Guild Wars 2 Archives - Page 40 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

AggroChat 41 and Pax Day Two

January 24, 2015 by Belghast

A Tale of Two Days

It was not until today that I realized that yesterday at Pax was a bit of a downer. I had a lot of fun playing around with various games that I had media appointments with, and I am so happy I caught moments like “Pax South Plays Pokemon” where a guy in a costume was accepting and mimicking commands just like Twitch Plays Pokemon. The problem is I mostly focused on the four appointments I had, and treated the day like I was working the convention. In theory I guess I was but the biggest thing that lead to this feeling was the fact that more or less I was completely alone. Sure there were people at the convention that knew but since I was so focused on making sure I was on time for the four meetings I didn’t really focus on mingling much other than with the random strangers I stood in line with. That was one of the things I found most interesting is just how comfortable I felt around strangers. I think part of it is that I knew if conversation did happen… it would at least be about something I was probably knowledgeable. It was like the entire weekend was this safe little bubble of geeks and dorks… and we all inherently sense we were among our own kind, and somehow safe.

Today however was a completely different experience. Upon arriving there I got into the line for the Guild Wars 2 expansion reveal, and immediately after that I met up with Ashgar who was also watching the panel but had arrived late. Shortly after that we met up with Rae and her brother and from that point on at least two of us were together at all times. This completely changed the entire dynamic of the show for me. Instead of being about milling around looking for something interesting… it became about having this grand adventure with friends. I of course had to sho them everything I thought was cool from day one, which involved trying to get them a play session of Gigantic. Sure enough the folks were amiable to the idea of having two more members of the podcast playing. While I wasn’t really expecting to play along as well we all ended up on a team opposite Angry Joe of the Angry Joe Show. It seems like the Gigantic Live twitter feed caught us playing, and while it was an extremely hard fought match our team pulled ahead in the end and seized the day. For those playing at home… faces right to left at the machines are Myself, Ashgar, and Rae… with the every awesome Lonrem beside Rae offering words of advice.

Heart of Thorns

This morning of course was the big announcement of the Guild Wars 2 expansion pack. The fact that it was happening was of no real surprise because apparently the ending of this most recently living story episode concluded with some heavy hints about the expansion. What was a surprise to me at least is that Arena Net seems to be shoving aside the MMO tradition of releasing an expansion and raising the level cap. Instead they are introducing an alternate progression path called Masteries. This system will apparently be account based so once something is unlocked it is available to all of your characters. Some of the unlocks will be quality of life things like a new hang gliding skill, and others will be as game changing as brand new specializations. The only one that they gave examples of is that the Ranger will apparently be able to specialize into a Druid giving them access to staff weapon type and brand new druid abilities.

The other big announcement for me at least is that they are adding a third heavy armor class to the game. It seems their flagship character Rytlock has gone through a transformation turning him a warrior to the brand new revenant class. It seems the revenant focuses on channeling the mist and gives access to retelling certain legends that give it special abilities. In the video above it shows him summoning a giant dragon spirit, or dashing around the battlefield striking all targets. I have to say both the trailer and the expansion content sounded cool, but at the same time I know my history with Guild Wars 2 in general. I am not sure if the revenant is enough to make me care about the game, but it is at least a step in the right direction since I love me some “shadowknight” style classes. They plan on trickling out information between now and the expansion about what will await players in Maguuma. I had to share the above photo because people were pumped for the show… they gave us these boom stick things and folks were putting them to good use.

AggroChat 41 – AggroChat Game Club

Since we will be on the road super early in the morning I am writing this post after coming home from my last day at Pax South. I had a phenomenal time and spent the day hanging out with some of my favorite people on the planet. However since myself, Ashgar and Rae were all at Pax this weekend… we were unable to do our normal aggrochat recording thing. We actually got our shit together and planned ahead for this eventuality and recorded double episodes last saturday night releasing the first as AggroChat 40, and then I have just published the second episode tonight through the magic of “publish on date” functionality. With the second part we are announcing a new idea we had. The idea is relatively simple… we have a book club but with games. We will pick a game, play it through a given month and then record a show where we spoil everything allowing us to tear into the game completely. We did this some time ago for Transistor, where we recorded a very non-spoiler show first… and later recorded a deep dive show about the plotline.

Leading up to this show we each compiled a list of games we wanted to nominate for the inaugural game club game. During the course of this show I made the folks who posted each game defend their title, explaining why they thought it would be a good pick. At the end of the show we arrive at title, but I am not going to spoil what our pick is just quite yet. You can of course skip to the tail end of the show and find out for yourself really quickly, but where would the fun be in that? In any case whatever game we chose… on Saturday February 28th we will record a game descending into the title and picking it clean. From this point on we will figure out a more equitable scheme for picking games, to make sure we also get some “non-consensus” titles but I figured for the first pick it was probably good to grab a game we were all wanting to play. As we play the game I encourage our listeners to play along and then share your comments about the game, but I will give more details on that later. In any case… I am going to close down this evenings post and start packing up. It was a great weekend at pax, but I am amped for life to return to normal, so see you all soon in the regularly scheduled social channels!

World Without Levels

December 20, 2014 by Belghast

Holiday Hassles

Today is going to be an extremely quick blogpost because I am pretty much under the gun. Were I a proper and responsible adult I would have posted something last night. However when I got home from work I was completely drained and while I hung out and played games for a bit… I also crashed significantly earlier than even my wife did. Today is going to be an extremely day as we are officially beginning our Christmas shopping. This is actually pretty good for us because in general we are those folks wandering around on Christmas Eve trying to find those last few gifts. I like getting stuff just as much as the next person, but I really wish there was a way to turn Christmas into Thanksgiving 2.0. The gift giving just seems to get in the way of what should be an otherwise amazing holiday.

There is the pressure to get something awesome for people who have literally not seen since last Christmas. Then you end up with the gift of shame… the gift card because really you have no clue at all what this person might want. Instead if it were just Thanksgiving 2.0… we would share a meal together, and a conversation and not be constantly dreading the impending gift exchange awkwardness. Personally I am one of those people that if I wanted it at all, I probably already bought it, and my wife is the same way. So I feel like we are both exceptionally hard to buy for… so mostly people just don’t try and we ultimately end up exchanging cash, either in gift card form or actual crisp bills. Which brings me back to… what exactly was the point? A nice meal, a conversation… those are the things that are really valuable.\

World Without Levels

Yesterday a couple of my friends spun topics off of yesterdays post. Lord Tridus commented that games should “Flatten or wipe out the level curve entirely and content now becomes scaled on gear”. As Rowan stated in his follow up post, this system already exists and is alive and well in The Secret World. The problem that I see with that system however is that you still have leveling in the form of total Ability Points gained, which are then used to purchase ability unlocks. In theory it works, but the problem with the system is it becomes increasingly difficult to “restart” and try and go down a completely different path. Ultimately this became a wall for many of my friends because the classes we wanted to play… ended up being ultimately completely unviable when we reached the endgame aka “Nightmare” content.

Without a way to completely reset your character we had no way of really retooling after spending all of this time leveling ourselves into a corner. Actually I experienced the same problem with playing Champions Online. If you failed to follow the magical golden functional path, that game became an unplayable mess with you reaching a point very early on when you simply could not do the content you needed to. The part of this equation that I feel has not been solved is how to grant abilities in a way that is not grindy. I personally find The Secret World somewhat frustrating when I think about grinding out enough ability points to earn all of the abilities. I spent probably hundreds of hours killing vampires in one of the higher level zones doing essentially just this… that and farming gear to be broken down into crafting materials. I just don’t see that as being the answer to the level problem either.

New Ability Gains

Ultimately the problem that remains is we need a new an interesting way of gaining abilities. I think maybe Guild Wars 2 at least had part of this equation right, in that the equipping of gear SHOULD be what unlocks your abilities. The component I would change to this equation however is that they “Teach” you abilities instead of only give you abilities while the item is equipped. This completely changes what is considered a valuable item. Sure a sword might not have as good of stats as the one you are currently wielding but if it gives you a new “Life Drain” ability that can be learned while completing content with it equipped… that would make it worth keeping until at least you had learned that ability. Random loot becomes interesting again because it might have an ability that you have not yet unlocked.

Ultimately this sort of system only works if you also have a limited amount of slots for you to put abilities in. I think this is pretty much going to be the rule going forward that you should have no more than one hotbar worth of abilities at any given time. This does two things for your game… firstly it makes it significantly easier for a new player to get into the game because they only have to learn so many keys to press at a given time. Secondly it allows your game to be ported to a console significantly easier due to the limited number of button press combinations available. The importance of making abilities in such a way so that no one ability is that much better than everything else is also key, that way there is a significant opportunity cost to each choice. In any case… I feel like a game without levels can work, but you also have to take away the ability grinds. To me at least, learning a new ability from an item, feels significantly less grindy than simply racking up a currency that you then spend to unlock things. I would love to hear other players thoughts on this concept as well.

Blood of the Werewolf

October 12, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode #26

I feel like last night was a really good episode, or at least I hope it is. It is one of those nights where the conversation flowed freely and we had way more topics to talk about than we realistically had time to do so. Even at that we still recorded for roughly an hour and a half and it is completely packed full of stuff. The title of the show is the “Gospel of Galaxy Trucker” and that is because Kodra has become an evangelist for the power of that game. He has always been a big fan of the board game, and has latched onto the iOS port with both hands trying to get as many people to play with him as possible. Problem is for me at least I don’t have any iOS devices, and I sadly doubt that android and iOS users will be able to play together…. although in Carcassonne you could play across platforms so here is hoping.

Other than that we talked at length about Dragon Age: Origin and mostly how Kodra has been getting along in the game. He had tried to play it before in the past but was unable to get into it, so it seems as though he is at least over the hurdle. As we refer to it “Getting Off Citadel” because that was the big hurdle of when Mass Effect 1 started to become interesting, and getting past Lothering in Dragon Age is a similar journey. I talk at length about my issues with Destiny right now and the mindless grinding that is required to keep progressing. I am far more grind friendly than the rest of my cast mates but even I am starting to hit my limit. Finally we talk about the tell tale blank spots in the Blizzcon lineup and contemplate what they might be announcing. We throw out a bunch of ideas for a new game genre for them to polish to a mirror shine.

Blood of the Werewolf

I picked this up some time ago on a Steam sale because it had two things that greatly interested me. Firstly the fact that you were playing as a female werewolf looking for revenge for her slain husband was an interesting spin on the genre. Secondly it looked in many ways similar to the original Castlevania with a series of levels that show your progression in form of a minimap. The dual mechanics of “human” and “werewolf” modes seemed interesting as well. So for this mornings Steampowered Sunday I decided to give it a spin and play it for a bit. I was not really feeling up to interacting with the world so I opted not to stream it, however I did take lots of screenshots along the way. This however is a review that almost didn’t happen because apparently this game is essentially broken without massive intervention. When I launched it the first time I started getting C++ debug errors, and since I am programmer by trade and have visual studio installed… it kept asking me if I wanted to launch a debugger to step through the code.

It turns out this is a “known issue” and simply has not been patched. In fact there is a “helpful” thread on the steam forums on how to fix it. I put helpful in quotes because the “fix” requires you to edit your registry and hard code the resolution you want to run the game at. This is a horrible horrible decision, and I damned near stopped playing the game at this point. If you put a game on steam you should at least have a way to configure your games resolution without resorting to the registry. Quite honestly this right along makes me not recommend this game for anyone at this point. I feel like more than likely the current $1.04 pricetag and the regular $7.00 pricetag maybe reflects the fact that this game has some shitty development behind it. All of this said… the registry hack seemed to clear up my problems.

Charming Narrative

The art style and voice acting are really nicely done. I maybe should have used charming in quotes… since in reality you are going across the country side on a revenge fueled murder spree. But I guess in reality the original Castlevania didn’t give you much of a reason why you were going after Dracula… so it works here as well. The game is told from the perspective of the mother telling her son what she had to do to seek revenge for the killing of his father. I am not sure if this is like a journal that the son is reading, but it seems likely. Which makes me wonder does your character simply not survive in the end. I have not played enough yet to really be able to determine that, nor do I know if I will play enough, but I can get into the reasons behind that later.

The only problem I have is that the enemies you face are mostly random monsters… and while the rats and crocodiles and even other wolves make sense… I have no clue why there are giant fireball belching deep ones in the sewer system as well other than a faint nod to Castlevania. I feel like the game didn’t really explain who I was fighting against other than someone killed my husband and the father of the person reading the narration. What helps me care less about all of this is just how nice the characters and background end up looking. It is very stylistic but at the same time still richly detailed without going overly minimalistic.

Interesting Mechanics

The gameplay is split into two different kinds of mechanics. The first is that of your character as a human. She is equipped with a crossbow and here is where things get a little wonky. You aim your crossbow with your right thumb stick and fire it with your right trigger. Now if you fire your cross bow without touching your thumb stick it shoots straight at, but there are many times where you will need to angle a shot. The ability to fire directed arrows allows you to hit switches and trigger traps and angle shots just right to be able to shoot from relative safety. All of this however in practice feels like a lot to do as something is rushing at you. I got the hang of it as my play test went on, but it did not feel exactly intuitive at first.

Whenever your character goes out into the moonlight, you change immediately into your werewolf form which has a completely different set of attacks but maintains the same basic control scheme. Right trigger to attack, right shoulder to perform special ability. In werewolf form you get the ability to double jump, so a lot of the puzzles involve you jumping just at the right time in the middle of the air. One of the things they carried over from Castlevania is the constant cavalcade of bats timed at just the right spacing as to make it damned near impossible to ignore them, but futile to actually try and destroy them. Later the bats develop the same kind of loping movement as the medusa heads from Castlevania which makes them even more frustrating.

Uneven Difficulty

Other than the fact that the game does not actually run when you install it through steam without registry hack intervention… my number one complaint about the game is that it seems to have very uneven difficulty design in the levels. Granted the original Castlevania had this going on as well, but it was very much not a good feature. I feel like this game as a whole is a nostalgic nod to Castlevania in so many ways, and it even managed to carry over the same brutal and frustrating bits that quite frankly were just the product of poor level design rather than actual planning I feel. I played the first two levels this morning, and in each of them the bulk of the level was rather sedate with logical progression gradually ramping up as you went through the play field.

Then they would throw you at a bullet hell section, where for the course of a single area you would have to avoid three projectiles at a time from an enemy on the far side of the room, while avoiding environmental damage form above, bats flying in from the side, crumbling tiles beneath your feet and still having to make perfectly timed jumps between ladders and platforms. These sections are maddening but not in a good way. They feel completely misplaced when compared to the rest of the level design. Why should this one room be that much harder than the others, and why did none of the rest of the level really prepare you for it? The first time you really encounter the crumbling tiles… is during one of these sections so you really have no clue what that block does until you have already failed at doing so.

Blood of the Werewolf 2014-10-12 10-34-13-316

The above section is what finally made me decide I was done for the morning. YOu have a series of crushers that are a one shot kill. They move in all sorts of directions, and extremely quickly. There are status indicators above or to the side of them that show you how long before the piston fires. They require perfecting timing to get through. There is a moment where at two lights, you have to wait a split second before jumping. If you jump immediately after the second light you jumped too soon and die. If you jump as the third light is coming on, you jumped too late and die. I could have handled one sequence of these pistons but after doing three in a row… and having a fourth one at the top of the ladder in the above screenshot… I just said fuck it and killed the game. I was not in the mood for that, especially when the rest of the game was actually rather enjoyable.

Rhinestone in the Rough

Given that it is the season of monster themed games, I figured playing Blood of the Werewolf was a good pick this week. Now comes the hard part… do I suggest this game to others. I can’t really say this game is a diamond in the rough, because there is quite a bit of rough that you have to deal with to get to where you can play it. The steam forums are full of issues folks have had with this game, and apparently if you are not using an xbox 360 controller… you are likely going to have issues with controller support as well. Like the subheading says this is more a Rhinestone in the Rough. There are definitely some shiny bits that are fun, but the thing that got me was the uneven progression of difficulty. If you really like Metroidvania style games, and there is an aspect of collecting bits that make you more powerful… and you don’t mind frustration games that can be down right unfair like say the Mega Man series… this might be a game for you.

If you wanted a game that you could install, boot up without issue and play through without the feeling of wanting to throw your controller… this is very much not a game for you. Thankfully like I said earlier the game right now is super cheap on Steam through the 15th for only $1.04. At that price, even dealing with the bullshit it is probably worth it if you are at all curious. Sadly despite its charm I will likely never boot this game up again. I feel like Outland is better at doing the things I like about Metroidvania in every single way, so in truth you would probably be better playing it or Guacamelee. If however you have massive amounts of nostalgia over the original Castlevania… this might be just the game you were looking for.

#BloodoftheWerewolf #AggroChat

Savior of the Heavens

March 7, 2014 by Belghast

War of Guilds

A few days ago on a whim I decided to reinstall Guild Wars 2 and patch it up, which is not an insignificant process at this point. Last night before getting into anything else I decided to give it a spin. I have done this a number of times since launch, with essentially the same results. After a few minutes of running around I decided that I still don’t like the game. I figured this post is relevant with all of my recent Elder Scrolls fanboyism… that yes it is perfectly okay for you not to like a game. Guild Wars 2 is one of those titles that I want to like, because so many people have so many great moments with the game. However for whatever reason I just cannot see the magic in it that others can.

Guild Wars 2 stands alone as the only alpha program I have ever resigned from. I just did not like what the game was, and how it deviated from all of things I had read into their manifesto about the game. When it came close to release I got into beta and had a marginal amount of fun, and with it launching in a relative dead spot I decided to take the plunge and try it. On the initial play through I managed to make it through to about level 40 before running out of care to continue pushing forward. This is round and about the place most of us dropped out of it. Largely it was the chaos that is GW2 group combat that soured the milk for me.

All of that said… I want to see the magic that others see in this game. So every few months I patch it up and give it another try. I have always prided myself in being able to see the good in something despite its flaws, and as a result it drives me absolutely insane that I cannot grasp why people love this game. I don’t want the game to change to fit my desires, so after a bit of playtime every few months we agree to disagree and I end up uninstalling it again. Other than the chaotic game play, there is just something about the game that feels largely pointless… and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I love faffing about as much as the next person, and I do so happily in many other games… but there is just something about this games style of faffing that seems hollow.

I am not going to rage against this game and bash it for being bad… because it very obviously is NOT bad if so many people seem to be enjoying themselves. It is just not a game for me. I don’t pretend to believe that I could have built it better, nor would I even know where to start to make it feel more like a game I would want to play. So I guess in writing this… I want to show that it is perfectly okay to not like the game that everyone else likes. In doing so you can not like it, but also not seek to spoil the fun of those who really do enjoy it. There are a long list of games that I just don’t “grok” for one reason or another, but it is okay. They exist, and people like them… and it is just fine for me not to.

Savior of the Heavens

Last night I finished my play through of Diablo 3 this time on Hard mode. I am not sure why, but for whatever reason I prefer to level my characters linearly. I know I can jump around a bit after beating the game ages ago on my Monk, but it seems pleasing to see the story play out in front of me as I trudge through it. Last night I played with a handful of friends, and managed to get a few nice legendary drops. Traditionally I have stuck with dual wield, because in general I prefer that in most games. However last night I managed to get an early 50s version of the Zweihander and it good enough to get me to abandon my dual wielding ways… at least temporarily.

I am pretty sure at some point I flipped a slider and the game decided I needed “more spikey bits”, as I now am this bladed lord of death. The appearance is growing on me, and when you see it in small form on screen I look a bit like I imagined the Shrike looking from the Hyperion series. Upon defeating Diablo I promptly restarted the game, this time bumping the difficulty up to expert. As a result I have had to tweak my build a bit to add in a bit more survival. It is not quite as faceroll as it was during my run through Hard. Mostly I am noticing that my healbot spec Templar is starting to struggle to keep up, or at least allowing me to drop quite a bit before topping me back off. Wondering if this will change as I upgrade his gear a bit. I have been trying to keep it upgraded, mostly with my handmedowns.

At the close of the night I managed to ding 56, so hopefully tonight I should be able to finish off my push to get this character to 60. At this point, I can’t really see playing up another character until the crusader. I am sure the Witchdoctor, Demon Hunter and Wizard are cool in their own way… but each of them is very much a ranged/finger wiggler class. They are just not the type of character I enjoy playing. I realize you can tweak them a bit to make them play in different ways, but at the core they will still be more glass cannonish than I care to play. I enjoy tanks and tanky dps… and I feel like the Barbarian, Monk and Crusader fit that bill just fine. If I continue to struggle a bit I might switch to a sword/board build on my Barbarian as I have done in the past. For the time being it is working, but I am having to finally start using my heal pots on elites and champions.

Steampowered Sunday Bioshock Contest

Just a quick reminder that I am running a contest of sorts to let you guys pick what I will be playing this Sunday for my Steampowered Sunday feature. The idea behind Steampowered Sunday is to get me to install and play a game from my steam backlog. Then I will write about the game play experience. Sometimes it is extremely glowing, other times not so much. This week I decided to mix things up a bit and post a google form that allows you guys to vote on which title I will be playing the following week. I have had a handful of votes to date, but I am really hoping for more. As of this morning it looks like if nothing changes I will be playing Alan Wake. Tomorrow when I blog I will be tabulating the results and declaring a winning game.

Additionally to make this more interesting, I have decided to use this as a way to get rid of some of the duplicates I have in steam and have gotten through the various indie bundles. This week I will be giving away a copy of the original Bioshock for Steam. So when you vote, make sure you let me know if you want to be entered in the running for the copy of Bioshock. If so make sure you include your steam id in the form. Saturday morning when I blog I will be picking a winner for this as well and sending off the free game. So get out there and vote… and decide my Steampowered Sunday Fate.

Vote Here!