Tales of the Aggronaut

Deep Turtle

January 16, 2017 by Belghast

Lately I have been going through an anxiety ridden period where I just find it super stressful to be around people on a regular basis. This started over the break, and for some extent I pulled myself out of it a little bit around the time I went back to work. However increased stresses in that realm seems to have caused a relapse. As a result I am firmly back in what I refer to as “turtle mode” where I duck my head into my shell and largely forget the world exists. As a result I am taking every possible excuse to avoid doing things that have lots of people involved with them, and I missed both raids this week… both with completely reasonable reasons but reasons that I probably could have avoided were it not for my anxiety desperately clinging to them. Sure I had a window to fix, but I could have probably been done in time for the raid. Sure I dozed off on the sofa, but had I drank a monster or some coffee I probably would have been fine there too. The excuse was too convenient not to take it when the reality was I am simply having trouble processing existing around other human beings.

When I am in deep turtle mode it is all I can really do to exist on a daily basis, let alone have to pretend to be a normal human being. Which I realize is a bit odd given that I am generally a gregarious and welcoming sort, and have become famous for opting people. There are times where I just can’t be “rockstar bel” as one of my friends has referred to it. There is time when I just need to hide out and pretend the other human beings don’t exist. Generally speaking when I am in this mode I play a lot of Minecraft or Skyrim… or in the case of what has happened over the weekend return to playing an MMO that I really don’t have much of a social structure in these days. Awhile back I reinstalled Elder Scrolls Online and this weekend I stared playing it extremely seriously. I am enjoying myself immensely and other than the occasional message from folks who are also dipping their toes in as well and just happy to see a familiar face.

I have to say the game feels amazing coming back to it after a significant time gone. The game has released a ton of DLC/Expansion content since release and there are basically two ways of playing it. Either you buy the DLC outright, where there is a deal that can be had that includes the four major DLC packs for 5500 crowns… which is $39.99. The other option is to subscribe to the game which immediately unlocks all of the content… so long as you keep an active subscription. However there is another reason to go for the ESO Plus subscription option… because it magically fixes your bag situation. At launch one of my key problems was trying to keep enough bag space to be actively looting crafting ingredients, while at the same time picking up gear that drops from things I was killing. With the subscription plan it adds what seems to be a separate bottomless crafting inventory, that items simply go to automatically when you loot them. This means you can finally afford to loot all of those random crates and barrels full of fish and berries because it all gets whisked away off into the ether into a storage bin you never actually have to mess with.

The other awesome thing that has happened in the period of time I have not really be playing is that they have shifted the Veteran Rank system to be the Champion Point system. At first I thought this was a one for one swap over to a sort of Skyrim-esc celestial system based around the Thief, Warrior and Mage. However it seems to be way more than that, in that they are essentially an account wide system of alternate expansion much like the Planar abilities in Rift or Paragon points in Diablo 3. That means if you log into your level 7 alt like I did yesterday… I had 130 champion points to spend making me able to do some pretty insane stuff at low levels. Sure this greatly trivializes the leveling process for alts… but I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. In truth it makes me far more likely to level alts knowing that I have a lot of the same benefits, on them as I do on my main character. That said the collections and cosmetic systems also exist at an account level so you can keep using your favorite mounts and pets… or anything you have unlocked through the crown shop. All in all I have been happy to fade quietly back into a game that I still fine immensely immersive at least from a single player level.

Torn on Switch

January 13, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was of course the Nintendo Switch reveal stream… that seemed to occur for pretty much everyone at an extremely awkward time. For me personally it kicked off about 10 pm, so I was able to tune in as I was winding down a night of running Nightfalls (and sometimes failing) in Destiny with Squirrel and Jex. I talked a bit yesterday about my mixed feelings regarding the Switch and its launch on twitter. Every fiber of my being wants this console, but there is also the logic center of my brain that keeps reminding me of the not amazing track record I have with Nintendo consoles. I will get more into that later, but first to talk about the details we learned last night. The Switch is in fact coming a lot faster than I expected with a launch window of March 3rd 2017, or for those who think in these terms…. if I am counting correctly 8 weeks from the Friday I am writing this post on. In the short term I will be able to play the console personally in a few weeks at Pax South, and there will be a series of demo events happening in “major” cities… which means nowhere event vaguely close to the fly over country where I live. They have confirmed two launch titles… the first of which is 1, 2, Switch which is another one of those Nintendo gimmick games like Wii Sports that while extremely fun is in large part a tech demo for all of the new “innovations” they have woven into the new system. The launch title that matters however is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Now yesterday I said that a lot of it was going to ultimately come down to price. The first leaked price of $250 seemed like a viable option and potentially even a day one and pre-order system for me. Shortly after that another price started circulating which was $350… and that was definitely going to be a wait and see price point. The final reveal targeted things at $299 which is a figure that I am not quite sure about one way or the other. I feel like ultimately… we are going to need to see more details about what actual titles will be available at launch. I am not sure if Zelda is enough to push this console for me at the start. However I also know if the Nintendo track record holds… this means that if you did not pre-order your console it is likely going to be next Christmas before there is a reasonable flow of units to the shelves to allow folks to make that late impulse buy. I remember when the Wii launched in November, it was late February before I even saw one on a store shelf, and even then it was probably mid summer before they were a regular enough occurrence to warrant not noticing. Nintendo is extremely horrible with supply chain management and producing anywhere near the right number of units to meet the current demand. This is evidenced by the fact that you quite literally still can’t find 3DS units on store shelves, from a drought that started around Thanksgiving. Similarly you essentially have zero shot in hell of finding a Nintendo Classic console yet.

Where my brain begins to temper my desire to buy this console is when I think about my general track record with Nintendo. Growing up I was absolutely a Nintendo fanboy, getting my Nintendo Classic shortly after release and my Super Nintendo a few months after launch as well. Similarly I saved up my money and purchased a Gameboy within the first six months. So when the Nintendo 64 launched in college I was similarly smitten with the console, and spent way more money than we should have been spending at the time for the unit given our already strapped college life existence. While enamored with the early titles through Zelda… an event occured that pretty much killed me caring about the later titles. PC Gaming got absolutely amazing, and I got my 3DFX 2 card which made everything that I was seeing on the Nintendo 64 start to look extremely sluggish and primitive. So instead of caring about Goldeneye, I was playing GL Quake. The other problem the Nintendo 64 had was the lack of role-playing game support, and when Squaresoft took the Final Fantasy franchise to the Playstation I followed it. That said I have so much nostalgia for those early days of Nintendo, so I keep purchasing the consoles hoping to rekindle some of that magic. In the end however of my consoles they tend to be the ones that gather dust.

The other huge problem that I have found is that my life really does not fit a mobile console that well. I have both a 3DS and a Vita and they maybe see some play time once a week as I am looking for something to do before falling asleep. The Wii U seemed like an awesome idea, but the limited range on the unit made it largely useless to me. My expectation was that I would be able to play the screen unit wherever in the house I wanted to, and maybe even out on the back patio. The reality however is that I need to remain within roughly 8 feet of the unit to keep a stable connection. So as a result currently the unit is set up in the bedroom so I can play it from bed… but that makes for awkward gaming any other time. Ultimately I think the real problem for me with Nintendo is that they seem to be extremely focused on gimmicks. The Switch as a console is a gimmick, and while I don’t think it will be the frustrating experience for me that the Wii controls were… I definitely think it is going to attempt desperately to function in methods other than your standard game console. This focus on gimmickry also seems to come at a massive cost in processing power and graphical performance. While Zelda Breath of the Wild looked gorgeous in its own way… watching the footage last night it definitely felt like a game that was not quite as detailed as the current generation of console games. While the Switch has courted Bethesda to put Skyrim on their new console… Skyrim is also a seven year old game at this point. In the montage of games… I didn’t see much in the way of modern ports which concerns me that we are setting up for another Wii U situation… where the console is simply not powerful enough to run the style of games that the majority of publishers are creating. That said… you buy a Nintendo console for the first party games and I really want to see some more firm times on when more of those are releasing before committing.

Distant Horizon

January 12, 2017 by Belghast

I've entered this place where nothing really new on the horizon interests me in MMOs. Expansions yes, new content yes… new games no

— Bel 🆚 Pax South (@belghast) January 10, 2017

There was a sequence of events that lead me to make the above tweet on Tuesday, namely reading a similar sequence of tweets from Syl and the resulting blog post. In truth I have felt this way for awhile, where I have been hyper interested in extension content being added onto the games I am already playing, but not extremely interested in anything new coming down the pike. The launch of Elder Scrolls Online was really the last big event that wrapped me up into the hope, hype, and heartbreak cycle that is the launch of a new MMO property. I got swept up a bit in Wildstar but that was never really “my game” no matter how much I wanted to try and make it be for the sake of hanging out and playing with friends. This is not to say that I have not tried a bunch of different games that have released since, but they have all largely left me wanting for this or that feature… or similarly wanting to remove other features. The latest boom in the MMO industry has been among a crop of games largely coming from South Korea and they all seem to share a vision of MMOs that doesn’t set that well with me. Not sure if it is the character design or the focus on eventually funneling players towards a murder box, but whatever the case I tend to bounce pretty hard with ArcheAge being the only game in that larger general classification that I play on a somewhat regular basis.

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As is always the case with our community… when you bring up an issue folks tend to come out of the woodwork to help you with it. I have to say this is one of the most charming aspects of the world I have gotten myself wrapped up in, even if sometimes I am just shooting off my mouth into the void. As is to be expected there were a lot of games suggested on the near horizon, and most of them I had already mentally bounced from for one reason or another based on past experiences with similarly constructed experiences. However buried in that pack of games was one that I had not even heard of… not that I am actively looking for new MMO properties. One of my blogger friends Isarii mentioned a game that he was interested in, and was just about to release an interview with called Ashes of Creation. Like any game I have not heard of I started googling and came across a sequence of videos showing off various aspects of the world, and I am not entirely certain what peaked my interest directly but something did. Yesterday they also released a much more detailed Q&A video answering some questions from the community, that when taken with the interview with Isarii fills in a bunch of details about the intent of the game. I will say off the bat there are a lot of things that give me hope, and a lot of things that give me potential heartache.

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The description of the game weaves a pretty lofty tale, hitting most of the features that I have loved from other games. In the Q&A they talk about the lack of hard faction boundaries, and a part of me almost audibly said “Hell Yeah” at that moment. However they also talk about this dynamic world with ever changing events based on a node system that allows each node in the world to change and effect the nodes around it. They talk about the engine of change being conquest and sieges… and that a guild holding a castle will have ramifications on the land surrounding it. This all sounds amazingly cool on paper but it is also something I am extremely gun shy about. This has been the pitch of essentially every PVP centric open world sandbox to date, that the players make lasting effects on the world. What ends up happening instead is that the game devolves into a PVP gankfest for at least the first six months, because there is a certain player base that the idea of ganking defenseless players seems really exciting to. So while ArcheAge for example is a perfectly reasonable game to play right this moment, it was an extremely toxic game for its first year of life… until said toxic players were either policed away or got bored and shifted to the next shiny object to take a giant crap on. So my big concern is exactly what Ashes of Creation is going to do to ensure this doesn’t happen.

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One of the bullet points talked about in Isarii’s interview is that they have a three phased flagging system, and that they hope it will help mitigate this issue. There will be a non-combatant “green” state, a combatant “purple” state, and corrupt “red” state. The corruption system sounds an awful lot like going rogue in The Division, or the pirate system in ArcheAge. Intrepid Studios talks about PVP being optional, but in the description of what a corrupted player is… they mention something that I stuck on mentally. I am going to quote a section of the interview for the sake of pointing this out a little easier.

Players can kill Combatants without repercussions, and are encouraged to do so, since dying while a Combatant means you suffer reduced death penalties. Where this changes is when a Combatant kills a Non-Combatant. In this case, the Combatant is Corrupt, and acquires a Corruption Score (which is accrued based on a number of different parameters, including the level differential of their freshly slain victim). This Corruption Score can be worked off with effort through a few mechanics, but the primary means of getting rid of it is through death.

The particular phase that is bothering me a bit is “when a Combatant kills a Non-Combatant” because in a traditional MMO flagging system this shouldn’t be a possible thing. “Green” players are traditionally not able to be attacked, and if this is a game where that is not the case we might already have our first stumbling block for me personally. Now of note… there is a lot of nuance here that I may simply not be seeing. Like for example in ArcheAge, as a completely non-combatant player you can find yourself in open pvp flagged zones… that entering will make you able to be attacked. So in the case of Ashes of Creation, if there are certain hostile areas that are openly contested… a player would know that entering there could put them at danger. I don’t however want to see the bodies of helpless players littering the ground in an otherwise peaceful zone like Elwynn Forest because they died at the hand of a ganker on an abusive power trip.

The idea behind this game feels like one that no one has really been able to implement correctly. If it works well it could be amazing, but generally speaking it is the player that is the ultimate unraveller of the best made plans. However all of that said, I am interested enough to have done enough reading and watching to be able to post this post… so I have to say I am curious about the evolution of this game. At this very moment everything is so fluid that I am not really certain if the end product is going to be something that I want to play. If will say that right now it is going to be extremely difficult to implement most of the things they are talking about, but I wish them all the luck in the world at trying to translate the vision into video game. There are a lot of parts of the Q&A session that remind me of the ill fated Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto. The problem with an idea… is once shared it mutates. So when I read the design manifesto it filled my head with all sorts of ideas and dreams of a better game that the reality never came close to living up to. Watching the Q&A session for Ashes of Creation did the same thing… filled my head with a bunch of fevered dreams about all of the things that I wish I could have seen in this MMO or that. It is this whirlwind of “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas that have been collected and carefully curated into the game these folks always wanted to work on. However there is always a chunk of nuance that is lost when you speak your vision, or commit it to paper. In doing so… that vision loses some of the sharp edges and becomes much more hazy. Based on the goals set out… this game could either be literally the game I always wanted to play… or yet another disappointment that cannot quite live up to my technicolor dreams of the way things “should work”. Regardless… in the coming months and years… as likely will be the case… I am going to follow Ashes of Creation as it evolves and see if it can deliver on any of my hopes and is worthy of my hype. All the while of course being extremely afraid of that heartache that often comes afterwards.

Lobbing SIVA Charges

January 11, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not go entirely as planned, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a pretty amazing night. The original plan that I had in my head was an attempt at completing the Nightfall bounty on as many characters as I could for shots at the Icebreaker. However as the day went on that plan slowly morphed into going to my very first Wrath of the Machine raid. So around 8pm last night we managed to pull together the six players needed for the raid and I shifted into full on learner mode. Destiny is one of those games where I am constantly amazed at the level of dedication the community has. A raid in Destiny is this complex sequence of events that have to be completed in a specific way… and the first time I step into one of the encounters it is full on information overload. I find it interesting how fast the community as a whole crowd sources the solution to the fights, sharing tidbits of information and ultimately mapping strategies for how to complete them. I say this because the fights themselves are actually messaged somewhat poorly as to what you should be doing at any given time. Since I am very much a “learn by doing” player, it means for the first few raids I ultimately feel completely lost.

What is extremely interesting about Wrath of the Machine versus Kings Fall is that the “roles” are not necessarily fixed. In Kings Fall you could essentially put your most seasoned player on the job of doing whatever was the most important task on a given fight. While there was a certain measure of randomness, like who got chosen to run the spark on the invisible platforms… others like the person getting Golgoroth’s Gaze were very much something you had in your control. As a result to some extent it was much easier to carry a new player through and allow them to see the fights in motion, before they were ever expected to take up a key roll in the fight. That is very much NOT the case in Wrath of the Machine given the game shifts the roles around quickly and while you might be dpsing one moment, the next you might be needing to toss SIVA charges at fixed markers. The hardest of these fights for me to grok was the Aksis encounter where the raid divided up into three sides, and the game randomly empowered three players at a time… sometimes requiring you to shift around quickly to cover a side if it did not have an empowered player. The end result is that new players ultimately have to learn quickly because you never know exactly when that key role is going to fall on your shoulders.

There were several points during the night where I absolutely know I failed at various mechanics, but while moving through the content I started to get a feel for what I was doing wrong and how to correct it. Now with Kings Fall, most of the encounters were fairly easy… but it was the jumping sequences that were the bane of my existence. With Wrath of the Machine, the encounters themselves seem to be the challenge, and while I died a few times during the much shorter jumping sequences they didn’t see anywhere near as nerve wracking as disappearing ships over of a giant open chasm. Last night was also important because it marked the first time I had really done large group content with Tequila Mockingbird my clan. It has been over six months since Axioma clan was dissolved in a fit, and [TQMB] was formed out of the ashes. It definitely feels like we wound up with the absolutely best natured of folks for the reboot. Within minutes I felt right back at home, which I guess is a strange statement considering I have been proudly sporting the clan tag since the moment the reboot happened.

So while I had no real intent of raiding last night, I am super happy to have seen the content now and to have gotten some of the really awesome stuff that drops there. There seems to be a massive problem with duplicates from the SIVA key caches. On the first boss encounter I got the Ether Nova fusion rifle… and then turned around and got the same thing from the cache. From the second encounter I managed to pick up Arms, that I am extremely happy about given that they have the crazy heavy ammo trait. From the third encounter, I picked up an Artifact which is decent but it is really hard to get excited over an artifact when I am apparently now swimming in 400 light ones. From the final phase of the Aksis encounter I walked away with the Genesis Chain auto rifle, and then spent a key and got an exact duplicate. Past that I wound up with three exotics from the run: 4th Horseman, Hereafter, and Crest of Alpha Lupi. The first two turning into shards since I don’t really like either weapon, and the last from an engram serving as infusion fodder for the Twilight Garrison I had yet to upgrade.

I spent a bit of time after the raid running around in the Plaguelands patrol zone to play with both the Auto Rifle and the Fusion Rifle and I like both. The Genesis Chain feels really awesome when you get headshots and cause the firefly to proc since it has a unique sound effect that goes with it. The Fusion Rifle… largely just feels like a competent Fusion Rifle. I sincerely doubt I will be giving up either The Branded Lord or Saladins Vigil for it, but it is nonetheless a reasonable weapon that is probably going to get ferried off to one of my alts. I have heard it works really amazingly in Crucible, so I will have to give it a shot there. It is bizarre how I have gone from being someone that NEVER used Fusion Rifles, to being someone who largely now favors them over Shotguns for close to medium range engagement. The other really awesome thing that happened is that I am now flagged to do the Outbreak Prime quest, which honestly could be an entire post in itself. It turns out that Lexy is also stalled on this quest, so that gives us Hunter and Titan… and we just need to find a Warlock to ride along with us since that quest requires you to group up all three classes to progress. Wondering if maybe some point this weekend we can knock out the required pieces so that by the time the reset rolls around we are working on the final step which is the run the raid again.