Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Alarms are Overpowered

October 1, 2015 by Belghast

I’m Late!

This blog post is going to be relatively short and sweet since I may or may not have forgotten to set the alarm last night. My life tends to revolve around rituals and when one of those rituals is interrupted I forget to do something. It is like I have committed entire segments of my life to muscle memory, but I can only actually do the things if I do them in the correct order. For some reason I decided in my infinite wisdom to go ahead and check the front door and make sure the cars are locked early in the evening. This is generally part of my whole “putting the house to bed” routine, and because I ran part of it… I never actually got to the part of the segment where I check the ferrets food and water and the cats water in the bathroom… and FINALLY just before crawling into bed set the alarm. It kinda sucks to be a slave to my own systems, and the problem is I am extremely highly functioning… until someone interrupts me when I am in the middle of one of them. Then like a remote control car that got knocked on its side I flail hopelessly for a few minutes until something finally helps me reorient my mental processes.

It does worry me at times that I will be sitting there lost in a process and be unable to shift gears quickly. Like if I am thinking about one thing, and need to conjure up the name of another person not connected to the thing I am thinking about. I am horrific with names in general, but in those moments I seriously cannot for the life of me figure out what to call this other person. There are social skills that I have figured out that smooth these moments, like how to effectively say hello to someone… while sounding sincere… at the same time attempting to pretend that you DO remember their name and you are just a casual person that doesn’t always say names. I think more than anything… I have some really bad indexing systems in my brain. I can see someone in the office and remember intimate details about their wife or kids or that they like this or that television show… but cannot for the life of me remember that name is associated with their face. I guess I have gotten used to the handles we all use in the virtual space that ARE extremely unique to the person, and often times adequately represent WHO they are, and as a result normal names just feel like an arbitrary system.

The Unlikely Patriot

Last night exited in two very distinct segments. Before my wife got home I spent that part of the evening playing Destiny and made my first attempts at raising my faction with the Gunsmith by testing weapons. Up until this point I had no clue how this worked, and I probably should have been doing this from the moment I could equip one of the weapons. However I failed miserably and am just now getting started. When my wife did get home we went out to eat and ran errands, and when I finally sat my butt down afterwards the evening became all about trying to make progress in Star Wars the Old Republic. At this point I have finished Hoth and Belsavis and am now starting my way into Voss. One of the things that I have enjoyed the most about the smuggler missions is that they make this weird overlapping pattern, where you end up revisiting places you have already been multiple times because the storyline leads you there. For example when we realized we needed to go to Voss, there was a problem… that it would take some time to get the right docking clearances for me to land. As a result I was asked to go take care of an issue on Belsavis while waiting, which filled in some details that I would ultimately use on Voss. Essentially the progression feels more significant than simply following a course of planets, each time I land there is a reason for going there connected to the larger story arc in a way that was not quite so evident when playing some of the other characters.

The other thing that I find interesting is just how much of a “manwhore” my captain happens to be. It seems like every single conversation there is the opportunity to flirt with whoever I am talking to. The best moments however is when he gets shut down harshly. The expression on the characters face is like someone broke his toy. As such I find myself using the flirt option far more often than I would on any other character because that seems to be a significant part of the smuggler experience. The thing is… the characters in game expect it from my character. So when I receive negative faction for doing it… it is only 2 or 3 points at a time rather than the 20-30 points you lose on say a Sith Warrior when you flirt with a character and Vette catches wind. I find this equal parts interesting and disturbing… because it is setting up a kinda bizarre paradigm with this character. I mean everyone thinks of the smuggler as having this roguish charm… but I guess that also means being a lush about everything? Then again if you think about it… all of the similar characters like Nathan Drake or Mal Reynolds tend to do the same thing. It is funny how much the “Han Solo” lovable rascal trope has embedded itself into game media… the problem being… I’ve never actually met this character in real life. When you meet a guy that flirts with literally everyone around them… they tend to be a complete jackass that just happens to have an overdeveloped libido.

Bounties and Newness

September 30, 2015 by Belghast

Shiny Newness

Right now the bulk of my social infrastructure is on fire with people returning to Wildstar. September 28th at Midnight EST was the official launch of the Wildstar Reloaded free to play experience. They are going through the same sort of growing pains that everyone goes through when they launch a game, or in this case relaunch it. When I got in last night, and managed to fight my way through the queue, I was greeted with a “server going down in 15 minutes” message as they were needing to do some sort of emergency maintenance. This is absolutely par for the course for an event like this, but nonetheless disheartening. I absolutely get why they were bringing the server down however because the tiny bit of time I was able to play the lag was horrific.

I did however manage to do what I had intended to do this morning, which was rifle through my bags… dump everything that was not needed in my bank, and start to clean out my mailbox. With the change to the way the crafting system works, a lot of the old crafted items were consumed and instead we were mailed a stack full of equivalent materials. I had seven or eight of these messages from Protostar, all containing things I have no clue what to do with them. Thankfully however pretty much everything seemed to fit just fine in my tradeskill bag so I don’t have to care for this very moment. I was able to consume all of the perks that I got through the whole cosmic points system. I am one step away from tier 6, and as of last night I got some perk that causes me to gain omnibits faster which is kinda cool. With new toys comes a new outfit, which I cobbled together this morning before sitting down to right a blog post. For the time being… I think I am going to stay off the servers until things calm down a bit.

Daily Bounties

One of the things I am still enjoying quite a bit is my daily routine of logging into Destiny and getting new bounties. I am not sure how a game goes from feeling oppressive and grindy, to fun an exciting in a single patch… but whatever the case Destiny did just that. I think more than anything it is the increased drop rates that make things feel interesting, because when I know it is highly likely that I will get something for my time spent, I don’t mind spending time doing something. I love the random chance of finding something cool, and maybe once I am geared enough to no longer care about drops… it will feel different. However every single engram that I see glowing in the distance is a chance at finding something to increase my overall light and as such make me more formidable. Largely my key goal this week however has been to try and stock pile strange coins again in the hopes that on Friday Xur will bring me something awesome and exotic.

I still have so much story that I have yet to complete, and I have barely scratched the surface of the strikes that are available to me. For the time being however I seem to get the most enjoyment from grabbing my bounties and going to some planet to whittle them down. There is just something relaxing about this process, and in many ways it reminds me of the way I felt about the daily hunts in Final Fantasy XIV… that is until I no longer really needed the currency to improve my gear. There is something calming about having a routine and right now popping into Destiny is pretty much the first thing I do each night. In the above video I decided to record a bit of me working my way through my daily quests, and that is actually my second attempt given that I had been recording for a bit only to realize that it was not picking up my mic. Essentially I changed the way I am recording so that I could pull my boom mic out and be able to capture audio while I am playing on the PS4 easily. The video itself was recorded through my Elgato HD, which I have hooked to a switch so that I can record any of my consoles. The end product just looks better than the default video recording options on the PS4.

Better Faction Systems

September 29, 2015 by Belghast

Loss of Nuance

I had this topic that I wanted to talk about this morning, and jotted it down so that I would not forget. Then last night I suffered from a bout of insomnia. So my hope is that even without much sleep I can still make this topic work, and devote the amount of attention it deserves. For years I have talked about my dislike of the faction wall system that was first popularized by Dark Age of Camelot, and then carried forth into the modern genre of MMOs thanks to World of Warcraft adopting it. For many players they know nothing different than picking a red versus blue faction and living their entire gaming life’s within the confines of it. I think I struggle against this concept because I remember a time when this wasn’t necessarily the case. Lately I have been spending a lot of time playing my smuggler in Star Wars the Old Republic, and yes I realize that game is a very faction locked experience. However if you think of the Smuggler itself in the Star Wars mythos, it has always been a character that skirted the lines trying to exist in Republic, Imperial and Hutt space at the same time, carving their own path balancing between them all.

The problem is, other than the original Everquest no game really supports this notion. You cannot live between the faction lines making your own choices, instead you are asked to choose an allegiance that is about the most impersonal experience imaginable. The problem is that I feel no personal responsibility for choosing Horde or Alliance or in many cases Red or Blue. They don’t represent me as a person, and as such I have no real loyalty tied to them. However in Everquest you were assigned essentially a default template of allegiances based on your racial choice… but from that point on you could blur the lines at will. I remember spending copious amounts of time hunting Kobolds in the Warrens off of Toxxulia Forest, for the purpose of gaining faction in the otherwise aggressive city of Paineel. Why did I do this? Honestly for no real reason other than I could, and that I thought the city of Paineel was extremely cool in its layout. Sure I could have simply banked and quested at the far end of Toxxulia Forest in the already friendly city of Erudin, but instead I made the conscious choice to hang out with the Necromancers.

Sapping Creative Expression

The problem with the faction wall system is that it forces all of the players to essentially be the same person. Later games started throwing in optional faction grinds, but those grinds are always connected to “things”. Gain this much reputation with this faction and you will get a nifty sword, or a pretty mount… but otherwise once the current expansion is over they will be utterly meaningless from that point on. The problem here is that these tertiary faction choices don’t actually effect the players game experience. They don’t unlock new areas of the world, or more so close off other areas that the player did have access to. Granted in the early days of World of Warcraft they did manage to create a few of these Factions that did actually do interesting things. Namely I am talking about the back and forth seesaw of the Bloodsail Buccaneers and the assorted Goblin factions. If you were truly insane you could skirt a thin line between gaining faction with the Bloodsails but also doing faction repair work with the Goblins to make sure you were not ever hitting “Kill On Sight” status.

The problem here is… this was an isolated example that granted players access to a handful of boats in the ass end of the world. This area was made immediately irrelevant as soon as the Burning Crusade and subsequent expansions released. Instead as an Alliance player I always wanted to figure out a way to gain factions with the Tauren. They were the only Horde race that seemed to cling to any ideals I could get behind, and I thought it would have been so interesting to be able to gain faction in a way that would allow you to enter the town and do commerce there. Things are never completely black and white, and even in the lore there are characters that skirt the lines managing to be friendly to two different groups at the same time. The entire World of Warcraft experience would have been so much richer if it allowed players through sheer will to grind out their own niche that lay somewhere between the predetermined choices. I think it would have been interesting to allow players to create the ultimate “diplomat” that was friendly to essentially ALL of the races.

Fear for the Future

The problem with games being iterative is that once a feature set becomes common, it essentially stays there forever. This past weekend when we talked about Tron 2.0 in our AggroChat Game Club show, one of the lines of discussion was how the cultural norms for shooters have changed over the years. What used to be representative of most of the shooters that were out in 2003, is no longer recognizable through the lens of the basic feature set that we now have come to expect. World of Warcraft borrowed heavily from the games that came before it, and since it chose to go with a walled off faction system, games that have borrowed from it have essentially followed that mold. Red and Blue factions with their own walled off areas of play have become the template for how to build a game, and right now the only real evolution has been a return to three factions instead of just two. Sure games like Rift have torn down the wall and made faction into “fiction” but they have not really gone anywhere in the struggle of making faction a personal choice.

Now going back to the original thing that spurred this topic, Star Wars the Old Republic. How much more rich would the smuggler have been if you quite literally could have been a freelancer in action and not just name. The game does a decent job of making you feel like you live somewhere between the red and blue lines, and then when the second chapter happens it essentially rips all of that forcing you to align to the Republic faction. Sure you can still play a dark side Smuggler, but these aren’t “real” decisions with any sense of “real” lasting consequences. You can’t decide to say screw the republic and opt to live entirely in Hutt space or Imperial space. You can’t decide to say on Alderaan or Balmorra and improve your faction with one of the leaders, opening up new questing opportunities that are unavailable to the average player. Everquest is a game that I could never really play again, because I just can’t handle the essentially “primative” game client. There however are still things that the game got right, that no other game that I have played have really tried to copy. The problem is… right now I cannot see a game adopting a more real world faction system, without somehow turning it into a marketing focus and losing sight of all of the other things that have to be in place to make a game enjoyable. Essentially I want real factions… but still be able to keep all of the things that I have come to expect from an MMO to this point. Unfortunately I fear that the era of MMO experimental-ism is over… and at this point our feature set is locked in place just like the feature set of shooter is locked as well. In the meantime however… I will still carry a rose colored torch for this features that I wish I could have in modern games.