Squandered Lore

December 21, 2017 by Belghast

This morning I am getting a little bit of a late start to doing the whole morning thing, because I am in full vacation mode starting today. Sometimes I just skip blogging altogether, but given how many days in a row I will be on vacation I figured I probably needed to at least make an effort. Sometimes in the course of this blog I have to post something more for my own sake rather than actually informing or entertaining. This is one of those mornings. Last week the Last Jedi was released and it signaled the next chapter in the Star Wars storyline. You have to understand I have a very special bond with this franchise. I was roughly two years old when I saw the first one and left the theater talking about “Darfa Bader” and wanting everything in my life to be Star Wars themed.

The Kenner action figures only served to cement this franchise even harder in my brain and at this point I find it very difficult to unravel the movies, the comics, the expanded universe novels, and eventual animated shows and the video games. They all combine together in my head into this amalgam I know as Star Wars. So it was a completely foregone conclusion that I would see Last Jedi. The prequels taxed my love of the franchise but my devotion was rewarded as Force Awakens and Rogue One brought back that passion with a burning fury. I felt extremely confident that Star Wars was in good hands as we entered this new era and new set of characters. The legacy of Star Wars seemed safe and good… so when I stumbled out of the theater at midnight on opening Thursday I was somewhat shocked and confused that I wasn’t feeling the same rush of elation that I did with the first two “modern” movies.

As time passed little frustrations started to worm their way into my brain, and when I watched it again last Saturday with my wife… those frustrations reached a crescendo. She turned to me as we were walking out of the theater and asked if it was just her… or if I also didn’t think it was as good as Force Awakens or Rogue One. I remember feeling like the movie dragged a bit on opening night, but I mostly equated that to the fact that I was up past my normal bed time. However watching it as a Saturday afternoon matinee, it seemed even longer. Basically the frustrations had settled into distaste… which only became compounded as I realized… I was not feeling the same love and passion that a lot of my friends seemed to be. I’ve had two kinds of conversations over the last several days, the first is real life friends coming to me with a concerned look on their face and asking if I took didn’t think the movie was that good. The second are mostly online friends trying to somehow make me understand just how precious and magical the movie is by constantly linking me articles that they thought were a “good read”.

The thing is… I get why the people that love this movie think that it is such a liberating and “brave” experiment. The problem is I just simply disagree with all of the points that these friends and articles and youtube videos and thought pieces seem to think are so perfect. What they watched was a life changing experience, and what I watched was a movie that squandered everything that could have been for the sake of being purposefully contrarian. What I watched was a movie that nuked everything from orbit to create a blank slate, and in doing so washed away everything that kept me going from movie to movie. Star Wars for me has always been this rich tapestry of mythology and religion and fable. The thing that always kept me engaged was trying to solve the puzzles left in the universe and figure out how they would ultimately change the future of the franchise. This movie grabbed a bullhorn and screamed at me that those puzzles and bits of lore that I had been hanging onto no longer matter.

This morning’s post took a very different turn than I had intended. I originally had planned on doing a full on spoilery discussion about each and every thing that bugs the hell out of me about this movie, and instead this ended up as a fairly non-spoiler narrative about my feelings. Tomorrow more than likely I will do the Festivus style airing of grievances… this is hilarious considering Saturday actually is Festivus. I’ve spent the week listening to folks as they tried desperately to explain to me why I should love this movie, and quite frankly each time someone sets off on another well intentioned attempt to educate me… it just makes me dislike the movie even more. In truth I don’t hate the Last Jedi, I just don’t think it is anywhere near as good of a movie as it could have been. There are moments I love in that movie that I would never trade for the world, but there are so many little details that just overwhelm that good will. Tomorrow I will get into it, but for today I just needed to do a little blog therapy and get this post out of my brain.

Dawning Sorta

December 20, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday the new and revised Dawning Holiday started in Destiny 2, but I feel like in order to understand the rest of this post we need to talk a bit about what Dawning was in Destiny 1. This holiday originally ran from December 13th 2016 to January 3rd 2017 and was lumped in with a major update to the game. As a result it is a little hard to separate what is the Dawning and what is the content, but I am going to talk about it anyways. In Destiny 1 we had these things called record books that included a bunch of achievements and completing them unlocked loot. There was one of these specific to the dawning event and featured achievements that involved either the brand new strike scoring system also included with the patch or the triumphant return of the Sparrow Racing League (SRL). SRL is legitimately my favorite part of Destiny 1 and when it came back over the holidays last year… I ground my little face off running endless Sparrow Racing League matches. With this it also introduced a ton of new SRL themed gear and sparrows including these really awesome class items that left a neon streak behind you as you raced on your sparrow. In addition to that three exotics were introduced into the game, as well as a series of presents that were in the tower allowing you to open one each day and get a mixture of good items and complete junk. Needless to say there was a lot of stuff included in the holiday and a good deal of it like Strike Scoring became a permanent part of the game after that.

This year around The Dawning is running from December 19th through January 9th and as much as I hate to be one of those folks… seems to be largely a bunch of new Eververse Trading Company items. You are given one Dawning Engram by logging in and then there are milestones that allow you to earn one each week. When you XP up it appears that you still get a Season Two Engram rather than one of the special event ones, so your ability to actually get items from this event without spending some money seems to be at least somewhat limited. Instead of presents that give you stuff for free… you get to loot a quest item each day that requires you to do some stuff and then turns in at one of the tower NPCs for some dawning loot. The first one is a pattern that goes in your ghost shell slot and requires you to collect 10 phase glass on Io and kill 15 servitors… which largely meant hanging out and farming the Servitor events as they spawned in the EDZ. I turned in and got an exotic ship and a shader, but based on what I am seeing this appears to be essentially the equivalent of opening one of those Dawning Engrams… so wide loot table including full sets of class armor, 4 unique emotes, 10 unique ghost shells including 1 exotic, 10 unique ships including 2 exotics, 11 unique sparrows including 2 exotic, 4 unique shaders, and 6 unique transmat effects. At any given time there are seven of that assortment of forty five items available for purchase with bright dust on the Eververse vendor… pending my math is correct. Essentially this is an Eververse holiday with Eververse rewards… and a minimal method of earning them through normal game play rather than swiping your card.

The biggest problem I have with the event is the complete and total lack of the Sparrow Racing League. Instead we get Mayhem Crucible modes… which admittedly are amazingly fun, but no crazy swoop bike racing action. For the uninitiated Mayhem is a mode of the Crucible where your super regenerates at an insane rate… and grenade and melee are slightly increased as well. It means that it takes what feels like a minute to get your full super bar, and as a result you are running around doing really silly things the entire match. I played quite a bit of it last night and it was enjoyable to run around the map trying to out super all of the other supers. Oddly enough I got plenty of normal weapon kills also as I sat back and picked off weakened targets when two different super saiyans clashed in battle. As fun as Mayhem mode is… unless it sticks around as a new permanent fixture it is going to feel super hollow. The original Dawning added so much new permanent content to the game, that this version feels extremely lacking. Strike scoring is one of those systems that is desperately needed in Destiny 2 and with the bulk of the dawning items coming from cash shop purchases rather than a book of achievements… it just feels cheap. I am as big a backer of Destiny 2 as they come, but even I have to stop and think that this seems more cash grab than content.

The Visionary

December 19, 2017 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole lot to say this morning given that by the time I got home I pretty much crashed on the sofa and wound up officially asleep about 9:30. Last week I had several nights where I was not asleep until after 1 am and I think they are catching up with me. I played a little WoW and a little Destiny 2 but nothing really of sufficient effort to talk about it at length. The bulk of my evening was an hour long call with my folks where we talked through christmas plans or the potential lack thereof considering we are expecting an ice storm. We mostly agreed that if the weather was dicey… Christmas could be any day given we can get together. My mom used to be super big on doing things on the official day but seems to have mellowed out over the years. Mostly this morning I wanted to make sure my readers knew about something… namely the Fall of Osiris comic book over on Bungie.net. Personally I would have rather they just released it in one of the comic book e-reader formats for us to download and enjoy on our reader of choice… but the step through the panels format works well enough. I mean in theory we could recreate it in PDF or CBZ format considering you can easily open the images in another window and snag them that way. That might be a side project… but anyways it is 10 pages worth of story and well worth the read.

Buried in the middle of the comic is a panel showing the written Prophecies of Osiris. Of course Redditors immediately noticed that at the top of the text was a broken line that looked a lot like morse code, and then another one quickly decoded it. The end result is a code that when input into the Destiny redemption page rewards you with an emblem. Simply input the following text in the code redemption box…

XFV-KHP-N97

As a result you end up with “The Visionary” emblem shown above.

Conflicted Feels

December 18, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend we ended up recording a full on spoilers Last Jedi show because it seemed to be a reasonable thing to do. Functionally all of the AggroChat crew had already seen the movie and were ready to start talking about it. In this discussion however I seemed to be the odd man out in the way I feel about the movie. In truth I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it on Thursday night when I saw it, and as I saw it Saturday with my wife I started to get more critical of it. When we walked out of the theater my wife was similarly not sure how she felt about the movie, and then as we were walking to the car said she was a little disappointed. The problem is that seed grows over time and there are certain things in the movie that really bother me. It has a film with a lot of really awesome moments, knitted together by a bunch of other stuff that I am not really sure how to think about it. Essentially I am at a place where I feel like this is the weakest of the modern Star Wars movies and I place it firmly behind Empire Strikes Back, Force Awakens, Rogue One and A New Hope. There are individual moments however that could easily elevate the movie above all of those… were the rest of the film that strong as well. I remember thinking Thursday night… that the movie seemed really long but I mostly chocked that up to being after midnight when we got out of the theater. When we watched it as a matinee on Saturday morning however… it felt somehow longer. My biggest frustration is that the movie really answers none of the questions I had in a satisfying manner, but I won’t go further than that. If you want to hear the whole spoilery conversation check out the podcast episode because I elaborate on a lot of things there… and end up being the single person who seems to feel this way out of the crew. I want so bad to love this movie… but I am just struggling with it much the same way as I did the prequels. I was born and bred with Star Wars in my veins… seeing the first movie as a toddler in the theater… but I am struggling hard to maintain that hype and love.

While sitting around questioning how I felt about the direction of the Star Wars franchise… I spent a significant amount of time playing World of Warcraft. The irony here is that Warcraft is another franchise I often have deep problems with but keep returning because there is a nostalgic core there that I still love. Belghast the Female Orc Warrior on Scryers dinged 110 last weekend and since then I have been focusing on gearing up. This largely has meant a lot of running world quests and more specifically unlocking a good deal of the content on Argus. In the last week and some change I have managed to raise my item level to 896 which means that I can run the LFR version of Antorus. In addition to this I have mostly just been focusing on slowly raising my level by knocking out the world quests that give me things that are useful. Additionally I am trying to burn through all of the Argus quests that I come across in the hopes of gathering enough of <insert newest currency name here> to be able to purchase 910 items. Luckily the world quest drops seem to be scaling quite a bit as I ratchet my level up there and as a result I am creeping closer and closer to 900. The biggest challenge right now is the fact that I have yet to see any Legendary items in spite of doing a bunch of stuff that could in theory get me one. Either they have greatly nerfed the drop rate… or I am just super unlucky. In truth what I need to focus on is finishing my Order Hall campaign, because the fact that I have not done so is starting to hold me back in a bunch of ways. I think tonight pending I feel like doing group content… I will sit down and force my way through it because I know there are still a bunch of missions that I need to run. Essentially I need to finish Valsharah and do some dungeons before I can get to the next set of order hall quests.