MMO Archives - Page 195 of 442 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Chat Goes On Left

May 15, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things I am realizing is just how bad I am at responding to messages some nights. Last night for example I was mindlessly grinding away in Destiny 2 while watching video full-screen on my second monitor. All the while various folks were messaging me on lots of different platforms including battle.net, slack, discord, and even some resorted to twitter. All of which I was largely oblivious to as I happily ground public events and took down high value targets pushing the warlock up in level so that I can start doing the weeklies on that character as well. The problem is really two fold, firstly that I am so used to soloing at this point that I am not really watching messages like I used to for the sign of someone else popping online. The second issue I will get into shortly.

At this point my Warlock is level 28 so nearing 30 but apparently completely capable of wearing gear of decent level because I am now rocking an energy weapon that is 350. It is super hard going back to the warlock after only really playing the Titan for a good deal of time. Hunter is simple… multi jump will always be multi jump. Warlock on the other hand has the wrong version of Titan jump and no matter how long I play it I never can quite get used to it responding the opposite way that I am expecting. I feel like folks either bond with Titan or Warlock jumps… and from that point on the other one just doesn’t feel like a jump should feel. Hunter on the other hand always feels like you are riding around on a midair pogo stick.

Now the other problem I was talking about earlier is that Destiny 2 UI design is designed wrong. What I mean by that is in literally every MMO I play the chat box location is on the left hand side of the screen as illustrated above by my UI in World of Warcraft. The chat you care about appears on the left hand screen, and in this ElvUI layout the chat I don’t care about at all ever… appears on the right hand side of the screen. This is pretty much how I lay out every MMO that allows me to shift around the UI, but I cannot remember a game off the top of my head that does not default to having the chat left justified for lack of a better term. Destiny 2 on the other hand creates a super spammy loot window that you cannot remove on the left hand side of the screen and gives you the chat you actually care about on the right hand side of the screen… that will constantly minimize to just a tiny notepad document looking icon. When you receive a message it does not de-cloak and show you said message… however any time some jackass loots some random item the game takes every opportunity to make sure you know about it.

This is a broken design and causes me to simply ignore that chat exists because it does not conform to the cultural standards I am used to. By culture I mean the general cultural design of MMO games, of which Destiny 2 is a part of regardless of how Bungie feels about that label. To make things worse… Bungie themselves taught us that the only place that matters for text was the left hand side of the screen in Destiny 1 as they placed all of that spammy nonsense there. There is in theory a sound that is supposed to play when someone messages you, but whatever sound that is is either inaudible to me personally… or just blends into the din of everything else happening in game because I never notice it. \

Ultimately what my inability to notice chat cost me last night was a run through the raid as my friends over in TQMB were trying to reach out because they needed one more to get started. I am hoping when they put in the clan chat they also give us the option to swap the locations of the two chat panes so that the spammy nonsense goes on the right and the important chat goes on the left. Otherwise I am honestly not sure if I can ever fully train myself to look for chat in a weird location. After over two decades of online gaming… I am just too indoctrinated into a “chat on the left” mentality.

More Warmind Impressions

May 11, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I managed to hit the first soft cap of 345 through doing some of the content that happens immediately following the completion of the main story. I am still a bit dismayed at how short it ended up being. The core problem with the experience is there was a disconnect between how the NPCs were acting and the events that were actually occurring. What I mean by that is when we took down Ghaul… he had done enough to interfere with our lives to make us really hate him by the time we reached the point of final confrontation. With Warmind… they end up treating the Worm God we are fighting with similar contempt… even though we only found out one exists on Mars a few minutes earlier. Sure I get the fact that the Worm Gods are one of the galaxies great sources of evil and they were key in creating the Hive in the first place. I’ve read the Book of Sorrows and understand that all… but the average player has not.

The average player would be going into that scene wondering what in the hell a Worm God is and why these two NPCs seem so freaked about it. The problem being that the game didn’t really give us enough run up to reach this supposedly epic conclusion. It feels a lot like the campaign in Rise of Iron where you have some epic things going on… but nowhere enough lead up to make them feel like that epic nature is earned. Sure taking down a giant SIVA enfused Iron Lord was a slick final fight just like taking down a Worm God was a slick final fight… but in both cases it felt like we lacked significant reason for what we were doing. I mean the “Guardian” is the Deus Ex Machina to fix all problems much like the Warrior of Light is in Final Fantasy XIV. The problem is it feels like that role is earned in FFXIV whereas we sorta just magically are able to best everything in Destiny without really knowing why we are so much better than apparently every other Guardian out there.

Tam and I get into these discussions a lot and he is usually the one raising these points. The funny thing is they generally revolve on why he quit playing a game, and for me this is an annoyance but by no means a game breaker. I feel like there is a magic formula that keeps me engaged in a game. First you have to have a core mechanical loop that I enjoy, for example in Destiny I love the gun play and the movement which makes me feel awesome as I traverse this beautifully rendered world. The second point of that magical formula is that there has to be something in the game that I want to do. There needs to be some objective out there that drives me forward and keeps me engaged with the game when the shiny newness of the mechanical loop wears off.

Please note what I said there… something I want to do. For example in a game like World of Warcraft there can never be a possible way that I would ever run out of things to do and content I have not actually seen. Similarly in Final Fantasy XIV there is just too much content to ever find a true end to it. The problem is in both of those games I have rather regularly reached a point where there is simply nothing left that I care to do. Either the content left involves something I don’t much enjoy like Player versus Player interactions or it feels like it has more stick than carrot attached to it. I reached this point after Trials of Osiris in Destiny 2 where the mechanical loop simply was not enough and the repetitive and unrewarding nature of the Infinite Forest made it so that I just didn’t feel like logging in anymore.

While Warmind is an extremely short expansion… it feels like it might be a fairly intricate one. What I mean by that is there are already a bunch of post credits items that the game is asking me to do that spawn new opportunities to go off on adventures. I am sure there will be an end to this, but in some ways it reminds me of the style of interaction that happened on the Dreadnaught in The Taken King. There are puzzles to be solved and items to interact with in ways that I have not quite figured out. There were weapons to collect that are associated with questing, and others that folks don’t even know how they work as of yet. There are drops that can be used to improve most of the exotic weapons, and in it a bunch of interesting ways to feel like I keep moving forward.

On the other end however the new grind is real. After hitting 345 and finally accepting my Milestones for the week… each one of those rewarded a 351 item… 6 levels of movement off the base whereas before we were regularly getting upwards of 15 levels of movement from the same milestones. This means that journey to 385 is going to be an extremely long one when you have a very finite number of weekly options to give any sense of movement. This means that if I find myself engaged in this game again I will by nature need to push the Hunter and the Warlock through Curse of Osiris so that I can have three sets of weekly upgrade options instead of one. Sure the armor won’t swap over but those weapons can keep pushing up slowly over the course of multiple characters.

The game needed something and in truth at this point I am not sure if this is what that need was. The problem with Destiny 2 is that on paper it looks like the sequel I wanted for Destiny. However in practice it has always felt lacking in part because it felt like we sacrificed so much cool stuff from the first one to get this as a result. Nothing I have seen from this game justifies the reasons why we had to reset back to ground zero. I know they felt like they wanted a fresh start, to shed any bad blood from the first title. However I feel like that plan backfired horribly. I’m interested to see where they can go with Warmind and if they can give us justification going forward to buy the “Comet” expansion that has been looming on the horizon and leaked via the Canadian Walmart website. The one act that would go a long ways to building good will for me personally… would be to port the old patrol zones to Destiny 2 and make it feel like we didn’t abandon half the world to get this game.

Mirrorball

May 9, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent a not insignificant amount of time playing Destiny 2 Warmind. You will have to excuse the garbage screenshots but I was largely chilling on the sofa with my laptop and it runs the game at the potato resolution of 1366 x 768. I say potato because scaling down to that from the 4K display I have upstairs is quite the adjustment. It however allows me to be flexible where I am gaming, and last night allowed me to hang out with the mrs while still getting to do the thing I wanted to do. I’ve had a bit of a falling out with Destiny 2 over the last few months and I am not entirely certain why. It is just like after the release of Curse of Osiris I lost my forward momentum and stopped caring that I was no longer getting those engrams every day. Based on the fact that I was the only person online in my clan for most of the night… I am guessing everyone has had this same thing happen to them.

That said I was extremely interested in this expansion because it is the return of three things that I love in the Destiny universe… The Hive, Rasputin, and Clovis Bray lore. The last bit takes the form of our companion during this expansion Ana Bray… a heir to House Bray and former golden age scientist turned guardian. There is a rule among the guardians that they are not supposed to go digging into their past life before they died and were resurrected with the light, but when you are a Bray… this gets a lot harder knowing that so much golden age tech that remains was potentially created by your hands. As a result you get the impression that Ana Bray is no longer a Vanguard member… and not even a real guardian in the eyes of Zavala… because she broke the rule and started digging into Bray tech when she first realized it recognized her and would respond to her commands.

I am not far enough into the story to fully understand the other parts of the equation that I love… The Hive and Rasputin. The polar ice caps of Mars seem to hide a group of frozen hive that include several new troop types and modifications to the others as well. There are now Knights that wield a shield making it extremely difficult to attack them, and versions of the Acolyte called Adherants that seem to snipe you with long beams of energy. In addition there are more heavily armored versions of the Ogre, but this might just be one of the boss models for this expansion that gets used on ultra units. The map area itself is a little bit bigger than Titan in scope… which is somewhat disappointing but a significant step up from the tiny and repetitive Mercury.

What I enjoy the most so far is that it feels like this is as tightly packed with secrets as the Dreadnought was in The Taken King expansion. I’ve already encountered a bunch of objects that say I need to have a specific item or buff to be able to interact with them, meaning there are secrets to be unlocked hidden out there much like the Skyburner Deployment Codes. On the director map there is a note out to the side saying that I have found 0 or 45 Latent Memory locations, so this feels like something along the lines of the Calcified Fragments or SIVA Clusters of old. This is the sort of stuff that Destiny 2 desperately needed, to give us a downtime activity to strive for in getting out and exploring the world.

There are of course a bunch of cool items that came in with this expansion. At one point I got to choose from three weapons… one of which was essentially Uriel’s Gift minus high impact rounds but with Dragonfly… so I had to take it. I’ve not finished the main campaign and not hit level 30 yet so I am not super focused on gear at the moment. That said I have picked up a bunch of cool items through the eververse doodads you get while leveling up. My Ghost is now a floating mirror ball that I eventually colored neon green via a shader. I’ve similarly picked up an exotic ship and an exotic speeder as well. They seem to have tweaked these exotic shells a bit so that they have the same two perks…. the first being summons your mount faster and the second being universal elemental telemetry. The last perk seems to now be some sort of a cache based perk for a given planet. This mirror ball for example works on Nessus, which is handy since that happens to be the weekly zone.

I have to say I really like the set of gear that you get through turning in tokens with Ana Bray, and I can already tell this is going to be something I try and collect in its entirety. So far the story has been interesting, but I have a feeling that I am nearing the end of it… and if that is the case it is also very very short. Maybe there is more going on than I think there is… and maybe the boss I am just about to face is only the midpoint. However it certain feels like it is pushing me towards a supposedly epic conclusion… and the way the NPCs speak sounds in terms like we are doing this massive struggle… when it feels like I only just arrived on the planet. Reading a little blurb on Reddit just now confirms that I am in fact on the final quest… so essentially there are five quests in a chain that had I not been dawdling probably could have completed in an hour and a half.

Granted I like the other parts of the game more than I do the story… but it feels like a bit of a let down. During Destiny 1 the justification they gave for the need to reboot the game and create Destiny 2… was that the way D1 was build was particularly difficult to build content for. They blamed the tools for the fact that we kept getting recycled areas instead of completely new maps and raids. The problem is… neither Curse of Osiris with its rampant recycling of the Infinite Forest and its tiny planetary area… nor Warmind so far really prove that the sacrifice the players made was worth it. I say sacrifice… because in coming to Destiny 2 we gave up a lot of things that we still have not gotten back. We were promised a better gaming experience and on some levels it is… but on other levels it is just a less interesting game.

Ultimately I will be around for awhile because it did feel good last night to shoot things. The new event type that they touted however was a bit of a let down as well… given that it is mostly just another planetary event that involves hunting wave after wave of hive and doing some stuff to destroy crystals. Sure it was fun but also I can see it will get pretty repetitive. However it does fill that Archon’s Forge/Court of Oryx niche in giving something repeatable that can give decent rewards. The protect the Warsat event type is back and I had missed it greatly. I am not exactly sure how you can push that one into heroic mode, but I am sure it will involve something silly like blowing up one of the hive ships. There is an open world version of the Hive Ritual event that seems really cool because I was so used to doing that in the one space it appeared on Titan. All in all I was happy to be playing again… but still a bit grumbly about how cool this game could have been.

Red and Gold

May 1, 2018 by Belghast

One of my favorite aspects of Monster Hunter World has been the constant revolving door of limited time events. It seems like at some point we will run out of brand new ones, and that they will begin cycling through the past happenings… but for right now it seems like every time I turn around there is something brand new and shiny to interact with. Starting on April 27th we got the Code Red event which involves fighting four “red” monsters in the standard arena, one after another. So you have to work your way through Anjanath, Odogoron, Rathalos and then finally the Elder Dragon Teostra. Doing this gives you a special currency that looks like a monster gem called a Red Orb. Collecting seven of these and a slew of parts from all of the monsters included in the quest allows you to craft a set of rank 8 gear patterned off of Dante from Devil May Cry.

What makes this set really interesting is unlike past offerings… this is not a complete suit but instead individual pieces allowing for some interesting Mixed Build options. For the unindoctrinated… armor pieces have specific stats on them and by mixing and matching them you can often times come up with really interesting builds that benefit specific weapons. The boots for example have two levels of weakness exploit which I can see very easily mixing into other sets to achieve the desired affinity boost while hitting weak areas. The other special thing about this event is the fact that we get a brand new Charge Blade that is themed after Devil May Cry as well and starts out Rank 8 without any need to do a follow on upgrade quest. Instead of a sword and shield… it is a short sword with a run that serves as the shield… that then turns into a giant two handed sword giving it a very unique appearance and feel while using. A good chunk of my last week and some change has been spent collecting bits for this set and weapon… and last night I finally managed to craft the final piece when Teostra dropped that last piece of webbing.

The other big thing I have been participating in is the Kulve Taroth “raid” quest that drops materials to create a really awesome set of armor that you can see me wearing in the above image. Other than that it is also a chance for a lot of really interesting semi-random weapon drops. During the course of the runs that I have participated in I have managed to get a purple or better weapon for every slot other than bow… which seem to be extremely stingy for some reason. I had enough blue weapons that when I sold them all last night I jumped from 10,000 zenny to just shy of 300,000 zenny. The keepers have been 9 orange rank 8 weapons and 23 purple rank 7 weapons. Like I have talked about before the real benefit of this quest is it gives you a stable of usable weapons that allows you to branch out a bit. Like I have a decent Hunting Horn now… why not try it out and learn to use it?

Among the weapon drops I have gotten one of the more interesting ones is this Rank 8 longsword with 330 paralysis on it. If a monster is at all susceptible to this status effect… it seems to proc quite often. I was clearing out some of my quests last night and took out a Lavasioth and during the short time it took me to lower it to skull territory and trap it… I managed to proc paralysis four times. While these weapons won’t likely ever outdo a truly tuned weapon… because they are spending some item budget on defense… I like them as well rounded general use options that I didn’t have to spend a lot of materials to create. The Kulve Taroth quest goes away May 5th and the Dante quest goes away on May 10th. I am curious to see what replaces each of them which I guess we will start to see late in the evening on Wednesday? The content release schedule is odd and ends up with some things releasing Wednesday night and others releasing Thursday night. I want to get some more farming in of Kulve tonight for more attempts at shiny gold weapons, but in the grand scheme of things I am pretty happy with the progress I managed to make.