destiny Archives - Page 47 of 60 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Scattered Gaming

March 28, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was an odd one. After a string of relatively nice weekends, we ended up getting one that was either cold and windy… or cold and rainy, both of which drove my instinct to stay inside and hibernate. The only problem is… with all this play time I largely squandered it and spent more time staring without purpose at games… than actually playing them. It feels like I am starting to go through another one of my “funks” because nothing seemed to fit “just right” as far as games go. I flitted between lots of different titles, playing them for a bit before shifting to something else… often times ending right back up in the game I started in. For a good chunk of the weekend I had the desire to play Destiny… but wanted to instead be hanging out downstairs which only left me the unofficial remote play app as a solution. Then there were games that I felt like I needed to make progress in like Division where I am still not at the level cap. Friday was largely devoted to Undertale, and I think after forcing myself to play that game… it maybe soured the rest of my weekend. So this morning I thought I would run down some of the progress I made in various games.

Undertale

I wrote about this at length but after hanging up my controller as it were… I opted to instead watch several of the different endings. I still feel fine in my decision to just abandon this game in an undefeated state. I guess I don’t have a primal urge to finish games, and more often than not I get to the ending and just don’t finish. I reach this point where I have gotten out of the game what I wanted, and I don’t see the point in expending that effort to push it across the finish line. In the case of Undertale the thing that was driving me forward was to understand the story, and now between the podcast and the various youtube ending videos… I feel like I do. Once that carrot was gone, the game play itself doesn’t make me want to ever touch this game again. On the podcast folks talked about ways to lower the impact of the mechanics, like the Temmie armor… but that isn’t even really an interesting option to me.

Destiny

I really did not do much in Destiny other than a little bit of Crucible. I am constantly amazed at how much I actually enjoy player versus player content in this game, when traditionally that is just not my thing. I think a lot of it is that in this game it feels like there is zero negative impact on the rest of the game. It is just another option I have to play, and gives me the same sort of PVE rewards that I expect to receive elsewhere. Other than specialty modes like Trials of Osiris it feels like I am rewarded equally for just doing whatever I happen to want to do at the time. I started down the path of the crucible simply as a way to get more Legendary marks, and then recently when I was grinding out sword kills I came to realize… I was actually legitimately enjoying myself. What is great about the crucible is that I get the central game play loop that I enjoy of shooting awesome weapons and charging around… without zero downtime. It seems like it is easier to get Three of Coins to proc on Crucible than it is while doing strikes… or it might simply be that Crucible itself is just about the perfect amount of time per coin use. While I have not actually gotten any of the really cool PVP drops… I do get a fair amount of strange coins, motes and random pieces of armor that end up getting deconstructed. Tonight I will hopefully be finishing up the rest of the Kings Fall raid that we had to abandon on Oryx last Tuesday, and beforehand it is my goal to hang out upstairs and run some more Crucible.

The Division

This weekend I managed to push Division a little harder than the rest of the games and caught up with my friend Tamrielo at least. At the start of the weekend I was sitting at roughly level 20, and as of this morning I am just about a third into 22. While I absolutely could play this and only give it partial attention at lower levels, as I have gotten into the twenties this is not really the case. As a result this weekend I managed to die probably more than I actually managed to accomplish anything. There are two missions that I know I attempted at least a half dozen times before finally giving it my full attention and pushing through. My standard operating procedure while hanging out with my wife downstairs is that I essentially have one eye on the game and one eye on whatever we happen to be watching… not literally but you know what I mean. The problem with this is that in doing so I am not exactly paying attention to the best possible tactical spot that I could be in while shooting incoming mobs. The addition of snipers really changed how the game works, and now that I have guys that rush me with shotguns as well.. I am having to be way more careful about how I take on content. That said I feel like I made some decent progress, but most of it was in short bursts of me playing for thirty minutes to an hour… and then logging out and doing something else. Thankfully much like Destiny… short batches of play time feel just as rewarding to me as multiple hour long sessions.

World of Warcraft

The other major happening of the weekend was me poking around on my Forsaken Hunter in World of Warcraft. Recently Blizzard added an achievement that you could unlock by leveling a character in WoW to 20, aka the free mode level cap. For doing this you end up getting Lady Liadrin as an alternate Paladin hero in Hearthstone. Not that I really play Hearthstone… and even more so… not that I really like playing Paladins in Hearthstone… I have this drive to get the achievement and unlock the extra shiny bits. The negative of this achievement is that it only counts if you have recently leveled to twenty after the launch of the achievement, that means my army of level 100s are doing me zero good for this goal. As a result I opted to level something on The Scryers Horde side since that is where the bulk of my lower leveled characters are these days. I largely played during the podcast on Saturday night, and as a result managed to get to I believe 18 before giving it up for the night. The goal is to spend some time this week pushing it over the line, so that I at least can feel like I got this out of the way. I honestly think this whole promotion is a brilliant idea to try and cross pollinate some of the players actively playing Hearthstone and get them to try World of Warcraft. I know Hearthstone is a major nostalgia bomb for me… but I wonder if it is the same for a player who has ONLY played Hearthstone, now being able to see where those cards they love are actually from.

Sometimes We Fail

March 23, 2016 by Belghast

The Rookie Raid

For a little bit now, one of the highlights of my week has been the Rookie Raid night with my clan in Destiny. I think mostly after playing the game for roughly two years… I was really wanting to raid, and getting to step foot in Kings Fall each week has been a blast. There are still a lot of things that I absolutely screw up, but I feel like I am getting better. I have always been one of those people that learns by doing, and it simply takes several repetitions before something actually gets cemented in my head. The highlight of the night was the fact that I actually made it through the ship jumping puzzle on the very first time… and it only took me two tries to get over to the wall and get into the chest nook just after the ships. This is serious progress because some of those jumps on past attempts took me dozens of tries to actually get. Similarly I seemed to make it through the piston wall without a ton of issues this week which also felt good. I ended up jumping to the final platform… and then got confused thinking I went the wrong direction. So I guess even I shocked myself that I had made it through with I think two deaths this week, instead of the literally dozens in previous outings.

I’ve had to develop the practice of sitting down with my character once I have reached the final platform of a jumping sequence. I wouldn’t go so far as the say that I am afraid of heights, because in real life I can look out over balconies or off the roofs of buildings without much issue. I can climb up on things without much issue either… well apart from the fact that I have zero dexterity. However for whatever reason in video games… I get disoriented and almost dizzy when dealing with jumping sequences. There are certain games that have triggered this feeling more than others, like Mirrors Edge. However there are other games that are just as parkoury for lack of a better word… like Dying Light that don’t seem to bother me at all. It has to be something about the perspective or some technical detail that does it… but whatever the case… Destiny absolutely triggers these feelings. So as stupid as it sounds, I feel like every time I don’t fuck up a jump… it is a pretty major victory for me. It takes so much mental stamina to get me through one of the jump sequences that when I finish… I am constantly afraid that I will do something stupid that leads to me plummeting back down below and having to do it all over again. So my little practice of sitting makes it seem like it is far less likely for me to somehow get bumped and fall.

Oryx Cheats

One of the cool things about this week is that I got to learn a few slightly different roles during the fights. Namely I moved from platform duty to Ogre duty, which is way more my style. When our group does Oryx we do it “challenge” style which involves making sure the Ogres do not move before they die, allowing all of the blight orbs to spawn in essentially the same place. This allows us to pop them all at the same time, and deal almost all of the damage to Oryx in a single turn. That is at least when things work out. As one of the Titans assigned to this duty, we run complimentary bubbles making sure Weapons and Blessing are both up and dropped in the same place. This allows us to take advantage of our Touch of Malice and keep from killing ourselves in the process. The goal is to dip back into the shield between ogres to replenish the shields and give us more life to spend while pummeling the adds. This works great… until we have to go into the fight without a super bar. We somehow managed to make it through that round but it was getting super dicey as far as the whole “not killing ourselves” part. It was during the Oryx fight however last night… that shit just got weird.

302 – Elulim’s Frenzy

304 – War Numen’s Fist

310 – Armamentarium

I had heard before of the bugs in the Kings Fall raid… but luckily in the previous two weeks we had never really encountered any. This week however they struck back with a vengeance, starting with several of us mysteriously dying to “misadventures”. Other times the platform sequence got messed up, or our runner was unable to grab the orb for some reason… having the platform disappear beneath them before the transfer actually happened. The scariest was when we saw an ogre appear in the default T state that models are generally modeled in… and then disappear quickly… coming up through the ground with the normal animation. Essentially there was something seriously wrong with the server, and even though we tried several different tricks to right the ship… we ultimately had to call it to time. The goal right now is to pop back in Monday night and see if we can wreck Oryx given that we have a check point right at the boss. Sometimes we fail… but even in failing I had a really good time. The loot on the other hand is starting to get more scarce, and I got some relatively low light level versions of things… but I did manage to pick up another much needed slot in the arms. I’ve posted a gallery of the various things, including the 310 Armamentarium chest that was waiting on me at the mailbox. I am not really sure where along the way that dropped but but it is much appreciated because I love having the extra grenades. However as long as I am running Defender, I kinda feel like the Saint-14 helm is a must have.

Light and Poms

March 21, 2016 by Belghast

Losing Light

This marks the second weekend of attempts to get a black spindle, and I am quickly reaching a point where I no longer want it. The first weekend was a tale of me largely spending the entire day either waiting to get a group or making attempts on it. For whatever reason Bungie seems to keep choosing Sunday as the day for Spindle runs… which is not exactly prime time for people playing the game. On top of that… Sunday is normally a day that I have stuff that needs to get done, and instead for two different weekends my world has focused around trying to get a Black Spindle. I reached a point yesterday where I wanted to reach through the internet and punch whoever it was that designed this mission. The individual parts aren’t all that bad… but combined together is just maddening. If you could simply respawn at a checkpoint before the 10 minute timer starts on the Ketch it wouldn’t be so bad. I would happily grind that until we finally got it… but instead it is the frustration of having to clear to a boss… then do the run across the temple… then unlock the various chambers… then FINALLY go up into the ketch and do the “real” mission. So you have 10-15 minutes of bullshit before you reach the point at which it is omg serious mode.

We tried several different methods of attempting to down the boss, the main one being that we jump to the middle and burn him down with swords. Towards the end we started trying to just whittle his ass down while keeping the adds under control, and honestly neither really worked well. Anytime we ducked outside of the entrance tunnel we would get wrecked, and almost one shot. I guess that is the biggest frustration is that the room has no place where you can really set up OTHER than the entrance tunnel and clean out the adds. The geometry of the room means that someone is always getting hung on something and stuck awkwardly out in the open… which means they are essentially dead. I am not sure what is up with the mission but it felt like we did significantly worse than the last time… and this time around I am 304 and decked out in raid weapons that deal extra damage to taken. I know I am the albatross around the neck of the group, but I am not exactly sure what I am doing wrong there. At this point I am not likely to spend another weekend of attempts on this stupid weapon… when I have two sniper rifles that I enjoy using already. Sure this is the best sniper in the game, but if it quite literally makes one of my party members slam their controller down against the desk breaking it… it is not worth the hassle or frustration.

Pom Pom Squad

The highlight of the weekend however for me was getting a Pom Pom Beanie on Friday evening while playing Division. Strangely enough this seems to be the chase item for most people because they are actually rather rare. I have given food and water to every single person that I meet along the street asking for it… and have a huge amount of clothing options… and have gotten exactly one pom pom beanie. Now these also can apparently appear on the appearance vendor that unlocks with the security tier, but I have yet to see any there. What is awesome about mine is the fact that it fits so perfectly with the colors that I already choose… black and green. Other than that last night I got a string of awesome weapon drops… and I finally abandoned my beloved LSW for a couple of ACR variants and eventually a P416… which all seem to feel the same when firing them. I also found an upgrade for my SRS marksman rifle but unfortunately the upgrade was only a green so it won’t last nearly as long. That seems to be my combo of weapons of choice… a fairly accurate assault rifle that fires well in single shot/bursts and a marksman rifle for headshots. This allows me to either spray and play, for random two mob encounters on the street… or get more strategic for larger groups.

I am consistently amazed at the wide variety of feelings this game can make me feel. There are moments when I feel stirrings of patriotism and sentimentality like when I come across a memorial like the one above, or improvised banners hanging out of windows that say slogans like “Can’t Keep NY Down”. Then other times the game gut punches you with feels when it comes to finding a phone message from before the infection, or as society was crumbling. Like last night I picked up a message from two parents that were coming into town to see their child because they missed them… and it feels all the more tense knowing that they had no clue what they were walking into. We had a lengthy AggroChat show talking about the morality of this game… and for whatever reason it stirs something completely different in me. I absolutely feel like the good guy, the one trying hard to bring some sort of order to a fallen city. Sure the only thing that separates me from the looters is the badge I am wearing… but I am also saving countless random people from executions or muggings as I roam the city streets. I might be more vigilante than righteous crusader, but I am okay with that. I think you miss some of the nuance of the game if you are constantly focused on this objective or the next, and aren’t really participating in the events that happen on the street. I cannot count the number of times I have rolled up on a group of Rikers with their guns drawn on a civilian, and even though it is a nameless faceless NPC… I saved them from certain death. Had I been a little slower on the trigger finger they would be dead on the ground, and those are the moments I feel heroic. Those are the moments when I don’t question what I am doing in this game.

Of Immersion

March 17, 2016 by Belghast

That Word

One of the things that I have come to realize over the last few days is that apparently immersion in a video game is not really that important to me. What I mean by that is that sense of “losing yourself in a game” and for lack of better verbiage start thinking like your character. This is one of those things that role players do amazingly well, and something that I have honestly always struggled with. So what ends up happening when I play a pen and paper game for example… is that I ultimately always play a version of myself. The same is true for MMOs that I create this “super me” where I change my features to match what I guess internally I consider the idealized version of myself. I created the above imagine some time ago to illustrate that point, that essentially I keep creating the same character over and over… and the games that refuse to allow me to create that character… I quickly lose interest in. The reason why this has reared its head once more is the fact that I keep reading Division reviews that say the same thing. There are a host of critics that find it jarring that they are having to fight people in essentially heavily armored hoodies. There are so many that state that it “breaks their immersion” to fight something that takes so many bullets to make it fall over, even though they are not terribly well armored. This is not the first time something like this has come up, and each time it makes me question… am I ever really immersed in a game?

The thing is… I geek out about the lore and world-building that happens behind the scenes of the worlds that I am inhabiting. I use the world inhabit because there are times I feel like I am wandering around through a realistic looking setting. I remember the sheer awe I felt the first time I left Kaladim in Everquest and turned around to see just how massive the entrance really was. I am a screenshot junkie and I am constantly snapping photos of the various vistas in the games I am playing. I get thoroughly impressed when I am wandering a game like The Division that makes me feel like I am actually wandering Manhattan. The thing is… there is never a point for me where I don’t realize I am playing a video game. I’ve yet to really experience that transcendent moment that some folks talk about, where they blend into the story and get swept away as though it were really happening. I mean a game can tug on my emotions, and make me feel all sorts of things… but it is always a game, and I am always me experiencing it not some other character. I got to thinking about the reason why this might be… and I finally landed on a possible answer. When I am playing games… there is never a moment when I am not also doing something else. If I am downstairs, the television is almost always on in the background, or I am carrying on a conversation with my wife at the same time. If I am upstairs I am monitoring slack, discord or instant messenger conversations on my second monitor (or at least making an attempt at doing so) and while playing PS4 I am constantly waking my PC up when the screen goes to sleep so I can do the same. Even back in the day when I would play a Nintendo or Super Nintendo game in my childhood bedroom… I would be listening to music or trying to jot down notes about where I found this or that. I guess I have always been a habitual multi-tasker with one foot always in the next activity, or the one after that… and because my mind is always thinking about other things and other possibilities it is very hard to get all that engaged in the one I am currently doing. So when I play a game… I want a really awesome world with really fun game mechanics… but a lot of the sticking points that seem to bother other people just simply don’t even register until I read it from someone else’s perspective.

Going Dark

A good chunk of last night was spent doing Mythic Dungeons in World of Warcraft. The normal Wednesday night raid group did not meet this week because we were down four or five people. When I got home I popped into Discord and ultimately wound up logging in and tanking a couple of Mythic dungeons, something that for whatever reason I had never actually done. Of note… unless it is late in the evening there is never a time when I am going to turn tanking for a full guild group. Now if we are having to pug people… you are likely going to see me check out completely, but I really do enjoy tanking for friends and friends of friends. After a couple of runs however I had my fill and ultimately logged from WoW for the evening. I popped into The Division and did a cleaners mission that was super stressful and wound up with me rezzing at the check point a number of times. The problem I have been having is that I am starting to feel severely under geared for my level, so after having watched so many dark zone videos where the loot seems to drop like candy, I decided to make my way over there even though I have heard so many times that “solo dark zone” is a bad idea. Within a few minutes of wandering around, I was absolutely slaughtered by a rogue agent… but the thing is it didn’t really bother me that much because I had yet to actually pick up anything decent. Instead I opted to simply hunt right around the nearest Extraction point, where I noticed there were lots of people who seemed completely happy not to shoot me in the back.

I wandered around for a little bit and in that time managed to successfully extract a couple of loads of stuff. A few of the items were blue upgrades… but the bulk was simply just stuff that I could sell and push me closer to my goal of a nice weapon available on the main base weapons vendor. I had quite a bit of fun, and I can absolutely see how exploring this super dangerous area would be amazing with friends. My schedule has been pretty damned wonky over the last few weeks so I am kinda hoping that I can connect with some of my other friends playing this game over the weekend and do some dark zone fun. I realize that I am in an awkward level not being 30 yet, but I still think it could be a lot of fun to wander around out there and see what we can take down. Last night I finally dinged 15, which again makes me so far behind the pack it isn’t even funny level wise. Lately I had been pushing my way around the lower zones trying to finish them, when in truth I probably should just skip ahead to the 15ish areas and do whatever is available out there. I poked my head into Flatiron and immediately started seeing greens that were massive upgrades over what I happened to be wearing, so I am guessing that is precisely what I should be doing. The problem is… I have spent so much time wandering aimlessly that I have out leveled the areas I still have some quests in. I figure I can always go at a later date and mop those up after I have hit the cap.