MMO Archives - Page 87 of 334 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Backyard and Banana

May 23, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty chill night and was spent either gaming or hanging out on the patio off our bedroom. Here is a photo from my chair as I waited to top off the pool and played Monster Hunter Generations. There was a nice breeze and it was making the wind chimes do all sorts of happy sounds. My wife was hanging beside me doing school work… because unfortunately it is both hobby and job rolled all in one. I love our backyard even though I don’t spend anywhere near as much time as she does out in it. Last night however was a perfect storm of overcast and cool which is about my sweet spot for outdoors. My eyes are super sensitive to light and there are times where while I am sitting in the shade… the world itself is just too bright for my tastes. The flowerbabies of course are doing okay still, and I need to wrap up this post soon so I can go out and give them all a drink.

As far as Monster Hunter Generations… I am largely playing it over 4 Ultimate because of the impending release of Generations Ultimate for the Switch. Monster Hunter is way too complicated a game for me to really enjoy playing it on a tiny screen with a thinkpad trackpoint nub serving as my second thumbstick. That said I do know that whatever effort I make is going to transfer over to the Switch so it feels like it is allowing me to have a bit of a headstart as it were. There are still three months until the release of Generations Ultimate and that gives me some time to casually work on leveling my Palicos and progressing through the quests to a point where I might not be completely on ground one at launch on August 28th. I am super looking forward to having a newish to me Monster Hunter experience to sink my teeth into… that I will be able to play on my 43 inch monitor upstairs.

The tail end of the evening I settled into playing some Iron Banner in Destiny 2 as I had not honestly played much of that since Curse of Osiris. I am nowhere near as good at Crucible as I once was because I am simply out of practice, but then again I never was terribly good in the first place. I did manage to turn in a couple of packages, one of which getting me the Auto Rifle that looks like Scathelocke. I am super pumped about it because firstly I love Auto Rifles and secondly… I had really wanted to try that weapon out and was afraid that I lost my chance when the season changed. There is another auto rifle available as faction rewards so I am wondering if I want to try grinding out 30 packages… and I pretty much figure the answer is no. I do however want the super high rate of fire weapon because it has auto loading holster and high impact rounds and seems like a much better version of Perseverance/Valakadyn… which are both weapons that I hated on the console but have come to enjoy with a mouse and keyboard.

I have significant problems with Destiny 2… but damn does that mechanical loop still feel fun.

Elves I Don’t Hate

May 16, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I pulled an example from World of Warcraft and after doing so I realized that I never actually talked about the character that was hiding underneath the fold of the Destiny 2 image. I am extremely late to the party when it comes to Allied races, the Horde races were super easy to unlock but the Alliance ones required a level of commitment that I was simply not willing to offer them. They were one of those things that I worked on off and on as I had time or wanted something mindless to do while watching television or a movie. It was a few weeks back when I realized that I was actually getting pretty close to exalted with both of the factions required to unlock them. Even then I largely failed at doing the quests on a daily basis because I really am not a huge fan of Argus.

Nevertheless I managed to push across the finish line and unlock them both a few weekends back and as a result I have been poking around on a brand new Void Elf hunter during the AggroChat podcasts. I’ve found it super relaxing to just roam around and take things down at low levels and for whatever reason Void Elves don’t trigger that “I hate elves” instinct that I have built up over all of these years. In part I think they mostly register as Drow to me, which is something I occasionally played in D&D or the games like Everquest that had decent implementations of them. Honestly it weirdly makes me want to go back and farm the single piece of Dragonstalker that I am missing, because in all of my years of running Blackwing Lair… I never got the boots to drop off Broodlord Lashlayer. The only thing keeping me from soloing it each week is the fact that I really hate doing the Razorgore event.

I realize that I recently started a Tauren Hunter, but the whole being assigned a pet at the start of the game thing still seems a little weird. On the Tauren your start with a Plainstrider which isn’t really my sort of pet, but even then I kept using it for a significant amount of time before taming anything else to replace it. As Void Elf though you start with Voidstalker… that is both my kind of pet and also extremely cool looking. I’ve found myself with zero drive to go out and tame something else, but that might change as I am now interesting Stranglethorn Vale. I might grab something rare if I happen across it but for now I am more than happy to run around with my void pal… even though I have yet to give her a proper name.

It is weird to me that I have lost any forward momentum in World of Warcraft thanks to Battle For Azeroth and the direction they are taking the game. However I still enjoy dinking around on low level characters because to me that is the purest version of the “WoW Experience”. BfA really has been a let down as far as the information coming out about it. Additionally my time playing beta… hasn’t really done anything to hook me on the direction the game is going. For years I thought that maybe Metzen was what was holding the game back… but now I wonder if he was a force of stability keeping the game from dropping off a cliff. Note I loved Legion “for the most part” but the one bit that I could push right into the sea was the factional nonsense that happens in Stormheim. Battle For Azeroth feels like an entire game made out of those factional nonsense moments and I am not really looking forward to it.

Chat Goes On Left

May 15, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things I am realizing is just how bad I am at responding to messages some nights. Last night for example I was mindlessly grinding away in Destiny 2 while watching video full-screen on my second monitor. All the while various folks were messaging me on lots of different platforms including battle.net, slack, discord, and even some resorted to twitter. All of which I was largely oblivious to as I happily ground public events and took down high value targets pushing the warlock up in level so that I can start doing the weeklies on that character as well. The problem is really two fold, firstly that I am so used to soloing at this point that I am not really watching messages like I used to for the sign of someone else popping online. The second issue I will get into shortly.

At this point my Warlock is level 28 so nearing 30 but apparently completely capable of wearing gear of decent level because I am now rocking an energy weapon that is 350. It is super hard going back to the warlock after only really playing the Titan for a good deal of time. Hunter is simple… multi jump will always be multi jump. Warlock on the other hand has the wrong version of Titan jump and no matter how long I play it I never can quite get used to it responding the opposite way that I am expecting. I feel like folks either bond with Titan or Warlock jumps… and from that point on the other one just doesn’t feel like a jump should feel. Hunter on the other hand always feels like you are riding around on a midair pogo stick.

Now the other problem I was talking about earlier is that Destiny 2 UI design is designed wrong. What I mean by that is in literally every MMO I play the chat box location is on the left hand side of the screen as illustrated above by my UI in World of Warcraft. The chat you care about appears on the left hand screen, and in this ElvUI layout the chat I don’t care about at all ever… appears on the right hand side of the screen. This is pretty much how I lay out every MMO that allows me to shift around the UI, but I cannot remember a game off the top of my head that does not default to having the chat left justified for lack of a better term. Destiny 2 on the other hand creates a super spammy loot window that you cannot remove on the left hand side of the screen and gives you the chat you actually care about on the right hand side of the screen… that will constantly minimize to just a tiny notepad document looking icon. When you receive a message it does not de-cloak and show you said message… however any time some jackass loots some random item the game takes every opportunity to make sure you know about it.

This is a broken design and causes me to simply ignore that chat exists because it does not conform to the cultural standards I am used to. By culture I mean the general cultural design of MMO games, of which Destiny 2 is a part of regardless of how Bungie feels about that label. To make things worse… Bungie themselves taught us that the only place that matters for text was the left hand side of the screen in Destiny 1 as they placed all of that spammy nonsense there. There is in theory a sound that is supposed to play when someone messages you, but whatever sound that is is either inaudible to me personally… or just blends into the din of everything else happening in game because I never notice it. \

Ultimately what my inability to notice chat cost me last night was a run through the raid as my friends over in TQMB were trying to reach out because they needed one more to get started. I am hoping when they put in the clan chat they also give us the option to swap the locations of the two chat panes so that the spammy nonsense goes on the right and the important chat goes on the left. Otherwise I am honestly not sure if I can ever fully train myself to look for chat in a weird location. After over two decades of online gaming… I am just too indoctrinated into a “chat on the left” mentality.

More Warmind Impressions

May 11, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I managed to hit the first soft cap of 345 through doing some of the content that happens immediately following the completion of the main story. I am still a bit dismayed at how short it ended up being. The core problem with the experience is there was a disconnect between how the NPCs were acting and the events that were actually occurring. What I mean by that is when we took down Ghaul… he had done enough to interfere with our lives to make us really hate him by the time we reached the point of final confrontation. With Warmind… they end up treating the Worm God we are fighting with similar contempt… even though we only found out one exists on Mars a few minutes earlier. Sure I get the fact that the Worm Gods are one of the galaxies great sources of evil and they were key in creating the Hive in the first place. I’ve read the Book of Sorrows and understand that all… but the average player has not.

The average player would be going into that scene wondering what in the hell a Worm God is and why these two NPCs seem so freaked about it. The problem being that the game didn’t really give us enough run up to reach this supposedly epic conclusion. It feels a lot like the campaign in Rise of Iron where you have some epic things going on… but nowhere enough lead up to make them feel like that epic nature is earned. Sure taking down a giant SIVA enfused Iron Lord was a slick final fight just like taking down a Worm God was a slick final fight… but in both cases it felt like we lacked significant reason for what we were doing. I mean the “Guardian” is the Deus Ex Machina to fix all problems much like the Warrior of Light is in Final Fantasy XIV. The problem is it feels like that role is earned in FFXIV whereas we sorta just magically are able to best everything in Destiny without really knowing why we are so much better than apparently every other Guardian out there.

Tam and I get into these discussions a lot and he is usually the one raising these points. The funny thing is they generally revolve on why he quit playing a game, and for me this is an annoyance but by no means a game breaker. I feel like there is a magic formula that keeps me engaged in a game. First you have to have a core mechanical loop that I enjoy, for example in Destiny I love the gun play and the movement which makes me feel awesome as I traverse this beautifully rendered world. The second point of that magical formula is that there has to be something in the game that I want to do. There needs to be some objective out there that drives me forward and keeps me engaged with the game when the shiny newness of the mechanical loop wears off.

Please note what I said there… something I want to do. For example in a game like World of Warcraft there can never be a possible way that I would ever run out of things to do and content I have not actually seen. Similarly in Final Fantasy XIV there is just too much content to ever find a true end to it. The problem is in both of those games I have rather regularly reached a point where there is simply nothing left that I care to do. Either the content left involves something I don’t much enjoy like Player versus Player interactions or it feels like it has more stick than carrot attached to it. I reached this point after Trials of Osiris in Destiny 2 where the mechanical loop simply was not enough and the repetitive and unrewarding nature of the Infinite Forest made it so that I just didn’t feel like logging in anymore.

While Warmind is an extremely short expansion… it feels like it might be a fairly intricate one. What I mean by that is there are already a bunch of post credits items that the game is asking me to do that spawn new opportunities to go off on adventures. I am sure there will be an end to this, but in some ways it reminds me of the style of interaction that happened on the Dreadnaught in The Taken King. There are puzzles to be solved and items to interact with in ways that I have not quite figured out. There were weapons to collect that are associated with questing, and others that folks don’t even know how they work as of yet. There are drops that can be used to improve most of the exotic weapons, and in it a bunch of interesting ways to feel like I keep moving forward.

On the other end however the new grind is real. After hitting 345 and finally accepting my Milestones for the week… each one of those rewarded a 351 item… 6 levels of movement off the base whereas before we were regularly getting upwards of 15 levels of movement from the same milestones. This means that journey to 385 is going to be an extremely long one when you have a very finite number of weekly options to give any sense of movement. This means that if I find myself engaged in this game again I will by nature need to push the Hunter and the Warlock through Curse of Osiris so that I can have three sets of weekly upgrade options instead of one. Sure the armor won’t swap over but those weapons can keep pushing up slowly over the course of multiple characters.

The game needed something and in truth at this point I am not sure if this is what that need was. The problem with Destiny 2 is that on paper it looks like the sequel I wanted for Destiny. However in practice it has always felt lacking in part because it felt like we sacrificed so much cool stuff from the first one to get this as a result. Nothing I have seen from this game justifies the reasons why we had to reset back to ground zero. I know they felt like they wanted a fresh start, to shed any bad blood from the first title. However I feel like that plan backfired horribly. I’m interested to see where they can go with Warmind and if they can give us justification going forward to buy the “Comet” expansion that has been looming on the horizon and leaked via the Canadian Walmart website. The one act that would go a long ways to building good will for me personally… would be to port the old patrol zones to Destiny 2 and make it feel like we didn’t abandon half the world to get this game.