AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 92 of 110

Cleansing Lunari

March 15, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #48 – Ori and the Sad Sads

Last night we embarked upon another journey through that weekly tradition we call the AggroChat podcast. Things are a little different sounding this week because I finally got a proper microphone. Positive is I can have my fan on me while we record without it picking that up… however it seems to pick up my mouse clicks like insanely bad. Last night we dedicated the show to the ultimate Pi day, and Kodra was celebrating with a bunch of tiny pies. The first game we talked about in depth is Ori and the Blind Forest which is so many sads out of sad. The game is a gloriously animated and beautifully done…. but has the saddest intro I have ever experienced in any game. We talk about how the hopeful tone of the rest of the game, doesn’t really fit with the intro sequence. From Ori we move into the pitfalls of the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system, and why all of us are trying to become Omni crafters for the sake of our free company Airship. This makes Tam exceptionally sad because all he really wants to be is a good goldsmith.

I talk about my guilds progress in Blackrock Foundry and some of the drama that happened as a result of us needing to pair down our dps in order to conquer the content. Most of the guilds I know have been struggling with keeping enough healers this expansion, and because we are habitually short that limits the number of dps we can realistically bring on fights. Since we are getting into harder content we had to bench a few people, and one of them took offense enough to rather dramatically guild quit during the middle of the raid. Tam went into a interesting discussion about the new Infinity rules and how they will change the way gameplay happens, by shifting focus away from combat to instead be focused on objective completion. Finally I talk at length about my experiences playing the Steam beta of Moonrise… but I will go into that in more detail below.

AggroChat Dot Com

A few weeks ago I had a bit of a brain storm… or at least a slight drizzle. The revolved around the idea of trying to apply to get press passes for the AggroChat folks to Pax Prime. It made me realize that between all of us that do this podcast on a weekly basis there is quite a lot of content that we are producing on a regular basis. I write Tales of the Aggronaut daily, Tam writes Digital Initiative, Ashgar writes Ash’s Adventures, Kodra the Keen Gamer, and Rae does Little Rae of Sun. What if we pulled all of this content together in one place, and then augmented it with some of our other friends that maybe don’t want to take the time to maintain a full blog of their own, but have the occasional post in them. The end result is AggroChat.com and while it is not finished and still very much a work in progress, I feel like it is “done enough” to start talking about it. Right now the big daunting task that is ahead of me this morning is pulling together all of the content from AggroChat into the site. This means manually creating entries for all 48 of our episodes so far, but it is well worth it to make sure everything works correctly.

There are a few outstanding issues, like why exactly Ash’s preview images are broken. Other than that I think things have come together rather nicely. I still need to do a “real” logo for the site pulling together the awesome Chibi versions of ourselves that Rae created, and I still need to get bio information from all of our bloggers for the individual author pages. However I am pretty pleased with how things are shaping up. The color scheme was intentionally obnoxious in some what of an honorific of Kodra… who we honestly thought was color blind for the first several years of gaming with him. He puts together some pretty outrageous color schemes, and I figured because of this our website needed to be equally insane. Let us know what you think of the site so far. Hopefully more bloggers will be coming on board the site within the next few days as I sort things out. My hope is that this will push all of us to create more interesting content.

Cleansing Lunari

One of the games I talked about a little bit in my day one PAX South wrap up post was Moonrise by Undead Labs. I had a lot of fun playing the game and being shown the ropes by Richard Foge, even though he kicked my ass in PVP numerous times. So as exciting as this game was, because it reminded me so much of Jade Cocoon… it really fell in the realm of “not the key demographic”. I am not really much of a mobile gamer, while I own tablets and numerous handheld systems… I don’t game on them very often. In fact right now I think the only mobile game I have installed on my phone is Final Fantasy Dimensions. As one of the few people on the planet that do not have an iPad the game fell in that category of “really excited to see it” but probably not for me. All of this was until the other night when I happened to click through to a twitch stream posted by the Undead Labs account. It turns out the game is coming to Steam Early Access soon, and this immediately changed my perspective on it. To make things even cooler I managed to score a closed beta key, and have been playing quite a bit of the game since.

I have a more proper preview post in the moderation queue on MMOGames.com, which should be releasing Monday or Tuesday, but I wanted to take a few minutes this morning to talk about this game and why you should be excited about it. First off the game is a really enjoyable art style that reminds me so much of Free Realms. I have always liked that sort of “realistic cartoony” feel to games where I can create something funky without it feeling like I am no longer actually connected to reality. The game centers around the event called the Moonrise which normally happens for only a few days, causing normally peaceful “Solari” to turn into ravening corrupted “Lunari”. The problem is this Moonrise has been lasting far longer than normal and seems to only be growing in strength. You play the role of a game keeper like Warden, and your job is to go around the countryside cleansing the Lunari of their sickness by engaging them in battle.

Immediately the game has some characteristics that feel very Pokemon like in that you are sending your pets out to do battle with other creatures. Where this whole equation gets turned on its head is the fact that it is happening in real time, and you are battling with up to two Solari at a time… out of a stable of six that you have “at the ready”. So if this were not frenetic enough, you also have the ability to do battle yourself, with your warden earning various abilities as you level up. When it comes to Warden vs Warden combat, you have two win conditions. Either you can knock out all of the enemy Solari… or you can instead use abilities that focus the enemy Warden directly. When I fought Foge at Pax South I seemed to do just fine at whittling down his Solari, but he would do a better job at focusing me directly and knocking me out as a Warden. The game itself is extremely enjoyable with a combination of lobby areas with open hunting zones and dungeons to explore and treasures to find. When this goes to open access I highly suggest you check it out, and I am sure over the next few weeks I will be posting more about it.

Heavensward Hype

March 8, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 47 – Scrabble is for Olds

Last night is another case of us sitting down, saying we had nothing to talk about… and then ending up talking for an hour and a half about everything imaginable. We talked about Ashgar and the insanity he is currently going through working on his Relic Novus in Final Fantasy XIV. We talked my recent journey back into Bravely Default and how that game requires a certain measure of degenerate play to defeat encounters after a certain point. We talk about Tam’s brush with near death as he decides that no one should ever be bit by a Black Widow spider because it hurts like hell. I talk about my experiences in Blackrock Foundry and the World of Warcraft selfie toy filling up my twitter feed. I talk about hitting level 80 on my first character in Guild Wars 2… and how empty it feels since the last 15 levels or so were essentially given to me for logging in daily.

Our longest discussion however that spawned the quote that I am using for the title of this show was about board games and miniature gaming. We talk about “long” board games, those taking several hours to play out… and the frustration of having to devote that much time to a game you are essentially “behind the curve” in the entire time. We talk about games that require less time to get into and play, and that can be played for a number of times in a single evening. This also spawns a discussion into miniature gaming talking about the problems with Warmachine and Warhammer 40k contrasted with some of the strengths of Infinity. As always it is a long rambling discussion between a bunch of friends, and since you apparently like that as AggroChat listeners… then this should be a banner episode.

Heavensward Hype

Yesterday was a pretty huge day for Final Fantasy XIV in that Yoshi P was at Pax East giving a presentation on the upcoming expansion. Thankfully it was live streamed to the internet, and you can check out the entire presentation from yesterday over on their twitch video on demand page. Honestly at first I thought it was going to be a disappointing repeat of all of the information that had come out of the Tokyo Game Show back in December. The show started with essentially revealing the same information about the Au Ra race and the three new classes that happened during that show. However quickly it segwayed into showing us things like the amazing level 60 class sets. The above image is that of the Warrior set, and while I still intend to play Dark Knight as my main… I have to say I will be rapidly leveling Warrior as well. Instead of breaking rocks with axes… they seem to have just skipped a step and made the axe itself out of a rock.

Since this is essentially the expansion of the Dragoon… you would expect the level 60 class armor to be amazing. As the above image shows it was well worth the wait. My biggest hope is that they don’t have the female “belly hole” problem that the earlier dragoon armor had. I have to say though that I will continue poking things with a spear if for no reason other than the collect this gear. As usual I was not quite so amped about the caster sets, but then again I never really am. I have no clue what is going on with the Black Mage set , at least the current set is something I would happily wear. This set is a bit more “demon lady gaga” than anything else I can think of. If you want to check out all of the new class armors you should hit up this youtube video that shows each set in action. I am happy that maybe just maybe I will finally have a Bard set that I am not ashamed to wear.

Not a Spring Release

The biggest news to come out of yesterday is a firm and concrete release date for the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion… Heavensward. Within the next few weeks they are apparently releasing a brand new benchmark application to allow us to test out the Direct X 11 changes, and play with all of the racial customization options on the Au Ra. If this works like the previous benchmark it should allow us to export our saved characters and then import them into our actual game client. On March 16th the pre-orders will open and like usual the physical collectors edition is going to have some sort of a big dragon statute pack in. Apparently earlier they had announced that we would be getting a flying dragon mount as part of the collectors edition as well, which in truth are the type of rewards I care a bout. All of this time we had heard “spring 2015” for the release date, but it turns out that the game will be launching on June 23rd with early access starting June 19th… so not spring but summer.

It turns out that they apparently did have a May date in mind for the launch, and they tried to make it. However as Yoshi P apologized they wanted to make sure they had a very polished product for launch. I for one support pushing back by a few weeks to make sure we have a really polished game, because really… the first expansion is a crucial time for any game. I want to make sure they are able to keep this quiet momentum they seem to have going into the new content. That said we also still have one full major patch waiting in the wings, and I am not sure there would have been enough time for us to really get to complete that content before the expansion anyways. I feel like that is the prime difference here as there is with other expansions. Most expansions land at the tail end of a six month or longer lull with no new content. In the case of Warlords of Draenor it was at the end of a 16 month lull… even with the impending expansion… they still have content releases planned up to the moment 3.0 launches. So in the mean time I will be working on my crafting… because it sounds like we are going to need a team of crafters to complete our free company airship.

Year Behind and Loving It

March 1, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 46 – Hards for Cards Extreme

Last night we once more recorded an episode of AggroChat and this time as one might expect our episode was almost entirely about Final Fantasy XIV patch 2.51. The patch introduced so much casual content to the game it is just silly. The primary addiction for our free company however has been the search for Triple Triad cards. While for some this has meant the constant dueling of NPCs to win specific cards, for me it has been doing hard content in the hopes that maybe just maybe it would drop a card. Yesterday Tam did some quick math and realized that over the course of the week I had completed more than 90 hard mode trials. Each of these trials rewards 5 poetics, and I capped almost exclusively through chain running them to get various primal cards. There are still a ton more that I need but so far I have managed to gather up Ifrit, Garuda, Gilgamesh/Enkidu, Ultros/Typhon and Good King Moggle Mog.

What I find amazing about this patch is the way that each of us has reacted to it slightly differently. Some of us have spent time racing Chocobos, others playing the catcpot lottery, and even others doing the various GATE events scattered throughout the golden saucer. Last nights show was overwhelmingly about our love of Final Fantasy XIV, but we did manage to slide a few other topics in. Tam and Kodra talk Elite: Dangerous and their recent missions to go asteroid mining. Kodra talks a new game that he has started called Deer God, and how it is not quite ready for primetime… but still charming. It was a fun show to record, and it is rare that all five of us are so completely enthralled with the same content at the same time.

Year Behind and Loving It

One of the things that made last nights show so damned entertaining to record, is we were essentially basking in the afterglow of a big raid win. Saturday night for a couple of hours before the podcast we have been doing this impromptu raid thing as a way of allowing some of the folks that cannot make our normal Monday night raid get some action. We alternate between doing serious content, and doing whatever eight man content one of our free company mates needs to get them off center. So as such last night we started off with the Chrysalis, the 8 man trial added with the last bit of storyline. It took us a bit to learn this fight but I was really pleased to see we could step in after a week and essentially down it in our first attempt. There was a bit of an intermission as we had to let Warenwolf catch up on the cinematic, but after that we set our focus on Titan Extreme.

For awhile we have had the awesomely named “Quake me up before you O’Ghomoro” sitting in our quest logs taunting us. This has been one of those things that I think all of us wanted to put behind us… but quite frankly Titan Extreme is one of the most demanding fights I have experienced in awhile. It requires the entire raid to move with confidence and precision, and there is a really slim margin of forgiveness. As we talked about on the Podcast it also does something really interesting, in that it makes you relearn your instincts. We died so many times because it is my tank instinct to run back in after a knockback and turn the boss. However in this fight there are reasons why that is the wrong decision, and it took awhile last night for me to get past that urge. Sure it is a year late in us beating this content, but damned does it not feel amazing that we did it… and that content that is over a year old is still relevant.

Faffing with the Mandervilles

This has become my new favorite screenshot, that I took on a whim the other night in the Manderville Golden Saucer. Before last nights raid, I opted to glamour my axe to the very awesome and very fitting Malignant Mogaxe. Most of the Good King Moggle Mog weapons have a bit of a silly side to them, but this one is just a very brutal looking axe with a Moogle pattern inlaid into the blade. It happens to match colorwise with my hair and my current chest piece nicely. This has been the best part about chain running Hard Mode Trials is the fact that I am picking up so many of the awesome primal weapons for Glamour purposes. I talked about this a bit last night, but since I have 5 level 50 classes… I have taken to collecting my Triple Triad Cards through running content because it kills two birds with one stone. There is always the chance of getting the cards that I want to drop, but at the same time all the while I am trying to get it I am stockpiling tomestones of soldiery that I can then use to buy gear for my army of classes.

Over the course of the weekend I managed to get Warrior and Paladin to 116, Dragoon to 110, White Mage to 100… and now I just need to catch up my Bard that is still sitting at 95. While it might seem tedious to run the same primal fights over and over… for me I guess it is much the same as soloing old school raid content in World of Warcraft. The fights and zones just feel epic, and I am happy to repeat them over and over. That has been one of the best things about having a fresh influx of new players… I am able to play “big kid” and run the old content with people seeing it for the first time. There is nothing quite like re-running content that never actually gets truly trivial. What I like the best is the fact that my chosen way of playing the game… is not the only one. Each of my free company mates has figured out their own particular style of play… and all see to be happy doing it. Nothing quite like being in a group where everyone seems to be happy.

Battle in the Big Keep

February 22, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 45 – The Citzens of Earth Show

Last night we recorded the episode devoted to the very first AggroChat Game Club title, Citizens of the earth. During the episode we talked about the various aspects of our game play experience. For this game play experience myself and Rae played on the PC, Tam and Ash on the Vita and Kodra on the 3DS. It seems like this game was not quite ready for primetime, because all of the console experiences were somehow fraught with problems. We attempt to dive into the mechanics in depth, talking about the interesting way the game recruits new characters to your party. We also dive into discussion about the storyline and our general feel on how successful the game ended up being for each of us.

I have to say this first game made us completely re-evaluate our process for picking titles for the future. As such going forward we will be doing a round robin starting with Rae. This months title will be Trine 2 which is awesome because I know that has been in a number of Humble Bundles as well as a Playstation Plus title. Our hope is this will make it a fairly easy title for people to join in the fun with. Since this game has two very different experiences for single player and multi-player we will be trying both. I know personally I plan on playing some on the PS4 as well as on the PC to give myself a feel for how the game performs both on a PC and on a console. It should be interesting, and I hope you all will join in the fun and give Trine 2 a play this coming month.

Battle in the Big Keep

On Saturday nights before podcast time we have started doing a semi-raid night where we gather up whoever happens to be on and run eight player content with them. The random nature of these nights is quickly making it one of my favorite evenings of the week. Last night we finally had a full eight player group ready for the latest of the Hildebrand quests. Once again we get into a battle with “Greg” aka Gilgamesh, but the awesome part is this time we really do get to see Enkidu his longtime companion. This entire sequence has been huge for our guild, because we have deep ties to Final Fantasy V. For years Ashgar has been twisting our arms to participate in the Four Job Fiesta with him, and as such we are all very familiar with the shenanigans of Gilgamesh. The sequence of events is almost directly ported from Final Fantasy V and as such we love every new step. There is just so damned much nostalgia wrapped up in this game that it is amazing.

I have to say the conclusion of the Hildebrand quest chain was well worth the wait. I don’t want to spoil anything about the quest chain or the fight… but this is quite possibly my favorite encounter in any game. Everything about it is just so amazing, the only problem is I am not sure how someone is going to complete it being less geared than we are. I was taking so damned much damage as a tank it was silly… which makes me think it has to be percentage based. Otherwise it would flat out kill any paladin tanks I know in the game. I have roughly 11k health and when he cast Sword Dance it would whittle off about 8000 health in a short period of time. We ran the fight back to back, and I swear there will be not getting tired of it for me at least. Also it drops an Enkidu chicken pet.. so I must have it.

Random Groupy Bits

One of the things I am really enjoying right now is having so many different people playing the game at different levels of completion. This is meaning that we need to keep running different activities and revisiting older content. I am absolutely eating this up, because I never really know what I might be needed to tank each time I log into the game. I would love to see us do a semi regular night of doing nothing but the things that can drop pets. Last night Exale needed Good King Moggle Mog, but ended up dropping from a duty and garnering the 30 minute debuff. Instead we pulled together a group and did the Dragon Neck encounter… aka Ultros. The first few times we did this it was super frustrating, but the last couple of times we seem to be getting better. To mix things up Ashgar and I swapped roles and he took Ultros and I tanked Typhon.

ffxiv 2015-02-22 10-52-42-36

We had one bobble in not getting enough water in the various Kappa transformed players “bowls” to interrupt Typhon, but on our second try it went pretty much flawlessly. I am generally pretty horrible at rolling on pets, in fact on Enkidu I rolled an 11. However when Ultros dropped at the end of that encounter, I managed to roll a 95. You can see in the above image me in ninja form standing beside the adorably creepy wind up Ultros minion. I maybe have a problem with minions… right now I have 60… and am constantly looking to get more. It is the little fun things in the game world that make it enjoyable for me. I need to get off my ass and get on with doing the various beast tribe dailies because each of them has both a minion and a mount waiting at the higher levels of faction. I am a little disappointed that there are not more mounts in the game that are dropped off normal dungeon content rather than extreme mode primals. Eventually someday I hope to join in the extreme mount farming fun, but so far these always seem to happen on Saturday nights… when we are recording our podcast.