Tales of the Aggronaut

Shamen and Pax South

January 10, 2016 by Belghast

Prepping for Pax South

Tis the beginning of the year, and we are now roughly three weeks away from Pax South, and I have to say…. I am a bit concerned. It is going to be an awesome time no matter what because right now I know of like a dozen friends that are going to be there… so going to have plenty of people to hang out with. What concerns me though is it seems like Pax South as a whole is a much less hopping place. By this time last year, all three days of the show were down to “low” rating, and Saturday and the Three Day Passes had been sold out for a very long time. Additionally they had already posted a picture of the convention floor and who was going to be inhabiting what booth space. As far as the passes, Saturday was still available on Friday… and just looking at the schedule there don’t seem to be as many “big name” presentations as there were last year. Last year after all we had the world announcement of Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns happening, as well as I believe the first real information about Sid Meier’s Starships. Now… what I see instead is very light on the game content and very heavy on the youtube and stream celebrities.

All of this said I am going to have the best time this year…. because what made last year so much fun was running around with Ashgar and Rae. This time around I will be running around with Ashgar, Rae, Thalen, Dallian, Damai, Lonrem, Helkim, Paragon, Tick, Rylacus, and hell probably several others that I am failing to rattle off on the top of my head. It is the people that make the place awesome, and it is my hope to meet up with as many people as I can over the two days I am going to be there. So if you are planning on going to Pax South please let me know. I did a poor job of actually connecting with people last year and I hope to fix that. The other thing that is going to make this year awesome is that I am no longer going to have to worry about somehow abandoning my wife. Last year she went running around during the day, utilizing the hotels shuttle service, and by all accounts had a lot of fun, or at least enough fun to want to come back again this year.

The problem being that I always felt guilty for leaving her at the hotel and felt the strong pull to rush home at night so we could go out to dinner and such. This time around we are also bringing one of her friends so she now also has someone to run around with and wander San Antonio. What is hilarious is… she feels like I am being awesome, and I think its awesome because I will feel less guilty all the time. This also means I will probably experience a lot of the nighttime content of Pax and go to the concerts and such, and maybe some of the after parties. Granted on Saturday night I don’t want to be out too late… given that I will be driving the eight or nine hours home on Sunday. In any case…. if you read the blog or you listen to AggroChat, drop me a line and it is my hope to catch up with as many people during that weekend as I can. I will be getting into the hotel room late Thursday night, and I am staying about six miles away from the convention center out by the airport… in part because we had a great experience there last year…. and the whole free shuttle service to various destinations thing was awesome for my wife. So yesterday we did a bit of juggling to change our arrangements, and now have a double suite so it should be awesome. There was talk last night about maybe trying to get in together and see Force Awakens as a group while down there… since supposedly there is a theater a few blocks away.

Shamanism

One of the things I am really enjoying about World of Warcraft right now is the ability to fly. I realize that I was heavily in the “no flight in draenor” camp, and for the most part I still am. That said… having it makes everything so damned much easier, and questing through the zones is greatly improved. I feel like WoW content however desperately needs the grounding of players at the beginning of an expansion to keep folks from just blowing through everything instantly. In the past once you had a single character at the new level cap you could purchase flight for your other characters, and that was a great option…. but an extremely expensive one. I think personally I like the Draenor Pathfinder option because even though it was a pain in the butt to complete… now that I have done it the benefit can be used by every single character on my account. As a whole I am a huge fan of account wide unlocks and they actually make it far more likely for me to play other characters. In Final Fantasy XIV everything that I have exists on a single character, and as a result I am completely disincentive from trying any more characters. Same goes for games like Rift that while I have alts… I always tend to play the same main character because he has the best toys.

I feel like playing an Enhancement Shaman is a little broken…. in a good way. After having leveled several other characters, this one seems to be the easiest. I can just straight up shred most mobs without my totems, or heroism…. but then I always have those things waiting in reserve for big mobs and elites. The speed of killing things is just so damned fast, and since I have crafters that can feed me gear…. walking around with a pair of level 630 blue weapons really makes a huge difference. I still don’t fully understand why the crafted blacksmith weapons start at 630 unlike the 640 that all of the other gear seems to start at, but in any case I am fine with it…. it is a huge dps boost over the weapons I am getting in the zones. The thing that I cannot wait for in WoW however is the new transmogging system. WoWhead, being the awesome folks they always are has put up a preview system to show you all of the transmog gear your characters are going to get granted from quest completion. I am really really hoping that the new system is account wide like Diablo 3, because there are certain characters like this shaman that simply don’t have a lot of cool gear to work with yet. I guess I should farm more old world content to get him a decent set to run around in.

Week Survived

January 9, 2016 by Belghast

Week Was Bullshit

snowyoutlook

This week was kinda hell. It was my first week back from my extended Christmas vacation, and it feels like it was pretty much the same thing for my entire office. Everything became a crisis, because all of those folks that had been slacking for the last quarter of the year suddenly realized that it was 2016 and all of the stuff they failed to accomplish now apparently looks bad for them. So as a result every half formed idea and improperly started project has seemed to rise up from the graveyard to walk the earth once more. All of this seemed to reach a head on Thursday when no less than a dozen different fires and microfires were blazing, all of which needing my attention. Not the least of which was a false positive trojan, and a virus scare where over a hundred users decided to click on that phishing email. As the week continued I started simply wanting to watch the world burn.

The positive is that as the week wore on I got less and less “jet lagged” for lack of a better term. Over the Christmas break my wife and I had managed to get our scheduled completely screwed up, and there were several nights when I was finally getting to bed around 3:30 inn the morning. Those first few days were pure hell, but Tuesday was better than Monday, and Wednesday better than Tuesday… and thankfully by the time he hellmouth opened up and dumped Thursday on me I was actually feeling pretty great. The other crazy thing that happened this week was the Lottery… and everyone daydreaming about what they would do if they won the lottery. It felt like on Friday I could not go anywhere without someone striking up a conversation about the potential winnings. While I realize that the lottery itself is a tax on those who are bad at mathematics… I managed to get myself suckered in as well and picked up a handful of tickets. I have long played the pool at work, because I view it as insurance. If for some reason the entire department hit the lottery… there would be a lot of tendered resignations the next day and I wanted to at least have the option to do the same.

Lots of Destiny

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From a gaming standpoint, I mostly played Destiny on the 360 this week… trying desperately to get to level cap so I have a character to play with the friends on that platform. Last night… I played absolutely nothing apart from some Neko Atsume. Then again with Neko you don’t actually “play” the game but instead just look in periodically on your adorable catbutts playing with balls and shit in your yard. Last night we had a gathering of some of our family, as before holidays we had resolved to try really hard to get together more often. The problem with last night however is that my wife is entirely too nice of a person. She somehow allowed one of the most bigoted anti-gay part of the family… to join our otherwise gay positive little gathering. The positive is that for the most part it was a pleasant night, which only serves to make me realize just how damned fucked up Facebook is. The asshole in question has the nerve to forward all manner of anti-gay propaganda on Facebook but apparently would never say that sort of thing to someones face. This is yet another reason why I don’t really have a Facebook, but instead just the one attached to this blog… largely for the purpose of propagating the blog out into the world.

As you could see in the first image of this post, it is fairly snowy outside so after our gathering we stopped by the grocery store last night and prepared to not really leave the house at all this weekend. So today we are having Frito Chilli Pies for lunch, and crock pot spaghetti for dinner… all the time between snuggling into our blanket cocoons on the couch. My wife is teaching Forensics this semester, and as a result she has a whole slew of videos that she wants to preview for augmenting certain sections of her text, like blood spatter analysis and such. Her first year teaching we ended up testing a bunch of different fake blood formulas because blood spatter is the sort of thing that only really makes sense with visual demonstrations. As far as myself today, I will probably be playing some more World of Warcraft, and I have even contemplated patching up Wildstar to try and get in on the world boss hunt thing that is going on. I am still finding my thoughts of Final Fantasy XIV pretty lackluster right now, but I know there is a world event that I should probably pop in do. Though admittedly I find the monkey samurai helmets creepy as hell… and no where near as adorable as the bunny samurai hat I wear all the time… or the ramurai hat from last year.

Cats and Wolves

January 8, 2016 by Belghast

Cattes a Plenty

At some point last year, lots of folks in my feed showed up with this Japanese app on their phones called Neko Atsume. From what I can tell it roughly translates to Cat Collector, and it is one of those passive things that I tend to refer as a “maintenance game”. The thing is…. I like cats. In fact as I write this post I have one on either end of my desk sleeping on their blankets. I for the most part avoided the game until recently when for some strange reason I decided to give it an install. Firstly I’ve talked about my problems with mobile gaming in general. I tend to install a game, play it a few times… and then never touch it again. Largely my life is not exactly mobile friendly, and if I have access to games…. I am generally at home when I can use a more traditional gaming system. This game however… fits that realm of do something… leave it sit for awhile… check back in on progress for a minute or two. I’ve found myself popping it open while waiting on a meeting to start, and the jolt of happy kittehs doing stuff seems to help my mental state.

The concept is really simple. You purchase cat toys, place them in your virtual yard… and the neighborhood cats will come visit you and leave you gifts if they enjoyed themselves. The gifts come in the form of silver or gold fish… with the later also serving as the cash shop currency of the game. As far as advancement… I have zero clue how that works. I know I have seen screenshots of folks with much bigger yards, but I have no idea how that actually occurs yet. The starter yard has a fixed number of mount points for items, and at any point you can pick the items up and replace them with other items from your inventory. I have a pretty simple yard right now, but it seems to draw cats in pretty well. You can play the game completely free and there is a conversion between silver fish and gold fish… but it is pretty painful. You can get 10 Gold fish for every 250 Silver fish, which is doable because over the course of a few days I have earned over 250. Right now it gives me tiny doses of happy especially when I pop over and my yard is completely full of cats doing adorable things. I fully expect that within two weeks time I will have abandoned this mobile game just like I have abandoned so many others.

Slowly Leveling

The other big project I have had over the last several days is working my way through the content in Destiny on my Xbox 360. This has been a somewhat crazy side mission, and I have to say… it has been interesting leveling from scratch for a second time. There were a lot of things I struggled with in Destiny playing through it that very first time, and for the most part none of them are big deals this time. I guess all of the time I have played on the Playstation 4 really has made me significantly better at the game, because swapping consoles has been a non-issue. Sure the 360 controller feels a little strange, but I seem to be able to switch hit between it and the dualshock without much problem. Admittedly I find the dualshock 4 significantly more comfortable, and if there was a way to make it work on the 360 I totally would. I guess you might ask yourself why exactly am I leveling on a last generation console… well I still have friends playing it. I have been really damned impressed at just how well the game plays. I mean admittedly it feels like someone smeared vasoline on the screen because everything feels a little fuzzy… given the lower resolution and with it lower texture detail. However the moment to moment game play is exactly the same… and the weapons and movement all feels just as responsive. I am sure at some point I will pick up an Xbox One, and at that point… in theory my 360 characters get to transfer over so any work I am doing now I can carry forward into the next system.

There are so many lessons that I have learned from playing through the first time. This time around for example I am stockpiling every single blue engram drop that I happen to get. The idea is that if I can wait to open any of them until level 40, I will be able to push up my light level quickly and get to a viable position to start doing content. I am investing a lot of time right now in this platform, but the hope is that eventually it will be the sort of thing I only play when I have people to play with. I still greatly prefer the Playstation 4 version, and those are the characters that I really care about. In theory I could have spent my level 25 boost on my Titan and probably would have been done by now, but there is something fun about doing this legitimately again. At this point I have beaten the main storyline of the original game, and darkness below. I am also a fairly significant way through the House of Wolves storyline, but it was getting late last night and I did not really want to deal with the Vault of Glass mission, so that is where I will pick up next time I play. I’ve reached level 25, which concerns me a bit… given that I have quite a bit to go before I can function very efficiently in the Taken King content. I mean in theory I could already be doing that… but sub 35 some of those later missions are a pain in the ass. Generally speaking on Destiny alts I push all the way to 40 before even really starting Taken King, so that I can burn through it easily. Given I need leveling fuel… I will more than likely start Taken King as soon as I finish up with House of Wolves. I guess I could do some Strike grinding, but I really really hate the Omnighoul strike, and that seems to be all I ever get in the level 20 range.

Virtual Reality

January 7, 2016 by Belghast

Next Big Thing

It feels like for the majority of my life, “Consumer Virtual Reality” has been roughly five years away…. or at least that is what the pundits are consistently saying. Granted I have been hearing this for the last three decades of my life. The 90s were really the era of this being the big thing, thanks to the popularity of movies like Lawnmower Man and the weekly reminder of just how amazing the Holodeck could be on Star Trek the Next Generation. The problem has been however that what we are actually capable of delivering, versus what we are expecting… has been a pretty huge gulf to cross. The first time I touched anything I would consider virtual reality, were the extremely expensive Virtuality arcade machines from the roughly 1991. You can see a screenshot of the type of graphics it delivered above. Sure it felt cool to be wandering around a fully immersive 3D world, but the amount of disconnect between your actions and the half dozen polygons that represented your hand… was pretty massive. The funny thing about this game is that apparently it was built on the Amiga 3000 as a hardware platform, which I guess only serves to show you just how advanced that system really was.

I guess for me Virtual Reality has been this failed promise for so long that I have doubted that it would actually really arrive. I threw in a few other examples in the collage above like Sega Holosseum from 1991 that chose to go down the smoke and mirrors route of creating the approximation of holograms, rather than trying to wrap you in a virtual landscape. In many ways it worked better, and playing the game felt like the 3D Chessboard from Star Wars. Then we had the famous Nintendo false step of the Virtual Boy from 1995, that came with the least ergonomic way of playing the game. I think the suggested method was to sit it on a kitchen counter or something…. and lean over to use it. However for MOST of the people I knew that had one they would end up laying on the couch and letting the console rest on their face. There were a bunch of negative effects of seeing the equivalent of gameboy quality graphics in red and black…. and the few times I used it I wound up with a nasty headache. Around 2003 I remember a good friend of mine having 3D glasses that hooked to the PC and provided 1024×768 screens for each eye, but this ended up working the hell out of the video card… and the framerates suffered. So basically… there have been a lot of technologies that have arrived telling me that Virtual Reality is here…. only to not really be the case.

Arrived at a Cost

It was roughly around this time last year that I got to play with the Oculus Rift for the first time. At Pax South I was scheduled to do a media demo of Elite Dangerous, and the marketing guy asked if I had ever used a Rift, and upon hearing that I had not shuttled me towards one of the two machines that had them. Granted there were around ten machines in total in the booth, and only two of them were hooked up and capable of using the Rift which immediately made me a bit suspicious. Firstly… I suck horribly at space shooters…. and they loaded up a dog fighting scenario for me to play where I was put up against a computer ship. The demo ended when either I killed the ship… or it killed me. Needless to say my demo probably took twice the amount of time needed as the other players, but it was really somewhat amazing the first moment when I realized that while chasing this ship…. I could look up through the top of the canopy to trace its movement. There was still the strange uncanny valley as I watched a set of hands move in the cockpit that were not my own. The computer was furiously trying to guess what my hand movements might look like based on the controls I was pressing on the real world HOTAS setup. After I destroyed the ship I asked the Marketing folks some questions, one of which was what sort of hardware they were running this demo on. Not surprisingly they had it running on an Nvidia Titan X which is still currently a roughly $1200 video card…. so I started to temper my expectations.

Yesterday the prices were released for the first generation of the Oculus Rift released for public consumer consumption. Granted at this point there have been several development kit models available for those daring enough to brave the potential issues of dealing with beta hardware. I guess in my mind the price point that seemed reasonable was around $300, because that is what the Samsung Gear unit retails for… and what the supposed price point of the Sony PS4 VR unit will be. I was not insanely shocked however when the pre-order price ended up at roughly double that amount $599. If that $600 price tag were a turn key solution that you simply plugged into the HDMI out on your existing PC, then I guess in truth that would probably be well worth it. However for the bulk of us… we are likely running hardware that is significantly less snazzy than their requirements. The minimum requirements listed are a Nvidia GTX 970 which is essentially a $350 video card. However I would not expect full performance in games like Elite Dangerous on anything lower end than a 980 ti… which pushes you into the roughly $650-700 price range on a video card. So before you have touched the rest of your computer set up at all… you are out $1300 in just the Rift and a high end video card. As much as I love this pipe dream, it is simply too expensive of one for me to even indulge the thought of.

Reality Sets In

The problem I have is that I have a $200 video card, not a $600 video card… and it is unlikely short of winning the lottery that I will ever be able to bring myself to spend that sort of money. I am sure as time goes on, people will get better at writing VR game experiences, and additionally the cost of the hardware itself will come down by the time it reaches the third or fourth generation of the Rift. For the time being, Nvidia gave some numbers that said rendering a game for a VR headset requires roughly seven times the amount of resources. So essentially I have ruled out the Oculus Rift as something I will ever be able to afford. I know my friend Scopique has been playing with some android VR options that supposedly allow you to create ghetto VR for the PC, and I am anxious to see how well these work out for him. Personally I think my first likely footsteps into this is in the form of the Playstation VR, and I linked in a video above to show off that unit and a few of the games. I already have the necessary hardware, namely in the form of a Playstation 4, and if the headset itself ends up being around $300 or even a little more… that becomes within the realm of possibility. Given that I managed to get my PS4 for only $200, that would make the total outlay for the system in the $500-600 price range which seems reasonable.

Essentially I am going to be happy as hell for anyone who manages to pony up the money to get a Oculus Rift. I’ve been watching another friend Qelric do videos every now and then showing off her beta hardware. I hope she can somehow end up getting one of the production units, so I can continue to live vicariously through her experiences. The problem is… that pricetag… is pretty damned steep regardless. The other big problem I have with the Rift so far is that I am not really seeing the killer apps other than Elite Dangerous. Most of the games she has played with feel more like “tech demos” rather than fully fleshed out rich gaming experiences that would sell a unit. RIGS on the other hand on the PSVR seems like exactly the sort of fun multiplayer hardware pushing experience that will get someone to add a headset to their Christmas list. I think the Oculus Rift right now is a true “enthusiast” experience, but isn’t quite “consumer virtual reality” just yet, and it is going to take manufacturers building games for the platform to finally make it worth the purchase price. In the time between however… I am going to continue being interesting in every bit of news I can find. From what I am hearing the units are apparently sold out through May 2016 delivery, so it seems like plenty of folks are willing to plunk down for purchase, and I am anxious to see the sort of experiences especially the youtubers and streamers showcase using the magic box.