Games Archives - Page 372 of 687 - Tales of the Aggronaut

MTG Arena Beta

April 18, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was of course the ninth anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog… and Wizards of the Coast got me a present. Roughly halfway through the day I checked my mail and noticed that I got an email from WotC inviting me to the closed beta of Arena… their attempt at making a modern Magic the Gathering client. The truth is Hearthstone has been eating their lunch for several years now due to its extreme accessibility. It also does the dual whammy of giving both a nostalgia buzz for magic the gathering and collectible card games in general… while delivering a fatal blow of world of warcraft nostalgia at the same time. It’s a good game… and honestly lately I have been playing quite a bit of the warrior rush deck, but even that said… it is no Magic the Gathering. There is just something about this game that causes me to follow the community and buy cards… even though I don’t get to play that often.

The biggest problem for me is that I don’t really have a LGS or Local Gaming Store to be spending my time at. I live out in the burbs and the closest thing to me is on the opposite end of Tulsa from where I live… making it not exactly convenient to go to in the evenings and play cards. Where a game like Hearthstone or Arena comes in is it allows me to get that fix… without the need to actually get hands on other players. That said I am working on fostering a little community at work for lunch time gaming and am building up some balanced decks to sort of make an easy drop in and play environment. All of that said… it is just so much easier to get online at the end of a day and get my gaming fix rather than trying to coordinate with other human beings.

When you start up the Arena client you are given a handful of packs to start crafting your own decks with. This assortment essentially encompassed the last two blocks of play… Rivals of Ixalan, Ixalan, Hour of Devastation and Amonkhet. I got a handful of decent cards and could have probably crafted together a serviceable deck from them. I personally like these two blocks of play theme wise and together they give quite a bit of reasonable synergy. I believe the plan going forward is to largely limit Arena to standard sets by default… which seems a little if that were the case why Kaladesh and Aether Revolt are not included. It was my understanding that when the Kaladesh block cycles out the Amonkhet block will as well in Q4 2018. Quite frankly I struggle keeping these things in my head as to which sets are in and which sets are out because it doesn’t seem anywhere near as clear as it used to be. I apparently am not the only person to think this because there is literally a website called What is In Standard.

One thing that is going to be a challenge to get used to is that the pack structure is vastly different from live paper magic. When you open a pack you get a grand total of 8 cards instead of 15 cards… which I hope means they are going to charge a reduced price for the packs when the whole buying packs for money thing is eventually introduced. You get a single rare/mythic, two uncommons, and five commons. If you already have more than a play set of a card they replace it instead with a token as you can see underneath Samut in the above picture. These can then be spent to fill out missing holes in your collection trading a rare for a rare or a mythic for a mythic. At first I could not understand why I kept getting them since at this point in my head… I had only opened a handful of packs.

Also in your collection are a wide variety of deck archetypes built and ready to go. Personally I have been shifting back and forth between Golgari Exploration for which Green/Black has always been my preferred color set, and Legion of Dusk which similarly is heavy black and vampire themed enough to ignore the fact that I am using white mana. I love the exploration mechanic and when it compounds with cards that do stuff when any card explores. This means you can get some really big critters on the board that escalate rapidly. Ultimately in a perfect situation I want a foul orchard out on turn one, Wildgrowth Walker on turn two, and then some combination of creatures that explore like Seeker’s Squire or Ixalli’s Diviner to pump up the Walker and start my assault proper. What that works it is beautiful… when it doesn’t there seem to be enough alternate paths to victory to hang in for a very long time.

For the most part the client itself plays exactly like you would expect a magic client to play. It does a lot of things for you, like if you have no plays it goes ahead and skips to the next turn which is likely going to throw you off at first. There is a way to flip the client into a more granular level having you verify each and every trigger that happens… which would be important for more technical decks. I do feel like the timeout is maybe a little bit long given how many phases you have to get through… there have been times that matches have taken forever because the other player was just slow at evaluating their options… or potentially just doing something else at the same time. Unlike the Duels of the Planeswalkers clients I never felt like it was rushing me through things and causing me to lose card play opportunities. It seems to have some intelligence built into the client and stalls anytime it thinks you might have a play option, and so far it has not missed a time when I needed to play a card in response to something.

After each victory you are awarded a single random card, and there are various quests that you can be working on while playing matches. For example you can see in the bar that I am at 8 wins of 10 needed for my next pack of Rivals of Ixalan. The pack quests seem to come at 5 victories, 10 victories and 15 victories… and not sure if that trend continues on every 5 victories or if you are limited to 3 packs per week. Similarly there are quests that I had already completed like Kill 13 of your opponents creatures or cast 13 white or blue spells, each of those rewarding 250 gold. The in game pack purchasing mechanism allows you to buy a pack every 1000 gold, so essentially after doing four of these quests you can get some more cards. I am assuming this gold currency will also eventually be used for drafting which sadly is not in yet… but I believe they have talked about wanting that game play mode exists.

The only real thing you need to know is the fact that I set up my account around 6:30 last night and the next thing I knew… it was 9:30. The game is extremely good and brought back all of the right nostalgia beats for sitting around playing magic the gathering and trying to figure out how to dig yourself out of a card draw hole. There are times when things go extremely well… then there are other times like the above match when things go south really quickly. I just could not get the exploration cards I needed to power up my front line and managed to keep the other player long enough to get a recursive combo on the ground. As a result they manages to gain up 183 life before finally finishing me off in a single round. I could have conceded at any point, but I wanted to see how big they could manage to get their health pool. Even in a horrible loss condition… I was entertained. I look forward to seeing how this product evolves over time and I am likely going to start streaming it on occasion so you can laugh at me as I make obvious mistakes.

Boosh and Barroth

April 16, 2018 by Belghast

It was a pretty great weekend as far as gaming goals go. Saturday I largely roamed around aimlessly in Everquest while hanging out with my wife downstairs watching various stuff on the television. Then at some point before the podcast I headed upstairs to see if I could knock out the megaman event. This entails fighting the most laughably small Odogoron you have ever seen… and one that is slightly larger than normal. In truth I am not completely sure it is larger than normal… or if it just seems massive compared to the tiny tiny one you fight first. Ultimately you need to get five tickets to get your full palico armor and I managed to finish mine up in three events… with the last one dropping three event tickets… something I was not sure could actually happen.

After the Podcast Thalen and I wound up hanging out and working on our Ryu costumes, which entails doing a challenge arena where you fight a massive Barroth. This thing is so large that really your only option is to wail away on the legs until it falls over…. then start scoring hits on other parts of the body. This event scores event tickets based on how fast you get the kill… if I am remembering right getting it in less than 5 minutes nets you a gold and three tickets, less than 9 minutes a silver and 2 tickets, and finally finishing at all before the 50 minute timer is up earns you bronze and a single ticket. You need seven tickets in total so we wound up running it four times in a row allowing us to craft the Ryu suit… that in all honesty we will probably never actually wear.

When Thalen and I both got on I created an open chat channel and we both joined the Greysky Armanda clan session, and at some point during our Barroth nonsense our good friend Shiana joined us in both. Thalen and I were talking for a bit about both needing Kirin and what sort of gear we were prepping for the fight. It was around about this point that Shiana offered to help us get some attempts in seeing as he was in the 90s rank wise himself. Granted this is like at 11 pm we are starting this madness… but my desire to kill the stupid unicorn was greater than my desire for sleep. So we continued forth with me wearing my mostly Xeno’jiiva set that nets 40 lightning resist with a veggie platter buff. In truth with multiple people the fight already seemed way easier because I was not having to spend my entire time trying to shed aggro from the lunatic horse.

One by one we each got carted… with me taking the last hit and closing out our first attempt somewhere around the 25 minute mark. On our second attempt we managed to get feline insurance, and in truth only managed to get carted the one time if I am remembering correctly. We had better luck as far as where exactly Kirin decided to fight us, shifting back and forth between two relatively open areas. When we managed to whittle it down to enough hitpoints to make it run back to it’s “nest” we barrel bombed it into oblivion then threw on our thunderproof mantles and proceeded to wale away on it. All the while this was going on… I was still very much on edge… afraid something would go terribly wrong and we would fail the fight once again. So when I saw the above screenshot… crediting a kill for Kirin I was ecstatic… making getting to sleep when I finally crawled into bed a little after midnight a bit harder than normal.

Sunday I spent the day swapping laundry and hanging out upstairs playing Monster Hunter while watching The Mighty Boosh on my second monitor. I am not exactly sure what prompted me, but for some reason I fired up Hulu to see what was available and it suggested to me this show. Now I had watched most of it some time ago when reruns were being played as part of the adult swim block late at night. This was back during my wow raiding days… and many of the sayings from the “Old Gregg” episode became constant quotation fodder during fights… especially “Fuzzy Little Man Peach”. So yesterday I hung out watching the Hulu feed of the episodes while doing random nonsense in Monster Hunter World. It was a day truly well spent.

I’ve been slowly adding weapons to my repertoire and then learning how to use them. It seems extremely bizarre but I have been crafting purple and orange versions of weapons that I have maybe never actually used… because I figure as I learn them I at least have an “end game” version to get used to rather than mess with all of the steps in between. For the moment I have solid versions of Charge Blade, Switch Axe, Great Sword and of course the Longsword of which I have developed quite the collection. One of the weapons that I have kept wanting to try is the Dual Blades which seem really cool when I see someone using them, but for whatever reason I have never actually tried.

I really really like the look of the Sin dual Chain Kama looking weapons, and thanks to farming the Odogoron quest I managed to get not only one but two gems. This allowed me to craft the weapon and the complete set of Alpha Odog gear to go with it. Sure it might seem weird that I have a full set of gear largely because I think its cool looking… but whatever. Now I am setting my sights on getting the Zorah blast lance… before giving that weapon a go. Sure I could just go into the training room… but as I keep being reminded I am the patron saint of bad decisions and that simply would not be my way.

Another project for this weekend was finishing farming the Anjanath claws needed to upgrade my weapon I can’t pronounce into the final form of said weapon I can’t pronounce. I then took the firey axe and shield out on a few test runs having really great luck with it. It could use a few more ranks of handicraft to give me more time in the blue zone, because it takes an awful lot of sharpness loss as you use it… but it also dishes out a lot of damage and is crazy fun to use. I am sure there are probably better options for sword and shield, but I like this one and it at least gives me an end game suitable weapon in that category. All in all it was a pretty great weekend… apart from one incident… but that is a tale for another day.

Everquest For Reasons

April 13, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did some nonsense “for science” or mostly to refresh my mind so that I was no longer talking completely out of my arse about Everquest. Prior to last night the last time I had played was apparently in 2013 if my screenshot archive was to be believed. So not exactly the most up to date information about the game considering it is still receiving updates and tweaks. Prior to starting up… or more correctly as the game downloaded I watched a video from Cohh to sort of re-familiarize myself with the game. This video included a link to Brewall’s Everquest Maps pack… which I then installed to have slightly better guidance than the default options.

The game presented a series of servers… some of which were flagged as preferred… something I am not completely certain what it actually means. However it did get me to end up rolling on Vox instead of one of the classic servers that slowly got joined over the years. This is technically a newer account than the one that I had while playing the original Everquest, but it is the one that I have the vast majority of my EQ2 characters on… so if I am going to sub somewhere it would be here. On my older account however my characters are spread between Veeshan and Xegony… neither of which sounded like an amazing option for starting fresh so I just went with Vox the new standard ruleset server that was being presented in the preferred list.

Originally I created a Gnome Shadowknight… but the fact that I could not change the color of the eyebrows from grey to something else caused me to ultimately delete that character and roll something completely different. This time around I went with a Troll which was a more min-maxery choice given that the latent regeneration has always been a little broken. Essentially there are three races that are large enough to be able to Slam… or essentially shield bash without the requirement of having a shield. So you if you play a Troll, Ogre or Barbarian you can interrupt casting while using a two handed weapon… which always seemed to fit the feel of a Shadowknight better than sword and shield. Yes these are things that I was somehow able to dredge up from the past and summon forth to advise my judgement.

The user interface still makes me deeply frustrated because it is sort of a much worse version of Everquest 2… and I have never thought the EQ2 interface was that brilliant. After about thirty minutes of tweaking I managed to get things moved in a way that didn’t make me quite so frustrated… though still not entirely happy. The hardest part was the mouse but after tweaking both the X and Y sensitivity I managed to get mouse look feeling a bit more normal. The next step was trying to figure out how to get tab targeting to work properly which lead me out onto the forums to sort out which of the keybinds would actually do what I wanted it to do. It turned out that basically I wanted to bind two things to tab… nearest npc and cycle extended targets… which combined sorta give me the style of tab targeting I am used to which is target the nearest thing or cycle through the things I am currently engaged with.

Over the course of the evening things started feeling significantly better as I got adjusted to this window on time. The combat is still largely non-interactive at low levels for a melee character and it was not long before I set up my old “Taunt and Slam” macro so that I could have a single button to train both abilities up with. Originally I had lumped Sense Heading in there but it seems that you maybe no longer need to train that like you did before. Most combat involved me pulling with my single spell Spike of Disease then starting up the auto attack and hitting my single ability button anytime taunt or bash/slam were up. It was not glamorous… but also pretty chill to hang out downstairs while watching television.

Unfortunately as of writing this… I am finding out that they apparently moved the spells so you start to get something new every level instead of not giving Shadowknights much of anything until around level 10. So I just bought Sense the Dead, Locate Corpse, Invisibility vs Undead, Disease Cloud and Siphon Strength which should serve to make combat significantly more interesting. The other thing that makes this entire experience more reasonable is the introduction of mercenaries… so I am running around with I believe a Human Cleric allowing me to do my tanky nonsense almost indefinitely receiving the occasional heal to keep me alive and functional.

All in all it is not a bad experience so I do need to back pedal a bit regarding some of my comments the other day when talking about Project Gorgon. That said I do think the interface for Gorgon is leaps and bounds ahead of this one, and it is probably the single most frustrating part of the experience for me. I feel like I will spend some time soon trying to clean the interface up a bit or seeing if I can hide some of the interface elements to reduce the size of everything. I am linking in a picture from Project Gorgon for reference… as there is just way less stuff on the screen but providing most of the same information that the Everquest screen does. Regardless it was interesting enough for me to get to level 8 and it is highly likely that I will keep leveling for a bit just to see how the experience expands once I leave the newbie cave.

Wandering Aimlessly

April 10, 2018 by Belghast

Right now I find myself struggling a bit to gain purchase in most of my MMO options right now. World of Warcraft I am back and active in because of the Wednesday night Mythical Nonsense thing we are doing. I was logging in every night to try and eek out the last bits of experience needed to unlock the Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei but even then… I have faltered considerably. I really do not enjoy Argus, so logging in every night and grinding every single quest available just seems grossly unpalatable. Final Fantasy XIV failed to catch my attention with Eureka, and I lost momentum catching up on the main story quest patched in with the latest expansion. Destiny 2 is sitting there largely untouched because when I log in… there is really nothing that I want to be doing which is ultimately where that game falls short of the original.. there are no long running breadcrumbs for me to follow when I spin out and lose purpose. Monster Hunter World is always easy to get back into… but there are nights that I just don’t want to spend my evening upstairs and the fact that my PS4 is there limits my play time.

In the end I keep coming back to Project Gorgon and its weirdly charming neostalgic experience. On the podcast Tam talked about the game feeling like the way we remember playing Everquest. While this might sound confusing at first… this is exactly what this game feels like. We have incorrect rose tinted feelings about how Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot for that matter felt to play. If you go back today you end up with a cludgy mess of a game that feels ancient and quite honestly not that enjoyable. However our in our memories the Everquest experience is still vibrant because we have edited out the rough spots and filled in the way those actions made us feel in place of the hard facts of just how limited that game actually was. Project Gorgon remembers those things that were lacking in Everquest and has supplied the spackle and paint needed to make those memories feel true and vibrant.

Sure I am doing the same kill ten rats quests I have been doing my entire MMO gaming career, but the fact that I seem to have a relatively limitless quest log… and the fact that I can complete the quests by killing ANY ten rats… not just the ones five feet away from the quest giver makes the experience feel more open ended. If I have a quest to kill wolves… Sickly Wolves, Mangy Wolves, Supporting Wolves, just plain wolves… specific named character wolves… all count towards a quest that says “kill wolves”. This means you can do the quests while roaming around the world and exploring… rather than feeling tethered to a specific location to be able to clear out your log. There are quests I picked up on my first day that I just managed to finish two weeks later because I had not actually encountered the thing I was needing to find yet. I dig the long tail that this cycle has and the fact that it feels like you are “questing” for something more than just completing a task list.

I am sure some of this is just my inherent lack of familiarity with the world or the fact that the maps don’t really have locations marked on them, or my habit of running the opposite direction I need to go. Whatever the case the specific combination of broad objectives and happy accidents along the way lead to a very immersive experience in spite of the fact that you spend a good deal of time running along and encountering nothing at all. The only real complaint I have so far is the fact that most of the gear that I use looks like complete nonsense… like right now it feels like I am wearing thermal long-johns… but they were unfortunately the best item I had and finally got rid of that horrible yellow bandage appearance.

At this point I have managed to hook two more people on this game, in part because I knew it would be down their alley. For the most part I am limiting myself to just Sword and Psychology… but I am contemplating trying out a few other secondary skills. I spent the 2000 councils aka gold to learn beast taming so it might be interesting to try a pet secondary for awhile. Similarly I now have the ability to learn fire magic, so that might also be interesting to shim in over top of Psychology. The one thing that I am finding weird… and cannot quite reconcile is that our hotbars have six abilities on them… but right now I have seven in both psychology and swords. I cannot however seem to be able to replace the spells from my bar… so how exactly do we use that last one? I might try dragging it to the optional bar and see if it becomes usable that way. Among all of the other games that I have access to at this very moment… this one feels the most comfortable and suited to whatever I am needing at this very moment. I’ve not really streamed much because nothing I am doing right now seems interesting enough for someone to watch. Grinding factions in WoW is boring as hell… and I am afraid me wandering around aimlessly in Gorgon will also be boring to watch.