Grand Experiment Archives - Page 159 of 200

Halloween 2013

October 19, 2013 by Belghast

Spooky Pasta!

One of the things I love in the various MMOs I play or have played… are the varried Holiday events. Some of them make an extreme effort to fit them into the lore of their world, and others just cut and paste a real world tradition onto their land. Both have their merits and both are enjoyable so long as they don’t involve too much grinding. Each game seems to pick and choose holidays, but there are two that every game seems to have… Christmas and of course Halloween.

Halloween time is generally my favorite holiday because the traditions itself usually involve killing lots of dark denizens of the night. Additionally the playing dress up theme usually means some cool weapon and armor skins that you can use throughout the rest of the year. Currently we are in the run up to Halloween itself, and as a result pretty much every MMO has some form of event going on marking the holiday. Going to take a few minutes this morning to talk about some of the cooler ones.

Nights of the Dead

This event runs in Everquest 2 from 10/15 through 11/11 and is probably the grand daddy of all Halloween events. Each year they keep adding new content, but still leaving all of the old content in place. Zam has a really great guide to the various quests and events. If you are one of the new to EQ2 folks who just partook of the free level 85 event… I highly suggest checking it out. However even with a brand new account you can still participate in most of the fun. My personal favorite event is the hedge maze that drops lots of nifty cosmetic gear.

Blood and Madness

Guild Wars 2 supposedly has a really amazing event called Blood and Madness that kicked off on October 15th that involved a series of limited time events (one day only) finally culminating in a big event that only exists Halloween night. Dulfy has a pretty comprehensive guild to the events, but for the most part if you are not already doing this series you have missed out this year. This has been my key bitch about Guild Wars 2 to date… I hate the concept of short run limited time events. The amount of busy work needed really only allows someone who ONLY plays GW2 to keep up… and because of this I just can’t be bothered to attempt it. I would love to see this as a long term event that ran the entire length of the holiday, but until then it will be out of my reach.

Autumn Harvest

Rift has an event called Autumn Harvest that starts on October 17th and runs through Halloween and potentially a little bit past. They have chosen to focus on the harvest aspect of the holiday and as such have sent you to a special version of the Realm of the Fae where you help Atrophinius and his minions bring in the amber sap harvest. There are a ton of cool things you can get, including a phantom version of several popular mounts. The coolest feature of the event however is that you can get these short time use potions that make tons of artifacts show up on the ground in the realm of the fae. This is a huge catch up on collections event. This year around there are a ton of new items to be gotten and you can check out this preview guide on Rift Junkies.

Hallow’s End

Hallow’s End is an event that occurs in World of Warcraft from October 18th through November 1st. There are tons of nifty things going on like trick or treating, but the meat and potatoes of the event is the Scarlet Monastery Headless Horseman instance. I have a love/hate relationship with this holiday. Every year it has been available (and that I have been playing wow) I have participated in the event… all for a shot at the extremely awesome flying headless horseman mount. Every single year I have come up empty handed. When a game company places an item in an event, like a mount… that is usable every day… and makes it a super rare random drop… I want to stab them.

All Saints’ Wake

Currently there is an event going on over in FFXIV that is completely new to me. All Saints’ Wake started a little early, but was intended to run from October 18th through November 1st. All of the time zones get a little discombobulated in the translation. While I am not partaken in the event yet, so far the other one I have seen has been what I would call “Holiday-Lite” in that there is a FATE going on that awards some sort of currency that you then use to purchase things off a vendor. Since the vanity gear system is not in place yet, this makes the things you can acquire super limited, but I plan on gathering them up just in case. One of the most humorous observations from last night is that apparently the Pumpkin helms… are repaired by Cullinarians.

The Rundown

That is the rundown of the big ones I know of that are going on, but like I said in the first part of the post… this is the one holiday that pretty much EVERY MMO celebrates. I can even remember in Hellgate: London there being a Halloween event of sorts that took its form in a Guy Fawkes day celebration… that happened to have a lot of Halloween themed stuff. I would be curious to hear about any events that are your favorite that I missed.

Subtle Tweaks

October 17, 2013 by Belghast

Fountains of Gil

Last night was the first night I have played FFXIV seriously since getting Pokemon. Well I suppose that is a bit of a misnomer as I was in game Tuesday night to help a guild member through the Garuda Primal… but suffice to say it was the first time I have really done something serious in a bit. In that time they released a fairly significant patch to the server, and it was for most of us the first time experiencing the changes. I have to say overall they are pretty positive. You can see the full patch notes here, but I will talk about a few of the significant items.

One of my largest complaints, that I have mentioned a few times is that this game has absolutely tons of gold sinks… but no really viable gold fountains other than crafted high quality end game gear. Even that has been dropping drastically as the best in slot HQ Robe of Vanya started out around 1.5 million gil and is now down to 400k gil on Cactuar. The main problem is, that in our little group since hitting 50 each of our pools of gil has been falling severely with no real way of gaining it back at a reasonable rate. Apparently Squeenix has heard our plea and implemented the strangest gold fountain I have ever seen in a game.

Apparently they did not like the fact that players were skipping trash packs in dungeons and doing “speed runs”, because when they put their fountain in it has in essence patched two holes in the boat. In the level 50ish dungeons, the trash packs now drop a not insignificant amount of gil… we were mostly seeing around 50 gil per mob. This means that the dungeon as a whole is a really good way to gain back some of that cash we have been losing. Over the course of the evening in running Amdapor Keep and Wanderers Palace once each I got around 6000 gil. That is not enough to make me wealthy… but it is enough to stave off the slow bleed of currency.

Subtle Tweaks

To make Wanderer’s Palace more appealing they have increased the number of “rockbooks” aka Tomestones that drop. Between a running of Amdapor and Wanderer’s I had enough to go out and purchase the Darklight belt, so I was pretty pleased with that. The trend continued last night with minor drops happening for our dps and healing, and not a single viable tank drop in sight. In the first picture in the post you can see I have swapped out my “so you decided to hit 50” chest piece for one that dropped in Wanderers… but sadly it was an exact side grade. I just wanted to look slightly different for a bit, so I snagged it.

In one of the patch notes threads, we had seen the extremely ambiguous patch note of “adjusted difficulty of level 50 encounters”, which we all took to mean that they made things more difficult. However upon running the two 50 4 man dungeons last night, it seemed like a lot of the fights were easier, or at least I was not taking nearly as much damage as before. Granted this could be to a large number of factors, not the least of which is that we are all fairly used to the encounters now. However it did feel like I was taking less raw damage than I was previously, especially on a few of the more troubling packs.

Goodbye Bullshit

In the past I wrote about the absolute hackery that was the Dark Devices FATE in Northern Thanalan. The FATE that essentially all players seemed to universally extend out as long as humanly possible to farm the constant flow of instant spawn cultists. If you were in the right group, and you got a tag in on every mob you could get some truly amazing experience. During one group we managed to get an over 300 chain of kills, and that FATE along was worth just over a half of a level a 48 when I was leveling my bard. However if you were NOT in the chosen party… you got to waste 15 minutes of your time and next to no experience for the process.

I am proud to announce that they did in fact fix that bullshit. Apparently now the cultists no longer instant spawn, and as a result there is no point in delaying the FATE. So as a result I am imagining that FATEs in Northern Thanalan are now nice and smooth, as quite honestly OTHER than Dark Devices it was a rather enjoyable zone for grouping. It is smallish in size but packed full of really high value fates including the really cool Chimera fate in the northern end of the zone that awards a pet. Hopefully as a whole the experience of grinding from 45 to 50 is better for most players. Our guild has just about determined that the best way to boost a player to 50 is to hang out in the zone and kill the various Garleans as fast as you can, rather than trying to FATE anyways. We’ve helped a handful of folks get the last bit towards 50 doing this, and it seems like something that is easily repeatable.

Party Like it’s 1995

August 7, 2015October 16, 2013 by Belghast

Flashbacks

I have been fairly oblivious to the world for the last few days, and as a result I had fallen behind on my news reader. The thing that I found most interesting was this article on Massively talking about a potential League of Legends Universe online TCG. I feel like I would love any game set in the League universe that is not League. The world they have built up around the MOBA has some pretty awesome lore, and in part that is why I continue to play the game in spite of my problems with the control scheme. My friends and I have talked about how successful we thought a single player game would be set in that world, but I could see an online TCG working as well.

Party Like It’s 1995

A friend and I were talking about this news, and he made the comment that it is 1995 all over again. In a way that is exactly what it seems like to me as well. For those who were not part of that scene during the TCG boom during the mid 90s… suffice to say every potentially marketable property got made into a card game. I like a sucker probably played most of them out of sheer love and nostalgia for Magic the Gathering the one that started it all. Some of them stuck around and gained a life of their own like Pokémon or Yugioh because they were driven by external motivators… and some were really amazing and died on the vine like Rage and Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.

However during the 90s… you could find a card game for any property you wanted to play, and I think among my friends we at least bought a starter deck of most of them. Magic the Gathering has had an online component for years, but for the most part it has never gained traction because it was arcane to get into, and Wizards of the Coast still very much favored the physical market. In essence it was a cheap copy of a physical property and the company seemed fine with that. What we are seeing now is a new crop of games conceived for online play, and that offer rule sets that would never really work in a physical card game.

The Next Boom

Much like we have seen for MMOs and MOBA… we are going to see a lot of companies entering this marketplace, trying to TCG-ize their existing intellectual property. Even though neither has released, it seems like the two leaders going into the marketplace are Hearthstone by Blizzard and Hex by their TCG business partner Cryptozoic. While they will be competing in the same space, and have quite a bit of overlap… I feel like each of these games is going after a slightly different player. Hearthstone is going after the “easy to learn, hard to master” demographic, with a deceptively simple mechanic that leads to extremely fast paced duels.

While I have not actually played it (hey Blizz flag my account already), I have watched more than a handful of youtube videos and live streams. Essentially it seems like a really straight forward rage style duel mechanic. The thing that I initially am not a huge fan of is the way that combat works. It seems like there is no real defense mechanic, or at least not one in the way I have come to expect from Magic: The Gathering. As a result the gameplay is extremely in your face and aggressive, but does not feel terribly nuanced.

Cryptic Gameplay

On the other side of things you have Hex: Shards of Fate by Cryptozoic… which is a oddly fitting company name for their approach. It feels like they are trying to be Magic: The Gathering 2.0 with an evolved rule set and extremely cryptic and nuanced gameplay. This is the type of game you go into already at a massive debt of knowledge, but as you learn the rules and uncover strategies you are rewarded for your ability to assimilate the information. It looks like it will support some extremely long running duels, much in the same way Magic did, with players coming back from the brink to snatch victory out of defeat.

Personally while I really want to play Hearthstone, Hex seems more my style. It is less Pokémon and Yugioh and more Magic: The Gathering… the game that started the craze and still has a honored spot in my heart. Currently I think there is more than enough market share for both of these games. However all of the late comers that are creating online TCGs… are likely going to get left out in the cold the same way all the other boom economies have worked. Mainly I don’t see anyone else bringing something truly unique to the table. During the physical card game boom, we saw lots of different themed versions of M:TG, and to a lesser extent I figure we will see this again.

Been There Done That

Currently both games are very fantasy oriented, so I expect the other genres to get on the act shortly. Since DC is working on a MOBA… I fully expect to be seeing a DC themed online card game. To be honest… the VS system that incorporated both DC and Marvel had a decent amount of success during the physical card game wars… so it might be a property worthy of resurrection in an online form. Additionally I fully expect there to be a Star Wars themed product offering with the upcoming 7th movie entering production. Then I am sure there will be other properties that jump on the bandwagon that we can’t even fathom being a card game… just like last time. The problem is… all of this has a feeling of “been there done that” for me.

I experienced this rush of excitement and crushing disappointment several times before during the 90s, as a property I cared about was turned into a truly un-inspired card game amalgam. To some extent we are still living through this each time an MMO spins up only to sputter out a year or so later. Another tidbit from my news feed yesterday was that Mummy Online was shutting down… I literally did not even know it existed in the first place. So MMOs are currently coming and going without me even realizing it. Basically I am bracing myself for a lot of shoddy card games to be released in a short period of time, trying to cash in on the “new” craze of digital collectible card games. So as much as I look forward to Hearthstone and Hex… I am entering what I feel will be a new trend with quite a bit of trepidation.

Pokémania

October 15, 2013 by Belghast

Age Gap

I feel like there is this huge phenomena that I completely missed the boat on. Even though it was my generation that brought the Gameboy to the world, and I can remember getting one in 1989 it was never a primary console for me. It was that thing I played when I was on a trip, or more often my younger cousin played when he was visiting. For him the Gameboy was totally a primary means of gameplay, but for me… it was more novelty than anything else. The battery life was pure shit, so it was not like you could actually take it anywhere for long periods of time without a large stock of AA batteries to fuel it.

Additionally it made everything you played look spinach green. There were various big name titles that came out like Metroid II that provided an experience that did not exist on the bigger consoles…. but by that time I had the Super Gameboy and the ability to play these games in pseudo color. While I bought a Gameboy Advance and later a second hand Gameboy SP they were still more novelty devices for me. As a result I feel as though I almost completely missed one of the biggest crazes to ever hit gaming.

Pokémania

I was already well into the working world when the whole Pokémon insanity happened. It was one of those games that I knew existed, but since I didn’t really play Gameboy much, I had never actually experienced. My first entry into the world actually happened when the card game was released. Before it really blew up, it had become something that the card gamer folks dabbled in at my local game store… and I had a starter deck and a handful of boosters. It was a charming little game, and it played rather quickly as compared to Magic: The Gathering that could often times drag on for ages.

I did not really encounter the Gameboy game until much later, when I played Pokémon Blue on a Gameboy emulator. I found it a charming game, and quickly became addicted to capturing these little critters, but the experience ended there for the most part. I don’t think I ever actually beat the game. Once the novelty wore off I was back to playing my JRPGs on the PlayStation, and traded Pokémon for Jade Cocoon. I likely would have stayed disconnected from the Pokémon experience were it not for MMO games and often times being one of the oldest folks in the raid.

Battle Pets

A large number of the gamers that I play with on a regular basis are one full generation younger than I am. As a result… Pokémon was a huge deal for that group. I can remember talking about WoW Pokémon with a small measure of disdain when it was originally announced, but mostly because I really did not get what is so fun about it. However when it was released I went from antagonist to addict in no time. In fact for the first several nights after the release of Mists of Pandaria, I wandered around doing nothing but battle pets. I have always been a pet collector in MMO games, but being able to do something with them… made the whole experience that much better for me.

The thing is… this also made me realize that this madness called Pokémon totally worked on me. I began to feel like I had missed an entire experience. Over the last few months my inner circle of gamer friends have been prepping for the release of Pokémon X and Y, and while at the time I didn’t think much about it… the closer it got to release the more I wanted to participate this time. I have not owned a Gameboy since the SP, and have completely missed the DS era. As a result I missed a number of games that I still want to play. So I feel like I have a significant backlog of games I want to play for it.

However the big title on the horizon that I would have had to play… was Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. A Link to the Past is one of my favorite games of all time… I put it very close to Castlevania Symphony of the Night… the game that is likely my all time favorite. I was always a fan of Legend of Zelda, spending countless hours beating the first one. However, Link to the Past was that game that really proved to me the raw power of the Super Nintendo. I picked up a copy on my way home from getting outpatient sinus surgery and I played the hell out of it as I recuperated. When I heard there was a sequel coming to the 3DS I knew sooner or later I would end up with the console.

Taking the Plunge

Much to the frustration of my wife I am sure… last night I took the plunge and picked up a black/black 3ds XL and Pokémon Y. My immediate group of friends have been keeping the X and Y thing pretty balanced so I could have gotten either. Basically for me it came down to the fact that I would far rather have a crazy red and black flying bird with three hands… than some kind of blue faerie antelope. Other than that… I really could not tell you the difference. I played the absolute crap out of the game last night, and spent most of that time catching Pokémon and then trading them off using the crazy wonder trade system.

This has to be the coolest feature I have found so far. Basically since the 3DS is an extremely connected device, you can place any Pokémon you do not want up for trade, and receive a Pokémon that another trainer does not want. Essentially it is the whole, one mans trash is another mans treasure concept… and while I am sure at later levels you mostly get things you have no interest in… starting out I found it to be the source of many Pokémon I was interested in. I oddly enough ended up with quite a few interesting and potentially rare ones mixed in with the dross.

I still feel a little overwhelmed. Having never really played a Pokémon game… there are so many things that have changed since my brief experience with Pokémon Blue. Luckily I have various friends that serve as an almost encyclopedic tome of knowledge about all things “pocket monster”. They have been helping me out immensely especially in evaluating which things are good and which things are not so good. I feel like I have a couple of decades of research to do before I even feel like I have a slim grasp on what all is going on. I am now a proud member of the 3DS era, so I can now add a “friend code” to the long list of other social identifiers I have.