Games Archives - Page 421 of 689 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Seasons End

April 4, 2017 by Belghast

Last Friday was the beginning of the tenth season of Diablo 3. In the lead up I had just about convinced myself simply to skip this one, because I really was not feeling it this go around. Generally speaking I chase the pet that is being offered as part of the seasons journey… and this time around there was no pet. Instead they offered the weird lamp post back piece thing you can see me wearing in the above image. However as time got closer to the launch I opted in given that I at least knew that Grace would be playing. While I do not at all regret doing this… I lacked the proper amount of steam that I normally have going into this sort of thing. Firstly I got home a little later than intended and by the time I had nommed some dinner I was about fifteen to twenty minutes behind Grace and Noreek. I think as a whole everyone pretty much either forgot that the season start was a thing… or they themselves had petered out as well. Normally on season launch night my friends list is completely chock full of little green leaves… aka the icon that represents a seasonal character. Instead of the usual twenty plus… there were five and two of them were in my party. I went Demon Hunter largely because they seem to be extremely easy to push through the seasonal journey content. Generally speaking I greatly prefer the Crusader, but they are not exactly known for their clear speeds.

Now it is not to say that I did not enjoy myself like I often do. Noreek was attempting to follow some best practices and for whatever reason, our luck did not hold out. In theory one of the first patterns you are supposed to get is the Cain set, which allows you to have a significant experience boost. However after doing a couple of rounds of bounties and none of us getting the book… we finally gave up and returned to Nephilim Rift grinding. However you could audibly tell that we were losing steam when about 8:30 or 9 pm voice chat started to get completely silent. I myself was just sort of barely hanging in there and I think I wound up tagging out around 10 pm and heading to bed to play a little switch before nodding off completely. It sounds like the rest of the group did not make it terribly further, with me leaving somewhere in my 50s and Grace only making it to I believe 59 before calling it a night. Each season it seems like we make it a shorter distance in the initial push before finally calling it. That first season for me I think I made it to 65 before calling it a night and by the time I logged in the next morning Grace was already paragon 150 or so.

I am super thankful to Noreek for giving me the much needed boost on Sunday to get to 70 and start unlocking the first few pieces of gear from Haedrig’s Gift. I turned that into a season finish Sunday night during the Walking Dead season finale. So now I am technically finished with the cosmetic portion of the season and trying to sort out how much further I am going to go. The set this season for Demon Hunters is Maurader’s which seems pretty easy to push content in. I just need to get to get the drive to do so… because last night I had ample opportunity to play because I knew Grace was going to be playing. However for whatever reason I just lacked the desire to log in… so instead I did something that was completely fruitless and ground random Hive mobs on the Dreadnaught for hours trying to get my Husk of the Pit for Necrochasm. I knocked out a few things on the Slayer list, and in doing so knocked out a few things it seems on the lists after that. I could in theory probably get an extra bank tab rather easily this season… if I can just muster the desire to do so. Right now it feels like I have this wealth of other things to be playing, so buckling down and playing Diablo 3… a game that is more than well trodden at this point just seems difficult. In all of this I am sort of saddened by the fact that it seems the magic of the seasonal journey is diminished. I’ve written several posts in the past talking about how much fun it is to push with your friends in an atmosphere like the launch of a new MMO… and that seems to be lacking this time around.

The Switch and Zelda

April 3, 2017 by Belghast

I have officially now joined the cult of the switch. For a brief period of time… probably fifteen minutes if we are going to be honest about it… Amazon had switch units in stock for prime members only. Now that sounds like an exclusive club or something… but quite literally everyone I know that shops Amazon regularly…. is a prime member. I had said for awhile that if I ever stumbled across one I would pick it up immediately, and I guess in my mind limited availability over Amazon was the same thing. What is even more shocking however is that I ordered it at 2pm on a Thursday and by some quirk or time travel it was waiting for me when I got home Friday afternoon. As a result I got to spend a good chunk of the weekend playing with it and fiddling with the various console modes. So far the honestly most comfortable mode for me to play is with the joycons detached and the little bumper things that it comes with attached. This allows me to just chill with each arm resting on whatever is comfortable be it leg, lap or the arm of a chair. All in all I am really damned happy with the unit, and it feels extremely good especially in “handheld” mode. I spent some time Saturday afternoon hanging out in the back yard playing Zelda Breath of the Wild and it was glorious. The switch is essentially everything that I assumed the Wii U would be for me… and probably was if not the for the fact that the gamepad has such an insanely short range from the base unit.

The thing I want to talk about this morning however is Zelda itself. There was a side conversation that happened over the weekend, of all places on facebook about switch ownership and the limited number of games. One friend mentioned that if there was ever a game worth spending $400 to play that it was Breath of the Wild. Then another friend chimed in that folks have said this a lot, but that no one has really been able to put into words why this game is special given the extremely stiff competition.

I keep hearing comments like this but still don’t understand what is so special about it. No one seems able to capture that in words. My skeptical self thinks it has a lot to do with Nintendo nostalgia, but that is just based on a lack of understanding of what is so compelling about it.

So as a result I think I am going to attempt this morning to put it into words why I feel this game is so special. For me at least it is not really a nostalgia thing given that in truth I have never been that big of a fan of the 3D Zelda games. I’ve beaten Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and Windwaker and while they were okay… they were not even close to dethroning A Link to the Past as my favorite Zelda series game. I never really could put my finger on it, but something always felt off about them. For me a huge factor of what made Zelda fun was that I had this huge world to explore, and barring that I had the right items at the right time… it felt like I could pretty much go anywhere. Granted in the 2D era this meant a bunch of tiles stacked side by side… which in truth was pretty limited… but in my mind it absolutely Felt open. When it comes to the 3D Zeldas… they have always felt like I was much more limited on my range of motion and where I could actually go based on how far I had progressed in the game.

With Breath of the Wild, the sense of exploration I felt in the original games is there in full. While I am similarly limited by my stamina meter, or weather effects like cold or rain… the game feels completely open to me to go wherever I think I can survive. There is a certain thrill of discovery when you find a new shrine and figure out the puzzle that exists within. That was the part I liked of the 3D Zelda “temples” is the fact that each one of them had some gimmick that had to be learned in order to progress through them… and in Breath of the Wild this same idea is contained with 120 of them. That is so much more of that element that I really enjoyed in past games, and is only improved by the fact that no one in games is going to explain to you where all of them are. Sure there are easy ones to find, that are right off the path or that serve as the teleport for a given town. However most of them involve getting out and roaming around, to try and find where they have been hidden into the landscape.

Similarly there is the Korok Seed mini game, and from what I understand there are 900 of them scattered throughout the world. Most of them involve noticing something going on in the landscape and then interacting with the elements in a certain way to reveal the Korok that is hiding. For example one of the very early ones involves diving off of a cliff into a ring of lily pads that are sitting in the water below. It is the sort of thing that as you walk by you notice… “that looks odd” and then when you start to investigate you try different things until you ultimately reveal another Korok. There is a challenge with Open World games to both allow open space to exist… but make that open space be meaningful and that is one of the things that Breath of the Wild really succeeds at. Not to mention that the Korok mini game is charming as hell as you keep bringing more seeds to Hestu for his Maracas. There are honestly an awful lot of elements of this game that just come across as charming. Once you leave the “starter zone” for lack of a better term you find out that the world is not really as “post apoc” as it seems at the start. Folks have learned how to survive and often times thrive in a world where destruction is looming over it, and each of the people scattered has a story to tell and hints to be given about other things happening in the world.

It is extremely hard to put into words what it is about this game that is so damned appealing. Even as I sit down with the purpose to do just that, I am finding myself lacking the necessary vocabulary to really make it make sense. I have plenty of problems with the game, namely the way the weapon durability system worlds. However that said I like it enough to have just purchased a second copy and completely restarted the game after getting a decent ways into it on the Wii U. There really are not a lot of games that you could say the same for, with the big two that are standing out in my head that I own multiple copies of being Destiny and Castlevania Symphony of the Night. There is an awful lot going on in the game… but I have this constant feeling that I have only barely scratched the surface of its complexity. I think that more than anything is what keeps drawing me to it. Its like this grand puzzle that, as I solve one little bit of it… keeps exposing new areas for me to explore and then ultimately solve as well. Its not just that I need to go to a new land and vanquish a new evil… but as I wander across that land I am constantly finding myself needing to learn a brand new mechanical vocabulary to survive its trials. In some ways the puzzles in this game remind me of the way the ones from Thomas Was Alone felt… where each time it increments on the information you already have but keeps pushing the boundary to incorporate new elements and challenges.

Unfortunately I am not entirely certain I have even begun to scratch the surface of the job I set out to do. Which of course was the put into words what made this game worth spending so much time and effort on playing. There are so many great games out there right now like Horizon Zero Dawn and Mass Effect Andromeda… both of which I am playing quite a bit of. However I still find myself drawn to keep venturing into Hyrule on a regular basis and keep figuring out how the world ticks. I can’t really say if this game is better than that game… because so far I have been enjoying all of them. I also feel like my attention isn’t a zero sum game, and that all of these games are worthy of it. I will say that Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is doing something different. It feels different from the previous 3D Zelda offerings, but at the same time very different from the traditional Open World model. Some of these differences are frustrating, but at the same time the quirks are also what makes the game itself feel extremely fresh. I will say having played it on both the Switch and Wii U now… that there is just something about the Switch that makes it all feel better. Its like playing a game on the platform it was designed for…. and playing it when it got ported to another system. Some of the things that felt awkward on the Wii U just seem to work beautifully on the Switch. So if you have not already ventured forth into Hyrule… I would probably suggest just waiting until you ultimately get your hands on a Switch. Is this game worth buying a console for? I obviously thought so, but in part I also bought the console knowing that there are always a high number of Nintendo games that I want to play on every platform they create. I’ve thought my purchase of the Wii U was well worth it, in spite of the fact that it never quite worked the way I wanted it to. All of that said… I don’t think the Switch is worth the markups or crazy “bundle” deals that places are trying to direct users towards. Just wait for the base unit to come back in stock, and I am hoping with the release of Mario Kart in a few weeks that there are going to be a whole lot more units available.

Dangerous Water

March 28, 2017 by Belghast

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I am pretty sure I am coming down with something because I have felt fairly lousy since the weekend. It is the sort of indiscriminate miserable that just makes doing anything a complete trudge. It also feels like I have spent more time searching for something to play than actually playing anything. Then things happen like the fact that for some reason I booted up Bioshock Remastered? I got the game free for owning all of the other Bioshock content, and I installed it some time ago thinking it might be nice to play back through this game. Then the election happened… and the character of Andrew Ryan felt a little too on the nose for me personally. So as a result it has sat unloved as a desktop icon… waiting on someone to give it the time of day and click on it. For whatever reason last night I did just that… and apparently the game defaults to running at 4k. Did you know that 4k PNG screenshots are almost 15 mb a piece? I didn’t but now do… I have lots of them that I will ultimately need to drop down if I ever hope to use them. Something else that I did not know is that if you have a USB Controller connected to your system… the game doesn’t seem to be willing to give you a mouse and keyboard option. So as a result I played through on the Xbox 360 controller I leave hooked up to my gaming machine. I didn’t get super far before the whim changed, but enough to remember how much I really love this game. I do find it extremely odd that you can’t really sight any of the weapons though…. that is not something I remembered but I guess it makes sense given that your alternate fire is whatever plasmid you happen to have equipped. Personally I still think the game looks gorgeous, and artistically it has some of the most memorable visual sequences and staging.

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When I bounced I ultimately did so in the direction of Mass Effect Andromeda, and opted to finish up Hvarl. The weird part about this is that I thought I had not actually really scratched the surface of this planet. However it seems like in the grand scheme of things is is maybe half the length of Voeld. The weird part about this is it seems like the last thing that I waited to do was actually go vault hunting. I am not exactly sure if you can do this early however since the actual access to the vault and the second half of the map only work if you happen to be on specific quests. So far this seems like the most “on rails” planet given that things need to happen in a specific sequence to end up leading to the end of it. The planet itself reminds me an awful lot of Dromund Kaas from SWTOR, with a much more wild jungle area. In the grand scheme I did not like this planet nearly as much as I did Voeld… and also it doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying to move on past it either. I think the biggest part of this for me is the complete and total lack of Nomad action, which makes sense given how dense the foliage is. That said I did not really realize how much of my enjoyment planet side is related to driving my Nomad around until I hit this planet. We talked about it on twitter yesterday… but want to buy a Nomad racing DLC for this game.

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Towards the end of the night I moved forward in the story and started the world of Kadara, which happens to be populated by a bunch of the Exiles off the Nexus. Functionally you can think of it as Omega by any other name… except instead of a slew of interesting Aliens… you have a bunch of asshole humans instead. After Desert World, Ice World and Night World… I was happy to move on to something that looked relatively normal. You know other than the whole acid water thing going on… and toxic regions that damage your suit similar to the last few worlds we have been on. Something tells me that I am ultimately going to work on terraforming the shit out of this world first thing so that I can enjoy the ride more freely. I’ve barely just scratched the surface but I gotta say… fighting Nexus outlaws is way more enjoyable than any of the enemy types I have encountered to date in this game. I mean I love the Remnant and it is always fun to kill Kett, but the outlaws here feel much more varied. Especially when you factor in that apparently there is a turf war going on, and the two factions are gunning for each other as well as you. I am sort of longing for a “kill everyone and settle the planet” option but I am not likely going to see that.

C is for Captain

March 27, 2017 by Belghast

I thought I would start things off with a humorous glitch this morning that started happening last night. Any time I would go into the bar and get a drink, the glass was missing and would instead get this goofy empty hand sequence. Secondly I got chastised the other day for not saying that there would be potential spoilers in my blog post… so lets get that one out of the way. I am not intentionally going into full on story mode, but I also am too sleepy to probably comb my post adequately for spoilers. So there might be some, especially since I am realizing that my definition of a spoiler is vastly different than the definition of some folks. For me a spoiler is generally a big plot point, or what happens when you make this or that decision. Whereas I never would have thought the fact that you end up on an ice planet, or the fact that you wind up getting a new race that has been featured in pretty much every trailer for the last bit would be classified as spoilers. So be forewarned, your mileage may vary. To be truthful this is probably a blanket statement about every post that I make. While I generally try not to spoiler larger plot points, the fact that I am writing a blog every morning and need constant fodder means that ultimately details about games will come out. Hell the simple fact that I am posting a constant flood of screenshots is probably spoilery in itself.

I spent a fair amount of Sunday playing Mass Effect Andromeda, and lets me honest… I spent MOST of that time wandering around Not-Hoth. The way the planets work in this game is a massive trap for someone like me who likes to roam around aimlessly and complete mini objectives. I generally like ice zones and ice planets… and while there was a huge segment of Hoth in SWTOR that was sheer drudgery… I still loved it. So the fact that I am wandering around in a giant all terrain vehicle on gorgeous ice flows exploring nifty things I see off on the horizon… that is definitely in my wheelhouse. I did however take time out of my busy schedule of killing remnant and kett camps to move the story forward, and unlock the vault on Voeld. This allowed me to set down my second colonial base, that was given a name there is no way in the hell I am ever going to remember. I mean I realize that they couldn’t give me the ability to name these settlements because voiced dialog lines…. but at least make them easy to remember. I mean they all have nifty lore nuggets when the colonial governor explains why they named the town whatever they named it… but there is zero point zero chance I am going to remember any of it. I may or may not have an issue with remembering the names of things… and if you have ever listened to AggroChat there is a lot of me explaining what I am talking about… and then Tam or Ash coughing up the name of whatever it is.

The biggest takeaway from the weekend… is just how much in general I like my crew. I am even starting to like Liam, who I guess at the first I was sort of expecting to be the Corso Riggs of the crew. There is something I like about each and every one of them, and I guess that is sort of the hallmark of a good Bioware game. The biggest surprise for me however is how I have ended up playing with Jaal. At face value he did not exactly seem like I character I would want to run around with, but did anyways because I kept exploring functionally his homeworlds. However over time I have come to actually like the Cat Squid Whatever quite a lot. I am however having weird flashbacks to the Selkath and Manaan when interacting with Aya and the Angara. In truth there is a lot of this game that feels thematically reminiscent of Knights of the Old Republic. I mean functionally we are unlocking ancient tech similar to that of the content leading up to the Star Forge, and while not exactly the same it feels strangely similar to me. I think in part I have spent so much time working on the two spin off Angara worlds because otherwise it would feel really freaking wrong when we started plunking colonies down on these planets. If I had not done a bunch of things to fix core problems and to build a giant freaking bridge between the Angara and the species of the Milky Way… it would feel super invadery when I started setting up shop on their worlds.

My growing take away however is that while this game is full of glitches and all sorts of strange shit going on… that underneath the lack of polish is a really solid experience. I struggled at length to get into Dragon Age Inquisition… because I just didn’t care about the story that was happening and in truth many of the characters that were part of it. That has not been the case with Mass Effect Andromeda. While the narrative feels a little ill fitting at time… and “Ryder” feels more forced at times… I still very much feel like I am my own character. I can tweak the dialog just enough to give my own spin on the conversation. While it doesn’t seem to have some of the same lasting effects as going renegade used to… there are still some of these moments scattered throughout the game play where a quick time event alters the course of the story. I think what is missing is the asshole Ryder option, similar to asshole Shepard… and that was something I never played. I could never bring myself to go down those dialog options because I just don’t have that level of cruelty in me… even if being enacted upon non-existent people. All of that said… I am enjoying the hell out of this game.