aggrochat Archives - Page 20 of 35 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Making Story Matter

June 21, 2015 by Belghast

The First Trial

Today begins the third day so far with Heavensward and I am feeling so completely behind. This is of course something I am doing to myself, as I am still significantly ahead of several of the other free company members, but I have this sense of falling behind. I guess it part it comes from the fact that expansions are by nature a reset. On Wednesday night I was that guy that had two max level and well geared tanks, a max level and well geared healer, and both a ranged and a melee dps also max level and well geared. I could literally fill any role I needed to fill in a party, and this gave me a great sense of confidence knowing that I could also we be useful in some way. Now as of Friday all of that is gone… and I am back to clawing my way uphill to try and arrive at that position of comfort again. I am focusing on my Warrior and as a result I can ONLY tank an instance. So that means I either fill that role or I have to watch from the sidelines as people have fun without me.

That is the stress of an expansion, the immediate feeling of inadequacy that only goes away with copious amounts of time spent pouring levels into all of your characters. It is a real struggle to keep myself from powering through everything so that I can reach that point of safety faster. Like in the back of my head I have this order in which I intend to level things to get back there, but if I am not careful the whole thing can be overwhelming. Everything is new and shiny and I am sure I will have plenty of time to level and still experience all of the content as it was intended. Right now I am held up on the first trial encounter, so I am hoping that as soon as I finish writing up my blog post I can pop in and try and defeat that so I can move forward in the story. The thing I find interesting is that they have apparently skipped “normal” mode entirely because this first trial is flagged as “hard”. I guess it makes sense as it happens post 50, but in the grand scheme of things I feel like maybe “leveling” content cannot really be deemed “hard” modes.

Making Story Matter

The story is getting extremely good, and that is the thing that I am the most impressed with. Usually when an MMO expansion happens, there is a resetting of things to square one and the world essentially forgets what its last state happened to be. I’ve always found this frustrating because I want the world to remember where it has been before. I want things to change and that the NPCs that I spent time working with, will remember who I am when I meet them again. One of the single most immersion breaking moments for me is when I encountered Alexstraza in Twilight Highlands and she had no memory of working with me at Wyrmrest Temple in the Dragonblight of Northrend. Sure years have passed by I was set up as a big damned hero through the events, and I am still the same big damned hero today. She should have embraced me as a friend based on those past events, not as another nameless and faceless NPC.

More than anything Final Fantasy XIV seems to do an excellent job of working with your character being the badass that it supposedly is. The reactions that you get are extremely human. Some people fear you for your power, and others seek to test their mettle against it. But regardless of their reaction… there is no NPC that at this point does not realize you are the “Warrior of Light”. The storyline of Heavensward takes place literally moments after the final events of 2.55, and while sure it would be frustrating to a new player to be told that they cannot enter the new content without catching up in the storyline… this is because the storyline would seem unintelligible if you did not experience the events of “A Realm Reborn”. This is really a new experience for me when it comes to MMOs and I have to say I am absolutely in love with it. Square Enix has figured out how to make MMO storyline and lore matter… and I am so damned thankful they did. I just hope that other games see how well it works in Heavensward and start adopting it in their own games.

AggroChat #62 – Flight and Chocobos

I originally thought that when we set down to record this episode of AggroChat we would end up putting aside all pretense and simply talk about the Heavensward expansion for Final Fantasy XIV. However what happened in reality is we ended up recording an extremely length show where we basically did that… AND a normal show as well. While many or our weeks revolved around the launch of this new expansion… we had to do something to bide our time until the Friday launch. Grace has apparently been completely hooked on Marvel Super Heroes so we talked about that for awhile. The other game she has been playing is Wildstar, so we spent a good deal of time chatting about how that game has been progressing.

In Final Fantasy XIV before the outage we managed to take down Shiva and Odin once again so we talked a bit about that. Then myself, Tam and Kodra have been playing an awful lot of ArcheAge so we talk again about that and our progress so far. Then finally when we start talking about Heavensward we get sidetracked on a lengthy debate about the merits of flight in MMOs and whether or not it is simply GM cheats. Each of us brought our own perspectives to the conversation and quite honestly this could have been a show topic in itself. Finally we talk about our experience so far with the Heavensward expansion to close out the show. It is an extremely packed show, and clocks in just shy of two hours.

World Boss Train

June 7, 2015 by Belghast

Wandering around Wildstar

Yesterday I had every intent to work on either leveling my Rogue or to work on getting poetics in Final Fantasy XIV. However recently I have had a resurgence of friends checking out Wildstar again so I opted to boot that up after finishing yesterdays blog post. To set the stage some of my friends from the FFXIV Free Company also lead quite possibly the largest guild on the Entity server. To call this guild “active”, is like calling the national debt “a large number.” This is a double edges sword because so often I feel like I am struggling to keep up with the activity going on in game. Wildstar is already an extremely busy game for me, and to have guild chat scrolling by like mad, as well as the assorted circles I am in is a bit of a sensory overload. So it is sheer luck that I happened to be paying attention to guild chat at just the right time yesterday.

One of my guildies was gathering up a group to take down Grendelus the Guardian, the world boss of Celestion. Now at this point I had not actually been to Celestion but they were awesome and willing to wait for me to find my way out there. Thankfully I was right next to the gates to Thayd and could hop across the city and get into Celestion in nothing flat. Firstly I want to say that when I saw Grendelus was only level 11 I was thinking this was going to be more of a token fight than a serious one. Those assumptions were completely wrong, because even at level 18 Grendelus was serious business. In fact we had a few level 50s with us in our group taking him down and it still took roughly fifteen minutes from the time we pulled to the moment we managed to down him. I remember world bosses existing and that folks banded together to fight them at launch, but I never actually managed to participate in one. I do however remember trying to take on King Honeygrave with a group of friends not really understanding that he was designed as a raid encounter.

World Boss Train

As it turns out that these world bosses are needed as part of the super complex raid attunement system in Wildstar. It also turns out that apparently even though I am level 18, when I participate in one of them I am getting credit that will eventually work in my favor when it finally comes time to do the attunements proper. I guess when you hit maximum level you get retroactive credit for all of the world bosses you have killed, or at least that is what my guild seemed to insinuate. Firstly I have to say how impressed I am with the way that the Black Dagger Society rolls into zones. Last night I managed to hook up with what was essentially a guild World Boss train, and they openly offer anyone in zone that wants to tag along a spot in the raid group. In fact they were more than willing to wait for people running in from Thayd to get there before starting. There is this infectious spirit about them that is really enjoyable to be around.

So while I didn’t get much actual leveling done yesterday, I did manage to knock four raid bosses off the list. I had been kind of shy about offering my help when things were going on in guild, but as I am starting to get to know the members better I am feeling more open about stepping up to the challenge. I’ve had moments of people jokingly asking if I was “THE Belghast”, and more people seem to know me than I know them… but overall I am slowly working my way into meeting all of the folks in the guild. It seems like a really great place to hang my hat, and had I NOT joined I have a feeling that Chestnut would have been a really sad panda. I am hoping with me dialing back World of Warcraft, that I can actually participate in more events that are going on there. The guild has a whole has these big events on a somewhat regular basis, so my hope is that I can get in on some of them in the coming weeks.

AggroChat 60 – Second Chances

Tonight on AggroChat we have Belghast, Tamrielo, Thalen and Grace. This week Kodra is off playing a rather convincing Fred from Scrooby Doo at Origins, and Ashgar disappeared mysteriously moments before the recording… and we are hoping everything is okay. The rest of us talked about some recent experiences giving games a second glance. The first game on that list is Wildstar and both Belghast and Grace have spent a significant amount of time back in the game. It has been amazing just what an embattled and often times struggling team has managed to accomplish. Similarly Tamrielo and Thalen have been checking out ArcheAge to find that community is much improved. Tam talks at length about what he likes about the design of the game, and how it manages to do a better job at being Rift.

Since Ashgar was missing we felt the need to give a huge plug to the Four Job Fiesta program and talk at length about how exactly it works. For Ashgar the “fiesta” is like a religion, and each June we know that sooner or later we are going to be hit up to join it again. This year he has pledged $10 for each AggroChat host that manages to beat the game and $5 for each AggroChat listener that beats the game and includes @AggroChat twitter handle on their victory shot. We talk about a number of other games including Lego Worlds, World of Warcraft, Shadowrun Returns and of course our getting prepared for the launch of the Heavensward expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. It is a big show chock full of lots of interesting discussions that we hope you will enjoy. “Please look forward to it.”

Nineteen Years

May 31, 2015May 31, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 59 – The Shadowrun Dragonfall Show

Last night we got the folks together to record the fourth AggroChat game club show, this time devoted to Tamrielo’s pick. Shadowrun: Dragonfall is the second game in the Shadowrun: Returns series from the wildly successful kickstarter process. While the first game focused mostly on getting the engine correct, this game focuses more on weaving an interesting narrative in the Shadowrun setting. In tonights show we delve deep into the game and talk about the various choices we made while playing it. Please be warned this is a full spoiler show, and we will talk about some of the plot twists and the alternate choice paths that you can make in the game. I highly suggest that if you intend to play this game, that you revisit this show after doing so as not to spoil any of the content.

This title is auspicious for various reasons, primarily because it is the first title that everyone joining in the show either beat or came extremely close to beating it. Kodra and I started recording tonight and during the course of the show actually defeated it. Ash however is in the final stretch making him only about thirty minutes away. The other extremely unique thing about this game is it is quite literally the first game we have played that we all were able to give a big thumbs up to. Join us next month for Kodra’s title as well called There Came an Echo, which is a voice controlled real time strategy game… that is certain to lead to some strange conversations. Additionally if you played Shadowrun: Dragonfall along with us, please head over to AggroChat.com and drop the team a line with what you thought about the game.

Nineteen Years

It was roughly nineteen years ago yesterday that my wife and I first got together as a couple. In truth we use May 30th as a close approximation of our “dating anniversary” because honestly neither of us really know the EXACT date. For the most part we consider it to be the more important anniversary and try and at least acknowledge it every year. We are not big into gifts and never really have been. We tend to label things we were already going to get as “anniversary gifts” after the fact. Like apparently the wooden rocking chair I got my wife awhile back is her anniversary gift, and according to my wife my new SUV and the used iPad 2 I will be getting Monday is my gift. It seems like I made out like a bandit until you learn how we spent our anniversary.

Friday was the last day with kids for my wife and thus begins the yearly ritual of packing up her room. This year however it is a bit more stressful for her because she is having to entirely vacate her cubical. When they moved into the building they created this “collaboration room” for the teachers, and set it up in quite possibly the least collaborative method known to man… the office cube farm. This summer however it seems like they finally got the memo and are going to tear down the cube farm and replace it with a much more open shared workspace. That said she has to completely move out of both her own personal cube and another cube for a program she manages. So yesterday I spent my anniversary packing up these cubes in boxes and moving them as she worked on packing away stuff in her classroom. It is not the most glamorous anniversary in the world but it was me helping her be less stressed so I think in the grand scheme of things it was a win.

End of School Stress

There are times in life when I have to fight my nature. I tend to be fairly protective of my friends and family, and I especially feel protective of my wife. She is a strong badass of a woman, who does not need me to fight her battles for her… but there are occasions when that instinct still kicks in. Part of the reason she is so damned stressed right now revolves around an event that happened Friday night. She is a rockstar of a teacher, and I mean that in every sense of the word. She will fight for these kids and bend over backwards to try and make sure they are doing whatever they need to be doing. This week was one of those cases where she bent over backwards to try and make sure one of her students was doing what they needed to be doing. The problem being this isn’t always appreciated and sometimes misguided parents can add to her stress level.

It is extremely hard for me to see her in the frustrated state she was in Friday. Every fiber of my being wants to protect her from the people who were stressing her out. Thankfully school is over and due to the extremely supportive administration things will work themselves out. But for the time being she has been wrestling with whether she did the right thing, or enough to help her students. For this reason and many others I am happy to help her try and at least get one stress out of the way. I know I would not be half the teacher she is, because quite frankly if I had to deal with half of the things she suffers with a smile… I would have gone postal a long time ago. She however has a level of dedication that can only be admired and respected. So I spent our anniversary packing up boxes, moving file folders, and moving it around the building. It might not be a glamorous chain of events, but if it lightened her burden then I think it was a successful way to spend our day.

Merry Sith-ness

May 30, 2015 by Belghast

Last Man on Hulu

Last night I had one of those nights where I was just restless without good reason for being so. Every activity I considered doing simultaneously sounded awesome and horrible at the same time. So while I finished my push to 21 in each of my Final Fantasy XIV crafting professions, I didn’t really accomplished much of use the rest of the evening. I spent a good chunk of my crafting time test driving Hulu and watching the tv show Last Man on Earth. My assessment of both is rather mixed. Firstly having never experienced Hulu my very first impression was precisely “what the fuck is with all these advertisements”. I finally found a blurb on the Hulu website explaining why they have ads which comes down to a bullshit answer of needing to reduce the cost of the subscription. How about this, how about you charge an “extra-premium” tier subscription that turns off all of that crap and just lets me watch the shows.

Right now my likelihood of actually staying subscribed to Hulu past the free trial is pretty non-existent for this reason. To make matters worse it is like watching Cable “On Demand” where they play essentially the same four commercials over and over. At this point I seriously want to burn down the honey bunches of oats factory that is shown on the Post cereal commercial that they kept playing over and over and over. After having that drilled into my brain all night long while watching an already sub par television show has made me want to vehemently avoid anything products by Post while roaming around the super market. I feel like that is counter intuitive to their original mission with the advertisement in the first place. As far as Last Man on Earth… the first episode was humorous, but then once Kristin Schaal showed up it progressively went down hill. Which is sad because normally speaking I adore Kristin Schaal, I still find this skit one of the most hilarious things on the planet. The problem with both Netflix and Hulu is the shows just keep playing without manual intervention… so I think I ultimately watched one too many episodes before finally deciding I had enough of it and stopped it.

Merry Sith-ness

Around 10 pm last night I opted to try and go to sleep, thinking maybe my malaise was simply caused by being tired. The problem being the moment my head hit the pillow it is like a flip got switched in my brain and I was instantly in “super awake” mode. I tossed and turned trying to figure out a way to get comfortable, and chatted with my wife until she fell asleep. After an hour of struggling to find sleep I opted to simply get up. Thinking that if I could go do something my brain would eventually shut the hell up and let me go to sleep. I’ve suffered from bouts of insomnia my entire life, and sometimes the worst thing I can do is try and force myself to sleep. Otherwise I will have sat there in bed for three hours and ultimately just end up frustrated that I didn’t get up and do something with that time. I am not entirely certain why I ended up launching Star Wars the Old Republic other than I have really not played much of it, and they have an insane xp bonus event going on.

I would really like to play the continuation of the main storyline on my Jedi Guardian, but the hard truth there is that I have been gone from the game so long that I quite literally have no clue where to start on it. Instead I opted to log into my Sith Juggernaut that is knee deep in Balmorra hell. In theory I could do just the class quests and be off the planet, but I feel a deep need to finish all of the things especially since this is the highest Sith character I have mustered to date. I am not sure if it was surprising or not but I actually enjoyed myself, but the unfortunately thing is that I managed to stay up until 2 am before sleep finally claimed me. This is going to make for a long evening with our podcast since I was back up again at 8 am. Hopefully I will be able to sneak a nap in today, but I have a feeling that since it will be nice outside my wife will want to get out of the house. We have been suffering through absolutely insane torrential rain. I heard an estimate that over the last week we have gotten as much rain as we normally get in an entire year.

Beautifying AggroChat

One of my failings is that I have done a pretty piss poor job of advertising the fact that AggroChat.com exists and is populated full of good stuff to read. Ultimately if you are reading Tales of the Aggronaut you are going to be extremely familiar with some of the content, but not all of it. Essentially AggroChat.com was a vehicle that I came up with as a way to pull together all of the content created by the hosts of the AggroChat Podcast. Additionally this site serves as a way to connect to each of the authors and a better vehicle for receiving both the AggroChat and Bel Folks Stuff episodes. We have had some grand plans to eventually expand this site to include people who do not already have blogs of their own. For the time being however it gives you a one stop shop for the following content…

The takeaway is that through this one site you end up with a ton of content delivered on a regular basis. I personally blog every single day, and Tam blogs five times a week at least. I keep hoping to add more news commentary content and game reviews but we have not quite gotten there yet. I plan on in the near future creating a special section of the AggroChat Game Club games where you can pull in some quick commentary from each of the folks that played it, as well as a link to the show where we discuss it. Essentially we are going to keep expanding it, so I should do a far better job of promoting it. So check the site out, and I would be open to any comments and suggestions. I’ve tried to set the site up in a way that allows you to drill down into specific content by one of our Authors quickly and efficiently. As of last week I even went back through every episode of AggroChat and indexed which hosts are on which shows so that they show up in our Author category links. While there is already a lot of great content here, watch the site because I am hoping it gets ever cooler.