Tales of the Aggronaut

Liberating Provinces

April 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I played what I would consider a truly excessive amount of Skyforge on the PS4. There was even a point where I left my office upstairs… and logged into laptop downstairs to play more Skyforge over Remote Play. I am not entirely certain why this game is so damned sticky for me right now… when arguably better games like Horizon are not at this moment. My working theory however is that I can only really handle playing one deeply narrative experience at a time… then need the gaming equivalent of celery to clear my palate. Skyforge makes an awesome version of celery… which is probably not at all what the folks behind the game would want me saying about it. However what I mean by that is that it presents a sequence of bite sized interactions and does so in a fairly enjoyable and no nonsense manner. Functionally in the past this is always what I used Destiny for, but with the impending death of that game and the release of Destiny 2 in September… that has really harmed my joy about spending a whole lot of time over there. I mean sure I want to do all the raiding stuff in the new and improved 390 light versions… but that also requires a lot of personal investment in trying to figure out what my clans schedule is like and how I can manipulate my own schedule to somehow be playing Destiny in the nights they are doing the things I need to do. That was one long contorted sentence but it fairly adequately represents how I am feeling about raiding in general right now regardless of the game.

I think one of the big improvements that happened at some point… and is probably not directly tied to the console release is the campaign map. When I last played the game you functionally went to the Aeleon observatory and would be presented with a number of chicklet sized images that represented missions you could run. It felt like there was no real clear order to which you should be taking the content… and as a result I wound up skipping around something horribly and subjecting myself to things that were probably much harder than I should have. The campaign make takes the game and attempts to make a clear narrative, so instead of playing a god answering 911 calls from various parts of an entire planet… you are on a campaign to liberate your people from the invading monsters. Functionally right now I am about halfway through the first fourth province in the sequence of nine provinces, and as of last night… I had barely just left the first one. There are what seems to be four types of content that you can encounter during this process. First there are solo missions that largely involve killing a bunch of mini bosses until you reach the end and ultimately drive the monster influence from an area. The next type is solo boss fights, and these have been pretty rare… but occasionally you are sent up against some sort of “big bad”. Thirdly there are large open world zones where you are ultimately dumped in with a random assortment of other players to complete a bunch of mini objectives. Lastly there are actual proper dungeons that require a group of adventurers to complete… and unfortunately as of yet I have not actually done one of these.

Last night I focused entirely on the solo mission/bossfight types along the main path of the campaign map, and completely ignored the dungeons and large open world areas… because they simply take a bunch of time to get through and don’t actually serve to unlock new areas of the map. I had a purpose in mind, and that single focus was to get to a temple for a class that I had not already unlocked. The reasoning being that I wanted to know just what madness was involved with getting something other than the base three classes unlocked. Sure enough by the time I hit map three I had access to the Archer temple… where I was prompted with two options [Purchase] and [Donate 3,000,000 Credits]. I tried the purchase option and it acted like it was sending me to the Sony store… only to error out a short period of time later. As far as Credits go… at first I thought that was sheer madness but by the time I finished the night I was sitting at around 1.5 million Credits. Sure it is going to suck to unlock all of the classes you might want to play, but it seems like there is going to be a time in the near future where 3 mil credits is no big deal. The purchase option however has me confused because it seems like at least on some level the game is wired to let you buy your way into a specific class. However for whatever reason this does not seem to function on the console… which is making me want to fire up the PC client just to see how the hell it works there. Whatever the case however… I am finding this game extremely enjoyable at the moment and if you can get past its flaws… atrocious boob jiggle and being limited to 3 classes at the start… I am hooked.

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.