Sandbox Archives - Page 16 of 30 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

H1Z1 Early Access

January 16, 2015 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff #4 – An Evening with Petter

This month the Bel Folks Stuff podcast focuses on the amazing Petter Mårtensson. Petter has been an extremely busy man, and has had a ton of side projects over the years. In his normal fashion he even offered to guest on Aggrochat if we could ever work out the time zone issues. Our listeners could know him from any number of places. For several years he worked for the european gaming magazine GameReactor both as a writer and as an on-air anchor. Similarly while dormant for several years, he is the man behind the Don’t Fear the Mutant blog. On the podcasting front he has been extremely active in the CSICON network serving as a host on several different shows including Claims the Normal, Three MMOSketeers, Enochian Frequency and most recently Who’s Who.

In addition to all of this he was involved in creating the A Tale of Internet Spaceships documentary talking about the culture behind EVE online. Now he is also writing a monthly Final Fantasy XIV column for MMOGames. Like I said… he is an extremely busy man and I am thankful he took the time to sit down with me and have a length conversation… mostly about non-gaming stuff. I think the most interesting thing about the conversation was the delve into Futurism and the things we would love to see. We also geeked out a bit about Doctor Who, which apparently is something that happens on every podcast now that he hosts the Who’s Who show. Definitely was an interesting conversation, and I hope you all enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Listen to the Show

H1Z1 Early Access

Yesterday Sony Online Entertainment launched the H1Z1 early access. This was originally supposed to go live on Steam around noon, but various delays pushed it back into the late afternoon. When I got home from work it was available and I figured $20 but satiate my curiosity was a fair price. However the game apparently is very much “not quite ready for primetime”. The above screen is what greeted me when finally after my World of Warcraft raid I fired the game back up. Early in the evening I was not able to get into the server select screen at all so I guess in a way it is progress? I am sure this is another case of “underestimated demand” and I seriously cannot blame them. Throwing a game up on Steam early access as your initial forray into alpha… is pretty damned daring. Right now the game has roughly 2000 reviews, roughly half of those are positive and half are negative, so if only a small fraction of the population comments… that means they sold a ton of early access copies.

I love the concept of a zombie survival game… the problem is I don’t want to have to deal with the world pvp aspect of games like Rust and Dayz. So when this game was announced I had zero interest, until it was confirmed that there would be PVE only server environments at launch. Hell I didn’t even mind that the original icon in the server browser list was a teddy bear. I am a carebear, and I am okay with this notion. While it is immature to taunt the player base that has proved to make up the overwhelming majority of MMO players… I can deal with it. I am sure H1Z1 is going to be a mess for the near future, but hopefully at some point it will be playable and interesting and allow me to play a base building game in a walking dead style world. If it gives me that… then I am largely going to be happy with it and will consider it $20 well spent.

Mar’gok Attempts

Early in the week on Tuesday we had a really phenomenal night or raiding, meaning we cleared 6/7 on normal and 2/7 on heroic. This freed up last night to work entirely on Imperator Mar’gok. While we got a bit of a late start due to key players running a bit behind, we accomplished just that, an entire night of attempts. Mar’gok is one of those fights with a lot of moving parts, and it is simply going to take a lot of repetition before we have our “click moment” when everything falls into place. We however did make good strides in that direction. Essentially there is one transition that is wrecking us… that we need to figure out how to do more smoothly. Once we have that transition down I think we will down the boss. All of that said we did manage to start getting him down into the 40% range each time, which tells me we are likely on the cusp of victory.

It feels really good to be doing current content in World of Warcraft. During my time back in Pandaria I attempted to raid with a group that was in theory several content patches behind. There is just something demoralizing about doing that, and especially since we never seemed to make any real forward momentum that would lead me to believe that at any time we were likely to get to current content. When LFR served as my primary source of upgrades… I had to ask myself why was I even bothering with the constant nights of wiping. This expansion however has been a completely different experience. I really want to kill Mar’gok but I have the utmost confidence that we will, and likely before the Blackrock Foundry raid opens. I am just bummed that I won’t be around Thursday night next week… because more than likely after reviewing the logs we will make some tweaks and finish this raid.

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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

Neon Ninjas and Knights

September 26, 2014 by Belghast

Its A Voxel World

Yesterday something pretty awesome happened… Trove Beta launched and overall everything went pretty smoothly. I have been a fan of the game since I got into the very first Alpha wave. You can check out my first video from November of last year and see just how much the game has changed. This is one of those titles that has changed at an almost staggering pace. I would pop my head in about once a month… only to find that the framework of the game was in a massively different place than when I last left it. I have to say during the Alpha this became a bit of an impediment to me playing it. I would want to just pop in and do something interesting and essentially have to relearn how to do anything at all. That said my friend Rae showed interest in the game early this week, and oddly enough we happened to both log in together on the very last night of Closed Alpha.

We had such a good time running around and smashing things, that we decided last night when the Beta launched to skip playing Final Fantasy XIV at least for a bit and dive straight into leveling up in Trove. The above mounts we found during the final hours of closed alpha, and they are essentially rainbow piñatas that shoot rainbows and confetti out of their butts as you ride along. Basically it is my goal to manage to get this mount again during beta. Nothing says Trove quite like leaving a trail of sprinkles everywhere you go. Unfortunately the mount comes from their version of a lootbox. I have no clue what the drop rate is for one of the piñata mounts but I know I purchased 10 of them last night and Rae purchased 5 with the points we were given going into the beta… and all we managed to get were a few crafting recipes.

Neon Ninjas and Knights

One of the brand new things for Beta was the introduction of the Neon Knight class. For most of the night this is what Rae ran around as while I played my Knight. The class is a bit of a stealthy melee in that your right mouse click causes you to drop a decoy and shift into stealth. From there you can throw shuriken at your target for a fairly devastating effect. The purple rings around you seem to be some sort of a charging up mechanic that indicates when you are ready to throw shuriken. Other than that if you attack from stealth you do a significant amount more damage. I personally found the class a little frustrating, since I like to rush headlong into combat and bash all the things in the face. For someone who wants more tactical game play however this might be the ideal option.

Fortunately or unfortunately I feel like the most “Bel” class in existence is still the Knight, which is essentially your default. For starters it is a melee class with pretty high survival in up close confrontations. The secondary attack is this impressive weapon slam that can knock back enemies and deal a cone of damage. The first ability you get is a charge and god knows I love charge attacks, but this one also doubles as a movement ability and a way to dash across gaps to get to places more easily. Finally the last attack is this shield that you can put up that causes you to take no damage for a period of time. The last one is on a long cooldown, but it serves nicely as an “oh shit” button for doing some of the harder content.

Content Density

One of the coolest things about late Alpha and now Beta is just how diverse and dense the content is. Early on in the game each biome section would have a single objective be it a castle or a tower or something of the sort. This time around you would be hard pressed to go for very long before discovering something that has a boss or a challenge or something of the sort. Granted by the time I came back later in the night, the world was getting more than a bit picked over… so I am hoping that the world reset happens pretty frequently. In any case we were able to roll around the map going to areas that had not been touched and doing the challenges we encountered along the way. The above shot is from this insane rainbow dungeon in the clouds that you get to by climbing up through the hollowed out tree pictured in the back. Each biome has its own challenges with is own mob types which make the gameplay feel fairly fresh.

Essentially the challenges that I have encountered break down into a few themes. The first involves triggering an event. These tend to say that there is something dangerous inside in the upper right hand corner of the screen. When you trigger the event you have to survive a few waves of enemies, and if you do so a chest appears. The negative is that both you and the mobs you are fighting have to stay inside a blue ring that spawns when the event starts. We had issues when fighting mobs up in the air, that they would fall off the edges. The positive is you can retry the event over and over by simply moving out of the ring and waiting for it to reset. The part that makes these challenging is that generally the area with the totem that triggers the event is covered in spikes or surrounded by these pillars that shoot fireballs in a Castlevania fashion. So while the half dozen mobs really isn’t a huge problem… keeping them from knocking you back into environment obstacles totally is.

Something Minecraft Doesn’t Give Me

At it’s core the gameplay of Trove is similar enough to Minecraft that you cannot talk about it without at least mentioning that game. You could call Trove Minecraft with more meaningful combat and MMO style loot, but the game itself feels richer than that might denote. One of the aspects of the game that I like the most is the existence of my Cornerstone. This is basically a plot of land that I control and can build permanent structures upon… but that also moves with me around the world. I can walk up to any plot that is presently unclaimed and the game will rebuild my cornerstone before my eyes. So I can have crafting machines travel around with me, and each time I do this it resets my spawn point. This gives me some permanence that I crave in an otherwise very flexible world. This however does not make for a great community, as folks are constantly picking up their home like a hermit crab and moving it with them.

What is more interesting is the fact that players can create clubs, which in essence give you guild like functionality. I’ve created a Club for the Alliance of Awesome, and as such we have a “Club World”. This is a fully instanced biome where we can control everything in it. This means you can build super intricate guild houses and give other players the ability to teleport into them. This is the more permanent structure from the looks of it, and gives folks a way to link up and meet in user created worlds. While ours does not really do much of anything at the moment, I have plunked down a few machines and will likely keep adding to it as we go along. You are given only the smallest of islands to start building on, but it looks like more or less you can freely build out over the ocean for quite some ways. There are a number of websites giving away beta keys right now, so I highly suggest you track one down and give this game a shot.