AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 97 of 108

Outland

October 5, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 25

Last night we recorded yet another episode of our weekly podcast AggroChat. This week we were missing Rae, but had Ashgar, Kodra and Tam to join me to talk about stuff and things. Of the four of us, three of us have almost spontaneously started replaying Dragon Age: Origins. In truth Ashgar started it and then Tam and I decided it was a pretty excellent idea to follow suit as we all realized we didn’t really have a good save to feed into the upcoming title Dragon Age: Inquisition. As such we have been lost in that title and remembering just how amazing it really is. We gush about about the writing behind the title and some of our favorite and least favorite characters. We try not to give many spoilers since Kodra has yet to make it terribly far in the game, so should be safe to listen to for complete Dragon Age nubs and pros alike.

We meander our way through a couple of indie games, namely Crypt of the Necrodancer that Kodra has been playing, and Outland the awesome metroidvania that I am reviewing as part of my Steampowered Sunday. Ashgar hooked me up with a copy originally with the intent of playing this co-op… but it seems like the latency for co-op play is still absolutely atrocious. So instead I played it all by my lonesome this morning… we at least as lonesome as you can be while streaming it to the internet. Finally we talk about Final Fantasy XIV and the odd sense of compartmentalism in that game. How you can progress among multiple vectors without the need to really mess with the others. Also we walk about how much we are looking forward to the as of yet completely announced 3.0 expansion, which is rumored to have as much content as the original 2.0 release had.

Two other really interesting things happened during the episode. For starters we announced that we were now part of TGEN The Gaming and Entertainment Network of podcasts. Quite honestly I am a bit humbled to be included with such illustrious podcasts as Battle Bards, Beyond Bossfights, Cat Context, Contains Moderate Peril, Couch Podtatoes, Massive Failure and Roleplay Domain. I am also quite humbled to be the first podcast to officially be launching the network, since we record on Saturday nights and launch Sunday, we are the first show sporting the new network bumper. Additionally we talk about the upcoming Extra Life gaming marathon and our team. Right now you can check out Ashgar, Kodra and Myself on the donor pages and our progress… and then tune in Oct 25th to the Alliance of Awesome hitbox team to watch the streamers. Being our first year I set a very low team goal of $200 and so far we have raised just shy of $600 dollars in pledges. Really looking forward to the event, and I hope you join us.

Outland

For a few weeks now my friend Ashgar has been talking about this particular metroidvania with some interesting twists. Last weekend shortly after recording the Steampowered Sunday for Mercenary Kings he hooked me up with a copy on steam, suggesting we might play it for this Sunday. Apparently there is some really cool co-operative play in the game, but at the time of writing this it is apparently completely broken in that the latency makes it absolutely unplayable. I can see how any matter of latency would be a problem, as there are several places where you have a very slim window to time a jump or an attack. Since the co-op was out of the picture, I opted to still play the game but do so solo… or at least as solo as you can be while streaming. At face value it is a really artistically slanted metroidvania game. It follows the artistic style to some extent of the current crop of mostly silhouetted figures against a colorful background. This almost always makes a game feel far more detailed than it actually is, and I tend to enjoy this style of art.

You play the role of the ancestor of a great warrior who tamed the twin sisters of light and dark to save creation. To be truthful while well done the narrative doesn’t seem to matter that much other than add a bit of flavor. You wander through the levels collecting coins and rare pieces of treasure and sometimes unlocking special abilities. The twist on the traditional Metroidvania genre however comes in the fact that over time you can harness the power of the Light Spirit and the Dark Spirit and use these to bypass certain obstacles. The Light is represented by blue, and the Dark by red and while in the same color as an obstacle you can pass directly through it. You can also use your color to active switches and platforms allowing you to traverse the levels. You are rationed these abilities slowly and I didn’t get the second color until I had defeated the first boss. Some of the later puzzles require you to switch colors midair to take advantage of a platform that activates when you land on it with a specific color. This is facilitated by hitting the right shoulder button on your controller. This definitely feels like the sort of game that is greatly improved with a controller, so I did not even attempt to pay attention to the equivalent keyboard controls for things.

Epic Boss Fights

At the end of the first level you have to fight a giant golem that is blocking your way. The scale of the fight is extremely impressive and makes the game feel much larger than it actually is. The camera zooms in and out based on how large the chamber you are in happens to be, and this gives a more dynamic feel to the gameplay. The boss mechanic was rather simple but extremely effective in that you had to avoid a ground slam and then climb the giant itself while it was temporarily drained of its power to attack and exposed weak spot. As the fight got on there were more details that had to be avoided, like a rain of red and blue bullets that gives the game almost a bullet hell feel to it. I had to stand in the blue beams to avoid taking damage from the red beams, and I am imagining that in later encounters you will have to shift back and forth between red and blue to soak specific abilities while flipping to the opposite to be able to damage your target. While you can soak beams of the same color… mobs of that color can still damage you, and you can only damage them when flipped to the alternate polarity.

The game is constantly compared to the fabled bullet hell shooter by Treasure called Ikaruga in that it has similar soak/polarity mechanics. However any many ways it reminds me of the gameplay of Silhouette Mirage and earlier title with the same basic mechanic by Treasure. Similar to Outland it was a side scroller and you had a dual polarity of absorption and repelling based on which direction you pointed your attacks. You can check out my entire hour and a half long play session this morning in the embedded Hitbox video. I have to say I dig the game so far and want to play more of it. I just felt like I needed to wrap up this mornings session so I could get my blog post out, however I played significantly longer than most Steampowered Sunday mornings… so that should tell you something. Right now the game is under $10 on steam, and more than worth that price. I would have paid at least $20 for it to be honest, had someone not ever so graciously gifted it to me. If you like the Metroidvania genre and especially like ones with interesting mechanics like Guacamelee you should check this out.

#Outland #AggroChat

Mercenary Kings

September 28, 2014 by Belghast

Dinklebot is a Great Name

It was not until last nights stream that I had heard anyone refer to the Ghost in Destiny as the “Dinklebot”. Kodra credits Matt Lees as originating the term, but whoever did it… it is absolutely priceless. Not only does it clearly identify that the ghost is voiced by Peter Dinklage but it also adquately sums up just how useless the Ghost as a whole feels in the storyline. Last night once again we recorded AggroChat, and this week we had our regular cast of hosts Ashgar, Rae, Kodra and Tam. Destiny has caused so much angst that we started talking about it even before we went on air, and finally I had to say “guys, we should save this for the show”. This week a letter from the producer came out as well as some patch notes talking about upcoming changes to gameplay. We lead off the podcast by talking about these changes and how they personally effect us and our gameplay. I somehow doubt that any of us in particular will be mourning the loss of the loot cave.

From there I think we dove into Kodra and his morning stream of Hatoful Boyfriend. I tuned in when he met a bird that is totally reminiscent of the vespa riding mad woman from FLCL… except she drives REALLY slowly. Carve it into your soul! The game feels like it is complete madness… and also created using lots of clip art… and Christmas tunes. I commented in the stream that I think the game probably cost about $50 in shutterstock credit to make. The storyline is absolutely insane, so it is totally worth a watch. From there we dive into Trove and the Closed Beta gameplay that just started. Rae and I have been playing a ton of it, and we even managed to get Tam and Ash to try it out. Then things turn to our present obsession with Fallen London. I think everyone but Rae is currently madly playing this game.

Finally I give over the floor and let Tam, Rae, Ash and Kodra verbally faff about what is going on with League of Legends Worlds. At this point my eyes glaze over as while I enjoy playing League of Legends… I do not grasp the concept of watching other people play it yet. It was a good show that ran a bit longer than we had intended… but oh well. In a rush to tie things up, I totally forgot to do the where you could find us bit… so instead I recorded a snippet later telling folks to please leave comments either on our AggroChat Nook or the @Aggrochat twitter account. We apparently have some loyal listeners out there, and would love to hear from them. By the time I record the show and post it Saturday night, to the moment I get around advertising it Sunday morning… we generally have a couple dozen listeners. That seems like dedication to me.

Steampowered That Wasn’t

This morning I had every intent to play Witcher 2, as I have had many people in my thread talking about how much they love this series. I have tried multiple times to play Witcher 1… and the controls on that game feel like absolute shit. I will boot it up, and the last time I didn’t even make it through the first action sequence before tossing it aside. It might have the best storyline ever, but if the controls are horrible… I cannot bring myself to suffer through it. Maybe at some point I will see if there is a lets play series where I can watch someone else play the game… or at very least all of the cut scenes edited together. Since folks had been talking up this game again in anticipation of Witcher 3… I figured I would play it for Steampowered Sunday. Apparently I figured wrong.

I have had this installed on my machine for some time, and when I went to launch it this morning nothing happened. After digging through the forums it seems to just not work for some users. There were a bunch of red herrings that I chased down, but none of them ever caused the game to launch correctly. The only thing I didn’t try was downgrading it to run under XP Compatibility mode… because honestly I just thought about it this very moment. In any case it does not seem to like Windows 8.1 64 bit, or at least my machine. There are numerous supposed problems that it runs into with virus scanners… but given my frustration with the first game… there is a plateau to just how much bullshit I am willing to go through for this game. Maybe at some point I will pick up a console version of it, because at this point I am done with the franchise on the PC.

Mercenary Kings

Instead I fell back on a game I have also had installed for awhile but never gotten around to playing. Mercenary Kings is a Metal Slug like shooter from Tribute Games with the amazing animator Paul Robertson. I was originally made aware of him several years ago when I watched the video Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. The animation is in fact as insane as the title might suggest. Later on he went to animate the amazing Scott Pilgrim vs The World console game, so quite frankly I picked this up because of him. This morning… I flat out sucked at playing a side scrolling Contra/Metal Slug style shooter. Maybe it was my frustration after trying to deal with Witcher 2, maybe it was the controller…. or maybe I just flat out suck. In any case I died a lot, and die in some pretty silly ways. I think I died to a kitten at one point.

Many of my deaths could have been avoided to be honest if I had just read the tutorial level. Me being my normal self… wanted to simply rush head long into fate and totally missed the fact that I could do things like proactively reload my weapon for example. No matter however as bad as I played I still had quite a bit of fun. The game is not really your traditional Metal Slug or Contra clone, in that the game map can be traversed in many different paths. One of the missions involved me hunting down and taking out 8 snipers, and as such this involved me covering the entire game map multiple times looking for the last sniper I had missed. A lot of the terrain is gated by obstacles that you cannot cross in a specific direction, so many times you have to go a different way to get where you were hoping to get. The game has a checkpointing system of huts that allow you to respawn in various points in the map… and I respawned over and over and over.

I saw this screen an awful lot during the time I played the game. You have two meters for failure of a mission. Either you run out of fixed number of lives, or you run out of time. I believe the initial timer is set to 20:00 and I mistakenly took this as having plenty of time to poke around the map. If you know what you are doing I am sure this is more than enough time to find your objective and move along. For me… I ran out of time several times. The game play is not the stage after stage progression that I was expecting. Instead you have a village full of members of your team, each of them interacting with you in different ways. There is a village store, someone that will allow you to toggle on internet play, the general that will allow you to pick your missions and the chopper pilot that will drop you off as well as a few other characters that I didn’t really interact much with. The game is at times reminiscent of a lot of classic arcade games, but it ends up being a really unique mash of of them.

You can check out my entire horrible play of the game in the above embedded Hitbox video. It is still making its way to Youtube, but if you would rather wait for that copy you can check it out here. I think I was mostly just having a bad morning. I woke up late and am still in a state of stupor, and then combined with the frustrations with Witcher 2… that I has psyched myself up to play… I was maybe not in the best place to do a recording. In any case I had enough fun that I will be playing it some more. It falls in a camp of being frustrating, but just frustrating enough to make you learn how to do things better. In the little bit I had played I had already improved quite a bit. When I got rushed however I would still make really dumb mistakes. There are some enemies I could avoid, and others I couldn’t. Quite frankly at this point I am really not that great at side scrolling platformers, even thought I continue to try and play them mostly in part to a huge sense of nostalgia for that genre.

On a positive note I did manage to actually complete one of the missions. The find the snipers mission, mostly was about exploring the level and not so much about rushing towards a final objective. As such it seemed to fit my playstyle a bit better. I got the first 7 snipers pretty easily, but it took me forever to find that 8th one. It ended up being back near the start of the mission… which Ashgar kept trying to tell me… but unfortunately I was not watching my stream chat. I didn’t advertise this one so I didn’t expect anyone to actually be tuned it. I just fine the process of streaming a considerably easier way to get a video up onto youtube than through actually uploading it myself. If you like Metal Slug, Contra, Gunstar Heroes, or any of those style of games I suggest you give it a shot. I might end up repurchasing this at some point on a PS4 because after getting used to that controller… I have to say the Xbox 360 that previously had been my controller of choice felt really really odd. I am wondering if I can hook up a PS4 controller to my PC… but I guess that is a mission for another day.

#AggroChat #Witcher2 #MercenaryKings

Fallen London

September 21, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 23

Last night once again we gathered myself, Rae, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam and recorded yet another action filled episode of Aggrochat. I would love to think it was action filled, but more likely than not it was just a lot of rambling about about various things. I titled this weeks broadcast “An Intimate of Devils” because one of the games we talked about is the web based Fallen London. Several of us are playing it but really only myself and Kodra have spent a good amount of time doing so. Somehow we both managed to align ourselves with the Brass Embassy which is the home of the demonic residents of Fallen London… the Devils. It turns out that apparently the plural of devil is an “intimate of devils” so I thought it was an interesting if not fitting title for the show. If you have not caught on I try and name the shows something that might cause someone to click through on it.

Other than that we talked at length about the Microsoft acquisition of Minecraft, and what its possible ramifications could be. We talked a little bit about Final Fantasy XIV and especially about Rae’s journey to become an Omnicrafter and get to 50 on all of her professions. We spent a large chunk of time talking about Destiny and our experiences playing the game… and trying in vain to find the story. Currently the Tokyo Game Show is going on, so we talked a bit about the games that were being shown there especially Final Fantasy XV or “Final Fantasy Roadtrip” as we have taken to calling it. Finally we discussed for a bit what all was happening at the League of Legends World Championship. We ran a bit longer than normal clocking in at an hour and ten minutes, but hopefully you enjoy what all we had to say about a large number of topics.

Fallen London

A few weeks back my good friend Tarantella convinced me to give a web based game called Fallen London a shot, and since then I have been playing it quite a bit, often times feverishly burning through my turns multiple times a day. I liked it so much that I decided to become an “Exceptional Friend” which is their equivalent of a patron system giving you a second “candle” worth of turns. That is the rather nice way of them displaying how many turns you have left. You start off with a rather large candle and as you take turns it slowly burns down to just the stub. If you have played the early web based RPG Kingdom of Loathing, the gameplay will be very familiar. You are allotted a fixed number of turns, and then periodically you gain a new turn. The turns regenerate at a rate of 1 per every 10 minutes, so generally speaking each morning you will start with a fresh candle of 40, or in my case two candles of 40 since I am a patron… and then you play through those and start accruing them back until you are at the maximum number of turns again.

one of the things that makes this more interesting than say Kingdom of Loathing is the fact that you get what are essentially “chance” cards that you can play. These also regenerate at a rate of 1 level 10 minutes until you have 6 in reserve. The size of your current hand is determined by the quality of your lodgings. You start with only one card in your hand, and then as you upgrade your lodgings this increases. Right now my lodgings is a decommissioned steamer and it allows me certain types of cards to show up as well as increasing my hand size to three. These cards tend to give you far better rewards than wandering around the various districts of Fallen London. I say wandering, but there is no action combat in this game. Everything is carried out by making a series of text based decisions, and the game has a Everquest style color coding system to show how difficult the encounter is. If you mouse over an option it will tell you specifically what the chance of success is. There are various items that can be spent to give yourself additional chances at completing the task.

It’s About the Setting

The aspect of Fallen London that makes it appealing to me is that you have this London by Gaslight era setting infused with all sorts of Cthulhu elements as well as a fair bit of steampunk. The background of the game is that London is the 5th great city to fall, and in this case it means to be consumed completely by the earth. In the early bits of the game I found it unclear if this was literally a fissure in the earth or if the city was somehow transported into another dimension. In either case it finds itself surrounded by a great subterranean ocean known as the “Unterzee”. Additionally the city has found itself host to several supernatural entities that find it as a handy stopping off place between their own realms and that of the above world. So the game is a game of factions and secret societies… and you as the player have to tiptoe your way through them figuring out exactly who you choose to align with.

Personally I have found myself fond of the “Rubbery Men” which are essentially Cthulhu style deep ones in suits that wander around the city trading for mysteriously throbbing stones. Additional over the course of my exploits I’ve found myself getting closer and closer to the Brass Embassy as I mentioned above, the cloister of devils that visits our fair city between trips above to take the souls of men. The artwork overall for the game is extremely simplistic, but at the same time evocative of a dark and mysterious world that it is trying to induct you into. The game is not terribly action packed in that you essentially are doing a lot of text adventure, but nonetheless I find it compelling. It is like a self driven pen and paper role-playing game. I’ve made more than a few false steps as I have tried to figure out my way around the world… not the least of which was somehow pissing off the patron that had gifted me some really nice things.

An Evolution

One of the problems with Fallen London is that the way it is set up is designed to ration you out a few turns at a time. Additionally you are essentially “landlocked” inside of London. There are missions that open up storylets in different areas, but all of which are roughly connected to Fallen London proper. The folks at Failbetter Games have created Sunless Sea that is now available on Steam Early access to address this problem. This time instead of taking the role of a prisoner being released into Fallen London, you are taking the role of a Steamship captain giving you mobility outside of town. You and your fearless crew embark upon missions outside of the city and engage in battle against pirates and sea monsters while trying to gain the favor of the factions within the city. I’ve not played a ton of hours yet, but I am nonetheless intrigued.

The game does not really hold your hand, and in a way it reminds me quite a bit of FTL in that you can screw up spectacularly and wind up dead within a few turns. While wandering around the “Zee” you have to watch several things… the hunger of your crew, the fuel of your vessel and your hull integrity. As you wander about the in your vessel, you will encounter new areas and if there is a dock jutting out in to the water you can explore on shore. So far I have found a few new areas, each with storylets that will likely come into play later as I get further into the game play. The overall interface of the game is very familiar if you have played the web based Fallen London. The primary difference is you have to learn what a whole new set of stats means, in that they do not use any of the same baseline abilities as the web version has.

Doing Battle

Eventually you are going to encounter something that wants to take a chunk out of your hull. Combat itself is turn based and strategic in nature. In order to perform most of your attacks you need to illuminate your target to be able to aim properly. As such the opening salvos of combat tend to be you throwing flares out into the water to light it up properly. There is the option to do a wild salvo, but the chance of hitting the target and dealing serious damage is pretty low. As such I tend to throw out 3 flares first so that I can hit the target with a full force attack. On small targets like this abyssal crab it generally only takes a single hit. When you start encountering pirates however you will have to a bit more tricky. I’ve noticed that the pirates prefer to open with wild salvos which generally do little damage but can stress you out as you are trying to light up the target.

When you defeat an enemy you are given a series of options based on how far you have progressed as a character. In the case of the Crab, you are given the option to harvest it for supplies or dissect it to learn knowledge. More often than not I take the supplies as this is quite literally how you feed your crew, and anything that keeps me from having to spend Echo to buy supplies makes me happy. When I took out a pirate ship I was given the interesting option of sending it to shore with a skeleton crew and getting more resources from the ship. I ended up getting quite a haul of Echo from doing this, but it greatly reduces the number of available crew members when you do it. I am sure that has an opportunity cost later on as a result, but I have not quite run into a situation where the number of crew members mattered.

Tomb Colonists

Right now in my game I am spending most of my time running Tomb Colonists to Venderbight. The Tomb Colonists are one of the stranger factions of Fallen London. They are in essence mummies that travel around in coffins. So basically as I am doing this, I am hauling three coffins at a time and getting a pretty decent payout when I get to Venderbight and sell them back to the Tomb-Colonists there. It isn’t exactly glamorous but it is worth quite a large amount of echo… something I am sorely lacking. I need to do some research to see what it takes to get a more efficient engine because right now it seems like I am burning through a good deal of my profit in simply buying up fuel… which greatly limits my range of movement. I figure in coming sessions I will explore more of the coast line and see what trouble I can get into. Unfortunately however I don’t really know how to gauge how rough an encounter is… so I feel like at some point I am just going to die horribly to something too strong for me to take. Right now I am very much digging the narrative of both games and the setting. I only wish there was a way to have the two games be connected, in that I was either playing the same character or somehow being a benefactor one way or another. I did notice I was able to log in with my Fallen London account, but I did that right before starting this post… so I have yet to see just how connected they end up being. Long story short, I highly suggest you check out Fallen London since it is completely free to play. If you like the setting and find the various factions as compelling as I do, then I suggest you also check out Sunless Sea. I am looking forward to exploring more of the “Unterzee” as a Steamship “Zailor”. Right now Sunless Sea is under $20 for steam early access, and I feel like that is an absolute steam considering just how much interesting content I have already seen. The one thing still on my wishlist is for a proper mobile client for my phone, then I would be raving wildly about how awesome of an experience this is.

#AggroChat #FallenLondon #SunlessSea

Dance of my People

September 15, 2014 by Belghast

Enter the Jigglehats

Yesterday the Breaking Brick Mountains event started in FFXIV which is a repeat of an earlier event used to commemorate the launch of DragonQuest X. For those not terribly familiar with the Dragon Warrior/DragonQuest franchise, it has a rather distinctive art style. So seeing that art style appear in Final Fantasy XIV is extremely entertaining. The quests have this great Dragon Quest stylized “Quest Accepted” and FATE related text that just makes me happy to see in game. The quest itself is rather simple. You talk to Havak Alvak near the Central Thanalan gate in Uldah, which sends you to talk to the Beefy Businessman down by the Thaumaturge guild. From there you have to find a specific fate called “Brick by Brick”. This will lead into one of two other FATEs either called “Brick by Stone Brick” or “Brick by Gold Brick”, both granting you quest completion.

One of the things I love about Final Fantasy XIV seasonal and special events is that they are super easy to complete. I used to hate how frustratingly grindy other games events were, in that if you did not participate every single day of a holiday you could not get all the prizes. Even with the Lightning Returns event, and trying to collect all of the weapons… it essentially meant I had to farm 5 different FATEs and then was completely done. This event in total took maybe 30 minutes, and most of that was travel time. Completing the quest nets you a Thug’s Mug cosmetic helm and a Wind-up Brickman cosmetic pet. Next to the Beefy Businessman there is a Toughie Peddler NPC that sells the amazing “Jigglehat” or more properly known as the King Slime Crown.

It has become common place for our guild and the members of Howling Moon free company to mingle around while waiting on things to happen. The events of last night are pretty common, in that we each tend to hang around the market board just down from our house, which can be seen in the background of the above image. It all started when Joren Noye started up with this amazing outfit that he had built around his Jigglehat, that was mostly comprised of a dyed to match vanya robe. What happens when to amazing Lalafell meet? Well we dance of course, and within moments the ever adorable Jade Taiga showed up as well. Well it was not long before Ayla Noye joined in as well, and we had an impromptu jigglehat party. You have to love any game that supports this sort of random dancing in silly hats. My friend Tam is convinced that the entire point of this game is to collect ever more amazing hats.

Paladin Soul

I spent most of yesterday working away quietly on my Gladiator turned Paladin. I completed the final level 30 Gladiator quest, and went through the opening quest for becoming a Paladin. So far the 30 and 35 quests that I have completed are significantly easier than most of the job quests that I have done on other characters. I am guessing that at some point in the near future they will drop the floor out from under me with a quest that is significantly more difficult than the others. I personally thought the final level 30 Gladiator quest was rather challenging, in that I seemed to fail it the first time for no apparent reason. I was doing everything they had told me to do and then all of the sudden I got duty failed. Upon trying it again this morning I apparently did all of the things that I was supposed to and then some because I passed, but still have no idea what I did the first time versus what I did the second time.

I started the day at level 28 and finished the evening about halfway to 36. I have yet to really sit foot in a dungeon yet, and have been mostly doing the FATE grind. First in Costa Del Sol and now I am out in Coerthas. In part I guess I like FATE grinding because it is mindless and something I can do over and over. Additionally I have really become addicted to the whole Quick Ventures system, and I view FATEs as a way to feed Venture tokens to my Retainers. For those that are unaware you can buy 5 venture tokens for 1000 grand company seals at your grand company quartermaster. So far I am digging playing the Paladin again, but in truth I am mostly leveling this so that I once again have a good class for grinding FATEs to get Atma parts. I maybe made a mistake in going for the Atma weapon on my warrior first. That is pretty much the ideal fate grinding class, and in order for me to get another one up with that sort of survival… I am going to have to play my paladin.

Moonwalker

Other than playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV, I spent the bulk of the rest of my weekend playing some Destiny. At this point my Titan is level 10 and I am spending most of my time in the Moon Patrol zone. While I was waiting for FATEs on Saturday to spawn for my Animus book, I was hanging out on the PS4 wandering around either the Cosmodrome or Moon Patrol areas. This is pretty much the ideal play style for me. I like wandering about doing mini quests and killing lots of Fallen and Hive aliens. However if you listen to our podcast you can tell that several of our cast have a real issue with the fact that the game has very little tangible story. The story that does exist is questionably written and even more questionably acted. For me, it is enough story to keep me entertained, but we have already agreed that I need and more importantly want significantly less story than most folks. Wandering around and killing things is totally enough motivation to keep me enthralled, especially when the controls feel so damned good.

The weird thing for me is I tend to lose motivation to do the various missions whenever I actually unlock the patrol zone. It is as though the mission only serve as a vehicle to unlock patrol and once I have done that I have no real interest in progressing further. At some point soon however I should really finish clearing out the moon, but in the mean time I am wandering around the surface looking for interesting stuff. I love it when I find a chest or a new place that I had overlooked previously. I love exploring this game, but find it more than marginally frustrating when I encounter the “turn back now” wall around the outskirts of the areas. At least with the Cosmodrome you have understandable boundaries that limit you to just being on this one island. On the moon you can see forever, so it makes no sense why I cannot wander out in the open, as there are no logical obstructions. In any case, I am still really enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it.

#FFXIV #Destiny