Tales of the Aggronaut

Barbecue Heroes

January 30, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was apparently all about Monster Hunter World. The game seems to have gotten its hooks into me because quite honestly all I could think about all day long was getting home and playing. More than anything I spent a fair amount of processing cycles trying to figure out how I was going to shift up my attack combos to be more efficient with the Long Sword. Right now I am focusing on a single weapon, and mindset wise… I am tending to think about this game much the same way as I would a fighting game. Traditionally with a fighting game I will focus on a single character and learn them first, so for example… with Street Fighter II I originally focused in on Ryu and learned everything I could about playing him before branching out and picking up Guile or Chun Li for example. Additionally I tend to focus on finding a workable sequence of attacks and getting the most out of those before introducing new things into my mix. For the moment this largely means building spirit gauge with triangle four times and then dumping spirit gauge with r2 four times. I’m trying to work in fade slash in place of just rolling out of the way, but the press X to survive behavior is already deeply ingrained. I need to sort out how to actually do the fade slash that turns you blue and gives you invulnerable frames… but I am not quite there yet.

As far as the evening went… I spent a good deal of it wandering around in the desert. I made it far enough in the quest chain to unlock the next major area of the map and immediately found myself going into explorer mode trying to scout everything I could find from the new area. One of the things I did not realize was that objectives do not show up on the map until my scout flies have found them… so as a result I spent a good deal of the night trying to train up my scout flies for the new area while working on bounties. I am still desperately hunting a M class monster bone, which I am guessing I cannot really get unless I take down something else big. I have been sitting on one for awhile and need another to move up to the Bone Shotel III. Ultimately I think I need to take Barroth down a bunch of times because I could use the materials from him to upgrade the armor for both me and my palico given that is the next big boost stat wise from the bone set I am wearing. Unfortunately Barroth is also the first monster I have had to call for help on… not necessarily because I fainted too many times… but because I saw myself quickly running out of resources. I was down to my last two mega potions and I was having hell gauging how close to finishing it up I was so I went ahead and threw up an SOS flare to get someone to come help me. Unfortunately by the time it was answered I had almost managed to take him down solo… with Barroth falling within a few minutes of the new hunter joining me.

Hunting with a second player though does make things like needing to sharpen your weapon way easier, and stopping to do that constantly really made a difference in my kill time and efficiency. When I fought Pukei Pukei it took me forever to actually find the damned thing because it wasn’t pathing where I had seen it the night before. However once I did… I managed to take it down way faster than I had almost any other monster to date. It ran twice but I managed to kill it at the third location by I believe disabling its wing. I am constantly ripping parts of monsters but also sorta not really understanding exactly what I am doing. I’ve taken off a bunch of tails largely because that and the hind quarters in general seems like a place where I can get solid combo hits without fear of bouncing the attacks. I wish I more fully understood what causes a bounce versus what causes a solid hit. I struggled with bounces constantly with Barroth and I am guessing that was just a side effect of its armor coating. Once I knocked off some plates and exposed the sinew below I managed to land really good hits and started dealing serious damage. I am guessing this is where a weapon like the hammer comes in handy for knocking off the armor plates. I can definitely see how each weapon is functionally deficient against specific types of monsters and why something like the charge blade that is flexible becomes a huge boon. For now however I am focused on my Long Sword and getting the most out of it before moving to something else… which admittedly may be the hammer or great sword next to see how bigger slower weapons feel. The goal for last night was to finally get in the squad and I managed to do that finally towards the tail end of the evening. Monster Hunter does not make grouping with others very easy, and I feel like it is still stuck in the mindset of having a bunch of 3DS around a table where everyone is physically present with each other. All in all though… I’ve already gotten far more out of this venture into the Monster Hunter world than I have with any other version of it I have played in the past which was my ultimate hope.

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.