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Lumu and Watcher Cat

February 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did not do much in the way of gaming because I came home just mentally drained from work, and wound up logging in and out of various things while watching a couple movies. Instead unsurprisingly I am going to talk a bit about Monster Hunter World. This weekend I spent a significant amount of time upstairs playing it and am now in the Rotten Vale area of the map. Weirdly enough the main screen of the game still shows the Coral Highlands, but I do love how it occasionally changes to areas that you now have access to. At this point I have taken down Anjanath, Barroth, Great Girros, Great Jagras, Jyuratodus, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Paolumu, Pukei-Pukei, Radobaan, Tobi-Kadachi, and Tzitzi-Ya-Ku… which feels like a lot of Monsters but ultimately I think the grand scheme of thing I am barely progressed at all.

In fact after my last play session I believe I finally hit Hunter Rank 7 which is just a drop in the bucket compared to past Monster Hunter series games that capped out at like 999. There is an achievement for getting to Hunter Rank 100, so at the very least World goes that high but I have no clue how much higher it continues after that. Regardless… I am a babe in the woods when it comes to this game and nowhere near as far along as a good number of my friends. My play style is just way more meandering I believe than others… and weirdly enough after playing with Tam for a bit over the weekend he wins the bloodlust trophy for this game. He kept getting distracted during hunts by whatever happened to cross our path… whereas I seem to have a laser focus on the beast at hand often times ignoring collectibles long the way when I am in serious hunting mode.

Paolumu or “Lumu” as everyone seems to call it is legitimately one of the weirder hunts I have participated in. This crazy squirrel bat thing inflates an air bladder… and then uses it to bounce up and down on you for insane amounts of damage. I managed to rip it to shreds with my long sword and even managed to completely wreck its wings… which seemed to effect how well it could fly but not necessarily if it could fly. That was a completely different experience from when I fought Pukei-Pukei and somehow managed to actually ground that monster completely once its wings arrived at a similar tattered state.

Tam joined in the fight and got completely distracted for a little bit when Tzitzi-Ya-Ku crossed our path. The worst times were when we managed to be fighting Lulu and Tzitzi at the same time… and the stupid lizard would flash knocking us all out temporarily. Every time Tam would mount the back of Lumu it would end up subsequently taking off and flying away with him in which I wound up running after trying to sort out where it would land. That said when we got Lumu to a point where the wings were ripped and shredded it seemed unable to really go very far and mostly just flew around the area we were in at the time. Regardless… it was a goofy monster to fight and my strategy largely wound up with me trying desperately to hit is air bladder. I do not look forward to hunting them for fuzzy gear because at least with long sword they were super annoying to fight.

I feel like I need to talk about how inconvenient grouping is in this game. On Sunday afternoon we managed to get a four player group of AggroChat folks all together trying to do some of the low level stuff that Kodra needed since he started super late. The biggest problem we kept running into was the fact that in the grand scheme of things… what we wanted to do was just create an expedition and go off and hunt everything currently available in zone. However there really is no good way to do that… and functionally one of two things needs to happen. Firstly you can start a quest and after its completion just agree to stay in zone and return to camp instead of base. The second option is to have someone start an expedition and run and find a monster… allowing you to fire off a SOS beacon… and then hoping that all of the folks you actually intend to group with can find it in the cludgy join quest interface before someone random pops in.

This system just works counter intuitive to everything I expect from grouping in games. My brain works in a mindset of forming a group and then going off and doing a thing… not doing a thing and then hoping people can somehow join you after the thing has already started. We had a PSN chat session going and it would have been so much nicer if we could have simply invited that “fireteam” for lack of a better term to participate in something rather than having to time everything just so. Because grouping is so cumbersome… I largely spend most of my time roaming around the world by myself. After the challenge of trying to get all four of us together in the same group… I am maybe rethinking my decisions before to jump into random games and “help” people out. What if I was the fourth rando that ruined someone else’s attempts to play with the folks they had on voice chat at that moment?

The real victory of the weekend is that I managed to get high enough hunter rank to do the timed event needed to get the parts to craft my palico a watcher suit from Horizon Zero Dawn. I managed to get enough parts on the first outing to craft the suit itself, and I largely decided to ignore the weapon considering it was such a massive downgrade from what I was currently using. The watcher suit itself however has an insane amount of defense and as a result it has gone into my main rotation of palico gear. It does feel a little bit weird to see a watcher cat roaming around with me in the wilds because there are certain instincts I still have from playing Horizon Zero Dawn. At least I am not playing with a bow… otherwise I would potentially keep trying to shoot out my palico’s eye.

In the grand scheme of things I am still really enjoying this game and happy to be getting indoctrinated into the rich world of Monster Hunter. As a closing note… I’ve been seeing something weird happening in the Destiny YouTube and Twitch communities. There are so many of these Destiny-centric channels that have been essentially rededicating themselves to Monster Hunter instead. While this follows my own current evolution game time wise… considering I only actually played a single match this past Iron Banner, it does feel really odd to have my news sources for Destiny turning into a wall of Monster Hunter. On one hand it makes me happy… and on the other hand it makes me frustrated that the state of Destiny has reached a point where folks are abandoning it in droves. At the end of the day you have to play whatever it is that currently makes you happy, and I to have been almost entirely devoting myself to this weird and wonderful universe of Monster Hunter.

Megafauna Rider

October 9, 2017 by Belghast

I spent most of my weekend playing Horizon Zero Dawn instead of Destiny 2 for a change. On Saturday night we recorded our September game club show and as a result I pushed myself to beat the main story quest in HZD. Firstly… this is really a foreign mode of play for me and in many ways it takes a lot of fun for me out of the game to focus fire on the main story. I remember bowing out of the FFXV show in part because I didn’t want to ruin the game by forcing myself to ignore all of the side stuff. With Horizon Zero Dawn I am sorta glad that I forced myself past this hump and buckled down on finishing. This might be some of the best science fiction that I have experienced regardless of form factor be it book, movie or game. The problem is it takes a really long time into the game before the hooks are set and you get enough of an inkling of what might be happening just beneath the surface. There is this place that a lot of people seem to stall out, where you exit the sacred lands of the Nora and before you are handed the reins to the real story of the game. I personally stalled out here as did Void and I have a sneaking suspicion SquirrelPope did as well based on some comments last night. Once you get past this hump however it is an amazing roller coaster of a ride all the way to the finish.

Since I was forced to play in a manner that is really not my style, I spent some time Sunday going back and meandering my way through the world. The game does the whole hand wavy “the final events have yet to happen” thing after you finish the credit roll. I feel this obligation to sit through the credits as a sort of homage to all of the people and work that went into making the game. This one however tested my resolve because it is quite possibly the longest credit roll I have seen, but it just shows how much effort goes into making a modern AAA blockbuster. I do however highly suggest you wade through because there is a massive payoff at the end that explains one of the weird little things that happens in the world as you explore it. I think more than anything that is what I love the most about this game… it is constantly planting seeds that do in fact grow into something cool by the end of the game. There seems to be nothing placed in this world that does not at least eventually lend its way to a larger purpose. The secrets of the game are revealed to you at the same time as they are to your character Aloy, and as a result the experience is really interesting. There were several times I thought I had guessed how this was all going to play out in the end, but the game kept throwing me curve balls. The end result is a mythos as rich as any of the big tenets of geekdom, and I am absolutely rabidly looking forward to the expansion that is coming in November.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.

Docks and Bellowbacks

March 9, 2017 by Belghast

I believe I have talked about one of my side projects before, but for those who are un-indoctrinated… I have been charged with setting up a gaming space at work. For the first pass we decided to go with a Wii U given that it is sort of a universal middle ground between folks who self identify as gamers… and those who do not. Everyone has played at least one round of Wii Bowling, and already since installing folks I never thought would sit down for a game of Mario Kart have done so. Part of the build out involved picking out controller docks because we did not want a bunch of wayward cables. For the Wii U pro controllers I chose the above dock by Nyko… admittedly more on price than anything. However after getting it and setting everything up… I am absolutely in love with the design. Each controller has a boot of sorts that you plug into the USB port, and it fits relatively snugly. Then on the backside is a magnet that holds the controller in place on the dock itself. It just works amazingly well and the magnet is strong enough to not only hold the controller but also serve as a guiding mechanism to make sure that the controller gets docked successfully. Which made me start to wonder… does Nyko make these docks for any other console system? My challenge is that in my office I have a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and am contemplating moving my Wii U back upstairs. That is five different styles of controllers that need to be charged and cradled in a reasonable manner to keep from getting a whole slew of cords tangled.

The tragedy however is that while Nyko makes controller docks for pretty much every system available… none of them work like this one. In a perfect world you could simply buy one base dock tree and then a bunch of connectors for the various controller types that you have. After a few hours of frantic googling… it seems like no one really has a system that works like this. There was however one apparently for the previous console generation that had support for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360… but for whatever reason never carried forth into this generation. What I would love is for Nyko to simply just release versions of this docking system for all of the platforms, or in truth… just sell me docks and then controller boots individually and allow me to mix and match my own system. In part I am writing about this problem today, because often times as soon as I complain about an issue… one of my readers comes out of the woodwork to present a solution. So if you have any ideas… that does not involve access to a 3D printer because I am already thinking along those lines… I would love to hear it. It is honestly the magnets that make this system work so amazingly well and quite honestly… I don’t have the electrical chops to make a magnetic USB connection work. I think part of the problem is that the Wii U pro controller uses the USB connector that the previous generation used… so mini instead of micro. That said… this feels like money left on the table because I know a lot of people like me with multiple console systems all with controllers that need charging.

Last night I returned to the cursed lands and continued my process of roaming around aimlessly. I went a completely different direction than the one I had been heading in… and encountered the Fire Bellowback… or as I think of them Fire Beetles. I ran into a trio roaming around some ruins… and after scanning them a few times to sort out how I was going to attack I went after them with gusto. The thing I didn’t expect was the fact that they essentially throw napalm at you, and have an insane range. I was well into the fields on the far side of the river and they were still lobbing fireballs at me. Essentially I got damned good at dodging while fighting them, and eventually whittled them down using my bow kitted out with extra tear damage. As you can see in the above screenshot they each rewarded an insane 1050 experience, but also provided a hefty amount of salvage. Other than that I actually started working on quests… namely the “Revenge of the Nora” story line. I have been playing this game in short spurts, and prior to last night it largely meant just roaming around and taking down machines. I cannot underline just how much fun that is… and how perfect the game play feels as you bulls-eye a watcher in the eye and watch it explode.

I really like that Horizon seems to reward you equally for aimless roaming and focused gameplay. I essentially had looked at the direction that the game was suggesting I go… and went in the opposite direction and largely… that was a completely fine decision. It was not really until last night that I finally sat down and started following the quests… and that too was a perfect fine decision. I am broke once more however because I bought a purple set of armor, and decided to go with the version that has balanced resistances since… more often than not I end up in melee range before fights are finished. Probably a lot of my success with the fire beetles is due to the fact that I had fairly decent resists going on. What I really want now is some upgraded weapons, because I am still using the Carja bow that you get from either collectors edition or the pre-order bonus. I got a whole slew of items and I am not completely sure which ones came from which thing. I’ve heard that the hunter trials reward items, so in theory I need to focus on doing some of those now. Regardless this game is still freaking amazing… and it serves as part of the reason why I have struggled to get into Breath of the Wild. In many ways the newest Zelda game just feels awkward and cludgy… whereas Horizon absolutely nails smooth and flawless gameplay.