MMORPG Archives - Page 343 of 408 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Invaders from Mars

September 29, 2014 by Belghast

Weekend Goals

This weekend I set out with a handful of goals, and as always not everything got accomplished. The first goal was to manage to get to 20 in Destiny. Had the servers not gone down last night I might have actually hit it, as I am a little ways into 19 and still have quite a lot of story content t o do. The second goal was to finish my second Animus book, and that one got wrapped up yesterday afternoon without much issue. Sadly I don’t have the “bookrocks” stockpiled to buy another one, but in theory I could hop on the nightly hunt mob train and get there without much issue. The third goal was to cap out my soldiery tomestones, and while I am not quite there I am close enough that tonight’s elite roulette will get me there. Finally I had planned on trying to get to 10 on my Knight in Trove, which I didn’t quite make but I am now level 9 and also have a level 6 gunslinger.

All in all I think I had a pretty productive weekend full of focused faffing. I think the Godmother would be proud of my little checklist of accomplishments… or at least almost accomplished items. This is what keeps me motivated in games, is to have things that I want to tick off a list. I am finding that I am exceedingly good at grinding headlong towards a goal, but when I lose sight of that goal I start to get bored. One of the more interesting side goals of the weekend was to figure out how to configure JoyToKey and in part thanks to this tutorial video from Beau Hindman, I managed to get it running with little issue. So now I am running around in Trove using my Xbox 360 controller and I have to say it works pretty well. There are some wonky issues with occasionally my view drifting off slightly to one side or the other, but I think that is more an issue of the thumb sticks not entirely centering each time. I might see if I can lower the sensitivity at some point to make it less twitchy. The big thing I notice is the amount of time you spend mapping and remapping controls until you find the thing that feels most comfortable.

Invaders from Mars

As always it was the love of loot and the desire to acquire more of it… that ended up lighting a fire under my ass in Destiny. Previously I had been happy to slowly poke my way around the patrol missions, wandering aimlessly through objectives. However due to the various loot issues going on that patch 1.0.2 intends to address, they are basically having a loot giveaway event. As we talked about in the podcast Saturday night, folks are frustrated with the grindy nature of the endgame, and as such they rolled out a limited time event that addresses that at least to some extent. The event that is going on is known simply as The Queen’s Bounty, and through it a series of items appear on the bounty board. Supposedly if you complete a handful of these you end up earning a legendary quality weapon. Basically I want to get in on this loot grab before it goes away.

I had managed to get to level 16 before setting foot on Venus, through just wandering about on the moon doing patrol missions. As such I knew that if I just worked my way up through the backlog of story content I had waiting on me, I would ding 20 without much issue. So yesterday I set forward doing just this. I got to experience Venus and Mars… and so far I have to say I still prefer good old Cosmodrome and the Moon. Venus can be extremely pretty, but everything seems to have this yellow green haze to it. Additionally I have come to realize I am really not a huge fan of fighting the Vex. The fact that I have to shift from aiming for the head to aiming from the yellow glowing spot in their belly can be frustrating at times. Additionally fighting them is a bit like fighting a zombie horde. The Fallen and the Hive had a fair amount of cowardice in their moves. You can push and pull them around the map, but the Vex just keep advancing regardless of what you do like this unrelenting mass of shambling robots.

Once you land on Mars however… the Cabal take heavy metal up to eleven. This is very much the Warhammer 40,000 faction, in that they seem to have a cavalcade of ever more insane mechanized environmental suits to do battle with you. There is this one baddie known as a colossus that has some sort of a chain gun that just pinned me down stunned as it ripped through my shield in a few moments. The Phalanx however were what became super maddening. They are basically a space marine with a giant riot shield. They fire out from around the corner and appear to be deadly accurate regardless of how awkward that position must be. The best tactic seemed to be either to toss a grenade, or try and bait them to move in one direction would looping around behind them. In any case… my sequence of hand cannon one shots pretty much stopped when I reached Mars.

At some point it appears that Destiny reset the player preferences, because apparently my grouping setting got flipped from invite only to allowing anyone to join. In part I am thankful for this because I was joined by Nidrew who basically carried me through a few of the rougher missions, or at the very least kept me from having to start over. So long as one of us stayed alive we could eventually respawn back up. I find that aspect of the game interesting, that when a team mate has fallen, your focus goes from finishing the objective to just staying alive for 25 seconds so that they can revive and get back in the fight. Of course you can go over and rez them youself, but often times they got pinned down in a fire fight and running back in there might end up being suicide. In any case I am very thankful for the help, and when I stopped I was sitting at 19 so hopefully I can push on through to 20 tonight and maybe start working on the bounties.

Book of Deeds

When you see this text pop across your screen it feels extremely epic… until you realize that this was just one of nine books that you have to do… and you have so many left to go. I love the feel of the Relic weapon quests because they still remind me so much of just how difficult it was to get your epic weapon in the original Everquest. The reality is that it is going to take me an insane amount of time to complete it, far longer than is reasonable considering lots of my FC mates are taking the significantly shorter route to a ilevel 110 weapon. I don’t want to call it the easy way, because it is in itself a significant amount of grinding, but with the most recent patch it just got way easier to acquire the necessary bits. In fact since that patch went in I already have everything waiting in my inventory to be able to get my ilevel 110 Axe, I just need a bit more soldiery which I should get Tuesday when the reset happens.

That said I still plan on going through with the Relic quest chain, because man… the Bravura Nexus looks amazing. I borrowed this image from the FFXIV reddit, but man I really want to swing that weapon. Granted the step between where I am currently and where you get that weapon involves months of work, but at some point I will be swinging it happily. Granted by the time that happens they will probably add another tier of progression in there, and it will already be outdated but screw it… it looks awesome. Final Fantasy XIV is really good so far at giving me things that I want to get that require lots of work to get them. I’ve always been extremely luck with drops, so getting that item to drop off a boss seems to be an ineffectual way of keeping me engaged. Giving me something that I have to do every week to slowly inch my way towards victory… that seems to actually work at keeping me around. I love the way that the books work so far in that each one slowly incrementally improves your current weapon. Someday I will get there, I just hope that the rest of the people I am playing with will still be playing when it happens.

#FFXIV #Destiny

A Proper Paladin

September 27, 2014 by Belghast

Capitalism Ho!

This morning I am getting around a bit later than normal. I am not sure why exactly I slept in so late. I got up to go to the restroom at 6 am, and then next thing I know my wife is getting up at 8:30 telling me that her tummy is grumbling. I apparently took from 8:30 until 9 to actually raise myself from the stupor. I showered and got dressed and wandered out like usual to find some breakfast. When I got to the QuikTrip just down the street from my house it was absolutely packed with people. When I exited the car I immediately realized why. Across the street is the high school and I was confronted with a barrage of the sound of that can only come from a dozen marching bands warming and tuning.

Since there were band parents and potential competitors wandering in and out of the store, I half expected that everything would be picked over. However it seems like they were prepared and pretty much everything you could want was in stock. I ended up getting my traditional Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Roll, and for my wife a chocolate long john. For the moment life is good as I have consumed my breakfast and am now writing for you lovely readers. It was around this point that I remembered that my friend Kodra and fellow host of AggroChat was planning a stream this morning. If you catch this post early enough you should totally tune into his Hitbox stream and watch him attempt to date birds. We have been joking for a few weeks that he needed to play this game… and the subsection title comes from a comment he just made over the stream when he was offered to get a job.

All Grown Up

Yesterday I was feeling absolutely like crap. I woke up and it felt like someone had filled my head with concrete over the night, and took after my throat with some sandpaper. I struggled around yesterday morning trying to get psyched for work, and it just wasn’t working. I texted one of my co-workers to make sure he was in the office, and that things were going smoothly. After reporting back in that all was well I decided to just stay home. I stayed remoted into work most of the day, working on this and that but took breaks to work on leveling my paladin. Considering I technically took a sick day, I didn’t feel bad at all about doing this. They were essentially getting free work from me as it was, and I was mostly just dealing with little issues as they came up, and responding to email.

After doing my daily low level dungeon roulette and getting Haukke yet again… I decided to pull everything in the zone and skip nothing. The boost of XP managed to take me through the rest of 48 and halfway through 49. I didn’t really feel like tanking another low level dungeon considering my precious bonus was gone, so instead I went out to Mor Dhona and worked on some leves. It is almost as though they had intended folks to do just this because all but one of the Leves spawn in exactly the same corner of the zone. So I could run to the vendor get four quests, complete all four and just say no to the free teleport between them. It took a couple of rounds of this to get close, but what actually dinged me was completely the “do 5 different types of leves” challenge log entry. Those things are worth a truly prodigious amount of experience.

The awesome thing about having so much Syrcus tower and Weathered gear, is that all of it is dual class for both Warriors and Paladins. This means the second I dinged 50, and bought 3 pieces of ilevel 90 gear from the hunt master… I was sitting at I think ilevel 89. My weapon and shield being the only thing dragging down my overall score. The problem is I had glamoured most of the hideous looking Syrcus tower gear to look like the default warrior set, and class specific glamours won’t show up when you equip it as another class. Instead I opted to go for a mix of the chain tunic I loved so much, and some of the heavy allagan bits I had managed to connect. For the paladin I keep the golden crown, and for warrior I use the bunny samurai hat. So far I am digging the look.

A Proper Paladin

Yesterday afternoon and into the night, my mission was to push through the Relic Reborn quest line and become a proper Curtana wielding paladin. One of the unintended consequences of the Nexus relic system, is that folks tend to be ONLY farming whatever happens to be the dungeon or trial that gives bonus light. Players have figured out there is the equivalent of the “Hot Zone” that Everquest and Everquest II used to have. Where if you run that one thing, you get a significantly boosted amount of nexus light. The result is that it took absolutely forever to get most of my primals done. I think at this point folks are still busy farming nexus light, and not working on alts… which I think is what keeps the group steps for the relic moving along quickly. You would figure as a tank I would get damned near instant queues… but unfortunately that was not the case.

I spent large blocks of time dancing in various places. Here I am dancing for two NPCs in Uldah… both of which seem thoroughly unimpressed by my skills. I think a rundown of the waits looked a little something like this… Chimera took around 45 minutes to finally pop and when it did I was the most seasoned tank so ended up tanking it. Hydra on the other hand took only about 25 minutes… and the other tank a Cat Girl in a Bikini wielding a huge axe rushed in and tanked it. For Ifrit it was more like a 15 minute wait, and oddly enough once again a Cat Girl in a Bikini tanked it, but from what I can tell it was a different one. Finally we come around to Garuda and it was almost instant pop. It turns out that I lucked out and hit a spot where Garuda was the Hot Zone… and as such it was the fastest Garuda run I have ever experienced. Folks were ignoring all of the mechanics and pretty much just burning her.

That just left Titan, and after another fifteen minute run I was volunteered to be the primary tank. This is fine because really as far as fights go Titan is one of the easiest fights to tank. For the most part you just stand in one spot occasionally shifting slightly to either be next to the red line or to avoid a bomb. Like every titan I have seemed to be in ever… it took a couple of wipes and echo stacks before we finally pushed through. On the time we won we were down to a single Scholar healer and a few dps and me. This seems to honestly be easier than trying to keep alive eight people on this fight. Sure it was a pain in the ass and took a really long time, but you reach a point where the healing and movement is manageable and you just keep repeating the same loop. With that I had my Curtana and shield. Moments later I had upgraded it to Zenith level and finally felt like a real paladin tank. This makes level 50 job number four and my fourth Relic Zenith.

#FFXIV #Paladin

Neon Ninjas and Knights

September 26, 2014 by Belghast

Its A Voxel World

Yesterday something pretty awesome happened… Trove Beta launched and overall everything went pretty smoothly. I have been a fan of the game since I got into the very first Alpha wave. You can check out my first video from November of last year and see just how much the game has changed. This is one of those titles that has changed at an almost staggering pace. I would pop my head in about once a month… only to find that the framework of the game was in a massively different place than when I last left it. I have to say during the Alpha this became a bit of an impediment to me playing it. I would want to just pop in and do something interesting and essentially have to relearn how to do anything at all. That said my friend Rae showed interest in the game early this week, and oddly enough we happened to both log in together on the very last night of Closed Alpha.

We had such a good time running around and smashing things, that we decided last night when the Beta launched to skip playing Final Fantasy XIV at least for a bit and dive straight into leveling up in Trove. The above mounts we found during the final hours of closed alpha, and they are essentially rainbow piñatas that shoot rainbows and confetti out of their butts as you ride along. Basically it is my goal to manage to get this mount again during beta. Nothing says Trove quite like leaving a trail of sprinkles everywhere you go. Unfortunately the mount comes from their version of a lootbox. I have no clue what the drop rate is for one of the piñata mounts but I know I purchased 10 of them last night and Rae purchased 5 with the points we were given going into the beta… and all we managed to get were a few crafting recipes.

Neon Ninjas and Knights

One of the brand new things for Beta was the introduction of the Neon Knight class. For most of the night this is what Rae ran around as while I played my Knight. The class is a bit of a stealthy melee in that your right mouse click causes you to drop a decoy and shift into stealth. From there you can throw shuriken at your target for a fairly devastating effect. The purple rings around you seem to be some sort of a charging up mechanic that indicates when you are ready to throw shuriken. Other than that if you attack from stealth you do a significant amount more damage. I personally found the class a little frustrating, since I like to rush headlong into combat and bash all the things in the face. For someone who wants more tactical game play however this might be the ideal option.

Fortunately or unfortunately I feel like the most “Bel” class in existence is still the Knight, which is essentially your default. For starters it is a melee class with pretty high survival in up close confrontations. The secondary attack is this impressive weapon slam that can knock back enemies and deal a cone of damage. The first ability you get is a charge and god knows I love charge attacks, but this one also doubles as a movement ability and a way to dash across gaps to get to places more easily. Finally the last attack is this shield that you can put up that causes you to take no damage for a period of time. The last one is on a long cooldown, but it serves nicely as an “oh shit” button for doing some of the harder content.

Content Density

One of the coolest things about late Alpha and now Beta is just how diverse and dense the content is. Early on in the game each biome section would have a single objective be it a castle or a tower or something of the sort. This time around you would be hard pressed to go for very long before discovering something that has a boss or a challenge or something of the sort. Granted by the time I came back later in the night, the world was getting more than a bit picked over… so I am hoping that the world reset happens pretty frequently. In any case we were able to roll around the map going to areas that had not been touched and doing the challenges we encountered along the way. The above shot is from this insane rainbow dungeon in the clouds that you get to by climbing up through the hollowed out tree pictured in the back. Each biome has its own challenges with is own mob types which make the gameplay feel fairly fresh.

Essentially the challenges that I have encountered break down into a few themes. The first involves triggering an event. These tend to say that there is something dangerous inside in the upper right hand corner of the screen. When you trigger the event you have to survive a few waves of enemies, and if you do so a chest appears. The negative is that both you and the mobs you are fighting have to stay inside a blue ring that spawns when the event starts. We had issues when fighting mobs up in the air, that they would fall off the edges. The positive is you can retry the event over and over by simply moving out of the ring and waiting for it to reset. The part that makes these challenging is that generally the area with the totem that triggers the event is covered in spikes or surrounded by these pillars that shoot fireballs in a Castlevania fashion. So while the half dozen mobs really isn’t a huge problem… keeping them from knocking you back into environment obstacles totally is.

Something Minecraft Doesn’t Give Me

At it’s core the gameplay of Trove is similar enough to Minecraft that you cannot talk about it without at least mentioning that game. You could call Trove Minecraft with more meaningful combat and MMO style loot, but the game itself feels richer than that might denote. One of the aspects of the game that I like the most is the existence of my Cornerstone. This is basically a plot of land that I control and can build permanent structures upon… but that also moves with me around the world. I can walk up to any plot that is presently unclaimed and the game will rebuild my cornerstone before my eyes. So I can have crafting machines travel around with me, and each time I do this it resets my spawn point. This gives me some permanence that I crave in an otherwise very flexible world. This however does not make for a great community, as folks are constantly picking up their home like a hermit crab and moving it with them.

What is more interesting is the fact that players can create clubs, which in essence give you guild like functionality. I’ve created a Club for the Alliance of Awesome, and as such we have a “Club World”. This is a fully instanced biome where we can control everything in it. This means you can build super intricate guild houses and give other players the ability to teleport into them. This is the more permanent structure from the looks of it, and gives folks a way to link up and meet in user created worlds. While ours does not really do much of anything at the moment, I have plunked down a few machines and will likely keep adding to it as we go along. You are given only the smallest of islands to start building on, but it looks like more or less you can freely build out over the ocean for quite some ways. There are a number of websites giving away beta keys right now, so I highly suggest you track one down and give this game a shot.

Cancelling Titan

September 24, 2014 by Belghast

Bragtoberfest 2014

bragtoberfest_spooky

This month Izlain and J3w3l of Couch Podtatoes are running an event for the gaming community. The idea is to have an entire month of remembering the good things about gaming. The last few months have been frustrating to be a gamer, and the word gamer itself has been drug through the mud a bit by some misguided individuals with other agendas… and their willing or not so willing peons. The idea is to get back to the roots of gaming… and just play awesome games for the fun of it. I was brought into the equation to help out with some logo work, and I did a couple of them that you might see used during the event. For a better description you can check out what Izlain posted on his blog Me Vs Myself and I.

We all know that the last few weeks have been a frustrating time to be a fan of video games. There are sections of the Internet and our society as a whole that don’t necessarily see things the way we do, and a huge push back against women, other minority groups, and the industry have stigmatized the word “gamer.” I want to take it back. I want us to remember why we started gaming in the first place. I want you to enjoy being a gamer, and to brag about your accomplishments in games, be it a high score shattered, a nice piece of loot earned, or your name at the top of a leaderboard. That bragging can take place however you see fit, be it via your blog, on a podcast, in a video, whatever you want. Let’s just get back to our roots as gamers.

Bragtoberfest aims to make it fun to be a gamer again. We all game, and most of us also either blog, stream, vlog or podcast about games as well. Why not combine the two into a month-long event?

If you are interested you should definitely check out the Bragtoberfest 2014 nook as that Is where the contest will be running out of. There are four major events that Izlain and J3w3l are running, as well as a slew of prizes to be had. More importantly this is an embracing of the good that is left in gaming, and the enjoyment each of us have that first time we boot up a new game. Also to get some buzz going, don’t forget to mention #Bragtoberfest when you post about the events.

Goodbye Alpha

Monday night on a whim I hooked my good friend Rae up with a key for the Trove Alpha, since she had shown some interest in the game. So we spent the evening wandering around the game, and I wish to god I had been streaming it… because the running commentary of her and I “discovering” things had to be hilarious. Trove is one of those games that I really enjoyed early on, but have simply not played of late. Each time I do manage to boot it up the game has changed so massively since the last time that I almost felt overwhelmed to even begin to play it. If nothing else the game has shown players just how in a constant state of flux most game development is. Trove has broken some of the rules and for the most part uses Reddit entirely for its user forums, as well as communicating copious amounts of information back with the community about what it has done and intends to do.

As much fun as we had, Monday night was a little bittersweet. It was only after logging out that night and checking into the Reddit yesterday that I realized that it was in fact the end of Alpha events that we were seeing. So many awesome things were going on, mostly that people were throwing down these pinatas full of loot on the ground for us to combat. We both managed to get amazing Pinata mounts… that leave a trail of rainbows and sprinkles as you move around. Sadly all of this went away that night as the servers went down. We will not be able to play again until Thursday when the beta officially begins… and I have to say right now I am feeming to play again. In the past I had pretty much played by myself, but to be running around with someone else was an absolute blast.

Right now we have tentative plans to wander around Thursday night leveling. I plan on working on Knight since that tends to be my favorite, and at this point I am not sure if Rae will be a Gunslinger or a Faerie Trickster. At least a small part of me is hoping that the new Neon Ninja class will be ready at the start of beta. I have to say the game is so much more solid than at any point I have ever played it in the past. The biggest improvement is just how content dense the various biomes now are. Once upon a time there would be a single element in the biome that was worth finding and clearing, but we stumble across all sorts of points of interest, each with their own bosses and treasure chests to be found. Right now I have an Alliance of Awesome guild running, so if you are playing or plan on playing let me know and we can get you invited.

Cancelling Titan

Yesterday during an interview with Mike Morhaime the website Polygon broke the news that apparently the mystery project Titan has officially been cancelled. For those who are completely unfamiliar with the name Titan and the mystery surrounding it, you can check out this excellent post from Massively running down the short history of a game that doesn’t exist. For me I guess it feels weird to know now that Blizzard does not have a new MMO up its sleeve, and makes me wonder if they are completely abandoning the MMO genre in general in favor of games that are frankly easier to manufacture content for. Right now Hearthstone is by all reports doing amazingly well, and they have managed to find a mix of value in their micro transaction model so that it does not feel abusive to the players. Similarly with the ramping up of Heroes of the Storm, we have them formally throwing their hat into the MOBA arena which at least for the games that have done it right, is also a cash cow. The amount of effort that it takes to develop a new hero for example is so significantly less than it does an entire MMO expansion.

Statistic: Number of World of Warcraft subscribers from 1st quarter 2005 to 2nd quarter 2014 (in millions) | Statista

Find more statistics at StatistaI feel like one of the things that most players do not understand is that World of Warcraft is following a very bell shaped decline. Each time a new expansion is released there is a momentary bump, but the last one of these only raised the subscribers enough to cover the exodus at the tail end of the previous expansion before steadily declining again. I am not trying to claim doom and gloom about World of Warcraft, but it feels like fact that the game has long since entered its golden years. The positive is that both Everquest and Everquest 2 have enjoyed significant followings and stability long after the buzz died down. In both cases they continue to churn out expansions happily, and for the small but extremely devoted fan base they are great places to be. As such I more than expect that the same will be true for World of Warcraft. I expect the game will likely taper off and flatten the curve a bit around 2 to 3 million players. Looking at the number alone however, we can see that the game is at a level of subscribers that it has not been at since the sometime between the opening of AQ40 and the launch of Naxxramas in vanilla.

So I guess my question is this… does this really mean that Blizzard as a company is moving away from the MMO model that they popularized? Do they have another skunkworks project up there sleeves that they can surprise the player base with at a later date? I realize talk about the decline of World of Warcraft makes a lot of fans nervous. I am trying to do so with the least amount of hyperbole available, and in a way that is an non-incendiary as I can. The truth is right now World of Warcraft still brings in a very significant amount of money. As it ages however, that revenue stream keeps diminishing. The question is, can they make enough money from micro transactions to replace the stability of the subscription dollar? Will they be able to muster the same amount of fandom without an MMO to stir up the hysteria to eleven? What does the future of Blizzard look like, and is it as dominant a force as it has been to date?

#ProjectTitan #Trove #Bragtoberfest