Tales of the Aggronaut

Yarn Chasing

October 25, 2013 by Belghast

Hearth Dailies

Last night I played quite a bit of Hearthstone, as I had allowed my quests to stack up on me. For those not familiar, there are daily quests you can do in hearthstone that earn you gold. The gold can then be spent on packs of cards. The quests tend to be things like “Destroy 40 Minions” or “Win 2 Games as Priest or Druid”. The first kind are easy to do and simply involve plugging at it until you have filled the requested amount of carnage, the later are more challenging since you actually have to beat players.

While I can fairly readily do this if I am playing the Warrior or Hunter decks, this is not so much the case with the other decks. Through the process of leveling each “class” to 10, you unlock various basic cards along the way that you can’t get any other way. The problem is, that while my Hunter is 15 and my Warrior 10… the rest of the classes are in the 1-5 range… which means they are missing significant weapons from their arsenal. Despite these constraints however I still managed to clear my quest log by winning 2 games as Priest, 2 as Rogue and 2 as a Shaman. The reward for what took an hour and a half to do… 2 new packs of cards and in the process a few more rares.

A New Whim

While playing Hearthstone I am still regularly suffering bouts of nostalgia, and while I am still resisting the urge to re-up World of Warcraft, I find myself craving that style of play. In a sequence of events that will not really make sense to anyone… I decided as I played Hearthstone that I would start the Allods client downloading. Allods has always felt like some weird soviet block steampunky WoW. I alpha and beta tested the game eons ago when it was rolling out, and remembered it fondly… to be truthful I likely would have played it were it not for at the time the extremely predatory cash shop.

It was an extremely fun place to run around, right up to the point that they introduced the cash shop in beta. It was then that I lost interested and moved on. However in the passing years I had heard that the cash shop was greatly relaxed, so I had filed it away as one of those games I wanted to revisit. Apparently last night was that night as I went through the process of retrieving my password on the account and rolled a brand new character on the free to play server.

Soviet Steampunk

A few weeks back I talked about the fact that I essentially make the same character in every single game I play. Since it was always the steampunk nature that appealed to me, I decided to go with the Empire faction instead of the generic fantasy “The League”. While gibberlings are seriously the coolest idea for a short race, I remember really liking the feel of the Empire better as a whole. So I attempted to create Belghast, which is always a human equivalent, always dark hair, and always a moustache and goatee. There was no racial option for black hair so I had to go dark reddish brown, and there was no option for a ponytail so I had to go with another option.

Without really meaning to I seem to have created “Lenin” with hair. While I felt the character creation options were limited, they were about as varied as WoW, so mostly viable. I ended up going with a Vanquisher, which based on the fact that it was sword and board… made me assume it was the tank. Upon playing it for a few minutes I noticed it had the standard protection warrior kit, along with an extremely long cool down charge and eventually a shield bash. The gameplay was fun but nothing really revolutionary, but then again I was not really expecting innovation.

Shocked and Amused

I have to say I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the experience. I found myself really enjoying the questing and gameplay as a whole. The world is far more intricate and beautiful than I had remembered, and filled with really great ambient music that instead of appearing out of nowhere… seems to come from in game speaker systems adding to the experience. I killed around two hours playing the game without really realizing it, and ultimately had to pull myself away from it to go to bed.

There is a lot to like in this game, and they seem to have reformed at least a bit their predatory cash shop ways. While you are leveling you get several freebie items from the cash shop in the form of chests that you can open every 5 minutes. Through these I got a number of cosmetic items and a 24 slot bag upgrade in additional to several vouchers for free cash shop items. I feel like this is a way to get you wanting the items from the cash shop, but overall I have gotten quite a bit of nifty stuff without paying a dime, and I am completely fine with that notion. If it ends up being a game I play quite often I have no problem at all supporting it, and likely will.

Yarn Chasing

The most bizarre thing of the night however was their guided waypoint system. For major quests they draw a series of massive glowing arrows along the map pointing out the path you should travel to get to your objective. However this system goes several steps past that and has put in an automated pathing system in order to get you to your destination. Out beside every quest in your quest log is a red ball icon, that invokes this giant bouncing ball of yarn. Your character begins to move of its own accord following the bouncing ball of yarn until you reach the destination. The whole experience is rather comical as your character willfully chases down this bouncing ball.

I get the impression that large blocks of the player base are playing this game as click to move… since that functionality is defaulted to on. It was rather shocking the first time I clicked a quest NPC and my character started running towards it. I turned that feature off since I have never been able to stack click to move control schemes, but it appears that the yarn ball movement system is still in place. While I don’t use it that often, I am finding it extremely helpful since the quest objective direction are usually unclear as is the mapping system as to where you are actually supposed to go to find things. Usually I can click the ball of yarn, to get it to show me the vague direction I should travel and them I am good to go. As a whole I was really surprised by just how much I enjoyed the game, and I look forward to playing again.

Trials of Ascension

October 24, 2013 by Belghast

Computer Crash

This morning I really don’t have the time to devote to a proper post as I got upstairs, ate my oatmeal, drank my coffee and then noticed one of my computers was stuck in a booting up loop. As a result I spent most of my normal blogging time trying to resurrect it. It appears to be gone now, and I will have to figure out what happened over the weekend. But in the meantime as I play a somber rendition of taps for it… I need to get a post together today.

Trials of Ascension

File this in the “Yet Another MMO Kickstarter” category. Trials of Ascension came across my RSS feed this morning so I felt like I needed to check it out. Their claim is that they plan to build a “truly innovative MMORPG” and some of the things they mention wanting would definitely be different. The tech demo they posted looks pretty spartan, but then again so did the Pathfinder tech demo. Hopefully given resources they will clean that up a bit. In it’s current state it reminds me quite a bit of the old Atari published MMO Horizons. Some of the features they mention wanting are…

Perma Death – 100 deaths and the character stays dead
Random Everything – no static spawns or dungeons
Hardcore Gameplay – video talks about wanting to challenge the players a lot
No Fast Travel – feels it shrinks the world too much
No Global Chat – whisper and shout only work within a radius
No Names – can’t see character or npc names
Magic Difficult – magic is hard to acquire but extremely powerful
GM Team – live GM events and interaction
Cooperative Crafting – players have to work together to craft items
No Minimap – world map but no way to tell exactly where you are
No Con System – no way to determine the level range of a player or mob

Not For Me, But Maybe You

So what they propose is a drastically different game than what is available currently. I am posting this on my blog because I figure there are several of my readers who would be excited to play something like this. The problem is… I am not. I read the list of features they want to implement, and I remember the fervor that was whipped up before Vanguard released about it being a return to hardcore gameplay. The problem is… players will say they want this sort of a game but they never seem to show up with their pocket books when one is released.

Maybe Kickstarter is a viable vehicle for this sort of niche vision, and potentially it can get built and find a quiet following to keep the lights on. Mostly I am just shining a light on this existing to let folks who might want to support it know about it. Personally nothing they are describing sounds like “fun” to me. I like my modern conveniences and I tend to rebel against the games that don’t have them. However that is not to say that there are not players out there who have been craving this more hardcore and primitive gaming experience. In that case support the hell out of this game and hope it makes it through to fruition.

WoW Remix

October 23, 2013 by Belghast

Gamer Nature

One of the things I have learned while playing Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn… is that any player from 11 or 14 classic… really hates it when a player compares the game to World of Warcraft. I’ve seen so many of these “classic” players fill with so much rage the first time someone mentions WoW. Yesterday I encountered a small bit of it outside of the game in a G+ thread where myself and another tank were giving an up and coming Gladiator some advice on how best to deal with multi-mob threat.

Best advise I have to you is: don’t expect this game to have "WoW equivalents." This isn’t WoW. It’s not a WoW clone. It’s not trying to be WoW. You’ll enjoy the game a lot more if you take it as it is, rather than forcing it to fit some molded preconception you have for it. You’re trying to fit a circle peg into a square hole.

WoW Remix

So I found the above comment rather puzzling. Especially coming from where this game did… the new version while not a “WoW Clone” is at the very least a WoW Remix. Almost every ability I have has some simulacrum in World of Warcraft. For example I think of my Warrior as a mix between a Druid tank and a Deathknight tank. While it is in fact a unique beast… I still refer to the process of tabbing through mobs and applying Butchers Block as “Tab Sunder”. Everything ultimately gets referred to more often than not by the wow name for it. I don’t teleport back to my home location… I hearth.

Since most of the active MMO gamer pool has a relatively short memory… this is the way it has always been. Before WoW claimed the crown as the most popular MMO… each new release got referred to by the terms we used in Everquest. Damaging yourself to get back mana… was referred to as “Twitching” or “Cading” in reference to the Necromancer or Shaman spells. Any form of a speed boost was often referred to as “SoW”, I can remember hearing people call the various speed powers “SoW” in City of Heroes. To some extent listening to the FFXI diehards talk in FFXIV ARR has been a trip down memory lane… because those players carried with them terms from EQ into XI like DD for direct damage.

Top Dog Sets Rules

Awhile back there was a thread somewhere asking what games you would suggest to new players… and quite honestly despite my sordid relationship with the game, I have to say I would always suggest that someone play at least SOME World of Warcraft. In my own guild we have a few players who have never played the game, and as a result they miss the references that are made in guild chat and mumble all of the time. Thing is… this is not just a thing my guild does, this is a thing EVERY guild does in EVERY new game. World of Warcraft had its own vocabulary that was grown out of the lingo that we used in Everquest. Essentially as that game eclipsed the other games, its ability names started to take the place of the previous ones that were used.

Today going into any MMO for the first year at least… every single thing in game is going to be referred to by its WoW equivalent. So the fact that as a seasoned MMO player… I can find immediate and direct WoW equivalents makes me think that the above statement is a little naïve. FFXIV very much has wow equivalents, just like every game since the rise of wow has… and every game after will as well. It is the fact that a game becomes the market leader that determines who dictates the vocabulary, because essentially there is nothing new under the sun. Everything we do in FFXIV also has a direct EQ vocabulary equivalent, as everything we see today is a remix of the things that came before it. The comparisons will someday shift again, but only when a game has eclipsed the current leader.

Final Funk

October 22, 2013 by Belghast

Pull Resisted

Last night I resisted the desire to re-up my World of Warcraft account… in part because I really did not feel like playing much of anything. When I first logged in I popped into Hearthstone to see what the daily quest happened to be. It was win two matches with a paladin or priest deck, neither of which I have even finished unlocking the basic cards for. I made a valiant attempt at victory on a paladin, only to find out that practice victories did not count. Essentially there is no way in hell right now that I could beat an actual player with either of those decks… even though priest seems to be pretty damned hax based on my regular loss record against them.

After that I popped into Rift for a few but could not seem to find the oomph to play that either. Though since the shiny vault was backed up again, I figured I would at least take the time to pilfer through that and help relieve some of the stress. I have been in these unknown funks before, but I am not sure what to do to kick myself out of this one. Ultimately I ended up retiring to bed and playing Pokémon Y until my wife joined me some time later.

Final Funk

I think in part my present funk is due to the fact that once again I have topped out another game and lack the drive to do much of anything further in it. I am still very much enjoying the dungeons when we can pull those together, and I want to do more 8 man content especially now that we have a fresh 50 to run through it. However I don’t have a single thing I really care to do in game the rest of the time. So as a result I am simply not logging in. I did the All Saints’ Wake and it was extremely disappointing and finished within like 10 minutes time or running errands throughout the various cities.

One of my game designers always brings up the “moment to moment” play, and I guess for me this is what is lacking in Final Fantasy. After pushing my Warrior to 50 and then grinding up a Bard to 50 as well doing literally nothing but FATES… I find myself lacking the desire to do the FATE grind ever again. Normally tradeskills is a thing that fills in the gaps, providing me some downtime between grinds. However you can tell a tradeskill system is bad if I would far rather play the EQ2 mini-game crafting system than do anything within the FFXIV system.

Another huge thing that tarnishes my enjoyment of FFXIV is that like it or not… I am a bit of a loot whore. At the very least much of my homicidal rage against monsters… is because I know they have a chance, albeit slim of dropping something amazing. I like playing the loot pinata, and when a game has that sort of a loot system I can happily grind again at mobs never quite knowing what the next one will drop. FFXIV on the other hand has absolutely no meaningful loot. Mobs drop crafting items, and since I don’t really care about crafting… there is absolutely zero excitement there.

So as I stand currently I am not playing the game much at all. My friends have access to me via instant message, twitter, text message… so I figure if they need me to tank for them I am more accessible than most folks. In the meantime I keep trying to figure out something that excites me to do in the time between dungeon runs. My other friends seem to default to League of Legends, but quite frankly I don’t enjoy the game enough to ever queue with strangers. So as a result I end up trying to resist the desire to re-up wow and playing quite a lot of Pokémon.