Tales of the Aggronaut

Fel Flames and Motivations

May 8, 2020 by Belghast

This morning’s post is likely going to be disjointed because I did not get quality sleep last night. Over the last week I have almost rediscovered the practice of farming transmog gear from old raids. Largely I have been focused on the Warlords of Draenor raids, and more specifically Mythic Hellfire Citadel and Mythic Blackrock Foundry. I have two 120 Paladins and 1 120 Warrior that I have been running in an attempt to collect the various cosmetic bits of these raids. The Tier 18 Warrior set for example is one of my favorite designs as it is a call back to the Wrath set from Blackwing Lair. At some point I hope to collect all of the appearance options for it.

The influx of new gear has lead me to craft a new transmog for my Horde Paladin. Largely this came about by finding a really cool mace and a really cool shield and trying to make something that works with it. The funny thing about this transmog is that I don’t believe ANY of the pieces actually are from the same set. Luckily however any time “fel” is involved, it is highly likely that they will also have gold highlights, which effectively glue together a bunch of disparate pieces. We all know the cosmetic game is the real game, and since I have the Transmog Yak, I find myself trying to stay Transmogged as much as humanly possible. Wearing armor that doesn’t look like crap, greatly enhances my enjoyment in the game.

Another thing I noticed in my travels is just how often the Horde still has control of Wintergrasp. Lets talk really quickly about things that frustrate me from the Wrath era. Vault of Archavon is a fun little raid that never actually drops any loot that the character I happen to be farming it on can use. However when I popped open the map earlier I was reminded of how much it bugged me that the layout was not symmetrical. It absolutely looks like there should have been another wing to open up on the upper left hand side. Similarly it bugs me that there are portals underneath Wyrmrest Temple that don’t go anywhere. There are just little areas of the world that FEEL like they should have something going on, but don’t which has always felt like a bit of a lost opportunity.

Another thing that has been floating around the blogosphere during Blapril is the Quantic Foundry gamer motivation profile. If you are so inclined you can check out my full profile here. So there are aspects that surprise me. I would have expected that my social component would be significantly higher, but in truth I spend a lot of time organizing communities… and then spending my actual time in game soloing. In fact soloing is my default stance these days and it is a rarity that I actually group up with another human being, which is partially desire and partially circumstance that voice chat does not work while playing through parsec. I absolutely agree with the Mastery rating because I rarely give a shit if I am actually good at something, and I really don’t have much of a competitive streak. Immersion and Creativity both track I guess, and I do have a pretty strong leaning towards action oriented things.

If we dive into the secondary motivations it feels a little more nuanced. I am absolutely not a completionist, and I rarely finish video games. My community score is real strong, which also makes a lot of sense given my lack of a competitive nature. I also really like feeling strong… see me soloing two expansion old raid content for fun and profit and similarly I could care less about a challenge. The fantasy vs story thing… at first confused me until I read their definitions and again I mostly agree with it. I care more about the lore of a world and being able to create MY character in than world, than the continuity of a story being told with a character that I did not choose. I also really like blowing things up… though I would not necessarily call myself an “agent of chaos and destruction” as they describe it. When playing Mass Effect I only ever choose the renegade option when it is really warranted… like punching reporters.

So the question is then, how good is it at recommending games. When choosing the “Balanced” option It spit out the following list for me. All of these are games that I own and have talked about more than once on this blog. They are also all games that I greatly enjoyed for one reason or another. When flipping things to the “Niche” pick, it again spit out a list of games that I largely already have played and enjoyed including some picks like The Legend of Dragoon, which is one of my favorite PlayStation era RPGs. It also grabbed Grim Dawn, which I have written about at length and is probably one of my favorite Diablo 2 style games. It highly suggests Slime Rancher and Hellblade: Sensua’s Sacrifice which are games I own but have never played, so maybe I need to give them a try soon.

Do I think this is valuable and something I should actually follow? Probably not. Notice that the absolutely highest recommendation is only a 3.3, and there are other games that appear that I am way more into like Diablo III that only ranked 1.7. The problem with trying to boil down a game to a number is the fact that not every person plays every game the same way. You take an MMORPG, and there are dozens if not hundreds of different patterns to follow while playing it, and all of them can bring with them immense enjoyment to the player. I like farming older raids so I can look cool in World of Warcraft, and that isn’t exactly a standard pattern of play for a lot of players, but it also really makes me happy when I am doing it. Games are ultimately to nuanced of an experience to really be boiled down to a set of specific statistics, however I do think this does a reasonable job at giving recommendations in spite of all of this.

Age of Shareware

May 7, 2020 by Belghast

I grew up in what I consider to be one of the best eras in gaming, namely the mid to late 80s and early 90s. This was the era of the 8 bit and 16 bit juggernauts by Nintendo and Sega, and while it was years later when I first experienced it NEC as well. However there was something else going on that damned near knocked me out of console gaming entirely. In 1991 my family got our very first computer, a no-name 386 16 mhz with a massive 90 mb hard drive and 2 mb of ram. There was no sound card and we were still several years ahead of CD-ROMs being a thing that you would regularly see in a computer. However the same friend of my dad that used to send him home VHS tapes filled with movies from HBO, used to send me floppies loaded with games for me to play on our new computer. Howard was a member of a BBS, an through that he would get all sorts of things some what I would later learn as “Warez” and others something called “Shareware”.

For those not old enough to remember this era, the idea was simple. A company would release one fully playable level of a game and distribute it freely on Bulletin Board Systems and FTP sites. Folks would download it, play it, and if they liked it you could buy a code that would unlock the full version of the game and let you play the rest of the levels. They also distributed their entire catalog of games in an ASCII text file format along with all of the pertinent information on how to purchase the games. Being a teenager and not having access to a credit card, it would be years before I was able to play the full versions of most of these games. For example I played Spear of Destiny long before I actually played any level of Wolfenstein other than the first one. The same is true with Doom and having played Doom II before the later episodes, in part because in both of these cases they got a physical release stocked at our local Walmart that didn’t require me to convince my parents to give someone a credit card number over the phone.

The first of these titles that I played were the original Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, and I remember at the time not being able to understand why these games were not released for the Nintendo or Super Nintendo. I was completely unaware of the proud history of effectively home brew game development on Computers like the Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 64 because I simply wasn’t exposed to it at the time. All I really knew was the original Atari 2600, and then the 8 bit and 16 bit era consoles. It was after I got access to the internet that I more or less descended into the madness of all of the other options and got heavily into the Amiga scene when I picked up a 3000. At this time however it was extremely common place for ALL major game releases to offer a freely downloadable demo. When CD-Rom entered the scene is was extremely common for a Games magazine to have a pack in CD filled with demos of various products that were either out or coming soon.

This wasn’t just a computer thing either. During the PlayStation and Dreamcast era, I remember demo cds for both systems in regular circulation. I used to subscribe to a PlayStation magazine, and each month there would be a CD included that had short demos for a lot of the titles that were just about to release. Once you moved into the PlayStation 2 and Xbox era of game consoles, the demos existed but were significantly less common. When you arrived at the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, the concept of downloading a demo had more or less been forgotten by developers. The era of try before you buy was a thing of the past, and this was also the era of several game releases becoming controversial for not quite living up to expectations.

While none of this is Shareware, I find it interesting that at some point over the last few years something changed. Nintendo Handheld devices have often had downloadable demos to sort of whet your appetite and get you interested in buying the full game. When Nintendo released the Switch I started noticing how many of these first party and major third party games had a fully playable demo that you could download ahead of time. Not only was the game playable, but often times you could pick up where you left off in your save file giving you further incentive to pay some money to continue that gaming experience. For example I absolutely played the Demo for Trials of Mana, and while I decided to start fresh after-all with a different party, I could have easily just picked up where I left off.

This is a trend however that might have been happening under my nose for longer than I realized. Now that I look around it seems like there are many digital storefronts offering demos, and that might be what ultimately changed. Digital distribution, just like in the golden age of shareware, has become more a primary means of getting titles out to the public. It costs money to press a demo cd and distribute it out to the stores, but uploading a demo version to a store front is effectively free. It feels like maybe we are just about to go through a second age of Shareware, and while you are not downloading the games from some University hosted FTP server that you found through Gopher, you are still downloading them freely. So if you are curious what is available in demo form you can check out the following Storefront links that should in theory bring you right to the demo sections.

As someone who often writes impressions of games that he is enjoying, I should start digging up links to see if demos are available for that game. I can write all I want to tell you how cool I think something is, but giving you access to download freely and see for yourself is significantly more powerful.

Trials of Mana Thoughts

May 6, 2020 by Belghast

Cannon Based Travel Systems are a Bad Idea

The game that everyone seems to be talking about right now is Final Fantasy VII Remake, and based on everything I am hearing it is a pretty great game. While I own it… I just haven’t been able to bring myself to booting it up and playing it. The truth is, Final Fantasy VII just isn’t that important of a game for me personally. At the time it came out I was super heavy into PC gaming and as a result I was playing Fallout instead. I did not get to play seven until it eventually got a PC release, and while it sounded amazing on my Yamaha based wavetable soundcard it already looked dated compared to the graphics I had been experience on the PC. Later on I got a PlayStation and the very first Final Fantasy game that I played on it was VIII, which probably holds that same game changing place that seven does for a lot of players.

The Secret of Mana series for me personally holds an equal place in my memory as Final Fantasy, and once I found out there was a third game in the Seiken Densetsu series I desperately wanted it to see localization. The Mana series blended two games that I absolutely loved… The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy and rolled them into an extremely engaging package. I even liked the not-officially-in-the-series-but-possibly-should-be Secret of Evermore, which effectively used all of the same mechanics but more like if the Mana series had a weird love child with Earthbound. I was never really a handheld player, so I completely missed the release of Trials of Mana until it recently came out as part of the Collection of Mana. However at the same time that was announced we got a glimpse of a proper remake of the game, and ultimately I held out playing it until now.

Trials of Mana has become my new main Switch game since I more or less fell off the Animal Crossing bandwagon. I’ve been playing this before bed and as a result I am not super far into the game, but absolutely loving it so far. It is a seamless blend again of two genres that I adore, the Zelda-like and the Final Fantasy style RPG. There are so many weird in jokes for those who have loved the original Mana series and some cross pollination with Final Fantasy as well. I had to look this up to make sure, but they absolutely substituted Final Fantasy IV/Shadowbringers style dwarves in place of what apparently were mostly skull faced guys in the original. I’ve not encountered a Lali-ho yet, but I am absolutely inserting them in my mind.

Some time ago I wrote about the demo, and I opted to load those save files but also still create a brand new game just in case copying the save does anything. Originally I went with a team of Duran, Charlotte and Reisz which was fine… but I did find Charlotte to be a little annoying. So in the reboot I am mixing things up a bit and choosing at Ash’s suggestion the diametrically opposed character to Duran, aka the moody space princess Angela. I kept Reisz because she looks badass and I am hoping if rumor is true I can turn her into effectively a dragoon later in the game. Mostly it was a toss up between Duran and Kevin… but it largely came down to me not really liking Kevin’s default outfit and wanting to swing a big sword. Duran also reminds me of the hero from the first Mana game I played, so there is an awful lot of nostalgia there as well.

As I said I am not terribly far into the game, having only gone through a few scenarios, but I am really enjoying what I have played so far. The demo takes you up to a specific point and I have played through a couple of different sequences that occur after that and have collected my second element. It sounds like there are six different elements that I need to collect, so I still have quite a long ways to go considering I figure there is a final act that probably occurs after having collected them all. The hardest part to get used to is that you the character level up abilities rather than having weapons that holy weapons that gain experience. So far I have upgraded my gear twice, but it has all been purchased through shops and I have yet to see any world drops.

I definitely suggest checking out the demo, which is probably a post I have in me at some later date talking about this new golden age of try before you buy. After getting my hands on and playing through the final released game, the Demo should give you a really good idea if the game is for you or not. The combat gets a bit more nuanced but for the most part it is a very fluid Zelda-like with jump attacks. The game feels like I remember feeling while playing Secret of Mana. While I have played through Final Fantasy Adventure which is actually the mislabeled first game in the series, I feel like I need to dig up the Gameboy Advance Sword of Mana remake and play it at some point on my RG350 emulation handheld.

Coin Weight Is Bad

May 5, 2020 by Belghast

Before I dig into this mornings topic I feel like I need to preface it a bit. I really want Pantheon Rise of the Fallen to succeed. The release of new Western MMORPGs that are not highly focused on becoming pvp kill boxes is an extreme rarity. The Everquestian and Warcraftian dynasties are barren. It is a fevered dream for me to someday tuck into a brand new game that doesn’t involve playing k-pop idols in heavy armor. What I actually want is something more akin to a World of Warcraft or a Lord of the Rings Online that takes advantage of all of the niceties of everything we have learned in the last twenty years of gaming. However what I am apparently getting instead is a love song to the pain filled days of Everquest.

That is not to say I didn’t know this going into following Pantheon. This is a game created by the late Brad McQuaid. I also feel like I should preface once again that I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I should have known with crystal clarity what I was in for. Brad has effectively developed the same game three times, each time trying to realize his original vision with a higher level of fidelity. You have the original Everquest that was severely limited by technological constraints. Next up was Vanguard that appeared to go through some severe development time constraints of needing to push forward to market in an incomplete state. Lastly you have Pantheon which seemed like a final attempt to make good on what he was seeing inside of his head but never quite capable of realizing in digital form.

I feel like another important statement is that both Everquest and Vanguard ultimately eased up on the harsh restrictions that were originally placed on the player on both games. Everquest made itself considerably more casual friendly with the introduction of graveyards that summon bodies, a massive teleportation network that allows players to move around more quickly and freely, and even the introduction of instanced content that was more casual friendly. In an effort to find an audience, Vanguard went through a lot of more casual player friendly changes as it struggled to stay afloat. I remember playing it launch and deeming it just not very fun, when I was used to World of Warcraft at the time. I went back considerably later towards the end of its life cycle and had a blast running around and exploring Telon.

Coin weight should matter, and we’ve decided to go that direction
Joppa – Pantheon Creative Director

However all of the above doesn’t exactly explain why I am writing about Pantheon this morning. Yesterday while casually browsing the interwebs I stumbled onto a blurb from MassivelyOp talking about the decision to add coin weight into the game. For those who were not from that era of gaming, back during the Everquest days, the coin you were carrying had weight to it and you regularly needed to dump coin in the bank to keep from being encumbered. For those poor monk players they were constantly fighting a losing battle trying to keep their total item carry down below a specific weight number in order to keep from being debuffed. It was a bad idea then and it is a bad idea now. By the time of Dark Age of Camleot, the immediate successor to Everquest, coin weight had been abandoned and effectively has been gone from the genre ever sense.

The fact that this community wants coin weight back in the game tells me that they have a deeply masochistic streak. I think more than anything it also sets a tone for the type of game that Pantheon is trying to be. If you have coin weight then you are likely probably also going to have full item loss on death and corpse recovery, and on top of that the ability to lose levels. Essentially it sets a tone for a game that I really don’t want to personally play, because I would never freely return to a game that put me in the sort of negative positions that Everquest did. I don’t want to get those real world calls on a Sunday afternoon begging me to log in and resurrect a corpse because they had lost their level and needed the experience back and it was just about to rot. I also have no nostalgia for twelve hour long runs in Fear, Hate or the Plane of Sky.

They’re looking for people with the time and dedication of college students but appealing to the nostalgia of middle-aged gamers who no longer have that kind of time.
Tipa – via Tweet

I think last night Tipa hit the nail on the head and phrased my thoughts in a much more concise manner. Pantheon is being built for an imaginary demographic, that has the tastes of a 40 something but the free time and real world constraints of a teenager. I also wonder if this is the video game equivalent of a midlife crisis… the desire to recapture the glory of our past adventures in a modern game without having the logic to understand that is a bygone era. We put up with a lot of these punishing design patterns, not because we loved them… but because there was no other game out there for us to be playing that offered the same kind of experience. The critical thing we have now that we lacked then is the freedom of choice and a wealth of options that we could be playing that asks significantly less of our time.

What I want is a game that feels like Everquest felt like, without actually making me re-live the trauma of the past. I also want that game to be delivered with all of the knowledge we have learned in the two decades worth of online gaming that have happened between now and then. I am somewhat saddened by the fact that Pantheon won’t be that game. However I am more saddened by the fact that Pantheon is effectively being built for an audience that I question actually existing. Sure there is a community of backers and folks like Cohh Carnage fueling this fire, but I have also experienced this all a number of times as games launched. Players will absolutely tell you with utter conviction that they want this thing today, and then post launch tell you how it didn’t end up feeling as good as they thought it would. Players ultimately don’t know what they want.

What I do however know for certain is that I don’t have the room in my life that demands total control of my play time, and the requirement to always be grouped with other players. Sure folks will tell you that you can solo just fine on certain classes… as someone who tried to solo level a Cleric in the original Everquest, I can tell you that really is no life at all. The truth is I didn’t really have the time to play Everquest the first time around. However I was so hungry for that type of experience that I was willing to risk marital strife in order to get that experience. I know more than one marriage that ended over that game and the time constraints placed upon its players. While “coin weight” really isn’t as big of a deal as I am probably making it out to be, for me it is emblematic of a “vision” that I want no part of. I feel like we have probably swung too far in the direction of player convenience to make interesting game decisions. However I feel like this reaction is way too far in the other direction.