Tales of the Aggronaut

The Rat Trap

June 10, 2013 by Belghast

By necessity this is going to be one of my shorter early morning posts. I am in process of drinking some coffee, and before much longer I will need to run my wife to the airport. I’m awake roughly 30 minutes ahead of when I normally wake up… but for whatever reason it feels like I am missing 3 or 4 hours of sleep. I always find it extremely hard to shut my brain off when I know I NEED to be sleeping… and last night was no exception to this rule.

The Prophecy

I am still finding myself very much inexplicably drawn to this game. The more I play it, the more nuanced the combat becomes… but at the same time everything about it is deceptively simple. It is essentially all the same clicks and key presses, but when you do them in timing with what other abilities produces entirely new results. This feels extremely liberating in that I can get all the same warrior like abilities that I enjoy in other games with a handful of key presses just varying my timing for different results. This guy feels like I have always wanted a warrior to feel… brutal and imposing but also controlling the battlefield.

My biggest problem so far is the fact that I seem to always receive the quest to do something… moments after I have done it. The game has these public quest areas that are very reminiscent of Warhammer Online. They involve killing a bunch of things, and then finally an insanely difficult boss spawns and taking it down rewards treasure and completion of the public quest. In every single instance of a public quest in game… I have completed it, and then shortly thereafter gotten a quest to kill the final guy in the public quest.

Some of these were extremely difficult to solo… like the Subject 18 public quest area, and I have not been amped to try and do it again. So as a result these public quests kill tasks sit in my task list undone until I finally get frustrated enough to go over and repeat the process. This is the one thing I really wish they would change… instead of unlocking the public quest kill task at the end of a chain… just give it to players up front similar to the wanted posters were in World of Warcraft. That way if you are already in the area and are feeling your wheaties you can make a stab at the big boss.

The Rat Trap

The other aspect of the game that is quite literally killing me… is the fact that killing rats of ANY kind is a trap. Basically when I play any game I thoroughly believe in a scorched earth policy. If it is killable… it should probably die and die often to give me tasty tasty loot. I find myself ping ponging across most maps killing everything in my wake. The problem is… in Dragon’s Prophecy this is a brutal trap. Rats are generally non-aggro neutral mobs, that have a nasty habit of wandering into AOE attacks and adding onto whatever you happen to be fighting. They rarely have much hit points so the immediate thought is… this is no big deal.

The initial thought process… is so deadly wrong. While rats don’t do much attack damage and are fairly week… they pack the single strongest attack I have encountered in this game… Bacterial Infection. This appears to be a percentage based damage over time ability… that can take me from alive to dead in like 10 seconds. I have yet to really find a good way to counter this. Right now I take on of the strongest potions I have and pray I will survive. I would say that 90% of my deaths so far… have been to a damned stray rat.

This has lead me to play the game completely different than I normally would. I end up carefully picking my way through packs of mobs… drawing them around corners to try and fight in areas that are not so rat infested. It is so difficult for me to quell my “kill all the things” instinct and carefully pull my way through content. This basically has flipped me into dungeon tank mode… tanking an instance is the one time I am super cautious about my pulls. Everything about the guardian feels like the WoW Warrior on steroids, with more nuanced controls.

I am still not 100% sure why I am enjoying the game so much. It just feels like it is perfect for whatever state of mind I have been in. I am sure my enjoyment will fade over time, but right now the dragon taming aspect with some really amazing tanky gameplay has made this a real win for me. I always find it interesting when a game like this completely takes me by surprise. Everything about the setup for this game, sounds like something that would annoy me. I never really cared for runes of magic so the constant assertion that this was developed by the same people… was only taken as a negative by me. What we have instead is an extremely deep and subtle game, that I feel like I have just barely scratched the surface of its systems.

PK Comes through Again

Last week in response to a post talking about playing a Ranger again in Rift and farming cloth, PKDude99 the guy behind my favorite warrior solo build… posted a link to his favorite rogue build. This one is called the “Granpa said knock you out” build and is comprised of 41 Nightblade, 21 Riftstalker, and 4 Tactician. I have to say once again PK is completely right. The build works amazingly well, has extremely high damage output and next to no downtime. I can routinely take mobs 2 or more levels than me without any issue or added difficulty. I played with it quite a bit this weekend and was burning through the quests I worked on.

The funny thing is… as melee centric as I tend to be. This is the first time I have ever really seriously played a melee rogue in Rift. For whatever reason I was always drawn to the ranger/marksman builds that mimicked the WoW Hunter. I think it is mostly that traditionally I do not get along well with stealth classes. It always feels so tedious stealthing around and setting up the perfect moment to attack… then the combat itself is usually over in seconds. If you do not stealth around, usually you die horribly for your poor life choices.

Fortunately stealthing in Rift is completely different than my experience playing stealthers in the past. Stealth is a 30 second buff that you use only as a setup immediately before combat. Additionally you do not slow your movement speed, so combat still feels fast paced. Additionally it seems to not really matter if I open with a stealth attack or not… I can still chew through mobs just as effectively without a big opener. I feel like the Rift rogue is the “warriors” rogue… for someone who prefers fast paced combat to fiddly stealthy nonsense. I am sure most rogue types are ready to throttle me at this point… but I am enjoying it.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap this up so we can get on the road. We need to get to the airport, and then me on to work. I hope you all have a great day, and hope that you all go as much sleep as needed… unlike me. Not really sure what this week will bring, I tend to completely vege out on video games during these periods. I am sure I will play a good deal more Rift and Dragon’s Prophet… and I would like to get back in to some more SWTOR as well. Hopefully the week goes quickly.

The Dragod Comes

June 9, 2013 by Belghast

The bed felt extremely good this morning… and it took just about all effort I could muster to leave it, shower and go fetch some breakfast. As a result it is after 10 am and I am finally sitting down to blog. This morning I am listening to Red Hot Chilli Peppers as an attempt to block out the world and focus on my writing. So far it is having mixed results because at the same time I am downloading Dragons Prophet to my laptop… and I am getting the occasional cut out, as I am streaming the music from my network attached storage. Apparently I am flooding my wireless cards capacity with that 8 gig download.

The Dragod Comes

Last week this video was released about the new SOE game Dragon’s Prophet, and as silly as it sounds… this prompted me to download the game. Anyone who could create a video this awesome… had to be up to some good. I am a rather simple monkey, and if you give me a big dude in armor with an even bigger sword… and I am generally pretty happy. I figured this would be the kind of game that I play for a few hours and forget about forever. Funny thing is… the game is really good and is extremely fun to play. I expected the game to be a big dumb beat-em-up and what I found instead was a strangely nuanced game.

Belghast the Dragon Tamer

Belghast lives again as a Guardian… which is essentially the big heavy armored warrior type. My first issue with the game was the character creator. This is another one of those games that for whatever stupid reason links hair style with facial hair style. So essentially I got to choose between guy with mutton chops and handlebar moustache… or member of the duck dynasty cast with dreadlocks. I thought it was kind of bullshit that there was not an option for a nice clean goatee and moustache. Stupid as it might sound… this is almost always my major issue with Asian MMOs… they seem to have nothing but clean shaven options.

If you have been following me for long, you will notice that almost every single character I make in any game looks the same. Ultimately Belghast is an idealized version of myself with black hair, goatee and Adrian Paul ponytail if the game supports it. I get grumpy when I cannot look the way I want to look, so this was an initial major strike against the game. Luckily as I got into the game itself I quickly forgot about this woe… and after spending some of my stockpiled station cash on cosmetic armor… you can no longer see the lower part of my face anyway.

Smashing Things

The game itself reminds me of a mash-up of TERA, Neverwinter and Guild Wars 2, as it has aspects of all of the above with its own spin on each. Combat is pretty much controlled with left and mouse clicks and various combo abilities on Q, W, and Number keys. Your second mouse button varies based on how many times you have swung your main weapon. This produces some pretty interesting gameplay and offers a lot of variance of abilities without having to hit a lot of different buttons. For the guardian parry is R and charge is V… but I am sure some of these abilities change greatly based on your class.

There are various bugs with combat, namely the charge has a lot of issues. Sometimes you will charge directly to the mob you are wanting to attack, but other times you teleport across the screen… the screen freezes and when you get control again you have a bunch of friends on you. Essentially I have learned not to really rely on charging… and unfortunately that takes away some of my enjoyment. Instead of I have started using my Q ability which is a Guile like sonic boom attack. It travels a short distance and hits any mobs in the path, which I can then pull back and fight safely without aggroing other things.

The zone design reminds me a lot of Everquest 1. In that you have town hubs, with a ring of lower level mobs around it… but as you get further away from a town the mob levels increase. It is interesting to see zones designed specifically for early flying mounts, in that these mob level radius extend out from each little hub town. If you travel the path between towns you will see a progression of mobs that looks something like this… town 1, level 5, level 6, level 7, level 8, level 15, level 14, level 13, level 12, level 11 town 2. Essentially it seems like from ground up they are expecting players to charm a flying dragon and use it to hop back and forth between towns.

Poke-dragon

Another interesting concept with the game is the fact that you can charm a mount extremely early. I managed to get a flying mount at around level seven, pretty much as soon as I found a dragon out in the landscape. Essentially as soon as you get the “capture” ability unlocked you can whittle down a dragon in health and attempt to capture them. It might just be my imagination but it seems to get easier to capture them the more damage you have dealt to them before firing the command. At that point you mount the back of your dragon and have to play a mini-game in order to complete the capture. Essentially you have two bars… red meter that starts empty and fills, and a yellow meter that starts full. The goal of the mini-game is to keep your reins icon in the center of a circle on screen. If you get out of the circle, the yellow meter goes down rapidly… if it empties before the red bar fills you fail at the capture.

So the simple fact that you can capture a dragon is not as far as the Pokémon metaphor goes… you also inherit new abilities from the various dragons you capture. I am not 100% sure if I understand this all yet, there is a lot to figure out and not a ton of tutorial to do so. However it seems like every dragon you tame has new abilities, these range from attacks, to harvesting and crafting abilities. Eventually it seems like your dragon dictates whatever ability you have on the 1 key. My current dragon has this lightning leap attack which is extremely powerful. Additionally you seem to be able to stable your dragons and get them to learn new abilities. Obviously I need to figure more of this out… but the takeaway is… there is a lot of hidden depth in the game.

I seem to have won the lottery when I picked starting in Sibernia. I have been watching my friends talk about getting their first flying mount for a few weeks now… and the very first dragon I tamed had full flight. In fact it was not until I got into the level 12ish area that I found a pure ground mount. Having a wide array of flyers definitely has helped the enjoyment of this game, because seriously who doesn’t love riding a dragon? Two of the dragons I captured came from a dungeon and were somewhat akward to get to… so it seems like there are common and less common versions of the various dragons. My “emerald purple dragon”, definitely came with more abilities than any I had seen to that point… we will just ignore the fact that it has emerald in the name but has absolutely no green or yellow on it.

Station Cash Drain

One of the good things about this game is that it is by SOE, and uses the standard Station Cash system for micro transactions. As a result, I have a Station Access account, and have been accruing station cash for some time. The bad is that almost everything in this game has the option to spend SC in place of game money. This means not only cosmetic stuff, and stat boosts, but enchanting items, crafting etc. Everything has a slow money drain factored into it… but honestly I was expecting this from the company that brought us Runes of Magic. Most of my SC expenditures have been what I term quality of life. Essentially you can increase your bag and bank and stable space with station cash… all of which have made the game more enjoyable for me and less about micromanaging my inventory. The negative is I had about 7500 sc going into this and am sitting right at 3000 now.

The one thing I am surprised about is that so far I have not encountered the ubiquitous cash box, or anything even vaguely similar. Right now all of the station cash outlay seem to be on speeding up gameplay and buffing your character… but not necessarily direct money for items transactions. Those might be there… I may just not have encountered them. Additionally I have seemed to be able to live just fine off vendor and dropped gear, without need for anything more. I’ve decided that once again I prefer sword and board to two hander… but this is probably not a shocker to anyone. I look badass in my frosty/deathknighty armor… so I am completely happy running around and beating things down like a proper tank.

The Takeaway

Essentially my takeaway at the end of the day, is this is a game that I had essentially written off as something that I was not likely to enjoy. However upon playing it, I am really having a blast doing so. Basically if you liked TERA, but were turned off by just how horrible the questing experience was… then this is the game for you. The combat is fun and strangely nuanced… and the dragon taming aspect throws something fresh into the mix. This is definitely gaming junk food, but the experience is so worth the calories. The game reminds me of so many other games, that combined it becomes its own very unique experience. The game is pretty brutal at times as well… I have died an innumerable amount of times… but there seems to be no punishing effect of it other than the slow bleed of repair costs. Download the game and give it a try, I figure you will find something in it you like.

Less of Me

June 8, 2013 by Belghast

It is officially the weekend and I’ve made my trip out to get sausage rolls once more. We have a bunch of stuff to do to get ready for my wife going out of town for a week.. So I am assuming that I really need to speed my way through this mornings blog post, so we can get on with that stuff. Additionally I forgot to pick up the cleaners on the way home… so we have to go do that as well. I’ve had breakfast at this point, showered, and had a 5 hour energy… so I am ready to confront anything.

Less of Me

This morning is a pretty monumental day for me. Not the date or anything about the day itself… but the fact that I weighed this morning and I am at my lowest point since I can remember. Back in 2003 we went on a pretty epic diet and were extremely successful with it. However we went on a cruise… and with in ability to really watch what we eat we fell completely off the bandwagon. We maintained a decent weight until a death in the family, then we completely fell apart. At that point we lost all the progress we made and then some.

Last year as a new years resolution we attempted to get back on the wagon… but for reasons that I honestly cannot remember the fell off the wagon again. The first week in march this year we started a new, and treated it as a completely new process. We have not been doing much of anything special, other than just religiously keeping track of our food intake. The process has finally reached a point where it is ingrained in our nature now. For once I feel like I am not really missing anything, and I have been able to log the food without actually feeling shame about what I am eating. If I eat something expensive calorie wise, I can still be okay with being under for the week.

This new view towards food and out intake has really paid off. The reason why today is so monumental is the fact that as of this morning we are on week 14 and I have lost 42 pounds since starting. That is an average of 3 pounds per week, which has been a fairly breakneck process. There have been so many changes as a result of this. In general I feel better about myself, and I think the result has been my willingness to continue to blog daily… and open up more about myself. I will never be small, it is just not a thing in the cards for me. I come from a family of big people, but I can be smaller. The stupid thing is… the only thing I really want is the ability to wear geeky t-shirts… which is ironic that they don’t really make those in big and tall sizes. You can get them in big sizes… but at 6’4” there will never be a time at which I do not require that T added onto whatever size I wear.

Survivalism

Last night I spent some more time with the survivals of State of Decay. I have to say the more I play the game the more I love it. This game really tweaks whatever instinct there is in me that comes out when I play Fallout and Skyrim. I was given a task of meeting up with some other survivors at a church… the objective was marked on my map… but I had hell bringing myself to keep driving the station wagon I had pilfered past all the houses I could be clearing. The whole “I wonder what is in that building over there” is so ingrained in me at this point.

The two big negatives I have encountered… and just personal ones. First off… melee weapons will always be what I favor for ease of use and ability to keep from drawing extra attention with gunshots. The only problem is melee weapons break super fast… I am really hoping that I either find a way to repair them… or find stronger melee weapons. I have an assortment of guns, but since ammo is so limited I really don’t want to use them. The second negative is that night is really dark… you can turn on a flashlight but it really doesn’t do much of anything to help you out. It is really only effective when you are exploring a building during the night.

One resounding positive is the fact that I managed to successfully make my way to the church without a melee weapon at all. I ended up just taking it very slowly and relying on kicks to finish off the zombies. I am sure there would have been no way for me to deal with a horde of zombies… but so long as I took them on one at a time I could kick them down without much issue. I found the flashlight extremely helpful as a way to draw attention to random shamblers that happened to be in my path. I could flash them with the light, and get them to charge me… at which point me and my entourage finished the job.

So another huge thing I have to say about the game… is how gracious and personal the response from Undead Labs has been to the success so far. I watched twitter for awhile yesterday afternoon… and sent my congratulations to Undead Labs for just how overwhelmingly positive the response has been. Before I knew it I was being tweeted by Annie Strain… wife of Jeff Strain the founder of Undead Labs… thanking me for my kind words. This has only made me want even more success for them… because that kind of personal touch is really unheard of these days.

It added a completely different dimension to this whole process… it feels very much like I am rooting for the little guy and when they win it feels like we win as well. The game really is amazing, and so far I have only encountered a couple of bugs. The entire experience is extremely polished and feels better than most traditional AAA release titles I have played. If they can follow up with a PC release, multiplayer, and DLC content packs… I feel it will continue to be an amazing success. The figures I saw floating around yesterday put it at just over 130,000 sales on the first day, which I believe puts it in the top ten of XBLA releases.

Come Back Haunted

So another big thing that happened this week, is that the new Nine Inch Nails single has been released… Come Back Haunted. This was a massive surprise since at one point Trent Reznor had said that Nine Inch Nails was essentially over. The upcoming album is the aptly labeled “Hesitation Marks” which is scheduled for release September 3rd. NIN will always have a special place for me, it is one of those projects that has been so much to me over the years. There always seems to be something that speaks to me, regardless of which “Halo” we are listening to. Every doubt, every fear, every indecision seems to be reflected somewhere in his library of songs.

I’ve been a loyal devotee since the Pretty Hate Machine days, and Down In It is still among my favorite songs. This new era feels like a blending of everything that has come before, into a new sound… almost retrospective. More than anything it feels like a strong mix of the Downward Spiral era mixed with the Pretty Hate Machine. Whatever it is, it feels fresh, vibrant and new… and I am in love with it. I will be anxiously waiting for September when we can get the full Halo. Here is hoping that a few more tracks get leaked in the process.

Wrapping Up

So in the name of full disclosure… I have been listening to Nine Inch Nails Year Zero while writing this mornings post. I have found that if I listen to something, I can tune out the television and other background noise and focus on what I am writing easier. The same thing goes for when I really need to crunch through code at work… but in that case I tend to listen to movie and video game soundtracks. Otherwise I find myself naming my variables after songs… the same way I named the SoD section above after a NIN song. Anyways… I hope you all have a great day… and I hope we can find all the things needed to get my wife on her way this week.

Shinobi Jones

June 7, 2013 by Belghast

I am struggling with existence this morning. I have always thought the saying “Thank God Its Friday” was a little trite, but I have been telling myself for the majority of the week “all you have to do is make it through Friday”. I am not really sure what about this week has made it so stressful, but I am certainly feeling it. It might be the fact that I know I am just about to be completely alone for a week as my wife has to go to a conference thingy. Have I mentioned that I don’t really embrace change well?

The Hills have Dead

One of the games I have really been looking forward to on the Xbox 360 is State of Decay. This is the open world exploration based zombie game from Undead Labs. It was available as of yesterday on the Xbox Live arcade for 1600 points… aka $20. Additionally it seems that Undead Labs is trying the failed 38 Studios approach of launching a console game and then bankrolling that success into a MMO version. So as I look at the game, I am also in the back of my head thinking about how well this will work in MMO form.

Basically in a quick sound byte… State of Decay is Dead Island but done better. You are given a more interesting world to explore, populated with less random encounters and a stealth mechanic should you choose to deploy it. I am about as subtle as a hurricane, so this is usually lost on me… but stealthier folks will love being able to sneak up on the shambling dead and get a silent take down. There is a lot going on in the game, and most of it really good… especially for a Xbox live title.

The premise is simple, you are at a campground when the world falls to shit… and you and your friend Ed (poor bastard) agree to go around searching for survivors. By saving other characters you essentially end up building a pack of stalwart zombie hunters. I believe later on you can develop an enclave of survivors and protect them, building influence with each of them. This influence seems to dictate the type of things you can do.

There are some really cool mechanics as you go out and explore the world. One of the niftiest things is that you can at any point essentially fortify your position. While this defies reason a bit, because as you fortify your position you magically brandish a hammer, nails and a stack of bedraggled board. However this function allows you to protect yourself from zombies busting through windows to come attack you and the human target… Ed. This will buy you more time to rifle through the bags and chests in an area to scavenge for materials.

So far I have encountered two kinds of undead. The first is your normal shambling kind that if they hear you comes running but can pretty much be beat down with a bat easily unless they swarm you. When I was searching the camp I discovered a maintenance shed that was guarded by a half dozen of a completely different kind of undead. These were far more dexterous and had an almost demonic appearance with glowing eyes. As a result these were much harder to take down… and quite honestly damned near killed me. However as I said earlier… the game really rewards risk taking, because the maintenance shed was completely loaded with stuff to scavenge.

At this point I have not really played the game for very long, as I had some things I was planning on doing in The Secret World. However the content I have played has left me wanting to play it more. If you like zombies and you like Fallout style open world exploration… then I would give this game a look. Additionally it has some pretty good voice acting and writing so far, even though I have not really experienced a lot of it. As a whole it very much feels like Dead Island meets Fallout meets Walking Dead by Telltale. If that sounds like an enjoyable combination… then you should totally check this one out.

Shinobi Jones

Last night we lacked our quorum of five members, so nothing really coalesced in the game around a “group activity”. Since I had not yet done the “Last Train to Cairo” sequence, I figured it was as good a time as any to go get my whip. First off I have to give Funcom major kudos because this is hands down the best issue they have released. The feel of this mission goes above and beyond everything we have experienced to date. It makes me extremely anxious to see what seven and eight are going to be like… especially with seven supposedly having a 007 flair.

I am going to try to keep from spoiling any of the content… but essentially the mission pack is a wild ride of sabotage, puzzles, stealth, and the most epic train sequence you have ever seen. All the while you have these great flavor references to the Indiana Jones movies. This is made all the more surreal by the fact that of late I have been rocking a combination of the shinobi outfit… with the glowing draugr mask… to produce a ninja with glowing blue eyes. Jones. Shinobi Jones… with my subtle rocket launcher combat style.

As always the puzzles are extremely puzzling. There was one deadly floor trap that took me over thirty minutes and probably a dozen deaths to get the hang of. All of the risk however is well worth the reward, as you not only get your spiffy new whip… but also get a 10.1 epic helm in the process, as well as some currency with a new faction of the Council of Venice. I have heard rumor that through the upcoming expansions, there will be similar 10.1 epic items, all designed as a way to ease someone into being able to do the NY raid content. If so I fully support this notion of gear through truly epic quest sequences.

I really need to go back and complete the Tyler Freeborn sequence of quests, as I have left that one hanging as well. Quite honestly I am sure there is a lot of content I have missed, as the only issue that I have fully explored was the first one, with the awesome prom night sequence. Carter is still one of my all time favorite protagonists in this game, but after taking the train to Cairo… I am starting to really like combo of Nassir and Said. Quite honestly almost all of the content is extremely well written and memorable.

The Secret World has been one of those games that I fired up every few weeks and piddled around a bit in. However it has been months since I had actually played the game seriously. Each time I come back for awhile, I marvel at just how well crafted it is. It still has some very rough spots around the edges, but they have improved a lot in the last year. I hope that they manage to find that point of equilibrium at which they are able to continue producing introducing content, and as the same time sustain their work force. The game always gives me some awesome experiences.

Wrapping Up

I have more things I could talk about, but honestly my head is killing me and I want to wander off and find some headache medicine. Additionally it is already getting late in the morning, and I need to gather laundry for the cleaners. I might do a few bonus posts this weekend, because I have a few ideas that need to congeal in my head for awhile before throwing out onto paper. I hope you all manage to survive the coming work day, and that it ends up turning into a weekend quickly. Ours is going to be dictated by preparation for my wife to travel, and by myself mental preparation for being alone for a week.