Tales of the Aggronaut

Dragon Commander: Divinity

July 6, 2014 by Belghast

A Cursed Bread Maker

Last night we recorded our thirteenth episode of AggroChat. In various cultures the number thirteen can be either a positive or a negative, and going into the show I was not quite certain how that would shake out. Apparently for us however, thirteen is a very unlucky number. Last week Ash, Kodra and Tam were off hanging out together, and one of the activities was to build Kodra a brand new machine. All of this time we thought his intermittent problems were related to running on six year old hardware. Apparently whatever demons infested his previous machine have jumped ship and are now residing in the new one. We had trouble keeping him online and when he was online he seemed to have issues broadcasting.

All of that aside I think we had a pretty good show last night. We talked about a hole bunch of topics including Tomb Raider and the fact that I maybe just maybe finally enjoy narrative gaming experiences. We also talk quite about about Thomas Was Alone and how that game manages to get the player emotionally attached to a red colored rectangle. We also talk about Rob Pardo leaving Blizzard and the potential effects, as well as the idea that no one person is really that responsible for anything in a game. Additionally we talk about the Divinity series of games, and how the publisher seems to be able to stick to just one genre. We did pure madness this time, due to some confusion on my part we ended up with five guests.

Dragon Commander: Divinity

As has been the case so many times… I added a game to my wish list in part as a way of tracking to see if it goes on sale… and then another friend comes along and griefs me by adding it to the pile of unplayed games. I say grief in the nicest possible sense of the word, because Ashgar has supported this thing I call Steampowered Sunday so many times in the past with an interesting game that he would like to see me play. This time around he ended up purchasing a four game pack and decided he would not play Dragon Commander for some time. As always I am extremely thankful of his generosity, and the fact that it pretty much determined what game I would be playing this week. I am still pretty new to the Divinity setting, but so far I have to say I love the universe that it is set in. I am glad that I played my way through Divinity II this week, otherwise I would have been completely clueless playing this title.

At face value this game is a rather pretty 4X title, and were it only for that the game would be forgettable. The game is extremely confused as at times it is a Civilization clone, other times an RTS like Starcraft, and other times yet a flight simulator. What makes the difference however is the narrative of the game and the lore of the franchise backing it up. As a result the game takes you on this deep quest to win the hearts and minds of a kingdom and at the same time defend it from your mad half dragon brothers and sisters. The game itself is set before the events of Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity and Divinity II: Ego Draconis. As such you play out the events of your quest alongside Maxos the wizard that is spoken of in Divinity II in an attempt to liberate the world.

You’re Going to Need Friends

The storyline centers around your command carrier the raven, a ship that holds many dark secrets… not the least of which is the fact that the ship itself is a bound demon. In order to power the infernal machine, Maxos has bound Corvus the Raven demon in a special chamber that eventually you can enter. The rest of your ship is made up of ambassadors from each of the races of the games setting, as well as a number of gifted generals that you can call upon to guide your troops in battle. At various points these ambassadors will want to meet with you, an the above picture shows a three way discussion happening between the generals Edmund and Catherine and the Dwarven ambassador Falstaff Silvervein.

On board your ship you have representatives of the Dwarves, Lizards, Elves, Undead and Imps… and each time you do something that benefits one faction you inevitably piss off two others. Like so many of these games it quickly becomes a juggling game to try and keep most of them happy in the process. Making the advisors of the various races happy seems to earn you cards that you can play that can turn the tide of a battle. These give you surprise troops, or a tactical advantage or even there is a card called “Genocide” that lowers the population of an area before attacking it. I’ve not actually used this one, but had the enemy play it on me multiple times and it can be rather devastating.

Taking Territory

Through the bridge of your ship you have access to the map view of your territory. From here you can assign one building per area be it a War Forge that allows you to build units, or one of many other buildings that gather some form of resource in a turn by turn basis. From here you try and gain a foothold against your siblings that you are locked in a land war to control as much of the Rivellon heartland as you can. Combat is resolved in one of three ways. You can pay one of your generals to lead your forces for you, giving you some tactical advantage in the process. You can let your army lead itself, which seems to only be advisable if you have an extremely superior tactical advantage, or you can take up the banner and lead your forces yourself. The limitation is that you can personally lead only one battle per turn, and similarly you can only have a single general lead your forces per turn as well. This means that you want to limit combat to as few volleys as you can per turn.

When you choose to lead your own forces the game changes yet again. This time around you are presented a real-time strategy playing field where you conquer resources on the map and use them to churn out more troops to eventually overwhelm your opponent. The interesting thing about this mode is that I tend to leave it in reserve for battles where I do not have a very obvious superior tactical advantage. There have been fights that I came into the conflict with a single unit, but through the RTS game play get the best of my opponent and push forward with a victory. If this were not enough, you also have the ability to quite literally manifest yourself on the battlefield and take your dragon form to attack the enemy.

When the map starts there is a counter in the center of the HUD counting down how long before you can take flight and join the fight as a dragon. When you do, you become a nearly unstoppable killing machine with a series of dragon powers that either hurt enemies or help your fighters. From the air you can wreak havoc on enemy buildings, or hover over your troops and heal them from above. To make things feel even cooler… you are a Dragon with a freaking jetpack. Personally as enjoyable as this mode is… I tend to try and RTS my way through combat as much as possible without taking to the skies. There are moments where you think that this game is ultimately four different games that they built, but couldn’t really decide on which one to finish. However each of these elements is integrated so well into the whole that it just feels natural.

Embracing Controversy

There are some really odd events that play out on board of your ship, and a number of conflicts that you will be called to resolve. Early on you are chosen to pick from one of four princesses paraded before you, and I opted to go for the one that seemed the “sweetest” which oddly enough… was the undead princess Ophelia. Moments after tying the knot she confides in you that she is wracked by a debilitating disease that will eventually eat her bones from the marrow outwards. There is no known cure, and her father the Undead Advisor forbids her to research any of the options as such things are considered to be heretical. However with your permission and the protection of your ship… there are a number of increasingly twisted things that you can do to resolve the issue. All of them with some pretty severe moral implications as you are tested to find out just how far you would go to save your bride.

Similarly you have to deal with all manner of moral and ethical decisions as you engage with your crew. Some will attempt to bribe you to look the other way as various things happen. There is one specific event where an undead artist is revealed to have been a lesbian, and after her death the undead have taken to the streets trying to purge all of her art as heretical. Do you step in and preserve her works, or do you let the course of undead society go unimpeded. Similarly there is a general who is by nature a very misandrist character. She comes to you telling you that she and the other female general are not making near as much as their male counterparts. Do you do the right thing and increase their pay, while at the same time angering all the males on your ship? The game does not shy away from presenting issues pulled from our own times, including the ratification of gay marriage. All of which gives the setting and lore that much more of a living feel.

Sum of All Parts

If you were to take apart all of the different games that make up Dragon Commander, you would end up with a passable but uninspired civilization clone, a passable but uninspired starcraft clone, a political intrigue and romance sim, and a dragon flight combat game. None of the parts is really that amazing on its own, but when combined together with the woven narrative of trying to save your kingdom from the hands of your insane siblings the game becomes extremely compelling. This is a truly ambitious title, and it is carried out with such charm that you tend to overlook the rough spots here and there. The hardest part honestly is the fact that the tutorial could use a bit of refinement. It took me a couple of games before I felt like I was getting the hang of it enough to survive for long. If you like Age of Wonders and Starcraft and have ever wanted to fly a dragon with jetpacks, I highly suggest you check this one out the next time it goes on sale over on steam. It has definitely managed to eat the better part of two days for me, and as soon as I finish with this post I plan on going back to the game and playing some more.

#DragonCommander #SteampoweredSunday #AggroChat

Raiding Tombs

July 5, 2014 by Belghast

Process Automation

One of the things I have figured out over the years is that things work really well only if you aren’t thinking about them. For example if I have a repetitive data entry task, I can seem to do it awesome and at full speed… only until I actually stop to think about what I am doing. Hell even typing itself works amazingly well and I can compose perfectly at the keyboard with zero typos… until I stop to think about what my hands are doing. At that point I screw everything up and get the sequence completely out of whack. As a result I try and commit as many things as I can in life to a sort of ritual. This frees me up to daydream about whatever the hell I want to, while still performing the task at hand on autopilot. My morning routine is much like this, a sequence of events that happen essentially on their own, and works awesomely until I am forced to think about it. When I do have to think about whatever I happen to be doing the process breaks down completely.

Each morning I get up out of bed, walk across the room to turn off the alarm clock. I turn on the television, make sure it is on the local news channel, walk to the kitchen and turn on the keurig and then hop in the shower. When I am out of the shower I get dressed, make coffee, deliver a mug to my wife and take mine upstairs into my office where I sit down at my computer and do a blog post. After I’ve finished that I head back downstairs, feed the animals, give our eldest cat her medicine, run back into the bedroom to say goodbye to my wife, grab my chromebook and then leave the house. At which point I head to QuikTrip, grab breakfast and consume said breakfast while I drive to work. Finally about the time I reach work I am capable of physical exertion because my body is for the most part finished “booting up” and I walk leisurely the 1000 steps or so it takes to get into my office. After sitting at my desk for thirty minutes or so checking email and catching up on my blogroll, I am finally at that point ready to engage in conversation. All of this happens pretty much on its own, and any false step along the path causes the whole sequence to fall apart.

The weekends have naturally had an abbreviated version of this process, as a lot of the activities simply do not need to happen. However the last two mornings I have decimated this process entirely, and I have been paying the price. At first yesterday I thought maybe I just was not awake enough to go walking. So I got up, sat up in bed and watched an entire episode of Pokémon, thinking that surely my body was fully awake at that point after having to explain why Ash Ketchum cares about collecting gym badges to my wife. But still, even after that prep work… my body had no clue what in the hell I was doing to it. I feel like maybe I could add a walk into my existing process…. but essentially that would defeat the purpose, since I doubt I would be awake enough to perform until I have at least had a shower and some caffeine. I think today will be the end of this experiment and I will return to my modified weekend process tomorrow, because right now I feel completely out of sorts.

Raiding Tombs

I have to admit that I was never a big fan of the Tomb Raider franchise. Maybe I am not “male” enough, but I didn’t find the previous incarnation with its two big breasts and two even bigger guns that amusing. There were so many times in the games where I had no clue what was going on, and rarely made it more than an hour into the game before giving up. So when the 2013 reboot happened I had no real fondness for the series, and was not even really paying attention to it. That said something interesting happened… all of my friends raved about just how amazing the game was. Even more interesting to me was how most of said friends raving about the game… were Female. So I knew at some point I wanted to give it a try, but that said I have technically owned this game in one form or another for the better part of a year, but this weekend was really the first time I had given it a play.

Traditionally I do not go in for this sort of game. I have tried multiple times to play Uncharted, but the whole “playing a movie” aspect has always been a massive turnoff for me. Something I just realized last night is that for the better part of the last two decades I have had my head firmly in one MMO or another. During that time I have nibbled at single player experiences, but never really sat down to to the buffet. In that time we moved from the golden age of 90s sandboxy rpgs like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout… to a world where most games are cinematic on-rails experiences. The dissonance of this cultural shift honestly took some getting used to. I would poke my head out of MMOs long enough to consume the more free form gaming experiences like Fallout, Elder Scrolls and even to some extent Mass Effect that allowed me to go off the rails and wander freely, but I have resisted giving myself over to the “narrative experience”.

Stop Fighting It

Basically I give up… I cannot fight the direction my beloved game industry has gone in. I have spent my time resisting it, and as a result have essentially turned into an old man yelling at the kids to “get off my internet”. So after hearing yet another friend talk about just how amazing this game was… I decided to give myself over to the experience. To get the full effect, and keep myself from trying to use the old crutch of “mouse and keyboard”, I opted to play this game entirely on my Playstation 3. It was given away some time ago as part of the Playstation Plus package. For awhile I considered trying to pick up the double special extended deluxe remastered edition available for the PS4, but I really don’t care about how pretty her hair is… or how realistic her sweat movement is. The game looks gorgeous regardless of what platform you play it on, and in truth I kind of prefer the “clump” of hair rather than being distracted by seeing each individual particle.

I like this Lara Croft so much better than the previous one. Firstly she seems to have human proportions as well as human emotions. The previous incarnation was essentially Wonder Woman with guns, and felt like playing a guy with tits at times. I actually enjoyed the series of Angelina Jolie movies, but this Lara feels like a product of her circumstances, rather than someone trained and bred to be mind numbingly amazing. In the course of this game, your character goes through some truly horrific things… things no one should ever have to. Each time she becomes stronger for it, and you start out as this visibly naive girl and turn into a woman with razor will and a desire to survive at all costs. Quite frankly… everything about this franchise is just better than the previous incarnations. This is a Lara I would love to see in a movie, but in reality that is essentially what we are seeing… movies played out through our actions.

Many Narrative Elements

One of my favorite constructs in the game is that of the “day camp” system. Every so often in the game there is a camp spot, be it a formal camp or just a clearing with a makeshift fire ring. When you are at camp all of these interesting interludes happen. Sometimes it is interaction between two characters, other times it is Lara talking to herself… and then there is a series of asides that involve her watching pre-shot footage from the video camera of another of the characters. These little moments help to flesh out the story, and the character interactions making them all far more three dimensional in the process. This combined with the various journal entries you find scattered throughout the levels helps to create a very three dimensional feeling of Yamatai and the characters that inhabit it.

I think another aspect that has helped to make me fall in love with this game quickly, is that the setting itself is extremely familiar to me. Playing Tomb Raider is like playing out what happened to Oliver Queen on the island of Lian Yu in the television show Arrow. The fact that the best weapon Lara has at his disposal is a make shift bow… that slowly improves over the course of the levels really underlines this feeling. So it gave me a point of reference that I already cared about that I could latch onto with both hands and use to pull me closer to the story. The funny thing about surrendering to the narrative, is that it has allowed me to do something I rarely am able to… Play a female character and enjoy it. Most of my game play experiences have been about inserting myself into character character I happened to be playing. So as superior as the writing of “Femshep” might be, I could never disconnect myself enough from the character to make that work. Now it is not like I am playing a character, but instead watching a story unfold in front of me… and it is working.

Old Dog Learns New Tricks

Now at this point I want to go back and try again some of the game that did not work for me in the past. So often times I wanted them to “let me play the game” and stop with all the “cutscenes” never really grasping that the game had changed, and I was simply not prepared for that sort of a game play experience. Another thing that has helped this process is that I have forced myself in many cases to start playing with a controller. Earlier this weekend I was playing Bioshock Infinite with a controller, and not absolutely hating it. I still feel like a controller does a poor job at fight targeting control, but for the most part it works well enough, and I have now reached a point where controlling my character with two thumbs has reached a place where I no longer have to think about it. Movement and Aiming is starting to become “ritual” and as such I am rejecting it considerably less.

Not every game is going to work out to be better because of this little revelation I have gone through. I tried to play the original Witcher again last night, and realized that “nope, it still sucks”. That game has one of the most uncomfortable and unorthodox control schemes I have seen in some time. No matter how awesome that storyline is… I will likely never play it, because I cannot get past how horrible it feels. This is the sort of game that I guess “lets play” videos exist, because while I would love to know what happens storyline wise… there is no way I am going to play it. I’ve given it three tries, at separate times and come up with the same rejection. I guess this is literally a case of three strikes and you are out for me. There are many games however, namely console titles that I look forward to dusting off and trying to play again.

#TombRaider #PS3

For Science!

July 4, 2014 by Belghast

Rude Awakenings

At this point I have been up since right around 7 am, and have now walked almost 2.5 miles for the day. Why on earth have I done a thing like this. Over the summer months my wife has been getting up every morning and going for a walk, figuring that even if she is sedentary the rest of the day she has at least gotten a big chunk of steps in that can then be added to that evening by another walk. Last night she asked me if I wanted to go with her on the early morning walk, and I thought at the time it was a good idea. During the work week I am up at 5:30 in the morning, and get up and around pretty leisurely over the next hour or so. On the weekends I tend to allow myself to wake up naturally and then stumble to the QuikTrip and get breakfast.

This morning I was woken up by two things… first the weight of one of my cats not so gracefully deciding to plop down on my stomach, and moments later my wife petting my eyebrows. In the grand scheme of things I really don’t know what she was doing with them, but it sure as hell felt like they were being petted. I think she was bored of waiting for me to wake up and was trying to “annoy” me into coherence. So I stumbled out of bed, attempted to wet down the cowlicks in my hair and pulled on my walking shoes. I do a lot of complicated things in the morning, one of which is write a blog post, and almost every morning that is done well before 6:30. Apparently physical activity is not one of the things my body is willing to tolerate.

As I started down the path outside the house, it was immediately conscious of how hard it was to keep anything resembling a straight line. We were going extremely slow as compared to our normal pace, but it felt like my wife was racing on ahead of me and I was struggling to keep up. Nothing was really cooperating… not my thighs, shins, ankles… all of which screaming at me wanting to know what the fuck I was doing to myself. By the time we had made it most of the way through the first loop, my body was starting to wake up enough to keep moving forward on its own without me forcibly concentrating to move my legs one at a time. It wasn’t until we had finished the second loop that I was really ready to introduce speech into the equation. My wife kept saying things, and I would have to have her repeat them because I just couldn’t concentrate on both walking and listening at the same time. I feel awesome for getting up and walking a triple loop already, but damn did my body not want to play along with this notion. Here is hoping tomorrow will be easier.

For Science!

This title is extremely misleading, because in truth there is very little scientific about my poll. For starters the sample size is too small to really be meaningful, and the fact that I chose to distribute my poll through twitter and Google plus means the sample will naturally be skewed towards social gamers. All of that said… yesterday was the day that all of us day one Wildstar players got billed for our first month of playtime. In my case it was months of playtime because generally speaking I give every new game three months to hook me. From a standpoint of an Dominion player, I watched our guild turn into a ghost town over the last few weeks so I was curious to see just how many players were choosing to stay subscribed to the game. Additionally of the players who would be subbing… I was curious to know how many were doing it with a monthly fee and how many were trying to use the CREDD system.

I opted to use Strawpoll.me because I love the way it gives you instant results, and you can just simply watch the page as the responses roll in and it automagically refreshes itself. Firstly I want to thank all the helpers I had yesterday in spreading the poll. I got so many people willing to retweet this that it greatly improved the success of the results. If you look at the results above, we had at the time of writing this 238 total votes and of those 30% chose to subscribe to the game. Quite honestly this is about the conversion rate I was expecting just based on what I was seeing on the social networks. There were a lot of supposedly diehard wildstar fans that didn’t make the month. Of those that are subscribing 11 players are trying to pay through the use of CREDD, and I am assuming those folks were smart and bought several months in advance when they were still roughly a platinum per month. I have been watching the CREDD market over the last few days and it is slowly increasing, and at least on our server right now is roughly 4 plat per month.

We Are Not the Average Player

One of the things I think we as bloggers, podcasters and gaming pundits seem to miss however, is that we are in no way the average player. I think it is safe to say that the reach of this survey at least is firmly locked in what I keep calling the “internet zeitgeist”. This is a binge and purge cycle of latching onto a new thing and tossing aside the old one never to return to it. Wildstar was the new hotness for roughly a month, and now it appears that Divinity: Original Sin is the next hot thing. After that there will be something else that is a shiny bauble to draw away players attention. I am just as guilty of this as anyone, so I am not judging… just explaining that the way we play games does not represent how most people tend to play games. There will never likely be a game that stops our fickle ways, or at least we will never again have another multi-year long game like World of Warcraft.

I think the “average joe” I still enjoying Wildstar, and I think personally I just had the back luck of picking the wrong server/faction combination. As a result I have been flirting with rolling Exiles on Evindra, because the bulk of twitter seems to be playing that server/faction combination. I am still enjoying the game personally, but am just going through one of my down cycles right now. I will engage and be socially active for a very long time… but eventually I hit my threshold where I simply cannot take anymore human interaction. When this happens I duck my head into my shell and “turtle” for awhile, playing nothing but single player games.

Eventually I get to where I miss people again and venture back into society, but I figure I still have a few more weeks of turtling before I am ready to return to any sort of normal social interaction. I claim that I am an introvert, and folks have disputed that claim… but I think I just simply have built up more stamina for human interactions. That said there is always a point at which I just can’t handle any more, and this is one of those periods for me. So while I on one level I want to be playing Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online, when I actually log in and encounter other players my fight or flee instinct kicks in and I log right back out. So I realize I am adding to the feeling of the server being empty, but right now at this moment there is nothing I can do about that. I can only hope people will be around when this current funk fades.

#Wildstar

Not A Bel Game

July 3, 2014 by Belghast

Thomas Was Not Alone

Two significant things happened last night. First we went out to eat and dinner did not set well with me, causing me to want to go lay down for a bit. The second of which was that I decided to take my new Playstation Vita with me. Now I have done this before with other handhelds, but what was significant here is that thanks to Playstation Plus I had a smorgasbord of games that I could download and play that were already attached to my account. The first game I gave a shot was Terraria, which I have played a truly silly number of hours of on the PC. The game almost translates to the handheld, but not quite making it so much more frustrating of an experience especially when it comes to trying to build anything. When I decided to stop playing that, I opted to boot up a game I have heard so many things about from my friends.

Thomas Was Alone is this deceptively simple game about getting a series of different blocks with different properties through mazes. You start off with the red block Thomas, that can jump quite a bit and thanks to the magic of the narrator we find is a rather cheery fellow. You then add a series of blocks each with their own traits like the ability to float in water, or the ability to bounce other blocks higher that additionally have similar interesting traits that we learn via the narration. The game reminds me in a way of Bastion, in that the game itself is somewhat lackluster but it is the superb narration and voice acting that make it really pop out there. Thankfully this same narration is artfully displayed on screen at the same time allowing for the experience to translate hopefully to the hearing impaired.

Not A Bel Game

This game very much did not seem like a “Bel” game, as in there is no carnage, no body count… and I am forced to solve a series of structured puzzles to get through the levels. The funny thing is… I spent most of my night playing it and next thing I know it is 12:30 and I am forcing myself to stop on the above level rather than “play just one more”. There is something unbelievably charming about this game, and just doesn’t make sense when you approach it from its most simple parts…. that it is a game about a series of blocks. The game tricks us into using that most human of traits, and attributing personalities and feelings to inanimate objects. Even when the narrator is not necessarily talking from the standpoint of a specific character… as you move that block you imagine what that character might be saying in your own head.

If you are like me and a Playstation Vita owner, with a Playstation Plus subscription… I highly suggest you install the game and give it a spin. If you are NOT like me… then I highly suggest you purchase the game because even at $10 for a what is essentially a puzzle platformer… it is money extremely well spent. Nothing about this game makes sense at face value, that you should not want to care about a series of blocks on the screen in the way that you do. As you progress through the levels and are slowly being trained to face new challenges you truly do. The game does an amazing job at introducing concepts slowly and then building upon those concepts in each progressive level. Most of the levels will involve solving a challenge with a subset of blocks and each time there is an often poignant narrative that goes with it explaining how the blocks feel about being split up. I am shocked an amazed that I could feel this way about a series of abstract pixels.

Very Bel Game

The other game I played a significant amount of last night was once again Divinity II. At this point it feels like I am getting near the end, considering I am fighting through progressively larger and larger waves of mobs at a given time. This is honestly a bit disappointing, considering the early combat was extremely interesting and involved some interesting boss mechanics, and now the answer seems to be the old tried and true throw more bodies at the screen. That said I am still enjoying myself, but there are lots of things that end up frustrating me, like getting stunned by mobs that are halfway across the screen. As I have progressed through the levels, it feels like playing as anything but an archer is really a sub optimal experience. I’ve noticed that even the “Wizard” and “Healer” type mobs now fire nothing but a bow, and the overall gameplay experience at times devolves into a shooter.

I feel like maybe this is why Divinity: Original Sin did not return this game into the “behind the back” dungeon crawler. The throw waves of mobs at the player thing tends to work fairly well in a Baldur’s Gate type game, but it just feels childish when you do the same mechanic in a first person or over the shoulder style scenario. Thankfully there are still vignettes of smaller scale gameplay that work extremely well, and interesting puzzles to unlock… but the overall depth and granularity of the game seems to have decreased. There are entire zones that are made up of nothing but these giant flying fortresses that you clear first in dragon form and then can clear out on the ground. In all of them so far, it has been a focus on quantity of mobs not necessarily the quality of them. I am somewhat off the rails right now in my play through, but I am wanting to see it to the end.

#DivinityII #ThomasWasAlone