Action RPGs Archives - Page 214 of 262

Twitter GOTY “Poll”

April 26, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of a rough night, because we had a massive storm blow through. A side effect of the storm was the fact that about 11:30 my wife woke up on the couch because something dripped on her foot. In the middle of our living room, dripping from one of the beams was a slow trickle of water. At that point there really isn’t much to do other than put down a towel and a bucket and hope it stops. However that sort of ruined any thoughts of a really solid nights sleep. This morning I had originally intended on writing about a rather hamfisted absurdist article that is making its way through my twitter circle, but in truth I am simply going to not deal with that today. It reminded me of conversations that myself and Tamrielo have on a regular basis… but I also wanted to approach the topic with more grace than I probably have in me right now. So instead I am going to answer a twitter poll in blog form.

TWITTER POLL: Quote this tweet with your GOTY for each year for the last five years, 2012 to 2016.

— Alex Carlson (@PostMesmeric) April 25, 2017

While technically not a poll, it is definitely a thing that I thought looked interesting so this morning instead of tearing into discussions that I don’t really want to get into… I started thinking back upon various years and trying to determine the games that mattered the most to me during that time. Also I may or may not be applying a little “in retrospect” to a few of these choices, but that is also ultimately my prerogative. I limited myself to only picking games released during a specific calendar year, but in many cases the true impact the game had happened much later.

2012: The Secret World

I really cannot say enough good about this game… from the perspective of someone just starting out playing it. I’ve said an awful lot about this game over the years in three pages worth of blog posts… and probably some others that I failed to categorize correctly. This often makes my “best games I am not playing” list whenever I compile one. Functionally there are two vastly different game experiences… the leveling game when you are digging through the story and trying to solve the mysteries of the world… and the end game where you lose all creative freedom that you had while leveling. The first game is phenomenal and something that I feel everyone should experience at least once. The later… is ultimately what caused us to quit and keeps me from reattaching to the game for any length of time. However that said the ride is well worth it, and the game has some of the more interesting dungeons in MMOdom… until you reach nightmare levels where everything sort of falls apart. I am really looking forward to the re-release of the game under the Secret World Legends name… and hoping beyond hope that they can give me an experience to latch onto with both hands.

Aggronaut Posts about The Secret World

2013: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

The impact this game has had on me and my friends is immeasurable. Largely because it gave us a common ground in the form of an MMO experience that we all care about. More than anything however it knows how to tell story in and interesting and serialized fashion, where the story arc from one expansion sets up the key players for the next. This is also the only MMO that has ever sufficiently pulled off a surprise plot twist, and has done so many times…. and been willing to assault structures that I assumed were fixed and sacred to the game itself. From August onwards in 2013… my life pretty much belonged to Final Fantasy XIV until we slowly petered out when we ran out of things we were capable of doing. However we came back and had a renaissance with the game that has continued to the present times with this still being the game we can all sort of agree on.

Aggronaut Posts about Final Fantasy XIV

2014: Destiny

This is another game that realized its ultimate impact on me long after the year it actually released in. Destiny is a really important game to me for a whole lot of reasons. Firstly it has amazing moment to moment gameplay and it is hands down the best feeling shooter I have ever played. From the moment I heard about the world and the setting I was completely sold… and in truth this is the game that pushed me to buy my way into the current console generation. I got my PS4 console the week the first PlayStation exclusive alpha was happening, and the little I played of it hooked me extremely hard on the concept. Year one had a lot of problems, and I sort of picked at it like you might pick at the remains of a meal you know you are done with… but just keep nibbling on. I did return to paying regularly towards the tail end of the first year, so that I was primed and ready for the launch of The Taken King. From Year Two on however I have been a dedicated acolyte of the world, and own it for both PS4 and Xbox One… and am contemplating making the leap to PC version with the launch of Destiny 2. The game still has some narrative problems, but it does not stop me one bit from enjoying it.

Aggronaut Posts about Destiny

2015: Fallout 4

I love Fallout as a franchise. I still remember saving up the cash to buy the first one when we were in college, and I was completely hooked. I am not old school enough to remember Wasteland fondly, but I have always been a fan of the whole post apocalyptic nukepunk genre. So while I am listing this as my game for 2015… it is a hype cycle that began long before and continues long after. This is still the game I boot up when I am in a specific mood. Similarly I have played Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas countless times, and Fallout 4 simply replaces those in succession. This game is proof to me at least that I care far more about systems, and gameplay… than I really do about the main narrative in a game. In fact the only reason why I probably beat this game is because we chose this as our November/December AggroChat game club game for the tail end of 2015. I would probably still be avoiding the main story… and still off on my own having adventures in my head…. which is in truth my preferred method of playing a game. Just talking about the game has given me this huge urge to boot it up… right now… which would be a horrible idea considering I have to go to work.

Aggronaut Posts about Fallout 4

2016: World of Warcraft: Legion

I have to give a lot of credit here to World of Warcraft and the rebirth of the game that happened with the launch of the Legion expansion. They took a game I thought I no longer really cared about, and was legitimately done caring about…. and turned it into an experience that I rabidly played. I even managed to return to raiding and didn’t check out this time until we were a few bosses into Nighthold… which is in truth way longer than I lasted in Draenor. I’ve reached this point where I am not really playing the game or following it now… but the transformation that took place should nonetheless be honored. They tried a whole bunch of new ideas that they admittedly borrowed from other games… but wove it together in a fashion that felt new and fresh. Similarly I feel like it has to be said that they have done and continue to do a great job of managing patch cycles. They finally broke the “three and done” mold that had happened with Pandaria and Draenor and by all accounts are still releasing interesting content. I know at some point I will return and at the very least finish out the Legion flight meta achievement, but for the time being I am simply not forcing myself to play a game I am not super into. Legion however is probably going to go down in history for me as their best expansion… toppling what was previously my current favorite Wrath of the Lich King.

Aggronaut Posts about World of Warcraft

So now that I have given you mine… what are yours? Feel free to post them in the comments section here… or join in the twitter poll. I am curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.

Boosts and Buffs

April 7, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve officially reached the point in the Diablo 3 season where I can straight up wreck at least early torment content, which means… I can boost my friends. Last night I snagged Byx, Ammo and Sol and drug them through a few Nephilim rifts until they came out level 70s on the other side. In truth I am rather horrible at boosting people… I tend to overclear because my tank instincts kick in and I desperately want to protect my fledgling charges. So that means that the individual Rifts probably take way longer than they should. However it also means if you are being boosted by me… you are not only walking away with levels but also with a sizable amount of cash and gems. Sadly the loot is functionally meaningless until you hit 70. However since Byx was way ahead of the rest of the crew I am pretty certain she walked with some decent loot as well. The funny thing with writing about how much I was not feeling this season… is that it actually made me really want to play. The moment I posted the blog post I logged in and did a solo greater rift before heading into work that day, and each night since I have at least spent a little bit of time playing. After the boostery, I connected with Grace and we did a couple of rounds of bounties since we were both in desperate need of the crafting materials. I technically have everything that I need gear wise apart from one legendary gem, and a single ring…. but everything could be improved by getting some ancients which have been in short supply thus far.

After playing some Diablo 3 on the laptop, I decided to go upstairs and check out the latest patch for Mass Effect Andromeda. All in all there have been a lot of subtle improvements to the way that the character models look. In truth I think there are a bunch of improvements to the game in general because the worlds just feel better looking. This might of course be the placebo effect, and because they said they patched…. it is making my brain desperately want to see the improvements. However at the very least my Ryder and all of the characters I am interacting with seem more normal looking. The Botox face is largely gone… and the fully open surprise eyes seems to be gone as well. I am pretty pleased with the results because this little bit of window dressing has fixed a lot of my gripes about the game. On the other side of the equation on non-cosmetic changes… the general inventory increases are also amazing. I feel like I am no longer needing to deconstruct items in the middle of a planet rather than waiting for me to be back on my ship. Similarly the ability to tab out of the flight animations while in a solar system makes that just work better, and I am wondering if there is some option I can check in the settings to default to disabled so I don’t need to hit tab.

I put a few hours in last night and in truth probably played about thirty minutes longer than I should have… for my sanity… and my sleep patterns. I really like this game and It definitely is up in the game of the year territory for me. The problem there is… so is Zelda Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn… and all of those were released in the first quarter of the year. I guess in a way I am extremely thankful for all of these games, because with the way the real world is turning out… this seems to be the golden age of escapism. It is comforting to be able to lose yourself in a deep and rich game, and completely forget that the world is apparently on fire and someone replaced the fire extinguisher with a can of easy cheese. There are just so damned many quests that I have picked up and that are littering my inventory that I need to spend one entire night trying to burn those down before I move forward. I will probably always be grossly over-leveled for the content as a result… but whatever I have my trust Rank V Pioneer Gun. I just gotta say that once I stumbled onto the weapons provided by the DLC… or more so I stumbled onto how to GET the DLC items… I fell in love with the Auto Rifle. Yes I keep giving mine bizarre names because I’ve had to craft each after the first one…. but whatever it is a freaking awesome gun. More importantly… Ashgar can be happy that I have finally moved on past the Avenger.

Seasons End

April 4, 2017 by Belghast

Last Friday was the beginning of the tenth season of Diablo 3. In the lead up I had just about convinced myself simply to skip this one, because I really was not feeling it this go around. Generally speaking I chase the pet that is being offered as part of the seasons journey… and this time around there was no pet. Instead they offered the weird lamp post back piece thing you can see me wearing in the above image. However as time got closer to the launch I opted in given that I at least knew that Grace would be playing. While I do not at all regret doing this… I lacked the proper amount of steam that I normally have going into this sort of thing. Firstly I got home a little later than intended and by the time I had nommed some dinner I was about fifteen to twenty minutes behind Grace and Noreek. I think as a whole everyone pretty much either forgot that the season start was a thing… or they themselves had petered out as well. Normally on season launch night my friends list is completely chock full of little green leaves… aka the icon that represents a seasonal character. Instead of the usual twenty plus… there were five and two of them were in my party. I went Demon Hunter largely because they seem to be extremely easy to push through the seasonal journey content. Generally speaking I greatly prefer the Crusader, but they are not exactly known for their clear speeds.

Now it is not to say that I did not enjoy myself like I often do. Noreek was attempting to follow some best practices and for whatever reason, our luck did not hold out. In theory one of the first patterns you are supposed to get is the Cain set, which allows you to have a significant experience boost. However after doing a couple of rounds of bounties and none of us getting the book… we finally gave up and returned to Nephilim Rift grinding. However you could audibly tell that we were losing steam when about 8:30 or 9 pm voice chat started to get completely silent. I myself was just sort of barely hanging in there and I think I wound up tagging out around 10 pm and heading to bed to play a little switch before nodding off completely. It sounds like the rest of the group did not make it terribly further, with me leaving somewhere in my 50s and Grace only making it to I believe 59 before calling it a night. Each season it seems like we make it a shorter distance in the initial push before finally calling it. That first season for me I think I made it to 65 before calling it a night and by the time I logged in the next morning Grace was already paragon 150 or so.

I am super thankful to Noreek for giving me the much needed boost on Sunday to get to 70 and start unlocking the first few pieces of gear from Haedrig’s Gift. I turned that into a season finish Sunday night during the Walking Dead season finale. So now I am technically finished with the cosmetic portion of the season and trying to sort out how much further I am going to go. The set this season for Demon Hunters is Maurader’s which seems pretty easy to push content in. I just need to get to get the drive to do so… because last night I had ample opportunity to play because I knew Grace was going to be playing. However for whatever reason I just lacked the desire to log in… so instead I did something that was completely fruitless and ground random Hive mobs on the Dreadnaught for hours trying to get my Husk of the Pit for Necrochasm. I knocked out a few things on the Slayer list, and in doing so knocked out a few things it seems on the lists after that. I could in theory probably get an extra bank tab rather easily this season… if I can just muster the desire to do so. Right now it feels like I have this wealth of other things to be playing, so buckling down and playing Diablo 3… a game that is more than well trodden at this point just seems difficult. In all of this I am sort of saddened by the fact that it seems the magic of the seasonal journey is diminished. I’ve written several posts in the past talking about how much fun it is to push with your friends in an atmosphere like the launch of a new MMO… and that seems to be lacking this time around.

Be The Battery

February 10, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterdays post was a little more bleak than they usually are, and the bizarro thing is… I think writing it helped a lot. It helped putting the frustrations and dread into a single post and sending it out into the world. Its almost as if typing the words lessened the hold the malaise had on me. Then again the activities of last night helped quite a bit as well. However I will get to that shortly. First off I want to show off my home in Elder Scrolls Online. I went back and forth on a few different homes before finally settling on Mournoth Keep in the Halcyon Lake area of Bangkorai. I remember being extremely fond of the main campaign in Bangkorai so that fit for me as well as the fact that since I chose Daggerfall Covenant as my original faction… I wanted something to call home in the same area. In truth I have not done much with it since getting it, largely because I have not had much luck in getting pattern or furniture drops. I am being told that looting furniture seems to be the best way to do that. In theory I could resort to stealing, or instead just fine one of the many towns controlled by enemies and run amok looting there. I have a feeling through with the focus on housing there is going to be a lot of competition for lootables.

Now on to the events of last night and how they seem to have turned around my spirit. For awhile now Squirrel, Jex and myself have had an informal Thursday night thing where we go off and do small group content in Destiny together. Originally this was the night when we took on the Challenge of Elders, but more recently we have been running all three of our characters through the weekly nightfall. I have yet to get an icebreaker, so I largely think they are humoring me until I actually get one. Whatever the case it is a lot of fun, but due to the bizarre schedule since coming back from PAX it had been a few weeks since we last did one of these nights. In truth I had not actually played Destiny since probably January 19th now that I am thinking about it. I was extremely rusty, and by the sheer number of times that they had to rez me it showed… but regardless I think we all had a lot of fun. This week the Nightfall is Dust Palace which is something that has been in the rotation since year one… and that everyone has memorized at this point. As a result we were able to run through three characters worth of Nightfalls in way less than an hours time. During the Nightfall runs they asked me where I was on progress on the quest line to unlock the Outbreak Prime weapon, which requires you to group together in a fire team with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter to make forward momentum.

The truth is I had not really made it terribly far other than picking up the occasional progress from our Thursday night runs when the stars happened to be aligned and we wound up choosing to play different classes on a given run. Like they often do… they set out to change that and we ran a sequence of Archon’s Forge to finish out the step I happened to be on since those apparently count as “public events”. It was around this point that we realized that we did not have three characters with the devices needed to do the decoding step of the quest chain. There is a phase that needs to be completed in a social area where a titan, warlock and hunter input a sequence on this item that drops from the quest chain. If all three sequences are correct you can click through and get to the next step. After a little shuffling we realized that Jex’s warlock had already completed the quest, and Squirrel’s hunter was on the step I had just completed. So we continued on to catch Squirrel up in the process and ran a sequence of three heroic strikes, and then three public events to get us all on the same stage of the quest. After that back to the social area to complete the matrix and move on to the next step.

It felt like the night was still relatively young, so instead of hanging it up for the evening we pushed on into the next quest which involved collecting a bunch of SIVA tech by killing splicers. This also required us to run the Sepiks Perfected strike, which we knocked out in short order by simply doing the 320 light version. From there it was back into Archon’s Forge to complete three events, and farm up the rest of our SIVA Tech fragments. All of which went extremely quickly and before we had finished the three events, we had gotten 100% of our fragments. Watching those things scroll by 2 at a time on the right side of the screen was madness as we tore apart the forge event. Finally it was another trip back to a social space, this time to solve a four by five matrix. It took a half dozen attempts but we finally got the right numbers on all three of us, allowing us to move to the final step. Now both Squirrel on his hunter and myself on my Titan are on the step that requires us to simply kill any three bosses in the Wrath of the Machine raid. Then I will have my very own Outbreak Prime pulse rifle, and can do silly damage to SIVA targets with my nanites. All it all it was exactly the sort of concentrated fun that I needed to pull me out of my funk, and even though I am staring down the barrel of what will almost certainly be an extremely stressful day… I suddenly found a new packet of spoons with which to confront it.