Rift Archives - Page 12 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Best Games I’m Not Playing

February 13, 2015 by Belghast

This mornings post is going to be a bit of a departure from my normal routine in that I am going to talk about some of the games that I really enjoy, but am not playing for one reason or another. I guess with the recent news about Daybreak, it highlights the fact that there are so many games we hold dear… but aren’t actually actively supporting by playing them. As such here goes my attempt to write a post about the three best games I am not playing.

Everquest II

Like so many former Everquest junkies, I am in love with the setting of Norrath. I love its cities, and races and the aspect that I enjoyed the most playing EQ2 was how often times you would just see glimpses of the world that came before this one. The folks behind the zones in Norrath 2.0 were exceptionally good at tugging on your nostalgia at just the right moment, while at the same time making something entirely new. More than anything I think it was the scale of this game that made me fall in love with it. I did not play it at launch, but a few months into World of Warcraft I took a break and joined my friends who did. The world felt so much larger than anything I was seeing in Azeroth, and this sense of amazement through scale never really faded. It felt so much more like a living breathing world. This game also gave me one of my favorite playable races in any game… the Ratonga. While often goofy comic relief I enjoyed roaming the world as my little rat shadow knight.

The problem is that each time I play Everquest II, I ultimately leave due to the same problem. I absolutely hate the combat system with its largely unintelligible stat increases, alternative advancement point minutiae and what feels like three hundred different attack buttons… that are largely indistinguishable. The funny thing is playing my Shadow Knight was a key sequence of about twenty five attacks… and still to this day I can reinstall the game and play it entirely through muscle memory. For me it is the gaming equivalent of chicken fried steak… that comfort food you return to over and over even though it is largely uninspired. The problem is… I will always return to it eventually. It has my favorite world in any game, so full of life and mystery. I just wish I could transplant that world into a game I enjoy on a technical level.

Rift

Rift was the game that pulled me away from World of Warcraft by giving me every single thing I ever said I wanted in a video game. I spent a good amount of time playing Rift at launch and since release it is a rarity that I do not have an active account. The problem is… I am not playing it. This game is one that I want to love so badly, and I wished and tried so many times to transplant my WoW family into. Rift is a game made up of extremely well crafted systems that are honed to lightning precision… but have been assembled in the wrong order. That is the best possible analogy that I can give you. Have you ever walked into a house and felt that something was just off, and then spent the rest of your time in it trying to figure out exactly what it was? There is something wrong with Rift, and I cannot figure out what is missing.

I have heard the complaint that “Rift has no soul” and as much as I have rebelled against that notion… maybe that statement is right. There is some spark that ties everything together that is missing in this game. I will always keep returning to it, because there are lots of well crafted components that make up this game, but the overarching game itself lacks something. With the Nightmare Tides expansion I came back and started playing more regularly, but it was not long before I realized that all I had been actually doing was logging in to play the minions mini-game. Even now talking about this game I am getting the desire to pop my head back in, because it is like this puzzle I cannot quite solve. I want to know why it doesn’t work, but never actually find the answer. What I do know however is it is a game supported by a lot of awesome people, and while I am trying to figure it out… I absolutely do not mind funding their efforts.

The Secret World

When The Secret World was released, I thought that it was absolutely going to be the game I could settle in for the long haul. I believe it in so much that I spent the almost two hundred dollars to purchase a “Lifetime” membership, after having missed out on that same opportunity for Lord of the Rings Online. The experience of leveling through this game and completing all of the content was absolutely amazing. It still has some of the most thoughtful and interesting quest lines I have experienced in any game. The thing that broke myself and the rest of the AggroChat crew was the fact that behind the Gatekeeper encounter there loomed a giant wall. When we began nightmare content, we came to the realization quickly that we were essentially “playing the game wrong”. The answer to beating the content was for us to change our specs to something that the content wanted us to be. Doing this would have destroyed the magic of the game, the fact that we could craft the characters we always wanted to play.

All of this said, it is still a game I think upon fondly, and still consider the lifetime membership some of the best money I have ever spent. Content is released in “Issues” and while purchasing one of these gives you the main story quest… there is also a substantial amount of minor content that goes in with each of them. Games are notoriously bad about pointing out things that have changed in the world, and The Secret World is no exception. I find it a mentally daunting task to not only try and remember how to play my character each time I return, but also try and figure out what is actually new. The fact that you can repeat almost every quest in the game only serves to make this more maddening. The answer of course is to claw your way through copious patch notes to figure out what new elements were added, but instead… I simply don’t play apart from logging in every now and then to buy a cool new outfit with my monthly allotment of in game store currency.

Fondly Remembered Loves

There you go, this morning in honor of Valentines Day I give you the games I love but am not actually playing. I feel like all gamers have these games in their history. I am curious what some of yours are. Leave me a comment letting me know what game or games out there are you still smitten by but just not playing anymore.

Maintenance Gaming

January 8, 2015 by Belghast

A Conundrum

A few days ago I posted a tweet saying that at this point I am far less bored with World of Warcraft than I have been during other expansions. There are a myriad of reasons behind this, not the least of which is that I actually like the leveling arc in Draenor. I am working my way through level 100 number three and I am not really bored with the content yet. Granted I don’t really seem to have the burning desire to get through it like I have in the past, I am more comfortable to take a “will get there when I get there” approach to my leveling. I feel like maybe this is a more sustainable thing than my normal “burn three characters to max and quit” mentality that I seem to have. Hopefully by the end of the weekend my hunter will be 100, and I will likely start pushing more seriously my Enhancement Shaman.

I think there are a few reasons why this is happening. Firstly I really do like the Garrison now that it is finished, especially on my warrior. It gives me a place of peace and sanity before I venture out into the chaos of the world. I can bank, transmog, and hopefully at some point auction without having to worry with mailbox dancers or folks standing on vendors with their corehound mount. It was when I ventured out of my of my garrison on Christmas to go pick up my presents that I realized I really didn’t miss the people from my “daily” chores. Someone had taken it upon themselves to coat all of the packages with a layer of savage feasts making it a pain in the ass to click the actual presents… and my immediate thought was “and this is why I don’t leave my garrison”. That is maybe the problem however… that no one actually leaves their garrison.

Maintenance Gaming

Initially I was surprised when the response to my original statement about not being bored with World of Warcraft was that so many of my friends absolutely were bored. The common thread went something like this “Right now I am only logging in to run Garrisons, so I am probably going to cancel”. I’ve reached this point many times myself when a game has a gimmick that wants you to log in every so often to trigger. With the launch of Nightmare Tides, Rift introduced the Minions system where you could send these mini-pets out on missions to go fetch things. There was a period of time I was logging in twice a day… when I got up in the morning and when I got home at night to swap out my minion missions. It wasn’t long before I realized that I was only logging in to flip these switching and faded away from that game again.

The exact same thing happened for me with the Dragon Coins mobile game, and to some extent Landmark in that I was only logging in to pay my upkeep on my claim. When you realize you are only fiddling with something out of a sense of obligation, it is almost always time to leave. I think the problem with what I am terming “Maintenance Gaming” is that it can very much slow down the burnout of a player by giving them things to fiddle with to distract them from burning through the objectives. The problem is it can also serve to reanimate an already dead corpse allowing players to keep logging in ONLY to do the maintenance activity and never actually playing the game. So the folks that are logging in “ONLY” to play the garrison, are essentially the walking dead and will eventually quit.

The Glue in Gaming

I feel like the glue that keeps gamers attached to a game is progression in one form or another. Right now I am actively raiding in Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft and progressing in both of them. I care deeply about both games because that is my anchor… the fact that I am raiding. When all the other minutiae bores me… there is a functional core there of the raid that draws me back in. For others it is the people you play with, but that can only go so far… because eventually you will have done everything you want to do with said people. PVP can act as an anchor for some folks, but then again you have to be building towards some long term goal to make the PVP seem like anything other than mindless grinding. While “maintenance gaming” is definitely now a trend… it isn’t enough of a thing to actually keep someone glued to a game it seems.

Minions in Rift were fun for a few weeks, and so was building aimlessly in Landmark… but when I realized I was only logging in to mine exactly enough copper to pay my upkeep… I was more than willing to let my claim get repossessed. I have a feeling that before long we are going to start folks reaching that point with ArcheAge where they are willing to let their claim disappear because they are tired of logging in only to pay the upkeep. The “glue” is a deeply personal thing, and is going to be slightly different for each player… but ultimately you have to find whatever it is that connects you to the game and makes you care about it. I think for me at least this is what has been missing… a sense of building towards something more important than what I happen to be doing this day. The longest stretches I have spent playing any game… are the ones where I have been raiding. So I feel like I need to raid to keep caring about the game world, and I need that game world to be interesting… to keep caring about raiding.

Things That Should Die…

November 1, 2014 by Belghast

…in a Fire

This morning I thought I would take a stab and talking about some of the constructs in online games specifically that need to just go away. Over the years I’ve noticed a bunch of things that really do not benefit players in games and only serve to divide them. This is going to likely be a more free form style post than my normal 3 blocks structure… but I am just going with that one.

1) Region Lockout

There are literally an unlimited potential visualizations of the internet, because so much depends upon the activity at the moment you observe it. The image to the left is someone’s vague attempt at “drawing” the internet. It looks like many things, but you know what it absolutely doesn’t look like? That’s right there is no way to somehow match that image up to a map of the countries of the world. The internet is this grand technology that has essentially abolished borders and turned them into meaningless distinctions. I have friends in England, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Brazil, and more than I can possibly count in our sibling to the North… Canada.

Ultimately I want to be able to play freely with all of them, and if it was not hard enough to try and juggle time zone conflicts… game companies seem to feel the need to throw up artificial boundaries to keep players from different regions in separate bundles. This needs to stop, and while server localization is a good thing… blocking players from freely mingling between the areas is a bad thing. Region based launches and region based exclusivity also need to “die in a fire”. We are living in a global community, and its about damned time we realize it.

2) Server Restrictions

Another massive frustration is that as gamers we are still somehow constrained to playing on servers. Don’t get me wrong… I love servers. Before it went to shit I loved Argent Dawn my role-playing server in World of Warcraft, and currently I am in love with Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. I absolutely think having a small intimate group that you see every single day is a good thing. What I don’t think is a good thing is the hard boundaries. Just because I live in the Tulsa area in Oklahoma… doesn’t mean I can’t go visit someone living in the Dallas Texas area. Essentially this is how our games should work too. There are certain games that are already doing this and it is amazing. In Rift for example you can choose to move your character between servers at will once every week, but more important than that you can choose to transfer yourself temporarily to ANY server in your cluster and you are able to group across servers freely. The Secret World has the same sort of setup, and it allows you to join up with literally anyone else playing the game.

Both of these situations represent the ideal, that you still have a server structure that gives you familiarity with other players but at the same time the freedom to hang out with anyone else who happens to be playing the same game as you. Completely abolishing servers on the other hand isn’t as good of an idea. In The Elder Scrolls Online we free floated on the same server, but the fact that player names were hidden and that you were constantly being mixed with a different batch of players… kept you from developing ties. There are friends I have in FFXIV only because we saw each other doing the same things over and over and struck up a conversation while doing it. This is important, but it is also important to be able to hang out with that person you meet five months after you started playing… and find out they are playing in a completely different server community. Your character is just data, and it should be able to flow between servers… which are also just data.

3) Faction Walls

Another thing that I find super frustrating is when you meet someone that happens to be playing the same game as you… but then you find out that you are on opposite sides of some meaningless conflict in game and as such your characters are sworn enemies. Red versus Blue mentality needs to go away. It is a very dumb way of dealing with the concept of factions, because in the end it is the players that end up losing out. I’ve never felt faction pride in a video game, because these factions have nothing to do with me. I didn’t get to choose the way that the Horde was founded in Azeroth. I didn’t choose to align to the Orcs and the Tauren and Undead and god forbid the damned Blood Elves. I was brought into a situation where those were already connected for various also meaningless reasons. Nothing about that has anything to do with me and my motivations as a player.

What is more meaningful is that for players to start out in the world with certain baseline alignments determined by their race or their class… but have those be malleable. One of the things I loved about the original Everquest was that your faction choices were personal in nature. Paineel was a city of Evil Erudite Necromancers… but by choice I aligned my Wood Elf Ranger with the city through lots of personal work. Meaning that I could go there at any time I wanted and use the city like any other city. Similarly I knew players who factioned with the giants turning Kael Drakkel… an area that is normally a raid zone into a useable player city. These are interesting choices ones that take lots of effort, but ones that also bring the player deeper into your world as a result. Setting up artificial boundaries just for the propagation of shallow player versus player combat is a horrible idea and needs to go away. Let the players choose their allegiance, and let the players decide just what they are willing to fight for.

4) Weekly Lockouts

This one is a thing that is starting to change slowly, but where it still exists it needs to go away. What I mean by weekly lockouts is that once you run something like a raid you are locked out from participating for another week. This used to create this complicated process of making sure that you stayed unlocked from this or that content to make sure you were eligible to participate in it with your raid or your guild. As a raid leader it was always disappointing to get ready to go and find out that one of your key members had locked themselves out earlier in the week. Like I said this is starting to change slowly with the introduction of the “loot locking” construct, where you can participate as many times as you like but you can only receive loot once. Even this has many forms because the World of Warcraft version is a per boss loot lock, and the Final Fantasy XIV version is a single piece of loot period from the entire instance.

In both cases however it is significantly better than being locked completely and unable to help out your friends. If you notice that is a running theme in all of these things that need to go away. Basically there are a lot of MMO constructs that get in the way of you playing with your friends. For awhile now I have had this maxim of “anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad” and I still stand by it. What I would like to see is that there be some reward for the players “just helping out”. Sure they can’t win the actual loot off the boss, but maybe for participating they get a loot bag at the end of the run that can contain some interesting stuff. This sort of thing would give folks warm fuzzies for helping out their friends, but also not be rewarding enough for people to abuse it by grinding the raids over and over. In any case… these are four constructs that I feel that MMOs would be better off without.

Lalafell Rescue Squad

October 31, 2014 by Belghast

Rubber Snake Attack

Instead of coming home and gaming like normal last night, I actually went out and did something sociable with actual living and breathing people! I know it is a shock to the system to fathom the ramifications of that statement. Several months ago a group from work attended the live RiffTrax showing of the Matthew Broderick Godzilla and it was an absolute blast. I have been a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since college, and RiffTrax is essentially the same folks doing the same sort of thing… without the robots and a guy trapped on a space station construct. During that they previewed the next movie and at that point we decided that we had to attend again so we could see Anaconda… a movie that I did not remember being as cheesy as it actually was. Thankfully we learned a lot from the first time, and arrived at the theater considerably earlier. Last time none of us actually got to sit together, but instead ended up having to pair up to get us all seated. Last night we at dinner at a restaurant in the same parking lot as the theater so we were able to walk over and got there well before they even opened up seating.

Anaconda… was seriously worse of a movie than I remember, and even at the time I thought the snake looked nothing like an actual snake. The cast was disturbingly “star studded” for as bad of a train wreck as it ended up being. You had Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube and I believe this was the movie debut of Jennifer Lopez. At the very least it was before I was actually aware of who she was, as I don’t think she had released her first album yet. There were just so many cheesy things about the movie… like the fact that every single time that we see J-Lo on screen it is apparently super cold in the Amazon because they make a point of lingering on some massive nippledge going on. Aside from the snake being horrible… it looked like they recycled a ton of footage. The Rifftrax guys pointed out a moment near the end of the movie where the waterfall is going backwards… as they quite literally just reversed a shot from earlier in the movie. Similarly they seem to keep passing the exact same snake idol a half dozen times.

I did not however attend to watch the movie, but instead listen to the RiffTrax crew tear it apart. The Godzilla show was great but this one took it to all new levels. In fact I would have to say this is probably going to go down as one of their better performances. There was just so much to make fun of in this movie, and the fact that it had both J-Lo and IceCube in it… basically gave them free reign to mix in lots jokes about their careers as a whole. This is starting to become a regular thing that we do as a group. They previewed the next show coming up December 4th which is a strange rendition of Santa Claus from the 50s. The trailer bits they showed looked absolutely insane… Santa Claus in space… fighting and army of dancing devils. Hopefully we can once again muster the troops and go as a group. Not sure we get much “team building” done, but it is a really fun time nonetheless.

Lalafell Rescue Squad

This RiffTrax overall seemed a bit shorter than the last one, and as a result I ended up getting back home at a decent hour. I decided to pop into Final Fantasty XIV for a bit and see what all was happening. After milling around a bit in the housing district a few of us pulled together a run for the new Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard mode. This was one of those dungeons that we avoided like the plague because of its frustrating “one shot death” mechanics, so I think as a whole we were at the least concerned when we saw it would end up as a hard mode. Thankfully the mechanics are not that cheap this time around. Not to spoil this for anyone, but there are no bees this time around. What is there instead is a continuation of the original story. When we cleared the dungeon the first time, it apparently made the place safe enough for groups of adventurers to begin exploring it. However a group of tomb robbers triggered yet another trap, and you are going there at the bidding of a brother who wishes you to go rescue his sister. Adorable Lalafell needing rescuing… that sounds like as noble cause as any… my people need me.

I am not as geared as I could be, but I am no slouch overall. The bare minimum for the dungeon is ilevel 80 and I went in there last night with 103. Overall I think I was managing the damage pretty well, but it definitely put our healer through a workout. I think in part he was just used to healing Paladins with their significantly smaller health pools. With group buffs I was over 10,000 hit points, and a comparable Paladin would be around 6,000. So when the final boss hit me for 2,000 it really didn’t feel that significant, however with a paladin that would be 1/3rd of their available health pool. I think Tams complaint was that it felt like his heals weren’t doing much, but that is primarily because a percentage of my health bar is quite a bit more hit points than a percentage of someone else’s health bar. In any case we made it through the dungeon without any wipes and only I believe a single death. The content is hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that it becomes punishing. I feel like Pharo Sirius is still a rougher dungeon than this one for example.

At the end of the day we finished the run, beat the big bad end boss and saved the adorable Lalafell Adventerer. I feel like it was a good way to end an already awesome night. One of my favorite things about the new dungeons is that they drop these tokens that can then be turned in for any ilevel 90 class piece of armor. So while they did in fact remove these from the Tombstone and Hunt vendors, you can still get the gear. The fact that they shifted it to a token system means the mobs have a more shallow loot table, and as a result each individual piece is more useful. I feel like I will enjoy picking up a level 90 set way more by running these three new dungeons than I ever would by simply grinding tombstones or hunts until I had the necessary currency. This is fine and dandy for experienced players, but I still feel like this patch and its changes made it significantly harder for a brand new player to gear up. Granted maybe they did that on purpose, so players would have to spend a bit more time running dungeons before leap-frogging into end game content.

Dimension Goodies a Plenty

With all the Final Fantasy XIV goodness, I am still playing some Rift Nightmare Tide… it has just taken a back seat. At the very least I am logging in a few times a day to make sure my minions are running the 8 hour long missions. These reward some crazy stuff, and so far as a result of all of my minion missions I have literally three 28 slot bags full of nothing but dimension stuff. At some point I need to sift through it all and see what I can actually use. You get a pretty broad mix of things from basic building blocks to intricate items like the Infernal Dawn Cannon. The 8 hour long dimension missions have a chance of rewarding these chests that each have half a dozen items in them… so it feels like buying those grab bags off the store. I really like the Rift dimensions system for player housing, so at some point I really should work on building a proper home.

Rift is more than likely going to be a weekend game for me as I do laundry and watch stuff off netflix or the DVR. The pace works well there and the fact that I can pop to the guild dimension when I afk, and return exactly to the point where I last left off is a really nice feature. The content in Nightmare Tide is significantly more enjoyable for me than Storm Legion was. At some point soon I want to try out one of the new dungeons. I dinged 61, so have made some forward momentum, but still have not really touched even half of Goboro Reef. While there may only be three new zones, each of the zones is absolutely massive in scale. I’ve not actually done any of the instant adventures, mostly because it seems like an excessive amount of area to try and cover rapidly. In any case I am still enjoying the game, but just playing it as a side venture with Final Fantasy XIV being my primary focus.

#RiffTrax #FFXIV #Rift