Tales of the Aggronaut

ArcheAge Impressions

May 9, 2014 by Belghast

Peach Fuzz and Pretty Boys

As I said yesterday, a friend of mine hooked me up with access to ArcheAge alpha and throughout the day it downloaded and installed. I came home over lunch to take a breathing treatment, and when I got there it was ready and waiting for me. I didn’t get much time to play at that point, but I did manage to create a character. I have to say at this point my hopes were a bit dashed. I generally have a problem with the Asian and specifically Korean graphical style, in trying to create a character I really liked. I had this problem with Aion, GW2, and to some extent Rift. It very difficult in these style of games to create any form of a male that is not a “pretty boy”. I went into FFXIV with the same fears but found myself pleasantly surprised that I could create a character aligned to western ideals with a very nice beard and everything.

ArcheAge unfortunately… this was not the case. They have beard options but essentially they were choices between “Five O’clock Shadow”, “Peach Fuzz” and “Well Trimmed Peach Fuzz”. There was not a single “real” beard option available. This is a little bit disappointing considering from everything I have heard there are some massive configuration options available for the female models. So Trion if you are reading… not sure if this is something you can do but both ArcheAge and Rift for that matter need better beards for the human models. The above character is as “close” to the standard Belghast appearance as I could get out of the system. I can live with it, but I am not exceptionally happy about it. I feel like my choices were as good as possible with the system.

Solid Combat

Complaining about the character models aside, the game feels very good once you actually get into it. The first several levels are the same as every fantasy MMO with a series of punctuation leading you around the map and showing you the things you should do. Right now the experience feels a little disjointed since you are supposed to be getting treated to nice cutscenes… that happen to all be in Korean. This also causes some odd shit to happen… at one point last night a rock on the ground was speaking korean to me… and I never quite figured out what was happening there. It was some sort of a tutorial system, and I ended up disabling. The world feels good, and combat feels responsive for standard MMO fare hotbar combat.

I chose to go “BattleRage” for my initial tree and it is pretty much standard warrior fare. At level five I was able to pick a second tree, and I went for Defense… which is as you would expect the archetypal “tank” tree. At that point I had a kit that included a ranged pull, a charge, a multi modal combat attack that could hit multiple targets and a really powerful long cooldown shield bash. That is a pretty great start for any game that only a few levels in I feel like I have a complete enough kit to absolutely run wild with. At level ten I was able to pick up my third tree, which I went Occultism with. Basically this is the “Dark Knight” build from the Korean version, or as it is called here “Doomlord”.

My ultimate plan is to try and create a Shadowknight like tanky character with life drains to and maybe a cool summon or two. Right now I have this really awesome attack called “Hell Spear” that impales every mob within a radius around me on a fiery spear that comes up from the ground. They are rooted and take damage when it fades. This honestly is one of the aspects of the game that most appeals to me, that I can build pretty freeform classes. While it is zero shock that I ended up trying to create a Dark Knight given my love of Shadowknights and Deathknights… I am happy that I am in fact able to craft it however the hell I want to. Looking at the trees it looks like I will be able to build a tank with a charge and a deathgrip type yank ability, which should give me a pretty solid kit for tanking instances… if those even exist here.

Rift and FFXIV Had a Child

One big take away from last night is that the world is gorgeous. Not everything is amazing… and there are plenty of generic fields and forested nooks to explore. However every now and then you are just awestruck by how breathtaking a vista is. Overall like the subtitle says the game feels as though Rift and FFXIV had a child… and then spent time raising it with LoTRO and even an odd Warhammer Online feel to some of the quests. That description will either make you think “man that sounds great” or like some of my friends cause you to affix a firm “NOPE!” sticker to it and move on. I happen to like the mix and this is probably going to be my new “off night” game. I still plan on playing the shit out of Elder Scrolls Online, but this game is probably going to fill that space that SWTOR has recently been filling. The game world has plenty of downtime, so it doesn’t feel like I have to be “constantly on” like it does in ESO.

Granted all of this might change as I move out of the more themepark areas into the more serious sandbox ones. At some point soon I will be turning off most of the channels. I would say already it has one of the worst communities I have seen in a game. At one point I was given a quest where I had to cross a bay on a shitty rowboat. The folks with huge ships took a perverse sense of pleasure ramming into me and trying to capsize my boat as I moved across the bay. Granted they could not actually attack me, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t make my life hell for a few minutes. This “griefer spirit” seems to be infused with the game community so far, and ultimately will probably be the biggest problem I have with it. If you look at most of the streamers, they seem to be almost entirely devoted to ruining someone’s day. Although if you want to watch some streams that are not blatant griefing and high seas piracy… I highly suggest Kiwidream or IRLJasmine.

Systems Within Systems

That is the oddest thing about this game honestly, is that it can be so many different games to so many different people. From my limited experience so far it is very much a straight forward themepark style game. However after watching lots of streams on the game, I can see just how detailed the various systems are. You could in theory live your entire life in game as a crafter, doing nothing but running trade deliveries and crafting goods for sale. You could spend your time raising crops, or animals, or doing nothing but building really awesome houses for people. However you can also spend your time adventuring or as the community seems to be doing… griefing other players. Wading into this game is much like wading into Everquest 2 at this point. There are just a ridiculous amount of systems to try and figure out, and even though the game gives you a summary introduction to each… the depth there is almost staggering.

I still stand by my statement on the MMOPRG Game On podcast… I feel like this is going to be the game that has finally arrived for the Star Wars Galaxy player. One of the hallmarks of that title, was that so many different play styles were embraced and supported. ArcheAge so far feels like a spiritual successor, but with a really good combat system. I’m sorry to the SWG fans out there, but combat in that game felt horrible, even compared to what was available in Dark Age of Camelot at the time. What it had going for it however was all the open world goodness and player created content, and I feel like even with the seemingly asshole community… there might be a place to carve out a niche among the lawless. I know they are targeting free to play for this game, but it almost makes me hope that there might be a “patron only” server. I feel like a game with this much potential to ruin your day, needs a more curated environment.

Final Thoughts

I am starting to get used to the character especially now that I am starting to shift away from leather armor into plate gear. I feel like there will be a point where I actually enjoy playing the character and the way it looks. As far as the world goes… while it does not inspire me yet to go absolutely batshit crazy with the exploration like Elder Scrolls Online does… I figure as it opens up I will start to feel that way. Right now I am most concerned with staying on the path, since I don’t know where the free for all boundaries are. I want zero part in the pvp aspects of the game, so I will be doing my best to avoid them. I really like the way combat feels, the animations are nice and the abilities while essentially spamming hotkeys… feels good. I feel like it gives any wow-like combat system a run for its money. It is not extremely deep, but what is there is enjoyable. I feel as I keep unlocking skill points and subsequently new abilities it will keep feeling more “fleshed out”. While I do not feel like abandoning all other games and declaring ArcheAge the one true king… I enjoyed myself enough to keep playing periodically and see where the journey leads me. There is a lot to like in this game, and I feel as it progresses, that will increase.

#ArcheAge

Take on the Trinity

May 8, 2014 by Belghast

Maypocalypse

This morning I am struggling to get my act together and actually start writing. Why you might ask? Well I have been sitting here dwelling on just how much crap has to get done this month. My wife is a school teacher, which means there are two absolutely hellacious times of the year for their spouses… the beginning and the end. Right now I am trying to make myself available for whatever she might need to be done, which means I am going to miss a lot of regularly scheduled playtime. Additionally we have several landmines in our schedule throughout the month as we are expected to attend various weddings, graduation events, and mothers day all lumped into the mix.

This weekend for example I really deeply need to crash hard in a vegetative state on the sofa. However instead we are going to run all over half of the state as we attend a big graduation event on Saturday, and then attempt to juggle our Mothers Sunday… making sure no one feels slighted in the process. Thankfully I already have my Mother taken care of gift wise, but at some point soon… likely tonight we need to go shopping and figure out what to do for my wife’s two mothers. I expect to end up a rather grumpy man by the time everything is said and done. Right now I am just hoping that I am back Saturday night in time to record the podcast.

Take on the Trinity

Yesterday I spent some time chatting with Syl and among the many topics was scattered in a brief discussion about roles in MMOs and more specifically the trinity. I have long been a defender of the trinity, but even I fully admit that it is deeply flawed in a few ways. The problem is that the game that try to completely remove it… end up with a chaotic mess when it comes to group based combat. Games like Elder Scrolls Online have tried to blur the lines a bit, but it still very much requires a handful of things to get through a dungeon successfully. We have not really landed on an ideal solution to replace the trinity with something else. The moment you replace it however… you more than likely end up with a new kind of trinity.

Somewhere in this conversation I had an idea. In a game like the Elder Scrolls Online you meet along the way a cast of really interesting and varied characters. What if you collected these a sort of unofficial followers within your sphere of influence. Games like SWTOR do this sort of things, but very much in a subservient “pet like” manner. What would happen if you could call upon them for assistance, but instead of them following you around in a zone… you assumed control of them. The idea is that basically you would be able to become any of these characters temporarily, assuming their abilities and hot bars and by extension the role each of them fills. Where I am getting at is if the party needs a tank, you just rummage through your NPC contacts and summon the spirit of the one that is a tank.

In Everquest 2 they have a very similar system to this, but it was put in place specifically for the dungeon maker system. It allowed you to collect a series of avatars by adventuring out in the world and then run player created dungeons as these characters. This would take this same concept but apply it to every place you might need a specific kind of character. The idea is that each of the avatars would be a balanced but not quite optimized version of that role. Essentially just “good enough” to get by with, but nowhere near as good as a player could craft the same role. But it would serve a lot of purposes. Firstly anyone could truly take over and heal, tank, crowd control or whatever role happened to be missing from a party. Secondly they would serve as a kind of “try before you buy” for interesting mechanics.

For players familiar with the MOBA genre, this would be very similar to the Champions that you collect or purchase. Each one would have unique strengths and weaknesses, and be able to fill specific roles in the party. However the idea is that each one of these while interesting to play can be easily improved upon by the player. However each one would be able to showcase a specific game-play mechanic or style, allowing players to see if they like that sort of thing before going through the lengthy and expensive process of recreating it themselves. You obviously would need to have a smattering of character to tail to different player tastes, but it would almost become a new meta game as you go around the world influencing NPCs and collecting them into your “stable”. There is a moment in the original Rift cinematic trailer where they visualize a player switching specs… and I figure switching avatars would have a similar look and feel.

Incoming Obsession

I woke up this morning and saw an email waiting there notifying me that I had been added to the ArcheAge alpha. I have been watching this game evolve with great interest, but have been on the fence about taking the buy in plunge. Right now I have lots of games that I want to be playing, firstly I still have so much that I want to do in ESO. However now that I am in I know I will be playing this as my “off night” game. For awhile I had been dabbling with the notion of joining the Alliance of Awesome people in their Dominion Wildstar guild, however with this new game being piled on I doubt I will at this point. In related news… the transition from Reddit to Anook for the Alliance of Awesome community site has been pretty seamless. Folks are slowly starting to pick up momentum and trickle in. I have done a piss poor job of promoting this on the Stalwart site but that will be changing.

For a bit I was considering just trashing Stalwart Online entirely and going to a Nook for our site, however I have backed away from that notion. For starters I think it might be a bit too traumatic for people to have a second forum ripped away from them in a year. It was around this time last year I think that I made the transition from the original Stalwart forums to the new Vanilla based one. Secondly… I really want people using Anook, but all directed in the same place. As a compromise we have considered carving out guild specific areas on the Alliance of Awesome site, that way we are all in the same shared space and not fragmented off on a bunch of individual sub sites. The big step in unifying the guilds will still be to transition to all using the same voice software… but that has been a hill I was not ready to die upon. However it is still very much one that I need to address.

ArcheAge definitely gives me something to look forward to tonight when I get home. If you are in game and playing, ping me and let me know how to get a hold of you. I feel like there is already a significant population of people I know in game right now. I have severe reservations about the game, but after reading Liores post about what exactly can pvp flag you yesterday… I feel a bit more at ease. I am still a damned dirty care bear, and as such try to stay the hell away from PVP. That said I still very much enjoy my time spent in Cyrodil and want to get more of that happening soon. Now that we have this handy dandy event calendar… thinking maybe about penciling in next Wednesday night for a grand Cyrodil excursion. In the mean time I will be horribly conflicted as to what game I will be playing on a given night.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #ArcheAge #Trinity #AllianceOfAwesome

Shores of Oblivion

May 7, 2014 by Belghast

Mornings Are Hard

This one in particular is extremely difficult for some reason. I guess it could be the fact that I fell asleep at the keyboard last night, and as a result ended up getting to the actual bed far later than I had intended to. Now as I attempt to jump start my brain with caffeine I am realizing how frustrating the act of a morning can be. More than anything I am finding myself extremely easily distracted. Of late several of us have been slowly migrating to Anook.com as a social site. Primarily this is for the fact that it is ideally suited for a multi-guild meet-up site like the Alliance of Awesome. At this point I am wondering if I could simply transplant my folks from the House Stalwart forums to the site as well making the whole experience more fluid.

For those who don’t remember… or were not reading my blog at the time, the Alliance of Awesome is a weird experiment that we have been running. With the launch of Landmark alpha, several of us realized just how many different overlapping groups we were a part of. So we proposed a grand alliance, and since then many of us have been laboring to make those efforts successful. Right now the AofA as we call it, is a combination of Combat Wombat, Dark Religion, Mercy Gaming, Multiplaying and House Stalwart. Elder Scrolls Online was the first game we really went into as a large amalgam guild and so far it seems to have worked extremely well. I have been shocked at just how little drama has been involved, but I guess that is to be expected when most of us are “thirty somethings”.

Shores of Oblivion

Last night was an odd sequence of events. Firstly I was supposed to be doing a pen and paper thing with several of my friends. However I did not want to get into anything too deep because I knew I would need to go do things with my wife when she got home. As a result I ended up piddling around in Elder Scrolls Online while waiting in a holding pattern. As the evening went on, the time of her arriving home kept slipping backwards, so in grand total I ended up playing and streaming my gameplay for a few hours. The mission of last night as always was to finish up Bangkorai. I have finally reached a point where I think there are just two objective areas left in the map. However completely by accident I seem to have moved past the zone and into Coldharbor by following the storyline.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVAt some point soon.. or at least as soon as I can find a wayshrine in Coldharbor I will be venturing back to Bangkorai to finish up the last few things on my map. I find it almost impossible in this game to “skip” content. It drives me absolutely insane that there is still a black skull on my Alik’r map from a world boss that was bugged out. I feel like I have to explore every corner of the map before I finally and reluctantly move on to the next area. At this point I am just a stones throw away from 47, so I figure that I will ding 50 well before I even come close to finishing Coldharbor. That zone looks equally huge as compared to Bangkorai. When I posted the above picture on Anook, someone commented about the Mudcrab. That is “Butter” my faithful companion that has been with me the entire journey. I am not sure why I bonded with the brown mudcrab pet over the Monkey, Bantam Guar or Red Mudcrab… but I did and he has been at my side throughout all of this.

Crush the Resistance

I love the Elder Scrolls Online with every fiber of my being, but the game requires a lot of focus. This past weekend and the last few days I have struggled a bit in trying to maintain that focus. Wandering around the world requires you to be constantly aware of your surroundings, because an afk in the wrong area can end up with a hefty repair bill. As such I need a game that doesn’t quite matter so much. For a long while this has been landmark, but I have reached a point of builder burnout there for the moment. On a whim this weekend I decided to fire back up SWTOR and I have been piddling around on my Caithar Sith Juggernaut. I never really got to see the Sith side of things, so overall it is pretty enjoyable. I opted to go Light Side Sith, which seems to be far more my style anyways. I am this island of honor and nobility in a seething mass of evil.

To be truthful… this specifically is the reason why I logged in over the weekend. On “May the Fourth” they gave everyone that happened to log in an adorable astromech droid pet. I could not pass this up, because of my friends… I am the only one who ever seems to be nostalgic enough to re-up a game subscription and revisit games the guild has moved on past. So while it started out as “get this thing while it was available”, I am actually finding myself enjoying the game again. It is no real competition for ESO, but it scratches the itch that most everyone seems to be satiating with Wildstar beta weekends. Additionally… after all this time I finally have a machine that will run SWTOR on maximum everything. This client is so poorly optimized that even on my laptop with dual video cards… it runs like complete shit. No clue how long I will piddle around with SWTOR, but I might even stream some of my adventures.

From the Desk of Doctor Hannah

Another good friend of mine decided to enter the Newbie Blogger Initiative fray. Dallian, otherwise known as Doctor Hannah from twitter… has had a blog for ages, but for the most part it had lived in a dormant state. I think both the blog and the twitter account started as a joke reference to the now infamous Tabletop episode where Felicia Day creates this massive backstory of Doctor Hannah while playing Last Night on Earth. So while the blog started off as a joke, at some point during its life it morphed into being Dallian’s personal space. With the NBI he is taking the step of rededicating himself to blogging more regularly, and about his gaming side as well. In this post on the forums he mentions wanting to do at least a post a week, but so far he has made like four posts this month. I will do whatever I can to help support this effort, but in the meantime you should totally pop over to his blog and check it out.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #SWTOR #DoctorHannah #NBI2014

Permission to Suck

May 6, 2014 by Belghast

The Ugly Baby

Something that is probably useful to know about me is that I am absolutely an NPR junkie. Several years ago I made the decision to stop listening to music and instead use that time to catch up on the worlds events. There is a concept among NPR listeners, called the “driveway moment” where you have reached your destination but you cannot leave the car because you are enthralled by whatever is happening on the radio. Yesterday I had one of these and in a way I found it extremely relatable to the Newbie Blogger Initiative. Ed Catmull is most well known for being one of the founders of Pixar Animation Studios. Yesterday afternoon on the Diane Rehm show, he was talking about his new book. But he dwelled upon a specific chapter, and I was able to dig up the same basic discussion in the youtube video above.

The chapter of the book is “The Ugly Baby and The Hungry Beast”. In his example the “Hungry Beast” is the part of Pixar or any creative studio that is the most productive. They are the ones churning through content and making things happen. The front of the studio, the creative side however is the “Ugly Baby”. He said that when Pixar starts a new project the output is always horrible. Nothing looks quite right, nothing fits together, and generally speaking it is rather ugly. The creative ideas need time to grow into something fully fleshed out, and during this period they need to be protected and given time to nurture. When you are just starting out blogging, your blog is this Ugly Baby. Nothing quite works the way you want it to, things don’t quite flow, but you have a vision for where it can be and you have to give it time to mature.

Permission to Suck

One of the hardest things about creating anything, be it a blog or a web comic or a podcast is giving yourself permission to suck. We intellectually see failure as being a necessary part of the creative process, because it allows us to grow and change. However as people… we never want anything we do to fail, because culturally we have placed all of this weight upon that happening and attached all sorts of meanings to it. In order to make a blog work, you have to give yourself permission to suck, and to not know all the answers. Like most things in life you can figure things out as you go. My blog has evolved over time into what it is, because quite frankly the first two years of it were pretty lousy. Still on a daily basis as I sit down at my desktop and put fingers to keyboard each morning, I question if I know what the hell I am doing.

As a writer you need to create enough space around your work to allow it to grow and mature into what it can be. At least when you are getting your feet about you, you need this judgment free zone. Realize that in six months most of what you create today, is going to embarrass you. That is part of the process and if you somehow manage to get everything right immediately… then you are some sort of freakish prodigy. That said… no one gets everything right immediately. Blogging is one of those things where you learn more by doing, and doing often. I don’t feel like I really learned much about myself or the process until I was forcing myself to do it every single day. While I don’t suggest anyone follow me down that path of madness I do suggest you pick a schedule and stick to it. This can either be a fixed number of posts per week, or an actual schedule like Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Just Write Anything

There are going to be days where you are scheduled to write something and you don’t have a clue in the world what you are going to say. I’ve found it is important to observe the routine, and brute force your way through the issue. If you look through my blog there are massive several month long lapses in content. Each and every single one of those started with a day when I just could not think of anything to say. I used to get to the point where I would feel like, each time I made one of these lapses that I would need an extremely epic post to start back up again. As sort of a payoff for those who still had me in their RSS feeds, that I needed to make a really good one to make the outage worth it. Problem is… this only complicated the process and make it all the more unlikely that I would be making a post to start things up again.

When I have days where I am quite literally experiencing writers block, I just start writing. I might rattle off three paragraphs of completely banal bullshit, but there is something about the act of writing that gets the process started. Flowing words out onto the page, somehow clears the logjam in your head and within a few paragraphs of crap you start seeing genuine content. So when this happens I keep writing my way through the post, and end up deleting most of the “bullshit header”. Ultimately relying on inspiration is not sustainable, so many times you have to make your own inspiration. This could be playing a game that inspires you, or crawling through your RSS feed looking at what others are writing… or it could be just forcing yourself to produce content by sheer will alone. In any case, the more you force yourself to write, the better your content will be and the more mature your blog will become.

New Challengers

In many ways “winning” NaNoWriMo has forever changed the way I look at things like the Newbie Blogger Initiative. While I still have so much editing to do, the focus of that exercise was not necessarily to write really amazing content, but instead to focus on getting my 1500+ words a night. During the Newbie Blogger Initiative I really see the focus on getting your blog off the ground, and posting content regularly. The content can be horrible, but the act of doing it over and over will improve your own personal process… and similarly improve your blog. So far the Class of 2014 seems to be busting down all expectations I might have for them and producing some really great posts. Additionally there have been several new people added to the mix since my last post so I wanted to post an updated roster.

I highly suggest you check them all out and add them to your RSS reader. We have a few that are on their first or second post, but we have quite a few that are cranking them out on a pretty regular basis. Just remember to give yourself room to post things that you don’t immediately like. Cranking out the posts is the only real way you can develop your own process. The Newbie Blogger Initiative is this great judgment free zone, where each and every established blogger wants you to succeed. Use the hell out of this space to experiment and try new things. Figure out what it means for “you” to write “your” blog. This experience is worth what you get out of it, it is like an optional boot camp, and those who really take that to heart seem to be well served by it. As I look out on the class of 2012 and 2013 I see many well established voices, and I look forward to being able to say the same about 2014.