mhw Archives - Page 5 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Delightful Nonsense

February 16, 2018 by Belghast

Last night didn’t exactly go as I had originally planned but what actually happened was probably better. There were a couple of things that I knew I had on my list for the evening, one of which was to run to target and attempt to find clearance valentines candy for my wife’s classroom. There are several candies that she uses in lab exercises like kisses, m&m’s and skittles. The scene in that candy aisle was just insane with random display boxes strewn everywhere and essentially everything mostly gone. We did manage to scavenge some plain old fashioned Hershey’s Kisses in valentines packaging for the 50% off discount.

Prior to going into the store I called in a take out order across the street at Baja Jack’s Burrito Shack, so we picked up our orders… for me a steak fajita quesadilla and for my wife steak fajita nacho platter. I flipped over to Twitch to see if anyone was streaming, and I appeared to be auto hosting Sushi so I tuned in to say hi. I finishing “nomming my tasty noms” and fired up the PS4 when almost instantly I had a party invite waiting on me. Pizza Maid was also just about to fire up her stream and was looking for people to hang out while doing so. So I joined her, SitaDulip, Misiek, and a very drunk Welsh Fox and Wolfy in chat and prepared for an evening of delightful nonsense.

One of the main reasons why Monster Hunter World has been scratching my MMO itch is for nights like last night. While we lost Fox and Wolfy pretty early because they decided they were a little too sauced to be on a stream… we had this great night of just wandering around and doing random stuff. Sure I wasn’t necessarily moving my quest chain forward, but I was still having a lot of fun knocking out random stuff… some of it low rank and some of it high rank. It was this furious blend of investigations, optional quests, and arena missions and a heck of a lot of fun.

I think the only high rank monster we actually took down was a Pukei Pukei at the very end of the night when the stream had whittled down to just me and Pizza hanging out. The best moment of the stream however was when Pizza runs off to use the restroom only to find out that Aria her adorable asshole cat has rolled all the toilet paper off the roll. Props to stealthy for clipping this because it is an amazing conversation happening off screen… but I am chuckling along in my recognition that I have also had this thing happen. Basically it was a really fun night and if you so care to… the entire VOD of our random adventures is available.

Tonight however… I would actually like to make some progress. If that means catching Pizza up to this point in the storyline and then taking down an asshole pink Rathian together then so be it. Last night was all about hanging out with friends and tonight would be lovely if I could hang out with friends and also kill this horrible creature. The other thing I am contemplating is doing a dueling banjos stream of sorts where I am also streaming while Pizza is streaming and then posting one of those links that allows you to see the stream side by side. I will of course have to talk to her about this concept, also also I will have to figure out what PSN chat does to my streaming set up. I am not sure if it is going to be a horribly echoy experience for my viewers.

Regardless if we take down a Pink Rathian or not I would love to engage in some high rank hunt nonsense. Right now I have a handful of pools of people that I have been actively playing with and only time will tell tonight who I end up grouped up with. Regardless though Monster Hunter is feeling like and MMORPG to me in spite of it not really being one. It feels like I am doing all of these epic boss fights with friends and I guess at the end of the day… that was my most important requirement for MMO grouping. I had wished Destiny 2 would feel like this, but for whatever reason the magic sauce just wasn’t there as strongly this time. With Monster Hunter it is all brand new to me having never really gained traction in the series, and with Destiny 2… I just kept thinking about all of the awesome things we had to give up from the first game.

A Social Weekend

February 12, 2018 by Belghast

It was a pretty great weekend as far as hunting monsters goes. I got to hang out with so many different groups of people and do so many varied things. On Friday night it was all about hanging out with Tam, Ash and Kodra as I was finally up late enough to allow our schedules to align. On Saturday it was all about hanging out with Pizza Maid, Wolfy and Rakuno… and then in a little pre-podcast gaming some more with Tam, Ash and Kodra. Then Sunday I streamed for a bit in the morning between editing two podcasts. Then in the evening I spent quite a bit of time in the evening running around with Sushi Geisha and Smashy doing some high rank egg birb killing among other things. The variety and quality of my company was absolutely the best.

The other thing that really happened this weekend is that I spent a ton of time hanging out with various groups of folks on twitch. I’ve never really acclimatized to that community but right now I am spending a significant amount of time with folks connected to the very awesome casual/positive Moogle’s Pom Tavern. They have all accepted me as one of their own and call me a streamer even though I barely qualify as one. Just to give some shout outs… some of the folks I spent time lurking or actively hanging out in are…

Right now my jam seems to be playing Monster Hunter on the 43 inch 4k monitor while trying to cram a bunch of windows on one of the 23 inch monitors. As a result a lot of the time I have spent soloing, has been hanging out in a twitch stream and occasionally throwing random comments. During the shenanigans of Saturday and Sunday I actually wound up on voice chat and as a result “on stream” with Pizza and Sushi. The world got many opportunities to watch me fail at longswording and miss attacks as monsters shifted on me in combat. It was a lot of fun and I need to sort out a time when I can stream for myself more regularly. I had a lot of fun with the little bit that I did this weekend and the whole Sunday morning is starting to turn into a routine.

As far as Monster Hunter itself… I have now progressed into High Rank hunts but have not done a whole lot of them. I’ve taken down Pukei Pukei which is the gatekeeper of sorts to unlock High Rank, and then taken down Kulu-Ya-Ku a bunch of times to farm bits so I could upgrade to this crazy two handed scimitar of sorts called Last Dance I. I am wearing a mishmash of gear because I basically went to the workshop and crafted whatever the hell I could as soon as I hit high rank. As a result I have 1 piece of Zorah Magdaros gear, 2 pieces of High Rank Bone and 2 pieces of High Rank Alloy gear. This shockingly has wound up being a fairly reasonable set of gear to run around and do stuff with, and the added defense helped a lot as compared to the amount of damage I was taking during the Pukei Pukei fight.

I could go into a bunch of detail about the various hunts I did, but for this morning I am not. The weekend as a whole was all about hanging out with various groups of people for me. That is always the problem I have when it comes to online gaming. There are so many different groups that I want to be hanging out with. I spent a lot of the weekend as a sort of fill in, but still had a blast in doing so. Right now the timing for me is just weird in actually hanging with the AggroChat crew given that the majority are now on the west coast. On most nights they are starting to get active around 9 pm… as I am starting to wind down and prep to head to bed. This has made organizing anything in a time other than the weekend a pretty fraught experience.

The whole grouping experience in Monster Hunter does not make this easier, given that for much of the weekend folks were having trouble joining specific sessions. I know last night we kept trying to get a 4th in to help them with some quests… but the sessions kept timing out. What I crave the most for Monster Hunter World is some form of a viable friends list, with the ability to invite to parties from it… and even more importantly have a Diablo 3 style “request to be invited” system. I hope as time passes that the whole cludge that is grouping in this game improves. That said… the core experience is compelling enough that I can look past all of that nonsense as I obsess about getting monster bits to make awesome weapons and outfits.

Flame Broiled Defeat

February 1, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I met my first real defeat in Monster Hunter World and completely failed a quest. That quest was me attempting to beat Anjanath in the Ancient Forest, which admittedly I am super happy I did the tracking work I already did for this mob in spite of what everyone has told me. I managed to find it super fast and now we get into the part of the show where I talk about my horrible ideas. I have thought this thing was serious business since the first moment I saw it… and as a result I went ahead and threw up a flare to see if anyone wanted to join me. Within moments I had a full party of people tasking on this monster and in the grand scheme I thought it was going pretty well… then I started noticing other players fainting. It was around or about this point that I remembered that you get four faints per party… not per person. So when I finally fainted myself… it happened to be the fourth one our party had gotten and the quest immediately failed out. In theory I should have just tried this on my own because I was managing to land some significant hits in on the big guy but I guess the truth is I just sorta like running with party tactics going on. I have been joining other folks quests and enjoying trying to learn how to play off of the strengths and weaknesses of the other weapons. Mostly I am wanting to learn how not to trip up other players with the Longsword which has been a problem that other people have reported with the weapon. As far as I could tell this was not actually happening because I tend to favor surgical strikes rather than just flailing away with R2 sweeping attacks. My goal for tonight is to seek revenge and down a flame breathing dinosaur.

My enjoyment of this series is way more focused on playing with my Palico than probably any other element. So much so that the first thing I do whenever I drop down on a map is find where the free roaming tailrider Palicos are and go get one. I love the sequence of events that happens when your Palico meets one out in the wild. They get together and then high five and cheer… and moments later you have a new friend following you around and helping you. This is literally the best part of monster hunter and the most purest joy I feel in the game. Last night I found a Palico wearing the Horizon Zero Dawn Watcher suit and I just about lost my mind. It too had the Pukei-Pukei bow equipped so it was an interesting combination of two mostly ranged characters helping me out. My weapon development is sort of stalled out at the moment because I am not exactly sure what I need to get the next ranks as I have been using the Bone Shotel III for a few nights now. I can in theory make an elemental version… but its base attack is slightly lower so for the moment I am sticking with what I have.

I will close out this mornings post with a video of one of the varied Monster Hunter World cooking sequences. I just cannot explain how happy the Palicos and the Felyne chefs make me. I find myself getting a meal cooked even when I am just going to go wandering around in the wastes doing nonsense for an hour completing bounties. There are a lot of people who lament the change in the cooking song, but I never knew the previous one so its not like I am missing anything particular. What I love is the completely over the top cooking sequence… which admittedly was also one of the things I loved about Final Fantasy XV so maybe I just like digitally rendered food? I’ve tried to play Generations again but find it particularly hard to control the game with my existing 3DS XL… which is still way too small for my tastes. As I have talked about in the past… I have large hands and a lot of controllers just feel awkward in them. I play PS4 with the Hori FPS Plus which itself is a way larger controller than the default PS4. It really makes me wish that Generations existed for the Switch because I think I could get into the game there knowing I had the option of playing docked if I want to… which admittedly I play switch docked 90% of the time. Side note… I consider the default Xbox One controller a little small as well and similarly have found an aftermarket alternative that I love in the form of the no longer made Power A Fusion Pro. Thankfully I have managed to pick up a couple of those… one for PC and one for Xbox One off Ebay for way cheaper than that Amazon listing.

Lantern Light

January 25, 2018 by Belghast

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had originally intended. The initial goal I had in mind was to go home and attempt to pull myself back into a mindset where I could play Final Fantasy XIV. Instead I hit a few detours along the way the first of which being that shortly after I had finished doing all of the stuff that I need to do when I first get home… the power went out. Now I realize this is mostly an irrational fear, but the first thing that always goes through my head is… did you pay the bill? I am not sure exactly why I have this fear because we have never actually been disconnected from any utility, but it is still something that happens. I was already in my “not suitable for public” clothing, but I did stumble outside long enough to notice that all of my neighbors were also lumbering around by flashlight. I called in the outage and reported it through the menu driven system and then spent the next little bit trying to sort out how to see reported outages without logging into the damned electric company page with an account that I didn’t have. There is a local facebook group that serves as the closest thing we have to a city wide “water cooler” and my second place was to go check there knowing that there would already be a thread of a hundred or so posts about whatever was going on. The lights went out around 6 pm and if the group was to be believed the estimated time for the fix was 11:30 pm… which meant it was about to be a really long night living by lantern light. It was around this time that I remembered I had the Switch and grabbed it from my office settling into the sofa to play some games. I had played some Super Mario Odyssey and was about ten minutes into the Octopath Traveler demo when the power was magically restored at roughly 8 pm.

From there I did all of those things I had been avoiding… like opening the fridge to get a drink and settled down to play some Final Fantasy XIV. Upon logging in I got greeted by friends… roamed around Limsa Lominsa and then promptly logged out because I just did not have it in me to do the group activities I need to do in order to make any semblance of forward momentum. Instead I popped into Elder Scrolls Online and continued work on Stonefalls. This zone is like a giant immovable object for me and the sooner I get on the other side of it the better. It has singlehandedly killed every attempt at playing an Ebonheart Pact character because even though it has gone through a ton of changes since alpha… it still is not what I would call a good zone. The weird shape and geometry of the zone makes everything a bigger chore than it should be. Objectives that might look really close on the map instead require you to backtrack half the way across the zone to find the proper entrance into the region you need to go. All of this is just the functional reasons… but there is also the fact that it is bleak. The quake color palette and the constant smokey haze and falling ash make it not exactly the most visually exciting place to be. I did however feel like I made a bunch of progress in the zone last night and checked off a bunch of areas. I am not even sure where I am in the zones main story quest, and if I could change one thing about Elder Scrolls online I would make it so that those primary quests required to move to the next area were somehow highlighted differently in a FFXIV style manner.

The other thing on my radar is that at the time of taking this screenshot we were roughly 17 hours away from unlocking Monster Hunter World on the PS4. Granted I have no actual intent of staying up until midnight to play this game, but I do plan on playing Friday night. This is going to be my first real attempt at playing a Monster Hunter title while it is in the public zeitgeist and I am hoping that by doing so… I will be able to grok what the fuck is going on. I’ve attempted the PS Vita version and purchase Generations for the 3DS… but largely chocked up a lot of my problems to the fact that I am just not much of a handheld gamer. World however is coming to the PS4 which will allow me to play it on this nifty 43 inch 4k television (even though I don’t have a pro and can’t do the higher resolutions really) and my hope is it will be a much more compelling experience. I’ve always thought this was the sort of game I could get into if I had the proper introduction, because the core loop of grind random stuff to make yourself stronger to take down big bad monsters is one that I can likely get behind. I am hoping I can rely on those who have come before like Ashgar and Stormrazor to get me over the adjustment hump. I am also super excited that Arekkz is devoting a series of videos to easing beginners in. I most definitely need the assistance. Needless to say I will be on the PS4 giving it a whirl tomorrow.