Aggrochat Archives - Page 76 of 103 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Frustration and Fallout 4

January 3, 2016 by Belghast

Morning Will Suck

This morning I attempted to get myself back in line for the impending work week, and I have to say the experiment has been a dismal failure. I normally get up for work at 5:30 in the morning, and then get up… do my routine and finally knock out a blog post. Sundays have always been difficult because generally speaking I am up until at least after Midnight and often times 1 am working on the AggroChat podcast that I end up having to finish editing and posting in the morning. Last night I was up until around 1:30 but thought it was probably a good idea to set an alarm. So at 7:30 I at least put toes on the ground…. and sat there teetering on the edge of the bed for a few minutes trying to decide what step came next. I finally realized that hoping in the shower was a good idea, and did that hoping that the water would somehow jog my brain into functioning enough to go through the rest of the morning boot up routine. I had decided yesterday that instead of having a yummy bowl of cereal in my warm home…. I would get out and find something in the cruel cold world to call breakfast. This ultimately meant that I would go outside and scrape the vehicle since apparently over night the temperatures had dropped a bit.

So I consumed my breakfast and a big tall monster zero…. and played the fun game of trying to throw my muffin wrapper away. I say its a game… because my kitten for some reason LOVES muffin wrappers. She will literally go dumpster diving through my trash can trying to get it, only to drag it out from the bottom of the bin…. carefully unwrap the plastic bag I threw it away in and unfold the muffin wrapper so she can lick it. She is a damned determined cat and the second I leave the room and let my guard down…. she strikes and before I know it she has the damned wrapper out again. This will be something that continues over the next several days. The long and short of all of this…. is that tomorrow is going to be pure hell. I am dreading going back, not because there is something there that I dread necessarily… but that twelve days off from work is more than enough time to completely destroy any routines you have had. Many nights it might be two in the morning before I finally get to sleep… which is not exactly conducive to a 5:30 alarm clock. The goal is to have forced myself to get up earlier than normal this morning, and to stay up all day long regardless of how tired I might be…. in the hopes that I will get a nice full night of sleep tonight. I feel like it is not going to go anywhere near as well as I might have hoped.

Making a Murderer

This break has been the one of binge watching content, and while most of it was Star Wars… we did manage to watch a new Netflix series called Making a Murderer over the last few days. Apparently my wife’s friends had been talking about it, and when she said they explained it as “like Serial” I knew I was in for the ride. Serial was one of those things that I got in on late, but I still dutifully listened to the show over the course of a few days while doing other things. The only problem with content like this, is that it does not wrap up neatly in a box at the end of the experience. In a “crime drama” at the end of the show you have some grand exposition that explains how it “really happened”, but real life is never that neat. Serial more or less was a show that made me wonder if this kid did what the police said he did, but it never made me physically angry at the police. I could see their side of the tale and I could see the kids side of the tail… and the end result was you mostly trying to sort out what you personally believed in the mix. “Making a Murderer” on the other hand presents a tale so frustrating that it ended up with me yelling at the screen several times, and my wife having to talk me down.

I am not sure how much I can say that won’t give the entire tale away, because I feel like it is probably best to just watch the 10 episode series for yourself. There are however lots of moments that swayed me to the side of the supposed killer. I feel like he was most definitely not given a completely fair chance in this case, and there is a significant amount of bias in the area against him. There were several incidents that occurred that were never explained… like one of the police officers running the tags for the Jeep two days before the victim was reported missing, but after she WOULD HAVE BEEN missing. The recorded dispatch call sounded as though he was staring at the vehicle reading the plates off, and verifying that it was a jeep. Don’t get me wrong… I know a lot of really awesome police officers, but I also know some that probably would not bat an eye at planting evidence to support their case. The thing is… I believe at no point did anyone think they were framing an innocent man… but instead that from the moment his name was mentioned he was already assumed guilty and they began trying to make a case against him work. I think that is probably the worst thing that the show highlights is how non-existence the burden of proof really is. Maybe I am just more questioning of information… but I had more than enough “reasonable doubt”.

The Fallout 4 Show

Last night we recorded our AggroChat podcast devoted to Fallout 4. More or less this was the reason why I pushed through the storyline recently, and I have to say forcing myself to complete this game was one of the more miserable experiences. I wanted to be able to talk about story plots, but part of me thinks i would have been happier if I had just not done that. Bethesda games in general for me are about the little moments, and not the big picture. This is a game that delivers in spades when it comes to little vignettes, but fails to deliver when it comes to giving me a larger story arc that I really cared about. The biggest problem for me at least was the fact that in no way could you complete the game in a fashion that did not end up with completely closing off all of the other options. I hate red versus blue situations… and even though fallout 4 was red vs blue vs orange vs green…. it still set up an artificial conflict that I had no way of mediating. There were no “grand bargain” options but instead a lot of “nope they will hate you now” paths you were forced down.

All of that said… the game itself was really awesome and I highly suggest it. When we finally do the game of the year show, this is more or less going to be my pick. I love the game, but then again I have loved every Fallout game to date…. well except Tactics… we don’t talk about Tactics. It was awesome and interesting hearing everyone elses options on the game as well. When we got to recording the show neither Ashgar or Kodra had managed to beat the storyline… and I think I probably would have been far happier if I had joined them in that club. Dallian on the other end of the spectrum had gotten 100% of the PS4 trophies, meaning that he had quite literally gotten every ending possible I believe. The takeaway is… this is a Bethesda game. If you like those games, then you are absolutely going to love Fallout 4… and more than likely you already own it and are happily playing it. If you don’t like Bethesda games, then this isn’t the departure you are looking for. If you are on the fence… then wait for a sale and try it then. If you’ve never played a Fallout game… I highly suggest you pick up Fallout New Vegas because it pretty much represents some of the best storytelling in the series. The show itself is full spoilers so if you plan on playing Fallout 4 at some point, and if you are one of those people for whom spoilers mean something…. then you probably should skip the show until a later date.

AggroChat 89 – The Fallout 4 Show

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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.

A Boy and his Ship

September 14, 2015 by Belghast

Healers Not Required

I have a distinctive grumpy this morning. For starters it is raining and storming… and I cannot pull the covers over my head and allow myself to be lulled back to sleep by the rhythmic noise. Secondly I was up far later than I expected last night. but that in itself wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. However roughly 45 minutes before the alarm was set to go off, our kitten using some of her newly discovered jumping abilities caused an avalanche to occur sending a ton of crap falling off of a high perch. Instead of just accepting my fate and getting on up, I did the futile thing and attempted to go back to sleep. So I am going through that sluggish phase when you have attempted to get sleep… but didn’t get enough of it. As such my mental processing is a bit sluggish, but the show must go on. Coffee is being consumed, and hopefully that will fix all the wrongs in the world… or at least lessen them. As to last night… I was up late in part due to a bout of insomnia and in part due to doing things with friends. I wrote the other day about my process of working through the HK-47 storyline, and over the weekend Tam managed to get caught up to the same place I was. As I was folding laundry last night, I got a text asking if I was around but I didn’t actually see it until I was headed upstairs to wait out my insomnia.

There are a whole lot of faffing about that you have to do, which involves going to planets and scanning for HK-47 parts. After that however you have two dungeons… the first one being a normal mode False Emperor and the second being a hard mode Maelstrom Prison. We managed to get four warm bodies, which included a tank and three dps… but unfortunately our only healing option had to go to bed early. Since all of us were between 56 and 57 in level we assumed we would be able to do the normal mode dungeon without much issue. While I managed to get a little low a few places, False Emperor went off without a hitch and we even managed to get a few cool cosmetic pieces. Still feeling brave we decided to go ahead and attempt Hard Mode Maelstrom Prison without a healer… and while I took a few deaths due to my own stupidity… we managed to make it through that dungeon as well. So in theory… we can likely run any of the older content without heals. The cool thing is that while we were running the place we managed to get housing items to drop… which makes the place far more interesting for repeated running. I think tonight I can run the last part of the HK-47 chain, which is a return to the Heroic 2 dungeon from the very first of it. I simply did not have the oomph to remain awake last night and push through it.

A Boy and his Ship

I spent most of yesterday chasing Skavak across Coruscant on my Chiss Scoundrel. I am having quite a bit of fun playing the smuggler right now, and it is really the only class that I did not spend a significant amount of time playing during release. Before leaving the game I had managed to get the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular and Trooper all to level cap, and had several failed starts and playing the smuggler. This time around I decided to go for the “sawbones” spec, which now does more than it previously did. The Scoundrel subclass was a confusing mess because I personally struggled trying to figure out what abilities I should be using. Previously you got this mix of melee focused and ranged abilities… and it seemed like a horrible idea to be a melee healer in this game. Instead they have taken out all but the crowd control melee abilities and give Sawbones a focus on ranged damage to mix in with their healing. This combined with switching to Treek as my tank over Corso Riggs has ended up making for a much more enjoyable experience. Towards evening I blasted out of the space port on Coruscant headed for the wasteland of Taris.

Now that I have dinged 21, I spent some of my hard earned commendations and kitted out both my armor and that of Treek in full level 21 modifications. I am pretty damned happy that I have orange sets of gear for both, and my theory is that I will upgrade at the end of each planet, hoping to soak up enough commendations while on the planet to be able to kit out my gear each time. The truth is with the experience bonus I am well ahead of the curve. Taris for example is originally intended for level 16-20 players… and I didn’t even make it onto the planet until 21. My hope is this is going to allow me to be able to complete some of the heroic four content, and get more commendations that way. In theory I think the heroics are daily quests, and I could keep going back to Coruscant to do those in order to soak up a few additional commendations. In any case I am really enjoying myself, and this has been a welcome diversion. My hope is that we can muster some grouping again over the next few days and explore some of the flashpoints that we never saw. While this is a long shot, it would be kinda cool to be able to see some of the operations as well. Tonight however… we are going to work on taking down Ravana Extreme.

Something New

Yesterday I decided to try something slightly new, and failed a little bit along the way. I had noticed that many podcasts actually uploaded their shows to YouTube, by simply throwing up a static image with the audio running behind it. I figured this couldn’t hurt, and for some people YouTube might be a more comfortable experience than having to set up podcast software. The first attempt however lacked any audio at all. I was using Adobe Premiere for the first time, and as a result ended up exporting in some strange format that was a combination of a video file and a waveform audio file as well. Windows seemed to know what to do with the file, and when I tested it… it appeared to play just fine. However upon uploading it… I got a really long still image with zero sound kinda defeating the purpose. The second export however made it just fine, and we now have our first YouTube show up. We’ve already gotten a few views so we will see how this compares to the podcast. It might also make an easier format for folks to comment on. Let me know what you think. I doubt we will ever do a video show like Cat Context and The MMO Show… but for the time being it gets our show in another medium.

Week In Gaming 9/13/2015

September 13, 2015 by Belghast

Very Rough Week

As you could probably tell from some of the subtext of my posts this week… it was a pretty rough one for me emotionally. Work is still being stressful, but honestly that really had nothing to do with this one. For our country September 11th has some pretty tragic context, but for me it has completely different issues. Firstly September 11th was the birthday of my grandmother, and she would have been 90 this year. I miss her an awful lot, and there are days where it is just rough to think about her. Her birthday always brings back memories of her, which are honestly all good… but there is a bittersweet melancholy associated with it. She essentially raised me during the first years of my life, because she was my constant babysitter and companion. She is also the one member of my family that really seemed to appreciate my wife being a member of the family. If that were not enough to get me down in the dumps… this week also marks the anniversary of a pretty horrible period of my life. In September of 2012 I lost my Grandfather, and the day after the funeral… September 11th… a pretty horrific event happened at my work place. It quite literally with zero hyperbole ushered in the worst six months of my life. Someone screwed up, and screwed up badly… and I had to deal with the fallout and recovery. So each time this day comes I get a little gun shy. So this past Friday I was crawling in my skin as I waited for they day to end.

Demon Huntering

As far as gaming this week, I had a pretty cloistered time of it. I am still very much in my “hiding out” mentality, and I guess in part I think it was just me waiting for this week to pass me by, dreading Friday. I spent some time working on my Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 and I think when I last played I was about halfway through 69. At some point soon I hope to pop back in and finish leveling him to 70. I also spent some time farming away on Rifts, Greater Rifts and Bounties attempting to get blood shards… which I then disappointingly spent trying to get class set pieces. I have been stuck at 3 of 4 pieces of the set I am going after on my Barbarian for a few weeks now. I am not sure but Diablo might have worked its way out of my system for a bit. I finished off the seasonal stuff, but as of last night Grace on the podcast talked about additional seasonal rewards. I am just not sure if I will be willing to do any of the crazy things that are required to get them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

The big event of this week was that I apparently have fallen into a Star Wars the Old Republic shaped hole. I have played this game off and on since release, but this is really the first time I have felt I was actually back in the swing of things. I’ve played alts a lot in the past, but this is the first time I have actually continued the storyline on my Jedi Guardian main. As of last night I finished Makeb and am working through the precursor content leading up to Shadow of Revan. My plan is to finish the story content before the drop of Fallen Empire next month. Additionally I am taking advantage of the insane twelve times experience bonus. Last night during the podcast I started working on my Chiss Smuggler and I have to say… having access to Treek as a tanky companion makes that experience so much better. Seriously… I hate Corso Riggs so much… and was completely stalled out trying to play a smuggler because he annoyed me so much. Treek is simply a better tank.. in that she jumps AT the mobs instead of grappling them back to me. Who though a tank companion pulling back to the healer was a good idea? Anyways as soon as I wrap this post I intend to go downstairs and play some more Smuggler… that was how much I was into it last night. I may or may not have stayed up until 1:30 in the morning playing.

Final Fantasy XIV

I am very much in a lull right now with Final Fantasy XIV. I talked about this a bit on the podcast, but it is strange… that even while in this lull I still consider it my home base of operations. I figure when 3.1 lands which should be soonish… everyone will be invigorated once more and we will return to logging in every single night. In the mean time I am playing a lot of other games as not to force myself. I am still raiding on Monday and Wednesday nights, and this week we managed to get a few more people through Bismarck Extreme. I really want to defeat Ravana Extreme before the new content lands, but one of the big problems we are having is… that honestly it just feels like there isn’t much content for us to be doing. When we returned to Final Fantasy XIV July 2013 we had a years worth of content to explore since we had last played. While we managed to slowly whittle our way through all of it… it gave us tons of small goals to work towards. In Heavensward there really does not seem to be the much for us to work towards. We can clear Alexander Normal in our sleep, and are pretty successful with Bismarck Extreme. We are working on Ravana Extreme and I believe it is in our sights… but Savage Alexander just isn’t a realistic goal, namely because I can’t bring myself to do the gear grinding that it would require to really be viable there. I am well enough geared to do all of the content I feel like I could do… and I just don’t have the drive to push towards that bleeding edge. So instead I play other games and wait for another content drop.

AggroChat 74 – Force Binds Us

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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