MMORPG

Chunky Robo Ranger

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Phantasy Star Online 2 – Original Xbox One

This weekend was one where I was all over the place on my gaming. There is a huge part of me that wants to be playing Phantasy Star Online 2 since several of the AggroChat crew are currently enthralled by it. The biggest problem I have is that I know how good this game looks on a PC and as a result I am constantly confronted by how awful it looks on my base Xbox One. I know at some point on the near horizon it will be releasing for PC and that the characters will be cross compatible. In theory I should be able to catch up without much issue, and all of this means that my desire to actually play is severely diminished. I did get to level 10 however before ultimately “noping out” of its chunky graphics.

Trials of Mana – Nintendo Switch

I also played a bit of Trials of Mana and progressed the story to the point of being able to my make very first class change choice. On Duran I went light side and became a Knight, on Riesz I went Dark to eventually become a crazy dragoon, and on Angela I went light to go Sorceress because the Dark “blood magic” route seemed like a trap. Still greatly enjoying this game but I am only really playing it before bed, and even then only until sleep claims me. The prolific appearance of golden angel statues seems to help me out in this mission as it never feels like I have to make it much further to get to a save point.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC – Cactuar Server

I’ve also been trying to ease my way back into Final Fantasy XIV, with minimal success. This is in part because my friends Bells and Zuu are now playing, and I want to be able to hang with them and run content as they get to various dungeons. The other side of this point is that an event is about to start today where you can farm moogle widgets and earn older mounts. I like mounts so it might be fun to poke around and farm up a bunch while the event is going on. Thalen in theory says he can craft a lot of the gear pieces that would potentially make my viable again, so here is hoping I can actually get back in the swing of things. I have no clue what the struggle is with this game, but it is real.

World of Warcraft – PC – The Scryers Server

On the World of Warcraft front, I managed to finish the Death Knight and am in the process of gearing him out. This makes my seventh character to level 120 since the Winds of Wisdom buff went active, and I went from having only a couple of characters horde side to play around to a pretty sizable stable of options. I am still not quite certain what I plan on “maining” come Shadowlands, but ultimately I have narrowed it down to a handful of options.

  • Warrior – This is my OG love as far as classes go, but ultimately it all depends upon how good tanking feels on it. Last expansion at the start tanking felt like I was being completely ineffective. The positive here is that I really do love Fury as well and gives me an enjoyable DPS alt for running content and raiding.
  • Demon Hunter – Once the Warrior failed out after getting it to 120, I rapidly leveled a Demon Hunter because tanking felt extremely strong. Over the course of the Battle For Azeroth expansion, I have come to really enjoy it.. but I do not really love DPSing on it.
  • Paladin – After leveling a Paladin on both Alliance and Horde sides, I have really come to love the class. Tanking feels great and I have always loved Ret as a dps spec. This even would give me the option of healing… which admittedly will probably never happen but of the WoW options this was the only healer I could actually stand playing.
  • Death Knight – When I finally hung up my Warrior shield at the tail end of Wrath of the Lich king it was for playing the Death Knight and I “mained” this all through Cataclysm. Playing the Death Knight has made me remember what I loved about it, so it now is in the running as well.
World of Warcraft – PC – The Scryers Server

I legitimately have no clue what I am going to choose for a class, but at least for now I am somewhat leaning in the Paladin direction. As far as World of Warcraft projects going forward I will be working on finishing off the Monk since he is in his 80s. That would give me a 120 for every class but Priest, Shaman and Rogue which are not exactly favorites of mine. However I like playing all of them more than a Mage, so that is ultimately why I chose to boost that . Monk is fun, but not nearly as fun as leveling some of the other classes I have had in my stable so far. I should give Brewmaster another shot, but so far leveling as Windwalker has had a pretty high time to kill.

I am all over the place right now when it comes to my gaming habits and I guess for now that is perfectly fine. What have you all been up to over the last few weeks? What games do you find yourself drawn to? Leave me a note in the comments below.

An Undead Death Knight

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After yesterday’s totally important post, we are going right back to my regular nonsense. I am still playing an excessive amount of World of Warcraft and I am still very much finding it relaxing. At this point currently I am working on an Undead Death Knight and have just started on Frostfire Ridge in the Warlords of Draenor content. I mean I realize that Death Knights get a bit of a boost, but it feels like I am moving slowly because I opted to do Howling Fjord instead of Borean Tundra. While I like the look and feel of the Fjord so much better, I gotta say across the board Borean Tundra is just a better built zone. The objectives are more tightly clumped and there is way less travel time between them. The amount of time I spent flying halfway across the zone in Howling Fjord was significant.

I am somewhat obsessed with leveling an army of Horde characters while this buff is active. One important note is that at the beginning of this process I had two characters sitting at 120, my Warrior and my Demon Hunter both of which were leveled during the early days of Battle for Azeroth. Now you can see I have a pretty formidable stable with effectively five classes missing… Death Knight and Monk that I have already made progress on and then Priest, Shaman and Rogue which are not exactly favorites of mine. For the sake of transparency I should state once again that I spent my boost on the Mage since that is my least favorite class to play, and it also serves as a handy bank alt given its teleportation properties and ability to rapidly deliver stuff to friend characters.

I am of course the consummate adult while going through the leveling process. This time I decided to write a word instead of just drawing a penis with my trail of gunpowder. Sadly it mostly translates as “Euck” but oh well an effort was made. I have been informed that this is client side only, so while I didn’t do this sort of nonsense when Warlords was relevant, I absolutely do now knowing it harms no one. I have to say, as much as I generally did not enjoy Warlords, it is a way better feeling expansion if you are playing the Horde. Additionally that intro sequence while frustrating because it is unskippable, is pretty freaking epic feeling. I feel it is some of the best crafted content in all of World of Warcraft, because it feels like you are playing through a movie for awhile. I’ve always loved the Borderlands style title cards introducing each of the Villains as you encounter them.

In other news I finished the process of unlocking Kul Tirrans on the Alliance side and I now have a potbellied Druid. I don’t love the Alliance content, not in the same way as I did the Zandalari content… but it is equally competent. The funny thing about Kul Tirrans, especially seeing mine… is that they just remind me of the Norn from Guild Wars. I have no interest in leveling another Druid right now, but I mostly chose it for class because it has freaking amazing shape shifted forms. I dig the whole Drust thing, but I am also a huge fan of my Worgen Druid so it would be real hard for me to pass up being a Werewolf. If they had Paladin as an option I would probably consider race changing Exeter over to a Kul Tirran, but alas that is not a thing. Mostly I am just happy to have this done because this was the last thing that I absolutely had to be playing Alliance to complete. I can finish out the rest of the requirements for the Mechagnomes from my horde characters.

The above shot is just something I am posting because I thought it was really cool. I am not exactly sure where I was flying from, but I was headed over to the Dark Portal and this vignette in the distance just looked really cool. Sadly I never could time my screenshot for when one of the lightning flashes happened. There are times when this game still looks really pretty even though the engine at times feels a little dated. The world really is massive at this point, and while we spend most our time zipping around in portals… it is occasionally nice to manually fly over top of it to see vistas like this one.

Fel Flames and Motivations

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This morning’s post is likely going to be disjointed because I did not get quality sleep last night. Over the last week I have almost rediscovered the practice of farming transmog gear from old raids. Largely I have been focused on the Warlords of Draenor raids, and more specifically Mythic Hellfire Citadel and Mythic Blackrock Foundry. I have two 120 Paladins and 1 120 Warrior that I have been running in an attempt to collect the various cosmetic bits of these raids. The Tier 18 Warrior set for example is one of my favorite designs as it is a call back to the Wrath set from Blackwing Lair. At some point I hope to collect all of the appearance options for it.

The influx of new gear has lead me to craft a new transmog for my Horde Paladin. Largely this came about by finding a really cool mace and a really cool shield and trying to make something that works with it. The funny thing about this transmog is that I don’t believe ANY of the pieces actually are from the same set. Luckily however any time “fel” is involved, it is highly likely that they will also have gold highlights, which effectively glue together a bunch of disparate pieces. We all know the cosmetic game is the real game, and since I have the Transmog Yak, I find myself trying to stay Transmogged as much as humanly possible. Wearing armor that doesn’t look like crap, greatly enhances my enjoyment in the game.

Another thing I noticed in my travels is just how often the Horde still has control of Wintergrasp. Lets talk really quickly about things that frustrate me from the Wrath era. Vault of Archavon is a fun little raid that never actually drops any loot that the character I happen to be farming it on can use. However when I popped open the map earlier I was reminded of how much it bugged me that the layout was not symmetrical. It absolutely looks like there should have been another wing to open up on the upper left hand side. Similarly it bugs me that there are portals underneath Wyrmrest Temple that don’t go anywhere. There are just little areas of the world that FEEL like they should have something going on, but don’t which has always felt like a bit of a lost opportunity.

Another thing that has been floating around the blogosphere during Blapril is the Quantic Foundry gamer motivation profile. If you are so inclined you can check out my full profile here. So there are aspects that surprise me. I would have expected that my social component would be significantly higher, but in truth I spend a lot of time organizing communities… and then spending my actual time in game soloing. In fact soloing is my default stance these days and it is a rarity that I actually group up with another human being, which is partially desire and partially circumstance that voice chat does not work while playing through parsec. I absolutely agree with the Mastery rating because I rarely give a shit if I am actually good at something, and I really don’t have much of a competitive streak. Immersion and Creativity both track I guess, and I do have a pretty strong leaning towards action oriented things.

If we dive into the secondary motivations it feels a little more nuanced. I am absolutely not a completionist, and I rarely finish video games. My community score is real strong, which also makes a lot of sense given my lack of a competitive nature. I also really like feeling strong… see me soloing two expansion old raid content for fun and profit and similarly I could care less about a challenge. The fantasy vs story thing… at first confused me until I read their definitions and again I mostly agree with it. I care more about the lore of a world and being able to create MY character in than world, than the continuity of a story being told with a character that I did not choose. I also really like blowing things up… though I would not necessarily call myself an “agent of chaos and destruction” as they describe it. When playing Mass Effect I only ever choose the renegade option when it is really warranted… like punching reporters.

So the question is then, how good is it at recommending games. When choosing the “Balanced” option It spit out the following list for me. All of these are games that I own and have talked about more than once on this blog. They are also all games that I greatly enjoyed for one reason or another. When flipping things to the “Niche” pick, it again spit out a list of games that I largely already have played and enjoyed including some picks like The Legend of Dragoon, which is one of my favorite PlayStation era RPGs. It also grabbed Grim Dawn, which I have written about at length and is probably one of my favorite Diablo 2 style games. It highly suggests Slime Rancher and Hellblade: Sensua’s Sacrifice which are games I own but have never played, so maybe I need to give them a try soon.

Do I think this is valuable and something I should actually follow? Probably not. Notice that the absolutely highest recommendation is only a 3.3, and there are other games that appear that I am way more into like Diablo III that only ranked 1.7. The problem with trying to boil down a game to a number is the fact that not every person plays every game the same way. You take an MMORPG, and there are dozens if not hundreds of different patterns to follow while playing it, and all of them can bring with them immense enjoyment to the player. I like farming older raids so I can look cool in World of Warcraft, and that isn’t exactly a standard pattern of play for a lot of players, but it also really makes me happy when I am doing it. Games are ultimately to nuanced of an experience to really be boiled down to a set of specific statistics, however I do think this does a reasonable job at giving recommendations in spite of all of this.

Coin Weight Is Bad

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Before I dig into this mornings topic I feel like I need to preface it a bit. I really want Pantheon Rise of the Fallen to succeed. The release of new Western MMORPGs that are not highly focused on becoming pvp kill boxes is an extreme rarity. The Everquestian and Warcraftian dynasties are barren. It is a fevered dream for me to someday tuck into a brand new game that doesn’t involve playing k-pop idols in heavy armor. What I actually want is something more akin to a World of Warcraft or a Lord of the Rings Online that takes advantage of all of the niceties of everything we have learned in the last twenty years of gaming. However what I am apparently getting instead is a love song to the pain filled days of Everquest.

That is not to say I didn’t know this going into following Pantheon. This is a game created by the late Brad McQuaid. I also feel like I should preface once again that I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I should have known with crystal clarity what I was in for. Brad has effectively developed the same game three times, each time trying to realize his original vision with a higher level of fidelity. You have the original Everquest that was severely limited by technological constraints. Next up was Vanguard that appeared to go through some severe development time constraints of needing to push forward to market in an incomplete state. Lastly you have Pantheon which seemed like a final attempt to make good on what he was seeing inside of his head but never quite capable of realizing in digital form.

I feel like another important statement is that both Everquest and Vanguard ultimately eased up on the harsh restrictions that were originally placed on the player on both games. Everquest made itself considerably more casual friendly with the introduction of graveyards that summon bodies, a massive teleportation network that allows players to move around more quickly and freely, and even the introduction of instanced content that was more casual friendly. In an effort to find an audience, Vanguard went through a lot of more casual player friendly changes as it struggled to stay afloat. I remember playing it launch and deeming it just not very fun, when I was used to World of Warcraft at the time. I went back considerably later towards the end of its life cycle and had a blast running around and exploring Telon.

Coin weight should matter, and we’ve decided to go that direction

Joppa – Pantheon Creative Director

However all of the above doesn’t exactly explain why I am writing about Pantheon this morning. Yesterday while casually browsing the interwebs I stumbled onto a blurb from MassivelyOp talking about the decision to add coin weight into the game. For those who were not from that era of gaming, back during the Everquest days, the coin you were carrying had weight to it and you regularly needed to dump coin in the bank to keep from being encumbered. For those poor monk players they were constantly fighting a losing battle trying to keep their total item carry down below a specific weight number in order to keep from being debuffed. It was a bad idea then and it is a bad idea now. By the time of Dark Age of Camleot, the immediate successor to Everquest, coin weight had been abandoned and effectively has been gone from the genre ever sense.

The fact that this community wants coin weight back in the game tells me that they have a deeply masochistic streak. I think more than anything it also sets a tone for the type of game that Pantheon is trying to be. If you have coin weight then you are likely probably also going to have full item loss on death and corpse recovery, and on top of that the ability to lose levels. Essentially it sets a tone for a game that I really don’t want to personally play, because I would never freely return to a game that put me in the sort of negative positions that Everquest did. I don’t want to get those real world calls on a Sunday afternoon begging me to log in and resurrect a corpse because they had lost their level and needed the experience back and it was just about to rot. I also have no nostalgia for twelve hour long runs in Fear, Hate or the Plane of Sky.

They’re looking for people with the time and dedication of college students but appealing to the nostalgia of middle-aged gamers who no longer have that kind of time.

Tipa – via Tweet

I think last night Tipa hit the nail on the head and phrased my thoughts in a much more concise manner. Pantheon is being built for an imaginary demographic, that has the tastes of a 40 something but the free time and real world constraints of a teenager. I also wonder if this is the video game equivalent of a midlife crisis… the desire to recapture the glory of our past adventures in a modern game without having the logic to understand that is a bygone era. We put up with a lot of these punishing design patterns, not because we loved them… but because there was no other game out there for us to be playing that offered the same kind of experience. The critical thing we have now that we lacked then is the freedom of choice and a wealth of options that we could be playing that asks significantly less of our time.

What I want is a game that feels like Everquest felt like, without actually making me re-live the trauma of the past. I also want that game to be delivered with all of the knowledge we have learned in the two decades worth of online gaming that have happened between now and then. I am somewhat saddened by the fact that Pantheon won’t be that game. However I am more saddened by the fact that Pantheon is effectively being built for an audience that I question actually existing. Sure there is a community of backers and folks like Cohh Carnage fueling this fire, but I have also experienced this all a number of times as games launched. Players will absolutely tell you with utter conviction that they want this thing today, and then post launch tell you how it didn’t end up feeling as good as they thought it would. Players ultimately don’t know what they want.

What I do however know for certain is that I don’t have the room in my life that demands total control of my play time, and the requirement to always be grouped with other players. Sure folks will tell you that you can solo just fine on certain classes… as someone who tried to solo level a Cleric in the original Everquest, I can tell you that really is no life at all. The truth is I didn’t really have the time to play Everquest the first time around. However I was so hungry for that type of experience that I was willing to risk marital strife in order to get that experience. I know more than one marriage that ended over that game and the time constraints placed upon its players. While “coin weight” really isn’t as big of a deal as I am probably making it out to be, for me it is emblematic of a “vision” that I want no part of. I feel like we have probably swung too far in the direction of player convenience to make interesting game decisions. However I feel like this reaction is way too far in the other direction.