MMORPG Archives - Page 234 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Legacy Lacking

October 19, 2015 by Belghast

Fine with Failure

I have come to accept the fact that there is no way in hell I am going to manage to finish all of the class story lines before tomorrow, when Knights of the Fallen Empire launches. I allowed myself to get massively distracted by Destiny, and for the most part I am okay with this. Last night I hit the start of Act 3 on my Sith Sorcerer and I should be able to wrap that up tonight if I am lucky. That leaves only the agent to play, and as a friend suggested last night… it might be interesting to see what leveling is like post KotFE. In truth while I am excited for this expansion, I am not just rushing headlong into the content. I still have yet to complete Shadows of Revan on any of my characters, and while my Jedi Guardian is sitting at 57… I have no real desire to rush through that. Honestly at this point I might ding the new level cap before I even set foot into the new chapters content. I want to play, but I am not feeling like I have to rush ahead, since really I am not trying to keep up with anyone. That normally is why I push so hard at the beginning of an expansion, is that I feel like I am obligated to grind my way to the top of the heap so I will be available for tanking as we level. That ended up in a small bit of burnout recently with Heavensward, so with SWTOR since I am now enjoying it again… I want to futz around a bit.

My biggest complaint about this game is shared with party based role-playing games in general. Nothing frustrates me more than anything, when the game forces me to take a specific character on a mission. This happened last night with Talos, and while I like the companion just fine… a healer and a dps/healer grouped together is not exactly the best mix in the world. I had to stop what I was doing in the middle of this mission, go back to the fleet, upgrade my mods and only then was I able to keep myself alive during a section where I am essentially soloing while Talos fiddles with something in a tomb. I tend to get really connected to a specific group of characters, and when the game forces me to mix that up I get frustrated. I am one of those people that plays Dragon Age with the same party every time, and never switches to use any of the others except begrudgingly when the game makes me do it. I like building a small tight knit team and then using everyone else for crew missions. The worst moment in Dragon Age was the bit where you have to split up and use all of your companions… only half of which had anything other than their starting gear. I had to load back in from a previous save and go out of my way to figure out how best to gear them all. It was pretty much the opposite of fun, and that is how I feel in SWTOR when I am forced to use a specific companion pairing for a specific mission.

The Distraction

The reason why I am mostly okay with not hitting my goal is because I have been having a silly amount of fun playing Destiny. Over the weekend I spent some more time working on my Hunter, which I hope to also get to 40 at some point soonish. After playing around a bit on the Warlock, I decided to use my boost to level 25 on the Hunter instead… because Blade Dancer seems like a really fun spec. I also just like the look and feel of the hunter better than the warlock, and it makes me a bit jealous that my Titan doesn’t have a knife to stab things with instead of just punch them. At this point I am level 30, and considering starting the Taken King content proper soonish if for no reason other than to unlock the Dreadnought for patrols. Ultimately I want to be able to get all of my characters up there in level so that I can share the benefit of having multiple near cap characters. A lot of the cooldowns can go faster if you can swap an item back and forth between your characters. The Agonarch runes can gain one charge per day per character, so if you bank the item you can pop on another character and gain another charge… ultimately getting special event access faster.

I am still very much in the slogging phase of the game, and I have been hovering around the 290 mark for over a week now. Ultimately my only way out is to start chain running Heroic Strikes, but I just have not been able to bring myself to do that. I am having fun with the game, and I am afraid pushing that hard is going to ultimately break it for me. When I start to resent the RNG, or resent the other players… I know my fun time with Destiny will be over. So I am sitting in this realm of finding enjoyment in the little moment to moment gameplay and trying to ignore the larger picture almost entirely. There is part of me that would love to see the raid… but a whole other part of me that doesn’t want to take that hit of heroine. I know what I am like when I start chasing raid drops… I approach them with a single minded determination and focus that ultimately leads to me being completely hollow as a result. I obsess over gearing… and grind myself into the ground destroying whatever enjoyment I had for the game in the process. I tried really hard not to do this with Heavensward, and in part it is why I have been taking this break and playing other games in the process. My hope is that by the time we end up going back to Final Fantasy XIV it will feel fresh and enjoyable again with the launch of the 3.1 patch. Similarly though I am trying to keep Destiny and SWTOR as enjoyable as I can for the time being… and it seems like not caring too much about reaching a particular destination is my way for doing that.

Week in Gaming 10/18/2015

October 18, 2015 by Belghast

One Track Mind

This week was quite literally… all about Destiny. We have a trio of myself, Damai, and Saldonas aka Carthuun that have been running around together quite a bit. Alternately I have been spending some time with Euron as well when we can manage to meet up, and both “actually” be on at the same time instead of afking for long periods of time and leaving our Playstation 4 on while connected to Destiny. Of note… if you do not exit out of Destiny before walking away, your PS4 will not fully go to sleep. I know I have frustrated many people on my friends list who tried to invite me to parties at all hours of the day… when I am not actually at my console. I have really been so into the PS4 this week that last night when we recorded the podcast, it was my first time on voice chat and really my PC since last Sunday. Anyways… on with the games!

Rift – Primal Urges

This week on a whim I decided to try and win one of the Wilds Packs being given away by Trion on their Twitter account. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time… and apparently choosing the right code to try. I opened the image that had six codes in it, and keyed it in quickly into my account and BAM… it gave me the Wilds Pack. I did not at first realize it but this was the big $100 pack of goodies, but the only negative so far is that it did not seem to give me ANY of the loyalty. Otherwise it would have pushed me from the Orange tier that I am currently on into the the Red. I put in a support ticket to ask, but my working theory is… that you get the loyalty for purchasing the pack, not for redeeming it. In any case I am more than happy to have a slew of free stuff including the new Primalist calling.

I have to say that mechanically it is really interesting. Instead of an energy or mana based mechanic, you have this push/pull mechanic that shifts your character between Fury and Cunning. Abilities that are scaled based on Fury push your bar closer to Cunning… and Cunning abilities push towards Fury. So you are constantly switching back and forth between the two stances and the gameplay feel reminds me quite a bit of the solar/lunar cycle of the old Boomkin. I say old Boomkin because I honestly have no clue if this push/pull thing is still in that class or not since I have not played one since Cataclysm. The calling itself is a leather wearing heavy weapon wielder, and so far I am digging it. As you can tell I shunned the tribal feel of the class and ended up making mine a steampunk dwarf. I’ve not really made it terribly far, but I have enjoyed the little bit I have played. I hope at some point soon I will devote a few days to getting really up close and personal with the calling.

Star Wars the Old Republic – Sith Happens

Last night during the podcast I returned to my Sith Inquisitor and am working on trying to finish it. I realize there is no way now that I will finish ALL of my classes before Tuesday, but I am at the end of Alderaan now and it seems like maybe if I can focus attention on it today I will be able to wrap this one up. I am still having a very love/hate relationship with the Sith Sorcerer. Namely I love that I can burn things down quickly with lightning, but hate how horrible of a healer I am if my companion ever seems to get into trouble. I switched from Khem Val to Treek and am enjoying that decision so far. Namely the big problem I run into is that my instinct is to burn harder as our health gets lower… and unlike my Scoundrel I cannot pull us out of quite the health deficit. So that means I really need to watch the companion health more closely and start healing sooner. As a result I end up dying quite a lot on this class, which just slows down the process. The storyline isn’t really “catching” me either… and I think largely the problem is I ended up choosing the finger-wiggler path instead of the melee path. Were I slashing things with my dual saber I would probably be enjoying this class significantly more. It does however give me a healing option Sith side… so I am just going to go with it for now and struggle through.

Destiny – Struggling for Exotics

I have reached the point in Destiny where those upgrades are no longer coming as quickly. I am now in the 290 light range and the engrams are being assholes to me. Right now the best source of gear seems to be doing Heroic Strikes, but our trio still struggles a bit with them. I realize that through running copious amounts of them that problem will solve itself. I also am frustrated by three of coins, which seem to be far less effective for me than others. It took me eight coins before I got my first exotic drop, and I am continuing to feed the beast and have not seen a second so far. I will say that the exotic that I did get was pretty sweet… Invective. I like shotguns, but my frustration has always been their relatively small ammo pool and clip size. Invective seems to take care of that for me, in that it regenerates ammunition at a fixed rate… which is actually pretty damned quick. I am finding it useful in strikes for when mobs get too close and personal.. and the fact that you can fire off the four rounds in full auto style… means you can absolutely shred a heroic minotaur for example. Then I shift back to my pulse rifle and by the time I need my shotgun again, the ammunition is back and ready to go. The only thing that could be better about it is if the chamber reloaded…. but that would probably be asking too much.

The funny thing is… I am in this place where I am really happy with my assortment of weapons. I just wish I had more high level blue fodder to feed to them to level them up. Right now I tend to mostly use… Hawksaw, Hung Jury, 1000 Yard Stare, Invective, and Sol Edge. I would love to have the exotic shards and fodder to power up my Hawkmoon… but I don’t have the steady income of exotics yet. I love that gun… but at 280 it is just too low right now to keep up with my other weapons. For the most part I am happy shifting back and forth between Hawksaw and Hung Jury… both of which are weapons that feel great and can precision shot pretty easily. The other big thing that happened this week is that I dug deep into the lore of Destiny, and if you ready yesterdays blog post you will see a bit write up about a series of videos. Last night I also ended up going on at length about this factor on AggroChat and probably bored the pants off of my co-hosts. What can I say… I am loving this universe and as I still continue to work my way through the missions I keep seeing more interesting parts of it. Destiny is one of those games that has grabbed hold of me and does not show signs of letting go. My hope is that I will be able to get it mostly out of my system by the time Fallout 4 launches…. because I want to spend some close and personal time with the wasteland.

MMOs Worth Playing: Rift

October 16, 2015October 16, 2015 by Belghast

Why This Series

Happy Friday and welcome to the second part of my “MMOs Worth Playing” series where at the end of the week I try and talk about an MMO that I think is very much worth playing. I thought this morning I would go into some of my thought processes as to why I am doing this. Lately there has been a lot of angst floating around about various games and the state of them, and while I can very much get riled up just like the next person there is a thought that goes through my head. Life is far too short to spend your leisure time playing something that makes you unhappy. There was a time when if you wanted to play an MMO you were pretty much shackled to one of a handful of games in order to get your fix. However now there are tons of really fun games out there, so it quite honestly would serve most people well to pop around and play several of them to see if any are a better fit. The other part of this is the fact that we really have no major new AAA MMOs looming on the horizon. It feels like the era of big releases is over, and instead we have a bunch of existing MMOs that are continuing to make awesome content. Popping back into an existing MMO to see how it has progressed is a great experience, because there is almost always a huge mountain of content waiting for you to explore.

For the Ascended

Rift holds a special place in my heart because it was the the game that first truly pulled me away from World of Warcraft. There were a lot of games that were heralded as the “WoW Killer” and for a time for me at least, it absolutely was. If there is a feature you have always wanted in an MMO, chances are Rift has it. But it was more than just cloning features of other games, it also finally figured out how to do public events in a manner that felt both epic and beneficial in the form of Rifts and Invasions that spawn from them. For a bit about the game setting I am going to draw directly from an early tidbit from the lore team.

Of all the worlds in the universe, only Telara was constructed entirely of sourcestone at an unprecedented nexus of the elemental planes. Elemental energies that come into contact with sourcestone become tangible, and Telara, so heavily influenced by every element, boasts incredible diversity and wealth. Telara’s resources are capable of providing its people endless prosperity, if only they could share the wealth and keep the world safe from those who would plunder it. Though Telara always knew its share of strife, the Blood Storm and the rifts brought entire new plateaus of horror, leading to the edge of oblivion.

Telara is a world that is constantly sieged by forces outside of itself. Over the years this has taken the form of the elemental dragons, and even gone so far as to seeing parts of these planes of existence merging into Telara itself as the various denizens of these alternate realities set up footholds like that of Hammerknell. The storytelling gets a little esoteric at times, but essentially you are thrust into this conflict on the brink of destruction. Most games set up an artificial narrative of good versus evil, and this has pretty much become the standard trope for MMOs. Rift however does something slightly different and gives you a conflict that feels very real and tangible to us… considering we too are constantly seeing the clash of Technology and Religion. The Defiant faction relies on very steampunk feeling technology to tame the wilds of Telara. The Guardian faction instead relies on the Vigil, a pantheon of gods that have long forsaken Telara but are now choosing to make their power known. You the player takes the role of an ascended, which essentially is vessel for the souls of past warriors that ultimately end up giving you your abilities. The opening scenes of the game take place on the eve of a final showdown with Regulos the Death Aspect, and you are sent back through time with the mission of trying to stop these events from unfolding.

Soul Keeper

The most central game play mechanic is that of the souls that you have access to. There were originally four callings in the game, and recently they added a fifth. These callings provide the basic feel for what would ultimately be your “class” in another game. Until the release of the Primalist these all had a clear division based on the armor type… Warrior was Heavy, Cleric was Chain, Rogue was Leather, and Mage was Cloth. The Primalist blends the lines a bit and uses Warrior like two handed weapons, but is a leather based calling. Inside of each of these callings is a number of souls, for the original Callings they each have 11 total souls… with 10 of them available for free and 1 each coming from the two expansions to the game. The Primalist class launched with 6 souls with more supposedly coming over the coming months. Souls are essentially what “WoW like” games would refer to as a Talent tree. The enjoyment of this game for me at least has always been that I get to mix and match any combination of these souls to craft a very personal feeling class out of it. Traditionally in Talent tree based games, there is a lot of “illusion of choice”, meaning that while you have lots of options there are really only a handful that are ever viable at a given time. While there are definitely flavor of the month builds in Rift, it seems like if you are dedicated enough to any given play style you can figure out a way to develop a character that has that feel.

The game has all sorts of trope that simply don’t exist in other games. Want to play a Mage Tank… Sure you can do that. Want to play a Warrior Healer… sure you can do that too. Want to play a brutal Smite Cleric… yup that is a thing too. The game gives you a template that allows you to carve out your own class. Any given “class” is a combination of three Soul trees, and when you slot a given soul it gives you certain abilities by default. You unlock additional abilities through spending points in that tree. You could quickly see how this might become tedious, especially given all of the options you have at your finger tips. It is absolutely possible to create a character with little to no synergy, and that does not play terribly well. To solve this the game gives you a series of templates that essentially direct you down a path that should be good for this or that… and as you hover over these pre-built templates they tell you the skill level of the class and what sorts of roles they can fill. Additionally the game has an extremely active player community, and unlike most games… there forums are actually a great place to find help and information. There are class guide forums that are an awesome place to start for looking at different specs and builds. I am not sure what the maximum is… but I have 8 different “roles” or specs that I can swap back and forth between freely allowing me to get super granular and create specific builds for very specific conditions.

Feature Rich

Calling this game feature rich is a bit of an understatement. Essentially if you can think of a feature that exists in any game… there is likely a version of this fine tuned and available inside of Rift. For the things that don’t exist the game has a fairly robust mod system… though honestly not quite as complete as say World of Warcraft or Wildstar. To keep players from “breaking” the game, you cannot override default features of the original game client. This means that a lot of things don’t integrate fully, but if you really want to use it… the mods are available. The game has quite possibly the best cosmetic gear system called “Wardrobes”. This allows the players to save up to fourty different outfits and change between them freely. Additionally the game uses an appearance collection system, freeing you from having to keep old gear just for the purpose of appearances. Additionally the dye system allows you to collect certain dyes and then apply them at will to any of your wardrobes, allowing you to change things up whenever the mood suits you without an additional cash sink. Similarly the game has an amazingly rich housing system in the form of pocket dimenions, allowing the players to customize area of the world. For example our guild house is the Stone Flask Tavern at Granite Falls in Stonefield, and Rae did some crazy stuff even making a hidden path up the waterfall with a little temple area up there. Essentially if you can dream it up, there are the tools inside of Rift to be able to create it, and the sorts of dimensions that are available are extremely wide and varied. The only negative is that there is no way to put resources in your dimension like you can in other games… so you can’t bank, auction, or craft there… which I realize is an effort to keep the capitol cities feeling vibrant.

The game also has one of the more robust mentoring systems allowing you to drop your level at will while wandering the world. This allows you to vary the difficulty level of a lot of the encounters, but more importantly allows you to hang out freely with your lower level friends without simply steamrolling the content for them. This mentoring system is also the core of one of the coolest features the game has called Instant Adventures. I talked a bit about this concept yesterday in my blog post, but essentially you can pop into game… join the Instant Adventure queue and you will be fed a series of objectives for you and a group of players to complete. What is awesome about this is it is a revisiting of a lot of quest objectives from a given area, but each sequence of objectives generally reaches a crescendo in the form of some sort of mini boss. While doing this you are racking up planar currency and loot bags that usually contain nice relevant level gear. When one sequence finishes you are teleported to a new area and the process begins again. If an area becomes active with a planar invasion, then the instant adventure suddenly shifts purpose to defeating that. It has been one of my favorite leveling means to go through early content, because you are constantly doing something… and at any point you can hop off the train and go do something a little less frantic. It does a great job of breaking up the monotony of following quest chains, and like dungeons just gives you another way to mix things up a bit.

Monetization

This is always the specter looming over a free to play game, is how exactly is it itemized and is it honestly playable for free… or do you really need to subscribe to enjoy it. This is always a difficult question for me to answer since I never actually play these games in free to play mode. From what I understand… if you play this game for free you get access to all 65 levels worth of content, the original four callings, and ten souls per calling. Instead of penalizing the players… Rift took the path of rewarding them for becoming “patrons” because once a game goes free to play.. that is after all what it becomes… a patronage system. As a Patron you get all sorts of perks, and don’t have to worry about any limitations to the number of dungeons you can run a day or anything of the sort. You also get a number of extremely generous boosts to experience, gold gain, as well as daily and weekly rewards that guarantee you at least one cash shop lockbox for free. The only thing that keeps it from being a perfect free to play implementation however is that you gain no monthly stipend of shop currency like you do in other games. With no way of gaining the shop currency in game, it ends up actually making the prices on items feel more reasonable since the game is not having to dilute the price to make up for the fact that players can grind out the currency in game.

Like most cash shops, there are tons of chase items that offer rare and limited time things that you can only acquire through lockboxes. Having these items that you want appear only in lockboxes can be an extremely frustrating proposition, especially if RNGesus is not on your side. To combat this not they offer these super limited time sales that allow you to buy the various mounts outright, and if you regularly watch the Friday twitch stream they often times give away these goodies as well there. So while there are a lot of trappings of the normal insidiousness of a cash shop… I feel like for the most part it is fair, and in truth you can largely ignore it completely. Honestly I would say this is one of the few games that you can literally play without spending a dime and be completely happy doing so. I’ve been subscribed off and on since the release of Rift in 2011… but there are also times where I have played this game for free here and there before picking back up my patronage. I can say I noticed zero difference in the game other than the fact that I was obviously missing my experience boost buffs. The game felt the same, and played the same… and that is just about as high of praise as I can give for a free to play experience. If you’ve never played Rift, you owe it to yourself to give it a try… especially since it can be played completely for free. It is either going to click with you or not, but in any case there is a lot to experience… and I have to say I really enjoy the early leveling experience especially. Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides… is admittedly a bit of a slog, but I keep thinking I must be missing some path that I should be taking there. In any case… I said a bunch of stuff about Rift, and I still definitely burn a candle for this game. Join me next Friday as I talk about another game.

The Mission System

October 15, 2015 by Belghast

Angst and Frustration

Yesterday World of Warcraft released an announcement about patch 6.2.3 and the twitters collectively lost their shit. Essentially the patch felt like a thinly veiled batch of carrots to try and string players along for a few more months. It also sent the sign that maybe just maybe Legion beta would not be ready for Blizzcon, and more than likely players are going to see another significant lag between expansions. I even joined in the frustration for a bit until I realized… that it no longer effects me. World of Warcraft is like a bad breakup, that you can still get upset over years after the fact. I am not playing the game any more, so honestly while I still have “disappointed parent” moments over the game that has not really lived up to its true potential in years… in no longer actually has any effect on my play time unless I let it. All of that said… it did start me thinking about a problem that most MMOs have. When a game gets to be as old as World of Warcraft it has just silly amounts of content available to the players, but most of it is largely invisible to players. I’ve talked about in the past how MMOs are horrible at telling players how to get to new content, but they do an even worse job of directing players towards “old” content.

Unless you have been playing since November 2004 and have been a rabid completion-ist… chances are there is still a lot of old content that you have never seen in the game. The problem being that there is no real way of notifying players other than the achievement system that this or that area of the world exists… and might be worth looking at. Additionally most companies have this problem of trying to pretend that the past is behind them, and that only the new and fresh parts of the game matter. If this were not the case we wouldn’t see quite so many “boost to level cap” schemes out there. The problem I see with this is at least in the case of World of Warcraft… their best content is ALL from the past as far as I am concerned. Trying to till it under to plant new seeds does a great disservice to the awesome experiences that could be had doing past content. The problem once again is there is no really good way of letting players know what they are missing.

Exposing Old Content

There are some games out there that try really hard to wrap systems around this. For example in Rift you have the Instant Adventure system, which will port you to somewhere in the world, scale your level down, and give you a mini quest chain to follow along with a bunch of other players. This is an insanely enjoyable way to level, and they even introduced a version of this that allows for the exploration of raid content. It is something less like LFR and more like a world event that just happens to take place in a raid zone, and the bit of it I have played has been ridiculously fun. That said… this system is super limited in scope and still misses out on some of the quest content that happens in these zones and other things to do. Essentially we have all of these systems around grouping, but no real time has been devoted to helping players come up with things when they aren’t grouping. Sure you have facebook game like systems of the Garrison or the Shipyard, but eventually you reach a point where you realize that you are only playing the game to log in and fiddle with your house for a few moments before logging out again.

What I propose is a new kind of system that essentially takes a look at all of the content a player has completed and then suggests something that they haven’t. No game on the market does not have a robust system of tracking player achievements and most of them even go to the finite level of tracking every single kill the player has gotten… and occasionally even what they have gotten as drops. What I am proposing is a join between the list of “what is available in the game” and “what the player has completed” and then packaging and presenting literally anything the player has not done… in a quest form. Now I remember a time when there were threads on the Blizzard forums that you could post your profile, and someone would “assign” you an achievement that you had not completed to go and work on. What I am essentially suggesting is creating a formalized system for just that. Now since Blizzard still does not have a level scaling system, that is going to harm some of the enjoyment… because in a perfect situation it would scale you down to a level equivalent to the content. My idea would be to have a series of checkboxes in the UI allowing players to particularly avoid things like PVP, Raid or Crafting items if they don’t want to do those.

Interesting Baubles

The really important thing about this however is that players need to feel like there is a reason. Ultimately I think that is what players are saying when they say there is “nothing to do”. At least for me when I say these words what I really mean is “nothing I want to do, that has any bearing on my modern game play experience”. There are ALWAYS things you can do, that has never been the problem, but there are often times a loss of things that you want to do that give you some sort of reward that you actually care enough to chase. The itemization of this “Mission” system would need to be right, and my theory is that we could do something like a loot bag upon completing the mission. Maybe even make it so that when you get a mission, it is being given to you by one of the old world factions relevant for the content you are being asked to do. The loot bag would contain rewards equivalent to the sort of achievement you are being asked to do… and most likely for 90% of the bags opened would just be a little pocket money and maybe some consumables or crafting materials. However there would need to be the chance of obtaining some ultra rare items, like mounts or cosmetic items in order to make it worth the players time.

Sure it is rehashed content, and there is no denying it. It does however give players a way to essentially mine more enjoyment out of content they have not completed… and get rewards for doing it. Largely this idea hit me while thinking about the events of yesterday, and the problem of having a decade worth of content but no real way of getting players to go back and consume it. Additionally I have been playing a lot of Destiny, and that game is the master of giving me little mini-quest sand events, largely in the form of patrol missions that give purpose to what is otherwise a bunch of wandering around the shooting random shit. It struck me how much more enjoyable for me it is to kill a dozen Vex when I have a quest asking me to collect items from them, than it is just to kill a dozen Vex on my own. The act is the same, but in one case I have a false sense of purpose. Ultimately I think that is what most unhappy customers lack, is a feeling of purpose in the things they do. After all you can only log in for so long without doing something meaningful without realizing that you are essentially paying for an expensive chat client. I am not saying this is a system to stop games from hemorrhaging players, but it is something. I absolutely think I would use something like this because I would know I am working toward two things. Firstly I would be slowly inching up my achievement score, which give me a bit of a false sense of satisfaction. Secondly I would know that maybe just maybe there is a chance that upon completing one of these many missions I would get awarded something really awesome and special.