Warframe Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Banking and Bosses

January 18, 2016 by Belghast

Busy Morning

Trying to knock out a really quick blog post, because if I don’t right now I am not entirely certain when I will get the chance. Both my wife and I are off today for the holiday, and as a result we have tried to schedule as much as humanly possible to do today. Largely this means finally getting in to talk to the bank about refinancing our loan. Adulting is frustrating and horrible… and hopefully it will go smoother than I have made it out to be in my head. In a perfect scenario we will be able to do this without much hassle. In theory it should only really be a case of someone from the bank coming to look over the house and appraise it, and after the recent renovations that should go a hell of a lot more smoothly. I mean we have a relatively new roof and very new siding, so the house has looked better than it has in years. All of that said… there is still so much anxiety for me anytime you are dealing with finances and banks and such.

After that I have this feeling that we are going to run around looking at dish washers. For whatever reason… it is suddenly a big deal to my wife that we have a non-functional dish washer. Don’t get me wrong I understand, I hate washing the dishes but for reasons entirely different from probably hers. When you are 6’4″ they simply do not make a sink that is comfortable to stand at, and by the time I finish washing dishes my back is killing me from stooping over the sink. Why it is suddenly a crisis is the part that I am not quite understanding, because the thing has been dead for several years now. All of that said… if she wants a new dishwasher we are getting a new dishwasher. I know she has looked at a couple of them, and I know she wants my input… but basically whatever one she wants I am completely happy with. I just hope this one I can actually figure out how to use…. because the last one… every time I seemed to run a load of dishes something horrible went wrong.

Boss Farming

It was fairly late by the time I finally filtered downstairs and got set down, and by then a bunch of my friends were in Warframe so I decided to join them. We spent the next hour and some change farming a boss mission trying to get myself and Thalen the last pieces of the Mag Warframe that we needed. Unfortunately… we didn’t have much luck. It seems that through killing planetary bosses you have a chance of getting parts to drop to a specific type of warframe. The boss in question was at the end of Mars, and drops all three parts of the Mag frame. I am not really sure why we cared so much about it, other than the fact that we both had all but one part… and it was the same part we were missing. I am in that same position with Rhino, and that is a mech I am far more likely to use. But whatever the case we were wrapped up in the moment of killing stuff for loot, and I have to say… we walked away with a bunch of awesome stuff.

If nothing else… it was a great source of the various crafting materials needed to create mechs. There is a single piece that I am missing for a couple of helmets that I will need to track down at some point. I also had plenty of materials to craft a bunch of weapons, including two new swords, a new bow, and a set of fists for me to use on my Rhino frame. Right now I am really liking the moment to moment feel of this game, and it seems to be the ideal drop in and hang out type co-operative experience. The question will be how long it takes for one of us to get super serious about the game, because this feels like the sort of game that is fun to play casually… but deeply frustrating to play seriously. There is one mission type that I absolutely hate, and that is the sneak up and capture the target type mission. I never can seem to get in close enough to them to keep from triggering them to make a run for the escape vessel. Then when they start running… I am simply not fast enough to take them down before they get away. There is one mission that I tried four or five times yesterday and never seemed to be able to finish successfully. Other than that mild frustration… I am enjoying pretty much every other mission type I have done.

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.

Pumpkin King

January 13, 2016 by Belghast

The Hammer

All day long yesterday I had been craving some more Victor Vran, so when I got home last night… I fed the animals… fed myself… and plunked down on the couch to play some more. Firstly I have to say how nice it runs on my aging gaming laptop. For many games that I would want to play downstairs… like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Fallout 4… they simply do not run well on the dual 650 video cards that the laptop has in it. This game however looks gorgeous and runs at a solid 60 fps, which makes me happy. Granted graphically it is a much more simple game than the ones I rattled off, but nonetheless it makes me happy. While roaming around last night I found this crazy boss fight, that spawned after taking down several other bosses in an area. Upon defeating the specter it announced that if I would only spare him… I could have access to his truly rare wares. When I opened up the vendor window I saw my very first purple weapon…. the Pumpkin Hammer. So I proceeded to liquidate everything in my inventory except my handful of favorite weapons… and was barely able to afford it.

It is every bit as cool as you might imagine. Firstly you are running around with a giant jack-o-lantern on a stick which in itself has a cool factor. To add to the effect however, when you hit anything… it spawns a pumpkin bomb on the ground… which moments later then explodes taking out more stuff. The only negative here is it actually cost me an objective last night. The objective was to take out a handful of monsters with the hammer… problem being that in one case at least the pumpkin bomb went off and finished off the monster and as a result it did not count. So that is something to watch, but what I like about it is the fact that the attack animation seems much faster than the standard hammer. It hits for slightly less than my previous hammer, but since I am able to hit more often it balances out in the end. Other than the hammer the ghost sold a few spells, that also looked pretty great… but after bankrupting myself I could not afford anything else. From the sound of the message it seems like the creature appears at random in various levels, so hopefully I can build back up my gold reserves by the time I see him again.

Guyver Time

Warframe and I have this strange relationship… where I have downloaded it for PC, PS3 and PS4… but never actually played it. I’ve seen friends on my various social media timelines playing it for ages, and been intrigued. The problem being that I apparently had the wrong impression of what sort of game it actually was. In my head I had this filed away as some sort of PVP experience, when in truth it is largely a PVE team based experience. Over the weekend Ashgar and Tamrielo discovered the game, and Monday night I was going to join them. Unfortunately there were some complications…. namely that for whatever reason my ISP could not connect to Warframe.com or any of the game servers for a period of time. As a result I instead spent the entire night playing Victor Vran and had a blast doing so. Since I spent the evening on the sofa, it meant that I needed to download the client again, and about half way through the evening I switched games.

So far I have to say I am pretty impressed. I am only running the game at 720p because I didn’t want to have any possible frame rate issues on the laptop, however the game itself looks gorgeous. In many way its missions remind me of the missions from Mass Effect 2 and 3. The most fun I had was this mission we did as a group where we entered a ship, triggered an alarm and then tried to hold out as long as we could. We managed to make it up until the point that the ship started spawning in waves of level 5 mobs… at which point we retreated to the extraction zone and held that tunnel for as long as we could before making a break for it. Towards the end these firebombing mobs started coming in and we damned near lost Ashgar. I myself came precariously close to dying a few times, only to get revived in a similar fashion to how you can players in Destiny. All in all it was a really good experience, and I think honestly the Excaliber warframe suits me pretty well. I like the blade, and for my main weapon I ended up choosing a bow. Later I spent a little money on the game and got some upgrades and now my secondary weapon is a heavy double firing pistol called the Kraken. I also spent some time making the suit look more “me”. Look forward to playing more over the coming weeks.