Tales of the Aggronaut

Master of Orion Impressions

March 4, 2016 by Belghast

Indulging a Whim

Due to some strange glitch in my blog… I am apparently writing this blog post for the second time this morning. Unfortunately I am probably not going to be able to go into nearly as much depth as I did previously… because I am running out of time. Last night I indulged a whim and gave the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion a spin. For years Master of Orion and Master of Orion II were those go to games when I wanted to spend an afternoon clicking the “next turn” button. They sit firmly in the 4X genre, so when I want to Xplore, Xpand, Xploit or Xterminate… they serve as a great way to destroy an entire day. I am not joking about that aspect because there are absolutely moments in the past where I have started playing Master of Orion II at around 1 pm… and then realized suddenly that it was apparently 1 am and I should really go to bed. I love this franchise… but previously I had to put an asterisk at the end of that statement. Master of Orion 3 was one of those games that I was looking forward to in 2003 more than pretty much anything else. The problem being when I finally got my hands on it… it was largely indistinguishable as a Master of Orion game. The aspects that existed… were buried beneath a horrible interface that made the game play itself a chore.

So imagine my glee last night when I booted up the Wargaming.net reboot and found that pretty much every single aspect of the game was instantly familiar to me. Those things that had changed were leaps of simple logic and not necessarily problems for me to figure out. Traditionally when I play Master of Orion I have always played the Silicoids, a race of rock creatures that have the interesting trait of being able to colonize quite literally any planet that is not a gas giant. This always allowed me to get an early lead on the total number of star systems… which would ultimately give me a lead in the ability to crank stuff out of my industrial complex. While I see the Silicoids on the website, they are apparently not yet available in game. So instead I went with the bugbear-like Bulrathi which started me with a significant military advantage… one which I tried to keep the entire game by denying the other races the technological increases they kept asking to buy from me.

Familiar Patterns

When I play one of these games I tend to play it in the same pattern, and it absolutely worked here once again. I am an early expansionist, devoting most of my resources to generating colony ships and a skeletal fleet to protect them and defend planets. While not as useful as the Silicoids, the Bulrathi do have the ability to colonize heavy gravity worlds… which allowed me to snap up a bunch of planets that the other races could not. From there I focused on improving each of the planets and cranking out as many tech advances as I could. There were many points in the game where the other races were one to three weapon grades behind me, which meant when the tables turned… and I shifted into my other game mode… it was a blood bath. Generally speaking when I play a 4X game I play extremely peacefully. I stick to my own worlds and build up my engine… and then whichever race makes the mistake of picking on one of my worlds… I flip everything from producing infrastructure to producing war machines. Last night it was the Psilons that had the poor decision making skills to pick a fight with me, at which point I sent a fleet of Carriers… which ended up being my high powered Capital Ships to destroy them. As soon as I could churn out new troop transports I was moving the fleet on to the next planet and conquering it.

Towards the end of my march across their star systems, the Humans got in on the act of bombing their planets from orbit. This is when I saw what might be the first significant glitch in the AI. I had no formal alliance with the humans, and they simply decided to start attacking the Psilons on their own as well. There was a period of time where I had to wait on a troop transport, and they easily could have landed their own and took over the world. The problem is… they never did… they just continued to bomb the populace from air. I am not sure if they simply lacked the technology to create troop transports… or if the AI was confused by having a contested planet. Ultimately I landed my own troops, took over the planet and the humans left orbit considering the planet was now being guarded by one of my cruisers. It was around this point when I realized that it was 11:30 pm and I really should be logging for the night. Once again I had frittered away an evening playing this game, and enjoyed every moment of it.

But Early Access

If you have ever loved Master of Orion in your past… then I highly suggest you check this game out. It does a great job of washing the bad taste of MOO3 out of my mouth, and making me forget it actually exists. I will go so far as to say that from this point on… the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion is probably replacing MOO2 as my go to game for scratching that 4X itch. It is an Early Access game, and I have no clue when it will be “finished”. The game already looks extremely polished and I am guessing that most of the remaining development time is adding additional races to the available list, and multiplayer balancing. I’ve only played single player at the moment, but I would absolutely try playing this multiplayer… but I just have to find a time when me and several friends have entire afternoons to blow away as we furiously click that “next turn” button. The only concerns I have is how Wargaming might try and monetize this later. I could see them selling races, or selling various bits for the game… but at this very moment it feels a very good single player gaming experience. Time will tell but for the time being I am happy I picked it up. As far as playing it on a regular basis… I will probably finish the game I started last night and see just how it ends up, and then neatly pack the game away until it launches. This seems to be my current method for playing those early release titles… test it out, kick the tires… and then leave it along until launch.

Hellfire Assault

March 3, 2016 by Belghast

Weekends are Bad

One strong constant in my life is that weekends are bad for me when it comes to making plans. This is counter-intuitive since for MOST of the living world… weekends are the time they can regularly commit to doing stuff. The truth is that weekends are really the only time that my wife and I are both together and pointed in the same direction for any lengthy period of time. During the week she has a mixture of responsibilities, commitments, and spur of the moment activities that often times keep her from getting home until eight or nine in the evening. Whereas I tend to have a fairly predictable schedule, that gets me home by 5 pm CST most nights. This means that the only time we actually get to do anything as a couple is on the weekends, and as a result I have tried really hard to be pretty sparse with committing myself to things that occur on Saturday or Sunday. I am already breaking that rule heavily with the recording of AggroChat Saturday nights… but generally speaking by the time our 9pm CST start time rolls around we are home anyway. There however have been a long list of activities that have happened on Sunday and Saturday afternoons that I have flaked like mad on. There was the whole pen and paper role-playing game that happened at 2pm CST, that by some freak occurrence I managed to make four or so of… before life caught up with me and I started being unavailable. Then similarly I thought “Sunday is TV Night” and started trying to raid with my friends Horde side… only to find that I am just barely making it into my chair some nights before Walking Dead. As it gets nicer outside… we push back our range of activity further… so pretty much the entire summer months are a no-go for planned activities on the weekend.

As a result I thought I was pretty much done raiding in World of Warcraft at least until Legion hits. Then my good friend Carth decided to pull together a casual raid group and after everyone voted on the best day of the week… I lucked out and it landed on Wednesday nights. This is pretty much the perfect raid night for me, given that my wife is already committed to church that evening and I can pretty much do whatever I want to do without causing a major imposition. Last night was the first official outing, and we planned on raiding from 7:30 pm cst to 10 pm cst but wound up going a little over due to the overall successes of the group. We absolutely had a few “ringer” dps in the mix, but even accounting for that… I think we did really well. For a bit we would end up having to pug some people… but we managed to pull together a 10+ player team. The roster was super comfortable and included so many long time friends: Carthuun (on Aalis), Tick (on Taavish), Giulietta, Kylana, Edana (@catinglasses), Jasmynne (Carth’s Wife), Bleddwen (@KerynWeylan)…. with myself and Damai tanking and a mixture of ringers that cycled through for which I don’t know all of the mains from Praetorian Guard.

Significant Progress

We did significantly better than I expected on our first outing. We managed to clear up to Iskar in a single evening, and the only boss we really struggled a bit at was Kilrogg. That is pretty much the first fight where the mechanics really start to matter, and as a result it took us two attempts for folks to get the whole visions thing down solidly. On the second go however everything seemed to just work like plan. It was a bit messy at the end, but any kill you walk away from with a victory is a good kill in my book. The awesome thing about all of this as well is that we got a lot of gear for people who needed it. Bleddwen one of the two healers… that was quite literally drafted last night on the spot… walked away with I believe eight pieces of gear. Our other healer walked away with three pieces, but one of those was a tier set piece. I managed to pick up my first piece of tier gear as well, and I am hoping next go round Kormrok will be nice and drop the Warrior piece so I can throw on that two piece bonus. As much as I loved raiding with my Horde side family, I have to say it felt good to be Belghast again in a raid. I mean I have done Gladiator dps for awhile now, and it is really fun… but what I mean is Belghast the tank. It kinda felt good to go back to my roots with the character that was my main through most of those really memorable fights.

It doesn’t hurt that the folks that we raided with… are for the most part the folks I play all of these games with. The two healers we had… have healed me many times in Final Fantasy XIV so it felt natural to see that relationship shift to World of Warcraft. The awesome thing about this as well is that it seems like we have two tanks and two healers locked down solidly. That means we probably need a shift healer and potentially a shift tank to fill in the gap, but otherwise we have a really solid team. There is a certain amount of learning mechanics on the fights, like Iskar… but I forsee us being able to start Heroic before too long. It would be amazing if we could push through it as well and get folks some Moose loving. In any case it was a nice, relaxing and casual raid night, with the folks I probably would have been hanging out with anyways. The only gotcha seemed to be that we were having trouble with our normal Teamspeak server, and as a result are probably going to be migrating to Discord for next week. I had been wanting to give Discord a real world trial, and this seems as good as any time. I love the concept, and I just wish that it were a slack plugin rather than a completely separate application. For text chat purposes, I still like Slack and their notification system just works better… however for voice… at least based on testing last night Discord is seeming to be the new way to go.

OpenGame ID

March 2, 2016 by Belghast

The Problem

Now that I have consumed my morning coffee from my trusty skull mug… I am going to try really really hard to focus on a topic that I had kicking around my head. It all started with a rather simple announcement yesterday that the Microsoft store had Gears of War: Ultimate Edition available for Windows 10 computers. We will talk about the bullshit of making games Windows 10 exclusive some other day… but the discussion for this morning is game accounts. Right now I feel like I am deluged with account systems that serve no value to my life, and only serve to make shit more complicated when I just want to play a game…. and even worse when I want to try and play with friends. For a period of time my life was all nice and Zen, and pretty much everything I purchased went through the Steam interface. Sure Steam does some shifty shit, but it provided me a nice clean interface to play my games… and also a decent account system to keep track of which friends were playing which games. When a game integrated with said steam account system, and used steam servers for multiplayer… shit just worked and worked beautifully. Then Electronic Arts got pissy and spawned the Origin store, forcing me to deal with yet another store front with a significantly worse in every possible way interface. The worst bit about this whole thing is just how annoying the account system and trying to get everyone that I might want to play with “re-friended”.

Over the years I have picked up a number of these extraneous accounts that all do different stuff, and I need all of them for some reason or another. Just to rattle off a few of the multi game accounts: Steam, Origin, GOG, PSN, Xbox Live, Nintendo ID, Google Play, Amazon, Apple Store, Battle.net, Direct2Drive, NCSoft, Funcom, and now I am having to care about UPlay in my life as well. Then there is a whole other tier of things that are game social media like… Anook, Player.me, Raptr, Xfire, Discord and a couple of dozen other accounts that I am forgetting about right now. Then to even further confuse things you have Twitch, Hitbox, Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GPlus, and all of the other social trappings that folks want to interact over. Trying to maintain some semblance of the same group of friends among ALL of those platforms is complete and total bullshit. Sure some of them throw you a bone, by allowing you to either import friends or link accounts… but the end result is just pure madness. So this got me thinking… about all of the things that work well and all of the things that fail miserably. The challenge is that no two companies want to play together nicely… and everyone seems to revel in their proprietary crap. I think the problem is that they simply don’t want to have to comply to essentially their competitors designs, which makes everyone trying to re-invent the wheel and doing a piss poor job of it.

The Idea

In my perfect scenario there would be a single account that is portable and disconnected from any one manufacturer, that could be integrated with all of the existing services and act as a glue to allow players to share their connections between all of the platforms. The idea is that there would be an open standard, that was designed for social gaming. My idea is to start with something similar to LDAP, where you have an authentication core that then also has a metabase with different security bits that allow writing of data to different segments of a user account. This would allow PSN Trophies for example to exist in the same structure as XBox Live Achievements… but otherwise stay separate. The idea would be to divide up the social aspect of gaming from the structural requirements of running a game network, so that the friends list lives on its own… and all of the technical bits get buried in the segment of the account that folks don’t really need to look at anyway. Having a single game account would also go a bit towards solving some of the issues with anonymous access to gaming, and having disposable interactions. I don’t like the concept of real names being thrown around in the ether, and I think that is absolutely the WRONG idea to go about fixing that problem. However I do think that Belghast#1752 for example my Battletag is just as unique as knowing my real name… and so long as this is a piece of data that I cannot shed without a lot of effort it means you can track my actions across multiple platforms. If you see that a given “OpenGame” account has been flagged by Microsoft and PSN for abuse… then maybe it is time for Battle.net and Twitch and Steam to investigate their actions as well?

The problem with my idea is that it sounds great on paper… but the challenge is… who exactly would run such a system and who would administer it? If it is just an open standard and the individual companies are responsible for running their own servers… then where is the buy in and where is the cost savings. If it is a third party company… where is the monetization to make it work? I don’t have all the answers, but this is just the course of a “wouldn’t it be cool if” sequence that I had yesterday throughout the day. I would love to see someone fix this problem, and I would love to see things work in a way that is pro-consumer and not necessarily pro-company. We’ve reached a point where you can pretty much play any game on any console you like… and most of those also end up coming to the PC. I just wish we could get a point where you could also end up playing with PSN friends on your PC, and Xbox friends on your PS4. Considering we have examples like Street Fighter 4 and FFXIV that allow PSN and PC players to play freely together…. I have to assume that the roadblock is Microsoft, and even with an “OpenGame” system they would probably still remain a problem. This mornings post will not help in any meaningful fashion.. but I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. I welcome anyone with the right entrepreneurial spirit to come along and steal this idea… because I would rather have it be a thing than have credit for doing it. I’ve had a mantra for awhile now: “Anything that gets in the way of playing with my friends is bad” and this sort of “OpenGame” system would go a long way to fixing some of that. Here is some ideas for what a system like this would have to have.

Fixed ID that stays with a user between game systems and networks.
Not Real Name based… too much bad shit can come of this.
Systems in place to change that ID in case of dangerous shit like stalking and such… but enough friction to keep it from happening often.
Ability for each game system/network to update only their segment of the total account.
Friends lists are free floating and work regardless of what system you happen to be in… so cross pollination between games.
Thorough Privacy Settings… so you can say “this user can play with me in this game, but not in this one”.
Ability to go 100% stealth mode… because sometimes you’ve had enough interaction and need quiet time.
Linkages to social and other media platforms to allow folks to interact freely (but should also follow above privacy rules).
Cross Game/Platform/Whatever chat (again privacy aware).
In server based games, would be awesome to have suggestions as to which server most of your friends are on.
Ability for services to log account actions against the OpenGame ID.
Sign-Up process difficult enough to make it challenging for folks to keep spawning new IDs.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Last night was another night that was all over the place. Firstly I decided to reinstall Forge.gg and give it another chance. I have so many mixed emotions about this service, I like the concept that I can grab short clips at the end of my gaming session. I dislike the fact that I can ONLY grab short clips, which are generally too short to show a boss fight for example. I like the always on nature, and that it can just run in the background without me feeling like I need to be entertaining. However I ran into some issues last night where apparently even though I had push to talk set… it was still actively picking up my microphone the entire time as you can see in the above clip. So you get a snippet of a conversation between my wife and I about something I don’t even remember. I like the idea of streaming but I don’t always want to be actively interacting, and forge is this great middle ground. Ultimately I wound up muting my microphone at a system level just to make sure that it was not picking up. I am hoping this is just a bug in the current client, and I will crawl the site to see if I can find out why this was happening.

The other gotcha it seems is that it did not pick up and start recording Elder Scrolls Online. I spent the first part of the evening doing garrison dailies and doing at least one Tanaan objective in World of Warcraft and it recorded all of that perfectly. However as soon as I swapped into ESO, it never came up with the forge icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen letting me know it is recording. I will say that the really really nice thing about the client is sometime in between my last attempt at using the service and this one… it seems to work nicer with Fraps because there is no way I am giving up that just to use the service. I am too used to having a common and centralized screenshot tool for all of the games I play. It is an absolute necessity that I have a fresh source of new screenshots for this blog, and I hate having to try and find the screenshot directory for each individual game. So instead I tend to unbind the screenshot key if it is allowed and just use Fraps for everything. It was awesome last night that I was able to use fraps just fine while still recording on forge…. at least when it came to World of Warcraft. I am going to be a sad panda if that ends up being the issue with it recording Elder Scrolls Online.

Return to Greenshade

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The bulk of my time last night was spent wandering around Greenshade in the Elder Scrolls Online. Generally speaking I tend to play this game by wandering aimlessly from objective to objective, but last night I actually seemed to move through the zone with a purpose. That purpose being ingratiating myself to the Court of the Wilderking, a forest spirit that controls the Valenwood and that the local Bosmer worship as a God King. As part of trying to quell the rebellion and steal forces away from the Veiled Heritance, my mission was simple… get the support of the Wilderking to get the support of the local forces…. thus ending the rebellion. I of course did a bunch of other stuff along the way, and I am not entirely complete with the main story sequence… but I am having a blast. I got sidetracked in helping a friend level in World of Warcraft, and then again by the Love is in the Air event…. and finally I am settling back into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. Granted currently I will probably continue to hop games like mad because there is just so damned much stuff that I want to be playing. In Elder Scrolls I have yet to see any of the Imperial City content, or Orsinium… and they are just about to release the Thieves Guild as well. So much catching up to do… but at the same time I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it because I am not playing the game at a serious end game focused level.

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The other big happening of the night is that I finally dinged Veteran Rank 4, allowing me access to the next tier of crafted gear. I was doing awesome…. until I screwed up and rushed to get my shield made and forgot to go to the set crafting area. Originally I was planning on having 5 piece Alessia’s Bulwark, and 4 piece Ashen Grip… except I am now sitting at 3 pieces in that set because I got sidetracked and ended up making a non-set shield. Unfortunately I am completely out of the right kind of wood so I will need to do some more adventuring before I can finish things out. For the time being I have opted to abandon my costume and go with the actual armor look because I dig the Imperial armor look. I will probably always favor the Dunmer sword type, though recently I did enjoy using an axe for a bit. The game looks amazing on the laptop, and I am so damned happy with how well everything is performing to be honest. It does get a little hot but then again what gaming laptop doesn’t. My previous one had a SLI graphics card configuration so had insanely hot air venting out of both sides of the laptop. At least this setup isn’t continuously baking my mouse hand. I just need to sort out why exactly Forge was not recording the game.

The Division

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Also looming on the near horizon is the launch of The Division. At this point it is absolutely certain that I will be playing it on the PC, at least at first. When the price comes down a little I will probably also pick it up for the PS4 so that I have access to it for any of the friends that happen to be playing there. For the last few days since the end of the beta I have trying to sort out how best to organize folks for the upcoming launch. The game itself does not really have guilds or clans or any structure like that…. at least that I saw in the two betas I have been part of. So as a result this is going to make getting stuff going a little more difficult than in other games. However my friend Sigtric, the man who coined the hashtag #BelEffect is firing up a Discord group and attempting to get it to be the official/unofficial chat server for the game. If you are going to be playing I highly suggest you pop by and join the “Gone Rogue” community. There is a shared general chat and breakout channels for PC, PS4, and Xbox One to make organizing things a little easier. I honestly wish I had something like this for Destiny. Discord is one of those things that is growing on me, and while I still find Slack easier to use… there is a point in the near future where I could see abandoning traditional voice servers and moving to Discord entirely.