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Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 2

April 1, 2015 by Belghast

Yesterday I kicked off my own versions of the Developer Appreciation Week with five companies and game teams that I greatly appreciate it. It seems like we are starting to get some traction because yesterday MMOGames.com independent of my own intervention ran a piece of what we are doing. I still hope to see more people join in the fun and talk about the development staff that they really appreciate it. I play a lot of games… so I have a lot of love to go around.

Blizzard – World of Warcraft Team

Last night was quite possibly my single best night in World of Warcraft raiding. After some sluggish weeks we strolled into Blackrock Foundry and cleared seven normal bosses, then popped out and took down two heroic bosses… one of which was our first kill. To make the night even more special we managed to one shot all of them. After riding that high last night, it is impossible to do a developer appreciation week post without talking about Blizzard. World of Warcraft has been the juggernaut in the room for so long that I can barely remember a time when they were not the clear market dominator. While I have some disappointments about Warlords of Draenor, I feel like they are legitimately trying to turn the franchise around after what felt like years of neglect. It feels very much like they have doubled down on this game, and at the end of the day I am still enjoying playing it with my friends. For a ten year old game to still maintain relevancy is a pretty mighty feat, so my hat is off to the Blizzard staff who have supported it throughout the years and made it this experience that we judge all other MMOs against. It has been the gold standard for good reason. Even if World of Warcraft is not your game, you have to marvel at the level of polish that they deliver when they roll out a new expansion.

Bioware – Star Wars the Old Republic Team

Star Wars the Old Republic and I have somewhat of a checkered past to be honest. I went into this game feeling like it was going to be the WoW Killer for myself and my friends, but ultimately we lasted the same three months that we normally do in this sort of game. When they chose to go free to play, I was frustrated by how insanely restrictive the system ended up being. All of this said… if you can some how push past all of the limited time loot boxes and free to play cludge… there is a great game there at its core. With the launch of SWTOR I tried something that I don’t normally do… I leveled as part of a dedicated duo with my friend Euron. I played a Jedi Guardian and he a Jedi Consular, and we participated in each others stories. The way those two tales interweave was something to behold, and while it felt a bit confining to always have to make sure you and your friend were on at exactly the same times… it was a leveling experience unlike no other. The thing that stands out about SWTOR is the story, and what ultimately killed the game for me was when I ran out of it. Now I know I have several expansions that I can go back and experience and I keep thinking that one day I will do precisely that. In the meantime I have fond memories of the time we were all obsessed with this game, and give massive props to the folks who built such engaging content… that we pulled some fourteen hours a day to get through it all.

Zenimax – The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Since Daggerfall I have been in love with the Elder Scrolls franchise. Each time a new one comes out I end up devoting hundreds of hours to playing it, but all the while I keep thinking… this experience would be more enjoyable with my friends. So when I found out that Elder Scrolls was in fact being made into an MMO I was completely over the moon about it. I was lucky enough to be in the first round of alpha testing, so ultimately I participated in this game for over a year before launching it. Unfortunately this was a bit of a double edged sword because I got to see some features that worked better in early versions of the game, as compared to later more minimalistic ones. When you test a game that long it skews your vision of what the game actually is. Elder Scrolls Online has some of the best story content I have experienced in any game, and there are a number of quest lines that stick out in my memory. The whole concept of being able to continue into another faction after you have finished yours was inspired. The problem is by the time I hit the Aldmeri content I had lost a lot of my steam, and our guild was suffering the traditional drop off in players. Now that the game has shifted to buy to play however I am able to experience this game again and realize just how great it actually is. A lot of the problems I had with it early on have been smoothed out, and the post 50 progression no longer feels quite so grindy. I really appreciate the staff that has been plugging away quietly on making this game a better place to be, and I look forward to playing it more in the coming months.

Trion Worlds – Trove Team

Trove is this quirky world building game that blends MMO combat, MOBA style character design, and Minecraft style exploration and construction. I was lucky enough to be including in the first round of alpha invites for trove, and it has been insane to watch this game evolve. What I love the most is the way the developers have been meshed with the community since day one. Instead of a traditional forum, they decided to open up the process with a reddit, in fact I think this is the first game I can ever recall doing that. In those first days the community was so amazing, because it was so tight knit. You would log in and get welcomed by people that might recognize your name from the Reddit, and there was rarely a time when a developer was not in game talking to players. As the game has progressed the community has gotten larger, and the rigors of development have degraded this closeness a small bit, but it is still very much a game that draws its inspiration from the players. While I don’t play it as much as I should, I have loved watching it evolve around me. It feels like the sort of game you get when you throw a bunch of seven year olds in a room and tell them to solve a problem. It is pure unbridled joy and imagination… and has been good for my jaded soul to see that a game like that can exist.

Riot Games – League of Legends Team

League of Legends is 100% not my type of game. In fact I might never have played it were it not at the suggestion of my friends. Actually I rarely ever play this game other than when a bunch of friends want to do so. That said the experience of playing with a team of friends is contagious. There are a lot of aspects about this game that are problematic for me, a huge one being the still very toxic community. That said I give the biggest credit I can possibly give to the character designers. What League has in spades is the personality that seems to be lacking from so many other MMOs. The characters in League of Legends have a life of their own, and they make you fall in love with them. I have joked for some time, that this isn’t actually a game, but a modern sticker album… because I seem to largely collect characters and skins rather than actually play with them. Each character is really a triumph of taking what are mostly remixed elements and making them feel fresh and new. I tend to stick to the characters I know and love however like Darius, Graves, WuKong and Garen. My favorite gameplay mode however will probably always be ARAM simply because no one expect you to know what you are doing, which is about perfect for me.

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 1

March 31, 2015March 31, 2015 by Belghast

A few days ago my good friend Rowanblaze tagged me in his post about Developer Appreciation Week 2015. To the best of my knowledge this event was actually started by Scarybooster, but I cannot for the life of me remember if I actually got a post in while it was going on. If not then this is something I absolutely need to remedy. This morning as a result my post is going to be a little contorted but I really enjoyed the format from Ravanel of Ravalation… so I am rolling with that. Thus begins my super contorted and rambling Developer Appreciation Week post.

Funcom Games – The Secret World Team

This game is absolutely phenomenal. I was lucky enough to get on board early and do one of the lifetime subscriptions and I have to say I have never once questioned that investment. Knowing that it is always waiting there for me to return to the world of the Templars and the Illuminati… makes me happy inside. While there are a lot of interesting things about the game, the part that always floors me is just how well written the quests are in this game, and how well the whole cinematic feel of them works. I greatly prefer silent protagonist games, because they allow me to substitute my own inner dialog into the scenes. What is awesome about TSW is they manage to do this is a way so that the silence feels like an answer. I desperately need to poke my head back in and try out the new combat changes, because the nightmare level content was ultimately what crushed the hopes of my group. From what I hear a lot of these rough spots have been ironed out.

Square Enix – Final Fantasy XIV Team

I am constantly amazed at just how damned good this game really is. Every detail of the game has a loving care applied to it. Once again it is the storyline that first sold me on the game. It gave me a series of characters that felt like my party in a traditional Final Fantasy game… and then made me care about each and every one of them.. yes even Thancred. What has kept me coming back however is just how good their content is, and how frequent their updates are. I’ve heard that the team is only around fifteen people… and that they are doing both the live patches and expansion development at the same time. I am floored that they can manage to crank out a new patch every month, and major patch every few months… all the while working on a brand new expansion? The way they manage to make content remain relevant to the players is pure magic, because I really enjoy running low level content with friends… and making it feel like it matters again. Last night they patched in the 2.55 content… and I am completely amped to log in and play it.

Turbine – Lord of the Rings Online Team

If there was a list of games that I wish I played more of, Lord of the Rings Online would be near the top. There is so much for me to enjoy in the game, even not factoring in the fact that I love the franchise behind it. The gameplay is a bit of a throwback to an earlier era, and more than anything it has always reminded me a bit of a modern updated Dark Age of Camelot. That said the part that has always stood out for me is just how well they have managed to create the world of Middle Earth… everything is how I had imagined it while reading the novels. There are so many moments like the above picture where I reach some fabled destination and I have to just stop and sit in awe that I am in this or that place. Another strange thing that I love about this game are the horses. They have the absolute best horse movement of any game. As you are moving around the horse feels right, which adds so much to the feeling that you are in a living breathing world… and not just a themepark.

Trion Worlds – Rift Team

This was the game that finally came along and successfully dislodged me after playing seven years of World of Warcraft, and that in itself is no small feat. What makes me love the game however is its class system. I love being able to mix and match bits and pieces of class trees to make something unique that does exactly what I want it to do. Especially from a tanking front, this game will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first game to give me both charge and deathgrip in the same build. The raid content was absolutely insane, and I greatly enjoyed the times I was able to experience it. This is one of those games that I boot up every few weeks to poke my head in, especially now that it is free to play. I’ve spent a lot of its four year history with an active subscription, and there is just something about the world that keeps me coming back. With the impending release of the new Wardrobe system I am looking forward to popping back in and playing some more. Trion was the first team to make me believe that a company could keep a monthly content release schedule, and through it all they have created some very impressive work.

SOE/Daybreak – Everquest II Team

Everquest II for me is a tale of the path not taken. With EQ2 and WoW releasing at the same time, some of my friends went to EQ2, and I and the majority of my friends went to WoW. That said this has been one of those games that I keep coming back to so that I can re-experience this ball of nostalgia that is Norrath. This game has hands down the best world building of any game on the market. I love the world of Norrath 2.0 with all its detail and quirkyness. Sure it is not exactly how I remember it from the original Everquest, but that is part of the charm for me. Every now and then you will be knee deep in a dungeon, and you will see some little call back that makes you realize “oh my god this is that place” that you recall from your memory, changed over time and presented in so much higher fidelity. While I have issues with the combat system and likely always will… this is a game that I cannot seem to keep myself away from for long. Even today EQ2 is a sort of comfort food for me… where I will hang out inside and vege out on the couch dusting off my Shadow Knight and exploring Norrath with new eyes.

To Be Continued…

I feel like I have so many developers that I want to show my appreciation for… that I had to break these up into multiple posts. Tune in tomorrow as I talk about several more developers. Hopefully this will cause your own upwelling of nostalgia and end up with you posting your own thoughts in blog form. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to use my comment space for that same mission. There is so much negativity out there, that I believe completely in this notion of the Developer Appreciation Week. Reach out and show your appreciation to those games you love.

Moggle Mog Extreme

March 30, 2015 by Belghast

Bowling Aftermath

It feels like I have been on this sequence of strange posts lately, so this morning I am trying to get back to the normal swing of things. This weekend was spent mostly recovering from Friday night, and not in the way that you might think. We had a “team bonding” outing with my co-workers to go bowling, and it had been about a decade since I had last attempted to hurl a large marble down a wooden plank. We bowled three games, and it feels like that was one too many for me. The biggest issue I had was the fact that the shoes were absolutely awful. At some point they changed from what I knew as the standard bowling shoes to these strange velcro things that I never could get to fit well at all. I have a size 13 shoe, but my foot is not all that terribly wide at least not anymore.

I am not sure if they handed me a wide width or if they just make them insanely wide to accommodate lots of different feet but in any case my foot was sliding around like crazy in them. Normally I would be able to fiddle with the laces to get it tight enough to work for me. However the hook and eye velcro strap mess just would not synch terribly tightly. Leaving my foot sliding around in the shoe most of the night. At the end of the evening I had what felt like a stone bruise and it still hurts to flex my toes. Other than that the evening was rather enjoyable, apart from the fact that I have zero skill at bowling these days. The absolute best game for me was around 100, and I am not sure if I got any strikes. The thing I did learn is that I apparently throw the ball exceptionally hard. The lanes had a miles per hour readout saying how hard you threw each ball, and most of my coworkers were in the sedate range of 10-13 mph. The hardest I saw from me was 22.5 mph, and the slowest about 18 mph… apparently I was angry at the lanes.

Moggle Mog Extreme

From an accomplishment standpoint, the highlight of my weekend is definitely Saturday night before the podcast when we pulled together a raid. One of the fights that we held in almost a state of reverence is Good King Moggle Mog Extreme. It seemed like the pinnacle of difficult fights because it was so different from the normal version. Anytime we brought the fight up, it was quickly ushered away as being too much of a pain in the ass for us to try. Maybe it is the progress in turn 9, or maybe it is something else… but when it was brought up this weekend there was more of a chorus of “might as well” than anything. What makes Moggle Mog extreme so difficult is that you have a very limited window to perform the fight. At roughly 90% Mog stops taking damage from player attacks. Instead when any member of his “court” of Moggles dies, he saps his own life healing all Moggles to full health.

From a functional standpoint this means that you need to drop the health of every single Moggle before finally finishing one off. Two make this more complicated there is a tank swap mechanic, and at certain points during the fight the White and Black Mages will cast a spell that needs to be interrupted by dealing a damage to them. You get three rounds to lower Mog’s health, before he starts channeling Ultima, which will wipe the entire raid if it casts. Mog is also immune to any damage while any member of his Moogle court is alive. This means that on the final turn you have to make sure every single Moogle is down low enough to be able to finish them off in a few hits, and jump straight on the boss and burn like hell. I am not sure if it was on our third or fourth attempt but we managed to get everything to work just right and finished the fight. It feels extremely good to have beaten a fight that all of us had declared was “complete bullshit”.

Appleanche

I spent most of the rest of my in game time alternating between two activities… World of Darkness and Botany. In World of Darkness I have once again had zero luck in getting one of the two pieces of Dragoon loot that I need to drop. Right now I am down to the boots that drop from the very first boss, and the chestpiece that drops from the second boss. This makes for some demoralizing gameplay late in the instance when I know I have zero hope of getting anything cool apart from maybe a puff of darkness minion. Sunday is a notoriously bad day for running raids in any game, but it seems like this is doubly the case in Final Fantasy XIV. The worst was a dungeon where we ended up having to fight the Cloud of Darkness boss five times before we finally did things well enough to win and get our loot. That run was fraught with other issues however so it was not a huge surprise that we were failing at the end of the raid. I spent more than my fair amount of time tanking adds a a Dragoon. Hopefully I can get in tonight and maybe just maybe pick up a chest piece before the raid.

Saturday during the podcast and last night during the 90 minute season finale for The Walking Dead I worked on leveling Botany. My goal with trade skills thus far has been to brute force my way to 25 without the assistance of leves, while I have my recruit a friend helm experience bonus. Once I hit 25 I start working on leves allowing me to shoot up quickly from that point on. During the podcast I managed to hit 25, and then last night I started working on leves in the South Shroud area. Botany has one of the best named leves I have encountered called Appleanche where you are asked to pick a bunch of Sprite Apples from this grove within a set amount of time. Not sure why but that quest just makes me happy, and overall there is something amazingly calming about harvesting flowers and chopping down trees in this game. After a few hours of Botany I found it rather easy to get to sleep last night, so maybe that is something I should indulge at the tail end of the night every night.

The Patreon Thing

March 29, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 50 – Game Club 2 – Trine 2

Last night we recorded our 50th episode of AggroChat and I have to say that is a bit staggering now that I think about it. We’ve almost recorded a full year of AggroChat, and we only “missed” a single week. In fact now that I think about it two weeks from now will actually be our one year anniversary show. It is insane how an entire year of recording gets away from you like that. Things are going to be a bit strange over the next few weeks as Kodra has accepted a new job and is moving out to Seattle to join Tam and some of our other friends there. Everyone is joking that they are trying to recruit everyone to Seattle, but honestly the cost of living difference would be horrible coming from Tulsa. Besides according to the New York Times we are apparently this up and coming hipster hub. It is shocking the number of smaller game conventions that are happening in this area.

In any case this week we talked about Trine 2, an exceptionally beautiful game about a Gluttonous Warrior, a Grumpy Wizard and a Larcenous Rogue. Honestly this is one of the shortest shows we have recorded in a long while because there just wasn’t a whole lot to talk about in regards to Trine. We came down on multiple sides of the game with some of us enjoying it, others not feeling much of anything about it, and still others disliking it immensely. From that aspect I feel like the first round robin title was a success. From the aspect of giving us a lot of material to talk about, maybe not quite so much. We also announced our third game club title, which would be one of my picks: Darkest Dungeon. Since that is a game about dungeons… and mental illness I have a feeling like it is going to create a lot of stories as a result.

The Paetron Thing

Yesterday I wrote a strange piece, and among many things that folks got out of it, at least one person thought I was talking at least in some part about the current Patreon trend. I honestly didn’t mean it to come across like that, but it is proof that we can all read the same post but take vastly different messages from it. Patreon and I have this odd relationship, where I think it is both really awesome… and worrisome at the same time. The awesome part is it gives people who are creating a lot of really awesome content a way to actually do that as a living, providing them a semi-regular source of income from the creation of “stuff”. The troublesome aspect is that I seem to see people who are NOT creating much content, throwing up Patreons left and right because it seems to be the latest way to get something for nothing. Internet celebrity is apparently now a thing worth funding? In the case of full disclosure I back a couple of different Patreons because the people involved are creating a regular stream of content that I value, so I don’t want it to sound like I am against the concept.

Where I end up wrestling with myself is that there are times I think “man it would be nice to have my costs offset”. Within a few seconds a little voice inside me pipes up and says that if I did advertising or a patreon or any other way of offsetting my expenses that it would somehow “cheapen” the process. I’ve always considered my blog a labor of love, and this whole getting up every morning to write something new is something I do… because I enjoy it, not because I am trying to profit from it. All of that said there are some very real and concrete expenses to keep it all up, and if I did not have a good paying job I would have to stop doing pretty much everything that I do. I added up some details this morning and for hosting and domain registration alone I am paying the equivalent of a little more than $60 a month once you factor in everything. Then you tack onto that another $150 a month for really fast internet, and various game subscriptions and you quickly get into some real money. So while part of me thinks that I should be creating a Patreon as a sort of Tip Jar, there is another part of me that says “don’t”.

Limited Funding

Patreon is an amazing thing for those who are creating the content and actually needing the money to keep the process going. The problem is… I don’t need the money in the strictest sense. My fear is that as people start popping these accounts up for the fun of it, that they will dilute the money away from the people that actually need it. The blogging and the podcasting and the occasional streaming… are all part of my larger hobby of “gaming” and I just view all of these costs as being part of that bigger habit. If I were to lose my job or something drastic like that, I would actually have a real need for it. I feel like setting up a Patreon now would be akin to “crying wolf”, and asking for the goodwill of my readers and listeners before I in the strictest since needed to. Maybe I am odd in my point of view, in that I view this relationship between reader and writer as some sort of a social contract. I provide for you, and you give me a reason to keep making content. But like all relationships I feel like there is always the problem that one side might end up taking advantage of the other.

Setting up a Patreon page, because it is seems to be the popular thing to do… feels like taking advantage of that relationship. Because honestly I know there will be people out there who do donate because they want me to feel loved and appreciated. I have an exceptionally warm group of readers and listeners. I appreciate every single one of you out there, and that is a big part of the reason why I have turned down every single person wanting to place advertisements on my blog. I don’t want to cheapen that relationship, and I don’t want to tarnish our friendship. That is not to say that at some point the expenses of my sites will grow to a point where I simply cannot weather the entire burden myself. But that time is not now. Until it reaches that point then I will continue avoiding trying to “monetize” what I do for my own personal enjoyment. I will continue also suggesting people show support for the Patreons that DO need the funding, and are providing a wealth of content as a result.