ffxiv Archives - Page 76 of 92 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Heavensward

October 20, 2014 by Belghast

Fan Festival Was Amazing

Watch live video from finalfantasyxiv on TwitchThere have been several community events that I have watched over the years for the various games I have been into. I’ve watched SOE Live, and Blizzcon… so I guess I was expecting the Fan Festival to feel pretty much the same, but in the end it felt considerably different. With Blizzcon there is always the feeling that the folks from Blizzard are imposed upon to be up in front of the fans, especially during the question and answer sessions. SOE Live on the other hand feels more like a gathering of loyal fans to a long running franchise, but even it felt different. When one of the members of the FFXIV team was on stage, they were practically glowing with excitement at being there. If you think about it, I guess it makes sense… because this is a game that was so bad during the 1.0 launch that they simply could not charge money for it. These team members have through a monumental effort turned the listing ship around and not only stopped it from sinking but made it the second most successful subscription MMO on the market.

Watch live video from finalfantasyxiv on TwitchI think it goes deeper than that however. Each time a developer of any stripe was on stage, they were almost vibrating with excitement about talking to the fans. Naoki Yoshida aka “Yoshi P” the producer of Final Fantasy XIV and the man mostly credited for the games resurrection… was only actually scheduled to be on stage a few times. However he ended up sitting in on damned near every panel because you could just tell that he was having a blast at the festival. The man however that needs the lions share of the credit for pulling off this event as smoothly as it ran is Michael Christopher “Koji” Fox. Not only was he a constant bundle of enthusiasm over all matters lore, but he spent the majority of the conference live translating for every dev panel. This is a pretty monumental feat, and his localization and lore panel is one that everyone should see. Right now the twitch stream are these two 10 hour blocks of video… but I am hoping that these get broken up into individual panels.

Since the release of the game my friends and I have talked about just how awesome the localization and quest writing is for this game, and come to find out… that is almost entirely the work of Koji Fox. The Japanese version of FFXIV apparently lacks almost all of the flavor that the English version of the game has. During the Lore panel they gave a few examples of a Japanese quest that was extremely utilitarian contrasted against one of ours that is all about amazingly bad puns. I feel like the game would not have been nearly as successful were it not for all of this diligent work during the localization process. Apparently it has been noticed, and the Japanese version is going to be much more closely related to style of the English client from this point on. It almost sounded like things would even start in the English client and get translated to Japanese, but I might have misunderstood that bit. In any case Koji for me at least is the reason why this game is so damned sticky.

Heavensward

It is safe to say that I have not been this excited about an expansion in any game since the months leading up to the Burning Crusade. There is just so much that I am looking forward to in Heavensward, not the least of which is the unlocking of Ishgard. I am in the minority among my friends but I love Coerthas, and not because I particularly like the elves that inhabit it. I love snowy climates, and Coerthas is like the king of all snowy climates because it has Dragons and the Dragoons. I am looking forward to having Ishgard be the fourth city state and am hoping that it has a grand company associated with it. I am also hoping that the political assholery that is the Coerthas quest chains… does not represent all of Ishgard as a whole. The other thing that I am completely pumped about is that we don’t have to wait over a year to see this expansion. It is currently slotted for Spring of 2015 which could mean as early as March, but potentially as late as May. This is the way that you announce an expansion… a few months before release so that your fans have enough time to get excited about it, but not so much time that it feels like it is extremely far away.

I think the thing that excites me the most about Heavensward is the potential for new classes. It has already been stated that there will be several new classes and jobs to learn with the expansion, and over the course of the Fan Festival there were a few leaks. During one of the panels Gondai the battle team developer held up a Batman shirt, verifying one of the long held rumors that we would be seeing the Dark Knight. During another panel it was leaked that Samurai would also be included. Between those two I am pretty much in heaven. Both are two of my favorite jobs from the Final Fantasy series, and you can damned well bet I will level both of them… and depending on the particulars will likely switch to Dark Knight as my primary job from that point onwards. I have loved that job since Final Fantasy IV and always found it so damned disappointing when Cecil changes to being a Paladin. My theory is that Dark Knight will be the DPS half of Warrior, and likely use Two Handed Swords… but who knows.

2.4 and Beyond

The most exciting bits for me however had nothing to do with the expansion. We have been waiting anxiously for the 2.4 patch to launch, and during the Live Letter managed to get a definitive date. Next weekend will be the London Fan Festival, and a lot of the job related information is being held back to reveal during that event. However the Tuesday immediately following London, the 28th we are getting the patch that introduces Rogue and Ninja, the Final Coil of bahamut and a bunch of Quality of life tweaks. What I am really hoping is that since Second Coil of Bahamut is getting uncapped in the amount of loot you can get from it each week… that they might be doing the same for Syrcus Tower. If nothing else the Soldiery gear should be considerably easier to get since once again they are introducing a brand new Tomestone category “Of Poetics”, which means they will be converting existing tomestones and lowering the price of items.

What is awesome is that Heavensward is not terribly far away, but they have a whole bunch of stuff that will be going into the game in the meantime. They confirmed that the Golden Saucer area will be going in during 2.5 and with it Chocobo Racing, various mini-games and the thing I am absolutely amped about… Triple Triad. This was a card game that existed as part of the Final Fantasy VIII game where you collected various cards throughout the world and dueled other Triple Triad players. The game play was extremely simple to pick up, but hard to master. I am so ready for this to be in game and expect me to duel a lot while hanging in our housing zone.

Community Spirit

There is a massive rundown on Reddit of all of the things mentioned during the Live Letter during the show yesterday. I highly suggest you check it out if you are wanting more information. Needless to say it is a super exciting time to be playing Final Fantasy XIV. If I was not already enamored with the community I would have been after the Fan Festival. The community spirit was constantly apparent when they dealt with players. There were a number of events set up for players who were attending the show to compete in. Among these was a preview of the as yet to be released Odin Primal fight. Teams of players had 15 minutes to defeat the encounter, which pretty much meant at maximum they had two attempts. The end result was not only bragging rights, but also an “I Beat Odin” shirt only available during the convention. What sprung up around it was an atmosphere of folks cheering on other teams as they tried to get their own shirts and the sharing of tips and pointers. As you talked to players that were defeated by the encounter, all they wanted to do was get back in line and figure out how to tweak their strategy for the next try.

Watching the crowds and watching folks on twitter talking about the experience… it was like the entire group was this big family. I was so happy to see that this same spirit that we seem to have on the Cactuar server, apparently exists on all other servers as well. I feel like each player that has made a home on their server, feels the same way about their own server as being truly “awesome”. The most interesting thing was listening to the various social channels in game during the event. It felt like most of the community was tuned into the festival and sharing tidbits of information they just saw. There was so much cheering over various things, not the least of which was the announcement that the Atma drop rates would be more than doubled starting in 2.4 and the Animus books themselves would be considerably cheaper after the Tomestone conversion. Folks are amped about what is coming during the next few months, and I feel like there won’t be a single dull moment until we arrive at the launch of Heavensward in the spring. If you could not already tell… I am extremely excited.

#FFXIV #Heavensward

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

October 17, 2014October 16, 2014 by Belghast

Little Projects

I am cheating a bit on this post, and writing it the night before I intend to post it. The plan is for us to go running around in Fayetteville tomorrow, and as such I really need not to take my normal leisurely “not having to rush to work” amount to time to write a post in the morning. Today was an insanely busy day. Right now I am taking a few days off work because it is Fall Break here in Oklahoma, and since my wife is a teacher she is out. One of the problems with living with a teacher is that you pretty much have to plan your time off around school breaks. For awhile we had planned on doing a little project, originally the intent was to rip up all of the carpet in the bedroom and paint the floor.

As time got closer to fall break we backed away from that notion, mostly because it would quite literally take all four days of this little break… and since my wife has had an insane semester so far… she really needs to take an actual break, and not a working one. Instead we opted to do a bunch of little things around the house today. Our house for starters was in massive need of a deep cleaning. Additionally we needed to gather up and take another load to Goodwill. The front closet was our key mission, and for quite some time it had been packed with coats and shoes we weren’t actually wearing any longer.

Instead we took what was useless space and turned it into something useable. Previously the closet was full with a bunch of coats that were too big for us since the weight loss. The floor was full of shoes that we longer wore, and the top was full of a bunch of board games that we had not touched since college. We kept the few things we were actually going to use from all of those categories and the end result left us a bunch of open space. We moved an 8×2 cube unit into the empty space, allowing us to store our SLR equipment on top of it, and use the other bins for scarves and such, and the lower two bins for storage of our current shoes. This left a spot on the right side that was perfect for our laptop cases, and just enough room to hang the handful of coats we decided to keep. One of the nice things is once we end up organizing something… it tends to stay organized so here is hoping that is the case with this as well.

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

When I finally crashed on the sofa after working on the house all day long, I logged into Final Fantasy XIV and ran my daily elite roulette with my good friend Cylladora. It went pretty smoothly and when it was finished we both logged out of FFXIV for a bit. I opted to poke my head into ArcheAge for a bit since right now it is pretty much a solo affair for me. A few days ago I applied for Greymoon the guild that everyone I know is playing the game is in… and was accepted, but I have zero clue how to actually go about getting an invite. None of the folks I know have been around since I got accepted, so I figure I will just wait until one of them is on to ask them. The guild requires folks to log into teamspeak, which seems a little odd to me. Granted I spend most of my time connected to TS, but it feels strange to require that folks just log in out of course rather than for them doing so with a purpose.

I am still slowly working my way through the content, and I am closing in on 22. I managed to get a pretty sweet katana to drop earlier which was a massive improvement over the blue sword I had been using for awhile. I took a handful of deaths because I really was not paying nearly as close of attention as I probably should have been. Lately I have been hanging out on the sofa and watching television while playing games, but tonight I opted for a movie. I had yet to see the Amazing Spiderman 2, so I decided to watch it. All in all I think it was a pretty good comic book movie. I’ve never been a massive fan of Spiderman, but I think all kids who read comic books at least know a bit of the storyline and a few of the major villains. It seemed like they did a good enough job at representing both the Green Goblin and Electro. It was good enough to pull my attention from the game a handful of times leading to deaths.

8 Bit Boy

A few days ago I watched the awesome Missy Mojo playing an interesting game on her stream. The game reminded me of a mishmash of a bunch of the late 8 bit Nintendo games as sort of a combination of McKids and Super Mario Brothers 3. 8-Bit Boy pays homage to so many different games and is an absolute steal at only $3.99. I have been playing it off and on, and while I don’t find it in the same league as the various frustration games like Super Meatboy, I find it plenty challenging. I’ve reached a point where the game has started to feel a bit like the special levels in Super Mario World. It isn’t the type of game I can play a lot of in one sitting, but I keep returning to it and whittling away at progress.

There is a certain generic character to the game, that would normally turn me off. The main character is just about as bland as you can get and at the same time looks somewhat like Mario, the character from Adventure Island, and even a little bit Alex Kidd. I think I would have rather the game actually built a strong character for you to play than something that ends up being his amalgam that never is as strong as any of them. The level design kinda feels super generic as well, borrowing elements from a ton of different games. So all of these things would normally turn me off, but I have to say the game play makes up for it in spades. It controls like pretty much the best version of all of the games it is trying to replicate. If you are into that sort of thing, you should totally check it out.

#ArcheAge #FFXIV #8BitBoy

Pre-Warlords Patch Time

October 15, 2014 by Belghast

Tis the Season

I have to say I am more than a little bit scared that this crap I have had for the last few weeks is not just “allergies” as I had originally thought. The last couple of days whatever it is seems to have settled into my lungs, and it is getting a bit harder to actually breathe. I still would not think anything about it really, apart from the fact that my boss has been out the last few days for a fairly serious case of bronchitis. I guess in truth it isn’t so much the bronchitis that is serious but more so the fact that he has bronchitis… and only one lung. In any case something appears to be going around, and considering the close proximity in which we all work together… it is likely if one of us catches something we are all going to catch it.

The positive I guess is the fact that today is my Friday. Since my wife is off for fall break the next couple of days I decided to take them off as well. As of yet we don’t really have any solid plans other than a few projects around the house. In any case even if I feel like shit, at least I don’t have to go into work right? Thankfully most of the projects are just time intensive rather than labor intensive so I can totally muddle through them with junk in my lungs. If things get much worse I will either go to the doctor or go to urgent care and hopefully get a steroid course or something to clear it up. I would probably call in this morning, but since my boss has been out for the last two days… and I have been attending meetings in his place… we need to actually do a bit of an information dump before I am gone from the office as well.

Pre-Warlords Patch Time

Yesterday twitter was completely abuzz over the release of the 6.0.2 patch in World of Warcraft that brought in all of the major changes that are always the precursor to a major expansion. One of the biggest of these was the entrance of the brand new player models for all but the Worgen/Goblins. While I had played quite a bit in Alpha… I had not actually copied most of my characters over to see what they would end up looking like. I copied my main Belgrave, but since he is a Worgen it really didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. I made a handful of premades, but when I last did that they still had the whole “single face” issue going on so it was really hard to see just how they would match up the appearances. So when I logged in last night I have to say I was a little shocked at just how strange the transition looked. Above is an image of Belghast prior to the patch and Belghast after the patch.

Something was just off for some reason in the appearance. It didn’t feel like “my” character that I had spent so much time playing and tanking on. So like everyone the first thing I did was run to the barber shop and try and improve the appearance. After some tweaking I finally landed on a look that feels “closer” to how I felt Belghast looked in appearance. What is strange about this entire process is how much I realize that the characters no longer feel like they are “mine”. I am not sure how to articulate that, because it wasn’t until I saw what my characters looked like that I realized how much the face apparently DID matter to me. The differences aren’t that massive, but they just don’t feel like they belong to me any more. They were just these higher fidelity things that happened to have the name and all of the gear of my previous character.

The characters I feel that translated perfectly however were the Dwarves. This shot is of Lodin my original raiding main from vanilla and his after the patch translation. I have to say it is perfect, it captures everything I intended for the character and feels just about perfect. So the handful of characters I have that were dwarves feel the same to me as they did previously. The big problem I seem to be having is with the Humans and Draenei. For whatever reason they just seem to be off in ways that I can’t fully articulate. If I did ever come back, I have a feeling I would be race changing most of my characters to be dwarves, because so far that seems to be the clear winner in this upgrade to me at least. Granted that could just be my natural affinity to the subterranean folk in the first place. In any case my curiosity was sated and other than things feeling odd, I didn’t really have much emotion about the translation either way.

Lalafell Badass

The real fun of yesterday was the fact that Tuesdays are reset day in Final Fantasy XIV. This means I was able to pop back into Syrcus Tower to try for another piece of gear, or one of the tokens needed to upgrade an existing piece of gear to ilvl 110. In addition this was the week that I finally would have enough tomestones of soldiery to be able to purchase the chest piece. Granted I already had a level 100 chest, but there is just something about this chest that the moment I saw it… I knew I had to get it. I have this thing for plate mail skirts in games, that I likely will never fully understand. In world of Warcraft, my favorite set of gear will always be the Paladin Judgement set, and in FFXIV it seems to be right now the soldiery chest. The problem with it is that my bunny samurai helmet no longer really went with it. Thankfully last week I managed to get in on a Behemoth kill which netted me the really badass looking plate helm I am wearing in the above image.

Tuesday nights are traditionally our raid night, but over the last several weeks we have been struggling with getting enough people online at the same time. Last night we sat there with seven for quite a bit, and then two of our newer 50s that are considerably less geared came online. We opted to get their weekly elite hunt done, which would allow them to get just enough gear to be able to enter something interesting. As a way of breaking them into what raiding in FFXIV is like, we opted to do Hard Mode Ultima Weapon. It had been quite some time since we had downed it ourselves, so we were all a bit rusty, but we managed to work through the issues and the massive lag issues our newest charges were having… and defeated the boss. Hopefully over the next few days we can start knocking out the various hard modes for them so that they can do the Hard and Elite duty roulettes for gear and tokens. If nothing else going into Ultima allowed me to take this really badass screenshot. I love my new armor, and while I will miss the bunny samurai hat… the behemoth helmet just looks amazing.

#WoW #FinalFantasyXIV

Rostygold and Primordial Shrieks

October 8, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff

For a few weeks I have been kicking around a concept, and I’ve finally decided to start moving towards the goal of making it happen. The concept is pretty simple, that I have a conversation one on one with a personality in our community or in the gaming industry. Instead of bringing them on to promote something, or actually talk about their gaming… I want to delve into the person behind the screen, what makes them tick and what they are passionate about. I decided to give the show a quirky name “Bel Folks Stuff” which as you can see from the logo is short hand for “Bel Talks to Interesting Folks About Really Important Stuff That They Enjoy Doing”. Because pretty much that sums it up in a nutshell. I personally find a lot of the people in our community super interesting and I have a sneaking suspicion that listeners would as well.

Now as far as the details of when I would record, how often I would record, what kind of turn around I am expecting… all of that is up in the air. This is the sort of thing that I would consider a “bonus” podcast rather than a serious scheduled one. There might be times that I schedule a recording and we realize there just wasn’t much to talk about. Other times I might record way more audio than I could ever cram into a podcast and have to release multiple parts. I am keeping all of this pretty flexible. Think of this as more of a “boutique” project than say AggroChat where we keep a weekly schedule. I am pretty pumped about the prospects, and the closest thing I can really compare it to is Actor’s Studio with James Lipton. I still need to firm up some of the things I plan to ask, but the idea is to keep it flexible and go wherever the conversation happens to go. I am also purposefully not making this specifically a “gaming” podcast. If folks want to talk about their passion for gardening… we are going to talk about their passion for gardening. The people behind the screens that we play interesting me more than what happens on the monitor.

Syrcus Grind Starts

For years I have been enamored with the concept of a “reset day”. So many MMOs have various gates that block you from completing too much content in a single week, as such once a week all of these gates unlock again and you can enter them to get awesome baubles. If I am being absolutely honestly with myself, I do not raid for the challenge… I raid for the spiffy things that I can obtain through it. Over the last several weeks I have been fastidiously gearing my Warrior job in Final Fantasy XIV through running Syrcus Tower and careful application of Tomestones of Soldiery. Over the course of these last few weeks I have managed to take my average item level up to 98 which is nothing to sneeze at. Quite honestly most of this has been sheer dumb luck. I’ve entered Syrcus each week and during the course of the first or second attempt at the run a piece of gear has dropped that was an upgrade and I won it. Now however I am down to just two pieces of gear that I can obtain from there… apart from the Sands and Oil of Time which I will focus on eventually.

Over the course of the night last night I ran Syrcus a grand total of four times, and in none of those times did I manage to see either the Helmet or the Legs drop. I feel like I have managed to pick up the easy pieces, and now that I only need two… both of which drop from the same boss I am going to have a much slower time to go. I will probably limit myself to a single running of Syrcus a night to keep from making it absolute misery. If by the end of the week I haven’t gotten either the helm or the legs I guess I will go after either an oil or sands with the hope of upgrading one of my existing soldiery slots to 110. I posted the picture above because there is a rule in FFXIV that I have noticed… if more than one Lalafell is standing in an area for too terribly long… dancing will happen. This is a bunch of us waiting on the last person to realize they had not yet rolled on the Onion Knight cosmetic pet. Of course I didn’t win it, but by god I am not leaving the instance until I at least see that my chance at it is over.

Rostygold and Primordial Shrieks

Several weeks into the game and I still find myself hopelessly enamored with Fallen London. I guess I have Tarantella to thank for this… and in turn my circle of friends has me to thank for their present addiction as well. I guess what surprises me the most about this game is just how deep the rabbit hole gets. In various areas of the game there are “Ambition” storylets, and for the uninitiated a storylet is the equivalent of a quest in other games. You might do something in an unrelated series of a events, which sets a flag that now opens up a bunch of stories that cascade off of it. The ambition quests tend to be the most intricate and detailed and also time consuming. While playing Fallen London there are many positive statuses you can earn, but additionally many negative ones as well. Each of the negative statuses has some consequence associated with it. For example if you allow your nightmares to reach 8, you quite literally go insane and can take no actions other than ones attempting to reclaim your mental faculties.

Yesterday I got an Ambition that involved me purposefully getting thrown into Newgate Prison to track an enemy of yours that is residing there. In order to accomplish this I had to raise my suspicion to 8, triggering a sequence of events that ended with being unceremoniously thrown into prison. From there I could go after my mark directly, but the problem is… once that was completed I still was sitting in prison. At this point I was forced to take actions in an attempt to lower my suspicion back to zero again. These actions involved calling in favors that I had earned in the rest of Fallen London, blatant bribe attempts, or doing actions that show “good behavior”. The problem is while the ability that got me into prison swapped 1 action for 1 suspicion… digging my way out of the hole took a considerably amount of time.

That seems to be the “negative” consequences in this game, are that you can get yourself into a situation where you have to spend copious turns correcting the mistake you made in the first place. I am still slowly working my way into the confidence of the devils. I had reached a point where I was getting dangerously close to losing my soul in game, and I took actions to delay that… which cost me a ton of faction in the process. As such I have been slowly building back up to that point, because really I think it might be interesting to see what the game is like if you have gone through the “abstraction”.

The problem with courting the devils is that you end up constantly teetering dangerously close to the fail condition on both Nightmares and Scandal. As such I am constantly in search of creative ways to lower both of these negative statuses. In any case I am still digging the game, and enjoying the setting. I really need to spend more time digging into Sunless Sea, but I keep hearing there is a major patch in the works that will fix a good number of the problems with the game, and as such I am mostly holding back. If you have not played this game and enjoy roleplaying games with quirky settings… I highly suggest you check it out. If you do add me as a contact, so that we can be “delicious friends” to borrow the verbiage of the game.

#FFXIV #FallenLondon