Blog Features Archives - Page 63 of 283

Regularly Playing

March 7, 2025May 27, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I decided to start “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” section of my hot bar. This area has been through many changes throughout the years and the whole idea was just to let readers know what I am actually playing right now. It originally started as me simply i-framing in the information from Raptr… but since I don’t actually use that server or any other equivalent games tracker that isn’t going to work. I shift games quite often, and I wanted a way to indicate what games are currently “on tap”. So this shifted from “Now Playing” to “Frequently Playing” and eventually wound up with the verbiage of “Regularly Playing”. The goal now is to evaluate the list once a month and make adjustments to keep it “mostly true”. I realize I am finger quoting a lot of shit in this post, but the truth is I come home and log into whatever seems enjoyable unless I have a specific activity planned that night. Over time some stuff fades away and other games get added, so I thought as part of this process I would talk a bit about where I am currently in each game on the list, as well as a bit about any that I might have removed or didn’t quite make the cut.

Destiny: The Taken King

I am still just irrationally enthralled by this game, though over the last week I have not played quite so much because I am starting to get back into MMOs once more. This week has been all about Iron Banner, because I am trying my best to get my Hunter to Rank 5… in spite of not being here for the weekend due to travel plans. The major goal of the month was to hit 335 light and I have managed to do just that on the Titan, however I am still lagging on the Warlock and Hunter with the primary slot that they need the worst being literally any legendary quality artifact. I need to sort out what I can do to get one of those because I have plenty of infusion fodder to feed into an artifact… they just have 320 blues currently equipped. The only real frustration that I have with Destiny right now is that Bungie is apparently shit at math. We were told that several activities would drop an item equal to your current light level of better. However now sitting at 335, there are still a truly silly number of activities that drop 334 items. From Challenge of Elders turn-ins last night I got both a 334 weapon and 334 arms, and from an exotic engram I got a 334 secondary… all while showing up in game as 335 light. This is pretty maddening since 334 is useful for infusion if you are desperate but what you want to see is 335s so you can bring up ALL of your gear to that light level. Regardless I am still loving the game and I am hoping that the next big patch will address this problem. Also hoping that when I get back from my trip I can finish the push to Rank 5 because I am roughly halfway to Rank 4 at the moment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

This marks the second week of me being “back” at least as far as doing the Tuesday night raid content is involved. I am still very much in “catch up” mode, but I am enjoying myself. As far as downtime activities I have started the grind to get elemental crystals for the first Anima weapon, aka the Relic 2.0 or 3.0 depending upon how you are counting. I am loving being Lala-Bel once more and I guess whatever funk I was going through that was keeping me from playing MMOs has passed because I am enjoying myself again. I very much need to be doing a nightly Expert but that has yet to happen quite yet. After yesterdays post however I found a whole slew of people willing to be tagged and pulled in for expert running. Now I just need to get back from this weekend and get started on this proper. Also apologies ahead of time for the nightmares that will be induced by the creepy-assed Calcabrina dolls.

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls

Season Six is very much winding down to a close, and I have managed to accomplish pretty much everything that I could have hoped for… at the very least I got my additional stash tab. I have friends who still have things to knock out to get theirs so I am very much in a help as needed mode. That said I am still poking my head into the game on a regular basis to farm for Menagerist Goblins…. something I have yet to actually see. The highlight of the season was something that I did not even realize was a thing until it dropped. I guess the cosmic wings are among the rarest item this time around.. because it is RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG. You have to get one of the rainbow goblins to show up… and then have to get it to drop the Whimsydale portal… and then have to get a specific mob to show up in there to get them. In any case pretty much any time I get a Whimsydale portal I holler at anyone who happens to be on to come along with me now just in case they drop again. I’ve made it way further this season than at any other time… the only thing I am not looking forward to is trying to merge my current seasonal bank into my non-seasonal bank once more.

Overwatch

This is the newest addition to the list and also the one I have spent the least time playing. This week was the official launch of Overwatch, and my friends list has been completely on fire about this game. I played it enough in beta to know that I liked it, and then ceased to play it any further waiting for launch. Now that launch is here however… I have all of these competing priorities. The game is really good and so far I have yet to find a champion that I don’t like… pending I give them a serious chance. I was largely diametrically opposed to D.Va largely because the mech looked like a killer whale mixed with a guardian mode veritech. However after getting the carbon fiber skin from a loot box… and giving her a proper try I found out that I really enjoyed it. The game is probably the best designed shooter I have played in a very long time. The thing that is going to keep me from really sinking my teeth in however… is it has no PVE/Exploration gameplay like Destiny. If I could have Destiny set in this universe with character progression and collecting awesome weapons… I would be completely hooked. This will likely always be a game relegated to the “once or twice a week” column for me largely because I am just not that competitive. Earning loot boxes is a cool reason to keep playing, but eventually there will come a point where I run out of things I care about that came come from lootboxes.

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

This is the backburneryist of backburner games for me right now. I’ve gotten in the habit of logging in daily and collecting my free money from the garrison… especially now that I put a massive dent in my finances and bought the Grand Expedition Yak. That said every now and then I do play one of the characters that I am still in the process of leveling. I have this grand idea that it would be fun to roll into Legion with a full list of level 100 characters, however I somehow doubt that is going to happen… much the way as it has never actually happened during any of the other expansions. However that said the alt of choice right now is my druid that I am slowly pushing up. In truth I am in a holding pattern until Legion and largely not paying a ton of attention to the game in the meantime.

Things Removed From List

Elder Scrolls Online

The truth is the MMO Funk hit and I never really returned to playing this regularly. I still very much want to, but it is going to need another lag in some other game for me to really sink my teeth into it. The game that exists today is amazing and they have done a really good job of keeping the content fresh. The biggest problem is I really don’t have anyone to play with over there on the North American server cluster. Now if I were playing on the EU side… I know lots of active and happy guilds. I would absolutely play with the Whitestar folks were that really a viable option.

Warframe

While initially interesting to me, this game just did not sink its teeth into me the way it did the rest of the AggroChat crew. There is just something that I don’t like about it… and I have tried to reason out what exactly it was. I still have an account and still have some cool stuff on it, so I might at a future date return to it, but it never really replaced my love for Destiny.

The Division

While technically it was never actually on the sidebar… it probably should have been. I was all about The Division at launch and that excitement did not even manage to carry me through to the level cap. I am sitting around level 26 and I am just not sure what is holding me back. Largely the content at that level doesn’t feel nearly as interesting or rewarding as it did at lower levels. The packs of mobs out in the world seem to be scaled for group play, and when you down folks… they don’t seem to be dropping anything interesting. In theory I could hold my nose and grind through it… but what would I be grinding for? I am so far behind the curve in gear and it doesn’t feel like the game really gives you a lot of great options to catch up. There has been a sequence of changes that I really didn’t feel like had me in mind. At first I liked that it felt like you could progress through the game on many different vectors and end up at the same loot goal. However the crafting material nerf really hurt that feel for me. This is something I might return to later, once they offer some Destiny like catch up mechanisms to give players a hand up.

DAW2016: Final Day

April 30, 2016 by Belghast

DAW2016_logo

Developer Appreciation Week is here! For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster. The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios. As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better. That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole. So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there. If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

The Roundup

Today draws to a close this years Developer Appreciation Week and there are always more things that need to be talked about than there was time to do so. During the week I wrote about five different studios. Some of them were pretty pointed discussions, and others were just nostalgic romps. What is always left at the end of the week however are a bunch more than I COULD have talked about. So the purpose of today’s post is to recap where I have been this week and do a few shorter blurbs. Here is the rundown of studios discussed this week.

Now here are some topics that ultimately got left on the cutting room floor for lack of time.

Bethesda Softworks / Zenimax Media

Ultimately had I not taken a break for a day this would have been the missing topic. I have this huge love for Bethesda games in their own right, but over the years they also snatched up iD software and became a third party publisher for amazing studios like Arkane. The root of my love however comes from the modern Fallout and Elder Scrolls Franchises. These are games that I can lose myself in for hundreds of hours and still feel like I have not even begun to scratch the surface on what there is to see. There are so many times in the past where I have lost entire weekends to exploring Tamriel or the burnt out husk of the Capitol Wasteland. I will also always have a soft spot in my heart for Elder Scrolls Online, since it feels like I have a closer connection to that title than most. It has made me pretty happy to see that the game is now thriving after a pretty rough start.

Larian Studios

I love this company, in spite of the fact that they have seemed horribly confused as to what sort of game company they actually wanted to be. They have this world that is amazing, and each game they have released has told a piece of the story of its background. The only confusing part is that each game for the most part has been in a vastly different genre. You have Divine Divinity which was originally a Diablo style game… and then the follow up Divinity II which has a very Elder Scrolls/Dragon Age type feel to it. Then there is Dragon Commander which is this strange 4X mixed with RTS elements. Finally you have Divinity: Original Sin that feels like the game they always had been meaning to create. The title is so insanely content dense that I have trouble actually making any progress because I keep finding something else that is interesting to check out. In the very first town it felt like every single NPC had some interesting backstory to delve into. I just love that a game company is out there trying to create all of these different game types, and for the most part succeeding at it. I have thoroughly enjoyed every single Larian game that I have set my hands on, and look forward to playing more in the future.

Supergiant Games

This company makes some really amazingly detailed and well crafted games. Bastion had so much going on, from the physical mechanics of gameplay… to the amazing running narration. I was also a huge fan of the soundtrack and have spent many an hour with it running in the background. When Transistor came out, I was shocked that I loved everything about that game even more. We have devoted at least three podcasts where we have gushed about Transistor, and how well written the story was… which combined amazingly with the soundtrack and gameplay. Now Supergiant has a brand new game that they showed at Pax East called Pyre. At first look it doesn’t exactly seem to be my sort of game, but I know from past experience that if they have crafted it… then chances are I will ultimately love it too. I am amazed how they can seem to do it every time… build this completely unique experience that I still love just as much as their others.

Gearbox

This company comes with some baggage. I unequivocally love the Borderlands series of games. It has such amazing characters and writing, and manages to pull off a sort of self aware comedy that is extremely hard to do in a game. Most “comedic games” fall short, and end up not quite translating into actual humor. Borderlands has mastered the art of telling a real story while making me go into full on belly laughs at times. This in itself wouldn’t been all that amazing, but it is on top of a really damned solid shooter. When I first heard the concept of “Diablo with Guns” I was not 100% sure I would be sold. However playing the first Borderlands I was completely bought into the concept, and then Borderlands 2 came after improving quite literally everything. Now I am not sure if I am sold on the notion of Battleborn, but I am giving it a shot because of the pedigree and some of the single player videos remind me a lot of the things I loved from Battleborn. Now when I say the company has some baggage…. this is also the studio that released Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines. I am just hoping that Battleborn ends up feeling more Borderlands… and doesn’t add to the detractor column.

Bungie

I feel like I have to write about Bungie, but I also didn’t really feel like I had enough ammunition to really do a full post. I was never a Halo player. I never owned an Xbox, and when I played the PC port it didn’t feel all that amazing as compared to the game I was super into at that time Unreal II: The Awakening. I feel like Microsoft did a massive disservice by keeping a strangle hold on the Halo franchise, and does to this very day. However when I first saw Destiny… I knew this was going to be a game for me. In fact this was the game that ultimately made me buy my PS4 and learn how to play a shooter with a controller. While the game didn’t really grab me and keep me during year one… year two and the Taken King expansion have been amazing. I love this game so much and over the course of the last few months it is really my primary game. While I loved the Diablo 3 season launch last night, there was a little part of me that would have rather been playing Iron Banner in Destiny. The game has its hooks in me hard, and it really has become this perfect package of game play feel, with a reward system that makes it feel like my time spent was worth it. Seriously bravo to Bungie for the creation of this game… the only thing that could make it better is if it released on the PC as well.

DAW2016: Square Enix

April 29, 2016 by Belghast

I knew sooner or later I would end up needing to do Square Enix because at various times during my life they played a huge role in shaping how I looked at games. Lets go back to a time and a place where the only gaming news I got was through Nintendo Power magazine. In one of those issues I was first introduced to a game called Final Fantasy. For ages I had been looking for the personification of Dungeons and Dragons in game form, and while the gold box games did a decent job of doing just that… there was always something missing. Final Fantasy bridged the gap and gave me precisely that, along with a story line that made me care about all of the dungeon crawling. I remember being so insanely excited when I went to a nearby Walmart and they had this game in stock. The only negative was that within a short few days I would be heading to Boy Scout camp for an entire week. While I normally loved camp, this was quite possibly the most miserable week of camp I have ever experienced. All that I really wanted to be doing was playing Final Fantasy from the comfort of my bedroom… and instead I was making campfires, and hiking up sharp flint rock strewn paths. When I finally got home, firing up that Nintendo and playing Final Fantasy was quite literally the best feeling ever. Regardless of how exhausted I was from a week of camp, I still ended up pulling an all nighter and getting through that damned Marsh cave.

When Final Fantasy 2 was released… aka Final Fantasy IV for the rest of the world… it once again dominated my life for a period of time. I was completely blown away by the graphics at the time, and also amazed at how much more complex the story line of that game was. This was also the point at which I learned the hard lesson of save at every single save point, because of a bad mishap with the Magus Sisters. The game also introduced the term “Spoony Bard” into my vocabulary and for that I will always be grateful. This was also the first game that gave me characters I had no interest in playing… I am looking at you Edward and your inability to do any real damage. The game also gave my quite possibly my favorite goofy archetype of character… the Dragoon, with its amazing but also sometimes frustrating jump attack. I was completely hooked on the notion of having this huge cast of characters that I could switch between at will… but then ultimately only ever seemed to play with the same party ever. For the most part that party was Cecil, Rydia, Kain, Rosa, and Edge… with that last spot being highly variable as I went through the play session. This is really something I do even today when I play for example a Bioware game. In Dragon Age Inquisition, my party is pretty much permanently Cassandra, Dorian, Sera and my character.

It wasn’t until High School that Final Fantasy 3 was released… or Final Fantasy VI for the rest of the world. I remember it coming out around Christmas break and at first I rented it… which was a truly dumb idea given that the Super Nintendo didn’t have memory cards. The main reason for this was because the game itself was something stupid like $85 when it released, which was an awful lot of my limited resources at the time. However after a few days of playing the game I was making a trek to the big city to try and find a copy. After searching a dozen different stores I finally found a copy at Target, and much to my shock it was on sale for only $65. I am not sure exactly sure what it is about Final Fantasy VI, but for whatever reason I think this game will always be my favorite. I tend to love games that pull a bait and switch on me, when you think you are nearing the end of the game… only to realize that the world just got much larger and instead of being nearly done… I was just barely starting. I also have a soft spot for a lot of the characters in this game, because it managed to make me feel things that video games had not really succeeded in doing up to this point. Ashgar and I have had a conversation about this… and for me the game that did all of these things was Final Fantasy V. However for me… that game was not available and didn’t even receive a fan translation until I was well into college. The two games do a lot of the same things, I just happened to experience six first.

Over the years there has been a string of Final Fantasy titles always in my life, and several non-FF series games that I loved as well. For example I love beyond love Vagrant Story, and I remember playing the hell out of it when it came out on the PSX. I also spent more than my fair share of time playing Chrono Trigger, and the subsequent follow up games. Then there are games that I wish would get a reboot like Parasite Eve that were so amazing for the time in which they came out. Essentially there has always been some Square Enix game somewhere in my life, be it Bravely Default that I am slowly working my way through on my 3DS downstairs on my bedside table, or the Kingdom Hearts collection I have sitting beside my PS3 ready to start in earnest. All of these are in fact great experiences, but the one I feel like I really need to talk about is the miraculous rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV. This game was released in 2010 and was essentially universally despised. I remember getting into the beta for it and finding it just largely uninteresting more than anything. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t really feel anything about it. So I was more than happy to return to World of Warcraft, and forget that the game existed.

However in August of 2013 the game relaunched as A Realm Reborn, and I have to say I was shocked at just how much I liked the title. We played for a handful of months until our group ran out of content that we could realistically complete. Then July of 2014 I decided to fire the game up again, because I wanted to see how it had progressed in our absence. Final Fantasy XIV was one of those games that our group left on good terms. What I found waiting on me was this rich cache of content that laid untapped. Over the next several months we had what could only be termed as a renaissance of MMO gaming all centered around this game. I was happy to raid once again, and happy to be doing pretty much all of the tropes of a MMORPG. What made all the difference was the loving way in which this game was being crafted. I have to give huge shouts to the localization team and namely Koji Fox. Final Fantasy XIV is so amazingly well written and is packed full of more feels than most games ever manage to muster. There is content that will make you painfully belly laugh, and other times infuriate you for all of the right reasons. Then there are moments that will make you cry… and there are certain cut scenes in this game that even the mere thought of will summon up the waterworks.

While I am currently on a break from the game after burning myself out again with the launch of Heavensward, I know sooner or later I will return and be happy to do so. Heavensward was quite possibly the expansion I have looked forward to the most from any MMORPG that I have played, since maybe the launch of Trials of Atlantis in Dark Age of Camelot. Unfortunately much like ToA… I got my expectations up way too high, and the content drought that followed the launch ultimately ended up with me stopping playing. However as a couple of patches have built up for me, I plan on returning soon… probably after I get the upcoming Diablo 3 season out of my system. I am happy to know that there is still a very thriving guild presence in this game waiting on me. I have a feeling that sooner or later we will all return for yet another renaissance of MMO gaming and when it happens… it will be in huge part to just how great Final Fantasy XIV turned out.

DAW2016: Bioware

April 27, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a difficult one to tackle, especially since I didn’t get a ton of sleep thanks to the tornado warnings. However I am going to give it to good college try, and hope that the end result turns out at least not too shabby. I first became aware as Bioware as a company with the release of Baldur’s Gate, or more so the existence of what I later came to know as the “Infinity Engine”. I have been a fan of Dungeons and Dragons since I first found a players manual abandoned in a locker on the last day of school in second grade. Finding that book spawned a lot of things, not the least of which was trying to hungrily gobble up anything TSR related. I played the “gold box” series of games, namely because I had read the novels behind a lot of the stories. There was just something missing with the game, and while I enjoyed them at the time they never really felt that good. The story that was being told felt limited by the meager technology, and while I was happy enough with the end product… that only lasted until I had played my first Final Fantasy game. Baldur’s Gate was the title that brought me back from my console days into once again believing that the PC was a great platform for role-playing games.

Subsequent games were released… Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate II and even one of my all time favorites… Planescape Torment… all using this “Infinity Engine” I have to admit I got a bit of the wrong idea behind what exactly the company Bioware really was. In my mind it seemed like Bioware was the tools company, and Interplay, Black Isle, or later the reboot Obsidian were the game creator. It wasn’t until Neverwinter Nights was released that I really started to understand that Bioware was both the tools division and a lot of great storytelling wrapped into one package. Neverwinter Nights was one of those revolutionary games for me personally. While the original campaign was awesome… it was the inclusion of the aurora toolset that set my mind on fire. At this time I was playing a lot of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot so I tried to replicate some of my favorite features of those games using the Neverwinter engine. I learned the C Script language and figured out how to code things like randomly generated loot from tables when you opened chests or killed mobs. I also eventually figured out how to create a token based system along the lines of the one that allowed you to purchase armor in the Darkness Falls dungeon. The end result was this amalgam of the EQ Plane of Hate and DAoC Darkness Falls that I called the “Plane of Spite”. While I never did anything really interesting with it, I loved every single moment of working on it and figuring out the inner machinations of this engine.

It was not really until Knights of the Old Republic that I hopped back on the Bioware fandom, and I remember being crushingly disappointed when I learned that the title was going to be Xbox Exclusive. Thankfully later that year it came out for the PC and I was absolutely thrilled to be dissecting that game world as well. I loved Neverwinter Nights for its technical precision, and the Aurora and Infinity engines for giving me this awesome framework to go out and explore worlds in. However KOTOR was the first time from Bioware that I was completely stunned by the storyline. Last week we went into a discussion on AggroChat about the best Star Wars stories, and by the end of that show all of us pretty much came to the consensus that Knights of the Old Republic was if not the absolute best story, it was at least among them. There are moments in this game that had shocking revelations that I have never quite recovered from. Even though the engine is dated, and the graphics look like crap compared to what I am used to… I can still play this game happily over and over just because it was so damned well crafted. I’ve bought it for others, and even own the mobile port of the game. I feel like this game more than any set the tone for the modern incarnation of Bioware.

I ultimately for one reason or another skilled Mass Effect at launch, and instead picked up the Bioware banner once again with the release of Dragon Age: Origins. During this period of time I was raiding in World of Warcraft rabidly… but there were a few weeks where I completely dropped off the face of the planet, and it was thanks to this game. I was just completely enthralled with the world and the setting, and the concept of the dark spawn and deep roads. I am a Dwarf at heart, so I loved every single moment of Orzammar. My first play through was as a Dwarven Noble, and I have to say after all of the subsequent play sessions that is still the one I cherish the most. Much the same as KOTOR, it was ultimately the characters that set this game apart from the others I had played. They felt so fleshed out and three dimensional, and I actually cared about interacting with them. I am a huge proponent of smashing things with a big weapon, and games that allow me to slaughter by the hundreds… but it is significantly harder to find a game that makes me feel. Dragon Age made me feel so much, and during this time I had a really interesting encounter. One of my guildies invited me to tank for some friends of his, and when I popped onto voice chat we had some of the usual getting to know a new person discussion. I mentioned that I had been playing a ton of Dragon Age… and it was at this point that they started grilling me about this character or that, or what decision I made where. It turns out that I was ultimately raiding that night with a bunch of the writers, and you could almost hear them beaming as they proudly chimed in that they wrote this or that as I gushed about various details.

With the release of Mass Effect 2, I later went back and became an addict of that series as well. I still wish that someone would make that into a Walking Dead style serialized television show, because the story that is being told is among the best science fiction tales ever. It just seems a crime that the only folks that will ever see the story, are the ones who have played through the game. Then you of course have the release of Star Wars the Old Republic, that my friends and I tore through rabidly when it launched. I burnt myself out on that game but recently a bunch of us ended up going back and remembering just how damned well written all of the story arcs really are. At some point soon I want to go back and finish where I left off which is the start of the Revan content, and try out the new experience fallen empire content that I have heard so much about. For sake of time though I am going to wrap things up, because otherwise I could probably carry on for a dozen more paragraphs talking about all of the things from Bioware games that I love. It is a great studio, and while I was scared that EA would destroy its spirit… I have been pleasantly surprised that the core values of the company and the creative might seem to keep trucking along happily. I look forward to more adventures be it with Andromedia or the next great IP that we have yet to experience.