MMORPG Archives - Page 223 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tamriel Revisted

February 6, 2016 by Belghast

Point Click

Yesterday I kept being reminded by co-workers of just how horrible I sounded, so after I finished with my critical meetings I took off and headed home around 12:30. After eating a hastily grabbed lunch of convenience store pizza… I collapsed on the sofa trying to force fluids while finding something comforting to watch. I guess my version of comforting is a little different than most people, because I wound up watching the entire first season run of Rick and Morty. Granted I have watched a lot of this show, but it turns out there were a handful of episodes that I missed when they originally aired. Whatever this thing is that I caught down south, it is very much kicking my ass. Blogging has been a real struggle because it is very difficult to string thoughts together into enough of a cohesive mass to make into a blog post. It is my will along that I am committing fingers to keyboard and producing words… because I simply do not want the streak to stop. I am a couple of months away from my official three year anniversary on the whole daily blogging thing, and the seventh anniversary of my blog. So until I hit that at the very least, I will keep up doing the daily thing even if I have to struggle to make words happen.

Lately my crutch while sick has been Diablo 3, but I feel like I am running out of things I care to do right now. I’ve gotten the seasonal rewards, but more than anything I am farming content in the hopes of getting the last few items I need to drop for the build I am working towards. Clearing regular rifts and doing bounties is the sort of mindless interaction that works well when I am sick, but I am quickly reaching the point where I am questioning why I am bothering? The other side mission has been to gear my monk, but once I found out from several folks that you only get one set of gear per season…. a lot of my gusto was lost. I thought I would be able to go kill the bosses I needed to get my first set of gear, on my second character and be up and running and clearing content pretty quickly. Alas that is very much not the case, and my best option is to ride along with Rae who is regularly clearing TX stuff… but honestly after being able to participate, going back to just having to pray to stay alive… makes it pretty uninteresting. Yesterday my big problem was the fact that I had a very needy game install going on in the background, that kept slowing down my teleportation to the point that the battle.net would disconnect me before actually ending up in zone with Rae.

Worst Install

On a whim yesterday afternoon around 1 pm, I started installing The Elder Scrolls Online. I guess I had forgotten just how painful the install process was, because it took until roughly 8 pm for it to finally complete. During the last hour of that time I was pretty much unable to play anything else on my laptop. The thing is… I have installed much larger games in far less time…. so I have to fault the launcher for just how painfully slow it was going. I mean I say this as someone who was installing to a laptop that is using a AC Wireless card capable of 650 MB connection on a total internet connection that generally runs around 150 MB down. I should have been able to completely saturate my pipe and had this game down in short order… but it took quite literally 7 hours to finally get installed. Now for a good chunk of that time I was still playing Diablo 3 so that could have been slowing things down… but the total download was tortuously slow. The last hour or so it was thrashing my hard drive badly enough that I really could not do anything else functional on the machine, so I wound up mostly fiddling around on my phone while watching television. The problem with ESO was that I honestly can’t remember why we stopped playing, other than the fact that one by one we just stopped until I was one of the last four or so people still active. For me I guess the Veteran game system was so bloody boring because it felt like I was no longer making reasonable process. I made it roughly two zones into the Aldmeri campaign, when finally my desire to keep playing petered out.

I guess recently I had been curious about what was going on in game, and they have done a few high profile DLC releases. So around 8:30 last night I finally was able to log in and poke around. Firstly I have to say I guess playing this game for roughly two years in testing… means that I have some serious muscle memory going on. While I had to reset all of my talent points, I can still for the most part remember exactly how I played it. All of the little things like dodging, and blocking attacks… came back without any effort and before long I was up and running and questing again. I feel like maybe this is the speed of game that I need right now. What I am struggling the most with in my current state is interacting with other human beings. I have been pretty much oblivious to twitter and slack since coming back from Pax South, and as a result I am kinda cocooning in my own little world again. Much like SWTOR…. ESO was a great single player game… and as a result I found myself really enjoying questing around last night. That is of course until the nyquil kicked in and I simply couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer. I figure I will put in some more time today playing and maybe talk a bit about my experiences on AggroChat tonight. That is of course if I have any voice left. Right now my voice is pretty damned squeaky so I am thinking we might have to rely on someone else to do the bulk of the talking this evening.

Blade and Soul Impressions

January 22, 2016 by Belghast

Change of Plans

This morning I was all ready and prepared to go on an angry tear about the change to specs in World of Warcraft on Legion Alpha. Then I thought to myself… my blog has already hosted more than enough “I’m Angry at WoW” posts that I really did not need to add another one to the pile. I still think the idea is quite possibly the dumbest I have seen yet, but I figure if it does go in… I can either deal with it, or stop playing again and no amount of gnashing of my teeth is going to make a change. I have next to zero clout when it comes to things like that, so better just to ignore it for the moment and try not to get worked up over it. In the meantime however I finally was able to pop into Blade and Soul and give the game a proper try. I talked yesterday about some of my misgivings…. of which there were many, so the game started off on negative footing before I even entered. Last night my friend Liore mentioned that the newly added servers had no real queues, so as a result I ended up rolling a new version of Squirrelghast on that server. I am guessing that names are game wide, since I could not create a “Belghast” on Gunma the server I ended up rolling on. So while I will always probably think of it as Squirrelghast I am guessing technically I am some sort of black fox… but the tail is so fluffy and curvy that it reminds me of a squirrel. Also if I was being super pedantic about it… I would be Squirrelgrave since I ultimately had to go with Belgrave for the reboot character.

The game is shockingly charming… and I say shockingly… because I really did not expect much. The localization team has done an amazing job of shaping the story into something that I cared about. I admittedly cannot really remember any of the names, but the opening story arc involves you training at the Hongmoon academy under a guy that I am going to forever call “Dog Grandpa” because he is a Lyn and grandfatherly. Then a lady with a name that I also don’t remember so I am just going to call her “Evil Bayonetta” comes into the neighborhood and causes a ruckus. You watch her kill your fellow classmates, and find out that one of them…. that is pretty much exactly like Byakuya Kuchiki from Bleach… betrayed you for the special school scrolls. At this point Dog Grandpa transforms into Akuma from Street Fighter and whipping some ass, until Evil Bayonetta threatens your life… and he pays his own life and the blade he had been guarding to save you. At which point you get blasted off of magical sky castle place into the ocean and are found by a village guard captain that also just happens to be a former Hongmoon student. With this you begin your journey to be the best that ever was… and I am guessing we will travel to other towns… and meet other conspicuous former Hongmoon students that have life lessons to teach us. The entire game intro really does feel like watching Anime, and while I made up names for people… it was enjoyable and I did actually have some feels when Dog Grandpa sacrificed himself for my characters life.

Rise of Cricket

Honestly I have to say the game itself is really rather fun, or at least fun in the same ways that TERA was fun. The primary difference here is that the quests that you do seem to have some merit to them… rather than just being random grindy nonsense. The localization team has given the various people you meet, including the random peasants… personality and humor and it makes going off and fetching five healing salves or slaying 10 blackrams enjoyable. The mechanics work out really similar to TERA where your left mouse button is used for your resource builder/default attack, and your right mouse button is your resource spender. Then in addition to that you have various numbered special attacks and openers that you can use during battle, in addition to some quick time events that occur that allow you to for example stomp your enemy when they are knocked down. The combat feels really fluid and the animations are awesome. While I don’t normally go for that running on wires nonsense from kung fu movies…. when you sprint with your arms swept back… it just feels nice and when you do the whole glide thing in mid air it is surprisingly addicting. The game progresses smoothly and most interactions are doing using the F key which serves the purpose of the generic “interaction” key that some other games have. If you are used to TERA or Neverwinter or an “Action” MMO of the sort… then you should get accustomed to this game rapidly.

The world itself is gorgeous… and works well. Sure the textures are not always the best in the world… but the overall presentation “works”. I think what adds the most to this is the fact that the soundtrack itself is really well woven into the game. It changes regularly based on area of the world, so when you step foot near the graveyard it suddenly becomes more sinister, and when you are back in town it becomes a happy market tune. The only nuisance so far is the fact that a number of the areas are instanced, and there is a slight hitch when you zone into them. I am not sure if this is due to server load, or if there will always be this little hitch but it gets frustrating at times. Some areas are completely seamless, so I am guessing this is mostly happening where there are phasing or in a location where the actors change frequently. For example the Mayors Office or the Healers building… are instanced… but in both cases I have had several different interactions in those buildings. Its a quirk and you get used to it, but just something to expect. There also seems to be quite a bit of delay on waiting for NPCs to load in on your screen when you first arrive in an area, but this is nothing worse than the stuff I am used to dealing with in WoW.

Reservations

So far I am enjoying myself, but not sure if I am enjoying myself enough to actually spend money. Nor am I really certain how long I will remain playing. I was plenty fine with logging out and playing some Warframe after a few hours of gameplay, knowing that I would likely not make it through the queues again that night. So when you contrast that with a game like Final Fantasy XIV when we played at launch…. and I got so damned angry about the prospect of ever having to log out and fight the login boss again… that tells you it was enjoyable but nothing world shattering. There is also a lot of silly bullshit that is happening in the game that is super cringeworthy. When you first meet the character of Namsoyoo above, you get the impression that she is a very young girl… then when it pans out for the first time you see her wearing some sort of gauze based dress with insane anti-gravity boobs. The games bread and butter seems to be gratuitous T&A action in a way not dissimilar from the Dead or Alive franchise. All of this is sad, because the game and the localization are actually rather good… and don’t really need the oversexed window dressing. Now I have yet to run into super insidious, but right now it just seems a little much like somewhere the original artists were blushing and going “tee hee hee boobies”.

The game certainly has some character, and the first time you meet a really important character you get this cool cinematic intro thing…. which unfortunately has these insanely pixelated fonts that send my eye twitching like mad. I mean I realize that this game has been out since 2012… but we had better computers than that back then right? As far as performance… I am running this at 1080p on my GTX 960 card with pretty much everything cranked up as far as I can tell because their sliders are also somewhat nonsense, and I am getting a smooth 60 fps all of the time with little or no dips, so I am guessing the game will run smoothly on a toaster. So long as I focus on Squirrelghast I am pretty happy playing the game and being an adorable but super serious blade dancer. The other big negative right now is that everyone that I know seems to be spread out pretty evenly among the servers. However the gold spam is so horrible that honestly I am completely oblivious to the fact that chat even exists, so if someone were trying to message me and have conversations I wouldn’t notice. I have this feeling that Blade and Soul is going to be a very solo experience for me, and one that I will work out of my system in a few weeks, rather than a game I am going to set down roots. However if you are looking for a pretty fun action based MMO, you might give it a look. I didn’t expect anything… but enjoyed a couple of hours of running amok in this pretty landscape, and I suspect that if you also go into it with similarly lowered expectations you might enjoy yourself too.

Squirrelghast

January 21, 2016 by Belghast

Flak Cannon Time

When it comes to playing Warframe I have quite literally spent almost 99% of my time playing the game…. in a full or partial group. This greatly colors my feelings about the game, and in truth it has allowed me to play in a super inefficient manner. Last night we had several group missions and then when Tam went to class and Ashgar went to bed… it just kinda broke up and never reformed in spite of us having several people there. Instead of grouping I opted to start working on some of the missions I had not actually unlocked, and I have to say… I am pretty bad at this game. At the very least my chosen play style is not exactly a solo friendly play style. When I am playing my Excalibur with a Bow…. it works great, because I can sneak around and get a bunch of stealth kills. However last night I was trying to level my Atlas with a Braton… and the ability to stealth kill anything was non-existent. In truth I feel like most of the problem is the fact that I have yet to really sort out how I want to mod anything. At some point I need to spend an entire evening leveling mods, and deciding which ones work best with which weapons.

On the positive side of things, I did manage to finish up all of the sub components of the Rhino Prime and now simply have to wait the 72 hours crafting time to get it. I also managed to finish up the Drakgoon Flak Cannon last night, so I spent some time playing with that as well. I keep calling it a Flak Cannon because it very much reminds me of the Flak Cannon from Quake 3. At close range it can be fired like a shotgun, but if you charge up the attack it can be fired from a much longer range and still be effective. I am digging it quite a bit… and managed to have quite a bit of good luck with it running some missions. I still think that the Strun is probably a better choice for a charge in and sword damage playstyle like I tend to favor, which is something that Ashgar suggested. For the time being I am having a blast with this weapon…. and yes that pun was intended. The other thing I did last night was start building a Boltor rifle, to see if I like that as was suggested to me by Scarybooster. I mean in theory I could have gone shopping for a Boltor prime, but I happened to have all of the crafting mats available to make one without really dipping low in anything. I guess tonight I will give it a shot and see what I think about it.

Blade and Soul

Right now the new hotness at least among the blogosphere seems to be Blade and Soul, which just launched this week. In fact at this moment it seems like unless you are paying for the game, it is highly unlikely that you are going to actually get to play it. My twitter timeline has been full of folks posting pictures of the insane queue times just trying to log in. The other big problem that I have seen is that it seems like no one is actually playing on the same server. I did a few quick queries and it seemed like everyone I know is playing on completely different servers. I had no real interest in this game prior to launch, and honestly…. there isn’t much about it after launch that interests me. That said…. since it is a freemium game I have this overwhelming desire to at least give it a shot. I have to admit I have some pretty severe biases against Korean MMO art styles. There is just something about the art aesthetic that annoys me… the cloyingly pretty men, and the insane “Jessica Rabbit” style women… its just not my thing.

The positive is that there is a Lalafell like race in Blade and Soul so I decided to try and focus instead on the maximum cuteness potential of that. The problem there is… it just isn’t as good as a Lalafell. I created what I am dubbing Squirrelghast on the Old Man Cho server…. simply because I liked the name. At some point if I end up liking the game I will try and sort out another server to roll on that actually has people I know. The only negative is that I have yet to get any further than character creation because I end up getting dumped into a massive queue… and decided that I would simply rather play Warframe or Diablo 3. It is my hope that over the weekend I will be able to get in and give the game a proper try. The only thing I really know about it from clips is that it seems to be an MMO about the whole flying wire “crouching tiger hidden dragon” style of combat. These movies never really appealed to me either, because they just felt so over the top silly to see someone calmly flying across the screen. I’ve heard however that the localization job that Carbine did on this title was really damned good, and much like Final Fantasy XIV they slipped in a ton of cultural references. If for no reason other than that… I kinda want to play it. I really love the folks at Carbine and they seem to do a great job with the games under their care, so it is my hope that I will be charmed enough by the localization effort to overlook all the things I don’t care for.

Imposters and Shaman

January 6, 2016 by Belghast

Still Adjusting

The last couple of nights, by the time I got home from work I was so irrationally tired. I am sure it is largely just me trying to get adjusted to waking up at 5 in the morning again, but whatever the case it is annoying as hell. Last night I was so out of it, that I didn’t even cook a “real” dinner but instead simply made a peanut butter sandwich and then proceeded to sit on the couch fighting desperately not to fall asleep. By the time my wife got home around 7ish I had managed to get a second wind and started actually functioning, or at least a mental state closer to functional. I am hoping by the time I hit the weekend, I will have worked out all of the differences in sleep patterns and next week will be easier. What does not really help is the fact that upon coming back Monday it has been crisis central at work. We’ve dealt with a project that is threatening to go off the rails, a virus scare, and processing some crucial year end/beginning of year things. I guess that is always the case after coming back from Christmas break. Folks stop really functioning around Thanksgiving and all of that work gets pushed until we all get back that Monday after New Years. I have a friend that is smart in that he tends to take his vacation after the first instead of connecting the dots between Christmas and New Years like most of us do. That means he misses most of this insanity.

The only real positive is it feels like everyone else out there is struggling with 2016, so at least we can share the misery together. Making matters worse is that my boss is fairly sick, and I am now paranoid that I am coming down with it. The thing is… I would happily go to bed tonight around 8pm if I thought I would actually be able to sleep all the way through the night. My fear is that I would go to sleep, and then wake up at midnight completely unable to get back to sleep. There is just too much stuff to do right now so I feel like I cannot afford to get sick. There are projects that have to be completed, and others that need to get started. I am dealing with some of the most extreme impostor syndrome I have in a very long time, because I feel like I should be able to juggle all of this madness better. Its kinda shit walking around for days paranoid that someone is going to find out that you are a fraud, and that you really don’t know anything… all the while you are very clearly doing complex things that negate the notion that you are a fraud. Brains are dumb. If I could figure out how to negate the effects of this… and also the weird panic freak outs that I have been having life would be awesome. The other solution that I would love to fix is the fact that regardless of how tired I seem to be sitting on the couch, the moment I put head to pillow I am either wide awake or deluged by a panic attack.

Pushing Alts

Once I finished Draenor Pathfinder, I was hit with this feeling of… “Hey! You should finish some more alts!”. As a result I started in pushing up my Draenei Paladin Exeter, and as of last night I managed to hit level 100. I am honestly shocked at just how fast leveling goes when you can fly. Now one would think that maybe this would tip me to the other side of the “flying in draenor” discussion, but not really. When I leveled three characters to 100 without flight, the experience felt more “earned” if that makes sense. The time spent felt like I was actually living in those zones, rather than just flitting from point to point dropping off this or that item. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful now for the ability to level faster… because three characters was about the right amount of time that I wish to spend in these zones. The other characters, I just want to push as fast as humanly possible. Ultimately I started doing this Alliance side again because I needed a break from the Old World Horde leveling path. After rapidly pushing a druid to 40 over Christmas break, it felt “too soon” when I returned to working on my Orc Warlock. In theory at some point soon I might just end up transferring that druid to The Scryers so that I can play it with the regular crew of people that I play horde with. It seems silly to transfer a sub 60 character, but I really don’t want to push a new character through those zones that quickly. I need to do some more research into the horde potential zones, because in just following the adventure guide it seems to always direct me to the same places. Mostly I want to sort out how to get down the Grom’gol path and into Stranglethorn Vale.

In the meantime while on this break from Horde, I think I am going to work on my Dwarven Shaman. I have an army of still to be leveled to 100 post 90 characters… and this one is sitting at 91. I think in theory I can probably wrap him up quickly and make some movement over the weekend. Mostly what tipped him over the edge was a discussion with some friends that indirectly influenced me. Tam was talking about specs that became “better” than others… and mentioned some period of time when Enhancement was the bees knees. Which made me think about how Enhancement is the only Shaman spec I can really play… which made me remember how much I actually liked playing it. So as a result I think I am going to push the dorf for a bit and see how close I get to 100 before getting that urge to play Horde again. Largely I think it would be kinda awesome if I was able to push all of my characters to 100 before Legion…. but given how many horde characters are not even 20 yet… that is going to be a very tall order. In the meantime I am trying to do whatever feels the best, and trying to sort out how to stop feeling so damned tired all the time. Today is better than yesterday… and that was better than Monday…. so I feel like it is a gradual thing. With time I will get back used to this 5 am crap… and will continue onward being a super responsible adult type person.