Tales of the Aggronaut

E3 2017: EA and Microsoft

June 12, 2017 by Belghast

First up, you might notice that I have an awesome new masthead featuring my traditional Final Fantasy XIV “Bunny Samurai Warrior” appearance. I commissioned the always amazing @AmmosArt to get this ready for me in time for the Stormblood launch. However instead of waiting and sitting on it… and then revealing it this coming Friday when head start begins… I simply could not hold off my excitement and spent a chunk of yesterday morning switching it out. While the form factor does not exactly fit my blog I am posting the full version regardless. The amount of work that she put into getting everything just right, and even accounting for the fact that I have a blue color scheme to get the reflections in there just fight, along with those coming off of my Palace of the Dead axe… is just phenomenal. Over the years she has sort of become the official un-official artist of whatever the hell I happen to be doing. While I still adore the Chibi work that Rae did all those years ago, Ammo’s art style really speaks to me and has thus-far been pretty malleable to make work with literally anything I want to have her create for me. For example… the Tam commissioned Twitter Warrior Bel, or the extremely amazing Destiny themed Sunbreaker Bel. Other than that… this weekend was largely about the beginning of E3 when they cram a whole slew of not officially part of E3 shows into the days before the doors open. So far I have seen Electronics Arts, Microsoft, and I stayed up for the silly late Bethesda show. It has been a truly mixed bag of experiences.

Electronic Arts Show

Firstly on AggroChat I gave the analogy of Electronic Arts being the Dursleys from Harry Potter fame… and Bioware being the boy kept under the stairs. Bioware is the only reason why I care about Electronic Arts in the least, and all we saw from the studio during the show was a 52 second teaser video for the new IP Anthem. There was a follow up of course during the Microsoft event with more footage, but never have I felt like Bioware was more of a red headed stepchild. It feels like EA is trying to them of their Biowareyness, but I will talk about that a little later when I talk about anthem. As far as games… we had plenty of sports.. now with a focus on roleplaying elements and campaign storyline. This was so much the case that I literally thought for a second that they had dropped the madden name and instead decided to call this years football offering “Longshot”. As far as games I was interested in… Battlefront II seemed really cool and they talked about how they plan on having this cinematic campaign experience. However when it came time to show a demo… they instead showed us more Star Wars Battlefield game play on and over the planet of Naboo… which was cool but didn’t exactly show off any of the promised new features.

There was an extremely interesting prison break game called A Way Out by the folks that created Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. The gotcha here is that the game must be played in multiplayer either couch co-op or networked. I am not super keen on needing to complete a game with another person in tow, nor do I really have a ready “player two”. They also showed off Need For Speed Payback, which is cool… but literally should have been branded a Fast and the Furious game because it feels like those movies feel. Don’t get me wrong, Need For Speed is a really fun experience but they are also not pre-order or even day one games for me, but instead something I pick up when prices drop. Battlefield 1 moves to the Russian front, which I would probably care about a lot were I actually playing Battlefield… or if I even owned it. The Russian front at least in World War II games is always the awesome front… so I imagine that will probably be the case for Battlefield 1 as well. All in all it was a pretty disappointed show filled with a few truly awkward moments as people not used to using a teleprompter had to suddenly use one. At least one of these moments served as our reminder that YouTube content is highly scripted, and doesn’t exactly translate to extemporaneous speaking. The highlight of the night was twitter errupting with a bunch of people asking how the hell this “iJustine” person was.

Microsoft Show

Leading into E3… Microsoft needed to come out swinging. This has been an entire console generation where they have been lagging far behind Sony and it all started with a poor reveal of the Xbox that focused on its multimedia capabilities. This years E3 started with the announcement of the Xbox One X… or XBoneX the Edgelord from now on. Its a horrible name… if they simply dropped the one part and went with Xbox X it would make a lot more sense. I think part of this is cognitive dissonance from the fact that Xbox One is still a really stupid name for the third Xbox in the product cycle. All of this aside however it does look like a good platform, and the $499 price point seems reasonable… for folks who actually care about what it is offering. My problem with this and the Playstation Pro (which is also a stupid name) is the fact that I don’t own anything 4k for this to take advantage of. Honestly nor do I have any real plans in the near future to shell out the money to purchase something 4k, and if I did… it wouldn’t likely be in my office but instead in the living room where I wouldn’t hook up a console anyways. Basically I am not the target demographic but of those who are… they seemed okay with the announcements. The games however… that was where the story was for me given that they announced something like 42 games… albeit a lot of those were in a lengthy montage that always seems to say “we wanted to name drop but didn’t care enough to really show it”.

Metro Exodus

This game looked so damned amazing, but also seemed extremely scripted. I am interested to see what the moment to moment gameplay is like. Functionally it just proved that the new Metro cranks up the already pretty high quality bar.

Assassin’s Creed Origins

This game looks really interesting… but unfortunately as I have learned while attempting to play 2, 3 and 4… I really don’t like Assassin’s Creed games. The sneaking about is exactly the opposite way that I want to play. If there were more stand up fights, and if I could simply go from one end of town to the other systematically exterminating the enemy faction… I would probably like the game a lot better.

State of Decay 2

My criticism here is the fact that nothing about the trailer that they showed… revealed anything about the game or at least did not explain why State of Decay is not “just another zombie game”. I loved the first game and purchased it when it first launched on Xbox Live Arcade… and then again on PC… and then again when the Year One Survivor bundle came out… and again for a handful of people when it went on sale. I am a huge supporter of Undead Labs and what they bring to the Zombie genre, but I am always disheartened when the take away on twitter is that we really don’t need any more zombie games. We need good games regardless of genre, and if this is anything like the original… it is going to be an amazing game. My hope is that this game will allow them to go beyond the scope limitations they had with the first. My other hope is that we finally get multiplayer, because the first one would have been such an amazing experience if I could have drug a few friends into the world to scavenge with me. While I am writing this I am getting the severe itch to fire back up State of Decay.

Anthem

I am really not sure how I feel about this game. On one hand every possible nerd nob was turned well past 11 in the demo, and if you had told me that this was Destiny with the storytelling that Bioware is traditionally famous for… I would be throwing money at the screen. However there isn’t a lot in the demo that covers what the story will even be like other than a brief mission that was given to you as you wandered through town. The suits themselves… remind me of this amalgam between Pacific Rim and Fallout 4 Power Armor. I love the Jet packs… and I really hope you start out with those. Jet Packs felt amazing in Mass Effect Andromeda, and more than anything I wanted to use them as a means to traverse the areas… even though the Nomad was freaking amazing. The first strike the game gets for me though is the fact that it is a third person shooter. I really prefer first person, however when scoping it felt like maybe the perspective is going to be a reasonable one. I have old eyes and I just found it hard sometimes to sight in head shots in Division when they were at the actual ranges you would want to use a sniper rifle for. The other big strike against the demo is just how much it feels like the initial Division demo did. The same sort of bullshit fake voice chat, and the same sort of “we can do anything” open world game-play showcasing a bunch of stuff without really zeroing in that deep on any of them.

I was burnt by The Division, because what they showed at E3 never really seemed to materialize in the full version. The final game was fun enough but was definitely the sort of game you needed to have a squad with you in order to progress at reasonable levels. I still have yet to hit the level cap because there is this weird doldrum where my gear isn’t really good enough to make the harder content easier… but I am also not getting enough cash to be able to fix that problem. With Anthem I am cautiously optimistic, but also concerned that this is a steep departure for Bioware. Mass Effect was never really known for its combat prowess… and what made Destiny work and the Division not for me at least was the moment to moment feel of the gunplay. For Anthem to ultimately be my game they are going to need to make it feel unique each time I pick up a different kind of weapon, and be more than just a mech suit fantasy. There is a huge part of me though that wants to throw abandon to the wind and join this hype train. However there is that other part that is just cautious before I give my heart away to another game.

At this point I am just running out of time… but if you have the couple hours at some point you just watch the full press conference. I will talk about my general disappointment in the Bethesda conference at another time.

E3 2017 Anticipation

June 9, 2017 by Belghast

Next week is e3 and as is usually the case the first glimmers of what is going to be talked about have started leaking their way onto YouTube. There are several sites out there with pretty legitimate looking lists of what games have an have not been confirmed to be appearing. Functionally the show tends to revolve around several large press events, with a smattering of other news trickling out around them. The big shows tend to happen before the actual event starts, which means this weekend. For those interested here is the schedule I have been able to scrape together… most of which will be available through a stream of some sort.

Electronic Arts – Saturday June 10th – 12 pm PDT
Microsoft – Sunday June 11th – 2 pm PDT
Bethesda – Sunday June 11th – 9 pm PDT
Devolver Digital – Sunday June 11th – 10 pm PDT
PC Gaming Show – Monday June 12th – 10 am PDT
Ubisoft – Monday June 12th – 1 pm PDT
Sony – Monday June 12th – 6 pm PDT
Nintendo – Tuesday June 13th – 9 am PDT

The last several years the PC Gaming show has been an awkward cringefest to watch… but it sort of fit its late night time slot. With them moving it to a morning slot, I am wondering if that is a ploy to get more folks to show up and peddle their pc gaming wares. Whatever the case I can pretty much guarantee that I am going to be watching most if not all of this over the next few days… or at least the ones that are not happening during work hours. The show I am traditionally the most excited for is Bethesda, because in years past they have absolutely nailed giving gamers exactly the sort of things they wanted to be hearing about. With the Fallout 4 story arc finished, and a new Elder Scrolls outing still supposedly years away… I am not terribly certain what we might be seeing. It is almost certain that we will be seeing some Quake Champions news… but a twitchy competitive reflex shooter doesn’t exactly excite the 40 year old version of myself the same way it might have the 17 year old me. I mean I can always hope beyond hope that they will drop the mic this year with the reveal of Elder Scrolls VI but I won’t exactly be holding my breath either. Instead here are the few titles I am really looking forward to hearing more about.

State of Decay 2

stateofdecay2

State of Decay is one of those games that I loved… but never really played as much of it as I would have liked. At the time of release it was an Xbox 360 title and I just didn’t spend that much time playing my 360. When it released on PC I had a furious few weekends of playing it again… and have wound up purchasing it as a gift for several people. However I never really gave the game as much time as I would have liked because it was missing one core feature… multiplayer. This was the sort of world that I really wanted to go out and explore with my friends, and the absence of that option tarnished the experience for me. What I am wanting from E3 is just more of everything and a firm release date on when we can expect the game.

Destiny 2

destiny2ikora

I am just so damned ready for this game to release if we are being honest. Right now I just want more. I want more information, more game play footage… and I am hoping their mic drop is that we can download and start playing the beta now. I am not holding my breath, but that ultimately is what I want out of the experience. I am already sold and have already pre-ordered the PS4 copy… since the PC pre-orders are not open yet. I want to know a firm date of when the PC is going to launch, because even if it is delayed I want to know how long of a wait.

Farcry 5

farcry5teaser

This is probably the first Farcry game since the first that I am really excited about. America as a whole has a really hard time confronting our own lunatic fringe or religious extremists. Everything about this game seems like we are going to be fighting back against the madness of a weird religious cult of sorts. I am ready to roam around the backwoods of Montana and take out bad people doing bad things.

Super Mario Odyssey

supermarioodyssey

They had me at “new mario game for switch” but what I am wanting is more details. I want to know when exactly this is going to release because up until now we have only had some wild speculations as a “christmas season” launch. I also want to know more about this real world/mario world fusion, and I am wondering if it is going to have tie ins to Super Mario Land in Universal Studios Japan. Nintendo is generally the least forthcoming with the conferences as far as hard data goes… but I really just want to know when this is going to launch.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

bloodstaineddemo

We have not heard much from “Not-Castlevania” in awhile and I am hoping they have something to show off at E3. Once again there is the common theme of me knowing a game is coming out… and just wanting some hard data on it. I am a backer and have already played through the Demo game they released as a proof of concept several times… and now I am just ready for the full meal. Everything I experienced to date was spot on with exactly how I wanted this game to feel… they just need to push it across the finish line and not end up botching it in the process.

Mixed Results

June 8, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I spoke about an idea we had of trying to level lock and run dungeons “legitimately” and as a result slowly work our way through the content as a trio. I personally went with a Brewmaster Monk, a class I have never really devoted much time to playing. Grace similarly fell into a familiar role of healing, rolling a Mistweaver Monk. That left Mor with rolling an Assassination Rogue to be our damage dealer. We went into this experiment quite honestly expecting to largely face roll Ragefire Chasm. What happened instead was absolutely not anything even vaguely close to facerolling. From the first pull we knew we were in for some work, given that firstly… we were in an assemblage of whatever gear we happened to scrape together making our way to 15. Secondly we were going in as a trio instead of a full five player group. All in all given how much we underestimated the content… I feel largely okay about the evening. We struggled our way through the dungeon, boss after boss until we sat stalled at the final encounter. Lava Guard Gordoth has this ability called Seismic Slam, that deals damage to all players within 25 yards of the boss. There is no cast bar or from what I can tell any real way to mitigate this. The challenge simply put is the fact that this ability was a oneshot, and we could see no real way of avoiding it.

The problem here is that we are quickly realizing that the content is seemingly scaled for players in Heirlooms… and not necessarily gear that you happen to get organically. When I am in my full heirloom set of gear like pictured above I am sitting somewhere in the vicinity of 1600 health. When wearing completely legit questing gear… I am sitting somewhere around 500 health. Quite simply put we were running into a hard gear wall that we need to scale somehow. Because we are insane however… we are planning on attempting to throw a rope over the ramparts and scale that wall anyways. The first challenge is to decide what the actual firm guidelines are for this project. Right now we have a handful of rules written in a spreadsheet where we are attempting to keep track of the item levels for each dungeon. The rules to date look a little something like this.

Level lock at the minimum level for each dungeon
Use whatever means necessary during the in-between levels
Must complete all dungeons at level before moving on
No heirlooms in dungeons
Must get to the dungeon naturally and zone in
Attempt all raids even if we super fail

What we failed to address however is what exactly is fair game for gearing ourselves to be able to complete the content. There are a bunch of options that I see and they all sorta have their own pluses and minuses.

Continue Questing While Level Locked

This one is pretty straight forward. Stay level locked and just keep working on quests, with the thought process that eventually you would get good enough gear to be able to complete the content. The positive here is that it is entirely organic… at least in a fashion, the the negative is you are functionally making the next level grind a bit harder given that you will need to do more grinding and have fewer quests to rely on. That said we have already agreed that leveling between dungeon locks in heirlooms is completely fair game.

Auction House

Another thing we need to identify is if we are willing to allow purchasing items from the Auction House. My gut feeling here is no, especially given that we are currently in the twink PVP bracket and some of the decent options are going for as much as 300,000 gold. It always just feels wrong to buy our way to success in the dungeons.

Pre-Farming Gear

Another option is to simply run our alts through the dungeon and farm up a bunch of greens then trade them around. If I remember correctly Deadmines drops greens like candy and they should in theory be in the appropriate level range. I am mostly torn on this one because this is my gut reaction on how to solve a gearing problem… just throw a bunch of greens at it. However this also maybe tarnishes the legitimacy of the runs. Similarly we could simply take turns running each others characters through a zone… but that actually feels significantly worse to me given that you are able to pick up boss loot as well as an assortment of random greens that could have dropped anywhere in that level range.

Battlegrounds

Grace and I actually tested this one out and in the grand scheme of things this seems like a reasonable option to get an assortment of greens. The one match we played we both got really nice at level cap greens that were sizable upgrades over our questing look. The negative is that for Grace at least it did not seem to respect her loot spec choice and she continued to get agility gear instead of intellect gear. Additionally as stated this is the twink bracket which means it isn’t exactly the fairest fights in the world. However wearing heirlooms seemed to put us on a fairly even footing with the twinklords.

Crafted Gear

The potentially best option is to get a bunch of gear crafted that the characters can wear and start with that as a baseline. The challenge and frustration here is that Blizzard is generally lousy at crafted gear. It is nearly impossible to create a full set of gear at any given level, so you still wind up wearing a mishmash of items level 5 to 15 in order to finish enough pieces to get a reasonable set of anything.

Random Dungeon Bags

We have all but agreed this one is out of the picture because the gear that comes from the random bags you get at the end of dungeon finder dungeons… is scaled pretty similar to heirlooms. That means we will once again gear way past what our ultimately target goal is. We are looking to make the dungeons a challenge, but somehow find a happy medium where they are also not impossible like Ragefire appeared to be tonight. We’ve just reached the point where we need to hash out these ideas and potentially come up with others, and lay down some additional ground rules on how we want to gear these characters. Best to decide it now because we are going to have a lot of gearing in our future. The awesome thing about this however is that it is making us appreciate greens that we have been thoughtlessly vendoring for years.

RoboSquid Armada

June 7, 2017 by Belghast

Myself and a few friends may be deciding to engage in some madness. The idea spawned out of a discussion about how World of Warcraft would be a more enjoyable leveling experience if it featured the same style of instance level scaling that Final Fantasy XIV does. For those not familiar, in FFXIV you have a set of levels for a given dungeon much the same as you do in World of Warcraft. For example Deadmines is generally thought of as a level 15-16 dungeon… so in this case if it were FFXIV you would zone in and be downscaled to the level of the zone regardless if you are level 25 or level 60. The other feature of the level scaling is that you are limited to using abilities that exist within that level range… which in itself can be slightly annoying because you might need to do some hotbar swapping. The experience feels good however and you get to run the dungeons with your friends without necessarily feeling like you are powering them through the content. For years I have beat the drum of the need for “mentoring” in World of Warcraft, where you can voluntarily drop your level to that of a friend. While we absolutely know that the level scaling tech could do this… thanks to the Legion zones and Invasion event… it seems like the Blizz crew simply doesn’t want to add this feature. So we decided to take things into our own hands.

Years ago they put in a functionality of being able to lock your level and effectively turn off experience gain. For the most part this was entirely intended to be used by the thriving “twink” PVP scene that flourished during Vanilla and the Burning Crusade expansions. However some time ago we also used this for the purpose of raiding and I was a tank in a guild called “Years Behind” that attempted to raid all of the vanilla content with level locked 60s. That derailed a small bit because there was a significant amount of gear that you could equip at 60… but effectively came from the BC expansion, meaning some of those greens straight up wrecked hard fought purples from the raid content. Regardless it was a lot of fun to experience the raid content the way it was meant to be experienced, rather than steamrolling it with a bunch of wildly overleveled characters. The only negative with level locking is that it is a bit cost prohibitive… in that it costs 10 gold every time you want to lock your level… and another 10 gold every time you want to unlock it. As a result in order to complete this project we decided that we would need a benefactor… namely the already well geared characters of myself and Grace. With all of this in mind… last night we set forth to create a brand new set of low level horde characters. I myself am playing Belgwyb… a Female Orc Monk with the bluish skintone… in a slantwise honorific of the best Grand Company leader ever… Meylwyb Bloefhiswyn. Grace created another Monk but I believe she is going healy, whereas I am of course intending to go tanky. Finally Mor rolled an undead rogue, which gives us some semblance of proper dps.

The idea is a simple but also probably a slightly insane one. We level to 15… then lock our level and attempt to run Ragefire Chasm and Deadmines. If we cannot for some reason complete a dungeon during a fixed level range… we unlock and begin leveling again only to lock later and try again. The goal being to get through all of the dungeons in the game… especially the vanilla era ones with appropriately leveled and geared characters. The catch is that we are not using heirlooms at all. That is for a few reasons… firstly the xp gain boost would make like madness in trying to control our levels and secondly… using heirlooms is the equivalent of using blue or purple gear all of the time while leveling greatly reducing the difficulty of all encounters. The other constraint we are placing upon ourselves is that we must run to the dungeon and be able to zone in naturally. This means for Deadmines we are in fact going to have to do the Gromgol run up to Westfall through a bunch of really nasty stuff that can and probably will straight up wreck us. I am going to try and convince my companions to let me stream these adventures because I have a feeling they are going to be memorable. The fact that we are trying things at the right level is increased in difficulty by the fact that there are just three of us doing this, and not a full team of five. Our first step is to hit 15 however we want… and then we begin the dungeon crawl. I of course will be sharing our adventures… good or bad here on the blog. We formed a guild last night for this process… and named it the RoboSquid Armada because that is apparently what happens when you get the three of us together and tell us to name something.