destiny Archives - Page 51 of 60 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Week in Gaming 11/22/2015

November 22, 2015 by Belghast

Missing Breakers

During this segment I generally run down the gaming I have done during the previous week, however this week I am going to regale you with a story from last night. As I have talked about a bit on my blog we are currently going through some minor home renovations. We seem to be nearing the end however, and other than a few minor problems that they are working on… things seem to largely be done. During part of this process we had a big extension cord coming out through the garage door so they could do work on the front of the house, and as part of their wrapping things up they asked me to go inside and raise the garage door so they could unplug it. When I got out to the garage however… the door would not open, and around about this same time I noticed that our freezer was off. Thus began the mission to try and sort out what breaker was flipped.

The breakers are in a horrible location in our house, which is on the garage wall… but someone in their infinite wisdom decided to build a table and attach it to the wall in front of the breaker box. When I say table… I mean it is a 4 foot deep and 8 foot across shelving unit made out of full sheets of plywood. Sure it is sturdy as hell but it is super awkward and fiddling with the breakers means I have to essentially crawl up onto the table. The problem being… none of the breakers were flipped which began a hunt through the house because the contractors were convinced that this could not be the ONLY breaker box on the house. Please note that at this point we have lived in the house going on eighteen years…. we were absolutely certain this was the only breaker box. Finally after running around and flipping the damned house main in the back yard… someone noticed that the outlet in the garage that the opener was plugged into… had a ground fault switch. We flipped that and magically everything started working again. So yeah… that was a fun way to spend a good chunk of my night.

Final Fantasy XIV

This week finally saw my return to Final Fantasy XIV as it also announced the release of the 3.1 content. I talked about this a bit during the week, but it feels a little bittersweet. The content was really good, but also really really short. Usually we have some big boss fight as the pinnacle of the content patches, and this time around…. nothing. Sure there was a big fight but it wasn’t on the same level as a new Primal or an encounter like Gilgamesh. Also there is the fact that we still don’t have a new segment in the Hildebrand chain… or nothing to really replace the hole it has created in the content. I feel like they spent a lot of time on the Lords of Verminion minigame and as a result a bunch of other stuff slipped to the 3.15 patch later. I still have yet to do any of the dungeons, but hopefully I can get that going soonish.

The bulk of my final fantasy time consists of me logging in, and doing my Beast Tribe dailies for the new Vanu Vanu tribe along with some of the old world quests. What makes this pretty great is the fact that at the current level cap… all of the old world quests are super easy to do. So essentially my daily pecking order is… Vanu Vanu > Slyphs > Sahagin. Mostly I just want to be a tiny lalafell riding along on a giant goobue. Last night we also revived the tradition of doing stuff on Saturday nights as we ran bits of First and Second coil with the guild. I was not there for Turn 5 but I got pulled in on the second coil fun. We managed to get all the way up to turn 9, and put in a few attempts before Ashgar and I had to leave to prep for the podcast. My hope is we can get people in the habit of showing up on Saturday nights to do stuff like this and pony farming. That would go a long way towards revitalizing the Final Fantasy experience for me.

Destiny

I am continuing to play Destiny but a significantly reduced pace. Each Sunday afternoon we do a Star Wars pen and paper game, and right now Destiny seems to be my game of choice to play while doing that. It is something I can play on a machine that is not my main computer, and still be able to pay attention to what is going on in the roleplaying. Destiny is for the most part muscle reflexes at this point, so I am spending the time doing bounties and missions and such. I did however play quite a bit on Wednesday, or at least long enough to do my various weapon missions. I still very much love this game, but Fallout 4 has largely taken the place it held of the game I am spending most of my time playing. There are still a lot of things I want, but more than likely I am going to mostly do the Armsday/Xursday thing each week and then focus if there are objectives and goals that I really want to accomplish. There are a few interesting looking weapons this week that I am hoping turn out to be pretty awesome from the Gunsmith.

Fallout 4

I am still slowly wandering my way through the commonwealth. I am roughly sixty hours into the game and have yet to go to Diamond City. That said I have done a whole slew of side quests, but more often than not when I get one… I have already been to that location and cleared it out. When I went to help the Brotherhood of Steel for example… I had already completely cleared that location other than the areas that the Brotherhood ends up unlocking for you to go explore. As far as the Minutemen, I am tasked with taking back the castle, but the castle is a long ways off from where I am. Right now I am largely exploring the Cambridge area and delving into the ruined buildings that you find there. The hospital at Cambridge was one of the more interesting areas, so if you have not been there I highly suggest checking it out. There has been some crazy shit happening there… but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. At this point I am still largely using my crappy pipe gun, that has been upgraded as much as possible…. but that is largely because I have a truly silly amount of ammunition for it.

World of Warcraft

I am weak…. and nostalgia is strong. Over the last few weeks I knew deep down inside that I was fighting a losing battle. Finally yesterday I gave in and started playing my sub level 20 horde characters since I could do that for free. When Scryers and Argent Dawn merged, I ended up creating an entire accounts worth of Horde alts with the thought of playing with some of my Horde friends on the Argent Dawn server. I tried to create one of every race and class… and some of them I am probably going to simply re-roll. For my Warrior… I ended up going Blood Elf because I remember at launch Warrior was not an option for them. Also I have gotten kinda sick of playing Orcs, and my Deathknight is an Orc, and my Paladin is a Tauren. Maybe I am mellowing in my old age, but the whole “elf” thing is annoying me far less right now. Maybe it is the nostalgia of him wearing what is essentially a set of Wrath armor from Molten Core. In any case I am poking my head around World of Warcraft, and we will see how well that takes.

Week In Gaming 11/15/2015

November 15, 2015 by Belghast

Two Times the Monday

I’ve mentioned this before, but this week we got off in the middle of it for Veterans Day. While I completely support this holiday, I question the good of cutting a week down the middle. What it basically created for me at least was a whole lot of time I seemed to be occupying space in a chair but not getting much accomplished… because individuals smarter than me ended up taking either the entire front half of the week off… or the entire back half of the week off. Those people apparently did not coordinate well, which meant there was a skeleton crew on board and few of the people you actually needed to talk about this item or that available and ready to discuss. My hope is this coming week we can make up ground for all of the perceived lost time from this fractured week. On the gaming front though… this was a week entirely about Fallout 4. However while prepping the AggroChat episode I watched another sequence play out on twitter that I am going to get into towards the end of the post.

Irrational Desire

I am admitting here again that I am still struggling with an irrational desire to log in and play World of Warcraft. I think part of it is simply because I know that as much as I loved Gladiator… it will be going away in the coming expansion. Part of me wants to spend some more time playing as a DPS sword and board warrior while it still exists. Then the rational mind kicks and tells me that there is still nothing really there for you. The raid is gone, the guild is mostly gone… there just isn’t an infrastructure to return to. Similarly I realize that other than faffing about and running old content… there is nothing much there that I would really want to do. This reached its peak over the weekend while I was anxiously wanting to play Fallout 4, but not able to do it yet without VPN hackery. The problem is even though I am wallowing fully in the goodness that is post apocalyptic Boston…. there is still a bit of nostalgia tugging at my coat tails telling me that I would really like to log into World of Warcraft still. I have a slew of new content to go experience in Final Fantasy XIV as well, so hopefully between it and Fallout 4… I will slowly quell this desire. I am still really damned interested in seeing how Legion feels, so not giving up hopes on maybe being able to wrangle a beta invite somewhere… but unfortunately I think my past points of access are no longer available. If I had them I would have definitely tried to exercise one for access to Overwatch.

Viva New Vegas

Monday night I got so low that I booted back up Fallout New Vegas and spent a good deal of time wandering around there. I only managed to get as far as the Vikki and Vance casino before finally attempting to get Fallout 4 going. I have to say… it might be nostalgia talking… but I still absolutely love this game. I even popped in for a bit this morning to get this screenshot… and there is absolutely a direct lineage between Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4. The world feels the same… albeit considerably prettier in the newest incarnation. I guess this is why in part folks who hated Fallout… still hate it… and the folks that loved it… are having some of the best times of their life. New Vegas really raised the bar for the way the world felt, and it seems like Bethesda rose to the occasion and answered this narrative call. That said… there is a part of me that kinda hopes that we end up with a DC Metro and New Vegas reboot using the Fallout 4 engine… much the same way as we have one of those under works for Morrowind and Oblivion using the Skyrim engine. I would love to be able to roam around these areas with the fidelity that the new engine provides. Even then… I could still see myself returning to New Vegas time and time again… and loving every moment of it.

Critical Mass

The bulk of my week has been spent wandering around the Massachusetts area in the new Fallout 4 on the PC. Firstly I have to say… I am pleased and amazed at just how good this game looks and how well it runs on my fairly aging hardware. The game auto selected Ultra for me, and I have been playing on that since… with limited hick-ups. The game runs between 50-60 fps at all times and just works flawlessly. Folks are reporting all sorts of bugs… and honestly I haven’t really seen them other than the usual floating objects type issues when you are dealing with a complex open world game. For example… if you remove a table out front under a vase… there is a chance the vase will just hang there indefinitely rather than fall to the ground. This sort of stuff does not bother me at all, and I come to expect it when a game has physics and the ability to place objects. That said there are apparently a number of the traditional day one Bethesda bugs but I am happy to say that I have not encountered any of them… game breaking or not. Maybe I am simply lucky, or maybe I just have not gotten far enough into the game to experience them.

According to steam I am roughly 50 hours into the game… the problem with that is that I accidentally left it running one day while at work… so you can discount about eight hours of that time as that event happening. The rest of the time however is absolutely real… and I have built up at least partially every settlement that I have come across. That is the part of the game that is the real hook for me… especially now that I have trade routes going between the towns. I’ve said this before, but my big take away from why this game is more enjoyable than the previous incarnations is that it feels like I am actively making the world a better place. In other Fallout games… you were the good guy, simply because you were killing off all of the bad guys in the world. There was very little you could do to actually improve the lot of the other denizens of the wastes other than the occasional donation of money or fresh water. In this game… from the very beginning you are actively improving segments of the world and making it a decent place to live in. Sure the world is dangerous… but you are making it far less so for a group of settlers. That right there is the hook, and when I am out in the wastes… every hotplate and desk fan… excites me because I can go back and build something really cool with the parts.

Streaming and Games

While prepping this post today I watched a little exchange on twitter. Essentially one of my friends challenged streamers to do more with the games they are streaming. That it would be nice to have streamers take a mostly educational stance on either showing other gamers how to do something… or working through problems. While I think that might be pretty cool, the truth is that is not at all why game companies seek out streamers. I am going to give an analogy that is going to be a bit long winded, but stay with me. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, and in this part of the land there are few things more important than High School sports. I have my own damage thanks to this fact, and having no interest in sports at all… but that is a tale for another day. In a small town the team is the center of pride for the community… and while high school athletics has the possibility of making money for a district… in a small town it is mostly a giant hole that you pour money down. So when it came to maintaining facilities, it was always a struggle… and knowing this soft drink companies would often times ride in on a white horse to save the day.

There was not a small town anywhere near me that did not have either a big Pepsi logo or a big Coca-Cola logo on their score board. Of note I have no clue who’s scoreboard this one actually is, but I am just using it to illustrate my point. They would offer to sponsor the scoreboard, make sure the school district had a free supply of cups, lids and straws… brand new pop machines… and a discounted rate on the soda itself just so long as they would sign an exclusive contract with the brand and only allow their products to be sold at school events. The schools needed the goods they were offering… and could make money selling the product which then would end up supporting the school. Pepsi got advertising out of the deal and more than likely converted a good segment of the townsfolk into loyal Pepsi or Coke drinkers for life. My small town had Pepsi and it is probably no small coincidence that I grew up in a household that drank Pepsi and still drink predominately Pepsi products. The indoctrination works, and goes back for generations… so much so that when a school changes affiliation there is often times an uproar in the community.

But What about Streaming?

So you are asking yourself… Bel… you just told us an elaborate story… but you said it was about streaming? This is precisely what is happening with game companies and streamers. There is a natural symbiosis at work. The gamers need a fresh supply of whatever happens to be the hotly contested games to stream, in order to keep the eyeballs on their channel, and the companies need to have their games placed strategically on as many channels with as many eyeballs as possible. So even if there is no payola happening under the table… the streamers are actively promoting the products of these games companies. In fact there is a not so subtle desire on the part of the streamers to keep from burning any bridges with a company… because that could very well mean that they would lose their privileged access to new releases. On the part of the company… all they really want out of the deal is for this streamer to look like they are having a really good time playing their product, that way someone leaves the channel and gets convinced to subscribe or pre-order because it looked so appealing.

Sure it would make sense for them to serve a greater educational purpose… but honestly… the big popular streams aren’t doing this. The popular streamers are entertainers first and foremost. They are selling themselves playing this game more than the game itself. They build up loyal followings because the people are interested in the person, not so much what they are doing. The advertising still works however because it is subtle. They might have their back wall decorated in products of the company they are streaming for, or be wearing branded merchandise that the company provided… or even giving away items for the game on their streams. While all of these seems fairly natural and filters into our subconscious as benign… it is absolutely planned branding and ultimately we are the dollars that the companies and the streamers are trying to get. Once upon a time… game companies cared deeply about what the blogosphere was saying about their game. That time unfortunately is over, and over the last few months I have come to realize something. Blogging is not dead by any means… and nor is Podcasting really… but in the gaming sphere neither are they growing. Once you leave the land of MMO gaming… you are hard pressed to find ANY blogs devoted to games.

For example I have crawled the internet trying to find a source of news and information about Destiny other than Reddit. There is simply no one out there blogging on a regular basis and producing content explaining how the finer points of the game work. There are however hundreds of YouTube channels and streamers devoted to this niche. There are almost no blogs devoted to Call of Duty, but similarly there are thousands of channels devoted to it. While blogging was the comfort zone of my generation that grew up reading game forums… and podcasting is the natural extension of that… the next generation no longer really cares about it. They are completely connected to YouTube and Twitch as their game information sources, and as a result… I feel like the bloggers really don’t have much sway. I am not trying to do this as a living, so in the grand scheme of thing it doesn’t matter too much other than the fact that I don’t have much of a shot in hell of getting into this exclusive alpha or that limited beta. The companies know exactly what they are doing… and quite simply they are playing the numbers. They are putting their product in front of as many eyeballs as they can, and doing so in the medium that has the largest majority of those eyeballs… Twitch and YouTube.

Fighting Nostalgia

November 9, 2015 by Belghast

The Afterglow

You know… Blizzard would probably win back a lot of players if they activated every single account for the two weeks following Blizzcon

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) November 7, 2015

During the midst of the BlizzCon festivities I tweeted the above statement… and at the time I thought this would be a brilliant idea. BlizzCon brings up feelings in me at least that I didn’t even realize were still there about a game I have not been actively playing for six months. So yeah… it seemed like if they would just automagically make it so everyone can log in and play during BlizzCon and the two weeks after… they would probably re-hook a lot of players on the game or at least get them to stick around for a few months. The problem being… two weeks is probably long enough to make someone come to their senses. I phrase it like that because I am going through a bout of momentary insanity myself. Every instinct in my body tells me that I really want to play some World of Warcraft, which is odd because nothing really seemed that amazing while the presentations were going on. There is just something about the BlizzCon buzz that is real and tangible and makes you want to sift through your past characters and revisit old haunts that you had long forgotten.

I am having these desires to log in and run Icecrown Citadel or Naxxramas… or even Ulduar. Basically this is 100% nostalgia attacking me and making me want to go experience what I considered to be the best era of the game. I am fighting the urge with every fiber of my being because I know as soon as Tuesday happens… I will be devoting my life to Fallout… and thinking “Warcraft who?”. I know I could log in and play sub level 20 characters, and I have considered that… but have not been certain if that would make the desire better or just worse. The problem is… I don’t REALLY want to play World of Warcraft… I want to play the game circa 2009 when we were still in love with the Wrath of the Lich King patch cycle. Some of the Legion content seems like it could be really cool, and I do hope with every fiber of my being I somehow find my way into Beta, but I know all that waits for me on the live game is the same stuff that lead me to finally cancel my account again. Yes I am rationalizing the hell out of this because I am just trying to hold out until I am safely in a Vault Wednesday.

Closer to Sleeper

The above image was me yesterday morning while I wrapped up the AggroChat podcast and made my own blog post, waiting and hoping and praying to see a Warsat drop. Part of the time I spent trying to make Destiny Event Tracker work… which it does… but it feels like there is a paragraph of explanation text that needs to go with it that simply does not exist. It seems like this is a timer that shows when an event MAY spawn, and some of the spawn zones are not exactly active. For example I really do think that the Warsat simply no longer drops in Skywatch because of all of the other events that are happening there now. I waited that timer out for a significant amount of time and never saw one. However once I switched over to checking the Mothyard on earth, aka the location in the above image… I quickly got a Warsat and was able to move on. Similarly quickly I was able to get both the Mars and Moon Warsat drops which were pretty much accurate according to the timers listed above. That only left the archives mission on Venus, which I know I MUST have done at some point…. but damned if I can remember doing it at any point in the past. Maybe there is a special version if you are on the sleeper stimulant quest chain, but I do not remember something quite like that.

I have now finished powering up the Ikelos core, and have turned it in to the Gunsmith. In theory tomorrow with the reset he should offer me a new quest to go do a 280 light version of the Saber-2 strike. If I can cobble together a group for that, I should be able to loot the sleeper stimulant frame, which at least based on what I am reading will turn in at the Gunsmith for my finished 290 Sleeper Stimulant heavy pulse rifle. This will be the first of the exotic weapon quests that I have really completed… not counting the one you get from the gunsmith at rank 4. It definitely feels less arbitrary than the exotic bounties used to in year one. In all of the bounties I completed I only ever got the bounty for the last word. This at least gives me a ladder that I can climb, with more importantly a starting rung of that ladder that is clear…. well clear based on using external sources. I am not sure how the hell people figured these things out the first time… it seems like pure madness since the game doesn’t really give you much information to go on. I guess Bungie is accounting for the fact that the internet and YouTube is pretty much ubiquitous and someone somewhere would upload a video on how to do pretty much everything you can think of. I still at some point need to get the Cult Ghost from Paradox so I can eventually get No Time to Explain. Since my hunter is my Future War Cult devotee, I am thinking maybe I should try for it on them because at this point they should have all of the faction needed to complete the quest.