May 2017 - Page 5 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Legacy Complete

May 8, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was yet another almost entirely devoted to playing Star Wars the Old Republic. I tend to exist in one of two modes, either I am playing a bunch of different games casually or in “maintenance mode” or I imprint super hard on a single game and I clamp down on it until I run out of stuff that I want to be doing. SWTOR seems to be in one of those clamp down modes, because I am playing it with an almost single minded focus. I set out with a goal of finishing off the eight original storylines, and this weekend I managed to push the agent across the finish line. As you can see I now have all eight icons lit up on the left side of the character select screen. What is interesting is just how much overlap there are between the different classes. You might hear a name mentioned in one class briefly that ends up being a central focus character in another. With the Agent especially it felt like we were getting the secret story of the world being played out through our actions, and it was all the more real when I slid from that story into Shadows of Revan. This is a minor spoiler but functionally the events foretold in the Agent sequence are coming to fruition by the Revanites… which makes me feel like the Star Cabal was just one of so many other puppets in the setting.

Makeb was largely interesting content, but it also felt like content added in a minor story patch in other games. It was this side mission that didn’t really move the overall story forward by much. Sure it was another chance to dust off your team mates and go on one more adventure… but it largely felt like one completely disconnected to everything else in the game. While enjoyable I stalled out in part because I had the other goal to worry about and lots of class storylines to play before that twelve times bonus went away. I wish however two years ago I had stuck around long enough to play through the Shadow of Revan campaign because I think the game as a whole would have had a good deal more traction for me. Shadow of Revan and now Ziost feels more like what I had been wanting. While it is taking part in a corner of the Galaxy and involves a brand new cast of characters… there is continuity happening and all of my actions seem to actually matter once again. Again you can absolutely see that it was design in a way so that it is stand alone DLC, but it feels like it integrates into the theme considerably better.

I am wondering if I might be attached to Star Wars the Old Republic until the release of Stormblood at this point. I have all of Ziost, which I am assuming is a fairly small addendum to the Revanite story. Then I have the entire Fallen Empire campaign and finally the Eternal Throne campaign to keep me tied up for awhile. I am figuring one of two things is going to happen when I start Fallen Empire, and in part that is why I have been avoiding actually starting it. Either I am going to love it and tear through it hungrily until I catch up completely. The other option is that I am going to bounce hard in Galaxy 2.0. Either case I can only delay the inevitably so long, but I will be doing like I did in Mass Effect Andromeda… and trying to finish everything up completely before flipping the switch. Side note… while staring at the above image I never noticed that my starship looks like it has a bubble level on the front. Mostly I want to experience the world as it exists… before changing it completely.

Some other side notes from the weekend. The experience boost is absolutely insane because I was roughly 1/3rd of the way through Shadows of Revan when I hit the modern level cap of 70. That means I have been getting functionally end game gear as I level through the content. With Knights of the Eternal Throne they added in a new Galactic Command system… that in truth I don’t fully understand. However it appears to be an alternate leveling system, and each time you kill something or complete a quest… you earn command points. Every so often you go up a level, and this process includes earning a command chest. These so far have been an excellent source of orange mod gear, and also occasionally a blue or purple item that blows away anything I have been capable of getting thusfar. Another thing that I am digging heavily is that it seems like I can enter every flashpoint in “story mode” which allows me to complete the flashpoint solo with the help of an extremely overpowered robot buddy. These flashpoints however also seem to drop current gear instead of the level of the encounter which surprised me just a little bit. Whatever the case it feels like I am getting to chase down all these story bits, and at the same time be rewarded with lots and lots of gear. Thusfar I am pretty happy with the way the systems all seem to be working.

Destiny 2 Hopes

May 5, 2017 by Belghast

Even though I am playing playing much of it this very moment… Destiny holds an extremely special place in my heart. I love this game and I love what it has become over the course of the two expansions… and multiple content patches. They promised a setting as deep and rich and Star Wars, and while a lot of people will disagree with me… I feel that they ultimately delivered on that. The problem however is that they did not deliver in a contiguous story that was easy to learn. Instead they sprinkled the game with environmental storytelling and nuggets of information that the faithful had to gather up and piece together to learn what was happening in the world. Personally this made me want to know more about the world because each time I uncovered a truth it was like discovering another piece that fit into a giant puzzle I was trying to assemble in my head. For many others however… including the vast majority of my friends… they bounced hard. For them it was of the utmost importance to have a clear narrative that they could follow, and not be forced to do some admittedly silly nonsense in the form of the grimoire cards.

Fix the Narrative

The first hope with Destiny 2 is to do just that… give us this big bold epic space opera that you originally promised. Like I said it is absolutely there.. . but buried deep under the surface and in places that only the most lore hungry can find. There is an epic tale in the game, but you have to piece it together through doing things… and it never actually gives you any sort of threaded tale that you can then experience as a whole when you do finish gathering the pieces. I’ve linked the Book of Sorrow as read by Myelin games… one of the best Destiny Lore channels available. For those who are unfamiliar with it, each time you collected a Calcified Fragment on the Dreadnaught or one of the Taken related raids/missions in the Taken King expansion you unlocked a piece of the Book of Sorrow. Combined together they make a five part tale explaining who the Hive are and where they came from… and how exactly the Taken came to be. The problem is… were it not for lore videos like this one… this is an epic tale that would stay submerged and largely unknown. Bungie, you can craft amazing tales… just present them in a manner that the common player can grasp them.

A Larger Sense of Presence

Destiny is a game that constantly teases us with vistas we will never be able to explore. A prime example of this is that we as Guardians inhabit a Tower overlooking the last city on earth. We are told this time and time again… and if you look off the balcony you can see what appears to be a thriving city below in the shadow of the traveler. However we can never actually go down there and explore the area where all the lights seem to be bright. When we travel to a planet, instead of being able to explore its surface freely we are given a single path that loops around and connects to itself. The hallmark of MMOs is that you can go walking in a direction and more often than not reach whatever it is that you can see in the distance. To some extent I want to see this happening in Destiny 2. I want to find neat hidden areas of the world with interesting spawns or treasures. I want exploration to be a factor in the game, rather than just being somewhere at the right time when the right event fires off. With the Dead Ghosts, Calcified Fragments, and SIVA Clusters… you can tell they want to give us this sort of exploration already. However I just want to see this done on a much larger scale with hidden lairs, that are a challenge to get to… but also extremely rewarding for completing with your friends.

Item Drops

I think everyone at least on some level likes looking out and surveying the scene and seeing a bunch of green, blue, purple and sometimes orange engrams laying there on the ground. The novelty however wears off quickly, and when I am in an area like the Archon’s Forge I know that every so often I am going to have to return to the tower and do some inventory maintenance since you can only have twenty items in your mailbox… before you start losing loot. What ends up happening as a result is that players just straight up delete engrams, so that they can stay out longer. Later patches in the game even implemented a system so that when you pick up a green engram it automatically disassembles into the respective parts. This tells me that they release that the engram system is deeply inconvenient, and since later items like hoard chests drop actual items… I think they see the error of their ways. What I want from Destiny 2 is the ability for actual gear drops like they do in the raids and from item chests. That way I know if the item is useful instantly without having to go back to base and get a decryption. This serves a bunch of purposes… namely that you can then start using gear if it is an upgrade or something interesting. Secondly you can keep clearing your inventory without having to worry about getting that rare chance of something good dropping from a blue engram.

All Infusion All The Time

One of the things that Destiny eventually nailed is the item system. The funny thing about it is that I sort of wish all games had the item infusion system that we have now. So my hope is that Destiny 2 just manages not to fuck this up. Leave it alone… keep things exactly as they are now. Let us infuse gear into items we already have in our inventory, and keep upgrading the weapons we like using. That is the big thing that separates Destiny from other games for me… is that I become emotionally attached to my gear. Folks have talked about the feeling of when they get that first exotic, or the one that they have been chasing for months. For me… I get the same thing when I get that perfect roll on a weapon and know that from that point on I can just use that instead of using some crappy version of it that I had been holding on. The prime example is the Year 2 Haakon’s Hatchet that I use now as my primary weapon. I love this thing and the ability to keep using it into Year 3 had been a huge thing for me. Sure I try out lots of other weapons as they come across my path… but at the same time I know I have this old reliable friend sitting waiting on me whenever I want to return. Let me keep bringing my “companions” along with me in my journey in Destiny 2.

Platform Agnostic Account

This is one of those situations where I think Bungie had an intention but then for whatever reason could not get it to work as intended. When you play Destiny you have a Bungie account, and then those accounts are associated with either your Playstation Network or Xbox Live account. I’ve played Destiny on my original platform of Playstation 4, but I’ve also owned a copy for Xbox 360 that I then upgraded when I got my Xbox One. When I go to the Bungie website I can see both accounts worth of characters, but they are separated by this invisible barrier. What I want to see is for that barrier to fall. My <Tequila Mockingbird> Clan tag extends between the platforms so that even when I am playing on the Xbox I am representing my solely Playstation based group. So that tells me there is already connective tissue, but that things are just not working as they should be. With Destiny 2 there will be three possible platforms at launch: PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. Right now I plan on shifting my focus to PC because there is a whole group of players that wanted to play… but just were not console folks that I have been waiting to play with. However if I knew that I could rush out and pick up a copy for PS4 and Xbox One that then take the same characters and play with them? I would do so in a heartbeat. I understand the challenge of making Xbox Live and PSN talk to each other… and the weirdness that happens when an account crosses those boundaries. However the data is just data… and since it is dialing home to Bungie servers to retrieve that data that I can then see through the web interface… it would make sense just to let people have a single batch of characters and inventory spread across all of the platforms. If this expansion I could have taken my Titan main from PS4 and play it with my friends that are Xbox folks… I would have done that a whole lot more rather than trying to level an entirely different set of characters. Granted I did manage to get my Xbox One Titan up to 370 light… but I am also mildly insane.

These are just my hopes and suggestions for things that would improve my Destiny 2 experience. I am curious what exactly my readers would want in the new game?

Secret Story of the Galaxy

May 4, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is one of those days. I just literally got out of the bathroom where I held my hands under the tap to wash them… and then could not figure out why the tap was not turning on automatically. Moments later I realized I was in fact at home… and that we don’t have the same sort of magical faucets that the rest of the world does. This week has been a bit of a challenge because I am just straight up exhausted all of the time. No amount of caffeine seems to be able to break me out of whatever haze I seem to be in. It does not help that it has been cold and rainy… in May. By this time last year we already had the pool open and I had a yard full of flowers. This year however it just hasn’t been warm enough for either, and the yard is so water logged that before long I will have a grand primal swamp. My evenings have been spent watching various things on Netflix and working my way through the Agent storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic.

In a way I am glad that I left this storyline for the last, because it seems to be making a bunch of callbacks to the other stories that I never would have gotten had I not already played the other seven classes. There are constantly folks being mentioned…. and I am like “I know that person” or in some cases “I killed that person in another life”. For years I have thought that the Jedi Knight main story arc ultimately was the most “canon” of them all… but in truth I feel like maybe Imperial Agent is also deeply canon because it shows the underside of the world and all of the pieces shifting slowly into place. While Jedi Knight is the “big damned hero” tale, Agent seems to be the “truth” that happened while the hero tale was playing out. The story behind the story is always interesting, and I continue to be intrigued at just how much I am getting into this. I think it is a testament to just how good the game really is that it can plop me down in a role I would never actually play…. and make me love it. I also deeply dig Kaliyo and my dark side murdery nature seems to play well to her brand of violent sarcasm.

However after all of this skulking about and subterfuge… I am really looking forward to switching back to my Jedi Knight main and continuing through the rest of the story that I never got around to playing the last time. When we played December 2015, I got caught up in the 12 times story bonus that allowed me to play through all of the classic stories without having to worry about any additional questing. Once I finish the Agent that particular mission is complete, and it will allow me to pick back up where I left off… which is the beginning of the Shadow of Revan content. I really want to see how that storyline goes, and I also want to see how exactly the transition to being “The Outlander” happens as well. I love the original game, and in part I am wanting to see just how the game changes once it shifts to the Fallen Empire model. I mean I realize I have plenty of boosts available and could just catapult a character to near maximum level. However most of my enjoyment in SWTOR comes from actually playing through the content, much like the same is true with Elder Scrolls Online. So while it feels like both games are taking forever… I don’t really want to rob myself of the experience.

Netflix and Turtle

May 3, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday when I wrote my post I was deeply looking forward to the Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans. However as the day went on things went sideways. Its not so much that a sequence of bad events happened… but more a sequence of events that robbed me of every single “spoon” I had to give. I am very much a person who recharges my batteries by milling around by myself doing piddly things. Each social engagement, even if it is just saying good morning to the security guard on my way in the building… consumes a bit of energy that I have stored up in reserve. Now that I am in management… it feels like those batteries deplete all too quickly flitting between meetings and making sure my team is taken care of. One might question if management is really a great choice, but in truth it is one of those things that just sort of happened over time. I never set out to lead a guild, it just was something that I did because it needed to happen. Similarly I fell into my current position because it just needed to happened, and the alternative was to hope someone else did it.

As a result I came home last night, cooked some dinner… and by the time I had cleaned and sat down on the couch I completely lost sync with time as a construct. So at 8:30 I found myself apologizing to the FFXIV crew for needing some “turtle time” where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world doesn’t exist. I feel like this has to suck to experience from the other side of the equation, because I don’t always know when it is going to hit or what the ramifications are going to be. All I know is when it does I just cannot deal with communicating with other people. I have friends who experience the same sort of thing, and it is at least comforting that I am not the only person who goes through it every so often. The only problem is the more I do it… the harder it is to break out of the cycle. It reminds me in the days of this blog before I went on the whole crusade of regular posting. The longer I went between posts… the harder it was to make the next one because it felt like this invisible audience was somehow expecting me to poop sheer brilliance out on the page every time I posted anything. Similarly it feels like each time I withdraw, I have to psyche myself up to be some sort of rockstar version of myself to make up for the fact that I was in hiding. I mean I know that is not actually the case, but it is super hard to explain that to anxiety brain.

What did I do instead last night? Well I spent some quality time with Netflix… and tried to chill out and remember that everything is okay. Over the last couple days I have watched the first episode of American Gods… which makes me realize how damned long it has been since I read that book. Things felt familiar in a fuzzy melange of the details I sort of remember about the book, so I guess that is a good thing. I also watched Maria Bamford’s Old Baby… which was delightfully bizarre. I mean I suggest it, but you need to go in expecting it to not really be like any other comedy special you have ever seen. I watched a handful of episodes of Dear White People, which I really enjoyed on a bunch of different levels. Finally I finished the night watching the three available episodes of Handmaid’s Tale that were on Hulu. The last one I am not sure if you can actually enjoy… because it is fucking disturbing. I am hooked but on a stomach turning level… I mean for whatever reason I never read the novel, and I think I probably should. Probably not the best thing for an anxiety riddled mind, but I am glad that I watched it.