playstation 4 Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Devil’s Lair

June 16, 2014 by Belghast

Bad Decisions

I am still feeling pretty lousy from this allergy induced stupor, so last night I just was not really feeling Wildstar and interacting with other human beings. I ended up logging out about 9:30 and attempting to lay down. I hung out in bed for awhile snuggling with our cats but sleep just refused to take me. So as a result I ended up getting back up and decided I would begin my four job fiesta run. My intent was just to go through the process of backing up my savegame files from the previous draft run we were doing, and simply start the game going… maybe get to the first crystal. Next thing I know it is midnight and I am moments away from getting the fire crystal.

Now however I am paying the price because I feel nice and groggy to add to my allergy induced stupor. It is funny how a game you have played so many times can be so enthralling. So far I am off to a pretty good start. My first job was the Knight which lead to a really easy start to the game and me just being able to roll over the top of almost every encounter thanks to the power of “Two Handed”. The second pick from Gilgobot was the Red Mage, which still worked okay since I did not have either the black or white mage in the first round. Also the Red Mage can totally use a Two-Hander if equipped with that ability, so still pretty much rolling over the top of everything without having to cast any magic at all.

Since I am just a little ways from getting the fire crystal I went ahead and requested my fire job. Now is when things start to fall apart. I wound up with the Geomancer, which is one of my least favorite classes. This means I do have a use for bells… but I’ve always felt the geomancer was somewhat of a useless pick. Basically I have a couple of options… I can either deal with it and struggle through or I can donate money to Four Job Fiesta to buy my way out of geomancer hell. I have yet to decide what to do, and ultimately this is why I chose to request my job a little early so I could mull it over. Basically I have to make a decision before I collect the fire job crystals with which way I am going to go. I would have far rather had ninja or ranger, but then again I would have rather had mystic knight than red mage. but more than happy to roll with the punches there.

Destiny Group Play

Yesterday afternoon after I had finished editing the podcast and writing my morning blog post that almost turned into an afternoon one, I opted to do some Destiny with Tamrielo and Ashgar. At this point Tam and I were both completely sold on the game, but Ash however was not really feeling the game. While I was finishing up my blog post, Ash and tam ran through the first mission in good time and the three of us entered the “Explore Cosmodrome” map point which was a free roaming version of the Old Russia area you visit in the first static mission. We wandered around out there for some time getting both Tam and I to level 7 and Ashgar to level 6. The mobs we encountered ranged from level 2 near the entrance to the area, to level 4 in the instanced areas… and finally level 8 or 9 deep in the zone.

I had the forethought to set this up and stream while we ran around. The interesting thing about the playstation party communication is that apparently it ONLY records my voice. This leads for some odd one sided conversation going on as you watch the video. After having a blast running around in a free form area, we decided to take it to the next level and do what is in essence their first dungeon set in the same basic area. I have to say the concept works… like the boss fights in Borderlands 2 were interesting, but they never really reminded me of the level of complexity found in an MMO boss fight. Destiny seems to bridge that gap and provided us with a number of extremely challenging encounters. The first one was a sort of “hold this spot” fight where we were flooded with really horrible things in the room with us.

The Devil’s Lair

The first encounter essentially involved setting off one of our ghosts to work on scanning an objective, while it does this we have to hold the position. During this time we encountered a brand new mob type that we had not seen to that point called a “Stealth Vandal”. These are the sniper type mobs but they spawn in stealthed and remain so until they actually strike. Now their form of stealth is not truly hidden, but they blend in with the background “predator” like. It took us several tries to get a feel for how the encounter worked and manage to place each of us strategically around the room. Even after doing so it still involved a lot of running around chaotically looking for a safe bit of cover to attack from. Every so often one of us would have to stay alive long enough for another one to spawn back in. This becomes a crucial skill since when the last player dies… the entire team respawns back at the checkpoint and you have to redo the encounter from the start.

The second encounter was the one we had been waiting for. Periodically when in the open world version of the zone these group encounters spawn in. One of them is this insane walking tank that has a blast attack that you simply cannot hide from effectively. If you are on the other side of the wall when it goes off, it will still very much one shot you. The idea behind the encounter is that you have to take out a piece of leg armor, which causes it to fall down temporarily and expose a weak point behind the red cockpit looking shell. You can only whittle down so much health during each one of these phases. So the biggest problem we ran into during the fight is that we simply ran out of ammunition. Every so often another drop ship lands, and periodically it spawns the little drones… all of which are decent sources of ammunition. But this also forces one to make a suicidal run dangerously close to the walking tank to be able to gather it up effectively.

I wish I had thought to fire up the stream before going into the mission, because I swear we were fighting the tank for a good thirty minutes. Once we got to the other side of it, things started to get super creepy. You walk through an area littered with hundreds and hundreds of bones strewn everywhere. I started to wonder if I accidentally teleported into a Doom game, but I have to say I am loving the atmosphere so far. I really have no clue what exactly the “Fallen” are yet, but they seem to be some sort of incectoid baddies similar to the Prothean/Collectors from Mass Effect. Honestly there can be parallels made between those two games in many ways, as the atmosphere often feels like you would imagine Mass Effect would feel if the Reapers came and decimated the planet. So far I am hooked, and looking forward to getting to play more of it. Right now we have managed to hit the cap allowed in this first alpha test, which sucks a bit because each of us have gear that will never be equippable as we cannot get higher than level 8. That said it was a really good time, and I hope to play some of the other classes to see if I like them better.

Wildstar

My plan is tonight to play Wildstar, and work on finishing Auroria on my Engineer. Right now I have reached a point where I am just tired of that zone and want to move on. The southern area of the zone is extremely nasty, and I feel like I am almost underleveled to be able to complete it successfully. I am wondering if I need to go back and finish some of the challenges that I didn’t quite make to see if I can finish off 22. I am also considering making myself a secondary hotbar setup with non-tanky abilities to see how much more smoothly questing goes. Right now my biggest problem is that it takes forever for me to kill anything, and while I can stay alive for a really long time… that time is not infinite. I feel like I am high center right now on my engineer, so I need to do something to get back into the swing of playing it.

#Destiny #DevilsLair #FourJobFiesta #FinalFantasyV

Manifest Destiny

June 15, 2014 by Belghast

The Doldrum

Last Tuesday my wife flew off to her first conference of the year, and for the most part I had been unaffected by this. Sure I’ve missed having her around, but during the work week my time is so metered that I barely notice that I exist, let alone another person. However the first Saturday is always the day it really hits me. It doesn’t help that we are struggling with record pollen counts and the cottonwood is blowing with a vengeance that means I cannot breathe at all… and feel generally shitty. As a result I have completely fallen off the walking wagon, I am sure Monday I will get back into the swing of things, but the last several days I have walked a rather pitiful amount.

Right now I feel very lonely, and as a result have been forcing myself to hang out on Teamspeak as much as possible. For the most part the whole dumping of mumble thing has gone relatively smoothly. The folks I chat with on a nightly basis have just transitioned cleanly, leaving only a few stragglers on mumble. I am looking forward to Wednesday when she flies back into town, and in the meantime I am trying to busy myself and surround myself with as many friends as possible. My natural instinct is to “turtle” and pull my head up inside my shell, never to be heard from again. But I know based on past experience that is exactly the wrong reaction to feeling a bit depressed. I just have to get through a few more days for this current salvo.

Manifest Destiny

Literally within moments of posting yesterdays blog entry, I had a friend of mine hook me up with a Destiny alpha code. I love our community so damned much, and I am not sure if this person wants to be named by name… but yeah thanks so much. After a 6.9 gig download that went remarkably faster than I expected and next thing I knew I was logging in and creating a new character. My instinct was to go human, but for whatever reason they do not have any facial hair options. I cannot create a “proper” Belghast without a beard, so instead I choose to go their robot option called the Exo, which had some really slick configuration choices. The other racial option was some sort of tank grown looking protohuman called an Awoken that seems to be based on vampires/ghosts/elves in appearance. If you are familiar with Defiance, they feel a lot like the Castithans.

So this won’t be the only comparison I make the Defiance, because really so far Destiny feels like Defiance done better. I feel like Defiance was an MMO with Shooter elements, whereas Destiny is a Shooter with MMO elements. Subtle difference there, but being a really solid shooter first… and gear swapping mmo second seems to make all the difference in the world. Defiance was a cool idea, but the moment to moment gameplay felt unexciting, because it lived halfway between two worlds. Everything about the shooter elements of Destiny is solid, and while I fail miserably at playing console shooters… I was able to pick up the controls quickly and felt like I had more control that I normally do with a gamepad. Right now I am somewhat hooked, and hope to get in and play with some friends and explore the ruins together.

I still do not know quite how to hook up a mic and get it working, but I streamed most of my gameplay yesterday to twitch and then dumped it to my youtube channel like I normally do.` In the beginning I was super uncertain of the controls, but by the end of my play session I was starting to feel far more confident with aiming the dual analog sticks. Destiny is a title that I went from mildly interested in, to really looking forward to the release. I fully expect to pre-order this title and play it when it launches in September. I chose to play the Titan which is the closest thing they have to a tank in the game. I’ve you’ve played Mass Effect, it feels really similar to the paragon, in that you have a mix of ranged weapons with super powerful melee attacks. I would like to see how this plays with a group, because I kept encountering things I definitely could not take by myself. At this point I’ve beaten the first “on-rails” mission and opened up the more open world missions. Look forward to playing this a lot more over the next months.

Dances with Orcs

While I was piddling around and streaming things, I also spent a good chunk of yesterday playing Warlords of Draenor. I figured since I have been granted the ability to play the Alpha, I should probably be testing it. Also in a way I am playing it in memory of River, since he was so amped about being invited to the alpha. The game is trying super hard to be modern and relevant, but under the covers it still feels like a ten year old game. I am still working my way through the quests which have the added benefit of building my Garrison. Yesterday I completed a sequence of quests to unlock the Alchemy Hut and in theory the ability to run alchemy crafting missions. I have not however gotten enough Draenor era herbs of the right kind to be able to complete this.

Something I am highly enjoying is the fact that while I am out in the world, I am constantly gathering new followers for my Garrison. Some of them are even call backs to the TBC era Draenor. If you are like me and completed the netherwing dailies to get those mounts, you will remember the fel orc that buzzes past the tower constantly… Mulverick!!!! Well one of the early quests involves rescuing him from an Ogre strong hold. When you do he agrees to join your garrison as a follower. While I spent most of my time playing alliance, I am really hoping when that content opens up that we see similar nostalgic references. Ultimately that is going to be the hook for people if they can manage to wield it correctly. Nostalgia is a pain, and even as jaded as I currently am about the experience… this game can still manage to hit me in the feels occasionally.

So while streaming yesterday, some random stranger in the channel suggested that I run the first instance… and while I had nothing better to do, I figured sure… what the hell. So I joined a group in progress that had cleared to the first boss of Bloodmaul Slag Mines and apparently lost their tank. It got off to a bit of a rocky start as as soon as I pulled the boss I disconnected from the server. Warlords of Draenor is very much an alpha, and as such I have had more than my fair share of issues staying connected. However once I got back in the run went relatively smoothly from that point on with zero deaths. I still am not sure how I feel about the current state of Deathknight Tanking. The rotation feels off with large empty spaces where I can really do nothing at all. I am slowly moving things around, using soul reaper a lot more and using death siphon each time it is up… and things are starting to feel a bit better. I will continue to test and see if I can hit on the magic feel good spot for the class, but in its current state… I am considering going back to warrior tanking.

AggroChat Talks E3 2014

This week we were without Kodra and Ashgar because of various real world commitments, so once again we grabbed Dallian and Tam and talked about the various things that happened during this years E3 show. I have to say I thought this years show was strong enough that I actually went out and bought a playstation four at least in part to what I was seeing. We talk about so many different things that it ends up being a bit more disjuncted than normal, but overall upon listening to it and editing all morning… I think it is a pretty strong show. You can hear our take on what is coming down the pipe gamewise. Right now the game I am looking forward to the most is No Man’s Sky, and we talk at length about it. I would be curious to find out what you thought of this years showing as well.

Four Job Fiesta 2014

One last quick blurb… this years Four Job Fiesta is now open! I have officially registered by not started. It looks like this year I will be starting as a Knight, which should be pretty simple. If you are interested at all in Final Fantasy… or better yet are interested in making money for a great charity… you should totally sign up and play along with us. I will likely be streaming good chunks of my gameplay. I am pretty much forced to play this because Ashgar holds a gun to our heads and makes us sign up each year. We love him dearly and do not want to face his wrath. But really it is a pretty fun time, and there is a lot of community spirit going on as folks complete the game. Here is hoping I do not get stalled and actually finish this year.

#FFV #FourJobFiesta #AggroChat #WarlordsofDraenor #Destiny

Next Gen Achieved

June 14, 2014 by Belghast

Aversion to Sports

It started yesterday with a random dumbass quip that I am known to occasionally spout towards the end of the day. Watching the internet be enthralled about the World Cup is a really surreal experience when you are living in the United States and soccer never actually makes the sports page other than during the World Cup. I figured surely someone would give me shit about my statement, but I expected them to hone in on the World Cup portion. Instead my friend Liore latched onto the root of the comment… asking why exactly I found the appeal of sports bizarre. I rattled off a half truth and said that I just was not born with what I call the “spectator gene”. I love league of legends for example, but no matter how many times I have tried to watch the LCS I find it completely boring. All it does it make me want to boot up League and play it, instead of getting completely caught up in the matches like my friends do.

My aversion to sports however goes far more deeply than that. When you grow up in a small town in Oklahoma or Texas… your entire school life revolves around the sports team. I grew up in a town of 2000, with a graduating class of 60… and even though we had a horrible football team… the entire damned town revolved around it. Growing up a big kid I was stalked from middle school on by coached that wanted to make me part of their “lineup”. I played little league ball and gave an attempt to play football… but I just didn’t enjoy it. Additionally I have never bought into the bullshit drill instructor act that all coaches perform. While that might motivate some people, all it does is make me want to flip them the bird… because I had so many other options for spending my time. It completely baffled them that anyone would not want to play football.

On top of that over the years sports have come to represent what was wrong with a small town. You might have duct taped together supplies in the science classroom, and classes meeting in portable huts instead of actual buildings… but by god if the field house needs renovated that is going to happen, and there is nothing that will ever stand in the way of our losing football team from getting shiny new equipment every year. The focus on football means other things slide and the school as a whole graduated a ton of barely functional adults. In my graduating class of 60, I would say 2/3rds of the kids who went to college flunked out their first year and are now working menial jobs in the same town. Then we get to the problem of the coaches themselves… who always seemed to be History or Mathematics teachers. My Geometry teacher was the head football coach, and would spend exactly five minutes writing something on the board… and then spend the rest of the hour as we worked on our homework assignment with the football players huddled around his desk talking about plays for the “big game”. The history teacher, while a nice guy was equally incompetent. He once told us that “Old Iron Sides” was named that because it was made of Iron not Wood. So how can I respect sports when I grew up in this situation.

I realize that huge swaths of the population love sports, and love cheering for their team. I try my damnedest to just ignore it, because I really don’t want to be a buzzkill. Every now and then one of these quips slips out, and as I said while I really do not have the spectator gene… there is a lot more driving that attitude. I played little league ball, but for whatever reason the indoctrination never really took. Which is humorous because I used to work in a baseball card and later comic shop. I even collected cards… but then it was more about the artwork on the card or the value of a specific rookie… and not about me actually caring about the game itself. I will say though that to this day Baseball is the only game I will really willingly watch. There is something untainted about that sport, because at our high school they never got any attention either. They had to play in old uniforms and on a crappy field… because the football and basketball programs drained the system dry. So in a way I felt almost a sense of kinship with them, since they too were damaged by the system.

Next Gen Achieved

I have for the most part avoided the “next generation” of consoles, and as all the hype surrounded them leading up to the launch I didn’t think much about any of them. Then something happened… and I saw the 2013 E3 presser from Sony. During the current generation of consoles I started out an XBox 360 fan… but over time I gravitated towards the Sony Playstation 3 when I picked up one used from a friend. The primary reason behind this shift in allegiance was the phenominal deal that is the Playstation Plus membership. For what is roughly $50 it gave me access to a massive game library of I think a dozen different playstation 3 titles at a time. So not only was the service cheaper than Xbox Gold but worth way more value in that it actually just gave me a curated collection of games every month for me to download. One of my good friends Ashgarshowed me a nifty trick that allowed me to log into the website and “purchase” the free games to add them to my account each month. After watching the E3 press conference last year, I knew sooner or later I would be getting a Playstation 4, but I was mostly waiting for the price to come down. Nonetheless this meant every single month I would add the new PS4 game to my account knowing that sooner or later I would get one and have a game library ready to play.

Awhile back on the AggroChat podcast, my friend Tam introduced me a rule he uses for the purchase of new console systems. He waits to buy a new console until it has at least five games, either currently released or releasing within the next six months that he wants to play. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was an excellent and logical way to decide when to jump into a new console. For me right now the list of games I am excited about looks something like this.

Infamous: Second Son
Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Last of Us: Remastered
Destiny
Kingdom Hearts III
Final Fantasy XV
The Order: 1886
Guilty Gear Xrd
Bloodborne

While many of those are not Playstation 4 exclusives… I am devoted to the playstation family of consoles thanks to the warm fuzzies I have about playstation plus as a whole. In the time I have been subbed to the service I have gotten 151 games, and have a library of six PS4 titles waiting on me. Granted most of these are not exactly AAA titles yet, but one of them at least is something I have amped to play since the moment I saw game play from it. Microsoft on the other hand… really has nothing to offer me. As far as Microsoft Console exclusives… the only two that I am interested in that are not also coming to the PC are Killer Instinct and Sunset Overdrive. Neither of which are going to be games I play enough to make that console worth my time. Then again… there is just a lot I don’t like about the target of the XBox One. I was watching an excellent rundown video about the two consoles yesterday, and the guy admits that while he used the Kinect and TV integration features for the first month… he hasn’t used them at all since.

Getting the Goods

When it comes to buying hardware especially… I am a cheap bastard. I rarely if ever buy game systems new… in fact the only game system I did buy new was the 3DS, and only because I had pretty much exhausted all options. So when I started kicking around the notion of maybe picking up a PS4… I hit craigslist like normal. I did a search of the site and noticed that someone had a PS4 incorrectly posted in the barter section for way less than normal. They were wanting $280 and it came with two sports titles. Since I have zero use for those… I opted to try and talk the guy into a price without them. I honestly expected nothing to come of it, so when it texted me back a day later saying he would do $250 without the games… I was absolutely pumped. I joked during the day yesterday that I hope I didn’t get killed meeting a stranger on craigslist… which apparently disturbed Rae considerably. It was a little odd because generally I am not alone when I meet people from craigslist, but my rule has always been that we meet at one of the many QuikTrips in Tulsa… since they are ALWAYS busy 24/7.

The guy was running late… as in he was an hour late at the time he finally arrived. For awhile I was thinking that it was going to fall through like so many other “good deals” from Craigslist have. However he arrived with a PS4 in hand, with the original box and everything that came with it. It seemed that once again I was benefiting from the flighty nature of teenagers. He bought the PS4 and games with High School graduation money… and then decided he needed that money to move into an apartment. It is funny the stuff that folks you meet from craigslist will tell you, like when we bought my chromebook we found out that the guy grew up in the same town as my wife… and that they knew some of each others family. I think maybe this stuff only actually works out this well here in Oklahoma… where people are generally well meaning and rather polite about everything. But once again I am more than happy to take advantage of a good deal when I can find it. I took the machine home, booted it up and everything works awesome. It feels as though the dual shock four hasn’t really even been broken in. The guy had not even registered an account on the playstation network, so after a wipe of the system it is now set up with all the plus games.

So far I am mostly playing Resogun and Infamous Second Son. I would like to find a cheap copy of Killzone Shadowfall because it looks pretty cool. I am also kicking myself that I did not sign up for the Destiny Alpha. At that point I had no clue I would actually be getting a PS4, so of course hindsight is 20/20. Here is hoping I can figure out a way to get an alpha key and play it as well. So far I am loving the system, and super happy with the purchase. It is actually good timing considering my allergies are going completely haywire and right now I can barely breath. Seems like the perfect time to hibernate with a console and play some games. I might even try streaming to twitch later, just to see how well the service works.

#PS4