MMO Archives - Page 363 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tremors in the Force

October 13, 2014 by Belghast

Glorious Weekend

The entire weekend was pretty crummy outside here in Oklahoma, so as a result we spent most of it inside. I curled up on the couch with a brand new fuzzy blanket and spent it gaming on the laptop while watching stuff on television. It had quite literally been a few months since I had last watched television really. Granted there was a bit of television each night and each morning while going to sleep and waking up respectively, but I had not actually sat down to watch anything of any importance in a very long time. As such I had a bunch of shows stacked up that I wanted to catch up on. The most important of these was this seasons Doctor Who. I had watched the premiere several weeks back, but had not seen any of the episodes since.

I feel like the jury is still out on how I feel about the new Scottish Doctor. I guess I am just used to the normal fun loving slightly insane Doctor, and this interpretation just feels strange. The dynamic between Clara and the Doctor also feels a bit strained. Granted the companion that survives a regeneration I guess is always a bit odd, but this one seems more so. It seems in part that the Doctor still has a crush on her, and as he is watching her get on with her life… it feels a little awkward. As far as the stories have gone, I think I like the “Time Heist” episode the best. Trying not to go into much detail for fear of spoilers… because I am sure there are others out there that have not caught up yet. In fact public television here in the United States tends to be one full season behind.

Tremors in the Force

Other than Doctor Who I finally got around to watching the first two episodes of the new Star Wars animated series “Rebels”. What amazes me is just how well both of the animated series have managed to get the feeling of the universe, whereas the prequels failed so miserably. Star Wars Rebels is pretty much the perfect Star Wars show. You have a scrappy group of fighters, and interesting relationship between reluctant Jedi Master and a force sensitive padawan… all after the fall of the Republic in a super scary time where being a Jedi means being hunted. There are just enough call backs to the original series to let you know when exactly this adventure is set. In the first episode Ezra the main character happens to open a Jedi Holocron with the message Obi Wan Kenobi left for all Jedi during the events of Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith. Then in Episode 2, you encounter C-3PO and R2-D2 who are on their way to the Tantive IV. With those two little vignettes it tells you that the events are sometime in the gulf of time between episodes 3 and 4, which is a super fertile place to base a new series.

The characters are likeable from the start. They are just “scoundrel” enough to come across as being selfish… but quickly transition into a cell of rebel fighters trying to survive however they can. The entire series has a very “Firefly” vibe too it, and honestly I am just wishing there was more of the show to watch already. So far you have Hera Syndulla the Twilek Pilot/Engineer, Sabine Wren the Mandalorian Weapons Expert, Garazeb Orrelios the Lasat Muscle, Ezra Bridger the Street Kid Force Savant and finally Kanan Jarrus the leader of this group and a former Jedi Padawan at the moment Order 66 happened. The mix of personalities and skill sets makes for a really good viewing experience. Since Star Wars meant so much to me growing up, I am always happy to watch the fires get reignited for new generations. I just wish that it was still on Cartoon Network rather than Disney XD, since I seem to be far better in keeping up with Cartoon Network than any other channel. If you have not watched any of the show and are an old school Star Wars fan I highly suggest you check it out.

Eating some Crow

I finally decided to start giving ArcheAge a chance this weekend, in part because I have realized that so many people I know happen to be playing all in the same place, and same guild to be more specific. Other than ventures into Final Fantasy XIV this was the ideal game to sit on the sofa wrapped in my blanket cocoon and watch television while playing. The game itself is still intriguing and intricate, but the thing that turned me off of the game in beta was just how horrible the community had been. So far the launch servers seem to be far better than they were before. I was able to complete the early quests without much attempt at griefing. The place where I had so much frustration during alpha was when you are asked to take a rowboat across a bay. In alpha there were tons of high level ships waiting there to capsize players as they attempted to cross. This time around there was just a single high level ship and they seemed to be loading up for a trade run and completely oblivious to the fact that I was trying to do something.

Similarly I have actually had some decent random grouping experiences. So while the community is nowhere near as nice as say Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV… it is at least up to WoW Standards… which admittedly isn’t saying much. I did have a really positive experience in doing an elite quest. There is this event that happens in a fallen fortress where between the hours of 2am and 2pm in game time hordes of undead spawn with a boss and you are given quests to kill multiple undead. I noticed that it was nearing the spawn so I wandered up into the hills and decided that I would just kill undead while waiting. There were numerous people up there waiting, and it was moments later that I was invited to a raid team. Folks were relatively well organized and the leader made sure that everyone had gotten all 20 kills before we downed the final boss. Granted this might be an aberration, but it seemed like a pretty reasonable response to the situation.

At this point I am still not terribly certain how often I will play. Right now I have a level 16 Doomlord on Naima Western Continent. This seems to be where most of the people I know are playing, and white honestly I HAD to play Nuian because they were the only race that offered anything even closely resembling proper facial hair. Additionally the Western faction is supposedly going to get dwarves whenever XL Games decides to give the North American servers the expanded racial options. I’ve applied to be in the same guild as Liore, Zelibeli, and several others from both the Machiavelli’s Cats and Multiplaying/Alliance of Awesome communities. I have to say being patron seems to make all the difference in the world because as a true free to play account you have next to no labor points. I am not declaring this game the “best ever” or anything like that, but it seems to no longer be nearly as toxic as it was in early testing. I still prefer FFXIV, but right now I just haven’t had the oomph to grind up another character. So mostly I am working my way through my book quest and doing my daily elite dungeon. However since my friend Eliyon is now a newly minted 50 I can see myself probably playing a lot more in the evenings there. It was a fun weekend nonetheless and I look forward to piddling around in it some more.

#DoctorWho #StarWarsRebels #ArcheAge

Rostygold and Primordial Shrieks

October 8, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff

For a few weeks I have been kicking around a concept, and I’ve finally decided to start moving towards the goal of making it happen. The concept is pretty simple, that I have a conversation one on one with a personality in our community or in the gaming industry. Instead of bringing them on to promote something, or actually talk about their gaming… I want to delve into the person behind the screen, what makes them tick and what they are passionate about. I decided to give the show a quirky name “Bel Folks Stuff” which as you can see from the logo is short hand for “Bel Talks to Interesting Folks About Really Important Stuff That They Enjoy Doing”. Because pretty much that sums it up in a nutshell. I personally find a lot of the people in our community super interesting and I have a sneaking suspicion that listeners would as well.

Now as far as the details of when I would record, how often I would record, what kind of turn around I am expecting… all of that is up in the air. This is the sort of thing that I would consider a “bonus” podcast rather than a serious scheduled one. There might be times that I schedule a recording and we realize there just wasn’t much to talk about. Other times I might record way more audio than I could ever cram into a podcast and have to release multiple parts. I am keeping all of this pretty flexible. Think of this as more of a “boutique” project than say AggroChat where we keep a weekly schedule. I am pretty pumped about the prospects, and the closest thing I can really compare it to is Actor’s Studio with James Lipton. I still need to firm up some of the things I plan to ask, but the idea is to keep it flexible and go wherever the conversation happens to go. I am also purposefully not making this specifically a “gaming” podcast. If folks want to talk about their passion for gardening… we are going to talk about their passion for gardening. The people behind the screens that we play interesting me more than what happens on the monitor.

Syrcus Grind Starts

For years I have been enamored with the concept of a “reset day”. So many MMOs have various gates that block you from completing too much content in a single week, as such once a week all of these gates unlock again and you can enter them to get awesome baubles. If I am being absolutely honestly with myself, I do not raid for the challenge… I raid for the spiffy things that I can obtain through it. Over the last several weeks I have been fastidiously gearing my Warrior job in Final Fantasy XIV through running Syrcus Tower and careful application of Tomestones of Soldiery. Over the course of these last few weeks I have managed to take my average item level up to 98 which is nothing to sneeze at. Quite honestly most of this has been sheer dumb luck. I’ve entered Syrcus each week and during the course of the first or second attempt at the run a piece of gear has dropped that was an upgrade and I won it. Now however I am down to just two pieces of gear that I can obtain from there… apart from the Sands and Oil of Time which I will focus on eventually.

Over the course of the night last night I ran Syrcus a grand total of four times, and in none of those times did I manage to see either the Helmet or the Legs drop. I feel like I have managed to pick up the easy pieces, and now that I only need two… both of which drop from the same boss I am going to have a much slower time to go. I will probably limit myself to a single running of Syrcus a night to keep from making it absolute misery. If by the end of the week I haven’t gotten either the helm or the legs I guess I will go after either an oil or sands with the hope of upgrading one of my existing soldiery slots to 110. I posted the picture above because there is a rule in FFXIV that I have noticed… if more than one Lalafell is standing in an area for too terribly long… dancing will happen. This is a bunch of us waiting on the last person to realize they had not yet rolled on the Onion Knight cosmetic pet. Of course I didn’t win it, but by god I am not leaving the instance until I at least see that my chance at it is over.

Rostygold and Primordial Shrieks

Several weeks into the game and I still find myself hopelessly enamored with Fallen London. I guess I have Tarantella to thank for this… and in turn my circle of friends has me to thank for their present addiction as well. I guess what surprises me the most about this game is just how deep the rabbit hole gets. In various areas of the game there are “Ambition” storylets, and for the uninitiated a storylet is the equivalent of a quest in other games. You might do something in an unrelated series of a events, which sets a flag that now opens up a bunch of stories that cascade off of it. The ambition quests tend to be the most intricate and detailed and also time consuming. While playing Fallen London there are many positive statuses you can earn, but additionally many negative ones as well. Each of the negative statuses has some consequence associated with it. For example if you allow your nightmares to reach 8, you quite literally go insane and can take no actions other than ones attempting to reclaim your mental faculties.

Yesterday I got an Ambition that involved me purposefully getting thrown into Newgate Prison to track an enemy of yours that is residing there. In order to accomplish this I had to raise my suspicion to 8, triggering a sequence of events that ended with being unceremoniously thrown into prison. From there I could go after my mark directly, but the problem is… once that was completed I still was sitting in prison. At this point I was forced to take actions in an attempt to lower my suspicion back to zero again. These actions involved calling in favors that I had earned in the rest of Fallen London, blatant bribe attempts, or doing actions that show “good behavior”. The problem is while the ability that got me into prison swapped 1 action for 1 suspicion… digging my way out of the hole took a considerably amount of time.

That seems to be the “negative” consequences in this game, are that you can get yourself into a situation where you have to spend copious turns correcting the mistake you made in the first place. I am still slowly working my way into the confidence of the devils. I had reached a point where I was getting dangerously close to losing my soul in game, and I took actions to delay that… which cost me a ton of faction in the process. As such I have been slowly building back up to that point, because really I think it might be interesting to see what the game is like if you have gone through the “abstraction”.

The problem with courting the devils is that you end up constantly teetering dangerously close to the fail condition on both Nightmares and Scandal. As such I am constantly in search of creative ways to lower both of these negative statuses. In any case I am still digging the game, and enjoying the setting. I really need to spend more time digging into Sunless Sea, but I keep hearing there is a major patch in the works that will fix a good number of the problems with the game, and as such I am mostly holding back. If you have not played this game and enjoy roleplaying games with quirky settings… I highly suggest you check it out. If you do add me as a contact, so that we can be “delicious friends” to borrow the verbiage of the game.

#FFXIV #FallenLondon

Outland

October 5, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 25

Last night we recorded yet another episode of our weekly podcast AggroChat. This week we were missing Rae, but had Ashgar, Kodra and Tam to join me to talk about stuff and things. Of the four of us, three of us have almost spontaneously started replaying Dragon Age: Origins. In truth Ashgar started it and then Tam and I decided it was a pretty excellent idea to follow suit as we all realized we didn’t really have a good save to feed into the upcoming title Dragon Age: Inquisition. As such we have been lost in that title and remembering just how amazing it really is. We gush about about the writing behind the title and some of our favorite and least favorite characters. We try not to give many spoilers since Kodra has yet to make it terribly far in the game, so should be safe to listen to for complete Dragon Age nubs and pros alike.

We meander our way through a couple of indie games, namely Crypt of the Necrodancer that Kodra has been playing, and Outland the awesome metroidvania that I am reviewing as part of my Steampowered Sunday. Ashgar hooked me up with a copy originally with the intent of playing this co-op… but it seems like the latency for co-op play is still absolutely atrocious. So instead I played it all by my lonesome this morning… we at least as lonesome as you can be while streaming it to the internet. Finally we talk about Final Fantasy XIV and the odd sense of compartmentalism in that game. How you can progress among multiple vectors without the need to really mess with the others. Also we walk about how much we are looking forward to the as of yet completely announced 3.0 expansion, which is rumored to have as much content as the original 2.0 release had.

Two other really interesting things happened during the episode. For starters we announced that we were now part of TGEN The Gaming and Entertainment Network of podcasts. Quite honestly I am a bit humbled to be included with such illustrious podcasts as Battle Bards, Beyond Bossfights, Cat Context, Contains Moderate Peril, Couch Podtatoes, Massive Failure and Roleplay Domain. I am also quite humbled to be the first podcast to officially be launching the network, since we record on Saturday nights and launch Sunday, we are the first show sporting the new network bumper. Additionally we talk about the upcoming Extra Life gaming marathon and our team. Right now you can check out Ashgar, Kodra and Myself on the donor pages and our progress… and then tune in Oct 25th to the Alliance of Awesome hitbox team to watch the streamers. Being our first year I set a very low team goal of $200 and so far we have raised just shy of $600 dollars in pledges. Really looking forward to the event, and I hope you join us.

Outland

For a few weeks now my friend Ashgar has been talking about this particular metroidvania with some interesting twists. Last weekend shortly after recording the Steampowered Sunday for Mercenary Kings he hooked me up with a copy on steam, suggesting we might play it for this Sunday. Apparently there is some really cool co-operative play in the game, but at the time of writing this it is apparently completely broken in that the latency makes it absolutely unplayable. I can see how any matter of latency would be a problem, as there are several places where you have a very slim window to time a jump or an attack. Since the co-op was out of the picture, I opted to still play the game but do so solo… or at least as solo as you can be while streaming. At face value it is a really artistically slanted metroidvania game. It follows the artistic style to some extent of the current crop of mostly silhouetted figures against a colorful background. This almost always makes a game feel far more detailed than it actually is, and I tend to enjoy this style of art.

You play the role of the ancestor of a great warrior who tamed the twin sisters of light and dark to save creation. To be truthful while well done the narrative doesn’t seem to matter that much other than add a bit of flavor. You wander through the levels collecting coins and rare pieces of treasure and sometimes unlocking special abilities. The twist on the traditional Metroidvania genre however comes in the fact that over time you can harness the power of the Light Spirit and the Dark Spirit and use these to bypass certain obstacles. The Light is represented by blue, and the Dark by red and while in the same color as an obstacle you can pass directly through it. You can also use your color to active switches and platforms allowing you to traverse the levels. You are rationed these abilities slowly and I didn’t get the second color until I had defeated the first boss. Some of the later puzzles require you to switch colors midair to take advantage of a platform that activates when you land on it with a specific color. This is facilitated by hitting the right shoulder button on your controller. This definitely feels like the sort of game that is greatly improved with a controller, so I did not even attempt to pay attention to the equivalent keyboard controls for things.

Epic Boss Fights

At the end of the first level you have to fight a giant golem that is blocking your way. The scale of the fight is extremely impressive and makes the game feel much larger than it actually is. The camera zooms in and out based on how large the chamber you are in happens to be, and this gives a more dynamic feel to the gameplay. The boss mechanic was rather simple but extremely effective in that you had to avoid a ground slam and then climb the giant itself while it was temporarily drained of its power to attack and exposed weak spot. As the fight got on there were more details that had to be avoided, like a rain of red and blue bullets that gives the game almost a bullet hell feel to it. I had to stand in the blue beams to avoid taking damage from the red beams, and I am imagining that in later encounters you will have to shift back and forth between red and blue to soak specific abilities while flipping to the opposite to be able to damage your target. While you can soak beams of the same color… mobs of that color can still damage you, and you can only damage them when flipped to the alternate polarity.

The game is constantly compared to the fabled bullet hell shooter by Treasure called Ikaruga in that it has similar soak/polarity mechanics. However any many ways it reminds me of the gameplay of Silhouette Mirage and earlier title with the same basic mechanic by Treasure. Similar to Outland it was a side scroller and you had a dual polarity of absorption and repelling based on which direction you pointed your attacks. You can check out my entire hour and a half long play session this morning in the embedded Hitbox video. I have to say I dig the game so far and want to play more of it. I just felt like I needed to wrap up this mornings session so I could get my blog post out, however I played significantly longer than most Steampowered Sunday mornings… so that should tell you something. Right now the game is under $10 on steam, and more than worth that price. I would have paid at least $20 for it to be honest, had someone not ever so graciously gifted it to me. If you like the Metroidvania genre and especially like ones with interesting mechanics like Guacamelee you should check this out.

#Outland #AggroChat

Death of a Genre

October 4, 2014 by Belghast

Downfall of a Game

One of the problems within the MMO community is that we seem to view each release as a zero sum game. As such when something new comes out, it threatened to chip away at the player base of whatever game we happen to love and are currently playing. When that game falters and begins to fail, with this point of view it becomes extremely hard not to take pleasure in that downfall. The problem is this is an extremely toxic and dysfunctional outlook, and ultimately is what has lead to the current climate in MMOs. For years companies have been chasing an illusive dream of trying to create another World of Warcraft.

This was an inherently flawed vision because really… “mmo gamers” are a rather small niche in the market, and most folks who play World of Warcraft are not actually “mmo gamers”. If you take a look at the size of the market before World of Warcraft, you saw a handful of games with sub-million subscriber numbers. Before the launch of the first expansion World of Warcraft had boomed to be an over 6 million subscriber game. This was not the conversion of all of these other MMO gamers, but instead the conversion of fans of the existing Warcraft franchise into the MMO genre. The thing is… these new gamers are there for a myriad of reasons, but none of them easily translate into a new franchise.

So as these new games launch they are essentially fighting over the same piece of pie over and over. All you have to do is look at my immediate circle of friends. A large chunk of them stuck with World of Warcraft, and it would likely take an apocalypse or the servers shutting down to pry them from it. Another group has wandered away from the game each and every time something new and shiny showed up on the horizon. Very few of these players stick around in any game for longer than three months, and more often they play their free month and then return to whatever the status quo was before the new launch. I watched this pattern play out for both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, and the games industry is finally realizing that this is going to happen for every single new game that releases.

Indictment of the Trend

The cancelling of Titan has been a far more contentious issue in the blogosphere than I expected. At this point my point of view is that this is Blizzard admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players. While there will always be a core group of players in World of Warcraft just like there is still a core group of players in Everquest, Everquest II, and Dark Age of Camelot… that core group continues to shrink as folks either “grow out” of World of Warcraft as they find it no longer suits their interests, or simply run out of the copious amounts of free time it requires as they get that job, family, whatever. I think they have done some really simple calculus here and determined that there simply is not enough of a pool of players to make a brand new MMO from Blizzard successful.

With World of Warcraft they have a decade long buy in from a large number of gamers. They have literal years of memories and hard to acquire items to keep them chained to the game. With a brand new IP, they are starting from scratch in the same position as all of these games that have floundered have been in. Blizzard brand name recognition just isn’t enough to guarantee success, so I feel like it was a pure business decision that it just did not make sense to further dilute their subscription player base by trying to launch a new MMO. As much as I love the clean subscription model, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to launch a new game with it. After watching what happened to Wildstar and to a somewhat lesser extent Elder Scrolls Online, the market does not want any more subscription games. So by launching a new MMO they would be converting at least a portion of their subscriber base of easy month to month money to far more dicey and less predictable free to play money.

No Joy Watching Wildstar

I find it impossible to find joy in the unraveling of Wildstar that I see before me. I am not playing the game, so I am in essence part of the problem. For whatever reason it was an accumulation of all of the things my BC era self said they wanted in a video game. The problem is we gamers are notoriously horrible at trying to decide what we want. “We” said we wanted a hardcore game like Everquest and a return to forced grouping… then when we got Vanguard no one actually wanted to play that. We said we wanted a hard core PVP game like Dark Age of Camelot… and then when we got Warhammer Online no one actually wanted to play that either. So I find it no suprise that when we said we wanted a return to the golden says of World of Warcraft raiding… no one actually wanted that either when we got Wildstar. The truth is we have no clue at all what we want until we actually see it and experience it.

The problem is that the MMO design ethic has been so wrapped up in trying to target what the public is asking for, that it has stagnated into a mire of “wow like features”. A week or so ago there were a series of posts taking point and counterpoint on whether or not WoW has ruined MMOs. In a way I have to say yes, but not through anything that they did on purpose. World of Warcraft has been this juggernaut that everyone else is forced to content with whether or not they actually wanted to. It is a gold standard that every new game is judged by. So you either have games that try and out feature it like Rift, or out lore it like Star Wars the Old Republic… but each and every new release is at least in someway a response to the success that World of Warcraft was. Without that outlier of success we probably would see a much more healthy MMO ecosystem… albeit a ridiculously smaller one.

Death of a Genre

So I cannot take joy in watching Wildstar, or Elder Scrolls Online or any other MMO falter right now, because I see it as all being part of the same shared ecosystem. When one of these games fails, it is in essence taking a chunk of players out of the pool that will likely never return. So many of my friends have simply just checked out of online gaming for one reason or another, but the core thread among them all is they are just tired of the volatility. The choice is either return to World of Warcraft and make due with the status quo, or jump from game to game to game getting a months worth of enjoyment at a time before the ultimate crash. None of this sounds like a healthy ecosystem, and all of this is what is driving triple A studios away from the notion of even trying to do an MMO.

If you think about it right now… there is nothing really on the horizon for gamers to latch onto. There are a few boutique titles like Pathfinder or Camelot Unchained… that are super focused on a specific niche and that may or may not be at least partially vaporware, unlikely to actually launch with all of the features they are touting. Then you have a constant spin of Korean titles as they have their own MMO renaissance that we went through several years ago. However After the launch of ESO and Wildstar… there is really no big western titles on the immediate horizon. Everquest Next is the closest thing but realistically it is still several years from release. The other games that are coming out are more akin to Destiny than they are to a traditional MMO. So I can’t blame World of Warcraft for this current situation, because in truth it is our flighty nature that has salted the fields in our wake. We are the reason why there is no fertile ground for a new MMO to take purchase. It is because of all of this… that I can find no pleasure in watching yet another game fail.