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Best Games I’m Not Playing

February 13, 2015 by Belghast

This mornings post is going to be a bit of a departure from my normal routine in that I am going to talk about some of the games that I really enjoy, but am not playing for one reason or another. I guess with the recent news about Daybreak, it highlights the fact that there are so many games we hold dear… but aren’t actually actively supporting by playing them. As such here goes my attempt to write a post about the three best games I am not playing.

Everquest II

Like so many former Everquest junkies, I am in love with the setting of Norrath. I love its cities, and races and the aspect that I enjoyed the most playing EQ2 was how often times you would just see glimpses of the world that came before this one. The folks behind the zones in Norrath 2.0 were exceptionally good at tugging on your nostalgia at just the right moment, while at the same time making something entirely new. More than anything I think it was the scale of this game that made me fall in love with it. I did not play it at launch, but a few months into World of Warcraft I took a break and joined my friends who did. The world felt so much larger than anything I was seeing in Azeroth, and this sense of amazement through scale never really faded. It felt so much more like a living breathing world. This game also gave me one of my favorite playable races in any game… the Ratonga. While often goofy comic relief I enjoyed roaming the world as my little rat shadow knight.

The problem is that each time I play Everquest II, I ultimately leave due to the same problem. I absolutely hate the combat system with its largely unintelligible stat increases, alternative advancement point minutiae and what feels like three hundred different attack buttons… that are largely indistinguishable. The funny thing is playing my Shadow Knight was a key sequence of about twenty five attacks… and still to this day I can reinstall the game and play it entirely through muscle memory. For me it is the gaming equivalent of chicken fried steak… that comfort food you return to over and over even though it is largely uninspired. The problem is… I will always return to it eventually. It has my favorite world in any game, so full of life and mystery. I just wish I could transplant that world into a game I enjoy on a technical level.

Rift

Rift was the game that pulled me away from World of Warcraft by giving me every single thing I ever said I wanted in a video game. I spent a good amount of time playing Rift at launch and since release it is a rarity that I do not have an active account. The problem is… I am not playing it. This game is one that I want to love so badly, and I wished and tried so many times to transplant my WoW family into. Rift is a game made up of extremely well crafted systems that are honed to lightning precision… but have been assembled in the wrong order. That is the best possible analogy that I can give you. Have you ever walked into a house and felt that something was just off, and then spent the rest of your time in it trying to figure out exactly what it was? There is something wrong with Rift, and I cannot figure out what is missing.

I have heard the complaint that “Rift has no soul” and as much as I have rebelled against that notion… maybe that statement is right. There is some spark that ties everything together that is missing in this game. I will always keep returning to it, because there are lots of well crafted components that make up this game, but the overarching game itself lacks something. With the Nightmare Tides expansion I came back and started playing more regularly, but it was not long before I realized that all I had been actually doing was logging in to play the minions mini-game. Even now talking about this game I am getting the desire to pop my head back in, because it is like this puzzle I cannot quite solve. I want to know why it doesn’t work, but never actually find the answer. What I do know however is it is a game supported by a lot of awesome people, and while I am trying to figure it out… I absolutely do not mind funding their efforts.

The Secret World

When The Secret World was released, I thought that it was absolutely going to be the game I could settle in for the long haul. I believe it in so much that I spent the almost two hundred dollars to purchase a “Lifetime” membership, after having missed out on that same opportunity for Lord of the Rings Online. The experience of leveling through this game and completing all of the content was absolutely amazing. It still has some of the most thoughtful and interesting quest lines I have experienced in any game. The thing that broke myself and the rest of the AggroChat crew was the fact that behind the Gatekeeper encounter there loomed a giant wall. When we began nightmare content, we came to the realization quickly that we were essentially “playing the game wrong”. The answer to beating the content was for us to change our specs to something that the content wanted us to be. Doing this would have destroyed the magic of the game, the fact that we could craft the characters we always wanted to play.

All of this said, it is still a game I think upon fondly, and still consider the lifetime membership some of the best money I have ever spent. Content is released in “Issues” and while purchasing one of these gives you the main story quest… there is also a substantial amount of minor content that goes in with each of them. Games are notoriously bad about pointing out things that have changed in the world, and The Secret World is no exception. I find it a mentally daunting task to not only try and remember how to play my character each time I return, but also try and figure out what is actually new. The fact that you can repeat almost every quest in the game only serves to make this more maddening. The answer of course is to claw your way through copious patch notes to figure out what new elements were added, but instead… I simply don’t play apart from logging in every now and then to buy a cool new outfit with my monthly allotment of in game store currency.

Fondly Remembered Loves

There you go, this morning in honor of Valentines Day I give you the games I love but am not actually playing. I feel like all gamers have these games in their history. I am curious what some of yours are. Leave me a comment letting me know what game or games out there are you still smitten by but just not playing anymore.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

February 8, 2015 by Belghast

Banquets and No Caffeine

This has been a strange week for me, for several reasons but not the least of which has been my mission to try and stop energy drinks cold turkey. I have been less functional than I normally am, but I am hoping that at some point I will crest and things will start to get more normal. This morning seems to be the worst of it, or what I am hoping is the worst of it. When I went out for my normal early morning breakfast run, I was so damned tempted to buy a monster. Fortunately I stuck to my guns and just picked up a Dr Pepper instead. I think what has made the last two days so awful is that for one reason or another I have not been fixing coffee in the morning as per my usual routine. As such this morning I woke up with the worst splitting headache I have had in years, which I can only attribute to not having nearly enough caffeine in my system to sustain me.

Yesterday itself was a bit of an odd one as well. The bulk of the day was spent piddling around online and doing laundry other than my brief period of time recording Battle Bards. The highlight of the day was pretty much hanging out and talking with Syl and Jae for several hours. The low point was the fact that in the evening I had to go to an employee banquet. In the grand scheme of things it is not that big of a deal, and this was I think the fourth or fifth one I have gone to. The problem is… they are largely long drawn out awards shows with the exact same meal from year to year. The positive of this however is the fact that there is really great cheesecake. The negative is, most of the food tastes like it has been sitting out for hours. This years frustration is that they never came around with coffee after dinner, so I am not sure exactly what was up with the wait staff this year. They acted disorganized, when in the past they have always been a picture of lightning precision.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

The problem with having a banquet to go to meant that we would be getting home way later than normal. I gave my aggrochat crew a heads up, but Kodra sadly was just too sick to stay on and record. As a result we recorded the show with a very sleepy me, Ashgar, Rae and Tam. Granted Tam was probably not all that sleepy considering it wasn’t all that late for his newly pacific time zone self. For me we didn’t get started recording until 10 pm… and that meant 11 pm for Ashgar who got progressively less communicative as the show went on. Moments before we were about to hit record… Tam completely blew my mind. I’ve embedded the video above… the man in the videos hobby apparently is to make actual food… with doll sized utensils and then record it for YouTube. I had no real words for what I was seeing. As you are watching it… remember that he is putting this much effort into what is essentially a single spoon full of food.

When we finally recovered from that… we had a relatively normal show talking about Final Fantasy XIV and our defeat of Turn 6 and work on Turn 7 of Binding Coil of Bahamut. I break the pattern and discuss my experiences in Blackrock Foundry last week, and start a discussion about randomness in encounters and why it is both a good and frustrating thing. From there we delve into Tam’s faffing about in Elite: Dangerous. This reprises a conversation we have had before about his ultimate concept for a space game, where we all exist on the same ship, but can play vastly different roles. We decided in this grand space adventure he would be Wash, I would be Mal, and Rae of course would be Kaylee. I would love to have a game where pilot Tam could drop me off on a planet to explore while providing cover fire… then help me evac with all of loot I found, taking it to a near black market and unloading our spoils. Towards the end of the show we get into a discussion of the North American League Championship Series and how watching it has changed for Rae, Tam and Ashgar now that they also have a Fantasy League going on. It was a fun hour of conversation, albeit a very sleepy one.

I’ve Been Doing It Wrong

One of the more interesting tidbits that came out of last nights podcast is that apparently I have been playing Arcanist wrong all of this time. More so than that I have apparently been playing damage over time classes wrong in every game I have tried playing them. There have been few things I have hated more than playing a DoT heavy class, because the gameplay always felt slow and boring. What I had been doing all of these years was something relatively simple… I would send my pet to the target, apply my dots, and then use whatever weak nuke I happened to have to burn it down. I commented last night that I would rather level another Conjurer than play Arcanist. To which Tam was absolutely shocked… and he started to explain how he leveled where he ran around willy nilly and dotted everything in site up, letting Carbie fight to hold aggro while chain pulling everything. I tried this, in the middle of the podcast and damned if it did not work miraculously.

Truth is I simply do not think like a “finger wiggler” as I have always called them. I want to clash face to face with the mobs and burn them down one by one while holding aggro on everything else. That is my comfort zone, what I am used to, and the gameplay I always seem to return to. Arcanist and other dot classes apparently need to be played in a style that I had never thought about. Simply dotting up everything in sight and waiting for the dots to kill them while attacking other things. As Tam said, it is apparently easier to kill ten things at once than one thing… now knowing this I managed to get from 18 to 20 Arcanist with extreme ease in the amount of time it took to finish the podcast. This is just such a foreign concept to me, that it is taking awhile for me to grasp. So far it is working… maybe I will in fact have a Summoner/Scholar, the class that I never thought I would end up getting to max level.

AggroChat Game Club

February 6, 2015 by Belghast

Failure to Random

Last night was our second night of raiding in Blackrock Foundry, and our second night of attempts on Oregorger. This boss has become the pinnacle of everything I love and hate about Blizzard raid encounter design. The thing I love is the fact that it is a really inventive fight that lets us play pacman as we gobble up crates of ore throughout the arena before Oregorger can get to them. What I hate about it is the fact that there are some serious RNG elements to the fight. After our first night of attempts the raid lead and others poured over the logs, and did some serious research finally finding a video showing how the process worked. In theory Oregorger will always choose to go a direction where there a boxes So the theory goes that if you clear boxes in a certain order he will favor a specific path over others. The problem in practice is even then… there is still a large amount of RNG into the encounter as to which specific direction he will turn and charge.

You can watch the video we stumbled onto purporting to have the solution. The problem is no matter how many times we watched the video, no closely we aspired to follow the golden path… something went wrong. It is moments like this that I get frustrated since really I have no clue what is going wrong. If we can ever figure out the magic behind the box phase we will down this fight because we are now doing the first phase flawlessly, or what appears to be flawlessly. Largely this has always been one of the problems with World of Warcraft raid design. They tend to view “random” as a positive thing, and to some extent I get it… but don’t make these random occurrences raid wipes. The Oregorger encounter is long enough as it is… to have a single mechanic take out half of your raid. I guess I find myself preferring the Final Fantasy XIV raid design ethic of extremely difficult… but follows a predictable pattern. That way when you fail you know it is because you didn’t do something… not because the random element decided to screw you over this try.

Hans and Franz

When we took our break half way through the raid, we opted to switch gears and shift to the Hans and Franz encounter. The mob names are Hans’gar and Franzok, and I find it absolutely hilarious that they a reference a skit that came out when I was in elementary school… and large swaths of our raid was not even alive when it was a “thing”. But I am told apparently there is a State Farm commercial bringing the characters back… so I guess it makes sense. The encounter is in a room filled with conveyor belts with thin strips between them that don’t move. At the start of the fight the belts are off, but when it enters the environmental damage phase they turn on making it harder to avoid the obstacles. The first phase is avoiding the “pop tarts” as they have become referred to by the raid… which are these molten metal slabs that come into the room. The second phase of the environmental damage is avoiding the metal stampers, that come down from the ceiling in a certain pattern. There seemed to be four turns of a specific pattern before the encounter picked a new pattern. Granted it could potentially pick the same pattern twice in a row for eight turns.

There was also a tank swap mechanic happening, but as DPS I never quite grasped what was actually occurring. There was a point in the fight where a specific tank in the rotation needed to have an external damage cooldown cast on him while being slammed to the ground. The rest of the fight was simply avoiding damage that could be avoided, and pouring damage into the boss during the few times when they were standing still. This meant that you wanted to make sure you blew your dps cooldowns and took your second potion during one of the windows where you could stand on the non-moving sections and pour damage in. Everything about this fight is like a better designed Oregorger, and what I mean by that is… there is still a fun quirky mechanic, there is still an element of randomness… but the randomness is predictable and something you can adjust for quickly. I will admit on the first pull seeing everything play out felt like madness, but it was simply to adjust after that to match the pattern in play. As a result we downed Hans and Frans last night and I managed to pick up two more drops… one of which again I won’t be using.

AggroChat Game Club

I figure at this point… the statute of limitations on the podcast we announced our first AggroChat Game Club title. As a result I am going to talk about it today for anyone who happens to read my blog… but not listen to our podcast. One of the ideas we kicked around for awhile was to have a single title that all of us played during the course of a month. Then during the last show of that month we dive into the game completely with no concern about spoilers. The idea is for us to talk everything about that game, what we liked, what we didn’t like and how we felt about the major plot points. During Episode 41, we deliberated about a long list of games and finally decided to go with a consensus title for the very first one. As such we chose Citizens of Earth by Atlus, and over the course of this month all five of the AggroChat members are going to be playing it. To make things even more interesting… this is a title that is available on Steam, 3DS and Vita and in actuality we have folks playing each of these versions.

What I want from you… is to play along with us! I thought it would be fun if we also collected some of the best comments sent into us by listeners to the podcast that are also playing. So pick up the game on whatever platform you choose, play the game, and then send in your comments. We will try and pick out several of the comments we receive about the game and mention them while recording our podcast. The show in which we are recording is February 28th, so please try and have the comments to us by the 26th to make sure we have time to read them. Each of us are already knee deep in the game, and I look forward to this little experiment. For those wondering… all of the titles mentioned during AggroChat #41 that did not receive a “hard veto”, are still technically in play. We are sorting out how this club will work from this point on, but more than likely we will be round robin picking future titles from that same list. Hopefully you will join in the fun, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

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So Damned Charming

February 1, 2015 by Belghast

Episode 42 – Gigantic Personality

This week is the first live show we have recorded in two weeks. In the intervening time Bel, Rae and Ash went to Pax South, and Rae and Ash managed to catch the dreaded Pax Pox. Kodra represented our podcast on the Inaugural episode of the TGEN Tribunal podcast featuring members from all of the various TGEN podcasts and then became the grand Wii Bowling champion of his cruise. During the course of this episode my cast members try and convince me that I am a “media personality” to which I still deny. In addition to all of this madness we talk about a lot of games.

Kodra talks about his experiences with the 3DS port of Citizens of Earth, playing a lot of Sudoku and the punishing game 1001 Spikes. Ash talks about a week of playing Final Fantasy XIV, and the rogue like overture. Tam talks about time spent playing the new generation of adventure games including Dreamfall Chapters and Life is Strange. Rae talks about some FFXIV and her frustrations with the current state of League of Legends Lag, as well as the controversy of them completely blowing off Pax South. Finally I talk about my experience taking media appointments at Pax South, and getting to play a lot of Gigantic and Moonrise. We deep dive into Gigantic talkinga bout our experiences playing together, and what the various champions we played were like.

Finally at the end I talk a little bit about my joining the staff of MMOgames.com. It is a big episode full of lots of stuff and I hope you all enjoy it. We are happy to be back and happy to be hanging out and recording aggrochat once more.

So Damned Charming

One of the things that makes me happiest in life is when a bunch of my friends happen to be playing the same game at the same time. Over the course of the last week Syl, Jaedia, Liore, Aro and a few others have started playing Final Fantasy XIV on the Cactuar server. This morning was the first time I had actually caught Syl on since she started up, because of time differences and the fact that last weekend I was kinda a Pax South. While waiting on one of my filters to run on the podcast this morning I popped over to see what she was up to in Camp Drybone. While there I played show and tell with various outfits and then decided to show off my Draught Chocobo, the two player mount that comes from the recruit a friend program. She I think jokingly asked if it could take her to Vesper Bay… but sure enough that was precisely what I did. Granted I had to run across three zones to get there but it was super enjoyable, and all the while she was emoting all sorts of happy things sitting behind me.

Its moments like this that make Final Fantasy XIV so damned charming. Sure there are problems like goofy invisible walls, or things being gated behind group content… but the overall package is just so adorable at times it hurts. I mean what is more awesome than a pair of Lalafell trekking across country on a big damned chocobo? I love how group friendly this game is, that any one of us can easily help another guildie get something accomplished. We have started over the last few weeks doing a guild raid night of sorts directly before our podcast on Saturday. Last night we managed to catch a few people up with Shiva and Ultros, and then turned around and finished the Chimaera fight for another guildie. It is so painless to make this happen, no fiddling with hotbars, no fiddling with gear sets… the game just auto levels you down to the content that you need to run. I think in part the ease of helping others is what leads to the game being so friendly to new players.

Hard Mode Roulette

Another thing that happened recently is we managed to complete all of the new set of dungeons, unlocking hard mode roulette. I have to say it feels like Square has ramped everything about this patch up since in theory it is the last major one we will get before the expansion. Everything is leading towards what feels to be us entering Ishgard and joining in the battle against the dravinians. I spoke about the Keeper of the Lake dungeon earlier, and it definitely ties in to this theme. The other two dungeons feel more like us dealing with consequences of our actions. In Wanderer’s Palace we face the King Tonberry and through the course of the events end up defeating him. Upon entering Wanderer’s Palace hard mode… we see that this really destroyed the Tonberry people allowing a beast tribe to come in and take over, enslaving them. So here I am hanging out with my Tonberry Buddies after saving the day.

In Amdapor Keep hard mode we are going back in to deal with the havoc that the cultists started the first time. Cleaning up the remainder of the demonic hordes that were summoned. This is really the first dungeon that it did not feel there was a vastly different storyline. Granted you take a completely different path through the keep, and face entirely new enemies, but the story of the dungeon itself felt a little on the weak side. I did remark several times at just how pretty the dungeon was this time around. In all cases the new content was rather challenging, forcing us to use our limit breaks to get through almost every encounter. So far of this new set I would definitely say that Keeper was the hardest, and is likely going to be the one folks bail on if any. I felt like maybe Amdapor Keep was the easiest, leaving Wanderers Palace somewhere in the middle. I love the hard mode dungeons and am amped to see what they give us with the expansion. In the mean time I need to make my way into World of Darkness and see how that works.

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