RPG Archives - Page 47 of 54 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Death to Darkspawn

October 6, 2014 by Belghast

Lost in a World

One of the aspects of a good game that I have always been amazed by is just how lost you can become existing in that world. With the upcoming release of Dragon Age: Inquisition mid month, several of us have started re-playing origins in an attempt to get a new save file to import into Inquisition. I realize that the process for importing works a little differently than it has in previous Bioware games, and is done through an intermediary program called Dragon Age Keep that also allows you to choose the decisions you would have liked to have had from previous games. However with some experience with the Mass Effect 3 “comic book” tool, it tended to also make a lot of really horrible decisions for me. One of the most enjoyable experiences I have had with a game was playing through the entire Mass Effect series in sequence over the course of a Christmas break… so while the games in the Dragon Age series do not connect as tightly, I am hoping it will still be very rewarding.

Over the weekend I said that I had decided to start the “least” Belghast character possible for this play through. That I guess is not correct… the least recognizable character would have been me starting an Elven Mage. We all know that one is never going to happen, as I tend to be allergic to playing finger wigglers. Instead I basically picked something other than the high born warrior I always tend to play, and in this case that was a Dwarven Casteless Rogue. I love the Dwarves of the Dragon Age series, and having my very first play through be the Noble rogue pretty much ruined every other introduction storyline for me. That said the Casteless introduction is pretty great as well, and especially after having played through many of them… you see hints of the other introductions as you play. Like I know the events that are going on with the noble houses, and while they are only loosely alluded to in the casteless introduction… they are still very much there and very much the way they play out as a noble. I like thinking that there is a fixed story arc with multiple windows out onto it.

Death to Darkspawn

This game has always hit every trigger for me… in a good way. I love dark ominous demon filled landscapes where I am the only person with the tools to dispatch them. I love the political infighting and backstabbing and the identification of a truly wicked person that I can focus my anger and rage towards. But I also like that apart from that central story arc, nothing is really certain and the game doesn’t judge you much for dabbling in the grey areas. It is an absolute feat that this game manages to make me NOT side with the mage haters. Given my feelings towards finger wigglers, it would make sense that I would want to help the Templars eradicate the “Mage Threat”, but instead each and every play through I cannot bring myself to go against the Circle Mages. Maybe it is because I like the character of Wynne too much, or maybe they just manage to create a narrative that makes me actually care about magic users.

Granted personally I greatly prefer the side of the Apostates, and generally their cause is one that I can get behind whole heartedly. I am a huge fan of Morrigan, but I have found her character to be extremely polarizing even among my close friends. She is dark and brutal and abrasive… but I always enjoy listening to her quips. One of the things I am doing this time around that I have not in previous plays is varying my group composition based on what I know my intended action will be. Generally speaking if you make Morrigan happy…. you won’t make Alistair and Leliana happy for example. So I hedge my bets and end up simply not bringing the person that I know I will end up pissing off. It is a strange line to walk but at this point I have some duplication of most of the roles I might need. There are certain characters that I just absolutely cannot stand… I am looking at you Zevran. Though this time around I am finding myself softening to that character, especially after seeing him in Dragon Age II.

Slowly Progressing

I am taking my sweet time moving through the game. At this point I am just shy of 20 hours spent and have saved the Circle of Mages as well as Redcliffe Castle. I am however trying really hard to do every single side quest in a given area. This means that while I can just blow through Lothering… I am trying to do all of the little side missions which end up dragging out that area considerably longer than you might think. In a way I am treating this as though it were my last time playing Dragon Age ever. I realize that is likely not going to be the case, but I guess I am trying to make every choice count since I will ultimately be importing this game into Awakenings and Dragon Age II before finally importing the entire mess into Dragon Age Inquisition next month. On this play through I am more acutely aware that I am building a world around me, a series of consequences that lead to other consequences later down the line.

This is a strangely different feeling than when you do the same process in the Mass Effect series. There you are living the legacy of one person, your version of Shepard… and it is a direct lineage from game to game. The choices you make on one game, are effect the relationships you have in the next game because you were the person that made them both times. Here you are setting up a conflict that spans multiple generations, and while you are creating ripples it is somewhat uncertain how the final events will play out. It is also playing through a game knowing the beginning and the ending but having the steps between be rather fluid and changing. This will make my fifth play through of Dragon Age Origin since release, and I am still finding little details that I don’t remember from previous plays. That and the fact that I am not bored with the game, really are a testament to just how good the writing is.

Sneaking into Denerim

Right now I am tempted to save my game and then make a run at getting to Denerim before completing any other areas. I would really like to resolve the whole Urn of Sacred Ashes business before moving too much further in the storyline. I have also never actually gone to Denerim this early in the storyline before. I have no clue what the rammifications of doing that are, but I already have several quest chains that take me there. So I think that might be the order for tonight, to create a good clearly labeled save game so I can roll back if I am not happy with the consequences started by my actions. That is one of the things that is interesting about Dragon Age is just how unforgiving it is when it comes to your choices. It is super easy to close off a quest chain to you by picking the wrong answer… and there will never be another way to get that option back. In some of the later Bioware games they have given us the ability to escape out of a dialog tree, but this being a fairly early one has really strictly binding choices. As such it is making me super careful about what I end up choosing.

If it has been awhile since you last played Dragon Age then I highly suggest you dust off your copy and give it a proper play again. I am currently playing the “Ultimate” edition that comes preloaded with all of the DLC… and there was quite a lot of it. I’ve found this game plays significantly better through Origin than it does through Steam, as anytime I have tried to play through Steam I have issues with it not recognizing my DLC as being “genuine” and the official Bioware answer to this is to hack the save game file to turn off the protection bit. I would rather just play the game without doing all of that so I am using Origin and overall the experience is not too horrible. I have to say that Origin as a whole has gotten considerably better since its launch, and right now the only problem I really have with it… is that it is not steam. I still to some extent resent having to have a separate launcher just for Bioware games but the experience is worth it so for the time being I just deal with the frustration. Thankfully Ubisoft is taking steps to move towards better integration with steam so that the entire process will be transparent to the users. Unfortunately with the rather public falling out between EA and Valve… I doubt that will actually ever happen. In any case… I am having a blast with Dragon Age and look forward to completing it.

#DragonAge

Outland

October 5, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 25

Last night we recorded yet another episode of our weekly podcast AggroChat. This week we were missing Rae, but had Ashgar, Kodra and Tam to join me to talk about stuff and things. Of the four of us, three of us have almost spontaneously started replaying Dragon Age: Origins. In truth Ashgar started it and then Tam and I decided it was a pretty excellent idea to follow suit as we all realized we didn’t really have a good save to feed into the upcoming title Dragon Age: Inquisition. As such we have been lost in that title and remembering just how amazing it really is. We gush about about the writing behind the title and some of our favorite and least favorite characters. We try not to give many spoilers since Kodra has yet to make it terribly far in the game, so should be safe to listen to for complete Dragon Age nubs and pros alike.

We meander our way through a couple of indie games, namely Crypt of the Necrodancer that Kodra has been playing, and Outland the awesome metroidvania that I am reviewing as part of my Steampowered Sunday. Ashgar hooked me up with a copy originally with the intent of playing this co-op… but it seems like the latency for co-op play is still absolutely atrocious. So instead I played it all by my lonesome this morning… we at least as lonesome as you can be while streaming it to the internet. Finally we talk about Final Fantasy XIV and the odd sense of compartmentalism in that game. How you can progress among multiple vectors without the need to really mess with the others. Also we walk about how much we are looking forward to the as of yet completely announced 3.0 expansion, which is rumored to have as much content as the original 2.0 release had.

Two other really interesting things happened during the episode. For starters we announced that we were now part of TGEN The Gaming and Entertainment Network of podcasts. Quite honestly I am a bit humbled to be included with such illustrious podcasts as Battle Bards, Beyond Bossfights, Cat Context, Contains Moderate Peril, Couch Podtatoes, Massive Failure and Roleplay Domain. I am also quite humbled to be the first podcast to officially be launching the network, since we record on Saturday nights and launch Sunday, we are the first show sporting the new network bumper. Additionally we talk about the upcoming Extra Life gaming marathon and our team. Right now you can check out Ashgar, Kodra and Myself on the donor pages and our progress… and then tune in Oct 25th to the Alliance of Awesome hitbox team to watch the streamers. Being our first year I set a very low team goal of $200 and so far we have raised just shy of $600 dollars in pledges. Really looking forward to the event, and I hope you join us.

Outland

For a few weeks now my friend Ashgar has been talking about this particular metroidvania with some interesting twists. Last weekend shortly after recording the Steampowered Sunday for Mercenary Kings he hooked me up with a copy on steam, suggesting we might play it for this Sunday. Apparently there is some really cool co-operative play in the game, but at the time of writing this it is apparently completely broken in that the latency makes it absolutely unplayable. I can see how any matter of latency would be a problem, as there are several places where you have a very slim window to time a jump or an attack. Since the co-op was out of the picture, I opted to still play the game but do so solo… or at least as solo as you can be while streaming. At face value it is a really artistically slanted metroidvania game. It follows the artistic style to some extent of the current crop of mostly silhouetted figures against a colorful background. This almost always makes a game feel far more detailed than it actually is, and I tend to enjoy this style of art.

You play the role of the ancestor of a great warrior who tamed the twin sisters of light and dark to save creation. To be truthful while well done the narrative doesn’t seem to matter that much other than add a bit of flavor. You wander through the levels collecting coins and rare pieces of treasure and sometimes unlocking special abilities. The twist on the traditional Metroidvania genre however comes in the fact that over time you can harness the power of the Light Spirit and the Dark Spirit and use these to bypass certain obstacles. The Light is represented by blue, and the Dark by red and while in the same color as an obstacle you can pass directly through it. You can also use your color to active switches and platforms allowing you to traverse the levels. You are rationed these abilities slowly and I didn’t get the second color until I had defeated the first boss. Some of the later puzzles require you to switch colors midair to take advantage of a platform that activates when you land on it with a specific color. This is facilitated by hitting the right shoulder button on your controller. This definitely feels like the sort of game that is greatly improved with a controller, so I did not even attempt to pay attention to the equivalent keyboard controls for things.

Epic Boss Fights

At the end of the first level you have to fight a giant golem that is blocking your way. The scale of the fight is extremely impressive and makes the game feel much larger than it actually is. The camera zooms in and out based on how large the chamber you are in happens to be, and this gives a more dynamic feel to the gameplay. The boss mechanic was rather simple but extremely effective in that you had to avoid a ground slam and then climb the giant itself while it was temporarily drained of its power to attack and exposed weak spot. As the fight got on there were more details that had to be avoided, like a rain of red and blue bullets that gives the game almost a bullet hell feel to it. I had to stand in the blue beams to avoid taking damage from the red beams, and I am imagining that in later encounters you will have to shift back and forth between red and blue to soak specific abilities while flipping to the opposite to be able to damage your target. While you can soak beams of the same color… mobs of that color can still damage you, and you can only damage them when flipped to the alternate polarity.

The game is constantly compared to the fabled bullet hell shooter by Treasure called Ikaruga in that it has similar soak/polarity mechanics. However any many ways it reminds me of the gameplay of Silhouette Mirage and earlier title with the same basic mechanic by Treasure. Similar to Outland it was a side scroller and you had a dual polarity of absorption and repelling based on which direction you pointed your attacks. You can check out my entire hour and a half long play session this morning in the embedded Hitbox video. I have to say I dig the game so far and want to play more of it. I just felt like I needed to wrap up this mornings session so I could get my blog post out, however I played significantly longer than most Steampowered Sunday mornings… so that should tell you something. Right now the game is under $10 on steam, and more than worth that price. I would have paid at least $20 for it to be honest, had someone not ever so graciously gifted it to me. If you like the Metroidvania genre and especially like ones with interesting mechanics like Guacamelee you should check this out.

#Outland #AggroChat

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

October 3, 2014 by Belghast

Ready for a Freeze

The last few weeks my allergies have been killing me, and this is not usually the case for fall here in Oklahoma. It feels like the seasons are getting horribly confused, and ragweed that normally hits its worst during July has been still active in August and October. As such my lungs have decided to betray me under the onslaught, and yesterday afternoon I ended up going home from work. I took a few breathing treatments and got some sleep and this morning I feel marginally better, but still on the scale of “lousy”. Right now I am just read for the first hard freeze to happen and kill off most of the allergens. Sadly that doesn’t look like it is going to happen any time soon. The temperature is dipping down today to the 60s, but otherwise we are still having 70 to 80 degree days.

The constant drainage and coughing just makes me want to stay inside and hibernate. Thankfully right now I have a ton of good games to play. With the impending release of Dragon Age: Inquisition several of my friends are replaying Dragon Age: Origin since like many Bioware games there is reportedly going to be a save game import feature. I know my experience playing through all three Mass Effect games in a row produced a ton more quest options than when I played Mass Effect 3 without importing. So it has me wanting to try going back through the past games as well. My upcoming gaming schedule may be devoted to Dragon Age: Origins for a bit, but I still plan on poking my head into FFXIV, Trove and Destiny on a nearly nightly basis to see what is going on.

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

Thanks to the miracle of the Queens Bounty event I’ve managed to shoot up to 24 light through upgrading the two purple pieces of gear that I managed to get. Through running various other things I have managed to pick up a handful of nice weapons and other light bearing blues. Right now I am running around with a level 20 scout rifle, that while it doesn’t deliver as much punch as the hand cannon, it still has a bit of impact and can carry like 250 rounds with me. It makes it extremely good for whittling down enemies at range with extreme accuracy. I would still love to find a level 20 blue or purple hand cannon, but so far my only purple ingram has produced crafting materials instead of a weapon. Upgrading gear right now seems to be my sole source of getting more light, as I have yet to find any items that can directly replace anything I am currently wearing.

Last night my play time entirely revolved around trying to find more green armor to grind down into Plasteel, and finding Relic Iron… which so far is the hardest of the materials to spot. I’ve gotten rather good at picking out the chunks of brown against the red brown landscape of Mars, and had a fair bit of luck finding chests that had quite a large quantity of it. The problem honestly as you can see from the screenshot is that I just cannot seem to get enough plasteel. I could in theory buy ingrams from the Cryptarch and grind those down… but that seems defeatist. Instead I am mostly spending my time doing patrol missions on Mars since they give me reputation and have a fair chance of dropping greens. I have now entered the grind phase of the game, and while I am still very much enjoying myself I can see how this might wear on folks with a lower tolerance to grind.

Tron and Infinium Ore

With the release of Beta and the addition of the Neon Ninja, they added in a biome to go with that theme. While this morning I was only able to find a very small one… this is what folks have dubbed the “Tron” biome. In fact when you are in the biome a musical theme plays that reminds me quite a bit of some of the Tron Legacy soundtrack. There are rivers of neon blue water, and instead of grass and brushes you have chips and resistors. It feels like you are in a datascape and the various robots have similar tron coloring. Each biome has a version of the skeleton, and in this biome they look like the Red MCP guards from the original Tron movie. I hope that eventually I can build a table that allows me to spit out stuff themed like this biome, because I will completely switch my entire cornerstone to look like it.

This little innocuous looking block is Infinium Ore, and it has become the bane of my existence. After a certain point in the crafting system… every single recipe requires this. The problem is that as you go up in level this doesn’t seem to get any more common. You can find Shapestone and Formicite Ore until your heart is content, but Infinium still is a very rare occasional, and any given vein maybe gives you twenty if you are extremely lucky. Most of my playtime has been wandering around looking for these ore spawns. The problem with Trove is I simply don’t understand how the game works yet. In Minecraft the spawns were based on a certain logic, and once you mastered that you could be plopped down almost anywhere and be able to find the resources you need. In Trove it feels more like you have to be lucky. I feel like I need to spend some time scouring the Reddit looking for tips and strategies for finding this ore node. I won’t be able to do any of the really cool things without large quantities of it.

#DragonAge #Trove #Destiny

Fallen London

September 21, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 23

Last night once again we gathered myself, Rae, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam and recorded yet another action filled episode of Aggrochat. I would love to think it was action filled, but more likely than not it was just a lot of rambling about about various things. I titled this weeks broadcast “An Intimate of Devils” because one of the games we talked about is the web based Fallen London. Several of us are playing it but really only myself and Kodra have spent a good amount of time doing so. Somehow we both managed to align ourselves with the Brass Embassy which is the home of the demonic residents of Fallen London… the Devils. It turns out that apparently the plural of devil is an “intimate of devils” so I thought it was an interesting if not fitting title for the show. If you have not caught on I try and name the shows something that might cause someone to click through on it.

Other than that we talked at length about the Microsoft acquisition of Minecraft, and what its possible ramifications could be. We talked a little bit about Final Fantasy XIV and especially about Rae’s journey to become an Omnicrafter and get to 50 on all of her professions. We spent a large chunk of time talking about Destiny and our experiences playing the game… and trying in vain to find the story. Currently the Tokyo Game Show is going on, so we talked a bit about the games that were being shown there especially Final Fantasy XV or “Final Fantasy Roadtrip” as we have taken to calling it. Finally we discussed for a bit what all was happening at the League of Legends World Championship. We ran a bit longer than normal clocking in at an hour and ten minutes, but hopefully you enjoy what all we had to say about a large number of topics.

Fallen London

A few weeks back my good friend Tarantella convinced me to give a web based game called Fallen London a shot, and since then I have been playing it quite a bit, often times feverishly burning through my turns multiple times a day. I liked it so much that I decided to become an “Exceptional Friend” which is their equivalent of a patron system giving you a second “candle” worth of turns. That is the rather nice way of them displaying how many turns you have left. You start off with a rather large candle and as you take turns it slowly burns down to just the stub. If you have played the early web based RPG Kingdom of Loathing, the gameplay will be very familiar. You are allotted a fixed number of turns, and then periodically you gain a new turn. The turns regenerate at a rate of 1 per every 10 minutes, so generally speaking each morning you will start with a fresh candle of 40, or in my case two candles of 40 since I am a patron… and then you play through those and start accruing them back until you are at the maximum number of turns again.

one of the things that makes this more interesting than say Kingdom of Loathing is the fact that you get what are essentially “chance” cards that you can play. These also regenerate at a rate of 1 level 10 minutes until you have 6 in reserve. The size of your current hand is determined by the quality of your lodgings. You start with only one card in your hand, and then as you upgrade your lodgings this increases. Right now my lodgings is a decommissioned steamer and it allows me certain types of cards to show up as well as increasing my hand size to three. These cards tend to give you far better rewards than wandering around the various districts of Fallen London. I say wandering, but there is no action combat in this game. Everything is carried out by making a series of text based decisions, and the game has a Everquest style color coding system to show how difficult the encounter is. If you mouse over an option it will tell you specifically what the chance of success is. There are various items that can be spent to give yourself additional chances at completing the task.

It’s About the Setting

The aspect of Fallen London that makes it appealing to me is that you have this London by Gaslight era setting infused with all sorts of Cthulhu elements as well as a fair bit of steampunk. The background of the game is that London is the 5th great city to fall, and in this case it means to be consumed completely by the earth. In the early bits of the game I found it unclear if this was literally a fissure in the earth or if the city was somehow transported into another dimension. In either case it finds itself surrounded by a great subterranean ocean known as the “Unterzee”. Additionally the city has found itself host to several supernatural entities that find it as a handy stopping off place between their own realms and that of the above world. So the game is a game of factions and secret societies… and you as the player have to tiptoe your way through them figuring out exactly who you choose to align with.

Personally I have found myself fond of the “Rubbery Men” which are essentially Cthulhu style deep ones in suits that wander around the city trading for mysteriously throbbing stones. Additional over the course of my exploits I’ve found myself getting closer and closer to the Brass Embassy as I mentioned above, the cloister of devils that visits our fair city between trips above to take the souls of men. The artwork overall for the game is extremely simplistic, but at the same time evocative of a dark and mysterious world that it is trying to induct you into. The game is not terribly action packed in that you essentially are doing a lot of text adventure, but nonetheless I find it compelling. It is like a self driven pen and paper role-playing game. I’ve made more than a few false steps as I have tried to figure out my way around the world… not the least of which was somehow pissing off the patron that had gifted me some really nice things.

An Evolution

One of the problems with Fallen London is that the way it is set up is designed to ration you out a few turns at a time. Additionally you are essentially “landlocked” inside of London. There are missions that open up storylets in different areas, but all of which are roughly connected to Fallen London proper. The folks at Failbetter Games have created Sunless Sea that is now available on Steam Early access to address this problem. This time instead of taking the role of a prisoner being released into Fallen London, you are taking the role of a Steamship captain giving you mobility outside of town. You and your fearless crew embark upon missions outside of the city and engage in battle against pirates and sea monsters while trying to gain the favor of the factions within the city. I’ve not played a ton of hours yet, but I am nonetheless intrigued.

The game does not really hold your hand, and in a way it reminds me quite a bit of FTL in that you can screw up spectacularly and wind up dead within a few turns. While wandering around the “Zee” you have to watch several things… the hunger of your crew, the fuel of your vessel and your hull integrity. As you wander about the in your vessel, you will encounter new areas and if there is a dock jutting out in to the water you can explore on shore. So far I have found a few new areas, each with storylets that will likely come into play later as I get further into the game play. The overall interface of the game is very familiar if you have played the web based Fallen London. The primary difference is you have to learn what a whole new set of stats means, in that they do not use any of the same baseline abilities as the web version has.

Doing Battle

Eventually you are going to encounter something that wants to take a chunk out of your hull. Combat itself is turn based and strategic in nature. In order to perform most of your attacks you need to illuminate your target to be able to aim properly. As such the opening salvos of combat tend to be you throwing flares out into the water to light it up properly. There is the option to do a wild salvo, but the chance of hitting the target and dealing serious damage is pretty low. As such I tend to throw out 3 flares first so that I can hit the target with a full force attack. On small targets like this abyssal crab it generally only takes a single hit. When you start encountering pirates however you will have to a bit more tricky. I’ve noticed that the pirates prefer to open with wild salvos which generally do little damage but can stress you out as you are trying to light up the target.

When you defeat an enemy you are given a series of options based on how far you have progressed as a character. In the case of the Crab, you are given the option to harvest it for supplies or dissect it to learn knowledge. More often than not I take the supplies as this is quite literally how you feed your crew, and anything that keeps me from having to spend Echo to buy supplies makes me happy. When I took out a pirate ship I was given the interesting option of sending it to shore with a skeleton crew and getting more resources from the ship. I ended up getting quite a haul of Echo from doing this, but it greatly reduces the number of available crew members when you do it. I am sure that has an opportunity cost later on as a result, but I have not quite run into a situation where the number of crew members mattered.

Tomb Colonists

Right now in my game I am spending most of my time running Tomb Colonists to Venderbight. The Tomb Colonists are one of the stranger factions of Fallen London. They are in essence mummies that travel around in coffins. So basically as I am doing this, I am hauling three coffins at a time and getting a pretty decent payout when I get to Venderbight and sell them back to the Tomb-Colonists there. It isn’t exactly glamorous but it is worth quite a large amount of echo… something I am sorely lacking. I need to do some research to see what it takes to get a more efficient engine because right now it seems like I am burning through a good deal of my profit in simply buying up fuel… which greatly limits my range of movement. I figure in coming sessions I will explore more of the coast line and see what trouble I can get into. Unfortunately however I don’t really know how to gauge how rough an encounter is… so I feel like at some point I am just going to die horribly to something too strong for me to take. Right now I am very much digging the narrative of both games and the setting. I only wish there was a way to have the two games be connected, in that I was either playing the same character or somehow being a benefactor one way or another. I did notice I was able to log in with my Fallen London account, but I did that right before starting this post… so I have yet to see just how connected they end up being. Long story short, I highly suggest you check out Fallen London since it is completely free to play. If you like the setting and find the various factions as compelling as I do, then I suggest you also check out Sunless Sea. I am looking forward to exploring more of the “Unterzee” as a Steamship “Zailor”. Right now Sunless Sea is under $20 for steam early access, and I feel like that is an absolute steam considering just how much interesting content I have already seen. The one thing still on my wishlist is for a proper mobile client for my phone, then I would be raving wildly about how awesome of an experience this is.

#AggroChat #FallenLondon #SunlessSea