Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Games of the Decade: 2011

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Rift

On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.

Rift

Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.

Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.

Rage

Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it.

I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.

The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim

My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.

What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.

This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011

I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game.

So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.

Games of the Decade: 2010

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While not my first blog, Tales of the Aggronaut was created back in 2009. This means that the decade of 2010 to 2019 is the first time I am really able to legitimately look back on the last decade of gaming from a blogging standpoint. I’ve gone back and forth over the last several weeks about what sort of form these posts would take. For awhile I contemplated doing one post per day covering 5 games per decade. However at the time I dreamed up this concept it would mean that more or less you would get nothing from me but these posts for the rest of the year.

Instead I scaled things back to a single post per year, but even then I was uncertain of the number of games to talk about in each year. Being the unorganized person that I am, I could not really whittle things down to a clean number each year. So instead what you are getting is a compromise of a compromise, where I just write about the games in each year that were particularly important or noteworthy to me. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I am sure I will be completely blowing past titles that you my readers feel are super important. If that is the case feel free to leave me comments below with the game I should have included.

Minecraft

Technically Minecraft was available and playable in 2009, but I didn’t pay much attention until August of 2010 when I saw the above video from YouTuber DavidAngel64. The “X Series” as it came to be known was a series of videos where he explored various games, and in it he did a deep dive into those early days of Minecraft. I watched several of these and was hooked, and immediately went out and purchased the game and started doing my own explorations. It was a simple time when we were more or less figuring out the rules of the game and now to get to the sort of resources we wanted. For example the hunt for diamond because an overarching goal that pretty much dominated every waking moment of playing the game when I was not finding uses for the copious amounts of cobblestone that I was dredging from the earth.

The peak of my non-group gameplay was in October when I recorded a series of YouTube videos using Fraps and showing off some of the nonsense I had built. That channel is more or less abandoned and everything is on the “Belghast” channel that I dump our podcast on, and with no real great way or moving them, and no access to the original recordings… they more or less live out their life as they are… poorly done with crappy audio. I still have the original Minecraft files laying around in a zip, because I used to trade my files to other friends playing the game and they would zip up theirs and trade them to me so we could explore each others work in the days before an active Minecraft server. In 2011 the way we interacted with the game shifted significantly as we stood up our first server for the House Stalwart guild to all build together. That said 2010 was the renaissance of the game for me, and that blissful era when everything was new and magical.

Fallout New Vegas

I love the Fallout setting, and I can still remember saving up my pennies to buy the original game when it came out back during college. I’ve always been drawn to post apocalyptic settings, and Fallout is a world that is rich and textured and full of tantalizing bits of lore. While Fallout 3 pushed us into a brand new territory of exploring what happened to the Capitol Wasteland, Fallout New Vegas saw us returning to our roots of Southern California, the setting of the first two games. As a result what follows is a nostalgic ride seeing how the settings you were familiar with evolved in the time between the games.

The game is also a return to being controlled by Obsidian games, which represented a significant portion of the folks from Black Isle Studios that worked on the original two games. Fallout New Vegas is known for a handful of things… but the first being that the game does not start you in a vault and instead gives you what feels like a much more weighty introduction in the form of an attempt on your life. The other thing it is known for, is just how freaking buggy the game was at launch. I personally managed to get around most of these and found myself enjoying it greatly. The game is also significant because it represents one of the first times I wrote a review for a site that was not my own. You can still find my original review up on Polygamerous, though due to shifts in hosting I no longer have an account there… but the byline is still at the bottom.

Mass Effect 2

We are travelling through a time period when I was not quite as rabid about keeping screenshots for eternity. As a result I don’t have a ready archive of images to draw upon for most of these games. Mass Effect 2 represents my first entry in the series, and I remember buying it digitally on the ill fated Direct2Drive, because some other subscription I had that I am drawing a blank on gave me a significant discount there. This is the game that shaped my view of the Mass Effect setting, and still to this day is probably my favorite game in the series. I loved the characters and the interactions and the “away team mission” nature of the gameplay. In the years between then and now I have played through this game I believe five times in total, often times as part of a full replay of the series.

There are a lot of games out there that hope to be a narrative story that rivals that of Star Wars. Very few manage to pull this goal off, but Mass Effect absolutely did. I still stand by my stance that this series would make one of the absolute best Science Fiction/Fantasy television series out there. I keep hoping that Netflix options the rights, or shit even Disney Plus after seeing how amazing The Mandalorian has been. While I played through as Male Shepard, the canonical version based on all of my friends has to be the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard. I will admit I had a real hang up for a long time about playing female characters in video games. When I play a video game I am essentially playing me in whatever form takes place on screen, and I tried to always make each character as close to “Belghast” as I could. I seemingly have gotten past that… and at some point I need to break this game back out and play it through in the mode that so many people say is the best possible version.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2010

So those are the games that I was playing behind the scenes, but on this blog… you got a vastly different view of me. It was a time of deep irregularity in my posting schedule. I didn’t really start doing this regular posting thing until 2013, and each time I had a major lapse it was harder and harder to get back into posting again. There are so many sign posts in those early years like this one from April where I find myself apologizing for not feeling up to writing. I was not happy with the end of Wrath of the Lich King, and similarly not super happy with the beginning of Cataclysm. I was also super hung up on this blog being a World of Warcraft Tanking and Raid Leadership blog. That niche no longer really fit me, and as a result I was struggling trying to get the oomph to be writing about what I thought were the topics folks wanted me to write about.

I’m glad I figured this whole thing out at some point, or at least have a working theory about how to progress forward with a blog. I am not sure how often I will be writing these pieces, but I figure I will probably do Monday and Friday or some semblance of that until I get through the years between 2010 and 2019. As I do this, I would love to hear in the comments about your own games of a specific year.

Halo and Wolcen

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Halo Reach

I have to admit I got caught up in the Halo hype last night like so many other players. The key difference for me is that I have never really been a Halo aficionado. I never owned an original Xbox and I first played the game with the pretty tragically bad PC port that came significantly after the fact. At the time I thought Unreal 2 was a much better game and doing a lot of the same things that Halo was. However there are times when you see how much a franchise means to people that you respect, and you desperately want to understand what they like so much about it. This is why I keep throwing myself down the path of Halo games and trying to figure out how to flip the switch inside of me that makes me love them.

With the PC release of The Master Chief Collection, Microsoft has opted to dole the games out one at a time rather than giving us all of them at once like exists on the Xbox One. The first game up is Halo Reach, which came out in 2010 and is in theory the second game chronologically, centering around the defense of a planet called Reach. That is pretty much all I know about the game because at this point I am only two missions into it. The controls do not feel amazing by modern standards and the voice acting in 2010 was significantly lower fidelity than what we are used to today as well. Both of these things lead me to bounce out pretty early last night on the campaign.

The core problem that I always have with Halo is its weapon system. There are weapons that feel good to use, but they are generally the Spartan weapons and while out in the field you can never seem to find ammunition for them. This means you are going to ultimately have to keep throwing away the gun that you like and picking up some random piece of trash just to survive. This gameplay feels awful to me, and I am super thankful that Bungie went on to create Destiny… a game largely focused around playing with amazing feeling weapons. I appreciate that Halo exists because without it I wouldn’t have gotten Destiny, but I am still struggling to glean what makes the game so magical.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

On a whim I decided to reinstall Wolcen the other night, because it had not significantly played the game since February of 2018. At that time I believe my assessment was that the game was “very alpha” which is my polite way of saying it is a buggy and formless mess. In the months between then and now the game has completely changed into something that is extremely playable, and to the best of my understanding has at least one act completely finished. There is also a planned launch in January, which would indicate to me that we are getting pretty close to its final form.

The end result is a game with a pretty solid storyline and good voice acting, as well as combat and systems that feel pretty polished. Gone is the complete free form system and instead one that sort of nudges you into one of three paths largely centered around melee combat, ranged combat or magical casting. However you can at will jump off the rails and go in whatever directions you want to because in theory there isn’t much difference between these paths at the beginning of the game. You pick up spells while roaming through the world and these serve as your abilities. Each one has specific weapon requirements, leading your way down those three paths for the most part.

Combat feels solid and fluid and a seemingly good blend of difficulty, where it is absolutely easy to sink into but can be punishing if you are not paying attention to your surroundings. There is a dodge system bound to the space bar and it follows a pip based system giving you 4 charges of dodge before you have to wait for them to regenerate. Shocking to no one I am largely centered around a melee build and have an interesting blend of abilities including: a leap attack, a charge, a death grip, a warcry shout of sorts and a big hammer that I slam down dealing AOE damage. The interplay between abilities feels really good and they have added little perks like you automagically charging into combat with your primary attack as a gap closer if you were out of combat.

The gearing system all seems to more or less be standard fare for an ARPG, with the added element of wearing armor of a specific play style giving you extra attribute points for that play style. So ultimately your “build” becomes a combination of your skills that you use, your talent picks and the items that you happen to be wielding… all of which sort of adding up to a total character identity. I’ve more or less stuck to heavy armor which greatly increases my resistances, but there have been moments when a significantly better item drops of another armor family, and I was able to freely swap stuff around to fit the need.

I know Grace also has Wolcen and at some point I would like to group up with her and see how the group play feels. Ultimately that is going to be the make or break for the game, because while I enjoy playing an ARPG solo… there is limited life in doing that. We come together each Diablo 3 season because group play is fun and rewarding, and while I want to see the story play out in Wolcen, unless it also has rewarding feeling group play I am not sure if it becomes a real option for the long haul.

Diablo 3 Keybinds

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Over the Thanksgiving break I spent most of my time playing Diablo 3. I go through these periods at the beginning of a new season where I play hard and heavy for a few weeks and then taper off once I have achieved whatever goal I thought I wanted to achieve for the season. This time around Blizzard put a Tyrael themed Goblin pet at the end of the process and as a result I ground my way to the very end. This was supposed to be the season that I learned the joys of playing a Wizard, but I have to say I am just not a big fan of that class. The highest I managed to get my Wizard was a solo Greater Rift 60, and now that I am in the post seasons journey I might try finishing out the set I was going for and seeing how well it plays.

My friend Grace bailed me out and helped me power level a Demon Hunter and get some of the basic gearing that I needed. This ultimately was the class that I finished the Seasons Journey on and has rapidly become the class that I am the most familiar with. Effectively it and the Thorns Crusader are pretty much my favorite ways to play Diablo 3. I should branch out more, but when I find something I like I end up sticking to it. On the Demon Hunter I effectively ran a variant of the Unhallowed Essense Multi-shot build that you can find on Icy Veins. The most important part about playing the build is never stopping long enough to get hit, because you are still relatively squishy… but Demon Hunter has the mechanics to keep that from happening whereas I felt like the Wizard lacked them.

I’ve seen a bunch of friends dipping their toes into this season, and because of this I thought I would spend this morning breaking out the most cogent advice that I have. I have to credit Grace for starting me down this path initially, but the single best thing I did to improve my gameplay in Diablo 3 was set a keybind for “Force Move”. This effectively gives you a key that pressing it down moves your character towards your mouse cursor. I highlighted the keybinds that I am going to be talking about in the above image but the first one is that when I hold W my character moves towards where my mouse cursor is allowing me to move the mouse to steer rather than relying on the sometimes sloppy click to move. This is important because it allows you to be moving independent of any other actions you might be taking with your character and rapidly change directions as needed.

The next important keybind is that I bound my first skill slot to space bar. This is where I put my movement key on whatever class I happen to be playing. So on Barbarian this would be Leap Attack or Furious Charge, on Demon Hunter it would be Vault, on Witch Doctor it would be Spirit Walk, Wizard it would be Teleport, and Crusader it would be Steed Charge. It is plays on a key that is super easy to spam because you are going to want to be moving as fast as possible most of the time especially when dealing with higher level Greater Rifts.

You are probably questioning why I have Action slot 2, 3 and 4 bound to 7, 8 and 9… and I have to admit this is a fairly new revelation. I play with a Logitech G600 gaming mouse with a keypad on the left hand side. For me the most natural and comfortable keys to hit are in the 7/8/9 row as that seems to be where my thumb naturally rests. That means I can comfortably move up to hit 4/5/6 or down to hit 0/-/= without really interrupting my play in MMORPGs. Most builds involve putting your most important abilities on Left Mouse and Right Mouse and then anything you just want to keep hitting periodically on keybinds 2/3/4. I find it takes me out of the action less if I am hitting these on the mouse as opposed to trying to reach them on the keyboard while holding the W key to be moving forward. Ultimately you sorta have to figure out what feels best for you, but for me this works.

The truth of playing higher tiers of Diablo 3 is that standing still is going to kill you. You effectively need to stay in constant motion to be able to avoid the cavalcade of nonsense that is being thrown at you as far as ground effects and missiles headed your direction. I find it way easier to do this while staying shifting around the battlefield and in order to do this effectively you need to be able to move independent of you performing any attacks. Similarly there are a bunch of attacks that are effectively skill shots requiring you to swing your mouse cursor around in a specific direction and I find this easier to do it I am doing so without worrying about what directional inputs I might be sending my character. Keybinds made Diablo 3 feel so much better and I need to see if I can set up something similar in Path of Exile to maybe fix some of the bad feelings I have towards that game.

As far as my late game seasonal journey, I have had a decent amount of luck with Primal Ancient drops. I aligned these in the order of which I got them, and the one I got from clearing my first 70 Greater Rift is the Nemesis Bracers, which are usually a cube item… but I wound up shifting up my build a bit to accommodate them. The most important drop was my Primal Ancient Yangs which I managed to get by re-rolling a spare Yangs over and over trying to get an Ancient and then somehow winning the Jackpot. The St. Archew gloves are mostly a throw away drop, but I got them on a character I will be talking about in a few minutes making that a little bit more viable. Lastly I got a Primal Ancient piece of the Unhallowed set which blends perfectly into the build on the Demon Hunter.

At the beginning of the season I mentioned that I had never played a Wizard or a Witch Doctor before and apparently this is the season where both of these have been remedied. Grace mentioned that since we are both done with the seasonal journey that we should roll a couple of “Chicken” build Witch Doctors to do some nonsense farming with. I leveled a Gem of Ease and ground up the Witch Doctor yesterday afternoon for fun. I have to admit while I don’t have anything close to a final build, the leveling build I am running is rather enjoyable. The class as a whole feels like this weird blend of the Necromancer and the Demon Hunter… both of which classes that I greatly enjoy. So I can see this being enjoyable.

I’ve only managed to get up to Torment VI with the character, but right now I mostly need the rest of the Helltooth Items and the weapon set that makes the Chicken build work. More or less this is going to be the thing that keeps me invested in this season, and I may even dust off the Wizard and get it moving again. Weirdly at night I am going from playing Diablo 3 on the PC to laying in bed and playing Diablo 3 on the Switch for awhile as I play up a seasonal Barbarian there. Apparently I am in the zone as far as it comes to playing Diablo, and I am sure this will last right up until the point that the new season starts in Destiny 2.