final fantasy Archives - Page 7 of 21 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Musical Steeds

May 18, 2016 by Belghast

Muscle Memory

The tale of our run in Final Fantasy XIV has been interesting, namely we played for roughly two years straight… and then after the launch of Heavensward that original group more or less faded away from the game. When we played the game at launch, I was towards the end of the pack when it came to leaving, and this time it seems like I was among the first. I had split priorities when it came to FFXIV and WoW raiding… and to be truthful I was burning out intensely in both. I last played regularly in December of 2015, and for whatever reason I’ve just not had much drive to dip my toes back in. As additional story content was released, I made a college try to come back and consume it. Unfortunately however I never actually made it all of the way through the 3.2 content. As a result I admit I had more than a little trepidation upon returning, because I wondered how much skill I would have lost. It turns out “muscle memory” is ungodly strong, and for the most part I was able to sit down and begin rotating through abilities and hitting hotkeys by reflex.

What also helped however was the content we were doing. Now our raid group met on Tuesday nights for two years, and it seems as though the current batch of Greysky folks have kept up that tradition. This time instead however it has been turned in to a pony farm night. Now back when we were doing the Extreme Primals legitimately, I had managed to get the whistle for the Leviathan pony, and counted myself damned lucky. In the meantime however it appears that Square has increased the drop rate, and getting those musical horses seems to be a pretty regular occurrence. What shocked me was just how quickly the boss fights came back, even in their currently abbreviated state. For example I instinctively followed the normal tank queues for Titan… even though I initially stood on the wrong slice of cheese. I was happy to know that I could in fact still apparently tank in this game, and I think I will feel significantly better actually doing some duty finder for gear currency.

A Good Night

It felt really great to be back, and equally great to be playing Lala-Bel again. There is just something about this character that makes me happy, and maybe some of the funk I have been in has been due to the fact that I haven’t been playing him lately. After the raid my friends Tzi, Rylacus and Nyte helped run me through The Antitower, the first of the 3.2 dungeons. I poked around a bit afterwards trying to figure out where all the other dungeon quests started, but sleep claimed me pretty quickly. I know I will be doing Destiny raid tonight, but the hope is to return to FFXIV in the coming days. I mean maybe the answer is to simply play all the things. Right now I am getting enjoyment out of WoW and FFXIV again… so maybe the idea is to simply ration them both. I know I have a lot of catching up to do in FFXIV so it serves as an excellent game to grind away while downstairs. When I left in December I was one of the better geared characters in the Free Company… and now I am probably one of the worst geared. I know this… because in running the Antitower I managed to pick up no less than two upgrades, which is generally a good sign that you are way behind the curve.

Garuda Pony

Nightmare Pony

I managed to get the Garuda pony which was an easy drop since everyone else in the raid had one, and was quite literally just farming it to get me one. Then I rolled on Nightmare that dropped from Titan, and managed to get the lucky roll. The only thing there is… I guess I didn’t fully realize that this was a rare drop from any of the first three primals… even thought Ashgar said as much. I didn’t quite grok it at the time, or I would have probably passed on the roll. We did not however see any of the ACTUAL pony that is supposed to come from Titan. We did however manage to get at least one person a Leviathan mount, and I believe one other mount… but I am drawing a blank. All in all it was a really fun night and I am going to try and juggle my schedule so I can start making this a weekly thing. Hopefully I didn’t do anything that pissed anyone off too terribly. I felt a little bad falling right back into my overbearing tank mode… but like I said I was largely relying on instincts to get through the evening and that comes with the tendency to pull. Ashgar however pulled for me a few times expecting that I would provoke it back from him, and I did like a good lalatank. It was kinda great getting to hang with Tzi and Rylacus again, even thought poor Tzi had no voice at all. Maybe I am over my mental block against MMOs, or maybe I just happened to choose the right nights to play again.

DAW2016: Square Enix

April 29, 2016 by Belghast

Developer Appreciation Week is here! For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster. The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios. As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better. That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole. So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there. If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

I knew sooner or later I would end up needing to do Square Enix because at various times during my life they played a huge role in shaping how I looked at games. Lets go back to a time and a place where the only gaming news I got was through Nintendo Power magazine. In one of those issues I was first introduced to a game called Final Fantasy. For ages I had been looking for the personification of Dungeons and Dragons in game form, and while the gold box games did a decent job of doing just that… there was always something missing. Final Fantasy bridged the gap and gave me precisely that, along with a story line that made me care about all of the dungeon crawling. I remember being so insanely excited when I went to a nearby Walmart and they had this game in stock. The only negative was that within a short few days I would be heading to Boy Scout camp for an entire week. While I normally loved camp, this was quite possibly the most miserable week of camp I have ever experienced. All that I really wanted to be doing was playing Final Fantasy from the comfort of my bedroom… and instead I was making campfires, and hiking up sharp flint rock strewn paths. When I finally got home, firing up that Nintendo and playing Final Fantasy was quite literally the best feeling ever. Regardless of how exhausted I was from a week of camp, I still ended up pulling an all nighter and getting through that damned Marsh cave.

When Final Fantasy 2 was released… aka Final Fantasy IV for the rest of the world… it once again dominated my life for a period of time. I was completely blown away by the graphics at the time, and also amazed at how much more complex the story line of that game was. This was also the point at which I learned the hard lesson of save at every single save point, because of a bad mishap with the Magus Sisters. The game also introduced the term “Spoony Bard” into my vocabulary and for that I will always be grateful. This was also the first game that gave me characters I had no interest in playing… I am looking at you Edward and your inability to do any real damage. The game also gave my quite possibly my favorite goofy archetype of character… the Dragoon, with its amazing but also sometimes frustrating jump attack. I was completely hooked on the notion of having this huge cast of characters that I could switch between at will… but then ultimately only ever seemed to play with the same party ever. For the most part that party was Cecil, Rydia, Kain, Rosa, and Edge… with that last spot being highly variable as I went through the play session. This is really something I do even today when I play for example a Bioware game. In Dragon Age Inquisition, my party is pretty much permanently Cassandra, Dorian, Sera and my character.

It wasn’t until High School that Final Fantasy 3 was released… or Final Fantasy VI for the rest of the world. I remember it coming out around Christmas break and at first I rented it… which was a truly dumb idea given that the Super Nintendo didn’t have memory cards. The main reason for this was because the game itself was something stupid like $85 when it released, which was an awful lot of my limited resources at the time. However after a few days of playing the game I was making a trek to the big city to try and find a copy. After searching a dozen different stores I finally found a copy at Target, and much to my shock it was on sale for only $65. I am not sure exactly sure what it is about Final Fantasy VI, but for whatever reason I think this game will always be my favorite. I tend to love games that pull a bait and switch on me, when you think you are nearing the end of the game… only to realize that the world just got much larger and instead of being nearly done… I was just barely starting. I also have a soft spot for a lot of the characters in this game, because it managed to make me feel things that video games had not really succeeded in doing up to this point. Ashgar and I have had a conversation about this… and for me the game that did all of these things was Final Fantasy V. However for me… that game was not available and didn’t even receive a fan translation until I was well into college. The two games do a lot of the same things, I just happened to experience six first.

Over the years there has been a string of Final Fantasy titles always in my life, and several non-FF series games that I loved as well. For example I love beyond love Vagrant Story, and I remember playing the hell out of it when it came out on the PSX. I also spent more than my fair share of time playing Chrono Trigger, and the subsequent follow up games. Then there are games that I wish would get a reboot like Parasite Eve that were so amazing for the time in which they came out. Essentially there has always been some Square Enix game somewhere in my life, be it Bravely Default that I am slowly working my way through on my 3DS downstairs on my bedside table, or the Kingdom Hearts collection I have sitting beside my PS3 ready to start in earnest. All of these are in fact great experiences, but the one I feel like I really need to talk about is the miraculous rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV. This game was released in 2010 and was essentially universally despised. I remember getting into the beta for it and finding it just largely uninteresting more than anything. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t really feel anything about it. So I was more than happy to return to World of Warcraft, and forget that the game existed.

However in August of 2013 the game relaunched as A Realm Reborn, and I have to say I was shocked at just how much I liked the title. We played for a handful of months until our group ran out of content that we could realistically complete. Then July of 2014 I decided to fire the game up again, because I wanted to see how it had progressed in our absence. Final Fantasy XIV was one of those games that our group left on good terms. What I found waiting on me was this rich cache of content that laid untapped. Over the next several months we had what could only be termed as a renaissance of MMO gaming all centered around this game. I was happy to raid once again, and happy to be doing pretty much all of the tropes of a MMORPG. What made all the difference was the loving way in which this game was being crafted. I have to give huge shouts to the localization team and namely Koji Fox. Final Fantasy XIV is so amazingly well written and is packed full of more feels than most games ever manage to muster. There is content that will make you painfully belly laugh, and other times infuriate you for all of the right reasons. Then there are moments that will make you cry… and there are certain cut scenes in this game that even the mere thought of will summon up the waterworks.

While I am currently on a break from the game after burning myself out again with the launch of Heavensward, I know sooner or later I will return and be happy to do so. Heavensward was quite possibly the expansion I have looked forward to the most from any MMORPG that I have played, since maybe the launch of Trials of Atlantis in Dark Age of Camelot. Unfortunately much like ToA… I got my expectations up way too high, and the content drought that followed the launch ultimately ended up with me stopping playing. However as a couple of patches have built up for me, I plan on returning soon… probably after I get the upcoming Diablo 3 season out of my system. I am happy to know that there is still a very thriving guild presence in this game waiting on me. I have a feeling that sooner or later we will all return for yet another renaissance of MMO gaming and when it happens… it will be in huge part to just how great Final Fantasy XIV turned out.

Bunny Samurai Returns

February 24, 2016 by Belghast

Half Undressed

I am back on the wagon as far as cutting out caffeine during the evening. During my post PAX illness without really intending to, I quit drinking pop. Any time I attempted to it hurt my already ungodly sore throat so I switched to mostly drinking water, juice or fake koolaid. As a result my intake of Caffeine seriously plummeted, causing a few side effects. Firstly my operating range… was greatly stunted, and by that I mean that I am able to stay awake until 10 pm max instead of my normal Midnight to 1 am sleep times. Additionally I noticed that I actually slept better and fell asleep easier… so after all of these years of thinking caffeine had little to no effect on me… I am guessing I was completely wrong. Monday night I was being lazy and ended up drinking Mountain Dew, instead of making something else to drink and when I finally tried to go to bed around 11 pm I found it significantly harder to actually get to sleep. As a result last night I opted to drink mostly water, and once again returned to being able to fall asleep easily. This however has some strange side effects… like my body is still used to getting 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, and for some reason when I go to bed at 9 pm I end up waking up again sometime around midnight.

So last night I ended up waking up around 11:30 pm and my body apparently thought I had slept a full night. The television was blaring because it seems that I crashed hard and forgot to turn it off. In my brain I am guessing that I equated the television to the alarm clock, and I started going through the routine of grabbing underwear and taking off my night clothes and heading for the bathroom to take a shower…. only to realize that it was not in fact 5:30 am part of the way through that process. It is one of those moments when I was glad my wife was still completely conked out… because I am sure I looked like an idiot… half undressed, holding my underwear stumbling for the door. The point at which I realized was when I went to turn off the alarm clock only for it to finally dawn on me that it was the television. Now I am not saying I am giving up caffeine completely… because I just finished a tasty cup of coffee. I am however trying really hard to not drink anything with caffeine once I get home from work, and I have absolutely cut energy drinks out of my life completely. I am still very much going through the phase where every time I pass a cooler in a store that is loaded with them… I get that desire to purchase one. The positive however is that for the most part I don’t “need” one, and other than yesterday after not sleeping terribly well the night before… I haven’t had any real moments during the day where I was fighting drowsiness.

New Machine Thing

For the next few days I will likely be installing games on the new laptop, playing them once or twice and then moving on to installing another game. This seems to be my tradition when it comes to getting a new machine, because ultimately I am wanting to see how much better everything seems to perform. Last night the first game on the menu was Dragon Age Inquistion, which I finished installing Monday night. It ran beautifully and using the Geforce Experience settings it picked reasonably high settings, or at least high enough to NOT have playdough hair. After that I played some Fallout 4 and once again… it ran beautifully on reasonably high settings. The thing I am noticing is that there seems not to be nearly the gap in performance between the gtx 960m and the gtx 960 as there has been in previous generations. For the most part I am able to run things in the same sort of fashion I have come to expect on my desktop machine upstairs… which honestly makes me even happier. I was fully expecting the 960m to perform something akin to the 760/860 which had always been the case before… where a mobile card was roughly a full generation behind the desktop equivalent. Maybe Nvidia realized that this felt shitty and was also deeply confusing to the customers? The next game on tap will be to install the Witcher 3, which was another in the long list of games that my laptop simply would not play. At some point I will settle down and actually begin to play some of these games… rather than just launch them to see how pretty they look.

Towards the end of the night however I did manage to settle into a single game… that is at least until sleep claimed me. Yesterday was the release of the 3.2 patch in Final Fantasy XIV and I have honestly been fairly scarce in the game since well before the launch of 3.1. I always said at some point I would get drawn back in, and I guess last night in installing the client that started to happen. I am not sure yet if I will stick around for a long period of time… or if this will simply be another one of my “content locust” passes where I gobble up all of the new stuff and move on to something else. I do however want to see the new story content in 3.2 before someone online spoils any of the key plot points, which considering that is already happening to folks… I need to move fast. Last night I didn’t get much more accomplished than the first few steps of the continuation of the main story quest. I did however see several other quests that I am guessing are the new Hildebrand and new dungeon starter, that I will at some point have to pick up. The thing is… there hasn’t been a moment where I didn’t care about this game… I just wanted to play other things instead. I have a feeling that it will be up to the MSQ to determine if I really want to stick around after finishing the content. It seems like they also made some significant changes to the game, that I will have to sort through and determine how they effect me. One of my guildies last night told me to respec out of Strength because apparently Vitality is now literally the only stat that applies for tanking, so thankfully I had enough company marks to do that. This makes me wonder just how deep the rabbit hole of changes actually goes.

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.