Tales of the Aggronaut

Fallout First Impressions

November 11, 2015 by Belghast

Non-Spoiler First Thoughts

War Never Changes…. and neither does Fallout, and that is a statement I mean in the best possible way. When a sequel to a beloved franchise is released, you never quite know if you are going to get absolute greatness like Skyrim… or if you are going to be stuck with a Master of Orion 3. For those who loved MOO3 I apologize… but that game was horrible and broke from far too many of the tenets of the original franchise. Fallout 4 however… keeps all of the best features from Fallout 3 and New Vegas… and applies a next generation coat of paint and features to it. If you have been an aficionado of Bethesda games for very long you will notice that several of the really nice features of Skyrim have been implemented into this engine. Everything from the loading screen item previews… to the ability to favorite weapons and swap between them quickly in combat… are direct lineage to Skyrim. What you also get is some genuine evolution of the engine, in the form of just how content dense the world is and how much of it can be fiddled with.

At this point according to Steam I am roughly four hours into the game, and I have to say… that was the fastest four hours of my life. I mentioned yesterday that I did not stay up Tuesday night to play the game, but instead had to wait until after work yesterday. Additionally we have contractors coming to the house to put a door in our bedroom today… so we had to do a lightning round of cleaning before I finally got to sit down and play with my precious. From the moment I set down… every time I was aware that time had passed… it was an hour and not fifteen minutes like I had thought. Most of that time was spent not actively doing any quests or following the story line really. The first handful of events happen to play out in a pretty organic fashion, and I apparently followed the story line to a point… without really meaning to. I remember watching the demo footage from E3, and I have for the most part made it through the sequence that they showed… which happens pretty early in the game. It gives you a neatly framed vignette that allows you to understand some of the forces in the world that you are contending with.

Packrat Friendly

For me at least the best part of this game is that they have taken things to essentially their logical conclusions. If you are living in a world with limited resources, then essentially everything you come across could be useful. In the past I was a horrible packrat and constantly on the brink over being overburdened. Why was I carrying fifty coffee mugs…. who knew… but I might need them someday. Those tendencies are absolutely paid off in full in this game because quite literally every piece of crap you find in the world is useful either to modify your weapons and armor… or to construct things for the new base building side game. Pretty early on, you end up in the neighborhood you once lived in. This then becomes your base of operations allowing you to scrap materials there, and build new structures. As you venture out into the world you find survivors that you can invite back to your little sanctuary, and in a fashion very reminiscent to State of Decay you have to watch after their well being and their defenses. I am assuming as your settlement gets bigger you will become the target of raiders and the like trying to take your hard earned resources.

The other big noticeable change in this game is that everything seems more dangerous. Radiation is a real problem this time, because instead of causing you to lose health over time… it reduces your maximum health pool. All of the old baddies are also more deadly… Bloat Flies move more erratically, Mole Rats can burrow under ground and pop up when you least expect them…. and move insanely fast… and there are new dangerous like giant mutated mosquitoes. All of this and more I have encountered within a short radius of where you actually start the game. Everything I am talking about is within visual distance of the Vault 111 entrance. Essentially this is a game that is going to eat every waking moment for a long while… because right now I feel like I have not even begun to unwrap the wrapping of the game… let alone actually dip below the surface. The big takeaway is that it is the Fallout game play that you either love or hate… with more advanced systems and more fluidity of character movement and actions. Everything “feels better” and I know this largely because I played quite a bit of New Vegas Tuesday night as a sort of placebo for Fallout 4 while waiting on it to unlock. The changes are extremely noticeable, even from the level the engine was at during Skyrim. I’m now going to shut up about my impressions… and launch the game and lose myself in it again.

Waiting for Apocalypse

November 10, 2015 by Belghast

Seasonal Hunter

Last night was the tale of me doing a bunch of things to avoid thinking about the fact that I was not yet playing Fallout 4. Throughout the day people were unlocking it through either legitimate means of happening to be in the right time zone… or through some chicanery. If you have access to a VPN tool, you can in theory make your system look like it is from a time zone where a game has already unlocked. This means however that you have to stay connected to said VPN the entirety of your time playing the game… either that or go completely offline. Thusfar Steam seems to have turned a blind eye to this practice but my fear is that someday… they won’t. I ultimately value my Steam account far too much to risk losing it just to play a game a few hours early. So as a result I was like the rest of the nation waiting on midnight eastern time for the game to unlock here. The problem is when you want to be playing one thing… and can’t… nothing else really seems that much fun.

I instead decided to work on some things that I had been meaning to do. Since the BlizzCon madness of the weekend I had been poking my head into Diablo 3 periodically, and before the season 4 crunch had played out for us… I managed to get a Demon Hunter within a stones throw of 70. In fact I was sitting at 68… which ironically is exactly the point at which I got my non-seasonal Monk. I oped to work on grinding out that last little bit so that I could at least say that I finished both the Warrior and Demon Hunter during the season. While I had some fun with the Hunter, I doubt I will play one again because in truth… it really just is not my style. My final play style centered around using whatever ability generated a ton of hatred… and then using that to fuel the fan of knives attack and rapid fire, and through a combination of those two I could pretty much burn down anything. I dinged 70, crafted a ton of gear…. and now my hunter is probably going to sit in this state for eternity. At some point I would really like to finish up the Monk just so I can check that one off the list. That leaves only the Wizard that I have never gotten close to capping.

Pre-loading is a Lie

The tale around Fallout 4 is a little bittersweet for me. Months ago I was happy as hell to have managed to get one of the rare elusive Pip-boy edition pre-orders. The problem being… it was silly expensive, but was going to be a one time only type thing. I have long wished I had gotten the bobble head version of the Fallout 3 collectors edition with the metal lunchbox. Fallout is one of those franchises that really gets me as a player… and since saving my pennies in college to buy the first one at Wal-mart… it has been one of those games that will just consume all of my time for a period of months. The problem being… in the meantime we have had a whole slew of unexpected expenses, not the least of which is the home renovation that we are going through. As such I ended up doing the adult thing… cancelling my Pip-boy pre-order and going with the significantly cheaper Steam version of the game. The positive is however that I was able to pre-load the game… and in theory play it last night.

I say “in theory” because while I struggled to stay awake until 11 pm central… when I finally was able to hit play a whole other process started of “unpacking” the game. At times this said it was only 13 minutes away… at other times 4 hours… because in truth the system had no clue how long this would actually take. After about ten minutes the progress bar was less than an eighth of the way through so I finally gave up and went on to bed. This morning however I got in and played through the first little bit of the game allowing me to create a character and at least get my family into the vault. This game is so damned pretty… but more than that the motion and movement just feels better. One of the many things I did last night to pass the time was to start a new game of Fallout New Vegas… and I had forgotten how much NOT a shooter that game was. I still love it immensely but the movement and motion felt pretty damned stilted. This however controls beautifully, and I was shocked to see my fairly old machine being able to run it on what it suggested as Ultra High. We will see just how well that actually works once we leave the vault and venture out into the world. But alas that will have to wait until after work tonight.

Fighting Nostalgia

November 9, 2015 by Belghast

The Afterglow

You know… Blizzard would probably win back a lot of players if they activated every single account for the two weeks following Blizzcon

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) November 7, 2015

During the midst of the BlizzCon festivities I tweeted the above statement… and at the time I thought this would be a brilliant idea. BlizzCon brings up feelings in me at least that I didn’t even realize were still there about a game I have not been actively playing for six months. So yeah… it seemed like if they would just automagically make it so everyone can log in and play during BlizzCon and the two weeks after… they would probably re-hook a lot of players on the game or at least get them to stick around for a few months. The problem being… two weeks is probably long enough to make someone come to their senses. I phrase it like that because I am going through a bout of momentary insanity myself. Every instinct in my body tells me that I really want to play some World of Warcraft, which is odd because nothing really seemed that amazing while the presentations were going on. There is just something about the BlizzCon buzz that is real and tangible and makes you want to sift through your past characters and revisit old haunts that you had long forgotten.

I am having these desires to log in and run Icecrown Citadel or Naxxramas… or even Ulduar. Basically this is 100% nostalgia attacking me and making me want to go experience what I considered to be the best era of the game. I am fighting the urge with every fiber of my being because I know as soon as Tuesday happens… I will be devoting my life to Fallout… and thinking “Warcraft who?”. I know I could log in and play sub level 20 characters, and I have considered that… but have not been certain if that would make the desire better or just worse. The problem is… I don’t REALLY want to play World of Warcraft… I want to play the game circa 2009 when we were still in love with the Wrath of the Lich King patch cycle. Some of the Legion content seems like it could be really cool, and I do hope with every fiber of my being I somehow find my way into Beta, but I know all that waits for me on the live game is the same stuff that lead me to finally cancel my account again. Yes I am rationalizing the hell out of this because I am just trying to hold out until I am safely in a Vault Wednesday.

Closer to Sleeper

The above image was me yesterday morning while I wrapped up the AggroChat podcast and made my own blog post, waiting and hoping and praying to see a Warsat drop. Part of the time I spent trying to make Destiny Event Tracker work… which it does… but it feels like there is a paragraph of explanation text that needs to go with it that simply does not exist. It seems like this is a timer that shows when an event MAY spawn, and some of the spawn zones are not exactly active. For example I really do think that the Warsat simply no longer drops in Skywatch because of all of the other events that are happening there now. I waited that timer out for a significant amount of time and never saw one. However once I switched over to checking the Mothyard on earth, aka the location in the above image… I quickly got a Warsat and was able to move on. Similarly quickly I was able to get both the Mars and Moon Warsat drops which were pretty much accurate according to the timers listed above. That only left the archives mission on Venus, which I know I MUST have done at some point…. but damned if I can remember doing it at any point in the past. Maybe there is a special version if you are on the sleeper stimulant quest chain, but I do not remember something quite like that.

I have now finished powering up the Ikelos core, and have turned it in to the Gunsmith. In theory tomorrow with the reset he should offer me a new quest to go do a 280 light version of the Saber-2 strike. If I can cobble together a group for that, I should be able to loot the sleeper stimulant frame, which at least based on what I am reading will turn in at the Gunsmith for my finished 290 Sleeper Stimulant heavy pulse rifle. This will be the first of the exotic weapon quests that I have really completed… not counting the one you get from the gunsmith at rank 4. It definitely feels less arbitrary than the exotic bounties used to in year one. In all of the bounties I completed I only ever got the bounty for the last word. This at least gives me a ladder that I can climb, with more importantly a starting rung of that ladder that is clear…. well clear based on using external sources. I am not sure how the hell people figured these things out the first time… it seems like pure madness since the game doesn’t really give you much information to go on. I guess Bungie is accounting for the fact that the internet and YouTube is pretty much ubiquitous and someone somewhere would upload a video on how to do pretty much everything you can think of. I still at some point need to get the Cult Ghost from Paradox so I can eventually get No Time to Explain. Since my hunter is my Future War Cult devotee, I am thinking maybe I should try for it on them because at this point they should have all of the faction needed to complete the quest.

Week In Gaming 11/8/2015

November 8, 2015 by Belghast

Reapers Attack

Yesterday was N7 day and what I can only imagine as reapers… continued to dismantle my house. What I mean by that is that this week contractors have been working on siding our house and other little home improvement things. Friday during the day and all day Saturday I have had to listen to them tearing parts of the exterior of my house off, and sawing bits to put back in their place. I have a headache that is completely insane and I think its simply from all the noise over the last few days. Another thing that happened yesterday was the ExtraLife Marathon, and at one point we had these grand plans to try and do it as AggroChat. I am extremely glad those plans fell through because with the contractors traipsing in and out of my house there would have simply been no way I could have done that yesterday. I did however get to hang out a bit with Liore on her stream, and my hope was that anyone who would have supported me would end up supporting her. Last I heard she raised something like $2200 which is pretty damned awesome!

Seeking Stimulant

This week once again has been largely devoted to me playing Destiny. As I had hoped it does in fact seem like the Sleeper Stimulant quest is going to be reappearing about once a month. I managed to complete the First Firewall and the follow up Shadow Call missions that are the ones that were time sensitive. Shadow Call in itself was pretty damned insane because it is a mission where you have to reach the top of a tower in three minutes. This tower is full of tons of Taken Fallen mobs, and essentially you don’t have time to fight ANY of it. You need to run past as best you can, and the only thing I ultimately took out were the blight orbs that robbed me of my ability to jump. When you get to the top you have to take down three Wizards all within the original time limit. It took me about eight tries to get to the top of the tower… but when I finally did I was able to take down the mobs without much issue. Now I am just left with the task of gathering up all of the elements required to recharge the Ikelos fusion core. The problem I am having is of course the Warsats… I spent most of last night waiting on Earth in the supposed area where the Warsat spawns. I waited through three different blights and did not see any Warsats at all during that process, so I am wondering if for some reason they have moved where the Warsat drops. I am getting conflicting reports of it happening in the Mothyards and Skywatch… which while next to each other are only connected by a series of tunnels that makes them hard to move between.

The other big thing I worked on this week was my Warlock, and I have managed to get him up to level 30. Doing the level 20 strikes I thought initially would be a great way to level, but for some reason I seem to only get the Omniguul one which is freaking annoying. I have a few more of those Red Bull experience stimulant things… and I plan on chain running some strikes with them up in the hopes of maximizing the experience gain. I still need to finish up the Black Garden quest, because ultimately when I am on I spend more time faffing about in patrol missions than I actually do in directed combat. I have a slew of quests that the various folks on the tower have given me as well that I should probably finish up. I am not sure what I have this drive to get the Warlock to 40 and geared, but in theory I guess I just want one of each. In an MMO it always bugs me when I get exclusive gear for a specific class but cant use it… and that has always been my strongest drive to level said class… because I knew I had it waiting on me when I got to level. I have most of a level 40 gear set waiting in my bank, and I am amped to be able to get the Warlock up to use it.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Another side project this week has been to go through and play the original Halo: Combat Evolved, or at least start it. The original Xbox and honestly the GameCube as well are like the biggest voids in my gaming history. They happened at a time when I was largely in an Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot shaped hole. As a result I never got to play Halo other than the pretty lousy PC port, and I never really caught back up when I finally got an Xbox 360. In my travels I have picked up copies of the Anniversary edition of Halo for 360, as well as 2, 3, and 4 and plan on playing through them at some point. What ended up peaking my interests is the fact that apparently on of the elder races in Halo were the Ecumene, which during the Book of Sorrows in Destiny you find out was a race destroyed by the Hive. So in theory at least it seems like the Destiny universe is the “future” of the Halo universe, or at least Halo is a universe that exists before the coming of the Traveler and the dawning of the golden age. I am not exactly sure why I am so fascinated with the lore of Destiny, but I guess in a way it reminds me a lot of the universe of Dune. Super complex… but you also have to dig hard to find that connective tissue that brings everything together.

I have to say that so far Combat Evolved holds up pretty solidly. My only real complaint is that I cannot actually remap my controls. You can choose from one of many presets, but you can’t actually swap around the buttons. If I had my druthers I would map things to match Destiny more closely… but I did manage to find a set that is “close enough” for me not to instinctively do anything stupid. I am mostly wanting to know the story of the Halo universe, so that I can maybe glean more information about the Destiny universe. Also I seem to be on an FPS kick so playing another one just seems to be in the cards. I am honestly considering playing Fallout 4 on the PC with an Xbox 360 controller just to continue this pattern. I do at some point need to get back into the swing of playing FPS on PC with the mouse and keyboard because I absolutely intend to play Overwatch that way.

Heroes of the Storm

As I mentioned briefly above… I ended up playing a bunch of matches with Liore and Elly yesterday during their Extra Life stream. It had been a really really long time since I had played any Heroes, more than likely not much since the game officially launched awhile back and reset. They have really added a bunch of nifty stuff, and I noticed that one of my previously “cool” but largely just a recolor skins.. has turned into this elaborate Diablo Tyrael thing which I absolutely approve of. Unfortunately while playing I just saw a bunch of skins that I really want to get… like Marshall Raynor… and Judgement Uther. Later last night I poked my head in again, this time alone and noticed that I had more than enough gold to purchase Uther, which is one of those characters that I have enjoyed on free weeks, but never actually picked up. I have also heard that Rehgar is equally enjoyable in the melee support role, but not really played him either. I ended up winning a game as Uther which completed a quest. I guess at some point they backed away from the concept that you could not complete quests in bots only games, which makes me happy because I can actually pop in and get stuff done on days that I don’t feel like dealing with other players. This is still a really fun game, and probably the only MOBA that I would actually play by myself and solo queue. Funny how making chat option improves my experience, the only negative is that you always seem to have one player that is off by themselves and not really paying attention to what the team is doing.

Rift

I also popped my head into Rift for a bit while we podcast last night, and continued to work on my primalist. At this point I am level 14 and I feel like I am starting to wind down the content in Silverwood. I guess I am just a die hard Defiant… because I just don’t have near as much fun when I am playing Guardian side. I liked the idea of a Dwarven Primalist, but man do I wish I had the option of choosing to play the Defiant content instead. I mean I know you can race change, but it simply was not worth it for me to roll a Defiant and then race change to Dwarf. I just kinda wish that races were independent of the path you choose to take faction wise… since the faction as fiction patch made all of that really a personal preference not a hard line. I mean Freemarch has all sorts of awesome Undead that you get to fight… and what does Silverwood have? Goblins… Fae… and more Elves… just not nearly as cool on the “fun to slaughter” meter. Complaints aside I am continuing to progress but not really playing that often. This is one of those games that I keep returning to when I want some low key activity, and I don’t feel like I have time to get into something more serious. I guess I play Rift much the same way as a lot of people play Guild Wars 2. Get in, do a few things… and get right back out.