Open World RPG Archives - Page 32 of 41

Chateau Belghast

February 13, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bizarre one. We are still very much under the gun of a release date, and I attempted to do whatever I could to further that goal. However for all of Saturday our building was without power, and I was instead on call just in case something went wrong. The building power went down at 6:30 in the morning, and by the time we started recording AggroChat we had not yet gotten the all clear. I was just hoping that things would cycle off of the generators as successfully as they did cycling onto them, and that I would not end up getting interrupted during the podcast. Sunday was a mixed bag of work and doing all of the other things that we ultimately put off until Sunday like laundry and various errands. The weekend as a whole wound up being a very random mix of games as I played whatever I could during the brief moments of downtime. As you can see by the Chateau Belghast image above, I started fiddling around with Fallout 4 once again, and scrapped my old house and built this one instead. The inside is largely unfurnished but I am digging the outside quite a bit. It took me far longer than it should have to sort out how best to attempt centering the neon text, but in the grand scheme it seems to look okay. The frustrating bit with their neon font is that is is in no way monospaced with the characters all varying pretty wildly in width.

In Final Fantasy XIV I am still very much getting back in the swing of things, and have fallen into the pattern of doing Beast Tribe dailies. In theory I started down this path because I wanted a reliable source of ventures for my retainers, so that I could keep sending out my gatherers on field exploration. However I also really like mounts, and over the course of the last week or so I have been pushing up the Sahagin, not necessarily because I love the mount, but more because it was the next closest faction. For a long period of time, it was the faction I was spending the rest of my daily allowance on while working on the Sylph. Yesterday however I managed to push Sahagin across the finish line and now have my truly bizarre Sapsa mount to ride around on. I figured what better place to take a picture of it than in the waters of The Mists, where the Free Company house is located. Next up should be the Kobolds as once again… they are the next closest given that I had been spending my extra ventures on them while working on the Sahagin. I mean I know there are lots of other things I SHOULD be doing… but I just can’t bring myself to pug dungeons yet. After a string of bad experiences with Palace of the Dead… I don’t much feel like pugging that one either. The problem there is as we talked about on the podcast, is that if you fail… you lose all progress gained which seems deeply punitive for a random group activity.

Finally I spent a good amount of time this weekend playing Elder Scrolls online. I failed to take any screenshots so instead you get an interior shot of my home. I pushed forward the story line in Malabal Tor a bit, but the big problem with ESO is that I tend to wander wildly. I find it extremely hard to stay focused and instead I wind up going after the next object on the horizon that looks interesting, and as a result never seem to end up getting my objectives accomplished. There is always a fallen log to harvest, or an outcropping of ore to mine. Whatever the case I find myself continuing to move steadily towards 160 champion levels, which is the current item cap. Unfortunately I have a feeling this is probably going to change with Morrowind, but for the time being getting there.. and being able to craft a set of gear that will last me for a bit tends to be my focus. The other thing that I am realizing is that 160 champion levels is just a drop in the bucket given that quite literally every build I find expects you to have at least four or five times that amount. There is a part of me that wishes I had never actually faded away from this game, because at this very moment I am so impossibly behind the curve. Then again I think that overwhelming amount of content is what has been drawing me there much in the same way as it did for A Realm Reborn until we caught up. I know there is more to do than I have time to do it… and in some way that is insurance from ever really getting bored.

Anubisath and Whiterun

November 2, 2016 by Belghast

In all honesty, my world lately has been a sequence of fairly shit days. Yesterday was no difference, so by the time I got home I just wanted to chill out quietly for the evening. I started off over in World of Warcraft, completing the daily emmisary quest, capturing a new falcosaur orphan… and then on a strange whim I decided to poke my head into AQ40. The original goal was simple, for me to attempt getting an Anubisath Idol for the purpose of doing some actual pet battles. I had both Sol and Grace suggest Xu-Fu’s pet battle strategy guides, because at some point I would actually like to learn how to do pet battles in World of Warcraft. Unfortunately this is like the advanced guide… because I need something far more dumbed down to ease me into the process. Of note while I play Pokemon games… I never really “play them” properly because for me it becomes entirely about capturing new and interesting critters. In Warcraft battle pets are largely the same thing for me… I simply want to catch one of every pet. However to get very far at all… it feels like the game is expecting me to properly do the content as expected. As a result I really should spend some time to figure out exactly what the hell I am doing. I watched a few videos yesterday on pet battles, but most of them were very centered around “exploit this weakness to power level”, which is all well and good but I still feel like I am flailing helplessly. I like knowing WHY I am doing something, rather than simply knowing a gimmick that works. This is a big part of why I have never been a fan of exploiting glitches in boss fights… because once said gimmick gets fixed you are back at square one.

So while I set foot in AQ40 with a very clear purpose… I went a little nuts while inside collecting scarab coffer keys and by the time I finished a single run I was able to purchase all but one piece of gear from the raid. So I can look like the unmade bed that everyone looked like during AQ40, wearing some really bizarre looking bug themed gear. From there while I was nearby I also stomped AQ20, but didn’t get much of anything to right home about. After a bunch of false starts in Division and Destiny… I finally settled into playing some more Skyrim Enhanced Edition. This is the point where I left the path once more and am officially in “ineligible for achievement” territory because I installed a slew of mods through the official interface. I am not a big achievement hunter, but it does frustrate me a bit when doing the thing that a game is well known for… shuts off achievement tracking entirely. The achievements that I am running are largely quality of life changes, like the unofficial bug patch and the additional of lamps and sign posts to trails making it easier to navigate the world without having to constantly pop your map up. Last night I finally made my way to Whiterun to start the game in its proper, defeating my first dragon and getting the summon to High Hrothgar to hang with the Greybeards.

The interesting thing about this game is that while I have beaten various elements of it countless times… it feels no less fresh than the day I first played it… especially with this fresh coat of paint. The only problem with playing Skyrim and starting it relatively late in the evening… is that you pretty much lose the entire night. The next thing I realized is that it was after midnight and I really should be going to bed. I am honestly probably going to be playing quite a bit more of Skyrim, largely because it feels like right now I need an offline game without other people in it. Right now my job is filling my threshold of human interaction, and while I want to be doing stuff… I also need to distance myself from people to try and empty out my buffers. I mean I am looking forward to Karazhan on Sunday, and hopefully getting a Xavius kill tonight in Emerald Nightmare… but I also need some quiet time and few games handle that better than Skyrim.

Wandering Skyrim

October 28, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of a strange night for me. Originally I had plans to get together with some of my friends and work on Karazhan attunements… of which I have not even started running the dungeons. However I had apparently forgotten that last night was the RiffTrax live show. By “live” I mean streamed to theaters around the country as the original show is going on in Nashville. This time around we got to see two shorts and the really bizarre feature film “Carnival of Souls”(which is apparently up on youtube in its entirety). The film is apparently by the same guy that did another RiffTrax classic… the “Shake Hands with Danger” PSA from Caterpillar. This literally is probably one of the more bizarre movies I have watched because really from the entire moment it started… it felt like this strange meandering film about nothing. The RiffTrax send-up however was great, the movie itself just ended with what was supposed to be a shocking reveal… but largely felt like maybe the director was the only one not in on the secret? In any case by the time I got out of there, and drove home I was a little out of it. I existed in that state of too tired to do anything serious, but not tired enough to actually head on to bed.

Instead I decided to install the Skyrim Special Edition and check it out. I have to give Bethesda a lot of credit for giving it out for free to anyone who already owned the original game and all of the expansions. The install was roughly 9 gig so I am guessing that the improvements were more or on the processing side of the equation rather than just pushing a lot of upgraded textures. Whatever the case the game looks gorgeous, if I had been thinking I would have installed the base game on this newer machine and done some side by side comparisons. It is enough of an upgrade to make me happy, and I am always willing to have a new excuse to roam around Skyrim being a murder hobo. Once again however I am torn between sword and shield and bow… ending up mixing between the two quite a bit based on the fight. As is always the case I had trouble staying to the actual missing and instead have already cleared out the first barrow while retrieving the golden claw. In theory I think I probably should have gone to Whiterun, but whatever the case I am wandering down my own path once again. The game doesn’t really feel that changed, more like you installed a graphical upgrade mod. Whatever the case it looks pretty, and runs well so that pretty much ticks off the boxes I needed. At some point I might check out the mods available, but for the time being I am largely running vanilla.

Not First Rodeo

March 8, 2016 by Belghast

The Waiting Game

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country. Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock. My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us. It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle. The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play. I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo. To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy. My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam… which was a process that took over twenty minutes. I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight. The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division. My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around. After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me. It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing. Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit. That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty. This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead… which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp. The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around. This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation. I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay. If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light. Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it. I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley. The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great. At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them. I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions. I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”. While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again… I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game. It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well. Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us. Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two. I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error. As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard. It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile. My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction. In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines… this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option. During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window. It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable. Dear UbiSoft… never do this again… in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu. I mean I get what they are going for… wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game… but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta. So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan. I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue. I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon. The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available. I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land. If the servers stay stable… like will be golden. I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night. However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.