Tales of the Aggronaut

Tiny Samurai vs Eureka

November 20, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things that happened over the weekend that we did not talk about on the podcast, nor have I mentioned on the blog… was the reveal of the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion Shadowbringers at the Las Vegas Fan Fest. I mentioned Fan Fest when I was talking about BlizzCon and how they only hold one when they have a big announcement to give us information about. As such you go into the experiencing knowing you are going to see something really cool, and while the trailer for Shadowbringers is cool… it was not the big reveal of the weekend. That said I do find it interesting that we are not going where I thought we were going at various points in the Stormblood storyline. It seems like in order to restore balance… we are to become the Warrior of Darkness.

The more important reveal however was that of the Blue Mage… aka the MMO class that I questioned if was even possible to do in a multiplayer game. With it they are introducing this concept of “Limited Jobs” and by that they mean Jobs that you can do… but are purely solo/open world only. Blue Mage will launch with 4.5 and be locked to a maximum of level 50 in progression. Like a Blue Mage in any other Final Fantasy game, you will not learn new skills by leveling up and instead learn them by fighting the monsters that perform certain abilities. So to learn Bad Breath you will need to fight a Morbal and watch it do that move… or similarly you will need to watch a Sabotender do 1000 Needles to be able to pick it up and start doing it yourself. I really dig this concept because it allows them to do this class with all of its flavor and power… without having to worry about balancing it against any other class. Level 5 Death would have been super hard to balance around… and I am wondering if they will start bringing other challenging classes in to the game under this Limited Jobs banner.

All of this thought about Final Fantasy XIV lead me to patch it up, and attempt to figure out where the hell I left off in the Stormblood post expansion main story quest. I bounced very hard on Stormblood and I am still not entirely certain why, but after leveling the Warrior and then grinding up the Samurai… I just ran out of steam. I’ve made a few attempts to get engaged again and similarly bounced out. Hell recently there have been a few times I logged into the game and then right back out when I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed to do in order to gain traction. All of this time however Sol has kept Greysky Armada active and there is a group of folks that do a cycle of regular events. Last night was Eureka night and I decided to log in and join the shenanigans.

Ultimately it was myself, Mor, eventually Neph and a character that I have seen around but can’t really place a person to… being babysit by Pix who deserves a hero medal for easing us all into the concept of Eureka. I remember when this first opened I spent some time solo grinding and managed to make it to level 2 just by killing random stuff. It seemed insanely grindy and a love song to Final Fantasy XI which itself was effectively the Japanese version of Everquest. Soloing it was miserable but with a group of friends it felt an awful lot better. Even more so once we started gathering up the materia shards that effectively gave us a 60% damage boost. I entered the night at level 2 and managed to push through to level 8 before we finally called it because it was getting late.

Seriously Pix deserves massive thanks at herding us around Eureka and helping us get the objectives we needed to get knocked out. Effectively he was out of group and AOE taunting everything onto him… while we sat there killing it down as fast as possible. As a result I spent most of the night as Samurai and while it took me a bit to remember how to play the class it eventually came back. When Neph joined us I feel like she went through the same thing with Machinist… which I guess is to be expected for as long as we have been gone. I know they have other themed nights, like one in which they do crafting maps… so for the time being I am probably going to be logging in and doing those activities at least until I get my bearings. I had an awful lot of fun, and I most of it was due to the fact that I was getting to hang out with a bunch of friends that I had not hung out with in a really long time.

Let’s Go Thoughts

November 19, 2018 by Belghast

Without really intending to… this weekend became largely about Let’s Go Pokemon, the new Pokemon game that released on the Nintendo Switch Friday. I went with Eevee, because quite honestly it is one of my favorite Pokemon largely for the sheer versatility that is available in the evolved forms. The starter Eevee however will be permanently locked in its adorable pupa stage, and I am mostly okay with that… as it keeps me from having to try and figure out which way I want to evolve my Pokemon. I decided to give my Eevee the super adult name of Wigglebum.

Similarly I decided to give my rival the super adult name of Buttface, because in most of the other Pokemon games that I have played… they turn out to be a dick. Unfortunately this one is rather awesome, and constantly cheering us on and giving us free stuff. Now I feel sorta bad when I am in a cutscene with the two of us… and I see the monaker that I unfairly bestowed upon them. Blue however is around to play the role of the butthead, but even he seems better behaved than I remember him… or in my case it was Red that was the Butt since I played Pokemon Blue not Red.

A few days ago my friend Hestiah posted a thread where she commented on a few of the Pokemon Go names that she came up as she caught them. This made me realize how generally boring I am when it comes to catching Pokemon, in that I never actually give them names. Maybe it feels better when I send them back to the professor to grind into candy if I didn’t name them in the first place. Ultimately she is the one who inspired all of this serious adulting… and has trickled down to the individual Pokemon as well. ZappyGirl started her life as ShockyRat, and then I decided to name her based on the whole Zappy Boi meme… and thankfully this game lets you rename your charges whenever the hell you want to.

The interesting thing about Let’s Go as a game is that it seems way the hell more sticky for me personally than any other Pokemon game to date. The truth is I don’t really like Pokemon combat, and it always felt weird to be beating up on random woodland creatures. In this game it has adopted a Pokemon Go sort of approach where the individual Pokemon appear and you walk over to them to engage in a capture session… where you have all of the same tools as you do in the handheld game. If you are playing in handheld mode you simply center the screen on the pokemon and throw the ball… if you are playing docked you have to do some motion controlling nonsense with a dettached joycon in order to capture. I am super disappointed that I could not play with my Pro Controller and just mimic the same behavior I do in handheld mode… as such I am largely playing this game undocked which sorta makes me a little sad.

Traditional combat still exists and is reserved for dueling other trainers, which feels a little better than kicking the ass of every random pidgey that happens across your path while roaming between two areas. Wigglebum however is a soul less killing machine and gives zero fucks about beating up her kin. She believes in Highlander rules… and there can be only one Eevee. The interesting thing about random trainer battles is just how insanely lucrative they are, and the fact that apparently you never really need to buy Pokeballs in this game? Most battles reward anywhere between 3 and 5 Pokeballs… and have just started paying out in Great Balls helping me keep in stock of those as well. When I am playing in motion control mode I fail an awful lot so I am guessing they are paying out to help stop the frustration of Nintendo and their determination to make me do stupid shit with my hands while playing their games.

The game feels extremely good and while it is mimicking Red and Blue… that doesn’t somehow ruin my experience because I have not played either of those since 1999/2000ish on a Gameboy Emulator? This is mostly a fresh experience to me and while it seems really familiar… I can largely chock it up to the fact that ALL Pokemon games feel somewhat familiar. I spent just shy of 9

hours over the weekend playing Pokemon Let’s Go, and while that might not sound like a ton of time… it is for me when it comes to a Pokemon game. I tend to bounce off of them pretty fast, and this time I just kept playing… until my switch battery ran out… and then went upstairs to dock it and try playing some more.

I am not terribly far progressed, but at this point I have made it through three Gyms and quite honestly the only one I had any issues with was Misty and the Water type gym. The only real problem there was Starmie and its inexplicable fire type moves??? I limped through it, but I had to take two runs at getting through her. Surge and Brock were both easy as hell and largely fell over when I attacked them. There are a bunch of weird moves that you can teach your starter, and according to Ashgar… while they have horrible names they are actually really good. So I might make my way back to that NPC and try a few of them. So far Doublekick and Tackle have been my money attacks… and everything else seems to largely be expendable.

Ultimately the game is super charming and if you like the concept of Pokemon, but maybe struggled a bit to get into it… I highly suggest you check this game out. If you are a Pokemon purist, some of the changes might frustrate you… but then again it is a Pokemon game so admit it… you are probably going to play it anyways. I’ve linked my Pokemon Go account but have not made it to the area of the game where it allows you to swap stuff back and forth. Last night Ash and I were going to try trading some stuff, but I ultimately fell asleep… so I will try and catch up with him tonight and do that thing. All in all… super fun game and my wife was shocked to see me playing it instead of something with more death, gore and dismemberment. There is still a time for childlike wonder in the Tales of the Aggronaut.

If you are so inclined… we also talk quite a bit about the game on the podcast this weekend.

Hellgate Disappointment

November 16, 2018 by Belghast

If you have read my blog for any length of time you will know that I have a hot burning and undying love of the game Hellgate London. I played it originally at launch and was of the few suckers who actually ponied up for the subscription plan as well, with its extra events. There were a whole slew of us that were playing World of Warcraft at the time, that took a break and started playing Hellgate as effectively our primary game. There was in fact a House Stalwart guild in game that was pretty damned active for awhile… but sadly a very short while. The game released on October 31st or 2007, and in 2008… Flagship Studios filed for bankrupt protection and all assets including the intellectual property of the games they were working on… were seized by Comerica bank. Namco Bandai kept the servers going through January 31st of 2009 and after that point it was effectively a single player only game. The assets were eventually sold to T3Fun/HanbitSoft a South Korean game developer who took the unreleased assets and spun up a few new areas of the game centered around Seoul.

In 2014 the game showed up on Steam as Hellgate Global which was being run by a HanbitSoft Connected company called T3Fun/Redbana Corporation. Hellgate Global was an MMOized version of the game and featured a number of micro-transactions that added some “pay for qualify of life” type features like an item that would identify all of the items in your inventory instead of having to do them one at a time. Similarly there was an item that would deconstruct every item in your inventory at the same time. I actually played this game for a bit, and noticed that the difficulty was massively watered down and these mini bosses were added in every so often that served as a loot pinata. It was entertaining but also nowhere nears a compelling as the original game, and it eventually shut down in January of 2016. Recently Hellgate once again showed up on Steam as a game that was coming November 15th… and last night I purchased it for myself and a couple of Aggrochat members. One to grief him because I sincerely doubt he will like the game, but he also once gifted me a copy of Bad Rats. The other however because I think she will absolutely like the game… that is if she can get past the frustrations with this version.

My hope was this would be an easy way to get people in and let them experience Hellgate London. Previously the best way to play Hellgate London was to either Amazon or Ebay a copy of the old game and then install Hellgate Revival to bring it up to more modern standards. There is even a side project called London 2038 that acts as a server emulator, allowing you to play online with others and restoring much of the functionality of the game. My hope was the Steam version would bring a lot of these improvements to the game and make it as easy as purchasing and installing to get in and play. Unfortunately after last night… the route I just described is still the best way to play the game.

First of all we have to talk about how HanbitSoft has seemingly changed the story of Hellgate London, by introducing a some equally questionable animation tacked onto the front of what is still the most epic intro sequence from any game. The original game is largely the story of Doom… rifts from hell open up and a bunch of demons flow into our world and decimate it. They however shifted it to be a battle between the light and the dark in ambiguous terms, that maybe work better for a South Korean audience than the biblical hell on earth story of the original. The other big problem is that seemingly this is a game that was taken from the original English… localized into Korean… and then has now been localized back into English. We’ve all seen the memes of what happens when you pass something through google translate too many times… in fact my favorite is a twitter account called Rosewatta Stone that does that with Magic the Gathering cards.

There is an awful lot of jank going on with this game, from the completely unskippable tutorial sequence that keeps popping up how to do everything… and then will freeze your character in place until you perform whatever the hell they are asking you to do. To the fact that the textures are extremely muddy and are way lower resolution in a few of the areas than the base install of the original game. Hellgate London was a game with a bunch of different tile sets for lack of a better term, and they were constructed out of a series of themed prefabs… and this one in particular seems to have fared the worst which is the cityscape with rubble strewn through it. Others like the train station tileset, seem to have gotten a much higher resolution texture treatment and as such look significantly better. The problem is however that this experience feels extremely uneven… like they got bored while working on the game and only focused on the areas that they liked the most.

This is effectively the same version that was released as Hellgate Global from what I can tell, and as such it includes a handful of classes that were not available in the original release. I am however a creature of habit and wound up rolling a Guardian again… which is the class I always tend to play when I play Hellgate. I am a sword and shield tank, but again you can see the unbalanced nature of the textures. That shield looks perfectly fine… the armor however is blurry and washed out. It also has the weird intro sequence where it places you in what used to be the cash shop hub of the game, before sending you to your first destination. None of the cash shop vendors still exist, but that was effectively a player lobby that allowed groups to gather up, and it seems like there is no real way to get back there once you have started actually playing the game. It definitely comes off as them quickly singlerplayer-izing what was designed to be a rudimentary MMO cash grab.

The thing that cracks me up the most is the inclusion of the Korean warnings about play time. After paying an hour you get the following message to pop up in the chat window “You have been playing for 1hour. Excessive game play may affect your lifestyle.” This is one of those loot pinata bosses that I talked about, and when you kill them you get a fountain of loot most of it blue or higher quality to come pouring out. All of this aside the game was largely playable once you got past that forced intro section. That is until I started encountering some more serious issues with the game. Shortly after the hour mark I started encountering some massive slowdowns, and at first I thought maybe there was a memory leak in the client. However upon restarting the game and getting into a fight the same things started happening again. I think this might be an issue with one specific spell effect from a specific type of monster, which are the the demons that crawl around and then throw fireballs at you. The moment one of these sends this spell effect in your direction my framerate bottomed out. This is coming from me playing on an i7-5820k with a Geforce 1080 ti… so more processing power than this game ever dreamed about having initially. I finally had to stop playing last night because it was impossible to do anything… because I kept hitting these framerate walls.

Ultimately I still love Hellgate London and I happily played for about two hours until I encountered the issues. I was hoping that the Steam release would have actually had some effort put into it, but unfortunately that is not the case. The positive side is that right now it is selling for a little less than $10, so it isn’t like even with the three copies that I bought I am out a significant amount of money. I am hoping that the modding community decides to fix these issues, because it is probably something as simple as the fact that the game inexplicably dropped Direct X 10 support and is only allowing Direct X 9 for some reason. If you really want to play Hellgate London, you are still better off digging up an original copy… installing Hellgate Revival and then using London 2038 to play on the multiplayer servers. I have a feeling in the coming days I will be doing this thing again just to see how different the experience is.

I hope that HanbitSoft will patch the game to make the experience less frustrating, because I still would love to see the Seoul levels as well as the Hellgate Tokyo content that supposedly was added in to the game as well. I am not however holding my breath that any of that is going to happen, and more than likely this was just a quick cash grab that I got suckered into by my love of this franchise, and the nostalgia of all that it could have been. I’ve spent thirty bucks on dumber things, so in the end I will be just fine.

Mobile Core

November 15, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve been on this journey of discovery, that largely started with the negative reaction the Diablo Immortal reaction had in the community as a whole. Sure there was the pent up disappointment that we had waiting for Diablo 4, but it seemed to go way further than that. There was a reaction that most of the Diablo fans had, myself included… that mobile gaming was somehow “not for them”. Right or wrong there has been an impression among PC and Console gamers that mobile gaming was something “casuals” did, and that serious gamers were playing games on other platforms. I am not even sure if this was ever the case, but it feels like things are changing drastically on this front, largely because mobile devices have improved greatly over when I was trying to play a Diablo clone on my Palm Pilot back in 2003. Like I have said before when I fail to understand something, I tend to pour myself into trying to figure it out, and as such I have been playing a lot more mobile games lately.

One of them is The Walking Dead Our World, which at face value appears to be a Pokemon Go clone for The Walking Dead. Sure I knew Pokemon Go fans were hardcore and established raids and such on a regular basis… but that more or less is in spite of the fact that Nintendo still refuses to accept that the internet is a thing that exists. Our World seems to be a game that takes the idea of PoGo but extends all of the things we have learned about clan/guild play and internet connectivity. As a solo player it is largely a game about clearing infestations, picking up supply caches and rescuing survivors. As a team however it changes drastically, and in truth were I not now part of an active clan I probably would have faded away from this game long before.

The game more or less suggests you join a group, and then suggests the ones that are active in your vicinity. The biggest problem I had was finding one that was not outwardly racist, trumpian, sexist or anti-LGBT. It was shocking to me to see just how many groups had something like that in their message, thankfully I found this one that seemed to be reasonable and largely focused on getting objectives done. Now I don’t know any of these people in real life, but they apparently live in the near vicinity of me… and a lot of the locations that get called out over chat are places in the surrounding communities. There is a Weekly Challenge system that involves performing a bunch of objectives and then unlocking rewards as a result. Last week I believe we made it through four maybe five of these challenge boards, each time earning really good loot and the in game “upgrade” currency. What I find the most interesting is that everything I see in the social chat that I largely just lurk in… mirrors the exact same behavior I have seen in MMO Guilds. They are all working together on a shared objective and focusing on specific things that they can bring to the table.

The game has this interesting system that allows players to drop a flare at a specific location, and then other players in your clan can teleport to that location and be able to farm the objectives there. I’ve seen this a few times when someone happened across an area with a cluster of epic missions for example. The game tends to follow the television shows, and if a character has a major role that week… then immediately following there will be a number of seasonal missions that show up awarding the cards related to that player. I’ve also seen my clan drop flares when they find a cluster of a specific type of walker needed for an objective… like over the last couple of days we have been working on killing armored walkers with Darryl, which as such lead to my load out in the above screenshot. It of course has a cash shop, and while it is pretty pushy about advertising what is for sale… it doesn’t appear like you actually need anything from it pending you are willing to wait things out. Similarly being in a clan tends to help make sure you are rolling in resources.

Mostly I found it shocking to see the exact same MMORPG behavior on a mobile platform. I will admit I largely thought that Pokemon Go and the dedication of those players… was more attributed to the source material and less something that you find on mobile devices in general. However as I have dug into Dragalia Lost I have run across some seemingly super hardcore players there as well. I think the tides are shifting, and maybe those of us who proclaim to be PC or Console gamers need to update our mindsets. Sure mobile gaming might be “not for you” but the low barrier of entry… and how well all of these games run on my $300 unlocked android phone… makes it accessible to a market that may not be able to purchase a Console or a Gaming PC… but is damned likely to have a mobile phone that they use as their primary source of internet access. As a developer I have watched the numbers skew over the last few years on the large site that I maintain professionally… and previously we used to see 10-15% of our users coming in off mobile devices. Now that has reached a point where 49% of our users are either on phones or tablets, which has created a massive shift in how we approach content. It is not shocking that game developers have started to do exactly the same thing. I may not be super happy with this trend, but I am now at least starting to understand it a bit more.