Blog Features Archives - Page 59 of 283

Friendtime Storything

April 28, 2017 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff

Once upon a time I recorded a podcast called “Bel Folks Stuff”. I am extremely talented at giving things super specific names. The idea was pretty simple, AggroChat in a smaller setting allowing me to branch out and record shows with individual friends. The central conceit of the show was that it was going to be somewhat of an interview show, where in theory I asked all of the participants the same questions each time. There were things that worked about the show, and there were things that didn’t really. It never gained much traction which was a bit of a bummer, but it is extremely to gain momentum when you are only releasing a show each month. In the grand scheme of things I am still fairly proud of the shows, and every so often someone asks me when exactly I am going to record some more of them.

In truth… while I want to do something similar, it feels weird to consider just starting up three years later and recording new episodes for the same show. I cancelled the show in June of 2015, largely because I was going through a bit of a rough patch in my life and something needed to change. At that point I was publishing Tales of the Aggronaut each morning seven days a week, recording AggroChat each Saturday, writing two weekly columns for MMOGames.com, and trying to squeeze in time to figure out when I can record with someone and get a Bel Folks Stuff episode in each month. Additionally work was a little insane with me stepping up to more of a managerial role, and then also attempting to raid in two different games at the same time. The show didn’t have a whole lot of listeners in the grand scheme of things, so it felt like it was the obvious thing to drop. Ultimately in the long run I wound up cutting back more severely in that I am no longer really associated with MMOGames.com at all… and I have dropped this blog down to a weekday morning only thing.

The show had a good run however of seven episodes where I got to hang out and talk with eight different friends. There was in fact a bonus episode where I got both Rowan and Scooter together to talk about gaming as a couple. For those who didn’t even know the show existed… here is a full list of the episodes that I now keep on the AggroChat.com page.

Huge thanks as always to @Gypsy_Syl, @RowanBlaze, @Sctrz, @Petterm, @QelricDK, @HeyItsLiore, and @Jaedia for making the show awesome and interesting to listen to. The biggest problem that I ran into as a whole with the show is the fact that out of the eight folks I had to schedule time with… only three were in anything even vaguely close to a drift compatible time zone. That meant the whole process of finding a time that they were conscious and I could record was a challenge. Unfortunately that is not really ever going away since a lot of the people I really want to sit down and have a chat with are European. However trying to juggle that along with everything else on my plate was a bit much. The problem is that I still have the desire to record something along these lines, but like I said before it felt weird just to start up doing the same thing again.

For awhile I have been trying to sort out how I wanted to functionally reboot “Bel Folks Stuff” and what changes if any I wanted to make to it. I got completely hung up on the concept of having a friend on the podcast and having them tell me… and our listeners a story. One of the constant threads among gamers is that we file away these experiences to recall at a later date as we tell tales to our friends and guildies. I mean I have spun a yarn about the “Bunny Incident” numerous times in the past, enough that you can just say those words and most of the people I play with know exactly what I am talking about. As I mulled over the concept a bit more I decided that I didn’t necessarily limit it to gaming stories only. Sure that solidifies the niche of listeners I had for the show… but in truth I am just not that super concerned about soliciting a huge number of listeners. There was a period of time I thought maybe this would be an alternate career path, but after attempting to do the writing for pay thing… I’ve come to realize how not compatible I am with that idea.

I name things oddly… and that is pretty much a given. The name “Friendtime Storything” came from a lot of mulling things over and some brainstorming with my friend Neph who is going to ultimately be a victim of this process. Now I simply need to figure out the list of people that I want to talk to and start scheduling times. In truth this mornings post is intended to be somewhat of a recruitment vehicle. What I am wanting to do is hard to explain without understanding what I was trying to do with Bel Folks Stuff in the first place. Mostly it will be me sitting down with a friend and having a good chat, with as the tag line states… a thinly veined excuse to make folks tell me a story. I feel like I need a show like this to pull in the people that I don’t have time to talk with on AggroChat. Right now we have a fairly fixed and reliable crew on that show with myself, Ashgar, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen. That has been “the crew” for a few years now and apart from missing an episode here or there, or bringing in some additional folks for a big show… that mix feels good the way it is. This show is going to let me snag people and do something different. The main plan is to release these episodes as sort of bonus material in the already existing AggroChat podcast feed. In theory I SHOULD have enough free bandwidth on Libsyn to sneak one of these shows in each month. There are a lot of things I would do differently had I a second chance… and one of them is to quit spawning secondary sites each time I had an idea to do something.

I am not entirely certain when this process is going to start, but I have a feeling that within the next few weeks an episode should appear.

Random Screenshots #4

March 7, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is one of those mornings when I am super thankful that I cobbled together the random screenshot tool. Last night I sort of failed at doing any measure of directed content. I tuned into Spiral’s stream as she continued to push forward into Final Fantasy V and spent most of the night alt tabbing between twitch and Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been on this mission to make sure that I complete the Ixal quests each day, and they take significantly longer than your average quest. In truth the bulk of the slowdown is all of the swapping back and forth between classes and having to craft items over and over until I get X number of high quality baubles for the turn in. Sometimes I just get unlucky, and the higher crafting gets the harder this seems to be. So while I might only need 4 items for the turn in… I might end up with a stack of 15 normal quality items that I had to craft to get those four HQs. Needless to say when I finally finished up with the quests it was around 9 pm last night… and I was feeling largely done with Final Fantasy XIV for the night. So instead I popped into the bedroom where I have my Wii U connected and played some more Zelda. It is growing on me, but I still find a lot about the game frustrating, or at least non-intuitive. As a result I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, and definitely no screenshots so… once again I crawl back into the vault and do a random sort.

wildstar64-2015-04-27-18-24-18-27 — Chua Starting Area – Wildstar

While I may have issues with Wildstar… it will always be a gorgeous game. This is I believe a screenshot from the tail end of Crimson Isle, the Chua/Draken starting zone. There are times I miss my little Chua, and I went so far as to create a new one awhile back as a Warrior. The problem is the game of Wildstar itself just never quite clicks. There is just too much going on visually for me, and the style of targeted directional abilities with hotbar combat never seems to feel as good as I think they hoped it would. I feel like the game would feel a lot better on a console where you can bind your main attacks to the triggers and bumpers and control movement and aiming with both analog sticks. In theory you could emulate this… but keyboard to controller emulators never quite work as flawlessly as if you set the controls up for that purpose out of the box. Just like running a console with a mouse and keyboard… you are trying to fake out the hardware while using out another control scheme under the hood.

Funny thing that I get a World of Warcraft image in this search because I really have not talked about the game lately much. I am admittedly on a bit of a break right now, and in part I am simply just not forcing myself to log in when I don’t really want to. For three or four weeks the real world got in the way of my raiding… and then I just got out of the habit of logging in regularly. As it stands I have this meeting on Wednesdays that usually lets out about 6pm which leaves me an hour to get home.. find food and log into the game for the raid which is simply too rushed for my tastes. So for the moment I am on extended leave, until the spirit drives me to start playing again. This image is from me finding the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker… aka the Protection Warrior alternate appearance. This is probably the moment in Legion when I was playing the most intently, and every single day I made a trek out here to see if the shield was up. The day it finally was… I took lots of screenshots and I so happily used this appearance until I got something newer unlocked recently. The Legion launch and the first few patch cycles will always be a happy memory… even if I have sort of fallen out of the habit of playing the game.

Another happy moment in a game… at the end of a long grind is when I finally got Turquoise on my Chocobo in Final Fantasy XIV. For those who are unfamiliar… your base Chocobo can be dyed through an insane process of feeding the chocobo various fruits. What makes the process maddening is that one set of fruit alters the RGB values… and another set of fruit seemed to instead alter CMYK. When we first started doing this it was largely trial and error before the calculators came out… and even when they existed it never really was an exact science. At the time we were doing this… the fruit for dyeing was prohibitively expensive. While we were trying to keep an active stock of seeds growing in the garden… it never quite met up with the desires. If you find yourself interested in this process, check out this calculator because it seems to be the best. I remember towards the end I teetered back and forth between three colors until it finally clicked and gave me the Turquoise that I was hunting for. All of this… was simply to make sure that it matched my Leviathan Barding.

Random Screenshots #3

February 23, 2017 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about. Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm… when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30. Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch. As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3. That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching. It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show… be prepared for some disturbing content. That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode. Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about. I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar. I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners. Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is. The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion. For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt. Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable… but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked. Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me… where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home. I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams. This is one of those games that I root hard for… just from a distance.

We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do… but still don’t end up playing that often. I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype. I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized. I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed. I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content… let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne. I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point… they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing. I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing. This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World. To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character. To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create. However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it. Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on. When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed. I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long… and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it. This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp. If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender… you wind up with Blood Dragon. If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory. It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry… nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.

Games Played 2016 Edition

December 30, 2022December 30, 2016 by Belghast

First I want to take a quick moment to talk about the awesome avatar adorning the right side of this paragraph. Some time ago I talked about doing the Icecrown Challenge and to the best of my knowledge most of the folks I challenged have since completed their own and donated some money to the cause. I still feel slightly sorry for Mort who ended up taking almost 50 minutes to get through the raid because had apparently never actually raided during Wrath of the Lich King. I did the challenge because one… I end up doing Icecrown Citadel almost every week anyways, and two because of the weird connection that Ratsel and I just found out that we have. Then of course there is always the part that it is a good cause. Of all of the reasons however… none of them was to win any prizes but apparently I did. The prize I happened to win was the amazing Faebelina doing an avatar, and instead of my character I chose to have her do a “Me”. So I supplied her some images and set her loose in a specific direction… and largely wanted to see what she came up with on her own. The end result is something really interesting that so far everyone has said “yup, that looks like you”. In the end though I really need to get the hat, hoodie and shirt so I can cosplay myself. I am mostly using it on my “real life” accounts but I wanted to show it off nonetheless because I think it is really cool.

Full Spreadsheet Link

Last year I realized that with the whole daily blogging thing that I had a decent way of telling exactly what games I had played during the year. Like I often do I took to Google Sheets and started a spreadsheet trying to track what games I played during what months. This year I went sorta overboard with that concept and you see the image above as a result. Essentially if I talked about a game during a given month… I put a 1 in that square and ultimately colored it it. Then in the last column I did a calculation that added up all of the months that a given game appeared in… and as a result you have the sort above… by number of months played and then alphabetically. The first thing we can take away from this graphic is that there is no denying the fact that I am an online and MMO gamer. Based on the data above I played the following MMOs…

World of Warcraft – All Twelve Months
Destiny – 10 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 10 Months
Rift – 8 Months
Diablo 3 – 6 Months
The Division – 5 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 Months
Overwatch – 4 Months
ArcheAge – 3 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 3 Months

As far as non-online games that I played… you end up dropping down significantly into single digit territory with only a handful of games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky making that repeat list. The big shocker for me is always seeing all the various singlets I end up playing throughout the year that I completely forget about. All told I played 57 different games during the year… which seems like a lot but is a bit down from last year and it’s 67 unique games. So I feel like the real tale of the year is just how much World of Warcraft and Destiny I wound up playing. Sure FFXIV is up there at 10 months but some of that is a technicality while I was subbed but only logging in once a week or every few weeks. Destiny and World of Warcraft really were constant things throughout the course of the year. This was the year I feel like I really learned to love WoW again, more than just a passing fancy that let me play with my friends. With the launch of Legion I was legitimately and unabashedly happy to be playing the game for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm. In fact Destiny dropped off the Radar only for the blip around the launch of Legion because I was just playing that game so damned much.

Even More Madness

Full Spreadsheet Link

The problem with spreadsheets is that they crave more data… and once I start down a path I tend to go into really insane territory. I had data that I had collected for 2015, and now data that I had collected for 2016. I wondered what would happen if I went all the way back to 2013, the year I first started the daily blogging experiment. Now of note… the 2013 data is super spotty given that I did not officially start the daily blogging thing until April. However I managed to piece together some data based on my archive of screenshots mixed with actual data from the blog. The end result is a view of the games I have played since 2013 copied into my weird google sheets format. Once again you can see that I really am an MMO Gamer overall. The top ten games played in total number of months is as follows…

World of Warcraft – 37 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 35 Months
Rift – 35 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 24 Months
Destiny – 19 Months
Diablo 3 – 16 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Wildstar – 12 Months
Everquest II – 11 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 9 Months
Trove – 9 Months

Of note… Trove and Guild Wars 2 are technically tied for 10th place with the same number of months. The only one that gets a little weird is Elder Scrolls Online, because I am counting time spent playing in the Alpha and Beta process which I could not of course talk about on my blog. However I entered that process in February of 2013 and we had one or two events a month through launch. During that four year period I played 172 different unique games. Again however if you look at the distribution of titles played… you have to go pretty far on the list until you get into single player territory with Minecraft, Fallout 4 and Final Fantasy V leading there. Minecraft technically can be a multiplayer game, but generally speaking I go on single player building binges. Final Fantasy V pretty much accounts for all of the years I have gotten talked into participating in the Four Job Fiesta thanks to Ashgar.

At some point I want to true up the data even further by going through my screenshot archive and sorting it by dates. I have literally every screenshot I have taken over the last several years archived and sorted by game sitting on a network attached storage device. I am maybe a little obsessive about such things, especially since screenshots tend to play such a large role in my blog. I like having a deep archive of things that I can go back to for getting reference material. From that I should be able to get a few more games that maybe I played but didn’t actually write about. However I think for the most part this represents a pretty true picture of my gameplay for the last four years. It took awhile to compile, but much of it was done while hanging out downstairs on the laptop as we watched something on television. The end result gives me a really interesting tool to use going forward, and I plan on keeping the spreadsheet up to date as I go through 2017. The biggest thing we can take away from this however is that… firstly I am a creature of habit and keep returning to the same games over and over. Secondly I tend to be one of those players that keeps returning to MMOs that I have played in the past to see how they are getting along. Lastly… I really do not play the number of single player games that I would like to play, mostly because while playing them I get lonely. It feels strange to roam around a world without lots of other people sharing it with me.