Grand Experiment Archives - Page 74 of 200

Death to Darkspawn

October 6, 2014 by Belghast

Lost in a World

One of the aspects of a good game that I have always been amazed by is just how lost you can become existing in that world. With the upcoming release of Dragon Age: Inquisition mid month, several of us have started re-playing origins in an attempt to get a new save file to import into Inquisition. I realize that the process for importing works a little differently than it has in previous Bioware games, and is done through an intermediary program called Dragon Age Keep that also allows you to choose the decisions you would have liked to have had from previous games. However with some experience with the Mass Effect 3 “comic book” tool, it tended to also make a lot of really horrible decisions for me. One of the most enjoyable experiences I have had with a game was playing through the entire Mass Effect series in sequence over the course of a Christmas break… so while the games in the Dragon Age series do not connect as tightly, I am hoping it will still be very rewarding.

Over the weekend I said that I had decided to start the “least” Belghast character possible for this play through. That I guess is not correct… the least recognizable character would have been me starting an Elven Mage. We all know that one is never going to happen, as I tend to be allergic to playing finger wigglers. Instead I basically picked something other than the high born warrior I always tend to play, and in this case that was a Dwarven Casteless Rogue. I love the Dwarves of the Dragon Age series, and having my very first play through be the Noble rogue pretty much ruined every other introduction storyline for me. That said the Casteless introduction is pretty great as well, and especially after having played through many of them… you see hints of the other introductions as you play. Like I know the events that are going on with the noble houses, and while they are only loosely alluded to in the casteless introduction… they are still very much there and very much the way they play out as a noble. I like thinking that there is a fixed story arc with multiple windows out onto it.

Death to Darkspawn

This game has always hit every trigger for me… in a good way. I love dark ominous demon filled landscapes where I am the only person with the tools to dispatch them. I love the political infighting and backstabbing and the identification of a truly wicked person that I can focus my anger and rage towards. But I also like that apart from that central story arc, nothing is really certain and the game doesn’t judge you much for dabbling in the grey areas. It is an absolute feat that this game manages to make me NOT side with the mage haters. Given my feelings towards finger wigglers, it would make sense that I would want to help the Templars eradicate the “Mage Threat”, but instead each and every play through I cannot bring myself to go against the Circle Mages. Maybe it is because I like the character of Wynne too much, or maybe they just manage to create a narrative that makes me actually care about magic users.

Granted personally I greatly prefer the side of the Apostates, and generally their cause is one that I can get behind whole heartedly. I am a huge fan of Morrigan, but I have found her character to be extremely polarizing even among my close friends. She is dark and brutal and abrasive… but I always enjoy listening to her quips. One of the things I am doing this time around that I have not in previous plays is varying my group composition based on what I know my intended action will be. Generally speaking if you make Morrigan happy…. you won’t make Alistair and Leliana happy for example. So I hedge my bets and end up simply not bringing the person that I know I will end up pissing off. It is a strange line to walk but at this point I have some duplication of most of the roles I might need. There are certain characters that I just absolutely cannot stand… I am looking at you Zevran. Though this time around I am finding myself softening to that character, especially after seeing him in Dragon Age II.

Slowly Progressing

I am taking my sweet time moving through the game. At this point I am just shy of 20 hours spent and have saved the Circle of Mages as well as Redcliffe Castle. I am however trying really hard to do every single side quest in a given area. This means that while I can just blow through Lothering… I am trying to do all of the little side missions which end up dragging out that area considerably longer than you might think. In a way I am treating this as though it were my last time playing Dragon Age ever. I realize that is likely not going to be the case, but I guess I am trying to make every choice count since I will ultimately be importing this game into Awakenings and Dragon Age II before finally importing the entire mess into Dragon Age Inquisition next month. On this play through I am more acutely aware that I am building a world around me, a series of consequences that lead to other consequences later down the line.

This is a strangely different feeling than when you do the same process in the Mass Effect series. There you are living the legacy of one person, your version of Shepard… and it is a direct lineage from game to game. The choices you make on one game, are effect the relationships you have in the next game because you were the person that made them both times. Here you are setting up a conflict that spans multiple generations, and while you are creating ripples it is somewhat uncertain how the final events will play out. It is also playing through a game knowing the beginning and the ending but having the steps between be rather fluid and changing. This will make my fifth play through of Dragon Age Origin since release, and I am still finding little details that I don’t remember from previous plays. That and the fact that I am not bored with the game, really are a testament to just how good the writing is.

Sneaking into Denerim

Right now I am tempted to save my game and then make a run at getting to Denerim before completing any other areas. I would really like to resolve the whole Urn of Sacred Ashes business before moving too much further in the storyline. I have also never actually gone to Denerim this early in the storyline before. I have no clue what the rammifications of doing that are, but I already have several quest chains that take me there. So I think that might be the order for tonight, to create a good clearly labeled save game so I can roll back if I am not happy with the consequences started by my actions. That is one of the things that is interesting about Dragon Age is just how unforgiving it is when it comes to your choices. It is super easy to close off a quest chain to you by picking the wrong answer… and there will never be another way to get that option back. In some of the later Bioware games they have given us the ability to escape out of a dialog tree, but this being a fairly early one has really strictly binding choices. As such it is making me super careful about what I end up choosing.

If it has been awhile since you last played Dragon Age then I highly suggest you dust off your copy and give it a proper play again. I am currently playing the “Ultimate” edition that comes preloaded with all of the DLC… and there was quite a lot of it. I’ve found this game plays significantly better through Origin than it does through Steam, as anytime I have tried to play through Steam I have issues with it not recognizing my DLC as being “genuine” and the official Bioware answer to this is to hack the save game file to turn off the protection bit. I would rather just play the game without doing all of that so I am using Origin and overall the experience is not too horrible. I have to say that Origin as a whole has gotten considerably better since its launch, and right now the only problem I really have with it… is that it is not steam. I still to some extent resent having to have a separate launcher just for Bioware games but the experience is worth it so for the time being I just deal with the frustration. Thankfully Ubisoft is taking steps to move towards better integration with steam so that the entire process will be transparent to the users. Unfortunately with the rather public falling out between EA and Valve… I doubt that will actually ever happen. In any case… I am having a blast with Dragon Age and look forward to completing it.

#DragonAge

Death of a Genre

October 4, 2014 by Belghast

Downfall of a Game

One of the problems within the MMO community is that we seem to view each release as a zero sum game. As such when something new comes out, it threatened to chip away at the player base of whatever game we happen to love and are currently playing. When that game falters and begins to fail, with this point of view it becomes extremely hard not to take pleasure in that downfall. The problem is this is an extremely toxic and dysfunctional outlook, and ultimately is what has lead to the current climate in MMOs. For years companies have been chasing an illusive dream of trying to create another World of Warcraft.

This was an inherently flawed vision because really… “mmo gamers” are a rather small niche in the market, and most folks who play World of Warcraft are not actually “mmo gamers”. If you take a look at the size of the market before World of Warcraft, you saw a handful of games with sub-million subscriber numbers. Before the launch of the first expansion World of Warcraft had boomed to be an over 6 million subscriber game. This was not the conversion of all of these other MMO gamers, but instead the conversion of fans of the existing Warcraft franchise into the MMO genre. The thing is… these new gamers are there for a myriad of reasons, but none of them easily translate into a new franchise.

So as these new games launch they are essentially fighting over the same piece of pie over and over. All you have to do is look at my immediate circle of friends. A large chunk of them stuck with World of Warcraft, and it would likely take an apocalypse or the servers shutting down to pry them from it. Another group has wandered away from the game each and every time something new and shiny showed up on the horizon. Very few of these players stick around in any game for longer than three months, and more often they play their free month and then return to whatever the status quo was before the new launch. I watched this pattern play out for both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, and the games industry is finally realizing that this is going to happen for every single new game that releases.

Indictment of the Trend

The cancelling of Titan has been a far more contentious issue in the blogosphere than I expected. At this point my point of view is that this is Blizzard admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players. While there will always be a core group of players in World of Warcraft just like there is still a core group of players in Everquest, Everquest II, and Dark Age of Camelot… that core group continues to shrink as folks either “grow out” of World of Warcraft as they find it no longer suits their interests, or simply run out of the copious amounts of free time it requires as they get that job, family, whatever. I think they have done some really simple calculus here and determined that there simply is not enough of a pool of players to make a brand new MMO from Blizzard successful.

With World of Warcraft they have a decade long buy in from a large number of gamers. They have literal years of memories and hard to acquire items to keep them chained to the game. With a brand new IP, they are starting from scratch in the same position as all of these games that have floundered have been in. Blizzard brand name recognition just isn’t enough to guarantee success, so I feel like it was a pure business decision that it just did not make sense to further dilute their subscription player base by trying to launch a new MMO. As much as I love the clean subscription model, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to launch a new game with it. After watching what happened to Wildstar and to a somewhat lesser extent Elder Scrolls Online, the market does not want any more subscription games. So by launching a new MMO they would be converting at least a portion of their subscriber base of easy month to month money to far more dicey and less predictable free to play money.

No Joy Watching Wildstar

I find it impossible to find joy in the unraveling of Wildstar that I see before me. I am not playing the game, so I am in essence part of the problem. For whatever reason it was an accumulation of all of the things my BC era self said they wanted in a video game. The problem is we gamers are notoriously horrible at trying to decide what we want. “We” said we wanted a hardcore game like Everquest and a return to forced grouping… then when we got Vanguard no one actually wanted to play that. We said we wanted a hard core PVP game like Dark Age of Camelot… and then when we got Warhammer Online no one actually wanted to play that either. So I find it no suprise that when we said we wanted a return to the golden says of World of Warcraft raiding… no one actually wanted that either when we got Wildstar. The truth is we have no clue at all what we want until we actually see it and experience it.

The problem is that the MMO design ethic has been so wrapped up in trying to target what the public is asking for, that it has stagnated into a mire of “wow like features”. A week or so ago there were a series of posts taking point and counterpoint on whether or not WoW has ruined MMOs. In a way I have to say yes, but not through anything that they did on purpose. World of Warcraft has been this juggernaut that everyone else is forced to content with whether or not they actually wanted to. It is a gold standard that every new game is judged by. So you either have games that try and out feature it like Rift, or out lore it like Star Wars the Old Republic… but each and every new release is at least in someway a response to the success that World of Warcraft was. Without that outlier of success we probably would see a much more healthy MMO ecosystem… albeit a ridiculously smaller one.

Death of a Genre

So I cannot take joy in watching Wildstar, or Elder Scrolls Online or any other MMO falter right now, because I see it as all being part of the same shared ecosystem. When one of these games fails, it is in essence taking a chunk of players out of the pool that will likely never return. So many of my friends have simply just checked out of online gaming for one reason or another, but the core thread among them all is they are just tired of the volatility. The choice is either return to World of Warcraft and make due with the status quo, or jump from game to game to game getting a months worth of enjoyment at a time before the ultimate crash. None of this sounds like a healthy ecosystem, and all of this is what is driving triple A studios away from the notion of even trying to do an MMO.

If you think about it right now… there is nothing really on the horizon for gamers to latch onto. There are a few boutique titles like Pathfinder or Camelot Unchained… that are super focused on a specific niche and that may or may not be at least partially vaporware, unlikely to actually launch with all of the features they are touting. Then you have a constant spin of Korean titles as they have their own MMO renaissance that we went through several years ago. However After the launch of ESO and Wildstar… there is really no big western titles on the immediate horizon. Everquest Next is the closest thing but realistically it is still several years from release. The other games that are coming out are more akin to Destiny than they are to a traditional MMO. So I can’t blame World of Warcraft for this current situation, because in truth it is our flighty nature that has salted the fields in our wake. We are the reason why there is no fertile ground for a new MMO to take purchase. It is because of all of this… that I can find no pleasure in watching yet another game fail.

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

October 3, 2014 by Belghast

Ready for a Freeze

The last few weeks my allergies have been killing me, and this is not usually the case for fall here in Oklahoma. It feels like the seasons are getting horribly confused, and ragweed that normally hits its worst during July has been still active in August and October. As such my lungs have decided to betray me under the onslaught, and yesterday afternoon I ended up going home from work. I took a few breathing treatments and got some sleep and this morning I feel marginally better, but still on the scale of “lousy”. Right now I am just read for the first hard freeze to happen and kill off most of the allergens. Sadly that doesn’t look like it is going to happen any time soon. The temperature is dipping down today to the 60s, but otherwise we are still having 70 to 80 degree days.

The constant drainage and coughing just makes me want to stay inside and hibernate. Thankfully right now I have a ton of good games to play. With the impending release of Dragon Age: Inquisition several of my friends are replaying Dragon Age: Origin since like many Bioware games there is reportedly going to be a save game import feature. I know my experience playing through all three Mass Effect games in a row produced a ton more quest options than when I played Mass Effect 3 without importing. So it has me wanting to try going back through the past games as well. My upcoming gaming schedule may be devoted to Dragon Age: Origins for a bit, but I still plan on poking my head into FFXIV, Trove and Destiny on a nearly nightly basis to see what is going on.

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

Thanks to the miracle of the Queens Bounty event I’ve managed to shoot up to 24 light through upgrading the two purple pieces of gear that I managed to get. Through running various other things I have managed to pick up a handful of nice weapons and other light bearing blues. Right now I am running around with a level 20 scout rifle, that while it doesn’t deliver as much punch as the hand cannon, it still has a bit of impact and can carry like 250 rounds with me. It makes it extremely good for whittling down enemies at range with extreme accuracy. I would still love to find a level 20 blue or purple hand cannon, but so far my only purple ingram has produced crafting materials instead of a weapon. Upgrading gear right now seems to be my sole source of getting more light, as I have yet to find any items that can directly replace anything I am currently wearing.

Last night my play time entirely revolved around trying to find more green armor to grind down into Plasteel, and finding Relic Iron… which so far is the hardest of the materials to spot. I’ve gotten rather good at picking out the chunks of brown against the red brown landscape of Mars, and had a fair bit of luck finding chests that had quite a large quantity of it. The problem honestly as you can see from the screenshot is that I just cannot seem to get enough plasteel. I could in theory buy ingrams from the Cryptarch and grind those down… but that seems defeatist. Instead I am mostly spending my time doing patrol missions on Mars since they give me reputation and have a fair chance of dropping greens. I have now entered the grind phase of the game, and while I am still very much enjoying myself I can see how this might wear on folks with a lower tolerance to grind.

Tron and Infinium Ore

With the release of Beta and the addition of the Neon Ninja, they added in a biome to go with that theme. While this morning I was only able to find a very small one… this is what folks have dubbed the “Tron” biome. In fact when you are in the biome a musical theme plays that reminds me quite a bit of some of the Tron Legacy soundtrack. There are rivers of neon blue water, and instead of grass and brushes you have chips and resistors. It feels like you are in a datascape and the various robots have similar tron coloring. Each biome has a version of the skeleton, and in this biome they look like the Red MCP guards from the original Tron movie. I hope that eventually I can build a table that allows me to spit out stuff themed like this biome, because I will completely switch my entire cornerstone to look like it.

This little innocuous looking block is Infinium Ore, and it has become the bane of my existence. After a certain point in the crafting system… every single recipe requires this. The problem is that as you go up in level this doesn’t seem to get any more common. You can find Shapestone and Formicite Ore until your heart is content, but Infinium still is a very rare occasional, and any given vein maybe gives you twenty if you are extremely lucky. Most of my playtime has been wandering around looking for these ore spawns. The problem with Trove is I simply don’t understand how the game works yet. In Minecraft the spawns were based on a certain logic, and once you mastered that you could be plopped down almost anywhere and be able to find the resources you need. In Trove it feels more like you have to be lucky. I feel like I need to spend some time scouring the Reddit looking for tips and strategies for finding this ore node. I won’t be able to do any of the really cool things without large quantities of it.

#DragonAge #Trove #Destiny

Not For Rent

October 2, 2014 by Belghast

Allergic to Advertising

One of the things you might notice about my website is that it is completely devoid of any form of advertisements. Granted you could consider my blogroll a form of an advertisement, but those are hand made with love for blogs I care about. I’ve always shied away from using banner ads or even something as relatively unobtrusive as Google adwords. The problem I have with them in general is that while I can carefully curate the links I post or the banners I create… I can’t do the same with the advertisements that might show on my website. This blog is essentially about me, and as such it is about the things I support and care about. If a questionable ad played on the side of my website beside my content, especially something like those heinous Evony ads… I would feel just as responsible for it as if I were the one that created it.

Additionally my website is my hobby, and if I were to start trying to monetize it… I almost feel like it would somehow cheapen the experience for me. Getting up every morning and writing to you is a labor of love, and I often times pour my soul into whatever thing I happen to be writing about. If all of that was just part of a cash transaction… I can’t see as how I would be able to keep doing it. I have a weird association with money, and I have been in some extremely high performing environments that paid massive bonuses at the end of the year. I’ve learned that extra money doesn’t really motivate me to produce, but instead the intrinsic benefits of feeling like I am making even a small incremental effect on the world… that is the stuff that keeps me going. So I took a massive pay cut for my principles to work where I work, and similarly I am willing to turn down profit in an attempt to keep my blog “pure”.

Not For Rent

All of this is why I am almost offended when I get a certain kind of email. At least once a month, sometimes more than that I get emails from various marketing companies wanting to co-opt my blog and my readers for whatever their product happens to be. Frustratingly they don’t ever mention who they happen to be working for. Maybe that might make a difference, but more than likely not because the whole exchange makes me feel dirty. Here is an example of the type of letter you get, I’ve edited out the identifying bits because really I wish the company or the person writing it no harm. They are after all just doing a job they were paid to do.

We are interested in sending over a quality and relevant article to your site, as a contribution. Is this something you might consider? If yes, please email me back and I’ll be happy to send over the article for your review asap. Note that the copy will include a few references to our client. We’ll also pay you $100 per post through PayPal, for your time and effort.

Generally speaking I don’t even bother to respond to these, but for whatever reason this time I decided to be magnanimous and write back. While I am not at all interested in “paid editorial” as they called it, I would be willing to give a fair and unbiased review of a given product, but that there would be no strings attached that I would give the product a favorable review. I didn’t honestly figure they would be interested in this, but I figured what the heck. I like doing product reviews, I find them enjoyable and wouldn’t mind doing more of them. Generally I write about things I am already sold on and using, as a way of sharing with my readers the nifty things I happen to find. For example I am using a $20 back lit keyboard I stumbled upon and really liking, so at some point I will likely write about it.

I rather promptly received back a response stating that “our clients only accept in-house content at this time”. Meaning that they don’t actually want product reviews… they want a puppet to spread the word of their product offerings. While I very loudly support the products I support, things like Anook for example… I do so because I believe in the product and I use it myself. I have no interest in being a “shill” and having my blog perverted into something that it was never intended to be. This is my blog and my personal venture, and while I might let my friends post the occasional guest post… I refuse to give this thing that I have created over to a corporation to use as it pleases.

What I Am Open To

All of this said, like I told the marketer… I am not opposed to talking about various products on my blog. In fact to some extent I do this already with my semi-regular Steampowered Sunday series where I take a game from my steam library and play it for a bit, then talk about what I just played. Initially the plan was to slowly whittle down the number of games that I have not played in my Steam collection, but then my friends started hijacking this process and sending me games specifically for the purpose of playing them. Granted these are not companies, these are people I talk to on a daily basis. That said I am not opposed to companies handing me games and asking me to write about them. The catch there is they have to be willing to accept what I write about the game, and I give no promises of a favorable review.

I don’t tend to be a very “ranty” writer most of the time, and generally speaking I can find some positive in even the worst gaming experience. However just because someone gave me access to a game doesn’t necessarily mean I feel obligated to push it forward. I was lucky enough to get into the early phases of the ArcheAge alpha… and quite frankly I did not like everything that I saw. I talked about it a few times and said more than my share of negative things about it. I thought it was a great game with a horrible community, and if there were a PVE/Co-Op server environment I could play it on I would totally be doing so. Even though I have friends at Trion, I didn’t necessarily feel obligated to spin their game in a positive direction. I absolutely love Trove, so I am more than happy to gush about that game, and I am still a fan of Rift even though I am not playing it any longer. But just because I have a relationship with this company didn’t make me feel like I had to support every single thing that came out of its doors.

Basically if you are a small company with an interesting product, I am more than willing to talk to you. I don’t mind the idea of doing a product review so feel free to contact me on twitter. What I am not interested in at all is being paid to give your product a glowing review. Hell I am not interested in being paid to write anything at all to be honest. I am perfectly happy living in this Hobby sphere and to be honest… getting paid to write would simply complicate my life in ways I don’t really want to deal with. I am always interested in helping folks out, and if you have something cool that I believe in then I am going to tell the world about it. This mornings post is a bit of an odd one, and I doubt that my writing this will stop any of the marketing emails that I get. I just felt like I wanted to say something about this practice, and draw some sort of a line in the sand that says very clearly “not interested”.