Open World RPG Archives - Page 30 of 41

A Warm Blanket

August 1, 2017 by Belghast

Today marks the beginning of the whole “Daily Creative Thing” business and while you might have been expecting something from me… unfortunately you can’t really expect me to get up and do creativity by six in the morning. Sitting down and writing out a blog post is challenging enough. I am however planning on making something happen today or tonight depending upon when the muse hits me. The other big thing going on today is that it is my Nineteenth wedding anniversary, and while I am not entirely certain what we are doing to mark the occasion yet I am sure we will come up with something. In truth what it will probably mean is that my wife and I go out to dinner, and then wander around hitting the various stores and checking to see if they have started marking down their back to school stuff yet. “School Supply Season” is like Christmas for my wife, and while this is not exactly the normal thing for people to get excited about… it is for a teacher. I’ve spent many an hour over the years scrounging for one last folder or ruler or package of gluesticks for her classroom.

Work is still madness and I am still finding myself deep in the throes of turtle mode. Honestly more than anything what happens during these times is I resort to comfort gaming. I end up dusting off a game that I had not been playing that much and spend a significant chunk of time roaming around its world. Lately that has meant an awful lot of Rift because much like Phantasy Star Online yesterday… I carry a significant torch for this game as well. In honor of the occasion I decided to vary up my default wardrobe a bit from what I had been running around in the first screenshot… to what I am now running around in… which is honestly mostly just some dye and swapping a few pieces. I never managed to hit the “Prophecy of” level cap and I’ve just been working my way through any of the content that I had left to do in various zones. So far the thing that I am liking the most about the content is the way that each zone has this major event that takes place at the very end of the zone that ties up a bunch of loose threads from various quests and packages it neatly in this really epic fight. In many ways Rift feels like a game from a different time, and this has both good and bad aspects to it. The bad is it feels much slower than other MMOs and the time to kill and time to level can feel a little grating at times. However on the good side this is also this same thing that makes it feel familiar and lived in… and something that I can return to over and over to wear it like a blanket. The main problem that I have with Rift that ultimately causes me to wander away is that I don’t have my social infrastructure here. My circle of friends that I record the podcast and game on a nightly basis with… have moved on past this game and will likely never return. At this point I think I am just too set in my ways to branch out and build new communities, and I also know that I will soon return to the fold and wander away from the game myself.

Another game I have been playing a not insignificant amount of is Fallout 4. This runs pretty damned smoothly on the laptop and it has been a recent go to for when I want to wander around a world and explore a bit. In the theme of carrying torches for games… I have loved Fallout since I saved up my pennies to buy the first game when it released back in 1997. I was going to college at the time and not really buying many games, but still made a beeline to Walmart to pick it up once I knew they had it in stock. Side note… that was literally the only place in town that sold PC games and was before the mass expansion of Game Stop. At that point Software Etc and Babbages still existed as separate entities as well as Comp USA and the unrelated Circuit City and Computer City. When the games made the tradition to the open world format I was skeptical but quickly got on board thanks to my love of the Elder Scrolls games. Now the modern Fallout games serve as this familiar touchstone that I can keep returning to anytime I need solace. I’ve started countless games of Fallout 3 and New Vegas and it seems like now I am carrying that tradition over into Fallout 4 as well. My default play mode tends to be to wander towards a corner of the map and do whatever happens to be there. I am not really big for following larger quests in this game, and I likely would have never actually beaten it were it not for the fact that we chose this as a game club game… and I felt obligated to do so. Gaming in general for me is not ever really about beating the game… but more about existing in that game world for a period of time. The game world of choice is determined by whatever mood I happen to be in. Fallout for me tends to be for when I am in a slower paced mood and want to wander around aimlessly dispensing frontier justice on the raiders.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.

Twitter GOTY “Poll”

April 26, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of a rough night, because we had a massive storm blow through. A side effect of the storm was the fact that about 11:30 my wife woke up on the couch because something dripped on her foot. In the middle of our living room, dripping from one of the beams was a slow trickle of water. At that point there really isn’t much to do other than put down a towel and a bucket and hope it stops. However that sort of ruined any thoughts of a really solid nights sleep. This morning I had originally intended on writing about a rather hamfisted absurdist article that is making its way through my twitter circle, but in truth I am simply going to not deal with that today. It reminded me of conversations that myself and Tamrielo have on a regular basis… but I also wanted to approach the topic with more grace than I probably have in me right now. So instead I am going to answer a twitter poll in blog form.

TWITTER POLL: Quote this tweet with your GOTY for each year for the last five years, 2012 to 2016.

— Alex Carlson (@PostMesmeric) April 25, 2017

While technically not a poll, it is definitely a thing that I thought looked interesting so this morning instead of tearing into discussions that I don’t really want to get into… I started thinking back upon various years and trying to determine the games that mattered the most to me during that time. Also I may or may not be applying a little “in retrospect” to a few of these choices, but that is also ultimately my prerogative. I limited myself to only picking games released during a specific calendar year, but in many cases the true impact the game had happened much later.

2012: The Secret World

I really cannot say enough good about this game… from the perspective of someone just starting out playing it. I’ve said an awful lot about this game over the years in three pages worth of blog posts… and probably some others that I failed to categorize correctly. This often makes my “best games I am not playing” list whenever I compile one. Functionally there are two vastly different game experiences… the leveling game when you are digging through the story and trying to solve the mysteries of the world… and the end game where you lose all creative freedom that you had while leveling. The first game is phenomenal and something that I feel everyone should experience at least once. The later… is ultimately what caused us to quit and keeps me from reattaching to the game for any length of time. However that said the ride is well worth it, and the game has some of the more interesting dungeons in MMOdom… until you reach nightmare levels where everything sort of falls apart. I am really looking forward to the re-release of the game under the Secret World Legends name… and hoping beyond hope that they can give me an experience to latch onto with both hands.

Aggronaut Posts about The Secret World

2013: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

The impact this game has had on me and my friends is immeasurable. Largely because it gave us a common ground in the form of an MMO experience that we all care about. More than anything however it knows how to tell story in and interesting and serialized fashion, where the story arc from one expansion sets up the key players for the next. This is also the only MMO that has ever sufficiently pulled off a surprise plot twist, and has done so many times…. and been willing to assault structures that I assumed were fixed and sacred to the game itself. From August onwards in 2013… my life pretty much belonged to Final Fantasy XIV until we slowly petered out when we ran out of things we were capable of doing. However we came back and had a renaissance with the game that has continued to the present times with this still being the game we can all sort of agree on.

Aggronaut Posts about Final Fantasy XIV

2014: Destiny

This is another game that realized its ultimate impact on me long after the year it actually released in. Destiny is a really important game to me for a whole lot of reasons. Firstly it has amazing moment to moment gameplay and it is hands down the best feeling shooter I have ever played. From the moment I heard about the world and the setting I was completely sold… and in truth this is the game that pushed me to buy my way into the current console generation. I got my PS4 console the week the first PlayStation exclusive alpha was happening, and the little I played of it hooked me extremely hard on the concept. Year one had a lot of problems, and I sort of picked at it like you might pick at the remains of a meal you know you are done with… but just keep nibbling on. I did return to paying regularly towards the tail end of the first year, so that I was primed and ready for the launch of The Taken King. From Year Two on however I have been a dedicated acolyte of the world, and own it for both PS4 and Xbox One… and am contemplating making the leap to PC version with the launch of Destiny 2. The game still has some narrative problems, but it does not stop me one bit from enjoying it.

Aggronaut Posts about Destiny

2015: Fallout 4

I love Fallout as a franchise. I still remember saving up the cash to buy the first one when we were in college, and I was completely hooked. I am not old school enough to remember Wasteland fondly, but I have always been a fan of the whole post apocalyptic nukepunk genre. So while I am listing this as my game for 2015… it is a hype cycle that began long before and continues long after. This is still the game I boot up when I am in a specific mood. Similarly I have played Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas countless times, and Fallout 4 simply replaces those in succession. This game is proof to me at least that I care far more about systems, and gameplay… than I really do about the main narrative in a game. In fact the only reason why I probably beat this game is because we chose this as our November/December AggroChat game club game for the tail end of 2015. I would probably still be avoiding the main story… and still off on my own having adventures in my head…. which is in truth my preferred method of playing a game. Just talking about the game has given me this huge urge to boot it up… right now… which would be a horrible idea considering I have to go to work.

Aggronaut Posts about Fallout 4

2016: World of Warcraft: Legion

I have to give a lot of credit here to World of Warcraft and the rebirth of the game that happened with the launch of the Legion expansion. They took a game I thought I no longer really cared about, and was legitimately done caring about…. and turned it into an experience that I rabidly played. I even managed to return to raiding and didn’t check out this time until we were a few bosses into Nighthold… which is in truth way longer than I lasted in Draenor. I’ve reached this point where I am not really playing the game or following it now… but the transformation that took place should nonetheless be honored. They tried a whole bunch of new ideas that they admittedly borrowed from other games… but wove it together in a fashion that felt new and fresh. Similarly I feel like it has to be said that they have done and continue to do a great job of managing patch cycles. They finally broke the “three and done” mold that had happened with Pandaria and Draenor and by all accounts are still releasing interesting content. I know at some point I will return and at the very least finish out the Legion flight meta achievement, but for the time being I am simply not forcing myself to play a game I am not super into. Legion however is probably going to go down in history for me as their best expansion… toppling what was previously my current favorite Wrath of the Lich King.

Aggronaut Posts about World of Warcraft

So now that I have given you mine… what are yours? Feel free to post them in the comments section here… or join in the twitter poll. I am curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.

Chasing Aloy

April 19, 2017 by Belghast

It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.

The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.

Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.