blog of their own, but have the occasional post in them. The end result is AggroChat.com and while it is not finished and still very much a work in progress, I feel like it is “done enough” to start talking about it. Right now the big daunting task that is ahead of me this morning is pulling together all of the content from AggroChat into the site. This means manually creating entries for all 48 of our episodes so far, but it is well worth it to make sure everything works correctly.

There are a few outstanding issues, like why exactly Ash’s preview images are broken. Other than that I think things have come together rather nicely. I still need to do a “real” logo for the site pulling together the awesome Chibi versions of ourselves that Rae created, and I still need to get bio information from all of our bloggers for the individual author pages. However I am pretty pleased with how things are shaping up. The color scheme was intentionally obnoxious in some what of an honorific of Kodra… who we honestly thought was color blind for the first several years of gaming with him. He puts together some pretty outrageous color schemes, and I figured because of this our website needed to be equally insane. Let us know what you think of the site so far. Hopefully more bloggers will be coming on board the site within the next few days as I sort things out. My hope is that this will push all of us to create more interesting content.

Cleansing Lunari

One of the games I talked about a little bit in my day one PAX South wrap up post was Moonrise by Undead Labs. I had a lot of fun playing the game and being shown the ropes by Richard Foge, even though he kicked my ass in PVP numerous times. So as exciting as this game was, because it reminded me so much of Jade Cocoon… it really fell in the realm of “not the key demographic”. I am not really much of a mobile gamer, while I own tablets and numerous handheld systems… I don’t game on them very often. In fact right now I think the only mobile game I have installed on my phone is Final Fantasy Dimensions. As one of the few people on the planet that do not have an iPad the game fell in that category of “really excited to see it” but probably not for me. All of this was until the other night when I happened to click through to a twitch stream posted by the Undead Labs account. It turns out the game is coming to Steam Early Access soon, and this immediately changed my perspective on it. To make things even cooler I managed to score a closed beta key, and have been playing quite a bit of the game since.

I have a more proper preview post in the moderation queue on MMOGames.com, which should be releasing Monday or Tuesday, but I wanted to take a few minutes this morning to talk about this game and why you should be excited about it. First off the game is a really enjoyable art style that reminds me so much of Free Realms. I have always liked that sort of “realistic cartoony” feel to games where I can create something funky without it feeling like I am no longer actually connected to reality. The game centers around the event called the Moonrise which normally happens for only a few days, causing normally peaceful “Solari” to turn into ravening corrupted “Lunari”. The problem is this Moonrise has been lasting far longer than normal and seems to only be growing in strength. You play the role of a game keeper like Warden, and your job is to go around the countryside cleansing the Lunari of their sickness by engaging them in battle.

Immediately the game has some characteristics that feel very Pokemon like in that you are sending your pets out to do battle with other creatures. Where this whole equation gets turned on its head is the fact that it is happening in real time, and you are battling with up to two Solari at a time… out of a stable of six that you have “at the ready”. So if this were not frenetic enough, you also have the ability to do battle yourself, with your warden earning various abilities as you level up. When it comes to Warden vs Warden combat, you have two win conditions. Either you can knock out all of the enemy Solari… or you can instead use abilities that focus the enemy Warden directly. When I fought Foge at Pax South I seemed to do just fine at whittling down his Solari, but he would do a better job at focusing me directly and knocking me out as a Warden. The game itself is extremely enjoyable with a combination of lobby areas with open hunting zones and dungeons to explore and treasures to find. When this goes to open access I highly suggest you check it out, and I am sure over the next few weeks I will be posting more about it.

Day One

January 24, 2015 by Belghast

The First Day

It was pretty early on in the day when I had my first realization that I had no clue what I was getting myself in for. I got up yesterday morning at 5:30, showered, blogged, ate the free complimentary hot breakfast (sausage and eggs) and started roaming towards the convention center around 8 am. When I got there I noticed there was absolutely nothing for parking, and the garage across the street from the convention center had a massive line of cars backed up in both directions. After not find any real alternatives I got in that line and waited, hoping the “Open” side on the side of the garage would not change. I was quite literally in that line for an hour before I finally got in and parked on the roof of the parking lot.

I have to say I have never been quite so happy to be parking on a rain drenched roof in my life. I made my way into the convention hall where I entered a line of people… quite honestly not really knowing why I was lining up. It turns out I was doing mostly okay since this was the line for the opening of the expo hall at 10 am, the area that I had planned on spending most of my day. I mingled with folks standing in line waiting on things to happen. They had us line up five across and the entire length of the hall. When I got there I was towards the front of line three, so people had been there in theory since at least 7 am. By the time the halls actually opened up there were I believe eight of these lines all waiting to stream into the convention hall like an invading army. Most were in search of the illusive swag… me I was mostly trying to get my bearings and figure out where my media appointments would be.

Go Gigantic

Gigantic is one of those titles that I have known about for some time. The art style and character designs appealed to me, but when I had a friend describe it as a “MOBA” my brain closed down shop. Right now I am engaged in both League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm for various reasons… and I just did not feel like I had enough room for “yet another moba” in my life. Gigantic however is only a moba in character and skill designs, but the rest of the game play borrow elements from many genres the biggest is that of the first person shooter. A match feels like a fast paced objective based deathmatch. The gameplay starts with two teams of champions defending their teams “Guardian” which are these insanely huge monsters at either end of the arena. The goal of the game is to score three wounds on the opposing teams Guardian. You can either do this by dealing damage directly, or sending summoned creatures in to fight for you. The challenge is that when you are summoning a creature you can be interrupted by taking damage from the other team.

Where the game play gets interesting is when “The Clash” happens, which is an end game condition that keeps matches from going too long. When this happens the game arena shrinks in size as your guardian moves up to actually start fighting directly with the enemy guardian. At this same time it funnels the players into much tighter quarters. There are a lot of nuance to the mechanics, and since I have only gotten to play a single match it is hard for me to guess at much of it. My background is that of an MMO tank… and having played mostly that… I have to say picking up The Margrave the “tanky”champion felt right at home. He has a kit with a big ground slam, frontal cleave attack, channeled defensive, and a charge that can be used to hit other players or simply cover ground. I actually landed the first kill of the match because the controls felt so natural. The biggest highlight of my trip through Gigantic land is that I got to meet and hang out with Lonrem, better known for his community role with Anook. Apparently he has been in the Gigantic community for some time, and when they made a call for experienced players to help act as “coaches” for the convention he jumped.

Decay and Moonrise

After hanging out with the Gigantic folks it was time for me to go to the floor and talk to Undead Labs the first of my press appointments for the show. I have to give huge credit to Sanya Weathers for being so awesome in setting this up. I’ve long been a fan of the stuff Undead Labs is doing and I was a day one buyer of State of Decay on XBLA and then later re-bought the game when it came out on steam. Since then each time it has gone on sale I have picked up copies for various people to keep spreading the game. I describe it to my friends as “Fallout with zombies and base building”, and I was pleased to find out that the folks at Undead Labs are completely happy with that description. What is coming out in April is what they were showing off at the show, the Year One Survival edition. Since it is targeting the PC and XBox One they have gone back and re-mastered the entire game so that it looks glorious at 1080p. Additionally as Breakdown and Lifeline were released a number of improvements were made to the gameplay in each expansion. All of those quality of life changes have been applied to the entire game as a whole and you can also play all of the characters from Breakdown and Lifeline in the original game as well. For folks who own the previous release of the game there is going to be a special veteran only character with a sword and a suppressed rifle. I asked the million dollar question of what the future plans were for the franchise and if it would include multiplayer. As expected they could not commit to anything concrete, but did say that multiplayer was their original goal and still something they very much want to happen. They said that when they did it, they wanted to build a game from the ground up with multiplayer, not try and tack it on as an afterthought… and that much I definitely agree with.

Also while in Undead Labs land I got to get my hands on Moonrise their new mobile targeted pet battle rpg. The idea behind the game is that every so often a condition happens that cause the animals of the planet to get infected with a sickness and become “Lunari”. You play the role as a Warden, a public servant of sorts that does battle with the enraged Lunari, curing them and turning them back into the peaceful Solari. If you have ever played the game Jade Coccoon, it feels very similiar… and in talking to Richard Foge it seems like the team had not actually played that game until after folks like me started comparing Moonrise to it. The game is highly influenced by Pokemon, but the game plays out in a much more realtime fashion. Not only do you have to have the right combos at the ready.. you have to be able to play them in rapid succession without your opponent somehow throwing a monkey wrench in your plans. When we got around to playing PVP I happened to have one of those monkey wrenches and I kept throwing it often. The game plans on being free to play with its monetization focusing on speeding up actions. However they did not want to build a game where the player spent all of their time waiting on something to free up to be able to continue. The goal was to create a game where there was always something to do, and from the sounds of it keep the player from going into maintenance mode. I definitely look forward to seeing the game launch which is started at “sometime 2015” on consoles, iOS, Android and supporting both phone and tablet form factors.

Uncanny Valley

The last media appointment of the day was with the folks at Frontier to show off Elite Dangerous. I cannot explain how phenomenally bad I am at star ship flight simulator type games. I can do relatively well when I am constrained by gravity… but when you throw in that element of being able to fly upside down in the mix I get completely lost. To make matters even more difficult, they opted to show me the game using the Occulus Rift, hardware I had as of yet not been able to play with. To say it was disorienting is a bit of an understatement. That said after sitting in this virtual cockpit for a bit I noticed myself doing things instinctively like looking up through the top of the canopy to follow smoke trails or looking down at the dashboard indicators. The only thing that I found really disturbing was the render hands that took actions similar to mine but not quite mine. When you fire your weapons, the hand in game would fire your weapons… when you raised the shield the hand in game would raise the shield. The problem is the rest of the time the hand largely sat there lifeless. It was a really cool experience and I quizzed them about their future plans. They said they would not be happy until you could do everything you would want to do in the setting including planetary exploration. That however will take a long time, and they are prepping the 1.1 patch to becoming soon and adding new content.

The first day was a whole for me was almost as disorienting as playing Elite Dangerous with the Occulus Rift. I am not entirely certain what I was expecting, but the reality turned out to be all the more strange. I wish I could catch and bottle some of the enthusiasm of some of the other participants. The whole place has this “summer camp for dorks” feel to it that is magical, and please don’t misunderstand… I am absolutely a dork, just a deeply jaded one at this point. Maybe it is because I have friends on the other side of the looking glass, that makes me able to see that there really isn’t magic at work… just a lot of clever programming and determination. I also am not in a rabid search for free stuff mode, that it seems most of the conventioneers are so there is that. I think if I were going to do this again I would try and schedule my entire day with nothing but press appointments. That is what I found interesting, talking face to face with the folks behind the games. I guess after writing about games for so long my interests have become far more nuanced. At this point its time to hit publish and get ready to go do day two where I am hopefully met by Ashgar and Rae.