Tales of the Aggronaut

Grinch Stole Steam-mas

June 27, 2014 by Belghast

Changing the Game

The first Steam sale that I can remember was back in 2008 during the Christmas break. It was a truly magical event where we saw entire publishers catalogs neatly packaged for a specific price. I remember picking up everything that THQ had released to date for something insane like $20 and I was completely hooked. The deals were just flat out unheard of at the time, and I opened my wallet and gobbled up a ton of things that I had wanted to play, but never bothered to pick up. From that point on there have been multiple tiers of interest in a game for me. There are always going to be the games that I will preorder happily so that I can play day one hour one, but these are getting significantly fewer in number.

There is a slightly larger group that I am willing to pick up when it goes on sale for the first time, meaning that first time steam drops the price for a daily deal or a weekend special. There is a significantly larger group that I am interested in when the price gets below $10. Then there is another batch that I am willing to pick up if the price ever lands below $5. Finally there is a group that I have no interest in whatsoever even if they were giving it away for free, and these mostly are made up of the sports games out there. All the while I know in the back of my head, the game is just going to keep getting cheaper each successive Christmas and Summer steam sale. Essentially the amount I am willing to spend on any game is now reduced because I know something like steam exists.

Grinch Stole Steam-mas

The only problem is this year it all feels so formulaic. In part this is because the games we see for sale this year, we also saw for sale during the Christmas 2013 sale, and the Summer 2013 sale, and the Christmas 2012 sale, and the Summer 2012 sale… etc etc. The awesome and horrible thing about steam is that the catalog never depletes. They still regularly offer deals on games a decade old, and while these are generally pennies on the dollar… you can only see the “FATE collection” on sale so many times before you stop giving a crap about it. Over the last few years it has felt like the Steam sale was less an insane deal on games, and more this event that everyone wanted to participate in. There were “games” to be played and “party favors” to collect, and a universal sense of loss of money as folks indulged in picking up all of those games they had been waiting for.

The problem is this year it just feels tarnished. I still instinctively check the page each time a new set of games goes on sale, and for the most part there hasn’t been anything that really excited me in the daily sales. I am not sure if this is a side effect of me just being more accustomed to preordering the games I really care the most about, or if it is a cumulative effect that over the years I have cherry picked most of the good things from these sales already. This year the thing I have really indulged in so far is using this opportunity as a way to pick up the various DLC associated with games I already owned, since while the games go at a significant discount, it is usually the DLC that goes for pennies on the dollar during the steam sales. I used this opportunity to pretty much unlock everything that was available for Borderlands 2, and at the same time freak people out as it spammed my steam activity thread.

You can tell the magic is pretty much gone, when there are multiple flowcharts floating around the interwebs showing users how to get the best possible guaranteed deals from the sale. The base rule is to never buy anything unless it is on a Daily Deal, Flash Sale or Community Choice. Daily deals of course change out around Noon Mountain time I believe, and then Flash and Community Choice swap out every 8 hours. Then at the very end of the event, on June 30th this time around… there is usually an encore sale featuring the best deals of the entire run of the sale. This offers a last chance to pick up some of the more popular items. Since there is this formula however it takes almost all of the excitement out of the process. Once upon a time it was super exciting seeing what new wonders would go on sale each day, now it feels like you have guess what games will be big sellers based on the past performance on the store.

Soured the Milk

The thing is, it isn’t just steam that has destroyed my willingness to pay “full price” for anything. PlayStation Plus is this amazing program where you pay $50 a year and get 2 games a month for each of their three platforms (ps4, ps3, vita). Over the course of my time being a subscriber I have gotten 150 games through the program. This coming month we are getting Strider for the ps4, a title I would have eventually bought…. but was holding off just on the off chance that it might be a free title thanks to the PS4s currently limited software library. Sure enough it is this month and my waiting paid off… and the thing is, that is really way Steam and Playstation Plus and even Games With Gold has taught gamers. If you wait long enough you will get whatever it is that you wanted for next to nothing… or maybe even free. Sure this gives publishers a longer tail on the revenue stream, letting them make some profit off of games that have already cycled off of the store shelves, but it also lowers the total value of ANY title in the process.

At this point $60 seems absolutely outrageous to me to pay for a game regardless of platform. If it is something I am really amped to play, I might do it… but very rarely am I willing to pay that for something that is not an MMO. $40 is really the sweet spot of where I start to be interested in a title, but it isn’t until it gets to $10 or so that I am starting to be willing to pick it up “just because it looks interesting”. Essentially all of these programs have turned games into a commodity for me that I know will lower significantly over time. As far as console gaming goes, I have purchased mostly used games for years… and even then I am not willing to pay the type of prices that GamesStop, Best Buy or even our local chain Vintage Stock has to offer. Most of these places drop the sticker price by $10 and call it good. In order for me to snap up a console game, it has to be at Pawn Shop prices, so $15 bucks or so.

Gaming Altruism

The Steam Sale has taught me to buy a lot more games… but has lowered the total price I am willing to spend on any single game. The funny thing is… this also has caused something completely different. Every now and then there is a title that I believe in so much, that I am willing to buy additional copies and give away to my friends. So this week Borderlands 2 was like $5 and one of my friends mentioned that they had never played the game… so BAM! I purchased it and gifted it to them, because like a really good book… I feel like that is a game that everyone should play. This happens quite often in our little community. Over the course of the week, I gave away several different games… but at the same time received several back from totally different people. The prevalence of this happening has increased significantly over the years I have participated in the steam sale.

So while the total price given per item is less, there are several titles that get bought over and over to give as gifts. A few of my friends keep a stock in their steam inventory of titles that they loved to give out to someone who hasn’t played them yet. This has turned the whole process in a different direction for me, and when I see something like that happen it just makes me smile. Games are to me like Books are to my wife… and just as there will always be a “must read” book that you have to share with everyone you know, there will be a “must play” game. I am just happy to be in a place in my life where I can be generous like that without much issue. It has always made me happy when I can turn someone onto something cool, be it a game or a song or even one of my favorite movies. It is this act of sharing our favorite things that makes the internet such an awesome place to be. Maybe in spite the formulaic nature of the steam sale, there is still a little bit of magic left in that old top hat.

#SteamSummerSale2014

Stormtalon’s Lair

June 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping Soundly

When my wife travels I always have trouble sleeping. You get so damned used to having another person laying in bed beside you, that something just feels off. The cats try really hard to make up for the fact that there is another person missing from the bed, but it doesn’t quite work the same. When my wife is gone I end up with one cat pushed up against my face on my pillow… another one burrowed against me on the side my wife would normally be, and a third pretending the bed is lava by standing elevated on my legs. The end result feels like I am trapped in place for fear of upsetting some crazy version of kitty jenga.

Last night however I picked my wife up from her latest trip, which should be the last of the season. So when I hit the sack around 10:30 I conked out soundly and sleep that way for the majority of the night. Its funny how amazing a good nights sleep feels when you haven’t been getting them. I am still a bit groggy, but things feel like they just function better. I should try getting this sleep thing more often. By the time I finish this Monster Zero Ultra I should be feeling right as rain. However it will never cease to amaze me what an effect having my wife home can have on me and my overall happiness and well being.

Nipplegate

So yesterday blizzard released the images of the new Male Human model as part of the reworking coming with Warlords of Draenor. Overall I have to say they seem to have done a pretty good job of translating the original look to a more high fidelity version. It has been compared to Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as well as the “Human” Shrek from the second movie. I can definitely see the human shrek thing, but overall it doesn’t really bother me. Belghast is a human male warrior, and I can see being just fine with the look and feel of the new model once you slap some facial hair on it. The only thing I don’t get are the nipples. What the hell is going on with those… like I sincerely hope this is a texture mapping issue deforming them and not the intended final look. They remind me somewhat of a pair of pepperoni slices glued to the canned ham like pectoral muscles.

It makes me wonder if the Dwarven male had the same issue, but we just didn’t notice because there was always a beard covering them up. So I did some digging and the emotes manage to allow us to see the nipples on the Dwarven model. Maybe it is just that they are smaller scale but they look less like something pasted onto the chest. Yes I realize the irony here in pointing all of this out… because this is precisely the same sort of thing that women have had to go through every time a game releases a female model of anything. Hell Wildstar as much as I love it… I am convinced the animators have never actually seen a female form, because the proportions for the waists especially are anatomically impossible. Anyways… twitter is freaking out. Since I don’t tend to run around shirtless in an MMO, at the end of the day it doesn’t really effect me much.

Stormtalon’s Lair

At this point we had run Ruins of Kel Vorath a few times, but there is a completely different level 20 dungeon that we had yet to touch. So last night we managed to pull together a workable team and run Stormtalon’s Lair. After the mess that was the last time I tried to tank one of these things wearing something other than tank gear, I opted to craft a bunch of new gear and augment it with a few careful auction house purchases. The end result was that I had what felt like enough support power to do the job, and sure enough I had none of the threat issues that I had the last time. It seems like if you are in tank gear, you will do just fine controlling the mobs in an instance, which is somewhat of a cool thing. For awhile we had heard this dungeon was considerably harder than Kel Vorath, and by the difficulty we had with the first boss and some of the trash mobs I would have agreed with those people.

However once we got used to the trash, it felt far more manageable than that of Kel Vorath. While there were quite a few annoying things they did, there seemed to be far fewer of the “Random group wiping” type effects. The first boss honestly was probably the hardest boss in the instance for us. We managed to down the second boss in one try and the final boss I think took us two, and we finished it up with only three people standing. As far as a dungeon to run multiple times… I would honestly far rather do Stormtalon now that I am used to it. I don’t really want to give away any of the fight mechanics, because for us at least that is one of the most enjoyable things about going into a new MMO is hitting the fights completely cold and trying to figure out the mechanics on the fly.

That said we did encounter an optional boss that completely beat our spirit down. We made five or six attempts and never could quite land on the right strategy for dealing with it. During the encounter he summons some adds, and if I try and tank both the boss and the adds I get absolutely wrecked. I am wondering if this is going to be one of those situations where I have to kite the boss around while everyone burns the adds. The problem is… the adds don’t go down terribly easily, and he summons more waves rapidly. While we don’t have the answer yet, I look forward to going back in another night and trying to figure the encounter out. Right now I am loving the feeling of the boss mechanics in these dungeons, because whoever did their encounter design is really doing some interesting stuff.

For the longest time I have wished there was such a thing as 5 man raiding, and really the type of mechanics we are seeing are the level that normally accompany raid encounters. I would say that the 5 man normal dungeons here are at least as difficult as LFR is in WoW. I can see these encounters being an absolute nightmare to try and PUG your way through them. There are moments where the entire group has to pay attention and do something or they die in almost every boss fight I have come up against. While World of Warcraft tended to recycle boss mechanics from one expansion in the next expansions dungeon content… this is something wholly different. It is introducing a raid level of responsibility into encounters that I have not seen before. The existence of Interrupt armor is going to be the death of many a PUG group.

#WoW #Warcraft #Nipplegate #Wildstar #StormtalonsLair

Packaged Chaos

June 25, 2014 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

Last night I had every intent of coming home and playing Elder Scrolls Online all night long. It felt like it had been ages since I had done so, and since I won’t likely be around tonight I thought it would be cool to play last night. My wife is coming back into town from her second conference and I have to pick her up this evening around 7ish when she gets into town. So that is going to minimize what time I have to do anything tonight. Last night I technically logged into Elder Scrolls Online, but only managed to play for about thirty minutes before my mind wandered elsewhere. To be honest the game looks even more beautiful than I remember it being, but I just was not in the right frame of mind to play it.

The pace of ESO is extremely slow compared to the games I have been playing lately, and I didn’t really want to force myself into playing it just for the sake of doing so. So I did a bit of crafting and queued up more research since I had long since completed what I was working on for all of the slots in Blacksmithing, Woodworking and Outfitting. I think mostly last night I was feeling overwhelmed by not remembering what the hell I was actually doing last time I had played the game. The last several times I had logged in, it was just to do some Cyrodil with the guild. As far as where I was in the actual completion of Auridon I had no real clue, and to make matters worse… apparently the recent patch broke every single mod I had installed. So more than anything, I didn’t feel like playing the game with the stock interface.

Packaged Chaos

I have to admit, somehow I completely missed playing Saints Row 3. Now I have seen video of my friends doing completely batshit insane things… and have it on multiple platforms, but for whatever reason I never actually played it. I did however play Saints Row 2, and while I enjoyed myself it just felt like a “better” version of Grand Theft Auto 3. It was charming, but for all of the same reasons why I never really cared for GTA, it didn’t just inspire me to go out and play Saints Row: The Third when it came out. That said everything I have heard about the franchise has been amazing, so when Saints Row 4 went on an extreme sale yesterday I opted to pick it up and give it a shot. So while I was playing Elder Scrolls last night, my mind was wandering to giving this game a shot as I had it remotely install to my main gaming machine. That still is a great feature, I just wish that you could stay logged into steam on all of your computers and remote install to one or many.

For starters… where has this game been all my life, and why did I not do this sooner. Basically Saints Row 4 scratches so many itches all at once it is silly. Some of my favorite games are open world non-linear titles like the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Just Cause 2 and this game is firmly in that wheelhouse. You play through a rather long intro sequence, but it is so silly that it is wildly entertaining to me. This sequence of events might somehow connect to the events at the end of Saints Row 3, but I have no real clue having not actually played it. Essentially through a series of illogical leaps… you end up the president of the united states. Then like a sequence out of Duke Nukem, these very familiar looking aliens invade the planet capturing all your friends from the previous game. All of this is just enough plot to set up for the fact that you become trapped in a matrix like simulation and have to work to escape it.

I Know Kung Fu

Remember the crazy shit that Neo did in the Matrix where he “pushed” off the ground to leap insanely high up into the air… well gratz we get to do that here. So on some level it feels a bit like running around City of Heroes at times as I have both Super Jump and Super Speed. The system is familiar to anyone who has played GTA, that the more mayhem you cause the more attention you get from the police… and in this case eventually the alien invaders. The escalation is pretty slow actually, but the it becomes extremely hard to “get away” long enough to let the system reset and for the police to stop chasing you. I reached a point last night where every few minutes there were more aliens arriving on the scene and eventually they called in this insane gunship that I just simply could not take down as I did not have access to a rocket launcher yet.

Another cornerstone of the series is the insane options to dress up your characters. While I did not purchase the above outfit… I came really close to doing so. The only thing I wish is that I had the ability to change outfits on the fly, but that might be in there that I just haven’t figured out. I seem to alternate between various steampunk and futuristic fusion looks. I am really thankful that overall the costumes seem to be really cheap. You tend to be rewarded several thousand “cache” each time you complete a mission, and I have yet to find a costume more than a few hundred. The ability to play “dress-up” definitely helps out with the enjoyment of the game. As is the ability to customize your base weapons to look insane. Right now I am wielding Deckard’s pistol from Blade Runner, the heavy bolter from Aliens, and a Thompson machine gun… all of which make me extremely happy.

Driving Funtime

So my Grand Theft Auto experience pretty much is limited to GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas. But in all of those games a major detractor for me was that when you boosted a vehicle that it performed like crap. It was a struggle to get the vehicle to do what you want it to do. Saints Row 4 does an amazing job at making the different vehicles feel awesome. Above is a picture of me zipping through the city streets, and it feels like I am really hauling ass thanks to a really good use of motion blur. I was able to zip around the city at max speed and still be able to make my turns when I needed to. I also really like the variety of vehicles I have found so far. I’ve even hijacked a garbage truck and it was equally fun to control, albeit a bit more unwieldy to maneuver.

I think one of the problems I have had with the Grand Theft Auto universe is that increasingly it has seemed like a felony simulator. The game seems to favor a more realistic depiction of crime, while still maintaining a sense of gallows humor about it. This makes me feel like a complete and total asshole while playing the game, and generally speaking I feel like the characters I am playing have little to know redeeming human values. Saints Row goes in a completely different direction, making absolutely everything about the game over the top cartoony violence. So playing it makes me feel like I am watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon from my youth. This game goes one step further by telling you that you are just trapped in a simulation. So when you blow away a pedestrian… they were just polygons in a simulation right? The game lets me run amok without feeling horrible about it, and that works for me. At this point I have just scratched the surface of the game, but I can see this becoming something I play quite regularly for awhile.

#SaintsRow4

Pairing Down

June 24, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

One of the biggest challenges about this whole “blog every day” concept is that some mornings there is just nothing at all in my head to talk about. When I am sick like I was yesterday, I tend to turtle and pull my head up inside my shell, disconnecting me from the interwebs and all of you fine people. Unfortunately when my biggest source of inspiration is gone, I can get a little bit of writers block. It is mornings like this that I feel outline the importance of just allowing yourself to write whatever happens to pop into your head. It might not be epic and exciting, but it is staying true to the mission as a whole. Unfortunately we are well based the NBI 2014 initiative, otherwise I would spin this into some sort of an inspirational post about struggling through.

This is not a slight in any way to the previous NBI groups, but I have been really impressed with just how tenacious the Class of 2014 has been. Generally speaking there is a significant drop off the month after the initiative as folks take a massive breather after having survived being the focus of so many folks attention. When the spotlight fades a bit, it is rough to keep posting when you inevitably notice fewer people are reading. However this group either is blissfully oblivious to the existence of blog statistics, or they really are writing for themselves, because they seem to still be going strong. A few of the “newbies” are among the most prolific posters in my blog reader, and I am amped to still see them enjoying the whole experience.

Pairing Down

WoWScrnShot_061314_062051 Right now I have come to realize that I am playing entirely too many MMOs to feel like I am making any significant progress in any of them. Over the last two months I’ve played Warlords of Draenor, Rift, ArcheAge, Wildstar, Star Wars the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Defiance, Everquest II, Landmark, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Lego Minifigures Online and Trove. While I embrace the whole polygamerous thing, I think even for me this is a bit too much especially when you throw in League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm on top of those… and occasionally some Hex and Hearthstone. Mostly I think I need to drop some of the games that feel similar to me from the rotation, or at least games that scratch the same itch.

I feel like I have to keep testing Warlords of Draenor in part out of remembrance for River, and him being so damned excited to have gotten into the alpha process. While I won’t be playing with the same wide eyed amusement that he would have, I am trying my best to enjoy the experience in his honor. However I can safely say that I will not be playing the actual live World of Warcraft anytime in the near future. I think maybe WoW has run its course with me for awhile, and Wildstar has stepped in to take its place in my heart without me really wanting it to. Wildstar really is a much better version of WoW, and I am just embracing that fact. As a result Rift and SWTOR are also losing out, because to me they still fill the same “wow-like” niche. As a result I won’t be renewing my patron account in Rift.

The Non-WoW Itch

It was fun trying to get into Defiance, but the problem is I got into the Destiny alpha… and it was pretty much everything I had hoped Defiance would be. So I won’t be spending much more time trying to get into that game when I know there is something I will like much better coming later this year. ArcheAge I want to like, but it has without a doubt the worst community of griefers I have experienced anywhere. So unless Trion comes out and announces there will be a co-op server… it is pretty much a nonstarter for me and no sense really spending much more time on it. Landmark on the other hand has an amazing community, but right now there just isn’t much game there for me to play. They have built this amazing crafting sandbox, but without combat it isn’t all that interesting to me past the initial build phase. They have added caves so I figure at some point I will poke my head back in, but exploration without combat just sounds boring to me. I’ve officially allowed my claim to be repossessed at this point.

I still have a special place in my heart for Everquest II, and I can’t say I won’t return to it in the future… but for now I think there are just too many other options. EQ2 was one of those games where I hated the combat system but loved everything else about it. Wildstar with its systems within systems is really filling the niche that EQ2 always did, which might be why it is feeling so sticky considering it is replacing both EQ2 and WoW for me. The Secret World is one of those games I love to remember fondly, but never seem to have a desire to log into on a regular basis. I know there is a bunch of storyline that I have yet to participate in, and I keep thinking that some weekend I will play through all of it. That weekend just has yet to arrive, and lately the only time I seem to log in is when I get new hardware and want to test how it performs.

The Also Rans

Diablo 3 is enjoyable, and at some point I would really like to get a crusader to 70… hell I would like to get my monk to 70. I just struggle to find any drive to play it when my own personal internet zeitgeist… aka the folks I hang out on voice chat nightly, are not also playing it. It was really fun up until the release of Elder Scrolls Online and then boom we all vacated the premises. For the time being I am pretty much crossing it off my list until there is another upwelling of desire among my friends to play it. Trove is similarly really fun, but without a lot of people that I know playing it on a regular basis I have fallen back out of love with it. I will likely continue to poke my head into the game irregularly but when I do play… so much has changed that the experience feels very off-putting. The game is in a pretty much constant state of flux, which is awesome if you are devoted to this game, but confusing if you are a “sometimes” player like me. League of Legends will be a permanent fixture in my gaming rotation so long as I have friends who are devoted to playing it. I don’t necessarily love the game, but I enjoy playing with my friends. I personally like Heroes of the Storm so much better, but the problem is with it being in a limited release “technical alpha” state there just are not enough people around regularly to play with. The MOBA genre is really only fun for me if I am playing with a group of friends, and in this scenario League wins out every time. That is not to say that I won’t keep poking my head into Heroes especially as they add new waves of players. As far as Hearthstone and Hex… I am back playing Magic the Gathering in real life with friends at lunch time… so the draw of these games is minimal right now.

Those Who Made the Cut

So after spending all of this time culling games for this or that reason, I figure I should talk about the games I am deciding to keep in the rotation. Warlords of Draenor I am actually enjoying when I do manage to get in and play it. So yes I am partially doing it in honor of River, and his desire to be in the Alpha, but there is something charming about the new content. I don’t feel like it will be enough to keep me in WoW, but for the time being I am enjoying it while I can. Wildstar has pretty much filled the corner of my heart that desire to play a theme park MMO, and it really is the most glorious theme park of experiences once you give yourself over to it. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface on what it has to offer, and I am intrigued at the schedule they have put out before us. I really like that they are choosing to put in “hardmode” single and small group content before augmenting the raid game. That says a lot that they understand that they need to focus on both going forward to keep players.

I still feel like I have so much more that I want to do in Elder Scrolls Online. I want to finish the Aldmeri Dominion content and see the Ebonheart Content, as well as spend time exploring Craglorn. I love this game even though I am not playing it much, and I can’t see dropping it from the rotation anytime soon. I realize that not many players feel the same way about the game as I do, but really for me it is like the best possible version of Skyrim. I have been out so long at this point that I feel like I am going to be extremely rusty. There game has problems, namely it is awkward as hell to do anything as a group other than Cyrodil. They really need to fix this, and I hope that the good folks at Zenimax are looking into things like mentoring. Right now it is a really awesome single player experience, but gets cludgy when you start adding in more people. That said it still does have amazing dungeon design, and there are so many of them that I have yet to experience.

Last but not least is a game that has come in and taken my heart by storm. Lego Minifigures Online is absolutely adorable and I love everything about this game. Last night this was the only thing I actually played, and grouped up with Rae she managed to catch me up almost to her level in experience. Right now we have a vastly different set of mini figures, and it is really enjoyable to group together. We have both opted to get memberships, and the pocket dungeons are awesome… some of them ending up extremely challenging like the Dragon’s Lair dungeon with I think five different boss fights in it. I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth of enjoyment out of it, so this is definitely going to be in my weekly rotation for a long while. It basically scratches the itch that Diablo 3 did, and cashes in on my absolute love of all things Lego.

So there you have it, going forward I am mostly going to be focused on Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online and Lego Minifigures Online. I of course reserve the right to change my mind and undo all of these in the blink of an eye. That said I do have a ton of single player games that I want to play through, and both the PS3 and PS4 ready to stream content. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Assassin’s Creed 4 for example… and I am absolutely horrible at it, but enjoying myself quite a bit. As far as online games, I am going to try and limit myself to just these games above for the time being. I know in September I will be digging into Destiny and playing that online with friends quite a bit, but it doesn’t directly conflict with the types of games I chose above. Maybe with this abbreviated list, I won’t constantly feel overwhelmed when I sit down at night and try and figure what exactly I am going to do.`