MMORPG Archives - Page 203 of 412 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Catfish Dargon

January 31, 2018 by Belghast

At least on some level I feel like I might be playing this game wrong. I’ve put a little over eleven hours into the game at this point and I am just now hunter rank 4. At this point I have managed to take down Great Jagras, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Pukei-Pukei, Barroth and Jyuratodus. Now some of those I have taken down multiple times like I keep farming Barroth for bits and pieces to craft gear and I have taken down Kulu several times just because killing the angry chicken is fun. Side note… hunting Kulu in Wildspire Wastes is so much easier than Ancient Forest because it doesn’t keep running away up into the canopy of the trees. My mission for last night was to farm some Barroth and attempt to get better gear… and another Monster Bone M which I did in both cases. I don’t have a full set of gear yet, but I did manage to upgrade two pieces of Barroth gear and one piece of Jyuratodus. It is around this point that I decided to start using the Samurai cosmetic armor because wearing Barroth armor makes you look like you are a walking rack of prime rib. Jyuratodus so far has been the most annoying thing I have fought to date because it cannot decide if it as a Catfish or a Dragon… so from now on it will simply be known as Catfish Dargon. I never really got to a point where I was in danger…. I just found it terribly annoying to fight because being in the water and mud is dumb and I never want to do that.

On my Palico front I now have Kenzie kitted out in a full set of Pukei-Pukei armor which seems to be working well. I am completely in love with my Palico, and it sorta makes me sad that in the above screenshot she ever doubts that I will be bringing her along on the next hunt. Side note… I have no clue if my Palico has a gender but in my head canon Kenzie the Cat is female so Kenzie the Palico is also female. I feel like I am improving at the game largely because of the continued shortening of time it takes me to hunt certain things. My first Barroth kill was a complete bear and I wound up firing an SoS flare because I had run completely out of mega potions. On kill number two at the beginning of last night I still struggled a bit, but never really got close to either fainting or running out of resources. On kill number three… it finally felt like I knew what I was doing and simply executed a sequence of attacks I had rehearsed over time. The other thing that I finally started getting the hang of last night was mounting the monsters and going into rodeo mode. I think more than anything that has probably sped up my process because when I finally knock them down I can get in a bunch of really powerful attacks. When I took down Kulu last night after my first ride the monster was already limping. So far all of the monsters have been challenging, but I feel fairly comfortable in my longsword abilities and it is mostly me just executing on the same things I have learned to this point… which I guess is maybe the point of the game?

I love the cheesy grin and weird uppercut pose on my guild card, so you are likely going to keep seeing it over and over. The biggest thing I am not quite grasping at this point is how the hell multiplayer actually works. My theory was that I could potentially hop in on quests that folks were doing in the game session I happened to be in. However when I click on a name everything seems to be grayed out. I have no clue how social connectivity is supposed to work in this game and I have no clue what throwing someone a guild card actually does but I keep receiving a bunch of them. Connecting with other people to play the game just feels way harder than it should be. It should be as simple as… is a friend of yours on… okay click to join their game and kill monsters together. Instead it feels like this weirdly contorted system that makes absolutely zero sense to my western brain. I keep thinking back to the madness of Final Fantasy XI and World Passes… and trying to place my mind into that sort of mindset because I just do not get it. If someone could explain to me like I am five how this system works… I would greatly appreciate it. I would love to be able to just hop in on someone else’s session and kill monsters because at this point I could give a shit about quest progression and just want more crafting bits. Based on what I heard from Grakulen last night apparently people can’t join me when I am in an expedition, which seems sorta broken. Regardless I am having a lot of fun in my own little sandbox… but sorta want to start learning how to group to take things down.

Lantern Light

January 25, 2018 by Belghast

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had originally intended. The initial goal I had in mind was to go home and attempt to pull myself back into a mindset where I could play Final Fantasy XIV. Instead I hit a few detours along the way the first of which being that shortly after I had finished doing all of the stuff that I need to do when I first get home… the power went out. Now I realize this is mostly an irrational fear, but the first thing that always goes through my head is… did you pay the bill? I am not sure exactly why I have this fear because we have never actually been disconnected from any utility, but it is still something that happens. I was already in my “not suitable for public” clothing, but I did stumble outside long enough to notice that all of my neighbors were also lumbering around by flashlight. I called in the outage and reported it through the menu driven system and then spent the next little bit trying to sort out how to see reported outages without logging into the damned electric company page with an account that I didn’t have. There is a local facebook group that serves as the closest thing we have to a city wide “water cooler” and my second place was to go check there knowing that there would already be a thread of a hundred or so posts about whatever was going on. The lights went out around 6 pm and if the group was to be believed the estimated time for the fix was 11:30 pm… which meant it was about to be a really long night living by lantern light. It was around this time that I remembered I had the Switch and grabbed it from my office settling into the sofa to play some games. I had played some Super Mario Odyssey and was about ten minutes into the Octopath Traveler demo when the power was magically restored at roughly 8 pm.

From there I did all of those things I had been avoiding… like opening the fridge to get a drink and settled down to play some Final Fantasy XIV. Upon logging in I got greeted by friends… roamed around Limsa Lominsa and then promptly logged out because I just did not have it in me to do the group activities I need to do in order to make any semblance of forward momentum. Instead I popped into Elder Scrolls Online and continued work on Stonefalls. This zone is like a giant immovable object for me and the sooner I get on the other side of it the better. It has singlehandedly killed every attempt at playing an Ebonheart Pact character because even though it has gone through a ton of changes since alpha… it still is not what I would call a good zone. The weird shape and geometry of the zone makes everything a bigger chore than it should be. Objectives that might look really close on the map instead require you to backtrack half the way across the zone to find the proper entrance into the region you need to go. All of this is just the functional reasons… but there is also the fact that it is bleak. The quake color palette and the constant smokey haze and falling ash make it not exactly the most visually exciting place to be. I did however feel like I made a bunch of progress in the zone last night and checked off a bunch of areas. I am not even sure where I am in the zones main story quest, and if I could change one thing about Elder Scrolls online I would make it so that those primary quests required to move to the next area were somehow highlighted differently in a FFXIV style manner.

The other thing on my radar is that at the time of taking this screenshot we were roughly 17 hours away from unlocking Monster Hunter World on the PS4. Granted I have no actual intent of staying up until midnight to play this game, but I do plan on playing Friday night. This is going to be my first real attempt at playing a Monster Hunter title while it is in the public zeitgeist and I am hoping that by doing so… I will be able to grok what the fuck is going on. I’ve attempted the PS Vita version and purchase Generations for the 3DS… but largely chocked up a lot of my problems to the fact that I am just not much of a handheld gamer. World however is coming to the PS4 which will allow me to play it on this nifty 43 inch 4k television (even though I don’t have a pro and can’t do the higher resolutions really) and my hope is it will be a much more compelling experience. I’ve always thought this was the sort of game I could get into if I had the proper introduction, because the core loop of grind random stuff to make yourself stronger to take down big bad monsters is one that I can likely get behind. I am hoping I can rely on those who have come before like Ashgar and Stormrazor to get me over the adjustment hump. I am also super excited that Arekkz is devoting a series of videos to easing beginners in. I most definitely need the assistance. Needless to say I will be on the PS4 giving it a whirl tomorrow.

Rift Prime Thoughts

January 24, 2018 by Belghast

The launch of Rift was a really special time for me. It was the first time that my “wow tourism” turned into something else. It was the first time that I really immersed myself wholeheartedly into another game and I loved it so much. At the time Rift was giving me everything I had said I wanted in an MMO and I chose to be a giant purple Bahmi warrior. We had a lot of great times in the game and while we didn’t really start to break into the raid scene until the release of slivers… we regularly had huge guild outings to open raid rifts which were an awful lot of fun. At that point it was just a lot of fun to grab some friends and chase rifts for awhile, and in truth I cannot really remember what caused us to initially fade away. For some players they never really grasped it in the first place as player fantasies turned out to be less than what they expected. Others shifted back to the familiar womb of Azeroth, but a group of us stayed true to the cause for quite some time. By the time the first expansion had rolled around however we were down to a shell of our former selves and a series of server mergers saw our little guild scattered. I personally had landed on my feet with another very active guild in the form of Machiavelli’s Cats helmed by fellow blogger Liore, and entered a sort of second golden age of Rift for me personally. I even managed to make my way into their raid rotation as I did my best impersonation of a dual wielding warrior. With the launch of Storm Legion saw a bunch of changes and a bunch of folks wander off, and before long I was once again left as a member of a dwindling guild. I made an attempt to rekindle the interests of my friends with a fresh start on Faeblight and the proper founding of House Stalwart in Rift, and it again worked for a time… but by three months down the line we were once again down to a handful of people actively playing. Essentially the core problem I have always seem to have with Rift is getting anyone other than myself interested in playing it for any length of time. No matter how solo at heart you happen to be… if you don’t have a guild core to organize around it is really hard to keep excited about logging in every day.

Recently Trion announced that they would be creating “Rift Prime” and it is not in fact shipping a temporal disturbance to your house in an hour or less. I realize I am super late to the party in talking about this… but I’ve been largely out of commission due to the flu so cut me some slack. The idea in theory is that they are trying to roll back time, to an era when the game was subscription based and not fueled by loot box purchases and store purchases. We don’t really have a ton to go on as to what specifically this means, but the full text of the blurb released on January 18th goes as follows.

Introducing RIFT Prime

In the Spring of 2018, we will launch a new server, RIFT Prime. We’ve paid a lot of attention in discussions with all of you and within the broader gaming community regarding business models in the MMO and games industry as a whole.

We have the opportunity to experiment with this fresh RIFT server using an oft-requested subscription model and progressively unlocked content. Our goal for RIFT Prime is to provide the experience that many of you have requested: no lockboxes, a significantly reduced store with more of the current store-based items obtained through gameplay (or removed entirely) – plus the excitement of sequential progression through RIFT’s content with monthly milestones and achievements.

So we know whatever it is will be happening in Spring… which is one of those super squishy definitions as far as time goes. It promises a return to a subscription only server, which admittedly is a huge boon as far as I am concerned. During the early days of Rift the community was something I cared about and I regularly volunteered for groups forming up in public channels. With the introduction of the free to play players… I more or less stopped watching public channels because they were full of nothing that I cared to see. I like the idea of starting over again with the core of vanilla Rift and building back out from there. A good portion of my struggle to stay connected myself is that there is just so much competing wrong information that you have to sift through in order to find what is actual good advise. We are lacking the Rift equivalent of Icy Veins to use as a sanity check to see if you are in fact speccing your characters in a reasonable manner. I think rolling back the sands of time might help this a bit, especially if prime sees its own forum infrastructure to support the initiative. Sure I would miss all of the toys I have accumulated over the years, but I also think having a reason to start fresh without having to deal with the baggage and friction of a free to play experience would be positive.

There are two problems I foresee and I am going to talk a little bit about them. Firstly how vanilla are we actually talking? I never again want to return to an era when the “faction as fiction” patch has not been applied. One of the best things to happen in Rift was the fall of the faction wall and I want to be able to run Guardian and Defiant together freely based on user choice. Secondly… if they build it will the people come back? I can be as interested as possible, but if no core upwelling of players want to come back and play… then my own journey through the game will be truncated as well without a guild base to build out upon. I’ve not had the best luck with guild projects lately, and I am not sure if I even have the energy in me to try and organize anything for the purpose of Rift. Destiny 2 was a colossal mess that never quite materialized into any semblance of regular group activities, but admittedly a lot of the problem there was the complete and total lack of guild chat. I still love Rift and I have so many fond memories of the game, but always run into issues each time I attempt to play the modern incarnation. At some point I left the tracks and never quite figured out how to re-rail myself. If I could find an active community to do this thing with me… then maybe just maybe it would work. However similar nostalgic based trips into other games have been short lived in the past, and even the third resurgence of Rift myself was us trying to do a similar “fresh start” that only wound up lasting three or four months. At this point however I am willing to give it a shot. If I am actively playing a game I am already in the mindset where I want to subscribe in order to support it… so flipping that switch is a no-brainier for me personally. The real question however is… will I have anyone else joining me in that madness?

Saving Bleakrock

January 22, 2018 by Belghast

Lets get this update out of the way. I am still struggling quite a bit with this death flu bullshit that has been going around. Here in my home state of Oklahoma there have been 45 deaths since the beginning of Flu Season, and I absolutely understand why. I religiously take the Flu Shot each year when work offers it, but some of the estimates I have seen say it is only 10-15% effective against what is actually out in the wild. Due to my case getting misdiagnosed as a sinus infection early on… it mean’t I lost that time window when something like Tamiflu would be useful. Now I am having to just slog through it in an attempt to get to the other side. This weekend things started feeling worse as it triggered my Asthma in a major way, and instead of podcasting Saturday night my wife was making a mercy run to Walgreens to pick up more medication that the on-call doctor prescribed. This meant that Friday night I wound up having to take six Prednisone pills in one dose in an attempt to shock my system back to normal. It is helping but going way slower than I would have liked, I am now starting day three of a dose pack and I am really hoping that today is the day that I start to feel more human again. Most of the weekend I was in this mode where I felt fairly reasonable so long as I was sitting perfectly still and not doing much of anything. The moment I would get up and attempt to do something simple like get a drink, or swap a load of laundry… and it felt like I had just finished some epic uphill slog through the tundra. I hate feeling useless, and I hate that this has continued to drag on as long as it has. Since the only time I felt reasonable this weekend was sitting on the sofa snuggled into a blanket with my laptop… that mean’t I spent most of my time playing games. With the current state of World of Warcraft feeling fairly awful until they make what is going to inevitably be a balance and tuning pass on World Scaling… I needed something else to hold my attention. I am still playing quite a bit of Neverwinter, but for whatever reason that game feels best to me when played in short focused bursts. It was around Friday that I started playing Elder Scrolls Online regularly and it managed to get its hooks into my psyche.

I have been extremely stubborn in the way that I play Elder Scrolls Online. For the uninitiated, the base game has a really cool feature of having a build in new game plus and plus plus modes. What that means is that as you beat your chosen faction’s content, you walk backwards around the ouroboros taking on the next faction in sequence while you play through all three. I originally rolled as Daggerfall Covenant, which mean’t my new game plus faction is Aldmeri Dominion and then new game plus plus would be Ebonheart Pact. Where we get into the stubborn part is that I refuse to play any of the “expansion” content aka Imperial City, Orsinium, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Shadows of the Hist or Morrowind until I have completed all three of the original factions. Of note each one of these factions is designed to be 50 levels of content and now we get into where I have stalled out… it takes a very long time to work through the original game three times. Aldmeri Dominion originally seemed like pure hell to me because of my severe distaste for all things elves… and that faction has both the Altmer (High Elves) and the Bosmer (Wood Elves). That said… I do have a very deep soft spot for the often times completely feral cannibal Bosmer, and I have always loved the moon sugar imbibing Khajiit… so I thought on those two elements alone I could probably make it through the content. What I was not expecting however was to completely fall in love with the storyline featuring a bunch of elves and their weird struggles to hold together what apparently as a very unlikely alliance. With elements of the Wild Hunt and crazy drug induced visions… Aldmeri Dominion turned out to be a really excellent ride and I am sure Tam is pleased as hell with himself because I know he was responsible for at least some of the content. This weekend I managed to finish up the main storyline in Reapers March, but I will admit there are a lot of side quests that I simply did not deal with over there that at some point I will probably revisit. Ultimately I would love to 100% every one of the zones… but that will take time and I did not want to burn myself out doing so.

As a result last night I finally started Bleakrock Isle and Ebonheart Pact. This is without a doubt the content that I tested most thoroughly over the course of the year or so that I was in various alpha and beta tests. It was the content I could essentially do in my sleep… along with Stros M’kai. The funny thing is… time had clouded my memories and left me with vague idea for how the flow of the zone was supposed to go… but left me struggling to remember how to get 100% of the refugees off the island. I realize I could have easily skipped the intro area and moved straight on to Stonefalls, but in truth I have always found the intro areas to be extremely strong content. I know they were a huge problem for players who wanted to log in and just start running amok, but for me personally… they were this great guided tour into the game. That is one of the things I constantly find myself amazed by is just how damned good this game really is, and how relatively shunned it was by the broader Elder Scrolls community. Each time I return I get immersed completely into the world and am right back where I left off mentally and wandering around completely interesting quests. That honestly is a double edged sword because what ultimately causes me to wander away is that it is almost at times too immersive. Much like playing the story in SWTOR I get engrossed in the game and have trouble doing anything else while playing it. There is always more dialog to listen to and more quest chains to complete, and my ability to binge Netflix and play this game is largely a nonstarter. If I want to Netflix… my game of choice is something like World of Warcraft that is so familiar and almost mind numbing that I can play it almost entirely with muscle reflexes. Elder Scrolls is largely still a game about muscle reflex for me… but still one that I need to accurately read the tells that the mobs on screen are giving me to be able to react correctly to in order to stay alive. I cannot simply blindly run around mashing buttons… or I will end up dead exceptionally fast for someone who has just shy of 200 champion points as of logging out last night. I know I am probably playing less than optimally, but I have a build that works for me and feels reasonably well and I am afraid to dig too deeply into it past that. Optimization is often times the path of misery for me and drains the fun out of the experience. I do however need to perform a little resource to figure out exactly what the gear level breaks are and how soon I should be looking to upgrade out of my 160 CP gear into something else.