Tales of the Aggronaut

Breaking the Format

August 8, 2015 by Belghast

A Time for A Change

there are days I want to nuke my blog theme from orbit

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) August 5, 2015

A few days ago I made the above statement on twitter, because I had reached a point where I was finally frustrated with my original blog theme. For the last several years I have structured my posts in a way as such to hide the faults of my theme. For example the whole “heading” construct that I use is largely to keep any images I post from overflowing and acting wonky. I’ve used the same theme since 2008 and over those years I grafted new appendages onto it like an undead juggernaut until it reached the point where it was simply having trouble staying upright. My theme believe it or not was originally a super limited World of Warcraft theme, that I have revitalized time and time again trying to keep it current. When I first started my blog for example, there was no menu editor in WordPress, and the theme was originally designed to have someone actually go into the php pages and edit navigation items. I hacked in basic nav support, but I have finally decided to get off my ass and apply some structure to the way things are laid out. After spending an hour and a half the other night reclassifying posts… I came to the sad realization that my theme didn’t actually have suckerfish style menu support and every bit of effort I had just done was essentially in vain.

So quite literally I did nuke my old theme from orbit and replaced it with a brand new one. For awhile I had considered building my own and I have downloaded Underscores more than a few times to get started on that. However the end product never really makes me happy, and it always ends up feeling extremely spartan. So while I COULD build my own theme… I decided not to. Instead I decided to go with the extremely flexible GeneratePress. The freebie version has a lot of features, but I ultimately wanted some of the things that their paid addon gives you, and after doing some of this myself for years… that $30 seems like a steal. Ultimately to have a theme that I can simply patch each time a new version of WordPress comes out and adds more toys to my disposal is worth twice that amount of money to me personally. Last night I rebuilt the logo from scratch and pestered the hell out of one or two friends as I tweaked this font size or that amount of spacing. I think I am mostly done for the time being, but I am sure I will be tweaking things over the coming weeks. I am curious to know what people think, so drop me a line and let me know.

Breaking the Format

Another thing about my blog that frustrates me, is that I have a clearly defined format that I always seem to follow. In large part every post has three headings, three images, and six paragraphs. In that format I usually introduce three completely different subjects as I hop around through what I have been doing. For awhile I have referred to this at least privately as my “swiss army post”, that is everything to everyone and reliable. I absolutely do not mind reliable, because in truth every single day I have a conversation with my readers… albeit a generally one sided one. I share lots of details of my life, and my gaming… and that part is awesome. The problem is that every single day feels formulaic, and I am hoping to begin to change that a bit. As I was sorting my posts I noticed that I have this way of starting down a path only to quit after a few weeks. There were so many “series” that I started down and never got very far… remember Easing Into Eorzea? or Forum Fodder Friday? or even the more recent Storytime Saturday? All of these are prime examples of why the daily posting routine has become so important to me. I know that once I get disconnected from my routine… I never really return to it.

Ultimately what I want to do is allow myself to post more spontaneously. When I make more than one post in a day… it feels like I am stealing material from what could be the next mornings post. So I hold off on doing it… and then a backlog of ideas happens… and I feel are no longer relevant because I did not post them “in the moment”. While I started Blaugust as this festival of routine and regularity… I think personally I am going to use it to mix things up a bit. I already nuked my theme from orbit… maybe it is time for me to nuke my format as well. Once again I would love to hear some feedback from my readers since I am basically going to be doing some renovations to what you have come to know about this blog. I am sure I will still create swiss army posts in the future, because at this point I can knock them out while I am sleeping… literally most mornings I don’t remember writing a post. However I also want to play with the format a bit and try and find room for smaller and more focused posts. One of my key problems with advertising my posts on Anook for example, has been that rarely are they actually devoted to a single game. This also was a huge problem when it came to trying to categorize my posts.. because you might click through to my World of Warcraft posts to find half of them only mention the game in passing. Essentially I want my Tales of the Aggronaut to be better than it actually is, and I am hoping you are all willing to struggle with me on this new journey.

Blaugust Games of Week – Week 2

August 7, 2015 by Belghast

Another Week Down

One of the things that I find easiest to blog about is when I am experiencing a new game, or re-experiencing a game after some time has passed. As a result last week I started doing the Blaugust Games of the Week thing, and for the first week I posted three vastly different titles. While Marvel Heroes 2015 has been in my gaming rotation for some time now, Everquest II and Dirty Bomb were not and as such I spent a bit of time this past week playing both. While I didn’t really talk much about any of the games this week, I hope some of you out there at least gave them a shot. I spent the most time playing Everquest II on the Stormhold Time Locked Server. It has been so strange starting from scratch without having some of my favorite leveling spots. The later leveling zones like Darklight Wood and Iceclad Ocean are just better designed than the original Everquest 2 leveling process was, and as a result you could tear through them so much more quickly.

As of last night I hit level 10 on my Iksar Shadowknight, and in part I think I was doing things the hard way because I stormed right out into the Commonlands and attempted to start leveling off the mobs out there that tend to be significantly higher than my level. One of the things that I had forgotten about the Commonlands were all of the Small Chests that drop additional quests. At this point my quest log is full of level 15-20 Far Seas supplier quests that essentially ask you to kill X of a thing and then turn in the end result at an NPC. I remember these being the bread and butter of early leveling, but I have to say the thing I miss is all of the individual neighborhoods of Freeport. I think it was a huge disservice to the game when the revamp of Freeport got rid of these completely. They are now instanced zones that you can only enter on specific quests, but I have to say these zones made up a lot of the feel of both Freeport and Qeynos and did a good job of explaining why the cities were the way that they were. Of the three titles from this week, this is the one that I am most likely to keep playing because I am finding an odd enjoyment out of retracing my EQ2 roots.

Trion Theme

Since it is once again Friday it is time for me to pick another three games to talk about and suggest. This time around I decided to go with a theme and as a result I am picking three games from Trion. Again I am limiting my selections to games that you can download and start playing immediately without having to purchase a game client or pay a subscription fee. My goal is to make it so folks who are stuck and in need of inspiration can pop into one of these games and get instant “blog fodder”.

Rift

Considering the announcement of the World of Warcraft expansion yesterday, I thought it was fitting to lead off this morning talking about Rift as it was the first game to actually pry me away from the WoW Juggernaut. The game is designed in such a way so that in theory you can play one character and provide every possible role in the game. This was not necessarily the case at launch but over time they have provided additional talent trees or “Souls” to help flesh out the missing abilities. So now you can absolutely be a healing warrior or a tanking mage. This game has an absolutely phenomenal early leveling game, and the first fifty levels are an absolute joy to level through. The expansions however are a completely different thing. I personally found both leveling in Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides to be extremely tedious, and found myself wishing they had not abandoned the early game that I enjoyed so much.

The core of the game though is great, but there are various things you are going to have to content with especially along the lines of ability bloat. One of my key complaints about Rift has been that you end up with a lot of abilities where ability 2 and 3 are absolutely better than 1… but have long cool downs. The end result is that you usually end up macroing all three together, which can lead to some fairly uninteresting game play. That said the game excels at letting you literally branch out in any possible direction and build a character out however you want to. There are some less than optimal options, but in theory any combination of three Souls will make a potentially viable character, which gives you a lot of freedom to customize things as you see fit. Fortunately the game has an excellent set of prebuilt specs to at least get you going in the right direction. As far as the free to play goes… it is among the least restrictive and there are not really any pay walls standing in your way.

Steam Download – Direct Download

Trove

I was lucky enough to get in on the first wave of Alpha invites for Trove and having played it that long… has been an interesting experience. The game has changed massively in that time, and the key elements have shifted and morphed but the basic game is still the same. I tend to think of Trove as Minecraft meets Diablo, and my recent Bel’s Big Adventure series of Minecraft videos has made me appreciate how important this really is. Minecraft has a fairly horrible combat system, that is passible but frustratingly bad if you are going to spend much time fighting anything. Trove on the other stand decided to go in a direction that allows you to pick one of several classes that each have their own built in abilities and a MOBA style character design. I tend to have a natural synergy with the base Knight class, but have spent significant amounts of time playing the Gunslinger and Neon Ninja as well… and they are all extremely well built. The core gameplay loop in Trove centers around going out into the world and fighting baddies to find interesting stuff in level ranged based worlds that steadily increase the challenge.

On top of this however there is a very awesome building system where you can build extremely complex custom worlds for your “Club”, or you can build out your cornerstone which is a traveling spawn point that you can move with you as you go out exploring the world. I love this aspect of the game because it feels like I am able to take all of my most important resources and keep moving my base of operations as I go exploring. The other thing that makes this game amazing is the community support, and the vast majority of the weapons that you will get were created by fans just like you. The game has a silliness to it that is contagious, and I will forever cherish my Dapper Raptor mount that you can see above. Another favorite of mine is the ability to collect item appearances and then make ANY piece of gear that you get look like that, so as you keep exploring you just keep opening more and more unique looks for your character. If you have never played Trove I highly suggest you download it and give it a shot.

Steam Download – Direct Download

ArcheAge

ArcheAge and I have an extremely checkered past. I was in the early Alpha process of this game and found the community to be among the most toxic I have ever experienced in any game genre. As a result I pretty much actively ignored the game for some time. However with some of the AggroChat folks started testing the waters and playing it… I decided to give it another shot. The end result has been a pretty enjoyable leveling experience and allowed me to see just how subtle and nuanced the game really is. I am not a fan of open world ganker style pvp… and early in the game that seemed to be extremely prevalent. More so than that, the players seemed to revel in griefing others in non-combat ways as well. If you AFK’d in town, someone might come along with a tractor and push you out into the middle of a dangerous area just to watch you die. However all of those elements seem to have gotten bored and moved on, and what is left seems to be a bunch of generally nice folks.

The game play itself is also rather good, and while the quests are pretty basic the world is gorgeous and huge, and the class designs are really interesting. While Rift has an issue with duplication of abilities, ArcheAge seems to be designed in a way so that there is natural synergy between talent trees without giving you a bunch of abilities that you will never actually use. I have gone full circle on my opinion of this game and you can track the progress if you flip through some of my blog entries. The game is absolutely playable on the free to play model, but there are some serious constraints. Namely it is very difficult to do more than just one thing as a “free” player because every action is throttled by your abysmal labour points. As a Patron player your labour regenerates when you are offline… as a free player you have to be logged into the game waiting on your points to come back. The other huge constraint is that free players cannot own land, which means if you get very serious about this game you are likely going to end up subscribing. However in the meantime the free model does allow you to get your feet wet.

Steam Download – Direct Download

So Much Better With People

August 6, 2015 by Belghast

The AMA Experiment

Yesterday my good friend Syl started a thread over on the Blaugust Nook with a very simple purpose. The idea was to generate writing prompts by asking the person above you in the thread a question. It seemed like an awesome idea, so I joined in the fun asking the first question, which then left me open to be asked a question. Wilhelm from The Ancient Gaming Noob chimed in after me and gave me a really excellent question, because it is honestly one I have thought about before but never actually written anything on. Without more rambling… here is the prompt.

For a lot of people, starting off in MMORPGs changed the way they viewed and interacted with video games. I often defer single player games in favor of online games now due to the fact that games with other people are… or at least seem… more interesting, even when I am playing them solo. Did starting off with MMORGPs change your relationship with video games?

Brief History of Belghast

So I feel like in order to answer this question appropriately we have to go a ways back into my history. I grew up in a small town, but more so than that… I grew up a significant distance outside of the city limits. This compounded with the fact that I had no siblings, meant that I really didn’t have anyone to play with. As a result I got extremely adept at entertaining myself, but when we hit middle school… the prime era of sleep overs, I pretty much took every opportunity to stay over at someone else’s house or have someone at mine. It was awesome to be able to play games with friends, but my reality was that I was mostly a single player gamer the majority of my time. As such I tended to favor mostly single player titles like role playing games, and zelda like adventure games. These would let me explore worlds by myself without the need of an additional player to bring the fun.

In college I did my fair share of LAN gaming, but the majority of my time was still spent playing single player titles like Fallout on the PC. My first real “MMO” experience was Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, and I ate that game up. Even though communication was not that big of a deal, I spent so much time exploring the worlds with other players. I even went so far as to get a PC keyboard adapter that I could hook up to my Dreamcast so I could make communication easier. During this time I was still playing a significant amount of single player games on the PC and devouring every single Japanese Roleplaying Game that was released on the PS1, PS2 or the Dreamcast. Then my “jumping into” Everquest happened, as I was asked to play a friends secondary character during a Vox raid… and from that point on I was pretty much hooked. Gradually I just stopped playing anything single player and instead devoted every single moment of gaming time to whatever my current MMO crush happened to be as I moved through EQ, DAoC, Horizon, and City of Heroes.

So Much Better With People

Something else happened during this time, that ultimately disconnected me from single player game experiences. Games became so much more cinematic, and quite honestly this was not a good thing as far as I was concerned. There were so many times I wanted to plunk down in front of a game, boot it up and just start playing. When I played my role playing games, I absolutely expected to have a serious time commitment. I did not however expect to have to wade through cut scene after cut scene just to play a platformer. So I became even more immersed in my big online worlds that let me wander aimlessly and find my own enjoyment. I also found myself favoring games that were extremely similar to the online worlds I was playing in. Games like the Elder Scrolls or the three dimensional Fallout games provided me that big open world I craved but allowed me to explore offline. The problem is there was always something missing. These are games that I have devoted hundreds of hours to playing, but there is always a point where I start thinking to myself… this world would be so much better with people.

Ultimately even if I am in “alone in a crowd” mode, I enjoy seeing people roaming around in the same world I am inhabiting. Maybe this is an artifact of my early desires to have someone to play with, or a side effect of being recruited into Everquest in the middle of a bustling and thriving guild. In any case I always end up missing the people when I am playing other games. So as a result there are lots of single player titles that I want to play through, to experience the story… but they ultimately sit in my steam library unfinished and in some cases not even started… because I would rather be online interacting with people that I care about. Fairly recently I have found that hanging out on Teamspeak while playing single player games helps a bit. It allows me to chat with people and feel like I am part of a larger community, while still indulging in single player worlds and experiences. Similarly streaming a single player game to twitch feels like I am in some way making it a multiplayer experience by sharing it with others. So to answer the original question… yes MMOs have changed the way I play single player games, by simply making me not satisfied with being in a world without other human beings to interact with.

WoW 7.0 Predictions

August 5, 2015 by Belghast

I didn’t want to do this as an “official” post, so instead I am making a bonus post today which is a truly rare occasion. With tomorrow being the day we find out what the new World of Warcraft expansion is, I thought I would jot down some ideas. Some of these are in fact serious ideas… others are absolutely not, and I can’t be bothered to differentiate between the two at this point.

During this expansion Thrall will have to stay home with the kid, which leaves Aggra to go out on adventures and be the “big damned hero” for a change.
Yrel comes to Azeroth from Draenor and deposes Varian Wrynn as the leader of the Alliance.
With a strong woman at the helm of both the Alliance and the Horde they realize how childish and futile it is to continue making up wars over essentially nothing… and instead decide to join forces and usher in a new era of peace allowing people to do whatever the hell they want with whoever the hell they want to.
Unfortunately our time bending shenanigans have punched a hole in the fabric of space and time, and we have ended up in the world of The Nexus.
All of the zones in this expansion as a result will be vaguely square in shape and consist largely of three large fields of play where all the quests will be located. The dungeon for each map will be conveniently located at the far end of the map.
Because we broke time we can now have a raid tier consisting of Arthas, Illidan, Diablo, Tassadar, and Sgt. Hammer.
Bolivar Fordragon has decided that his butt is cold, and has finally climbed off the Frozen Throne and now begins rampaging across Azeroth with his army of Scourge. The game will become a gritty survival game about fighting for resources in a world plagued by the Zombie Apocalypse.
We figured out yet another way to bring Onyxia and Nefarian back… and they are doing something in a dark dungeon with lots of lava and orcs or something… we will figure it out as we go with this one.
We are absolutely going to have an Old God in this expansion, because everyone loves crawling through Titan Dungeons right? We’ve had Norse and Egyptian mythology based Titans… now we are just going to remove all of the illusions here and make a H.P. Lovecraft themed mythology… every world needs for nameless tentacled things right?
Mentoring will be introduced but you can only do it on patch day while the servers are down.
We will have roughly half of our abilities removed so that it can fit on an Xbox controller… which will lead the way to World of Warcraft breaking onto consoles for instant improved relevance.
Gnome Druids… kitten form, bear cub form, baby seal form…. and Parrot form. We will make it work lore wise… something about digging too deep and hitting the Emerald Dream or something. Hippie Gnomes.
Bards… will not be in the expansion because while it would be awesome… we really don’t want to have to add a fourth role to the holy trinity.
World of Warcraft will no longer be a game, but a carefully curated selection of designer snacks… delivered monthly to subscribers.
We voyage to the South Seas and discover a kingdom of Murlocs… player character Murlocs! Except they can’t use text chat other than Murloc noises.
The Burning Legion… seriously it is probably going to be about The Burning Legion.