Games Archives - Page 272 of 687 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Missing Friends

July 24, 2020 by Belghast

I spent most of last night playing around on my Monk in World of Warcraft. I am still in a somewhat weird headspace and decided to hang out on the sofa and snuggle with the cats instead of doing anything more serious. One of the challenges of being a gamer like I am that hops around through a bunch of games is that you end up losing touch with a lot of friends along the way. Gamer friends right or wrong and largely bound together by the mutual love and adoration of a specific game. When you are not playing that game together, you often end up struggling to find things to relate to because that social lubricant in the form of the shared gaming interest is gone from the equation.

Sure you can build lasting friendships that are based on firmer stuff, but those take time and as someone who has formed guilds and raids for decades I have a truly ridiculous number of “surface friendships”. What I mean by that is that you are close within the context of a specific medium, sorta like the friends you might make at a workplace and then never see again once either of you have moved on from that environment. The thing is every so often something reminds you of one of those folks that were lost in the shuffle, and you start to get some pangs of regret that you couldn’t find a way for that friendship to stay evergreen.

At some point last night I was searching for something in gmail, and because I never seem to actually delete anything I stumbled across a conversation thread between me and one of these friends. There used to be a time when my means of contact with a whole slew of people was through trading long form emails. The entire thing was peppered with in jokes, because we had this running gag where we both claimed that they hated me… since they constantly avoided my recruitment pitch to join House Stalwart. This is someone that I raided in Vanilla with and then fairly frequently communicated off and on until I ultimately left the game in Cataclysm, and again pretty frequently when we were both playing SWTOR.

It is weird how ephemeral friendships can be at times. We were obviously close because reading back through this ancient gaming history there were all of the markers of a shared language. However its probably been a decade now since we were in regular contact. A lot of stuff happens in a decade, but as I sat there in World of Warcraft I decided to dust off my Battle.net friends list, something I almost NEVER pay any attention to these days and sure enough they happened to be also playing at the same time. The problem with getting out of contact with someone is that the longer it goes the harder it becomes to fire off that opening salvo of conversation. Not knowing what to say I just went with the sheepish “Heya :)”.

What followed was a solid hour and a half of catching up about this or that and while yeah a gulf of time had passed, it was still pretty easy to fall back into holding a conversation. I am exceptionally bad at staying in contact with people once whatever shared medium we had is gone. I need to reach out more and try and catch up with more of these people lost to the turning of the tides. The challenge however is that there is no going back really. I’m not the person I was when I was leading House Stalwart and actively recruiting for raids. Mentally I have to realize that this person in question is not the exactly skittish warlock that I knew from so long ago. Time passes and people change and some of those folks that you were once “drift compatible” with are probably not going to be.

The thing is, I need to learn to get over the fear of reaching out and finding out. I have this list of friends in Battle.net for a reason, I guess at some point I should start poking additional people on it to see how they are doing. Right now I find myself in the awkward position of being without a permanent game home, and I tend to flit around madly between a bunch of side projects in different games. It is super hard to build a stable support structure when you yourself cannot seem to commit to any specific medium. Facepull is a delightful home in World of Warcraft, and I adore them all given our long shared history. However there are a bunch of voices out there that I would love to hear from again if only to have a single day of catching up before fading into the mists once again.

The funny thing is… there are still a handful of friends that I communicate with mostly through email. Back during the days when everyone was using a single messaging platform, it was a bit easier. I could fire up Google Talk or AOL Instant Messenger and get immediate access to a whole list of people. I still have a fully populated friends list in Google Hangouts, but the only people I ever seem to talk to are Vernie and my Wife. AOL Instant Messenger was the platform I was way more prolific on… but it of course is lost to time. So as a result of all of this email just sorta became the easiest default middle ground. My friend Cylladora and I go through this pattern where completely from out of nowhere we will exchange an email and then go months again without communication.

Being an old gamer means you have a lot of old gamer friends out there somewhere. It would probably be good for my mental state to occasionally reach out to a lot of them and at least get into the pattern of talking once or twice a year.

Humans are Not Well Balanced

July 23, 2020 by Belghast

For years I have complained about doing escort missions in MMORPGs. They generally involve taking some hapless character along a fixed path as they aggro every single thing in sight. I have long wished I could literally just pick the NPC up and carry them along to the goal to hopefully get it over with quicker. I’ve now played Death Stranding and can without a doubt tell you that having to carry an NPC to the destination is not better, and also apparently humans are really hard to balance on your back. You might be wondering also how in the hell did we get into this situation and I will explain.

One of the things that porters occasionally carry is the bodies of the dead to the nearest incinerator to prevent a “void out” when they go necrotic as they attempt to pass over to the other side. You have to understand that the world of Death Stranding is extremely dangerous and unforgiving, and most of the individuals in this world live in a bunker or vault and have never gone outside for any length of time. So there have been a few cases where some NPC needs to move to another location and asks you to carry them on your back like you would a body. In this case I had to carry a fairly important story NPC effectively the entire length of what was the currently discovered world at the time. It took a good chunk of last night and the entire time I was having to adjust for her listing to one side or the other.

In this case it was an NPC that I have come to really like over the course of our interactions, so as a result I felt like I needed to be super careful as we traversed the landscape. Every time she would shift on my back I felt bad that I was not more careful transporting my “cargo”. Another thing that I love about this game is the random holograms that players have access to, which ultimately break up the wastes. It was really cool to see a Tallneck looming out over the horizon, because it is literally the same size as one in Horizon Zero Dawn making for this massive hologram. I’ve seen a few other HZD cross overs, so I am guessing this is all due to the fact that both games use the same engine, so Kojima more than likely spent a lot of time working with the Guerilla Games team.

If I am correct, I think I am at roughly the halfway point of the game. My goal is to try and finish things up to a reasonable level of satisfaction before the launch of Horizon Zero Dawn on August 7th. That gives me roughly 15 days worth of play time to push across the finish line. I feel like this is a game that I most definitely want to finish, especially given that there is supposedly a 15th chapter that is open ended allowing you to play around in the final state of the world. I always hate it when the continued play option for a game is to effectively “roll back” the world to the moments before the final conflict. Those are the games that I often times never quite finish because I know poking around in the world after that will feel fairly unsatisfying.

On the me front, I am doing better. Taking yesterday off was a pretty good idea even though I hate not actually blogging for a given day. You need to give yourself room to make these decisions every now and then, because in my case it gave me another day to clear my headspace a bit. My wife is healing nicely from the accident, and me… yesterday day was really bad but I am dealing with it. It is like every so often I kinda have to mentally bandage myself up a bit. I have all of today and half a day tomorrow and then it is my weekend which should help a bit. As always thanks for the kind words I received, they do help and they do mean a lot but I mostly share my struggle for anyone out there who might also be struggling.

So I did not get 31 people for the promptapalooza, but I have decided I am going to try and make it work nonetheless. I got pretty close and as a result I will just stub in myself for several days in order to make it work. Tomorrow afternoon since I am off work I will be pulling it all together, creating the list of prompts, the tentative posting calendar, and contacting everyone to try and link topic prompts to people. This is way less lead time than I would have liked, but I should have been more vocal about it. I’ve been in a really bad headspace this month so trying to deal with this has added a lot of stress to my plate as well. For those who have no clue what I am talking about, check out this original post that sorta outlines the idea. There is still time to sign up.

Player Impact on Game World

July 20, 2020 by Belghast

I have been playing an excessive amount of Death Stranding over the last few days. On paper it does not seem like a game I would necessarily enjoy. I remember when it launched on the PS4 it was universally lauded as a flop or as a “Walking Simulator”. However there is a quiet brilliance here that seems perfect for the time in which we are living currently. We find ourselves in a scenario of dealing with a pandemic that keeps us separated in ways that we are not used to and many are struggling with this reality. Death Stranding is a game where a cataclysmic event has separated what is left of humanity into a bunch of disconnected pockets, and your role as a “porter” is to deliver packages and also link all of these people up into a shared global network.

Fundamentally it is in fact a game about transporting cargo between point A and point B and attempting to do so as safely as possible. You are graded based on how much damage the cargo took, and believe me that cargo is constantly taking damage. However what is happening behind the scenes is the interesting part when you talk to the individuals at the destinations who are grateful that you risked your life to cross the wastes to bring them something they desperately need… like medication. Essentially you are in a time of vast networks of 3D printers that can replicate almost anything, but anything organic or very specific needs to still be transported by hand.

The most interesting aspect of the game for me is how your actions and the actions of other players are constantly impacting your decisions. I brought with me three ladders and ended up using them at the top of this waterfall to create a path that future porters would be able to cross safely. Me laying down those ladders worked on top of the efforts of those who came before me, because there are a total of I believe nine ladders that make up what is effectively a safe way to cross. That isn’t to say it didn’t terrify me to cross it, especially while hauling a bunch of mission critical cargo behind me… knowing that one slip would probably send it all plummeting down the falls and become unrecoverable.

The other really interesting thing about the game is how players are impacting the world in ways that are directly obvious. See this dirt path that is in front of me? This was not here a few days ago when I started playing. This represents a path that players are carving through the world, and as I understand it data is being collected about player movement and this is then impacting the terrain of the world around you. So a common footpath turns into a place where the grass is worn down and eventually ends up in an area of exposed dirt. These don’t always appear in the most efficient paths, but more the most commonly and as a result easiest to travel paths for transporting cargo. If you are adventurous there is still plenty of room to carve out your own path however.

On the podcast this weekend, I described the game as what if you were playing Fallout in a world where all of the Vaults were active and you were instead playing a caravan leader delivering goods between them all. There are definite moments where it feels Fallout-like, especially any time you are called to explore the ruins of some part of civilization from the fall of humanity. Instead of Deathclaws however, you are left to content with BTs or Beached Things that you can choose to deal with either through sneaking around them or later in the game by outright attacking them with weapons that have been developed specifically to deal with them.

The thing that I did not expect, is that I have actually started to grow my BB or Bridge Baby. There is more happening here with this child in a bottle than I initially expected, and as you encounter bad things you have to take its mental state into account. Soothing the BB ends up making it produce these heart shaped air bubbles and increases the bond between you two… and as a result its effectiveness in detecting bad things as well as its ability to handle psychological strain. The whole thing is a really strange concept, and I did not at all expect that I would slowly find myself being attached to the little runt and taking actions that I know specifically that will make it happy. For example when you are running with the speed exoskeleton you can make these massive leaps, and the hang time seems to make the kid extremely happy… so I find myself trying to plot a course that is going to allow me to do a bunch of them in the process.

I am still not entirely certain why I like this game as much as I do, however for now I am mostly just rolling with it. Death Stranding is exploration porn, and roaming the wastes is gorgeous. Right now I am more or less roaming around the same neck of the woods trying to “finish” with a few objectives before moving forward the story. I am specifically trying to convince a few individuals that joining the network in full is a good idea, and trying to track down missions specific to them in order to gain favor. There are so many interesting cameos and references going on, and I realize this is not going to be the game for everyone. However for me it seems to hit all of the right notes and is the sort of game that apparently I need to be playing right now. I will be sad once my journey is finished.

AggroChat #308 – Dance Battle Time

July 19, 2020 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

This evening we record an entire show where we basically talk about three games. The first of these is Ooblets which came out this week in early access and how it is a blending of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Pokemon and a Card Battler. From there we talk about Ghosts of Tsushima and how it presents Samurai gameplay in a new high fidelity light. Additionally we talk a bit about Kurosawa mode which offers you a unique black and white/film grain way of playing the game. Finally Bel talks about his adventures being a post apocalyptic fedex driver in a world seemingly run on twitter likes… aka Death Stranding. He talks a bit about the odd social aspect of the game where other players can only have a possible positive impact without ever causing any negatives.