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AggroChat #425 – Check Your Filter

March 5, 2023 by Belghast

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we start off with some light discussion about Guild Wars 2 and more specifically the new patch that dropped on the 28th including a brand new map called Gyala Delve. We talk briefly about wrapping up Diablo 3 Season 28 and looking forward to the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch landing next Thursday. We talk a bit about Microsoft getting to subpoena Sony for records about their practice of paying companies to keep games from GamePass. We also talk about the practice of corporate write-downs and how Wizards of the Coast and Funko have gotten caught throwing massive amounts of product in landfills recently. From there we have a sort of rapid-fire discussion of a bunch of mech names, namely Mechwarrior Online, the upcoming Armored Core game, and Mass Builder.

Topics Discussed:

Guild Wars 2
- Gyala Delve Content Drop
Diablo 3 Season 28 Finished
Last Epoch Multiplayer Patch on 3/9
Phantom Brigade
Beating Wagon World
Microsoft gets to Supoena Sony
Wizards and Funko Land Fill Disposals
Mechwarrior Online
Armored Core
Mass Builder

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Snagging Playstation Plus Games

February 24, 2016 by Belghast

Playstation Network Trick

This is a trick that my good friend Ashgar showed me some time ago, and I have talked a bit on the blog… but given several comments from my twitter feed I thought it was probably time to create a dedicated blog post about it. One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is the way that it synergizes between all of the available Sony platforms. For the longest time I had only a Playstation 3, but had even intent of some day picking up both a Vita and a PS4. At one point I think I was lamenting having to go upstairs and log in my PS3 because I had forgotten to grab that months free games. It was then that Ash shared with me that you could in fact log in through the Playstation Network website and not only grab games for the systems you owned but also for everything that was currently available. What was great about this is that for several months ahead of picking up my Vita and PS4 I was able to start stockpiling a library of games to play on it, so when I finally purchased them I had more than enough content to keep me interested.

Having done this now for a couple of years… I have to say the Sony Network site is less than easy to navigate. Since their site is somewhat resistant to deep linking, I sorted out the best path to get to where I needed to go in a matter of clicks. As a way of demonstrating the path, I threw together a quick image. Once logged into the website, from the site header click the “Games” tab in the menu bar. On the next screen that loads click “Playstation Plus” which is confusing because there is also a Playstation Plus Specials option that doesn’t really lead where you want to go. Finally on the next page click “Free Games” which will then get you to the area of that months games. Now something I have noticed is that it sometimes takes a few days for the PS+ titles of the month to show up in this section. From here it is simply a matter of adding all of the games to your cart and checking out. The games will all have a $0 price on them, but you still have to formally check out with them to get them added to your account. If you encounter games saying that you are “not eligible” generally speaking that means the game supports cross buy and you only need to have one copy of the game for it to work on all platforms. The store however will be showing a separate copy of the game for each platform it is available on. Go ahead and check out with what is available, and if you refresh the page all of the games should then show up as “Purchased” like the below screenshot.

Game With Gold As Well

The other thing I have realized is that this sort of trick works with Games with Gold from Microsoft as well. Their system of releases is a little bit more fiddly as they seem to like to stagger them throughout the month, and when the next batch is released you generally lose access to the previous batch. I have however been successfully adding Xbox One games to my account, without actually owning an Xbox One. I figure at some point I will pick one up, and it will be nice to have a huge batch of games to play on it when I do. The quirk with Games With Gold is that you have to check out with them individually, and often it still shows a price tag associated with the game… until you get to the final step of the checkout process. Hopefully this post helps some folks out, because it is nice knowing that you can quickly snag your months worth of games without booting up the individual consoles.

E3 2015 Day Zero

June 16, 2015 by Belghast

Microsoft E3 2015

Yesterday was a huge day of E3 shows with Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony all strutting their stuff with big press conferences. While I still stand by my statement yesterday, that Bethesda software is winning this E3, everyone involved had some interesting things to show off. Mainly for me this is the year that Microsoft figured out how to do a relevant press conference. The past two years since the announcement of the Xbox One have provided extremely awkward and disconnected moments, but for the most part Microsoft nailed it this time around. They provided a wide scope of games to appeal to all genres, and while I don’t believe in their exclusivity after seeing titles appear on steam months later, I do feel like they are trying really hard to wrap up a large stable of winners as far as software goes. The big title that I am interested in is the new Tomb Raider game, which makes me realize that I really need to finish the last Tomb Raider game.

I’ve never been a huge Halo fan , but even I have to admit that the Halo Guardians demo looked pretty amazing. The title I was most amped about seeing again however was The Division, since we had not really seen much since the last E3. It seems like now we have a pseudo release date and a beta beginning towards the end of this year. My big concern was with the lackluster showing of Destiny so far, that this title might have simply quietly been cancelled. Thankfully that is not the case, and we will be exploring a new action role-playing game setting early next year. The video that takes the cake however for Microsoft is the Hololens demo showing off a special Hololens version of Minecraft. The more I see of Hololens the more I think it is going to be a real force in gaming, and not just another gimmick hoping to find a Market. Virtual Reality headsets extract you from the world, and Augmented Reality keeps you interactive with the world… I think that is going to make a big difference. The little I have played with the Occulus Rift was cool, but I suffered a pretty massive headache and was dizzy as hell as my mind tried to readjust to the “real world” after being in the unit for only around fifteen minutes. I cannot imagine what it would be like after some of my marathon gaming sessions.

EA and UbiSoft E3 2015

As good as Microsoft did with their press conference, EA doubled that effort in the opposite direction. The entire thing was this awkward and disjointed mess trying to play towards too many different demographics and just coming off as frustrating to I believe all of them. The biggest frustration for me personally was the fact that this press conference was about one thing for me… getting to see the new Mass Effect game. We got a minute and a half trailer… and that was quite literally all we saw of Mass Effect. Similarly with Mirrors Edge Catalyst… the game so many people have been amped to hear more news about… we got a two minute trailer. It seems that all EA actually cares about is peddling the new years edition of the same damned sports titles they have been selling for decades. From what I can tell roughly an hour of the presentation was tied up in these sports titles with blips at the beginning and the end about something interesting. I do have to say though that Star Wars Battlefront still looks amazing, however I have had that on preorder from the Playstation network since the Fan Fest announcement. They didn’t really need to sell me on that title, but I am looking forward to it all the same.

UbiSoft on the other hand unleashed a whole bunch of interesting stuff. We are apparently going to colonize the moon in Anno 2205, which looked amazing. They are releasing a version of Trials Fusion where you apparently play a cat that rides a flame breathing unicorn. We got to see even more staged footage of The Division, this time centering around the “Dark Zone”PVP area. The game I never thought I would be interested in however was Ghost Recon Wildlands, which for all intents and purposes seems to be their answer to the Just Cause franchise. Big open world game where you take on drug lords in whatever fashion you see fit. It looks like it is going to be extremely fun in the same way that I lost serious amounts of time to Just Cause 2. The real triumph of the show however is that Aisha Tyler is amazing, and I want her to host every press conference from this point on. Additionally they brought out Angela Basset at one point, who is the absolute badass mocapped leader of the new Rainbow Six. While there was not a whole lot that I was extremely interested in, it was nonetheless a good show or at least looked amazing as compared to the train wreck that was EA.

Sony E3 2015

Finally we wrapped up the night of E3 events last night with the Sony Press conference, and honestly even hours afterwards I am not 100% sure how well it went. They dropped some massive bomb shells on the crowd, but it only really plays to the folks who were already PS4 fans. Ultimately the goal of an E3 press conference for both Microsoft and Sony is to sell hardware, and at the end of the day I end up with the same equation. Most Xbox One exclusives also come out on the PC, and I own a fairly solid gaming PC. Most PS4 exclusives don’t, and as a result that is the hardware I chose to buy. This years game conference only serves to give me more reasons to be happy with my decision. The show lead off with finally giving a date to a game many had just expected got cancelled… The Last Guardian. This game was originally slotted for the PS3, and it was questionable if it had survived the generation hop. The big reveal of the night however is that Final Fantasy 7 is in fact getting a Remake. It was glorious to see at least glimpses of Cloud and Barret as they moved past the camera in all their ps4 glory.

The title that both came from out of nowhere and stole the show for me however was Horizon Zero Dawn from Guerilla games. This apparently ushers in a brand new breed of post apocalyptic storytelling, that manages to do so without weaving in a zombie premise. We live in what seems like a Clan of the Cave Bear like setting, until we see the first giant robot roaming the landscape. This is Turok the Dinosaur hunter, meets Last of Us, meets Zoids. We get to see the female bow hunter protagonist take down a giant robot t-rex like creature. As Tam commented during the stream, we have apparently gotten really good at making fighting giant monsters seem awesome. Had I not already purchased a PS4, this would have been the title that sold me the console. I am really hoping this ends up being a vast open world landscape that lets us wander around and explore, hunting the big game and unfolding what happened during “the darkness” that lead to the machines roaming the earth. There were of course other titles announced that looked great, and that I will likely play, however at six in the morning… the day after the show… the Sony conference was all about FF7 and Horizon for me. You can check out the full show trailer below.

Minecraft and Microsoft

September 17, 2014 by Belghast

Of Minecraft and Microsoft

Monday the news broke that Microsoft would be buying Mojang, the company behind Minecraft for 2.5 billion dollars. Since then I’ve seen a lot of varied reactions on this, but I had not quite formulated my own thoughts yesterday morning so I didn’t mention it. I admit I am a bit scared for Minecraft as a game to be in the often ham fisted hands of Microsoft. The thing is this is my own personal biases showing through. While I make my living supporting Microsoft products, in truth I have not been a huge fan of the company since Bill Gates ejected himself from the picture. I’ve felt that they’ve made a significant number of missteps on a many fronts, more importantly to the topic of this conversation on the gaming front. In a way I feel like this makes Microsoft look like they are making a desperate grab at relevance by purchasing the juggernaut that “all the kids are playing”.

From the standpoint of Notch I completely understand why he did this, and I support his decision. Notch has always been one of those figures for which the spotlight has burned a little too much. He blew up his own blog Notch.net when he posted this statement, so it made its way over to Paste Bin. In the statement he explains how he feels like he had become this symbol, and not a person and for those of you who haven’t not watched the This is Phil Fish video Notch mentions you should really check it out. It talks about the weird relationship we have to developers, especially in the indie world. I honestly feel like Notch has always wanted to be this guy who worked on interesting projects, and just had the fortune or misfortune depending on your point of view of one of those projects going viral behind his wildest fevered imaginings.

So we have this odd marriage. Microsoft desperately needs to claw its way to relevance, and Notch needs a company with the infrastructure to support his creation. The Minecraft community can be extremely awesome, but they can also turn on a dime into an unruly mob as they did over supposed terms of service changes. I highly suggest you check out Notch’s “Literally Worse than EA” post to see the point at which I think he decided he was getting out. As an avid player of Minecraft since the early days of beta, my only hope in all of this is that Microsoft can keep from fucking it up. They have this golden opportunity to prove to the world that they are not these clumsy and confused overlords. Do right by this game and you might have just won yourself a lifetime of supporters. Do wrong by this game and you likely caused the next few generations to hate you. Ultimately this is not about me or my generation, but the children growing up with Minecraft as their generations Lego.

The Story Barrier

Last night we had the intention to go do the next few parts of the Coil of Bahamut raid. We did not however have the necessary well geared bodies to pull this off, so instead we opted to do the two instances that come at the end of the main story of the game. Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are both 8 man dungeons that are extremely story and cut scene heavy. They often act as the bottle neck for players who have just finished leveling to 50, since so much of the end game content cannot be completed until you have finished this step in the main story quest. This is one of my biggest complaints about the flow of the game, is that you have this massive gulf to cross when you think you are nearing the end. You can of course queue for these two through the Duty system, but there is a significant problem with that.

Folks have figured out tricks to run these dungeons extremely quickly, and if you do so they are worth are lot of Tomestones of Mythology for limited work. As such folks tend to power pull these dungeons and anyone who stops to watch the story gets lost in the mix, often times missing entire boss fights because they are locked in a cut scene. This is extremely frustrating since so much of the final act of the story gets played out in these two dungeons. As such we try and wait until we have several 50s that need these before running them, since to run the two dungeons while watching waiting on cut scenes is around a two hour long Endeavour. Last night we had a block of time when we had a bunch of individuals online at the same time so we knocked them out for Thalen.

It had been a long while since I had watched all of the cut scenes and I have to say I am still impressed with the events at the end of this game. I don’t want to go into spoilers but the conclusion of the main story sequence is so satisfyingly “Final Fantasy”. It has all of the elements that make a game like this feel epic. Big boss fights, orchestral music with the requisite choral requirement, huge spell effects and large scale devastation. You cannot come out of The Praetorium without feeling like the big effing hero of the day. This is the way the ending of every video game should feel. The awesome thing here is that the story just keeps going, and in fact I feel like we are building to just as big and exciting of a conclusion somewhere down the line. I find myself actually waiting with baited breath on the next segment of the storyline coming with 2.4.

Recruitment and Games

I had a situation happen last night when two of my friends officially declared that Final Fantasy XIV was the worse. In truth I think they were referring to the hassle that is the Square Enix account management process, and in that I absolute agree with them. Square seriously needs to rethink the number of hoops you have to jump through to be able to play their game. Someone has to be pretty damned committed to giving them money to suffer through that bullshit. That said it did bring up a slightly different point, that I thought I would talk a bit this morning. I get super excited about video games, and in my enthusiasm I feel like I need to share that experience with others. As such through a series of posts on my blog I gush about various features of a game, and some of my friends have taken to calling me the “games pusher”. At its core, I want to share the enjoyment I am having with my friends… because I want them to feel awesome about things too.

The thing is this doesn’t always work, and that is completely okay if it doesn’t. People enjoy games differently, and as such the things that might be perfect for me are not going to be perfect for everyone. So if you see me gushing about a game, it does not mean that I expect you to like it just as much as I do. Hell I find it awesome that people have even tried to play whatever it is that I am playing. Of the folks who have taken the “FFXIV challenge”, a few of them have tried and decided they loved it. Still others have decided this game is not for them at all and walked away from it. I still love both camps equally, and for the folks who fought through the struggle that is account management to try it… I am especially appreciative that they push so much effort into it. Ultimately not every game has to be just right for everyone. We can play different games and still be awesome friends. That said I don’t think I will ever stop trying to get folks playing the game I am playing and on the same server I am playing. That is just too deeply ingrained in my nature.

#FFXIV #Minecraft