Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Fall of Gigantic

February 2, 2018February 2, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I want to take a little bit to talk about a game that I used to have a lot of faith in… that just announced they were closing down the servers this coming July. This game was originally announced at Pax Prime 2014 and I first got my hands on it during my very first Pax… the inaugural Pax South 2015. To say they were the belle of the ball was an understatement… they had the biggest booth and also had really awesome media and tournament suites upstairs. On the floor of the convention they had computers set up to have constant running multiplayer battles and in order to make this all work… had called in this legion of devoted fans to help ease the new players into the experience. I managed to get in to the press suite on the first day and was completely blown away with the game that I had seen.

You have to understand this was pre-Overwatch even being announced, let alone releasing and taking the world by the storm. This was also pre-Paladins being a thing… so the only experience similar was Smite which was a fairly faithful port of the MOBA genre to a more player point of view experience rather than the traditional top down isometric. The biggest challenge out of the gate was what to call the game… we largely referred to it as a MOBA but even then… it didn’t quite conform to that concept. The characters were really the part that stood out because they were vibrant and animated extremely well… you had some that played like a traditional shooter and others like The Margrave pictured above that felt very much like an MMO tank.

It felt extremely fresh and when I left Pax I was super excited to the game launch. They had their press game on point giving out these really cool thumb drives that were super detailed vinyl/plastic versions of the games logo… that then had an executable you could run that would connect out to their ftp server and grab whatever were the freshest media assets available.

On Day two I managed to sneak everyone that was attending from AggroChat into the press suite again to do battle against other folks attending the media demo. The above image wound up on the Motiga twitter account and I am super grateful someone took a picture of us playing. Side note… we completely trounced Angry Joe and his entourage, in part because we had devs and community folks constantly trying to help us ease into playing the characters. Basically I went away from Pax South 2015 singing the praises of this game and was super pumped when I got my email a few weeks later getting into the alpha/beta program.

The excitement sorta died off however once we started actually playing the Beta client due to the lack of reasonable matchmaking. What seemed so damned polished at the show… was a carefully cultivated image. The actual experience was anything but, and largely focused on logging into the beta voice server and convincing people to group up with you… then dropping to a private channel and trying to join on each other and queue as a complete group. That said I did this a few times and Lonrem helped ease me into this community a bit, but it felt like too much hassle for me at this point when I am not really even a big player of this sort of genre. My stance had been that I would come back when things were a bit more polished and I could queue on my own without need of the very manual matchmaking.

In November of 2014 the oxygen started being drained out of the room… when Blizzard announced Overwatch. While these were not exactly the same… they were definitely similar enough feeling to be serious competition. I told myself that all Motiga needed to do was get to the market first… and develop an initial foothold. The experience was interesting enough to keep people engaged if they could just launch. In February of 2016… Motiga went through a massive round of layoffs and this is really the first signs that maybe the future wasn’t nearly as bright as we might have hoped. They did a deal with the devil at this point… securing additional funding from Microsoft in a trade for console and windows 10 exclusivity… forcing them down a path of the Windows Store instead of something more mainstream and actually used by gamers… Steam. This also cut them off from being able to do some sort of Steam early release program that has been effective for a lot of games as they worked out the kinks getting them to market.

I kept expecting to hear an announcement that Gigantic was going to be releasing… especially with the support from Microsoft to help them get across the finish line. I went through the hoops to convert my original Gigantic beta account to a Windows Store beta account and downloaded the game to give it a go. The only problem is… the game didn’t feel anywhere near as fresh and unique as I remembered it. I was now standing in a world where Paladins had also released in a pretty widespread beta program and Overwatch was constantly looming over its shoulder. Additionally while match making was a thing… the player base had dwindled to a point where I had to sit there waiting for fifteen to thirty minutes to get a match. When I did… you had one of two options… the map that was awesome and tuned… and the map that was way the hell too big and had some memory leak issues. Once again I put the game away and thought “I will try it again at launch” because honestly I thought surely there had to be a launch window just around the corner.

Things got more complicated in May of 2016… when Motiga announced that it would be inking a deal with Perfect World to become the official publisher of Gigantic. We all knew the writing on the wall with this one… it meant they needed more money and this was a way of obtaining it. This erased that Windows store exclusivity… but also probably watered down any support Microsoft was willing to give. Additionally it set up a scenario where the player base was forever going to be fractured. One version of the game would be working with Xbox One and Windows Store users… and another version of the game would be running through the Perfect World Arc client. Overwatch released in May 2016 and Paladins in September 2016… triggering an arms race of companies trying to create their own version of this new genre that was being branded the “Hero Shooter”… all without even a potential date on the horizon for the launch of Gigantic.

When it finally launched in July of 2017… it was the textbook definition of too little too late. It released on Windows Store/Xbox One and a version that ran on the Arc Client available through the Perfect World store or Steam. At this point unfortunately… nobody really cared. I’ve never actually played the released version of this game because while I filled up a hype balloon at Pax South 2015… over the course of the next few years a bunch of tiny punctures drained every bit of it away to where I was left with a flaccid balloon that could never be inflated again.

Amazing little gem of a game whose light is dying along with its playerbase.

The above quote is from a review on steam… and I feel like it sums up Gigantic as a game nicely. It was in fact an amazing idea and it was doing a lot of things that were revolutionary for its time… but the constant failure to launch caused everyone who was once interested to eventually fade away and start playing something more viable. Multiplayer games live and die by the player base… and once you lose the trust of a large core of gamers… there is absolutely nothing you can do ever to get it back. I have to admit I sort of mourn what might have been when it comes to Gigantic. I still feel like it was a great game concept with extremely interesting characters… the problem is… Overwatch did everything better except for the core concept of having two gigantic monsters duking it out for control of the map.

Motiga was a really cool company, and I hope that each of the folks that managed to hang on through the end… find a good home in another company where they can bring their interesting ideas to a game that actually has a chance. I feel like both Microsoft and Perfect World kept the balloon afloat for way longer than it would have were they not in this story… but in the end we wound up with a really complicated sequence of event and a fractured player base which is a critical fault for any game. This is by no means the complete tale of this game or some gripping piece of journalism, but instead just my personal experience as I watched and hoped that they would get their shit together and make it work.

Flame Broiled Defeat

February 1, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I met my first real defeat in Monster Hunter World and completely failed a quest. That quest was me attempting to beat Anjanath in the Ancient Forest, which admittedly I am super happy I did the tracking work I already did for this mob in spite of what everyone has told me. I managed to find it super fast and now we get into the part of the show where I talk about my horrible ideas. I have thought this thing was serious business since the first moment I saw it… and as a result I went ahead and threw up a flare to see if anyone wanted to join me. Within moments I had a full party of people tasking on this monster and in the grand scheme I thought it was going pretty well… then I started noticing other players fainting. It was around or about this point that I remembered that you get four faints per party… not per person. So when I finally fainted myself… it happened to be the fourth one our party had gotten and the quest immediately failed out. In theory I should have just tried this on my own because I was managing to land some significant hits in on the big guy but I guess the truth is I just sorta like running with party tactics going on. I have been joining other folks quests and enjoying trying to learn how to play off of the strengths and weaknesses of the other weapons. Mostly I am wanting to learn how not to trip up other players with the Longsword which has been a problem that other people have reported with the weapon. As far as I could tell this was not actually happening because I tend to favor surgical strikes rather than just flailing away with R2 sweeping attacks. My goal for tonight is to seek revenge and down a flame breathing dinosaur.

My enjoyment of this series is way more focused on playing with my Palico than probably any other element. So much so that the first thing I do whenever I drop down on a map is find where the free roaming tailrider Palicos are and go get one. I love the sequence of events that happens when your Palico meets one out in the wild. They get together and then high five and cheer… and moments later you have a new friend following you around and helping you. This is literally the best part of monster hunter and the most purest joy I feel in the game. Last night I found a Palico wearing the Horizon Zero Dawn Watcher suit and I just about lost my mind. It too had the Pukei-Pukei bow equipped so it was an interesting combination of two mostly ranged characters helping me out. My weapon development is sort of stalled out at the moment because I am not exactly sure what I need to get the next ranks as I have been using the Bone Shotel III for a few nights now. I can in theory make an elemental version… but its base attack is slightly lower so for the moment I am sticking with what I have.

I will close out this mornings post with a video of one of the varied Monster Hunter World cooking sequences. I just cannot explain how happy the Palicos and the Felyne chefs make me. I find myself getting a meal cooked even when I am just going to go wandering around in the wastes doing nonsense for an hour completing bounties. There are a lot of people who lament the change in the cooking song, but I never knew the previous one so its not like I am missing anything particular. What I love is the completely over the top cooking sequence… which admittedly was also one of the things I loved about Final Fantasy XV so maybe I just like digitally rendered food? I’ve tried to play Generations again but find it particularly hard to control the game with my existing 3DS XL… which is still way too small for my tastes. As I have talked about in the past… I have large hands and a lot of controllers just feel awkward in them. I play PS4 with the Hori FPS Plus which itself is a way larger controller than the default PS4. It really makes me wish that Generations existed for the Switch because I think I could get into the game there knowing I had the option of playing docked if I want to… which admittedly I play switch docked 90% of the time. Side note… I consider the default Xbox One controller a little small as well and similarly have found an aftermarket alternative that I love in the form of the no longer made Power A Fusion Pro. Thankfully I have managed to pick up a couple of those… one for PC and one for Xbox One off Ebay for way cheaper than that Amazon listing.

Catfish Dargon

January 31, 2018 by Belghast

At least on some level I feel like I might be playing this game wrong. I’ve put a little over eleven hours into the game at this point and I am just now hunter rank 4. At this point I have managed to take down Great Jagras, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Pukei-Pukei, Barroth and Jyuratodus. Now some of those I have taken down multiple times like I keep farming Barroth for bits and pieces to craft gear and I have taken down Kulu several times just because killing the angry chicken is fun. Side note… hunting Kulu in Wildspire Wastes is so much easier than Ancient Forest because it doesn’t keep running away up into the canopy of the trees. My mission for last night was to farm some Barroth and attempt to get better gear… and another Monster Bone M which I did in both cases. I don’t have a full set of gear yet, but I did manage to upgrade two pieces of Barroth gear and one piece of Jyuratodus. It is around this point that I decided to start using the Samurai cosmetic armor because wearing Barroth armor makes you look like you are a walking rack of prime rib. Jyuratodus so far has been the most annoying thing I have fought to date because it cannot decide if it as a Catfish or a Dragon… so from now on it will simply be known as Catfish Dargon. I never really got to a point where I was in danger…. I just found it terribly annoying to fight because being in the water and mud is dumb and I never want to do that.

On my Palico front I now have Kenzie kitted out in a full set of Pukei-Pukei armor which seems to be working well. I am completely in love with my Palico, and it sorta makes me sad that in the above screenshot she ever doubts that I will be bringing her along on the next hunt. Side note… I have no clue if my Palico has a gender but in my head canon Kenzie the Cat is female so Kenzie the Palico is also female. I feel like I am improving at the game largely because of the continued shortening of time it takes me to hunt certain things. My first Barroth kill was a complete bear and I wound up firing an SoS flare because I had run completely out of mega potions. On kill number two at the beginning of last night I still struggled a bit, but never really got close to either fainting or running out of resources. On kill number three… it finally felt like I knew what I was doing and simply executed a sequence of attacks I had rehearsed over time. The other thing that I finally started getting the hang of last night was mounting the monsters and going into rodeo mode. I think more than anything that has probably sped up my process because when I finally knock them down I can get in a bunch of really powerful attacks. When I took down Kulu last night after my first ride the monster was already limping. So far all of the monsters have been challenging, but I feel fairly comfortable in my longsword abilities and it is mostly me just executing on the same things I have learned to this point… which I guess is maybe the point of the game?

I love the cheesy grin and weird uppercut pose on my guild card, so you are likely going to keep seeing it over and over. The biggest thing I am not quite grasping at this point is how the hell multiplayer actually works. My theory was that I could potentially hop in on quests that folks were doing in the game session I happened to be in. However when I click on a name everything seems to be grayed out. I have no clue how social connectivity is supposed to work in this game and I have no clue what throwing someone a guild card actually does but I keep receiving a bunch of them. Connecting with other people to play the game just feels way harder than it should be. It should be as simple as… is a friend of yours on… okay click to join their game and kill monsters together. Instead it feels like this weirdly contorted system that makes absolutely zero sense to my western brain. I keep thinking back to the madness of Final Fantasy XI and World Passes… and trying to place my mind into that sort of mindset because I just do not get it. If someone could explain to me like I am five how this system works… I would greatly appreciate it. I would love to be able to just hop in on someone else’s session and kill monsters because at this point I could give a shit about quest progression and just want more crafting bits. Based on what I heard from Grakulen last night apparently people can’t join me when I am in an expedition, which seems sorta broken. Regardless I am having a lot of fun in my own little sandbox… but sorta want to start learning how to group to take things down.