October 2015 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Week in Gaming 10/11/2015

October 11, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Week

I am sitting here this morning with my writing buddy beside me. I’ve shown pictures of Allie in the past as she sits on the blanket that I have folded beside my keyboard, and once again this morning she is there purring quietly. She really is the mascot of the week I have had, because honestly other than a bit of an emotional roller coaster surrounding The Beginner’s Guide, I would say that the week as a whole has been one of contentment. I managed to accomplish quite a bit in my quest to push through all of the stories I had not seen in SWTOR, as well as made small bits of progress in Destiny. At work things seem to be largely calmed down, or at least to a manageable madness. More than anything I think it was taking Tuesday off that helped reorient my world to a much better state of mind.

Star Wars the Old Republic

This week was an insanely productive one when it came to Star Wars the Old Republic. As of last Saturday night during the podcast I managed to wrap up the Smuggler storyline, and picked up work on the Sith Warrior. With Tuesday essentially being a day where I did nothing but play SWTOR, I managed to finish up the Sith Warrior. I’ve talked about this already but I have to say at the time the Sith Warrior was one of the most gratifying experiences when it comes to giving you the control to settle all of your vendettas in one ending. Every person that you want to seek your revenge on is laid out in such a way as that you can, and the final events are so damned satisfying. Having played both Sith Warrior and Jedi Guardian… I have to say I am a bigger fan of the Warrior experience namely because it is deeply personal… and not simply the overarching events of the game as a whole.

From there I picked up on my Bounty Hunter, largely because I needed a palate cleanser from playing a force user… and having just wrapped up Smuggler I was not quite ready for another cunning class. I fully expected to not be terribly into the Bounty Hunter experience, largely because I didn’t really enjoy Trooper that much. However I am coming to realize most of my problems with the trooper was the fact that it was my third class within a few months of the launch of games to push to 50… and at that point I was simply bored to tears of all the repeated planet story content. The Bounty Hunter is quite literally the most reasonable person on the imperial side. The game gives you the ability to play the consummate business man, and that is absolutely the path I took. I killed no one for free, and kept my collateral damage to a minimum. As a result people were constantly surprised that no, I was not in fact going to kill them. Generally speaking I almost always took the option to freeze them in carbonite and return them to the client fully intact. I am guessing that quite honestly, Bounty Hunter is probably going to go down as my favorite game play experience in SWTOR.

Destiny

My progression in Destiny has slowed down considerably, with the bulk of my forward movement coming from Armsday packages and any time I level up a faction like the Gunsmith or the Cryptarch. While I am playing the game of equipping my best gear before I decrypt any engrams, I am still ending up with low level blues most of the time that I turn into crafting materials. I’ve developed the nasty habit of buying shaders, emblems, and ships…. and as a result I am generally running low on Glimmer most of the time. I really need to try using some of those glimmer items that increase the drop rates while I work on bounties. My latest toy that I am enjoying playing with is the scout rifle above that came from a package when I leveled up Dead Orbit faction. I had not really played with a scout rifle much since coming back and had forgotten that it was essentially a high payload sniper rifle. Realistically I am to the point where if I want to progress I need to be running Heroic Strikes, and I simply have not messed with getting friends together yet in order to do that. Still having a lot of fun, but trying to keep it super casual so I don’t burn myself out and get bored with it.

Battlefront

Another game this week that I have spent some time with is Star Wars Battlefront. I pre-ordered this game through PlayStation network the moment it was announced because I am super nostalgic about the lineage of Star Wars shooters. This weekend they allowed players to download and play for free in the beta, and I have to say my feelings about it are extremely mixed. The game does an excellent job of giving you the fantasy fulfillment of playing a soldier in the Star Wars universe. Past that however… I think it suffers from the fact that I have been playing so much Destiny lately. The game handles significantly worse in the moment to moment gameplay that Destiny does. The guns feel worse, the movement feels worse, the cover mechanics… feel worse. I think if I spent enough time I could get used to it and even come to like it, but right now I am struggling with the feeling of “I would rather just play destiny”.

The Beginner’s Guide

I’ve said everything I could really ever want to say in my deeply personal post on the game from last week. Last night on AggroChat I to some extent reprised those thoughts in a much more condensed manner. The take away for me is really this. If you are not in an extremely stable position in your life, and if you are at all struggling with your own emotions… don’t play this game. Essentially there are two possible reactions… either you are going to think it is complete bullshit and it won’t effect you in any way. Or it is going to act as a mirror to show you all of your fears and anxieties about yourself. It quite literally took me a few days to recover from the experience of just watching a play through of this game, and not actually playing it myself. I am not unhappy that I went through it, but it is also not the sort of experience that I would suggest lightly to anyone. I know that sounds weird and arcane… but this game does strange things to you. This is honestly the closest thing I have seen to a real life “The Ring”, in that this game will ultimately leave you slightly changed as a result… and not always in a good way.

Media Consumption 10/10/2015

October 10, 2015 by Belghast

Netflix Binge Time

This week things felt like they were starting to get back to normal. Since last week was so freaking crazy I ended up taking Tuesday off and just hanging out around the house. That meant it was the perfect time to binge watch something on Netflix. Unlike the previous week there have been multiple times that I simply hung out downstairs with the laptop and television, and as such have some shows to talk about. Of note, if anyone has something they suggest I watch feel free and chime in. I am always looking for something interesting, but the caveat is it must be available either through Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime streaming. I know iZombie has started back up, and I have the episodes recording to my DVR but am largely waiting on my wife to watch them since she also was able to get into the previous season.

Dark Matter – Season 1

Dark Matter is one of those shows that folks had been suggesting to me for some time now, but I never really got around to watching it. When I first checked to see if the show was streamable somewhere, I was only able to watch like the last five episodes through Hulu. Now the entire series is on Netflix and it seemed like the perfect time to watch it. I can’t think of this show without also comparing it to another SyFy channel show Killjoys. There are moments where you wonder if this is set in the same universe, because they seem extremely similar. Distopic future where corporations control pretty much everything, and folks are forced to carve out their lives on the fringe of society. The twist here is that the crew woke from out of cryosleep only to find that they have all had their memories erased. During the first season we spend a lot of time trying to sort out who they are and what exactly they were doing, and at the same time blending together as a team.

So far my two favorite characters are “Five” aka the hacker stowaway girl, and the Android…. that they sadly just keep calling Android. I am hoping in season two they finally give her a name, because I like the character and actor playing her. If you are a fan of Lost Girl it is the same actor that played the Fae Doctor on that show, and sometimes love interest of the succubus title character. What is awesome is that obviously there is some malfunction with the Android as she is starting to develop emotions, which makes the experience very “Data” like. As far as the hacker… I knew she looked familiar and it finally hit me. She is the little girl that played Alessa in the Silent Hill movie, and I IMDB’d to confirm it. There are moments where the show gives me very Cowboy Bebop vibe to it, as they wander around space looking for jobs to pull…. so you know they can eat and have fuel. All we need now is a genetically modified Corgi.

Arrow – Season 3

Also showing up on Netflix is season 3 of Arrow, which I somehow completely missed arriving until last night. While playing SWTOR I binged my way through about half of the season and plan on trying to finish it up today. So far I am liking it, but I am not super keen on some of the events that have transpired. There is a lot of this season that just feels like it is set up material for future events. I feel like I also really need to watch Flash after this to help piece together some of the parts that are missing when ONLY watching this season. The cross over episode felt a bit odd, because I am assuming it started with Flash. Also the lengthy set up for Atom has been interesting but a little contrived. I am also not super sure what is going on with the character of Felicity this season, she seems to be shifting personalities a lot. I am largely cool with Laurel taking the mantle of Black Canary as well. The problem with the DC universe is that I only really know a shallow version of it that tends to be very Batman-centric.

Growing up I was a Marvel kid, and the only comics I really delved into were the Batman and Green Lantern universes… other than Superfriends that is. Marvel always felt like the universe of gritty anti-heroes and that was the sort of thing I thought was cool. DC however tended to have much more detailed story arcs, and they obviously did a far better job of licensing their properties than Marvel since we have the ability to see all of these cross overs. Obviously the whole handing Cupid over to Suicide Squad bit… is going to end up biting them in the ass. I am hoping as the season goes on we see more of the Suicide Squad, especially as this season and season four probably really need to set up for the Suicide Squad movie, seeing as that is not a part of the DC universe that most people know anything about. Well that is other than Harly Quinn… at this point everyone knows and loves Harly Quinn. Looking forward to finishing the season today, as I continued to work my way through the Bounty Hunter storyline.

Fear The Walking Dead – Season Finale

The funny thing about Fear the Walking Dead is how the episode finale had two vastly different effects on me and my wife. Up until this point in the season she had been watching the episodes with me, and it seemed like maybe she was almost getting into the show. Whereas honestly I was bored and kept waiting for the inevitable other shoe to fall, because having been a long time walking dead watcher… you knew the bad stuff was coming eventually. Finally in this episode everything starts to go wrong, and this is the point at which my wife completely loses interest. It seems like she is fine with a world where people have to sort out how to survive, but not so much in a world where they are constantly being chased by the dead. Daniel still rises from this episode as my favorite character, namely the only one who is truly prepared to exist in this world. The only problem there is he takes what is a bad situation and makes it even worse by letting loose the first horde.

In earlier episodes we find that they were using a stadium as a shelter, much like they did in Katrina with the super dome. Something goes wrong and people start turning, and the military is unable to sort out who is living and who is dead and just ends up chaining the entire contents in essentially assuring that all two thousand plus people end up as zombies. So when Daniel turns them lose to use them to attack the military compounds, it gives us a hint and maybe HOW the hordes form. Maybe they get started when zombies finally break out of places they have been pinned up in and keep wandering together because they don’t exactly have free will. Which makes you wonder… where exactly did the mega horde near Alexandria come from? The big thing I wanted from Fear the Walking Dead, was more insight into WHY the world fell to hell and that seems to be something that was not on the menu. Largely I am disappointed in the show, and the lack of Talking Dead after it was a problem for me. Talking Dead essentially played the role of having someone to talk about the show with, in a strange way. I am hoping when Season Two comes around they will do a “Talking Fear” show or something like that. In any case this week we get the return of the real Walking Dead show so in the meantime I am pretty amped for that since experiencing the watered down version.

MMOs Worth Playing: The Secret World

October 15, 2015October 9, 2015 by Belghast

The Games Pusher

I need a new mmo in my life

— Z (@zerena_hoofs) October 7, 2015

One of my friends coined the term “Games Pusher” to represent the force I have when it comes to getting people to try a game. She said she called me a drug dealer in the nicest possible way, but the term has stuck in my head. It is true, I get super excited about games and enjoy trying to introduce people to ones they are not currently playing. The thing is… originally I thought this was just me vying to get more people to join me in the game I am currently playing. However I feel like there are dozens of MMOs that are really good and that people should play all of them at least for a bit. So we zoom to earlier this week when a friend of mine… one @zerena_hoofs made the innocuous comment that “I need a new mmo in my life”. At which point I ended up flooding her with suggestions. I jokingly said that I could keep it up for hours… and in truth I really could. While I generally suck at sticking with “columns” I always have the desire to spawn them. This time the idea is to do a short run of posts each Friday talking about the awesome things relating to one MMO that is “worth playing”. Since it is October, I thought I would start things off with the most Halloweeny of all MMOs… The Secret World.

The Plot

The game is set essentially in an alternate reality version of our own world, and with that comes a lot of pop culture references. When your character is awoken to your own latent abilities by a mysterious bee flying into your mouth while you are sleeping, you are recruited by one of three different secret organizations. It seems while the world “slept” there has been a secret cold war going on between three ancient powers: The Knights Templar, The Illuminati and a mysterious and relatively unknown organization called Dragon. Each organization has its own agendas… for the Templar based in London it tends to be to keep the order. For the Illuminati based in New York it is all about hoarding knowledge and making a profit. For Dragon based on Seoul it is about sowing the seeds of chaos throughout the world. This secret back and forth between these clandestine entities would have remained like this for continued centuries were it not for the fact that something is changing. A darkness is bubbling up from the bowels of the earth in the form of “The Filth” which is this black ichor that infects anyone who touches it with a sort of deliberate madness. Now each organization is trying to get to the bottom of what is going on, while at the same time protecting their own assets and vying for supremacy over the other orders.

The game relies upon urban legends and myths to weave a tapestry of strange happenings throughout the world. One moment you are investigating a small town in New England overrun by Lovecraftian horrors and zombies, and the next you might be uncovering a lost city in the Egyptian desert forgotten to time and filled with its own unknown dangers. All the while you are trying to sort out what is happening to the world and what you and your chosen order can do to fix it. What makes all of this work is the fact that this game has some of the best writing I have seen in any game, MMO or not. The quests are interesting and actually require some pretty damned devious puzzle to solve. There was one quest in Egypt that I remember vividly that actually provided data that you had to decode that was included in a number of real world encoding mechanisms. Only after decrypting all of them could you get the clue needed to solve the riddle. To make life easier on you, the game provides an in game browser and Funcom operates a number of “fake” websites for people and corporations in game that contain clues that are needed to solve certain quests.

The Mechanics

The game claims to not have levels or classes but in truth… neither of these are absolutely correct. What the game offers is a free form character creation system, but that freedom is actually fairly dangerous. You can in theory build a character that is so screwed up that you cannot actually function in the game. The game provides a few specific templates for each of the professions and earning all of the abilities for this template gets you a nifty costume. These also serve as relatively functional builds for you to work towards, that will hopefully prevent the problems of absolute freedom. The challenge here is the fact that there is no “respec” or skills reset system. Doing things in the world gains you ability points and skill points, each with their own uses. Ability points are spent learning new abilities in several different weapon based trees, and Skill points are used to level your ability to equip higher tiers of gear. In its most basic form a “build” is a combination of up to seven active abilities on your hotbar, and up to seven passive abilities that hopefully interact with the actives you chose. Later in the game they introduced new weapons that also take up space, but those won’t unlock until you have completed a quest.

The game itself feels almost like a card building game like Magic the Gathering or the Guild Wars 1 skill system… where you are trying to build a “deck” of abilities that interact in interesting ways together. For example you might have a passive that does something really interesting when you push an enemy into a “hindered” state, and then you would want to use that with abilities on your hotbar that trigger that hindered state. What makes this extremely interesting is the fact that you can swap your abilities at any time out in the world, and when we were running dungeons we often found ourselves swapping around what specifically we were using to better synergize with what other players were bringing to the table. The biggest problem is that the game takes a lot of careful research to play well. One of our challenges was the fact that we each had a specific idea of what we wanted our character to be… and some of those options simply were not viable when you got to the hardest content. I have not played the game in some time, but one of the challenges was that there were certain required abilities and not every weapon tree could provide those.

The Style

One of the best aspects of the game for me personally, were the awesome cosmetic gear options. I am a huge fan of transmogging or whatever a given game calls it, and if my character looks awesome I feel awesome about playing it. One of the coolest things that The Secret World has going for it, is that essentially all visible gear is cosmetic by nature, and you can swap between looks freely while you are out in the field. All items you pick up go into a dressing room and you can swap bits whenever you feel like it. The actually “gear” that gives you statistics are your weapons and a number of talismans… necklaces, bracelets, rings etc… that are other than your weapon non-visible gear. To make weapons cosmetic as well, they give you the ability to create a weapon mold that can chance the appearance of an item. Combined this gives players extreme freedom in expressing their characters… but sadly that means that the majority of players are going to be women running around with as little clothing on as humanly possible. The above screenshot is one of my favorites, because my friend Tam and I essentially both arrived at super similar looks while doing a mission completely accidentally. We jokingly dubbed this our Blues Brothers pose.

Another great thing about the game is that it is truly a mega server experience. There are “servers” but they really don’t actually matter. All of the characters span all of the servers, and you can group freely with anyone regardless of faction. This means that there is never a situation where two friends playing this game won’t be able to play together. The only negative is that Cabals themselves aka Guilds… don’t span multiple factions. I’ve spent most of my time playing for the Templar, but I know just as many diehard Illuminati and Dragon players. The only problem is with the Cabals not spanning factions, it made it mildly frustrating for the folks who didn’t want to play Templar, since the guild was in that faction. The workaround is that the game supports social channels and we used them prolifically when we were playing actively. Another really cool thing about the game is that it has an extremely devoted and active role-playing population. If you wander around London you are going to find pockets of players acting out their characters, and that adds a certain depth to the environment.

Expansion

The growth of the game comes in the form of comic book like “Issues” where a batch of content is released with a common theme. To date there have been twelve issues spanning from July 2012 to August 2015, each with their own themes and usually their own comic book cover to go along with it.

Issue 1: Carter Unleashed
Issue 2: Digging Deeper
Issue 3: The Cat God
Issue 4: Big Trouble in the Big Apple
Issue 5: The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn
Issue 6: Last Train to Cairo
Issue 7: A Dream to Kill
Issue 8: The Venetian Agenda
Sidestories: Further Analysis
Issue 9: The Black Signal
Sidestories: Love & Loathing
Sidestories: The Last Pagan
Issue 10: Nightmares in the Dream Palace
Issue 11: Reaping the Wind
Issue 12: To the Dark Tower Below

Monetization for this game comes primarily in the form of purchasing these issues, and in the various cosmetic items that you can purchase only through the store. They have a number of really cool themed outfits that you can pick up, and for subscribers they give you a unique batch of items each month. I purchased a lifetime subscription when the game was released that converted when the game went free to play to one that gives me access to all the subscription content, and a stipend of cash shop currency each month to spend. While we call this game “Free to Play” it is in truth “Buy to Play” meaning you have to purchase the base game in order to do anything. From there to get these new stand alone issues you have to purchase them one by one. Right now on Steam the game is running $29.99 but quite often it goes on sale for as little as $10. Similarly there is an ultimate version available for $59.99 that includes all of the content as well as a custom costume and some other consumables. I fully expect that as we get closer to Halloween we will see both of these versions get discounted heavily. The long and short is.. this is one of the most enjoyable questing experiences I have ever had in any game. The story content is amazingly well written and the quests themselves are extremely inventive. That said occasionally the solutions are insanely difficult to figure out. Thankfully there are plenty of awesome guide sides out there like Unfair.co for if you find yourself stuck. This is one of those games that I think everyone should try, just be willing to devote some effort into sorting out just what kind of character you want to build. Once you get into the game world however… it becomes extremely infectious… just like the Filth.

Sithmas Time Is Here

October 8, 2015 by Belghast

Merry Sithmas

It has been so surreal since the launch of the Force Awakens toy line. Everywhere I go the world seems to be teeming with Star Wars enthusiasm and with that… comes a bunch of priced to own kitch. While we have yet to reach anything close to the hype bubble we experienced before the release of Phantom Menace, it is still extremely noticeable. A few weeks ago I wrote about re-watching the prequels and how I had wondered if maybe I was just too harsh on them at the time. After re-watching I decided that no… they really were horrible films. The problem is that for years I let them have control over my enjoyment of the Star Wars universe as a whole, and that frustrates me. If you were to completely ignore their existence, then honestly the rest of the Universe is still pretty great. Sure there was some strange stuff on the fridges of the Expanded Universe, but I cannot discount just how phenomenal the Old Republic Era has been. I remember picking up one of the first Tales of the Jedi comics and being completely blown away at this concept of a universe set essentially 4000 years before the time of Skywalker. Then as that universe blossomed over the course of sever comic series, and then came to life in the form of the Knights of the Old Republic game, I was absolutely hooked. Now that I am back roaming around SWTOR, I am realizing I care about this universe far more than I ever realized.

When the game mentions Freedon Nadd or Exar Kun… I remember who they are and what they did in this worlds history. I remember awesome characters like Nomi Sunrider from the comics, or Jolee Bindo from KOTOR. When I see a reference to Casus Fett or Mandalore the Ultimate in game… I know who those characters are and can remember reading about them in the comics. The thing is… it is not just the Old Republic era that is amazing. Essentially each time another creative force has been given free reign in the fertile Star Wars universe… really awesome things have happened. For example while the official Prequels are pretty horrible, the Clone Wars cartoon series is amazing. No one can deny just how awesome Ahsoka Tano as is a character, and just how much more interesting the interaction is between her and Anakin… than pretty much ANYTHING in the Prequels. Now if we scan forward we have Star Wars Rebels… also being allowed free reign in the universe, this time within the constraints of the more well known modern era. Similar to Shadows of the Empire it is weaving its way in and out of events we already know, and doing a great job of making us care about this new cast of characters.

Excitement Grows

Which leads me to realize… the times I have really loved Star Wars lately is when someone has been able to wriggle out front under the grasp of George Lucas and run freely creating their own plot lines and characters. Essentially this is exactly what is happening with Force Awakens… it is all the goodness of the Star Wars universe with none of the harmful effects that Lucas has forced upon it in recent years. In fact Lucas has been more than a little bit salty when talking about Episode VII and the fact that for the most part Disney ignored his plans to create a movie focused around teenagers. What is happening is that Disney has become the most powerful marketing juggernaut on the planet, and at the core of their methodology is protecting the bottom line, and with it the long term profitability of the franchises they own. I am sure there is some computer program somewhere that knows precisely what fans will like, and just how far they are willing to allow the themes to be stretched. While at some point down the line this might be a bad thing for innovation… I sincerely doubt they will allow anything even vaguely close to midichlorians to ever happen again.

The only frustration I have with the Disney approach however is that so much of the Universe became ruled “non-canon”. There were characters like Mara Jade and Grand Admiral Thrawn that were absolutely amazing… in fact I have action figures for both of them hanging on my wall as well as Clone Emperor Palpatine, Dark Jedi Luke, and Jedi Leia. Those stories meant a lot to me, and while there were parts of the Expanded Universe that were completely unfollowable… most of it made a certain logical sense at least at one time. The problem being like most fan centered fiction, it iterated on itself causing the characters to become more distorted and unbelievably heroic as time went on. It is my hope that they will figure out how to work some of the best characters into the new tales. There has been rumors that Mara Jade will be introduced as an Inquisitor instead of the Emperors Hand for example, which is fine with me… so long as she is introduced at all. Basically I find myself in a strange place, of having hope for Star Wars… when for so many years I lacked it almost entirely. I imagine as we get closer to the December release of the movie, the cross promotions and Star Wars branded soup cans will start to get annoying. However in the meantime… I am reveling in Sithmas.

The Professional

As of last night I have finished Balmorra and Nar Shadda on the Bounty Hunter and just went through the “intermission” that generally occurs there. I didn’t really expect to be all that into this storyline, because essentially it was one of the ones that I never intended to actually complete. While I enjoyed the Trooper storyline, the class itself was not that compelling to me. Largely I think this was the reason why I ultimately fell out of love with SWTOR after pushing three characters to the then level cap of 50. Bounty Hunter however feels completely different, and much more action packed. There are little things like rocket punch and the jet pack charge that make it feel more brutal… even if the attacks are essentially the same as my trooper vanguard. The funny thing about the storyline is just how much of myself I can pour into it. I am playing a very grey bounty hunter, who does not kill anyone for free. Also as the story goes on I am becoming a bit of a softy, and I am wondering exactly when that will bite me in the ass. Essentially it does not seem like a very “sith side” storyline so far other than the fact that essentially I am doing everything for the sake of payback… and for a girl.

I imagine over the next few days I will rip through the content quickly and before the end of the weekend start work on the last of two classes. Not sure what I will be doing next, if it will be the Inquisitor and its constant shock treatment… or if I will go for the Imperial Agent. As it stands now… I am starting to lean towards Agent. Whatever the case playing all of these stories is making me fall in love with the Bioware writing all over again. It is also making me look forward to Fallen Empire and its more story driven focus. When you ONLY play the class quests, SWTOR becomes a much better game because it has a nice clean story arc that does not get muddied by repeating the same planetary quests over and over again. At some point I will go back and play some of the quests I missed Sith side, but for the time being I want to push through the classes because each one feels like it adds another piece of a puzzle to the central story arc of this game world. This is also making me want to go back and get KOTOR 2 working, and actually attempt to beat it this time. It feels like there is a chunk of storyline that I am missing there, and with it several characters that I really only know by name. Essentially I am saying by all of this… that once again I am proud to be a Star Wars junkie.