Tales of the Aggronaut

Marvel Future Fight Thoughts

April 25, 2019 by Belghast

Lately I have been feeling fairly awful, which is leading me to vary my gaming patterns a bit. The last few nights I have been heading to bed earlier, but not necessarily because I am ready for sleep… but more because I am tired of being upright. Additionally my wife has been drained as she is entering that end of the year rush…. and when she decides it is time to sleep I tend to follow her to the bedroom as well. However since I am in a state of not quite ready for sleep I have been looking for activities to do on my phone. Dragalia Lost is still great and still something I pretty much play on a nightly basis… but since we are between events I do my five or so daily activities and then pop right back out of that game. As such I have been looking for new things to try and recently landed upon Marvel Future Fight, in part because I have been nostalgic about Marvel Heroes the Diablo-esc action rpg that was cancelled a few years back. In a post about Marvel Heroes someone mentioned that Future Fight was probably the closest thing that was currently available… which peaked my interests. Future Fight is not exactly new however as it is currently celebrating its 4 year anniversary with an event based on Avengers Endgame.

Effectively it is an Action RPG where you build a team of characters to bring into the content… but only actually control one of them at a time. Each champion of sorts has a basic attack and a range of abilities that can all be powered up. I am weirdly playing Morgan Le Fay in part because I had read she was one of the easier characters to get through the main story with… and seeing as how my mobile skills are still not amazing I figured I needed all the help I could get. At various points over the last couple of days I have been given free unlocks… and have wound up building a team that consists of Morgan as my main and Sharon Rogers and Shuri as my alternates. Ultimately everything appears to be gated based on where you are in the story, and as you progress through you unlock new options… which in truth seems to be a common design for mobile games in general. To some extent Dragalia Lost does some of this with various things unlocking as you reach different chapters in the primary story. The missions thusfar involve running through a few small areas, encountering a boss… and then getting some story afterwards and usually unlocking whatever character you just fought as something that becomes playable.

So far in my experience the character unlocks appear to be plentiful, however the vast majority are all “one star”, which means that they are really not that usable until you start pouring resources into them. I’ve played two nights… and already have an arsenal of 15 characters that have been unlocked and are playable. Among that mix is 4 6 stars, 4 5 stars, 2 3 stars and 5 1 stars… and I am not entirely certain if this is always the case or if the escalation of six stars is somehow due to the fact that there is an Avengers Endgame themed event happening right now. As is almost always the case I am probably going to stick with the same core team before I start messing with other characters. As you work through the main story you are effectively ranking up Captain America, Ironman and Black Widow… that begin as 1 star champions but now that I am halfway through chapter three of the story are up to 5 stars. I am somewhat assuming that before long they will be 6 star champions giving you three freebies in the process.

The only real negative is that Future Fight is what I would refer to as a “very free to play game”. What I mean by that is you are constantly having “special offers” thrown at you, and this game seems to go one step further than most. When you cancel out of one of the offers you are occasionally greeted with a message that states you will not be able to get this offer once you close the window. In the case of my screenshot above it is simply advertising something that already exists in the store… but those “limited” offers are there to try and invoke FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. If you are susceptible to this sort of twisting of your arm… then it might not be a game you want to try. In all truth there is a past version of me that would have been turned off massively by it… but now I am mostly apathetic about it and just accept it as part of the price that comes with playing games on your phone. They all seem to do something like this in one form or another… with the only real exceptions being the ones that are released by Nintendo and their advisement to not abuse the users. In the end… Future Fight is a fun time waster and fills the bill of laying in bed and messing around on my phone.

Mortal Kombat 11 – Early Thoughts

April 24, 2019 by Belghast

Yesterday Mortal Kombat 11 released and I spent some time last night playing it. Warning there will likely be spoiler information included in this post, but seeing as I have not gotten terribly deep into the game it won’t be very complete. One thing you need to understand about my psyche is that I was a fighting game arcade rat. During my High School years the world was having its renaissance of fighting games that began with the release of Street Fighter 2 and continued through until the franchises evolved into 3D and the arcade construct as a whole eventually petered out after my college years. That time however was one of mystery filled with random messages scrawled on the proto-internet message boards like those of CompuServe and AOL and a heaping dose of misinformation. I still remember the day my local arcade… and by local I mean one thirty minutes away from my house… got one of the beta boards for Mortal Kombat II. It had a limited set of characters and only a handful of fatalities introduced in the game… but we hungrily devoured what content it did have trading home made guides with each other to try and level the playing field.

From the very beginning I found myself drawn to the lore of this world and its weird inhabitants. Mortal Kombat 1 was a fairly dry game that was more or less a straight rip off of Enter the Dragon. With the second installment in the franchise they expanded this lore to include the Outland a realm which the Earth Realm was in a constant struggle for domination. Only through the rules of the tournament were we the players able to keep this other realm at bay and from invading our own. Then with the third installment of the game… we learn that unlike the first tournament… we didn’t actually win. This was crazy for me to wrap my head around at the time… because here was a game that was telling a narrative through a fighting game that had both an official canon that was different from that of the player “heroes journey”. It was always trying to do something really unique and cinematic with its storytelling that other fighting games at the time were not, and I appreciated that. However as my personal tastes changed I found myself exiting the Fighting Game genre and moving on with my life… eventually getting engrossed in MMORPGs. There was something however about what I had been seeing surrounding Mortal Kombat 11 that made me want to pick the game back up and see what the story mode was like.

Time has passed and a new generation of characters is effectively taking the place of some of the names I recognized. The long canon relationship between Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade apparently bore fruit in the form of a daughter named Cassie. Similarly we are introduced to the daughter of Jackson Briggs (Jax) named Jaqui who happens to serve in the same defense force unit as Cassie under the command of Sonya. The opening scenes of the game revolve around the family connection and how in order to get her promotion to Commander… Cassie has to defeat Sonya in combat. Then bam… we are immediately and seamlessly transitioning into the fighting game with no real pause… the camera rotates and the familiar 2Dish playing field is presented with the combat bars overhead. The game controls pretty much like I would expect a Mortal Kombat game to control and before long I was able to pick up some of the basic muscle memory of how to do this thing. Cassie more or less controls like Johnny Cage… with some tweaks here or there that make it more an amalgam of both Cage and Sonya’s move set.

What I found most odd about this whole experience is how once you get started you are largely on rails and working your way through a story sequence without any pauses. Eventually I needed to go do something else for the night… and it was awkward to find a natural place to break off the game. I am guessing the story sequences will pick up where I left off as I get pushed into the next fight. I made it through the opening sequence which involved a strike on Kitana’s Castle in the outland… where both her and Liu Kang have apparently been corrupted by Shinnok… a perennial baddie in the series since Sub Zero Mythologies and natural foil to our own protective Elder God Raiden. I feel like there is a ton of story here that I have missed over the years… and while I own Mortal Kombat X because I got it as part of another package I never really cracked it open and played it to see how its story worked out. In theory this first mission was to stave off an invasion of Earth from the Outland… but not everything goes entirely as planned.

Raiden is not the person we knew, because he too seemingly is being corrupted by the influence of Shinnok. You can see he is wearing Shinnok’s amulet around his neck… but his eyes and lightning attacks now glow red as opposed to the usual blue. That’s right… Raiden has fallen to the dark side and is now a Sith… or something like that. He still seems to be dead set on protecting the Earth Realm… but is way more harsh than the Raiden I remember. The team escapes from Outland back to Earth only to have another player peek her head onto the stage. We are introduced to Kronika the Keeper of Time who is tired of Raiden’s corruption of the timeline and probably pissed at him beheading Shinnok her apparent child. So some timey wimey stuff happens and suddenly we have a mix of timelines where characters from Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 3, and other games that I don’t recognize get blended together into one amalgam timeline that allows quite simply for us to play all the things in a single game without having to care much about why. Most time travel storylines are complete nonsense and bullshit… and I sorta expect this one to end up that way in the end. However for the moment I am engaged… but cannot play for long because my muscle memory for a fighting game ain’t exactly what it used to be… and my hand got to hurting after a handful of fights.

Other random observations… I never liked Johnny Cage. He always annoyed me as the consummate incarnation of a dudebro and the rich kid bully “Blaine” character from every 80s teen movie. You take his same actions and place it in a female character and it is insanely way the hell more tolerable… so I kinda like Cassie Cage so far. Jaqui seems an awful lot like her father Jax… so there is a weird mirror of some of the same dynamics I remember between Jax and Sonya before. So you get this whole feeling of getting the band back together… but the band performers are the children of the previous generation. Based on this game and what footage I have seen of the Injustice series… NetherRealm Studios seems to have perfected the art of telling a story through a fighting game. I look forward to making it through the story mode, but I am honestly doubtful that I will ever play this in any sort of a mode that allows the game to go online with other players. My days of slapping a quarter on the monitor to reserve the next game are well past me… and I doubt I would come anywhere close to enjoying playing random strangers on the internet. I do however appreciate a good story told through a vehicle that I enjoy playing… so this might cause me to go on a renaissance of playing other NetherRealm fighting games to experience more of it.

All in all… I am digging it heavily. The game is getting panned hard by critics due to the inclusion of micro-transactions but I have not gotten anywhere near enough into the game to be able to judge that. They are claiming that the game gains currency to unlock things from the “Krypt” very slowly… but I also remember sitting in our RV at the lake grinding the same tower over and over to unlock randomized coins in Mortal Kombat Deception on the PS2… which incidentally is probably the last MK game I heavily played. The coins did not come quickly and it find super grindy to get unlocks… so I am guessing this game is going to feel very similar. Those are vehicles for folks to invest more time in the game… not necessarily for casual players like myself. There is a really cool customization system that lets you swap out appearances and abilities on various characters which seems like it might be a cool idea… so that your sub zero might perform slightly different to that of your friends adding a bit of the whole MOBA character design into the mix. I cannot however gauge how that will work out in the end, because I am just a tiny bit into the game right now.

Jedi Train Heist

April 23, 2019 by Belghast

Playing World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV spoil you as a player. What I mean by that is these are both games with rabid fan armies that keep a slew of websites updated with the freshest information. Playing any of the other MMORPGs means you are going to be sifting through a minefield of abandoned websites and slightly incorrect information. Hell even my own website adds to this confusion with my Planet and Bonus Series Level Ranges list… that was created in 2012 as a way of trying to organize when you should be doing the bonus series and intermingling them with the leveling worlds. For me… I have just been trying to find an accurate list of what order I should be doing the content story wise… which causes me to stumble across wiki pages that seemingly have not been updated since 2014. This was the core problem I also had when playing Rift was trying to sift through all of the debris to find a path forward into actually learning about the game. Official forums are generally the correct answer but even they end up as a stratified mess of older posts when you dig below anything currently available at a surface level and start doing specific searches.

Last night I worked my way up to and through the Crisis on Umbara Flashpoint, and can I just say how happy I am for the existence of solo mode Flashpoints. This gives them a way to expose story content in dungeons without ultimately gating story behind a wall that requires a group to see it. Final Fantasy XIV also loves to put main story quest content in dungeons and primals… but ultimately causes you to have a gear check wall to see the next batch of it. SWTOR on the other hand has been expanded out horizontally for awhile, giving you new content without really bumping up the level or gear requirements. I have a feeling that I am probably wearing the last gear I need currently that I got through Command Crates, which allows me to just sit there and focus on playing through the content rather than trying to gear up. I realize that statement I just made is something that the raider me would have balked at… but as a super casual in this game I love the fact that it is an option. One of the quests leading up to the flashpoint did cause a really interesting bug to occur allowing me to take the above screenshot.

That is one word of warning that I have to give is that the game seems to be often times in a fairly buggy state. I’ve noticed having to be very careful with my companion… especially with the sniper variants because they love to park their asses right out of healing range which means I have to keep dragging mobs back to them. As such I GREATLY prefer the force user healer options because they will wade into combat with me, but when I am running with a “turret healer” I have to refrain from using my leap into combat. Another thing that I did not remember is that apparently aggro does not reset in instances? There are wide areas during the instance that just required me to wade back through a bunch of stuff that I have already been through… so I decided to mount up and make a run for it. However this wound up with me getting everything pulled on top of me and summarily dying as soon as my healer dropped. It was less than a stellar performance but funny enough when I respawned I did so in a way that allowed me to completely skip all of that trash in the first place… rewarding me for my bad behavior.

So far the game has given me a train heist… which is always going to be cool when it happens. One of my all time favorite missions in The Secret World is Last Train to Cairo which also… was effectively a train heist of sorts. This really is a bad ass construct and I am surprised that more games don’t use it. If I had to guess the train I am on is probably stationary and the scenery keeps being spawned in and moving past me, but I have no clue how they actually pulled this off technically. Whatever the case they make for really cool feeling missions when you get one of them. The story still remains to be very interesting and there was a bit of a major mic drop spoiler moment in this… that unfortunately I had spoiled for me ages ago when I watched the wrong trailer. I will not however spoil that moment here because if I did not know it was coming… it would have been surprising. I have my theories as to what it actually means however, because I figure it isn’t just as simple as face value. Playing this game is making me want to commission Ammo to draw my Jedi Guardian… in the gear that I fastidiously searched the auction house shortly after release to get. This will always be his default outfit in spite of all of the other awesome outfits I have for him to run around in.

Eternal Alliance

April 22, 2019 by Belghast

The extended holiday weekend for me was largely about playing Star Wars the Old Republic and working on the Knights of the Eternal Throne content. As I talked a little bit about last week… I got caught up in the Star Wars spirit which lead me to return to the Star Wars game I keep visiting periodically. Thankfully the easing in period was pretty short and my muscle memory returned pretty quickly for hitting the right combat abilities at the right time. I would have been completely screwed if my hotbars had somehow gotten reset between times playing the game however. It makes me realize how much of game play for me is sort of fuzzing my mind out and letting my fingers do the actions on their own. I think that is in part why I keep setting up various games in the same manner so I just don’t have to think about the controls and can instead focus in on enjoying the story and world.

One of the things that I am amazed by is just how compelling this game is when it releases new content. While the early expansions Rise of the Hutt Cartel, Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds are a bit of a snooze fest… starting with Shadow of Revan and going forward the game reaches a level that rivals the original main class stories. There is however a necessary shift from class specific stories to being a more general story that has little nuggets of information embedded for specific classes but not necessarily an entire unique arc. The logistics of maintaining class specific story arcs is just not viable given the less than solvent state that SWTOR has been in at various times in its history. Knowing that rocky history however makes me appreciate all the more the content that was accomplished against this adversity.

When I last played SWTOR Fallen Empire had wrapped up and Knights of the Eternal Throne was just about to begin. I am very thankful that they have a 2 month pass non-reoccurring option because in general this is about how long it takes for me to get the game back out of my system. I am a content locust and I swarm back into a game after a large volume of content has been released and then fly away while it regenerates a batch of content for me to visit again. This time I had the entirety of the Eternal Throne campaign as well as a bunch of side content that takes place after those events. Which should keep me busy for the better part of this sixty day pass. Again I would never suggest playing SWTOR without subscribing because the free to play experience is highly frustrating to me because it locks away a number of features that I consider crucial.

The thing that I like the most about both Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne is how cinematic the content feels. It is weirdly disconnected from the rest of the game which in itself is a little weird to get used to, but once you have accepted that fact it is really great to experience. At any point you can pick back up the story by simply hitting the play button in the upper right hand corner of the screen at which point you are teleported into the last step that you left off at. The only real negative with this approach is that I found it extremely hard to stop playing until I had finished a specific chapter of the content. I wanted to see how each step would eventually resolve, and along the way there were a few things that probably served to be controversial to long time players… but made your decisions feel like they had significantly more gravity.

Now however I find myself in the extremely weird position of having defeated this beat the content and reclaimed the Eternal Throne for all that is right and good in the galaxy. Then immediately afterwards as I started the next batch of content… found myself as a Light Side Jedi Guardian… willfully choosing to align with the Sith against the Republic. There are distinct story reasons why I did this… but man does it feel really weird to have made that decision. I am largely hoping that this just has consequences related to the current batch of content and that I did not actually join the Sith Empire permanently. Maybe the content that I just went through made me way more grey than I expected, or maybe I ultimately made the right choice given the sequence of events that played out leading me to this decision. Whatever the case I am embracing it for the time being and playing across faction, which in itself is pretty interesting that they went there as an option. I am no longer a Jedi Guardian… but instead the Commander of the Eternal Alliance… and have to make the choices that I feel best for the galaxy as a whole.

I am having a blast visiting all of this content, and it makes me realize that now that I have one of every single class… I could in theory do it over and over again if I so got the gumption. The Jedi Guardian however will always be the character that represents me, and I like a lot of the directions his story has gone in as a uniter of allies rather than a dogmatic practitioner of an ancient order. One of the things about Bioware and Star Wars that I loved… is there was always a bit of nuance to a lot of the experience. They after all gave us Jolee Bindo one of my all time favorite Star Wars characters, and now that Kathleen Kennedy has announced that they are working on Old Republic content… it is my hope that some parts of this universe can make it into the greater Star Wars story. For me… Revan and Bastila Shan is just as crucial and fundamental to the Star Wars experience as is Darth Vader or Boba Fett. I grew up without placing barriers between what was officially Star Wars lore and the stuff that was excluded… and now that I have Grand Admiral Thrawn another favorite character of mine I am hoping they swoop in and gobble up all of the Bioware goodness.

Replaying this game has left me with weirdly mixed feelings about Anthem. Seeing Bioware at its story driven greatness is one thing… but also realizing that this same studio Bioware Austin is largely responsible for reviving anthem gives me hope. It also makes me chagrin for what might have been had they given that game enough time to properly cook. That however seems to be the story of every game that doesn’t quite land solidly on its feet… is that it needed a bit more time to coalesce into its final product.