RPG Archives - Page 43 of 54 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Lego Worlds Impressions

June 2, 2015 by Belghast

Lego Open World

On an absolute whim yesterday I popped onto the steam website to check out what had been released, or was impending release this morning. One of the titles listed was something I quite literally knew nothing about called Lego Worlds. After some research, the consensus seemed to be Lego meets Minecraft. It has the same pedigree of the other Lego games out there as it is also created by Traveler’s Tales. Right now the game is on Steam Early Access for $14.99 and I figured for that price it was worth the risk. I was seemingly one of the few people who actually through Lego Universe was a pretty cool game. Similarly I have really enjoyed my time spent in Lego Minifigures Online, and will more than likely pick up the Lego portal based game as well. I may or may not be a Lego Maniac to borrow the 80s commercial catch phrase. As I sit here typing up my blog post I am sitting in an office surrounded by a mountain of Lego sets.

If you have ever played any of the Lego franchise titles like Lego Harry Potter or Lego Star Wars, this game will feel extremely familiar to you at least as far as movement and gameplay goes. Ultimately this is a game about destroying everything in sight, because when you destroy an object it erupts in a shower of “coins” which are represented by the 1×1 round plate pieces in various colors to denote denominations. Essentially as you roam around the world every new object you encounter, you collect its appearance. You can spend your coins to unlock the ability to build with these prefabs. This means that if you are running through an area and there is a neat lamp post along the trail, you can bump into it and collect its appearance and then build with these lamps from that point on. There is a truly overwhelming number of these prefab objects out in the world and in the three hours I spent yesterday playing I collected what seems like hundreds of them.

Custom Minifigures

When you start the game you are given a very limited choice of appearances in the form of either a Male or a Female explorer. As you roam around the world however you encounter lots of other minifigures. Some of them are friendly and simply walking up to them allows you to collect their appearance, and others are more aggressive and you have to defeat them to collect theirs. In either case these minifigures that you have met go into the same “coin store” as the prefabs you encounter, and from there you can spend your coins to unlock their appearance items. At any point while playing you can swap around your look by changing out the various parts that make up a minifigure including head, body, arms, hands, legs, hat, cape, and assorted hair slot options. So far while roaming around I have managed to run into twenty one different figures, ranging from Yeti to a Surfer Girl. Each of them gave me various unique bits to add to my assortment of appearance items allowing me to assemble some fairly strange looks.

LEGO_Worlds_DX11 2015-06-01 23-00-03-30

This for example is the caveman beard and hair combination, with the wizard cape, skull head and outlaw body parts. I got tired of this look pretty quickly but the beauty of the system is that you can swap things out on the fly and incorporate new pieces you might find as you are roaming around. I feel like that is this games strong point is that it really rewards exploration. While roaming around you encounter all sorts of vehicles and animals that you can ride on. Like everything else once you encounter it, you can purchase it in the coin store to permanently unlock it’s appearance. Once you have paid for an vehicle or mount like this, you can then summon it to your location at any point. This means if I want to ride around on a polar bear I can on a whim, or summon a racing bike, or even an airplane. The more you explore the easier exploration gets as you have all sorts of modes of transportations to get you where you need to go. Also while you explore there are special large chests that have items that you can collect like weapons and other items to help you in your adventures. Since I favor melee I am right now using a big club to bash things, but there is also a rifle and a bow that I have managed to find as well to allow you to attack things at range.

Interesting Exploration

One of the most interesting vehicles that I encountered was this Ninjago inspired drill car vehicle. With it comes the special ability to hold A while driving it to drill the terrain. There are a few pitfalls with this vehicle, namely that it always seems to want to drill directly down. That said I had quite a bit of fun tearing up the terrain and drilling under a mountain. Now getting back OUT of that area was more of a challenge. This vehicle from what I can tell only appears in the similarly “ninjago” themed Biome, meaning the one with the cherry blossom trees and the huge pagoda like buildings. Other vehicles similarly spawn in unique biomes, like the Airplane appears to only be in the snowy biome, and the “Monster Fighters” style Roadster only appears in the desert/Egyptian biome with the free roaming Mummies. Essentially each biome seems to be based on a popular family of Lego sets and generally contains creatures that you might also find in that set. The only one that seems to make zero sense so far is that Cavemen and Cavewomen seem to spawn damned near everywhere.

The game right now is very “early access” and I do not mean necessarily that the game feels “beta” and buggy, but more so that the game feels like it is missing a lot of features that will be in what I hope is the final version. Right now there does not seem to be much purpose to the exploration other than to unlock items to build with. The problem there is that there seems to be little to no reason to really build anything. There are certain biomes where skeletons spawn infinitely during the night cycles, but building a structure does not really seem to present you with much shelter against the endless waves of them. For the time being the game is strictly single player, but I know multiplayer is in the works. Right now the list of things planned from the Steam page includes…

Like/Dislike system for tailoring World Generation
Procedurally Generated Underground Cave Networks
LEGO ID integration to allow for sharing and uploading of in-game builds
Additional Biomes
Painting Themes
Pre-Generated Towns/Villages/Settlements relevant to the Biome
Updated AI Behaviors to provide organic feeling to free-roaming creatures and characters
Red Brick Extras
Full liquid behaviors
Additional Minifigure Characters and Creatures
Additional Vehicles and Pre-Built Models
Additional Weapons
Cut/Copy/Paste chunks of landscape
Underwater Gameplay (including Vehicles, Creatures and additional sea life)
Character Customizer
Online Multiplayer”

So as you can see they pretty much intend to flesh this game out to be competitive with the Minecraft genre. For $14.99 it was more than enjoyable enough roaming around and interacting with things. However if you are looking for a complete game, keep moving on. There really is not much “game” to be had here and in that aspect you are far better off for the time being playing Trove because it offers a lot of the same fun and exploration gameplay, while also offering an actual game that creates reasons for your exploration and combat. This is planned to stay in Early Access throughout 2015, and by the time it launches next year it is probably going to be an awesome experience. The biggest suggestion I have if you plan on giving it a try is to hook up a controller, because the keyboard and mouse control options are pretty frustrating. The user interface has been designed for a controller and that experience seems to be the most enjoyable.

Back But Don’t Play

May 11, 2015 by Belghast

Supporting Kickstarter

This morning I am going to tackle the second talkback topic for the Newbie Blogger Initiative because it is actually one that has been on the hearts and minds of the AggroChat folks for the last few weeks. For the April AggroChat Game Club game I chose Darkest Dungeon, and since then the topic of playing “unfinished” games has been somewhat of a recent discussion among us in private. The fact that the game was unfinished caused numerous problems, not the least of which was the simple fact that we were never quite sure if this or that functionality was intended… or just unfinished. So I feel like I was not able to give it a really solid testing, because I don’t know what might change between now and when the studio deems the game “finished”. The prompt however for this talkback is pretty straight forward but my answer is going to be a bit more nuanced.

Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?

So for the first part… yes I wholeheartedly support the backing of unfinished games. I’ve backed more than I can count at this point through either Kickstarter or company specific initiatives. I think Kickstarter is a pretty awesome thing, and it has caused a lot of things that I care about to see the light of day. I’ve backed both software and physical merchandise projects through it, and have been relatively happy with pretty much every project I have ended up chipping in on. Kickstarter does a lot of things, but the biggest one to me is that it allows me to vote with my dollar on what I think is going to be an idea worth making. I rarely back very far into a given product tree, and the end result is me usually getting a cut price copy of the game at launch. While many of these games offer a double platinum early access alpha program… that is not so much what I am interested at least not any more.

Tired of Alphas

Once upon a time I wanted to be playing every single game I could get my hands on. I reveled in the fact that I had alpha and beta tested most of the MMOs out there. For a period of time this was something that was achievable because at any given moment there were a very limited number of Alpha and Beta test programs available. Somewhere along the line I noticed that playing an Alpha seriously adversely effected my chances of staying with a game for very long after release. In essence I would burn myself out playing the Alpha, so that when launch happened the game felt very old and tired to me. The pinnacle of this problem happened for me with Elder Scrolls Online. I seriously cared about the release of this game, and I took my Alpha testing duties seriously. I was told at one point that I was in the top 1% of all bug reporters in the game, and every single time we played I spent most of my time reporting and re-reporting issues I saw.

The problem here is that I had been alpha and beta testing builds of this game for a good year before the game actually launched. So while I only managed to play about three months after the launch of the title, in truth that was around 17 months of me actually playing the game. Huge chunks of the content I had literally seen hundreds of times, and remembered each of the different incarnations. The additional problem is I had trouble letting go of the past. There were some changes made in that game that I considered “for the worse” and myself and many of the other early testers rather vehemently pined for the imagined “good ole days” of early alpha. Memory is always an incomplete state, and what we remembered was this or that feature that stood out in an ocean of an otherwise broken game. The final product was so much better than the one we were requesting they return to, but we got hung up on the minutiae of this or that feature that we missed. Basically I learned that Alpha testing ultimately ruined my enjoyment of the final product… and it only took me twenty some years to wake up to this fact.

Back But Don’t Play

Ultimately I have a very nuanced stance on Kickstarter. I am more than happy to donate money towards a cause that I believe in like the creation of a brand new Wasteland experience on the PC, or any of the other games I have backed that let me wallow in the nostalgia of my youth. Generally speaking I now back just far enough into it to give myself a cut rate copy of the game at launch. Then when I get said copy and any bonus trappings… it seats neatly in my Steam account until I am ready to play it. I might boot it up periodically to check on its progress, but ultimately I am not going to start the game for real until I see that note from the developer talking about how the game has launched. The problem is this also means I am phenomenally bad at tracking the progress of games on Kickstarter. I almost always have a message that needs to be responded to about this or that game but this is what works for me. It lets me feel like I am backing things that I believe in, but also gives me the piece of mind of not actually starting a game play session until the game is “finished”.

As far as other games that are in a permanent state of development like Minecraft… once again my feelings are a bit more nuanced. Paying to play an alpha does not really bother me, if the experience and the enjoyment itself is worth paying to play said alpha. I got into Minecraft for example during its pre-beta days when you could pick up a copy for well under $10. I have gotten easily $1000 worth of enjoyment out of that game. Similarly while I don’t play them nearly as often I have gotten more than enough happiness out of both Trove and Landmark to recuperate any costs I might have put into them. Ultimately backing an unfinished game, and playing said unfinished game is not an entirely bad idea… so long as you go into it with the thought process that you are playing something that isn’t quite done yet. Early Access games are in essence paid betas, and if you can live with that… awesome… if not wait for the release of the game. I personally have found that the games I played heavily in Alpha and Beta get more enjoyable over time, and going back a year after launch I end up really enjoying myself. So that is to say that the games I ruined through Alpha testing… are not in a permanent state of ruined as evidenced by my recent travels into Guild Wars 2, Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately you have to figure out what works for you, and the amount or risk you are willing to take. If I feel like I am going to care about a game, I try my best not to burn out before launch.

Grand Experiment – Year Two

April 26, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 54 – Darkest Dungeon Show

This evening we held the third episode of the AggroChat Game Club where we talk about my pick the early access rogue-like Darkest Dungeon. I personally chose this game because so many of my friends had been talking about it, and purposefully delayed playing it in the thoughts of this eventually becoming an AggroChat title. The result is that each of us played the game slightly different, and walked away with a very different perspective and feeling about the game. Some of us loved it, but even among those that loved it… we brought with it a completely different outlook and as such a different reaction. Of course some of us absolutely hated the game, enough to actually Alt-F4 out of the window.

The end result however is what I feel like our most successful game club title to date, because it certainly spurred on some conversation. Next months title is announced towards the end of the broadcast and I am sure it will be an equally interesting discussion. As for my own feelings… I really enjoyed the game, but it seems like I might be the most heartless bastard on the planet when it comes to how I treated my dungeoneers. Some of my co-hosts developed bonds to their spelunkers and for me… they were just fodder to be thrown at the problem like minions in a Dungeon Keeper game. Of all the games we have played for the game club so far this is the one that I am most likely to visit and keep playing, but I might be waiting until it exits early access. There are certain things in the game that I don’t know if they are broken or simply that they have not been finished yet.

Grand Experiment – Year Two

Two years ago today I set about to change the nature of my blog and embarked upon what I termed the “Grand Experiment” which was more than anything blogging every single day no matter if I had a thought in my mind worth writing down on paper. Now 730 posts later I continue to question what I was thinking when I started down this road. The end result has been an interesting ride to say the least. What has happened more than anything during these last two years is that I have gotten closer with the community of my fellow bloggers. This has been more important than anything else to me, and it is through all of the various events like the upcoming Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015 that it is happened. So while I question if I did anything that really mattered over these last two years, I am thankful for every single reader and peer that I now have. There are lots of bloggers that write daily, and they have not made a big deal about it… but for me this was huge. If you scan back through my blog there are several six month long lapses in content… and very rarely did I actually make it through a month without having a week with zero posts.

It has been so much more than just writing a blog for me personally. I have allowed myself to open up more about myself and my life than I ever had to date online. I’ve talked about my personal struggles, and shared with you my excitement and joy. I’ve let you all into my life, and while I still for the most part am scant on the details… you are seeing the impression of something very real that is happening. I figured out early into this process that there would be days when I simply don’t have anything game related to talk about. There would be days that I would have something on my chest that I needed to get out there, right or wrong… and I am thankful that you all have supported me. I’ve been told that for many people my blog post is now part of their morning ritual, and if they get to work… and don’t see one they start to worry if something happened to me. The first day I was late with a post and I had a deluge of people pinging me over twitter and IM to make sure I was okay… was absolutely overwhelming.

Year Three

So tomorrow I begin the third year of this journey. There are days I question myself why I am doing this… what exactly I am trying to prove. The thing is I don’t really have an answer for either of those things. I enjoy this connection that I have to my readers, no matter how ephemeral it might be. There are days that I am doing this as therapy, other days doing it to share my excitement that I might burst if I don’t get it out onto the page… and in other days… the days I cannot seem to find the words, I am struggling forward for you. I feel like we have this contract, that I will write and you will read and together we will have this connection. I don’t want to be the one to sever that connection. I don’t want to be the one who lets down my end of this contract. So I will keep living and experiencing and doing my hack job of sharing that experience with you. This time next year I have no clue what I might be talking about… but I hope to still be talking and looking forward to our next journey.

Now I ask something of you. Since we have been sharing these moments each morning for some time… tell me about what you have done over these two years. Granted a lot of you have blogs of your own and they are in my RSS reader that I consume at irregular intervals like drinking from a giant firehose of words. But some of you out there have been with me this entire trip, and have never commented. I would love to hear from some of you, and let me know how your life has changed over these last two years. I might not even know you yet, but I would like to. What major changes has my readership gone through while I have been on this journey. I’ve upset a few people along the way, some of which have blocked me out of their lives… but I have gained several orders of magnitude more friends along the journey. That is the really important thing to me… all of the friends I have to show for my trip, and that I still keep in contact with on a weekly basis. You are the ones that give me the drive to keep moving forward, and hopefully this next year will be a fun trip shared together.

Loot and Mental Breaks

April 6, 2015 by Belghast

Rainy Weekend

The problem with three day weekends… is that ultimately you find yourself in need of a fourth day. While I kept a pretty strict schedule, for whatever reason having three days off in a row tends to shift you out of work mode and into vacation mode. This morning getting up was absolute hell, and my wife is going through the same thing. I watched her start to get up only to face plant back on the bed… a move I likely would have tried had I not needed to get up and turn off the alarm. In the grand scheme of things I managed to get to bed fairly early last night, or at least early for me. To make matters worse I am supposed to be in this conference call most of the day… which for those indoctrinated means fighting desperately to keep from falling asleep and snoring as someone on a speaker phone drones on at length about something.

To make matters worse I am freaking freezing this morning. Not literally but we are going through one of those periods that we do here in Oklahoma where I am uncertain if we should have on the heater or the air conditioner. So since it is 55F outside I am upstairs with my zipper hoodie on trying to warm up. We were supposed to have this lovely Easter weekend, but in truth it was cloudy, windy and rained most of the day. We went out at one point to visit family in the hospital and it only managed to warm up to around 53F. The highlight of yesterday however was that getting out and about, and it being relatively lousy out meant that we were able to go to our favorite Desi restaurant and not have any semblance of a line. Their awesome Desi Rice ended up making both lunch and dinner for me yesterday. There are times I wish we had a place closer, but I think it would lose some of the specialness of having to make a pilgrimage to go eat there.

Guild Runs

One of the simple pleasures of the weekend came from running lots of content with my guild. I am amped that folks are getting into their 50s and needing content that will actually pay out in tomestones. This has been a point of internal conflict for me lately, is that I desperately want/need to cap poetics, but I also want to be there to help people when they need runs. With the influx of people into our guild I could easily spend every waking moment tanking this or that for one of our free company members. The problem is for the low level stuff it puts me no closer to my weekly cap goals. Now that the 130 weapon is within sight, I really really want to get one. This means that I am going to need to gather up 1300 poetics, which in turn means that I am going to need to cap several weeks in a row to reach that. So it frustrates me that while I enjoy running stuff for the lowbies, that I am spending time on content that won’t get me any closer to that goal.

Saturday and Sunday however, lots of people needed lots of upper level content which allowed me to feel useful and helpful, but at the same time keep inching towards the goal of hitting 450 poetics for the week. Over the course of the day we ran experts and hardmodes, each of them slowly incrementing that total so that by the time I slept I was only around 100 poetics away, which seems doable tonight between raiding, the daily expert, and potentially running the new trial. That honestly is my huge hope for tonight is that we will be able to run the Steps of Faith trial really quickly, because I have tried with two random groups only to have half of the group bail on me after a single failure. That trial is also gumming up the works right now of the trial roulette because the moment people random into it, they are abandoning party and taking the penalty. The result is that people seem to just be avoiding the trial queue, because we ran a few this weekend and they took forever to form.

Loot and Mental Breaks

I’ve spent what feels like a silly amount of time playing Darkest Dungeon this weekend, and I have to say I am still loving it. Essentially I have been playing through at least one adventure per day, which seems to be about the right amount for me in one sitting. After that I log into whatever game I am going to be playing for the night. At this point I have lost one entire party, a couple of singles and pushed three characters to the point of having a mental break. That said I am having a blast doing it and I finally defeated the Apprentice Necromancer, the first real objective in the game. Right now my ideal party would include a Bounty Hunter, a Highwayman, a Jester and an Occultist. No particular reason other than the group comp seems to work really well for me. As far as healers go I really really like the Occultist, because I guess I am really good at winning the roll that keeps him from bleeding my characters. I have seen as much as 16 points of health healed on a single turn by an occultist, whereas the plague doctor seems to only be able to dink heal single points.

The bounty hunter right now is my absolute favorite hero, but that might just be because he looks pretty much like every character I tend to play in games. I love the whole grappling hook thing, and the ability to use it as either a ranged weapon or to pull targets within his melee range. Highwayman just seems really strong with his range abilities, and if the target can bleed he has a nice attack there as well. Jester is really brutal, with two attacks that deal a lot of bleed damage. The biggest problem I have with them is that one of their best attacks is this jump dirk ability that also places them in the first slot in your party, potentially pushing the bounty hunter out of melee. So I try really hard not to actually use that ability unless I think I can finish someone off with it, because the person in the first party position tends to soak some of the worst attacks. So far I am going into dungeons with lots of food, bandages and torches and doing remarkably well. I am sure as I go further the game is going to get more punitive.