Rift Archives - Page 17 of 20 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Pre-Endgame Game

October 29, 2013 by Belghast

Limited Time Stuff

First off I guess let me open todays post with a complaint. I really had nothing much to talk about as I sat down at the keyboard, so I did what I normally do and sifted through my RSS feed. I spent most of yesterday super busy and really did not have time to read anything much. One of the first posts was over on Rift Junkies talking about how apparently there was a new mount available for only four hours on the Rift store. They are apparently calling this unstable artifacts, which is a clever excuse to make something super limited that costs a hell of a lot on the store.

I am not against the 2700 credit price tag, but I am against the concept of limited time items. I hate when something goes into game only to be pulled out swiftly keeping anyone else from getting the item. I honestly don’t care about the red Kirin at all, because I think the mounts are ugly, but for me it is more a principle of it. When a game starts doing one time only things, I really lose interest quickly. I get extremely frustrated anymore when I am asked to play a game on someone else’s schedule. With the recent rapidly expiring world event each phase lasting only two days… this seems to be the direction that Rift wants to move in.

The more of this type of content goes into the game the less and less interested I am in it. There are so many things about Guild Wars 2 that I think I would enjoy, but the fact that content expires roughly every two weeks keeps me from wanting to dig in and try it. I don’t want to ONLY play this one game, and in order to farm up every new thing in the world… I would really have to do just that. The whole playing the same game every single night concept just seems foreign to me. There are so many different games I want to experience, so knowing I will go into a game missing out on things… makes me think my time is better spent elsewhere.

Pre-Endgame Game

I guess while I am complaining, I might as well not stop with Rift. Onwards to FInal Fantasy A Realm Reborn! We absolutely lucked out as a guild and had eight of us reaching 50 within a few days of each other. Well that is not true I guess, we had one super impatient gamer rush through to the end game and sit there without any additional support for about two weeks. However the majority of us arrived at the end game at roughly the same time. This made the sequence of three eight man instances seem not that horrible in part because it was fresh content for all of us. However now that we have another three characters up to 50, I am realizing what a slog it really is.

So much of the end of the main storyline in FFXIV reminds me of the trials and tribulations of having to key players for various raid instances in both EQ and WoW. Be warned there will be some spoilers, so if you care about that sort of thing, I would stop reading. I will try my best to do as few as possible, but it is going to happen. Essentially when you hit 49 you start down a sequence of events that leads to the finishing of the main storyline. The first of these is Cape Westwind, yet another trial. We have done this now three times… and quite honestly I cannot tell you exactly how the mechanics work. The biggest pain is getting eight players online at the same time.

Next you run through a few quests and end up unlocking Castrum Meridianum… which is surprise surprise another eight man dungeon. This takes a little over an hours time normally if you are not doing the speed run chicanery… and now that every mob in the instance drops decent money there really is no reason why you would. These places are decent money. Once you finish up in there, you do a few more quests and wind up stalled on The Praetorium… yet another 8 man dungeon. This one takes quite a bit longer than the previous one and is a wee bit trickier at times. Finally after finishing this sequence of events you can finish the main storyline and unlock Amdapor Keep.

We have been working our way through these for Cyl, Opo and Tivo… and the problem with an eight man dungeon is trying to accommodate eight different play schedules. We really only seem to have time to do one of the dungeons in the sequence per night. Last night we were trying to figure out when we could pull together a group next… and the problem is we are unlikely to be able to get ALL of the necessary players online until next week sometime. As we started going through the days, there was one player that could not attend on each of the nights. While the final storyline is extremely cool… it just seems like a lot of bullshit to have to slog through to even begin the end game grind.

Norrath Calling

Towards the end of the night I ended up logging out of FFXIV and popping into EQ2 for a bit. I have said it before, and I will say it again… sooner or later I always return to playing EQ2. I am not sure if I am ready to be back in it yet, but I did some questing out in Withered Lands and enjoyed the relaxed pace. My friend that recently returned was telling me excitedly about the guilds plans to start doing heroics, and while I think that is cool I don’t want anyone to factor me in their gaming decisions yet. I already have a game where I am a key resource for running instances… I really don’t want another one.

That is not to say that I don’t enjoy tanking dungeons, because I do… otherwise I wouldn’t keep returning to playing that role. I just find that tanking takes more out of me than it used to. I cannot chain run instances like I once could. So I find myself needing something else to play so I can have a bit of peace and quiet… and more importantly downtime. Everquest 2 has always been a good filler of this niche. I would like to get my Shadowknight up to 95 so I can be prepared for the new content when it releases as well. I still feel like in many ways I am running from WoW, because I know that will only end up in tears of frustration. I continue to ignore its sirens call by playing other things… just not sure how long that will work.

How Diablo Ought Be

October 27, 2013 by Belghast

Hibernation Weekend

This is one of those mornings when I really wish I did not have to write a blog post. I guess in the grand scheme of things… there is nothing forcing me to do so, but I would hate to break my streak of daily posts. This is one of those hibernation weekends when neither my wife or I really want to leave the house. In fact I went out and got breakfast in my fuzzy slippers that look like shoes this morning and a hoodie. Not like the folks at the convenience store really pay too much attention to what people are wearing, but it was a reasonable facsimile of “dressed”.

Yesterday I was completely all over the place game wise. I started off the day by playing quite a bit of Hearthstone, this was a side effect of me wanting the gold from my daily quest and a new friend just getting into the game. Once he got through the tutorial and unlocked a few decks we played a few games. The first game he trounced me liberally, and the second two I managed to pull ahead significantly mostly due to him not getting the cards he needed when he needed them. Playing against actual players has made me extremely aggressive when it comes to Hearthstone, and I am not really sure how to tone that back a notch.

Mixed Bag of Gaming

After hearthstone I poked my head into Rift for a bit, but really didn’t find much enjoyment there. I am not sure what it is but right now Rift is just not that fun of a game for me. I am sure before long I will cycle back around to it and it will once again be the next best thing to sliced bread. I have the same sort of thing going on with EQ2 as well. I have a desire to play some, but when I actually log in I have no desire to do anything. So in both cases I poke my head in and then log back out almost as quickly.

Right now I am still enjoying Allods quite a bit, but I have a feeling that very soon the bottom will drop out. I have heard that after a certain point there are very few non-group quests. Currently at level 8 I am still having no problem at all, and this is sufficiently scratching that World of Warcraft itch. However I get the sense that I am nearing the end of the starter city of <Insert Russian Sounding Name Here>. I am really enjoying the game, and it is extremely well crafted, but as a whole the storyline and missions are forgettable. There is really little “special” about the game other than the awesome soviet era steampunk feel.

Forced

After a bunch of mucking around yesterday, I settled into playing a brand new game with some friends. Forced had been a title that popped up on our radar during the Kickstarter, and was subsequently picked up as a Steam Greenlight title. Well it has officially released this week, and one of my friends decided to buy a four pack and distribute copies. They describe the game as Diablo meets Left4Dead… and to some extent that makes sense. However I do not think that description really explains just how much cooperation is needed to make it through the levels. In many ways it reminds me of Gauntlet Legends… if Gauntlets Legends required you to use the NES Rob the Robot to make it through the levels.

Each of the gladiators chooses a weapon that will dictate their active and passive talent trees as well as set the overall flavor of the arena combat. Above you can see an image of three weapons in the preparation room leading into any of the arenas. I am currently holding the magma hammer and all of the attacks both passive and active are somehow fire based. To the left of that pool is the green daggers, most of the attacks being about speed, stealth and health regeneration. In a way they are the support class in that they can generate combo points on the target than the heavier hitters can then consume. On the bottom left you have the Ice Shield, and this is the tank of the group focusing on being able to negate large amounts of damage. Finally you have the D&D Animated series style lightning bow, with chain lightning and energy based attacks.

How Diablo Ought Be

The controls are also extremely unique… or at least unique to me. In many ways it reminds me of Ikari Warriors in that you have one set of controls to move your body and another to control your facing. If you choose mouse and keyboard this means that WASD will move you physically around the arena and your mouse will choose your facing with Left and Right mouse buttons being your primary and secondary attacks to start out. Later on you will pick up additional attacks Q being the first of these. I assume with a controller one stick is likely your movement and the other your facing with your triggers being your primary attacks, but quite honestly I have not tried this out.

The pace of the action was so intense most of the time, that I quite honestly forgot to hit the screenshot last night. However the gameplay revolves around using the glowing sphere of light Balfus your “spirit mentor” to move around the arena and active switches and traps for you. As a team this gets super tricky since you have ONE balfus and each of you can call it at any given moment… so this involves a lot of communication to figure out who can use it next. Additionally if your timing is right you can position the next person to call it as soon as one objective is done. It is hard to fully understand how the gameplay works cooperatively without seeing it in action. So as a result I am going to embed the trailer that shows quite a bit of play.

Challenging Co-Op

So essentially there are so many ways to fuck over your friends while playing this game. There are maps for example where Balfus provides a protective bubble, and if you stray outside of that bubble you take large amounts of damage per tick. So these force your team to be placed JUST right as you pay your way through the map. It becomes progressively easier to abandon a player on the edges of the map and trap them. So for us… access to voice chat was SUPER handy. We kept communicating and I was generally the dullard that tried his best not to ever call the ball. My job was to call down orbital strikes in the form of meteors upon the heads of the big baddies and consume combo points with my heavy hitting attacks.

You get a crystal for each objective that you complete. On each map there is a completion shard, a time based shard, and one for getting a specific objective. They have made these in such a way as it is super difficult to get all three within one run. So as a result you can do each arena over and over to try and gain as many crystals as you can. Last night in our little 2.5 hour play session we managed to rack up 15 shards. The first world was honestly rather straightforward but as we entered world two… the frequency of cursing increased massively.

Downright Brutal

Face it… you are going to be seeing a lot of this screen. The game excels as forcing various no-win scenarios if you are not fast enough or clever enough to figure out the trick on the first attempt. We would have probably continued on for another hour and a half had one of our players internet not taken a massive dump. At that point we figured… it was a good place to take a break. The gameplay is extremely frenetic, but also amazingly rewarding when you and your friends manage to complete a scenario. If you too have a group of friends to game with… I highly suggest buying a four pack and distributing copies because forced provides an extremely unique gameplay experience for multiple people. As a whole I give the game a big thumbs up.

Final Funk

October 22, 2013 by Belghast

Pull Resisted

Last night I resisted the desire to re-up my World of Warcraft account… in part because I really did not feel like playing much of anything. When I first logged in I popped into Hearthstone to see what the daily quest happened to be. It was win two matches with a paladin or priest deck, neither of which I have even finished unlocking the basic cards for. I made a valiant attempt at victory on a paladin, only to find out that practice victories did not count. Essentially there is no way in hell right now that I could beat an actual player with either of those decks… even though priest seems to be pretty damned hax based on my regular loss record against them.

After that I popped into Rift for a few but could not seem to find the oomph to play that either. Though since the shiny vault was backed up again, I figured I would at least take the time to pilfer through that and help relieve some of the stress. I have been in these unknown funks before, but I am not sure what to do to kick myself out of this one. Ultimately I ended up retiring to bed and playing Pokémon Y until my wife joined me some time later.

Final Funk

I think in part my present funk is due to the fact that once again I have topped out another game and lack the drive to do much of anything further in it. I am still very much enjoying the dungeons when we can pull those together, and I want to do more 8 man content especially now that we have a fresh 50 to run through it. However I don’t have a single thing I really care to do in game the rest of the time. So as a result I am simply not logging in. I did the All Saints’ Wake and it was extremely disappointing and finished within like 10 minutes time or running errands throughout the various cities.

One of my game designers always brings up the “moment to moment” play, and I guess for me this is what is lacking in Final Fantasy. After pushing my Warrior to 50 and then grinding up a Bard to 50 as well doing literally nothing but FATES… I find myself lacking the desire to do the FATE grind ever again. Normally tradeskills is a thing that fills in the gaps, providing me some downtime between grinds. However you can tell a tradeskill system is bad if I would far rather play the EQ2 mini-game crafting system than do anything within the FFXIV system.

Another huge thing that tarnishes my enjoyment of FFXIV is that like it or not… I am a bit of a loot whore. At the very least much of my homicidal rage against monsters… is because I know they have a chance, albeit slim of dropping something amazing. I like playing the loot pinata, and when a game has that sort of a loot system I can happily grind again at mobs never quite knowing what the next one will drop. FFXIV on the other hand has absolutely no meaningful loot. Mobs drop crafting items, and since I don’t really care about crafting… there is absolutely zero excitement there.

So as I stand currently I am not playing the game much at all. My friends have access to me via instant message, twitter, text message… so I figure if they need me to tank for them I am more accessible than most folks. In the meantime I keep trying to figure out something that excites me to do in the time between dungeon runs. My other friends seem to default to League of Legends, but quite frankly I don’t enjoy the game enough to ever queue with strangers. So as a result I end up trying to resist the desire to re-up wow and playing quite a lot of Pokémon.

Halloween 2013

October 19, 2013 by Belghast

Spooky Pasta!

One of the things I love in the various MMOs I play or have played… are the varried Holiday events. Some of them make an extreme effort to fit them into the lore of their world, and others just cut and paste a real world tradition onto their land. Both have their merits and both are enjoyable so long as they don’t involve too much grinding. Each game seems to pick and choose holidays, but there are two that every game seems to have… Christmas and of course Halloween.

Halloween time is generally my favorite holiday because the traditions itself usually involve killing lots of dark denizens of the night. Additionally the playing dress up theme usually means some cool weapon and armor skins that you can use throughout the rest of the year. Currently we are in the run up to Halloween itself, and as a result pretty much every MMO has some form of event going on marking the holiday. Going to take a few minutes this morning to talk about some of the cooler ones.

Nights of the Dead

This event runs in Everquest 2 from 10/15 through 11/11 and is probably the grand daddy of all Halloween events. Each year they keep adding new content, but still leaving all of the old content in place. Zam has a really great guide to the various quests and events. If you are one of the new to EQ2 folks who just partook of the free level 85 event… I highly suggest checking it out. However even with a brand new account you can still participate in most of the fun. My personal favorite event is the hedge maze that drops lots of nifty cosmetic gear.

Blood and Madness

Guild Wars 2 supposedly has a really amazing event called Blood and Madness that kicked off on October 15th that involved a series of limited time events (one day only) finally culminating in a big event that only exists Halloween night. Dulfy has a pretty comprehensive guild to the events, but for the most part if you are not already doing this series you have missed out this year. This has been my key bitch about Guild Wars 2 to date… I hate the concept of short run limited time events. The amount of busy work needed really only allows someone who ONLY plays GW2 to keep up… and because of this I just can’t be bothered to attempt it. I would love to see this as a long term event that ran the entire length of the holiday, but until then it will be out of my reach.

Autumn Harvest

Rift has an event called Autumn Harvest that starts on October 17th and runs through Halloween and potentially a little bit past. They have chosen to focus on the harvest aspect of the holiday and as such have sent you to a special version of the Realm of the Fae where you help Atrophinius and his minions bring in the amber sap harvest. There are a ton of cool things you can get, including a phantom version of several popular mounts. The coolest feature of the event however is that you can get these short time use potions that make tons of artifacts show up on the ground in the realm of the fae. This is a huge catch up on collections event. This year around there are a ton of new items to be gotten and you can check out this preview guide on Rift Junkies.

Hallow’s End

Hallow’s End is an event that occurs in World of Warcraft from October 18th through November 1st. There are tons of nifty things going on like trick or treating, but the meat and potatoes of the event is the Scarlet Monastery Headless Horseman instance. I have a love/hate relationship with this holiday. Every year it has been available (and that I have been playing wow) I have participated in the event… all for a shot at the extremely awesome flying headless horseman mount. Every single year I have come up empty handed. When a game company places an item in an event, like a mount… that is usable every day… and makes it a super rare random drop… I want to stab them.

All Saints’ Wake

Currently there is an event going on over in FFXIV that is completely new to me. All Saints’ Wake started a little early, but was intended to run from October 18th through November 1st. All of the time zones get a little discombobulated in the translation. While I am not partaken in the event yet, so far the other one I have seen has been what I would call “Holiday-Lite” in that there is a FATE going on that awards some sort of currency that you then use to purchase things off a vendor. Since the vanity gear system is not in place yet, this makes the things you can acquire super limited, but I plan on gathering them up just in case. One of the most humorous observations from last night is that apparently the Pumpkin helms… are repaired by Cullinarians.

The Rundown

That is the rundown of the big ones I know of that are going on, but like I said in the first part of the post… this is the one holiday that pretty much EVERY MMO celebrates. I can even remember in Hellgate: London there being a Halloween event of sorts that took its form in a Guy Fawkes day celebration… that happened to have a lot of Halloween themed stuff. I would be curious to hear about any events that are your favorite that I missed.