Games Archives - Page 380 of 690 - Tales of the Aggronaut

One Big Download

March 7, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was mostly an evening filled with frustration… at least the tail end of the night. I’ve talked about this before but I have a slightly different setup from most people in that all of my gaming stuff is upstairs in my office with both consoles and my real gaming pc hooked up to my 4k television up there. My wife needed to grade last night which is traditionally a downstairs activity and after about an hour and some change I felt sorta bad being upstairs while she was downstairs… when I was technically playing something I could play on the laptop. So I stopped the stream and headed downstairs to in theory chill on the sofa.

The core problem with that idea is that FFXV is a 75 gigabyte download which took legitimately a couple of hours to download over the wireless. However once we reached what I thought would be the end of the download… it stalled out for thirty minutes with zero activity. In the past when this has happened I have paused downloads in steam and restarted… and then things wake the hell up and finish up. That was not at all what happened this time however and the game decided to start downloading everything again. So when I finally gave up last night we were about 40 gb into download number two… and I have zero clue if it actually finished over night.

According to Steam I have spent 72 minutes playing Final Fantasy XV and for the most part it feels great and looks amazing as a PC game. There are some weird hiccups where the game would freeze but I was not sure if that was part of the whole combat engine or not. It would always happen after I did a big attack so maybe this is something that also happened on the PS4 that I am simply not remembering. As far as the actual feel of controlling the game with mouse and keyboard… it feels amazing other than the menu interactions. What it seems like you would logically do is select the menu item with your mouse, but that is not at all what happens. Instead you have to sort of scroll through the menus with WASD or a super awkward move the mouse in a general direction to pick an option scheme.

Combat however feels way more fluid for me using a mouse and keyboard than a controller which is ultimately the mode of the game I am going to be interacting with the most. This is one of those times that I am super thankful that the game is constantly prompting you which button you should push when, because it allowed me to drop right into the game and start playing rather than trying to memorize the keybindings. The biggest thing that just feels instantly better thought is basic sword attacks because I always felt like I was never quite dexterous enough with my fingers to do all of the interactions I needed to do. I was constantly missing blocks and parries which are things that I just sorta now do instinctively with a mouse.

I didn’t make it super far into the game because of the nonsense I tried to do with the laptop, but I did make it to Gauldin Quay which moves the story forward a tiny bit. That said I was absolutely more into doing the side quests than I ever cared about the main story. All in all I am happy I wound up picking this up for PC and look forward to making it further than I did on the console. This is mostly going to be a downstairs and chilling game for me, and the demo performed well on my laptop. Sure it lost a lot of detail that I get on the full gaming rig, but it will be fine for running around and slashing things to death.

Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle

March 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was all about Monster Hunter World as I had made plans ahead of time to run around with Grace and do the various events. First out of the gate we worked on the Wiggler quest that grants this truly questionable helm. It truly is the stuff of nightmares and honestly would have been a pain in the butt had we not realized that you could register multiple wiggler catches at once. We quickly fell into a pattern of sneaking up on the wigglers and getting one in our sights… then coordinating over voice a 3, 2, 1, GO! to capture both at the same time. Sure it took three shots at the quest to get all of the tickets needed to craft this monstrosity but here we go… I have a goofy helm that I wasted some zenny on crafting and will likely never actually use.

From there we spent some time doing the “The Proving” quest that involves killing a fairly beefy high rank Anjanath. We ran into all sorts of problems with PSN connectivity which made it significantly more challenging than normal. Throughout the night I kept getting disconnected from the quest with a “Left Quest” message. At first Ash suggested that Grace was just going off and leaving us… but I think it was more than that considering Ash and Mor both got punted out of the mission after having successfully joined with no ability to get back in. We struggled through two kills and called the process done for the moment moving on to other things.

Grace is in that awkward in-between step where she is officially a High Rank player… but still is using a significant amount of low rank gear. Considering her next quest is the Pink Rathian, that is probably something she needs to fix and as a result we farmed Zorah Magdaros a bit for parts. I am still to this day wearing the Zorah gloves for the hidden element ability, and honestly its an easy farm considering the event mostly just finishes itself. Now when I was farming this I SOS Rouletted my way into full groups that allowed us to quickly complete the event which for those who need Zorah bits is a completely viable option. The biggest challenge I ran into… and why I kept running it was that Zorah is super stingy with gems which are unfortunately needed for the gauntlets.

As far as starter High Rank gear goes… I am way more in favor of the Alpha Bone set because it has a lot of good stuff as well as 10 fire, 10 dragon and I believe 10 lightning resistance. All total to craft the full Bone Armor set you need… 12 Quality Bone, 10 Monster Bone +, 2 Warped Bone, 3 Monster Bone L, 3 Boulder Bone, 3 Coral Bone, and 3 Ancient Bone. Basically you need to kill a few big monsters and run amok harvesting bone piles in most of the zones to get it. The end result gives you a set with Health Boost, 3x Attack Boost, 3x Entomologist, Slugger, Horn Maestro, and Master Fisher. Not all of those are winners… but Entomologist can be super useful if you are farming bug parts. All of that said I still think its a great starter set for High Rank shenanigans.

The highlight of the evening however was getting a Tailrider Safari with Grace’s Neutrino and PizzaMaid’s Aria. Normally I just send Tailriders out from my room back in Asteria, but for this combination I made the trek to the Research Base so I could get the cutscene. I am also realizing that I need to trade cards with Pizza and Grace because neither of them are actually using these outfits anymore. The PS4 always has a bit of a delay when you attempt to take a screenshot so I am super happy that I was able to catch a decent one of this party going out to fight.

Tonight however I am thinking about kicking back and streaming some Final Fantasy XV on the PC… all depending on how well today goes. I will be in training and in theory will have homework tonight because I am going through one of those cram session courses. As a result my brain may be too broken to do anything interesting.

Bunny Fail Tank Returns

March 2, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but I have struggled with Final Fantasy XIV since finishing the Stormblood main story. I am not exactly sure why, but after leveling my Warrior through the questing process… and then grinding up a Samurai I bounced. When I say I bounced… I bounced hard. I just stopped logging in entirely and even didn’t care enough to log in for most of the major holiday events that have gone on. At one point I made an attempt to get back into the game and pushed through the new MSQ content right up until I reached the Drowned City of Skalla. I could not bring myself to tank that with a random group and I told myself… I would wait until I had friends around to run it with me. That event never happened and I got distracted by a bunch of games in the meantime.

The problem with this is that it sort of set up an artificial barrier between me and the content. It was as though I had some sort of a mental block preventing me at just throwing myself at content the way I used to be willing to. I knew I needed something severe to get me off high center and back into caring about what was going on in Final Fantasy XIV. There used to be a time when I willing to log in each night and run experts with completely random groups of players from the roulette system. However I developed some sort of barrier against doing that… one that I think was slowly chipped away given how freely I am willing to do my “SOS Roulette” nonsense in Monster Hunter World.

Watch Sleep Deprived Bel tries to remember how to Fail Tank in FFXIV from Belghast on www.twitch.tvAs a result last night I used the presence of an audience as a bit of a kick in the butt to get me back into Final Fantasy XIV and doing dungeon content again. I streamed for a little over two hours and in that time I believe I ran four dungeons and made some progress in the MSQ afterwards. In truth were it not for the MSQ slowing the pace down significantly… I might have streamed longer throwing myself at more dungeons for gear currency. I managed to pick up a chestpiece with tokens and now feel like maybe I can do this thing and catch my gear levels up to something reasonable. At the start of the night I was 313 item level and by the end I edged it up a bit to 315. Skalla and the next set of patch dungeons all drop gear that is an incremental upgrade, as well as some tasty tasty currency. Basically at this point I need to reach a state where I can start doing expert roulette again to play catch up.

After taking a break from streaming and FFXIV I hopped over to Monster Hunter World for awhile and spent some time running nonsense with Grace. I have been mostly running hammer when we are doing stuff, because it is a weapon that I like quite a bit… and one that I want to get better at using. There are definitely times when I am fighting something that it feels like having something more than a longsword in my arsenal would help greatly. We took down a Squirrel Blimp and I managed to unlock the third of my elder dragons while she ran around trying to find the Great Girros. I was not in terribly long as I was already in a fairly sleep deprived state from the previous nights fragmented sleep schedule due to the launch. All in all though it was a pretty great night and I want to thank everyone that stopped by to tune in and chat with me. Also huge thanks to Solaria who actually joined my discord and hung out with me while I eased my way back into Final Fantasy XIV. It’s fun lobbing comments at text messages scrolling across twitch chat, but it is even more fun when you have someone hanging out in chat to talk to over voice as well.

Frying Pans and Nora Braves

February 28, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have had a hankering to play some State of Decay. This was a game that I originally started playing on the Xbox 360, then picked up when it was eventually released on the PC. When the Year One Survivor Edition came out I picked that up too… as well as buying it for a friend that I thought would enjoy it. Since I had not actually tried streaming from my Xbox One, I decided to pick the game up on that platform and give it a go. Basically Undead Labs is an awesome developer and I have no problem supporting them by picking it up on multiple platforms. We don’t officially have a release date for State of Decay 2… but based on the trickle of activity I am hoping we get some more news soon. My hope is the sequel takes everything that worked well about the first game, but adds in the ability to hang out and explore the zombie filled landscape with friends.

Watch Hanging out playing some State of Decay YOSE on Xbox One from Belghast on www.twitch.tvSo as a result last night I fired up the stream while testing out a few new screen elements and bashed some zombies. If you are for any reason interested you can check out the Twitch VOD here (or click the embedded player above thanks to Jaedia), but it involved a lot of me stumbling around trying to figure out what to do and a few gloriously brutal deaths. I also may or may not have run over the NPC that was following me around and bashing things with a frying pan. The kinda cool thing last night is I had a bunch of folks that were completely different from what I would consider the normal crew of people who take pity on me and hang out while I stream. It’s really bizarre for me to have someone pop in the channel that I don’t actually know. It was a surprising amount of fun to just hang out and publicly fail at playing a video game.

Right now I don’t have much in the way of stamina as far as “being on” goes. I lasted a little bit over an hour before needing to go do something else with less of an audience for a bit. I am not sure if it was just that I was tired dying in State of Decay and wanted to play something else for awhile, or if I was tired of interacting. I need to sort out a proper way to swap games when I am just not feeling the one I am playing, because in truth I wound up logging into Monster Hunter World and farming content and it would have been nice to have a little company doing so. I originally logged in with the goal of doing a little SOS Roulette, but noticed a note in the Login Bonus about the Aloy event going live. For those who are curious, the quest is titled “The Proving” and shows up under events as a 6 Star High Rank mission that requires the player to be Hunter Rank 11, so you may need to do a little bit of progressing to get there.

There are two pieces to the set, a full suit of armor similar to the Ryu gear that literally transforms you into the Aloy character model. Additionally there is a version of Aloy’s bow that can be upgraded to a Rarity 7 weapon with some elder dragon bits. The gear can be upgraded a total of 10 times allowing it to remain fairly relevant for a long while. If you want to craft the gear you are looking at collecting the following….

Aloy Armor

Nora Brave Trophy – 4 – Obtained from Event Quest
Anjanath Pelt+ – 14
Anjanath Nosebone+ – 6
Anjanath Gem – 1
30,000 Zenny

Aloy’s Bow

Nora Brave Trophy – 2
Anjanath Fang+ – 3
Monster Keenbone – 5
Anjanath Plate – 1
16,000 Zenny

Aloy’s War Bow – Upgrade to Rarity 7

Nora Brave Trophy – 3
Anjanath Scale+ – 7
Elder Dragon Bone – 3
Wyvern Gem – 1
32,000 Zenny

Now it should be noted that the only part of this that you absolutely have to collect during the event are the Nora Brave Trophies which drop at least one per mission… and there was one time I lucked out and got four in one shot. The rest of the bits can be gained from either normal High Rank Anjanath hunts or in the case of the upgrade by taking down Elder Dragons to get those bones. I ran the mission a total of five times last night and got everything I needed to craft both the base rarity 5 bow and the rarity 5 armor. The cool thing about this is that it not only makes you look like Aloy… but you also MOVE like Aloy. Not really sure how to describe it other than that, because it feels like you are playing Horizon Zero Dawn set in the Monster Hunter World setting. I have no clue how long this event is going to run, but personally I knocked mine out doing good ole SOS Roulette. That said more than willing to help folks get their parts if they need them. Honestly I might farm it a bunch while it is available because it seems to be a really good way to get High Rank Anjanath parts.