Tales of the Aggronaut

Horror Story

October 26, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I finished up the fragmented souls grind and picked up Horror Story, which is in fact as Squirrelpope suggested just a rebranding of The Origin Story. However that is perfectly fine with me considering that I really loved that weapon in Year 1. The biggest benefit of this weapon however is that it comes with baked in 600 light level… which had a significant boost in my gearing process. That is something I want to talk about briefly… gearing feels much better. Sure blues and purples by default drop at relatively low light levels like they did before. However there are so many more opportunities to get poweful engrams, in fact it seems like there is the daily ability to get something called a prime engram to drop out in the world while doing other activities or in the crucible. This also drops at a decent boost to your light levels allowing you to slowly ratchet that up in so many more ways than you were able to before.

In my travels last night I also managed to pick up a new copy of Go Figure, this time with Outlaw in stead of Zen Moment… which for a Pulse Rifle immediately makes it much better given that Zen Moment really doesn’t work that well for burst fired weapons. It still has High Caliber rounds and High Impact reserves so for all intents and purposes it is the same weapon with a single perk line swapped out. Unfortunately this dropped from a regular legendary engram and not one of the powerful/prime versions so it dropped at my then adjusted light level of 506.

The best light level that I can currently high is 527 since I am literally just getting started on the Forsaken grind. I’ve technically not even finished the storyline, largely because I am not entirely certain where I need to go with that. This is one of the problems with Forsaken is that you don’t have quite the clear story path as you did with previous content. Right now I have a milestone that says “hunt barons” but nothing really outlined on how I should go about doing that. This probably makes the content feel more organic for your average player, but for me… I tend to avoid doing quests like the plague so when I finally buckle down and start doing them… I want a big freaking blinking arrow pointing me in the right direction so I can get them over with and go back to nonsense free play.

Another thing that I messed around with was Dragon Quest XI last night, and I have a lot of issues with this game on the PC. The control scheme is not great… and what I mean by that is that while sure you can navigate mostly with WASD and Left Mouse click to attack… there are a bunch of other menus that drive on some other combination of keypresses. The problem with that is that the game has baked in reminders to tell you to press an Xbox controller button to do this or that, but it doesn’t actually update to tell you the equivalent keyboard command. Basically it is a poor console port, that while functionally struggles at actually doing things in a manner that PC gamers are used to.

Basically I have two options… grab a controller which isn’t super interesting to me… or spend a bunch of time remapping buttons. The other big issue that I have with the game is that it has a god awfully long intro sequence that is unskippable… and the first two times I attempted to get through it something happened which caused the game to crash out meaning that I had to set through the whole mess each time I tried to get into the game proper. The other big problem is that saving the game is super obtuse and apart from auto saves… requires you to pray at shrines to manually save. PC players traditionally expect that you can hit Esc to bring up some sort of a menu system… however in this game it brings up a prompt telling you that you are about to exit the game and lose all of your progress.

Ultimately… my suggestion if you are interested at all in Dragon Quest XI is just to get a console version. This is available on pretty much all of the consoles at this point, so save yourself the frustration of dealing with the poorly thought out PC port and play it on a platform it was actually intended for.

Chicken Friend

October 25, 2018 by Belghast

This is going to be one of those morning posts where I largely talk about a bunch of screenshots. Last night I managed to max out my Colonel Sander’s Mask, which is of course the best of the Festival of the Lost masks you can get quite frankly. Who doesn’t want to be Cayde-6’s faithful chicken companion… especially in the light of recent events. I love the way that they added a perk system that levels up on these masks, because the buffs that they give you… largely make up for having no light level associated with them. Now it gives me extra defense while in air, which is especially handy when you have the grounded debuff, and it also buffs damage dealt towards all mobs as well as increasing the drop rate of heavy ammo. So far the furthest I have made it into the Haunted Forest is successfully clearing 8 rounds, which to be honest unless I was in with a stacked group of friends I am not sure if I am going to do better.

As far as Fragmented Souls… I am up to 86 out of the 120 needed for the Auto Rifle. I can only seem to manage running a couple in a row before I need to go off and do something else for a bit. I do however have a multi-part bounty that I should be finishing tonight that will reward me 40 at once, pushing me over the number needed. As far as Auto Rifles go however… I am in love with The Misfit. Normally I don’t really go for the low impact/high rate of fire auto rifles, but this one is awesome. It had reasonable stability as far as that style of weapon goes and because of my roll rather fast reload speed. It is far from a great roll however, because it has the perk that causes the weapon to reload on critical damage… which sure is cool but would be so much better if it had pretty much anything else on it. I think I would ultimately want one with Zen Moment which increases stability as you deal damage… and Rampage that gives you a stacking damage buff each time you take out a target… since this thing melts minion type mobs.

Another weapon that I am using that I love… but is less than optimal other than the Haunted Forest is Go Figure, that rolled with insane amounts of range on it. This means I can sit back and psuedo snipe things with a pulse rifle. This is actually decent in the crucible since it has High Caliber Rounds and High Impact reserves and a silly amount of range. For everything else however I tend to go with Ricochet Rounds for more range and stability. I think more than anything the weapon just looks badass, and you have to admit it to yourself… that occasionally you use a weapon just because it looks cool.

As far as heavy weapons go, I have been playing with the Exotic Sword that I got to drop a few nights ago. This isn’t necessarily optimal, but for the case of grinding Haunted Forest it melts a good deal of the nightmares… other than the Hydra one which is just a pain in the ass to deal with regardless of how you are fighting it. I am not exactly a fan of the look of this weapon, because it feels more like a dagger than a sword… but the whole combo that allows you to hurl the blade towards an enemy is kinda cool. It has relatively low ammo which is its weakness because it expects you to be using the perk that gives back ammo to the weapon when you perform a kill. At some point I will stop using it when I find another shiny bauble, but for now it works well enough.

In the honorable mention category… I really love bows… and while I am not the biggest fan of the look of this bow it is extremely nice. This one in particular has Explosive Head which cause the arrow to explode shortly after hitting a target, and Rampage which I talked about earlier. The combination… is that you can just snipe a large amount of targets in a very short period of time especially in a PVE setting. The Explosive Heads are great for taking out large groups of mobs like Dregs when clustered tight together, and Rampage lets you stack up the buff a bit to take out yellow bars. This is situational for me… but I like using bows a lot when dealing with story content because it allows me to take down a bunch of the targets before they get close enough to notice me.

Lastly… all the wearing of the Colonel Sanders mask… made me nostalgic so I had to go visit the best Cryptarch… Tyra Karn at the Farm. I really wish that she had moved with us to the Tower, because I really do prefer using her… but it seems like an awful lot of effort to go to the farm just to decrypt the few engrams we get that need decrypting. Had they mirrored everything at the Farm that they have at the Tower I would end up opting to use the Farm 100% of the time… but alas the vendors I need are at the Tower.

Trion Concerns

October 24, 2018 by Belghast

A few days ago it was announced that Trion was acquired by Gamigo, a company that I knew very little about in truth because it catered to an end of the MMO market that I don’t spend much time in. As a result there were massive layoffs at Trion Worlds. I am not exactly sure what the starting number was but it is reported that they are down to a shell of 25 people. Essentially with one action all of the people that I knew that worked for Trion… no longer do… with the exception of one that I am not entirely certain about the fate of. I have a feeling that the 25 remaining will only be there during the transition period. At least with SOE being purchased by Daybreak, it felt that the name changed but the company as a whole was going to continue trying to do the same thing. This however feels like a completely different beast.

If you follow the course that Gamigo has taken it sort of fits the pattern of a company trying to gobble up intellectual property. Here is a little timeline that I was able to cobble together rapidly this morning.

February 2013 – Acquires Outspark the publishers of Fiesta Online.
September 2014 – Acquires Intenium – which is labelled as “a publisher and distributor of casual games designed for females” whatever the hell that means.
May 2016 – Acquires Aeria Games – a bunch of Korean localized MMOs – the only one of which I have played is Echo of Soul.
July 2016 – Acquires Highdigit – which appears to be a SaaS CRM sort of platform that targets marketing and sale of games.
August 2016 – Acquires HoneyTracks – which appears to be a game focused Analytics company.
March 2017 – Acquires MMO Games – which you will know for MMOGames.com a site that I wrote for briefly a few years back, and largely dissolved my relationship with because while the other writers were awesome… the company behind it always felt a little sleazy.
July 2017 – Acquires Mediakraft Networks – which proclaims to be an “Online Television Network”. It sorta looks like a German language BuzzFeed?
October 2018 – Acquires Trion Worlds – which of course is the reason why we are here reading this post in the first place.

So there is a pattern here… grab IP content, grab distribution and analytics, and then grab media networks to advertise your products. It makes sense but it also doesn’t exactly make me have warm fuzzies about the way this is being set up. The ultimate question is going to be how they manage Trion games like Rift going forward. Do they crank the loot box and gacha dial up to 11, or do they leave things largely running as is? I said above that the only Gamigo game that I had played was Echo of Soul… which I got access to while I was still at MMOGames.com. This was technically before the site was acquired but regardless… it now feels a little odd. I was going to write a review of the game, but quite frankly I had nothing positive to say about it. It felt like a cheaply made generic MMO that didn’t have open world areas… but instead these Guild Wars 1 style on rails “corridors” that you traversed between regions.

I didn’t end up writing the review because I knew it would never see print. There had been another game that I felt was extremely cheaply made, and wrote what I felt was a fair assessment of its positives and negatives. I focused on the few things that I did enjoy about it, but the final product wound up being about 50% positives, 50% negatives. The article never saw the light of day however because the company behind the game was a big advertiser, and as a result wanted positive press to push their product. I felt like anything I would write about Echo of Soul would be a similar experience so I politely declined the article and moved on with my life. While I legitimately stopped writing for the site because of personal reasons… it was events like this… that made me feel not exactly comfortable having my name associated with it. I’ve been torn for years about this reaction because I had a lot of really good friends who relied and still do technically rely on a paycheck from the site.

Basically I am at this point where I have deep concerns about the fate of the Trion Worlds games, because I am not entirely certain that Gamigo cares about these games or their communities. I legitimately think this is a grab for more potential revenue streams, just like they made grabs to cover the marketing, distribution, analytics and advertising. Gamigo seems to have assembled this machine for pushing MMO games hard to grind out whatever profits that they can get from them. On the Wiki there is a list of fifteen games that they have discontinued, this doesn’t include the five that were announced but never made it to production, or the three that they lost the licensing rights for. None of this really makes me feel like my stable of characters in Rift… or the time that I put into Trion or ArcheAge are really going to be safe.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom… but ultimately I have some deep concerns about this move. The problem is… MMORPGs are fighting over what seems to be a static pool of players. We are likely going to see more of this in the future rather than less of it, as the properties that have been struggling for awhile find a new home in a potentially less than reputable environment. Ultimately… play and support the games you love because there is the real possibility that at some point they simply won’t be there… or else may be so changed that they are barely recognizable from their former selves.

Nightmare Matrix

October 23, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I dove head first into the Haunted Forest activity associated with the Festival of the Lost event. There is absolutely no hyperbole intended… but this might literally be the best content they have created for Destiny 2. The only unfortunate part is that it is associated with a limited time event, and it isn’t available for that much longer. When they first talked about the Infinite Forest I pictured this mode where you go through a random series of changing and shifting segments until you face a boss at the end… that then gives you a chance at loot. Basically I pictured it working a lot like the Court of Oryx or Archon’s Forge events in Destiny 1… and then was completely disappointed when it released and was ultimately nothing like that. What we got felt super repetitive and didn’t have any real hook to make you want to keep roaming around in there.

The Haunted Forest is 100% recycled content, but re-purposed in such a way as we are descending into the nightmare visions created by the Vex that we saw bits and pieces of during Curse of Osiris. Firstly instead of a washed out digital landscape, we have dark and brooding levels with very sparse lighting allowing for monsters to seemingly jump out from the Darkness. Additionally there is effectively the stand in for Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head in the form of a giant Hive Knight that is indestructible and chases after places hitting you with a giant axe and doing nonsense amounts of damage. Each time you dip into the Haunted Forest you are trying to kill a certain percentage of the projections of the various enemy factions within Destiny 2. When your bar hits 100% you get transported to fight a Nightmare, or a version of one of the Ultra boss monsters that exist in other areas of the game. Upon defeating the monster a timer starts that gives you a certain amount of time before the Haunted Forest collapses upon itself, and effectively you are trying to see how many times you can get to the Nightmare boss and defeat them before you run out of time.

There is a reward chest at the end after defeating your final Nightmare that rewards a currency specific to the Festival of the Lost called Fragmented Souls. These are then used to purchase the paper masks and if you can manage to save up 120 of them… a item level 600 Auto Rifle called the Horror Story. It is the last item that I am grinding for. In previous iterations of Festival of the Lost the masks were purely cosmetic, but this time around they have a purpose and can be leveled up through doing content. So while they add no item level, they do have a bunch of perks that tweak your gameplay in the Haunted Forest. For example I went with Vampiric Touch that increases damage to challenging enemies and triggers Health Regen on precision kills. There were three other options and each one was effected by a different type of kill, and I’ve managed to get a single upgrade so far that increases the drop of Heavy ammo, which speeds up the killing of Nightmares.

It also seems like you have the chance of getting Legendary drops from the various mobs inside of the matrix. Can we talk about how much better it feels to have engrams decrypt immediately showing you if you got something useful in the process? I managed to pick up Go Figure a really bad ass Pulse Rifle, and mine rolled with range boost which makes it silly to effectively snipe things with pulse shots from across the map. It also has High Caliber rounds and High Impact Reserves making it stagger like crazy. I am super in love with this weapon so far and I thought it looked coolest in the white and black color scheme that I ended up choosing. So far… I am greatly enjoying my time back in Destiny 2, because things feel “better” in ways that I am not exactly sure how to quantify. Time will tell if I feel the same once this event is over, but for the moment… I am grinding Fragmented Souls for that Auto Rifle.