October 2014 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Amazing Podcasts

October 7, 2014 by Belghast

A Network of Awesome

Yesterday each of the members of The Gaming and Entertainment Network blitzed the world with posts announcing this awesome new venture we are all part of. However since I ended up technically soft launching the network on Sunday when I posted the latest episode of AggroChat I opted to also follow up at the tail of the pack. At this point I am uncertain how someone could miss there is such a thing as The Gaming and Entertainment Network, but just in case here goes my attempt to explain just how great this concept is. TGEN as it will be referred to from this point on as the full name is longer than I want to type on an average basis, is really the brain child of Braxwolf from the Beyond Bossfights podcast. So the lions share of the credit for this venture has to go to him. I think each of us had considered the possibility of teaming up with other podcasters, but the most important thing is the person who gets the ball rolling.

Brax had quietly noticed that there were several of us that spring form the same basic community that surrounds MMO gaming and participated in events like the Newbie Blogger Initiative and my little creation Blaugust. Then over the course of a few months we proceeded to hash out the details in some extremely long gmail threads. At this point pretty much everyone involved has pitched in with some skill or at least voted in many polls that lead us to reach this point. So many podcast networks feel corporate and impersonal, and I think while we all wanted to present our best face to the world… we also wanted it to come from the same place as our blogs and podcasts did. As such TGEN is very much a podcast network for and by the podcasters.

Amazing Podcasts

The entire venture would be completely empty without the actual podcasts and I am not sure if it is absolute coincidence or careful planning but all of the member podcasts fill various niches and happen to be releasing mostly on different days giving us a pretty varied release schedule. We have a new podcast releasing almost every day except Saturday, but with the whole weekend being family time thing… at least as far as my blog is concerned that is a dead spot in the statistics anyways. I feel like at this point I should probably just cut to the chase and introduce the member podcasts.

AggroChat – you guys should know this one by now, since it is the podcast tied to the blog.
Battle Bards – awesome podcast devoted to something that is often times overlooked in the gaming experience… the music. Each episode is thought provoking as they delve into various game scores with the awesome cast of Gypsy Syl, MMOGC, and Sypster.
Beyond Bossfights – excellent thought provoking podcast by the man who started this madness. Braxwolf often digs into deeper topics behind the games and communities we love.
Cat Context – awesomely intelligent podcast that is in essence a conversation between friends: Liore, Arolaide and Ellyndrial. I started listening because they were my guildies, and stuck around because it was always interesting.
Contains Moderate Peril – One of the most polished podcasts I have listened to and always enlightening. Reminds me of the classic news discussion show, and always has interesting co-hosts. Additionally Roger has an amazing voice, and I could listen to him read a phone book.
Couch Podtatoes – Face it, every podcaster is jealous they thought of this name first. You come for the interesting name but you stay for the great dynamic of Izlain, J3w3l and Doone. They always dig into some interesting discussions and have been known to do some interviews as well.
Massive Failure – Join the MMO Troll as he talks about what is happening in MMOs and adding commentary to what is going on. Troll being tongue in cheek as he talks about the good, bad and the ugly in MMOs.
Roleplay Domain – And rounding out our founders is a cool podcast that I just started listening to myself recently. Roleplay Domain is devoted to roleplaying in any form be it on the computer, classic tabletop or live action.

That is one hell of a founding line-up if I do say so myself. I am absolutely humbled to be included in this venture, and I hope we don’t let everyone down with our more rambling style. TGEN provides an opportunity for us all to cross pollinate our efforts, and help support each other. I know personally even in the few days since the launch I have seen a boost in listeners to this past Sunday’s episode of Aggrochat, so it seems like the basic theory is working.

Shared Mission

What makes me the proudest of our network is that while many can say phrases such as “like-minded podcasters” without really hanging that on any sort of a framework, we sought to fix that. Early on when we started talking about this network we decided that we needed some basic tenets that we should all abide by. We went into this planning for the contingency that the network might grow beyond these podcasts and encompass new ones, and as we inducted them… we should have a clear “code of ethics” for them to follow as well to insure that the statement “like-minded” stayed true as we moved on. You can check out the full form on the TGEN About page, but I am going to copy the relevant bits here.

What can you expect from TGEN?

Honesty – If we like something, we’ll say so. If we don’t like something, we’ll say so. It’s a pretty simple policy, really.
Creativity – We value the diverse, unique talents of our creators. As such, we offer a wide range of shows. At TGEN you’ll find topical discussions as well as news, opinions, interviews, and even music! All of which relate back to our main foci of gaming and entertainment.
Diversity – We hail from all around the globe and represent a variety of backgrounds and experiences. As such, you can expect a variety of input and opinions!
Collaboration – Even as diverse individuals, we understand that we can accomplish more by working together, not only as creators within TGEN, but also with outside shows, personalities and networks.
Consistency – While our creators all lead busy lives and release schedules may differ, we want to make sure that we have a steady flow of new content available. All shows on TGEN are “active” shows that release on as regular a basis as life allows. No waiting months between releases for our shows.
Fun – This may be the most important, yet easily overlooked. The purpose of gaming and entertainment is to have fun. And if we’re not having fun, neither will our listeners. Let’s build something fun together!

I think all of this creates a pretty firm foundation for us moving forward. There has been talk of trying to do some regular mixed podcast roundtables in the future so I can only see things like that strengthening the network as a whole. Additionally I feel like there is plenty of room for us to grow, and I know personally I have a handful of podcasts that I would love to “adopt” as I am sure other members do as well. I am extremely excited to be a part of this, and am looking forward to seeing just what awesome things we can do together.

#TGEN #Podcasts

Death to Darkspawn

October 6, 2014 by Belghast

Lost in a World

One of the aspects of a good game that I have always been amazed by is just how lost you can become existing in that world. With the upcoming release of Dragon Age: Inquisition mid month, several of us have started re-playing origins in an attempt to get a new save file to import into Inquisition. I realize that the process for importing works a little differently than it has in previous Bioware games, and is done through an intermediary program called Dragon Age Keep that also allows you to choose the decisions you would have liked to have had from previous games. However with some experience with the Mass Effect 3 “comic book” tool, it tended to also make a lot of really horrible decisions for me. One of the most enjoyable experiences I have had with a game was playing through the entire Mass Effect series in sequence over the course of a Christmas break… so while the games in the Dragon Age series do not connect as tightly, I am hoping it will still be very rewarding.

Over the weekend I said that I had decided to start the “least” Belghast character possible for this play through. That I guess is not correct… the least recognizable character would have been me starting an Elven Mage. We all know that one is never going to happen, as I tend to be allergic to playing finger wigglers. Instead I basically picked something other than the high born warrior I always tend to play, and in this case that was a Dwarven Casteless Rogue. I love the Dwarves of the Dragon Age series, and having my very first play through be the Noble rogue pretty much ruined every other introduction storyline for me. That said the Casteless introduction is pretty great as well, and especially after having played through many of them… you see hints of the other introductions as you play. Like I know the events that are going on with the noble houses, and while they are only loosely alluded to in the casteless introduction… they are still very much there and very much the way they play out as a noble. I like thinking that there is a fixed story arc with multiple windows out onto it.

Death to Darkspawn

This game has always hit every trigger for me… in a good way. I love dark ominous demon filled landscapes where I am the only person with the tools to dispatch them. I love the political infighting and backstabbing and the identification of a truly wicked person that I can focus my anger and rage towards. But I also like that apart from that central story arc, nothing is really certain and the game doesn’t judge you much for dabbling in the grey areas. It is an absolute feat that this game manages to make me NOT side with the mage haters. Given my feelings towards finger wigglers, it would make sense that I would want to help the Templars eradicate the “Mage Threat”, but instead each and every play through I cannot bring myself to go against the Circle Mages. Maybe it is because I like the character of Wynne too much, or maybe they just manage to create a narrative that makes me actually care about magic users.

Granted personally I greatly prefer the side of the Apostates, and generally their cause is one that I can get behind whole heartedly. I am a huge fan of Morrigan, but I have found her character to be extremely polarizing even among my close friends. She is dark and brutal and abrasive… but I always enjoy listening to her quips. One of the things I am doing this time around that I have not in previous plays is varying my group composition based on what I know my intended action will be. Generally speaking if you make Morrigan happy…. you won’t make Alistair and Leliana happy for example. So I hedge my bets and end up simply not bringing the person that I know I will end up pissing off. It is a strange line to walk but at this point I have some duplication of most of the roles I might need. There are certain characters that I just absolutely cannot stand… I am looking at you Zevran. Though this time around I am finding myself softening to that character, especially after seeing him in Dragon Age II.

Slowly Progressing

I am taking my sweet time moving through the game. At this point I am just shy of 20 hours spent and have saved the Circle of Mages as well as Redcliffe Castle. I am however trying really hard to do every single side quest in a given area. This means that while I can just blow through Lothering… I am trying to do all of the little side missions which end up dragging out that area considerably longer than you might think. In a way I am treating this as though it were my last time playing Dragon Age ever. I realize that is likely not going to be the case, but I guess I am trying to make every choice count since I will ultimately be importing this game into Awakenings and Dragon Age II before finally importing the entire mess into Dragon Age Inquisition next month. On this play through I am more acutely aware that I am building a world around me, a series of consequences that lead to other consequences later down the line.

This is a strangely different feeling than when you do the same process in the Mass Effect series. There you are living the legacy of one person, your version of Shepard… and it is a direct lineage from game to game. The choices you make on one game, are effect the relationships you have in the next game because you were the person that made them both times. Here you are setting up a conflict that spans multiple generations, and while you are creating ripples it is somewhat uncertain how the final events will play out. It is also playing through a game knowing the beginning and the ending but having the steps between be rather fluid and changing. This will make my fifth play through of Dragon Age Origin since release, and I am still finding little details that I don’t remember from previous plays. That and the fact that I am not bored with the game, really are a testament to just how good the writing is.

Sneaking into Denerim

Right now I am tempted to save my game and then make a run at getting to Denerim before completing any other areas. I would really like to resolve the whole Urn of Sacred Ashes business before moving too much further in the storyline. I have also never actually gone to Denerim this early in the storyline before. I have no clue what the rammifications of doing that are, but I already have several quest chains that take me there. So I think that might be the order for tonight, to create a good clearly labeled save game so I can roll back if I am not happy with the consequences started by my actions. That is one of the things that is interesting about Dragon Age is just how unforgiving it is when it comes to your choices. It is super easy to close off a quest chain to you by picking the wrong answer… and there will never be another way to get that option back. In some of the later Bioware games they have given us the ability to escape out of a dialog tree, but this being a fairly early one has really strictly binding choices. As such it is making me super careful about what I end up choosing.

If it has been awhile since you last played Dragon Age then I highly suggest you dust off your copy and give it a proper play again. I am currently playing the “Ultimate” edition that comes preloaded with all of the DLC… and there was quite a lot of it. I’ve found this game plays significantly better through Origin than it does through Steam, as anytime I have tried to play through Steam I have issues with it not recognizing my DLC as being “genuine” and the official Bioware answer to this is to hack the save game file to turn off the protection bit. I would rather just play the game without doing all of that so I am using Origin and overall the experience is not too horrible. I have to say that Origin as a whole has gotten considerably better since its launch, and right now the only problem I really have with it… is that it is not steam. I still to some extent resent having to have a separate launcher just for Bioware games but the experience is worth it so for the time being I just deal with the frustration. Thankfully Ubisoft is taking steps to move towards better integration with steam so that the entire process will be transparent to the users. Unfortunately with the rather public falling out between EA and Valve… I doubt that will actually ever happen. In any case… I am having a blast with Dragon Age and look forward to completing it.

#DragonAge

Outland

October 5, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 25

Last night we recorded yet another episode of our weekly podcast AggroChat. This week we were missing Rae, but had Ashgar, Kodra and Tam to join me to talk about stuff and things. Of the four of us, three of us have almost spontaneously started replaying Dragon Age: Origins. In truth Ashgar started it and then Tam and I decided it was a pretty excellent idea to follow suit as we all realized we didn’t really have a good save to feed into the upcoming title Dragon Age: Inquisition. As such we have been lost in that title and remembering just how amazing it really is. We gush about about the writing behind the title and some of our favorite and least favorite characters. We try not to give many spoilers since Kodra has yet to make it terribly far in the game, so should be safe to listen to for complete Dragon Age nubs and pros alike.

We meander our way through a couple of indie games, namely Crypt of the Necrodancer that Kodra has been playing, and Outland the awesome metroidvania that I am reviewing as part of my Steampowered Sunday. Ashgar hooked me up with a copy originally with the intent of playing this co-op… but it seems like the latency for co-op play is still absolutely atrocious. So instead I played it all by my lonesome this morning… we at least as lonesome as you can be while streaming it to the internet. Finally we talk about Final Fantasy XIV and the odd sense of compartmentalism in that game. How you can progress among multiple vectors without the need to really mess with the others. Also we walk about how much we are looking forward to the as of yet completely announced 3.0 expansion, which is rumored to have as much content as the original 2.0 release had.

Two other really interesting things happened during the episode. For starters we announced that we were now part of TGEN The Gaming and Entertainment Network of podcasts. Quite honestly I am a bit humbled to be included with such illustrious podcasts as Battle Bards, Beyond Bossfights, Cat Context, Contains Moderate Peril, Couch Podtatoes, Massive Failure and Roleplay Domain. I am also quite humbled to be the first podcast to officially be launching the network, since we record on Saturday nights and launch Sunday, we are the first show sporting the new network bumper. Additionally we talk about the upcoming Extra Life gaming marathon and our team. Right now you can check out Ashgar, Kodra and Myself on the donor pages and our progress… and then tune in Oct 25th to the Alliance of Awesome hitbox team to watch the streamers. Being our first year I set a very low team goal of $200 and so far we have raised just shy of $600 dollars in pledges. Really looking forward to the event, and I hope you join us.

Outland

For a few weeks now my friend Ashgar has been talking about this particular metroidvania with some interesting twists. Last weekend shortly after recording the Steampowered Sunday for Mercenary Kings he hooked me up with a copy on steam, suggesting we might play it for this Sunday. Apparently there is some really cool co-operative play in the game, but at the time of writing this it is apparently completely broken in that the latency makes it absolutely unplayable. I can see how any matter of latency would be a problem, as there are several places where you have a very slim window to time a jump or an attack. Since the co-op was out of the picture, I opted to still play the game but do so solo… or at least as solo as you can be while streaming. At face value it is a really artistically slanted metroidvania game. It follows the artistic style to some extent of the current crop of mostly silhouetted figures against a colorful background. This almost always makes a game feel far more detailed than it actually is, and I tend to enjoy this style of art.

You play the role of the ancestor of a great warrior who tamed the twin sisters of light and dark to save creation. To be truthful while well done the narrative doesn’t seem to matter that much other than add a bit of flavor. You wander through the levels collecting coins and rare pieces of treasure and sometimes unlocking special abilities. The twist on the traditional Metroidvania genre however comes in the fact that over time you can harness the power of the Light Spirit and the Dark Spirit and use these to bypass certain obstacles. The Light is represented by blue, and the Dark by red and while in the same color as an obstacle you can pass directly through it. You can also use your color to active switches and platforms allowing you to traverse the levels. You are rationed these abilities slowly and I didn’t get the second color until I had defeated the first boss. Some of the later puzzles require you to switch colors midair to take advantage of a platform that activates when you land on it with a specific color. This is facilitated by hitting the right shoulder button on your controller. This definitely feels like the sort of game that is greatly improved with a controller, so I did not even attempt to pay attention to the equivalent keyboard controls for things.

Epic Boss Fights

At the end of the first level you have to fight a giant golem that is blocking your way. The scale of the fight is extremely impressive and makes the game feel much larger than it actually is. The camera zooms in and out based on how large the chamber you are in happens to be, and this gives a more dynamic feel to the gameplay. The boss mechanic was rather simple but extremely effective in that you had to avoid a ground slam and then climb the giant itself while it was temporarily drained of its power to attack and exposed weak spot. As the fight got on there were more details that had to be avoided, like a rain of red and blue bullets that gives the game almost a bullet hell feel to it. I had to stand in the blue beams to avoid taking damage from the red beams, and I am imagining that in later encounters you will have to shift back and forth between red and blue to soak specific abilities while flipping to the opposite to be able to damage your target. While you can soak beams of the same color… mobs of that color can still damage you, and you can only damage them when flipped to the alternate polarity.

The game is constantly compared to the fabled bullet hell shooter by Treasure called Ikaruga in that it has similar soak/polarity mechanics. However any many ways it reminds me of the gameplay of Silhouette Mirage and earlier title with the same basic mechanic by Treasure. Similar to Outland it was a side scroller and you had a dual polarity of absorption and repelling based on which direction you pointed your attacks. You can check out my entire hour and a half long play session this morning in the embedded Hitbox video. I have to say I dig the game so far and want to play more of it. I just felt like I needed to wrap up this mornings session so I could get my blog post out, however I played significantly longer than most Steampowered Sunday mornings… so that should tell you something. Right now the game is under $10 on steam, and more than worth that price. I would have paid at least $20 for it to be honest, had someone not ever so graciously gifted it to me. If you like the Metroidvania genre and especially like ones with interesting mechanics like Guacamelee you should check this out.

#Outland #AggroChat

Death of a Genre

October 4, 2014 by Belghast

Downfall of a Game

One of the problems within the MMO community is that we seem to view each release as a zero sum game. As such when something new comes out, it threatened to chip away at the player base of whatever game we happen to love and are currently playing. When that game falters and begins to fail, with this point of view it becomes extremely hard not to take pleasure in that downfall. The problem is this is an extremely toxic and dysfunctional outlook, and ultimately is what has lead to the current climate in MMOs. For years companies have been chasing an illusive dream of trying to create another World of Warcraft.

This was an inherently flawed vision because really… “mmo gamers” are a rather small niche in the market, and most folks who play World of Warcraft are not actually “mmo gamers”. If you take a look at the size of the market before World of Warcraft, you saw a handful of games with sub-million subscriber numbers. Before the launch of the first expansion World of Warcraft had boomed to be an over 6 million subscriber game. This was not the conversion of all of these other MMO gamers, but instead the conversion of fans of the existing Warcraft franchise into the MMO genre. The thing is… these new gamers are there for a myriad of reasons, but none of them easily translate into a new franchise.

So as these new games launch they are essentially fighting over the same piece of pie over and over. All you have to do is look at my immediate circle of friends. A large chunk of them stuck with World of Warcraft, and it would likely take an apocalypse or the servers shutting down to pry them from it. Another group has wandered away from the game each and every time something new and shiny showed up on the horizon. Very few of these players stick around in any game for longer than three months, and more often they play their free month and then return to whatever the status quo was before the new launch. I watched this pattern play out for both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, and the games industry is finally realizing that this is going to happen for every single new game that releases.

Indictment of the Trend

The cancelling of Titan has been a far more contentious issue in the blogosphere than I expected. At this point my point of view is that this is Blizzard admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players. While there will always be a core group of players in World of Warcraft just like there is still a core group of players in Everquest, Everquest II, and Dark Age of Camelot… that core group continues to shrink as folks either “grow out” of World of Warcraft as they find it no longer suits their interests, or simply run out of the copious amounts of free time it requires as they get that job, family, whatever. I think they have done some really simple calculus here and determined that there simply is not enough of a pool of players to make a brand new MMO from Blizzard successful.

With World of Warcraft they have a decade long buy in from a large number of gamers. They have literal years of memories and hard to acquire items to keep them chained to the game. With a brand new IP, they are starting from scratch in the same position as all of these games that have floundered have been in. Blizzard brand name recognition just isn’t enough to guarantee success, so I feel like it was a pure business decision that it just did not make sense to further dilute their subscription player base by trying to launch a new MMO. As much as I love the clean subscription model, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to launch a new game with it. After watching what happened to Wildstar and to a somewhat lesser extent Elder Scrolls Online, the market does not want any more subscription games. So by launching a new MMO they would be converting at least a portion of their subscriber base of easy month to month money to far more dicey and less predictable free to play money.

No Joy Watching Wildstar

I find it impossible to find joy in the unraveling of Wildstar that I see before me. I am not playing the game, so I am in essence part of the problem. For whatever reason it was an accumulation of all of the things my BC era self said they wanted in a video game. The problem is we gamers are notoriously horrible at trying to decide what we want. “We” said we wanted a hardcore game like Everquest and a return to forced grouping… then when we got Vanguard no one actually wanted to play that. We said we wanted a hard core PVP game like Dark Age of Camelot… and then when we got Warhammer Online no one actually wanted to play that either. So I find it no suprise that when we said we wanted a return to the golden says of World of Warcraft raiding… no one actually wanted that either when we got Wildstar. The truth is we have no clue at all what we want until we actually see it and experience it.

The problem is that the MMO design ethic has been so wrapped up in trying to target what the public is asking for, that it has stagnated into a mire of “wow like features”. A week or so ago there were a series of posts taking point and counterpoint on whether or not WoW has ruined MMOs. In a way I have to say yes, but not through anything that they did on purpose. World of Warcraft has been this juggernaut that everyone else is forced to content with whether or not they actually wanted to. It is a gold standard that every new game is judged by. So you either have games that try and out feature it like Rift, or out lore it like Star Wars the Old Republic… but each and every new release is at least in someway a response to the success that World of Warcraft was. Without that outlier of success we probably would see a much more healthy MMO ecosystem… albeit a ridiculously smaller one.

Death of a Genre

So I cannot take joy in watching Wildstar, or Elder Scrolls Online or any other MMO falter right now, because I see it as all being part of the same shared ecosystem. When one of these games fails, it is in essence taking a chunk of players out of the pool that will likely never return. So many of my friends have simply just checked out of online gaming for one reason or another, but the core thread among them all is they are just tired of the volatility. The choice is either return to World of Warcraft and make due with the status quo, or jump from game to game to game getting a months worth of enjoyment at a time before the ultimate crash. None of this sounds like a healthy ecosystem, and all of this is what is driving triple A studios away from the notion of even trying to do an MMO.

If you think about it right now… there is nothing really on the horizon for gamers to latch onto. There are a few boutique titles like Pathfinder or Camelot Unchained… that are super focused on a specific niche and that may or may not be at least partially vaporware, unlikely to actually launch with all of the features they are touting. Then you have a constant spin of Korean titles as they have their own MMO renaissance that we went through several years ago. However After the launch of ESO and Wildstar… there is really no big western titles on the immediate horizon. Everquest Next is the closest thing but realistically it is still several years from release. The other games that are coming out are more akin to Destiny than they are to a traditional MMO. So I can’t blame World of Warcraft for this current situation, because in truth it is our flighty nature that has salted the fields in our wake. We are the reason why there is no fertile ground for a new MMO to take purchase. It is because of all of this… that I can find no pleasure in watching yet another game fail.