Action RPGs Archives - Page 185 of 254

Mirrorball

May 9, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent a not insignificant amount of time playing Destiny 2 Warmind. You will have to excuse the garbage screenshots but I was largely chilling on the sofa with my laptop and it runs the game at the potato resolution of 1366 x 768. I say potato because scaling down to that from the 4K display I have upstairs is quite the adjustment. It however allows me to be flexible where I am gaming, and last night allowed me to hang out with the mrs while still getting to do the thing I wanted to do. I’ve had a bit of a falling out with Destiny 2 over the last few months and I am not entirely certain why. It is just like after the release of Curse of Osiris I lost my forward momentum and stopped caring that I was no longer getting those engrams every day. Based on the fact that I was the only person online in my clan for most of the night… I am guessing everyone has had this same thing happen to them.

That said I was extremely interested in this expansion because it is the return of three things that I love in the Destiny universe… The Hive, Rasputin, and Clovis Bray lore. The last bit takes the form of our companion during this expansion Ana Bray… a heir to House Bray and former golden age scientist turned guardian. There is a rule among the guardians that they are not supposed to go digging into their past life before they died and were resurrected with the light, but when you are a Bray… this gets a lot harder knowing that so much golden age tech that remains was potentially created by your hands. As a result you get the impression that Ana Bray is no longer a Vanguard member… and not even a real guardian in the eyes of Zavala… because she broke the rule and started digging into Bray tech when she first realized it recognized her and would respond to her commands.

I am not far enough into the story to fully understand the other parts of the equation that I love… The Hive and Rasputin. The polar ice caps of Mars seem to hide a group of frozen hive that include several new troop types and modifications to the others as well. There are now Knights that wield a shield making it extremely difficult to attack them, and versions of the Acolyte called Adherants that seem to snipe you with long beams of energy. In addition there are more heavily armored versions of the Ogre, but this might just be one of the boss models for this expansion that gets used on ultra units. The map area itself is a little bit bigger than Titan in scope… which is somewhat disappointing but a significant step up from the tiny and repetitive Mercury.

What I enjoy the most so far is that it feels like this is as tightly packed with secrets as the Dreadnought was in The Taken King expansion. I’ve already encountered a bunch of objects that say I need to have a specific item or buff to be able to interact with them, meaning there are secrets to be unlocked hidden out there much like the Skyburner Deployment Codes. On the director map there is a note out to the side saying that I have found 0 or 45 Latent Memory locations, so this feels like something along the lines of the Calcified Fragments or SIVA Clusters of old. This is the sort of stuff that Destiny 2 desperately needed, to give us a downtime activity to strive for in getting out and exploring the world.

There are of course a bunch of cool items that came in with this expansion. At one point I got to choose from three weapons… one of which was essentially Uriel’s Gift minus high impact rounds but with Dragonfly… so I had to take it. I’ve not finished the main campaign and not hit level 30 yet so I am not super focused on gear at the moment. That said I have picked up a bunch of cool items through the eververse doodads you get while leveling up. My Ghost is now a floating mirror ball that I eventually colored neon green via a shader. I’ve similarly picked up an exotic ship and an exotic speeder as well. They seem to have tweaked these exotic shells a bit so that they have the same two perks…. the first being summons your mount faster and the second being universal elemental telemetry. The last perk seems to now be some sort of a cache based perk for a given planet. This mirror ball for example works on Nessus, which is handy since that happens to be the weekly zone.

I have to say I really like the set of gear that you get through turning in tokens with Ana Bray, and I can already tell this is going to be something I try and collect in its entirety. So far the story has been interesting, but I have a feeling that I am nearing the end of it… and if that is the case it is also very very short. Maybe there is more going on than I think there is… and maybe the boss I am just about to face is only the midpoint. However it certain feels like it is pushing me towards a supposedly epic conclusion… and the way the NPCs speak sounds in terms like we are doing this massive struggle… when it feels like I only just arrived on the planet. Reading a little blurb on Reddit just now confirms that I am in fact on the final quest… so essentially there are five quests in a chain that had I not been dawdling probably could have completed in an hour and a half.

Granted I like the other parts of the game more than I do the story… but it feels like a bit of a let down. During Destiny 1 the justification they gave for the need to reboot the game and create Destiny 2… was that the way D1 was build was particularly difficult to build content for. They blamed the tools for the fact that we kept getting recycled areas instead of completely new maps and raids. The problem is… neither Curse of Osiris with its rampant recycling of the Infinite Forest and its tiny planetary area… nor Warmind so far really prove that the sacrifice the players made was worth it. I say sacrifice… because in coming to Destiny 2 we gave up a lot of things that we still have not gotten back. We were promised a better gaming experience and on some levels it is… but on other levels it is just a less interesting game.

Ultimately I will be around for awhile because it did feel good last night to shoot things. The new event type that they touted however was a bit of a let down as well… given that it is mostly just another planetary event that involves hunting wave after wave of hive and doing some stuff to destroy crystals. Sure it was fun but also I can see it will get pretty repetitive. However it does fill that Archon’s Forge/Court of Oryx niche in giving something repeatable that can give decent rewards. The protect the Warsat event type is back and I had missed it greatly. I am not exactly sure how you can push that one into heroic mode, but I am sure it will involve something silly like blowing up one of the hive ships. There is an open world version of the Hive Ritual event that seems really cool because I was so used to doing that in the one space it appeared on Titan. All in all I was happy to be playing again… but still a bit grumbly about how cool this game could have been.

Rudderless

May 4, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was largely spent cleaning up quests that I have had in my log for a long while over in Monster Hunter World. Since the Kulve event is over… I feel like I don’t have as much of a pressing goal as I previously did. I could of course just farm things like Nergigante for parts that I need to make awesome weapons, but the Kulve event sorta robbed me of a bit of the drive there. Apart from the bow… I have a reasonable weapon option of every type right now. Sure there are things I want to make but the need isn’t there in the same way that it once was given that I have a box full of decent options. At this point I am hunter rank 70 and the meter is climbing extremely slowly on doing normal stuff. In theory I should be engaging in a bunch of tempered fights but I really don’t like soloing in Monster Hunter World that much, and I also didn’t much feel like SOS Roulette last night… so was stuck just wandering around and knocking out things that have been sitting in my log for awhile.

Monster Hunter World has more or less become my MMO of choice right now, and as a result it is making every other MMO feel really weird to play. I’ve largely been checked out of Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, and the Battle for Azeroth changes are making me not that keen on World of Warcraft. I have the desire to play Elder Scrolls Online… but I find myself lacking the focus since that is a game that requires all of my attention. I realize this is an odd thing to say given that Monster Hunter World is way more reactionary than ESO is… but I also have to play MHW upstairs and with Elder Scrolls I can chill out downstairs with the laptop while watching television. I find my mind wandering or paying too close attention to something that is on television and end up in a horrible spot in Tamriel. The other game that is sorta calling my name at this very moment is Star Wars the Old Republic because I really would love to play through the rest of the content I have missed. I have not done any of Knights of the Eternal Throne, in fact the first quest of that expansion is sitting waiting there on my Jedi Knight for me to pick up and start playing.

Lately I have been trying to ease my way back into Destiny 2 given that the new expansion lands on Tuesday. The moment to moment PVE gameplay is still every bit as fun as it ever was… but my current problem with this game is actually a silly one. I have been out of inventory space for a very long time and the pain of having to juggle items between characters or dismantle things immediately upon getting them wears me out. When I have an MMO and my bags are a mess or I am lacking enough bag space in general… I find myself extremely demotivated to play it. This is in part what is going wrong with Project Gorgon at this very moment… I have next to no bag space and as a result I am constantly having to play the inventory management game which is the exact opposite of fun. The expansion is adding another 100 slots and supposedly some of the kiosks we used to have back in Destiny 1 so we will see how this improves my opinion of the game by not having to care quite so closely about what was in each inventory slot. In theory I would love to push my Warlock and Hunter through Curse of Osiris… because that is a sign of just how hard I stalled out on this game. The expansion landed and I only managed to get one character through before legitimately giving up and moving on to other things.

I’m in a really weird space with gaming in general right now and it seems like I spend more time getting ready to play a game… than actually sitting down and playing a game. There is an intangible wanderlust that has effected me and I am not sure what the cure is. It is almost as though I am too stressed on a daily basis to actually sit down and enjoy the things I am supposed to enjoy. I’ve been through these periods in the past and sadly it has also cut off any desire I had to stream or be engaged with other people in any way. It has been a rough several weeks and I have a feeling that at some point it has to let up… and the clouds will part once more and I will feel like a human being. Apologies to anyone who is attempting to interact with me right now because I am sure the experience is lacking.

Monster Hunter and Destiny

April 25, 2018 by Belghast

While I am not quite ready to throw out a complete post about it… I am swirling around in my head the notion of rebooting Blaugust this year. If I did so it would be a slightly different affair and I am sorting out in my head exactly what that might entail. There was a period of time when we had a bunch of events happening at the same time… Developer Appreciation Week, Newbie Blogger Initiative and Blaugust. None of which really exist today in their current form and have not properly for a few years. So in remixing Blaugust I would be also attempting to fill some of the niches that the others provided as well by laying out a series of themed weeks. The rough idea is it would start with the last full week in July as a sort of “Prep Week” where the remaining elder bloggers would sorta throw out “how to get started” posts from an inspirational, logistical or technical manner. It is still an idea that is incubating however so I will do some sort of a larger post once it has solidified completely in my head.

The other general thought that has been going around in my head is that Monster Hunter World has become my new Destiny: The Taken King. That sounds counter intuitive I know since Destiny 2 is a much closer simulacrum to the original game than Monster Hunter World given that they are two completely different genres. However what I am talking about is more the way I engage with the game rather than the way the game actually plays. Destiny 1… especially during the Taken King era was this game I was completely obsessed with and wanted to know every tiny bit of lore I could find for it. It was this giant box of content that allowed me to engage with it in whatever method I chose to, and also always gave me one more goal to complete once I had finished the previous one. It was this title that I could just log in and play any given night without needing to bring into it a predetermined purpose because there were so many layered purposes available that I could easily latch onto one of them and proceed happily for an evening.

I had a small group of friends playing it, that allowed me to do bigger activities if I so choose like the various raids I completed with Axioma and later Tequila Mockingbird. That said most of my time playing the game was just me roaming around and doing stuff that suited whatever mood I happened to be in. There was always one more obstacle to overcome and one more piece of loot that I was chasing and never quite obtaining. It was a perfect storm of hooks for me personally and kept me entertained right up until the point when my head was filled with daydreams of Destiny 2 and what might be. I realize I can still log in at any point I want and play the game again… but it almost feels tarnished due to the greatly diminished community surrounding it.

Destiny 2 for reasons I cannot fully explain does not contain the same hooks for me that the original did. I tried very hard to stay focused on it, and for some time I have blamed my eventual malaise towards the game on the fact that I tried to play it twice. What I mean by that is that I played the game hard and heavy when it released on Playstation 4 and then immediately turned around and went through the same manic leveling process on the PC one month later. Effectively I ran up six characters to high gear levels back to back, and I had managed to hit 305 the then cap on PS4 before swapping over to PC and grinding up to that point again. That is a lot to ask of any game to sustain interested during that sort of nonsense and I largely explained my fading away from the title as simple burnout.

The problem is there was so much more that I have yet to completely unpack. The moment to moment game play in Destiny 2 feels amazing… but there is a problem with its feedback loop. What was missing was my drive to keep doing more of it once I had obtained whatever shiny baubles I wanted to obtain weapon wise. What was missing was some larger overarching pull that kept me going off and doing individual tasks that ultimately felt like they were adding up to some big payoff. In part the problem is a lot of those items that I used to grind for… now exist as Eververse cash shop exclusives. The other problem is that when they have put in longer grinds like the weapons of osiris… they feel extremely hollow because they are so horribly repetitive and involve you doing the same limited number of activities over and over. I realize they are still trying to fix this broken loop and some of the upcoming changes might help it… but I feel like their over reliance on timed mechanics is going to be a bridge I just cannot cross given now much anxiety they inflict.

On the flip side you have the game Monster Hunter World that I honestly did not expect to get into, given my lousy track record with the handheld versions. However I am engaging with it much the way as I engaged with Destiny during the Taken King era. I find myself looking up lore for the monsters if they have existed in the series before, and if not speculations about their origins and such that are floating around on Reddit. I find myself researching bits and parts for armor and what interesting builds surround them that exploit their specific attributes. I find myself able to log into the game any given night and just find something to do because I have this massive laundry list of things I want to go acquire. I can always use more elder dragon parts…. but similarly can use the gemstones that are rare drops off of almost any creature you can hunt. I became completely ecstatic last night when I got a double gem drop off Zorah Magdaros… that I cannot fully explain why I was bothering to do in the first place.

This is the feedback loop that used to drive me while playing Destiny 1 and it is the feedback loop that keeps me doing nonsense. I have an addiction to SOS Roulette which isn’t even really a thing… just something I made up in my head to relate it to the various roulette’s in Final Fantasy XIV. I like dropping into the middle of an assortment of random events happening that people need help on and trying to push the scenario to a win condition by my interaction with it. Sure there are times we fail miserably like Monday night… but then there are nights like Last night where we somehow managed to win every single boss fight I attempted including Val Hazaak and Nergigante. There will likely NEVER be a time when I cannot use at least one or two things off the elder dragons.

What makes Monster Hunter World so sticky is that eat time I get the parts to craft a new piece of gear, it ends up opening a whole bunch of possibilities to solve other problems… and often times leads me down a path of wanting something else to try some new build out. The way the gear sets interact in interesting ways means I am constantly searching for another piece of gear to complete a specific stat packages that I have decided in my head that I need. This was the same sort of nonsense that happened for me in Destiny 1 where I was constantly seeking out a slightly better stat package that interacted more perfect with the gear I had. I had a vault full of items that I didn’t want to shard because they were useful under certain circumstances and led me to want to keep them. I am having this same problem in Monster Hunter World where I am afraid I will legitimately hit the 1000 item hard cap on equipment.

Effectively what I have realized is that Monster Hunter World is my new Destiny, and hopefully I have explained a bit this morning what that actually means. It is that game that I can pick up and play without any real reason… and find a constant stream of activities that I want to be doing… that also feel like they are working towards some larger objective. Capcom is doing an excellent job of keeping a constantly flow of events and activities happening almost every week to keep us engaged and wanting to do new an interesting things. Kulve Taroth is phenomenal and might go down as some of my favorite content in any game… but the fact that they sprung it on us completely unannounced makes it all the more exciting. While I have had friends who have bounced off of this game… I still maintain an active enough community to be able to do things together if need be. The only problem is that right now I seem to be a couple of hours off what would be prime monster hunting time… given that I tend to wind down around 9:30 my time and that is when folks are getting online.

Ultimately while this might seem counter-intuitive… if you loved the original Destiny but largely have bounced off Destiny 2… you might give Monster Hunter World a try.

Nothing Much to Say

March 28, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I feel like I don’t have an awful lot to talk about, but still feel obligated to say words and things. The last few nights have mostly been what I would refer to as maintenance gaming, where I log into something… do a few repeatable activities and then log right back out. The majority of this time has been spent in World of Warcraft since I apparently have set forth a goal of unlocking the alliance races which will involve copious amounts of reputation grinding. At this moment I am about 6500 out of 21000 towards exalted or some close equivalent in both of the necessary factions. At the suggestion of my friend Grace I have started hoarding faction tokens for the Darkmoon Faire buff, which admittedly is not a thing I have really partaken of in its modern format.

I still find it super annoying that the Alliance route to new races is way harder than the Horde route. As a “Mostly Alliance” player for most of my wow career I have always felt like Blizzard favored The Horde… not in the least because of the constant insistence that we should care deeply about Green Jesus. Weirdly enough however for the last while I have been almost exclusively playing The Horde and the character I am grinding up is my Orc Warrior not my Human one. There are certain things that just work easier on that side of the pond than the other… for example jumping the wall from the flightmaster to the Horde area in Dalaran is so much faster than having to fly all the way across the map to the Alliance area. Having a reasonable foothold on both continents is another nice point… with ways to get there quickly. Sure you can still use the Theramore boat as Alliance… but it feels weird to do so.

Grace had this idea of doing a sort of “raiding light” group one night a week that worked on trying to get the Mythic+ number as high as we could. So far however that is struggling to get off the ground given in our most immediate aggrochat crew we represent the only viable folks for this mission. I am heavily favoring Horde side since my Warrior there is 927 but most of the connections I would have to pull in people for nonsense are Alliance side. Over the coming days I might start reaching out to individuals that play horde side to see if they would be interested in shenanigans but for the moment the idea has taken root but not seen much progress.

As evidenced by the screenshot I used for this post I fired up Destiny last night and played around in it for a bit. The changes have made a lot of the weapons feel odd so in theory I will need to test everything out again to see what I do and do not like now. The fast rate of fire valkydyn that I am pictured holding above no longer feels that great. The general movement speed however does and it feels like Titan Skating is back to being a fairly viable thing once more. I am not sure if this is “just me” but I swear the grenade recharge rate was lowered once again, either that or I am still struggling to adjust to how generally slow that is. Even with double charges it was rare that it would actually be up when I wanted to use it while roaming around Mercury and doing events.

I miss Destiny 2, and more importantly I miss wanting to play it. I am not sure why I bounced so hard with the release of Curse of Osiris, and why I never actually managed to get any of the other classes in my stable through the story. Ultimately I was expecting something along the scope of The Taken King, and then was disappointed that we got something the scope of Dark Below instead. Additionally there just isn’t a grind I want to be doing there, because the weapons at least prior to yesterdays patch all sorta felt the same. Maybe now with the sandbox update there will be some reason to grind content to attempt to get masterworks for the things I want to be playing with.

The other side note is that I have started attempting to play some Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate over lunch, but quickly realized that if I want to do this thing I will need to leave the floor. We have a gaming area set up for folks to mostly play the WiiU that is hooked up there, but it does offer a bunch of really comfy chairs. Over lunch yesterday I attempted to camp out in one and do a few hunts, and within minutes had someone do a drive by and start up a conversation about some project we were working on. Basically now that I am 100% in the management world I cannot bump into someone without a conversation about something we need to deal with happening. Ultimately I like the concept of playing a little 3DS or Switch over lunch, but I need to find a hidey hole to go do this thing in.