Tales of the Aggronaut

The Will of the Moon

February 11, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about me trying to recuperate from whatever crud I had on Friday. I’m feeling better as a whole but still not feeling 100%. I’ve referred to this weekend as a name brand beta, because when a company throws a special test that most of the world seems to be invited to it definitely comes off as more marketing ploy than actual test of the game infrastructure. Overall the game performed flawlessly other than an apparent known memory leak bug, that I never quite encountered because I didn’t play longer than the requisite two or three hours that it takes to encounter it. The missions that I ran were rather enjoyable, and I fully expect to at a minimum play through the story content and unlock all of that. I make no guarantees about how long it will take me given that it took me a good two years before I reached maximum level in the original game.

I still question how well the game fits my play style, but at the moment I am looking at it for a purely single player experience given that I know going into it that none of the other AggroChat crew will be playing it. They all for the most part bounced off of the original Division, and primarily for the bleak story beats. I think the fact that we were effectively working for the various communities that we discover makes the flow of the story feel better. However as Kodra pointed out on the podcast, it does leave us a question of why exactly we are still an agent if there is no organizational structure left? I mostly view that trope as the lone lawman in the wild frontier sort of approach. I will say the game improved massively after I turned off the HDR, given that I was only able to SEE the HDR effect upstairs in my office and not while playing remotely through parsec… and as such it made everything extremely washed out and hard to pick out details.

The game I spent the majority of Saturday playing was Assassin’s Creed Origins and I have reached a point where I am staring down the barrel of the ending. However I am extremely frustrated by what appears to be the ending that is unfolding in front of me. Now I have said for some time that my opinion is that when this game was originally planned the ultimately design was that you could play it as Bayek or as Aya since the two characters at least on some level are interchangeable and have the same reasons for engaging in the main story plot. For sake of budget I assume they cut one character so that they would not have to animate two copies of everything, but the problem with this is… that every time you are forced to play Aya it is like stepping foot into a level one character.

What I mean by that is through the course of the game you make a lot of stylistic decisions about what weapons you want to use and what talent points to sink into. Then each time you are throw into playing Aya you are forced to return back to the character that lacks the ability to customize anything. So spoilers time… but I just went through a sequence where it appears that I am saying goodbye to my character Bayek… aka the one that I have spent the last 40 levels customizing to be exactly the way I want him to be… and being forced to do the ending of the game with Aya the level 1 blank slate. This makes me really not want to do any of the ending and just call it good enough… returning to playing through the fun part of the game which is doing random quests out in the world. Maybe this isn’t exactly what is about to happen… but it certainly seems like I am just about to be forced into beating the game as a proxy. Please note… I like Aya as a character and would have been fine playing her… if I could actually control what sort of gear and talents she had.

Lastly I spent some time playing Final Fantasy XIV this weekend and accomplished two things. Firstly I managed to get my Blue Mage to 50… which means I now need to find a party of blue mages to go collect the rest of the spells I have available to me given that everything else seems to come from a dungeon or trial. I spent the podcast grinding out mobs in Northern Thanalan and managed to push across the line solo. I also managed to get through The Burn which served as a bit of a roadblock since the final boss of that dungeon appears to be a PUG destroyer. I’ve now moved the quest line along to where I am failing miserably at a fight that is about four times longer than it really needs to be. Actually I have only failed it the one time and it was mostly because I didn’t catch on what was going on fast enough. I opted to play through the mission as a warrior instead of a samurai, but that also meant that I was not prepared for a burn phase, because I assumed I was simply trying to out survive the encounter.

I will likely poke my head back in again tonight and give it another shot. I think I am probably nearing the bridge between 4.4 and 4.5 and as such getting closer and closer to being able to understand what the hell is going on.

Sickly Agent

February 8, 2019 by Belghast

I’m feeling like crap this morning so I am probably going to be fairly brief as far as blog posts go. Granted I just said that in the least brief way I could possibly muster… so who knows. I played a little Division 2 last night and quite honestly it didn’t grab me. Of the looty shooty games that were on the market I will say that Division was probably the one that I had the most on again off again relationship with. Destiny I knew from the first moment I played it that I loved it. Warframe I knew from the first moment I played it that I largely disliked it. Division… I was never quite certain of. There were aspects that I liked and aspects that I didn’t like… namely I was never a huge fan of their particular brand of hide behind shit and aim your tiny cursor at someones head. It felt way more tactical and less visceral than a Destiny where everything is first person gun play. I found it fine when I was trying to keep track of three targets, but stressed when I was attempting to hide from a dozen targets all bearing down on me. The movement never felt fluid enough to compensate for the need to constantly be ducking myself behind something. Also my target personal target acquisition skills seemed to be incompatible with zeroing in on a tiny area of motion fast enough to get in a shot before I also took a lot of damage in the process.

If anything… all of these things seem to be worsened experience wise for me in the sequel. The world is more cluttered and there is just more things that you have to reconcile in your field of view… and given that I spend most of my time playing on a 15.4 inch laptop screen… tracking tiny areas of motion is a challenge. From what I can tell Division 2 is much like Destiny 2… where it is mostly the same game just rendered in much higher fidelity. However just like the first game I am not entirely certain if that is a game that I actually want to play. The whole military fantasy thing is not really my jam anymore, so that is an initial strike. Third person shooters are less of my thing than first person shooters… so that is another strike. Lastly I am finding that I just don’t enjoy the run from cover to cover sort of gameplay and much prefer to run around guns a blazing… and Division is a game that actively and brutally punishes you for that. However as this genre broadens I feel less of a need to try and keep up with all of them. I play Destiny and Anthem… and apparently not Division and Warframe.

That is not to say that I won’t spend more time during the weekend giving it an opportunity to infect me with its madness. This is just a post saying that more or less its the same game that I remember… and that I took two years to hit level cap in. I know there are a bunch of my friends who are super amped about it and I am not really going to bash the gameplay experience. It is good at the thing it is doing and I think it is probably better at the thing it is doing than the first game was. I just find myself questioning if I like the thing that it is trying to do. It is perfectly reasonable to think that a game is actually pretty good, but that it isn’t a game that you enjoy. Division 2 is without a doubt a worthy successor to Division… but I found myself just wanting to play more Anthem.

MMO-Lite Fantasy

February 7, 2019 by Belghast

One of the things I have learned over the nearly ten years of doing this thing… is occasionally you need to see your own words reflected back at you through the eyes of another player for something to finally click into place. Yesterday my good friend Pete left a comment on my blog and I had one of those moments of clarity. So for reference the comment was specifically about the statement I made about having trouble engaging with a more traditional MMORPG.

I recently re-subbed to FF XIV; in my case I was so lost I rolled yet another alt to start over. Annndddd I’m really struggling to engage for that same “been playing quasi-MMOs too much” reason. I just feel like the time-invest:reward ratio is off now. Maybe it’s because I started fresh, or maybe I’ve just moved past MMOs. Of course knowing I’m all-in on Anthem in a couple of weeks is also kind of coloring all my gaming experiences now. Everything is just to ‘tide me over’ until Anthem comes.

Ultimately I think the key problem I have been having is that what I am looking for doesn’t quite exist yet. I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of the quasi-MMO/MMO-lite style games where you get some sort of bit of your cortex lighting up every few minutes as something happens that is interesting and exciting. This could be an engram drop or a really freaking sweet headshot… or getting to use your super or favorite grenades… but something cool is constantly happening. In a traditional MMORPG it just feels sluggish by comparison with nothing really exciting happening unless you are in a dungeon… and even then loot has been so sanitized and normalized that nothing really exciting ever drops anymore. Gone are the days of hoping that one item you had been seeking drops… and replaced is the item level 300 version of the same item you have been since since item level 100 just scaled up.

Everything feels like what we used to refer to as a “stat stick”, aka those boring trinkets that had a lot of stats on them but didn’t do anything to change the gameplay. In a MMO-Lite like Destiny, each time I pick up a new weapon it feels like an interesting and unique experience and having that one magically rare “god roll” feels so much better than the slightly less perfect versions I have littering my vault. In Anthem… each weapon and ability load out felt vastly different than the other options… so Venom Darts felt significantly different from Pulse Blast for example. Items in a traditional MMORPG don’t do this… because they are trying desperately not to upset the balance of how each class relates to every other class. As a result you get the same item over and over scaled up for level as not to upset the apple cart.

Then there is the action aspect that I find myself craving… in an MMORPG the skill component tends to be either mashing your buttons with Dance Dance Revolution style perfect timing, or your ability to react to things happening quickly, or in the case of Final Fantasy XIV… execute a choreographed dance perfectly. Please note I am not discounting the amount of skill that any of those things take, because I have done them all in one form or another but never at the level of polish that the hardcorest of hardcore raiders do. However this just feels fundamentally different than lining up that perfect headshot or timing a grenade just right as the enemy is running down a hallway and you wind up sweeping that entire group. That is just a level of interaction that you don’t really get in fantasy games… and I think is in part why I have been enjoying Assassin’s Creed Origins so much because it gives me some aspects of that.

The more Actiony Fantasy games comes close, but never quite work in the same way that a Destiny, Division, Warframe or Anthem do. Probably the closest that exists is Skyforge, but while the combat feels great… the overarching flow of that game is somewhat incomprehensible and it is also “very free to play”. Neverwinter has a lot of the same traits… and it can be super enjoyable but it is almost too MMO at times… and again suffers from the “very free to play” hurdle as well. I feel like I should take a moment to explain what I mean by that. Free to play games tend to do a bunch of things to confuse the user and drive them towards buying their way out of holes… so they give you very limited inventory or in the case of Neverwinter spend lots of time deluging you in complete useless shit that you will loot and fill up that inventory space. They also have tons of competing currencies that have no direct exchange rate that largely just give me a headache thinking about them. If I can manage to keep my head down and focus on the quest at hand I can enjoy these games for a period of time… but again the gear all has the problem of feeling like the exact same item regurgitated over and over with higher stats.

Elder Scrolls Online is a phenomenal MMORPG that wants to be action oriented… and while yes you are constantly swinging your sword with your mouse button in place of hitting an ability with the number 2 to spam it… it also doesn’t feel very far removed from the traditional formula. Hitting an ability doesn’t feel exciting in the game and instead just feels like hotbar combat filtered through a different lens. I continue to play that game for its expansive and wonderful story and my love of the Elder Scrolls setting, but it failed at providing a more action oriented alternative to the MMORPG because in many ways it feels like they didn’t go far enough. I love the fact that we are limited to a specific number of abilities, but most of those abilities don’t feel powerful enough and can be spammed… which sorta destroys that feeling of having an exciting moment driven through gameplay.

The game that comes the closest to nailing the Fantasy MMO-Lite is Monster Hunter World. So many of the elements feel spot on, but it is absolutely NOT trying to be this game and it shows. Grouping still feels awful even though at least on the PC it is driven by Steam Communities instead of a Clan that requires people to have joined the same session to invite folks into. It is also very limited in focus… it is about hunting big monsters and if you want to do something other than that the game really doesn’t offer much in the way of opportunities. There is no “strike” or “dungeon” construct and there are very few activities that offer an opportunity to just hang out and chill, as everything is laser focused on taking down big boss monsters. However it does nail down the perfect crafting system for one of these MMO Lites or “collect a bunch of monster bits” and then have some NPC make your gear from it.

The challenge is still that no one has quite created a version of the Destiny model that works for Fantasy games. “For Honor” tried to create a version of melee combat that does things to require skill… but it feels confusing and obtuse with its rock paper scissors inspired system of defending and attacking. In a perfect world… someone would take the world of Anthem… the activities of Destiny… the combat of Monster Hunter World… and package them all together in one MMO-Lite that gives me my fantasy fix. However for the moments developers all seem to be chasing that looter shooter niche… which is great… but sometimes I don’t want to shoot but instead hit people with a sword. Sure I know that Warframe has that ability but it is still a Sci-Fantasy game… and I still have issues with the fucked up perspective of the characters in that title and the inability to zoom out further. What I ultimately want is a game that no one has built yet.

Lost Allagan Tankybutts

February 6, 2019 by Belghast

It feels lame when I say it this way… but I am been on this very slow path of trying to ease back into Final Fantasy XIV. Most recently I have spent my time leveling as a Blue Mage, but last night I decided to try and figure out what it would take to get unstuck in the main story quest. One of the frustrating parts about coming back to FFXIV is that generally speaking there are gear roadblocks in the way. This is not to say that the game does not give you ample opportunity to catch up… but you have to be playing to be able to exercise those options. If you have been like me and largely checked out for the better part of an expansion… you come back and find that what might have been good gear for the launch of the game… is no longer able to actually participate in anything.

This was the case with me who was largely in 310 gear when I checked out of Stormblood and slammed right into a wall called Castrum Fluminis in the main story quest. To be able to do this 8 player trial it requires you to have 335 item level… of which there are a bunch of ways to get, but all of which required me to actually be doing content. Then I was reminded of the fact that a new set of hunt seal gear went into the game. Last night I started the evening running around and collecting Centurio Seals…. only to notice that when I checked the total I had gotten… that I was apparently capped? I don’t remember doing that much hunting before I left but it was enough to get me into a full set of 330 gear. Shortly after this a very awesome guildie dropped a brand new 380 crafted axe on me pushing my item level up to 336 and over the line needed to do the trial.

However I took the chickens route out and decided to see what it would take to gear out my Samurai in an equivalent amount of gear. The answer? Roughly 1 million gil by the time all was said and done bought me a new weapon and a few strategic pieces of gear that pushed my total item level up to 336 as well. I completed the Trial as Samurai since no one actually expects much out of them considering they seem to have replaced the Dragoon as the lolclass in the minds of the populace. I do need to get back on the tanking horse… but last night was not the night. I did however get through the Trial relatively easily and pushed forward in the story until I hit one of the infamous “lots of cutscenes” warnings. Based on past experience this means thirty minutes to an hour and a half of stuff that is about to happen.

Given that it was fairly late in the evening already I took this as my queue to head on to bed. From what I can tell I am at the border between patch 4.3 and patch 4.4… and I have all of the content in 4.4 and 4.5 yet to go until I have reached the ultimate conclusion of Stormblood. So far they have thrown out a few surprises… but unfortunately the news of Shadowbringers has spoiled a little bit of the conclusion. I’ve still not watched the long form trailer that came out with FFXIV Fanfest Paris, and as such am trying to push through so that I can be up to date. I am trying to get back into playing an MMORPG again… but it just feels weird considering how much of the Destiny style MMO Lite I have been playing of late.

If my math is correct… tomorrow is the beginning of the Closed Beta test in Division 2. I will likely be pausing my MSQ progression to spend time checking that game out. Curious… who else will I be seeing there?