Tales of the Aggronaut

Dragon Quest Builders Thoughts

February 20, 2018 by Belghast

I thought I would take a bit of a break from the constant stream of Monster Hunter World posts to talk about something else that I’ve been playing. Dragon Quest Builders was originally released on the PS4 and Vita back in October 2016 in the United States. There is apparently also a version that runs on the PS3 in Japan, but seemingly that copy never made it over here. I remember being super interested when I first saw the trailer, but by the time it was released was deeply distracted by other things. Just scrolling back through my blog… on the month it released I seemed to be dabbling in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Destiny 1, Diablo 3 and a little bit of Skyrim. Basically it released while I was distracted by other things… and as a result I never actually got around to picking it up.

Scroll forward to February, a month where I am mostly in a Monster Hunter Shaped hole… and I notice that it officially releases on the Nintendo Switch. I’ve not really had any builder games in my life over the last few months, so in theory it was maybe a good time to dig into a new one. It is really hard to describe what Dragon Quest Builders is because it is this sort of beautiful amalgam of a bunch of different games. At times it feels like a Legend of Zelda game especially when you don a sword and shield and go out into the world to whack monsters. There are times when it feels like Minecraft because you are absolutely collecting resources and building up your base. Then there are times when it feels a bit like Actraiser where you are intervening in the lives of the NPCs that populate your village.

The story of the game is pretty simple at face value. The game world itself is that of Alefgard the world of the original Dragon Quest, and is essentially what would have happened… if we had failed and the Dragonlord won. It is also a world where over time the fledgling human populace has lost hope and forgotten the power of creation. You as a builder are granted the ability to look at a set of raw resources and gain inspiration in how they might be shaped into useful objects. As a result it is your place as the new hero… to start reclaiming the world through combat and creativity and push back the forces of the Dragonlord.

The world itself is divided up into a series of islands, and through the course of gameplay you can learn how to make teleporters allowing you to traverse between them for different resources. All the while you continue running quests for the NPCs that start showing up in the town you are slowly piecing back together. Placing blocks together in certain ways creates rooms that then the NPCs can inhabit, and you begin to create machines that they can then utilize giving you resources that then can be used as you go out venturing the “save the world”.

I’ve loved Minecraft since the moment I first watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of the game. The problem with Minecraft however is that it is awesome to go out and create things in… but it also doesn’t really have a point. Sure there is the whole Ender Dragon nonsense that was placed in game late… but really there is no sequence of events that you need to complete to “beat” the game. For me “beating” Minecraft is amassing enough Diamonds to be able to use full Diamond everything and not give a crap about it. However regardless of how cool you build your world out… it feels hollow because there are no NPCs inhabiting it.

Dragon Quest solves this problem by allowing you to build a world… that then comes to life as various types of NPCs come live in it. Sure you can get this sort of functionality with modding, but it always feels tacked on to the side of the game and not really part of it. Dragon Quest gives you a reason for your wanderlust and harvesting and allows you to keep coming back to a place you call home and in doing so help out the people surrounding you. This might be a subtle difference but it is the one that is the most important and is why I have been playing the heck out of this game each night before falling to sleep. I like that I can pick it up, do a few things and feel like I have accomplished something. If this sounds at all interesting to you, I highly suggest checking it out.

The Good Grind

February 19, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have been thinking about where Monster Hunter World has succeeded and Destiny 2 has failed. I know this is probably a strange way to start off a post, but I am playing MHW the way that I fully expected to still be playing Destiny 2. If you add up the total time I have spent with the Destiny franchise across different platforms you wind up with 741 hours. Given that sort of track record I fully expected to be playing that game currently. That said I have missed two faction rallies, two iron banners and have not really even logged in during the current crimson doubles event. Sure I could be getting all manner of cosmetic gear from them… but the weapon and gear system just feels hollow given that I have collected most everything I am interested in using.

While I love the token loot system, Destiny 2 has a problem with not giving us a meaningful grind to be focused on. Doing event after event hoping to get a Masterwork Weapon or Piece of armor doesn’t really count. When I say meaningful grind I mean something that I can do on a nightly basis that is fun, but also feels like I am making progress towards some larger objective. In many ways the fickle nature of loot in Destiny 1 and the existence of things like the Court of Oryx and Archon’s Forge gave me something I could do… that felt like I was potentially moving in the direction of something that I wanted from the game. As it stands there are too few interesting weapon options and the watered down version of exotics no longer really make them worth chasing in the way we used to before.

It may simply be because I am playing on the PS4 with friends that I am drawing the conclusion… but as I play Monster Hunter World I think about the ways that it has given me this path to madness paved with little incremental rewards. When you kill or trap a Monster you are hunting you are showered with a bunch of monster parts… some of which are useful and some of which are not as useful. The thing is, regardless if I have 50 of an item… I am still sorta excited to see them because I know that eventually I might need to use them to craft some new weapon that I then have to upgrade up to the final version. I might suddenly decide that Hammer is awesome and then have to start building up my collection of weapons much the same as I do for my beloved Longsword.

I know that every thing I kill, and every object in the world that I loot is taking me towards some bigger goal. The number of times that I have had to go out lately and farm herbs… one of literally the first items you encounter in the game… is shocking given that I am dealing with a completely different set of monsters than I did back then. However it doesn’t seem like tedium because they have placed value on almost everything you can encounter out in the wilds and while you may not need it today… there is likely going to be a time at some point in the future where you will be wishing you had more of it. While literally every moment I am not hunting a big epic monster is busywork… none of it feels like it because it feels valuable to the larger mission of the game.

While Destiny has never really had something close to this grind, I am thinking maybe it should. The central focus of all of this for me personally is the Smithy, which is a menu driven crafting system that allows me to turn all of these bits and pieces of critters I have taken down… and meld them into usable gear with interesting stat combinations. I’ve spent a good deal of time farming up Odogoron, which is a giant hairless blind hell hound looking thing. I personally really like its armor set and I want to be able to wield the full thing a a potential replacement for my mishmash of gear I am currently wearing. This gives me a goal, and the grind itself is slow enough that each kill feels like meaningful progress without ever giving me that landfall moment of getting everything I possibly need in a single round.

Imagine for a second if you had gear and weapons in Destiny based on a similar concept. Each time you took down the Fallen example, there was a chance of getting an item that could be used in the crafting of Fallen themed weapons or armor. The common items would drop from Dregs, medium rarity items from Vandals and the rare bits from Servitors and Walkers. Then say you wanted to craft the Vex Mythoclast you would need to maybe take down a Gate Lord to get the focusing lens, and a bunch of Minotaurs to get the armored housing. All of this is more meaningful than collect 40 of token Z and hope the RNG gods smile upon your en devour as you may or may not get the item you want from a relatively deep loot table. It also turns Banshee-44 into more than the Gachapon machine that he currently is, by giving him the actual ability to craft specific items for you.

What Monster Hunter World does better than almost anything is that it gives me a target for my nightly nonsense. Granted right now I cannot craft the Chrome Slicer I because I lack the zenny to do so…. but I know where every single piece that it requires drops from. I know that I can run loops around High Rank Wildspire Wastes for most if it, but to get the Fucium Ore I am going to have to make my way down into the Elder’s Recess. If I notice a weapon requires parts off of a specific monster I am given a bunch of different ways to target that one specific encounter and run it over and over if I so choose. In my case what I personally tend to do is answer SOS beacons for that specific encounter, feeling like I am actually helping out someone else in the community take down that critter for fun and profit as well.

More than anything what I think Monster Hunter World does so well is that it eases you into all of this. You quickly learn the value of the items you can grab out in the world as new patterns start showing up that you can craft. You notice that items have ??? beside some of the materials and it drives you to go out and explore until you find them. All of this creates a feedback loop of take down epic feeling monsters, get items, craft interesting gear… so you can take down even bigger monsters. Sure a lot of the gear is not strictly required… but for someone who is very gear focused it certainly makes the journey feel a lot more meaningful. The monster battle portion being fun enough that while I am actively engaged in fighting… I am not even thinking about what might drop which is not the case in most MMORPGs.

When they first started talking about Destiny 2 being a much more open world and quest driven game… this is honestly the sort of experience I had been envisioning. What if you could fight a Destiny boss the same way you do a Monster in Monster Hunter World? What if getting every player to focus on taking out a Gatelord’s weapon arm caused it to no longer be able to fire that weapon… and instead forced it to change up tactics and start engaging in melee attacks. What if the way you fought a boss mattered just as much as the weapons you took into the fight? When we got Destiny 2 and it was a stripped down version of what we had in Destiny 1… I was disappointed, but the mechanical loop of the game kept me engaged for way longer than the game itself probably deserved. I had enough hype built up to carry me through the console launch and restarting with the PC launch… but now I just don’t ever feel like even logging in.

What I want is a good grind. That doesn’t necessarily mean running Omnigul hundreds of times hoping that maybe just maybe you will get that one in a million perfectly stated Grasp of Malok. What that means for me personally is something that I can do on a nightly basis that feels like I am eventually heading towards some goal down the road. Maybe at some point in the near future I will feel like I am out of grinds in Monster Hunter World, but I can at least see a road map in front of me that seems like it is going to be an interesting ride. Right now I am almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of objectives that I could be chasing, and as I move up… it feels like the world keeps expanding out rather than narrowing down to a pin point like the raid cycle does in an MMORPG. Monster Hunter World is a really great grind, that is attached to a really fun experience of taking down giant monsters that fight in a fluid and believably organic manner. Maybe Bungie will find its footing at some point, but for the moment I am enjoying discovering the Monster Hunter franchise.

Delightful Nonsense

February 16, 2018 by Belghast

Last night didn’t exactly go as I had originally planned but what actually happened was probably better. There were a couple of things that I knew I had on my list for the evening, one of which was to run to target and attempt to find clearance valentines candy for my wife’s classroom. There are several candies that she uses in lab exercises like kisses, m&m’s and skittles. The scene in that candy aisle was just insane with random display boxes strewn everywhere and essentially everything mostly gone. We did manage to scavenge some plain old fashioned Hershey’s Kisses in valentines packaging for the 50% off discount.

Prior to going into the store I called in a take out order across the street at Baja Jack’s Burrito Shack, so we picked up our orders… for me a steak fajita quesadilla and for my wife steak fajita nacho platter. I flipped over to Twitch to see if anyone was streaming, and I appeared to be auto hosting Sushi so I tuned in to say hi. I finishing “nomming my tasty noms” and fired up the PS4 when almost instantly I had a party invite waiting on me. Pizza Maid was also just about to fire up her stream and was looking for people to hang out while doing so. So I joined her, SitaDulip, Misiek, and a very drunk Welsh Fox and Wolfy in chat and prepared for an evening of delightful nonsense.

One of the main reasons why Monster Hunter World has been scratching my MMO itch is for nights like last night. While we lost Fox and Wolfy pretty early because they decided they were a little too sauced to be on a stream… we had this great night of just wandering around and doing random stuff. Sure I wasn’t necessarily moving my quest chain forward, but I was still having a lot of fun knocking out random stuff… some of it low rank and some of it high rank. It was this furious blend of investigations, optional quests, and arena missions and a heck of a lot of fun.

I think the only high rank monster we actually took down was a Pukei Pukei at the very end of the night when the stream had whittled down to just me and Pizza hanging out. The best moment of the stream however was when Pizza runs off to use the restroom only to find out that Aria her adorable asshole cat has rolled all the toilet paper off the roll. Props to stealthy for clipping this because it is an amazing conversation happening off screen… but I am chuckling along in my recognition that I have also had this thing happen. Basically it was a really fun night and if you so care to… the entire VOD of our random adventures is available.

Tonight however… I would actually like to make some progress. If that means catching Pizza up to this point in the storyline and then taking down an asshole pink Rathian together then so be it. Last night was all about hanging out with friends and tonight would be lovely if I could hang out with friends and also kill this horrible creature. The other thing I am contemplating is doing a dueling banjos stream of sorts where I am also streaming while Pizza is streaming and then posting one of those links that allows you to see the stream side by side. I will of course have to talk to her about this concept, also also I will have to figure out what PSN chat does to my streaming set up. I am not sure if it is going to be a horribly echoy experience for my viewers.

Regardless if we take down a Pink Rathian or not I would love to engage in some high rank hunt nonsense. Right now I have a handful of pools of people that I have been actively playing with and only time will tell tonight who I end up grouped up with. Regardless though Monster Hunter is feeling like and MMORPG to me in spite of it not really being one. It feels like I am doing all of these epic boss fights with friends and I guess at the end of the day… that was my most important requirement for MMO grouping. I had wished Destiny 2 would feel like this, but for whatever reason the magic sauce just wasn’t there as strongly this time. With Monster Hunter it is all brand new to me having never really gained traction in the series, and with Destiny 2… I just kept thinking about all of the awesome things we had to give up from the first game.

Monster Hunter Online

February 15, 2018February 15, 2018 by Belghast

There are times I do things that don’t make sense at all… but am nonetheless compelled to do them anyways. Last night was one of those nights and the madness that my brain was targeting involved seeing if I could actually get Monster Hunter Online installed and running. I had decided that I would end up hanging out with my wife last night and watching some olypmics while she graded, which meant I would be losing access to my beloved Monster Hunter World. I mean sure I could play it through PS Remote Play but the experience degrades so drastically since I am used to playing it on a 4K display in HDR. Early in the evening I had stumbled onto a video by Arekkz from June of 2016 where he attempted playing the game. This for whatever reason triggered something in my brain wanting to try it, much like I will sometimes devote way too much effort to trying to emulate something that I have sitting in my closet.

The first problem is that there are plenty of guides out there for playing Monster Hunter Online. The key problem with each of them is that they involve downloading some random package of binaries from either a file dump website or in some cases google drive. I do not trust downloading a “verified good” client from somewhere I don’t know as the originating source of the file. Basically that ruled out all of those options and left me sorting out the steps by myself. Essentially the step to get up and running look a little something like this.

Register a QQ Account – this is essentially the Tencent version of AIM and has a really weird profiling system that includes details like asking you for your blood type which is not creepy at all. I filled out only the minimum of information and found it hilarious that the QQ version of the Twitter Egg icon… is a crying baby. Apparently all Tecent games are driven by the QQ account and this will be a numerical address combined with a password. SAVE THIS NUMBER… there is apparently no great way to recover an account.
Download WeGame – WeGame is the Tencent version of Steam for lack of a better term for it. There is no english version so you are ultimately going to be flying blind here. All of the categories are in chinese except for FPS and MMORPG. Since what we are looking for is an MMORPG it was pretty easy to select that category and find the Monster Hunter Online logo shown above to start the download process.
Download Monster Hunter Online – there will be what appears to be an obvious download button when you find Monster Hunter Online in the menu. This seems to download the game in the background… so the process will show up in Task Manager but won’t actually be a window you can flip over to through Alt-Tab or through the task bar. I have really fast internet so it did not take long at all… but it involves two downloads one that is around 9 gb and another that is around 15 gb so it may take forever for you.
Launch Monster Hunter Online – when the game finally finishing installing which is an awkward and largely blind experience… it will show up in the left hand bar of the WeGame client. All the while it is downloading there will be what is the Monster Hunter Online theme playing in the background… that you can literally do nothing about. How I determined it was finished… was when the music went away. Immediately upon launching the game you will be presented with the next hurdle.
Fake a Chinese ID – You will immediately be presented with a page from QQ stating that the game cannot be played without some sort of national Chinese ID. This was not super surprising because when you attempt to play a lot of South Korean games you run into a similar problem. The difference here is that apparently the Chinese ID is an amalgam of a birthdate, region codes, and some randomized number all with a check bit to verify that it is “official”. As result there are tons of places online that offer you a generator to create your own. The one I linked is the one that worked for me… and quite honestly since I do not read chinese we engaged in a bit of pattern matching. You will need to make sure that you match up the names of the regions in both the generator and the client and unfortunately google translate only goes so far. I went with Bejing and what looked to be the most distinct pattern that I was able to match in both locations. SAVE THIS NUMBER.
Plug Code into QQ Page and Pray – The page that popped up when you launch Monster Hunter World should still be sitting there in the background, and for me at least I was able to pop that code into the box, hit submit and it worked first attempt. Your mileage may vary especially depending on your pattern matching skills on the earlier steps.
Relaunch Monster Hunter Online – If everything worked you will now be able to play Monster Hunter Online and have the same fun I did guessing what the buttons actually do in the character creation system. I managed to limp through the process of creating a character by guessing the logic that was used. On the lower left hand side there is a menu that appears to be some sort of a batch of presets… and then the button beside it to the right appears to be some sort of a confirmation that takes you to a prompt in the center of the screen that lets you name your character and enter the world. It accepted my english named character without any problems.

The next question you should be asking yourself is whether or not you should actually do this thing I just explained to you how to do. The short answer is no… you should not. You should really just stick to playing Monster Hunter World and waiting for the eventual PC release. The positive take away from last night is that I have a fully functional QQ account and will be able to play things that get released by Tencent in China if I so care to at some point. The bad part however is that the game is not great. Sure it sorta looks like Monster Hunter but more importantly it FEELS nothing like Monster Hunter World. If I did not know this was a purposeful collaboration between Capcom and Tencent I would have assumed the game was yet another asset flip mobile game because it is not pretty.

You are treated to this opening cutscene where some monster type I have never seen crashes into your airship. All the while the monster is clipping through the airship and as you begin to crash land the ship itself randomly clips in and out of the mountain side. When you finally get to ground level you have to fight yet another monster that I don’t recognize… but it could have been an overly stylized version of a Rathian. During this fight you are provided with MMO style telegraphs on the ground to denote where the monster is going to attack. These show up well before the actual animation sequence starts taking out a bit of the fun of playing Monster Hunter in the first place which is reading the monsters attacks.

I am not sure if everyone starts out as longsword but I lucked into that allowing me to try out a weapon that I already understand the attack patterns of which helped me get acclimatized quickly. In the grand scheme of things the attacks were all recognizable and worked much the same as if I had been using a controller. The equivalent of my Triangle attack was on the left mouse button and the equivalent of my R2 attack was on the right mouse button… with the short jab circle attacks being tied to E. Z for whatever reason became the interact/harvest key which is only explained after you encounter your first herb plant to harvest. You are not really given enough time after your first actual monster encounter to harvest the corpse.

It was playable but the post tutorial interface was clogged with tons of cash shop functionality that I never could figure out how to get rid of. It was around the time I arrived in the first town that I finally decided to just stop playing and find something better to do with my evening. The game did not feel great and the visuals felt cheaply thrown together and appear to be vastly different than the original images I saw from the first versions of the game. The game appears to have been stylized a bit more away from the traditional Monster Hunter vibe, and in doing so the appearance and experience seems to have been cheapened significantly.

At the end of the day I highly suggest you not do the thing that I did last night. I still felt largely compelled to explain how I did it though in case someone wanted to follow in my footsteps. This methodology allows you to go to the original sources and get the actual files instead of hoping and praying that some google drive share doesn’t give you a bit coin mining virus. I could not get any of the screenshots I took last night working, so instead I had to harvest a few from the interwebs for the purpose of this post. Ash warned me away from this madness but sometimes I just feel compelled to do stupid things.

[Edit – 2/15/2018 – 10 am]

After posting this… Ashgar suggested that in fairness I should at least namedrop Dauntless here. Right now it is in fact a PC based Monster Hunter like game available in closed beta. To get into that said beta however you either need to be a media personality/streamer of some note… or to pay for it. There are varying levels of access that start at $40 and end at $80 (that used to be $100 and the way you got into alpha). I’ve played this briefly at Pax South a few years back but can’t really speak to the state of the game. If you are interested I would suggest you check out the video by Skill-Up that I will link below. His take is that the game has promise, but it is not really a replacement for Monster Hunter yet. So I return to my original advise of just waiting for World to be released on the PC.