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The Institute

December 31, 2015 by Belghast

Riding the RF

This coming Saturday it is the intention to record the Fallout 4 show for AggroChat since we ultimately put it off until after the Holidays. As a result I am back on the mission of trying to finish up the main storyline so that I can discuss it. I have to tell you… focusing on the storyline has killed a lot of my enjoyment of this game, and even then I find myself having a hard time of not following my instincts and letting myself get lost in the rabbit holes that are the weird side events going on around the commonwealth. However I really really need to focus so I can finish up and be read to discuss the path I took. Tam, Kodra and probably a few others will have likely beaten the game multiple times by the show happens… but so much of my enjoyment has nothing to do with the storyline that I am going to be hard pressed to finish this game once. I’ve logged hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the other Fallout and Elder Scrolls games… and started playing each of them numerous times… and to be honest… I think I have maybe beat the main story exactly once per game. Beating them is just not part of what I find crucial to the enjoyment, but instead roaming around and inhabiting the world is what makes them special. That said I am going to talk a bit about the storyline so if you don’t want to have any plot details spoiled… please just skip the rest of this post.

Firstly… I love the Railroad. I’ve loved everything about the quest sequence so far, from the having to follow the freedom trail to find their base, to the extracting and guarding of runaway synths. One of my favorite missions was when I had to pick up a synth and guard him while waiting on someone else to help ferry him along to his new home. I realized by following the path of the Railroad I would ultimately come into conflict with both the Brotherhood of Steel and the Institute, and more or less I am perfectly fine with both of these choices. The Minutemen however, I am hoping I can retain my position with them, because I really like the concept of them as the unsung heroes of the commonwealth. The only frustration so far has been that working on the main story, and also the railroad story… has forced me to follow at least to a point the institute story. Everything about the institute creeps me the fuck out. They keep trying to tell me that they are no where near the bogeymen that they are acclaimed to be…. but then they want me to go abduct a scientist, and act like they weren’t going to give him a choice in the matter. They also really wanted me to create a radio broadcast threatening the commonwealth that if they messed with the institute they would destroy them. Again there is the whole Synth thing as well… if you create life you have to respect it… and they very much seem to treat synths the same way we would treat a toaster.

Double Agent

You would think that by working with the Institute I would come to respect and understand them, but instead it has only served to make me more creeped out by their actions. The only real positive of the institute is the fact that the Courser outfit looks amazing, and I am more than happy to wear it around everywhere. Basically the Institute reminds me of the Vault, magnified to the extreme. Everything is cold and sterile, and I believe you are supposed to sympathize with your son…. aka “Father” but he seems just as twisted and misguided as the Overseers from the various vaults. There is a point where you have this conversation with him, where he basically writes off everything that is happening in the commonwealth as nothing worth salvaging, but instead I feel like I’ve seen so much good already in the people of the commonwealth. What is killing me is how long it is taking for me to get to the point where I can stop playing nice… and help the synths escape from the Institute. There are a few of the scientists that I like, but it feels very much like running around in a creepy 1980s police state science fiction film. Having every single item in the Institute look like 1970s era “high tech” concepts isn’t helping either. I keep having flashbacks in my mind to movies like Logan’s Run or books like Brave New World. Basically the whole experience with the Institute is a whole lot of nope.

So much of me wants to just open fire and take out everyone down there…. then give the tech they have to people who will actually put it to use for the benefit of everyone. They claim that they are the last hope of humanity…. but they seem to be doing nothing at all to benefit anyone other than themselves. They are a bunch of scientists high on the act of doing science…. and seem go give zero shits about the practical application of the tech they are building when it comes to actually improving the world for anyone other than their cloistered society. Basically the Institute is against everything that makes me really love Fallout 4, the feeling of honestly saving the world a little bit at a time. Both the Insititute and The Brotherhood of Steel are these paternal forces, trying to gather power and resources for themselves at the cost of the common folk. So all of that said… I am going to be damned happy when I can finally open fire and leave the Institute behind me. Tam kept alluding to the Railroad not being what they seem…. but I just have not seen it yet. I don’t see the Institute as the noble force worth committing myself to… instead I see a group that causes a lot of harm and ends up thinking of it as “minor collateral damage”. The hubris is strong with them… and I am really hoping I am getting close to ending the story arc and leaving them behind.

A Matched Set

December 29, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Goals

Destiny_20151228171919 — 270 After Sifting Through Bank

There are a lot of folks that have goals going into the holiday season, for me… these tend to involve some gaming feat that would normally take a silly amount of time to do. One Christmas break I played through Mass Effect 3, and then started over from scratch and played from 1 to 3 again trying to control the outcome. The Christmas break that SWTOR was released I leveled as part of a duo from level 1 to 50. Other years my mission has been to level a character from start to finish in World of Warcraft, and I made a decent dent in that with pushing the druid from 1 to 40 so I could use that Yeti mount. This year one of the things on my list has been to finish leveling my Warlock who before this week was sitting at level 30 from the last time I got the urge to level. I am not exactly sure why but I have wanted to have a matched set of level capped characters in Destiny for awhile now. I think largely it is because when I am farming exotics, I hate the concept of items going to waste… and I pretty regularly got exotics for Warlocks in spite of not having one. So sitting in my bank I had 3 exotic helms and 1 exotic chest that were warlock only, as well as a few legendary warlock only items as well.

Throughout the course of yesterday afternoon, while the ice was falling outside… I was sitting upstairs in the warmth of my office plugging away at my warlock. Originally I started doing the House of Wolves content, since I tend to like it better than the Dark Below. However I quickly noticed that I was leveling way faster while simply working my way through the back log of bounties I had accumulated. As a result I spent most of my afternoon meticulously narrowing down the number of bounties I had until finally I was a sliver away from 40. I hopped down to Mars and completed a few missions and dinged. After sifting through my bank and spending a few legendary marks, I managed to push my overall light level up to 270 which is not too shabby for a fresh 40. The only negative is… some of my exotics are really specific to sub class and the only one I have made ANY movement in thusfar is Voidwalker. I really like jumping up into the air and throwing down three bombs at people… but at some point I need to push up sunsinger because for group activity that seems to be the best option. Self resurrection is slightly overpowered, but I figure it is something you save in reserve for when it looks like your group is going to wipe. However it should do well to feed Tlaloc whenever I get one.

Matched Set

It feels nice to have a matched set, and the funniest thing is…. every single one of my characters is an Exo. Mostly I had issues with not liking the other races character creation options. The humans were out because they lacked a beard…. because seriously… I cannot ever bring myself to play a human that doesn’t have a decent beard. The Awoken were out because well… space elves…. and I have a pretty deep hatred of most things elven. I am fine if other people want to play them… but they are very much not my thing. The best elves ever… were both from the Elder Scrolls setting… because Cannibal Wood Elves and Nasty Vile Dark Elves… are the only ones I can embrace fully. That left me with one race left to play… and since Destiny ultimately reminds me of playing Phantasy Star Online… and Exo is about as close as I can get to my Cast it was the clear winner. The awesome thing is though that each of my classes has a very fitting look and feel for their class, even though they are all technically just big robots.

I’ve not dwelled on it too much, but I really think that Phantasy Star Online being my first MMO… has greatly shaped how I feel about Destiny. The games have a very similar feel, with a lobby system of sorts being the tower… which equates pretty similar to the tower like area you ran around in PSO. Then you go out on missions that involve you going to planets and often times retracing the same areas over and over with slightly different features and creatures dependent upon your mission. I played the hell out of that game, up until the point when I got hooked on Everquest. The funny thing about it is, that as melee heavy as I was in other games… in PSO I always played a Cast Ranger. So the fact that I really enjoy Destiny doesn’t seem that shocking. It feels very much like the spiritual successor, minus the anime skin. At some point I really want to get into the raid in Destiny, but similarly to WoW…. I mostly just want to do it for the gear. Downing new content is cool and all, but the force that always drives me forward in these types of games… is the acquisition of new and cool things. When you take loot out of the equation, like in Final Fantasy XIV it is a serious hit to my enjoyment. Most of my dungeon running in FFXIV was in an attempt to complete cosmetic sets, and ultimately was still gear driven… just gear as an appearance not necessarily as function.

Next Mission

At this point I really need to buckle down and finish Fallout 4 main storyline, because this coming weekend we need to record the review show. I am not sure what exactly has happened but I have simply not been playing Fallout much over the last few weeks. I think we can blame most of it, on my re-entry into World of Warcraft and my desire to play “catch up”. Then this week has been a bit of a resurgence in Destiny, this combined with the only machine I have that plays Fallout 4 well enough is my upstairs computer. Over the course of our movie and television marathons I have largely been downstairs on the sofa in my comfy blanket cocoon. This has meant that Fallout sadly has been abandoned for the moment. I tried last night to play it some over steam in home streaming, and once I sorted out the many technically difficulties, I finally got it up and running. The only problem there was that the video stream would artifact out anytime I encountered much action, making it questionable if it is really worth playing it on my desktop… or if I would simply be better playing it on my laptop with greatly reduced graphical fidelity. My laptop will run it after all, but with a somewhat potato quality. In any case… I need to pick up where I left off and make some forward movement.

Week In Gaming 12/5/2015

December 6, 2015 by Belghast

Sunday Madness

Today my posts and the AggroChat podcast are coming out a little late, because reasons. My wife has this thing at church this morning, and stuff was not going very much as planned. So instead of wrapping up the podcast when I got up, I went into the mode of attempting to support my wife as she flailed around the house trying to get everything ready. I don’t really do the religion thing, but it is important to my wife so I’ve always attempted to support her in whatever way she needs. Normally speaking I would have been further along in the podcast creation process by the time I slept last night, but instead I decided to have a knock down drag out fight with Amazon. There is an item that starting last Tuesday, has been updating daily to tell me it would be there by 8pm the next day. This has drug on for several days… and the FedEx tracking that I finally received shows that there is no way it is going to be here until sometime at the end of next week. Needless to say I was more than a little perturbed, and ended up trying to get to the bottom of it.

Where I feel bad however is that I know I took out some of my frustrations on the agents that were working the case. I realize why companies hide their chat functionality, but overall it is a horrible practice, that only leads customers to be pissed as hell by the time they FINALLY get a hold of a person to talk to about their issues. I know I probably came off as a mad man, but seriously… I’ve been an Amazon customer since around 2000, and been a prime member for I think as long as the program has existed. I keep that active so that I can have items here in two days… and there have been a lot of times in the past where they actually have it here next day. Since the swap to using the US Postal Service however, I have had several delayed orders… and this one just seems to be another in that line of problems. The worst part about it is.. that after spending over an hour last night trying to get someone to tell me where the ball was dropped… no one seemed to have any answers. I did however get two months of prime added to my account apparently to appease me, so I guess that makes up for some of the frustration. I have no doubt that the item will arrive and be just fine… but man this situation has been annoying. It is nothing nearly as bad as Tam and Amazon quite literally losing his shipment.

The Week of Warcraft

For the most part this was in fact the Week of Warcraft as I am attempting to play both characters on Argent Dawn Alliance side… and the joined The Scryers server Horde side. This means there are two different communities that I am trying to be an active part of, and as a result pretty much everything else I am doing has fallen by the wayside. Part of my Sunday ritual is to go downstairs and watch a sequence of television shows until ultimately it is time for bed. However during this sequence I got pulled into the Horde side guild raid with my friends in the awesomely named Facepull. Between some gear upgrades from drops and some crafted gear by the amazing Brerhoof it took me to around the 670 range. Now after some LFR this week I am sitting at 679 so a stones throw away from 680. I have two parts left to do of LFR and my hope is at some point before this evening I can actually get them knocked out and will hopefully see some more upgrades. My lowest piece on the Paladin is his necklace which is still the level 640 boosted green gear. In theory if I get lucky I could get a baleful item to drop while I am doing dailies… which I also need to do at some point. I have everything enchanted and gemmed… at least with cheap enchants and gems so my performance as a whole should be better tonight… that is if they still want me to come and pewpewpew things.

Then Wednesday night I was invited to raid with some twitter folk that I have known for ages. There I brought my Alliance Warrior Belghast, and similarly have made some jumps in gearing as the week went out. I started the week at 680 and have bumped it a little bit up to 684. This is still a long ways off from the 705-710 range that I need to be in order to really function in Heroic for the Friendship Moose fun, but whatever I am enjoying the process. In both cases I was mostly a fly on the wall as the raid went about their business, but I could see myself enjoying both situations greatly. It is my hope that in both scenarios are am invited back for future weeks, and in spite of my crummy gear I still managed to end up I think 3rd in total damage done for the raid. My burst dps is still on the weak range, but I am throwing out a lot of total damage which still is nice. Gladiator is such a fun spec that I am really going to hate losing once the expansion ships. I guess there is hope at a later date that they might revive the spec, but I seriously imagine it was just too hard to balance when it essentially took all of the same gear that tanks did… which means that my overall survival is among the highest of the dps classes. In any case I am having fun… and that is what really matters right?

Reaching Diamond City

The original plan for this week was to record our final Fallout 4 show last night, and because of that I felt this overwhelming need to have completed the storyline. This means that a good chunk of this week I was pushing hard to get through the main story, and I have to say… it was some of the most miserable I have been playing Fallout ever. My play style is very much a “forget the story exists” method, where I wander aimlessly and go explore whatever happens to suit my fancy. This means there is a lot of ADD induced gaming as I see what that building over there in the distance is, or go explore that wrecked vehicle there because it looks interesting. The result is that I spend a lot of time playing, but not a lot of time getting anywhere specific. With the severe content density that is the Commonwealth, it means I had at 70 hours not gotten anywhere vaguely close to Diamond City. I knew where it was, but I was busy wandering around the Cambridge area and exploring lots of little nooks and crannies.

Instead this week I forced myself to follow the storyline, and while it is really awesome… and there are lots of interesting characters… the entire process feels forced. I mean it IS forced, because I am trying hard to play in a style that is not natural to me. I talked about this for quite a bit on the podcast last night, but essentially most of the time I don’t like it when games end. In Mass Effect 2, I enjoyed every moment of the side missions… but it felt like all of my fun was being sucked down a drain the moment I started that sequence of events that lead to the end of the game. I want these worlds and settings.. and characters that I have created to essentially live on forever… and the sooner I “beat” a game… the sooner that fun for me is over. I think in part this is why I like the MMO so much, because my characters never have to go away… they just keep going on and changing and adapting as new content is released. So as it looks like we are pushing off the Fallout 4 show a bit… I am going to try and find a happy medium where I alternate between following story… and also spending some time following my heart.

Launch Hype Cycle

November 24, 2015 by Belghast

The Perfect Amount

One of the subjects I have thinking about quite a bit this week is the video game hype cycle… namely the time from when a video game is announced to the time you can have it in your grubby little hands. There are a lot of times that a game is announced with great fanfare and then when it actually releases two years later… the excitement has died down to a point where I rarely realize it has launched. This is especially true with games that have an early access system, because quite literally in my mind they have been “out” from the moment they started taking money for the game. I’ve come to a line of thinking that Fallout 4 pretty much represents the perfect amount of hype leading into a game launch. While all manner of information was leaked about this game for a few years… there was no official acknowledgement of the game, nor any media floating around about it until June 2015 at E3. At which point they announced that the game would be available in November of that same year. This gave the game a focused four months to hype it up and get people read for it.

The truth is that most of the hype was fan created. Bethesda themselves continued to release a slow trickle of information and trailers… large parts of which were simply recompiled from the demos given at E3. But this constant trickle served to keep the fires ignited long enough that by the time the game actually launched a few months later… folks were still very much at the peak of excitement, rushing out into the store and buying damned near anything even vaguely related to the game. As an example of this fever pitch I give to you exhibit A… the fact that the extremely limited edition Nuka Cola Quantum cases are going for over $1200 on Ebay. They announced a game with lots of new features, and then delivered it a short period of time later as promised. This sort of brevity is refreshing when it comes to video games, because we are simply used to it dragging on over the course of several years including extended alpha and beta phases which only serve to get the players bored with the title before they even lay their hands on it.

Beta is Not Beta

Another huge problem that plagues the industry is the fact that Beta testing really doesn’t mean what it says it means. What is ultimately spurring on this post is the launch of the World of Warcraft Legion Alpha yesterday to the press, streamers and a few fan sites. While Fallout 4 had this nice clean short cycle, Legion is already setting up to have a considerably longer one. We first got the official announcement of the rumored expansion at Gamescom in August, and post Blizzcon in early November we received our potential launch window of September 2016. Now that we have an alpha circulating, we will now have plenty of hype inducing articles and videos circulating… with ten months to go until the potential launch window. While this is awesome to stoke the fires, the flames will have died down significantly by the time the game actually releases. Right now I myself am riding this nostalgia buzz that has lead me to resubscribe to the game, but there is likely no way that the game can sustain my excitement until next year to keep the love going.

What I meant by the Beta not meaning what it used to, is the fact that we no longer have these cloistered NDA protected testing environments. So in essence Beta becomes this time to allow streamers and the press to hype up the game for Blizzard, rather than the period of deeply focused testing. Sure it is frustrating to be in something that is under NDA, and not be able to talk about it… but games need an incubation period before the world gets to see them. When I was testing Elder Scrolls Online I was quite literally in the closed testing process for a little bit over a year before the launch of that game. I tested the hell out of it, and myself and Ashgar apparently developed a reputation for our prolific bug noting. There were lots of things that I saw that would have freaked the hell out of the press and public if they saw them, but I simply calmly noted it and described as many details as I could and moved on. As the builds changed we saw many of those bugs disappear… and often times other ones arise that we continued to note. For me at least it was not about getting to play the game free or having something to fill my site with articles… but instead about trying extremely hard to make sure the best possible game launched.

A Challenge

So now is the point where I present a challenge to anyone with access to the World of Warcraft Legion alpha client. Test the hell out of that game and submit bug notes for anything that even seems vaguely out of place. I want each of you to be so prolific in your bug notes… that the developers behind the scenes know you by name and immediately start predicting what you might say. The Warlords of Draenor testing process was not taken seriously by the developers or by the players… and most of us just used it as a way of showcasing what was coming out from the game. What we ended up with was an expansion that did not quite feel right on so many levels, all of which were things that could have been addressed during the Alpha testing process. By the time a game makes it into Beta… it is essentially in a polish phase, where the content gets the spelling errors ironed out, and cosmetic blemishes are fixed. Alpha is the time when you can actually effect the way a game will play like at launch, and now that you have access to this client I expect each of you to do your job. After all testing is a job, not a perk… or something that elevates you above other players.

Quite literally if Legion is not the best expansion that World of Warcraft has ever seen… we are in a lot of trouble. You can have a single bad expansion and still turn around… namely I am looking at Dark Age of Camelot and the horrible Trials of Atlantis expansion here. They continued on to do a lot of really interesting things, but they absolutely had a misstep. I feel like Warlords was without a doubt Blizzard’s misstep when it comes to the Warcraft franchise, and Legion is their chance to redeem themselves. The problem being they need you the players to give honest and sometimes brutal feedback on what is working and what is not working. There is a huge difference between the live client and the alpha client… and the alpha forums are this magical place where people actually talk about the serious issues of the game without resorting to hyperbole. I expect each and every one of you that have access to this alpha to put that time to good use, and find every single bug in the game. Sure you only have access to the Demon Hunter starting experience, but I expect you to help make that starting experience the best “newbie zone” in the game. Now what are you doing reading my post… get to making bug notes people!