Sandbox Archives - Page 15 of 30 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Much Darkness

February 2, 2015 by Belghast

Very White Mage

I won’t say that the sparkle is gone from World of Warcraft, because I am absolutely looking forward to starting Blackrock Foundry on Tuesday. However the shine has diminished enough that I no longer have any real pressing needs to spend non-raid time doing. As a result I have been spending considerably more time lately in Final Fantasy XIV. While I was at Pax South the 2.5 patch dropped and I have course have been working my way slowly through all the new stuff. Last Tuesday I was getting dangerously close to the 2000 soldiery cap, so I opted to purchase another of the 1300 soldiery level 110 weapons. Now I have one of these already for my Warrior, Bard and Dragoon… but rather than purchasing it for the Paladin my other 50… I instead opted to purchase it for my White Mage. Problem there is that my White Mage was only level 45 at the time of purchasing it. As such I now kind of feel like I should finish leveling, and for most of the weekend that is what I set my mind to doing.

I figured I would solve two problems, namely that I had been out of Venture tokens for months… and I miss running Quick Exploration ventures. For the uninitiated this game has a strange banking and auctioning system that revolves around the hiring of NPCs called retainers. Some time ago they added in the functionality to send your retainers out on missions for you… very similar to how the garrison mission system ended up being. One of these is called Quick Exploration, in which your retainer brings back something completely random. It could be something amazing like a rare primal weapon, or it could be something absolutely useless like fish glue. I spent most of my day piddling around doing levequests which have a chance of rewarding venture tokens but at the same time reward not too shabby experience. At the beginning of the day I was 45 and at the end I am almost 48… so making slow but steady progress. Probably going to start doing some beast tribe dailies tonight to mix things up.

Much Darkness

Syrcus Tower had been a thing for the majority of the time we have been back in the game. Which as we are realizing was like six months ago. One of the big additions in the 2.5 patch is the conclusion of the Crystal Tower series of raids, The World of Darkness. This only serves to further confuse me since WoD now means World of Darkness the dungeon, World of Darkness the pen and paper setting or the aborted mmo… or of course Warlords of Draenor. For the uninitiated the Crystal Tower series follows for the most part the theme of Final Fantasy 3. These are what I often refer to as the “casual raid” content and reward some nice “catch up” gear for players. In a Crystal Tower raid you are part of an 8 player full party, which is then part of a 3 full party alliance… making 24 players taking on the content. We have long joked that since 4 players is a Light Party, and 8 players is a Full Party… then 24 players should have been a Heavy Party or something similar.

At this point we have run Syrcus aka part two… so much we can literally sleep walk through it, so it was really refreshing to have to struggle through this raid. In fact we flat out wiped on the first encounter because of so much craziness going on. Each encounter has a laundry list of things that you need to watch out for or react to. Everything in the place just looks gruesome. I took a moment to snap a picture of this boss, which looked brutal but ended up being one of the easier encounters. This is another first and last boss are the worst scenario, but I have to say the Cerebus fight in the middle was pretty frustrating. I think a large part of that was the chosen strategy our group decided to employ. I don’t want to spoil the mechanics, but for folks who have ever fought C’thun it is going to feel fairly similar.

To some extent I forgot that we were back under loot rationing and rolled on a dragoon piece winning it. Normally speaking it is faster to queue as dps, and I just roll greed on the warrior items. The Final Fantasy XIV loot lockout system is fairly unique in that you can run content as often as you like, but you can only receive a single piece of gear. Granted both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower have had this restriction lifted for some time, but I forgot that World of Darkness being brand new would still have it in place. This is both good and bad, in that when you get a piece of gear you can stop running it for the week. But if you need only ONE MORE item… it becomes maddening when you cannot manage to get it drop, and keep running it over and over each week. I am not in a horrible place gear wise on my warrior so I guess it doesn’t matter that much that my first piece of World of Darkness loot went to the Dragoon.

So Zombie

Another activity this weekend is that I patched up H1Z1 and decided to pop in for a bit to give it another shot. I am still on the Carebear server Willamette and was surprised honestly that there had not been a rollback of any sort from my previous character. In the above picture I feel like I kinda looke like Nes from Earthbound had a really bad day. Overall it was more enjoyable because the world was populated with “stuff”. When I last played I logged out in a small town, and inside a house that was well fortified. Upon logging back in… the house was no longer well fortified but thankfully I did not get swarmed. In fact I watched a zombie completely ignore me and run chasing off after a deer, which admittedly was rather comical. A lot of things about the game seem to have improved drastically, like the fact that damage against zombies seems more predictable… and less likely for me to flat out end up dead as a result.

When I last played I kept looking for items in cabinets, trashed cars, etc… but apparently “container loot” was bugged… meaning the only items to be found were ground spawns. This time around I managed to find a backpack, craft a bow and arrow, and find lots of food… making my chances of survival not entirely dependant upon eating three million blackberries. I still found water something difficult to find, so I need to do some research to find out what other sources I can use for it. I know you can fill a bottle if it is raining… but not sure if you can go stand in a stream and fill a bottle as well. In any case I plan on popping my head in again this week as time allows because the game is starting to feel less alpha.

Fairwell to Highmaul

January 30, 2015 by Belghast

Isometric Sorta Minecraft

About a week ago a friend of mine hooked me up with access to the Albion Online alpha. I was immediately a fan of the art style, but concerned that it would end up feeling like a throwback to something like Ultima Online. I do not have the fond nostalgia towards that game that so many players did, largely because I did not give it a shot until after I had already played a ton of Everquest. So the other night when I got in, I noticed I was naked and the movement was click based… but other than that I popped right back out expecting to explore it at a later date. Last night after the raid I wanted to play something, but did not want to get too deeply involved. Seeing the icon on my desktop I decided to fire it up and give it a shot. When I was quite literally falling asleep at the keyboard at 11:30 I realized the mistake I had made… because this is absolutely one of those “just one more thing” games.

First off this is a game without classes in any fashion. You gain mastery over whatever you happen to be doing. As such I have focused on leveling my crafting and working on leveling my sword and board skills. So you start out rather simply by gathering rocks and chopping down trees so that you can build a skinning knife. There are “suggestions” of what you should do when that appear in the lower center of the screen but these can honestly be largely ignored if you like. I would however suggest you follow the first few until you grasp how exactly the game works. At the end of the night I had upgraded all of my crafting gear and adventure gear to tier 2, and was preparing to venture out to try and find the tier 3 areas. The real interesting thing for me is going to be that it appears to be available on PC, Mac and Linux… but also iOS and Android making it extremely cross platform. If this thing runs on my Samsung Galaxy S5 phone… I am in real trouble.

Fairwell to Highmaul

Last night we ventured forth into Highmaul Heroic and after clearing the roadblock that was Butcher on Tuesday attempted to down some new bosses. First up was Brackenspore and while we struggled a bit towards the end with the fungal creep and lost one of our flamethrower masters… we managed to push him across the line and kill him all in one shot. We had made attempts on Brackenspore heroic previously, but had not really put any serious time into it. From there we moved on to Tectus and while things did get a little dicey at times… we managed to oneshot him as well without any previous attempts on the heroic version. This set our sights on Ko’ragh, and we fought valiantly, however were ultimately bested. I believe our best attempt got him down to something like 22% but each time there would be a transition at a bad time and folks would die as the healers struggled to keep both tanks up. I figure given some more time to work on him we could easily get him down. As my friend Kadomi just reminded me… this content is still the current tier meaning we might want to kill Imperator to get the achievement.

However for the time being our princess is in another castle, as Blackrock Foundry releases next Tuesday and we plan on setting our sights there for the time being. Highmaul has been a really fun raid for us, and I am proud to have gotten 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic before the launch of the next raid. This is kinda huge for me, and as I said in and earlier post… I had not been up to date with relevant content since Icecrown. I especially appreciate the way that folks have pulled things together in the last few weeks. I joked that folks got good while I was away at Pax South, but it really did feel like that. When I left we were still struggling a bit here or there, but when I came back… everyone seemed to have laser focus and precision. I really am looking forward to Tuesday and sitting my feet down in a brand new instance… one that drops actual tier set gear!

Marketing Is Strange

When I first heard about Dying Light it was through watching a gameplay video from some conference… I spent a bit of time this morning trying to locate said video but was unable to do so quickly. Essentially the video touted the multiplayer co-op survival horror sandbox nature of this game, and in doing so sold it to me completely wrong. While it looked gorgeous, and while I have yet to tire of worlds full of post apocalyptic zombies. I have however completely tired of the hardcore survival sandbox genre. In a sea of hundreds of those games… it feels like a horrible way to market a game right now, but I am guessing the folks thought it might be wise to try and ride the coat tails of Day Z or something of the sort. The early description that I saw of the game, and was reinforced by almost every trailer pointing out the sandbox nature… excited me about as much as you saying “brand new moba”… which is to say, not at all.

What I am hearing after the launch of the game however is that it is essentially Dead Island, but better in every possible way. I loved Dead Island for its strange campy free roaming RPG feel. While I never played the second game that came out of that series, I logged quite a bit of time playing the first and would gladly step back into that world. The problem being that the storyline behind Dying Light was mostly obfuscated until I stopped caring about it. Had I seen the above trailer first… I would have been interested. I feel like this is one of those games that is going to be judged wrong by folks like me writing it off… when it sounds like it is absolutely a game for those who enjoy open ended RPGs. While I have missed the initial purchase rush, I will probably pick it up when it gets the first price break on steam. Had they done a better job marketing the game to more than one demographic… I would have likely been a day one purchaser.

Nostaltic Americana

January 18, 2015 by Belghast

Aggrochat #40 – Hexcells and H1Z1

It feels a little insane to be saying that we recorded episode 40 last night of our podcast. It just doesn’t seem like we have been running that long, but quite honestly at this point we have outlasted a large number of podcasts so I guess that’s a thing. We still manage to meet up each week to record a conversation about games… and then manage to like each other enough to do the same thing almost every night throughout the week. So I guess that in itself is an accomplishment. Last night was an absolute insane show, that in it’s content but in the fact that we recorded two shows back to back. So yes we are going to be perpetrating a dirty dirty lie, and releasing the shows a week a part as though it were fresh content.

Next week Kodra was going to be out anyways, and Ash, Rae and myself are going to Pax South and as such won’t have any of our normal recording style equipment. So the first episode we recorded last night follows the normal format, but the second episode is going to be announcing a new thing we are doing. However unfortunately I am going to make you all wait until next week to find out what it is. As far as the show proper yesterday we uncovered a recent addiction to a game called Hex Cells which if I am to believe Tam, Kodra and Rae is this super chill minesweeper like game. The fact that they mentioned minesweeper pretty much flagged me as not interested at all. Additionally we talk about the upcoming 2.5 patch in Final Fantasy XIV and finally I talk about my experiences playing H1Z1 in Early Release. Then I descend into my frustrations about the Early Access model and why if you are taking money for a game… your game is “Release” but you just released a broken game.

In Search of Vitamin D

Lately the weather here in the Tulsa area has been absolutely atrocious, not necessarily in precipitation but in the fact that it has rarely gotten above freezing for the last week. This means that the likelihood of us venturing outside of our house in a major way was next to nil. Now I have a love / hate relationship with the sun. I have super sensitive eyes and being out in bright sunlight pretty much gives me an instant headache. My wife on the other hand LOVES the sun, and during the winter months suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder or “SAD”, so I know so many times I will be pushed out into the bright light for her health and well being. Yesterday was one of those days because the temperature actually managed to climb up into the 60s. We juggled a few different ideas for how we would spend the day but finally landed upon “junking”.

One of the towns nearby has this really historic main street district where almost every building has been carved up into an “Antique Mall”. For those not familiar with the concept, it is basically where someone renovates a huge old open floor plan, and carves it up into little booths that they then rent out to folks wanting to sell their wares. Generally speaking they have an all too clever name like the image above, that is some sort of pun on what they are selling. The problem is when EVERYONE has a “clever” name it loses much of the desired effect and just becomes a painful cliché. Mixed in among the dross and “upcycled” furnishings are some interesting relics from the past. THIS is why I enjoy going junking, because you never know quite what you might find.

I mostly am interested in relics of my own past, namely interesting toys that I can remember and ones that I didn’t even know existed. Sometimes you find some quirks of branding… for example yesterday I saw an Archie Bunker themed baby doll, and this awesome construction set by Kenner. Mostly I snapped a photo of it because there is this really awesome twitter thread where they tweet various photos of kenner products. We spent the entire day roaming around, and the odd thing is at the end of the day we had purchased exactly nothing. Mostly for us at least it is getting out and doing something rather than just sitting at home, and in that we accomplished our mission.

Nostalgic Americana

While roaming around yesterday I got the “hankering” for some traditional American south “comfort food”, and the best place for something like that is Tally’s Cafe. It is one of those places that has always been there that I can remember and is somewhat of an icon for Tulsa food. It is seated on Historic Route 66, and gets a lot of traffic from folks traveling the old highway. What makes Tally’s so interesting to me is the fact that it is this strange nostalgic version of Americana that likely never existed other than in movies like American Graffiti. The owner Talal Jalil Alame aka “Tally” came to the United States during the 1979 Civil War in Lebanon, and after some time purchased the current restaurant opening on a Friday 13th in 1987. What makes the restaurant special is two fold. The decor is this idealized version of the 1950 that could only exist in the mind of someone who grew up watching 1950s movies. Lots of chrome, neon, and clean tiles give the appearance of this tribute to the mystique of Route 66.

The second aspect of the restaurant is the fact that the food is really good. Yesterday I had the boneless fried chicken which is precisely what it sounds like. These three huge pieces of fried chicken, deboned and served with two sides and a dinner roll. Quite literally two plates of food, for like $8. Tally could easily get away with charging far more than he does, but in truth he is more than a small part humanitarian. Each year during Thanksgiving he fixes this massive meal, dinner with all the fixings. Anyone can walk in off the street and have a meal, and you quite literally pay whatever you can afford. Honestly when we were not sure what we were doing for thanksgiving, I had seriously considering trying this out and massively overpaying to support the cause. In any case Tally’s definitely fit that comfort food desire and I ended up taking a good chunk of it home for pre-podcast leftovers. All in all it was a pretty great day.

The Fallacy of Alpha

January 17, 2015 by Belghast

Dehydrated in the Rain

Last night I was finally able to get in and play some H1Z1 and I have to say… I am fairly impressed with what I have seen. While the game world is not as pretty as the current generation of FPS games… there is a real world charm to it. Everything feels bleak and gloomy befitting a world rampaged by the living dead. I have been playing on the Willamette server which is of course a full on carebear server. It is in fact the very last PVE server in the list, and I am not really sure what my logic was in doing that… I likely would have been better off picking something in the middle as it seemed like a lot of other people thought the same thing as me. When I spawned into the game I was quite literally in the middle of nowhere. In all seriousness I spawned into a forest and walked to the nearest clearing… and could see the texture distortion of the “end of the world”. On the positive however this belt on the far side of the forest was populated with nothing but blackberries… something that would come in handy later on.

The problem I have with the game so far is it feels like the deck is stacked too much against you. There is a point in Minecraft where you can reach equilibrium, and are able to gather enough resources to allow you to explore with greater freedom. In H1Z1 I felt like I was always moments away from death, really limiting how much I was able to go out and explore. Which in itself is a catch 22… if you are not exploring, you are not finding resources, and therefore dying more quickly. One of the most humorous things about the game is the dehydration gauge… which continued to happily tick down as I was standing in the freaking rain. I did figure out how to capture rain water with a bottle… but the end result was “dirty water” which seemed a little counter intuitive. In the real world if you are able to catch fresh rain water, that is about as pure as you can possibly get since our cycle of precipitation is a massive filtration system.

Zombies Mean Business

Early on I found a branch, so that ended up being the first weapon I went out exploring with. It was horrible but did more damage than my fists so in theory… a much better choice. When I first encountered a zombie I was wandering back through the woods to try and find my way to civilization. I was able to knock it down in a single blow of the branch, but it just laid there… and I should have followed the “double tap” rule. Instead it got right back up and proceeded to chomping on me. I was able to kill it after a few more swings of the branch, but I found it far harder to avoid the attacks than say the zombies in 7 days to die. In that game you can do this whole bob and weave motion and pretty much avoid taking any damage. In H1Z1 if you tangle with a zombie… no matter how good the melee weapon you have… you are going to take some damage. Later on I found a Machete and a Combat Knife… the best of which seemed to be the Machete because it was able to knock things down. The Combat Knife technically did a lot more damage but it forced me to get closer to the zombies to stab them to death.

The biggest problem I had with zombies is the fact that they did not seem to drop shit. Again I am used to 7 days to die, when zombies are a smorgasbord of interesting object for you to repurpose. The zombies I killed… and ultimately I killed a lot of them… only seemed to drop cloth scraps. After some time I made my way to a city that was already swarming with other players. At this point I was on the verge of starvation… only having found blackberries to eat, which do not offer much reprieve. After a point I started feeling like a zombie myself, desperately looking for my next meal and finding nothing. I am not sure if resources really are that scarce… or if the place had just been picked over by the other scavengers. In any case the game play felt very dark and hopeless… which I think is probably what Sony is going for. There are a lot of issues with the world, but they seem to have a firm base to build upon.

The Fallacy of Alpha

Everything about the world is in a state of flux at this point, because the game is in its Alpha state. The problem is this word does not mean what it used to mean. Alpha used to be this phase of the game limited to only friends of the company, when they worked out the game breaking bugs in private before letting progressively more players into the game turning it into beta. We live in this strange world of “pay to alpha”, which to me means “not alpha at all”. The Alpha phase was the one that was done internally that we have been watching for the last six months. This phase that we are in now.. is simply a “broken release”. I have various maxims that I live by, some of which are simple like “anything that gets in the way of me playing with my friends is bad” that no one can really argue with. Others like “If you are taking money for your product, it is release” are probably the cause of some debate. To me H1Z1 is a released game because they are actively taking player money for it.

The problem with the Alpha and Beta system is it acts merely as a shield for the developer to deflect criticism. They can fall back on the bulwark of “its only alpha” to explain why things aren’t working the way players want them to work. It gives them time to dodge and weave before the official reviews start showing up, since the Metacritic score has become this all important metric that is ultimately meaningless… but I can rant about my hatred of metacritic another day. However if you are taking money for a product I feel like you are completely culpable for criticism. I will always give SOE credit for the fact that both for Landmark and H1Z1 they have offered refunds for players who were angry about the product. That said I feel it is still completely valid for me to complain about the things I feel are broken in an alpha product, and as such while some of them are absolutely hilarious… I feel like every single one of the almost 2700 negative reviews on steam are also valid. Game developers have decided that opening up the alpha process gives them a trickle of money, and early exposure to build hype. However they also have to realize that every action is being watched, they are on camera now and if they screw up… even if it IS supposedly alpha… it now matters.