Tales of the Aggronaut

Cycles

May 15, 2016 by Belghast

Something in the Water

Yesterday the very amazing Aywren posted a bit on her blog to serve as a bit of inspiration and support for bloggers out there, and a bit of it was directed at me. There is something going on and it is bigger than me or this blog, but seemingly effecting a lot of other bloggers out there. Its like this growing dissatisfaction with whatever we have been doing, and trying to find a way to tweak and change it to make our lives better. IronWeakness for example has been frustrated lately with the lack of attention to his family and faith, and as a result is quitting cold turkey. Liore has reached a point where she just doesn’t really want to write about games because of a lot of reasons… not the least of which is how toxic gaming has become. As far as me, I have written about my frustrating inability to get into MMOs lately. I guess the thing is… this feels different from your average lack of creativity. I can sit down at the keyboard and summon a post at will every single day and I have done so for the last three years. More than anything I have started to question why and if I actually want to do it.

In part I have felt this massive amount of pressure to keep moving the ball forward. It is like I have all of the plates spinning in the air and I am desperately trying to make sure that none of them stop and come crashing to the ground. The past year has not been amazingly well for me when it came to gaming, and more importantly writing about gaming. I made an attempt to do the whole writing for a paycheck thing when it came to MMOGames.com. The problem is… turning it into a job… no matter how sporadic and supplemental it was… drained all of the fun out of the experience for me. Similarly I used to love to write code on the weekends… until I became a programmer for a living… and now the last thing I want to see once I exit work is code of any form. This was only compounded by Blaugust which took a significant toll on me, and my ability to enjoy reading blog posts. During that month, the insane number of people we had signed up… meant that every morning I was getting up and religiously checking this long list of post and tabulating data in a spreadsheet. Nothing drains the fun out of anything like a spreadsheet.

Backing Away

So I have slowly backed away from MMOGames and the thought of taking any assignments there, thinking that distance would make the enjoyment come back. I also took a long break from reading blogs, because I thought with time the desire to read them would come back. In both cases things regenerated over time, but I feel like a part of me died in both cases that can never come back. Right now I just feel somehow out of phase with the world. There are days when I am mostly okay, and can hold normal conversations… but the rest of the time it feels like everything is washing over me in a manner that is just impossible to grasp. There are so many times I contemplate interacting, but it is so damned hard to take that first step. Most of the time I am this bundle of anxiety and awkwardness that I am trying desperately to make seem normal. The worst is that I have turtled for a very long time… and what I mean by that is that I have this tendency to tuck my head into my shell and just stop interacting other than when forced to do so. In part I think a lot of the games I have been playing like Diablo 3 or Destiny… I am doing so because I can play them in a completely solo way with brief intermissions of group activity.

I am not sure exactly when I stopped logging into voice chat on a nightly basis, but this has caused this wall of stress surrounding my interacting with the folks I podcast with each week. I still love them and feel the same way about them… but I struggle to interact with them outside of our weekly recording session. I can handle one or two people at a time… but the possibility of logging in to a whole room of people… no matter how familiar I am with them just makes me want to run screaming. Always in the past I have come out of one of these periods within a month or so… but this one feels like it has lasted the better part of this year and might have started last year. I know that I need to force myself to interact… but all I want to do is pull the covers over my head and forget the world exists. It is really hard to be any form of myself when I am like this… because I am known as being this gregarious sort that is kind and happy to see new people. There are just times when I can’t be that version of myself, and I am not sure how to knock myself free of this current slump.

Expectations

I guess I felt like I needed to be open about these struggles I am dealing with, because maybe it explains a bit why I am the way I am sometimes. All of this is in part why I have seriously contemplated just hanging up my spurs and stopping the blog for awhile. The truth is though… that I don’t really want to. I’ve built this dialog between you the readers and myself… and I enjoy it. I can rattle off a post and it is blissfully one sided. Sure folks comment, but I can deal with responding to those as I am ready. I don’t have to be prepared to have a bidirectional exchange immediately… I can sit down write what I feel like writing and then walk away feeling like I have gotten whatever it was out of my system. The only problem there is this giant looming pressure that I need to post something every day. I think the whole daily thing has been good for me as a whole, but now it just serves as this point of failure that is waiting to happen. I know at some point I will not write a post, and the streak will be over… and it honestly scares me a little bit. Part of me is wondering if I should just plan to have an outage and get it over with to remove a chunk of the pressure.

The truth is my readership on the weekend has always been limited, so I have been kicking around the notion of posting weekdays, but then making the weekends optional. I know coming up for Memorial Day weekend I will be out of town… so that might be the moment I just let the ball drop. My blog can survive without three days worth of posts, or at least I keep telling myself that. Part of me is afraid that if I stop the pattern, I will fall back into my old habits of being the least reliable blogger out there. I would love to be able to say that I would only blog when I have something really important to say… but then that barrier of what is important versus not important would throw me into paralysis. As it stands… I think at the end of this month I will be taking a break, and hoping that this lull with no gaming and no blogging will help to repair whatever schism has formed inside of me. I don’t really want to quit blogging, but I feel like I need to at least take a break, and a planned break is better than just getting up one day and being unable to do it anymore. So anyways… that has been what is going around in my head and I hope now that I got it all out on paper… it makes a little more sense.

Thanks as always for being there and reading.

E1M1

May 14, 2016 by Belghast

Doomed

Awhile back I wrote about my feelings regarding the Doom multiplayer tests on both the PC and PS4. It felt so much like they had missed the mark, and it seemed very much like someone trying to recreate the experience of the original Doom… without realizing that certain parts of that experience were due to a limit in the ability of the technology at the time. The experience just was not fun, and that is the most scathing indictment you can honestly give any game. So as a result I had for the most part decided to ignore that there was ever a Doom 4… or in this case a weird reboot. Then yesterday I started seeing the first impressions of the single player campaign come in, and they were positive enough that I thought I would take a look for myself. Even though at this point I have only really played an hour and a half of the game, I am glad I wound up grabbing it. The impressions I had of the multiplayer were correct, in that this is an attempt to boil the game down to its original roots. While this doesn’t really work for a multiplayer experience, it does work really well for single player. The game functions in a way that you don’t really see games function in recent years, in that the game is not open world. It is a series of closed loop levels that are designed to be approached as a single map. The first one is quite literally E1M1 as the title of this blog post suggests, borrowing the same naming as the original Doom. They are a closed puzzle that needs to be solved and involves opening a familiar series of Blue, Yellow and Red key card areas to progress through.

The combat itself is also really interested and reminds me of the way these games used to play, where you would have a truly frenetic amount of enemies spawn in on you and have to deal with them rapidly. However once you dealt with that room you were granted time to roam around the area freely before moving ahead and engaging the next set. In many ways it reminds me of the way that the Painkiller games felt, where each room is this challenge to survive and then you restock your ammunition and health in an attempt to prepare for the next such room. What helps make this manageable is the games “Glory Kill” system. When mob is near death it will glow slightly and stagger around letting you know that you can sweep in and with the F key engage a sequence where you do an almost Mortal Kombat like fatality. Sometimes you rip the head off of the monster, other times you rip the arm off and beat it with it. Other than just being a carnal ballet, they serve the purpose of giving you life or ammunition back allowing you to keep up the killing streak a little longer. I found it very needed for getting through some of the later rooms. Often times the mobs will spawn in with such number that you have to keep running around the room to avoid getting wrecked. The imps are also more frustrating than they have ever been with their ability to hang off the edge of things and gun you down with their fireballs.

Nothing Will Save You

Unlike the original Doom, there is no “save game” that you can rely on. Instead there are a sequence of Checkpoints that unlock as you go through the level. When you die you either fall back to the last check point or restart the level in its entirety. These checkpoints generally coincide with the various lulls in the action that I talked about. The only frustrating thing is that they sometimes encompass several rooms worth of encounters. I ultimately stopped last night playing because I died and rolled back to a check point a few rooms back… and simply didn’t have the strength to deal with the shit storm I had just waded though to get there. Even on normal difficulty that game is really tough at times, and you find yourself having to keep glory killing just to maintain your health long enough to push through to the next room. Ammunition also feels like a constant problem with both the 20 round shotgun and the 50 round or so Heavy Machinegun. Similarly the Chainsaw this time around relies upon gas tanks that you find scattered throughout the levels. What was surprising is just how fast you get into the action, similar to the original doom you are planted in a room with mobs that you have to chew your way through with only a pistol. The secret areas that can be found feel every bit as meaningful as they used to in Doom, with them often granting access to a weapon before you would find it in the normal flow of the game.

One of the more interesting aspects of the gameplay is the weapon modification system. Each gun has an Unreal Tournament style alternate fire system but these are unlocked by finding weapon kiosks scattered through the levels. Each mod package changes the way your right mouse button interacts, and once you have unlocked multiple modes you can change between them with your R key. For example with the shotgun its two alternate fire modes allow you to choose from what is ultimately a grenade launcher and a three round burst that can both be accessed by holding the right button for a charged shot. I personally tend to favor the grenade launcher because it allows me to bounce a grenade between several different mobs taking out the entire pack. However for boss fights or tougher enemies I could see how the three round burst would be extremely beneficial. The problem there however is that when you only have 20 rounds in the weapon, chewing those up 3 rounds at a time means you empty the gun quickly. The big takeaway is that the game is very much a 90s shooter, with 90s shooter sensibilities… remastered for the 1080p and beyond world. Some of these work amazingly well in single player, but not in multiplayer. However I might change my tune once I see how the snap map system works. In any case I am definitely enjoying the single player campaign, and it has just enough story and intrigue to keep the game moving forward…. but not so much that you get bogged down in character development. This is in no way the rich narrative environment that Doom 3 was for me at least, but it has enough atmosphere to keep my interested. If you want a good shooter, give it a shot… but if you are looking for a deep storyline… this is not the game for you.

Stolen Will

May 13, 2016 by Belghast

Challenging Elders

Over the last few weeks my friends Squirrel, Jex and myself have started what is turning out to be a little bit of a tradition. Generally by the time Thursday night rolls around we have done Challenge of Elders on our mains, and since there is traditionally nothing going on Thursday night on the Axioma raid calendar we’ve opted to make it a sort of “Alt Challenge” night. In the first week we managed to get two sets of alts nearly complete with the challenge. This week however I had not actually run Challenge on Tuesday as is usually the case, and as a result I ended up running my Titan main with Squirrel and Jex alts. That said we did extremely well and managed to get the requisite 90,000 cumulative score in only two matches. The one thing I am certain of however is that I am sick of the melee objectives. Last week the Challenge was Melee Bonus damage with Super bonus score, and this week it was Bonus Damage from Airborne kills and Bonus Score from Melee. So basically for the last two weeks of Challenge of Elders we have been running around and punching mobs until they are dead. Essentially it is time for something else, and I could definitely go for a modifier like secondary kills or something like that, but also have an increased ammo drop rate. I could also go for another precision kill week with small arms, because it would allow me to farm all of the exotic weapons that I wish I had farmed the first time around.

335 Primary

335 Cuirass of the Witness

335 Lord of Wolves

335 Zhalo Supercell

355 Stolen Will

335 Helm of Saint-14

After doing a round of Challenge of Elders, instead of starting another set of alts we opted to do the Nightfall which Bungie had the grace to give players something they had been wanting anyways. For weeks since the launch of the April patch players have been figuring out ways to somehow farm the Taken variants of the Winter’s Run strike. The reason is that this is the only place that will drop the Stolen Will “Taken” appearance shotgun. Even folks in my own clan have sorted out all sorts of methods to try and dictate that you are getting this strike versus some other strike. This is also what is causing the Heroic Strike playlist to be pure shit, given that very rarely is someone actually going to run a strike to completion that isn’t Winter’s Run. By setting this up as the weekly Nightfall it is allowing all of the folks who are desperately farming for the shotgun to get it out of their system. Sadly of the three of us… the one who seemed to want it the most was Jex… however Squirrel and I both walked away with one. Mine has usable stats so I am definitely keeping it… I think for Squirrel his is already infused into his 1000 Yard Stare. As far as the loot haul for the evening… I got a 335 Lethe Noblesse that I have already infused into my Hakkon’s Hatchet because one… I don’t really like Scout Rifles and two… the roll on the one I got was pretty crappy. I ended up getting a 335 Cruirass of the Witness that is more than likely also going to serve as infusion fuel. As far as the exciting bits… I picked up the 335 Stolen Will, 335 Exotic Lord of Wolves Shotgun, somewhere along the way a 335 Zhalo Supercell that will probably be infusion fodder… and finally a modern light level version of the Helm of Saint-14 also at 335. It was a really great night in both the hanging out and doing various stuff… and the walking away with lots of shiny baubles department. At this point I just need a Titans Mark and a Titan Artifact to push me over the barrier and hit 335 light cap.

Agent Carter

I just wanted to write a quick blurb about this to finish off this mornings post. Yesterday afternoon it was officially announced that the ABC series Agent Carter had been cancelled and would not be brought back for Season 3. This of course is causing a lot of frustration among the general geekdom community that I am plugged into. I personally think it is a show because the bit of it I have watched… it was really good. The problem with that statement however is the “bit of it I have watched”. I am part of the problem. This show is absolutely in my wheelhouse, but I am not watching it… because I am not watching Television. I do however watch a lot of Television through streaming, and as a result I am completely not used to the concept of watching something on a specific schedule anymore. As a result I am woefully behind in so many shows because I ultimately wait for them to show up on Hulu, Netflix or Amazon Prime. I feel like Agent Carter is a victim of a disconnect between how Televisions really want us to watch, and how people are actually watching. What I mean by that is that Agent Carter the only place I could find to stream Agent Carter was on Amazon… and by that I mean purchase each episode for $2.99 and that is not going to happen. Hulu offered the show but in their ultra shitty 5 episode window, which means that if I for some reason get behind in a show… as was the case with this one… I can never actually catch up because those first episodes are gone to the sands of time.

So the truth is this is absolutely a show I would have watched, had they simply put it in the format I consume broadcast media. The problem is much like was the case with the music industry… Television is desperately clawing, kicking and screaming… trying to hold onto the power base that they built over the decades. Shows like Agent Carter that resonate with the generation that has already moved past the “TV Guide” era are unfortunately going to be the casualty until they sort out how to make this function. I feel some guilt here, because if folks like me were watching then maybe it would be getting that third season. However I am just not willing to watch television on someone else’s schedule, and even the DVR concept seems foreign to me these days. I don’t have the number of tuners to be able to record all of the shows I am vaguely interested in, and I certainly don’t have the hard drive space on said DVR to keep them until I am ready to watch them. I am perfectly fine with watching commercials in my stream… just let me stream it… and from the platforms we already use. This is not permission for yet another proprietary video network that requires a login and a bunch of hoops to jump through. Sit down and cut a deal with Hulu or Netflix… and get over this shit. Unfortunately if networks don’t get with the program soon they are going to continue to watch their market share slip through their fingers as a generation finds other ways to entertain themselves.

Hype Cycle

May 12, 2016 by Belghast

Shiny Baubles

I guess it is time to actually start writing this morning, considering I have stared blankly at the screen for roughly fifteen minutes. A bunch of storms blew in over night, and I am guessing they woke me up because I feel like I just did not get a single bit of rest last night. I struggled quite a bit to actually go to sleep, and in the in-between time of laying down and conking out I spent some time browsing the 3DS Nintendo eShop looking for Pokemon Sun and Moon. I guess somewhere in the whole mix of discussion about the various starters… that I apparently missed that this game is not releasing until November. The amount of hype floating around twitter yesterday made me think that clearly I had apparently missed the launch date. However it was just apparently an announcement of the three starters which caused folks to go running and screaming in the aisles. The amount of pre-hype surrounding games has reached a critical point, and I am just as guilty as anyone. I pre-bought Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and Overwatch… because it gave me goodies in game immediately for doing so. That is ultimately the hook that gets me is when you offer something limited that I potentially won’t be able to get any other way than the pre-order something.

However I feel like today it reached a new level with Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, considering all that has been released is essentially a description of the game and a few screenshots… and it is now 3rd place in the current “top sellers” list on Steam right now. I mean Bethesda did something similar with Fallout 4, but the pre-orders didn’t start until after the e3 demonstration that gave us a few hours worth of video outlining all of the features going into the game. It feels like you could hold up a crudely drawn picture of a famous franchise, and money would literally start being thrown at the screen. Don’t get me wrong… I know that more than likely I too will order Civilization VI because its Civ… and that game makes me lose entire weekends. However the big takeaway for me is that I have is that I ultimately played way more Civilization IV than I ever did of V. There are just too many things competing for my attention, and I feel that this is happening to pretty much everyone.

Digging a Hole

I remember a time in PC gaming where you could go several months between the launch of big titles, but now companies seem to revel in stacking similar titles on top of each other at exactly the same time. I am certain that this information trickle about Civilization VI was to combat and somehow sour the milk of all of those folks thoroughly enjoying Stellaris right now. It gets frustrating to see this play out, when everyone is fighting for our very limited amount of attention. Battleborn is probably a good game, and the little bit of it I have played in the PVE campaign has been enjoyable, and has the same sort of Borderlands style humor liberally sprinkled in. However its launch has completely been gobbled up by the Overwatch hype machine. I’ve heard many folks utter the words “oh wait, Battleborn is out now?” or the equivalent because its launch week was completely consumed with the release of Open Beta for Overwatch and the floodgates opening allowing all of the folks who never managed to get an invite into the game. Now roughly a week after launch, this title that in any other Climate would have drawn huge attention due to it’s pedigree lists below Civilization V in the 16th spot on the current top sellers list on Steam.

It just feels like we are reaching a point where the games industry as a whole is going to eat itself. What I am seeing is the level of marketing bullshit associated with video games that I last saw prevalent during the big reality television boom of the 2000s. For all I know a ton of marketing flacks from that era took up roots in the gaming industry because it seemed to provide more stability… which in itself is a stretch given that very few of the folks I know in gaming have been in the same position for more than five years. What I find frustrating the most is that I say all this… and I still find myself wanting to pre-order this or that title so I can get the shiny bauble or widget that gets discarded about two hours into the game because it is now utterly meaningless and replaced by actual progression loot. I am very much part of the problem, and I have a disturbing back log of games sitting in various states of minimal play. Instead I keep logging into Destiny or Diablo or the MMO of choice this month… and spending hour after hour treading the same ground instead of truly giving the new games a chance. I’ve dug a hole that I will never be able to dig myself out of, because the amount of time needed to finish all of the games in my backlog is more time than I probably have years left to live… given that I have to you know work and stuff.

I don’t have a brilliant conclusion that I can tack onto this discussion like a pretty bow, it is just what happened to flow out of my fingers when I sat down at the keyboard this morning. The only way things will change is if we stop giving into the pre-sale cycle, but the problem is that the current financing model for games… depends heavily on that early trickle of money. So this is both “why we can’t have nice things” and “the only way we will have nice things”. Ultimately it feels like the Video Games industry is being propped up by the same sort of hedge fund shenanigans that lead to the great recession. There was a time where I thought it would be amazing to work in the Games Industry, but now… I am thankful I chose another path. I also need to credit Talarian who ultimately planted the seed of this mornings post in my head yesterday, which then I started going over in my head as the night went on.