Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 42 of 129

Regularly Playing: June 2019 Edition

June 4, 2019June 4, 2019 by Belghast

For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!

To Those Remaining

I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.

If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.

While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.

While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.

To The New and Returning

I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.

With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.

I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.

To Those Departing

Grim Dawn

I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.

Marvel Future Fight

I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.

Mortal Kombat 11

Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.

Outward

This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.

Honorable Mentions

Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.

While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.

I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.

I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.

And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.

Clones of Fort Tarsis

April 1, 2019 by Belghast

The other day I noticed that there were three NPCs with the same face standing in line at this meat shop. I figured it was probably just a weird occurrence with the NPC generator putting the same model all clumped together accidentally. However last night I noticed that there were 4 standing in line… and when I turned the corner there were two more. I made a post on twitter about this and by the time I got back to the game as I had simply alt tabbed out, they were ALL within the frame of a single screenshot. Sure there are subtle differences between each of them but they ALL have the same face. This leads me down a path that I was talking about in Slack the other day… but there is no such thing as a random number generator. Effectively you try your hardest to create randomness with a computer, but you will never quite get to truly random because in my experience trying to write them over the years… they have a tendency to get stuck. This makes me wonder if a lot of the loot generation within this game is suffering from a stuck sequence. Imagine if you will a D&D encounter table… with the really interesting encounters happening towards the top of that scale. Imagine also that you have percentage dice that for whatever reason don’t want to roll anything higher than a 85. I have no clue why loot is as fickle as it is, but a when you see things like our six clones it makes you wonder. Additionally not in this shot there are two kids running around with the exact same face, so this may be fairly common in game and I just didn’t notice it until recently.

As far as content in Anthem goes… they have at least roped me in with the whole Elysian Chests thing. At a minimum each night I do whatever the daily challenge is that rewards a key, and then run at least one Stronghold to open that chest. So far I have gotten a bunch of shitty crafting materials and a handful of extremely lackluster vinyls. The ones you purchase off the shop apply a design to the majority of your lancer, but the ones you get for free… are in general a sticker on your shoulder and maybe something on your helmet. Again very disappointing as compared to what I went into that system expecting. However the limited nature also triggers my desire to catch them all before they disappear. I am certain that at some point in the future this game will pull its head out and become extremely fun, and I sorta want to make sure I don’t have pangs of regret by not getting something cool along the way. After a very long dry streak I did manage to pick up a Legendary version of the weapon I use for priming targets, so I am super excited about that. I would have probably rather had some defensive stats on it, but I will deal with it as is because it is lime green and not orange. I also wish that 50% physical damage was not limited to the weapon, but oh well you cannot control the rolls in Anthem.

Other than Anthem I spent a significant amount of time playing Breath of the Wild on Cemu, and have cleared my second Divine Beast. I did the Zora Beast first and then since it seemed to be the next closest worked my way through the Goron area. I found the second Divine Beast way easier than the first one, but I am not sure if it was simply that I went into it knowing what to expect or if it was simply that the fight was much easier. There was a mechanic that I glommed onto pretty fast during the second boss that largely trivialized the encounter, so maybe it would have been rougher had I not tried that. Now I have made my way over into the Gerudo are and am trying to figure out how to sneak into the town. I’ve already seen the next encounter which is apparently a giant robo Camel? So effectively you have an Elephant, a Salamander/Lizard thing, a Camel and a Giant Birb? I say Salamander largely because in Japanese games they tend to be fire aligned, and a lot of other lizard types are lightning aligned.

Regardless still having a blast finally getting deep into this game, and key is one small tweak that made the experience immediately better. There is a plugin for Cemu that allows you to disable weapon durability, keeping you from having to play the game of constantly swapping weapons. That one tweak changed the experience from something I bounced off of out of the frustration of trying to keep finding more decent weapons to use, to something I have dug into hard and am loving. This was my biggest complaint when the game released, and not shockingly once it was gone my experience felt so much better. When playing on the Switch I made a conscious decision to go for the Zora area because I had read online that you could get a repairable weapon there. So much was my focus on trying to stay fully equipped that I altered my path just to make sure I could keep some reasonable gear. Take weapon durability out of the game and I just wander freely without a concern of getting into an area and not having any weapons. It has been a liberating experience, so much so that I really think there should be a toggle in the official game to disable the stupid durability system. In the meantime however I have Cemu and it gives me that functionality.

And finally… I have seen the second credit roll of Stormblood and am officially ready for the release of Shadowbringers. This one was way shorter than I was expecting, and largely entailed a single quest chain. So here is where I am going to complain about Square Enix because they have started doing something that drives me insane. There have been a few quests towards the tail of Stormblood that involved a bunch of cut scenes and multiple phases… all without checkpoints so if you fail at any point you have to complete the entire sequence over again. I absolutely failed the final quest of this expansion a few times until I sorted out the dance of the fight, and each time… it forced me to play through a sequence that was largely on auto pilot and un-fail-able… before getting to the REAL fight. They need to quit this shit and divide things up into multiple quests. That said I did enjoy the tail end of Stormblood quite a bit and I am looking forward to Shadowbringers continuing things. Overall I think Stormblood was a much stronger expansion than Heavensward was… however nothing holds a candle to just how great the post release content was for A Realm Reborn. Stormblood however was way closer to that, so I am hoping this means a return to wider themes. Based on what I saw at Fanfest Tokyo, I am guessing that is absolutely going to be the case. Heavensward had its moments, but there was way too much horrible Elf politics for my tastes, and the Dragons were not much better.

How was your weekend? Do anything interesting in game or in the real world? Drop us a note in the comments.

Vacation Gaming

March 25, 2019 by Belghast

Today is going to be the first day back after a lengthy break, and as such I am struggling a little bit to get up and around this morning. Last week was the universal spring break week for Oklahoma schools and with that I opted to take Wednesday through Friday off to spend time with my wife. We went back and forth about taking some sort of a trip, but instead just dealt with a lot of things around the house that needed dealing with. I cleaned and organized my office, she tackled the closet, we got a new rug for the living room, made two trips to my mechanic to fix my drivers side window that was having trouble rolling up, finally dealt with our taxes and didn’t have to pay… and a slew of other small things that filled most of the time I took off. In between all of the running around I got in a fair amount of gaming, with the largest single target being The Division 2.

I am completely in the swing of this game and am slowly pushing my way across the map clearing control points and side missions along the way. At this point I have largely cleared the White House surrounding area, Downtown East, Federal Triangle, East Mall and have been focusing my time on clearing out content in the Southwest area. I am spending 99.9% of my time soloing the content and it is going more or less fairly well. My jam is still some sort of a fast firing single shot rifle and a shotgun to back it up when things get too close. What I am actually using for either of those varies based on what I happen to have seen drop… which is the weird thing about this game is the large number of drops I seem to get that are in no way upgrades to the weapon I was using from 3 levels earlier. However as with any Division game… the really important drops are the ones with a teal border like the one shown above.

Another major accomplishment of the weekend is that I finished the Final Fantasy XIV 4.5 content. I was ONE dungeon away from doing so but Anthem launched and then Division 2… and I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to log in and take care of it. Huge kudos to the awesome player who guided three of us newbies through Ghimlyt Dark and did an excellent job explaining the mechanics. I have to say though… it was a WAY easier dungeon than the Burn… which I think Thalen still needs? I need to check into that and help him out this week if that is the case. All in all I am ready for the next content drop to finally explain how we get from this point… to the point shown in the Full Trailer released at Fanfest Tokyo over the weekend. One of my employees is a super serious raider type… so I will be quizzing him this morning as to his thoughts about what was shown.

Another thing that has been stealing my time… namely the hanging out in bed before going to sleep time… is Baba is You. This is a weird puzzle game where you essentially hack reality and rewrite the rules of the universe to get a win condition. It reminds me of this mix between the old shareware title Paganitsu and Basic Programming logic. Paga was a significant title for me growing up because it fit neatly onto a floppy and we could play it clandestine like from the computer lab at school. Baba Is You is great because so often in puzzle games you get introduced to the mechanics and then they simply start dialing up the precision and speed that you need to react in order to complete puzzles. Baba on the other hand keeps challenging your conceptions and does not care at all about the fine motor skills or speed of execution… and as such gives you unlimited rollbacks as you sorta figure out how the pieces move on each map. Well worth checking out if you are interested in such things.

Lastly I started messing around with Breath of the Wild again… but if that were the end of that statement it would not be as nonsense as it ultimately is. I own this game on Wii U and Switch… but last night I started dinking around with Cemu the Wii U Emulator to see just how well it runs and what sort of resolution I could get it working at. The game looks gorgeous running in 4K but requires a bunch of fiddling to get it there. Not to mention just the act of getting it up in running was a pain in the butt which involved a whole slew of hoops to jump through to get the game patched and the emulator running. Then there was the added step of getting it working through Parsec so I could have the same experience while hanging out on the laptop downstairs… which involved installing controller emulators.

Basically I have NO CLUE why I did this thing, but I had a lot of fun and made it as far as Kakariko Village last night. I never made it terribly far into Breath of the Wild in part because of the restart. When the game first came out I did not have a Switch, and then at some point along the line I managed to find one in stock and re-bought the game on that platform. That meant having to redo everything over, which sorta killed my forward momentum. I seemed to log in more to summon treasure chests with Amiibos than I did to actually do anything else. My save game is littered with chests around the Dueling Peaks stable. It is truly shocking how well it runs, but there are a lot of frustrations… because the first time you encounter anything new there is a massive game freeze as it builds shader cache, however from that point on things are fluid again.

Basically chock this up to a long line of stupid things I have done like created a Chinese account so I could try Monster Hunter Online and setting up a Sega of Japan account to play Phantasy Star Online 2. I will likely wander away from it boredly at some point in the near future, but last night I had an awful lot of fun doing things that I should be able to do. I will however due to the potentially shady nature of this not be assembling a guide. I own two copies of Breath of the Wild so I figured it was completely legit for me to do shenanigans, but the real more stable answer to playing Breath of the Wild is to get a Switch.

The Will of the Moon

February 11, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about me trying to recuperate from whatever crud I had on Friday. I’m feeling better as a whole but still not feeling 100%. I’ve referred to this weekend as a name brand beta, because when a company throws a special test that most of the world seems to be invited to it definitely comes off as more marketing ploy than actual test of the game infrastructure. Overall the game performed flawlessly other than an apparent known memory leak bug, that I never quite encountered because I didn’t play longer than the requisite two or three hours that it takes to encounter it. The missions that I ran were rather enjoyable, and I fully expect to at a minimum play through the story content and unlock all of that. I make no guarantees about how long it will take me given that it took me a good two years before I reached maximum level in the original game.

I still question how well the game fits my play style, but at the moment I am looking at it for a purely single player experience given that I know going into it that none of the other AggroChat crew will be playing it. They all for the most part bounced off of the original Division, and primarily for the bleak story beats. I think the fact that we were effectively working for the various communities that we discover makes the flow of the story feel better. However as Kodra pointed out on the podcast, it does leave us a question of why exactly we are still an agent if there is no organizational structure left? I mostly view that trope as the lone lawman in the wild frontier sort of approach. I will say the game improved massively after I turned off the HDR, given that I was only able to SEE the HDR effect upstairs in my office and not while playing remotely through parsec… and as such it made everything extremely washed out and hard to pick out details.

The game I spent the majority of Saturday playing was Assassin’s Creed Origins and I have reached a point where I am staring down the barrel of the ending. However I am extremely frustrated by what appears to be the ending that is unfolding in front of me. Now I have said for some time that my opinion is that when this game was originally planned the ultimately design was that you could play it as Bayek or as Aya since the two characters at least on some level are interchangeable and have the same reasons for engaging in the main story plot. For sake of budget I assume they cut one character so that they would not have to animate two copies of everything, but the problem with this is… that every time you are forced to play Aya it is like stepping foot into a level one character.

What I mean by that is through the course of the game you make a lot of stylistic decisions about what weapons you want to use and what talent points to sink into. Then each time you are throw into playing Aya you are forced to return back to the character that lacks the ability to customize anything. So spoilers time… but I just went through a sequence where it appears that I am saying goodbye to my character Bayek… aka the one that I have spent the last 40 levels customizing to be exactly the way I want him to be… and being forced to do the ending of the game with Aya the level 1 blank slate. This makes me really not want to do any of the ending and just call it good enough… returning to playing through the fun part of the game which is doing random quests out in the world. Maybe this isn’t exactly what is about to happen… but it certainly seems like I am just about to be forced into beating the game as a proxy. Please note… I like Aya as a character and would have been fine playing her… if I could actually control what sort of gear and talents she had.

Lastly I spent some time playing Final Fantasy XIV this weekend and accomplished two things. Firstly I managed to get my Blue Mage to 50… which means I now need to find a party of blue mages to go collect the rest of the spells I have available to me given that everything else seems to come from a dungeon or trial. I spent the podcast grinding out mobs in Northern Thanalan and managed to push across the line solo. I also managed to get through The Burn which served as a bit of a roadblock since the final boss of that dungeon appears to be a PUG destroyer. I’ve now moved the quest line along to where I am failing miserably at a fight that is about four times longer than it really needs to be. Actually I have only failed it the one time and it was mostly because I didn’t catch on what was going on fast enough. I opted to play through the mission as a warrior instead of a samurai, but that also meant that I was not prepared for a burn phase, because I assumed I was simply trying to out survive the encounter.

I will likely poke my head back in again tonight and give it another shot. I think I am probably nearing the bridge between 4.4 and 4.5 and as such getting closer and closer to being able to understand what the hell is going on.