MMO Archives - Page 273 of 438 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Not First Rodeo

March 8, 2016 by Belghast

The Waiting Game

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country. Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock. My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us. It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle. The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play. I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo. To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy. My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam… which was a process that took over twenty minutes. I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight. The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division. My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around. After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me. It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing. Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit. That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty. This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead… which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp. The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around. This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation. I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay. If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light. Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it. I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley. The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great. At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them. I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions. I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”. While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again… I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game. It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well. Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us. Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two. I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error. As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard. It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile. My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction. In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines… this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option. During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window. It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable. Dear UbiSoft… never do this again… in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu. I mean I get what they are going for… wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game… but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta. So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan. I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue. I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon. The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available. I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land. If the servers stay stable… like will be golden. I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night. However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.

Day of Destiny

March 7, 2016 by Belghast

Axioma Clan

This weekend largely was a weekend for playing Destiny, or at the very least this was the primary activity for Sunday. The whole sequence of events started when my friend Squirrel mentioned that it was Black Spindle day, and that we needed to get that done. Which itself is a continuation of a conversation I had yesterday with him and several members of his clan. I mentioned it at the tail end of Saturday’s post, but one of the activities that I have really wanted to do over in Destiny is the Oryx raid. One of the challenges seems to be that you get stuck trying to get to 300 light level without access to the much higher light level raid items. For what feels like six months I have been hovering around 298 light, with no amount of activity seeming to push me over that barrier. As a result when Squirrel invited me to partake of a Tuesday night “newbie” raid for King’s Fall I jumped at the chance. Granted Tuesday night is also the prime night for playing The Division since it launches what I believe is essentially midnight EST tonight. That said I am more than happy to blow off that first night of a new game to be able to do the thing that I have been really wanting to do in Destiny. It had gotten to the point where I was going to try and twist a bunch of arms to try and get them to build a raid team to at the very least let me see the content. The prospect of being able to attend a more regular thing however… seems pretty great. It probably won’t be something I can do every week, but this week works out nicely.

So we zoom forward to yesterday, and I get the message that it is Black Spindle day. Now when I got this message it was like 8 in the morning and I was still having to wrap up the post production stuff for AggroChat, and then knock out my own Aggronaut blog post. Sadly by the time I finished everything… the Australian leader of the clan had gone to bed, and we were left with the normal non-primetime Sunday morning group of players. That did not stop Squirrel and I from running a Nightfall and a ton of Heroics back to back. From all of those strikes I managed to pick up a couple of decent exotics, and a few blues that are worthy of feeding into other things. I picked up Claws of Ahamkara for the Warlock, which gives me an extra melee attack which is always amazing. For the titan I picked up a new favorite chest piece, the Armamentarium which gives me an extra grenade. Finally I picked up the above weapon, the Thunderlord which fills a hole in my itemization that I had been looking for. I snagged Truth the rocket launcher and am extremely happy with it, but I had been wanting an Exotic Heavy Machine Gun… and bam I manage to pick one up today. Now I just need to go through the frustration of doing crucible with a sword to finish getting my exotic sword there.

The Spindle Hunt

The problem with yesterday is that I had a fixed time frame that I could do things in. I ultimately needed to be downstairs by 8 pm and so I could wrap some things up, and preferably be in bed at a decent hour. That gave me all day yesterday, but unfortunately for most of the time we were online we lacked a viable third. I am so thankful to Squirrel for the constant attempt to stir the chat and try and find someone. You might have noticed that among other things this weekend you will see that I now have the “Axioma” tag under my name, so that is something that happened as well. During all of my running around I also managed to get another level of Dead Orbit faction which rewarded me the sweet ship that you can see in the above image. Both of us ended up needing to take breaks every few hours, to go off and do a small bit of adulting here and there. The funny thing is… it is amazing how fast two hours can just evaporate when you are chain running heroics. It doesn’t seem like each of them takes that long, but when you stack a bunch of them end to end it really adds up. Finally around 5:30 we managed to get a spindle group together, which meant I needed to quickly learn the role of the Defender Titan on the fight. Please note… while I have a Defender spec, I don’t often play in it other than PVP… and even then its just for the Helm of Saint-14 procs that stun people in my bubbles. I am neither proficient or even effective as one most of the time… so I had a lot of ground to catch up.

We grabbed another Axioma member Jex who was also awesome in helping me sort out what I should be doing. For those who don’t understand the Black Spindle, it is an exotic sniper rifle that comes from the end of a daily heroic mission. The gotcha is that you have to do some stuff that is not intended to actually get it, and it is hands down the roughest thing I have done in this game so far. Essentially at the end of the normal mission you have to rush out of the final chamber and down a series of corridors, where you can’t really fight anything… but instead just need to keep moving forward and avoiding taking as much damage as you can. I believe there is some sort of time limit that you are under during that part, and you have to reach another area before it is considered safe and you can ease up a bit. You have essentially moved into the area where another strike takes place… and from there you proceed as normal for a few rooms until finally you take a detour down the path that would normally lead to the Ketch in the Shadow Thief strike. Now is where the difficult part begins… you take the elevator up into the Ketch and when you enter the first room with mobs, a timer starts. You have ten minutes to get to the end of the strike, take down the boss and destroy all of the taken. We were so damned close… and on my last attempt we literally had TWO mobs up when the timer ran out. There are a bunch of things that I can do to help… namely get my damned exotic sword so that the next time this is available it will be a little easier. Similarly I hope I pick up some gear in the raid on Tuesday so that my overall light level will be higher. I was frustrated that I felt like given another attempt or two… we would have gotten it. However I had pretty much all day to make attempts and simply ran out of time before I needed to pop off the PS4. There will always be a next time.

Rocking Chairs and Zeds

March 6, 2016 by Belghast

Adulting Happened

The temperature is warming up here in Oklahoma, the birds are singing, the trees budding… and with all of this comes the desire to get the hell out of the house and do something. This is essentially the second nice weekend we have had and with it the desire to get out and sort out the mess that is our backyard. As a result the day unfolded through a masterwork of killing so many birds with one stone. Essentially it had been quite a while since I had seen my folks, so I knew this weekend we probably needed to meet up with them for a meal. Additionally we had a bunch of things that we had been wanting to purchase, but the lack of a good means of hauling it home was problematic. So we proposed that I met my folks for a nice meal… and then potentially abuse the use of my Dad’s truck for the purpose of hauling a few things home from Lowe’s and Sams Club. In theory some of this could have been done a single chair at a time, like we hauled home the resin rocker to decide if we liked it last weekend. Other than that we really needed a new deck box and for the longest time Sams Club has had this excellent looking one for a very reasonable price, that has hydraulics to hold the lid open while fiddling with stuff. So we set forth on the mission to eat a nice meal… and gather up a bunch of stuff.

We tag teamed a good portion of the day, while I was wandering around trying to find the things we needed with my father, my wife was back home filling up four big black trash bags full of debris. The end result of our adulting is that we have a great little patio off the newish bedroom door for us to sit out there and rock and enjoy the shocking amount of peace and quiet we have in our back yard. I also finally got some wind chimes… something I have always wanted since I was a small child. My grandmother had them and I used to love listening to them on spring and summer afternoons. We might have to adjust where they are hanging because they honestly don’t get a ton of wind, but that is something we can fiddle with over time. We took the older, smaller deck box and put it around side the house under the cantilevered bit that sticks out from our stairwell. We figured that would be an excellent place to store to pool cover and any covers for lawn furniture and such during the summer months. It is my mission this year to actually enjoy our back yard more, and we are even contemplating opening the pool a little early since it seems like we are now through the cold weather. Adulting is one thing… but having something to show for the adulting is a completely different thing.

Kovak’s Survival Guide

Another thing that I have been fiddling around with over the last few days is How to Survive 2. A good friend of mine hooked me up with a copy, and I have been poking my head around in it. While I am not exactly sure if I am ready to write a proper “impressions” piece I did want to talk about it a little bit this morning. There is still a lot of the game that I have not touched, like there is an entire online component that I have largely ignored. For the most part so far I have been playing the local single player, which is more or less a series of missions. The premise is as with many other Zombie Survival games… to scavenge the wastes to find useful stuff and then craft it into more useful stuff. The game itself has this entire old school fallout feel to it, where you are plunked down into limited maps to go exploring while doing the missions. It reminds me of all of the various city maps from Fallout 1 and 2, and this is where my explorer bit kicks in. During these missions you are asked to do a limited set of objectives… and as soon as you complete them you can tag out and leave the quest. However I cannot ever seem to bring myself to leave an area until I am absolutely certain I have killed everything and gathered every possible resource.

The world appears to be procedural generated and every mission seems to be repeatable, with a difficulty slider of sorts allowing you to ramp up the number of encounters. Last night I did a few missions on a higher level, and I have to say the number of zombies increases quickly. I went from having one or two stragglers here and there… to having small hordes to deal with by simply bumping it up by a single level. The game play is really fun, in that you move through the world with WASD and click to attack with Q/E cycling through any items you have like medicinal herbs. The mouse wheel works as a way of scrolling through your available weapons. I’ve found quite a bit of ammunition but so far I have not found any guns, so I am curious as to how the zombies interact with hearing a gunshot. Generally speaking I am largely a melee only guy when it comes to the zombie genre, because it allows me to get in… and get out without alerting the entire mass. Admittedly while playing this game… I keep expecting to see a Vault Dweller because it is so reminiscent of the way I used to feel playing Fallout. The only thing that is a bit frustrating at the moment is that I have reached a point where I need to be level three to continue the story missions. However at this point I am not even level two… so I am not exactly certain how I am supposed to be leveling. I am really hoping that the answer is not “grind the first missions over and over”. I will ping my friend and pester her to see if there is something I am missing in all of this, and hopefully there is. However I have been enjoying myself just wandering around looking for cool stuff and smashing zombies in the head with my upgraded baseball bat.

Hellfire Assault

March 3, 2016 by Belghast

Weekends are Bad

One strong constant in my life is that weekends are bad for me when it comes to making plans. This is counter-intuitive since for MOST of the living world… weekends are the time they can regularly commit to doing stuff. The truth is that weekends are really the only time that my wife and I are both together and pointed in the same direction for any lengthy period of time. During the week she has a mixture of responsibilities, commitments, and spur of the moment activities that often times keep her from getting home until eight or nine in the evening. Whereas I tend to have a fairly predictable schedule, that gets me home by 5 pm CST most nights. This means that the only time we actually get to do anything as a couple is on the weekends, and as a result I have tried really hard to be pretty sparse with committing myself to things that occur on Saturday or Sunday. I am already breaking that rule heavily with the recording of AggroChat Saturday nights… but generally speaking by the time our 9pm CST start time rolls around we are home anyway. There however have been a long list of activities that have happened on Sunday and Saturday afternoons that I have flaked like mad on. There was the whole pen and paper role-playing game that happened at 2pm CST, that by some freak occurrence I managed to make four or so of… before life caught up with me and I started being unavailable. Then similarly I thought “Sunday is TV Night” and started trying to raid with my friends Horde side… only to find that I am just barely making it into my chair some nights before Walking Dead. As it gets nicer outside… we push back our range of activity further… so pretty much the entire summer months are a no-go for planned activities on the weekend.

As a result I thought I was pretty much done raiding in World of Warcraft at least until Legion hits. Then my good friend Carth decided to pull together a casual raid group and after everyone voted on the best day of the week… I lucked out and it landed on Wednesday nights. This is pretty much the perfect raid night for me, given that my wife is already committed to church that evening and I can pretty much do whatever I want to do without causing a major imposition. Last night was the first official outing, and we planned on raiding from 7:30 pm cst to 10 pm cst but wound up going a little over due to the overall successes of the group. We absolutely had a few “ringer” dps in the mix, but even accounting for that… I think we did really well. For a bit we would end up having to pug some people… but we managed to pull together a 10+ player team. The roster was super comfortable and included so many long time friends: Carthuun (on Aalis), Tick (on Taavish), Giulietta, Kylana, Edana (@catinglasses), Jasmynne (Carth’s Wife), Bleddwen (@KerynWeylan)…. with myself and Damai tanking and a mixture of ringers that cycled through for which I don’t know all of the mains from Praetorian Guard.

Significant Progress

We did significantly better than I expected on our first outing. We managed to clear up to Iskar in a single evening, and the only boss we really struggled a bit at was Kilrogg. That is pretty much the first fight where the mechanics really start to matter, and as a result it took us two attempts for folks to get the whole visions thing down solidly. On the second go however everything seemed to just work like plan. It was a bit messy at the end, but any kill you walk away from with a victory is a good kill in my book. The awesome thing about all of this as well is that we got a lot of gear for people who needed it. Bleddwen one of the two healers… that was quite literally drafted last night on the spot… walked away with I believe eight pieces of gear. Our other healer walked away with three pieces, but one of those was a tier set piece. I managed to pick up my first piece of tier gear as well, and I am hoping next go round Kormrok will be nice and drop the Warrior piece so I can throw on that two piece bonus. As much as I loved raiding with my Horde side family, I have to say it felt good to be Belghast again in a raid. I mean I have done Gladiator dps for awhile now, and it is really fun… but what I mean is Belghast the tank. It kinda felt good to go back to my roots with the character that was my main through most of those really memorable fights.

It doesn’t hurt that the folks that we raided with… are for the most part the folks I play all of these games with. The two healers we had… have healed me many times in Final Fantasy XIV so it felt natural to see that relationship shift to World of Warcraft. The awesome thing about this as well is that it seems like we have two tanks and two healers locked down solidly. That means we probably need a shift healer and potentially a shift tank to fill in the gap, but otherwise we have a really solid team. There is a certain amount of learning mechanics on the fights, like Iskar… but I forsee us being able to start Heroic before too long. It would be amazing if we could push through it as well and get folks some Moose loving. In any case it was a nice, relaxing and casual raid night, with the folks I probably would have been hanging out with anyways. The only gotcha seemed to be that we were having trouble with our normal Teamspeak server, and as a result are probably going to be migrating to Discord for next week. I had been wanting to give Discord a real world trial, and this seems as good as any time. I love the concept, and I just wish that it were a slack plugin rather than a completely separate application. For text chat purposes, I still like Slack and their notification system just works better… however for voice… at least based on testing last night Discord is seeming to be the new way to go.