This is likely going to be a super short post because reasons. Last night was an interesting shift from my personal status quo because I guest hosted on the For the Lore podcast. They were recording their yearly E3 multi-episode and for also reasons… @Samodean was forced to miss. So as a result @ZenBuddhist pinged me over twitter to see if I was willing to join him and @LodurZJ as an alternate. In the past I have always really enjoyed guesting on other podcasts in part because it lets me see how exactly everyone else is doing this recording thing. AggroChat as a whole is largely done almost by accident, and it is sometimes nice to see how those who have a clear purpose actually piece together things. It had also been entirely too long since I had done this sort of thing. The only gotcha was their normal recording time is about 1 hour sooner than I could realistically get to the screen and settled in for the night. Thankfully they pushed it back a little bit and I was able to join in. Hopefully once again I did not make too much of an ass of myself. I am not exactly sure what their release schedule is, because in truth the only release schedule I know is our own. However in the near future you should be able to catch me on the first of a two part episode covering E3 2017 on the For the Lore site.
In other news… Stormblood has officially begun… or at least the head start for those who pre-purchased the game. This expansion had some fairly sweeping changes, and when I first logged in it felt like my hotbars were on fire. Many of the buttons that I had slotted were replaced by a shared pool of role specific abilities. So that mean’t things like provoke and stun now exist in that shared tree from which I was able to slot 5 abilities in total. This is ultimately going to lead to some interesting choices because unlike before with cross class abilities… there were way more than five choices from that pool that I wanted access to. I have a feeling we are going to be swapping up to attempt to tailor for specific fights. For example I now seem to have an AOE taunt… which isn’t that important for leveling… but I could absolutely see needing that on specific fights or if you were taking over the add tank on a specific encounter. For the most part Warrior feels the same with the big change being that we lost the 5 stack resource… that I never can remember the name of and instead get the beast gauge. This swap has a bunch of positive benefits to the class as a whole. For example there were many fights where I would need to hold back using Inner Beast for specific mechanics… but this meant there was the opportunity cost of being capped out at 5 stacks of the buff. Now I have a gauge that goes from 10-100… or functionally 10 stacks of my resource meaning that even while holding back an Inner Beast I can also keep building up at least one more attack in reserve. The other amazing quality of life change is I am not sure if this meter actually decays over time… I have been able to hold onto beast charges for way longer than I could have the equivalent stacks before.
The negative of the launch so far is that the Duty instance system seems to be toast. That means there is a point in the main story quest where you simply cannot proceed past. The folks that habitually skip cut scenes seem to be far worse off because it seems to keep them in a bit of a locked state where they can’t interact with NPCs at all. As a pretty rabid cut scene watcher… I did not have this problem but I did absolutely hit the wall already. There are some that are raging against the machine in chat, and others that keep telling them to calm down. There are of course new Jobs to work on and other things to occupy time until this gets fixed. I am absolutely certain someone somewhere is having a really bad day and working as hard as they can to remedy this. In truth we don’t even know if this is a development thing, but could instead be an infrastructure issue with the hosting environment. Whatever the case… folks are getting stalled out but that sort of goes hand in hand with the release of anything. All in all I am happy that my character largely is going to make the transition without massive horrible feeling changes, and that we get to explore a new part of the world. For the moment I am not bothering to glamour back my helm… and apparently have tiny floppy wings instead of bunny ears.
Some time ago I started a thing. The first piece of information you need to understand this… is to know that Final Fantasy XIV for whatever reasons does not have an idle kick. I remember this causing so much issue during the launch during, and them finally having to implement one. However at some point they turned it back off and sometimes we abuse the hell out of it. Kodra is notorious for staying logged into things… and Final Fantasy XIV is not exception. I remember there have been times when he has stayed logged in in some hub like Mor Dhona for literal days. One night he happened to be AFKing and I decided it would be funny to update the guild MOTD to say something to the effect of finding Free Company members AFK and taking awkward photos with them. This was something that regularly happened in World of Warcraft, and most of the photos were questionable to say the least. Sita however has decided to turn this into an art form and the photos just keep getting better. As you can see.. I made the mistake of going afk right out in front of our guild house. I had been alt tabbed doing other things and it wasn’t long before a number of photos of me and other people showed up on Sita’s twitter feed.
You have to admit they are pretty great. Sita has caught a bunch of Ashgar, Sol, and Kodra as well over time. As far as Final Fantasy XIV goes… we are now in the great outage that is preparing everything for the headstart launch of Stormblood. In theory at 2 am PDT or 4 am my time on Friday the servers come back up… and we officially transition into 4.0. Am I completely ready for this? Truthfully no. I feel like I have done very little to prepare for the launch of an expansion, but I did manage to mostly clear out my bags and also put a dent in some of the stuff that had been clogging my retainer. The biggest problem right now is I don’t remember at all where the MSQ last left off. If I had to guess… the Rising Stones in Mor Dhona since everything seems to take place there. I am not nearly as pumped for this launch as I was for Heavensward, only because I have so many other things to distract me. I am still spending a significant amount of time in World of Warcraft doing random stuff and enjoying myself. I think part of my trepidation is that I know the moment I log in Friday, my character will have changed. Warrior from all accounts is one of the least changed classes, but with Heavensward I knew that more or less I was only going to be adding tools to my kit rather than swapping for a slightly different kit. Functionally those first few levels are largely going to be me getting accustomed to driving a new character, and I am hoping I pick it up quickly.
I think the part I am looking forward to the most however is seeing all the faces show up and seeing the Free Company be a thriving hub once again. That is the part of an MMO cycle that is the hardest to really put into words, is how awesome the launch of a new batch of content is. Folks you might not have seen in months suddenly show up and are interested in doing stuff. I’ve been in one of those cycles where I have simply not been around, and I am looking forward to digging in and getting involved in shenanigans. That said I don’t really want to launch of Stormblood to stall any of the other things I have going on. For example I still want to keep moving the whole RoboSquid thing forward and continuing to take down dungeons with minimal gear and level. I am probably going to take a few weeks off of the Friday night thing in World of Warcraft, but ultimately I want to return to that as well because I still enjoy hanging out with that group of friends. Then there is the huge backlist of things that I really need to play that are not MMO based. E3 had this weird effect of making me want to play games that are already out, more so than making me long for the games on the horizon. Well that is other than Destiny 2… I kinda want access to that now. That said it will have released before I realize it. The older you get the faster time seems to move and right now entire months evaporate before I realize it. Stormblood seems like it was still off in the distance… and now instead it is launching tomorrow.
I am taking a break from my regular E3 regurgitation and commentary… to talk about what might be the last ride of the RoboSquids for awhile. This coming Friday is the launch of Stormblood and with it a lot of us will be working on leveling and get settled into that game. As a result our time for screwing around on low level characters in World of Warcraft is going to be limited. As a result we decided to tackle the one that we had all been dreading… the Stormwind Stockades. Now normally folks just queue up for this dungeon and ignore the fact that like Ragefire… the dungeon entrance is embedded in a faction capitol. To recap our rules…
Level lock at the minimum level for each dungeon
Use whatever means necessary in-between levels
Attempt all raids even if we superfail
Must compete all dungeons at level before moving on
No heirlooms in dungeons
Must get to the dungeon naturally and zone in
Gear cannot be solved by money
Blue quality or higher gear can only come from questing, robo-squid group random drops, or bosses at or below our level lock
I emphasized the rule that is the problem here. At level 20 we had to make our way into Stormwind and get to the zone in for the stockades on our own. There were four of us… myself, Grace, Mor and Ashgar. Like with the Deadmines we ultimately chose to enter through the Grom’gol airship and then run up to Stormwind from there. Two of us chose to take the land route of… Stranglethorn > Duskwood > Westfall > Elwynn and then go through the front door. Myself and Grace chose to hop on our water striders and try and make it up the coast and then enter through the docks… thinking that might end up missing some of the guard density. My ultimate goal was to get to Lions Rest which is the shrine that was erected to replace the big empty area that was formerly the park. My thought was that potentially this had fewer guards and I could then get closer to the dungeon entrance and potentially rez hop my way in.
The funny thing about this entire trip is that I had no clue that the graveyard assigned to horde players… is the Eastvale Logging Camp. I posted a screenshot for reference, each time we died we had to run where my arrow is currently all the way to wherever the hell we died in Stormwind. Simply running across Elwynn forest each time ate a bunch of time. While we were doing this run I decided to start streaming it… and looking back it took roughly 50 minutes for all four of us to make our way into the instance area. We started a race of sorts as we tried to rez our way across Stormwind… and without really meaning to I won. I had an absolute lucky break in that I could rez up on a significantly higher vertical surface and bypass a lot of the dock area. Similarly I also had a lucky rez around the Lion’s Rest area and was able to get into the instance area in about 35 minutes. Grace who also took the dock route joined me at about 44 minutes and then Mor not that long after… and Ashgar having the roughest time getting inside. Ash however took one for the team early on as he attempted to use the spirit healer at the instance hoping to hop back up right there. However whatever faction code is in place caused him to resurrect back at the Eastvale Logging Camp. The funniest part of the night however was the fact that it took us 50 minutes to run there… and 10 minutes to actually do the instance.
After finishing up the Stockades we decided to go ahead and make the push to Blackfathom Deeps. The ultimate goal would have been to go ahead and finish up the level 20 dungeons and allow us to start leveling towards the next cap of 24. However moments after all four of us zoned into the instance… we got disconnected. Last night the servers as a whole had a significant issue, where folks either could not log in, could not see their characters… or simply could not finish loading into the game. Just about when we were going to give up I managed to log into the dungeon… and shortly after Grace and Mor were as well. Ash unfortunately was stuck in a disconnect loop, so we opted to start clearing trash hoping he could eventually make it in. We had cleared to the first boss and were starting to clear the way to the second boss… when Grace disconnected. What was worrisome was the fact that she no longer was responding on Discord as well, meaning whatever issue was happening was on her end… not the server. At this we finally decided that the world was trying to tell us something, and that we should just call it for the night. The frustrating part however is by the time Grace got back in moments later… it seems like the servers as a whole had stabilized. We are not really sure how we are going to do the RoboSquid content going forward, but we might need to set up an almost raid night happening once a week or something. At this point we have run…
Ragefire Chasm
The Deadmines
Wailing Caverns
Shadowfang Keep
Stormwind Stockade
Five dungeons down… only One Hundred Fifty Nine instances left to go…
I am lagging behind a bit in my posts since I am still limiting myself to one of these a day… and whatever I happen to be able to write during my normal morning writing period. Bethesda is traditionally the gaming showcase that I look forward to the most during E3. In the past they have announced a lot of really awesome stuff like Fallout 4… and then turned around and announced that they were going to release said game within six months. Bethesda traditionally is the master of the hype cycle, and while there might be rumors swirling around a game… it won’t actually be confirmed until it is nearly ready to launch and there is a clearly defined pathway to release. This year however it feels like a lot of the amazing announcements were lacking. There were several items that were mentioned at other shows… for example they talked about Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind… that was just literally released on the 6th so it doesn’t feel like that really counts. Similarly Quake Champions was one of their big reveals for last year, and it has been in some state of beta for awhile now so it also feels very “been there done that”. Some of their big announcements this year… were also things we already knew about Doom VFR and Fallout 4 VR. The problem with both is… I don’t have a VR setup nor am I really planning on getting one in the near future so that doesn’t terribly interest me. If I was getting something in the VR space it would probably be the PS4 VR option given that it is a hell of a lot more plug and play and seems to have a wealthy of interesting titles developed for it. Similarly Skyrim Switch was announced… more or less during the Switch reveal, but we finally got some real details and confirmation I guess. Here is a run down of the things that I did think were worth mentioning from the show.
The Evil Within 2
If you have ever wanted to be afraid of milk… watch this trailer. I own copies of Evil Within but I have never actually gotten around to playing it. It is on that long list of things that I want to play but never seem to find time to actually do. In theory I should have been using this time when my wife is travelling to play a whole slow of immersive single player games. Whatever the case this game looks really awesome, even though I had hell actually following what was happening. It seems like this is a continuation of the events from the first game. If you are into that sort of thing it seems like this might be right down your alley.
Dishonored Death of the Outsider
At first we thought this was a DLC sort of like the previous two that were released for Dishonored, however this is apparently an entire stand alone game. Once again it follows the Daud side of the story, and apparently brings back Billie Lurk. I am thinking maybe we will see the same sort of options that you have with Dishonored 2 where you can focus on playing either of the characters, but I might be wrong. Not a whole lot of information is actually out yet about the game, but what we were treated to was a really awesome teaser trailer. It seems like we are going to go Outsider hunting, since they blame that entity for all the chaos that has happened. I know I will be playing it, because I loved Dishonored… but I have also found that I don’t get into the non-Corvo games nearly as much as the mainline series. It is kinda cool though that we are functionally taking two paths at all times to this story… the Story of Corvo and the Story of Daud.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
This title release has been a hotbed of conversation among the AggroChat crew… namely in that I am amped as can be and Kodra and Tam are disappointed. Me getting into the reasons here is going to be super spoilery about the first game… and since I still think everyone should play the first game… I am largely going to refrain. Suffice to say I am pumped in every possible way about the release of this game and it pretty much gave me everything I could ever hope for going going into it. The thing about New Order that I enjoyed the most was seeing this jacked up re-imagining of the world. I am a sucker for alternative history novels, and this game fed right into it… especially given the what would have happened if we lost World War II thing has been played so many times in fiction. On the other side… I have been playing Wolfenstein since 1992 and have played through every iteration of the game including all of the parts of the actual chronology leading up to this game. For those who are curious… and want to start at the beginning… best as I can piece it together you have Return to Castle Wolfenstein > Wolfenstein (2009) > The Old Blood > New Order > New Colossus. The only one I really have hell placing in that order is Old Blood… and it could fit directly before New Order or could even be before RtCW. Anyways the whole point is I am deeply invested in this franchise and have been for years. New Order was a strict departure from the largely mindless kill all the Nazis gameplay, but definitely in a good way. It introduced a compelling story to wrap around the core of the game… but in the end I was still largely there for that core gameplay of leave no one standing. Generally speaking all I am looking for out of a sequel is a chance to dust off the characters I have bonded with… and take them out on another adventure. If New Colossus provides me with this… it is going to be everything I could have hoped for.
Creation Club
I am supremely uncertain of how I feel about this announcement. Bethesda has been working on a way to sell mods for awhile now, and even though they claim this is not paid mod support… it is definitely paid something. Time will tell what this actually looks like in the final version, and what the economy is like. However immediately it is reminding me of the paid creator system in the SOE games. That actually produced some really awesome stuff that allowed talented 3D artists to sell new and interesting weapons. The prime difference there is… that was a previously closed game that was opened up through their creator system. Bethesda games however traditionally are open to mods and if you have the will you can find pretty much anything already for the games. You want to run around Fallout in Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine armor? Sure there is a mod for that. Things like that however cannot officially exist in either the in game mod support or the creation club, because no one has consulted with the license holder to pay for offering that. It seems like Bethesda is damned determined to make this system happen regardless, so I suppose we have to take a wait and see approach on it. I do think it would be nice of the mod creators themselves have a way to actually get paid for their work. In World of Warcraft there are lots of addons that I have chipped in a few dollars to support the author in creating it, because their work greatly improved my game play. Similarly I have no problem chipping in some money to support a Fallout or Skyrim mod… but I would prefer that the money go to the creator and Bethesda not get to take a cut.
PC Gaming Show
The PC Gaming show since its inception has been this really awkward show that never really felt like it could hang with the big kids. That is not to say that Sean ‘Day[9]’ Plott does not try super hard to steer the train and keep it from completely falling off the tracks. This year however… felt almost like a proper show. There were a lot of changes that happened this year that maybe lead to that. Firstly it happened during the middle of the day instead of being something happening relatively late in the evening. Secondly they swapped the primary sponsor from AMD to Intel.. and potentially Intel cares way more about a polished presentation. Thirdly the number of support as far as medium to big reveals went up significantly. Now for me personally… there was not a lot about the show that I cared deeply, however there were definitely some reveals that I could see going over well. Firstly the release of a remaster of Age of Empires seemed to get a bunch of notice, but for me personally I never played the games in that series that much. Similarly there was the reveal of a new Xcom 2 expansion… but that also is not really my style of game. A whole bunch of people seemed to be really happy with the reveal of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord… but again not exactly my type of game. I have never wanted to be a single soldier in the middle of an otherwise RTS style battle. The trailer that did stand out to me that I was the most interested in… was Ooblets which seemed to be this weird amalgam of Pokemon and Harvest Moon and adorable as hell. The Last Night seems awesome… but I won’t be buying it because I don’t want to support anything that creator does after the bullshit he has caused in the past. Ylands also looked kinda cool.. but I feel like I have an overabundance of good sandbox games. It is going to have to do a hell of a lot to stand out from the pack for me. Battletech… I was a backer and am purposefully trying not to play it until it officially releases.
This show… was like the parody anti-show of E3. They didn’t actually announce anything… or in truth show anything. It was sort of the Tim and Eric of E3 Shows and while I personally found it funny there are a lot of people who did not seem to be in on the joke. Among the AggroChat crew it was less in on the joke but instead that they simply didn’t appreciate the style of humor. Buckets of fake blood are not their thing. For me I found it entertaining and watched the entire thing…. but they were trying super hard to be edgy. I wouldn’t suggest actually tracking down the video and watching it since it really ads no value other than an attempt at shock.
