Tales of the Aggronaut

The Anchors Fall

March 3, 2014 by Belghast

Snowbound

Tulsa once again is buried under a thick coat of ice, with a dusting of snow on top. Luckily we were prepared for it, and I did the traditional grocery store run Friday afternoon before the madness really started. Saturday we got out early in the morning and ran the few errands we had to run, and made it in well before the crap started that evening. It was predicted that the ice would begin around 6pm but it started considerably later. Thankfully it was just sleet, and not freezing rain or we would have been in trouble. When we got up yesterday morning it really did not look like we had much accumulation, and as a result my wife was convinced that they would be having school today.

However over the course of the morning, it started in hard and heavy with the ice and didn’t let up until late last night. While we only got roughly 3 inches of accumulation, almost all of that was ice in one form or another. One of the more interesting things is we had what they call “Thunder Sleet” and “Thunder Snow”. Essentially it sounded like a rain storm with lightning and thunder, but as the precipitation fell it turns into sleet on the way down. After a day of this I texted my boss about 9pm saying that I was not even going to try getting out this morning. At that point I was apparently the third person to say the same thing, and he was not sure if he was going to try and make it or not.

I am really questioning if my wife will be having school tomorrow either. At some point today I need to go out and try and clear the vehicles, as I am sure tomorrow morning I will be driving into work. Honestly when a day like today happens work pretty much shuts completely down, and it is their own damned fault. Once upon a time we would work remotely during a snowstorm, and things would continue moving forward. However the current management made a point of stating that there was no official working from home policy, and as a result we all take vacation days and ignore email. I think they were far better off the other way around, because at this point… it damned well better be a crisis for me to deal with it when I have spent a vacation day.

The Anchors Fall

I spent I would say the majority of the weekend in Tamriel. Not that I really felt the rush to play, since I have been part of the private testing group for roughly a year now, but I did want to get to hang out with my friends as they played. By the end of the weekend I think we had 35 members or so in House Stalwart, and for the most part everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. There were a few people who simply could not get used to the “action mmo” perma-mouselook interface but overall I think we are going to have a large and bustling guild for launch. Really that is the most I could hope for. I entered the weekend with grand ideas of getting to the 15-18 range of Spindleclutch… the first dungeon in Daggerfall. However i didn’t even get close, ending the weekend around 9.5.

I am really bad at leveling in Elder Scrolls. There is always this cool thing over here to look at and explore, or this camp of baddies to clean out… or this bit of ore to mine. The Elder Scrolls Online is distraction city, and I am a willful participant. In World of Warcraft, I have learned to “quest grind” and push my way through content extremely quickly. However in the much more immersive world of ESO I tend to stop and smell the roses quite a bit. One of the interesting things about the game is that I actually somewhat pride myself on making my own gear. So the tail end of the night since I was roughly half a level from 10… I was in a mad rush to gather iron ore. Up to this point I have tried to have a full set of the next level of gear ready to go for when I ding.

I realize I don’t NEED to do this, as you can pretty much get by fine in several levels old gear. However I like the concept of making my own stuff. Firstly it levels blacksmithing, but more importantly I always know where my next upgrade is coming from. Granted it usually means I am well over level since wandering around mining ore, tends to mean you are also killing a ton of bad guys and soaking up extra experience. Right now I am just ready for this to launch. It feels like I have been waiting for this to happen for so long, and now we have a month left before go time. I am ready for my characters to finally be permanent and my choices to matter for longer than a weekend. Since I didn’t explain it… the above image is of a Dolmen moments before a Dark Anchor is about to fall. If you see this scene… go somewhere else… because if the anchor falls on you… you end up taking massive damage.

Not on Easy Mode

After my little Steampowered Sunday write up, my friend Ashgar informed me that even though it says “very easy” in the upper right corner… that is apparently a lie. He said he could tell from the things on screen that I was not in “easy” mode, and that I should try that setting. So sure enough I fired up the game a bit later in the day and noticed that I was not in fact on easy mode. In fact when I DID set it to easy, I managed to get through the first level just fine. Well “just fine” being relative, because the game is still maddening at times. However after a few deaths I managed to progress to stage two “Sky Meadow”.

There I proceeded to die rather spectacularly over and over. So while the game is a BIT less abusive on “easy”, it is still maddening. I am probably going to fire this up every now and then, just because at this point I really want to see more of it. I don’t know why I do… but I do. This is like a puzzle that I want to crack, and I don’t understand WHY I want to open it… but I really do. Ash says this is one of his more played steam games, and I can see why. There is just something about it that gets under your skin and makes you want to play more. It is so brutally unapologetic in the way it kills you, that you want to keep getting back up just to try and piss the game off.

Risk of Rain

March 2, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #7

I feel like I am getting on on this bandwagon about three months too late. Risk of Rain is an interesting indie metroidvania shooter, with randomly generated worlds and randomly placed objectives. I remember seeing this and thinking, man that looks cool. So I picked it up over the Christmas break, but never ended up playing it. When I started this whole Steampowered Sunday section this was also the very first game I think that a friend of mine gifted me to do a write up on. It was at that point that I knew sooner or later I would have to devote a Sunday morning to it. It was with a certain bit of trepidation that I finally sat down to play it. I had watched a few streamers playing this… and saw the frustration of them dying horribly over and over.

Your Death Was Extremely Painful

I honestly cannot remember a game that has been quite so successful at making me feel like a complete and total failure. I just finished playing roughly thirty minutes of the game and I feel like I want to throw the controller across the room. I of course won’t because I don’t want to break my favorite controller. The deck is stacked against you from the start it feels like, and the longer you take to find the teleporter, the worse the enemies get. However the longer you hold out, the better your chances are because you level up and can unlock various abilities throughout the level. The best I managed was getting to level 8 before finally getting swarmed to death by so many adds on screen at one time.

The problem I had with this level is I seriously could not find the damned teleporter. I wandered all over the place, picking up all sorts of nifty things, but never finding the actual objective. This is the real frustration of the game for me, is the dual missions… find the teleporter fast, and level up and find interesting weapons. When you finally do trigger the teleporter, you have to stay alive for 90 seconds while this insanely huge colossus attacks you, along with tons of other baddies that have spawned in. I have made it to the colossus phase half a dozen times at this point but the closest I have managed to make it is 30 seconds to go.

I think in part my issue is that it is set up with “modern” controller settings. I am just not used to using my trigger buttons for anything. I am far better controlling games with the face pad, so I have considered remapping the controls greatly to put all of my cooldowns on the face buttons. This is a side effect of growing up in the Atari/Nintendo/Super Nintendo era and pretty much disappearing from consoles in any serious way until Playstation/Playstation 2. I am just used to having everything controlled with the thumb buttons, and even while playing super nintendo games I tended to remap the controllers to put the buttons I almost NEVER pressed on the shoulder buttons.

The game itself is pretty gorgeous, and for not having many pixels to work with, the sprites evoke a sense of character to them. It honestly reminds me of the same kind of graphical treatment that the old school PC lemmings games used to have. Super intricate world made up of super tiny sprites. The music adds a certain character of foreboding to the alien landscape. Running around this world just feels eerie and I can’t really explain why. The purplish color palette fits the first level, but I am not sure if this changes the further you go in the game. The game is extremely well crafted for the limited resources it has on screen at a given time.

What the game reminds me of honestly is a bullet hell shooter, but if a bullet hell shooter started out extremely sparse and continued to get progressively worse over time. In most bullet hell games there is a point of equilibrium where “it can get no worse”. Once you reach that point you can adjust to it, and move forward. Risk of Rain always gets worse, there is no point at which you can really take a breather from the gameplay and prepare for the next assault. Each of the mobs on screen has a pattern, but some of them are purposefully non-complimentary. So far the things that always seem to kill me are the little flying jellyfish things. At the very least they whittle down my health to a point where one of the other mobs, like a lemurian can finish me off.

As maddening as I found the game, and while I could only take thirty minutes in one sitting… I have to say I enjoyed myself. I kinda want to boot the game up again and give it another try until I can defeat the first level. The game is extremely enjoyable and the concepts are simple enough to pick up in a few minutes. Survival is the major problem. I think if I could find the leech seed again, and then locate the teleporter early on I would be able to make it through the 90 second phase. If I got better at using the trigger buttons, namely to dodge I would have had a much better chance of success as well. Sooner or later I will have to adapt to “modern” controller layouts, because this new fangled trigger button thing apparently is not going away.

Now For Something New

For some time now, I have gathered up not only a backlog of games to play… but also thanks to the various humble bundle packs, a number of duplicates. As a result I have decided to start hosting a contest. The idea is that you the reader votes for the next game to be featured on Steampowered Sunday. I picked 10 possible titles from my steam backlog, and you the reader will pick which one you want me to play next sunday. During Saturday’s blog post I will declare a winner and choose a random submitter to win the game that is up for grabs that week. This week I will be giving away a copy of the original Bioshock. For this giveaway you must have a steam account to be eligible. I will be tabulating the results using a Google Form. If you are not interested in the game, but want to vote anyways… there is an option for that as well.

Click Here To Vote

Micro Voxel Welding

March 1, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This weekend they seem to have completely opened the floodgates and then some as far as Elder Scrolls Online testing goes. It seems like every person that signed up for beta before a certain point, got their invite this weekend. In addition to that, pretty much everyone who has ever tested got a buddy key. So essentially if you wanted to test the game, you should have gotten your chance this weekend. Admittedly I was more than a bit disappointed to see we were testing on an old version of the client that did not include the changed introduction. In fact it seems like everyone in the test was expecting to see the new and shiny progression. However I love Stros and Betnihk so I am more than happy to play through them again.

I had all these plans of trying to play a caster, but when it came down to rolling one… I just could not bring myself to play one. Instead I am playing “ole reliable” the build I have enjoyed the most up to this point. Dragonknight + Sword and Board and honestly each time I roll one, I perfect my build order a little bit for the next time. You would think I would get bored of playing the same basic character over and over, but instead it just makes me like it all the more. Essentially I have arrived at a point where the very first ability I take is Puncture aka the taunt/armor debuff. Essentially the first ability you place on your bar, means it is also going to be the first skill line you will have available for morphing later on. Essentially my goal in doing this is to get to Ransack the morph of Puncture, which adds a new ability that increases my armor for 12 seconds every time I use it. This makes the ability really good for survival and essentially my opening becomes a combo of Fiery Grip, Ransack… then mostly basic attacks to burn it down the rest of the way.

I just like the feel of playing this specific build, it feels very much like I want a tank to feel. I decided this weekend to cast aside my traditional human builds and go with a proud Orsimer. Normally I rely on swords, but I decided to start crafting him maces… because smashing things seems more fitting an orc…. also I don’t like the orc racial “giant machete” sword graphic. The guild is absolutely insane right now, when I logged in earlier to take a screenshot of my orc, we had 25 members and there are at least five more that have not accepted guild invites yet. Doing pretty great for a beta guild. If you are playing the game add @Belghast to your friends list, and pending we actually know each other… and you are okay with the Three Tenets… I will get you into the guild.

Level 60 Monk Get

I have to say my monk looks pretty badass. I know eventually I will upgrade out of that sword, but once we get the ability to transmog with the expansion, I can totally see dual wielding that graphic. Before the ESO beta weekend madness started, I managed with the help of Warenwolf to push the monk to 60. Really I am happy just knowing I have a character at max level before the expansion, but I can see playing it quite a bit more trying to get paragon levels. Running around in our impromptu groups has really increased my enjoyment of the game… especially now that we are getting some decent loot. It is funny how loot factors into my enjoyment so much, and in many ways the complete and total lack of meaningful loot is what killed my enjoyment of FFXIV once the questing was done.

We tried an experiment that didn’t really work yesterday as well. While I was pushing my way to 60, we had a friend join us in level 60 content with his level 10 character. We thought surely the catch up experience would be amazing, allowing him to fly through the levels. Problem is… he was not alive long enough to really catch the benefit of the xp windfall. Every mob seemed to make a beeline for him, and one-shot poor Banzai. So after getting him three for four levels this way, we opted to switch to our own characters in the teens and play for real. I had not really played my Barbarian much, but playing him I could not think about playing Olaf from League of Legends. At one point I picked up a legendary leaf blade… to which we dubbed him “Growlaf” the plant defender.

Complete and total rabbit trail here… but we started talking about how amazing it would be to have a game like Diablo 3, that instead used the champions we have grown to love from League of Legends. For awhile my friend has talked about how bad he wanted a PVE game set in the League universe… and really this seems like the ideal fit. They really would not have to change the champions that much to make them work in a Diablo setting. Additionally I have already noticed, that post League we all kinda play Diablo like we are laning in League. We move like League players move, especially when we are kiting a bad guy away to try and separate it from the pack. While I enjoy league from time to time, it is really the character design that I like, and not the game itself. If they gave me those awesome characters in a setting like Diablo that I do actually enjoy… I would probably waste innumerable hours playing it.

Micro Voxel Welding

Watch live video from EQNLandmark on TwitchTV

Hopefully this embeds just fine. I wanted to share this because I thought it was really cool. In last Wednesday’s livestream Dave Georgeson showed off a really cool “glitch in the matrix” of sorts that players have figured out. One of the interesting characteristics of the voxel engine that Everquest Next Landmark uses is that it tries to buffer between differences in two objects and naturally fill in the gaps. This can be something really cool or something really frustrating depending on how you use it. Out in the wild, players have been using this to stretch the boundaries of the engine and create something that has been dubbed the “micro voxel” or as Dave calls it in the livestream “pips”.

The idea is to take a single square voxel of the smallest available size and reduce it using the square smooth tool to get a smaller base size to build with. Having a tiny square is not that cool, but what is cool is the behavior you get in the engine when you place two of these beside each other. The engine draws the gap between creating a thin bar. This can then be used to craft really interesting things. In the video Dave Georgeson shows off a steampunky claim that he has created making metal ladders and metal grating in all sorts of shapes. Where I find this extremely cool is what this means for player crafted furniture. In the video he makes a few book cases and desk that looks far nicer than anything I have been able to craft so far.

It does seem like this takes a lot of trial and error… and copious amounts of patience. However at some point I want to get in and start trying to make furniture for my keep. The other really cool thing mentioned is that we will be getting the ability to add on to our claim in the next patch. So at this point I am trying to figure out which direction I want to grow things. I like building large structures, so I was already to a point where I was feeling extremely boxed in. I could very easily grow my existing property out to four total claims. This might be the kick I need to get back in and do more crafting. I am currently hung on a point where I need to farm just truly silly amounts of burled wood to complete all the things I want to complete.

Burn It All Down

February 28, 2014 by Belghast

Diminishing Returns

This morning I am feeling absolutely horrible. My lungs have conspired to rebel against me again, and since there is a good chunk of weather on the way this weekend, I am hoping I can get it under control before then. Yesterday the world was all a twitter about the blog post that Blizzard was going to release at 6 pm PST… see what I did there? Twitter was was full of speculations of what this news announcement might mean. Some predicted the start of Warlords preorders, but eventually Rygarius the coffee bird eventually explained that it was going to be more of a roadmap type post. With that I believe most of our fearless brits opted to get some sleep and just check it out in the morning.

At least I am really hoping that they ended up getting a good nights sleep, because what ended up posted really did not feel like it was worth staying up until 2 am for. Don’t get me wrong I am not trying to disparage the blog post itself, but it was not the shock and awe that players were hoping for. For me personally there were a few things that concerned me. Firstly the tweaking of the Racial abilities. I wholeheartedly agree that some racial perks are better than others… however many of us chose to PLAY those races for that reason. When this goes love will they give everyone a free racial change for each character? Some of the racial perks that I am personally most attached to are some of the fluff ones. For example I am still reeling from the loss of Find Treasure on my dwarves… but not sure how I would feel if we lost Explorer as well. I mean I fully expect to lose Every Man for Himself, but I would hate to lose the fun traits in the process as well.

The part of the post that worries me the most however is the talk of crowd control. It starts off with the statement “One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP.”. Now are they only talking about removing CC for the purpose of PVP here? Or is PVE once again getting the shaft for the sake of a game I have no interest in? I have to say my favorite era of dungeon running was burning crusade, in part because crowd control was absolutely mandatory. Even in tier 6 gear, you needed to CC or you would die. The problem with that era however was that crowd control was not distributed equitably, and over the years each class has gotten some form of permanent or temporary crowd control. Problem is the dungeon design has just not required doing anything other than smashing into objects with your face repeatedly.

My hope was with the return to Draenor, and the focus on heroics as a way to gear up for raiding… that we would see a return to this more strategic era of dungeoning. However if they feel that Pandaria had too much CC… and by that I mean no one CC’d anything at all EVER… it gives me great concern for what dungeons might look like going ahead. Maybe I am coming off a bit half cocked here, since they did qualify the statement with PVP, but the diminishing returns changes would keep a fight like the PVP encounter in Crusaders Coliseum from really being viable in the future. The one thing I did notice they left completely off the list of diminishing returns mentions… taunt. This was honestly the secret to us beating the crusaders coliseum fight, that the tanks would swap off taunting the hardest hitting mobs and kite them around. A druid taunt, warrior taunt, deathknight taunt and paladin taunt all had unique diminishing returns stacks, so we could swap targets to keep them tied up.

Burn It All Down

As a programmer, I read these changes in a completely different light… because I have been them before. When you get dropped into a situation where you have some severely outdated code, the knee jerk reaction is to burn everything to the ground and build it from scratch. This reaction is in part because no one still exists that remembers why the code worked the way it did. This is what this current phase of Blizzard development feels like. No one remembers why they had hit and expertise and all these other things… so lets just simplify everything and get rid of all things that are not strictly needed. As a programmer I totally get this, because it feels like they are trying to minimize the variables that they have to deal with.

I figure at this point there has been a prodigious amount of turnover in the folks that are working day in and day out on World of Warcraft. The guy that wrote this or that code is simply not around any longer to explain why exactly he named that variable “Football” when it is just passing data around. My fear is that in this minimalistic approach we are going to lose some of the things that make Warcraft feel like Warcraft. I am trying my best not to fall into “change is bad” mode, but in many ways the sequence of changes feels like knocking down a 300 year old building, to put up a mini-mart. Maybe I will be wrong, and maybe the end result will feel fresh and shiny… in the same way that Diablo 3 2.0 has felt for me. At this point… you can just file all of this in a bin called “concerns”.

Fun With Demons

Last night my friends and I continued our trek through the demon infested realm of Diablo 3. The big thing we have noticed is that the game gives players insane catch up experience when the level ranges are not even. This accounts for how I went from 37 to 50 in a night, because most of the players were significantly higher level than that. Last night the experience curve flattened significantly, so during the course of the evening I managed to go from 50 to 58 before I just felt too lousy to continue. As a result however I am knocking at the door of 60 and have no doubts that I will finish off leveling my monk before the expansion. Granted most of this weekend will be spent in Tamriel playing with the multitude of folks who are getting in for the weekend test.

We managed to get a second puzzle ring, so for most of the evening both myself and my friend Warenwolf were running around with our treasure goblin pets. We managed to get a ton of legendaries, but oddly enough I got three different versions of the same item… the Saffron Wrap. Apparently the game thinks I need a lot of belts… maybe it knows that I actually only have one in real life… that I keep punching new holes in as I lose weight. The score of the night came from when we beat Belial. There were several points through the night where we learned just how impressive “ignores durability loss” can be, as we took a number of chain deaths to freezing, poison bomberman, electrical orb mobs. The sad part of the evening however is that I no longer have my ghostly fallen champion pet, because I reached the point where I absolutely had to upgrade out of that axe.

The Final Factoid

Well as I was reminded by my wife, today is the final factoid. I have somehow made it through an entire month of writing these. As a result I think it is fitting that I close this factoid off with one relating to the purpose of this entire month. I do not like writing about myself, at least I do not like talking about personal details. Talking about gaming is a space of comfort for me, and I have no problem discussing me the gamer… but I always shy away from talking about me the person behind the screen. I guess in a way I feel like what I have to say about myself is pretty boring, and the more people know about me… the more likely they are to reject me as a friend. I grew up as an “only child”, and we lived just far enough out of the city limits to greatly limit the number of kids I had to play.

For years I craved having someone else to be there and play with, and that craving has carried through to my gaming life. I end up trying to collect people into my little digital family. I have deep anti-social tendencies that I struggle with, but online I can have just as much interaction with someone as I want, but then still be able to shut down the game, or twitter and walk away and have seclusion time as well. 2013 was a year of great personal growth for me. I completed NaNoWriMo, started the daily blogging thing and ended up losing 70 pounds. In a way Factoid February was a way of trying to get used to opening up and talking more about myself and my life in my blog. For the most part I think it has worked, and I did manage to complete the month writing something new each day. There were times I had to sit and think for quite a bit before deciding what to write about, but I struggled through.

The odd thing is… it seems as though people have enjoyed it. Looking through the blog statistics, it seems as though my average daily readership has increased a bit during the month of February. I am not sure if this is in part because I am writing more personally… or if I have just gotten more exposure thanks to the amazing folks who regularly retweet me like @RowanBlaze and @AlternativeChat. It gives me huge fuzzies when I see people are reading what I have written, but I have to say at this point… even if I had zero readers I would likely keep doing whatever it is I am doing. I find the process of waking up in the morning and dumping my thoughts onto the page while drinking my coffee amazingly therapeutic. On the weekends when I am forced to vary my schedule a bit, the day just does not seem entirely right… until I have done my blog purge. I want to thank all of you for coming along with me on this journey. Not entirely certain where I am going next, maybe more features… maybe more of the same, but I appreciate that you all are on the ride with me.