Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 90 of 129

So Damned Charming

February 1, 2015 by Belghast

Episode 42 – Gigantic Personality

This week is the first live show we have recorded in two weeks. In the intervening time Bel, Rae and Ash went to Pax South, and Rae and Ash managed to catch the dreaded Pax Pox. Kodra represented our podcast on the Inaugural episode of the TGEN Tribunal podcast featuring members from all of the various TGEN podcasts and then became the grand Wii Bowling champion of his cruise. During the course of this episode my cast members try and convince me that I am a “media personality” to which I still deny. In addition to all of this madness we talk about a lot of games.

Kodra talks about his experiences with the 3DS port of Citizens of Earth, playing a lot of Sudoku and the punishing game 1001 Spikes. Ash talks about a week of playing Final Fantasy XIV, and the rogue like overture. Tam talks about time spent playing the new generation of adventure games including Dreamfall Chapters and Life is Strange. Rae talks about some FFXIV and her frustrations with the current state of League of Legends Lag, as well as the controversy of them completely blowing off Pax South. Finally I talk about my experience taking media appointments at Pax South, and getting to play a lot of Gigantic and Moonrise. We deep dive into Gigantic talkinga bout our experiences playing together, and what the various champions we played were like.

Finally at the end I talk a little bit about my joining the staff of MMOgames.com. It is a big episode full of lots of stuff and I hope you all enjoy it. We are happy to be back and happy to be hanging out and recording aggrochat once more.

So Damned Charming

One of the things that makes me happiest in life is when a bunch of my friends happen to be playing the same game at the same time. Over the course of the last week Syl, Jaedia, Liore, Aro and a few others have started playing Final Fantasy XIV on the Cactuar server. This morning was the first time I had actually caught Syl on since she started up, because of time differences and the fact that last weekend I was kinda a Pax South. While waiting on one of my filters to run on the podcast this morning I popped over to see what she was up to in Camp Drybone. While there I played show and tell with various outfits and then decided to show off my Draught Chocobo, the two player mount that comes from the recruit a friend program. She I think jokingly asked if it could take her to Vesper Bay… but sure enough that was precisely what I did. Granted I had to run across three zones to get there but it was super enjoyable, and all the while she was emoting all sorts of happy things sitting behind me.

Its moments like this that make Final Fantasy XIV so damned charming. Sure there are problems like goofy invisible walls, or things being gated behind group content… but the overall package is just so adorable at times it hurts. I mean what is more awesome than a pair of Lalafell trekking across country on a big damned chocobo? I love how group friendly this game is, that any one of us can easily help another guildie get something accomplished. We have started over the last few weeks doing a guild raid night of sorts directly before our podcast on Saturday. Last night we managed to catch a few people up with Shiva and Ultros, and then turned around and finished the Chimaera fight for another guildie. It is so painless to make this happen, no fiddling with hotbars, no fiddling with gear sets… the game just auto levels you down to the content that you need to run. I think in part the ease of helping others is what leads to the game being so friendly to new players.

Hard Mode Roulette

Another thing that happened recently is we managed to complete all of the new set of dungeons, unlocking hard mode roulette. I have to say it feels like Square has ramped everything about this patch up since in theory it is the last major one we will get before the expansion. Everything is leading towards what feels to be us entering Ishgard and joining in the battle against the dravinians. I spoke about the Keeper of the Lake dungeon earlier, and it definitely ties in to this theme. The other two dungeons feel more like us dealing with consequences of our actions. In Wanderer’s Palace we face the King Tonberry and through the course of the events end up defeating him. Upon entering Wanderer’s Palace hard mode… we see that this really destroyed the Tonberry people allowing a beast tribe to come in and take over, enslaving them. So here I am hanging out with my Tonberry Buddies after saving the day.

In Amdapor Keep hard mode we are going back in to deal with the havoc that the cultists started the first time. Cleaning up the remainder of the demonic hordes that were summoned. This is really the first dungeon that it did not feel there was a vastly different storyline. Granted you take a completely different path through the keep, and face entirely new enemies, but the story of the dungeon itself felt a little on the weak side. I did remark several times at just how pretty the dungeon was this time around. In all cases the new content was rather challenging, forcing us to use our limit breaks to get through almost every encounter. So far of this new set I would definitely say that Keeper was the hardest, and is likely going to be the one folks bail on if any. I felt like maybe Amdapor Keep was the easiest, leaving Wanderers Palace somewhere in the middle. I love the hard mode dungeons and am amped to see what they give us with the expansion. In the mean time I need to make my way into World of Darkness and see how that works.

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Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

January 27, 2015 by Belghast

The Morning Back

This morning is my first morning back to work, and I am surprisingly cheery about it. At the very least I had a pretty easy time waking up. I’m trying to type my morning post with a very attention craving cat sitting on my arm. The cats are still not entirely used to us being back. I can tell they missed us because they are pretty much smothering us 24/7. Now I know our house sitter played with them… because we got text messages talking about how sweet and adorable they were. I guess there is no substitute for mom and dad being home. Kenzie the kitten still acts confused any time she realizes we are not in sight. Off and on during the day yesterday she would come tearing through the house meowing trying to find me… then upon doing so snuggle up tight. I guess it feels good to be needed.

Gw2 2015-01-26 16-11-37-88 I seem to have skipped the convention plague, or at least I don’t really feel much different than I normally do. The biggest thing I am experiencing is a sort of jet lag feeling. Like my brain is still on convention time and I am not quite used to being back and communicating with other human beings “normally” just yet. As such I spent most of my yesterday chilling out on the sofa, and piddling around in Guild Wars 2. Yup that is right, I downloaded it, patched it up, and spent my day mucking about in it. I enjoyed myself I guess… but I am still in the same phase I always seemed to be with that game… trying to sort out what everyone finds so damned appealing about it. I admit the video and the crowd were enough oomph to get me to give it another try.

During Pax they kept touting their community as the “friendliest” and I feel like that is a bit of a misnomer. Sure when you die people seem to rush out of the woodwork to resurrect you… but in doing so they NEVER SAY A WORD. I feel like GW2 is the friendliest… because it is also the most silent. I wandered about yesterday interacting with several other human beings and not a single one said anything to me, even when I thanked them for helping me out. So I guess they are the friendliest because no one is being an outward asshole? I still say for my money Final Fantasy XIV is a far more enjoyable community, even the gold spammers are polite. All of that said I did begrudgingly enjoy myself, so I might be poking my head in now and again and slowly working my way towards the level cap. Right now I am 53 so there is still a long ways to go until 80.

Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

Last night our normal raid night in Final Fantasy XIV but with several people out that did not quite happen. I spent most of the night hanging out in free company chat talking to various people and working my way through the latest of the Hildebrand quest lines. It was once again completely insane, but as I ran through it I noticed… this quest seemed to make call backs to every single Hildebrand quest line we had experienced to date. It was almost as though the Hildebrand storyline were a television series and the final episode reintroduces all of the themes from behind, wrapping them up in a neat bow. My working theory is that this is the last we will see of Hildebrand before the expansion. For that matter even the main story line feels like it is acting as the precursor to the upcoming expansion, easing us into the world that will be once Heavensward launches. I am absolutely fine with this notion, and eating every moment of it while it lasts.

ffxiv 2015-01-26 21-30-03-90

After a period of time we realized that we had a full group of people on teamspeak to do some of the new dungeons. As with any patch this one introduced three new dungeons, two of which are hard mode versions of existing dungeons… and the third something completely new that fits the current storyline. Since the new dungeon Keeper of the Lake will prevent moving forward in the main story, we opted to do that one. For starters… this dungeon has some of the more difficult boss encounters we have seen to date. In fact I would say this is the first dungeon that we did not really feel overpowered for. The gear that it drops is ilevel 100, but I would hazard a guess that maybe it was designed for players to mostly be in ilevel 120. We however are all in the 110 range so it was a real challenge. One of the cool asides about the dungeon were that a lot of the mobs we encountered were named after ships from the classic Shmup Einhander. A few were references to other shooters like the mobs called the “Silver Hawks”.

We had to do what we have done on so many first runnings of new dungeons… limit break our way through every encounter. The first encounter took two attempts and the final encounter took a lot of luck and two attempts to figure out what we needed to do. It is easily the most difficult of the dungeons to date. Ashgar had run Amdapor Keep Hard and said that this new series had a running theme. Relatively easy trash encounters, that were not likely to kill the party… and really difficult bosses. I honestly prefer dungeons to be this way. Hard trash makes the dungeons frustrating, but when you arrive at a boss everyone naturally focuses on the encounter at hand. Similarly to the Manderville quest line… this dungeon seems to be ramping us up for the end of the expansion, and I believe that these are the last set of dungeons we will see before the spring 2015 launch of Heavensward. I hope to be able to run the other two soon, so that I can start doing hard mode roulette once more. They were worth quite a few poetics, so it should finally be reasonable to gear up in full 120 gear.

Proud to be Ul’dahn

January 21, 2015 by Belghast

Progress on Imperator

This morning I am struggling in a big way at getting anything started on my blog post. As I run out of time to actually write I decided to just dig straight in. Last night was our normal raid group time, and we cleared everything up to Imperator, and took some attempts on him. I joked before the start of the raid that since I would not be there Thursday due to Pax, that they would totally defeat him while I was gone. After last night I seriously think that is probably going to happen. Essentially I feel like we have one last hurdle to get through which is the second intermission when three adds spawn. We had one really amazing attempt where no one died at all until 15% or so… when the adds spawned and we got excited and sloppy and caused a bunch of bombs to blow up. To the best of my knowledge no one died to the mark of chaos bullshittery, so all that is really left is getting through that one bit and we have a boss downed.

My general theory is that pending they have full attendance (minus me of course) that they will totally kill Imperator Mar’gok Thursday while I am driving. I would love to be able to pop in for a bit but I am not sure I will even be in my hotel room before the raid ends. We are stopping off in Austin to eat dinner with a friend of my wife. I am a mix of excited and nervous about the whole PAX thing. One of my goals today is to start on lists of things to pack so that I don’t forget anything. I ran out yesterday to Target and picked up a few supplies that I had intended to bring like Beef Jerky and Cliff Bars. Tonight will be devoted to a whirlwind round of cleaning just to make sure things are as nice as we can get for our neighbors to come down and maintain our animals.

Proud to be Ul’dahn

The other big happening yesterday is that Final Fantasy XIV was back online after an extended downtime for the 2.5 patch. My general theory was that I would get into game and get caught up on the new content that just released. However it turns out that I did not actually finish off the story content from the last patch. I guess I ended up never turning in after the big boss battle so I spent most of my time before the raid last night working through the tail end of the 2.4 patch content. The odd thing about Final Fantasy XIV is the way it makes you care about the characters you interact with, and even the characters that are largely in the background of your conflicts. There is not a single Scion that I don’t like, and while there are some that I am more fond of… like Y’shtola and the ever adorable pair of Papalymo and Yda, there is not a single one that I dislike. This is an odd thing for me considering I am only a few hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition and already dislike Vivienne.

More important than that… I like the leaders of the various city states. While my character is technically Limsa Lominsan, as that was the city state that I started my citizenship in… I draw the strongest connection to Ul’dah. Now I am going to try and tread lightly to keep from delivering any spoilers, but I am a huge fan of Nanamo ul Namo and the leader of the Immortal Flames Raubahn. I’ve long though they were interesting characters, but the tail end of the 2.4 patch content has made me proud of both in different ways. There were moments I honestly wondered if I would tear up with pride while going through the quest content. If nothing else finishing that storyline has made me proud of be an adopted Ul’dahn and proud to be an Immortal Flame. That is the magic of FFXIV, to be able to create factions that you care deeply about… without the feeling of needing to somehow be “against” another faction in the process. I wish more games could manage to do that one.

Subligars for Everyone

Another quest series I seemingly did not wrap up was the 2.4 Hildebrand quest chain. While trying to work through the first few steps of the new main story quest, I stumbled across a turn in for Hildebrand and just ran with it. I have to say this is one of the more ludicrous conclusions of a Hildebrand quest in the series. I am not really sure how much I can go into it, other than once again Godbert saves the day. I was able to snap a questionable screenshot. I will let you try and decode what is actually happening here. Once again it was humorous, and a series of extremely well staged in engine cinematics. The only thing that bums me is that more than likely I will not get a chance to play any of the additional content from the patch until after I get back from PAX. Right now it is looking like tonight will be a packing night, and then during the actual convention when I get back to my hotel room I will be furiously working on blog posts. The closer this gets, the more I realize this is going to be a working convention.

Right now the plan is that Friday I will be roaming around the booth space, trying to talk to as many people as I can. I currently have a media appointment around noonish, but other than that my day is going to be devoted to playing demos and talking to the folks behind it. Saturday there are a few panels I intend to go to, and that will be the day that Ashgar arrives. So more than likely we will hang out a bunch since we have never actually met. In between all of these happenings I am going to try and meet as many folks from the twitter/blogosphere as possible. I plan on taking lots of photos with my cell phone, and jotting down lots of notes either the old fashioned way on a notebook or with my chromebook. Battery life is a concern so probably going to use the chromebook sparingly throughout the day. I kinda wish I had the forsight to arrange a spare battery. I did pick up one of those extra cell phone power packs yesterday so I should be good from the random twitter aspect. Similarly I am sure my 3DS will survive the day because they seem to have insane battery life. Tonight I will most likely prep the post for tomorrow morning… because we plan on getting up early and getting on the road. So much to do!

Restarting Inquisition

January 20, 2015 by Belghast

Final Fantasy XIV Downtime

The is something strange about knowing you can’t play something… that makes you want to play it. Right now this is happening for me with Final Fantasy XIV, especially since I knew that more than likely I would not really be able to sink my teeth into it until I got back from Pax South. It sounds from the early reports that World of Darkness is absolutely not the cakewalk that Syrcus Tower has come to be. Then again maybe at one point Syrcus wasn’t either… considering I have never actually been around when one of the 24 man dungeons was “new”. Both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower were aging content when we came back to the game. So it will be interesting to see how it works out.

Pax is going to pretty much eat all my time starting tomorrow with the planning and packing. So I am not likely going to get to experience much of this patch until I come back Sunday/Monday. In the Pax front I have some exciting but scary news. I guess I totally have a media appointment with a game company. It started with a conversation over twitter and lead to a discussion over email and an appointment. It should be awesome, but it is a new experience for me so hopefully I won’t bore or annoy the devs too much with my questions. I might end up doing more of these but right now this is the only one I actually have scheduled. Its strange that my first convention, is in a way a working one since I will be covering the convention in part for a bigger site than mine.

Restarting Inquisition

When Dragon Age: Inquisition first landed it did so during a fairly bad time for me. We were starting raiding in Final Fantasy XIV and I was just then coming back to World of Warcraft for the impending Warlords of Draenor launch. To make matters worse I suffered some pretty crippling technical issues surrounding this game. Every six to ten seconds there would be a hitch in the gameplay, like a record skipping. There were numerous reports of this, and even more fixes but none of them seem to work quite right for me. A few of them made things better but this hitch happened on even the lowest possible settings. Finally I found the solution myself that involved playing the game in fullscreen windowed. However at that point I was just flat out pissed at the game itself and really wanted nothing to do with it. I listened as friends raved about the game but ultimately I would put it away for the time being.

With the force downtime in Final Fantasy XIV I used my day yesterday to restart the game fresh. I feel like this “better” mindset has made so much of the game more enjoyable. The first time I was trying to play the traditional “Belghast” character, aka a Human Sword and Shield Warrior. The problem with that is that once again the first companion you meet up with… is a far better tank than you will ever be for awhile. I wanted to be able to group with Cassandra, so on the second play through I opted to go for a Dwarven Two Handed Weapon Warrior. So far the choice has been a good one, and I am enjoying the game much better. The worst part about restarting is having to play through that section where it flips you into tactical mode. Everything about that mode feels horrible, and it took me a bit to figure out how to flip back to the normal combat. The first quality of life change I made was rebinding “search” from V to R making it significantly easier to hit while moving.

Faffing the Hinterlands

In spite of everything my friends have told me… I faffed about heavily in the Hinterlands. When planted down there with a blazing inquisition eyeball icon showing me the way I needed to go… I chose to go the opposite direction. This has always served me well in Elder Scrolls games and overall I think it was the right choice for me this time as well. It gave me time to get used to combat and explore the world a bit before being locked into more serious dialog again. I am very much a man of action, and the introduction to all games generally makes me deeply unhappy. I keep saying to myself “why won’t it just let me play the game!”. Dragon Age Inquisition was a fairly action oriented introduction, but still there were moments where I was more than ready to move past the talking about things phase. So I puttered around exploring things, picking up quests and figuring things out before the game actually intended me to learn things.

During this time I was thrown directly into the fact that the mages and templars were at war with themselves… and everyone that happened across their paths… including towns folk, the chantry, and the occasional farmer. It was also during this time that I started to embrace the notion that maybe I was in fact the chosen one. I think I did enough objectives to get to 8 or 9 power, closing several rifts before eventually meandering my way to my objective. Ultimately I did end up leaving the Hinterlands before getting entirely mired in them… but I did it in my own fashion without the feel of rushing through them. The game feels better to me now, or maybe I am just in the right frame of mind to be playing it. I’ve added several more companions to my crusade, including the very amazing Sera. So far the only one I don’t really like is Vivienne, but that really isn’t terribly shocking. What does amuse me is how much I actually like Solas, but then again I tend to get along far better with apostates than circle mages. I picked a poor time to start playing, given that I am just about to lose a weekend to Pax, but hopefully I have made it far enough into the game to have the storyline cemented so I can pick it up again later.