Tales of the Aggronaut

Day of Destiny

October 5, 2015 by Belghast

So Much Fireteam

Pause in loading gave a rare screenshot opportunity.

It seems my recent Destiny addiction has rekindled the fires in a handful of my friends. As a result over the weekend I spent most of it in a Fireteam with Damai attempting to help level our friend Carthuun represented above by his PSN name Saldonas. Saturday night my wife was freezing, so I got drafted into going to bed the moment our podcast broke up to provide “warmth”. As a result I had to spend a good chunk of Sunday morning editing the podcast, creating the YouTube version, blogging about it and broadcasting it to the world. After that I of course has to throw out my own Aggronaut post… which means that I was fairly late getting started on playing anything. By the time I logged into Destiny Damai and Carth had a fireteam going and were working on the last few missions of the original storyline. From there we pushed through The Dark Below and House of Wolves expansion content as a group, which honestly had been a bullet point that I wanted to get through at some point. The problem is with so much new and exciting stuff to do and gear to get… I never quite got around to making the time for it. However with Carth leveling for the first time… all of the items you get through those storyline elements were actually relevant. I finally st0pped grouping around 7pm when my wife got back home, and I went off to fix dinner for the two of us. At that point I think Carthuun was sitting around the level 25 mark which is not too shabby for a day of grouping.

The big thing that I sorted was how to use PS4 party chat comfortably. I have a Logitech G430 sitting relatively unused because after swapping to using a Blue Yeti microphone on my machine upstairs, I swapped to simply using a pair of Behringer HPS3000 studio headphones. The sound output was better and they are nowhere near as heavy as the Logitech pair because they don’t need an attached boom mic. Ages ago I ordered a few pairs of adapters that take a standard headset and converts it down to the single jack style input that modern phones and the PS4 controller uses. Yesterday I took the time to dig out my G430 and one of those adapters and after some fiddling and piping all of the game audio through the headset… I finally arrived at something that was fairly comfortable to use. I don’t seem to mind the fact that playstation chat is mono audio… when I have the rest of the game audio coming through my headphones as well. Additionally having something other than my dedicated PS4 headset… makes them far more comfortable to use for several hours on end. Also this finally allows me to crank up the game audio without frustrating my wife, who has on occasion asked me to turn it down when a really crazy moment happens and the audio is booming. Now that it is sorted I feel more comfortable using a headset with the console, and am also more likely to just hang out in party chat for awhile. I am wondering what the upper bound on a party group is, and if you can have more than just the three fire team members.

Swapping Companions

When I got downstairs last night to prepare for the season finale of Fear the Walking Dead, I of course booted up and started playing Star Wars the Old Republic. Now that I have finished with my smuggler, I am picking up where I left off on my Sith Warrior. Through the course of the evening I worked my way through the rest of the Nar Shadda storyline and just now starting on Tattooine. I have to say it is very nice to finally have all four buffs after beating one of each base class. I am a bit saddened however that I am finally reaching the stage of the game where it feels like having a healer is a very useful thing. This means relegating Vette to crafting and spending the majority of my time with Malavai Quinn. In the grand scheme of things I have no problem with Malavai, because he seems like the honorable Imperial Soldier type. The problem being that I just like running around with Vette, because I always loved Mission Vao, and honestly for me… she was always Mission 2.0 rather than her own character. Instead she will farm up companion gifts… that I will ultimately give to her later… which seems a little strange?

Basically if I have a shot in hell of getting the special legacy unlock thing for beating all of the stories, that means I have to play through the rest of Sith Warrior, Imperial Agent, Bounty Hunter, and Sith Inquisitor all before the end of the month. I am seriously doubting I will be able to do it, but…. that said if I ONLY focus on the story missions I might be able to make it. When you only focus on the class story the early planets at least go extremely quickly and you stay at a decent level. I might need to spend some cartel coins however to unlock more mod gear to throw on my characters. The plan I arrived at on my smuggler of upgrading my armor every other planet seemed to work pretty well and I would really like to do that with my Sith characters. The problem being the game is not extremely forthcoming with armor options. There are sets available for pretty much any level range on the Cartel Market, but each of them cost a fair amount of coin. So I guess we shall see what ultimately happens. I guess if I got desperate I could make them wear the free moddable flight suits they give you, but that is not exactly a great option. I might use the imperial pilot suit for Malavai Quinn however.

YouTube AggroChat

The funny thing about AggroChat is that in the grand scheme of things… we don’t actually get that many listeners… or at least not enough listeners to go through the trouble of some of the things that I do. For example… our YouTube videos maybe get a dozen views a piece. That said I like doing them, and I am not sure why. I guess they are just far easier to link to someone when they ask you about the show than linking the actual podcast page. Also I like embedding a youtube video far more than I liked embedding the Libsyn player. I feel like I could probably do better about advertising our show. I tend to do it in a rather haphazard fashion, because I feel rushed to get each show out the door and ready. By the time I finish editing, uploading, and doing all the other things… I reach this point where I just want to be done with it for another week. It is not necessarily the most enjoyable period of my week. I love making the show, but the tedium that comes from doing all the fiddly bits to make it happen… gets annoying. So I reach this point where I just want to hurl it out into the world and hope someone finds it interesting. The hardest part is it feels like we don’t have a lot of feedback. Podcast listeners tend to listen silently, and while we have a few people that comment here and there… you don’t get the sort of commentary that you do when you have a blog. There are weeks however like this week, where I feel like we got into some extremely interesting conversations, and it is well worth listening. I love the folks I podcast with, because ultimately they are the folks that I hang out with on a daily basis.

Week in Gaming 10/4/2015

October 4, 2015 by Belghast

Moving in Slow Motion

This morning I am having one of those days that feels like I am fighting against quicksand, to be able to accomplish anything. It is the fitting end of the week I have had where so many issues have come up, that I had to deal with. This week was one where my boss was out of the office for most of it, which meant I got to be the boss. This is a concept that sounds fun on paper, but after having done it for years… I promise it is not nearly as entertaining as it sounds. Being the boss means you are the one that has to deal with isssues when they arrise, even when the issues are of a magnitude that makes you just want to pull the covers over your head and forget the world exists. As such my gaming was a bit odd, because I needed to vent my frustrations in the form of shooting aliens. There were many nights this week where I intended to do something else, but ended up playing Destiny all night. As such there really are not a lot of individual games to talk about but here goes nothing!

Star Wars the Old Republic

As of last night during the AggroChat podcast I have officially completed the original Smuggler storyline, and with it… I have a lot of thoughts about what I experienced. When Kodra played through this content I can remember him being extremely disappointed… but maybe I am just more simple minded, but I absolutely loved the ending. It is everything I expected underworld dealings would be… romance, betrayal, and getting revenge on the people who betrayed you. It wraps up everything a good outlaw story should, and like the best ones… ends up with you on the side of justice. Maybe I just grew up with too many westerns, but it felt like it should to me. My character wasn’t necessarily a white hat, but he definitely was not a black hat… and at the same time I got to do enough things that felt like decisions I would make, to keep me hooked on the storyline. Now that I have wrapped this one up, I think I am going to work up faction on Risha and see what that romance option looks like. After that I think I am putting the Smuggler to bed for awhile, no pun intended… and moving on to something else.

While I doubt I will manage to play through the four imperial storylines before the launch of Fallen Empire, I think I am going to make a good college try to do so. It would be cool to go into Fallen Empire with the special perk for having defeated all eight storylines. Last night I swapped over and started working on my Sith Warrior which is the next closest to moving forward. I have to say once I stopped doing side quests and only focused on the character story the entire experience became far more enjoyable. Not that the side quests are not awesome… but when you have done them multiple times… they begin to drag on. As I play my Sith Warrior I will probably keep doing side quests because most of them on the Imperial side I have not actually seen. I wonder how many if any duplicate between the two factions. In any case I am still very much enjoying my SWTOR vacation and I think it has been a great way to spend the lag time between 3.0 and the 3.1 patch in Final Fantasy XIV.

Wildstar

I have to say the disappointment of the week has been the free to play launch of Wildstar. I guess I say “disappointment” in quotes because really… any time you do a major launch there are significant issues expected. Wildstar relaunch has not been smooth by any measure of the word. In theory from what I have heard if you can manage to get things are fine… but that was not my personal experience. I fought through the queues twice this week, and each time moments after actually getting into the game… I saw a message scroll across my screen warning me that the servers would be coming down in 15 minutes. What does not help I guess is the fact that I am entirely focused on the Entity server, which happens to be the most populated. At some point I will get some play time in, but at the very least I was able to go fiddle with my inventory and clear out my mail box. I also gathered up all of my new items, and I am almost tier 6 on the Cosmic Points system. I have premium sub time through next May so I am sure during that time I will play it quite a bit.

Destiny

Not really sure what I can say about Destiny that I did not already cover this week in my blog post about it. That said I am still having a blast playing, and several of my friends have also rekindled their interests in the game. I’ve been getting snagged into a fire time quite often and as a result we are doing quite a few strikes to help my friend Damai get geared up. Also this week Carthuun joined the game, so I have a feeling we will be doing some lower level content to help him catch up. To some extent I have been working on leveling my Warlock other than doing my daily bounties, and enjoying replaying through the content. This game is just so zen for me right now… nothing quite relaxes me like headshotting all manner of aliens, and in the strikes I have run I seem to get the lions share of the kills because of my focus. I am absolutely in love with the Sunbreaker because seriously…. every game needs the ability to throw flaming hammers at your opponents. I actually even spent some time running crucible skirmishes and enjoyed myself. I didn’t lead the kill count for my team but I did manage to place second, and I didn’t have the negative experience some of my other friends have reported as a result. I imagine that the community for Destiny PVP can be pretty horrible, I am just lucky that I have not seen that yet.

As far as today… I am probably going to spend a lot more of my time playing Destiny as while waiting editing the podcast this morning I managed to knock out most of the objectives. After I wrap those up I will probably migrate downstairs and spend the rest of the day SWTORing on the sofa while watching something on the television. Destiny has for whatever reason been the perfect blowing off some steam game for me this week. My hope is that as I continue to gain light and gear up it will stay just as enjoyable. I have yet to really try any of the true “endgame” content like the Raids and the Heroic Strikes, but I have to say if I have enough friends playing… it might be interesting. I am still just blown away by how much better the game feels to me. Once again if you played the game at launch and found it lacking… I highly suggest you patch up your client and at least give the game a spin. The changes trickle down through the entire game, and you should be able to see if you like the new feel before purchasing Taken King. Thankfully there is the option to ONLY buy Taken King without having to repurchase the entire game… but those options are only available for digital copies of the game. Not sure if you can upgrade a former physical copy or not. The Destiny theme song however is playing in the background as I type this… so I am going to go answer its call. Hopefully we all have an awesome week to come.

Media Consumption 10/3/2015

October 3, 2015 by Belghast

Week of PS4

This week was pretty much the week of me intending to play other games… and then never quite getting off of my PS4 in time to actually do that. As a result I spent most of my time upstairs in my office with my chair turned to the side pointing at the television that runs my consoles. Also as a result I did not really watch any television other than last Sunday night, which means that portion of my usual media consumption was pretty scant. However that said I did watch a bunch of really interesting things on the Internets own television station… aka YouTube. As a result this episode of Media Consumption is largely going to focus on things I found interesting on YouTube.

Tommy Westphall Theory

So firstly I have to give a major shout out to the PBS Idea Channel for creating videos that are almost always thought provoking or at least makes me want to discuss whatever it is they are talking about with my friends. This week however they posted a video that quite literally blew my mind. Tiny fireworks went off followed by lots of mental pain… as I attempted to reorient myself to accept the notion that what they were saying could be real. They delved into this idea called the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, where essentially over four hundred different seemingly unrelated televisions shows… all occur in the same universe. To make things even stranger the suggestion is that this entire universe exists in the mind of one autistic boy named Tommy Westphall that appeared on Saint Elsewhere. If this sounds interesting then by all means watch the video and prepare to make mind explodey noises.

Ahoy – Nuclear Fruit Series

The problem with the internet is that things change regularly… and there is little to no way to track down what things previously were called. There is this great channel that is currently called Ahoy, but I cannot for the life of me remember what the original name was. Essentially it is a channel that does these awesome videos that explore video game concepts with amazing narration and artful two dimensional graphics. I first was made aware of the channel through the Brief History of Graphics series where they delve into computer games and explore the various eras and the graphical changes that came into play as part of them. There is also a really great series called Iconic Arms where they delve into the ubiquitous guns that we use in shooter games, and the origins of them… usually delving into the maker and the real world conflicts they were actually used in. Today however I am here to talk about their latest five part series called Nuclear Fruit, where they delve into our fascination with nuclear warfare and the games that were inspired by it. As of writing this there are only four parts available but the next part should arrive this coming week if they follow the standard schedule. If you look in this playlist the video appears to be available but just flagged to “private”.

Cool Ghosts – The Taken King: Does it Fix Destiny?

If for some reason you missed this yesterday, I am a really huge fan of this video. It does an excellent job of highlighting the things that felt wrong with Destiny Year One and the way many of those have been improved in Year Two. Yesterday I also went into my own reasons for why I think the game is in a much better state, but still the video is well worth watching. Matt Lees the guy who appears in the video makes absolutely brilliant videos, the problem being they are somewhat sporadic. My hope is that his new “Cool Ghosts” initiative where he collaborates with another friend will serve to be a fertile ground for new content. In the mean time we can always just re-watch his crowing achievements of the PS4 and Xbox One reveals.

Fear the Walking Dead

There is a huge part of me that is excited for this weeks Fear the Walking Dead… because it means this season is over and we can return to the normal Walking Dead television show. In all fairness I have to say last weeks episode had things finally starting to get interesting. From this point out… I am going to delve into a ton of spoilers and if you have not been watching this show you might just want to stop reading this sub section. We found out a bunch of stuff that does not bode well for the characters. I have a feeling that there is no way that they are getting out of tomorrows episode without at least losing one of the characters. Essentially the crazy old man… aka Daniel Salazar… aka the only person who has the survival instincts necessary to survive the undead apocalypse… has kidnapped the soldier that his daughter Ofelia is sweet on. Then he proceeds to do what so many fathers have wished they could do to the guys dating their daughters… slowly peels away his skin in a cruel torture ritual. The thing is… as horrible as this act is… it is quite literally the only way he was able to get him to spill the beans about operation Cobalt. This is apparently a planned execution of all of the civilians when they abandon the Los Angeles Basin. As we go into this weeks episode it is essentially the day these events are supposed to play out. That said it seems like most of the soldiers who would have been involved in said plan… got nommed on in an overrun hospital. So here we go… things are finally going to get crazy… because I am tired of this suburban living under armed guard phase of the show. Let the bodies hit the floor! It is seriously time to weed out some of the characters.

Destiny Got Better

October 2, 2015 by Belghast

Destiny Year One

For a few weeks now I have wanted to write a post to explain all of the things that I did not like about Destiny Year One, and talk a bit about how Year Two has just made things “better”. However it appears that Matt Lees, one of the lovely people behind the “abridged” e3 videos that I love so much… has done pretty much exactly that in video form. Seriously if you have not watched the abridged PS4 reveal video… stop what you are doing and watch it now because essentially that one video has given our group a whole slew of inside jokes for a few years. Despite Matt having done such a great job of this mission I wanted to do in the first place… I am going to attempt to do my own discussion. Destiny was one of those games that quite literally made me buy a console. Admittedly it was one of a long list of Playstation 4 games that I wanted to play, but it was finally the catalyst that got me to pick up a used unit and finally join the rest of my friends in owning that console. More important than that… it was the game that got me to shed my pc-gaming-hipster distaste of the thought of playing a shooter on the console. Prior to this game existing… playing a shooter without a mouse and keyboard was utter blasphemy in my household.

What we got however in Destiny Year One was this oddly disjointed and terribly uneven play experience. The single player missions were excellent, and in spite of dinklebot not having a personality… and never actually letting us in on the details that were happening in the universe, I found myself craving more of the game. The story is one of the big problems because so much of it was told through the collection of grimoire entries… that you could not even read in game. You had to trek out to the Bungie website, log in, and then you could find huge swaths of story-line for the events you just did in game. That design decision was confusing at best, and a laughable mistake at worst. Story issues aside… the moment to moment game-play was amazing… until you reached level 20. Then a completely different game started about item management and trying to maximize just how much “light” you had on your gear. This stat that simply did not exist before level 20 suddenly controlled not only how effective your gear was, but also what “level” your character was in game.

Grinding Light

Not A Year One Shot… my current state in the game

The problem with the post 20 game was that it introduced so many things that you simply had not seen before that point. For example post 20 gear could be upgraded, and in fact this is something you needed to do in order to unlock the true potential and maximum light value. With each incremental upgrade you added a few more points of light here or there and could increase your level. In order to upgrade items you had to essentially grind out the rare materials that you had been picking up incidentally on planets but not really knowing what to do with them. In fact the game gave you a way of turning in huge quantities of these materials… for quick faction and experience boosts, but gave no indication of why you might not want to do this. As such I went into the end game with limited resources, and had to spend hours scouring the various patrol zones trying to find enough spinmetal or iron ore to pay for the upgrade of my items to the next rank. This is the point where the game lost me, in that I had all of my gear needing to be upgraded but nowhere near enough materials to actually do this.

The other frustrating problem with the light system was the fact that you could get a potentially better item, but not be able to afford to use it. What I mean by that is you would get say a weapon with a higher starting light, but after several rounds of upgrading your current weapon had more total light. So you knew that if you upgraded you could get high light level and as a result higher physical level by using this new item… but in the meantime you would have to suffer the penalty of losing light in the process. This made gearing a frustrating mess, and in those early strikes one level difference meant the difference between being able to actively participate and feeling like you were dragging down the entire team. What added to this frustration was the fact that drops in general were pretty scarce. I could log in and run around collecting iron on Mars for a few hours, killing tons of things in the process and maybe just maybe see a couple of greens. As a result the end game just felt disconnected from the awesome game play experience that we had getting there.

Year Two

When Taken King got its announcement, I have to admit I was originally highly frustrated with the fact that there was no initial offering that did not also include the base game and its expansions. They have since changed that and you can pick up a digital copy for around $30 that does not include all of the additional stuff. However I have to say that I agree with the branding because Taken King essentially takes everything about the original game and fixes it. For those who will understand the analogy, this is the Diablo 3 2.0 patch for Destiny. Even if you do not buy Taken King, I highly suggest you patch back up Destiny and give it another shot. Start a new character and revel in just how much better the overall experience feels. I did just this, and within a few days it convinced me that I should go ahead and pick up the digital upgrade to Taken King. Firstly the loot scarcity is no longer an issue at all. I can play for a few minutes and I will have a stack of a dozen engrams that I need to decode on the tower. Similarly the engrams themselves are more truthful. If you get a blue engram, you will get at least a blue item. If you get a purple engram you will get at least a purple item. That said I have actually gotten a handful of purple items from blue engrams… which is insanely exciting when it happens.

As far as the light grind… it is essentially no more. Your light rating becomes something akin to a gear score in modern mmos. It is a number that is an average of the attack and defensive ratings of all of the gear you have equipped. Why this feels better is the fact that you can incrementally increase your rating, whittling down a few points a night giving you the feeling of constantly moving forward. As far as upgrading gear goes, I have never run into a problem where I do not have the resources needed to upgrade an item, even though they still require the materials gathered on planet. What has changed however is the fact that these nodes are far more plentiful. There was a point last night that I was on Venus and could see four different spirit bloom nodes from where I was standing. What makes this easier as well is that the Ghost is an actual item that can be upgraded. You collect “shells” that change the appearance and defense rating gained by your ghost, and as you upgrade it they often have perks like the ability to increase the amount of a given resource that you gain. When you bring up the ghost menu, that you would normally use to return to orbit… you get additional benefit now of the ghost scanning your surroundings and pointing out anything useful. This gets used quite a bit in the later missions to help you map out your surroundings or show things that are invisible.

What has helped me at least is the fact that it feels like I have a bunch of little things that I can be doing at any point. I am actually enjoying doing my bounties each day, and I just started working on my Gunsmith reputation. That one is pretty interesting in that each week you can purchase a series of weapons from the Gunsmith and “field test” them. Each weapon has different requirements to help it “gather information”. For example I did one last night that only gathered information by killing Vex Minotaurs, and another that only gained completion if I got double kills with a sniper rifle… which as far as I could tell just meant two kills in quick succession without reloading my clip. Once you have gained some reputation you are able to place “Armsday” orders, which apparently means that every Wednesday the Gunsmith will give you a rank appropriate weapon of the type you ordered. All of this and more gives me the feeling that there are simply a bunch of things that I can do to improve my character in small and meaningful ways without really feeling that I am grinding without purpose. I can quite literally lose entire nights playing this game right now, and last night I had every intent of logging in and playing for an hour… then going off to do something else. I ended up playing all night, because I kept finding one more thing that I wanted to accomplish. I’ve now actually started playing through the game again on a Warlock, for when I want a break from my Titan main. If you too were disillusioned with the original Destiny experience, I think you owe it to yourself to patch up the original game and give it another shot. Even without the expansion you are still going to be able to experience new encounters in the old patrol zones, and at least get a taste for what “The Taken” as a race feel like. If you are playing on the Playstation 4, hit me up with a friend request on Belghast my PSN account.