Grand Experiment Archives - Page 46 of 200

Much Darkness

February 2, 2015 by Belghast

Very White Mage

I won’t say that the sparkle is gone from World of Warcraft, because I am absolutely looking forward to starting Blackrock Foundry on Tuesday. However the shine has diminished enough that I no longer have any real pressing needs to spend non-raid time doing. As a result I have been spending considerably more time lately in Final Fantasy XIV. While I was at Pax South the 2.5 patch dropped and I have course have been working my way slowly through all the new stuff. Last Tuesday I was getting dangerously close to the 2000 soldiery cap, so I opted to purchase another of the 1300 soldiery level 110 weapons. Now I have one of these already for my Warrior, Bard and Dragoon… but rather than purchasing it for the Paladin my other 50… I instead opted to purchase it for my White Mage. Problem there is that my White Mage was only level 45 at the time of purchasing it. As such I now kind of feel like I should finish leveling, and for most of the weekend that is what I set my mind to doing.

I figured I would solve two problems, namely that I had been out of Venture tokens for months… and I miss running Quick Exploration ventures. For the uninitiated this game has a strange banking and auctioning system that revolves around the hiring of NPCs called retainers. Some time ago they added in the functionality to send your retainers out on missions for you… very similar to how the garrison mission system ended up being. One of these is called Quick Exploration, in which your retainer brings back something completely random. It could be something amazing like a rare primal weapon, or it could be something absolutely useless like fish glue. I spent most of my day piddling around doing levequests which have a chance of rewarding venture tokens but at the same time reward not too shabby experience. At the beginning of the day I was 45 and at the end I am almost 48… so making slow but steady progress. Probably going to start doing some beast tribe dailies tonight to mix things up.

Much Darkness

Syrcus Tower had been a thing for the majority of the time we have been back in the game. Which as we are realizing was like six months ago. One of the big additions in the 2.5 patch is the conclusion of the Crystal Tower series of raids, The World of Darkness. This only serves to further confuse me since WoD now means World of Darkness the dungeon, World of Darkness the pen and paper setting or the aborted mmo… or of course Warlords of Draenor. For the uninitiated the Crystal Tower series follows for the most part the theme of Final Fantasy 3. These are what I often refer to as the “casual raid” content and reward some nice “catch up” gear for players. In a Crystal Tower raid you are part of an 8 player full party, which is then part of a 3 full party alliance… making 24 players taking on the content. We have long joked that since 4 players is a Light Party, and 8 players is a Full Party… then 24 players should have been a Heavy Party or something similar.

At this point we have run Syrcus aka part two… so much we can literally sleep walk through it, so it was really refreshing to have to struggle through this raid. In fact we flat out wiped on the first encounter because of so much craziness going on. Each encounter has a laundry list of things that you need to watch out for or react to. Everything in the place just looks gruesome. I took a moment to snap a picture of this boss, which looked brutal but ended up being one of the easier encounters. This is another first and last boss are the worst scenario, but I have to say the Cerebus fight in the middle was pretty frustrating. I think a large part of that was the chosen strategy our group decided to employ. I don’t want to spoil the mechanics, but for folks who have ever fought C’thun it is going to feel fairly similar.

To some extent I forgot that we were back under loot rationing and rolled on a dragoon piece winning it. Normally speaking it is faster to queue as dps, and I just roll greed on the warrior items. The Final Fantasy XIV loot lockout system is fairly unique in that you can run content as often as you like, but you can only receive a single piece of gear. Granted both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower have had this restriction lifted for some time, but I forgot that World of Darkness being brand new would still have it in place. This is both good and bad, in that when you get a piece of gear you can stop running it for the week. But if you need only ONE MORE item… it becomes maddening when you cannot manage to get it drop, and keep running it over and over each week. I am not in a horrible place gear wise on my warrior so I guess it doesn’t matter that much that my first piece of World of Darkness loot went to the Dragoon.

So Zombie

Another activity this weekend is that I patched up H1Z1 and decided to pop in for a bit to give it another shot. I am still on the Carebear server Willamette and was surprised honestly that there had not been a rollback of any sort from my previous character. In the above picture I feel like I kinda looke like Nes from Earthbound had a really bad day. Overall it was more enjoyable because the world was populated with “stuff”. When I last played I logged out in a small town, and inside a house that was well fortified. Upon logging back in… the house was no longer well fortified but thankfully I did not get swarmed. In fact I watched a zombie completely ignore me and run chasing off after a deer, which admittedly was rather comical. A lot of things about the game seem to have improved drastically, like the fact that damage against zombies seems more predictable… and less likely for me to flat out end up dead as a result.

When I last played I kept looking for items in cabinets, trashed cars, etc… but apparently “container loot” was bugged… meaning the only items to be found were ground spawns. This time around I managed to find a backpack, craft a bow and arrow, and find lots of food… making my chances of survival not entirely dependant upon eating three million blackberries. I still found water something difficult to find, so I need to do some research to find out what other sources I can use for it. I know you can fill a bottle if it is raining… but not sure if you can go stand in a stream and fill a bottle as well. In any case I plan on popping my head in again this week as time allows because the game is starting to feel less alpha.

So Damned Charming

February 1, 2015 by Belghast

Episode 42 – Gigantic Personality

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

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

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

So Damned Charming

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

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

Hard Mode Roulette

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

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

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In Mourning

January 31, 2015 by Belghast

So It Happened

A couple of days ago I talked about the present rumor that AOL would be shutting down all of its enthusiast press websites… as far as we are concerned that was Joystiq, Massively and WoW Insider. Yesterday I first saw that it was officially in reading Brianna Royce’s touching announcement on Massively. I have to saw that as well written as it was… it was breaking my heart to be reading it. At this point I am not really sure how much of meaning I have to say about it. It just flat sucks, and seems to follow the model that everything AOL lays its hands on goes to shit. The most frustrating part is that it seems so senseless considering that from what I could tell all of the publications were doing swimmingly, in spite of draconic and ham-handed budget cuts. I feel bad because I really did not follow Joystiq at all, but I did however read Massively and WoW Insider on a near daily basis.

While I didn’t always agree with every article, I felt like the site needed to exist. There is a blogger that I am not even going to dignify by naming, that seems to be dancing on their grave with their “I Hope Massively Shuts Down” post. I am done with that site and anything associated with it, and I think it was the last straw for a lot of people who had long only half heartedly followed it. In fact I am officially done with rant blogs in any fashion. But all of this is side tracking me from the purpose of today’s post. I feel strongly that all of these writers will find homes either in community work or on another gaming website. Today I compiled the list of twitter accounts for the writers that had them, for Massively and WoW Insider. I figure this is the best way to follow people and see what they end up doing over the coming months. February third will be the final day of all of the Joystiq connected sites.

Massively Cast

WoW Insider Cast

Pax South Panel Rundown

I had happy things to talk about in Final Fantasy XIV… but quite honestly after writing the first part of today’s post I am really not amped up and prepared to write them. Instead I am going to close out today’s post with something I have been working on over the last few weeks. One of the cool things about the age we live in is that sooner or later most things end up on Youtube. For those that did not have the benefit of travelling to San Antonio for the inaugural Pax South show… or if you are like me and missed a bunch of the panels because you were doing other things… I thought I would compile a list of everything that I could find online. I did not record any of these and as such I do not take any responsibility for the quality… but this is the best of what I could find.

Game Panels

Conversation Panels

I am still missing a LOT of panels, but as I find them I will try and update the list to include them. One of the big problems that I saw was that Gearbox and Bioware were pretty much doing their own things… and NONE of their panels were listed on the official Pax South registry, making it really hard to catch them. I am really hoping I can find recordings of some of the ones by Bioware, but for those I don’t even know the name of said presentations to go off of. If you know of any obvious ones that I am missing, I would appreciate a comment below to let me know. In any case, I hope you have an awesome weekend and that you go out and do awesome things… to help us forget that our gaming ecosystem is suffering a loss.

Fairwell to Highmaul

January 30, 2015 by Belghast

Isometric Sorta Minecraft

About a week ago a friend of mine hooked me up with access to the Albion Online alpha. I was immediately a fan of the art style, but concerned that it would end up feeling like a throwback to something like Ultima Online. I do not have the fond nostalgia towards that game that so many players did, largely because I did not give it a shot until after I had already played a ton of Everquest. So the other night when I got in, I noticed I was naked and the movement was click based… but other than that I popped right back out expecting to explore it at a later date. Last night after the raid I wanted to play something, but did not want to get too deeply involved. Seeing the icon on my desktop I decided to fire it up and give it a shot. When I was quite literally falling asleep at the keyboard at 11:30 I realized the mistake I had made… because this is absolutely one of those “just one more thing” games.

First off this is a game without classes in any fashion. You gain mastery over whatever you happen to be doing. As such I have focused on leveling my crafting and working on leveling my sword and board skills. So you start out rather simply by gathering rocks and chopping down trees so that you can build a skinning knife. There are “suggestions” of what you should do when that appear in the lower center of the screen but these can honestly be largely ignored if you like. I would however suggest you follow the first few until you grasp how exactly the game works. At the end of the night I had upgraded all of my crafting gear and adventure gear to tier 2, and was preparing to venture out to try and find the tier 3 areas. The real interesting thing for me is going to be that it appears to be available on PC, Mac and Linux… but also iOS and Android making it extremely cross platform. If this thing runs on my Samsung Galaxy S5 phone… I am in real trouble.

Fairwell to Highmaul

Last night we ventured forth into Highmaul Heroic and after clearing the roadblock that was Butcher on Tuesday attempted to down some new bosses. First up was Brackenspore and while we struggled a bit towards the end with the fungal creep and lost one of our flamethrower masters… we managed to push him across the line and kill him all in one shot. We had made attempts on Brackenspore heroic previously, but had not really put any serious time into it. From there we moved on to Tectus and while things did get a little dicey at times… we managed to oneshot him as well without any previous attempts on the heroic version. This set our sights on Ko’ragh, and we fought valiantly, however were ultimately bested. I believe our best attempt got him down to something like 22% but each time there would be a transition at a bad time and folks would die as the healers struggled to keep both tanks up. I figure given some more time to work on him we could easily get him down. As my friend Kadomi just reminded me… this content is still the current tier meaning we might want to kill Imperator to get the achievement.

However for the time being our princess is in another castle, as Blackrock Foundry releases next Tuesday and we plan on setting our sights there for the time being. Highmaul has been a really fun raid for us, and I am proud to have gotten 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic before the launch of the next raid. This is kinda huge for me, and as I said in and earlier post… I had not been up to date with relevant content since Icecrown. I especially appreciate the way that folks have pulled things together in the last few weeks. I joked that folks got good while I was away at Pax South, but it really did feel like that. When I left we were still struggling a bit here or there, but when I came back… everyone seemed to have laser focus and precision. I really am looking forward to Tuesday and sitting my feet down in a brand new instance… one that drops actual tier set gear!

Marketing Is Strange

When I first heard about Dying Light it was through watching a gameplay video from some conference… I spent a bit of time this morning trying to locate said video but was unable to do so quickly. Essentially the video touted the multiplayer co-op survival horror sandbox nature of this game, and in doing so sold it to me completely wrong. While it looked gorgeous, and while I have yet to tire of worlds full of post apocalyptic zombies. I have however completely tired of the hardcore survival sandbox genre. In a sea of hundreds of those games… it feels like a horrible way to market a game right now, but I am guessing the folks thought it might be wise to try and ride the coat tails of Day Z or something of the sort. The early description that I saw of the game, and was reinforced by almost every trailer pointing out the sandbox nature… excited me about as much as you saying “brand new moba”… which is to say, not at all.

What I am hearing after the launch of the game however is that it is essentially Dead Island, but better in every possible way. I loved Dead Island for its strange campy free roaming RPG feel. While I never played the second game that came out of that series, I logged quite a bit of time playing the first and would gladly step back into that world. The problem being that the storyline behind Dying Light was mostly obfuscated until I stopped caring about it. Had I seen the above trailer first… I would have been interested. I feel like this is one of those games that is going to be judged wrong by folks like me writing it off… when it sounds like it is absolutely a game for those who enjoy open ended RPGs. While I have missed the initial purchase rush, I will probably pick it up when it gets the first price break on steam. Had they done a better job marketing the game to more than one demographic… I would have likely been a day one purchaser.