grand experiment Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bethesda Just Won E3

June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 by Belghast

It is nights like last night that make me realize I am wired just a little bit weird. Last night while the world seemingly was watching the season finale of Game of Thrones, I was tuned into the E3 2015 festivities over YouTube and eventually twitch. It started early in the evening with the 2015 Nintendo World Championships, and concluded later with the phenomenal Bethesda Softworks showcase. E3 is this miraculous time of bottled hope, that seems to pump up the heart of a gamer about what might be or at least what could be. If you did not have a chance to watch it, I highly suggest you check out the Nintendo Championships. It was equal parts charming, and thrilling… and when we finally got to the heads up match between the last two contestants I have to say I was literally tense for them. The hoops that they were asked to jump through were just silly, and in the proud tradition of the Nintendo Championship… they were in fact forced to play a “game” they had never seen before.

Doom 4

The real excitement however started when the Bethesda showcase began. When a game company shows off its wares at one of these shows, it is a rarity that there are so many different titles that I care about coming from the same place. Doom will always hold a special place in my heart, because in theory it was the game that really sold me on the power of PC gaming. I remember my parents getting so damned frustrated with me for tying up the phone lines as I dialed into a friends computer to play the game cooperatively. I remember spending hundreds of hours creating my own levels and imagining what my own version of the game might bring. I devotedly played the derivatives like Heretic and the oddball narrative spinoffs like Strife, because I literally could not get enough of the game. The problem being that with Doom there also comes a lot of disappointment, and strange decisions like that god awful movie.

The problem is that ID Software for whatever reason lost its way. The last Doom game shipped in August of 2004 and we have had to endure a decade of waiting. There was this period of time where ID seemed to forget what made its games great in the first place, as it curiously focused instead on building more complex engines… than creating interesting games. That wait however is apparently nearing its end, because last night we got to see Doom 4 in all its glory, and I weep at the system I will need to have to play it in all its glory. The game play I saw was this gorgeous carnal ballet of demons and zombies erupting into red volcanoes of gore and blood on the screen. It seemed to capture everything that made Doom amazing, and strutted its stuff with a level of technical detail that I am just floored by. What makes me even happier is it seems this time they did not forget that it was ultimately multiplayer that made the Doom franchise famous. They showed off this awesome new tech that will maybe once again make level creation simple enough that anyone can pick up the map builder and start making awesome things. The builder also seems to support the creation of game play modes themselves, so I am really hoping that we once again start to see some innovation from the community in moving the FPS genre forward.

Dishonored II

If Doom was not enough, moments later the folks from Arkane Studios took the stage to talk about the leaked announcement of Dishonored 2. Dishonored holds a special place in my heart because it is in theory a “stealth” game that I actually loved playing. Granted this is because it allows you to play the game in a way that takes all sneaking about and stealth game play out of the mix. The awesome thing is, it apparently also plays extremely enjoyably for the folks who do want to stealth about and have a zero body count. It is one of the few games that both myself and Tamriello raved about when it was released, so quite honestly I was going to snatch up whatever game came from them next regardless of its hype. All of that said it looks like the continuation of the original Dishonored game is going to be amazing. One of the most interesting features of the first game is the interaction of the character Corvo Attano and his “charge” Emily Kaldwin. As you play through the game, your actions effect the upbringing of Emily. If you play the part of a bloodless hero she focuses on the good things in life, or if you are like me and go for 100% bodycount… she focuses on the death, destruction and carnage.

In Dishonored II the trailer shows us that dear Emily has apparently followed in your footsteps and takes up the role of righting wrongs at the point of a sword. Ubisoft really needs to watch what Arkane is doing because they are fucking nailing it. They are giving us both an awesome and interesting male lead, but an equally interesting female lead. To make things even better it seems that they are apparently not just carbon copies of each other. Both Emily and Corvo will have unique abilities and game play styles that will cause you to approach the level design slightly differently. In theory this means that you have at least two fresh play through of the game, and four if you are trying to get a bloodless victory on each and a full body count victory as well. Personally I am likely going to play through twice because there is no way I can somehow stomach playing through this game in a full on stealth fashion. If my actions in the last game “raised”Emily… I would not want to meet her in a dark alley, because I am certain “my” Emily would be a brutal and heartless killing machine.

Fallout 4

If all of the above was not awesome enough… we all were waiting anxiously for more tidbits of news about the latest game in the Fallout franchise. The Fallout fans out there were absolutely not disappointed, as the floodgates opened with information about the new game. This game is apparently set in Boston as has been long rumored, and for the first time we get to see the world “before the bomb”. They showed a few minutes of the character creation segment of the game, and the events leading up to being forced to go into Vault 111. I am really happy with the way they are doing this, but one of the confusing parts about the demo was that people seemed to be excited that you can create a female Vault Dweller. Far as I remember you have always been able to choose to create a female vault dweller, or at the very least you have been able to since the birth of the modern Fallout series with 3. That confusion aside the new system looks great and I should be able to create a Vault Dweller I am happy with. The world out there to explore looked phenomenal, and I got flashbacks to the moment I set foot of the vault into the Washington wasteland for the first time.

What was even more amazing however is when they started going into the systems. Apparently this time around we are going to be able to fully mod out our weapons and our armor to create brand new items that don’t exist out in the world. Each component is modular and changes the function of the items they are attached to, and while they spent a lot of time creating brutal versions of Laser and Plasma rifles… all I could sit there and imagine were the awesome shotguns I would ultimately create. This was not all of the awesome however, in that they showed this amazing modular housing system that was like the next version of what was made possible with the Skyrim Hearthfire system. In the trailer they showed these insane bases that they had built using the system allowing us to essentially create our very own “Megaton”. This is playing down my alley because I always spend so much time kitting out my player housing in the Fallout games, because it allows me to have a place to be a packrat. After showing all of this goodness, to have me salivating… they did the ultimate mic drop. Apparently this is all going to be available this November 10th. I should probably give warning to everything that I know… because I will not be seen or heard from for at least a month.

Missing the Point

This is your standard reminder that Bethsoft rarely makes compelling worlds. Every complaint about themeparks in MMOs goes double for them.

— Fierydemise (@Fierydemise) June 15, 2015

Now is where I am going to diverge from the full on “fanboyism” for a bit to comment on something I have seen said so many times. I do not know who Fierydemise is, but the above comment was retweeted into my timeline. I have no problem with this person, and my commentary isn’t really directed at them, but instead something I have seen for years. When a traditional Bethesda “Fallout” or “Elder Scrolls” series game is released, there is a group of people that seem to go into them expecting a deeply tailored narrative experience. Quite honestly if that is what you are looking for you might be missing the point. These style of open world sandbox games are not really about being told a story, but instead giving you a launch pad and a creative engine for you to wander off and tell your own story through your interaction with the world. I love them so much because they give me the freedom to enter a world without deep narrative shackles. They don’t care one bit if I wander off in the opposite direction the in game indicator is telling me to go, and find my own experience out in the wasteland.

There are so many games out there that give you a very “on rails” narrative experience, and in each of them I try my damnedest to ignore it… and tell my own story. I appreciate these games so much because I don’t have to ignore anything. They give me little nuggets of story when I crave it, but also the insane hardcore explorer porn of going off and conquering an uncertain world. It has been said that these games sacrifice fidelity for freedom of exploration, and I am completely fine with that. I guess for me maybe it comes from cutting my teeth playing games in an era essentially “before stories”. It also helps that I am far more combat drive in a game than story driven, and often times finding myself frustrated when getting bogged down in a series of cut scenes. There have been so many times when I have waited for games to “open up” and let me “do my own thing”. With Bethesda titles, I know the moment the character creation is over… that they are going to let me off my leash to go bounding madly into the distance and cause havoc. These games are designed specifically for me, and people like me… and please don’t try and shackle them with deep narrative.

Sequels that were Better

June 13, 2015 by Belghast

Chris Pratt: Raptor Whisperer

Yesterday I did something fairly uncharacteristic for me and took off a half day from work, just because I felt like it. It was shortly after turning in the paperwork that I realized I should really use this opportunity to go see Jurassic World. So I got my ticket for the 1 pm and settled into the theater expecting it to be largely empty. I was completely wrong, the theater was absolutely packed, so I am guessing I was not the only person with this idea. As far as the movie, I have to say I liked it quite a bit. My initial review was not as good as the original, but better than the sequels, but shortly realized that it sounded like I didn’t like the movie. I actually enjoyed the sequels quite a bit, just nowhere near as much as the original. I remember seeing the original in the theater and being enthralled, and that kind of magic just can’t be captured again.

The movie was enjoyable, but mostly once things started going to shit. The best moments in the movie involved Chris Pratt. He has become this loveable goofball of an action hero, and in many ways he reminds me of he way Harrison Ford played a lot of his action roles. The movie is kind of a big dumb action movie romp through dinosaur land, and I am perfectly fine with this. There were a lot of call backs to the original movie, which played well for a nostalgia factor, but also gave certain aspects of the movie a “been there done that” feel. It was well worth the $5 for the matinee ticket and hell it was probably worth a full priced ticket as well. I have a feeling we will see a reboot of the franchise considering that they left things open in the end for sequels. No one seems to make a one off movie anymore, they have to leave things open to make a desperate ploy for more money later in the form of a sequel.

Sequels that were Better

My initial reaction to Jurassic World being better than the original sequels got me thinking. The concept of a sequel is such that we immediately expect it to be worse than the original. So today I am going to delve into some direct sequels that worked surpassed the original games. Now there are some ground rules here. For example Castlevania Symphony of the Night is a sequel in theory to the original Castlevania… problem being decades passed between those two games so it is a no brainer that SOTN surpasses the original. The same is true for the original Zelda and Link to the Past. It isn’t really fair to talk about those games, because they are not direct sequels and had a lot more to work with than the original did. Similarly I am going to ignore games like Doom 2 and Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny… because they are quite simply the original game with more features added onto it. I feel like in order to declare something a sequel that surpassed the original, it needs to actually go past what the original game offered. I am looking at you Fallout and Fallout 2… because while I enjoyed the second game a lot, it probably should have just been an expansion pack since the engine was essentially the same.

Master of Orion II

I loved the original Master of Orion game, but when the sequel came out it just did everything better. The graphics were higher fidelity, and you could delve into things at a much higher level of detail. The game kept my favorite race the Silicoids and seemed to make them even more badass. Additionally you had the ability to design your own ships, which gave me the fantasy fulfillment of rolling into a star system with a death star and destroying it. The game was far more evolutionary than revolutionary but it surpassed the original in a way that it completely took it off the map. The funny thing is that this game still holds up, and I can still lose an entire afternoon playing it through the GOG galaxy client.

Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest

This is probably going to be the most controversial pick that I make, because people either seem to love this game or absolutely hate it. For me it took a game that I already liked and simply made it matter more. By the time this game came out I was already heavily leaning towards roleplaying games as my primary source of enjoyment. Simon’s Quest took the Castlevania game that I loved and added a persistent component that let me improve over time as I explored the world. Now there were moments in the gameplay where it was not terribly obvious how you should proceed, and these got frustrating apparently in tracking down a couple of draculas parts, but for me at least this is the game that really cemented “Metroidvania”. It was part Castlevania, part Metroid and part Adventure of Link, and melded together in a way that I enjoyed immensely. The critics at the time bashed it because it was not enough like the original Castlevania, and ultimately the third game in the series became more popular, but I still feel like Simon’s Quest was the best of the 8 bit Castlevania games.

Warcraft II

When this game originally came out, I for the most part ignored it. I thought Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans was a boring title, and in truth at the time I would have rather played Dune 2. It was not until the first Battlechest existed that I finally gave this game a chance, and I spent the next three months obsessed with it. The gameplay felt much more responsive and you had so many more options of things that you could build. I’ve always been a base builder when playing an RTS and this game allowed me to go to stupid lengths to build impenetrable fortresses. What really extended the life of the game past the original release however was the fact that you could download all of these user created maps in the form of “PUD” files, which in itself was a bit of a play on the Doom “WAD” file format. After a few months I spent as much time designing new maps for the game as I did playing them. Warcraft 3 really gets credited for the birth of World of Warcraft, but I think this is the game that made us first give a damn about the setting.

Assassins Creed II

First off I have to admit that I am not really a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I have spent a bit of time piddling around in them but quite frankly they don’t offer the mad hack and slash game play that I really crave. Ultimately the game is ruined the moment I need to stealth around and complete a mission. The rest of the time I have a blast killing random guys on rooftops, but that pretty much is ignoring the thing that people seem to like about it the story. I have to give this game credit however because when the first Assassin’s Creed game came out I played it on a friends console, and found the controls to be some of the most frustratingly cludgy things ever. I pretty much ignored the game from that point on until at the urging of Tamrielo I finally gave the game a proper shot. The second game improves on everything that was wrong with the first game and manages to make moving around the world feel natural. If it weren’t for the fact that the game is largely about assassins that like to stealth about and attack from the shadows… I could probably enjoy it. That said I have to give this title credit for eclipsing its predecessor and spawning the franchise proper.

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 took all the bits that worked well in the original Mass Effect and then sanded down all of the bits that never worked that well. The end result was the best game in the Mass Effect series as far as I am concerned. The first game was okay, and upon going back and playing it I can appreciate it for what it was. At the time however I just could not get into it. The combat in that game was maddening at times, and felt like it wasn’t quite certain how to do turn based third person combat. The second game however made it feel fun to duck behind objects and snipe things, in the same sort of way that Gears of War did. The other thing that made the game amazing was the sheer scale of the number of characters you could ultimately recruit into your party. I still think the Mass Effect series would make an amazing television show, that played out over the course of five or six seasons. If I have to play one game in the series though, I will always return to playing ME2. It still has the most enjoyable mission system, because I like the feel of going off on these smaller strikes rather than getting bogged down in the length on rails story missions. I would seriously kill to have a game that was just a bunch of going off on random strikes forever, that was Mass Effect game play at its finest for me.

I Showed you Mine…

I just scratched the surface on sequels that ultimately trumped the original game. Now that I have shown you mine, its time for you to show me yours. What games did you feel outpaced the original, or what games did you not manage to get into the series until the second iteration. I am curious what games you hold a torch for after all these years. Not sure why I was feeling particularly nostalgic today, but ultimately I decided to just run with it. I am hoping that this post spawns other posts or at least some comments below.

About League and HotS

June 3, 2015 by Belghast

“Last Hit” Builds Contention

Yesterday Heroes of the Storm officially launched around the world. As a result there has been some gnashing of teeth lately discussing how HotS is essentially a “dumbed down” version of League of Legends. The complaints I am seeing revolve around the lack of complexity in the individual champion builds, and the team focus rather than the single player focus. All of these things I see instead as positives. I have spent more than my fair share of money and time on League of Legends because I have a significant number of friends who really enjoy it. It is one of those game experiences that I find enjoyable only when I am playing with and against friends. When you put me out into the community as a whole, the toxic environment surrounding the non-ranked community is a massive turn off. I have heard that as you move up through the ranks the community starts to get better and more professional, but I lack the desire to play that game or any game for that matter “competitively”.

The big problem I had with League was the fact that it felt like I was not only competing against the players on the other team, but also competing against my own team mates for resources. The concept of last hitting feels so divisive that I am shocked it exists in any team based game. The fact that a team mate can either purposefully or accidentally snipe the last hit on a minion and gain all of the gold just seems like a horribly selfish tactic to introduce into a supposedly “team focused” game. While I feel like the higher tiers of competitive play more than likely focus on the team effort and winning games, the low tier players tend to focus entirely on making themselves look good. The best way to that end result is to feed heavily in lane and go on a murder spree, which means the other player in that lane is going to be starved out of resources and won’t be able to help the team later in the game. Essentially all I am saying is that I think the concept of the “last hit” breeds contention between team mates more than it ever supports positive play.

Item Build is Too Fiddly

While the first problem I have with the game I consider a fundamental design flaw, the second big problem I have with League of Legends is a “me” thing. I detest the item build system, in part because it asks me to care far more about that game than I actually want to. League is never going to be a game that I play on a serious level, but instead a game I play with my friends when they decide that they want to play it. I want to play just good enough not to shoot my team mates in the foot. The problem is doing the item build system well, requires you to have actually research your champion and what sorts of things they need. What I want is a more universal path to “this item adds more awesomeness” so I struggle to find items to build that make sense for whoever I am playing. Now on champions I have played a lot like Garen, WuKong or Darius I have finally figured out how I want to build each of them for my own play style. The problem being this was something that happened over lots of trial and error. Quite frankly I don’t want to have to devote the processing cycles to figure that out, I just want a sequence of choices that add some flavor but in which there is no real “wrong” choice.

Essentially the system I am describing is the system that Heroes of the Storm uses, and from the moment I saw it I immediately felt at home. I know that I can make small tweaks to the way my Hero performs, but at the end of the day no single choice is going to make or break the game for me. Essentially even if I just blind pick abilities to get back into the action there is nothing that I can do to screw it up. Someone described it as MOBAs with training wheels, and I am completely fine with that. Essentially the MOBA audience is already solidified around either League of Legends or DOTA 2, and there is nothing that will change the fact that those two audiences are extremely devoted to their chosen game. I see Heroes of the Storm being the game for the rest of us, the folks that are mildly interested in MOBAs but simply don’t want to have to memorize the amount of information needed to play either of the other games effectively. I still play League with friends but HotS is the only game I would consider solo-queuing in.

Champion Design

The big area where I have to crown League the king however is in the area of Champion design. They have managed to create this extremely malleable mythos that allows them to quite literally create a champion that can do ANYTHING and make it work thematically. The reason why I keep returning to the game is to keep playing these new and interesting champion designs. HotS I feel does a better job than most of the other competitors with making champions feel like fully fleshed out beings, but the key problem there lies in the fact that they can ONLY draw upon Blizzard characters. League of Legends can create brand new characters on the fly without having to worry too much about them not fitting into the lore of their world, because said world is ridiculously open ended. Right now every single champion in Heroes of the Storm has to fit into the Diablo, Warcraft or Starcraft universes. Given time I can see them also adding in Overwatch, but even then those are very specific genres that they can draw on, whereas League tends to take inspiration for designs from other pop culture iconography.

Lucian for example is a blending of Morpheus from The Matrix and a Grammaton Cleric from Equilibrium. Twisted Fate is absolutely Gambit from X-Men, and Draven is extremely influenced by Kraven the Hunter from Spiderman. Volibear is absolutely Iorek Byrnison from the HIs Dark Materials trilogy. League essentially has free reign for what they can adopt and adapt to fit into their world. Granted in each case they have absolutely made the champion into their own thing, but that initial inspiration still sits there oh so thinly veiled. Heroes of the Storm on the other hand is forced to eat its own, as it can only consume characters that are already in the existing Blizzard Intellectual Property Universe. I feel the end result is going to always mean that League feels far more fresh and interesting, and HotS to some extent will always need to rehash nostalgia to inspire its player base to keep playing. The positive is however that Blizzard players have proven time and time again to be deeply susceptible to fits of nostalgia. I am happy that both games exist, but the only one I actively want to play on my own is Heroes of the Storm.

Don’t Believe Your Own Hype

May 22, 2015 by Belghast

Strange Dreams

Last night I failed miserably to attend the World of Warcraft raid. For whatever reason I have not slept amazingly well this week, so by the time I got home yesterday I found myself incapable of sitting up straight in my office chair. From there I attempted to game on the couch from my laptop, but before long was finding myself dozing off. So around the 7:30 start time of our World of Warcraft raid I was ultimately taking a nap. It looks like they put in ten solid tries on Blackhand without me, which is pretty awesome. Hopefully this coming week we can manage to down him and take his candy. I am not sure why I am apparently sleep deprived but after all the napping on the couch I still managed to sleep a fairly full nights sleep. Admittedly I woke up several times during the night, but each time I was able to get right back to sleep without much issue.

I did have a really strange dream during the course of all these wake ups. It was at some banquet for Blizzard Entertainment, and somehow had gotten chosen to say a few words. When it came to me and I introduced who I was and what blog and podcast I am from… there was a sheer look of horror from the stage. It was like this overwhelming wave of “What is he doing here?” sweeping over the fine folks from Blizzard. I proceeded to say a few words about my love of Blizzard and I am not really sure what happened next because I woke up. However I do remember having this general feeling that I did not belong there. The funny thing is… that in order for the dream to function I would have to be well known, and this is something that I am not willing to accept. I don’t think anyone at Blizzard has a clue who I am, let alone enough of a clue to be horrified that I would be speaking at their banquet. I am just a guy that does a thing, and not terribly important for doing it.

Don’t Believe Your Own Hype

One of the interesting things about being a blogger or a podcaster is that you are forced into the often uncomfortable role of self promotion. This aspect of blogging names my skin crawl because ultimately whether your like it or not, you are building a brand. The brand is made up of you, the image you project of yourself and the content you create. Most of us adopt a persona of sorts that we break out when it comes to interacting with the world and our readers. For some of us that persona is really damned close to the real thing. For me it is like a super hyped up and self confident version of myself, and the odd thing is that over time the REAL me has become more and more like the “Rockstar” me. For the most part this is harmless, because “super” me probably is far more enjoyable to be around than the sulky and moody “actual” me that exists sometimes. The problem is it is really damned easy to lose your sense of self on the internet.

In the decade or so I have been serious about socializing online, I have seen more than a few people lose themselves in their own hype. They start to believe that they are legitimately famous and as such somehow separated from the “common” folk because of it. If you ever find yourself with the strong desire to utter the phrase “Don’t you know who this is?” then chances are you have already gone off the deep end. As strange as it sounds this is a constant fear of mine, that I will end up becoming one of those empty self promoting husks. I spend most of my time trying to actively deny the fact that I have any sway over other human beings, and that I am ultimately just talking to myself. The reality is somewhere between because apparently as much as I try and deny it the whole #BelEffect thing that I am cursed with is apparently a legitimate thing.

Find A Grounding Force

The reality is that on a daily basis I have somewhere between 500 and 1000 readers of this blog when you combine direct hits and folks that read it through an RSS reader. I am by no means a large presence on the internet, but I do have a niche following. I do everything in my power to forget that I actually have readers, largely because I am scared to death of turning into one of the people that I have been frustrated with in the past. I just want to be me, doing the thing that I do… and sharing that thing with other people. Essentially what has worked thus far is to surround myself with people that are not buying into my own hype in the least. While my friends like to grief me with things like that hashtag or trying to claim I am some media personality… they are also the first people that would call me on my shit if I ever started to believe any of it. More than anything the biggest grounding force in my life is my wife, who is not part of the gaming universe at all.

I realize this is a strange post as far as Newbie Blogger Initiative tips goes, because if you are just starting out you are in that phase where you are struggling to gain the courage every single day to post anything at all. There comes a time however when those fears go away and you are able to interact freely. I’ve tried my best to stay grounded and humble as this blog has grown from something a couple dozen people followed to the readership it has today. The problem is that not everyone does, and I have watched this whole process go to folks heads. I am no one special, and thanks to the support of my wife and friends… it is my intent to keep it that way. Self promotion is a necessary evil, and the “rockstar” version of my personality will more than likely always need to be there as a coping mechanism for the stress of dealing with other human beings. It is my sincere hope that I can keep from falling into the trap of believing in my own hype. It is also my hope that as you go through your own rollercoaster of success with your own blogging endeavors that you too can keep from believing your own hype.