AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 87 of 110

Nineteen Years

May 31, 2015May 31, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 59 – The Shadowrun Dragonfall Show

Last night we got the folks together to record the fourth AggroChat game club show, this time devoted to Tamrielo’s pick. Shadowrun: Dragonfall is the second game in the Shadowrun: Returns series from the wildly successful kickstarter process. While the first game focused mostly on getting the engine correct, this game focuses more on weaving an interesting narrative in the Shadowrun setting. In tonights show we delve deep into the game and talk about the various choices we made while playing it. Please be warned this is a full spoiler show, and we will talk about some of the plot twists and the alternate choice paths that you can make in the game. I highly suggest that if you intend to play this game, that you revisit this show after doing so as not to spoil any of the content.

This title is auspicious for various reasons, primarily because it is the first title that everyone joining in the show either beat or came extremely close to beating it. Kodra and I started recording tonight and during the course of the show actually defeated it. Ash however is in the final stretch making him only about thirty minutes away. The other extremely unique thing about this game is it is quite literally the first game we have played that we all were able to give a big thumbs up to. Join us next month for Kodra’s title as well called There Came an Echo, which is a voice controlled real time strategy game… that is certain to lead to some strange conversations. Additionally if you played Shadowrun: Dragonfall along with us, please head over to AggroChat.com and drop the team a line with what you thought about the game.

Nineteen Years

It was roughly nineteen years ago yesterday that my wife and I first got together as a couple. In truth we use May 30th as a close approximation of our “dating anniversary” because honestly neither of us really know the EXACT date. For the most part we consider it to be the more important anniversary and try and at least acknowledge it every year. We are not big into gifts and never really have been. We tend to label things we were already going to get as “anniversary gifts” after the fact. Like apparently the wooden rocking chair I got my wife awhile back is her anniversary gift, and according to my wife my new SUV and the used iPad 2 I will be getting Monday is my gift. It seems like I made out like a bandit until you learn how we spent our anniversary.

Friday was the last day with kids for my wife and thus begins the yearly ritual of packing up her room. This year however it is a bit more stressful for her because she is having to entirely vacate her cubical. When they moved into the building they created this “collaboration room” for the teachers, and set it up in quite possibly the least collaborative method known to man… the office cube farm. This summer however it seems like they finally got the memo and are going to tear down the cube farm and replace it with a much more open shared workspace. That said she has to completely move out of both her own personal cube and another cube for a program she manages. So yesterday I spent my anniversary packing up these cubes in boxes and moving them as she worked on packing away stuff in her classroom. It is not the most glamorous anniversary in the world but it was me helping her be less stressed so I think in the grand scheme of things it was a win.

End of School Stress

There are times in life when I have to fight my nature. I tend to be fairly protective of my friends and family, and I especially feel protective of my wife. She is a strong badass of a woman, who does not need me to fight her battles for her… but there are occasions when that instinct still kicks in. Part of the reason she is so damned stressed right now revolves around an event that happened Friday night. She is a rockstar of a teacher, and I mean that in every sense of the word. She will fight for these kids and bend over backwards to try and make sure they are doing whatever they need to be doing. This week was one of those cases where she bent over backwards to try and make sure one of her students was doing what they needed to be doing. The problem being this isn’t always appreciated and sometimes misguided parents can add to her stress level.

It is extremely hard for me to see her in the frustrated state she was in Friday. Every fiber of my being wants to protect her from the people who were stressing her out. Thankfully school is over and due to the extremely supportive administration things will work themselves out. But for the time being she has been wrestling with whether she did the right thing, or enough to help her students. For this reason and many others I am happy to help her try and at least get one stress out of the way. I know I would not be half the teacher she is, because quite frankly if I had to deal with half of the things she suffers with a smile… I would have gone postal a long time ago. She however has a level of dedication that can only be admired and respected. So I spent our anniversary packing up boxes, moving file folders, and moving it around the building. It might not be a glamorous chain of events, but if it lightened her burden then I think it was a successful way to spend our day.

Merry Sith-ness

May 30, 2015 by Belghast

Last Man on Hulu

Last night I had one of those nights where I was just restless without good reason for being so. Every activity I considered doing simultaneously sounded awesome and horrible at the same time. So while I finished my push to 21 in each of my Final Fantasy XIV crafting professions, I didn’t really accomplished much of use the rest of the evening. I spent a good chunk of my crafting time test driving Hulu and watching the tv show Last Man on Earth. My assessment of both is rather mixed. Firstly having never experienced Hulu my very first impression was precisely “what the fuck is with all these advertisements”. I finally found a blurb on the Hulu website explaining why they have ads which comes down to a bullshit answer of needing to reduce the cost of the subscription. How about this, how about you charge an “extra-premium” tier subscription that turns off all of that crap and just lets me watch the shows.

Right now my likelihood of actually staying subscribed to Hulu past the free trial is pretty non-existent for this reason. To make matters worse it is like watching Cable “On Demand” where they play essentially the same four commercials over and over. At this point I seriously want to burn down the honey bunches of oats factory that is shown on the Post cereal commercial that they kept playing over and over and over. After having that drilled into my brain all night long while watching an already sub par television show has made me want to vehemently avoid anything products by Post while roaming around the super market. I feel like that is counter intuitive to their original mission with the advertisement in the first place. As far as Last Man on Earth… the first episode was humorous, but then once Kristin Schaal showed up it progressively went down hill. Which is sad because normally speaking I adore Kristin Schaal, I still find this skit one of the most hilarious things on the planet. The problem with both Netflix and Hulu is the shows just keep playing without manual intervention… so I think I ultimately watched one too many episodes before finally deciding I had enough of it and stopped it.

Merry Sith-ness

Around 10 pm last night I opted to try and go to sleep, thinking maybe my malaise was simply caused by being tired. The problem being the moment my head hit the pillow it is like a flip got switched in my brain and I was instantly in “super awake” mode. I tossed and turned trying to figure out a way to get comfortable, and chatted with my wife until she fell asleep. After an hour of struggling to find sleep I opted to simply get up. Thinking that if I could go do something my brain would eventually shut the hell up and let me go to sleep. I’ve suffered from bouts of insomnia my entire life, and sometimes the worst thing I can do is try and force myself to sleep. Otherwise I will have sat there in bed for three hours and ultimately just end up frustrated that I didn’t get up and do something with that time. I am not entirely certain why I ended up launching Star Wars the Old Republic other than I have really not played much of it, and they have an insane xp bonus event going on.

I would really like to play the continuation of the main storyline on my Jedi Guardian, but the hard truth there is that I have been gone from the game so long that I quite literally have no clue where to start on it. Instead I opted to log into my Sith Juggernaut that is knee deep in Balmorra hell. In theory I could do just the class quests and be off the planet, but I feel a deep need to finish all of the things especially since this is the highest Sith character I have mustered to date. I am not sure if it was surprising or not but I actually enjoyed myself, but the unfortunately thing is that I managed to stay up until 2 am before sleep finally claimed me. This is going to make for a long evening with our podcast since I was back up again at 8 am. Hopefully I will be able to sneak a nap in today, but I have a feeling that since it will be nice outside my wife will want to get out of the house. We have been suffering through absolutely insane torrential rain. I heard an estimate that over the last week we have gotten as much rain as we normally get in an entire year.

Beautifying AggroChat

One of my failings is that I have done a pretty piss poor job of advertising the fact that AggroChat.com exists and is populated full of good stuff to read. Ultimately if you are reading Tales of the Aggronaut you are going to be extremely familiar with some of the content, but not all of it. Essentially AggroChat.com was a vehicle that I came up with as a way to pull together all of the content created by the hosts of the AggroChat Podcast. Additionally this site serves as a way to connect to each of the authors and a better vehicle for receiving both the AggroChat and Bel Folks Stuff episodes. We have had some grand plans to eventually expand this site to include people who do not already have blogs of their own. For the time being however it gives you a one stop shop for the following content…

The takeaway is that through this one site you end up with a ton of content delivered on a regular basis. I personally blog every single day, and Tam blogs five times a week at least. I keep hoping to add more news commentary content and game reviews but we have not quite gotten there yet. I plan on in the near future creating a special section of the AggroChat Game Club games where you can pull in some quick commentary from each of the folks that played it, as well as a link to the show where we discuss it. Essentially we are going to keep expanding it, so I should do a far better job of promoting it. So check the site out, and I would be open to any comments and suggestions. I’ve tried to set the site up in a way that allows you to drill down into specific content by one of our Authors quickly and efficiently. As of last week I even went back through every episode of AggroChat and indexed which hosts are on which shows so that they show up in our Author category links. While there is already a lot of great content here, watch the site because I am hoping it gets ever cooler.

The Madness Continues

May 24, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #58 – Eight Is Enough?

This week we explore the age old question of podcasting.. just how many hosts can you have before a show descends into madness? As the title suggests we ended up with eight hosts on this weeks AggroChat and I think for the most part we exited on the other side with our sanity still in place… or what little we actually had of it to start. This week Ashgar and Kodra are both travelling, and as such I made plans to cover for them if they were unable to make it for the show. However because they are the consumate professionals that they are… they figured out a way to podcast remotely. This left me with the choice of either backing out on the folks I had arranged or just push forward into madness. Like usual I chose the path of madness.

This week we have quite possibly our longest show to date as we aske the question if Eight is Enough? This week we talk about Kodra’s trip to Canada, and his descent into Pathfinder Online. This spurs a discussion about the recent crop of MMO nostalgia titles and how they all somehow miss the boat on what made those early MMOs so interesting. Since all of us literally are playing Final Fantasy XIV we spend a good deal talking about our two groups working on turn nine of the Second Coil of Bahamut, as well as contrasting WoW and Final Fantasy raiding experiences. Grace talks about her experience leveling a ninja and how this game causes us to play things we didn’t think we would ever like playing. I talk about my complete and total embrace of the black hole that is the crafting system and how I have managed to push all classes to fifteen this week.

On top of this we talk Sword Art Online in both the Anime and Game forms. We talk a bit about how each of us is trying to wrap up our time in Shadowrun in preparation for next weeks show. We talk Mad Max Fury Road and to a lesser extent Orphan Black. Ashgar talks about his continued experiences with Radiant Historia, and Thalen ventures into Broken Age. Dallian and I talk about our experiences this week playing Witcher 3, and how the Hearthstone mobile app doesn’t work nearly as well as we would have hoped it would. Finally we wrap things up with some discussion about Moonrise and the impending steam early access. It was without a doubt one of the biggest shows we have recorded but also extremely enjoyable to participate in. It seems we somehow were able to juggle eight people on a show without complete chaos.

The Madness Continues

The insanity that is the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system continues. It was a rainy day here in Oklahoma so I spent most of it curled up on the couch watching television and banging away slowly on crafting. As of yesterday evening I had managed to push every single crafting profession to fifteen, which essentially signals the end of “easy mode” crafting. During those first levels everything you need can be purchased off of a vendor and it is simply an act of brute forcing your way through the levels. Now I begin a trek through the dark territory that involves copious farming of materials. Last night while podcasting I farmed up three stacks of allumen and aldgoat skin for the purpose of leveling leatherworking. I was not sure just how much Aldgoat Leather I would ultimately need to get through to 30 but I suspected it would be quite a bit. Towards the end of the podcast and while editing I crafted up the entire stack of materials, making some 410 Aldgoat leather and it pushed me from level 15 to level 21.

In theory if I can just find something like this to farm at each step of the way I might make it through the 50 levels of crafting with ease. It seems that in leatherworking at least there is an item like that every 10 levels that can be mass farmed and crafted up. The ones that I worry the most about are Alchemist and Cullinarian because they seem to be the most fiddly of the professions. Right now I am farming up Limestone and Fine Sand to make a ton of Mortar because I actually need some to hand off to Cylladora to craft a Moogle themed wallpaper for me, for my personal room. Yesterday in the mix of things that I ran I helped some guildies get through Good King Moggle Mog and managed to get the rare crafting material to drop. Who doesn’t want Moogle themed wallpaper for their personal room? Anyways I am finding the whole crafitng thing oddly soothing but it has absolutely consumed every last moment of my play time. Now that I am having to farm up materials however I am at least venturing out in to the world some.

Poking My Head Out

Yesterday was quite literally the first day I have done something other than craft for the last two weeks. Maybe it isn’t quite that drastic, but the majority of my time in game has been working on some craft or another. Yesterday I ran Haukke Manor with some guildies and got to play my rogue. I have to say that class is just fun to play in that the animations are amazing. While it is only 28 right now I am thinking it might be the next class that I push to 50. A huge chunk of this desire admittedly is the fact that I have a pair of Moogle themed daggers waiting for maximum level. Mog weapons make everything more enjoyable, as I am using the mogfork on my dragoon and mogaxe on my warrior. Other than Haukke I ran an expert with Grace and Tam, and then later that night ran the Battle at Big Keep and The Chrysallis with guildies. It was good to actually stretch my warrior muscles a bit after all of the crafting. I feel like at this point I have more than I could ever actually accomplish still to do before the launch of Heavensward. There are only twenty six days until the Heavensward head start, and there is no way in hell I am going to finish a lot of my side projects before then.

Quite literally I feel like I could take a month off and focus on nothing but Final Fantasy XIV and still have things that are left unfinished before the expansion. Right now it seems I have opposite problems between Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft. In Warcraft there is nothing I really want to do, but in Final Fantasy I have what feels like dozens of competing desires. It is actually hard getting used to the notion that I will be going into this expansion with a lot of unfinished baggage, but I guess in the grand scheme of things that gives me reason to keep poking my head back in on the old world. The things that I absolutely want to finish before Heavensward is that I want to complete the Post Moogle storyline. I feel like I really just need a good afternoon to work through all of that content, so I am wondering if maybe that is going to be my mission on Monday. Put on Orphan Black on the television and quest my way through to one of the coolest hats in any game. Even writing this… I am realizing just how much content there is in this game yet to do.

Fear of the Unknown

May 23, 2015 by Belghast

MMO Nostalgia

One of the interesting subtexts this week that we will likely talk about on tonight’s AggroChat is Kodra and Pathfinder Online. He has begun the descent into this game and been trying to drum up a certain measure of interest from the rest of us to join him. The problem is that as I listen to him talk about the game I realize that I have already played this. In fact I gave three years of my life to Everquest, and everything about Pathfinder Online feels like a nostalgic throwback to that era. I am sure it is a perfectly awesome game, but while I miss the sense of community we had back then there are many things I don’t miss about it. This is all the more relevant since right now the Ragefire server is open in Everquest and folks are flocking there for their own hit from the nostalgia pipe.

The thing that I don’t miss about that era is the way I felt chained to the computer. Every time I set foot in the world I had a tangible fear of losing everything that I had worked so hard to attain to that point. There was always the fear that you might take a death in a place where you could not recover your body. Over time the items on your body started to decay and disappear, and eventually there was a point where things were simply no longer recoverable. The problem is when you took a death your entire mission in life became about getting that body back. I’ve known people that skipped major events in their life all because they were in the middle of trying to get back their virtual items. I’ve personally gotten calls on the middle of a Sunday afternoon begging me to go home and log in and go find them so that I could resurrect their body and give them back some of the lost experience.

Fear of the Unknown

So while I don’t miss any of that bullshit, I do the constant and tangible sense of fear. The problem being that the modern games seem to have missed the boat in what exactly caused this fear. Right now so many of these sandbox games take the cheap route and make every player afraid of every other player. The problem with this is that it is counter productive to building a community. You want your players to band together, rather than avoid each other like the plague. What caused the fear was that the world was this scary and unknown place. There were no in game maps, there were no mob statistics… and it was the lack of information that made the world frightening. We didn’t know what we didn’t know… and often times our imaginations invented a far scarier scenario than the game servers were possible of creating at the time. We imagined complex plans within plans… and that the server was quite literally out to get us.

There were situations like Kithicor Forest in Everquest, where during the day it was a friendly low level hunting zone, but at night all manner of maximum level undead spawned and started roaming. The truth of Kithicor is that there were far fewer undead spawning than we realized and that we were never in as much danger as we actually thought we were. In all the times I ran through the zone at night, I never once died to the undead… but I was constantly in fear of it. I “knew” death waited around every corner and because of it I tiptoed my way out into the world constantly aware of my surroundings and constantly afraid that at any moment the server would reach out and smite me for my impudence. The fact that it never actually happened, didn’t really matter… because I lacked the data mined information to tell me exactly what the spawn rates were and where the roaming paths were located at.

Players Together, Not Against

We are quite literally overloaded with information about the games we play. Knowing the amount of hit points a given mob has is just expected now, along with knowing every other intimate piece of information about the game. We know the attacks a creature is capable of making, and how exactly to counter them… before we even see said creature take a swing. Where this modern incarnation of Everquest nostalgia falls short is understanding that it was our lack of knowledge that made us afraid to venture into the world. It was not necessarily the harsh death penalties, and it most definitely was not that we were afraid of other players… it was that the world was cruel and unknown. The focus on PVP as a way of providing cheap content always seems to miss the point of why the original games worked. Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot worked more than anything because it caused players to be willing to look for help from anyone who would offer it.

When you expect the world to strike you down at any moment, you are willing to accept assistance from anyone willing to lend it. Especially in Everquest it felt like every player in the game was on the same team, that it was us versus the world. Sure there were territorial squabbles over spawn camps and the like, but more often than not each server had its own hard and fast rules for dealing with this sort of thing. We the players made order out of the chaos, and there was protection in numbers. There were many zones that you didn’t go to because you knew there were not likely to be other players to help you out if something went wrong. By the same token these untouched zones became the perfect place for a group of friends to go off exploring on their own. This is what we need in the current crop of nostalgic games, a sense of why exactly the first games worked and a certain measure of ignorance to make us all fear the darkness.