Tales of the Aggronaut

Pretentious Magitek

April 20, 2017 by Belghast

This morning my cats are being little butts. The normally sweet one is prancing back and forth on the keyboard… and the one that is normally a butt just wants me to keep flinging a rubber band for her to chase. None of this is really conducive to sitting down and writing a proper blog post. The sweet one has now taken to sitting on the cabinet to the left of the computer and staring… occasionally meowing. She is likely afraid that she will waste away to nothingness in the time it takes me to write a post, and believes that I really should stop doing whatever it is humans do and go feed her. On top of this I am having some hardware issues… with a box that is not connected to this one but it is frustrating me to the point where I am constantly reaching over to the other keyboard and fiddling with stuff. This also is not super great for writing a fully functional blog post. However I still need to somehow push forward and come up with some form of brilliance… even if that is dollar store brilliance that is on clearance for only 50 cents.

Last night I did not really do much in the way of gaming. I finally finished watching the last episode of Iron Fist, and while doing so I worked on my baby machinist. I managed to get back over the 60 barrier and turned my weapon red in the Palace of the Dead… which makes no difference when it comes to the speed of leveling but feels like it does significantly for your ability to burn things down quickly. I hit a string of parties with a tank and three dps…. and all things considered they tend to go pretty smoothly. The only rough spots are when the group decides to fan out and split down different pathways. In theory this is not a horrible way to approach the dungeon as a whole, but if anyone ends up pulling a mimic it is a certainty that someone will get pox. As I have spent more time in the dungeon, my focus has shifted to trying to avoid pox at all costs… at least until we have a pomander of purity waiting to be used. Most of my wipes in Palace of the Dead have revolved around a bad pull combined with folks having pox. The absolute worst moments are when a tank attempts to tank…. without having a healer. I mean I get it… as a tank our instinct is to run in and gather everything up. However that is just not really a viable option for running Palace of the Dead unless you have a pocket healer going in there with you.

Another thing that has happened that I have not really talked about is that I crossed the 500 commendation barrier and now have my giant pretentious golden magitek armor. I admit I was a little disappointed when I found out that the tune it plays is exactly the same as the normal magitek armor. The weird thing about the commendation system is that it pushes me to be friendly even if I am not really feeling like doing so. I tend to open every dungeon with a “hey folks” and close every dungeon with something along the lines of “thanks for the run, have a good one”. I am not sure if this matters but I usually can at least steal a single commendation from each run. Now my friends who random queue more often have been at the 500 mark for a very long time… I largely pushed through the last 150 or so while dungeon the deep dungeon. It feels like “strategic niceness” is a thing, and I feel sorta dirty admitting that sometimes I am just doing it for the sweet sweet comms. The only problem is… even after having gotten the mount I am still keeping up the practice. I think at some point it just began to feel normal to greet people when you join a dungeon and thank them when you finish… so while this largely started out as a way to leech commendations from folks it has apparently become a ritual now for me. This in part is why I wish other games would implement something like the commendations system. I’ve noticed that while a lot of groups are completely silent… that practice of the greeting at the beginning breaks the ice enough to get people discussing things if we run into problems. Folks seem far less likely to sit on a mimic chest and try and solo it down for example, when they have talked at the start of a run. It is like the act of a simple greeting makes it perfectly okay to say other things later, and while I tend to zone out… it is nice to have the occasional line of dialog flying by in party.

Chasing Aloy

April 19, 2017 by Belghast

It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.

The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.

Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.

Final Thoughts: Andromeda

April 18, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend I managed to finish Mass Effect Andromeda. While I did not come close to hundred-percenting the game, I still feel like I touched all of the important bits. Andromeda divides up its quests in a number of logical chunks: Priority Ops, Allies and Relationships, Heleus Assignments, and Additional Tasks. Priority Ops is functionally everything you need to do to finish the game. Allies and Relationships are tasks you are doing for your crew or other significant individuals and organizations within the Andromeda Galaxy. Heleus Assignments are for lack of a better term the equivalent of planetary missions from SWTOR, and anything you pick up for a specific planet ends up getting filed here. Lastly there are a number a busywork items that get filed into the Additional Tasks bin… and I largely think of these as Daily Quests from the MMO genre. According to the game I am sitting at 92% completion, and that is from doing all of the first three categories of quests and largely ignoring the last category… unless I happened to complete it while doing something else at the same time. All told according to Origin I have played 90 hours of gameplay, some of that being with the headstart and then continuing on into the release client. I am going to do my best to avoid any major spoilers about the game, but functionally… you cannot really talk about your experience without at least giving some minor details.

Mass Effect Andromeda had the deck stacked against it before we even set foot in the game. What I mean by this is the fact that the original Mass Effect trilogy is among the most loved gaming properties in history. The number of N7 hoodies and car stickers that I see out in the wild is pretty staggering that I live in a section of fly over country that is not exactly known for its geek friendliness. In truth I personally think that if they ever made the original Mass Effect trilogy into a science fiction television show that over the course of its run chronicles the events of the entire series… you would have a hit on your hands that would eclipse Game of Thrones by a large margin. So that said… trying to come in on the heels of that game and creating something that is going to ultimately keep up… and hopefully replace it… is just largely a suicidal proposal. The game had issues out of the gate and while the most recent patched fixed most of the ones that were bothering me… it is still the younger sibling of a child star, the Kieran to Macaulay Culkin. This is not exactly a fatal flaw mind you, because as time has gone I’ve come to realize that Kieran Cuklin is the much better actor… drawing out this analogy that horrifically dates me.

Regardless of how good the end product is… there is still an awful lot of awkward that you are going to have to wade through until you reach the tipping point of caring about the game more than you care about the ephemera. For me that point was about eight to ten hours into the game, which in itself is a hefty commitment for a game that has not fully grabbed you at that point. The larger problem is that Bioware in general is extremely hit and miss about indoctrinating you into their worlds. There is often times this odd chrysalis phase of the game, where it is trying to introduce you to new elements and characters and figure out ways to make you care about them. It seems to be the case each time we enter a few franchise, so Mass Effect 1 suffered from it… but 2 and 3 were able to draw on the fact that you probably played the first and they did not need to give you a fully fleshed origin story as introduction. The Dragon Age franchise unfortunately has had awkward beginnings each time because they have yet to give us a true sequel, jumping us into new characters and new perspectives for each game. Mass Effect Andromeda similarly is plagued with a whole lot of awkward front loaded into the game… as it attempts to induct us into a new universe filled with hundreds of new characters for us to start caring about. This is not made any easier by the fact that the Pathfinder is very much NOT Shepard in any fashion, so it takes those first dozen hours to really let that fact sink in.

Prior to Andromeda my top Mass Effect games list would have gone a little something like this: 2, 3, 1. One gets downgraded so heavily because it had an extremely awkward control scheme… and Kaidan Alenko. When it comes time in a play through I gleefully sacrifice Kaidan to the pages of History knowing that for the sake of my crew I am going to have to pretend that I cared. After playing Andromeda the new list looks much the same… just with Andromeda prepended on the beginning. If you place any weight in the Bartle types… I am of split brain with heavy focuses on both Killer and Explorer and as a result respond extremely favorably to open world situations where I get to run amok. Much of the reason why I liked Mass Effect 2 so much, is that there is a large sequence where you go on small character building missions and it allows you to delay the inevitable “rush to the end” that always happens in this sort of game. Part of what makes exploring these large planets such a joy however is the introduction to the Nomad… the vehicle we needed since the first Mass Effect. I never really got into the Mako because it had the handling of a small city… and the Hammerhead was a cool idea that was frustratingly constrained to a bunch of mini-game levels. The Nomad on the other hand is your constant companion as you wander the planets providing protection from the worst the atmospheres have to offer and through the jump jets and rocket boosts gives you the ability to scale absolutely crazy obstacles. As you can see from the above image, you can totally tear donuts or slide out on the ice if you so choose. I absolutely sacrificed weapon and armor upgrades just to be able to craft more nifty addons for my Nomad.

It is impossible to talk about a Mass Effect game without at least hitting on the story. For better or worse the original Mass Effect trilogy was largely the tale of the entire world slowly going to shit. You and your crew from the moment you set foot in the universe are fighting a losing battle. While you might win battles, you are ultimately losing the war… and each game gets a little darker than the previous one. There is of course some nobility and honor in being constantly the underdog, and it provides some excellent character building opportunities… but it is a fixed path and you sort of know it while going through the game. Mass Effect Andromeda however has a vastly different tone. The world is complete shit at the beginning of the game, and everything that could have gone wrong seemingly has. However over the course of your missions you are setting forth to build this better world for future generations. There is a hopefulness in this game that is largely absent in the previous offerings, and given how generally shit our world is right now… it is needed. The wish fulfillment of setting forth into a new Galaxy to make a better future is extremely tangible… and the fact that the game then allows you to start making things better from the first planet you touch down on is extremely important. So while I am not Shepard… over time I came to grow into Ryder and figure out how exactly I would approach the game. There has been a lot of frustration around the lack of the Paragon/Renegade system… but in truth I largely found it too limiting. There were times I just wanted to be a smartass, without actually going full asshole… and this game allows me to do that. What is lacking however is from what I can tell the ability to play a horrible human being… and I am largely fine with that.

The main story arc covers everything that I want from a Mass Effect game. You have evil races hell bent on your destruction, ancient technologies that you have to master… and the promise of lots of interesting story vignettes along the way as you introduce yourself to an entirely new galaxy. It is a glorious space opera and the final “rush to the end” sequence is one of the coolest I have seen in literally any video game. It is reminiscent of the earth landing sequence in Mass Effect 3, and once you have started things up… you functionally have to strap in and enjoy the ride because there is no stopping the final act of the game. That is really all I can say without deeply spoiling the game, and I have danced around the edges of saying more throughout writing this post. The one thing that I really want to talk about that this game does amazing well is the post ending. Most games like this offer you some way of completing everything you missed after you have actually gone off to fight whatever malevolent force is set against you. The problem is that in almost all cases they do some sort of hand wavy bullshit of returning you to a moment BEFORE the final fight… and allowing you to finish things up pretending like the fact moments of the game never happened. Mass Effect Andromeda however lets you continue on with the entire world knowing that you defeated the big bad, and things are subtly altered in the world as a result. This gives me an awful lot of hope that maybe just maybe the DLC for this game is going to literally extend the game much like an MMO, and it would be amazing if they helped to lay the ground work between this game and whatever the inevitable sequel happens to be. At this point I desperately want more game to explore, and while I could roam around doing tasks… I am figuring it is time for me to move on for now. It was a great experience and once I got past some of the awkward windowe dressing… I feel like this is probably the best crafted Bioware RPG to date.

Eight Years of Aggronaut

April 17, 2017 by Belghast

You would think that over time I would get considerably better at doing this sort of thing, but in truth I still struggle to find inspiration on a regular basis. This is a little funny considering that as of this morning I have been writing on Tales of the Aggronaut for eight years. Last year there was an awful lot of pomp around the seventh anniversary, and I even got my good friend Ammo to do some artwork for the site as a result. The problem with doing anything for eight years, is that after awhile you start to question if you are just simply repeating yourself in cycles. I cannot tell you the number of times I sit down to write a post… and then have to google my own blog to see if I have actually already written this post before somewhere in the past. In truth I have a sort of amnesia when it comes to writing things on this blog. I sit down each morning and bang out a post, pouring my thoughts into each post… and then as soon as I hit post the memory of having written it just sort of floats away. I question sometimes if this blog is more therapy than exposition, because at this point I am not entirely certain I could really stop writing. This is now a part of me and ingrained that I need to sit down each morning and attempt to say something meaningful.

This year saw me dialing things back a little however and breaking my daily blogging routine and shifting up the format to be weekly posts. In truth this has been something extremely positive for me as a writer and a human being. It gives me the weekend to simply not have to think about what I should and should not be writing about. Sunday had been a hellacious day for me especially considering I got up and finished editing and prepping the AggroChat episode that we recorded the night before. Then as soon as I wrapped that up I realistically needed to sit down and write a blog post before I was officially “free” to do anything. This also made planning anything on the weekends rough given that I was already claiming from 9 pm onward on Saturday night… then again functionally claiming an hour or two each morning. Then if we needed to travel I had to either drag a laptop with me on our travels and do the upside down day thing… or stage enough posts to cover the time away from home. There was something ultimately liberating when it came to breaking the pattern. So much of why I had been pushing myself was simply to make sure that I never dropped any of the plates that were spinning in the air, and once I allowed the first place to drop… it became a lot easier to allow myself time off when I simply was not ready to make a post. It also allows me to shift the format around a bit, so that if we take a vacation I can actually enjoy said vacation. For example I didn’t make posts from Pax South this year… or over Spring Break when we roamed Dallas hitting all of the Half Priced Books. The world seemed to manage just fine without me, and folks more or less have continued reading in spite of my occasionally dropping a post.

Part of the tyranny of the pattern is the fact that I felt like I became more known for the fact that I was doing the daily posting thing… than anything I might have actually been writing about. That said I have readers that have been around… sometimes begrudgingly the entire eight years so in truth this was probably just anxiety brain being horrible. The truth is that I still do not know why anyone reads this blog, and I am consistently baffled by the analytics. That said I also feel like I am on this shared journey with all of you. We are doing this together, even if you have never actually commented on the blog in the past. It feels like I always have a friend there to tell the tales of my adventures and foibles to, and as a result I always strive to make this a much more intimate experience. I let each and every one of you inside my mind from time to time to share my thoughts and feelings… and sometimes write more about “stuff” than I do gaming. I thank you all for being there, and even if you are just standing in the background lurking… the fact that you are there is important to me personally. I don’t want to be a “brand” or try and turn this blog into some sort of vehicle for self promotion. I just want it to be a shared experience of taking you all along with me as I do things. So in the end I am thankful for each and every person that has decided to come along for the ride.

The funny thing about April is that for me it is apparently a time of new beginnings. I started Tales of the Aggronaut on April 17th of 2009, because I was inspired by some of the World of Warcraft blogs that I had been reading. In truth it was a single blog called the Wordy Warrior, by Aeridel that ultimately tipped me to the side of writing my own thing. Sadly like so many blogs it is lost to the mists of time, but she went on to now be one of the amazing social media managers for World of Warcraft. In 2013 when I felt like I needed to restart things with the blog, I opted to start the “Grand Experiment” and go from having several month long breaks in blog posts… to blogging every single morning. It was a bit of a swift kick in the ass, and it was something that I needed to gain the confidence to just sit down at a keyboard and start writing without being super concerned about creating greatness every single day. I stuck with this for a little over three years before ultimately dialing it back for my own sanity. In addition I am realizing that the very first AggroChat podcast episode was on April 13th… something we probably should have mentioned in this past weeks show. So it seems like for me at least April is just this month where I hatch new ideas and make them into something tangible. As a result I have one such idea that has been incubating in my head, I just need to find the time… and volunteers to bring it to fruition.

In eight years of blogging I have written a little over 1500 blog posts, 1519 to be exact if I believe WordPress. During that time I have had 128,828 unique readers from 186 different countries. While English is not shockingly the top language group hitting the blog… French and German have a pretty large share of the numbers as well. My heaviest usage day was apparently November 2nd 2015, when Marvel Heroes reposted one of my blogs on both Facebook and Twitter. All of this is largely nonsensical to me because I still cannot fathom why anyone would actually care about my thoughts. I am not really a big blog, and I don’t really have this massive audience… but what I seemingly do have is a group of folks who are extremely devoted to whatever this experience is. I’ve said it before and I still think its true. There are really two types of readers out there regardless of whatever platform you happen to be posting on. There are the folks who are interested in a specific topic and your blog just happens to be drift compatible with those goals. However if you ever decide to shift focus, they can easily weed you out of their feed reader because it no longer meets their parameters. Then there are the folks who have somewhere along the way imprinted upon you, and probably arrived originally because your interests were similar… but ended up sticking around because they decided that they cared about you as a human being. The later group is really the folks that are here for the long haul because over these past eight years I have bounced around like crazy. So while this started as a “Warrior Tanking” blog and went through “Raiding Blog”, “General WoW Blog”, and “Rift Blog” phases… what exists today is just “Bel Says Things”. If you aren’t interested in that then you probably aren’t going to be around for long. Regardless I am deeply humbled that I seemingly have so many people interested in that proposal, and I will try really hard to “not fuck this up” in the process.