MMO Archives - Page 425 of 430 - Tales of the Aggronaut

End Game

October 13, 2013 by Belghast

Slowing Down

For most of us in House Stalwart the wild ride that was the Final Fantasy XIV storyline has come to a conclusion. As a result a large number of us have dialed back our playtime a bit to recover. This is only magnified by the fact that the game that none of us may speak of is having yet another event and a large number of us are actively playing that. The storyline was extremely exceptional and did everything I would expect in the ending of a classic final fantasy game. However this time it left the door completely open.

It felt much like that first time you transitioned Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past into the Dark World. It feels like we just scratched the surface of the game, which I guess is how the ending of the storyline content should feel in every MMO. Lots of things are resolved, but very quickly you realize that nothing at all is truly resolved. Now that we have spent all the storyline we are left with the fact that other than the wonderful story… the FFXIV experience is a rather skeletal one.

End Game

Basically eight of us have entered the phase of the end game at this point… which is extremely limited. Each step along the path has some pretty severe gear requirements, so what we have ahead of us is a large amount of running the same two dungeons over and over. Basically you are given two paths forward for gear. The first of which is running two 8 man dungeons that reward a lot of tomestones, but absolutely no gear… or running two 4 man dungeons that drop gear but very few tomestones. Neither option feels really good, considering for the time spent running Amdapor you really do not end up with much gear. I’ve run it three times as a tank and have yet to see a single drop.

The real problem is the fact that each run through the dungeon racks up a not insignificant repair bill. One of the big problems I have talked about before is the fact that there really is no good way to gain money at level 50. I carried with me into the end game about 200,000 gil, and that has been going fast as I use it for various needed things at the maximum level. The options I have before me are grinding fates which pay out around 200 gil each, grinding leves which pay out around 500 gil each… and playing the auction house. The problem with the auction house is that `the only thing worth anything really are high level crafted items. Leveling your crafting however can bankrupt your character… so it is a bit of a catch 22.

Relic Weapon

The goal of the game right now seems to be to get your relic weapon and later on your +1 upgrade to it. This is the best item in the game you can get, but much like the Everquest Epic weapon it is a long and drawn out process. To start down this path is a rather expensive one. Firstly you have to acquire the base weapon, for a Warrior this is the Barbarian’s Bardiche. This is crafted by a high level blacksmith and is gathered together out of bits that have to be farmed from a combination of dungeons and overworld zones. They currently go for about 10,000 gil on the open market, and since I do not have access to a max level Blacksmith that is the option I chose to go with. In my experience it costs far more than 10,000 gil to get a smith to create one for you.

From there you need to infuse 2 Battledance III materia onto the item. This once again has to be done by a level 50 blacksmith… and the going rate per infuse on my server is 10,000 gil. Acquiring the Battledance III materia is a whole other matter that is far more time consuming. These are gained from disassembling level 45 or higher items that are 100% spiritbound. The problem is… individual items can be disassembled into a wide variety of different materia. I spiritbound a set of Mithril Plate gear, and did not manage to get a single Battledance III. Ultimately I had a guild member give me one of them, and I bought the second on the open market for 15,000 gil.

So just to get to the point of turning in the infused axe I have already spent over 50,000 gil once you factor in the material costs of the infusions. I apparently got off easily… for a Paladin or a Scholar apparently the costs are more like 100,000 gil. From here it is a series of monsters that I have to take down, starting in Coerthas with the Chimera and ending with Hard Mode Titan. All of which is rather honestly a pretty horrific grind, considering by the time you get to Hard Mode Titan, you damned well better be in full darklight gear, the set you get from the tomestones I talk about grinding out earlier.

Grind, Grind, Grind

Ultimately this is going to be the thing that kills the game for me if they do not introduce some less grindy paths. Right now I have the option of grinding for money, grinding to level other classes or grinding out end game gear. There is nothing left to do in the game that is anywhere near as enjoyable as the questing experience was. At this point, the game is a really fun ride to 50, and then grind city afterwards. I still greatly enjoy the dungeon runs, and I look forward to doing more of that, but that involves getting a large number of people online at the same time. When there is not a full groups worth online, I am finding myself lacking in things I really want to do.

At this point I have leveled my Warrior to 50 and my Bard to 50… but any additional characters involve lots and lots of either mob grinding or fate grinding and right now after having done it twice… that lacks any sort of luster. So I find myself piddling around in other games waiting on enough of a critical mass to form in FFXIV that we can do some dungeons. At this point I really lack interest in doing anything else in the game. I think as time passes I will want to level other classes, but after having ground out two to 50, I need a bit of a break. As a result I have been piddling around in League of Legends and finding myself pining away from my Hex invite. FFXIV still has a ton of potential, but they really need to make some changes in 2.1 to make the game more livable.

Role-Playing

October 12, 2013October 12, 2013 by Belghast

Make Believe

This is a topic I have kicked around for awhile, and been uncertain of when exactly I wanted to use it. I have a rather conflicted relationship with role-playing. Essentially every person that plays a video game to at least some extent pretends to be someone else while they are playing it. Even if it is just changing your own world view just enough to accept that you can shoot laser beams out of your eyes… or jump in mid air. Role-playing however takes this simple “being someone else” a whole lot further. The average role-player generates a whole series of motivations and outlooks for their character fleshing them out into a real virtual personality.

I find this whole process extremely interesting, and I have always gotten along extremely well with serious role-players. I think this starts back when I found the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Manual in a locker at the end of school one year. From that point onwards pen and paper games colored my destiny. The thing is… or me they were always a game, not really a way of looking at the world. While some of my friends geeked out on figuring out a series of complex motivations for their character… I just wanted to grab a sword and slaughter endless goblins in search for big treasure and even bigger weapons.

Role-playing

While I love the theory of role-playing, and I will always gravitate towards a role-playing community… or a role-playing server… I am not actually a role-player. The above image is a collage of my characters from multiple games. You will notice a distinct pattern among them because in essence they are all exactly the same character. Belghast is essentailly the “super me”, an idealized version of myself and the way I wish I actually looked. While I do rock a moustache and goatee I have always wished my hair was black instead of the odd mishmash of brown, blond, with little bits of red especially in my beard.

Additionally I have always wished I had the type of head shape to support a pony-tail and make it look natural. However when I have tried it in the past, it hangs off my head like a top-knot so I only end up looking like a very fat samurai. It is in online games that I can fix the flaws in my own appearance and great this idealized version of myself. The games that allow me to create this appearance are ultimately games I really enjoy playing, however the ones that do not really support it.. ultimately are not as enjoyable for me and fall by the wayside. Namely I am looking at the Asian-styled games with their pretty boy appearances.

The thing is… there is no actual “character” of Belghast. Just like I use online games to revise my own appearance, to a lesser extent I revise my character and pump them into each of these avatars. While I keep all the good traits, like empathy and compassion… I get rid of my more conflicted and cerebral nature so that I can essentially become a man of action and not so much a man of constant indecision. The funny thing is… over the years of playing this character it has made the real person behind it more confident, less likely to mire down in over evaluation and more likely to take actions and risks. I feel like being a leader in online games has in turn made me more of a leader in real life, or at least have more confidence to lead.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Never

While so many of my life long friends are serious role-players, there is so much about their nature that I just do not understand. This has come to light lately while we are playing Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. In this game you are actually penalized for rolling multiple characters, since one character can literally do everything in the game. However as they approach the game… each of their internalized characters has a specific thing they do, and sensibilities. So for them it is extremely jarring to see their mage archetype wielding a sword as a gladiator. For me… it just keeps me from having to create three clones of myself like I did in The Secret World.

The end result is that many of them are splitting their focus between different characters, or in the case of a few of them creating a melee character and a caster character to keep from destroying their mental picture of what each character should be. So much of me just doesn’t understand why it matters. I respect the fact that it does matter to them, but since I always play the same character regardless of what game or class I am playing… it all feels so esoteric to me.

In-Character

The concept of role-playing inside of a game is also mostly lost on me. In every RP focused game there has been some spot where players gather together to talk amongst themselves in character. While I think it is extremely cool that people do this… I have never really understood it. Character dialog has always been the part of pen and paper role-playing that I was least interested in. I am that guy in ever campaign that always wants to blow the informants head off and search the corpse for clues… rather than try and ferret the information out of them with dialog. As a result I am the character with the highest body count, and the most well armed.

By a similar fashion.. I just can’t understand standing around in Stormwind talking about dragons that you have killed… when I could be out in the world killing new ones. I get fidgety when I go too long without combat in and MMO. I have developed this notorious reputation for always being in combat at exactly the wrong time. If the party pauses even for a moment… I am off pulling something else… and as a tank I have a long line of really amazing healers that enable these bad decisions. But nothing about this personal make-up is conducive to sitting around a hub and having long drawn out conversations “in-character”.

The Community

So as I said at the beginning of this post… I have deeply conflicted feelings about role-playing in general. On one hand, I will always gravitate towards a Role-playing server, simply because I feel that role-players as a whole are far more community minded. As a result a RP server will have all of the social structure I am used to… crafters guilds, event planners, friendly, helpful and mostly mature gamers that will in turn make my gaming experience more enjoyable. So as a result I support role-playing in whatever form it takes. If someone talks to me in character, I try my damnedest to respond back in character to not break the narrative.

However there will never be a time at which I actually seek out role-playing. If I know a guild or a raid stays in character constant, I will actively shy away from it. One of my really great friends had an amazing RP guild in WoW… but I did a dungeon run with them once… and after seeing that they chose to run dungeons in character… it was not a thing I ever repeated. It feels very foreign to me, and gets in the way of my constantly causing mayhem style of play. The thing is… I thought it was super cool that they had a group of individuals that wanted to do that, so while I was along for the ride I tried my damnedest not to break their run.

So I love Role-players, I love that people exist that can create such vivid make believe worlds that they can sustain similarly vibrant characters. I however am not one of them, but I don’t have to be a dancer to admire the beauty of ballet, and in a similar fashion I do not have to be an RPer to admire the fact that they exist. So as a result I will always be a supporter of the practice, even if I am not a participator. I hope games continue to support role-playing as a community rule-set, and I will continue to rabidly report all those horrible non-character names out there. I feel that games that support multiple play-styles and points of view to be the best, so here is hoping that games in the future will not forget that.

Fighting Nostalgia

October 11, 2013 by Belghast

Familiar Itch

Over the last few days I have been feeling immensely nostalgic about World of Warcraft. This tends to happen to me as we near Blizzcon time, and I start to see twitter a buzz with people excited to be attending the convention. Some of my tweeps have even resorted to Blizzcon countdown clocks, and yesterday they finally reached the 20 somethings in days left til the conference. With this wave of nostalgia comes the all too familiar desire to re-up my account and play some of it. It would not have been the first time I did so on a whim, and is more than likely not going to be the last.

However I am wise to this trickery, or at least have a contingency plan in place. I have come to the realization that I like the idea of playing WoW a lot more than actually playing it. As a result I keep a trial account at the ready for when of these urges strikes, and last night I patched up my client once more. I figure if I make it through playing the trial account with the desire to play more WoW… then it is probably time to re-up. I figure this is a decent litmus test to see whether or not the desire to play is real before I spent $15.

Fighting Nostalgia

As a result I rolled a brand new Worgen Warrior on my trial account and proceeded to play. Immediately the buzz of the nostalgia started to wane. I had honestly forgotten just how spammy playing a low level warrior was, and by example EVERY World of Warcraft melee character. The unpredictable nature of rage and to a lesser extent energy left me with a decision. I either spent the entire time fighting watching my bars to optimize cooldowns… or I could just spam whatever basic attack I wanted to ALWAYS go off. Being a relatively impatient player… I always chose the spam route.

After a few minutes of spamming Heroic Strike… I remembered just how much my fingers used to ache after a dungeon run, always banging on the key I wanted to fire next because I could not be bothered to actually watch my bars. Basically my master plan of fighting the wave of nostalgia worked, all too well. I made it to about level 5 on my baby Worgen, to the point at which the forsaken show up… at which point I was supremely bored and logged out of the game. Having a taste of the gameplay reminded me that it really was not as fun as my mind had built it up to be.

Project Phoenix

Sometimes a game is much more enjoyable to remember fondly, than to actually play it. Right now there is a kickstarter going on called Project Phoenix. The goal of it is to essentially recreate the magic that was City of Heroes/City of Villains. I had so much fun playing these games, and regularly descend into bouts of nostalgia swapping with another friend of mine on mumble. The problem is… I think CoH is another game that is much more enjoyable to talk about fondly than to actually play it. I remember so much about the game, but every time I tried playing it again during its later free to play years the whole experience just felt lacking.

I wish this project the best of luck, but super hero games for me seem like they were a phase of a bygone era. I have tried Champions Online and DC Universe Online and in both cases… I was carried into them on the nostalgia of City of Heroes but found both gaming experiences somehow unable to live up to my memories and as a result my expectations. I think World of Warcraft and City of Heroes are both games for me like the original Everquest… extremely enjoyable to sit around and talk about the “good old days” but not really fun for me to play any longer.

Thing is… I think that is perfectly okay. I think nostalgia works that way, it makes us romanticize things that would now be trivial. For example I can remember being amazed at just how huge the sandbox that my father made for me was, and how I spent hours playing in it with my Tonka trucks. However were I to evaluate it from adult eyes, I would likely find it tiny and boring… and be ready to stop in a few minutes. Often times things we remember so fondly end up tarnished if we go back and re-experience them. This has been the case for Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft and a long list of other games that I have moved on past… but tried to rekindle that flame.

Bun’Jitsu

October 10, 2013 by Belghast

Hexxen

As you can see from the above image I am almost 80% finished downloading the Hex: Shards of Fate Alpha client. Starting late yesterday Alpha invites began trickling out as the servers came up. They of course are starting off with the highest supporters and working their way down the list, only allowing small bits in at a time to keep from cratering the servers. As a result I figure it will take a few days for them to reach us plebeians that only supported enough to get INTO the alpha in the first place.

However at one point yesterday they stated that it would likely take a few weeks to get down to the “slacker backers” aka folks who supported the project after the kickstarter finished. If that is the case it should be a matter of days not a matter of weeks, which is good. I know there were a large number for $250 backers and that is the tier that is starting invites now. The majority of my friend are all like me and in the $60 mere-human range.

Bun’Jitsu

I have to say I am really looking forward to getting some playtime with this. Everything about it feels like a different take on Magic: The Gathering for the online age. I am already pretty fond of the Shin’Hare… which happen to be a combination of Wild (green) and Blood (black). That was the deck combo I always relied on in MTG so here is hoping it will be equally effective in Hex. Besides any race that has a card called Bun’jitsu has to be amazing right? I just love the concept of these crazy twisted anthropomorphic bunny rabbits.

They released a PDF with all of the initial cards in it yesterday to backers and almost immediately someone took that and broke it out into an amazing deck builder site, so you should totally check that out. Additionally on Reddit there is a Hex Alpha FAQ thread that is worth checking out as it has a number of useful links… including the downloader for the alpha client. Like usual we have a pretty decent sized community that will be playing this off and on so I expect it to join the ranks of League of Legends as one of our regular non-MMO games. If you are part of this madness as well let me know! I am always looking for more people to hang out with while playing various titles.