Tales of the Aggronaut

Backlog Madness

February 8, 2018 by Belghast

The image does not necessarily go with today’s post, but it happened to be in the recently uploaded images that I have not used on my blog so it is seeing some duty here. I had one of those nights where I attempted to go to bed early… and just wound up waking up every few hours leading to very fragmented sleep. However coffee heals all wounds and in the grand scheme of things I seem relatively cognizant and “mostly functional”. As a result I don’t really have much that is pressing to talk about this morning so I thought I would venture off into the arena of things I want to do but may not actually ever do. I am really great at coming up with ideas… I am pretty horrible at actually following through with half of them. I only really feel guilty about this… when money was spent to “prepare” for doing the thing.

One of those long reaching goals is to actually utilize this website that I was introduced called Grouvee. It seems to have been designed as a way of tracking the games you have beaten… which in truth is not a thing I give a shit about in the least. I am bad at finishing games. I will often times get to within a few hours of finishing and then just lose all desire to continue playing it, because I know that when I actually finish… the experience will be over. What the site does that I am interested in however is that it has the functionality to import all of the games in your steam library and track weather or not you have spent any time playing it. It also has the ability to create shelves to divide up your games, and do manual data entry for the services that aren’t steam.

The challenge is that right now because of circumstance more than desire… I have a collection of games spread out among multiple storefront platforms. The vast majority of my games are on Steam and have an exceedingly bloated number thanks to the fact that I tend to be a habitual purchaser of Humble Bundles. In second place is Playstation Network because I have been a Plus member for several years now and use the website to claim all of the games at once… regardless if I actually intend on playing them. In third place would be Microsoft Xbox Live or whatever the hell they are calling that platform these days… in which I have been similarly nabbing the games with gold titles every month. Then we drop down to probably Good Ole Games or GOG as they prefer to be called these days… which used to be the only place to buy a bunch of classic titles I wanted to revisit… and also is the home of my Witcher 3 copy due to a video card promotion. Lastly we have Origin… the network no one actually wants to use but has to if they care about Bioware games.

There are two main reasons why I care about this website at all. The first is… if I can ever get everything imported into the system I think it might be really cool to start using the [Tell Me What to Play] button when I am feeling lost and uncertain of what sounds good that day. I have 300 MBps internet, so can download pretty much any game within a few minutes and it might be interesting to force myself to play some of that backlog. The second reason why I care about this site… is I am wondering if maybe just maybe I could figure out a way to retrieve my now playing list on my blog from the playing shelf on Grouvee. I’ve not sorted out how I plan on going about that, but if I do… I will be sure to post a how to.

The site as a whole has been described as a “Goodreads” for games, and that seems pretty apt. I know I originally was introduced to the site through Jasyla who I believe actually uses this site for its intended purpose of tracking what she has finished. For me… it might just be useful to let me realize that I already have a game through PS+ or Games with Gold and I really should not buy it when it is being sold for $4 on steam. In theory since I left it off the list… I should add in my physical game libraries and the digital games I have on the Switch and 3DS. Mostly I have tried to move away from physical games, in part because I just like having whatever I want available and on tap without having to swap a cartridge or disc. If Grouvee seems like a useful site you might check it out… and feel free to friend me.

Ice and Frost Dragons

February 7, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was more or less madness. The last few days have been super stressful for a bunch of reasons that I don’t really want to get into, but its a sort of stress that I am not used to dealing with. The sort of stress that takes what should be a super familiar and safe environment and makes everything seem weird and tense. Last night I had a very late meeting that ultimately went over the allotted time, and by the time I left… we had gotten some freezing rain. That meant that driving home was in itself a tense experience as well with everyone poking along at a snails pace. There is this whole judgement game that happens as well, because in theory my normal route is the least populated of the possible routes home. So I question if I should take it or try and stick to the busier route… and as a result more prone to be delayed by wrecks and probably much slower.

Needless to say my normal ten to fifteen minute commute was turned into roughly an hour. When got to town I also needed to make a run by the local grocery store around the corner from my house. Normally this is a massive pitfall because people go insane when there is even the slightest sign of winter weather. We were completely out of coffee creamer however… something I really didn’t want to go home without so I went against better judgement and walked into the grocery store. In truth it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting… there are times where even the lightest dusting of snow can cause the grocery store to look like the apocalypse hit with entire aisles of food missing. This time however it was just about three times as busy as normal, but no frantic rushing around and hoarding food. That said… it had been about three weeks since we had been to a grocery store so while there I decided to pick up considerably more than just coffee creamer allowing myself to succumb to a bit of the madness as well.

I got home and made dinner… which in our case was some piping hot frito chilli pies because I needed something to defrost. The actual temperature was in the 20s but with wind chill factored in… it felt like the low teens, which for the northerners that might be reading this blog is not that big of a problem. However those of us who are used to 115 degree August weather are not exactly designed for this sort of frigid weather. I don’t even have a proper coat because we need one so rarely, which meant I have been roaming around in this in my hoodie. The frito pies did their job however and warmed me up enough to consider actually doing something this evening other than huddling underneath a fuzzy blanket and staring blankly at the television. Considering the late hour… I opted to settle into my office and play a little monster hunter considering I was about an hour late for my other obligation and it would have been weird to drop in at that point.

One of the things about Monster Hunter World is that I seem like I am only really capable of handling one big monster hunt each evening. As a result I am progressing painfully slow through the quest content that ultimately gates everything in the game. Sunday I tackled Radobaan and to a lesser extent Great Girros while roaming around in an expedition. That mean’t a trip back to the Third Fleet Master to once again descend to the bottom of the Rotten Vale. Unshockingly we once again encountered a problem that required my attention. Our path took us straight through the hunting grounds of a Legiana, which is a giant frost dragon of sorts that seems to like to gobble up the flying bird/wyvern things that hang out in the Coral Highlands. We pissed it off… and as a result I needed to go kill it so we could continue downwards.

This is not a terribly easy hunt for a Longsword because it spends most of its time in the air. Sure I can chip away at it slowly by swinging up at it… but that also put me in prime territory for its two main attacks. The first of these is a claw dive of a sort that did about a third of my health bar each time I connected with it properly. The second is the more annoying because it has lasting effects in the form of laying down a line of frost on the ground. Getting hit with the frost itself seemed to take me down two thirds of my health bar, and getting into the frost seemed to have a lasting slow effect that made dodging everything more annoying. The other major problem is this monster runs way more often than your average bear… and like all flyers in this game can travel half a map away in a few seconds forcing you to traverse some truly awkward terrain.

I’ve only actually failed a single hunt so far in Monster Hunter World, and that was the first time I attempted Anjanath. That one I mostly chock up to not paying attention and not watching my health bar anywhere near as close as I should have. Legiana however… was painfully close. When I finally took the monster down I had less than five minutes to go on the hunt, and was down to my last faint. The thing about a close fight like this… is that when you finally defeat it… you feel absolutely exhilarated. I had originally intended to just do the one hunt and go to bed, but instead I needed something to do to sorta come down off the high of the really difficult encounter. As a result I popped downstairs and saw that Sushi was streaming, and hung out there for a bit while roaming around and doing minor things in monster hunter over Playstation Remote Play.

The night did not go at all how I had intended it. I did not intend to be super late getting home, and I definitely had not planned on the painful drive home. I also had not planned on fielding messages and emails throughout the night about a recent promotion at work. All in all however it was still a good night, and I was super pumped to move the story needle at least a little bit in this game that I am rapidly becoming indoctrinated into. Expeditions are still more my speed and I’ve spent a lot of time roaming around the newly unlocked areas like Coral Highlands and Rotten Vale. I believe there are two more areas of the game but supposedly those do not unlock until I officially get into the “high rank” hunt territory.

My favorite part of the night however is that all of my shenanigans allowed me to upgrade my weapon to the Hard Bone Shotel II which with my current gear layout gives me a base attack power of 505. That is honestly the biggest problem I am seeing with switching weapons is the fact that none of them are even close to the attack power I currently have available to me through the “bone” weapon line. I see longsword folks running around with much cooler looking weapons… but ultimately they have not been able to compete with the raw attack power of my bone weapon.

At some point I want to jump ship to the “dragon” line of weapons… but that is going to require silly amounts of farming of fairly difficult fights like Rathian. For the moment I am happy with my damage output and the rather homely looking bone weapon hanging off of my back. I think my big focus over the next few game sessions is going to be trying to farm the ore needed to get the next real set of upgrades over the gear I am wearing. I feel like I am pretty close to the next “big” fight, so I might attempt that tonight as well. All in all still loving this game and still wanting more of it.

Lumu and Watcher Cat

February 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did not do much in the way of gaming because I came home just mentally drained from work, and wound up logging in and out of various things while watching a couple movies. Instead unsurprisingly I am going to talk a bit about Monster Hunter World. This weekend I spent a significant amount of time upstairs playing it and am now in the Rotten Vale area of the map. Weirdly enough the main screen of the game still shows the Coral Highlands, but I do love how it occasionally changes to areas that you now have access to. At this point I have taken down Anjanath, Barroth, Great Girros, Great Jagras, Jyuratodus, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Paolumu, Pukei-Pukei, Radobaan, Tobi-Kadachi, and Tzitzi-Ya-Ku… which feels like a lot of Monsters but ultimately I think the grand scheme of thing I am barely progressed at all.

In fact after my last play session I believe I finally hit Hunter Rank 7 which is just a drop in the bucket compared to past Monster Hunter series games that capped out at like 999. There is an achievement for getting to Hunter Rank 100, so at the very least World goes that high but I have no clue how much higher it continues after that. Regardless… I am a babe in the woods when it comes to this game and nowhere near as far along as a good number of my friends. My play style is just way more meandering I believe than others… and weirdly enough after playing with Tam for a bit over the weekend he wins the bloodlust trophy for this game. He kept getting distracted during hunts by whatever happened to cross our path… whereas I seem to have a laser focus on the beast at hand often times ignoring collectibles long the way when I am in serious hunting mode.

Paolumu or “Lumu” as everyone seems to call it is legitimately one of the weirder hunts I have participated in. This crazy squirrel bat thing inflates an air bladder… and then uses it to bounce up and down on you for insane amounts of damage. I managed to rip it to shreds with my long sword and even managed to completely wreck its wings… which seemed to effect how well it could fly but not necessarily if it could fly. That was a completely different experience from when I fought Pukei-Pukei and somehow managed to actually ground that monster completely once its wings arrived at a similar tattered state.

Tam joined in the fight and got completely distracted for a little bit when Tzitzi-Ya-Ku crossed our path. The worst times were when we managed to be fighting Lulu and Tzitzi at the same time… and the stupid lizard would flash knocking us all out temporarily. Every time Tam would mount the back of Lumu it would end up subsequently taking off and flying away with him in which I wound up running after trying to sort out where it would land. That said when we got Lumu to a point where the wings were ripped and shredded it seemed unable to really go very far and mostly just flew around the area we were in at the time. Regardless… it was a goofy monster to fight and my strategy largely wound up with me trying desperately to hit is air bladder. I do not look forward to hunting them for fuzzy gear because at least with long sword they were super annoying to fight.

I feel like I need to talk about how inconvenient grouping is in this game. On Sunday afternoon we managed to get a four player group of AggroChat folks all together trying to do some of the low level stuff that Kodra needed since he started super late. The biggest problem we kept running into was the fact that in the grand scheme of things… what we wanted to do was just create an expedition and go off and hunt everything currently available in zone. However there really is no good way to do that… and functionally one of two things needs to happen. Firstly you can start a quest and after its completion just agree to stay in zone and return to camp instead of base. The second option is to have someone start an expedition and run and find a monster… allowing you to fire off a SOS beacon… and then hoping that all of the folks you actually intend to group with can find it in the cludgy join quest interface before someone random pops in.

This system just works counter intuitive to everything I expect from grouping in games. My brain works in a mindset of forming a group and then going off and doing a thing… not doing a thing and then hoping people can somehow join you after the thing has already started. We had a PSN chat session going and it would have been so much nicer if we could have simply invited that “fireteam” for lack of a better term to participate in something rather than having to time everything just so. Because grouping is so cumbersome… I largely spend most of my time roaming around the world by myself. After the challenge of trying to get all four of us together in the same group… I am maybe rethinking my decisions before to jump into random games and “help” people out. What if I was the fourth rando that ruined someone else’s attempts to play with the folks they had on voice chat at that moment?

The real victory of the weekend is that I managed to get high enough hunter rank to do the timed event needed to get the parts to craft my palico a watcher suit from Horizon Zero Dawn. I managed to get enough parts on the first outing to craft the suit itself, and I largely decided to ignore the weapon considering it was such a massive downgrade from what I was currently using. The watcher suit itself however has an insane amount of defense and as a result it has gone into my main rotation of palico gear. It does feel a little bit weird to see a watcher cat roaming around with me in the wilds because there are certain instincts I still have from playing Horizon Zero Dawn. At least I am not playing with a bow… otherwise I would potentially keep trying to shoot out my palico’s eye.

In the grand scheme of things I am still really enjoying this game and happy to be getting indoctrinated into the rich world of Monster Hunter. As a closing note… I’ve been seeing something weird happening in the Destiny YouTube and Twitch communities. There are so many of these Destiny-centric channels that have been essentially rededicating themselves to Monster Hunter instead. While this follows my own current evolution game time wise… considering I only actually played a single match this past Iron Banner, it does feel really odd to have my news sources for Destiny turning into a wall of Monster Hunter. On one hand it makes me happy… and on the other hand it makes me frustrated that the state of Destiny has reached a point where folks are abandoning it in droves. At the end of the day you have to play whatever it is that currently makes you happy, and I to have been almost entirely devoting myself to this weird and wonderful universe of Monster Hunter.

Wolcen Alpha Thoughts

February 5, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was a largely chill en devour that focused on lots of gaming while either upstairs in my warm warm office, or downstairs snuggled into a blanket on the sofa. It was my original intent to spend lots of time hunting monsters with friends, and I did in fact manage that for a bit Sunday afternoon. I also managed another goal which was to craft the Horizon Zero Dawn set of Palico gear which Kenzie is currently wearing. It admittedly feels a little weird at times to talk about Kenzie in game versus Kenzie the real life cat, but I still feel like if you didn’t name your Palico friend after an actual cat you are a monster. The other big happening of the weekend is that I dove head first into a game that I had been wanting to try for a bit.

Wolcen Lords of Mayhem is an Action Roleplaying Game that draws its inspiration from Diablo 2, Path of Exile and to some extent Diablo 3. It’s funny how a genre that largely spawned from a single came can branch and wind up fairly divisive. There is an entire community that feels like Diablo 2 was the ideal version of the game, another that feels like Path of Exile is the true successor to the throne… and a whole other group of people that care nothing about that noise and happily play Diablo 3. Wolcen is this weird amalgam in which I can see some of the best traits of each of those camps, as well as pulling in some other games in the genre like Titans Quest and its eventual successor Grim Dawn. Essentially it is a good start at trying to build a brand new modern ARPG.

The game itself is completely gorgeous, which admittedly was the first thing that I noticed about it. I stumbled onto this game when D3 community YouTuber Rhykker did a video talking about it. I have been trying very hard to avoid playing alpha/beta/early access games because they tend to sour my impression and excitement when the final product is released. However when I saw the game play I promptly threw that rule out the window and slammed my $19.95 on the table to join the testing. Firstly please note the game is very much an alpha build and in my short time playing it I have encountered all sorts of bugs including being hit by a monster a few times and having it teleport me back to base without actually dying.

This is absolutely a buyer beware sort of experience, but for me at least I felt like I wanted to help fund the games development because they have some pretty big plans. They are even brave enough to post their long term roadmap in the form of a Trello board for the backers to look at and comment on. Similarly there is a community Discord available as well so folks can leave bug reports, comment on game play and leave feature requests. The little bit of time I have spent roaming around the chat channels have made me realize that the game already has a super devoted following. As far as the lineage of this game goes… it is my understanding that it originally started out as a mod for the game Crysis designed to allow folks to create an ARPG on the CryEngine. From there it turned into a Kickstarter project called Umbra, and then at some point the name shifted to Wolcen which I find insanely awkward to pronounce.

What makes the game extremely interesting to me is the fact that there are no classes. You start as either a Male or a Female character with pretty robust sliders and character creation options. From there your character becomes whatever you want it to be in the form that everything is treated like a spell… be it a melee attack or an orb of lighting being hurled at the target. How you begin to spec out your character determines how effective you are going to be in your goals. Not surprisingly I have largely focused on melee with a sword and shield build designed to get in… dish out a bunch of damage then use the games active dodge system represented by the green pips above the skill bar to get out safely.

Admittedly it does not always work because the monsters in this game hit super hard and involve a lot of movement to be able to take them down successfully. I spent some time streaming Sunday morning and died over and over to all sorts of silly situations, and with no difficulty slider currently… it could get frustrating if you are not willing to keep throwing your face against this game. As far as speccing your character you are given a combination of the traditional stat based system that allows you to allocate points each level into the core areas that you want to be improving. On top of that each individual skill has its own tree of sorts that largely involves you choosing one of two options… with one focused on efficiency and another focused on either dealing more damage or increasing the effect of your attacks.

Lastly you have the “Gate of Fates” or what I tend to call it the Sphere Grid, which is a sequence of thematic choices you make as a character in how you want to build it out. Now when I said there were no classes in this game… in theory that is probably a lie because you could think of the skill trees presented on this grid as classes. On the inner ring you have Arcanist, Guardian, Legionary, Thief and Hunter. On the second ring you have Elementalist, Warden, Maleficent, Gladiator and Trickster. Then on the third ring they have a single tree so far called Assassin, but I fully expect that their goal is to keep expanding outwards. What makes this interesting is there is an NPC in town that allows you to rotate the rings connecting up any first tier tree to any second tier tree. So as a result right now my Legionary tree is rotated to meet up with Gladiator and in theory your “Class” becomes the combination of which trees you choose to mash together.

Admittedly it was in the sphere grid that Path of Exile largely lost me as a player because it kept expanding… and keep seeming more and more like nonsense. However with Wolcen it feels more manageable because essentially I am making one of five choices… each time I move outwards on the grid and can feel pretty happy to just stay within those lines. There are a lot of things not messaged well in the game… including this sphere grid. So for example I did not realize I could rotate it until I had already started putting some points into Guardian. That said it doesn’t necessarily feel like those points were wasted either because I am getting the blended effect of both trees at the same time. I would imagine late in the game you would have more than one tree fleshed out on each of the rings… and as such keep tweaking the subtle nuance of your character design.

Essentially I broke my no alphas rule… because I really want to see this game come to fruition. What is there right now… has an awful lot of potential and I can see how it could be turned into serious competition for the Diablo 4 throne. I will always love Diablo and the action rpgs that have spawned out of it. I’ve spent many an hour playing games like Titans Quest or even the MMO variants like Devilian. Already Wolcen has managed to capture the essence of what makes a Diablo style game good… all the while taking this raw material and blending it into something fresh feeling. They are taking the genre into an interesting direction that combines the accessibility of Diablo 3 with the madness of Path of Exile to produce something that I think will have staying power. I fully expect that this is going to be one of those games that I keep popping back into as new features are added. I am sure it is still a few years away from exiting early access, but the product that is there already feels good to play. If you are so inclined and are willing to deal with a slightly buggy product… I highly suggest checking it out.