March 2015 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Cleansing Lunari

March 15, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #48 – Ori and the Sad Sads

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

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

AggroChat Dot Com

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

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

Cleansing Lunari

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

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

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

The Tower Guardan

March 14, 2015 by Belghast

There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia. I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

Ignorance is Bliss

I’ve told bits and pieces of my time in Dark Age of Camleot in the past, but today I thought I would delve further into what was ultimately the second MMO I played. I remember being in the beta process and thinking that the game seemed so much more advanced than Everquest that I had been used to. However I did not really play the game seriously until the launch of Gaheris the co-operative server. Most people think fondly upon Dark Age of Camelot of the realm versus realm combat, for me however it was all of the interesting PVE things that I did with my friends. At that time we had an extremely small and close knit guild called the Whispers of Legend. In fact the only real remnant of that guild is a posting on Zam’s for an item I submitted under our guild name. One of the best things about Gaheris was that we could literally play any class in the game together, and explore any realm freely.

Our motley group consisted of a Dwarf Warrior as the main tank, me on my Celt Champion as dps and off tank, a Lurikeen Enchanter providing dps and crowd control and a Celt Bard being dual boxed by our warrior providing all of the healing and song twisting. Much later on I picked up a second account and ran my very own bard, but much of the content that we experienced we did as a trio, with my friend Shadoes playing both the role of main tank and main healer. This game was also the very first appearance of me using the name Belghast, so even if I could never actually return to playing it… it will always hold a special place in my heart. There were so many times we ventured someplace we should not have been only to end up trying to fight our way back to our tombstones, more than anything to prove to ourselves that we could do it. It was a different time in online gaming, when more often than not we were playing with people we were able to lay our physical hands on in the real world. On average the three of us would get home from work, and log directly into Dark Age of Camelot for that nights adventure.

The Tower Guardian

The adventure that most stands out in my mind was our finding of the Tower Guardian. When the Shrouded Isles expansion hit we spent a good deal of our time wandering around its wilderness looking for interesting things. With that expansion a number of named encounters were introduced and spread through out the world. So it became our mission to try and find all of them… and farm them for every last bit of loot. In fact the item that I talked about submitting… I am pretty sure came from one of these such trips. One night while wandering the Dales of Devwy we stumbled upon this giant clockwork golem looking creature that towered over even the trees. I think at the time it conned purple to our group, but we decided to give it a shot anyways considering the area around it was difficult but easily huntable. While it took several attempts we managed to down it and got some really nice loot. So we proceeded to farm it, each time getting better at the process until we had it down to a science.

A few days later we happened to be in a local game shop, that had several folks that played Dark Age of Camelot far more seriously than we did. We were talking about our fun farming the golem, and the shop keeper had a somewhat stunned look on his face. I turns out that apparently this encounter was designed for a raid to take it down, and while it took upwards of thirty minutes for us to actually defeat it… we managed to do it with four characters, two of which were being played by the same person. While games have evolved to have hard requirements on what you need to bring to be successful, I have never forgot the lessons that we learned playing this game. That while you might not have the optimal grouping, you can sometimes persevere through sheer force of will. There have been many times I’ve tried to do things in an unorthodox way, but no game has rewarded it quite as much as Dark Age of Camelot did.

Sometimes We Failed

I won’t lie and say that things always worked out in our favor. In fact I have quite a number of screenshots like one above, with us dead in fairly horrible places. However we always seemed to manage to pick ourselves back up and keep trying long after others had given up. This trip down memory lane would not be complete without a photo of Shard our Dwarven Warrior main tank. The thing I find so odd about this game is that our experiences and our memories are so vastly different from most players that wax nostalgic about it. This was not a pvp game for me, but instead a game that let me explore freely every corner of three vastly different and exception realms. This was the game that really cemented in my mind how poor of a design decision that hard faction walls really were. Dark Age of Camelot went from being a lackluster experience, to one of the most memorable with the simple addition of the co-operative play server.

Do you have any memorable stories of games that you and your friends maybe played in a less than suggested style? I would be curious to hear some of your stories of times you entered something vastly unprepared but managed to pull out a victory nonetheless. One of my fondest memories from World of Warcraft for example was the time we took nothing but hunters into Upper Blackrock Spire and timed our aimed shots on the same target, just watching it explode before our eyes. It was like we were a walking firing squad, slowly mowing down our targets or burning it down while one of us kited the pack. Sometimes unconventional play can be extremely rewarding. For years I’ve found myself getting caught up in trying to do things the right way for the sake of speed and efficiency. Sometimes however you just have to break the rules and play games in a manner no one in their right mind ever planned. I freely admit that I still wish there wa such a thing as a melee hunter.

Raiding Drama

March 13, 2015 by Belghast

Eleven Sads out of Ten

Yesterday I ended up running home over lunch to fiddle with a server here at the house that was no longer responding. While here I decided to boot up Ori and the Blind Forest and play for a bit while I scarfed down my lunch. I had been prepared slightly for this intro by my friends and by watching the video from e3. In truth I still was not quite prepared. If you do not cry through this intro, or at least get really damned close to crying… you likely have no soul. We have joked a bit on the podcast that the video game industry seems to only really know how to do rage fueled revenge and soul crushing depressing sad as far as an available emotional range. This game is most definitely in the crushing sads territory, and I would give it eleven sads out of ten as the title goes. Quite honestly the best comparison I have is the introduction to the Disney film Up. It manages to be so touching and adorable… and at the same time so unfortunately depressing.

The positive is however that once the game proper starts and you manage to get through the introduction… the tone does get quite a bit more hopeful. The game itself is this wonderfully animation quality experience. At its core the game is very much a metroidvania, and it is quite clear early on which obstacles you can pass and which you cannot. Additionally the game has some interesting combat in that you have a light spark that follows you around and ends up flinging fireball like things that lock onto your target. So this is vastly different from the traditional mechanism of slashing things with a weapon or firing directly at your enemies. The game right now is $20 on steam, and as little as I have played of it… I am already hooked. If you like beautiful games with excellent narration… of the metroidvania genre… I highly suggest you check it out. I will more than likely be streaming some of this over the weekend and playing a good deal more of it.

Raiding Drama

We had a bit of an incident happen last night, and I have to say it was primly surreal to experience it. Over the years I have been the guild leader of most of the guilds I have been part of, and even when I was not… I still was treated as such by most of the membership. However for the past year in both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV.. I am not leading anything. I have taken up the role of cruise director and recruitment… but have not been doing any of the heavy lifting that comes with the crown. Apparently over the last several months I have finally gotten used to that role. One of our problems over the course of this expansion has been a lack of critical lack of available healers. For the most part we have struggled through, but are starting to get to content where we need the intended balance of dps, tanks and healing. As such our raid leader opted to bench a few people of our dps to try and get our ratios more in line with what they should be. Unfortunately it seems that at least one of our players took offense to this.

During the middle of the raid one of the players chain logged in all of his characters and de-guilded them one after another. I have to give him credit for saying a rather nice farewell message when he got to the last one… but all of this felt a bit over dramatic. Normally I would have been tracking that player down, and trying to talk them off the ledge. Last night however… I was content to watch the events play out in front of me, as I realized… this was no longer my problem. World of Warcraft is a game that comes with more than its fair share of drama, especially when it comes to raiding. However I am not the guild leader any longer, nor am I responsible for raid leading at all… and I can simply sit back and watch the events unfold in front of me without feeling any guilt in the situation. I have to say that was a pretty awesome feeling when I finally realized that I was fine with someone else dealing with things. It sucks when anyone leave the guild, but I have to accept that people are going to ultimately do whatever the hell they want to do. I have a feeling the person in question will cool off and come back, but if he doesn’t it is not really that big of a deal anyways.

Thogar Down

On the positive side of things, pairing the raid down to a more reasonable ratio of healers to dps… did manage to improve our performance. Before last night we had really only spent a single night of attempts on Operator Thogar in Blackrock Foundry. For those unfamiliar this is the “train” fight and it takes place on a series of four tracks. During the fight a dance happens of moving back and forth between the different lanes to avoid the oncoming trains that buzz through. If the player is hit by a train it seems to reduce their health by a specific percentage, leaving the player on the edge of death… but not quite oneshotting them. Previously our big issue was that in two places during the fight… the entire raid needs to split into two groups. The problem here is there is a fairly hefty tank swap mechanic so that the tanks need to time this swap in such a way so that the fresh tank is taunting Thogar as they are moving to the new position. The margin here is super slim, and both sides have to burn through their adds extremely quickly so that we can join back up and let the then free second tank taunt back the boss before the damage gets to great.

Last night we managed to do all these things right, and very quickly got to the second one of these swaps. Within another try or so we managed to push through the fight and down Thogar. One of the things that made last night extremely difficult was the fact that we essentially had no battle rez. Our druid healer was out for the night, as was our Deathknight DPS… meaning our only option was to have the bear tank stance dance and someone get a rez off before dying to the boss. Needless to say we largely did this without a rez, and I have to say I am pretty damned proud of how fast the progress happened. We spent the rest of the night working on the Heart of the Mountain event, and I feel like we need to sift through the logs and see exactly what was going wrong there. It is one of those events where there are dozens of mechanics happening at the same time… and while we could consistently push into phase two without issue… we struggled to get elementalists down. I have a feeling that we are going to have to split into teams and each focus on a finite number of mechanics. Drama aside it felt like a really good night of raiding.

Thriving Community

March 12, 2015 by Belghast

Oklahoma Conventions

Pax South was my first real gaming convention, and I have to say I had an absolute blast there. Don’t get me wrong I had been to a few conventions in the past, even worked a few comic book conventions when I worked at a comic book shop, but they were nothing like Pax. This got me thinking about what I might be missing out on here locally. It turns out we have a not insignificant number of conventions that happen within a short driving distance. In fact at the tail end of this month a pretty big retro gaming convention is happening in the Oklahoma City area. As you can see from the handy little button thing on the right it is happening March 28th and 29th at the Oklahoma Expo Hall of the Oklahoma State Fair Park in Oklahoma City… Oklahoma. Yeah that was a lot of Oklahoma in a row, even as a lifer I thought it was a bit excessive.

Super! Bitcon is going on its second year, and seems to be a pretty cool place to go especially if you are into “retro” gaming… or as I like to call it “my childhood”. They have several well known guests on the docket like Smooth McGroove, Alpha Omega Sin, and Patrick Scott Patterson. They also apparently have a fairly large exhibitor hall with several local and regional companies showing off the games they have been working on, as well as a free play arcade and gaming museum. There is this #IamSuperBitcon thing from social media where folks talk about their experiences last year that is really interesting to watch as well. The absolute best part of all of this is that you get a two day pass for only $10 and for this… I thought it would be a sin for me to pass up going. Oklahoma City is only an hour and a half drive for me from Tulsa, so not a big deal at all. One of my new goals this year is to try and hit up as many of these smaller conventions as I can to tide me over until the next Pax. As we get closer to time I will talk about the Heartland Gaming Expo and the XPO games convention both in the Tulsa area. It just excites me that we have this thriving games culture seemingly in my own back yard.

Thriving Community

One of the topics that I have been mulling over in my head is why exactly we have manages to stay happy and engaged with Final Fantasy XIV for the better part of this last year. So often we pop into a MMO and last a few months only to flit off to another title a month later. At the same time I have been examining why I stayed in World of Warcraft for over seven years, and continue to return to it. I think the answer to Final Fantasy XIV is two fold. Firstly we returned to the game after a sequence of boom bust cycles in MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. I was personally looking for a place to “settle down” for awhile, and Final Fantasy XIV had been the only title that all of my friends seemed to leave “on good terms” with. So we set down roots, and I started getting involved in the Cactuar community as did the rest of my guild. This process was aided by the fact that we had nothing on the horizon to draw our attention away from the game. As such we have been able to play the game without the distraction of shiny new objects and their promises of a better gaming experience.

I think this lull in MMO releases has helped a lot of games that were stable get more so. When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV last July they were at I believe 2.5 million subscribers, and last week they announced that they had blossomed up to 4 million subscribers. That is a fairly significant growth over what is essentially two quarters, and I think that in part it has a lot to do with the fact that there is really nothing out there to pull attention away from it. Don’t get me wrong Warlords of Draenor happened, and I have been playing it… but that is only a draw to players who still have warmth in their hearts for the World of Warcraft franchise. I think the answer to why we have stayed is that we were given enough time to set down roots. We not only have friends in our free company, but are members of several active linkshells that give us access to raiding and grouping beyond our own numbers. This sort of environment is contagious and has made recruiting more members to the fold exceptionally easy. All of which builds upon itself giving me the piece the kept me coming back to World of Warcraft all of this time… a stable and thriving community. The awesome thing is… I can have my cake and eat it two, because at this point my community in World of Warcraft is vastly different than my community blooming here in Final Fantasy XIV.

The Botanist

I had every intention to come home and have a quiet night of powering through the early levels of botany. In fact that is precisely how my evening started, with me brute forcing the level 10 trees near Bentbranch in the Central Shroud. Right now I am working towards the level 10 quest, which will require 99 Crow Feathers. My goal is to be able to have 99 waiting and ready for when I ding 10 and can immediately turn in that quest and move on to the next sequence. However last night it was only a matter of moments before someone in guild needed something… and the adventurer inside me leapt at the chance to do something “not crafting”. My friend Arkenor needed a run of Haukke Manor, and another group needed a run of Copperbell and thankfully we had the right mix of people to make both happen. I tanked Haukke on my Paladin and another run when smoothly. I have said this before, but I keep having to say it over and over. I love how damned easy and rewarding it is to run lower level content with your friends.

Once the crafting thing was tossed aside I spent most of the rest of the night running content. We moved from Haukke into a random Expert Roulette picking up Cav to add to Ash, myself and Thalen. Once finished there I ran a few trials roulette and a hard roulette… and before I realized it was 9:30 and I was starting to get a bit tired. This is the way an evening can evaporate in Eorzea, with a bunch of chain events that make you wonder where the time went. So sadly I did not make much progress on Botanist, but I am feeling that Sunday I will have another “catch up on television” day downstairs on my laptop and push forward again. At some point I need to run a good deal more content however because I would really like to cap my poetics this week, and I have barely put a dent in them. If I keep running a few roulettes each day, I should be able to do it without much difficulty. The only monkey wrench in this plan is the fact that most of Saturday I will be out of town, leaving me only Sunday to really work on such things. In any case… I had a fun evening with my Free Company and have zero regrets of not making any flower picking progress.