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Active World

August 16, 2017 by Belghast

As you know from the last several posts I have made on the subject… I have been playing a shocking amount of Guild Wars 2. I am still a little surprised myself considering how many years I just did not like this game at all. Something clicked in my brain and I am honestly happy that I stuck around long enough for that moment to happen. It’s weird just how much of what we like and dislike happens is related to the experiences we are ultimately comparing it to, and our present frame of mind. One of the things that I am finding shocking right now is just how damned active the game actually is. My frame of reference there has been mostly World of Warcraft, where not too long ago I spent some time on low level characters namely in the Ashenvale area. When pushing up my Orc Warrior I could go the entire night without seeing another single player. It legitimately felt like I was the only person in zone most of the time, and even if I made a trip to the Crossroads… it was a bit of a rarity that I actually encountered anyone there either. The weird part about this is the fact that I play on Argent Dawn and for the most part have every other role-playing server blended together… including the extremely high horde population Emerald Dawn server thanks to Alea Iacta Est and their presence.

Conversely while running around in Guild Wars 2 there is rarely a moment when I don’t have another player on screen. Last night I spent a good deal of time in Snowden Drifts which is a third tier zone in the Norn area, so not exactly a hub of the game. However each and every time I started to engage with an event or a hero challenge… moments after starting there were a slew of other players hanging out and doing the content as well. Now I gave the WoW reference not to somehow prove that game is dead… but just to highlight how vastly different the two games feel right now. Admittedly with World of Warcraft… the vast majority of the players are simply not leveling characters because if they are like me they have a stable full of post 100 characters in various states of completion. Guild Wars 2 has something else going for it though in that it serves to make every bit of content relevant by allowing the world to scale. Why this becomes interesting is the fact that if you do any major event… you have droves of players that show up to participate. The above event screenshot is from a random Ley-Line Anomaly from Gendarran Fields a level 25-35 area. By the time I saw the server message… and ported over there were already hundreds of players fighting the Anomaly. What makes this encounter so interesting is the fact that every so often it straight up kills a handful of players, and like clockwork there is always a chunk of players that stick around and rez the fallen before catching up. Thankfully in the case of this fight the mob drops these beacons that will allow you to leap ahead significant distances to try and keep from penalizing those community minded players.

One of the cool parts about Guild Wars 2 as well is the fact that at some point in the recent past they decided to open up the base game to everyone. Now you can pick up the “Standard Collection” for $49.99 which includes the base game, Heart of Thorns expansion and the as yet to be released Path of Fire expansion as well as 2 level 80 character boosts. That is pretty cool but if you are just wanting to dip your toes in to test the water, you can play the game for free with this registration link. In truth I suggest that option first given that it has legitimately taken me five years to reach a point where I am finding that I really truly do love this game. Now that free account has a bunch of restrictions on it, which thankfully they outline in a support article. Namely it seems like this is the standard protecting the environment MMO fare of limiting communication options. However there are a couple that are going to be annoying… namely the limit of 2 character slots and only 3 bag slots given that the game I feel has too small of bags in the first place. You are also limited to only the starter zones until level 10… but given you were probably going to stay there regardless that is not a big deal. Unlocking of Lion’s Arch around 35 is I believe about when you would normally go there through the story quests. Regardless if you decide you like the game you are probably going to at least pay the $50 to unlock the two expansions. The biggest annoyance to me would be Living Story Season 2 and 3 which are treated as separate purchases if you were not around to unlock the content when it was initially available. Now they go on sale periodically, however to purchase them outright would be around $16 per season. That said I have yet to complete Season 2 or in truth really get started in earnest on it, so that isn’t that big of a deal. The seasonal content helps you understand the lore of the world and the events that are going on around you. If you just want to smash things in the face with a hammer like I often do… this becomes optional content.

Top Five Lists Are Hard

August 2, 2017 by Belghast

I failed miserably at attempting to do a daily creative thing. Yesterday was an extremely crappy day on the work front, or at least one that drained every little bit of sanity out of me. By the time I got home I just wanted to vegetate on the sofa and play some games. With the announcement of the Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire expansion coming in September, this I am sure rekindled the fires for a lot of folks. For me personally… its particular un-directed style of roaming aimlessly yet still feeling like you accomplished something was a reasonable fit for the state of mind I happened to be in last night. It’s funny how my opinions of this game have changed significantly over the years. While I was in Alpha I was not a fan at all… and this is still the only Alpha program I purposefully resigned from. In Beta however I started to see some of the merits and played a little bit at launch, however that did not last extremely long. For years afterwards I was a bit at odds with the game and not really getting what everyone else was seeing in it. However about a year ago the AggroChat crew all returned and started doing some of the group content and more or less I began to see the merit. More recently I just find it an excellent source of bite sized entertainment… which is I think the intended goal all along. Of the original Guild Wars content, Nightfall was probably my favorite “expansion” that of course wasn’t actually an expansion. So since Path of Fire is going to be in that same area I am looking forward to this expansion way more than I did Heart of Thorns. I also find it extremely interesting that they are continuing to give horizontal progression… which on some level has traditionally bothered me… but also allows me to not feel left behind each time the game moves forward. The primary problem there is that I feel so far behind in the alternate progression paths that I will likely never actually catch up without a serious time investment.

Alright Twitter RT this with your top 5 video games of all time

— Westen (@epicgeezr) July 30, 2017

Yesterday a tweet was making its way across my twitterverse and it was interesting seeing everyone’s responses. The problem however is that I personally have a really hard time narrowing it down to a list of 50… let alone a list of 5. I made an effort to do so… then as soon as I posted it came up with half a dozen other alternates that potentially could have bounced the titles I listed from contention. When I look at an “of all time” list I tend to think of things in terms of long term replay-ability as well as the overall experience I had playing the game. Namely can I pick this title up today and still play it with the same level of joy that I had when I originally played the game. This means there is a significant number of titles from the PS1 and PS2 eras that are just dead to me without the introduction of a remaster or remake. We’ve experienced this several times in the AggroChat game club as we attempted to relive a title from the past only to find it doesn’t live up to our modern expectations for how a game should behave. So here is the list of games that I managed to whittle down to on impulse yesterday.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

This is the only game that is pretty much universally always going to be my number one slot… until something dethrones it. I love everything about this game from the art style to the music to the level design. I have this title in the original PS1 release, Sega Saturn, PSP, PS3, PS Vita, and Xbox 360 versions. To the best of my knowledge this means I own it on pretty much every platform it has been released on… and truthfully I can happily keep playing this over and over. About once a year I seem to boot it up and play through it… and I am secretly hoping that the Switch gets a release at some point.

Fallout New Vegas

I waffled on this one a bit because I like ALL of the modern Fallout games… but personally I feel like New Vegas is the best version so far. It has everything I liked about Fallout 3 but includes a much better overarching storyline. At release this was rife with all manner of bugs… but over time through official and unofficial patches it has reached an extremely solid state and is one of those games I can still boot up at any time and return to happily.

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

This for me is always likely going to be the pinnacle of the Legend of Zelda franchise. Its Zelda at its most Zeldaish, and again this is one of those games that I can keep playing over and over. I remember this also being one of the first times I was completely shocked by a World 2 transition, in thinking I had almost beat the game… and then finding out that maybe I had finished a fifth of it. What I love the most is just how much stuff lies just slightly off the path and is not really required to beat the game.

Dragon Age: Origins

There are times I would like to say that I love the Dragon Age franchise… but in truth I really just love Dragon Age: Origins. I have significant problems with Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, and I just can’t ever seem to get anywhere near as engaged as I did the first time. The thing is… it isn’t actually the first time because I have continued to successfully return to this world and play it over and over. The Grey Warden storyline beats every storyline they have come up with to date in every possible way… and I just want to keep reliving that character and experience. Additionally this was my Gateway drug into Mass Effect because if I did not love this game… I probably never would have given that franchise a second shot.

Mass Effect 2

Linked to the one above… Mass Effect 2 is the pinnacle of the series for me personally. It does the most things I want from Mass Effect which is honestly the “away mission” feel that you have in this game. In part I think Andromeda does a good job of recapturing this feeling, but the second game in the series will always hold a special place in my heart because it is the game that made me fall in love with this setting. I bounced pretty hard off of the PC port of Mass Effect because of the fairly cludgy interface, but after absolutely loving Dragon Age… and finding out that ME2 was going to be using that engine I gave the game a second shot. What I found was this rich world that ultimately caused me to go back and suffer through the first game so I could experience more of it. I love everything about this game from the recruitment of interesting characters, to ominous baddies… and even more ominous allies.

More Games

The moment I hit send I had a flood of other titles that really should have been included, and as a result I am just going to run through a few of these without delving into them. Regardless this is an extremely difficult exercise, because how do you condense over thirty five years of gaming into a single list of five.

Destiny
Diablo 3
Final Fantasy VI
Super Mario World
Knights of the Old Republic
Planescape Torment
Super Metroid
Phantasy Star IV
Guardian Heroes
Rivercity Ransom
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
Mortal Kombat II
World of Warcraft
Hellgate London
Wolfenstein New Order
Doom II
Minecraft
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
Thomas Was Alone

and honestly… the moment I hit post I will think of several dozen more than deserve to be on the list. Basically this is a really hard thing to do for me.

Pax Prime Hopes

August 28, 2015 by Belghast

The Big Show

It feels like we live in this world where there is always another big games show around the corner. I remember when quite literally all that existed was the Consumer Electronics show, at least for the United States. Now we have dozens of shows sprinkled throughout the year, all of which vying for exclusive announcements. As a result companies have to trickle information out so that everyone that attends one of the shows feels like they are getting to see something unique or special. This weekend of course is Pax Prime, and I had hoped this year I would be attending. The truth is however that Pax Prime will likely never be in the cards, as the husband of a teacher… August is a HORRIBLE time for me to be travelling. During this month my wife is in full on panic mode as she gets adjusted to another school year, and while for a bit I was bummed at not being able to attend, I am realizing it was ultimately for the best. As a result I will be a loyal yearly Pax South attendee and pretty much brush aside the thoughts of doing the Pax Prime thing. Instead at some point I will just go out to Seattle to meet my friends that seem to be pooling there, instead of trying to make one big combo trip. Having been to a Pax, I have to say in truth the folks at home have a much better view of what is going on there through the live stream. As a result I am looking forward to spending much of the weekend watching as much as I can. Which gets to the point of this mornings post. I thought I would talk a bit about the various things I am hoping to get out of Pax Prime 2015.

Final Fantasy XIV

The thing that I want this weekend… is a release date for 3.1. I know we are getting close, but I want to know a firm release date so I know just how long I am going to have to wait. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is going through a bit of a content lull much like it did after the release of A Realm Reborn. Quite frankly at this point I am tired of running Neverreap… since that seems to be the dungeon I get most often. Two dungeons in a roulette rotation simply is not enough, and I am honestly a bit concerned with the news that 3.1 is only going to add two more as well. My hope is that they create a four dungeon expert roulette instead of moving Neverreap and Fractal to Hard Roulette and making expert just be the two new dungeons. The other piece I am really looking forward to is the next 24 player dungeon the Void Ark, aka the creepy airship you sometimes seem flying around in the Sea of Clouds. The game needs a shot in the arm of content, because folks are starting to slow down… myself included. More so than this… I would like to see some future vision type stuff for 3.2 and beyond. In the past we have usually had this list of things that Yoshi P had promised for “future” patches and we are a bit low on that right now.

Wildstar

Similar to FFXIV… and honestly a lot of the things I am going to talk about this morning…. I just want a date for when the Free to Play conversion will happen. They keep putting new patches on the test server and it is starting to feel like maybe they are close, but what I need from them is a date. I am enjoying Wildstar so much more than I have at any point in the past, and a lot of the changes that are coming in with the free to play conversion are going to be generally good for the game as well. Past the free to play conversion… I would like to see some information about what their long range plans are. I don’t even know if they have a presence at Pax Prime this weekend, but even if folks don’t they tend to time announcements around major shows as well.

Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Since the expansion announcement at Pax South, I have had a strange connection with this title. Traditionally speaking I do not really enjoy Guild Wars 2 that much. That said I have to say the revenant looks more interesting than any of the previous classes. I fully expect that I will be picking this title up when it launches if for no reason other than the fact that it is once again “buy to play” and I have gotten my original purchase out of the game. This has been the year of announcements completely unfettered by timelines, and it is starting to get frustrating. Once again we have a big title looming on the horizon with zero date announced for when we will be expecting to play it. I am expecting that this one is going to be a lot like Heavensward was, where they announce the launch date and it is only a few months away. My hope is that Pax Prime finally is going to be the show where they talk about this at. Give your fans some firm dates.

Blizzard Titles

I am honestly not expecting anything new to come out of this conference from Blizzard. They did their big reveal of the World of Warcraft expansion at Gamescom, and I fully expect that with Blizzcon coming up in November that they will be holding everything else closely waiting on their big show to reveal it. I fully expect that they might announce a new Overwatch champion at Pax Prime, and potentially some more Heroes of the Storm champions or maps. What I am really wanting from them is an announcement for when Overwatch testing will begin and a beta key delivered in my mailbox. Everytime I launch the patcher and see that Overwatch button at the bottom of it… I get a little sad in side. I really want to play this game, and I sincerely doubt I will be doing so anytime soon. Over the last few weeks I have come to the realization that I still very much love Blizzard games… it is apparently only World of Warcraft that I am on tentative terms with. I would love beyond love them to announce something for Diablo 3… like maybe another expansion? They have already hinted that they might be doing a Warcraft RTS after they wrap up with Starcraft II… so that alone has me pretty pumped.

No Man’s Sky

I am so irrationally hopeful about this title, even though I keep telling myself that there is no way it can deliver on everything it has been promising. I love exploring new areas, and I love killing strange and interesting creatures. No Man’s Sky promises to give me a procedural generated world where I can do this… over and over again throughout the galaxy. On top of that the graphics are kinda cool as well with their hyper saturated version of reality. Again… all I really want from Hello Games is a release date. I have a feeling that we will have an announcement for some sort of beta testing to begin soon. Supposedly Amazon UK is already taking pre-orders so hopefully we will get a date this weekend.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

At this point I just want more information on this title. We saw a short trailer from E3 and I have been wanting more information since. Once again I have no clue if there will be a presence at Pax Prime, but I am hoping! I want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how this title is actually going to work. I want to know if there is going to be a multiplayer aspect, or if this is just one big single player skyrim-esc sandbox. I also want to know more about the world that surrounds the game.

Devilian

With my recent foray back into Diablo 3, it has made me extremely interested in Devilian a Diablo like Korean game that Trion is going to be publishing. I know Trion is going to have a good presence at the show so I am hoping we find out when the beta process is going to begin. I ended up with a key from Gamescom and I keep checking my Glyph launcher expecting it to show up in the list of games that are playable at some point soon. While on the topic of Trion Games, it is too soon to hope for a Rift expansion but I would still like to get more information about where that game is heading, and some more detail on the future plans for ArcheAge. The folks at Trion Worlds are awesome so I am always interested in what they have to say.

Goodbye Names

June 23, 2015 by Belghast

Preorder Announcements

This is a topic I have mulled over for several days, and am just finally getting around to posting. I have had a fairly rocky relationship with Guild Wars 2 that started with me bowing out of their alpha program and ended with me finally finding my groove a few months back and getting my first character to 80. The game is enjoyable but honestly it is not the kind of enjoyable I had hoped it would be. Which was all the more surprising when I found myself oddly riveted to the presentation at Pax South in January. I thought maybe it was the energy of the crowd, but whatever it was I found myself actually looking forward to the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have always liked Dark Knight type characters, and the Revenant looked very much like a character in my wheel house. So as we moved into E3 I was looking forward to seeing more information about the game, namely about the release date, pricing information, and what the guild hall system would end up being like. In all cases I pretty much got what I was hoping for, but upon seeing the pricing something struck in my craw.

As I looked through the options available on the website… the Standard, Deluxe and Ultimate versions all included the previous game. I kept looking for the versions of the game for players who bought the game at launch and had no need for the base game. Problem is there wasn’t one, and there was not planned on being one. Ultimately what I was looking for was a $10 or so price break on purchasing the game, to acknowledge the fact that I have owned their game forever now. The funny thing is… had they not mentioned anything about the core version… it probably would not have annoyed me at all. I guess I am not alone in my frustration because yesterday Arena Net announced that they would be giving Veteran Players an extra character slot to make up for the fact that they have owned the game so long. This is a nice gesture, but for me… who already has two empty slots because I don’t care enough to roll more characters… it still rings a little hollow. For the time being I won’t be pre-ordering, and honestly not even sure if I will be playing… just depends on what else I happen to be doing at the time this game launches. If nothing else I am sure it will go on sale at some point and I will be able to pick it up then.

Goodbye Names

I guess this morning is going to be a mixed bag of commentary from me, because another thing that mildly frustrated me yesterday was the announcement that World of Warcraft would be releasing all character names that had not logged in since December 7th 2010. While 2010 is a very long time ago… I also happen to have a bunch of characters. In fact I have a grand total of four different World of Warcraft accounts, and my primary and active account has managed to hit the maximum number of fifty characters. I have characters spread out on dozens of servers that I have no clue when the last time I played on them. So last night when I saw this news I had resigned myself to spending two hours logging every character on and off to make sure I reset the timer. Apparently the plan going forward is to do this release of character names each time Blizzard releases a World of Warcraft expansion. Personally I think that simply having an active subscription should be enough of a toll to pay to keep your names from getting the axe… but it seems that is not the case.

So while I was extremely frustrated when I first read that… my frustration faded as I came to the sad realization that there are very few characters in World of Warcraft that I really care about anymore. I have only had one foot in that game for the bulk of this expansion, and last night I realized I would far rather spend my hour making progress in Heavensward than logging characters in and out to make sure they did not get squashed. Today should be a big day for World of Warcraft with the 6.2 patch content being released… but I am finding myself not excited about it at all. I have too much new and shiny going on in another game, and while at some point I will log in and get my Naval missions going, for the foreseeable future I am not planning on raiding. That was really the last thing keeping me connected to that world was my raiding, and when it started to feel stale and forced… I felt it was time to start quietly fading into the background. So I guess at this point I am come around full circle, if someone really wants to be one of my old character names… then awesome go be it, because I won’t be using the name.

In Other News

Last night was a pretty great night… once I was able to get through the login boss mind you. I have some serious fears as to what tonight is going to hold in that department, unless Square Enix has something up their sleeves to make that problem magically go away today. For most of the night I was held up in the main storyline trying to get to level 55, so immediately upon logging in I started trying to arrange some dungeons. However other people in the guild needed stuff, so we arranged a very quick Shiva Hard trial for one of the guildies. It is amazing how “easy” this fight is, but then again my scale is greatly skewed from having just finished the Shiva Extreme battle last week. From there we ran another round of Sohm Al, which again dropped some nifty stuff for our alts. I think I managed to add one more piece of the cosmetic set to my inventory, which is awesome… because I absolutely want to complete the full set. Ashgar mentioned earlier in the evening that he needed the first primal encounter, and we also had several others nearing that point… so we hung out for a bit letting them get caught up before taking on the primal and defeating it rather brutally. That fight with a full guild group is a very different experience than with random players.

From there… we were bad people in that we decided to try and plant the seeds of raid addiction in a friend of ours. Lately Shiana has been leveling in game, and he was our raid leader back during Vanilla WoW and has raided off and on since then. I am not sure if it was Tam or myself that suggested it last night, but in either case we were both in collusion to get him into raiding. As a result we started last night on Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5, and while we had two new players to the fight… we managed to get through it without much issue. It was helped massively by the fact that both of the players that we grabbed were seasoned raiders in other games. From there we moved into Second Coil of Bahamut aka Turn 9 and we struggled a bit. Firstly with Ashgar gone by this point, I had to take over and learn the main tank role on the fight. In my experience each time you change roles on a fight, it is like starting back from square one and relearning everything. Then we had Shiana for whom this was just his second FF raid experience… but all in all we managed to make what felt like a bit of progress. At the very least I think I could fill in for Ash if I needed to, once I got over the whole Ravensbeak straight up murdering me bit. It was a great night of gaming… and tonight I am hoping to get a run of the third dungeon in… that I just unlocked.