October 2015 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Warriors and Bounty Hunters

October 7, 2015 by Belghast

A Day Off

Last week as you might be able to tell from the posts I made during it… was extremely stressful. As a result I ended up taking off yesterday as a sort of “mental health day”. It was absolutely glorious, because essentially I sat around playing video games and watching Netflix. I won’t talk about the Netflix viewing because I will save that for Saturday, but I will talk about the games I played. More than anything yesterday was a day devoted to Star Wars the Old Republic. I have this mad mission to somehow finish the rest of the class storyline that I have not completed before the launch of Fallen Empire at the end of this month. I know that seems a bit mad, but I am enjoying myself especially since we are in this length lag period in Final Fantasy XIV content. Over the weekend I finished up Smuggler, and yesterday I completed Sith Warrior. At this point I have completed Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Trooper, Smuggler and Sith Warrior… and I think quite possibly the Warrior is the most satisfying conclusion yet. The most interesting thing to me is how the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior class stories end up making a nice set of bookends.

The Jedi Knight storyline is deeply impersonal. It always felt less about your own exploits and more about you essentially saving the galaxy. What I mean is that the Jedi Knight storyline, IS the story of the game. Every major story arc event that trickles down into other characters seems to stem from a conflict brewing for the Knights. The end result is that it feels like you are more a slave of events and you doggedly follow the main story arc as the Republic war progresses. Sith Warrior on the other hand is a completely different experience. It is more personal, and more about your ambitions and your power as you ascend from an apprentice all of the way through essentially the Dark Council. I don’t want to go into a ton of detail but the end result is a much more satisfying experience. Every obstacle in your path you personally get to remove by your own hand. Last night I mentioned to a friend that the Sith Warrior storyline felt more “Sithy” than the Jedi felt “Jedi” but I guess in the grand scheme of things that isn’t true. The Sith are by nature about thinking inwards, and the Jedi are about thinking outwards… and the Jedi storyline being detached from more personal vendetta… I guess IS what a Jedi should be.

The interesting part about playing a Sith is that you know someone is always about to betray you. So you go into the equation knowing that none of your allies are really ever your “true” allies. As the story progresses they really find ways of driving this point home, and in many ways you have to deal with that fact or at least find ways to get past it. In the end however every decision made leads you towards an epic conclusion allowing you to take out all of your frustrations. The Sith Warrior story may be my favorite so far, just because there are so many epic moments where I absolutely feel like this avatar of wrath blazing a path through my enemies. I started off trying to play a mostly Light Side Sith… but as the events started reaching their conclusion I found myself succumbing to the darkside and began taking those “red” options to dispatch those who betrayed me. In truth I ended the story line in a fairly “grey” state, which I guess is fitting. In truth if I were a force user I would more than likely be a renegade that tried to live between the two factions, because it feels like the true path of the force is to find a balance between the two extremes. To draw on the dark side and your rage when you need to defeat an enemy, but draw on the calm and peace when you need to solve issues. My friend Tam mentioned something and it is absolutely true… making a “good” choice Sith side feels more rewarding because people are shocked and amazed that you did not force choke them into submission… whereas everyone expects it of you on the Jedi side.

Hunting Prey

After finishing off the Sith Warrior I decided to flip over and start working on my Bounty Hunter that was just now getting to Dromund Kaas. I figured I wanted a bit of a break from the “Sith” thing and having just finished playing a Smuggler I did not really relish playing a cunning character quite yet. This leaves the Bounty Hunter, which has always felt a little odd to play. As a Trooper the abilities felt like they made more sense, so I will have to sort through the bar and try and figure out what abilities I actually should be using. I did not want to re-roll my character so I am playing Powertech, but planning on going one of the non-tank options. At some point I am going to play a commando, which seems like it is far more satisfying to have a bit damned cannon than two pistols of the bounty hunter equivalent. I think I will be fairly happy as a bounty hunter as soon as I can get my hands on some armor that LOOKS like a Bounty Hunter. If I could run around in a color variant “Boba Fett” Mandalorian armor… I would be super happy to play this character. Until that happens however… I think I will ultimately be rather disappointed.

That is honestly one of my big complaints replaying content is that SWTOR should have made the getting of your class armor more of an important thing as you level. There is an iconic look for each of the classes, and as you travel through the content you should start adding pieces of moddable armor to allow players to complete that “fantasy”. Smugglers do a fair job of getting a few pieces of Han Solo-esc armor, and Jedi Knights eventually get a set of armor that feels like the armor+robe appearance you often see. However the other classes… seem to be a little less determined. Jedi Consular is the story of having to suffer through a whole series of stupid looking armor sets, never quite finding one that really fits the class. Bounty hunter so far, feels like I got my armor by scavenging bits off of my kills… and I guess in a way that fits. All I really want is to look like Boba Fett… is that too much to ask? I need to sort through my various cartel market options and see if I can find something I will be happy with. If my characters look good I enjoy playing them regardless of how they perform, and my fear is that I won’t really get into this class until I can make him “not look stupid”.

Beginner’s Guide Experience

October 6, 2015 by Belghast

The Hype

I am breaking my own tradition and writing this blog post… while things are still fresh in my head instead of waiting until tomorrow morning… or today if you are reading this. Every now and then there is an immediate buzz about a game title, and this has lead me to be leery of this factor. Sometimes the games are absolutely amazing, and other times they are pure hype. So when a brand new “art as game” title pops on the radar I get a little suspicious. This is not normally the type of fare I go into, because I like things that explode and things to whack with big heavy swords. That said when the word of The Beginner’s Guide started to circulate I got a bit curious. When my friend finished playing it yesterday and wrote a lengthy blog post called pretentious I thought it might be worth checking out. Especially knowing that it is a word he especially dislikes. Granted when I sat down to watch a Let’s Play of the game, I had not read that blog post… or pretty much any other “review” of the game, other than the fact that there was simply a lot of buzz about it all of the sudden. So I went to YouTube and ultimately found a video by someone I have never seen before playing the game.

What I am left after watching the hour and a half long video… is some stuff I am not even sure if I can adequately put into words. Hell to be truthful I am not really sure some of the emotions I am feeling actually even have proper names. There are going to be spoilers involved with this post, so if you intend to play the game I highly suggest you stop reading. I came into this play through like a blank slate, not really knowing what to expect other than the fact that this game came from the creator of The Stanley Parable which we had talked about a few times on AggroChat but I have never actually played myself. After watching what is essentially an act of interactive fiction, I think you get out of it what you take into it. Much like “The Box” from Dune, and the cave on Dagobah in Empire Strikes Back… it ultimately becomes a reflection of your own mental state. Seeing the events unfold in front of me, I guess makes me realize how potentially broken I am inside. I am sure someone could see the experience and immediately think “wtf is this crap”, but I guess I was in the right mindset for it to seep into my core.

The Terror

The narrator of the game is none other than the author, one Davey Wreden. He tells a tale of a fellow game creator that he met at a Game Jam, and the unusual series of games that unfolded between the years of 2008 and 2011. I have no idea who this Coda is or even at this point if it is a person that exists. There are moments during the game play that you follow Davey down this course, descending into the deep interpreted meanings of these games. Each game has a supposed point, and tells us a little bit about the Author. As we reach the halfway point, there is a slow growing dread because I am scared that I know where this tale ends. Each game seems progressively more alienating and more isolating… like someone retreating into the dark cocoon of depression. My terror at times was that we would find out at the end of this tale, that Coda had killed himself… and all that we were left with were this series of games that Davey was trying desperately to unravel. That however is not at all what happens… but instead in 2011 after Davey attempted to show the games to other people… he simply broke off contact completely. The final game is a series of frustrating puzzles that are either unwinnable or at the very least antagonistically set against the player. After cheating your way through them with the help of the narrator you see a series of messages essentially telling Davey to never contact Coda again.

This game we are playing is supposedly a last ditch effort to get back on Codas good graces, to apologize publicly. The thing is… I don’t think there is a Coda. I think this game is the tale of how one Davey Wreden reacted and internalized his struggle with his own fame brought on through the quirky success of Stanley Parable. I think the game as a whole is essentially him working through is own issues, like he supposedly thought Coda was. The problem there is… am I essentially doing the same thing he supposedly was by projecting myself and my own thought processes into the whole experience? The truth is… we cannot help but do this. There is no clinical distance that can keep us from doing this. We imprint on the things we experience and we have to decode them through the only language we know… which is that of our own experiences. So if you have never felt any of this alienation or crippling self doubt… then I feel like you could probably just let a game like this wash over you and not effect you in any way. Unfortunately that is not the case for me.

The Stupor

Part of the reason why I am writing this while the experience is fresh, is that I hope to maybe be more honest about the experience. I am by nature a creative person, and everything I do at least contains a part of me in it. While I don’t blog in my own name, and have chosen to adopt a pen name of Belghast… every post I write contains certain nuggets of myself that are more honest than I really mean them to be. I am constantly beset with this desire to be liked and loved, and to find validation in the favor of others. I find myself craving attention, but the problem is when I actually get it… I don’t have a clue what to do with it. This blog and the constant forward momentum, comes from a place that I don’t really understand. Before blogging I was one of those people that would post all too long posts on forums. Before that I was a devout IRC junkie and even managed to meet my wife that way. I have this need to connect to people, even though I don’t really know how to.

I think in part this is why I find myself constantly trying to start new things, like segments on my blog, or lets plays… only to abandon them when I get bored with them a few weeks to months later. I am always dissatisfied with nearly everything I do, and nothing ever quite works the way I envision it working. I’d love to say I don’t care about statistics and readership… but there are days I think to myself… why am I doing any of this if no one is actually reading? Then the very next day I sit down and the keyboard and keep writing. I guess I do this because I have to, and I am not sure exactly how NOT to do it. My world is arranged in a series of circles within circles, and the closer you get in the more I let people see of me. However deep down at the center there is this place that no one gets to go, where I keep the parts of me that I think no one would like if they knew existed. So there were levels in this game that maybe struck a deeper cord with me than others. There was a level that as the player backed away from a stage, these walls kept slamming down in front of them… until at some point you simply couldn’t see the light of the stage any more. This felt almost scarily familiar, and like all of those times that I needed to get away because I simply could not stand any more human stimuli in my life. There have been so many times I have eaten my lunch in the silence of my car, just because I needed not to exist around others for the thirty minutes to an hour that it afforded me.

Final Thoughts

This post is ending to be far more personal than I intended it to be, but in truth the experience brought on by the game is more personal than I had expected it to be. On AggroChat we have talked a lot about how games are generally bad at emotions, but this game… has so many. For some this experience might be liberating, but for me… it was something else. It has left me wallowing in my own faults and short comings. Ultimately I saw myself in both Davey and Coda during this tale, because I think we are all a little bit of both of them. Since finishing the Lets Play I have gone out to steam and purchased the game, and it will likely sit in my library unplayed. I am not sure if I can really handle going through this experience a second time. More than anything I wanted to purchase the game as a thank you for the experience, because even though I am a little off balance right now… it is a rare experience that a game can cause that effect on anyone so when it does… it is well worth supporting. Now I am going to spend the rest of my evening trying to get the thoughts out of my head that the game so firmly implanted there.

Day of Destiny

October 5, 2015 by Belghast

So Much Fireteam

Pause in loading gave a rare screenshot opportunity.

It seems my recent Destiny addiction has rekindled the fires in a handful of my friends. As a result over the weekend I spent most of it in a Fireteam with Damai attempting to help level our friend Carthuun represented above by his PSN name Saldonas. Saturday night my wife was freezing, so I got drafted into going to bed the moment our podcast broke up to provide “warmth”. As a result I had to spend a good chunk of Sunday morning editing the podcast, creating the YouTube version, blogging about it and broadcasting it to the world. After that I of course has to throw out my own Aggronaut post… which means that I was fairly late getting started on playing anything. By the time I logged into Destiny Damai and Carth had a fireteam going and were working on the last few missions of the original storyline. From there we pushed through The Dark Below and House of Wolves expansion content as a group, which honestly had been a bullet point that I wanted to get through at some point. The problem is with so much new and exciting stuff to do and gear to get… I never quite got around to making the time for it. However with Carth leveling for the first time… all of the items you get through those storyline elements were actually relevant. I finally st0pped grouping around 7pm when my wife got back home, and I went off to fix dinner for the two of us. At that point I think Carthuun was sitting around the level 25 mark which is not too shabby for a day of grouping.

The big thing that I sorted was how to use PS4 party chat comfortably. I have a Logitech G430 sitting relatively unused because after swapping to using a Blue Yeti microphone on my machine upstairs, I swapped to simply using a pair of Behringer HPS3000 studio headphones. The sound output was better and they are nowhere near as heavy as the Logitech pair because they don’t need an attached boom mic. Ages ago I ordered a few pairs of adapters that take a standard headset and converts it down to the single jack style input that modern phones and the PS4 controller uses. Yesterday I took the time to dig out my G430 and one of those adapters and after some fiddling and piping all of the game audio through the headset… I finally arrived at something that was fairly comfortable to use. I don’t seem to mind the fact that playstation chat is mono audio… when I have the rest of the game audio coming through my headphones as well. Additionally having something other than my dedicated PS4 headset… makes them far more comfortable to use for several hours on end. Also this finally allows me to crank up the game audio without frustrating my wife, who has on occasion asked me to turn it down when a really crazy moment happens and the audio is booming. Now that it is sorted I feel more comfortable using a headset with the console, and am also more likely to just hang out in party chat for awhile. I am wondering what the upper bound on a party group is, and if you can have more than just the three fire team members.

Swapping Companions

When I got downstairs last night to prepare for the season finale of Fear the Walking Dead, I of course booted up and started playing Star Wars the Old Republic. Now that I have finished with my smuggler, I am picking up where I left off on my Sith Warrior. Through the course of the evening I worked my way through the rest of the Nar Shadda storyline and just now starting on Tattooine. I have to say it is very nice to finally have all four buffs after beating one of each base class. I am a bit saddened however that I am finally reaching the stage of the game where it feels like having a healer is a very useful thing. This means relegating Vette to crafting and spending the majority of my time with Malavai Quinn. In the grand scheme of things I have no problem with Malavai, because he seems like the honorable Imperial Soldier type. The problem being that I just like running around with Vette, because I always loved Mission Vao, and honestly for me… she was always Mission 2.0 rather than her own character. Instead she will farm up companion gifts… that I will ultimately give to her later… which seems a little strange?

Basically if I have a shot in hell of getting the special legacy unlock thing for beating all of the stories, that means I have to play through the rest of Sith Warrior, Imperial Agent, Bounty Hunter, and Sith Inquisitor all before the end of the month. I am seriously doubting I will be able to do it, but…. that said if I ONLY focus on the story missions I might be able to make it. When you only focus on the class story the early planets at least go extremely quickly and you stay at a decent level. I might need to spend some cartel coins however to unlock more mod gear to throw on my characters. The plan I arrived at on my smuggler of upgrading my armor every other planet seemed to work pretty well and I would really like to do that with my Sith characters. The problem being the game is not extremely forthcoming with armor options. There are sets available for pretty much any level range on the Cartel Market, but each of them cost a fair amount of coin. So I guess we shall see what ultimately happens. I guess if I got desperate I could make them wear the free moddable flight suits they give you, but that is not exactly a great option. I might use the imperial pilot suit for Malavai Quinn however.

YouTube AggroChat

The funny thing about AggroChat is that in the grand scheme of things… we don’t actually get that many listeners… or at least not enough listeners to go through the trouble of some of the things that I do. For example… our YouTube videos maybe get a dozen views a piece. That said I like doing them, and I am not sure why. I guess they are just far easier to link to someone when they ask you about the show than linking the actual podcast page. Also I like embedding a youtube video far more than I liked embedding the Libsyn player. I feel like I could probably do better about advertising our show. I tend to do it in a rather haphazard fashion, because I feel rushed to get each show out the door and ready. By the time I finish editing, uploading, and doing all the other things… I reach this point where I just want to be done with it for another week. It is not necessarily the most enjoyable period of my week. I love making the show, but the tedium that comes from doing all the fiddly bits to make it happen… gets annoying. So I reach this point where I just want to hurl it out into the world and hope someone finds it interesting. The hardest part is it feels like we don’t have a lot of feedback. Podcast listeners tend to listen silently, and while we have a few people that comment here and there… you don’t get the sort of commentary that you do when you have a blog. There are weeks however like this week, where I feel like we got into some extremely interesting conversations, and it is well worth listening. I love the folks I podcast with, because ultimately they are the folks that I hang out with on a daily basis.

Week in Gaming 10/4/2015

October 4, 2015 by Belghast

Moving in Slow Motion

This morning I am having one of those days that feels like I am fighting against quicksand, to be able to accomplish anything. It is the fitting end of the week I have had where so many issues have come up, that I had to deal with. This week was one where my boss was out of the office for most of it, which meant I got to be the boss. This is a concept that sounds fun on paper, but after having done it for years… I promise it is not nearly as entertaining as it sounds. Being the boss means you are the one that has to deal with isssues when they arrise, even when the issues are of a magnitude that makes you just want to pull the covers over your head and forget the world exists. As such my gaming was a bit odd, because I needed to vent my frustrations in the form of shooting aliens. There were many nights this week where I intended to do something else, but ended up playing Destiny all night. As such there really are not a lot of individual games to talk about but here goes nothing!

Star Wars the Old Republic

As of last night during the AggroChat podcast I have officially completed the original Smuggler storyline, and with it… I have a lot of thoughts about what I experienced. When Kodra played through this content I can remember him being extremely disappointed… but maybe I am just more simple minded, but I absolutely loved the ending. It is everything I expected underworld dealings would be… romance, betrayal, and getting revenge on the people who betrayed you. It wraps up everything a good outlaw story should, and like the best ones… ends up with you on the side of justice. Maybe I just grew up with too many westerns, but it felt like it should to me. My character wasn’t necessarily a white hat, but he definitely was not a black hat… and at the same time I got to do enough things that felt like decisions I would make, to keep me hooked on the storyline. Now that I have wrapped this one up, I think I am going to work up faction on Risha and see what that romance option looks like. After that I think I am putting the Smuggler to bed for awhile, no pun intended… and moving on to something else.

While I doubt I will manage to play through the four imperial storylines before the launch of Fallen Empire, I think I am going to make a good college try to do so. It would be cool to go into Fallen Empire with the special perk for having defeated all eight storylines. Last night I swapped over and started working on my Sith Warrior which is the next closest to moving forward. I have to say once I stopped doing side quests and only focused on the character story the entire experience became far more enjoyable. Not that the side quests are not awesome… but when you have done them multiple times… they begin to drag on. As I play my Sith Warrior I will probably keep doing side quests because most of them on the Imperial side I have not actually seen. I wonder how many if any duplicate between the two factions. In any case I am still very much enjoying my SWTOR vacation and I think it has been a great way to spend the lag time between 3.0 and the 3.1 patch in Final Fantasy XIV.

Wildstar

I have to say the disappointment of the week has been the free to play launch of Wildstar. I guess I say “disappointment” in quotes because really… any time you do a major launch there are significant issues expected. Wildstar relaunch has not been smooth by any measure of the word. In theory from what I have heard if you can manage to get things are fine… but that was not my personal experience. I fought through the queues twice this week, and each time moments after actually getting into the game… I saw a message scroll across my screen warning me that the servers would be coming down in 15 minutes. What does not help I guess is the fact that I am entirely focused on the Entity server, which happens to be the most populated. At some point I will get some play time in, but at the very least I was able to go fiddle with my inventory and clear out my mail box. I also gathered up all of my new items, and I am almost tier 6 on the Cosmic Points system. I have premium sub time through next May so I am sure during that time I will play it quite a bit.

Destiny

Not really sure what I can say about Destiny that I did not already cover this week in my blog post about it. That said I am still having a blast playing, and several of my friends have also rekindled their interests in the game. I’ve been getting snagged into a fire time quite often and as a result we are doing quite a few strikes to help my friend Damai get geared up. Also this week Carthuun joined the game, so I have a feeling we will be doing some lower level content to help him catch up. To some extent I have been working on leveling my Warlock other than doing my daily bounties, and enjoying replaying through the content. This game is just so zen for me right now… nothing quite relaxes me like headshotting all manner of aliens, and in the strikes I have run I seem to get the lions share of the kills because of my focus. I am absolutely in love with the Sunbreaker because seriously…. every game needs the ability to throw flaming hammers at your opponents. I actually even spent some time running crucible skirmishes and enjoyed myself. I didn’t lead the kill count for my team but I did manage to place second, and I didn’t have the negative experience some of my other friends have reported as a result. I imagine that the community for Destiny PVP can be pretty horrible, I am just lucky that I have not seen that yet.

As far as today… I am probably going to spend a lot more of my time playing Destiny as while waiting editing the podcast this morning I managed to knock out most of the objectives. After I wrap those up I will probably migrate downstairs and spend the rest of the day SWTORing on the sofa while watching something on the television. Destiny has for whatever reason been the perfect blowing off some steam game for me this week. My hope is that as I continue to gain light and gear up it will stay just as enjoyable. I have yet to really try any of the true “endgame” content like the Raids and the Heroic Strikes, but I have to say if I have enough friends playing… it might be interesting. I am still just blown away by how much better the game feels to me. Once again if you played the game at launch and found it lacking… I highly suggest you patch up your client and at least give the game a spin. The changes trickle down through the entire game, and you should be able to see if you like the new feel before purchasing Taken King. Thankfully there is the option to ONLY buy Taken King without having to repurchase the entire game… but those options are only available for digital copies of the game. Not sure if you can upgrade a former physical copy or not. The Destiny theme song however is playing in the background as I type this… so I am going to go answer its call. Hopefully we all have an awesome week to come.