Tales of the Aggronaut

Bone Bunny Cat

January 29, 2018 by Belghast

I spent a good chunk of my weekend roaming around aimlessly in Monster Hunter World. I was not terribly certain about this game… until I unlocked expeditions. I’ve talked a little bit about my aversion to timed content, and I was deeply concerned that everything I had been picking up from the quest board involved some sort of a timer. While I had managed to complete most of them well within the time limit… my initial Great Jagras hunt was roughly 27 minutes out of the 50 minute limit. The problem is knowing there is a timer hanging over my head keeps me from doing the things I want to be doing… which is largely exploring and learning the map. Once I realized there was a mode of gameplay that worked much like patrols in Destiny 2… I was all on board with this concept especially since it meant that I could still hunt the big monsters freely on my own time table there. I’ve been spending most of my effort trying to learn the longsword and at this point I have upgraded to the Bone Shotel II… and need a M class monster bone to upgrade to the third step.

My biggest challenge however is now that I have found expeditions… my desire to do any other than bounties has pretty much dropped off the face of the planet. I know I should be progressing the main story through the quests, because I realize I am on somewhat of a timer to complete the Horizon Zero Dawn quest before it disappears. I’ve heard you can join missions from folks already doing that quest and just get your six parts that way, but I would actually like to reach the level required to properly do it. As of last night I got a full set of Bone Armor equipped on both me and my palico and have upgraded all of my pieces to rank 2. I did what so many others seem to have also done… and named my Palico after my real life middle cat Kenzie. It’s fitting because if I was going to go out adventuring with one of my animals… it would absolutely be her. She is my shadow most of the time and can deliver quite a wallop with her paw if she needs to.

If you look at my card it looks like I have made ZERO progress in the game, but I am just sorta doing it in my own style. At this point I have fought Great Jagras and Kulu-Ya-Ku and have been training up tracking on Pukei Pukei and Anjanath which I will tackle before too much longer. My biggest problem right now is the fact that I know going into a big monster fight is a serious time commitment, and as a result I am reluctant to start one because I am not entirely certain when I will get pulled away from my screen. My wife needed my help with something in the middle of the Kulu-Ya-Ku fight yesterday and I was trying desperately to finish it off quickly. Side note… until last night I had no clue I needed to be sharpening my weapon in the middle of these fights so in theory things might go a little smoother next go round. There are so many of those little things that I am starting to pick up this time… that I absolutely did not in Generations. It almost makes me want to go back and give Generations another go… but I realize a big part of why I am starting to grok this game is the fact that it isn’t on a tiny handheld screen. I am definitely not bouncing the way I have in the past and I want to spend more time getting into this title… but also I still have the desire to play other things as well so it is a bit of a juggling act right now. At some point soon I hope to meet up with Stormrazer in game and join his Squad. The whole grouping thing feels like it could have been a lot more transparent and still feels like it was designed for handheld interactions where you are sitting across the room from the people you are playing with. Hopefully they will tweak it over time and make it less obtuse. All in all though I am enjoying myself quite a bit, and I am happy to finally grasp at least the basic concepts of the game that allow me to hunt things without fainting all of the time.

Character Created

January 26, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve largely squandered my normal blogging time this morning by logging into the PS4 and getting things set up initially for Monster Hunter World. I left my system running over night hoping that everything would go ahead and patch successfully. I had heard there was a short day one patch to download and whatever the case I was in fact able to just log in and go this morning. I may or may not have spent way more time on character creation than on doing anything else so far this morning. I truly am a babe in the woods when it comes to Monster Hunter games, but I found a character design that I liked and named my Palico after my middle cat so I think I am going in the right direction at least.

Normally when I create a “Belghast” character I tend to go with black hair, but in this game… black was like absence of all light black. It just sort of looked artificial without any real highlights or reflections. Instead I opted to go with what was actually a dark dark blue grey, which I guess is fitting given that I myself am starting to turn grey. I tried going with the full bushy beard but it didn’t really fit the character in the way I would have hoped. I gotta say that Elder Scrolls Online still has the best beards and quite frankly I am happy that this has beards at all given the proclivity of Japanese and Korean games having shitty facial hair options. In truth I am not even sure how much I will be seeing my own characters face given that it should be encased in some sort of armor.

As far as weapons go… right now I am planning on starting out with the Iron Katana and see how that treats me. Always in the past I have used the equivalent of the buster sword, the super slow and hard hitting weapon and I always feel like I was not terribly agile. This time around I am going to go for what I hope is a reasonably hard hitting weapon that offers some more nimbleness. It goes against every instinct to not pick sword and shield, but I think I am going to try something else at least for awhile. I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about yet because I literally just got up to the first quest this morning, but I plan on poking my head tonight and seeing just how bad I suck at this game.

Lantern Light

January 25, 2018 by Belghast

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had originally intended. The initial goal I had in mind was to go home and attempt to pull myself back into a mindset where I could play Final Fantasy XIV. Instead I hit a few detours along the way the first of which being that shortly after I had finished doing all of the stuff that I need to do when I first get home… the power went out. Now I realize this is mostly an irrational fear, but the first thing that always goes through my head is… did you pay the bill? I am not sure exactly why I have this fear because we have never actually been disconnected from any utility, but it is still something that happens. I was already in my “not suitable for public” clothing, but I did stumble outside long enough to notice that all of my neighbors were also lumbering around by flashlight. I called in the outage and reported it through the menu driven system and then spent the next little bit trying to sort out how to see reported outages without logging into the damned electric company page with an account that I didn’t have. There is a local facebook group that serves as the closest thing we have to a city wide “water cooler” and my second place was to go check there knowing that there would already be a thread of a hundred or so posts about whatever was going on. The lights went out around 6 pm and if the group was to be believed the estimated time for the fix was 11:30 pm… which meant it was about to be a really long night living by lantern light. It was around this time that I remembered I had the Switch and grabbed it from my office settling into the sofa to play some games. I had played some Super Mario Odyssey and was about ten minutes into the Octopath Traveler demo when the power was magically restored at roughly 8 pm.

From there I did all of those things I had been avoiding… like opening the fridge to get a drink and settled down to play some Final Fantasy XIV. Upon logging in I got greeted by friends… roamed around Limsa Lominsa and then promptly logged out because I just did not have it in me to do the group activities I need to do in order to make any semblance of forward momentum. Instead I popped into Elder Scrolls Online and continued work on Stonefalls. This zone is like a giant immovable object for me and the sooner I get on the other side of it the better. It has singlehandedly killed every attempt at playing an Ebonheart Pact character because even though it has gone through a ton of changes since alpha… it still is not what I would call a good zone. The weird shape and geometry of the zone makes everything a bigger chore than it should be. Objectives that might look really close on the map instead require you to backtrack half the way across the zone to find the proper entrance into the region you need to go. All of this is just the functional reasons… but there is also the fact that it is bleak. The quake color palette and the constant smokey haze and falling ash make it not exactly the most visually exciting place to be. I did however feel like I made a bunch of progress in the zone last night and checked off a bunch of areas. I am not even sure where I am in the zones main story quest, and if I could change one thing about Elder Scrolls online I would make it so that those primary quests required to move to the next area were somehow highlighted differently in a FFXIV style manner.

The other thing on my radar is that at the time of taking this screenshot we were roughly 17 hours away from unlocking Monster Hunter World on the PS4. Granted I have no actual intent of staying up until midnight to play this game, but I do plan on playing Friday night. This is going to be my first real attempt at playing a Monster Hunter title while it is in the public zeitgeist and I am hoping that by doing so… I will be able to grok what the fuck is going on. I’ve attempted the PS Vita version and purchase Generations for the 3DS… but largely chocked up a lot of my problems to the fact that I am just not much of a handheld gamer. World however is coming to the PS4 which will allow me to play it on this nifty 43 inch 4k television (even though I don’t have a pro and can’t do the higher resolutions really) and my hope is it will be a much more compelling experience. I’ve always thought this was the sort of game I could get into if I had the proper introduction, because the core loop of grind random stuff to make yourself stronger to take down big bad monsters is one that I can likely get behind. I am hoping I can rely on those who have come before like Ashgar and Stormrazor to get me over the adjustment hump. I am also super excited that Arekkz is devoting a series of videos to easing beginners in. I most definitely need the assistance. Needless to say I will be on the PS4 giving it a whirl tomorrow.

Rift Prime Thoughts

January 24, 2018 by Belghast

The launch of Rift was a really special time for me. It was the first time that my “wow tourism” turned into something else. It was the first time that I really immersed myself wholeheartedly into another game and I loved it so much. At the time Rift was giving me everything I had said I wanted in an MMO and I chose to be a giant purple Bahmi warrior. We had a lot of great times in the game and while we didn’t really start to break into the raid scene until the release of slivers… we regularly had huge guild outings to open raid rifts which were an awful lot of fun. At that point it was just a lot of fun to grab some friends and chase rifts for awhile, and in truth I cannot really remember what caused us to initially fade away. For some players they never really grasped it in the first place as player fantasies turned out to be less than what they expected. Others shifted back to the familiar womb of Azeroth, but a group of us stayed true to the cause for quite some time. By the time the first expansion had rolled around however we were down to a shell of our former selves and a series of server mergers saw our little guild scattered. I personally had landed on my feet with another very active guild in the form of Machiavelli’s Cats helmed by fellow blogger Liore, and entered a sort of second golden age of Rift for me personally. I even managed to make my way into their raid rotation as I did my best impersonation of a dual wielding warrior. With the launch of Storm Legion saw a bunch of changes and a bunch of folks wander off, and before long I was once again left as a member of a dwindling guild. I made an attempt to rekindle the interests of my friends with a fresh start on Faeblight and the proper founding of House Stalwart in Rift, and it again worked for a time… but by three months down the line we were once again down to a handful of people actively playing. Essentially the core problem I have always seem to have with Rift is getting anyone other than myself interested in playing it for any length of time. No matter how solo at heart you happen to be… if you don’t have a guild core to organize around it is really hard to keep excited about logging in every day.

Recently Trion announced that they would be creating “Rift Prime” and it is not in fact shipping a temporal disturbance to your house in an hour or less. I realize I am super late to the party in talking about this… but I’ve been largely out of commission due to the flu so cut me some slack. The idea in theory is that they are trying to roll back time, to an era when the game was subscription based and not fueled by loot box purchases and store purchases. We don’t really have a ton to go on as to what specifically this means, but the full text of the blurb released on January 18th goes as follows.

Introducing RIFT Prime

In the Spring of 2018, we will launch a new server, RIFT Prime. We’ve paid a lot of attention in discussions with all of you and within the broader gaming community regarding business models in the MMO and games industry as a whole.

We have the opportunity to experiment with this fresh RIFT server using an oft-requested subscription model and progressively unlocked content. Our goal for RIFT Prime is to provide the experience that many of you have requested: no lockboxes, a significantly reduced store with more of the current store-based items obtained through gameplay (or removed entirely) – plus the excitement of sequential progression through RIFT’s content with monthly milestones and achievements.

So we know whatever it is will be happening in Spring… which is one of those super squishy definitions as far as time goes. It promises a return to a subscription only server, which admittedly is a huge boon as far as I am concerned. During the early days of Rift the community was something I cared about and I regularly volunteered for groups forming up in public channels. With the introduction of the free to play players… I more or less stopped watching public channels because they were full of nothing that I cared to see. I like the idea of starting over again with the core of vanilla Rift and building back out from there. A good portion of my struggle to stay connected myself is that there is just so much competing wrong information that you have to sift through in order to find what is actual good advise. We are lacking the Rift equivalent of Icy Veins to use as a sanity check to see if you are in fact speccing your characters in a reasonable manner. I think rolling back the sands of time might help this a bit, especially if prime sees its own forum infrastructure to support the initiative. Sure I would miss all of the toys I have accumulated over the years, but I also think having a reason to start fresh without having to deal with the baggage and friction of a free to play experience would be positive.

There are two problems I foresee and I am going to talk a little bit about them. Firstly how vanilla are we actually talking? I never again want to return to an era when the “faction as fiction” patch has not been applied. One of the best things to happen in Rift was the fall of the faction wall and I want to be able to run Guardian and Defiant together freely based on user choice. Secondly… if they build it will the people come back? I can be as interested as possible, but if no core upwelling of players want to come back and play… then my own journey through the game will be truncated as well without a guild base to build out upon. I’ve not had the best luck with guild projects lately, and I am not sure if I even have the energy in me to try and organize anything for the purpose of Rift. Destiny 2 was a colossal mess that never quite materialized into any semblance of regular group activities, but admittedly a lot of the problem there was the complete and total lack of guild chat. I still love Rift and I have so many fond memories of the game, but always run into issues each time I attempt to play the modern incarnation. At some point I left the tracks and never quite figured out how to re-rail myself. If I could find an active community to do this thing with me… then maybe just maybe it would work. However similar nostalgic based trips into other games have been short lived in the past, and even the third resurgence of Rift myself was us trying to do a similar “fresh start” that only wound up lasting three or four months. At this point however I am willing to give it a shot. If I am actively playing a game I am already in the mindset where I want to subscribe in order to support it… so flipping that switch is a no-brainier for me personally. The real question however is… will I have anyone else joining me in that madness?