Survival Archives - Page 5 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Night Falls

February 11, 2015February 11, 2015 by Belghast

Unfortunate Bonus Round

This is going to be a bit of an oddity for me, I am breaking my normal one post per day rule. I feel like the gravity of the situation warrants it, because right now I am feeling so many different emotions at the same time. By now most of you will have heard the news that I believe first broke over on the newly erected Massively OP website. Today Daybreak Games, formerly Sony Online Entertainment has chosen to make some sweeping cuts to staff. Among the individuals caught in this madness were none other than Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson and and Linda “Brasse” Carlson. I cannot fathom a chain of consequences that would lead to this happening, but I will get into that later. For me and many others these two individuals along with Scott Hartsman before he left to join Trion… were the face of the Everquest franchise. They were the spirit of the game, and the lifeblood that kept the player base constantly engaged, because never once did you question their sincerity or devotion to making the game world awesome.

Last Tuesday when the news broke that SOE was to be no more, and they would be taking up the new name of Daybreak Game Studio I tried to keep things in stride. After all I had gotten used to Everquest transitioning from Verant to being called Sony Online Entertainment hadn’t I? When I found out they had been purchased by what seemed to be a cold and faceless financial holdings company, I tried to keep a positive tone in that it seemed that they were holding most of the companies rather than chopping them up into pieces. I held in the back of my mind the possibility that the future was in fact going to be positive, that maybe out from under Sony they could reach previously locked off markets like the Xbox One. After all this same company owned both Rhapsody and Fiverr, surely they knew what they were doing right?

Night Falls

Today it seems that my worst fears have been realized, and that things really can’t stay the same. As online gamers we get lost in the worlds created by the games that we love to play. Part of that world are the names and faces of the individuals who act as the conduit between our normal mundane lives, and the magical realms we spent our free time in. At least in a small part they act as civil servants to the virtual cities we inhabit. As we watch public presentations and read patch notes and press releases, it is amazing just how quickly we can rattle off the names of the key players that are relaying the information to us. Even though we may never know them, we develop an almost personal relationship as they take the stage to give us tidbits of information about the future state of “our” game.

The problem is… we get extremely close to these personalities, so that when one leaves either by their own hand, or by circumstances the shock waves reverberate through the community. Today a mighty shock wave happened, and I am still not quite sure how to talk about it with any intelligence. For many years, Brasse has been the public face of the Everquest community team, and Smokejumper the face of the future of that franchise. It was impossible to watch either of them and not see just how excited they were to be representing this game that they too loved. I find it exceptionally hard to try and imagine a future that does not involve them, and I have to say a lot of my faith that there will even be an Everquest going forward is more than a little tarnished.

The Survivors

This has been the month of senseless corporate action. First with AOL killing off their blogs, and now the selling of of Sony Online Entertainment. I am deeply concerned about the future of these games, in part because the gravitas of Sony… allowed for SOE to be a little “funky”. They devoted time to building a lot of unique and quirky features that we were not likely to see come out of any other company. Do you think that any other company would have given us something truly strange like SOEmote? Sure I never used it, but I thought the tech was extremely cool especially for the roleplaying community. The tools that I did love, like the robust housing system and the dungeon builder… likely would not have come to fruition in a company not quite so willing to chase rabbit trails.

All of this said… I think it is important to also think about the people who were left behind. They are reeling from the layoffs, and seeing their friends gone. Having been through more than one layoff, it completely changes the feel of the office. Every action becomes questioned, and every motive suspicious, making it almost impossible to focus on doing the excellent job that the “citizens” are expecting you to do. It is easy to say you are done with the Everquest franchise, because of these rather rash actions… but in truth you are just going to punish the people who are still there, still trying to create the game worlds you love. Hopefully we can all take a deep breath, grieve the loss, and try and figure out how to move on without being bitter. I really hope this next week gives us some really good news, because this month so far has turned out to be a fairly tragic one.

Lost in Maguuma

February 9, 2015 by Belghast

Wanderlust

Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for many reasons. Firstly getting home super late Saturday night, and then recording AggroChat extremely late, meant that more or less I just straight up crashed instead of editing the recording. This meant first thing yesterday morning I had to edit the podcast and post it. After that I of course still had a blog to write, and needed to spend some time working on another article as well. Throughout all of this there were two problems. Firstly I had a splitting headache the likes of which I have not seen in almost a year. Secondly it was absolutely gorgeous outside, with the temperatures rising up to roughly 80* F yesterday. So my wife and I hemmed and hawed as to whether or not we would actually go do anything. Finally around 3pm yesterday afternoon we decided to get outside and go wandering about.

I’ve talked about the fact that any town of a decent size around me has a Wal-mart. It has always been this way, because quite honestly I live in the Wal-mart heartland, with Bentonville the home office only about two hours away. The first first Wal-mart supercenter in existence is about 30 minutes away in the town of Wagoner for example. Big Wal-mart stores are boring, utilitarian and predictable… but going to smaller less shopped stores often provides this strange melange of products that they still have on the shelf. Each store has a certain amount of discretion as to what they can clearance, so this means that shopping multiple stores might yield completely different results. As such a few times of the year it is prime territory for hunting down clearance Legos.

We set forth on an adventure that took us through three very small locations, and while my wife found more interesting stuff than I did, at the second store… a store I had good luck with last year… I managed to pick up a couple of really cool Star Wars sets at a deep discount. First up I found the Lego AT-AP walker which was originally $60 for the much more reasonable price of $30. Then at a considerably worse deal I picked up the originally $25 General Grievous Wheel Bike set for $19… which admittedly I only jumped at because the General Grievous figure is just so badass looking. This season honestly has been pretty slim pickings, largely because Wal-mart has started doing this annoying thing. They will throw something on clearance… and change the sticker color to red… but have the item marked at its normal price. Essentially I look up each Lego set and if the savings is not 50% off I generally don’t jump at it. This has netted me some pretty cool finds like the SWTOR Sith Fury for $60 but in order to find them… you have to be diligent, and for me the fun is more about the hunt than the finding.

Lost In Maguuma

One of the other things of note that happened yesterday while watching the return of Walking Dead is that I managed to hit level 60 on my Warrior in Guild Wars 2. I am still knee deep in the Maguuma jungle region and right now I find myself shifting between Sparkfly Fens and Bloodtide Coast, largely be cause the Fens simply got too “big” for me as I kept wandering into level 62 areas and having to deal with constant glancing blows. This leaves me 20 levels to go before I hit the Guild Wars 2 endgame, whatever that might be. One of the things that has always bothered me about this game is that I never managed to max a character out. Eighty levels is a rather daunting task, especially when you don’t find yourself really enjoying the game play. That said I am generally known for having multiple max level characters in any game I play, so it felt like a weak spot in my armor that I could not stomach the grind in this one game.

Maguuma region is a bit of a slog, which has me concerned for the Heart of Thorns expansion. I really do not like Jungle or Swamp regions in video games. I was having a blast so long as I stuck to the snowy peaks of the Norn regions, but once I wandered into the swampy zombie filled wasteland… the fun factor of the game went down significantly. Here is hoping that I can stomach it just enough to graduate into the higher zones. All of the guides I have read say that I should really be doing dungeons to level… but I am admittedly scared of them. The shitty dungeon experience was what ended up killing the game for me the first time. Right now I am enjoying the soloing over world gameplay style, and I am afraid if I go into the dungeons again… and they end up still being the chaotic and exploitative mess that they were originally… that it will enrage me enough to halt my journey.

The Real Game

One of the biggest frustrations for me when it comes to online games is when a massive shift in the way the game feels happens. Most games have this highly tailored starter experience to ease players into the game, and then something happens as though the really polished section of the game flew away. Sometimes this transition is gradual, and other times it is quite literally like having the bottom dropped out from under you. I’ve not written much about Albion Online because to some extent I fell off that rather steep cliff. The first two tiers of content felt really fun and natural as I wandered around the world collecting resources to be able to craft nifty things. Then I reached tier 3… and the fun drained away quickly. The game up until that point had been around gathering materials and lugging them back to town so that you could use the crafting machines and fashion them into whatever you might like. When you hit Tier 3, the crafting machines start charging you a fee to use them. This is the equivalent of having to pay every time you need to use the anvil in a World of Warcraft town.

The problem with this is that there really aren’t that many gold fountains that I have seen so far, but the machine problem ends up to be a rather massive gold sink. Granted at this point I don’t even know if there is such a thing as gold in the game… because I have only managed to gather up a few silver to my name. Admittedly this is their pricing scheme… to get players to purchase gold, to ease the process of playing the game. According to the pricing listed on the founders pack information, it looks like $20 would get you 4500 gold, and $50 would get you 12,000 gold. Not that either of these is an absolutely insane price for what seems to be the purchasing power that gets you, but I have essentially stopped playing because I quickly realized this game was unsustainable without either grinding bandits for days… or plunking down some cold hard cash for a game that was only mildly enjoyable in the first place. This is a bit of a shame, because really Albion does have some really interesting ideas at work. I might piddle with it off and on still to see just how deep the money chasm is, but if nothing else for the time being it has most definitely halted my forward momentum.

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.