Uncategorized Archives - Page 128 of 165

Finishing Heavensward

July 6, 2015 by Belghast

Trying to Break Me

When we planned this four day weekend of house manipulation… I knew somewhere along the lines I would end up harming myself. Now I have any number of minor injuries from the weekend including that time I sliced my finger open and bled all over the old PC I was pulling a hard drive from, or the time I got my arm pinched behind something and created a really strange bruise on my wrist. However yesterday I took my self mutilation to a new level, as I was carrying the final box out to the car for the last Goodwill load of the weekend. I went to set the box down carefully because it had something poking out of it… and I apparently lost my balance and wound up rolling down the driveway towards the mailbox. The end result is that I have one exceptionally banged up and bruised knee that makes it hard to walk, a second banged up knee that is far better off, and a wrist that I am guessing I have tweaked a bit because I ultimately landed on it. I am completing ignoring the piece of chat that seems to be embedded in my palm because in the grand scheme of things that one is just minor.

At this point I am trying to alternate between staying off my knee an getting up every so often and walking a bit to keep it from freezing up too bad. At the same time I am keeping ice packs on it every few hours which seems to be helping. The above photo is actually a massive improvement from yesterday when my knee cap itself was roughly five times its normal size. Today it hurts a lot less to stand on my knee, but a lot more to touch it… so I am hoping that means most of the trauma is just as a surface level and not actually effecting the joint itself. It seems like the pain in walking was mostly related to the swelling. Today actually my bigger complaint is my wrist that hurts like the dickens when I twist it. Thankfully nothing seems broken… except my pride. More than anything I just feel stupid for falling. I feel stupid that it happened on quite literally the last box… which in itself was an after thought. I am just thankful that while I put myself in a bit of pain that it seems like I am still fairly sturdy.

Finishing Heavensward

In similar fashion to 2.0 the end of the 3.0 story concludes in a series of group story content. Thankfully however it seems they have learned their lesson and instead of making long eight player dungeons, they created a single four player story mode dungeon and an extremely fun trial encounter. I won’t go into much detail about either because spoilers… but this time around they managed to get the risk and reward equation just right. I’ve now run the four player story dungeon I think four times, and will happily run it as many times as needed because at face value it is worth 80 Tomestones of Law, and when you factor in the “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it… you get 120 tomestones for what is a relatively quick dungeon run. Similarly while the trial only rewards 10 tomestones per run, it is fast enough and enjoyable enough that when we mentioned last night that we needed people to run it… folks jumped at the chance just to see it again.

Just like 2.0 the 3.0 credit roll resolves some of the current conflicts… but opens up just as many questions about our future. As it stands right now I am completely amped to se what 3.1 brings, because things happened… and I am intrigued as to how they will resolve. This is the thing that I love so much about the way Final Fantasy XIV expansions seem to work. They end on this warm and fuzzy point… but at the same time feel like you just completed the games introduction. You know that there is going to be twice as much content before you see the end of expansion credit roll. The only thing I am finding myself really disappointed in is my class quests. They felt disconnected and extraneous to the Heavensward content. Now I hear that some quests especially that of the summoner is deeply connected to this expansion, however for the Warrior which is the class I took to 60 first… it was a fun romp with axes but nothing more. I remember having a serious difficult time with my level 50 warrior quests… and nothing that I experienced in this expansion class quest wise even caused me to break a sweat.

And my Axe, and This Dungeon

At the launch of 2.0 getting Tomestones of Philosphy was a very painful grind, and as such it lead most of us to stop playing the game. When we came back they managed to fix some of these problems and we were able to actually get into the end game content. It seems like they have learned their lessons because the Tomestones of Law grind seems exceptionally easy. In the very meager content that I managed to run, I gathered up the 570 I needed for my weapon. Since I also had been running a significant number of Clan Hunts I managed to gather up the 395 seals needed to get the item to upgrade my 170 axe into a 180. So far I am really liking the way this works, you do dungeon content to get tomestones to buy the gear… then do hunts to get the bits to upgrade them instead of relying on random chance at getting a drop from a raid somewhere. My hope is that in short order I will be able to finish my law set and be in raiding form. For the moment I will be focusing on my worst slots first, so that I can improve my viability the most… as quickly as possible.

Last night I also managed to tank my very first level 60 dungeon, called the Fractal Continuum. I have to say I like this dungeon already so much more than I liked the whole Wanderers Palace/Amdapoor Keep thing that we had at the launch of 2.0. The other dungeon available is called Neverreap and I have yet to run it, but have heard it is similarly enjoyable. I have to say it was plenty challenging, especially the last encounter but at this point we are in essence a raid experienced group of players and were able to rely on mechanics we learned while raiding to defeat the encounters. I feel that the game set a pretty realistic starting gear place as well, in that you have to be at least ilvl 155 to run it. There is a gear vendor out in the final zone that should help players “catch up” and fill out any slots they have serious deficiencies in. I personally need to pop out there and check the vendor myself because I still have a few aging quest rewards. I feel like I am pretty happy with the state my next few months will be in as I gear out my jobs and level the ones that are not sixty.

Content Walls

June 25, 2015 by Belghast

A Different Dark Knight

So here is the point where I admit that I have never actually played any of the recent crop of Batman games. I own I believe all of them other than the latest one that just came out, because I keep thinking that they are games that I would really enjoy, but for whatever reason like so many games in my Steam backlog I never end up playing them. With all of the hype surrounding Batman Arkham Knight lately I have had this massive desire to delve into these games and see exactly what they are made of. Last night was an odd night in that I got home relatively early, but knew I would have to leave and go pick my wife up as she was getting in from our last trip of the summer. I knew I had an hour or so to kill so I opted to delve into this game and see how far I could get. So far there is a lot to like but some things that are a little bit maddening at times as well. Combat seems to take place in a three dimensional “final fight” style manner. NPC bad guys approach you in waves and you can beat on them to turn them away from your position.

The problem I have however is that the game employs a “bullet time” mechanic that I seem to have no real control over. Sure it looks cool to zoom in as your fist cracks against the jaw of a bad guy, but it is jarring in the same way that slow motion kills in Fallout 3 were. It pulls you out of the action and forces the entire world to slow down for a moment before unfreezing and expecting you to pick up combat where you left off. Hopefully this is something I will just get used to, as I didn’t make it terribly far into the game last night. I have to say the storyline and the plot are compelling enough to make me want to keep playing. I’ve always been a fan of Batman, and the dynamic between him and joker have been the stuff that has driven me to read more Batman comics than I can recall. Harley Quinn is another of my favorite characters in the universe, and she seems sufficient so far… but really I have not gotten to interact with her terribly much. Yes I realize at this point that this game is pretty “ancient” but I am going to enjoy it nonetheless.

Content Walls

I am still very much loving Heavensward but I wanted to take a moment to talk about my biggest frustration with the game so far. This game has some phenomenal story that makes you want to push forward so that you can see what happens next. The problem is quite frequently you hit a wall where you must be the next level in order to continue the quest chain. The red quest icon taunts you until you have managed to push through that next level… only to grant you access to a few more steps of story before locking you out again. I realize as I leveled my way through the original story in A Realm Reborn I experienced this… but it has been almost two years so I guess my memories had faded. Partially I think this is the fault of the way that I am currently playing the game, where I mostly focus on the Main Story, hoping to leave a lot of the side questing for secondary classes to get some experience off of. Unfortunately I think the designers intended you to do all of the new quests that open up in each area to help you push forward into the next content goal.

Thankfully I have dungeons to augment my leveling process, and since everyone seems to be comfortable asking me to tank for them… I am getting quite a lot of access to running these dungeons with my free company. The only problem being that I never know exactly how I want to level when I am left to my own devices… and have run out of story. I absolutely love FATEs but the problem being that they simply do not seem to be worth the effort. We have a running theory that they have watered down the FATE experience in an effort to force players to complete their main story content, rather than simply FATE grind their way through the levels. The whole FATE grinding to the end thing happened a lot in A Realm Reborn, and I could see them wanting to maybe nip that in the bud at least for the early players. The problem being that side quests, really don’t reward that much experience either. I’ve recently unlocked the second their of Clan Hunts, so I will have to see if they reward significantly more experience than the first tier that unlocks at 53. As it stands right now… I am hoping the first major patch gives FATEs a significant tweak as far as XP goes so I can return to doing those for my alts.

In That Old Place

This coming Tuesday in theory marks the end of our World of Warcraft raids break, and as I find myself moving closer to that date I realize… I am just not ready to resume raiding. In fact I am not really ready to play World of Warcraft right now on any level. So for the time being I will not be rejoining them in raiding, and more than likely won’t be playing at all for some time. I feel like my primary issue right now is there really isn’t anything other than the raiding tying me to the game. Sure I had some fun faffing about trying to farm mounts or doing old raid content for cosmetic gear… but that ultimately has a limit to just how long I can do that without something else keeping me rooted in the game experience. I’ve explored the new areas, and pushed three characters to the level cap in Warlords of Draenor. While the content was extremely fun to level through that first, second and even to some extent third time… the whole experience feels extremely disposable because it is also exactly the same each time you do it.

In many ways this expansion reminds me of the way I felt after leveling my third character in Star Wars the Old Republic. While the individual class quests there were excellent, it was all the other content that I kept having to repeat that ultimately wrecked my enjoyment of the experience. I thought walking into Draenor I would be awash with nostalgia about how much I enjoyed The Burning Crusade… and to some extent that worked for a month or so. The problem is it is like going back to your High school twenty years after you graduated… while some of the aspects are similar it is still very much a brand new place that does not synchronize with your memories of it. The reboot timeline just feels wrong, and with this patch and the reintroduction of Hellfire Citadel, I just find myself not caring anymore. Arthas and Illidan were bad guys I could really get behind taking down… a constant parade of grim dark future orcs… not so much. I made the mistake yesterday of checking my account to see when it would renew, and when I saw September I went ahead and cancelled it. I figure if the game has not grabbed my attention and made me want to play again in that time… it will just quietly close the door on another chapter of my own personal Warcraft timeline.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

June 11, 2015 by Belghast

Flight in Draenor

This mornings post is going to be a little odd, because I have already written it once before. I sat down at the keyboard like normal this morning and started banging out a post, and within a paragraph of finishing it and hitting publish… we had a power outage. Unfortunately I was composing on my local machine, and also unfortunately it seems that LiveWriter only recovers if it crashes… and not the entire computer powering off. As a result I am composing a second post… in which I am going to attempt to say all the sage things I said before. This experiment is likely going to fail miserably. In my original post I got a little salty over the announcement yesterday that Blizzard was adding in a meta-achievement that would allow you to unlock flight in Draenor for all of your 90+ characters. The problem being I was grumpy for a silly reason, and now upon rewriting this post I have realized that. Sure it felt good to rant a bit, but overall it was largely meaningless.

What I do feel like yesterday’s announcement signals is that Warlords of Draenor has been a testament to the fact that Blizzard does not understand its core demographic at all. As a friend said last night, Flight is a Genie that you cannot put back in the bottle. Once it was given to the players they will always crave its freedom. While I personally agreed with the decision to take flight away, and supported the supposed line in the sand they drew, it seems like the villagers with pitchforks storming the ramparts made Blizzard change their mind. Warlords as a whole has been a bit of a comedy of errors, with extremely good aspects like the raid encounters… and extremely bad aspects like the facebook game style garrisons and the demolition of crafting. Ultimately my frustration with the flight move is it seems so rushed, and that they simply drew a card from the Final Fantasy XIV deck on how to deal with it. Last October Square announced that they would add flight, but through a system that forced the player to explore a zone and learn how to harness the winds. This meta-achievement seems like a rushed clone of that concept, and while it made me grumpy at first… I realize that every single game draws upon the best parts of every game before it. I guess next week when Heavensward head start begins we can determine if it really was the good idea that Square hopes it is.

Clockwork Mayhem

I spent a good chunk of my night playing ArcheAge and I have to say the more I play Kitty Belghast the more I enjoy him. Technically I am not Belghast at all… because apparently someone on Tahyang has my name. To make matters worse they made an Elf Archer… which is pretty close to being the “anti-belghast”. However I am getting by just fine with Belgrave the Nuian and Belglaive the Firran. I finished up my questing in the mines and have moved now into a junkyard of clockwork machines. I am really enjoying my Darkrunner build, because it just feels awesome to rush headlong into things with two swords drawn. Everything was going well until I stumbled onto a quest to kill 20 discarded clockworks. As I wandered through the junkyard I found them sitting there in several clumps of smaller mobs surrounded by an aggressive Harani. At first I thought these were like the other packs of mobs I had encountered, so I pulled and popped my AOEs… only to get murdered in the most horrible fashion.

It turns out that when ArcheAge says something is an “Elite” quest it means it. It also turns out that these are part of the Clockwork Rebellion event, which is the mirror of the Oblivion Rift event I had done before on the Nuian side. These are absolutely scaled for groups to complete them, but instead being the stubborn fool that I am, I tried to solo it. What I like the most is the fact that this game allowed me to do just this. Through careful pulls I was able to peel smaller chunks of the large packs off and take care of them in multiple passes. I found that I could take three or four of the little robots if I absolutely had to, and then would need to regenerate my health and mana back before trying another pass. In doing this I whittled down the quest until I was able to complete it and get an achievement for doing so. I have to say this sort of careful and methodical gameplay was extremely rewarding, and reminds me of an older era of gaming. My hope is that once Kodra gets the ability to play ArcheAge that he too will find the game he had been looking for with Pathfinder Online. In the meantime, I am having a lot of fun being kitty bel.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

Several weeks ago I had ordered the Final Fantasy XIV Art Book from the Square Enix store, and last night when I got home it was sitting there waiting on my doorstep. The coolest part so far is the fact that it has almost all of the weapon and armor designs from the game, and shows the production art behind them. What makes that even more awesome is that each one of them has a sentence or two of notes below that explains some of their ideas that went into the design. If it is a weapon with animated parts it explains how the weapon bits actually move and function together and the idea behind them. If that was not cool enough it also included a tiny Enterprise minion that also has an even tinier Cid sitting on the deck. I am thinking this is the ideal minion to run around with as a Lalafell, because Tiny Cid actually makes me feel big.

I had logged out of ArcheAge and into Final Fantasy XIV last night because in theory it was the night our second static runs. Whenever my schedule works with it, I try and offer my services to make sure it can fill. Last night however after sitting around and waiting for a bit we were standing there with four people. The leader called the raid, and we instead shifted focus to running Art the bear tank from our WoW raid through some instances. The most frustrating part about leveling a DPS right now is the fact that the queues are so ridiculously long. As I have been leveling my Ninja lately my average wait time is around 40 minutes. So we built a free company group and I got the job of tanking. I tanked Copperbell as a Warrior, and Halatali as a Paladin and enjoyed both of them. I like tanking lower level content in part because it makes me realize just how limited my toolbox used to be, and how hard it was to actually hold aggro on mobs. Was a fun night all around, and I actually look forward to doing more of this as I work on leveling my Dark Knight eventually.

Fear of the Unknown

May 23, 2015 by Belghast

MMO Nostalgia

One of the interesting subtexts this week that we will likely talk about on tonight’s AggroChat is Kodra and Pathfinder Online. He has begun the descent into this game and been trying to drum up a certain measure of interest from the rest of us to join him. The problem is that as I listen to him talk about the game I realize that I have already played this. In fact I gave three years of my life to Everquest, and everything about Pathfinder Online feels like a nostalgic throwback to that era. I am sure it is a perfectly awesome game, but while I miss the sense of community we had back then there are many things I don’t miss about it. This is all the more relevant since right now the Ragefire server is open in Everquest and folks are flocking there for their own hit from the nostalgia pipe.

The thing that I don’t miss about that era is the way I felt chained to the computer. Every time I set foot in the world I had a tangible fear of losing everything that I had worked so hard to attain to that point. There was always the fear that you might take a death in a place where you could not recover your body. Over time the items on your body started to decay and disappear, and eventually there was a point where things were simply no longer recoverable. The problem is when you took a death your entire mission in life became about getting that body back. I’ve known people that skipped major events in their life all because they were in the middle of trying to get back their virtual items. I’ve personally gotten calls on the middle of a Sunday afternoon begging me to go home and log in and go find them so that I could resurrect their body and give them back some of the lost experience.

Fear of the Unknown

So while I don’t miss any of that bullshit, I do the constant and tangible sense of fear. The problem being that the modern games seem to have missed the boat in what exactly caused this fear. Right now so many of these sandbox games take the cheap route and make every player afraid of every other player. The problem with this is that it is counter productive to building a community. You want your players to band together, rather than avoid each other like the plague. What caused the fear was that the world was this scary and unknown place. There were no in game maps, there were no mob statistics… and it was the lack of information that made the world frightening. We didn’t know what we didn’t know… and often times our imaginations invented a far scarier scenario than the game servers were possible of creating at the time. We imagined complex plans within plans… and that the server was quite literally out to get us.

There were situations like Kithicor Forest in Everquest, where during the day it was a friendly low level hunting zone, but at night all manner of maximum level undead spawned and started roaming. The truth of Kithicor is that there were far fewer undead spawning than we realized and that we were never in as much danger as we actually thought we were. In all the times I ran through the zone at night, I never once died to the undead… but I was constantly in fear of it. I “knew” death waited around every corner and because of it I tiptoed my way out into the world constantly aware of my surroundings and constantly afraid that at any moment the server would reach out and smite me for my impudence. The fact that it never actually happened, didn’t really matter… because I lacked the data mined information to tell me exactly what the spawn rates were and where the roaming paths were located at.

Players Together, Not Against

We are quite literally overloaded with information about the games we play. Knowing the amount of hit points a given mob has is just expected now, along with knowing every other intimate piece of information about the game. We know the attacks a creature is capable of making, and how exactly to counter them… before we even see said creature take a swing. Where this modern incarnation of Everquest nostalgia falls short is understanding that it was our lack of knowledge that made us afraid to venture into the world. It was not necessarily the harsh death penalties, and it most definitely was not that we were afraid of other players… it was that the world was cruel and unknown. The focus on PVP as a way of providing cheap content always seems to miss the point of why the original games worked. Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot worked more than anything because it caused players to be willing to look for help from anyone who would offer it.

When you expect the world to strike you down at any moment, you are willing to accept assistance from anyone willing to lend it. Especially in Everquest it felt like every player in the game was on the same team, that it was us versus the world. Sure there were territorial squabbles over spawn camps and the like, but more often than not each server had its own hard and fast rules for dealing with this sort of thing. We the players made order out of the chaos, and there was protection in numbers. There were many zones that you didn’t go to because you knew there were not likely to be other players to help you out if something went wrong. By the same token these untouched zones became the perfect place for a group of friends to go off exploring on their own. This is what we need in the current crop of nostalgic games, a sense of why exactly the first games worked and a certain measure of ignorance to make us all fear the darkness.