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

Media Consumption 10/3/2015

October 3, 2015 by Belghast

Week of PS4

This week was pretty much the week of me intending to play other games… and then never quite getting off of my PS4 in time to actually do that. As a result I spent most of my time upstairs in my office with my chair turned to the side pointing at the television that runs my consoles. Also as a result I did not really watch any television other than last Sunday night, which means that portion of my usual media consumption was pretty scant. However that said I did watch a bunch of really interesting things on the Internets own television station… aka YouTube. As a result this episode of Media Consumption is largely going to focus on things I found interesting on YouTube.

Tommy Westphall Theory

So firstly I have to give a major shout out to the PBS Idea Channel for creating videos that are almost always thought provoking or at least makes me want to discuss whatever it is they are talking about with my friends. This week however they posted a video that quite literally blew my mind. Tiny fireworks went off followed by lots of mental pain… as I attempted to reorient myself to accept the notion that what they were saying could be real. They delved into this idea called the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, where essentially over four hundred different seemingly unrelated televisions shows… all occur in the same universe. To make things even stranger the suggestion is that this entire universe exists in the mind of one autistic boy named Tommy Westphall that appeared on Saint Elsewhere. If this sounds interesting then by all means watch the video and prepare to make mind explodey noises.

Ahoy – Nuclear Fruit Series

The problem with the internet is that things change regularly… and there is little to no way to track down what things previously were called. There is this great channel that is currently called Ahoy, but I cannot for the life of me remember what the original name was. Essentially it is a channel that does these awesome videos that explore video game concepts with amazing narration and artful two dimensional graphics. I first was made aware of the channel through the Brief History of Graphics series where they delve into computer games and explore the various eras and the graphical changes that came into play as part of them. There is also a really great series called Iconic Arms where they delve into the ubiquitous guns that we use in shooter games, and the origins of them… usually delving into the maker and the real world conflicts they were actually used in. Today however I am here to talk about their latest five part series called Nuclear Fruit, where they delve into our fascination with nuclear warfare and the games that were inspired by it. As of writing this there are only four parts available but the next part should arrive this coming week if they follow the standard schedule. If you look in this playlist the video appears to be available but just flagged to “private”.

Cool Ghosts – The Taken King: Does it Fix Destiny?

If for some reason you missed this yesterday, I am a really huge fan of this video. It does an excellent job of highlighting the things that felt wrong with Destiny Year One and the way many of those have been improved in Year Two. Yesterday I also went into my own reasons for why I think the game is in a much better state, but still the video is well worth watching. Matt Lees the guy who appears in the video makes absolutely brilliant videos, the problem being they are somewhat sporadic. My hope is that his new “Cool Ghosts” initiative where he collaborates with another friend will serve to be a fertile ground for new content. In the mean time we can always just re-watch his crowing achievements of the PS4 and Xbox One reveals.

Fear the Walking Dead

There is a huge part of me that is excited for this weeks Fear the Walking Dead… because it means this season is over and we can return to the normal Walking Dead television show. In all fairness I have to say last weeks episode had things finally starting to get interesting. From this point out… I am going to delve into a ton of spoilers and if you have not been watching this show you might just want to stop reading this sub section. We found out a bunch of stuff that does not bode well for the characters. I have a feeling that there is no way that they are getting out of tomorrows episode without at least losing one of the characters. Essentially the crazy old man… aka Daniel Salazar… aka the only person who has the survival instincts necessary to survive the undead apocalypse… has kidnapped the soldier that his daughter Ofelia is sweet on. Then he proceeds to do what so many fathers have wished they could do to the guys dating their daughters… slowly peels away his skin in a cruel torture ritual. The thing is… as horrible as this act is… it is quite literally the only way he was able to get him to spill the beans about operation Cobalt. This is apparently a planned execution of all of the civilians when they abandon the Los Angeles Basin. As we go into this weeks episode it is essentially the day these events are supposed to play out. That said it seems like most of the soldiers who would have been involved in said plan… got nommed on in an overrun hospital. So here we go… things are finally going to get crazy… because I am tired of this suburban living under armed guard phase of the show. Let the bodies hit the floor! It is seriously time to weed out some of the characters.

Destiny Got Better

October 2, 2015 by Belghast

Destiny Year One

For a few weeks now I have wanted to write a post to explain all of the things that I did not like about Destiny Year One, and talk a bit about how Year Two has just made things “better”. However it appears that Matt Lees, one of the lovely people behind the “abridged” e3 videos that I love so much… has done pretty much exactly that in video form. Seriously if you have not watched the abridged PS4 reveal video… stop what you are doing and watch it now because essentially that one video has given our group a whole slew of inside jokes for a few years. Despite Matt having done such a great job of this mission I wanted to do in the first place… I am going to attempt to do my own discussion. Destiny was one of those games that quite literally made me buy a console. Admittedly it was one of a long list of Playstation 4 games that I wanted to play, but it was finally the catalyst that got me to pick up a used unit and finally join the rest of my friends in owning that console. More important than that… it was the game that got me to shed my pc-gaming-hipster distaste of the thought of playing a shooter on the console. Prior to this game existing… playing a shooter without a mouse and keyboard was utter blasphemy in my household.

What we got however in Destiny Year One was this oddly disjointed and terribly uneven play experience. The single player missions were excellent, and in spite of dinklebot not having a personality… and never actually letting us in on the details that were happening in the universe, I found myself craving more of the game. The story is one of the big problems because so much of it was told through the collection of grimoire entries… that you could not even read in game. You had to trek out to the Bungie website, log in, and then you could find huge swaths of story-line for the events you just did in game. That design decision was confusing at best, and a laughable mistake at worst. Story issues aside… the moment to moment game-play was amazing… until you reached level 20. Then a completely different game started about item management and trying to maximize just how much “light” you had on your gear. This stat that simply did not exist before level 20 suddenly controlled not only how effective your gear was, but also what “level” your character was in game.

Grinding Light

Not A Year One Shot… my current state in the game

The problem with the post 20 game was that it introduced so many things that you simply had not seen before that point. For example post 20 gear could be upgraded, and in fact this is something you needed to do in order to unlock the true potential and maximum light value. With each incremental upgrade you added a few more points of light here or there and could increase your level. In order to upgrade items you had to essentially grind out the rare materials that you had been picking up incidentally on planets but not really knowing what to do with them. In fact the game gave you a way of turning in huge quantities of these materials… for quick faction and experience boosts, but gave no indication of why you might not want to do this. As such I went into the end game with limited resources, and had to spend hours scouring the various patrol zones trying to find enough spinmetal or iron ore to pay for the upgrade of my items to the next rank. This is the point where the game lost me, in that I had all of my gear needing to be upgraded but nowhere near enough materials to actually do this.

The other frustrating problem with the light system was the fact that you could get a potentially better item, but not be able to afford to use it. What I mean by that is you would get say a weapon with a higher starting light, but after several rounds of upgrading your current weapon had more total light. So you knew that if you upgraded you could get high light level and as a result higher physical level by using this new item… but in the meantime you would have to suffer the penalty of losing light in the process. This made gearing a frustrating mess, and in those early strikes one level difference meant the difference between being able to actively participate and feeling like you were dragging down the entire team. What added to this frustration was the fact that drops in general were pretty scarce. I could log in and run around collecting iron on Mars for a few hours, killing tons of things in the process and maybe just maybe see a couple of greens. As a result the end game just felt disconnected from the awesome game play experience that we had getting there.

Year Two

When Taken King got its announcement, I have to admit I was originally highly frustrated with the fact that there was no initial offering that did not also include the base game and its expansions. They have since changed that and you can pick up a digital copy for around $30 that does not include all of the additional stuff. However I have to say that I agree with the branding because Taken King essentially takes everything about the original game and fixes it. For those who will understand the analogy, this is the Diablo 3 2.0 patch for Destiny. Even if you do not buy Taken King, I highly suggest you patch back up Destiny and give it another shot. Start a new character and revel in just how much better the overall experience feels. I did just this, and within a few days it convinced me that I should go ahead and pick up the digital upgrade to Taken King. Firstly the loot scarcity is no longer an issue at all. I can play for a few minutes and I will have a stack of a dozen engrams that I need to decode on the tower. Similarly the engrams themselves are more truthful. If you get a blue engram, you will get at least a blue item. If you get a purple engram you will get at least a purple item. That said I have actually gotten a handful of purple items from blue engrams… which is insanely exciting when it happens.

As far as the light grind… it is essentially no more. Your light rating becomes something akin to a gear score in modern mmos. It is a number that is an average of the attack and defensive ratings of all of the gear you have equipped. Why this feels better is the fact that you can incrementally increase your rating, whittling down a few points a night giving you the feeling of constantly moving forward. As far as upgrading gear goes, I have never run into a problem where I do not have the resources needed to upgrade an item, even though they still require the materials gathered on planet. What has changed however is the fact that these nodes are far more plentiful. There was a point last night that I was on Venus and could see four different spirit bloom nodes from where I was standing. What makes this easier as well is that the Ghost is an actual item that can be upgraded. You collect “shells” that change the appearance and defense rating gained by your ghost, and as you upgrade it they often have perks like the ability to increase the amount of a given resource that you gain. When you bring up the ghost menu, that you would normally use to return to orbit… you get additional benefit now of the ghost scanning your surroundings and pointing out anything useful. This gets used quite a bit in the later missions to help you map out your surroundings or show things that are invisible.

What has helped me at least is the fact that it feels like I have a bunch of little things that I can be doing at any point. I am actually enjoying doing my bounties each day, and I just started working on my Gunsmith reputation. That one is pretty interesting in that each week you can purchase a series of weapons from the Gunsmith and “field test” them. Each weapon has different requirements to help it “gather information”. For example I did one last night that only gathered information by killing Vex Minotaurs, and another that only gained completion if I got double kills with a sniper rifle… which as far as I could tell just meant two kills in quick succession without reloading my clip. Once you have gained some reputation you are able to place “Armsday” orders, which apparently means that every Wednesday the Gunsmith will give you a rank appropriate weapon of the type you ordered. All of this and more gives me the feeling that there are simply a bunch of things that I can do to improve my character in small and meaningful ways without really feeling that I am grinding without purpose. I can quite literally lose entire nights playing this game right now, and last night I had every intent of logging in and playing for an hour… then going off to do something else. I ended up playing all night, because I kept finding one more thing that I wanted to accomplish. I’ve now actually started playing through the game again on a Warlock, for when I want a break from my Titan main. If you too were disillusioned with the original Destiny experience, I think you owe it to yourself to patch up the original game and give it another shot. Even without the expansion you are still going to be able to experience new encounters in the old patrol zones, and at least get a taste for what “The Taken” as a race feel like. If you are playing on the Playstation 4, hit me up with a friend request on Belghast my PSN account.

Alarms are Overpowered

October 1, 2015 by Belghast

I’m Late!

This blog post is going to be relatively short and sweet since I may or may not have forgotten to set the alarm last night. My life tends to revolve around rituals and when one of those rituals is interrupted I forget to do something. It is like I have committed entire segments of my life to muscle memory, but I can only actually do the things if I do them in the correct order. For some reason I decided in my infinite wisdom to go ahead and check the front door and make sure the cars are locked early in the evening. This is generally part of my whole “putting the house to bed” routine, and because I ran part of it… I never actually got to the part of the segment where I check the ferrets food and water and the cats water in the bathroom… and FINALLY just before crawling into bed set the alarm. It kinda sucks to be a slave to my own systems, and the problem is I am extremely highly functioning… until someone interrupts me when I am in the middle of one of them. Then like a remote control car that got knocked on its side I flail hopelessly for a few minutes until something finally helps me reorient my mental processes.

It does worry me at times that I will be sitting there lost in a process and be unable to shift gears quickly. Like if I am thinking about one thing, and need to conjure up the name of another person not connected to the thing I am thinking about. I am horrific with names in general, but in those moments I seriously cannot for the life of me figure out what to call this other person. There are social skills that I have figured out that smooth these moments, like how to effectively say hello to someone… while sounding sincere… at the same time attempting to pretend that you DO remember their name and you are just a casual person that doesn’t always say names. I think more than anything… I have some really bad indexing systems in my brain. I can see someone in the office and remember intimate details about their wife or kids or that they like this or that television show… but cannot for the life of me remember that name is associated with their face. I guess I have gotten used to the handles we all use in the virtual space that ARE extremely unique to the person, and often times adequately represent WHO they are, and as a result normal names just feel like an arbitrary system.

The Unlikely Patriot

Last night exited in two very distinct segments. Before my wife got home I spent that part of the evening playing Destiny and made my first attempts at raising my faction with the Gunsmith by testing weapons. Up until this point I had no clue how this worked, and I probably should have been doing this from the moment I could equip one of the weapons. However I failed miserably and am just now getting started. When my wife did get home we went out to eat and ran errands, and when I finally sat my butt down afterwards the evening became all about trying to make progress in Star Wars the Old Republic. At this point I have finished Hoth and Belsavis and am now starting my way into Voss. One of the things that I have enjoyed the most about the smuggler missions is that they make this weird overlapping pattern, where you end up revisiting places you have already been multiple times because the storyline leads you there. For example when we realized we needed to go to Voss, there was a problem… that it would take some time to get the right docking clearances for me to land. As a result I was asked to go take care of an issue on Belsavis while waiting, which filled in some details that I would ultimately use on Voss. Essentially the progression feels more significant than simply following a course of planets, each time I land there is a reason for going there connected to the larger story arc in a way that was not quite so evident when playing some of the other characters.

The other thing that I find interesting is just how much of a “manwhore” my captain happens to be. It seems like every single conversation there is the opportunity to flirt with whoever I am talking to. The best moments however is when he gets shut down harshly. The expression on the characters face is like someone broke his toy. As such I find myself using the flirt option far more often than I would on any other character because that seems to be a significant part of the smuggler experience. The thing is… the characters in game expect it from my character. So when I receive negative faction for doing it… it is only 2 or 3 points at a time rather than the 20-30 points you lose on say a Sith Warrior when you flirt with a character and Vette catches wind. I find this equal parts interesting and disturbing… because it is setting up a kinda bizarre paradigm with this character. I mean everyone thinks of the smuggler as having this roguish charm… but I guess that also means being a lush about everything? Then again if you think about it… all of the similar characters like Nathan Drake or Mal Reynolds tend to do the same thing. It is funny how much the “Han Solo” lovable rascal trope has embedded itself into game media… the problem being… I’ve never actually met this character in real life. When you meet a guy that flirts with literally everyone around them… they tend to be a complete jackass that just happens to have an overdeveloped libido.