RPG Archives - Page 49 of 51 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Elder Dungeons

April 10, 2014 by Belghast

H1Z1 Preview

Yesterday was the big reveal of the new SOE game H1Z1. While it should surprise no one… this is a zombie survival MMO. With the name there is literally nothing else that it could have been. Right now the details are pretty sketchy, but details are being collected on the official reddit. It really looks like it is going to take what Rust and DayZ are doing, to the next level and make it massive and persistent. While all of this intrigues me… I think it is pretty much in the “not for me” camp. I am amped about exploring a zombie filled world, and building bases with my friends to protect against the hordes. Dealing with additional players in a PVP scenario in that same world… pretty much destroys my enjoyment. Ultimately I am all about community and working together, and unless there is some unofficial co-operative server there really isn’t much pull for me.

I played quite a bit of the DayZ mod for Arma 2, but the thing that ultimately stopped me from playing it more was the fact that I didn’t need to worry about the zombies, but instead worry about getting sniped from a massive distance by other players. I realize that it is more realistic to have players be fighting other players for survival, but in these games there are often times far more players in the world than zombies. I feel like ultimately what I am looking for is State of Decay co-operative mode… which sadly is not in the cards. I want to explore a purely PVE world with my friends, and scavenge from potentially NPC factions. I guess the proof will be in the pudding and how things are set up. What would really kill the game for me is if other players can loot your corpse, similar to DayZ.

So long as if I die to players I get to keep my progression and my inventory, I might be okay with this. The other big concern is, that Smedley already talks about players coming along and burning down the bases of other players. As a kid I loved to build with blocks, but it would piss me off when another kid would come along and knock down my intricate structure. That is precisely what it feels like to me, when you have a base building game… that allows other players to come destroy yours. Some time ago Smedley said there was another game on the horizon that SWG players would love. I keep wondering if this is it, because it is supposed to have the whole player created town aspect. Knowing what I know about the SWG community however, I don’t really see them being terribly enthralled by this.

The Evil Within

A game I have been watching with some interest for some time is The Evil Within. Essentially it brings the world famous Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil. During the early days of the playstation, I absolutely ate up survival horror titles. I played the shit out of Resident Evil, its sequel, Parasite Eve, and even Dino Crisis. However for me the genre reached its peak with the release of the original Silent Hill. There was something so perfect about that game and the way it blended between the relatively sedate “normal” world, and the absolutely twisted “nightmare” world. The game absolutely blew me away from the opening chords of its theme song. As the Resident Evil series wore on, it became ever repetitive and boring, as you rehashed the same old t-virus saga again and again.

What The Evil Within does is pair the mind of Shinji Mikami with the publishing might of Bethesda Softworks. Now granted this is not the same team that brought us the Elder Scrolls, or even Fallout… but so far they have managed to prove that when one of the Zenimax studios creates a title… I am ultimately going to be interested in it. The above trailer is brand new for Pax and I have to say I am super interested. It feels far more like Silent Hill than Resident Evil, and this is an awesome thing to me. I want another game where I wander around a nightmarish landscape that I can’t quite wrap my head around. The title is slotted to ship at the end of August, and I am super excited about it. If you loved the original Silent Hill as much as I did, I figure you have reason to be excited as well. If nothing else the trailer is really freakin cool.

Elder Dungeons

I finally put my finger on what exactly I am loving about the dungeons in Elder Scrolls Online. In many ways it feels like a return to the dungeons of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. World of Warcraft did something to MMOs that has seemed unrepairable until now. It was really the first game to begin to treat dungeons as though they were wholly separate from the rest of the world. It walled the dungeons off in instances, filled them with special dungeon mobs, and applied abilities to them that you would see in no place OTHER than a dungeon. The dungeon became its own unique game, that required a completely different set of skills than play out in the world did. Every game since the launch of World of Warcraft has taken this lead and filled their dungeons with “elites” that for the most part require players to focus fire them down, since an individual player could not possibly solo one at level.

This was not always the case, dungeons used to be filled with the same kinds of mobs you might encounter out in the “real” world, just in larger numbers and higher frequency. So stepping into Elder Scrolls Online, I admit I was freaked out when we first encountered and 8 to 10 mob pull. I am only now realizing that this is essentially the same 8 to 10 mobs you would encounter while roaming around the world. What makes this challenging and not just “trash packs” is the fact that these mobs fight smarter. From the moment you step into the dungeon, you encounter “group tactics”. Healers will heal the lowest target, including other healers… Necromancers will raise the dead, melee will go after your squishiest party members. The mobs are treating you like dungeon encounters, and trying to take you down as a team.

What makes this so refreshing is that these tactics are not solely reserved for “dungeons” but the same kind of thing you start encountering as the game ramps up difficulty. In Stormhaven it is getting rare that I am not involved in three or more mobs at a time. Almost always this will include a healer of some sort, a “tank” of some sort and a “dps” of some sort. The first time a mob tried to kite me, it was a really cool moment. Why this is great is because Elder Scrolls is somehow managing to teach players the skills that they will need for later content, in the content they are actually playing. So while yes, there is a massive learning curve… I feel like we will not have the same problems we have with the PUG scene in World of Warcraft in the eventual Elder Scrolls Online end game. If you can make it through the veteran content, you likely can make it through any of the content in the game.

It is refreshing to have a game that does not try to coddle the player. Shit happens, and if you do not react appropriately to it… you get punished and punished hard. The game is not some brutal Dark Souls type experience, it plays fair and within a set of established rules… but even after playing it as long as I have… I still die, and die often. I really look forward to the adventure zone combat, because it feels like it is going to be something akin to the old Everquest planes. I loved breaking the plane of hate and the plane of fear, both of which were unforgiving and brutal… but also immensely rewarding. While Craglorn sounds like it is much more structured than the planes were, it feels like it might offer a similar style of gameplay. It will be a long while before I am Veteran Rank 10, but hopefully when I get there we will be able to wander about the zone finding adventure.

#H1Z1 #TheEvilWithin #CragLorn #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline

Pokémania

October 15, 2013 by Belghast

Age Gap

I feel like there is this huge phenomena that I completely missed the boat on. Even though it was my generation that brought the Gameboy to the world, and I can remember getting one in 1989 it was never a primary console for me. It was that thing I played when I was on a trip, or more often my younger cousin played when he was visiting. For him the Gameboy was totally a primary means of gameplay, but for me… it was more novelty than anything else. The battery life was pure shit, so it was not like you could actually take it anywhere for long periods of time without a large stock of AA batteries to fuel it.

Additionally it made everything you played look spinach green. There were various big name titles that came out like Metroid II that provided an experience that did not exist on the bigger consoles…. but by that time I had the Super Gameboy and the ability to play these games in pseudo color. While I bought a Gameboy Advance and later a second hand Gameboy SP they were still more novelty devices for me. As a result I feel as though I almost completely missed one of the biggest crazes to ever hit gaming.

Pokémania

I was already well into the working world when the whole Pokémon insanity happened. It was one of those games that I knew existed, but since I didn’t really play Gameboy much, I had never actually experienced. My first entry into the world actually happened when the card game was released. Before it really blew up, it had become something that the card gamer folks dabbled in at my local game store… and I had a starter deck and a handful of boosters. It was a charming little game, and it played rather quickly as compared to Magic: The Gathering that could often times drag on for ages.

I did not really encounter the Gameboy game until much later, when I played Pokémon Blue on a Gameboy emulator. I found it a charming game, and quickly became addicted to capturing these little critters, but the experience ended there for the most part. I don’t think I ever actually beat the game. Once the novelty wore off I was back to playing my JRPGs on the PlayStation, and traded Pokémon for Jade Cocoon. I likely would have stayed disconnected from the Pokémon experience were it not for MMO games and often times being one of the oldest folks in the raid.

Battle Pets

A large number of the gamers that I play with on a regular basis are one full generation younger than I am. As a result… Pokémon was a huge deal for that group. I can remember talking about WoW Pokémon with a small measure of disdain when it was originally announced, but mostly because I really did not get what is so fun about it. However when it was released I went from antagonist to addict in no time. In fact for the first several nights after the release of Mists of Pandaria, I wandered around doing nothing but battle pets. I have always been a pet collector in MMO games, but being able to do something with them… made the whole experience that much better for me.

The thing is… this also made me realize that this madness called Pokémon totally worked on me. I began to feel like I had missed an entire experience. Over the last few months my inner circle of gamer friends have been prepping for the release of Pokémon X and Y, and while at the time I didn’t think much about it… the closer it got to release the more I wanted to participate this time. I have not owned a Gameboy since the SP, and have completely missed the DS era. As a result I missed a number of games that I still want to play. So I feel like I have a significant backlog of games I want to play for it.

However the big title on the horizon that I would have had to play… was Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. A Link to the Past is one of my favorite games of all time… I put it very close to Castlevania Symphony of the Night… the game that is likely my all time favorite. I was always a fan of Legend of Zelda, spending countless hours beating the first one. However, Link to the Past was that game that really proved to me the raw power of the Super Nintendo. I picked up a copy on my way home from getting outpatient sinus surgery and I played the hell out of it as I recuperated. When I heard there was a sequel coming to the 3DS I knew sooner or later I would end up with the console.

Taking the Plunge

Much to the frustration of my wife I am sure… last night I took the plunge and picked up a black/black 3ds XL and Pokémon Y. My immediate group of friends have been keeping the X and Y thing pretty balanced so I could have gotten either. Basically for me it came down to the fact that I would far rather have a crazy red and black flying bird with three hands… than some kind of blue faerie antelope. Other than that… I really could not tell you the difference. I played the absolute crap out of the game last night, and spent most of that time catching Pokémon and then trading them off using the crazy wonder trade system.

This has to be the coolest feature I have found so far. Basically since the 3DS is an extremely connected device, you can place any Pokémon you do not want up for trade, and receive a Pokémon that another trainer does not want. Essentially it is the whole, one mans trash is another mans treasure concept… and while I am sure at later levels you mostly get things you have no interest in… starting out I found it to be the source of many Pokémon I was interested in. I oddly enough ended up with quite a few interesting and potentially rare ones mixed in with the dross.

I still feel a little overwhelmed. Having never really played a Pokémon game… there are so many things that have changed since my brief experience with Pokémon Blue. Luckily I have various friends that serve as an almost encyclopedic tome of knowledge about all things “pocket monster”. They have been helping me out immensely especially in evaluating which things are good and which things are not so good. I feel like I have a couple of decades of research to do before I even feel like I have a slim grasp on what all is going on. I am now a proud member of the 3DS era, so I can now add a “friend code” to the long list of other social identifiers I have.

Return of the Queen

June 19, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… this is my first post without the aid of coffee. I am trying to taper back my caffeine intake because the whole heart fluttering/palpitations thing has been back with a vengeance over the last few days. I honestly figure it is mostly stress induced, but I am willing to cut back on a few things to help the process along. It is not exactly an enjoyable feeling, so if I can stop it from happening… I will be happier. As a result without aid of coffee, I may not be entirely cogent at 6 am.

Return of the Queen

So yesterday was my birthday, and I have to say I was overwhelmed by the birthday messages I go from all sources. Logging into twitter of G+ was like hitting a wall of happy birthday… it was pretty awesome. You guys made what would have been a pretty crappy day not one. Essentially my birthday was slotted to be pretty awesome. I had a replacement laptop arriving sometime midday, and my wife would be flying in at noonish and I would get the spend at least half the day chilling out with her.

I got up pretty early yesterday, and when I got upstairs to catch up with the world my wife had messaged me telling me that her flight had been cancelled. Apparently there was “weather” in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and they were re-routing all flights. So instead of her 7 am flight… she was being placed on a 3:30 flight… on standby. At this point she was not slotted to actually get back to Tulsa until 9:30 that evening. So that left her having to do the awkward chilling out at the airport thing, and me to be alone on my birthday.

I would have driven up to get her, since she was in Kansas City, and it is a roughly four hour drive from where we live to the airport… but with the laptop coming, neither of us wanted to leave that out on the porch. We have a little pack of hoodlums in the neighborhood, that have been suspected for the flurry of car break-ins that I wrote about awhile back. Mostly they are bored teenagers with no real parental guidance to give them a moral compass, but they have been known to have sticky fingers.

So it became a waiting game… if the package arrived quickly enough it would be possible to run up and back and get home before the flights would have. However since my laptop arrived at 1 pm, that slotted her still getting home around 9 after you factored in both directions of the drive… and a lot of unnecessary stress in the process. Somehow along the process she managed to get juggled to an earlier flight, and in the grand scheme of things landed last night in Tulsa around 8 pm. It is really awesome to have my wife back, but honestly the impact has not quite hit me yet. We got home in time for her to unpack and pretty much go to sleep, since she had been up since the crack of dawn.

Laptop Resolution

Yesterday I had regaled you with the tale of the guy flaking out on me yet again, and me giving up and just ordering online. As I said above, yesterday around 1 pm I had a doorbell ring and my laptop was there on the threshold. Since it was too late to try and drive to pick up my wife, I decided to unbox it and play with my new toy. First off, for having dual SLI cards the laptop is remarkably quiet and cool. There is heat emanating from the heat sinks on either side but it is no way as hot as previous laptops have been. I am guessing this is the massive air intake on the bottom of the laptop causing the thing to stay cool.

I have not honestly had much time to really game on the laptop, I spent most of yesterday downloading stuff. I got in and played a little Dragon’s Prophet and it looked gorgeous. My previous laptop did not like that game at all, and this one funs it pretty much on high settings fluidly. Additionally I played a little Rift as it was patching and it also looked gorgeous and ran well on ultra settings. The sad thing about the digital age however is it still takes a long while to download multiple 16 gig game installations. For whatever reason League of Legends was taking the longest… which seems insane considering how simple a game it is… and how low tech the graphics are.

The keyboard is going to take some getting used to, but so far I really like it. Keyboards are a huge thing for me… and this is as best as I can describe it a mechanical chicklet keypad. It has the low key height of a chicklet style laptop keyboard, but you have the satisfying mechanical feedback of an old school keyboard. It reminds me a lot of a half height version of my Microsoft sidewinder keyboard that I use on my desktop. The important thing is it feels extremely responsive but like I said it will take some getting used to.

The biggest feature that is going to take awhile for me to adapt to is the fact that this laptop is Windows 8. I have to say, I still have no idea what Microsoft was thinking by defaulting a desktop operating system to the Metro interface. I realize that I likely use my computer differently than most people… I tend to do everything through the run prompt… but even for day to day use… the Metro interface seems worse than useless. The very first thing I did was download Stardock’s Start8 giving me back my start menu and run prompt. After that it feels much like using Windows 7 with a strange skin on it.

I will slowly get used to the forced minimalist interface elements… but I find the whole “we only use solid colors” movement of recent years a bit chafing. Our graphical designer at work seems to have been bitten by the same bug… and white frankly this whole only using bright solid colors thing looks a little “Fisher price” to me at times. All in all I am very happy however, I like the feel and form factor of the laptop, and what I have seen of its graphical powers are excellent as well.

Downtime Fiesta

While I was installing software yesterday, I had my PSP going and was playing through Final Fantasy 5. So far my biggest problem with this game is that it does a fairly poor job messaging what you are supposed to do next. There is always a certain element of roam around until you figure it out to every mission. Now that I am well past the point at which I had played previously… I am in virgin territory and often times struggle to follow the logic behind the game. Luckily I have veteran resources to rely upon if I get stuck, but for the most part I have figured out things.

I believe previously I had been just about to enter the moogle village after arriving at the second world. Yesterday I managed to play through Castle Bal, Quelb, Drakenvale, Ghido’s Island, Surgate Castle, Xezat’s Ship, the Barrier Tower thing, Forest of Moore, and am now just about to storm Exdeath’s castle. There were numerous difficult encounters along the way, but I managed through them and did not hit any major roadblocks like Soul Cannon was. Atomos was definitely a pain in the arse with his huge hitpoint pool, but I managed through it.

I feel like I have a super low maintenance party with Black Mage, Red Mage, Ranger and Samurai. My good friend Ash that talked me into this madness has a Blue Mage… so it seems like his entire play through is dictated by trying to get the right abilities off the right mobs. There was some madness last night about needing to have a level divisible by 3 to get some ability off some boss encounter. Right now the biggest thing I need to worry about is keeping my characters in the best gear (which I would have done already) and grinding mobs to get job levels ((which I would have done already). After making the swaps this party feels like my kind of party… simple and effective.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again, I need to wrap this up so I can finish getting ready and head on in to work. Going to pack up the laptop this morning and bring it for our noontime gaming excursions. It should be considerably lighter since it only weights 6 lbs. I hope you all have a great day, and I want to say again how much I appreciated getting all those birthday wishes yesterday. Now time to return to the real world and try and finish out this week.

Dam Impressive

June 3, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was another of my infamous “you no can has sleep” nights as my brain absolutely refused to shut down. I really need to get some melatonin and give it a shot when that sort of thing happens. I was extremely tired, but my brain was spinning on some completely useless project, and like the software you have to manually close when restarting your machine… it kept gumming up the process. As a result I am borderline catatonic, and find myself getting sidetracked by the simplest of things this morning. It is going to be a not so enjoyable day.

General Celes

I spent most of the morning playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6 on my PSP in an attempt to catch up to where I had gotten previously with the native PSN version. Taking screenshots is a bit more of a pain in the ass… so I did not take very many. As a result you get something I found from Google image search of the same basic spot I am at currently. Apparently the above example chose to rename their General Celes to Moghan… for whatever reason I have never really renamed my characters. I prefer to just accept the name they are given by default, since that tends to be how they are referred to out of game.

Yesterday I had encountered an odd glitch, where I was unable to talk to Kekfa and start the “Figaro Submerge” sequence. I had a previous save luckily, so I could load that back up and sure enough the second time it worked just fine. The big negative so far of playing the GBA version, is that you only have 3 save files. As a result you keep having to round robin your way manually through the saves. I pretty much save every time it is possible, and hate saving over whatever my latest game is, so this process just becomes more cumbersome.

I made my way back to the Mog screen that allows you to pick which batch of adventurers you will follow. As a result I picked Locke first, as he is generally my favorite character in FF6. It took me a bit to remember how this whole sequence worked, but after some trial and error I managed to get into the underground passage, rescue Celes and make my way out of South Figaro. When we needed to shower and get ready yesterday, I was standing just ouside South Figaro on the world map. So I will head my way back to Narshe and that should be the end of that sequence. I will likely play the river journey next… for whatever reason I tend to save the Sabin for last always.

Dam Impressive

Yesterday we had plans to eat dinner with my wife’s mother at 4 pm in Grove Oklahoma… which is on the edge of the Grand Lake of the Cherokees about an hour and a half from Tulsa. There are multiple ways to get there, none of which extremely straight… and some of them way more contorted than others. Since we had not really been out on one of our photo jaunts in awhile my wife suggested we take one of the extremely contorted ways so we could look for interesting scenery. As a result we took this hour and a half trip and extended it to be a little over three hours long.

The weatherman said that the day would be clear and sunny.. but the end result lead us to constantly check the weather on our phones as the sky was pretty much filled with rain clouds the entire trip. As a result the lighting was less than favorable, and especially so as we travelled past places we would normally stop. To the weathermans credit, it never did rain… just looked like it was going to at any moment. While we had been along the route at various segments of our planned trip, we had never actually been the totality before.

I am hoping this actually works… because I have never really attempted to create a linkable Google map for something. But this is the route that we ended up taking to get from 169 to Grove via Highway 20. When we got in the Spavinaw hills we encountered the extremely cool Spavinaw lake dam. Basically Spavinaw lake is where the bulk of the water for the City of Tulsa comes from. In the 1920s the City realized it would need to draw water from outside of the immediate area and as a result created this massive waterworks that spans from Lake Spavinaw, through other smaller lakes and ultimately ends of at the water treatment facilities inside of Tulsa. As we drove along the road it took us right beside the extremely cool looking spillway pictured above.

Luckily the sky had cleared a bit by the time we got there, so we pulled off into the parking lot and roamed around. Normally I have a no trespassing rule when taking photos… I will not cross any fences or barriers… however if there is a way around said fences that do not involve actually crossing one… I am game. As a result I ended up walking around a fence that was locked over at the power station near the spillway… and this allowed me to get some interesting shots close up to the water flow.

When I go out and take photos I end up uploading them all in bulk to Google+ albums, then create what I call a keepers album for sharing. I had not dumped my memory card in awhile, so I had photos from mothers day, the house work, and then these of Spavinaw… so the end result was that I uploaded 182 photos. After I did my culling and singling out the ones I really liked the most… that became whittled down to the 42 keepers you can see in this album. I think there are some pretty good shots in there, and it has honestly been awhile since I have felt like uploading what I shot… so I think this is a good thing.

Gaming Restlessness

When we got home from our little jaunt, I had to fight with the Google+ photos system for a good deal of time. They have changed something, so that it does not work nearly as well for bulk uploads. As a result I was pretty pissed by the time I finally finished with that mess. I ended up flitting back and forth between several different MMOs… never quite finding the fit for my mood. I played my Melee Mage in Rift for a bit, but ended up getting frustrated because I had not kept up my butchering… and was going to have to go back into Silverwood and grind wolves until I raised it enough to do Gloamwood. This is the negative side effect about leveling through the instant adventures system… you end up in a bad place skill wise.

After logging out frustrated, I went over into SWTOR and tried to play my Sith Warrior. Right now I am knee deep into Imperial Balmorra yet again… and that kind of frustration just made things worse. I managed to complete three or four quests before ultimately logging out again. I patched up Guild Wars 2, because for whatever reason… the fact that I have real internet and can patch things quickly. that would have taken me leaving a game running over night… still amuses me. That more than any other change has meant the most to me… the fact that we have real internet finally! There have been some negative side effects however… I used to host a small web server out of the house, and with Cox blocking port 80… we have lost access to most of that content.

I played GW2 for all of ten minutes before remembering why I don’t really play the game much. The gameplay choices they have made just are not that enjoyable to me. No matter how much I have tried to play it… I still find the lack of quests off putting. So I feel like I am running around aimlessly with nothing of any importance to do. Once that sets in, everything I do feels extremely grindy… since very little of it actually matters other than your world completion score. I wandered around in the 40-50 zone near Hoelbrak but quickly logged as the game almost immediately bored me.

I would have gone upstairs to the loft and played some PS3 or XBOX, but I fear that they would have had the same result. I was just in a restless and frustrated frame of mind… that was only made worse when I actually attempted to go to sleep. For whatever reason my mind latched onto the nettop computer I am building for the loft. I started going over all the things I would need to do, evaluating what the best emulator and video front ends would be… all of which were not at all important. Especially since I have yet to even move the computer out to the loft from my office. I was just restless in every sense of the word… and as a result am paying the price today as I struggle to keep my eyes open.

Wrapping Up

I am hoping that I survive the day as one of the sleep deprived masses. I will be mainlining five hour energy shots in a vague attempt to be alert and responsive. Right now I am honestly not sure what has to get accomplished today, but I am hoping by the end of my web service staff meeting I will be able to determine that. I hope you all have a productive start of the work week… and that you are not going into it nearly as tired as I am right now. Hope you all have great days.