Tales of the Aggronaut

Fallen London

September 21, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 23

Last night once again we gathered myself, Rae, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam and recorded yet another action filled episode of Aggrochat. I would love to think it was action filled, but more likely than not it was just a lot of rambling about about various things. I titled this weeks broadcast “An Intimate of Devils” because one of the games we talked about is the web based Fallen London. Several of us are playing it but really only myself and Kodra have spent a good amount of time doing so. Somehow we both managed to align ourselves with the Brass Embassy which is the home of the demonic residents of Fallen London… the Devils. It turns out that apparently the plural of devil is an “intimate of devils” so I thought it was an interesting if not fitting title for the show. If you have not caught on I try and name the shows something that might cause someone to click through on it.

Other than that we talked at length about the Microsoft acquisition of Minecraft, and what its possible ramifications could be. We talked a little bit about Final Fantasy XIV and especially about Rae’s journey to become an Omnicrafter and get to 50 on all of her professions. We spent a large chunk of time talking about Destiny and our experiences playing the game… and trying in vain to find the story. Currently the Tokyo Game Show is going on, so we talked a bit about the games that were being shown there especially Final Fantasy XV or “Final Fantasy Roadtrip” as we have taken to calling it. Finally we discussed for a bit what all was happening at the League of Legends World Championship. We ran a bit longer than normal clocking in at an hour and ten minutes, but hopefully you enjoy what all we had to say about a large number of topics.

Fallen London

A few weeks back my good friend Tarantella convinced me to give a web based game called Fallen London a shot, and since then I have been playing it quite a bit, often times feverishly burning through my turns multiple times a day. I liked it so much that I decided to become an “Exceptional Friend” which is their equivalent of a patron system giving you a second “candle” worth of turns. That is the rather nice way of them displaying how many turns you have left. You start off with a rather large candle and as you take turns it slowly burns down to just the stub. If you have played the early web based RPG Kingdom of Loathing, the gameplay will be very familiar. You are allotted a fixed number of turns, and then periodically you gain a new turn. The turns regenerate at a rate of 1 per every 10 minutes, so generally speaking each morning you will start with a fresh candle of 40, or in my case two candles of 40 since I am a patron… and then you play through those and start accruing them back until you are at the maximum number of turns again.

one of the things that makes this more interesting than say Kingdom of Loathing is the fact that you get what are essentially “chance” cards that you can play. These also regenerate at a rate of 1 level 10 minutes until you have 6 in reserve. The size of your current hand is determined by the quality of your lodgings. You start with only one card in your hand, and then as you upgrade your lodgings this increases. Right now my lodgings is a decommissioned steamer and it allows me certain types of cards to show up as well as increasing my hand size to three. These cards tend to give you far better rewards than wandering around the various districts of Fallen London. I say wandering, but there is no action combat in this game. Everything is carried out by making a series of text based decisions, and the game has a Everquest style color coding system to show how difficult the encounter is. If you mouse over an option it will tell you specifically what the chance of success is. There are various items that can be spent to give yourself additional chances at completing the task.

It’s About the Setting

The aspect of Fallen London that makes it appealing to me is that you have this London by Gaslight era setting infused with all sorts of Cthulhu elements as well as a fair bit of steampunk. The background of the game is that London is the 5th great city to fall, and in this case it means to be consumed completely by the earth. In the early bits of the game I found it unclear if this was literally a fissure in the earth or if the city was somehow transported into another dimension. In either case it finds itself surrounded by a great subterranean ocean known as the “Unterzee”. Additionally the city has found itself host to several supernatural entities that find it as a handy stopping off place between their own realms and that of the above world. So the game is a game of factions and secret societies… and you as the player have to tiptoe your way through them figuring out exactly who you choose to align with.

Personally I have found myself fond of the “Rubbery Men” which are essentially Cthulhu style deep ones in suits that wander around the city trading for mysteriously throbbing stones. Additional over the course of my exploits I’ve found myself getting closer and closer to the Brass Embassy as I mentioned above, the cloister of devils that visits our fair city between trips above to take the souls of men. The artwork overall for the game is extremely simplistic, but at the same time evocative of a dark and mysterious world that it is trying to induct you into. The game is not terribly action packed in that you essentially are doing a lot of text adventure, but nonetheless I find it compelling. It is like a self driven pen and paper role-playing game. I’ve made more than a few false steps as I have tried to figure out my way around the world… not the least of which was somehow pissing off the patron that had gifted me some really nice things.

An Evolution

One of the problems with Fallen London is that the way it is set up is designed to ration you out a few turns at a time. Additionally you are essentially “landlocked” inside of London. There are missions that open up storylets in different areas, but all of which are roughly connected to Fallen London proper. The folks at Failbetter Games have created Sunless Sea that is now available on Steam Early access to address this problem. This time instead of taking the role of a prisoner being released into Fallen London, you are taking the role of a Steamship captain giving you mobility outside of town. You and your fearless crew embark upon missions outside of the city and engage in battle against pirates and sea monsters while trying to gain the favor of the factions within the city. I’ve not played a ton of hours yet, but I am nonetheless intrigued.

The game does not really hold your hand, and in a way it reminds me quite a bit of FTL in that you can screw up spectacularly and wind up dead within a few turns. While wandering around the “Zee” you have to watch several things… the hunger of your crew, the fuel of your vessel and your hull integrity. As you wander about the in your vessel, you will encounter new areas and if there is a dock jutting out in to the water you can explore on shore. So far I have found a few new areas, each with storylets that will likely come into play later as I get further into the game play. The overall interface of the game is very familiar if you have played the web based Fallen London. The primary difference is you have to learn what a whole new set of stats means, in that they do not use any of the same baseline abilities as the web version has.

Doing Battle

Eventually you are going to encounter something that wants to take a chunk out of your hull. Combat itself is turn based and strategic in nature. In order to perform most of your attacks you need to illuminate your target to be able to aim properly. As such the opening salvos of combat tend to be you throwing flares out into the water to light it up properly. There is the option to do a wild salvo, but the chance of hitting the target and dealing serious damage is pretty low. As such I tend to throw out 3 flares first so that I can hit the target with a full force attack. On small targets like this abyssal crab it generally only takes a single hit. When you start encountering pirates however you will have to a bit more tricky. I’ve noticed that the pirates prefer to open with wild salvos which generally do little damage but can stress you out as you are trying to light up the target.

When you defeat an enemy you are given a series of options based on how far you have progressed as a character. In the case of the Crab, you are given the option to harvest it for supplies or dissect it to learn knowledge. More often than not I take the supplies as this is quite literally how you feed your crew, and anything that keeps me from having to spend Echo to buy supplies makes me happy. When I took out a pirate ship I was given the interesting option of sending it to shore with a skeleton crew and getting more resources from the ship. I ended up getting quite a haul of Echo from doing this, but it greatly reduces the number of available crew members when you do it. I am sure that has an opportunity cost later on as a result, but I have not quite run into a situation where the number of crew members mattered.

Tomb Colonists

Right now in my game I am spending most of my time running Tomb Colonists to Venderbight. The Tomb Colonists are one of the stranger factions of Fallen London. They are in essence mummies that travel around in coffins. So basically as I am doing this, I am hauling three coffins at a time and getting a pretty decent payout when I get to Venderbight and sell them back to the Tomb-Colonists there. It isn’t exactly glamorous but it is worth quite a large amount of echo… something I am sorely lacking. I need to do some research to see what it takes to get a more efficient engine because right now it seems like I am burning through a good deal of my profit in simply buying up fuel… which greatly limits my range of movement. I figure in coming sessions I will explore more of the coast line and see what trouble I can get into. Unfortunately however I don’t really know how to gauge how rough an encounter is… so I feel like at some point I am just going to die horribly to something too strong for me to take. Right now I am very much digging the narrative of both games and the setting. I only wish there was a way to have the two games be connected, in that I was either playing the same character or somehow being a benefactor one way or another. I did notice I was able to log in with my Fallen London account, but I did that right before starting this post… so I have yet to see just how connected they end up being. Long story short, I highly suggest you check out Fallen London since it is completely free to play. If you like the setting and find the various factions as compelling as I do, then I suggest you also check out Sunless Sea. I am looking forward to exploring more of the “Unterzee” as a Steamship “Zailor”. Right now Sunless Sea is under $20 for steam early access, and I feel like that is an absolute steam considering just how much interesting content I have already seen. The one thing still on my wishlist is for a proper mobile client for my phone, then I would be raving wildly about how awesome of an experience this is.

#AggroChat #FallenLondon #SunlessSea

Of Game Servers

September 20, 2014 by Belghast

The Server Dilemma

This week there has been a bit of a war waging in the ArcheAge community between two factions. The first faction wants them to open new servers so that they can play the game and not have to wait in 10+ hour long queues. The second faction doesn’t want new servers to be opened at any cost, because it serves to dilute the community, and in a game where land ownership is a crucial part of the experience there is no real way to merge the servers. I feel like this is one of those arguments when both sides have equal merit. Generally speaking when a company spins up new servers to help cover the launch weekend users, they also end up having a bunch of completely dead servers months later that have to be merged.

The ultimate problem with new servers, is that we want to play with our friends. By nature an MMO is a social experience, and at this point most of us bring with us a large group of friends and acquaintances that we want to be in close proximity to. As such lots of players will roll on another server only to get the feeling of actually playing the game they crave, but ultimately later on re-roll once the opening weekend crush is over to be in the same place as their friend. So I feel like new servers by nature are a damned solution to the opening weekend problem. Any servers that spin up are by nature less valuable to established players than the original servers. They will have less of an economy, and less resources to run any group content. Having done this multiple times, there is a certain pride in playing on a “day one” server.

Abolishing the Server

For a long time I thought the solution to this problem was to simply do away with the server infrastructure entirely. Elder Scrolls Online launched with a Mega Server infrastructure, where instead of pool resources into smaller named and classified clusters of servers… they just dumped all of them together in one of two larger data centers US and EU. This allowed them to simply add more nodes to the cluster to gently smooth out the server load without actually interrupting the users experience. I have to say after the what has to be hundreds of game launches I have experienced… this concept made for one of the absolute smoothest I have seen. We were able to get in and play without needing to fuss about what server our guild was going to be on. It solved so many issues and let us get in and play with our pool of players.

The problem there however is that as the population dwindled and our regularly nomadic guild did what they were good at… and moved on to the next big thing, we were left without much of a community. The only intimacy we had in that game was that which we brought with us. Coming back to Final Fantasy XIV it has refreshed my understanding of just how important that server community is to the overall feel of a game. The night we bought player housing, we had various folks from different guilds popping by our house and welcoming us to the neighborhood. Our housing district has not one but two dedicated linkshells for communicating with “neighbors” and after months of doing hunts and fates we’ve joined other really social linkshells that flesh out the rich community feel that I had been craving. So while the Mega Server answers one question, I feel like it comes up lacking in the social aspect greatly.

A Transitional Population

The Rift launch looked like pretty much every other game launch in memory. I compared a game launch to a natural disaster the other day, because really it is very similar. There is this crashing wave of users that hit the servers, and that which they don’t break they flood to the point of bursting. After the storm clouds cleared they were left with the same problem as always. Some servers had massive queue times, whereas the others where relatively dead. World of Warcraft tried to solve this problem by allowing players free character moves between overpopulated servers to very specific under populated ones… and as a result a bunch of thriving communities were born out of the leftovers of higher populated ones. We would not have the Scryers or Wyrmrest Accord servers were it not for this process, so it feels like it mostly worked well.

Rift however went a step beyond this in allowing any character to transfer to another server for free. There were some restrictions initially about transferring from PVE to PVP, but over time these went away as they patched in the “Faction as Fiction” concept. This allowed players to self sort, and overall it seems to have worked. I’ve moved around quite a bit during the time since this went live in that I started on Shadefallen a server that was whisked away in a great depopulation of servers. From there I moved to Faeblight, and then to Deepwood to hang out with Liore and the Machiavelli’s Cats… and then back to Faeblight again because I missed being on a Role-Playing server.

This solved the problem of being fettered to a server and having your friends disappear on you. You could freely transfer elsewhere to play with a different pool of players. One of the big problems I have with World of Warcraft right now is that my friends are so splintered across so many different servers. While you can do cross server grouping to an extent, it just isn’t quite the same as being on the same server and in the same guild. At $25 a pop it would simply be cost prohibitive to move my army around to another location, even though Argent Dawn where we are currently has seen it’s better days. With the Rift situation it becomes relatively easy to move your guild to a new location and set up shop again on more favorable shores. The big thing that Rift is missing however is an equivalent to the BattleTag system that gives you a simply way to connect all of your friends with one single ID.

The Hybrid Approach

I feel like maybe there is a hybrid to these options out there that we just haven’t seen yet. I really like the concept of the mega server in that it removes the work of even having to discuss what server everyone will be located on. It also opens things up.. so if you meet someone that plays the same game as you… there is never that moments later heartbreak when you realize you are on different factions or different servers. What I think we are missing is the concept that Elder Scrolls Online talked about when they were launching, that never quite panned out. Originally the idea was that while everyone would be on a mega server, we would be able to self sort into pools of players with like interests. This would apply an almost dating website series of questions to identify what types of goals you are focused on when you play an MMO. Then through these questions you would be sorted into the cohesive community that best represents your interests.

So when you are wandering around the Capital city, you are seeing the players that represent your tastes in MMOs. If you like being around role-players and crafters, you would end up being shuffled into a very collaborative environment. If you like competing with other players and doing battle to determine who has the most skills… then you would be shuffled into a very competitive focused environment. I feel like a scenario like this would give me some of the permanence from the community that I found I craved when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV. I like being involved with the community just outside of my guild. Guild is a comfortable home for me, but it isn’t the end of my universe, and I crave interaction of new ideas and new players. I feel like this self sorting mechanic would allow for both seamlessly. You could have different types of players in the same guild, but self sorting into their own little “perfect community”.

The Solution

Essentially I have seen a lot of solutions for the same problem, and each of them has fallen short. That doesn’t mean that we should just declare that there is no right answer to the problem and fall back to the old tried and true server structure. I feel like traditional servers are going to be a thing of the past, but we need to find ways of carrying the best aspects of that intimate server community forward with us. I am interested in seeing how people solve the problem moving forward. Games like Landmark and eventually Everquest Next will be tasked to solve it, and with Landmark they are already moving in what feels like the right direction. The ability to move between servers freely gives you the ability to play with anyone also playing the game. The permanence of an individual island however gives you a localized community feel. Do I think it is perfect? No, but I think it is a step in the right direction, and I hope more games try doing something new instead of falling back on the pitfalls of the server.

Booking Dungeons

September 19, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Roadtrip

This week the Tokyo Game show is happening and we are starting to get a trickle of goodies out like the long awaited updated Final Fantasy XV trailer. After watching it, I have to say this looks like it might be a Final Fantasy quite unlike the others. My friend Kodra mentioned how unusual it was to see an automobile in the Final Fantasy setting, and I had not really thought about it until then but he is right. It has almost been as though they have denied the existence of Automobiles in pretty much every setting other than Final Fantasy VII. Even in the super futuristic VIII they had the requisite flying airships in the form of giant aircraft… but they still lacked anything even resembling an automobile. Let alone a crazy sedan with suicide doors like they are touring the countryside in for this game.

From the video this seems like the game is going to be more like Final Fantasy XII was in the form of a more “Action Combat” approach to the JRPG. This has its fans and its critics, but I have to say one of my favorite Final Fantasy “cousins” was Vagrant Story that featured a very action combat game play style. I even liked Final Fantasy XII for what I played of it, at some point I want to go back and finish the game. What intrigues me the most about the game is the way it feels like the monsters are almost part disaster movie, like they are taking a road trip to survey the countryside like some sort of awkward rubberneckers. I just hope I can control which ever character I choose, because man I am all about the big dude with the beard and the knock-off buster sword.

Castlevania Dark Souls Edition

Another game I have been looking forward to on the PS4 since this years E3 is the game Bloodborne. At TGS they released a new trailer with some more tasty bits about the gameplay featuring what looks to be multiple classes for the player to choose from. I’ve somehow almost entirely missed the Dark Souls madness, but I am looking forward to this game as it feels more firmly in my wheelhouse. I love Castlevania, and I love the dire battle against the things that go bump in the night feeling that this game has. I just hope that the gameplay is every bit as fun as it looks like in the trailer. For a game like this to work for me, the moment to moment gameplay has to feel amazing… and from what I have played of Dark Souls my problem tends too be the wonky feeling control scheme.

This is probably going to to be a title that I end up trying before actually picking it up. I am sure this is blasphemy here but I actually thought Dragon’s Dogma felt much better than Dark Souls as far as moment to moment gameplay. As such I am really hoping that the control scheme is more similar to Dogma. In any case it is a grim dark game about slaughtering the undead and such, and that along makes me a happy camper. We need more games where we roam the country side slaughtering baddies for fun and profit. The only negative that I can see from the trailer is that like Order 1886 it looks a little bit “on rails” for my tastes. In any case I am watching both of those titles closely.

Booking Dungeons

Wednesday night we had tried to run Pharo Sirius for my friend Waren to complete this first Animus book and wound up failing miserably. In my infinite wisdom I attempted to bring along two of our lowest geared players, one of which was the healer… and quite simply he didn’t have the mana to heal the place at just barely ilevel 48 the bare minimum. Last night however we changed up the mix and brought in a very seasoned healer and cleared the dungeon with minimal effort. That really became the theme of the night, cleaning up dungeons both myself and Warenwolf needed for our Animus books. So in total we ran Pharo Sirius, Lost City of Amdapor, Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Stone Vigil. For the last of these we managed to grab one of our up and coming healers that still needed experience and got her roughly a level in doing the place.

Essentially what we learned through the failure that was Wednesday, and the success that was Thursday is that pretty much you can only afford to have a single player in the mix that is significantly undergeared for the content. There were other issues Wednesday night, like the fact that the player had not completed the level 50 quest and was missing both the piece of armor from it and more importantly the critical ability you get that for white mages is your full heal. I cannot impress upon new players enough that the moment you ding 50… go complete your last Job quest. It always gives your class something that you will desperately need from that point onwards. The game assumes you have these abilities, and will throw things at you that often times require them.

As far as leveling goes I managed to get my Paladin to 39, which let me equip a sweet new Grand Company weapon. Since I got Zantetsuken waiting on me in the bank, I thought I would take this opportunity to glamour my weapon to look like the Blazefire Saber. This might literally be the only time I get to use my spiffy gunblade from the Lightning Returns event… since seriously there is no weapon in the game nearly as cool as Zantetsuken. Additionally I have been banking the Hunt Seals needed to buy my Paladin a full set of gear the moment I ding 50. I am not sure what exactly happened, but at this point I have definitely changed focus from leveling the White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. I think more than anything it was my realization that I lacked a class to easily grind additional Atma bits on, now that I screwed up and got my Warrior Atma weapon first. Atma grinding does two useful things for me… firstly I get the chance at atma bits, but more importantly the steady flow of company seals keeps my ventures running. Hopefully at some point this weekend I will have a brand new paladin ready to go.

#FFXIV #FFXV #Bloodborne

Outside Looking In

September 18, 2014 by Belghast

Game Launches

This is going to end up sounding like a strange topic for me to talk about, especially since I have raged at length on this blog before about bad game launches. However that said, it seems odd to be on the outside looking in at a game launch going horribly awry. For the first little bit I could fall back on the statement of “have these people never seen a game launch before?” but at some point we crossed the threshold into silly territory. There was a report on twitter that I read earlier about someone waiting in a 10 hour non-subscriber queue and waking up this morning to find they were still 115 in line. Then when the queue finally ticked down to 1 person remaining, they got disconnected. Similarly I have heard all sorts of nightmares about the amount of Patron time for a game showing at one moment that they have a full year of paid time, and then the next moment showing that they have 30-60 days.

Of course this is all anecdotal evidence since I am not playing the actual game. I feel like this launch however has a whole host of issues that may or may not be entirely Trion’s fault. The thing that folks need to keep in the back of their head is that ArcheAge is not their game. They might be promoting it, and bringing a localized version to America… but they didn’t build the game and there are lots of things that are quite simply out of their control. I feel like there is a bit of a massive cultural disconnect between Trion and XL Games that likely only exacerbates any issues that might be happening. Similarly there seems to be this new trend of Denial of Service attacks against companies servers when they launch a new game. It happened with Wildstar to some extent, and over the last few months has been happening regularly to various game providers. Reports have Trion fighting off a DDoS while trying to launch this new game… and quite frankly as someone who has experienced one of these… there is often times little that can be done other than hoping the perpetrator gets bored and moves on.

Outside Looking In

The strangest experience is watching this all unfold as a spectator. Generally speaking I am almost always on the front lines as a new game launches. I’ve got my limited edition collectors deluxe vip section seat ready to go and have already explored the world during the head start. So generally speaking I view these launches through the eyes of someone having to deal with the issues, and getting frustrated with the folks parroting “just play something else for a bit”. Now I feel like I am on the verge of being one of those folks to spread the same wisdom. After a weeks time, the servers will stabilize either through a obsessive interest or because Trion has added a good bit of resources. In either case life will return to a normal pattern in relatively short time.

As a gamer I would always fall back on the argument that a game company had “sold access” to the game, so they should know just how many people would be playing. That is like me saying that I know a Tornado is coming, so my house should be prepared to brace for impact when it actually hits. Game launches are this industry’s version of natural disasters. Players are this insane wave that comes crashing down on the servers hard and fast and with relentless and obsessive repetition. When Final Fantasy XIV launched we resorted to making hardware macros to try and log into the game, and as a programmer I KNEW that I was essentially adding to the weight of the problem by constantly spamming the servers… but as a gamer I didn’t give a shit, I just wanted to play my shiny new toy that I rightfully purchased.

Were I interested in ArcheAge I would likely be right there with all of you gnashing my teeth and rattling my sabers about the bullshit situation we were having to endure. As an outsider, the whole ballet feels very predictable. All of this said I am not trying to be apologetic for Trion, because at some point a company needs to learn from the mistakes of their peers. That said when a game launches blissfully smoothly like The Elder Scrolls Online, we tend to not even notice. We only seem to care when we are inconvenienced from playing the game. While a bad launch might signal doom for a game, if it goes beyond a certain threshold… a good launch doesn’t actually really predict long term success. As such it likely doesn’t really benefit a company to over prepare for a launch, when they can just ride out the first few days and the relatively short attention span of the internet zeitgeist will have forgotten about the rough spots.

Hoping for Better

I have lots of friends playing this game, as I always seem to have lots of friends playing every new game. For their sake I hope things improve by the weekend so that they can enjoy some relaxing game time. I played quite a bit of this game in Alpha and later Beta and it has so many interesting ideas. The problem for me more than anything else was the toxic community, and the griefer culture that seemed to evolve around various aspects of the game. Go afk in a relatively safe town, and when you walk back to the screen you might end up dead on the battlefield somewhere because a player thought it was funny to push you out of town with a tractor. That sort of game play is not compelling to me other than the fact that I find it interesting that someone, somewhere thought that was a good idea.

At my heart I am a Care Bear and at its heart ArcheAge is a serious open world player versus player game. So while it was interest to experience, just like with Eve Online… I don’t feel like this game was really designed for me. Had Trion created a Co-Operative server I would have been there with the rest of you on day one being frustrated by the events. However from my understanding it was XL Games that was completely against the concept of a non-pvp realm. The game has a lot to offer for those willing to put up with the other players, and put up with these issues at launch. It has one of the most interesting and detailed crafting systems I have experienced in any game. The biggest strike against the game for me personally however is its almost complete and total lack of proper beards. Thankfully I was able to get around this problem in Destiny by playing an awesome looking robot, ArcheAge sadly has no robots.

#ArcheAge