MMO Archives - Page 324 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Darkest Dungeon

April 4, 2015 by Belghast

Twitch and Hitbox

Yesterday was a bit of a strange day in that I recorded two different podcasts that were not AggroChat on the same day. Early in the day I recorded another episode of Bel Folks Stuff, that was completely on the spur of the moment since I was off for Good Friday. Right now I am tenantively planning on releasing this on Wednesday. Then in the evening I guested on an episode of the Multiplaying podcast. While talking on that podcast or actually I think during the “after party” we were talking about Twitch and Hitbox. During yesterday morning I did my first real test of using JoiCaster to stream to both Hitbox and Twitch at the same time. Other than some technical difficulties it largely worked and I was able to produce a video of myself playing Darkest Dungeon.

The problem is that I had like five times the number of people watching the twitch stream as I did the hitbox stream at the same time. So much so that I stopped watching the chat on Hitbox and wound up missing a few comments. Last night I realized something, that my love of Hitbox is somewhat clouding my judgment. Me trying to make that happen is kind of like trying to make MySpace happen because you happened to like this or that feature better than Facebook. At this point Twitch is ubiquitous, everyone has an account and it is widely supported by lots of third party sites. There are several things about Hitbox that just feel better, but there just aren’t the number of people there that there are on Twitch. In theory I think I am going to abandon this whole multi-streaming thing and just stick with Twitch from this point on. It pains me to say it, but Hitbox as cool as it might be… is just too late to the party.

Darkest Dungeon

As we announced last week during the AggroChat episode, this month I chose Darkest Dungeon as my round robin pick for the game club. This is one of those games that I have seen circulating in among my friends but I largely avoided it, so that I could go into it fresh as a game club pick. Yesterday I played it for the first time, in the block above you can see the result of my stream. I have to say even though the game is pretty unforgiving… I am really enjoying the hell out of it. At its core it is a rogue like RPG dungeon crawler, with a really awesome woodcut art style… and an interesting sanity mechanic. So in part it feels a bit like playing Call of Cthulhu. Everything seems to have a chance of effecting your sanity, and when your characters get too stressed a saving throw is triggered. If they succeed this internal roll they gain a positive trait, and if they fail it… they gain a negative trait.

The cool thing is… these are not just passive debuffs but they actively change the way the character starts interacting. For example in the above play session my Vestal gained the “greedy” negative trait… which oddly enough made her far more blood thirsty in combat. There were a number of times where she just attacked without my say. This morning when playing the game a bit one of my highwaymen got the fearful trait causing him to periodically retreat to the back of the pack, changing what abilities you could actually use to attack with. The only real negative so far is that “the only way out is through” meaning once you start a mission it seems like the only way to leave the mission is to either finish it successfully… or kill off your party. The positive there is that party members are roughly as disposable as they are in Rogue Legacy. There are always fresh recruits available through the wagon in camp. At this point I have lost one entire party… and a few single characters here and there and it feels like I am still making forward momentum. I feel like this game is going to generate some interesting conversation at the end of the month.

Alligator Pears

Yesterday was a very strange day for me, largely because I was trying not to get too terribly involved in anything. With the two podcasts, and not really knowing the scheduling of the second one I stayed out of the mix for most things. This means that the vast majority of my time online was spent working on Botany. At this point I have managed to take it to level 35 which is the beginning of the more grindy levels. Thankfully I have for the most part a full allotment of leve quests to get me through them. Working on harvesting has become my “during podcasts” activity, because it is slow paced and proding and does not require much attention. So while recording both Bel Folks Stuff and Multiplaying I slowly worked my way through harvesting a ton of stuff… namely Alligator pears. I am not sure exactly what they are… but I certainly did manage to gather a dozen stacks of them. In truth I kind of expect they would look a bit like an avocado in real life.

Now I need to figure out what item I need for my level 40 Botany quest and start collecting that. So far that has been how I have leveled, I focus fire whatever item I need for the next quest and then when I collect enough of those I start doing Levequests. Botany seems so much more peaceful than mining was, and I guess it is in part because it almost exclusively takes place in the games extremely beautiful forest areas. There is just something relaxing about walking around, listening to the music and chopping down trees. Today however I really need to spend some time working on getting actual content in that can earn me poetics. I did take a break from the harvesting for awhile yesterday to run some new folks through Tam-Tara Deepcroft. Tanking low level content is always enjoyable, and it gives me a chance to break out my sword and board and paladin it up. The constant trickle of new players still manages to floor me, but everyone seems happy and well adjusted which makes me happy in turn.

#FFXIV #DarkestDungeon #Twitch

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Seven and Three

April 3, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Friday

Today is a very excellent day… other than the fact that I am actually awake at this hour of the morning when I don’t really have to be. Without exposure to children to constantly remind me of an impending holiday, they tend to sneak up on me. So at the beginning of this week when a co-worker asked me which day we got off for Easter I completely blanked… and had a sudden rush of realization that it was in fact that time. So I had expected to have to work today, which is part of what makes it such a truly good Friday. As far as what I will be spending my day doing… well we already have a list of things that I need to accomplish. For example as soon as the tag office opens I will be venturing out to renew the tag on my jeep, and at the same time going to get a money order to pay taxes.

On top of this I also have planned to record two different podcasts today, which is going to make it an exceptionally busy day. During the time in between I plan on streaming some Darkest Dungeon, which for those who have not listened yet is our March AggroChat Game Club game. I have not played it at all yet, so I figured I would stream my first moments in the game today. This was actually my pick in the round robin system we set up, and mostly because I had heard so many of my friends playing it a few months back. I am not sure what to really expect other than the fact that it is a dungeon crawler RPG about mental illness. The real question will be just how quirky the game is versus how fun and playable it is. There are a lot of games out there with a quirky mechanic that is supposed to be the reason why you play the game. Micromanaging mental conditions is not necessarily enough of a mechanic to keep me engaged, so hopefully there is a lot of good monster slaying fun as well.

Seven and Three

My week has been pretty much consumed with posts about the Developer Appreciation Week, and at least part of today will be consumed with trying to collect posts about the DAW2015. But during the time in between I did quite a lot of raiding. This week is easily our single best week in World of Warcraft raiding. In total we managed to down seven normal mode bosses and three heroic mode bosses in Blackrock Foundry, including two first kills for us. To recap that is Gruul, Oregorger, Darmac, Ka’graz, Kromog, Thogar, Hans & Franz on Normal leaving us Blast Furnace, Iron Maidens and Blackhand. Then we repeated a kill of Heroic Hans & Franz and went on to take down Darmac and Gruul as well. We spent most of last night working on Heroic Oregorger, which was the source of several frustrations… namely because we were getting discombobulated on the order in which we need to pop the boxes on the second time. We would end up tanking him where he stood when the boxes went down a second time, meaning that our normal order was jacked up because that place how was full of piles of the crap that he drops on the ground.

Unfortunately with all of these boss kills, I still have yet to pick up a pair of pants. I am still to this day rocking 640 legs, and I am starting to get frustrated enough to dump the resources into crafting a set. Honestly I have had some pretty shitty luck loot wise for awhile now. I was hoping and praying that Gruul would drop me an upgraded sword, but alas nothing. The best upgrades I have gotten in awhile seem to be from the Garrison loot crates that I get I believe every two weeks. I did somehow manage to get two piece set bonus this week which is a positive. I am not sure if it has helped my dps at all however, since I still seem to be bringing up the rear of the pack dps wise. I am insane on AOE fights, but single target fights I fall to the bottom. I think that might just be what Gladiator dps looks like honestly. All in all it was a fun night, but once again last night we struggled with lack of healers. For a period of time it looked like we were not even going to raid at all. So to come through and manage to down Gruul I guess was quite a feat all things considered.

Alone in the Crowd

@AlternativeChat the biggest challenge I see about the WoW community, is that lots are playing, but few are truly joyful to be playing it

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) April 2, 2015

I got into an interesting discussion yesterday with Alt that in truth all started from me misreading a tweet. In the tweet she asked what piece of advice would you give a new player starting Warcraft, the wording however lead me to quickly misread it as “Someone you know who has NEVER played Warcraft before wants to start a game from scratch. Give them ONE piece of advice.” To which I and apparently several other people replied to try FFXIV… because if I had a friend that had not played an MMO and was looking to get into them, that is now the game I would suggest they try playing. So I was being unintentionally contrarian because other responses to the question admittedly colored my own interpretation. This lead down an interesting path where we start talking about why I am frustrated with the World of Warcraft community. I said that I did not feel that most players feel “joy” in playing the game any longer, meaning that I think most people are playing the game because they have played the game for years and have one hell of a sense of inertia built up.

To which Alt drove down a course of discussion asking if the community even matters if you are mostly a Soloist. I had a pretty knee-jerk reaction of yes… community always matters, but upon sleeping on this question I still feel the same. There is this whole “butterfly effect” that happens in an online game. Even if you are going out of your way to avoid other players, you are being effected by them. You might wander through an area because the player density is less there, causing you to get into more battles along the way, than if you had followed the beaten path. Similarly it might take you twice as long to complete a quest because other players in the area are farming down and actively fighting you for the spawns. Essentially you are never alone when playing an online game, and even without you realizing it other players are imposing themselves upon your game time. My theory goes something like this… if you play a game with an excellent community these random encounters feel less imposing. In a game like Warcraft the systems are set up in a way that make you adversaries with every other player operating in the same space, fighting for the same resources. The Garrisons have created this bubble world where you no longer have to interact with other players, but that world is a hollow shell version of the larger world. I feel that games that create systems that allow players to share and collaborate instead of compete are more enjoyable experiences.

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 3

April 2, 2015 by Belghast

Over the last several days I have been rattling off a series of studios and game teams that I appreciate. Today will mark my final day of this process, but I am hoping that it has inspired some of you out there to make your own posts about the developers you appreciate. The person I really appreciate is Scarybooster for getting this thing started back in I believe 2010? Scary has a way of coming up with these great ideas, like he is the person who decided the Alliance of Awesome needed to happen as well. Unfortunately he no longer updates his blogs, and has deleted more of them in the past than I can count. So if you know Scary tell him he needs to stop doing that shit and keep coming up with interesting and awesome ideas.

Blizzard – Heroes of the Storm Team

I talked about League of Legends yesterday, and there is no denying it’s market domination in the MOBA arena. The problem is League is far more complicated of a game than I care to play. I get frustrated trying to figure out what I should build when, and then Blizzard comes along and creates an MOBA for someone like me. This game does what Blizzard does best, boil a genre down to its most basic essence and polish it until it shines. This is precisely how I feel about HoTS and its impact on the MOBA genre. Through a series of quick this or that choices you can build out your character and get right back into the action without constantly being afraid that you built the wrong thing. While friends have pointed out that this greatly limits what you can do with any given champion… I am fine with this and in fact welcome it. As much as I enjoy a “Tanky Darius” I would rather just have some clear messaging on what the intent of every champion was, and Heroes of the Storm gives this to me. On top of this the map design is awesome, and each one feels equally enjoyable with its own specific mechanics. I think the entire world is tired of playing Summoner’s Rift.

SOE/Daybreak – Landmark Team

Every time I talk about the company formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment, I do so with a little bit of heartbreak. Daybreak is not the same company, but I feel like the people that are still there are trying their damnedest to make this situation work. There is a lot of negative press that I could be talking about on my blog, about the poor decisions of the company managing Daybreak but for the most part I have tried not to. I feel like there is plenty of negativity out there already on this subject, and that the people who are still there need our support now more than ever. With that said this post goes out to everyone who has ever been a part of the Landmark game. While I am not playing it right now, I still think it is an extremely cool concept and I keep meaning on jumping right back in. Landmark is essentially the ultimate building game in every possible way, and the amount of stuff that the community has been able to create because of the excellent toolset developed by this team is phenomenal. This game blew me away, and I am still constantly amazed by the sort of things I am seeing built. So bravo to the folks who are no longer with the team, and bravo to the folks still there fighting to keep the ship going forward.

Undead Labs – All of the Them

For most of these I have singled out an entire team to talk about, but this time I am breaking that trend and instead talking about an entire studio. I love Undead Labs. I love their spirit, and I love their dedication… and quite honestly I love the way they interact with the public. I remember when State of Decay was about to release on the XBox 360 I was completely pumped for it. I went home that night played the game for several hours and then wrote a pretty gushy blog post the very next day. Within moments of posting the blog I had it being retweeted by Annie Strain the wife of Undead Labs Founder Jeff Strain, who then proceeded to engage with me in a back and forth about my blog post and the game in general. That sort of genuine interaction is just so damned refreshing, and it seems to extend to every single team member. I was lucky enough to get to hang out and talk to several of them during Pax South, and they all had this infectious joy over the games they had created and were creating. While I still desperately want a multiplayer version of State of Decay, I have faith that sooner or later the team will give me something akin to that experience. In the meantime they just seem like a really damned cool studio, and I look forward to watching as their latest game Moonrise progresses to launch. Additionally I feel like I am probably buying yet another copy of State of Decay as the special Year One edition should be landing shortly.

Motiga – Gigantic Team

This is another tale of me just really liking a game studio. I went to Pax South knowing next to nothing about this game other than the fact that it existed, had a cartoony art style and used a teal and orange color scheme it all of its marketing. I walked away from Pax South being both a fan of the game and of the team behind it. I was lucky enough to participate in several plays of the game, and got some time to talk to several members of the development and community staff. They all seem just as amped about this game as the players did, and it was awesome to be coached by the folks who built the game… or have them marvel when I apparently found a bug that nobody had actually found yet. The game is just really damned fun, and that seems to be the focus on making sure the various champion interactions are enjoyable. I have no clue what the timeframe for this games launch is but I look forward to it anxiously. Playing it with two other members of the AggroChat crew against a minor YouTube celebrity, and defeating him… was pretty much the highlight of my Pax South experience. So keep up the awesome work and I look forward to playing this game with my friends when it releases.

Every Single Game Developer

While I have singled out a handful of individuals for specific games that I really love playing… I feel like for this final day of my #DAW2015 love fest… I want to change things up a bit. Basically this goes out to every single game developer out there, regardless of what you are working on or for what company. You guys are living the dream of so many of us who did not choose to chase it. While there are absolutely days I’m thankful I am not in that industry, especially as another studio decimates its staff to realign for this or that reason, there are other days where I pine over the path not taken. You folks are my rockstars, and even if you are making a game that no one will ever play… you are being awesome. Games bring me so much joy, and there is a cast of often nameless and faceless people who struggled through crunch time to get that product into my hands. As I talk about the games I talk about, I try my best to always be aware of the folks behind the scenes that made it happen. So to all the game developers out there… keep making awesome stuff and I will keep playing it. Thank you all.

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 2

April 1, 2015 by Belghast

Yesterday I kicked off my own versions of the Developer Appreciation Week with five companies and game teams that I greatly appreciate it. It seems like we are starting to get some traction because yesterday MMOGames.com independent of my own intervention ran a piece of what we are doing. I still hope to see more people join in the fun and talk about the development staff that they really appreciate it. I play a lot of games… so I have a lot of love to go around.

Blizzard – World of Warcraft Team

Last night was quite possibly my single best night in World of Warcraft raiding. After some sluggish weeks we strolled into Blackrock Foundry and cleared seven normal bosses, then popped out and took down two heroic bosses… one of which was our first kill. To make the night even more special we managed to one shot all of them. After riding that high last night, it is impossible to do a developer appreciation week post without talking about Blizzard. World of Warcraft has been the juggernaut in the room for so long that I can barely remember a time when they were not the clear market dominator. While I have some disappointments about Warlords of Draenor, I feel like they are legitimately trying to turn the franchise around after what felt like years of neglect. It feels very much like they have doubled down on this game, and at the end of the day I am still enjoying playing it with my friends. For a ten year old game to still maintain relevancy is a pretty mighty feat, so my hat is off to the Blizzard staff who have supported it throughout the years and made it this experience that we judge all other MMOs against. It has been the gold standard for good reason. Even if World of Warcraft is not your game, you have to marvel at the level of polish that they deliver when they roll out a new expansion.

Bioware – Star Wars the Old Republic Team

Star Wars the Old Republic and I have somewhat of a checkered past to be honest. I went into this game feeling like it was going to be the WoW Killer for myself and my friends, but ultimately we lasted the same three months that we normally do in this sort of game. When they chose to go free to play, I was frustrated by how insanely restrictive the system ended up being. All of this said… if you can some how push past all of the limited time loot boxes and free to play cludge… there is a great game there at its core. With the launch of SWTOR I tried something that I don’t normally do… I leveled as part of a dedicated duo with my friend Euron. I played a Jedi Guardian and he a Jedi Consular, and we participated in each others stories. The way those two tales interweave was something to behold, and while it felt a bit confining to always have to make sure you and your friend were on at exactly the same times… it was a leveling experience unlike no other. The thing that stands out about SWTOR is the story, and what ultimately killed the game for me was when I ran out of it. Now I know I have several expansions that I can go back and experience and I keep thinking that one day I will do precisely that. In the meantime I have fond memories of the time we were all obsessed with this game, and give massive props to the folks who built such engaging content… that we pulled some fourteen hours a day to get through it all.

Zenimax – The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Since Daggerfall I have been in love with the Elder Scrolls franchise. Each time a new one comes out I end up devoting hundreds of hours to playing it, but all the while I keep thinking… this experience would be more enjoyable with my friends. So when I found out that Elder Scrolls was in fact being made into an MMO I was completely over the moon about it. I was lucky enough to be in the first round of alpha testing, so ultimately I participated in this game for over a year before launching it. Unfortunately this was a bit of a double edged sword because I got to see some features that worked better in early versions of the game, as compared to later more minimalistic ones. When you test a game that long it skews your vision of what the game actually is. Elder Scrolls Online has some of the best story content I have experienced in any game, and there are a number of quest lines that stick out in my memory. The whole concept of being able to continue into another faction after you have finished yours was inspired. The problem is by the time I hit the Aldmeri content I had lost a lot of my steam, and our guild was suffering the traditional drop off in players. Now that the game has shifted to buy to play however I am able to experience this game again and realize just how great it actually is. A lot of the problems I had with it early on have been smoothed out, and the post 50 progression no longer feels quite so grindy. I really appreciate the staff that has been plugging away quietly on making this game a better place to be, and I look forward to playing it more in the coming months.

Trion Worlds – Trove Team

Trove is this quirky world building game that blends MMO combat, MOBA style character design, and Minecraft style exploration and construction. I was lucky enough to be including in the first round of alpha invites for trove, and it has been insane to watch this game evolve. What I love the most is the way the developers have been meshed with the community since day one. Instead of a traditional forum, they decided to open up the process with a reddit, in fact I think this is the first game I can ever recall doing that. In those first days the community was so amazing, because it was so tight knit. You would log in and get welcomed by people that might recognize your name from the Reddit, and there was rarely a time when a developer was not in game talking to players. As the game has progressed the community has gotten larger, and the rigors of development have degraded this closeness a small bit, but it is still very much a game that draws its inspiration from the players. While I don’t play it as much as I should, I have loved watching it evolve around me. It feels like the sort of game you get when you throw a bunch of seven year olds in a room and tell them to solve a problem. It is pure unbridled joy and imagination… and has been good for my jaded soul to see that a game like that can exist.

Riot Games – League of Legends Team

League of Legends is 100% not my type of game. In fact I might never have played it were it not at the suggestion of my friends. Actually I rarely ever play this game other than when a bunch of friends want to do so. That said the experience of playing with a team of friends is contagious. There are a lot of aspects about this game that are problematic for me, a huge one being the still very toxic community. That said I give the biggest credit I can possibly give to the character designers. What League has in spades is the personality that seems to be lacking from so many other MMOs. The characters in League of Legends have a life of their own, and they make you fall in love with them. I have joked for some time, that this isn’t actually a game, but a modern sticker album… because I seem to largely collect characters and skins rather than actually play with them. Each character is really a triumph of taking what are mostly remixed elements and making them feel fresh and new. I tend to stick to the characters I know and love however like Darius, Graves, WuKong and Garen. My favorite gameplay mode however will probably always be ARAM simply because no one expect you to know what you are doing, which is about perfect for me.