Skyforge Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Scattered Evening

July 24, 2015 by Belghast

Orcs Must Die Unchained

This morning I am struggling more than a little bit. The last couple of nights have combined being up fairly late with not really sleeping that terribly well on top of it. As a result I am significantly more groggy than normal this morning and also more than a little late getting started with the blog post. A good chunk of this mornings posting time was spent playing the opening tutorial for Orcs Must Die Unchained. A few weeks back I posted my treatise on exactly what I meant when I said I wanted a PVE MOBA. One of the first comments came from a friend of mine… who may or may not work for Robot Entertainment. He said they were just patching in a new gameplay mode that sounded pretty close to what I was describing. So yesterday myself and practically everyone I know who signed up for beta… got into the game and I finally got around to testing it out this morning.

I have to say what I have seen briefly in the tutorial gives me hope that maybe this might fit the bill. I am going to have to spend more time playing it to really see, but it feels less tower defense and more dungeon keeper which I am okay with. Granted I did not play Orcs Must Die 2, and I am guessing a lot of the gameplay evolutions come from that title. The tutorial starts you off playing the sorceress which was a strike against it, but I am sure as soon as I can get my hands on a melee champion I will be just fine. It seems like there is a lot to figure out as far as trap placement, because I absolutely thought I would stop most of a minion wave… but barely phased them. There is also an interesting card collecting aspect that allows you to summon specific minions in each “warcamp” which seems pretty interesting as well. I will spend some more time this weekend playing this to give it a more proper test, but so far it seems interesting.

Astebreed

This weekend is the AggroChat Game Club show devoted to Ashgar’s pick… Astebreed. The bulk of my evening was spent playing this and I made it to chapter five before my thumb got sore enough that I wanted to take a break. I am really really hoping that the game will let me continue where I left off… because I am not really looking forward to playing back through the four chapters to get to the point where I left off. My opinion of the game is somewhat mixed right now, but hopefully I will get some more play time in before Saturday. I am not sure how far from the end of the game I really am, but based on some quick googling it looks like the game has six chapters as a total. The game play has been fun, especially since it lets me win by slashing things to death with a sword… which is not exactly something that most SHMUPS do. I wouldn’t really call this a bullet hell shooter, but there are definitely moments where there is a silly amount of stuff on screen that you have to try and navigate.

The biggest positive is the fact that your ship actually has a surprising amount of health. Usually in a SHMUP you get one or two hits before you lose a life, and in Astebreed you can actually soak up a surprising amount of damage before having to be concerned with death. Essentially at the end of Chapter 5 I encounter what I would consider the first really hard boss, and quite frankly by that time my thumbs were sore and I was ready to just be done for awhile. The boss had this super annoying attack that caused you to fly around the screen to avoid it… which meant you were not putting ANY damage into the boss. My theory is that you needed to use your missile lock type functionality while flying around to avoid damage… but I didn’t put in enough attempts to really test this one out. According to steam I have only actually put in 71 minutes… but it felt like significantly longer. I did manage to get a very “Bel” achievement called “Too Much Destruction” where I apparently killed 30 of these missile batteries on the boss at the end of Chapter Four.

Scattered Evening

The rest of the evening was significantly less focused, and I think a combination of sleep deprivation and having spent a little over an hour mashing buttons on a controller furiously left me in a bit of a stupor. I ultimately went downstairs and booted up the laptop, patching things up so that I could do something. I managed to watch through the first four episodes of the Humans television show, and I am actually enjoying it quite a bit. It is an excellent mix of creepy and endearing at the same time… and I am happy to see Katherine Parkinson that I know largely from IT Crowd. I attempted to play some Final Fantasy XIV but ultimately logged out after running a Vault on my Dragoon. I was feeling super disconnected from the world and my free company, so I slinked off into the shadows and booted up something I could solo without any human contact. Right now that game is SkyForge, and I spent some time working through another big open area… and my desire to “complete all the things” is ultimately what lead me to stay up so damned late again… only furthering the zombie like state.

The strangest thing about SkyForge so far is the fact that I do not have a single person on my friends list. Even in games that I am only thinking of playing for a few minutes… I still usually have a batch of people on my radar of sorts. I think this is a side effect of Final Fantasy XIV being my social game right now… and this being a game when I just want to blend into the crowd. I am not terribly opposed to having people on my friends list and you can find me there as Belghast Sternblade, but this is absolutely not a grouping game for me right now. I am enjoying poking my way around and soloing the content, and as counter intuitive as it might sound… I am really starting to enjoy the fact that every mission seems to have both solo and grouping options. Last night I very much felt like my interaction batteries were completely drained, so I just needed to spend some “me time” while slicing enemies with a sword. All things considered though the more I play of it, the more enjoyment I am getting out of SkyForge. It seems like just about the perfect foil to Final Fantasy XIV and does a good job at giving me an option to play that doesn’t require a lot out of me.

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.

Love Our Guild

July 20, 2015 by Belghast

Unlocking Dungeons

This weekend was a little bit split as far as gaming goes. I spent about four hours in SkyForge and the rest of it wandering around in Final Fantasy XIV. I had a bunch of side projects that I never really got off the ground. One of the things about being a tank is that you are constantly getting called on to do tanky things. Last night for example, I had all intentions of simply wandering around the new zones doing hunt mobs, but I ended up getting drafted to tank both Neverreap and Fractal Continuum for a friend who just dinged 60. Since this would allow him to unlock the content, and be yet another possibility for a daily expert roulette, as well as providing three of us in the dungeon run some tasty tasty first time bonus, I did not mind giving up my relaxing evening of hunting to help out.

Both runs went fairly smoothly other than Warenwolf falling off the side of the final boss in Neverreap. Luckily we had the stamina to go ahead and finish that boss without him. Fractal Continuum went extremely smoothly other than some annoyances with bomb placement on the final boss. Luckily the loot gods seemed to be at least a little favorable and Waren walked with a bow and some other items helping him inch towards that all too critical level 170 mark for Alexander. It is my hope that in this last week we will have increased our item level enough to be able to put a good attempt in on Bismarck Extreme tonight. I found out that apparently the dps constraint is that you be able to break the spine in a single attempt without also blowing every cooldown. Wednesday we were able to break the spine, but it was a “just barely” situation and we absolutely had to abuse every cool down available to get there.

Love Our Guild

Last night I had a moment when I was overcome with warm fuzzies. Folks were doing what they always do and filling my screen with green happy spam, and somehow it came around to the discussion of the free company. I am not sure if I remember who started it but someone made the comment that they were happy that I had recruited them into the guild, because if not for that they probably would not be playing. Then in a burst of activity a bunch of people chimed in with pretty much the same thing. So I wanted to talk a bit this morning about how much all of my guildies mean to me. There are so many days where I have had a rough patch, that I can log into our free company and within moments of seeing the cheery conversation I am in a much better mood. Having a happy guild family is ultimately what helps me keep returning to one game over another, and ultimately is what keeps me engaged in Final Fantasy XIV.

Sure the game is awesome, but having this big group who is willing to drop what they are doing to help someone else out, makes the experience so much better. Yesterday during the evening I worked through a backlog of dungeon runs that I had recorded, and came across a video that didn’t turn out quite as intended. Since the launch of Heavensward the guild crafters as lead by Solaria have been working away on making us an Airship. When it came time to launch it for the first time a good chunk of us gathered in the workshop basement of the guild hall. In part we hoped a cut scene would happen, and as a result I had OBS rolling away in the background recording the event. While the event did not turn out as I had expected, looking back on the footage it makes me exceptionally happy to see so many of my guild members roaming around in one place. I love the housing district for the constant flow of guild members popping in and out as they go off to other adventures, and this moment was probably the largest meeting of sorts we have had. It made me realize that we need to do something like this more often.

More SkyForge

The SkyForge open beta finishes up this Wednesday and in the mean time I plan on playing for a little bit each night. I have to admit while there are still problems with the game for me, it is growing on me in ways I can’t quite fathom. During yesterdays run I finally figured out something that had been bugging me. I said in my videos and in my blog posts that it seemed like the combo system was largely ineffectual, and for the most part this is true. However I noticed on my character to the right of the health bar was a charge counter of sorts marked with a lightning bolt. This is directly above the dodge counter that shows how many times in a row you can dodge, and how long before the counter regenerates when they are all spent. This lightning bolt number tied to the special combo attacks, and if I use a combo while I have a charge available it does significantly more damage. However any additional combos while that charge is regenerating end up being largely useless.

Knowing this is a thing, made combat feel more purposeful. Essentially I had one special move to use every 30 seconds or so, because that seemed to be roughly how long it took to regenerate a charge. When that ability was not available however I could happily wail away on the target then set up for the next special attack. This little bit of information seemed to dynamically change the way combat felt. Additionally doing the more open world zones, seemed much more enjoyable to me given that if I started wailing away on a boss, chances are someone would come along behind me to help me finish it. Running around with a group of other players also made me realize just how little damage the paladin does comparatively. In all honesty… I might end up playing quite a bit more of this game because it feels like I am starting to grasp the reason why it does the things it does. It is not the sort of game I would ever play as a primary mmo, but I have been enjoying playing it in these short bursts, where I complete a single objective and then log back out for awhile.

More SkyForge Thoughts

July 19, 2015 by Belghast

Controller Support

One of the questions left unanswered from yesterday was whether or not the game had controller support. On a whim I picked up my controller towards the end of one of yesterdays streams and I noticed that I could in fact control my character with it. Today I popped into game with the mission of trying to test this theory out. It seems that maybe they are working on controller support but that it does not actually work fully. I could control my character perfectly using both of my analog sticks, and if I hit the A button on my XBox 360 controller I could perform any of the normal actions that require the spacebar. However it did not actually seem to interact with the world, and pressing A when not hovering over an objective did not perform the jump action, which is normally the default action for spacebar. I went so far as to go into the keybindings section and it would not let me bind anything to controller presses.

Now of course if you wanted to go so far as to use Xpadder you could easily get this game up and running. It takes care of the toughest part which is getting the analog movement feeling right. My hope is that in subsequent patches it is going to add full controller support, and then this game is likely to increase significantly in enjoyment. Left button spammy attacks feel less spammy when done with a controller button. Since writing yesterdays post I have added another few hours worth of gameplay, and I have to say my verdict is still very mixed. I even talked about it a bit on last nights podcast. On some level I am feeling about this game much the same as I felt about Guild Wars 2 when it was in testing. There is something that compels me to keep trying to figure it out, but at the same time I find it extremely easy to stop playing after completing a single mission. The act of running a mission just wears me out, in a way that content in Elder Scrolls Online used to wear me out. Things are so ridiculously tightly packed that on normal solo missions you spend so much of your time mindlessly grinding through huge encounters.

Isola Digs

This morning however I ventured into what seems to be another large shared cooperative zone, much the same as the very first mission in the game. It involved a series of around 25 smaller objectives that were scattered throughout the map. The frustrating thing about this zone in particular is that the objectives were super linear, meaning when I tried to do my normal thing and hop off the path… I missed an objective that I then later had to double back through the entire zone to go find again. As a whole though I have to say I like this style of zone so much better than the little instanced mini dungeons I had completed more recently. The game also feels better when lots of other players are wandering around, which greatly speeds up the amount of time it takes to burn through the various health bars of the bosses. This tells me that a lot of my frustrations was simply that I was soloing content designed for groups to take down. The fact that I could fairly easily solo content as a paladin, maybe points to that class being a little overpowered for this sort of thing? Then again tanks in most games are adept at soloing bosses that were originally meant for a group to take down… I am looking at you Deathknight.

The other cool thing about this region is that it seemed to be full of boss encounters that did not seem to be tied to a specific objective. There may be a quest that I missed somewhere that opened these up, but from what I saw there was a fire, water and wind warden. Above you can see me taking on the fire one. The only thing missing elemental wise is earth, which I did not really see while wandering around. I managed to get a few greens off these bosses, so my theory is they are just there to make your experience more interesting. The boss fights with other players helping were significantly more enjoyable, but I could still shield up as a paladin and whittle them down until I succeeded. There was only one single encounter where I even came close to dying. At the last minute a wave of players rushed in and helped me finish the boss off.

Combat Still Repetitive

All of this said… my problem with the combat still exists. It just doesn’t feel like I can do anything interesting with the encounters. I did add a new combo attack to my repertoire, and while I abused the hell out of it.. each individual fight still seemed to take a little bit longer than they should for the game to feel really “fun”. The mobs still suffer from the same problem where they tend to be one trick ponies, and keep using the same attack sequence over and over. There is almost always one thing that you should dodge out of, but other than that it is grind them down with your main attack until they are gone. There are a lot of things I do like however when it comes to the interactions with other players. This seems like a game where everything is open tagging, and if you are in an area and have dealt any damage to a pack… you seem to get full credit for the entire pack. Similarly if there is an objective, it seems like everyone can click said objective, and that seems to have changed from one of the closed beta streams I happened to watch.

As a result I found myself wading into a lot of fights that I did not strictly need to just to help out the other players. Unfortunately not a single one of them did I actually communicate with. There are a lot of ifs about this game, and I am not quite certain how much I will be playing of it. In theory I kinda dig the model of purchasing classes or having a slow tedious process of unlocking them. To some extent I wish I had gotten in on the ability to play the Berserker, because I think that might be a class I would really enjoy. I have heard that you can go to the training center and test drive all of the classes, much like you can test drive champions in a moba, so that might be one of the things I do next. At this point I have played around five hours of the game, and I have enjoyed it just enough to keep me coming back to try and find the secrets that I seem to be missing as to why this game is really fun. Ultimately there will be a point where I just give up on it, but I have not quite reached that yet. After all it gives me a bit of a diversion from leveling my Dragoon and gearing in Final Fantasy XIV. If you want to check out the last two videos I have posted since yesterday I will be embedding them below.

Port Naori – Instanced Dungeon-like Mission

Isola Digs – Open World-ish Shared Zone Mission

(was still encoding at the time of posting this… so might have to check back later)