This weekend saw me succumbing to nostalgia, but not in the method you might think. With all the talk of the Warcraft movie, one would assume that I spent my entire weekend playing that game. However instead I wound up spending nearly the entire weekend playing the game that ultimately first took me away from World of Warcraft in a significant way. There were some events that happened this past week, and I ended up finding out that a friend of mine had passed away suddenly. That friend is someone I first met during the launch of Rift when they were part of the community team, and from that point on we kept in contact through the other games we both moved to. Of note… I am never too far from Rift, and I am rarely more than a patch behind when I inevitably fire up Glyph to peek my head in. I’ve subscribed to the game more time than I have not since it launched back in 2011, and I’ve watched the game evolved through expansions and the shift to free to play and have remained one of the few of my friends that carries a heavy torch for the game. The problem being that in order to do a lot of the things I want to do with the game… I need a body of active players. While we have had several resurgences into playing Rift, the last of which seeing the forming of House Stalwart on Faeblight during July or 2013. The only problem being this lasted a few blissful months and then once again we were all fading away from the game to play other things… myself included.
Something shifted as well with the way content was structured in the old world versus content in both Storm Legion and Nightmare Tide. In the original game I managed to level three classes to 50 happily before finally running out of steam. In Storm Legion I managed to push my warrior up to 60, and a significant time later managed to barely push up my rogue up just before the release of Nightmare Tide. The latest expansion however… for whatever reason I just hit high center and never quite managed to near the level cap. When I logged in this weekend I was sitting at level 62 and had been there for quite awhile. There was something about the way the zones were designed, that firstly greatly increased my inborn tendency to wander off aimlessly. This exacerbated another problem that I have had in the newer content… and that is I seem to be able to completely lose the quest chains in the mix and fail to follow them ultimately finding out I am entire zones behind in trying to follow any semblance of a leveling path. So instead I would wander about and grind mobs, mostly doing carnage quests… which are these kill X quests that appear in the wild as you well… will mobs. This is an extremely slow way to level and after a few hours of doing this… and not really seeing the level bar move terribly much I would wander away like a bored child into some other game.
Instant Adventures
Now a little over a year after the launch of the game, the good folks at Trion introduced a system called Instant Adventures. This was single-handedly the best re-purposing of content I have experienced in a game. There are a number of things that happen while you quest your way through a zone, and instant adventures is essentially taking all of these tasks and placing them end to end… and aiding the flow by offering the occasional teleport to the next area and the next set of objectives. The result is this mindless train that you can hop on and just focus on the mission at hand, and in the process getting a bunch of planar currency and the occasional gear filled chest in the process. I’ve always found these an extremely fun way to level at low levels, because you can just literally hit a button and start getting fed small bite sized objectives to focus on, which is the perfect manner to grind alts. The only negative however is that the gear chests are nowhere near as plentiful as they come be… and you often times wind up significantly behind the curve in equip-able items. Over the weekend while recording the AggroChat podcast for example I started a character on the EU server Zaviel and started leveling through Instant Adventure. I shot up the twenty in no time flat… however I am still largely wearing sub level 10 gear other than a handful of really amazing items that I happened to went through the adventures. That said… this is a fun way to level a character and so long as you are riding the train the gear disparities are largely not that bit of an issue thanks to a bit of a bolstering system in place.
Last year they extended this Instant Adventure system to raids, and released Hammerknell as what they called an “Intrepid Adventure”. The result is something halfway between World of Warcraft LFR, and an Instant Adventure that involves going through the raid and its trash packs… that have been chopped up and fed back to you in neat bite sized chunks. The thing that I find interesting is just how many mechanics have managed to make it into the Intrepid adventures, and that the saving grace seems to be that you can simply zerg your way back to the boss after every death instead of needing to wait for a rez. Roughly a month ago they released the second raid as an intrepid adventure based on the Mind of Madness raid. While I had a blast doing Hammerknell on a whim a year ago, I never wound up sticking around for long. This time around however I had a mission in mind… figure out a way to level from 62 to 65. I’ve felt like a failure for quite a while that I never managed to hit the level cap this time around. So Friday night when I hopped into game I headed straight for the queue for Mind of Madness and found myself enjoying both the content I was participating in and the speed at which I found myself leveling. Both Saturday and Sunday mornings I wound up sitting in one spot for a couple of hours and finally convinced myself to use some of those patron boosts that I had been sitting on for ages. Sure enough when you add in a +160% experience boost to the already good experience of Intrepid Adventures… the levels quite literally fly by. Sunday morning about noon I found myself with a newly minted level 65 character…. wearing a mismash of gear I picked up through the weekly patron crates… but somehow managing to qualify for expert dungeons.
Expert Grind
Now at some point during the weekend I had installed a dps meter because I was curious if I was actually doing okay… or if I was somehow struggling. When it comes to Intrepid adventures I seemed to be doing just fine with my dps usually running around third place or at least within a contentious pack hanging around that spot. I leveled for the most part with a high survival dps build 44 warlord, 32 champion, 0 paragon. This worked great for uptime and the ability to never need to really heal myself, however apparently it is a less than amazing build when it comes to running “end game” content. Being dumb however I just hit the queue button and hoped everything would be just fine. The end result was myself lagging so far behind the rest of the dps that I got called out on it almost immediately. We wiped over and over because we lacked the dps to tackle the encounters the manner in which folks in experts apparently are used to running them… namely in an ignore all mechanics push the boss as fast as you can and always get the speed run bonus manner. I dropped from the party and wished them luck… and in truth in spite of calling me out on the dps they managed to do so in a far more polite manner than would have happened in other communities. From there I went back to the drawing board and found my way once again to the warrior guides section of the Rift forums. Here I cobbled together a 61 Paragon 10 Warlord build that seemed to work okay… out in the world I can burst down most things before they really have a chance to damage me, but if you put me in an extended fight or a multi target fight I struggle. So I will probably continue to swap between it and my “Solo” build just for my own sanity.
The result was immediate and evident that the bulk of my problems in experts were spec. Granted I still grossly under gear the tier 3 raiders that are regularly running experts these days, however this time around I was able to out dps the tanks and healers. Over the course of yesterday I ran five for six experts and managed to cobble together some upgrades. I am still wearing several pieces of otherwise crap gear… but my hope is through running a bunch of experts I will either be able to mitigate that through spending currency or through getting lucky drops. In my very first expert I managed to complete I ended up getting a really nice purple two-handed axe so it seems like the loot gods have been smiling on me. This is not at all how I intended to spend my weekend, but I enjoyed it greatly regardless. Coming back to Rift felt like going to lunch with an old friend that you had not seen in a long time. I am not sure how long I will be around, especially given that there are other things in other games that I also want to accomplish. However for the time being I am really enjoying myself in my renewed resurgence in the game. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Bahmi and it feels good to be flexing those muscles once more. With the multi-core support the game runs amazingly well on my laptop, but unfortunately still struggles quite a bit on my AMD based desktop. The guild in Faeblight is empty, and I was alone for almost the entire weekend so that alone makes me wonder if this is sustainable. However I have the Rift discord channel to keep me company, and if I wind up staying I might end up needing to move Belghast elsewhere to find the support of a more active guild. Regardless it was an enjoyable weekend and I managed to mark one goal that had been bugging me for quite some time off that list in the back of my head.
First off let me start this post by wishing all of you my readers a Happy New Year. During the course of this past year nearly 70,000 of you have visited my blog, and I am still scratching my head as to why. Whatever I am doing, I guess I will keep doing that in the next year. I do have some cool ideas for things to keep me moving forward, but I don’t really want to go into those right now…. mostly because it will involve some programming on my part to make it function. The thing I have learned over the years of blogging and this coming year will make seven… is that I am really really bad at columns. I will start a feature and then after a few weeks to months it peters out. The MMOs Worth Playing feature was one of my favorite so far, but it was also one of the more time consuming. That said in the coming year I would really like to bring it back, and maybe change its focus to be a little big more manageable…. sort of a MMO of the Month Club type thing. Each week during the MWP thing I was trying to log into that game, play it a bit to remember the things I liked about it… take fresh screenshots and get up a post every single Friday. As we got into the pre-Holiday crunch time it failed miserably. Maybe an MMO of the Month will work better because it gives me more time…. though honestly if the AggroChat Game Club is any evidence I will probably just end up waiting until the week before we record the show before attempting to play the game.
This morning the idea is to do my Awards for the year, since we have officially wrapped up a year now. These are not exactly your normal awards and more like the back of a high school year book… most likely to succeed etc. Though from what I understand…. there are a lot of schools who are no longer doing that for sake of potentially damaging students self esteem. More than anything I want to thank all of you for joining me on this continued journey. The last few months of the year were pretty rough on this side of the equation, but you all kept with me and kept supporting me, and for that I am immensely appreciative. Without further rambling… here is the inaugural edition of “Bel’s Game Awards”.
Biggest Surprise
Hatoful Boyfriend – Feel the Birblove!
I absolutely did not expect to like this game, and in truth I probably never would have played it were not for the fact that my good friend Grace chose this as her aggrochat game of the month. I expected it to be largely played on a goof, and even went to the extreme of recording my first game play session because I expected it would be a maddening experience for me. The end result however was something I did not expect, I really enjoyed it. I laughed more while playing this game than I have laughed in a long time while playing any game…. maybe since initially playing Sam and Max Hit the Road. What is even more shocking is that I continued on after the initial play through and ended up getting six or seven different endings by the time we had recorded the AggroChat show. There has been a whole side discussion since about whether or not Hatoful Boyfriend is actually representative of Otome and Visual Novels in general…. or if it just lampoons the genre. I think more than anything it opened my eyes to the fact that this sort of “non-action” game can be extremely fun, and would make me at least try some other games. So kinda like WoW is an ice breaker for MMOs… this might be that sort of Icebreaker for Otome.
Biggest Disappointment
Citizens of Earth
I remember when I first saw this game… it seemed like this amazing callback to the Super Nintendo era of RPGs where you had such oddball genre bending hits like Mario RPG and Earthbound. The problem is that in application… the game ended up as this soulless hull that simply was not fun to play. This was our very first AggroChat game club game… and none of us really liked it. This was the game that essentially we all unanimously voted that we wanted to play… and was also the game that caused us to change gears and start letting individual members pick a game for us to play, rather than trying to all decided together what the next game we would play might be. The game was frustrating from a technical level, but the level of grind needed to get very far just made the experience simply not enjoyable. The idea of being able to recruit hundreds of potential party members was amazing… until you realized that not a single one of them was interesting at all. The part that ruined it for most people was the fact that the main character, the mayor was so completely unlikable. I think it was Kodra that said that the game would have been salvageable if you could simply leave him at home and go off adventuring without him. The stereotypes were caricatures were humorous for the first fifteen minutes, and then quickly became painful to keep playing.
Most Improved
Destiny – The Taken King
What can I say about Destiny the Taken King that I have not already said. I had no real hopes for this expansion because for the most part I had abandoned all hope for Destiny before the time the first expansion patch landed. Year one was a grindy mess whose light leveling system left me scratching my head and simply not caring anymore about trying to progress. I believe I managed to get to Light 26 before hitting a wall of resource gathering, that I simply lacked the desire to keep pushing through. In year one engrams in general felt few and far between, and you were constantly having to judge whether or not an item provided enough light to make it worth swapping it in, even if in other ways the item might be superior. Year two fixed a lot of this in the same way that the Diablo 3 2.0 patch just magically fixed that game, or at least made it FEEL better. That is the thing with me and games, the moment to moment game play has to feel good and also feel like I am getting something for my time spent. While I could say that technically there is way more grind in Year 2, it feels like you are at least getting something for your time…. even if it is just weapon and armor parts. I would rather see things drop… and all of those things be crap rather than never seeing a drop… and when you finally do it decodes into a lower level than the face value of the engram. The biggest change however is the fact that the Taken King has a story… and it is actually a cool one. Through both the quest narrative and the item descriptions that can be found on the website for each of the items you pick up… the game has started to tell this epic tale of both the Traveller and the Darkness, and how the two have battled through countless races and star systems since time began. For me, I patched up my game and tried the year 2 experience long before picking up the expansion…. and I highly suggest anyone who has not given it another shot do the same.
Game I Still Can’t Get Into
Dragon Age: Inquisition
I love the Dragon Age franchise…. or at least I did. I’ve been a fan since Dragon Age: Origins… and I have beaten at least six different endings of that game. Which as a person who rarely if ever finishes video games… that should tell you something. I even managed to play through Dragon Age 2 a few different times, and largely enjoyed my experience. However when confronted with Dragon Age: Inquisition it feels like this insurmountable wall. Firstly I think the game just looks ugly out of the gate with its overuse of object shine and its strange playdough hair. The other big problem I have is that generally speaking I play roleplaying games on the sofa, where it is nice and comfy… and none of the laptops that I own are capable of playing this game with decent settings, or at least good enough settings to make it look not like shit. Recently I have picked it up for the Playstation 4 over the recent sales and it is my hope to maybe try playing it on the vita. The first statement anyone ever seems to make to me when I talk about my problems with the game… is that I need to leave the hinterlands. I promise I have left the Hinterlands… but the main storyline is just boring to me. It is nothing as awesome as Dragon Age Origins was…. and I think that’s because I just don’t like the Inquisition. I could get 100% behind the Grey Wardens… I believed in their cause and was ready to go into battle for them. I could give a flying fuck about being the Herald of Andraste. I hate this green shit that comes out of my hand… and I hate the feeling that I am constantly fiddling with the magic of the world… and my key goal in life seems to be to close rifts full of annoying demons. I like some of the characters that I interact with, but some of my favorite characters so far are characters you can’t take with you on missions like Scout Harding. My party of choice would be Cassandra, Sera, and Harding…. but instead I tend to go with Cassandra, Sera and Dorian. I wish I knew why this game is just so not enjoyable for me…. but I want to play it… I really do.
Lived Up to the Hype
Fallout 4
The game this year that I was the most hyped about has to be Fallout 4, and that hype cycle started from the moment it was officially announced at E3. This game did so many things right, and really it was starting with the way it was announced. They held off to show any information on the game until it was already pretty damned polished, and then they hit it out of the part by saying that it would be in our grubby little hands only a few months later. In the meantime they gave us a pretty fun mobile game to keep us interested…. which I will talk about later. Fallout is one of those franchises that I place up on a pedestal for always giving me exactly what I wanted out of the game. A big open world with lots of little things to keep me interested, and a complete inability to ever truly “finish” the game. There is more content in Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and now Fallout 4 than I will ever have time to see. Hell in the few days ahead of the launch… I played some more Fallout New Vegas and was still finding things that I had never seen before… and I considered that game pretty damned well trodden. As far as Fallout 4… everything about the game makes me happy… apart from maybe the main storyline. The thing is… I don’t play Fallout games for the story… I play them to go off and inhabit the wasteland and weave my own storyline around me as I go. I thought the voiced protagonist would annoy me… but for the most part I have been able to ignore it. I really like some of the companions this time as well…. namely Piper and Nick. I wish so much that I could adventure together with Piper, Nick and Dogmeat at the same time because I love them all. The biggest moment for me though was when I realized that in this game through the settlement system I could finally make the world a better place. I have a dozen or so different settlements at this point, and I have spent time building on each of them. I feel like I am making things work…. and improving live as I go. As far as the Storyline… I find parts of it frustrating namely that I did not see a good option to broker peace between the three main factions. I would have loved a “Can’t We All Just Get Along” ending option… and maybe it is there but I just have not found it.
Hype That Didn’t Last
Final Fantasy XIV – Heavensward
If I had to pick a game of the year based on sheer amount of time I played it during this year…. the award would go to Final Fantasy XIV. It has been my constant companion… that is until the last quarter of the year when I started to lose interest. I can’t say I am disappointed in the game, because the content leading up to Heavensward… and the launch content was really amazing. The problem I have had is like after the launch of A Realm Reborn there just doesn’t seem to be that much to do to keep me engaged. I guess in truth the game has always been this way… because I remember us running into the same wall a few months after the launch of 2.0, that ended up leading us to un-subscribe shortly after. Coming back when we did July of 2014 meant we had roughly a year worth of content waiting for us to progress through. This content kept us busy up until the point of the Heavensward launch, with us not actually defeating Bahamut until we did it unsynchronized. With Heavensward we lack that backlog of fun older content to work through, and our casual gameplay style just does not really fit with the Final Fantasy XIV bleeding edge. So we managed to down Bismarck Extreme, Alexander normal, and made some pretty good progress on Ravana Extreme before we petered out and started to lose interest. What is making it extra hard is the fact that there are only two max level dungeons at a time this go around. Previous expansion each content patch came with three new dungeons…. and having to run experts by only alternating between the same two dungeons gets old really really fast. I am sure at some time I will get the bug and go back to playing this as my primary game…. but for now I am just basically only playing the new story and holiday content as it arrives and the rest of the time…. simply not logging in.
Shocked I am Playing
World of Warcraft – Warlords of Draenor
At the beginning of the year, I had quite a bit of fun raiding in World of Warcraft, but as Blackrock Foundry drug on…. and the launch of Heavensward loomed I simply lacked the care to keep playing like I have done so many times. In June I quit playing as the chart at the end of this post shows and focused solely upon Final Fantasy XIV, and I think maybe it is this single minded focus that caused me to burn out of that game so quickly. Blizzcon is a primal force of nature that no one can avoid… and I have to say it got me started down this nostalgia trip that ended with me playing the free version of the game on my sub 20 horde characters on The Scryers server. This ultimately ended up with me resubbing to the game and I have to say I am really enjoying myself. I am playing the game in a much more casual fashion than I am used to, and while I am raiding every single week…. I am doing so with a group that only raids on Sunday nights, and during a time slot when I am normally downstairs watching television anyways. I know there is technically no new content, but what can I say… I am having fun. Playing Horde has breathed new life into the game because it is allowing me to not only play with friends I never really got the chance to play with… but also see the world from a slightly different perspective. No clue how long this will hold out but I think so long as I am playing it and OTHER games at the same time… it might just hold for awhile. I think the key for me not getting burnt out is to allow myself the freedom to play whatever I feel like playing in a given moment and not really forcing myself to keep playing something that feels stale.
Made Me Almost Care About Mobile
Fallout Shelter
As I said above, one of the things that Bethesda did right with the launch of Fallout 4, is that they gave us a fun app to play with in the meantime. Fallout Shelter is essentially Sim Tower or the later Tiny Tower mobile game…. set in a Fallout Vault. This was actually a lot of fun for a few weeks and gave me a reason to play games on my phone. The problem is I eventually got bored with it the same way I seem to get bored with all mobile apps. There were a lot of times I thought that I would keep playing it, were it for the ability to play on my desktop while doing something else. But for a brief period of time I found myself caring about a mobile game, and that deserves some recognition. My lifestyle just doesn’t really support mobile gaming, in that if I am going somewhere… I tend to be the one driving. Then when I am at work… I should be you know… working and not playing games. When I am out shopping… most games simple require too much to get into them and do a few moves before you need to move on to the next area. Then when I am home…. I would far rather be using my laptop, gaming desktop, or one of several different consoles than spending time on a mobile device. The one thing that might change this is the fact that I have started spending some time on my new Kindle Fire before going to sleep. Right now that time is mostly occupied with reading comic books… but I could see eventually playing a game like Fallout Shelter while trying to fall soundly asleep.
Game I Wish I Enjoyed More
Rift – Nightmare Tides
If you were to write out every single feature that I would want in an MMO on paper… you would pretty much get the feature set of Rift. That said for whatever reason I have struggled to get into this game since the launch of the first expansion. I will come back and play for a bit but find it far too easy to walk away from. I love Trion, and I love the awesome people that work there. I love some of the awesome folks engaged in that community like Kiwi. All of this said… I just struggle to get into the game itself. I think it is several problems, namely that I just don’t have a large friendly and active community to be part of. I mean I have the House Stalwart guild but it has been dead since the last resurgence several years ago that lead me to go found it. For a long time my hope was Machiavelli’s Cat community, but during Storm Legion the Rift contingency pretty much died, and it lead us to merge into Alea Iacta Est…. who then also seemed to die out. During this awkward period I tried a few other guilds, and never found a home… eventually creating House Stalwart on Faeblight. The big problem that Rift has that WoW does not… is the fact that there is no cross account id system that you can use for communicating with friends regardless of what character they happen to be playing. However with the recent “Glyph ID” that is now showing up in the launcher… I am wondering if they are crafting that infrastructure. I feel like I simply have not put in the necessary legwork to find a new home, because it seems like so much effort. That combined with the fact that finding a workable spec itself is a challenge, has left me in this phase of logging in… playing for a bit and then fading out again. I want to love this game, but it has been a struggle.
Most Emotional Experience
The Beginner’s Guide
This is a strange one for me… because I’ve technically never played this game. The game itself is more of an experience… a visual novel of sorts… than a true game. Sure there are gameplay elements and mechanics… but those remind me of the video game equivalent of one of those pop up books that has levers and such that allow you to move the characters or animate a specific story element. I watched a let’s play video on this game, and in that I pretty much experienced all of it. The end result evoked some of the strangest emotions in me.. and actually lead me to cry at a few points. I think any creative type can understand the emotions that you go through in the experience, and I know for myself…. who tends to suffer from a fairly unhealthy amount of imposter syndrome… it hit incredibly close to home. I am not sure if it was a positive experience, and for all I know given the timing… it might have been the start of my recent funk. The rollercoaster I went through… was not exactly healthy. That said I feel like I have to give the game credit, because it made me feel things… like deeply feel things. Very few video games can do that, and ultimately I ended up purchasing the game as a thank you for the experience…. even though I doubt I will ever actually install it or play it.
Game of the Year
The only thing I can really give you… is a hearty shrug. I don’t know what my game of the year would be. If you judged it on sheer excitement and the eventual execution… it would probably be Fallout 4. If you judged it based on the amount of time I spent playing it through the course of the year, then it would be Final Fantasy XIV. If you based it on the sheer shock that someone got me to play the game in the first place… then Hatoful Boyfriend. Basically every game on my list deserves its recognition, and for the most part that recognition is positive with the exception of Citizens of Earth. I played a lot of games this year… and I hope to play even more next year. Game of the Year is honestly a silly concept… and just like I can’t really give you a firm answer for “Favorite Movie” or “Favorite Song” I could never tell you my absolute favorite Video Game. My mood plays such of a huge role in what I want to play at a given moment…. and if I want mindless destruction right now Destiny is giving me everything that I could ever want. But as soon as my mood changes… so does my preference in games… and I often times fall back on sheer comfort gaming like whatever MMO I happen to be into. So yeah… all of the games on this list… I mentioned because they were important to me, so they are all my Games of the Year.
Yesterday was N7 day and what I can only imagine as reapers… continued to dismantle my house. What I mean by that is that this week contractors have been working on siding our house and other little home improvement things. Friday during the day and all day Saturday I have had to listen to them tearing parts of the exterior of my house off, and sawing bits to put back in their place. I have a headache that is completely insane and I think its simply from all the noise over the last few days. Another thing that happened yesterday was the ExtraLife Marathon, and at one point we had these grand plans to try and do it as AggroChat. I am extremely glad those plans fell through because with the contractors traipsing in and out of my house there would have simply been no way I could have done that yesterday. I did however get to hang out a bit with Liore on her stream, and my hope was that anyone who would have supported me would end up supporting her. Last I heard she raised something like $2200 which is pretty damned awesome!
Seeking Stimulant
This week once again has been largely devoted to me playing Destiny. As I had hoped it does in fact seem like the Sleeper Stimulant quest is going to be reappearing about once a month. I managed to complete the First Firewall and the follow up Shadow Call missions that are the ones that were time sensitive. Shadow Call in itself was pretty damned insane because it is a mission where you have to reach the top of a tower in three minutes. This tower is full of tons of Taken Fallen mobs, and essentially you don’t have time to fight ANY of it. You need to run past as best you can, and the only thing I ultimately took out were the blight orbs that robbed me of my ability to jump. When you get to the top you have to take down three Wizards all within the original time limit. It took me about eight tries to get to the top of the tower… but when I finally did I was able to take down the mobs without much issue. Now I am just left with the task of gathering up all of the elements required to recharge the Ikelos fusion core. The problem I am having is of course the Warsats… I spent most of last night waiting on Earth in the supposed area where the Warsat spawns. I waited through three different blights and did not see any Warsats at all during that process, so I am wondering if for some reason they have moved where the Warsat drops. I am getting conflicting reports of it happening in the Mothyards and Skywatch… which while next to each other are only connected by a series of tunnels that makes them hard to move between.
The other big thing I worked on this week was my Warlock, and I have managed to get him up to level 30. Doing the level 20 strikes I thought initially would be a great way to level, but for some reason I seem to only get the Omniguul one which is freaking annoying. I have a few more of those Red Bull experience stimulant things… and I plan on chain running some strikes with them up in the hopes of maximizing the experience gain. I still need to finish up the Black Garden quest, because ultimately when I am on I spend more time faffing about in patrol missions than I actually do in directed combat. I have a slew of quests that the various folks on the tower have given me as well that I should probably finish up. I am not sure what I have this drive to get the Warlock to 40 and geared, but in theory I guess I just want one of each. In an MMO it always bugs me when I get exclusive gear for a specific class but cant use it… and that has always been my strongest drive to level said class… because I knew I had it waiting on me when I got to level. I have most of a level 40 gear set waiting in my bank, and I am amped to be able to get the Warlock up to use it.
Halo: Combat Evolved
Another side project this week has been to go through and play the original Halo: Combat Evolved, or at least start it. The original Xbox and honestly the GameCube as well are like the biggest voids in my gaming history. They happened at a time when I was largely in an Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot shaped hole. As a result I never got to play Halo other than the pretty lousy PC port, and I never really caught back up when I finally got an Xbox 360. In my travels I have picked up copies of the Anniversary edition of Halo for 360, as well as 2, 3, and 4 and plan on playing through them at some point. What ended up peaking my interests is the fact that apparently on of the elder races in Halo were the Ecumene, which during the Book of Sorrows in Destiny you find out was a race destroyed by the Hive. So in theory at least it seems like the Destiny universe is the “future” of the Halo universe, or at least Halo is a universe that exists before the coming of the Traveler and the dawning of the golden age. I am not exactly sure why I am so fascinated with the lore of Destiny, but I guess in a way it reminds me a lot of the universe of Dune. Super complex… but you also have to dig hard to find that connective tissue that brings everything together.
I have to say that so far Combat Evolved holds up pretty solidly. My only real complaint is that I cannot actually remap my controls. You can choose from one of many presets, but you can’t actually swap around the buttons. If I had my druthers I would map things to match Destiny more closely… but I did manage to find a set that is “close enough” for me not to instinctively do anything stupid. I am mostly wanting to know the story of the Halo universe, so that I can maybe glean more information about the Destiny universe. Also I seem to be on an FPS kick so playing another one just seems to be in the cards. I am honestly considering playing Fallout 4 on the PC with an Xbox 360 controller just to continue this pattern. I do at some point need to get back into the swing of playing FPS on PC with the mouse and keyboard because I absolutely intend to play Overwatch that way.
Heroes of the Storm
As I mentioned briefly above… I ended up playing a bunch of matches with Liore and Elly yesterday during their Extra Life stream. It had been a really really long time since I had played any Heroes, more than likely not much since the game officially launched awhile back and reset. They have really added a bunch of nifty stuff, and I noticed that one of my previously “cool” but largely just a recolor skins.. has turned into this elaborate Diablo Tyrael thing which I absolutely approve of. Unfortunately while playing I just saw a bunch of skins that I really want to get… like Marshall Raynor… and Judgement Uther. Later last night I poked my head in again, this time alone and noticed that I had more than enough gold to purchase Uther, which is one of those characters that I have enjoyed on free weeks, but never actually picked up. I have also heard that Rehgar is equally enjoyable in the melee support role, but not really played him either. I ended up winning a game as Uther which completed a quest. I guess at some point they backed away from the concept that you could not complete quests in bots only games, which makes me happy because I can actually pop in and get stuff done on days that I don’t feel like dealing with other players. This is still a really fun game, and probably the only MOBA that I would actually play by myself and solo queue. Funny how making chat option improves my experience, the only negative is that you always seem to have one player that is off by themselves and not really paying attention to what the team is doing.
Rift
I also popped my head into Rift for a bit while we podcast last night, and continued to work on my primalist. At this point I am level 14 and I feel like I am starting to wind down the content in Silverwood. I guess I am just a die hard Defiant… because I just don’t have near as much fun when I am playing Guardian side. I liked the idea of a Dwarven Primalist, but man do I wish I had the option of choosing to play the Defiant content instead. I mean I know you can race change, but it simply was not worth it for me to roll a Defiant and then race change to Dwarf. I just kinda wish that races were independent of the path you choose to take faction wise… since the faction as fiction patch made all of that really a personal preference not a hard line. I mean Freemarch has all sorts of awesome Undead that you get to fight… and what does Silverwood have? Goblins… Fae… and more Elves… just not nearly as cool on the “fun to slaughter” meter. Complaints aside I am continuing to progress but not really playing that often. This is one of those games that I keep returning to when I want some low key activity, and I don’t feel like I have time to get into something more serious. I guess I play Rift much the same way as a lot of people play Guild Wars 2. Get in, do a few things… and get right back out.
This week was quite literally… all about Destiny. We have a trio of myself, Damai, and Saldonas aka Carthuun that have been running around together quite a bit. Alternately I have been spending some time with Euron as well when we can manage to meet up, and both “actually” be on at the same time instead of afking for long periods of time and leaving our Playstation 4 on while connected to Destiny. Of note… if you do not exit out of Destiny before walking away, your PS4 will not fully go to sleep. I know I have frustrated many people on my friends list who tried to invite me to parties at all hours of the day… when I am not actually at my console. I have really been so into the PS4 this week that last night when we recorded the podcast, it was my first time on voice chat and really my PC since last Sunday. Anyways… on with the games!
Rift – Primal Urges
This week on a whim I decided to try and win one of the Wilds Packs being given away by Trion on their Twitter account. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time… and apparently choosing the right code to try. I opened the image that had six codes in it, and keyed it in quickly into my account and BAM… it gave me the Wilds Pack. I did not at first realize it but this was the big $100 pack of goodies, but the only negative so far is that it did not seem to give me ANY of the loyalty. Otherwise it would have pushed me from the Orange tier that I am currently on into the the Red. I put in a support ticket to ask, but my working theory is… that you get the loyalty for purchasing the pack, not for redeeming it. In any case I am more than happy to have a slew of free stuff including the new Primalist calling.
I have to say that mechanically it is really interesting. Instead of an energy or mana based mechanic, you have this push/pull mechanic that shifts your character between Fury and Cunning. Abilities that are scaled based on Fury push your bar closer to Cunning… and Cunning abilities push towards Fury. So you are constantly switching back and forth between the two stances and the gameplay feel reminds me quite a bit of the solar/lunar cycle of the old Boomkin. I say old Boomkin because I honestly have no clue if this push/pull thing is still in that class or not since I have not played one since Cataclysm. The calling itself is a leather wearing heavy weapon wielder, and so far I am digging it. As you can tell I shunned the tribal feel of the class and ended up making mine a steampunk dwarf. I’ve not really made it terribly far, but I have enjoyed the little bit I have played. I hope at some point soon I will devote a few days to getting really up close and personal with the calling.
Star Wars the Old Republic – Sith Happens
Last night during the podcast I returned to my Sith Inquisitor and am working on trying to finish it. I realize there is no way now that I will finish ALL of my classes before Tuesday, but I am at the end of Alderaan now and it seems like maybe if I can focus attention on it today I will be able to wrap this one up. I am still having a very love/hate relationship with the Sith Sorcerer. Namely I love that I can burn things down quickly with lightning, but hate how horrible of a healer I am if my companion ever seems to get into trouble. I switched from Khem Val to Treek and am enjoying that decision so far. Namely the big problem I run into is that my instinct is to burn harder as our health gets lower… and unlike my Scoundrel I cannot pull us out of quite the health deficit. So that means I really need to watch the companion health more closely and start healing sooner. As a result I end up dying quite a lot on this class, which just slows down the process. The storyline isn’t really “catching” me either… and I think largely the problem is I ended up choosing the finger-wiggler path instead of the melee path. Were I slashing things with my dual saber I would probably be enjoying this class significantly more. It does however give me a healing option Sith side… so I am just going to go with it for now and struggle through.
Destiny – Struggling for Exotics
I have reached the point in Destiny where those upgrades are no longer coming as quickly. I am now in the 290 light range and the engrams are being assholes to me. Right now the best source of gear seems to be doing Heroic Strikes, but our trio still struggles a bit with them. I realize that through running copious amounts of them that problem will solve itself. I also am frustrated by three of coins, which seem to be far less effective for me than others. It took me eight coins before I got my first exotic drop, and I am continuing to feed the beast and have not seen a second so far. I will say that the exotic that I did get was pretty sweet… Invective. I like shotguns, but my frustration has always been their relatively small ammo pool and clip size. Invective seems to take care of that for me, in that it regenerates ammunition at a fixed rate… which is actually pretty damned quick. I am finding it useful in strikes for when mobs get too close and personal.. and the fact that you can fire off the four rounds in full auto style… means you can absolutely shred a heroic minotaur for example. Then I shift back to my pulse rifle and by the time I need my shotgun again, the ammunition is back and ready to go. The only thing that could be better about it is if the chamber reloaded…. but that would probably be asking too much.
The funny thing is… I am in this place where I am really happy with my assortment of weapons. I just wish I had more high level blue fodder to feed to them to level them up. Right now I tend to mostly use… Hawksaw, Hung Jury, 1000 Yard Stare, Invective, and Sol Edge. I would love to have the exotic shards and fodder to power up my Hawkmoon… but I don’t have the steady income of exotics yet. I love that gun… but at 280 it is just too low right now to keep up with my other weapons. For the most part I am happy shifting back and forth between Hawksaw and Hung Jury… both of which are weapons that feel great and can precision shot pretty easily. The other big thing that happened this week is that I dug deep into the lore of Destiny, and if you ready yesterdays blog post you will see a bit write up about a series of videos. Last night I also ended up going on at length about this factor on AggroChat and probably bored the pants off of my co-hosts. What can I say… I am loving this universe and as I still continue to work my way through the missions I keep seeing more interesting parts of it. Destiny is one of those games that has grabbed hold of me and does not show signs of letting go. My hope is that I will be able to get it mostly out of my system by the time Fallout 4 launches…. because I want to spend some close and personal time with the wasteland.
