leveling Archives - Page 11 of 13 - Tales of the Aggronaut

More SkyForge Thoughts

July 19, 2015 by Belghast

Controller Support

One of the questions left unanswered from yesterday was whether or not the game had controller support. On a whim I picked up my controller towards the end of one of yesterdays streams and I noticed that I could in fact control my character with it. Today I popped into game with the mission of trying to test this theory out. It seems that maybe they are working on controller support but that it does not actually work fully. I could control my character perfectly using both of my analog sticks, and if I hit the A button on my XBox 360 controller I could perform any of the normal actions that require the spacebar. However it did not actually seem to interact with the world, and pressing A when not hovering over an objective did not perform the jump action, which is normally the default action for spacebar. I went so far as to go into the keybindings section and it would not let me bind anything to controller presses.

Now of course if you wanted to go so far as to use Xpadder you could easily get this game up and running. It takes care of the toughest part which is getting the analog movement feeling right. My hope is that in subsequent patches it is going to add full controller support, and then this game is likely to increase significantly in enjoyment. Left button spammy attacks feel less spammy when done with a controller button. Since writing yesterdays post I have added another few hours worth of gameplay, and I have to say my verdict is still very mixed. I even talked about it a bit on last nights podcast. On some level I am feeling about this game much the same as I felt about Guild Wars 2 when it was in testing. There is something that compels me to keep trying to figure it out, but at the same time I find it extremely easy to stop playing after completing a single mission. The act of running a mission just wears me out, in a way that content in Elder Scrolls Online used to wear me out. Things are so ridiculously tightly packed that on normal solo missions you spend so much of your time mindlessly grinding through huge encounters.

Isola Digs

This morning however I ventured into what seems to be another large shared cooperative zone, much the same as the very first mission in the game. It involved a series of around 25 smaller objectives that were scattered throughout the map. The frustrating thing about this zone in particular is that the objectives were super linear, meaning when I tried to do my normal thing and hop off the path… I missed an objective that I then later had to double back through the entire zone to go find again. As a whole though I have to say I like this style of zone so much better than the little instanced mini dungeons I had completed more recently. The game also feels better when lots of other players are wandering around, which greatly speeds up the amount of time it takes to burn through the various health bars of the bosses. This tells me that a lot of my frustrations was simply that I was soloing content designed for groups to take down. The fact that I could fairly easily solo content as a paladin, maybe points to that class being a little overpowered for this sort of thing? Then again tanks in most games are adept at soloing bosses that were originally meant for a group to take down… I am looking at you Deathknight.

The other cool thing about this region is that it seemed to be full of boss encounters that did not seem to be tied to a specific objective. There may be a quest that I missed somewhere that opened these up, but from what I saw there was a fire, water and wind warden. Above you can see me taking on the fire one. The only thing missing elemental wise is earth, which I did not really see while wandering around. I managed to get a few greens off these bosses, so my theory is they are just there to make your experience more interesting. The boss fights with other players helping were significantly more enjoyable, but I could still shield up as a paladin and whittle them down until I succeeded. There was only one single encounter where I even came close to dying. At the last minute a wave of players rushed in and helped me finish the boss off.

Combat Still Repetitive

All of this said… my problem with the combat still exists. It just doesn’t feel like I can do anything interesting with the encounters. I did add a new combo attack to my repertoire, and while I abused the hell out of it.. each individual fight still seemed to take a little bit longer than they should for the game to feel really “fun”. The mobs still suffer from the same problem where they tend to be one trick ponies, and keep using the same attack sequence over and over. There is almost always one thing that you should dodge out of, but other than that it is grind them down with your main attack until they are gone. There are a lot of things I do like however when it comes to the interactions with other players. This seems like a game where everything is open tagging, and if you are in an area and have dealt any damage to a pack… you seem to get full credit for the entire pack. Similarly if there is an objective, it seems like everyone can click said objective, and that seems to have changed from one of the closed beta streams I happened to watch.

As a result I found myself wading into a lot of fights that I did not strictly need to just to help out the other players. Unfortunately not a single one of them did I actually communicate with. There are a lot of ifs about this game, and I am not quite certain how much I will be playing of it. In theory I kinda dig the model of purchasing classes or having a slow tedious process of unlocking them. To some extent I wish I had gotten in on the ability to play the Berserker, because I think that might be a class I would really enjoy. I have heard that you can go to the training center and test drive all of the classes, much like you can test drive champions in a moba, so that might be one of the things I do next. At this point I have played around five hours of the game, and I have enjoyed it just enough to keep me coming back to try and find the secrets that I seem to be missing as to why this game is really fun. Ultimately there will be a point where I just give up on it, but I have not quite reached that yet. After all it gives me a bit of a diversion from leveling my Dragoon and gearing in Final Fantasy XIV. If you want to check out the last two videos I have posted since yesterday I will be embedding them below.

Port Naori – Instanced Dungeon-like Mission

Isola Digs – Open World-ish Shared Zone Mission

(was still encoding at the time of posting this… so might have to check back later)

SkyForge Impressions

July 18, 2015 by Belghast

Recreating Belghast

Skyforge is one of those games that I have consistently been unable to decide if I am interested in. There are certain aspects of the game that I really like, but then again there are certain aspects that I am really uncertain of. [Edit] Having to rewrite a chunk of this real quick because I was under the false impression that this game was from a Korean publisher. I guess this is primarily a Russian game with the assistance of Obsidian an American company. I guess this explains why I could easily create a character I liked when I have so much trouble doing this in most Korean MMOs. [UnEdit] So I was pleasantly surprised that I could create “Belghast” or at least a reasonable facsimile. In the above comparison you can see the traditional old school “WoW Bel” against what I was able to create using Skyforge, and I am pretty happy honestly with the look and feel.

Last night I spent some time streaming my first few adventures into the game, and as such did not take a lot of screenshots. The result is you are going to end up with a lot of screen captures from my stream that include my little chat blocker box thingy. As the weird little man that is touching my face asked me what I think… that is ultimately going to be my mission this morning. I can’t really call it a review, since I have not spent more than a couple of hours playing it. I can however talk about my thoughts. There have been so many times I have missed out on a games open beta period only to kick myself later when I start to get interested in the game. Similarly there have been many games that I bought my way into… only to find out later that I didn’t really care for the game at all. Even though I am still very much engrossed in Final Fantasy XIV and spent about four hours playing that last night AFTER my foray into Skyforge, I felt I owed it to myself to give the game a test drive. Similarly if you are on the fence and looking to my article to give you some guidance… I highly suggest you just try the game yourself while it is free.

The Setting

For those who have been around MMOs for awhile, you will remember a game that was discarded somewhere along the way called Imperator. Mythic games had originally planned on building its “Rome in Outer Space” title but quickly dropped the title when they got the license for Warhammer Online. After playing a little Skyforge I seriously wonder if someone from that original Imperator team rebooting this idea over at either Obsidian or Allods. There are only a few screenshots from the original Imperator team around, but to the right is one of the more interesting ones. From what I have seen of the world of Skyforge, it very much shares the same look and feel of a “Rome in Space” concept. To carry this even further the enemies and their leaders have a very “ancient egyptian” feel to them, which makes me wonder if we are going to see a lot more of these “high tech ancient civilizations” concept as we get deeper into the game.

The game does a decent job of setting up the story of how you came to have the powers you do and setting up a reason for why you can die multiple times and keep respawning. Your character is an Immortal, and just like in Highlander your powers do not manifest until you have died the first time. The introduction to the game is the story of how you died during what turned out to be a suicide mission. One of the interesting things about the game is that you play a fully armored character during the introduction and then choose your appearance later as you are telling your tale. While I may have missed it, it did not seem like I had a way to change my gender during this introduction. So I am wondering if that means that quite literally everyone is “male by default” until you get back to base and choose your gender and appearance. This did not bother me on a personal level, but I could absolutely see how this would really be a sticking point for some folks and rightly so. As you can see from the screenshots… the world is absolutely gorgeous and every little aspect of it feels highly detailed.

The Paladin

Since I tend to always play tanks in MMOs… I opted to roll the paladin. I am not sure if EVERYONE starts as one of three classes, or if this is just limited to the Open Beta, but I was limited to a choice of Paladin, Cryomancer and Lightbinder. These represent the tank, dps and healer essentially, and this is a game much like Final Fantasy XIV where you can swap your class at any given time. Unfortunately the Paladin is the only one of the starter classes that I have any interest in… there are really three classes in this game that interest me and that is the Paladin, Knight and Berserker. Now we are going to start delving into some of the negatives. Combat is similar to Neverwinter Nights which in itself is not bad. Essentially it is a combination of mouse clicks augmented by abilities you cast off keys around your WASD and numeric keys that tend to have long recast times. It uses a system similar to TERA in that your secondary mouse button is a variable combo ability.

As a Paladin my combos offered an impressive 360 degree whirl attack that you can see above, a single target lightning bolt, and a frontal cone slash attack. The problem being is that the combo system seemed to have a mind of its own. In Tera it related to a certain number of clicks… in Skyforge it seems to be tied somehow to your character animation. As a result I found it really hard to predict when I could hit a specific attack and always seemed to have the wrong ability available as my combo attack at the wrong time. Now this combo tree is something you can fiddle with freely and maybe given some time I could sort out how best to use it. However it gives the combat interaction a bit of a “sloppy” feel to its design. I find myself greatly preferring the ability to press a unique button for each attack rather than allow the game to sort all of that out for me. I know at least if I press the button, an ability will fire… instead here it felt more like the game was playing for me sometimes and I was simply mashing the attack buttons blindly.

I feel like all of the attacks were designed to look and feel impressive. For example the above screenshot is of me executing my finisher, that shows up when the mob is low on heath and there is a pop up window telling me to hit E to use it. It involves me throwing the mob up into the air and then a bolt of lightning or holy power or whatever it is that Paladins care about striking them back down to the ground. Again this felt like something I had to freaking mash E for whenever the mob was getting close to being low enough to use it… because my main attack seemed to run away with itself and I would get locked in a combat animation that seemed to be of variable length. The thing I keep coming back to is that maybe this game feels significantly better when played with a controller than with a mouse and keyboard. I need to sort through the settings and see if it supports my Xbox 360 controller because this might be an awesome offering to the console market more so than it is to the PC one.

My Impressions

Like I said at the start of this I have really not spent much time playing the game at this point. I got in yesterday morning and last night, and between those two play sessions I have completed two of the small instanced missions. After the second mission I went back to the main hub and got yet another one… and then decided that I was not really having enough fun to keep playing that night. That is a bad sign, for me personally. I love combat and combat missions, and if a game wants to throw me at kill X things… I generally eat them up like warm cobbler covered in ice cream. The problem is… I just found the combat boring and repetitive. I feel like maybe I am not grasping the “master plan” to its design but it really felt like I had to wail away at random with abilities and mash my shield whenever it was up to keep from taking damage. It really did not feel like there was much structure to the flailing about, and I found this frustrating especially compared to say the Cryomancer that I watched Jabberant play that seemed to have lots of strategy to it. It could just be a side effect of my being used to Final Fantasy XIV where every single key press feels like it has some importance behind it.

I’ve embedded my play session from last night so that you can see how the game looks and feels while moving through combat. I am not giving up on this game quite yet, but I will say my first day of play was “strike one”. Maybe it feels better as I go along, but I have a feeling that pretty much all of this game is going to be a Lobby/Instance approach with no real “open world” to go exploring. I might be wrong, and maybe I just have not seen “leveling zones” yet but the whole thing feels a lot like the way DDO did content, mixed with the combat styling of Neverwinter Nights. All of this said, since you can get in now for free and give it a spin… then I suggest you try it out for yourself. Maybe you will find it a refreshing experience, and not the boring and repetitive one that I found. Maybe I was simply in the wrong mindset, because yesterday was a really long day. In any case I am going to give it a few more shots this weekend to see if it does anything for me. Sometimes games take a bit for me to enjoy, and this might be one of those. In any case I am happy I gave it a shot before “buying in”. So far the verdict is pretty mixed, but I wanted to at least put my thoughts to paper for anyone who might be interested in them.

Northern Thanalan Problem

July 12, 2015 by Belghast

Button Mash Bard

Last night during the podcast I piddled around in Final Fantasy XIV as I often do. The fact that I had to edit a section of the podcast out because of my rapid fire keyboard mashing… means I was piddling around on my bard. Of all of my classes… this is the one that I seem to give the least shits about actually playing correctly. I will leave good barding up to Shiana, Warenwolf and Thalen… me I just mash buttons and pray. One of the problems is that I have all of these characters currently sitting at level 50 that I got to cap last expansion. The bard, the white mage and the paladin among them. The problem being right now without quest support there is no real handy way to get to level 51, which is the level you need to be to hit the first dungeon. On my dragoon I have been pretty much living in dungeons, and as a result I have managed to make a significant push in level, as he is roughly half way to 55.

So last night I struggled to figure out just how to get my bard over the hump, so I could start doing the same with him. I wandered around a bit in Western Coethas only to remember that even with the armory bonus… FATEs in Heavensward are still pretty terrible. Then Ashgar mentioned that I should do what I did at 49… and just go to Northern Thanalan. So I zoned into that area and it took longer to load than either Ishgard, Mor Dhona or Idyllshire. It turns out that pretty much everyone is living in this zone, and I guess it makes sense. On average FATEs in Western Coerthas rewarded my bard 28,000 experience. On average FATEs in Northern Thanalan rewarded around 21,000 experience… and the zone is about a fourth of the size of Western Coerthas… and has just as many FATEs. This means that there is a constant train of pink marks showing up all over your map.

Northern Thanalan Problem

On the live letter this week they mentioned that they would be tweaking FATEs to make them a better value proposition for players, and I think this is a bit of an understatement in the level of the issue that is happening. One of the interesting things about the internet and mmos is that players will figure out the shortest route to solving a problem and abuse the hell out of it. Quickly players realized that they could simply level faster by living in Northern Thanalan… and that is quite literally what is happening. I would estimate last night during the podcast there were somewhere close to 200 players in zone fighting over the FATEs that spawned, and in a crazy game of whack-a-mole as soon as one dropped the next one would be up and the rush would begin across zone to get the first hits in on it. We experienced these same problems at release with the abuse of a very specific FATE in Northern Thanalan called “Dark Devices” and it seems like once again this zone is the king of the fast leveling curve.

The problem with this is that it makes the game boring. You stand in zone and hang out there until you are 60… and quite literally players are doing this on their alternate classes, riding this elevator to the top floor and then getting off just in time to gear for Alexander. The end result is that we are starting to see level 60 players who have not done a single class quest and as a result have NONE of their new class abilities. Time doing class quests is time taken away from the “super efficient” level mill of Northern Thanalan. Here in lies problem two… this zone is a fun zone to run FATEs in… and absolutely worth while for players post 45 when Central Coerthas starts to slow down. My biggest fear is that we are going to see a bit of an overcorrection that leads to Square nerfing the FATEs in this zone once again to try and prod players to leave it. What I want to see instead is that they incentivize the content in the new areas… to make it worth spending time there and doing the FATEs.

More Carrot to the Stick

Those first days after launch, the FATEs were getting run and every single major boss fate was dropping all sorts of awesome items. Then players realized, or at least Reddit realized that mathematically the FATE grinding experience was shit. I want to see players in the zones doing the content the zones have to offer. We long speculated that they purposefully under-incentivized the FATEs to get players to actually do quest content, because at the launch of A Realm Reborn… it was absolutely a problem with players completely ignoring quests until they hit the level cap. The issue here is that dungeons are gated through the storyline… and without players entering the dungeon system… the queues got more than a little out of whack. So I guess I support the notion of nerfing FATEs temporarily… but at this point something needs to be done to derail the Northern Thanalan train once again. I don’t think we can probably afford to wait until 3.1, so I am hoping that we see a minor patch that introduces a series of tweaks that right this ships course.

In the meantime I am guessing I will start running Levequests to get over that 50 to 51 hump, because after the madness of last night… I really did not find the Northern Thanalan experience enjoyable. I had way too many flashbacks of the way the dark devices grind felt. I absolutely rode that up on my Bard and then never touched it on another character again. The game has some really awesome FATEs in the new areas that each tell a story… some of which we ended up talking about last night. I want Square to find a way to add enough carrot to their stick, in order to convince players that staying in the zone they are currently in and running FATEs is a valuable option. Mostly I want to be able to knock out all of the different zone boss fates because there are interesting things sitting on their loot table if you manage to get to gold contribution. Two weeks into the expansion though I am still loving it in spite of all the minor problems we have complained about. We talked about this last night in the podcast, that it seems like we complain a lot… but it is more a case of us wanting them to iron out the rest of the wrinkles… because the game is really damned polished already.

The Ancient Library

July 4, 2015 by Belghast

Land of Lost Cables

This morning I feel like the world is angry at me. Namely we spent the last two days doing some hardcore cleaning and rearranging of both my and my wife’s offices. This involved taking loads of stuff to good will, and even more loads of stuff out to the dumpster we rented. However it feels like maybe the end is in sight. The funny thing about this process is I am finding things that I did not remember existed. Like for example… wedding pictures… I did not remember we had a book of wedding pictures. I realize that statement sounds weird… because everyone remembers photos at their wedding right? Well for us… we eloped and there was a pretty limited group of people that COULD have taken photos. I am guessing my cousin Sarah took the photos because she does not appear in any of them, but it was still kinda cool…. and god did we look young.

We also found a stack of photos from our college graduation… and apparently overall shorts were a big thing in 1998… because both my wife and my niece were wearing them. The other awesome thing about cleaning is finding all the things I have bought and re-bought a dozen times. Like right now I have bins labeled video, audio, usb and network… and all of them are overflowing with cables. I seriously should not need to get any form of a USB cable for example for life. I have every possible connector save for maybe USB 3. In addition I found more iPhone/iPad cables than I remember us ever having. So as I dismantle my office today to do the final leg of this process I should have more than enough cables to hook things up however I want to in the final configuration.

The Ancient Library

Since we are expected to participate in the Four Job Fiesta every single year… our circle of friends has developed a deep understanding of the content contained within Final Fantasy V… in part because Ashgar has such a deep understanding of said content. So when it was leaked that Heavensward would include the Library of Ancients needless to say we were a little excited. Thursday night I managed to get up to the appropriate level to do the dungeon, and last night after all of the cleaning I sat down and managed to get a guild group to run it. I have to say I am really damned impressed with the experience and this might be my favorite dungeon yet… which is a pretty mighty feat considering I really really love The Vault, with its Scarlet Monastery 2.0 feel. What is best is the way that many of the mobs pop out of books just like they did in Final Fantasy V. In fact one of the mobs that you run into over and over is good ole page 64.

As you might suspect it has the ability to cast level 5 doom… which apparently plays by the rules set forth in Final Fantasy V. This means players who are 59 are unaffected, but those level 60 players have to get the hell out or they straight up die. Granted we have not actually tested this, so it might just be a rumor. Once again I streamed my run of the dungeon so that I could capture it in video form. The absolute best part of the dungeon is of course Byblos which takes the place of the middle boss. The best part is when you kill him he says “Soon, the seal of the master will be open.” I love it when Final Fantasy XIV does some fan service and so accurately depicts a mob from another game in this one. One thing I learned is that the Gale Cut attack can be completely avoided if you just move from out of front of him when he is casting it. So far every dungeon in Heavensward has been better than the last, so I am completely amped to see what the end game dungeons are going to be like.

The Road to Sixty

The library finally paid off and I started to get some warrior drops. The set that comes from the Library is one that I am going to have to farm up because I either look like a Sherlock Holmes era inspector or a refugee from Diagon Alley. In either case I am a fan of it, and it looks pretty adorable when I run around like this. Tam is going to be quick to point out that this is not a plate set of armor… and I will give him that. It is very much not plate, but instead a cloth robe… but it looks adorable so I am just going with it for the time being. The only thing that I have yet to see at all this expansion is a weapon drop. Every single dungeon seems to drop a nice weapon, but in all cases I have seen zero axes. As a result I am struggling through on the HQ white weapons that you get through the storyline. I figure soon enough I will be able to purchase a nice end game weapon as after last nights shenanigans I am roughly a sixth of a level away from sixty.

My hope is tonight… in my newly arranged office… I will be able to push the rest of the way into sixty. It seems there is a dungeon that folks are waiting to run that comes at the end of the main storyline. I am more than happy to tank for my friends… I just have to get to max level first. As horrible as 58 was… I have to say so far 59 has been pretty chill. Just through pushing through the main storyline in the final area and then doing some side quests and two dungeon runs… I have been able to conquer most of this level. Had I managed to actually do my clan hunts yesterday rather than getting pulled straight into a dungeon I might have dinged last night before logging. In theory I could do that tonight and hit the cap… then catch up on the last bit of story that leads to the final dungeon. My god… the story… things happen and I want so bad to talk about them, but most of my readers I would assume are not quite there yet.