lego Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Lego Worlds Impressions

June 2, 2015 by Belghast

Lego Open World

On an absolute whim yesterday I popped onto the steam website to check out what had been released, or was impending release this morning. One of the titles listed was something I quite literally knew nothing about called Lego Worlds. After some research, the consensus seemed to be Lego meets Minecraft. It has the same pedigree of the other Lego games out there as it is also created by Traveler’s Tales. Right now the game is on Steam Early Access for $14.99 and I figured for that price it was worth the risk. I was seemingly one of the few people who actually through Lego Universe was a pretty cool game. Similarly I have really enjoyed my time spent in Lego Minifigures Online, and will more than likely pick up the Lego portal based game as well. I may or may not be a Lego Maniac to borrow the 80s commercial catch phrase. As I sit here typing up my blog post I am sitting in an office surrounded by a mountain of Lego sets.

If you have ever played any of the Lego franchise titles like Lego Harry Potter or Lego Star Wars, this game will feel extremely familiar to you at least as far as movement and gameplay goes. Ultimately this is a game about destroying everything in sight, because when you destroy an object it erupts in a shower of “coins” which are represented by the 1×1 round plate pieces in various colors to denote denominations. Essentially as you roam around the world every new object you encounter, you collect its appearance. You can spend your coins to unlock the ability to build with these prefabs. This means that if you are running through an area and there is a neat lamp post along the trail, you can bump into it and collect its appearance and then build with these lamps from that point on. There is a truly overwhelming number of these prefab objects out in the world and in the three hours I spent yesterday playing I collected what seems like hundreds of them.

Custom Minifigures

When you start the game you are given a very limited choice of appearances in the form of either a Male or a Female explorer. As you roam around the world however you encounter lots of other minifigures. Some of them are friendly and simply walking up to them allows you to collect their appearance, and others are more aggressive and you have to defeat them to collect theirs. In either case these minifigures that you have met go into the same “coin store” as the prefabs you encounter, and from there you can spend your coins to unlock their appearance items. At any point while playing you can swap around your look by changing out the various parts that make up a minifigure including head, body, arms, hands, legs, hat, cape, and assorted hair slot options. So far while roaming around I have managed to run into twenty one different figures, ranging from Yeti to a Surfer Girl. Each of them gave me various unique bits to add to my assortment of appearance items allowing me to assemble some fairly strange looks.

LEGO_Worlds_DX11 2015-06-01 23-00-03-30

This for example is the caveman beard and hair combination, with the wizard cape, skull head and outlaw body parts. I got tired of this look pretty quickly but the beauty of the system is that you can swap things out on the fly and incorporate new pieces you might find as you are roaming around. I feel like that is this games strong point is that it really rewards exploration. While roaming around you encounter all sorts of vehicles and animals that you can ride on. Like everything else once you encounter it, you can purchase it in the coin store to permanently unlock it’s appearance. Once you have paid for an vehicle or mount like this, you can then summon it to your location at any point. This means if I want to ride around on a polar bear I can on a whim, or summon a racing bike, or even an airplane. The more you explore the easier exploration gets as you have all sorts of modes of transportations to get you where you need to go. Also while you explore there are special large chests that have items that you can collect like weapons and other items to help you in your adventures. Since I favor melee I am right now using a big club to bash things, but there is also a rifle and a bow that I have managed to find as well to allow you to attack things at range.

Interesting Exploration

One of the most interesting vehicles that I encountered was this Ninjago inspired drill car vehicle. With it comes the special ability to hold A while driving it to drill the terrain. There are a few pitfalls with this vehicle, namely that it always seems to want to drill directly down. That said I had quite a bit of fun tearing up the terrain and drilling under a mountain. Now getting back OUT of that area was more of a challenge. This vehicle from what I can tell only appears in the similarly “ninjago” themed Biome, meaning the one with the cherry blossom trees and the huge pagoda like buildings. Other vehicles similarly spawn in unique biomes, like the Airplane appears to only be in the snowy biome, and the “Monster Fighters” style Roadster only appears in the desert/Egyptian biome with the free roaming Mummies. Essentially each biome seems to be based on a popular family of Lego sets and generally contains creatures that you might also find in that set. The only one that seems to make zero sense so far is that Cavemen and Cavewomen seem to spawn damned near everywhere.

The game right now is very “early access” and I do not mean necessarily that the game feels “beta” and buggy, but more so that the game feels like it is missing a lot of features that will be in what I hope is the final version. Right now there does not seem to be much purpose to the exploration other than to unlock items to build with. The problem there is that there seems to be little to no reason to really build anything. There are certain biomes where skeletons spawn infinitely during the night cycles, but building a structure does not really seem to present you with much shelter against the endless waves of them. For the time being the game is strictly single player, but I know multiplayer is in the works. Right now the list of things planned from the Steam page includes…

Like/Dislike system for tailoring World Generation
Procedurally Generated Underground Cave Networks
LEGO ID integration to allow for sharing and uploading of in-game builds
Additional Biomes
Painting Themes
Pre-Generated Towns/Villages/Settlements relevant to the Biome
Updated AI Behaviors to provide organic feeling to free-roaming creatures and characters
Red Brick Extras
Full liquid behaviors
Additional Minifigure Characters and Creatures
Additional Vehicles and Pre-Built Models
Additional Weapons
Cut/Copy/Paste chunks of landscape
Underwater Gameplay (including Vehicles, Creatures and additional sea life)
Character Customizer
Online Multiplayer”

So as you can see they pretty much intend to flesh this game out to be competitive with the Minecraft genre. For $14.99 it was more than enjoyable enough roaming around and interacting with things. However if you are looking for a complete game, keep moving on. There really is not much “game” to be had here and in that aspect you are far better off for the time being playing Trove because it offers a lot of the same fun and exploration gameplay, while also offering an actual game that creates reasons for your exploration and combat. This is planned to stay in Early Access throughout 2015, and by the time it launches next year it is probably going to be an awesome experience. The biggest suggestion I have if you plan on giving it a try is to hook up a controller, because the keyboard and mouse control options are pretty frustrating. The user interface has been designed for a controller and that experience seems to be the most enjoyable.

Lost in Maguuma

February 9, 2015 by Belghast

Wanderlust

Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for many reasons. Firstly getting home super late Saturday night, and then recording AggroChat extremely late, meant that more or less I just straight up crashed instead of editing the recording. This meant first thing yesterday morning I had to edit the podcast and post it. After that I of course still had a blog to write, and needed to spend some time working on another article as well. Throughout all of this there were two problems. Firstly I had a splitting headache the likes of which I have not seen in almost a year. Secondly it was absolutely gorgeous outside, with the temperatures rising up to roughly 80* F yesterday. So my wife and I hemmed and hawed as to whether or not we would actually go do anything. Finally around 3pm yesterday afternoon we decided to get outside and go wandering about.

I’ve talked about the fact that any town of a decent size around me has a Wal-mart. It has always been this way, because quite honestly I live in the Wal-mart heartland, with Bentonville the home office only about two hours away. The first first Wal-mart supercenter in existence is about 30 minutes away in the town of Wagoner for example. Big Wal-mart stores are boring, utilitarian and predictable… but going to smaller less shopped stores often provides this strange melange of products that they still have on the shelf. Each store has a certain amount of discretion as to what they can clearance, so this means that shopping multiple stores might yield completely different results. As such a few times of the year it is prime territory for hunting down clearance Legos.

We set forth on an adventure that took us through three very small locations, and while my wife found more interesting stuff than I did, at the second store… a store I had good luck with last year… I managed to pick up a couple of really cool Star Wars sets at a deep discount. First up I found the Lego AT-AP walker which was originally $60 for the much more reasonable price of $30. Then at a considerably worse deal I picked up the originally $25 General Grievous Wheel Bike set for $19… which admittedly I only jumped at because the General Grievous figure is just so badass looking. This season honestly has been pretty slim pickings, largely because Wal-mart has started doing this annoying thing. They will throw something on clearance… and change the sticker color to red… but have the item marked at its normal price. Essentially I look up each Lego set and if the savings is not 50% off I generally don’t jump at it. This has netted me some pretty cool finds like the SWTOR Sith Fury for $60 but in order to find them… you have to be diligent, and for me the fun is more about the hunt than the finding.

Lost In Maguuma

One of the other things of note that happened yesterday while watching the return of Walking Dead is that I managed to hit level 60 on my Warrior in Guild Wars 2. I am still knee deep in the Maguuma jungle region and right now I find myself shifting between Sparkfly Fens and Bloodtide Coast, largely be cause the Fens simply got too “big” for me as I kept wandering into level 62 areas and having to deal with constant glancing blows. This leaves me 20 levels to go before I hit the Guild Wars 2 endgame, whatever that might be. One of the things that has always bothered me about this game is that I never managed to max a character out. Eighty levels is a rather daunting task, especially when you don’t find yourself really enjoying the game play. That said I am generally known for having multiple max level characters in any game I play, so it felt like a weak spot in my armor that I could not stomach the grind in this one game.

Maguuma region is a bit of a slog, which has me concerned for the Heart of Thorns expansion. I really do not like Jungle or Swamp regions in video games. I was having a blast so long as I stuck to the snowy peaks of the Norn regions, but once I wandered into the swampy zombie filled wasteland… the fun factor of the game went down significantly. Here is hoping that I can stomach it just enough to graduate into the higher zones. All of the guides I have read say that I should really be doing dungeons to level… but I am admittedly scared of them. The shitty dungeon experience was what ended up killing the game for me the first time. Right now I am enjoying the soloing over world gameplay style, and I am afraid if I go into the dungeons again… and they end up still being the chaotic and exploitative mess that they were originally… that it will enrage me enough to halt my journey.

The Real Game

One of the biggest frustrations for me when it comes to online games is when a massive shift in the way the game feels happens. Most games have this highly tailored starter experience to ease players into the game, and then something happens as though the really polished section of the game flew away. Sometimes this transition is gradual, and other times it is quite literally like having the bottom dropped out from under you. I’ve not written much about Albion Online because to some extent I fell off that rather steep cliff. The first two tiers of content felt really fun and natural as I wandered around the world collecting resources to be able to craft nifty things. Then I reached tier 3… and the fun drained away quickly. The game up until that point had been around gathering materials and lugging them back to town so that you could use the crafting machines and fashion them into whatever you might like. When you hit Tier 3, the crafting machines start charging you a fee to use them. This is the equivalent of having to pay every time you need to use the anvil in a World of Warcraft town.

The problem with this is that there really aren’t that many gold fountains that I have seen so far, but the machine problem ends up to be a rather massive gold sink. Granted at this point I don’t even know if there is such a thing as gold in the game… because I have only managed to gather up a few silver to my name. Admittedly this is their pricing scheme… to get players to purchase gold, to ease the process of playing the game. According to the pricing listed on the founders pack information, it looks like $20 would get you 4500 gold, and $50 would get you 12,000 gold. Not that either of these is an absolutely insane price for what seems to be the purchasing power that gets you, but I have essentially stopped playing because I quickly realized this game was unsustainable without either grinding bandits for days… or plunking down some cold hard cash for a game that was only mildly enjoyable in the first place. This is a bit of a shame, because really Albion does have some really interesting ideas at work. I might piddle with it off and on still to see just how deep the money chasm is, but if nothing else for the time being it has most definitely halted my forward momentum.

Eternal Youth

June 23, 2014 by Belghast

Something in the air

Struggling to exist a bit this morning. Yesterday evening we had a series of storms and something blew in with them that is pissing my asthma off. So at the moment I am taking a breathing treatment while doing this mornings post. It sucks when my lungs conspire against me, but after almost four decades of this you get used to it. That seems weird to type that out, but I dinged 38 last week… and as my wife puts it I am officially in my “late” thirties now. I don’t really feel any older most of the time, but there are moments when it catches up with me… like when I am talking to a teenager and I realize they were not alive when I graduated high school.

Age is one of those things that sneaks up on you. You assume everyone has the same experiences you had until you try and make a cultural reference that only really works well for folks born in the same decade as you. Rae that cohosts the podcast with me is literally a full decade younger than me, and I am constantly reminded of the gulf of time between us. Being a teacher my wife occasionally brings home of the the famous Mindset Lists for the incoming class of high schoolers. Nothing is guaranteed to make you feel old like reading through one of those, and seeing it peppered with events you think are “recent” history.

Eternal Youth

So in contrast when I find something that makes me feel eternally youthful, I latch onto it with both hands. I think that is one of the things I love most about Lego’s, they bring me back to an earlier time when I was sitting in the floor building 1980s era insane space ships. It is awesome to see that Lego Minifigures Online captures this optimism and bottles it into a Diablo like form. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing and I have to say I find it both adorable and infectious. The gameplay is simple, but at the same time nuanced when you add in the way the different characters behave in the setting. Right now I have settled on a team of the Roman Soldier, Forest Maiden and oddly enough the Waiter.

I have to admit, when I got a pack of minifigures to drop and I pulled the Waiter from it… I was more than a little disappointed. I had hoped for the Cyclops or the Knight… or even the Space Invader… but got a guy in a suit with a wine bottle. The awesome thing about the waiter is he exactly represents the ludicrousness of this game. Who would have thought that a waiter would be a badass combat character. All characters come in one of three basic types: Defender, Striker and Builder. Defenders have more survival at the cost of slightly weaker attacks. Strikers have extremely powerful offense at the loss of survival. Builders are odd things, because they can complete building objectives extremely quickly, but otherwise are pretty useless. Essentially my lineup is a melee defender, ranged defender and a melee striker and it seems to be working pretty well.

Over the weekend I decided to take the plunge and become a member, as there are quite a number of features paywalled. Most importantly you cannot really complete any dungeons unless you are a member, and the world is scattered with these little offshoot areas full of treasure and minibosses… aka exactly the sort of thing I love doing. Additionally as a member you get a pack of minifigures a month as well as a batch of their cash shop currency. For the most part the game uses a league like structure where instead of buying individual champions you buy packs that contain a random champion. Here is where my only sticking point comes in. If you purchase or win a pack… there is a chance of getting a minifigure you already own. Instead of giving you back the diamonds for your purchase… they give you the other in game currency stars, like 1000 of them. The problem is… that 1000 stars is in no way worth as much as the diamonds that went into purchasing. Especially since as a member you have a massively increased rate of star drops.

Lego Minifigures

That said I feel like this is a game where you could play it completely free if you so chose. Essentially by the end of completing the introduction to the game you have four different minifigures. The first three you choose upon creating your character, and are doled out your team through the series of a few quests. The starter team I chose was the Roman Commander, Bee Girl and Fortune Teller, but there are three different sets you have to choose from and they are designed to be a “balanced” team with a defender, striker and a builder on them. At the end of the tutorial you get a single random minifigure pack. This is where I picked up my waiter, and while I was disappointed at first he has become one of my favorite characters to play. So having four minifigures is a good start at playing the game, and I am sure you could complete almost all of the content with only these four.

The only other barriers seem to be level based. The big thing I have noticed since switching to being a member is that the drop rates in general are far better. You get both a significantly larger amount of stars from breaking apart structures and diamonds from completing quests. So this is going to make progression without payment significantly slower. Honestly though I feel that is pretty much how it should be. Free to play games have to make a profit somehow, and after watching Lego Universe crash and burn, I would love to see this one end up far more successful. Funcom has made an extremely fun game, and it is the perfect… I want to play something, but I don’t want to think too hard game. Seeing the Lego universe recreated flawlessly in online game form, is sure to be the source of hours of enjoyment.

#Lego #Minifigures #FreetoPlay

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

June 20, 2014 by Belghast

Baby’s First Diablo

It is no real secret that I love Lego, as I sit in an office full of sets waiting to be built and have an army of minifigures decorating my cube at work. So when I first heard that Funcom, the makers of my beloved Secret World were working on a brand new game revolving around the random minifigures bags that I already buy way too often… I figured I would be throwing money at the screen. A good friend of mine managed to get into the alpha and without saying much about it specifically she said it was extremely cute and charming. That about sums it up perfectly… oh and you might throw in adorable. I love the whole “toy store come to life” vibe that you get while playing the first level. You start off with one of three sets of minifigures, I ended up going for the roman soldier, because he is already one of the favorite minifigures I own.

I am not sure who exactly coined the phrase, but so far “Baby’s First Diablo” has stuck, and that is not to diminish anything about the game. It feels very much like a diablo style version of the various “Lego” franchise branded video games. You break up blocks to get resources and stars in this case instead of coins. Then you use special “builder” type minifigures to construct objectives. You can have three minifigures equipped at a time, and right now my team consists of the Roman Soldier that has a charge and a melee swing, the Fortune Teller who is one of those special builder types, and the Bee Girl that drops adorable honey bombs and attacks enemy legos with swarms of bee ranged attacks.

It seems like the game is going to use a model similar to league of legends in that you buy champions in the form of minifigures packs. The only gotcha is that I assume they will be just as random as the actual in store variety is. So if I had to guess you can probably end up with duplicates, but I have no clue at all how that will work. Will you be able to trade your dupes with other players, or will they have some sort of a deconstruction ability to turn them into resources… or are they just going to go with “smart random” in that you never have the chance of getting a minifigure you already have. In that case it would mean you would simply need to buy 16 packs of each type and would eventually get the full set. This is definitely going to be a game I watch as the open beta continues.

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

Just like Griff Tannen in Back to the Future… my hoverboard’s got power. Last night I dinged 25 and was finally able to claim both the preorder hoverboard and the deluxe edition hoverboard. Surprisingly I think I like the deluxe edition quite a bit better. Originally I upgraded to deluxe when I thought I would be sticking around for awhile, and I guess I am happy I did so. On the chua it seems so much cooler looking than the original human preview picture did. I guess the difference is that the preview shots didn’t really have actual in game lighting applied to them, so they made everything look that much more gold and gaudy. In game it looks pretty cool and as short and fat as my chua is… the regular hoverboard just looks too small for him.

So far moving out of Auroria has breathed new life into the game because I did not really understand at the time just how bored with that zone I was. It’s weird because I absolutely loved Deredune but couldn’t be bothered to care about Auoria at all. Now I am in something much more my style the traditional “snowy” zone. For whatever reason I seem to have an affinity for the snow zones in games be it Iron Pine Peaks or Winterspring… that usually ends up as my favorite leveling destination. Additionally I’ve installed a number of mods that make following the quest chains a bit easier so I expect that I will stay on track a little better rather than endlessly chasing rabbit trails. I am still firmly in the middle of the pack level wise, but there are several that are now into their 30s, so I keep feeling the need to “catch up”.

Battlefield Hardline

Game trailers are pretty much all lies, but even knowing that this one gave me hope that we might see an interesting shooter to play. You have to understand that my ideal shooter is one of the Enemy Territory series games, where you have real “objectives” that have to be completed in order to progress the map. Based on this footage and folks using the term objective based shooter… I had hopes that this might be a return to that gameplay style. So I applied for the beta and got accepted to play it on the Playstation 4. Within a few minutes of gameplay all of those hopes were dashed. This game is pretty much exactly like every single Battlefield or Call of Duty game… except this time you get to play cops and robbers. For some that will be a good thing, if you like Battlefield and Call of Duty… but for me it is a pretty damning indictment.

The objectives in Hardline are basically “capture the flag” by another name. Instead of creating a series of complicated objectives that the team has to work together to achieve, it simply creates temporary choke points where death-matching occurs. On top of this… the game just does not feel like a next generation shooter. Everything feels extremely low resolution as compared to say Destiny, in fact I wouldn’t even say those two games are anywhere near the same league as far as look and feel. Everything about this game feels like a “B Team” effort, and I think that is pretty much what players have come to expect out of “off year” titles in the big shooter franchises. Basically if you just want Battlefield 4 with a few changes, then you might enjoy it. If you were like me and hoping for something more… keep looking elsewhere. After all Destiny is just around the corner.

#LegoMinifigures #Wildstar #Hoverboard #BattlefieldHardline