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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!

Reaping What We Sow

January 22, 2015January 21, 2015 by Belghast

Pax Packing

Tonight is my last night at home before heading towards PAX. As such our world pretty much revolves around packing up the things that need packing and cleaning the house some more to make it nice for the house sitter. I think at this point I have everything that I am going to need to both enjoy and “work” pax. This is going to be an odd experience for me, because in theory I am the eyes and ears of MMOGames.com during the course of this trip. In addition to that I am going to try my best not to let my streak of daily postings slip either. As such I am writing this and planning on posting it in the morning… which while cheating is something I have accepted in the past. In truth most of my posts during this trip will be along these lines as I intend to write up what I saw during that day from my hotel room.

The oddest experience for me is that I am going to have some actual media appointments, as in sit on the couch and talk to devs about their games. I have a ton of questions, but at the same time I am feeling extremely self conscious. Its like I am expecting them to immediately realize that I am not really a professional writer, and get kicked off the couch or something. Sure I blog each and every day, and that has been one hell of a marathon, but for whatever reason this suddenly seems that much more real. I would love to be doing stuff like this for a living, but I learned long ago that writing simply does not pay enough to even come close to offsetting the salary of a programmer. So instead I will just pretend to be a “legitimate writer”, and simply be thankful that someone is letting me indulge that fantasy.

Buy To Play

For the several quarters it has seemed to me that Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar were like two kids sitting waiting on the bottom of a pool. Each of them trying to hold their breath as long as humanly possible before admitting defeat and swimming to the surface. Today Elder Scrolls Online swam to the surface and admitted defeat, announcing that they would be abandoning the subscription model in favor of a new “buy to play” strategy with an optional premium subscription. That said I absolutely expect Wildstar to swim to the surface themselves rather quickly confident that they won this game of chicken… but no less battered for the challenge. This was the year that the subscription model gave its last hurrah, and ultimately proved that the buying public simply was not willing to pay on a month my month basis.

I say this but it is not entirely true, given that World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Final Fantasy XIV are each doing better than they have in years. The subscription model is still very much alive and kicking, but unfortunately the folks willing to pay a monthly fee… seem to already be committed leaving only the game hoppers and nomads shifting from title to title. Awhile back I wrote an article calling Elder Scrolls Online my disappointment of the year… and in many ways it still very much is. That said I hate to see them having to shift payment models like this. I still like the idea of a subscription, but a game has to earn the right to see my monthly payment. Final Fantasy XIV does this by providing a constant stream of new content. World of Warcraft earns my dollar by simply being the first breakout hit to claim the market share and thus addict swarms of my friends who refuse to leave it. Elder Scrolls Online just lacked the glue to keep me playing, and after my initial six months worth of subscription time I let my account go dormant expecting to play again when it hit the consoles.

Reaping What We Sow

Don't like pay to win air drops, or overpriced early access schemes? We got games we deserve for not being willing to pay subscriptoins.

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) January 21, 2015

Today I made a tweet, and as luck would have it my fingers got faster than my brain… and it of course has a typo. That said I pretty much stand by the statement… once corrected for spelling of course. Game Companies are after all companies. Developers, Designers, Artists and Writers all have to get paid for their work, and at the end of the day no one can afford to work for free. Hell I couldn’t do half of the stuff I did with my blog, podcasts and the sort without a really nice paying job to back me up and fund my hobbies. At the end of the day these companies have to make money, so they can turn around and invest in those resources that support their games., and that’s not even taking into account the serious costs associated with keeping up a server farm. Sure single servers are relatively simple and cheap to operate… but when you are talking an online game you are literally talking about thousands of servers working together to maintain the structure that we demand be not only up 24/7 but also be relatively lag free.

So if we complain about blatant money grabs like the air drop scandal in H1Z1, or the constant limited edition loot box bonanzas in Star Wars the Old Republic and Rift. We have to realize that all of it is entirely our faults. The subscription model was nice and honestly and for the most part was a contract between the players and a company. We pay them to keep rolling out new content, and keep the lights on… and we would get to play their games. However at some point during the line that contract was broken, and we the players started wanting more for free. I have gotten so tired of seeing comments like “I like the game, but I will play it when it goes free to play”. If you like the game, and want to play it… you should be willing to support it. I’ve subscribed to games for months after I stopped playing them, just because I believed in the mission of the company or the game. If we don’t help the companies… they are going to keep taking progressively more desperate measures to try and stay afloat and keep making salary.

Players Are Now Investors

I will be the first to admit that steam early access or paid alpha and beta programs are frustrating riddled with problems. Ultimately I feel like that extra transparency bogs down the process and ultimately produces a confused product designed by committee. The problem is… we are quickly becoming the investors in the games we are playing. Why are we now investors you might ask yourself? Essentially the repeat failure of AAA MMOs means that a lot of the institutional funding is simply not available. Would you want to fund an MMO after the state of Rhode Island was stuck holding a multi-million dollar bill for the failure of Copernicus? Kickstarter has been an interesting catalyst for games development. It has placed a power in our hands that we have never had before… and it is not entirely a good thing. As investors… we feel entitled to have our say in the way the process works.

I honestly miss the days when I could look at the games industry like it was some magical engine of creation. When I could view it as being something that simply turned out the games I wanted to play without any real consequences attached to it. The problem is… I know the consequences in the faces of friends that have been effected by the closure of studios, and the “cutbacks” in staffing as subscriptions faltered. How do you build a family when you aren’t sure where you will be living in six months? Maybe I shouldn’t care about the human costs behind these things, but unfortunately that isn’t really a luxury I have. I write my blog and I make my quips, but at the end of the day I have nothing but the utmost respect for the folks that make the games I care about. I can be petulant just as much as the next person, but sometimes I lose sight on the truth behind it all. They make the games that we are supposed to have fun playing… and in doing so it is up to us the players to uphold our end of that bargain. I am not addressing the people that didn’t enjoy a game, because that is the way it works…. I am talking about the folks that loved a game… but were unwilling to subscribe.

Proud to be Ul’dahn

January 21, 2015 by Belghast

Progress on Imperator

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

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

Proud to be Ul’dahn

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

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

Subligars for Everyone

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

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

Restarting Inquisition

January 20, 2015 by Belghast

Final Fantasy XIV Downtime

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

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

Restarting Inquisition

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

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

Faffing the Hinterlands

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

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