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DAW2016 – Undead Labs

April 25, 2016 by Belghast

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.

I was first aware of the existence of Undead Labs back in November of 2009 when articles started filtering onto the various MMO news sites that this company had spun off of ArenaNet to create a zombie themed MMO. Firstly I am a huge fan of all things Undead, and I started watching any news about this upstart company to try and glean bits of information about the upcoming game. Few things make me happier than slashing my way through hordes of the walking dead, and I’m enough of a fan of the George Romero movies that I have a vial of dirt from the graveyard that the original Night of the Living Dead was filmed in. With time it was announced that they had set their sights on creating a really solid single player experience instead of an MMO, which honestly was probably a really solid move given that by the time the game would have released… the MMO market was looking a little shaky. On June 5th of 2013 the resulting game, State of Decay was released exclusively on the Xbox Live Arcade, and I bought it the moment it was available for purchase. If you were to craft a perfect Zombie game… you’d have State of Decay. I loved everything about it… minus one little detail. The game felt like it was originally designed to have co-op support if not a fully fleshed out MMO experience. However as excited as I was about the game I took to my blog and made a post talking about my day one impressions.

Shortly after making the post I had Annie Strain the wife of Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain interacting with me on twitter. This really told me that this game studio was a little different than the big polished institutions I was used to interacting with. Everything about Undead Labs seemed like a big family, rather than a business. I had the fortune to interact with a handful of them at Pax South 2015, as they were ramping up to launch both their pokemon-esc mobile MMO Moonrise and the State of Decay: Year One Survivor Edition. Just talking with them really brings home this feeling of them all being in this together. The best part however is that they really do make amazing games, and over the years since State of Decay has launched I have purchased it for so many of my friends. I even purchased the disc copy of YOSE for my boss, when I found out he had just purchased a Xbox One. While he is not a big gamer, he was a huge fan of The Walking Dead… and as a result is now also a huge fan of State of Decay. Once again… the only problem with the game is that it begs to be a multiplayer experience. We’ve talked about this before on our podcast, but if we could explore that game world with friends it would truly be one of the best games released on any platform.

Another huge boon about Undead Labs is the insanely hard working Sanya Weathers. If you have been around the MMO industry since the early days, there is a large chance you know that name. I became aware of her during my time playing Dark Age of Camelot, and always appreciated the job she did trying to wrangle the crazies and help out the folks who really needed assistance. Within the community management circles she is a bit “infamous” for her blogging days. Regardless of how you might remember her, she is one of those forces that it wouldn’t matter what company she was working with… I would pay attention to them from that point on. I am hugely thankful of my own interactions with her during the lead up to, and after Pax South 2015. I would not have actually had the interview with Undead Labs were it not for her reaching out to me on twitter, and that sort of proactive nature is just awesome. It was heartbreaking when the Studio announced that they would be cancelling Moonrise because I was right there with them pulling for it to be the next big breakout hit.

One of the folks that I met with during Pax South was Geoffrey Card the Lead Designer for State of Decay. Since the convention I’ve followed his movement a little more closely and found that he does this amazing series of live streams. What is awesome about these streams is that he tends to grab various folks from Undead Labs and streams over the pacific timezone lunchtime. The thing that I find valuable about them is the way that the various folks end up breaking down the games as they are playing them, and deconstruct what elements are really well done and what elements could use improvement. A lot of the games that I have seen him play are other zombie genre titles, and it feels like he is trying to grok everything that is going on in the title so that he can absorb it like a sponge and burn it down to the purist element to use for inspiration on State of Decay. As someone who has always been a bit of an armchair designer myself, I find the process valuable and it also serves to give the watchers a bit of a glimpse into the inner workings of the game studio itself at times. If you are into that sort of thing, I highly suggest you check the stream out sometime.

The best thing about the Developer Appreciation Week construct, is it gives me open season to write love letters to the various companies that I really respect and appreciate. Undead Labs is one that I knew without a doubt that I would be touching on during this week, and I am really excited to see whatever the next thing is that they are working on. Part of me is crossing my fingers hoping that we finally get either a co-op experience or a full fledged MMOized State of Decay. Regardless I will be watching any news about this great studio with interest.

DAW2016: Trion Worlds

April 24, 2016 by Belghast

DAW2016_logo

trionworlds_wht

So this year I am kicking off developer appreciation week with Trion Worlds. 2011 was a bit of a fraught year for me as far as gaming goes. Cataclysm had just landed in World of Warcraft, and I was reaching this point where I found myself falling out of love with that game. Early in the year I had friends who were talking about this new and exciting game called Rift. It turned out that it was precisely the sort of experience I was looking for. If you had put onto paper every single feature that I ever wanted in World of Warcraft… you would end up getting a feature list that looked a lot like Rift. While it failed to gain serious traction with a number of my friends, it was my gaming “main squeeze” for quite a long time. So much so that I ultimately rebooted this blog into a Rift fan blog, and became an official fansite listed on the Rift game website. From that point onwards Rift has been one of those games that is always somewhere in the background of my life. One of the most awesome things about the launch is that I ended up striking up a friendship with some of the folks responsible for building the game.

Now over the years I have done the same for various companies, but I was remarking the other day how few of those folks are even in the industry these days. The ones that are still in the industry are rarely at the company I first knew them through. However in the case of Trion Worlds, all but one of the folks I knew there… are still there and seemingly happy five years after the launch of Rift. That tells me that Trion as a whole is doing something right to keep employees engaged for that length of time. As with every company in the MMO space there have been a lot of false starts, and some cancelled projects… but I have been pleasantly surprised that they have managed to weather that cancellation of these projects. Rift for example started as a subscription game, and successfully navigated the transition to free to play, with one of the more viable cash shop models out there. Sure there are some things that they do that I find egregious… like the various mounts that can only be found on lockboxes, or the constantly limited sale mentality. Overall though even with all of these things taken into account, I find them a really great company and I am always interested in whatever they happen to have going on.

One of the more interesting experiences with Trion was the development cycle for Trove. This was really the first time that I had ever seen a AAA title do a fully NDA free Alpha program. Even more interesting than this however is the way that this game community embraced Reddit. There are no official forums for Trove, but instead they have an open community on Reddit that has also spawned a separate sub Reddit for users to submit creations. I love that when you pick up an item in game, it tells you which user in the community designed it. The only problem with this development style is that it felt like Trove was constantly changing, and in drastic ways. There was a period of time when I would log in and never quite know what design decisions would have been made in my absence. The end result is a really fun experience, but it was interesting to see these false starts and reworks happening in real time. Trion as a whole seems to genuinely care about and cherish their player base, and they were one of the first companies that I can remember embracing Discord as a means of keeping in contact with the player base. There are a number of discord servers that I am on that have devs and community staff publicly available for conversation, which goes a long way into making players feel connected.

I feel like Trion also has set the gold standard for interacting with the community on a regular basis. Each Friday they do a lengthy Twitch stream where they alternate through a series of back to back shows dedicated to each of their games. During these shows they of course do the standard give away construct, but also have the folks actively working on the games in the hot seat to answer questions live from the community. These also serve as a place where players often get a first glance at upcoming tech, features and content. Savvy players have learned how to read the comments from the community folks, and been able to glean additional information pretty regularly. While updates have slowed down significantly since the frenetic launch days of Rift, they still put out a steady stream of content. The negative over the years has been that two of their products they have limited control over. So I feel like they have maybe taken unnecessary flack over both ArcheAge and Devilian at times, when in truth they only run the servers and manage the localization… but have little to do with the overarching development direction. Localization is going to be a structure that we see more and more of, since South Korea is still going through a bit of an MMO renaissance, like we did in the 2000s. I feel like they have done a better job than some other localization efforts, but could still have some room for improvement.

Ultimately… while I can go for long periods of time between playing Trion games, logging into them always feels a bit like coming home. So if you have never played Rift, Trove, Defiance, ArcheAge, or Devilian I highly suggest you download Glyph their proprietary launcher and check them out. The upcoming Atlas Reactor seems really interesting, like a sort of competitive X-Com, but also not really my sort of gaming experience.

Seven Years

April 17, 2016 by Belghast

Interesting Journey

It feels so immensely strange to be sitting down to write this post. As of this morning it marks the seventh year of Tales of the Aggronaut. I am not exactly sure why but seven years seems like a significantly more auspicious number than five or six or even eight. Culturally we place a strange importance on the number seven as either lucky or magical, and I have to admit that I fall for this same trap myself. As a web developer by trade, I started this blog with a purpose and had all of the trappings of a proper website. One of those is of course Google Analytics integration, and I spent some time this morning going over the numbers before sitting down to write this post. In the Seven years I have published 1260 posts, and they have been read a grand total of 235,304 times at the moment of pulling the stats. Over the course of this blogs lifespan I’ve had 110,359 unique readers from 182 countries, and roughly 40% of them are return readers. What I found shocking was that there are a little over 4000 of you out there that have read my blog more than 200 times. As far as my readers go it seems that the bulk from from the United States as one would expect, but the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Australia also make up large chunks and round out the top five countries with France coming in a not too distant sixth. The web developer in me was also curious to find out that the vast majority of my readers are using Google Chrome (go them!) with the next highest batch using Firefox (also good choice)… and then unfortunately a large block are still using Internet Explorer and I was shocked that it actually beat out Safari.

The thing is… these numbers are utterly meaningless because at the end of the day it still very much feels like I am a little kid pretending to make a newspaper or sitting in a cardboard box pretending to tell the news. Every day I get up and make my post, and mentally I feel like I am talking to myself. I have a hard time reconciling that there are people out there reading each and every day without fail. I know there are mentally, because when I am late getting a post up… folks will come out of the woodwork to check on me. However emotionally I cannot quite comprehend that I have people that are that interested in the boring things that I do each and every day. I am not a terribly interesting person, and most of my life is spent going to work, trying to be a good husband, juggling family and friends… and attempting to get in as much game time as humanly possible. The truth is I share a lot of my life with you my readers, and if I didn’t feel like I was talking to myself… I am not sure if I would have the courage to say some of the things I have said. I’ve shared my high points and my low points… and attempted to be honest with my struggles and frustrations. The result has been more support from my friends and readers than I ever thought possible. When am feeling down, you all reach out to me and lift me back up… and in truth you are a huge part of why I keep going each and every morning.

Evolution of the Aggronaut

I still look back on the early days of this blog and wonder what exactly caused me to start it in the first place. I guess in truth I was always a blogger, I just didn’t realize it. I was one of those folks that haunted game forums, and was prone to writing huge wall of text posts about this subject or that. As to what prompted me to make the switch from forum goer to blogger, that one is a bit harder to nail down. I know I was ultimately prompted to start thinking about it by WoW Insider and their focus on a single blog called The Wordy Warrior. Since I was a Warrior trying to lead a raid, I felt a certain kinship with this blogger and that lead me to start my own “warrior blog”. Aggronaut itself has gone through so many changes over the years. It was originally a Warrior Tanking blog, and then shifted to a general warrior blog… to a raid leadership blog… to a general World of Warcraft blog… to a Rift blog… until finally it was rebooted in its current form which is MY blog. For so long I kept trying to make it into something more than just an open discussion I was having with my readers about whatever happened to be on my mind. I was told that in order to be “successful” you had to find a niche and then exploit the shit out of that niche… and that never really did feel amazing. The end result after all of this back and forth is that Tales of the Aggronaut is a blog about me and whatever the hell I happen to be doing. If you are going to read me for long at all, you have to be interested in me as a person because I am not always going to be all that interesting.

The strangest thing to get used to over these years is that once you have made a post it often times develops a life of its own. There have been many times I have written something and then someone came along behind me and got some other meaning from my post that I never intended or even thought about. Sometimes this is good… and other times it just serves as fodder for someone else’s rant blog. The one harsh reality is that the posts that become popular, are never the ones you actually thought were worth reading. Looking back through my analytics… here are the top five posts in the seven years of Aggronaut. At least one of them completely makes me cringe these days.

Of those the only one I am actually proud of in any fashion is my GroupCraft series of posts. The Keyboard Turning one I am actually actively embarrassed by largely because I don’t even recognize the “me” that wrote that post because I guess I have mellowed out significantly since I first started this blog. However I feel like it would be dishonest to remove posts from the annals of time, so I leave them… even the ones that make me cringe. If nothing else this blog charts my evolution as a player and a decent human being. However I admit that a lot of that evolution didn’t really start until I began my mad mission of blogging every single day. In a few weeks it will mark the third anniversary of blogging every single day, and it is funny how I have gone from being one of the least prolific bloggers to being among the most. In the first four years of my blog I made 148 posts… in the last three years I made 1112 posts, so a huge difference.

Faces of Bel

Like I said in the start of this very long and probably self aggrandizing post… seven feels like a special number. For years I have joked that I really only play one character, and then try and recreate that character in every single game that I play. I’ve even posted pictures of my various characters to drill home that point. This got me thinking, and since I am really good friends with the amazing artist @Ammosart I decided I would try and commission her to create a special graphic to commemorate this occasion. The idea was to have an image that showed off several of the “Faces of Bel” and I have to say I was completely blown away when I saw the end result. She went above and beyond anything I could have hoped for, and now I will have to be tempted to have her create something for every anniversary… if I can afford that. I absolutely wanted this on a shirt, so at my suggestion she has throw it up on her t-shirt store. I wanted every last penny of the proceeds to go to her, so instead of me creating a “Tales of the Aggronaut” store this seemed like the better option. For I believe the first 72 hours it is only $14 and then after that they go up to the normal price of $20 and $22 for bigger sizes. Once I finish writing this post I plan on ordering one for myself because I am so floored at just how well this turned out. I am super thankful to have awesome friends like Ammo, that I can pester to do little side projects like this.

I feel like I need to wrap things up, because this post has gone on quite a bit longer than I thought it would. I am very thankful to have all of you out there reading my words, and without you I am not sure I would have the strength to get up every single morning and commit text to page before I have finished my cup of coffee. Through this blog and the awesome community of folks that I have met through the various social media accounts connected to it… I have forged a family that I will take with me for the rest of my life. It doesn’t matter if we have only interacted one time… you’ve left an impression on me and given me the will to keep going. Sure there are mornings where I question myself why the hell I keep doing this, but all of you out there that ping me over twitter or slack or countess other methods… give me that drive to keep moving forward. I realize this post has sounded a little bit like a farewell at times, and I haven’t meant it to. Seven is a magical and special number, but so is Thirteen… so as I top the hill of this goal I set my sights on the next one. Thank you for joining me in this journey, and hopefully we will have a lot more of them before I decide to call it quits. Also side note… please take some time to tell @Ammosart just how damned amazing this image is! I’ve had it for about a month now… and it has been pure hell to keep it under wraps because from the moment I got it I wanted to share it with the world!

Week in Gaming 1/17/2016

January 17, 2016 by Belghast

It has been awhile since I have done one of these, and of the various failed columns that I have tried over the years…. I think this one is the best for me personally. Sunday is a rough day in general, in part because I wake up and have to finish up AggroChat and get it out to the various locations. As a result it helps to have a fairly formulaic option I can lean on when I am not feeling super inspired. As a result I am leaning once again on the Week in Gaming series just to talk about a bunch of stuff I played this week.

Pax South Hype!

I am starting to get super excited for Pax South. Last year I had various companies ask me for a business card, and I was somewhat kicking myself for not having any. I mean I guess part of me never really thought that having a business card for a blog and podcast was a good idea. This year however I have gotten my ass in order and if everything works as intended the cards will arrive at the beginning of next week. I only ordered 250 because I could not in any circumstance think of a reason why I would need that many. The design was done by Rae and was originally intended to be our Pax Prime cards, but since we were denied media access to that convention they never actually got made. I resurrected the idea because I thought it was pretty slick. In the original design each of the hosts has their own color, and given that I love green I latched onto that one. As far as a back design I went with something simple because I felt like it needed something on the back…. and in truth that is the crux of our thing… daily posts, weekly cast. If you are also going to be at Pax South let me know, I would love to meet up with everyone that I can while I am there.

Undertale

I have some mixed feelings about Undertale so far. On one level I really like the game and it feels like something that is going to be an interesting experience. The negative is I absolutely HATE the combat system. I hate mini-games, and while I was corrected last night on the podcast…. I am sorry but that isn’t a real combat system. Part of me just wants to run away from every single fight so that I don’t have to do it. I mean granted I was using arrow keys and maybe that makes it worse than it actually is, but I just hate the concept of breaking out of an otherwise fun old school RPG style game…. and having to deal with move the heart to avoid shit. For now I have essentially abandoned the game, in the hopes that some distance will in fact make the heart grow fond. Essentially I love everything else about the game… other than the combat system. This might be one of those games that is more enjoyable to watch.

Victor Vran

I’ve already talked about this game quite a bit throughout the week but I feel like it still deserves additional mention. The only negative about this game is that I started playing it essentially the week before a bunch of other things that I wanted to play happened. My hope is that once the recent infatuation with Warframe and Diablo 3 Season 5 have calmed down, I can return to this and play my way through the main story some more. I really want to see what multiplayer feels like in the end game experience. Playing it was fine for me… but essentially locked the other players that I was dragging along with me… out of some of the experience of interacting with the voice floating around in your head. If you are not partaking of the Diablo 3 Season 5 madness…. and still want a ARPG fix… I highly suggest you check it out.

Warframe

This game…. is so good and I am kinda kicking myself for never really giving it a proper attempt at playing. I have downloaded this game numerous times in the past on the PC, PS3 and PS4 when I saw other folks in my various social media timelines talking about it… but never actually tried it. I guess in my head I had this absolutely misrepresented as to what sort of game it was. With a super generic name like Warframe… I kept getting it jumbled up with the other game Warface. Warface being a super generic Call of Duty/Counterstrike style PVP shooter. So in my head I equated Warframe to a PVP experience… not this deeply nuanced cooperative PVE experience. There are so many aspects of this game that remind me of an MMO, but not necessarily in the traditional sense. The game as a whole feels like this amalgam of Destiny, Phantasy Star Online and Tribes. If that combination sounds like something you would be interesting, I highly suggest you check it out. I think I was largely luckier than most in that one of the freebie mechs, the Excalibur is right down my alley. I am slashing everything with my space ninja ways, and really enjoying myself. For those curious, I have pretty much set down roots on the PC, and while I might give it a shot later on the PS4, I have no real intention of moving at the moment as the AggroChat crew seem to all be playing it.

Diablo 3

The floodgates for Diablo 3 Season 5 opened on Friday at 7pm and from that point until 10:30 or so my time I was running around in a group leveling like mad. At this point I have managed to get to 68, which puts me behind the curve of folks like Grace that are 70 with over 150 paragon levels. That however is fine by me, because I am just happy I am almost to the cap with at least one character. I am going to be interested in seeing what the various challenges are that unlock the various seasonal rewards. What makes the season play so addictive to me is the fact that it mimics a MMO launch. Everyone on your friends list for a period of time is playing Diablo 3 and excited about it, as though they were playing a brand new game. So you have a few weeks of focused play, and then don’t feel guilty at all when you shift back to playing other games until the launch of the next season. This focused excitement is really fun to experience, and this is technically my third season so far. There is part of me that wishes I had gotten on board with the concept earlier. My goal today is to finish up my Crusader and then probably focus on some more Warframe. Hopefully all of you readers out there have had an equally fun week, and Pax South seriously could not get here soon enough.