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

Regularly Playing: August Edition

August 9, 2017 by Belghast

It has been most of the summer since I last updated my sidebar, and a lot of things have changed. I figured it was high time that I true things up since we are just about to go into the school year, and starting to enter a pretty tightly packed release schedule for the rest of the year. For those unfamiliar with this feature, I functionally talk about the things that I have added… the things that are remaining… and the things that I am ultimately removing from regular rotation. I play a lot of games at any given time… and generally speaking the moment I update my sidebar… I have a wild mood swing game wise that leads me somewhere completely differently. So here goes nothing!

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

Since I last posted there has been a lot of movement in this game, namely the release of a new expansion called Stormblood. As a result I swapped my Heavensward icon out for a Stormblood one. As far as my time in the game… I’ve reached 70 and 310+ gear on both my Warrior and my Samurai and have fallen off significantly in the amount of time I am actually playing. There is still plenty to be done, and I want to get back in the swing of playing on a regular basis, however lately I am deep within my own turtle session which means I tend to be favoring games where I don’t have much of a crowd. Still well within the realm of active games, just only logging in once or twice a day instead of devoting all of my time to it.

To The Returning and New

Guild Wars 2

This is the first time since picking up the game at launch that I can legitimately say that I am really enjoying myself while playing this game. For whatever reason it took five years to actually click with me, and now it is like discovering hidden treasure. I am attempting to do all the things and it is fitting the bill really well because I don’t have much infrastructure in the game currently. My current goal is reaching 100% in all of the old world zones, which I believe is one of the requirements for starting down the Legendary weapon rabbit hole. Another huge boon for my enjoyment of the game is the fact that there are now proper beards for non-norn characters.

Rift

To be honest since its release in 2011 it has never really been far off my radar. Crawling back into Rift is like wrapping myself in a warm blanket, because it is so familiar. In the past six years I’ve had highs and lows with the game, but I know that regardless I will always return and always be interested in whatever happens to be going on. Recently during my turtle mode game play in general, I have been spending a bit of time trying to catch up and hit the Prophecy of Ahnket level cap. I am also digging the tweaks I made to my default outfit. Rift in many ways feels like this snapshot of what everyone wanted in a game around its release, and in some ways it is still ahead of its time. In other ways though it feels like a time capsule to a time when MMO games were slower paced and more methodical. I still find it enjoyable and am always proud to feature it on my sidebar when I am playing.

Diablo 3

Another game that is never far off my radar is Diablo 3, and with us currently being in the thrall of another season… it is obviously occupying some sidebar territory. This is the first season to feature Necromancers and it has been hilarious to see literally bone spikes for days. I really don’t have a whole lot to talk about the game because if by now you don’t get my attraction you probably never will.

World of Warcraft

I have honestly all but stopped playing World of Warcraft, but I am keeping a space on my sidebar for it because of the RoboSquid Armada. This is effectively our weird brain chain of trying to run every dungeon and raid in World of Warcraft at level in minimal gear. Prior to the launch of Stormblood we had left off at Blackfathom Deeps and it seems like everyone is coalescing towards starting this up again. I am more than happy to do some madness with my baby monk.

To Those Departing

Star Wars the Old Republic

If I am being completely honest… I have to say I love what this game has become. I had this awesome time playing through the Shadows of Revan, Ziost and Fallen Empire content and then I sort of needed a break from deeply story driven gaming. It was also around about this time that we were ramping up for the release of Stormblood. At some point in the future when I need to completely dive into something wholly immersive… I will pick this back up and run through the Eternal Throne story line. I still poke my head in from time to time, but not enough to keep it on the sidebar.

Horizon Zero Dawn

This is one of those games that I really need to finish, but I have a feeling by the time I ultimately get back around to it… I will functionally need to restart the experience. This game is a casualty of too many other games coming out at the same time… and ultimately its playtime got eaten up by Mass Effect Andromeda that for whatever reason clicked way harder with me than Horizon did. I really enjoyed the game but I feel like I am going to have to be in the right frame of mind to actually return to it.

Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

Another game that has fallen off the radar that I want to start back up at some point is Breath of the Wild. Two things happened to harm this experience… firstly a bunch of other stuff got released. Secondly… I picked up the switch and decided to restart the game. I still play this occasionally but not enough to really keep it hanging out on the right side of the screen.

Finally Invested

August 8, 2017 by Belghast

Sometimes I do not understand my own gaming whims. In theory I should be logging into Final Fantasy XIV every single night and working on collecting the last bits of stuff I need from Omega, or at the very least trying to cap the latest limited tier of bookrocks. However instead I am finding myself wandering around in a bunch of different games where I have little to no online gaming community. I’ve been in pretty deep turtle mode, and as a result I have been dodging other human beings left and right. I’ve talked about the “spoons” concept in the past, but right now it feels like every last spoon I have is getting used up before I hit the house in the evening. So what this means is a much higher percentage of passive activities like watching stuff from netflix, and a lower percentage of things like gaming that requires active participation. Effectively at this very moment I am managing two different teams at work… one of which my normal crew of developers and the second being a sort of response team to an issue that has been going on. This is eating up every last drop of my time and attention. There was one day last week where out of what turned into a 10 hour work day… I had 7 hours worth of meetings… followed by furious periods of attempting to get anything done. The glorious lie of being salaried is that in theory you get the same amount of money if you work 4 hours as if you work 40 hours… but what that means in reality is I have never worked less than 40 hours anywhere I have ever been. Most weeks I work significantly over because I wind up working through lunch. Needless to say all of this sustained madness leaves me pretty drained when it comes to interactions with other human beings. To make matters worse in a short amount of time we will be going through the upheaval that comes when my wife starts back to school for a new semester, and having to double down on my support infrastructure as she adjusts to having to leave the house every day.

I am not sure if it is due to my current state of mind… or if I have just slowly warmed to the game over time… but at some point I decided that Guild Wars 2 was apparently something awesome to be playing. I have a really tenuous past with this game that I won’t go into now because I have talked about it at length in the past on this blog. At some point however it started to feel decent to run around in this world and have all of these little micro objectives that I could be doing… without feeling like I was terribly tied to completing any of them. This week however I for some reason started working on the main story quest yet again… and almost five years after the launch of the game I managed to beat it and have officially entered the “living story” content proper. I cannot tell you how initially turned off I was on the concept of living story being this limited time thing. The fact that all I can see from Season 1 is a short montage of the events that happened in it still frustrates the shit out of me. However the fact that Season 2 and Season 3 are sitting there waiting on me actually gives me some reason to keep moving forward in the game. There is just a deluge of content available spread across a whole ton of games that I enjoy playing… and in order for me to keep being interested in a game it needs to sit there waiting on me. In truth I juggle a bunch of games at once, flipping to whatever game happens to feel good at that very moment. Recently I have been playing a sizable amount of Rift as well because it similarly is devoid of a social community that I have to worry about interacting with. I have a feeling that if this turtle keeps up… I will be revisiting SWTOR and Elder Scrolls Online as well… and in all of those cases I know there will be fresh content patiently waiting on me to return and enjoy it.

What has kept me engaged thus far in Guild Wars 2 was that the story picked up. For a long time I thought the main arc was a little nonsense, and it involved a lot of characters that I was not that deeply endeared to largely because they were all dicks to each other. However at some point the tide turned and I got engaged in the race to discover Orr and uncover its mysteries. This process kept pushing me into zones I had never seen before, which lead to me wandering around and exploring… which lead to me doing little side missions and objectives. What used to feel like an unsatisfying loop… suddenly felt extremely sticky as I slowly became invested in the game world. Now I legitimately can say I love this game, and it took a really long time to get there. For years I didn’t understand why people enjoyed it. There was a point last year where the AggroChat crew and I did some Fractals… at which point I thought I had understood where the core fun of the game was. However after spending some more time wandering around it feels like the core fun of the game… is that there is just so damned much stuff to be doing at any given time. All of it feels equally rewarding and equally likely to give you something that might be useful. The difference here is that I am effectively in the same gear I have been wearing for the last few years… but that the game has given me all sorts of horizontal leveling paths that do everything from increase my mobility… to simply increasing my luck chance. The best part of all of this is that a good deal is unlocked at an account level so regardless of which alt I decide to be playing… I am getting a good deal of the benefit. How I got around the old world without gliding is beyond me… and I have a feeling with the upcoming expansion once I get the ability to ride mounts I will have a similar feeling. Another major change is the fact that with the expansion character models… I can now have a proper beard as you can see me sporting in the first image… as well as a nifty eye scar. I am not exactly sure when the turtle will end, but in the meantime I am finding interesting ways to enjoy new worlds.

Why No New AggroChat

August 7, 2017 by Belghast

This past goes down as one of the more bizarre weekends in a long while. Those of you who listen to AggroChat are waking up realizing there was no new podcast episode and this is due to some extenuating circumstances. Saturday for the most part was a pretty chill day, and I had settled into my office to prepare to record. I was just literally about to start trying to cobble together some semblance of show notes… when I had a knock on the door. My wife was on the phone with my mother in law and she had been in a wreck out on the turnpike. Granted this is 9 pm and there was a massive storm bearing down on us, so while my wife offered to go pick her up alone… I didn’t really want her going out there completely alone especially considering that we knew it would mean a two hour plus long round trip to take her mom home eventually. I gave my apologies to the AggroChat crew and threw some actual outside style clothing on… and rushed out the door. It turned out she was on the Turnpike slowing down to get off at the next exit, when someone hit her from behind. It came out while sitting on the side of the highway that the guy had been reading a text with cruise control locked in about 80 mph, and when he realized he was coming up fast on her… he swerved attempting to dodge and only caused his car to spin out and flip… and then catch on fire. Thankfully both car loads of people were okay, but this also set in motion a whole string of events.

We dropped mom-in-law off at home and I stopped to get some form of caffeine for the trip back. It was about when I got back on the turnpike that the skies opened up and began what would ultimately be this massive storm. Thankfully it remained a pretty chill drizzle until we made it back to town. Around about midnight thirty we ended up in bed and were both conked out pretty fast. Our niece lives on property adjacent to where mom-in-law lives… and she agreed to spend the night just to make sure nothing was wrong. The ambulance had checked her out at the scene of the accident but we were still concerned because when you take an 80 year old person and put them through a pretty severe car wreck… there is going to be at least some soreness. Because of this… when we did make it to bed my wife turned her phone up fairly loudly as it sat on the nightstand charging. Thirty minutes after falling to sleep we were woken up by a weather app on her phone going off and informing us that we were under a thunderstorm warning. It was around about then that the skies opened with this hurricane style deluge of rain. We fought through it and attempted to go back to sleep… when about another thirty minutes afterwards we were awoken again by the same app informing us that we were under a Tornado watch. Thankfully the area of rotation was not near us and unlikely to come our way… but it still shifted us into a night of trying to sleep while listening to the television just in case that changed.

Yesterday was a bit of a blur as we sort of slept walked through the day. After church our niece dropped mom-in-law off at our house, and my wife and her made a trip to go see the car. Functionally the entire back half of the car is gone… the trunk is now functionally pushed into the back seat and thankfully no one was back there. Now Saturday night while on the side of the road my wife attempted to cram everything she could find in one of those giant blue IKEA bags that I keep in the back of my SUV as a just in case… but then we always forget it is there and wind up buying a new one when we do make it to an IKEA. However in this case it was super handy, but there were a handful of things that they missed under dark of night that were visible during the light of day. There is little doubt that the car is going to be totaled, and and at the scene of the wreck the guy confessed to texting while driving so there is going to be zero doubt on whether or not his insurance should cover this. I feel like this is a not so subtle time to state that this should serve as a reminder why you shouldn’t be futzing with your phone while driving. Especially not while going 80 on a pretty congested turnpike with limited visibility because a massive storm front was bearing down and blotting out the stars. The most frustrating part about all of it… is that mom-in-law had no intention of being on the turnpike and was simply there because she missed her turn due to some construction and was trying to find a way to route back to where she needed to be. All of this is why there is no new AggroChat episode, and why I am still groggy as shit from lack of sleep. My hope is that tonight I will be far enough removed from the events to be able to get a normal nights sleep, because last night it felt like I didn’t get great sleep either because I was almost too tired to sleep. The Tornado that blazed through town was rated as an EF2, and I was so groggy yesterday that it did not dawn on me until this morning that I have a few friends in neighborhoods that were in the storm’s path. So here is hoping they made it through okay.

Last Banana

August 4, 2017 by Belghast

It has been a very gaming light week for me, and I wound up heading to bed something like 8:30 or 9 ish which is very much not normal for me. Functionally I am coming off of a few really rough weeks at work where I have been in firestomper mode 24/7. As a result I get home and I am just too drained to deal with human beings… or in truth the possibility of human beings. This is where my “I” streak comes out with a vengence, and it has lead me to play a lot of games in a very low key and solo manner. Last night however I decided to go ahead and play some Destiny. Right now the very last Iron Banner before the release of Destiny 2 is going on… and with it the chance to get the sniper rifle and hand canon… neither of which I have a decent roll for. Additionally with the thought about going into Destiny 2… I am finding myself more than a little nostalgic for Destiny 1 at the moment. I’ve never been one to really work on the book achievements, but I am finding myself doing so at least in a limited fashion. September 6th begins a new adventure into the Destiny universe… and with it we are leaving behind all of the trappings of the last. As flawed at times as the original might be… it still very much feels like home.

The match type for this last Iron Banner is Control, which is also in part what is pushing me back to play some. Control is my favorite game mode because it gives me a reason beyond killing other players to be engaged. Deathmatching was something that I was a fan of when I was in High School… but once I have gotten older I find myself craving some larger objective to be working towards. While I would love to have role based gameplay along the lines of Enemy Territory… holding points on a map at least gives me some measure of that core focus. What ends up happening in truth is that players form what I call a “muderball” and then ping ping back and forth across the map capturing points. In Destiny 1 this game play is actually to some extent rewarded because the more people you have standing on a point… the faster it shifts to neutral and then to captured. In Destiny 2 however… points capture at a fixed rate so it is going to be interesting to see if players actually spend some effort focusing on defense rather than just constantly retaking points. I saved the above screenshot largely because this was as good as it got last night as far as kill to death ratio.

As far as a load out… it just feels like the special weapon slot doesn’t mean much of anything anymore. The limited amounts of ammunition you get, and the fact that it seems like Invective no longer recharges at a reasonable rate meant that for the most part I was using nothing but primary. I tried a few things as the evening went on. At first I had some early success with Oversoul Edict, but as the night went on I wound up breaking out my friend the Genesis Chain. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Suros aesthetic but I absolutely love this weapon… especially if you get head shots and trigger the firefly explosion effect. I love the way that sounds… its like a tiny “fuck yes” as you are running away to find the next engagement. What cracks me up about me and Destiny… is that I tend to bond with whatever weapon everyone else says that you should just shard. This lives in an archetype that no one seems to like and is functionally just a better version of “An Answering Chord” that is a available on the Vanguard Quartermaster. However it just feels better and seems to work better for me than that weapon ever did. I mean I also love the Fabian Strategy… which is a weapon everyone else seems to hate so my particular tastes seem to consistently go against the meta. Last night I managed to finish all of my quests from Lady Efrideet, but I have yet to get any weapon drops so I am thinking I might want to go ahead and try and make rank 5 during this final Iron Banner in the hopes of maybe seeing some decent versions of the Hand Cannon along the way.