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

So Many Sads

June 28, 2015 by Belghast

Storming the Castle

This morning I admit that I have been struggling to figure out what to write about. It is not from a lack of material, but a conscious effort to filter myself. Last night I leapt over a content wall in Final Fantasy XIV and it was quite possibly the best dungeon experience I have had since first stepping foot into Deadmines back in 2004. It was so over the top amazing, that it is hard to put into words much about it because quite simply I do not want to ruin the story for anyone. Square Enix has somehow managed to capture all of the magic of Scarlet Monastery, distill everything that made it fun… and then amply that and unleash it onto the world. The dungeon design is vastly different than anything else I have seen in Final Fantasy XIV to this point. On one level it almost feels like a kung fu action movie, where you are deluged with impossible odds yet somehow manage to hold things together enough to keep moving forward. The fourth dungeon in the game is now the pinnacle of “storming the castle” experiences for me.

What makes it so amazing is the fact that the dungeon is set up by some truly phenominal storytelling. By the time you reach this point in the story arc, you feel like righteous avengers off to save the day. I had been stalled on this dungeon for awhile, but had been holding back doing it so that I could do it with a full guild group. Kodra managed to get caught up last night, and the two of us entered with two others that were gleeful in keeping silent about the tactics of the dungeon. Somehow we made it through, and our raider instincts kicked in enough to keep us from doing anything too stupid. It is funny how those instincts are now fairly universal regardless of what encounter a game throws at you. Final Fantasy XIV does an excellent job of messaging things you should avoid or at least take note of… and when it down… get the hell out.

So Many Sads

Does this picture not just break your heart? This is the saddest Bel I have ever seen in this game. So not only does it excel at giving you moment after moment of excitement… it can also manage to punch you in the gut when the story turns in a sad direction. Things happened… things that made us sad, and the game is doing an awesome job of letting us know it. Not to mention me the person behind the screen was effected by these events too, so it feels reassuring in a way to see my on screen facsimile struggling with the events as well. I cannot expound upon just how amazing the experience of Heavensward has been so far, with the storyline from last season picking up and continuing where we left off. I call it a “season” because really that is what it feels like. The original 1.0 launch was Season 1, A Realm Reborn was Season 2… and now we are entering the Third Season of this really awesome television show… where I absolutely cannot wait to see what happens next. It is a game like this that makes me feel like a game can both be engaging and deeply narrative at the same time. I feel like I am telling the story… more than I usually do in a story driven experience. Sure the story is happening to me… but I identify so completely with my character.

The thing is this feeling we are having is apparently completely intentional. The above quote is from a ZAM video interview with Yoshi P from E3. It is very clear that he feels like he is stilling one large episode of the same story, and as a result all of the little elements and people that you meet along the way have a lasting importance. Just because you go several levels without seeing someone, does not mean they will not show up at some point in the future. The characters in this world have their own destinies and do not just support that of the main character. Everyone has an agenda and are given the latitude to shift in and out of the focus of what we ultimately view as the “main story”. Ashgar and I were talking for a bit last night and he made the comment that there is enough story content in here to make an actual “traditional” Final Fantasy game. Thinking about this I absolutely agree and in many ways this sort of storytelling that we are experiencing is the same sort of storytelling we saw in Final Fantasy VI for example… where characters shift in and out of your party but you are constantly moving forward towards an end goal. This time we the player character are the constant in a world that is constantly changing around us.AggroChat

AggroChat 63 – There Came an Echo Show

Last night we recorded the sixty third episode of AggroChat and the fifth AggroChat Game Club game show. This time around it was Kodra’s pick a quirky voice controlled story driven RTS called There Came an Echo. My experience was vastly different than the rest of my co-hosts, but it seems that pretty much everyone other than Kodra and Tam had some measure of technical difficulties with this title. For example Thalen, Ash and I were all missing significant UI elements during our play throughs. Several of us had to content with moments when the game seemed to just stop accepting voice input commands as well. I however had the most issues with the game constantly crashing on me. There was no point when I was able to actually load anything without the game going unresponsive and having to hit the “wait for program” button in the hopes that maybe just maybe it would wake the hell up and start working again. As I said I was the only person who had issues quite that severely, and I am hoping that maybe this is just a bad patch as they recently rolled one out.

The positive however is it has good enough story and voice acting to make me futz with this game for two hours trying to make it work for me. During the course of they show the folks that did manage to beat the game exposed all the spoilery content and I got enough of a feel for how the story goes that I really want to see it play out. At the very least I am planning on watching a play through, and preferably one without much streamer dialog to preserve as much of the voice acting experience as I can. The one I was watching for a bit yesterday kept talking over the character dialog… which kinda ruined the experience. This game feels very much like a tech demo with good story and voice acting… and I would love to see this same level of effort taken and expanded into a more traditional game experience. Sure this voice control thing is somewhat neat, but I hate talking to devices. Devices like the Amazon Echo, Siri and even my own Google Phone experience are lost on me… because the last thing I want to do is talk to my device to have it do something for me. The voice control was deeply awkward for me, but your mileage may vary… Kodra and Tam both seemed to enjoy it greatly.

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.