RPG Archives - Page 10 of 13 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Man With the Hand

February 28, 2016 by Belghast

The Struggle

For over a year now I have desperately tried to get into Dragon Age Inquisition. The game starts really slow and throws your character in the middle of a conflict that I did not really care for. Be warned that there are going to be a few minor early game spoilers here, but I am going to try really hard not to say anything super spoilery. During Dragon Age II, you are constantly getting vignettes of Varric being in essence tortured and questioned by a figure that is identified as “The Inquisitor”. In Dragon Age Inquisition (and the anime if you had chance to watch it) you are introduced to Cassandra Penteghast…. the same Inquisitor who you learned to kinda hate during Dragon Age II. The thing is… in truth I actually rather like Cassandra, but the initial set up of the game places me squarely on the side of some epic side-eye when interacting with her. Not to mention that my character is apparently being blamed for some catastrophe as a result. Then with a huge amount of narrative whiplash I go from being the pariah and prisoner…. to quite literally the chosen one of Andraste. At no point did I want ANY of this… in past games I have only feigned interest in Andraste to get Leliana to like me. I am generally fairly anti-religion in games… and in this case especially since my preferred method of playing Dragon Age games is to play a Dwarf that believes we all spontaneously came from the stone and will return back there again someday.

Then on top of that… we basically find out that there is a war breaking out between the Mages and the Templar, and I am not terribly fond of either side. The entire game seemed to focus on my least favorite aspects of the Dragon Age world… and somehow got rid of the parts that I loved. I absolutely love the concept of the Grey Wardens. I was all about drinking demon blood and fighting dark spawn, and I would have been completely happy if we just had more games where I fought lots of bad things to save kingdoms. With Dragon Age II…. it took a big detour, but even then I got to fight self righteous asshole red lyrium Templar…. and was mostly okay with it. The thing that carried me through that game were the characters that I got interested in…. but the problem thus far with Dragon Age Inquisition…. were the fact that I simply was not really feeling the characters at all. I like Cassandra just fine, and Dorian and Solas were both growing on me. Varric felt like a caricature of Varric from Dragon Age II…. which bothered me from the start. Leliana changed for the worst, and was not the character that I came to adore…. lost all of the soft spots and became this battle hardened zealot. Blackwall is cool enough but I already had Cassandra to tank so quite literally had zero use for him. The only character I completely and wholeheartedly loved…. was Sera, but that didn’t really feel like enough. Mostly the grouping did not feel like “my team” in the same way as the other Bioware outings did, and more so felt like a bunch of characters that I just happened to get thrown in the same room with.

The Turning Point

DragonAgeInquisition 2016-02-27 19-29-50-85 — A Better Horizon

As I said at the beginning of my post… this has been a struggle for over a year now. I will sit down… play for a few hours…. not get drawn into the game and then log out once more. With the new laptop I have been in the process of trying to play games that I for one reason or another struggled with. At the top of that list was Dragon Age Inquisition, and last night I finally realized that I was sitting at a pretty major turning point in the story. I had been putting off the assault on the breech, thinking that it might lead me down a path that would ultimately lock me into the “end game” in a same way as attacking the collector ship does in Mass Effect 2. Sure I was only 20-30 hours into the game, but Dragon Age II was really short… so far all I knew the base game here was short as well if you simply steamrolled your way through the story. Last night Dragon Age pulled a “Link to the Past” on me… and bam all of the sudden I saw everything that everyone was talking about this game. Essentially I now view everything that I did up to this point as largely “the tutorial level” and now it feels like the real game is finally beginning. I have to tell you I am really excited to be “into” this game.

The game manages to pull together a sequence of events that not only cements your motivation and why you care about the events of the world…. but also serves to cement your team. I went from feeling this was just a group of people that I was stuck with…. to being a group of MY people. I am also completely bought into the Inquisition as an organization, because after last night I realized that I am the person shaping the fate of this organization. I can make the Inquisition be this brutal force similar to its namesake…. or I can make it into an organization that cares about people and tries to save them in the process. Bioware I am sold…. and I am ready to get started playing this game. What is frustrating about all of this is… Dragon Age: Origins had an AMAZING introduction… or at least it did if you played a Dwarf. By the time I completed that opening sequence I was completely sold on the setting and the characters and ready to go out into the world and carve my niche. Dragon Age II had a much rougher start, but even though it felt more forced and pushed down a single hallway… I eventually reached a point where it felt I was changing the world. Inquisition though… feels like the worst of those two options…. where you have only the most vestigial of control over your own character as you are forced down a path. Thankfully it seems that the skies are clearing…. and I am ready to step forth into the new world.

Week in Gaming 1/17/2016

January 17, 2016 by Belghast

It has been awhile since I have done one of these, and of the various failed columns that I have tried over the years…. I think this one is the best for me personally. Sunday is a rough day in general, in part because I wake up and have to finish up AggroChat and get it out to the various locations. As a result it helps to have a fairly formulaic option I can lean on when I am not feeling super inspired. As a result I am leaning once again on the Week in Gaming series just to talk about a bunch of stuff I played this week.

Pax South Hype!

I am starting to get super excited for Pax South. Last year I had various companies ask me for a business card, and I was somewhat kicking myself for not having any. I mean I guess part of me never really thought that having a business card for a blog and podcast was a good idea. This year however I have gotten my ass in order and if everything works as intended the cards will arrive at the beginning of next week. I only ordered 250 because I could not in any circumstance think of a reason why I would need that many. The design was done by Rae and was originally intended to be our Pax Prime cards, but since we were denied media access to that convention they never actually got made. I resurrected the idea because I thought it was pretty slick. In the original design each of the hosts has their own color, and given that I love green I latched onto that one. As far as a back design I went with something simple because I felt like it needed something on the back…. and in truth that is the crux of our thing… daily posts, weekly cast. If you are also going to be at Pax South let me know, I would love to meet up with everyone that I can while I am there.

Undertale

I have some mixed feelings about Undertale so far. On one level I really like the game and it feels like something that is going to be an interesting experience. The negative is I absolutely HATE the combat system. I hate mini-games, and while I was corrected last night on the podcast…. I am sorry but that isn’t a real combat system. Part of me just wants to run away from every single fight so that I don’t have to do it. I mean granted I was using arrow keys and maybe that makes it worse than it actually is, but I just hate the concept of breaking out of an otherwise fun old school RPG style game…. and having to deal with move the heart to avoid shit. For now I have essentially abandoned the game, in the hopes that some distance will in fact make the heart grow fond. Essentially I love everything else about the game… other than the combat system. This might be one of those games that is more enjoyable to watch.

Victor Vran

I’ve already talked about this game quite a bit throughout the week but I feel like it still deserves additional mention. The only negative about this game is that I started playing it essentially the week before a bunch of other things that I wanted to play happened. My hope is that once the recent infatuation with Warframe and Diablo 3 Season 5 have calmed down, I can return to this and play my way through the main story some more. I really want to see what multiplayer feels like in the end game experience. Playing it was fine for me… but essentially locked the other players that I was dragging along with me… out of some of the experience of interacting with the voice floating around in your head. If you are not partaking of the Diablo 3 Season 5 madness…. and still want a ARPG fix… I highly suggest you check it out.

Warframe

This game…. is so good and I am kinda kicking myself for never really giving it a proper attempt at playing. I have downloaded this game numerous times in the past on the PC, PS3 and PS4 when I saw other folks in my various social media timelines talking about it… but never actually tried it. I guess in my head I had this absolutely misrepresented as to what sort of game it was. With a super generic name like Warframe… I kept getting it jumbled up with the other game Warface. Warface being a super generic Call of Duty/Counterstrike style PVP shooter. So in my head I equated Warframe to a PVP experience… not this deeply nuanced cooperative PVE experience. There are so many aspects of this game that remind me of an MMO, but not necessarily in the traditional sense. The game as a whole feels like this amalgam of Destiny, Phantasy Star Online and Tribes. If that combination sounds like something you would be interesting, I highly suggest you check it out. I think I was largely luckier than most in that one of the freebie mechs, the Excalibur is right down my alley. I am slashing everything with my space ninja ways, and really enjoying myself. For those curious, I have pretty much set down roots on the PC, and while I might give it a shot later on the PS4, I have no real intention of moving at the moment as the AggroChat crew seem to all be playing it.

Diablo 3

The floodgates for Diablo 3 Season 5 opened on Friday at 7pm and from that point until 10:30 or so my time I was running around in a group leveling like mad. At this point I have managed to get to 68, which puts me behind the curve of folks like Grace that are 70 with over 150 paragon levels. That however is fine by me, because I am just happy I am almost to the cap with at least one character. I am going to be interested in seeing what the various challenges are that unlock the various seasonal rewards. What makes the season play so addictive to me is the fact that it mimics a MMO launch. Everyone on your friends list for a period of time is playing Diablo 3 and excited about it, as though they were playing a brand new game. So you have a few weeks of focused play, and then don’t feel guilty at all when you shift back to playing other games until the launch of the next season. This focused excitement is really fun to experience, and this is technically my third season so far. There is part of me that wishes I had gotten on board with the concept earlier. My goal today is to finish up my Crusader and then probably focus on some more Warframe. Hopefully all of you readers out there have had an equally fun week, and Pax South seriously could not get here soon enough.

Victor Vran Review

January 12, 2016 by Belghast

Secrets Abound

One of the hardest parts about getting steam gifts for folks… is trying to pick a game that you think they will really like. I know in one case every single game I thought “man that is perfect” for a friend of mine, it turned he had… and had already beaten. Every now and then someone completely nails it though, and I think this year my friend Ashgar did just that. As a kid I envisioned this game that I wanted to create, that was a lot like Castlevania in setting, but while adventuring you might see something in the background of a level. Then through doing a specific ability sequence you would be able to enter the background and find secret areas. The concept was pretty straight forward, and I’ve mentally conformed it to lots of different genres. The game I have been playing however… Victor Vran… does this thing and does it extremely well. You cannot imagine how exited I was the first time I played the game and saw it doing pretty much that thing I had always wanted to do. The game has old school secret areas, that are accessed by blowing up walls, jumping over seemingly impassable objects… or sometimes wall jumping your way up to a higher game field that you didn’t notice at first.

The gameplay itself is this strange amalgam of Diablo, with a setting that feels like the love child of Witcher and Castlevania. The monkey wrench into the traditional Diablo model is that the Z axis exists… you can jump and even deliver jump attacks. In many ways there are aspects of the game that remind me of Guild Wars 2, where there are several different types of weapons you can pick up and wield: sword, rapier, hammer, lightning gun, shotgun, spellbook, scythe, and mortar. There might be other weapons available but these are the ones that I have seen so far, and each of them comes with a specific main attack… as well as two special attacks that are bound to Q and E if you are using the keyboard and mouse controls. In addition to this you have two demonic power slots, which serve as spells that you pick up while playing the game. These are extremely varied and do everything from hurling down fireballs at the opponent, to shielding the player… to throwing you into a frenzied rage increasing your melee damage…. but also causing you to take more damage yourself at the time.

Your Destiny

Finally you have a series of Destiny cards that tweak your character in certain ways. At level 18 I have 11 Destiny points worth of cards that I can use at any given time… and as I open chests, kill monsters, and complete quests I often times have the chance of picking up additional cards. These vary greatly in their effect… so for example The Sun that I have equipped gives me a chance of proccing a huge explosion anytime I “overkill” a mob… meaning deal more damage than is needed to kill them in a single hit. Others like Hope simply increases your hitpoint pool directly, and others still add additional combat traits like The Vampire which causes all of your attacks to life steal. The game feels like it has just enough customization to let you feel like you have some measure of control on how your character feels, but not so much as to cause a quagmire of possible build options. Diablo almost suffers from this at times, and it feels like in order to really play your character efficiently you need to do a lot more planning than I really want to do while playing a game. In this game I often fiddle with my equipped items in the middle of levels just to see how it feels differently, and the ability to hot swap between two different weapons comes in extremely handy when dealing with different monster types.

The aspect of the game that most endeared me, was that every single area of the game feels like it is part of the larger game as a whole. What I mean by that is that there is one big play field for an area, and then linked off of that are a bunch of smaller sub dungeons. Then those dungeons often times are cross linked to other dungeons as well, giving the progression of play field an almost MMO like quality. Sure this exists in Diablo, but it feels almost accidental rather than “these are the building blocks of this zone”. What I like quite a bit is the fact that you can get a preview of a zone before you actually enter it. The above screen is an example of that, it shows what the new zone is, some examples of what kind of critters might be found in it… as well as a listing of all of the challenges. So in the above example I know that I probably want to have a scythe at the ready, so I can swap to it in order to kill a certain type of mob in the zone known as the “Volkavs”. I know the area has three secrets to find, and that I want to try really hard to power up my demon abilities so that I can kill lots of mobs with them. Then while going through the level each time you trigger one of those objectives it spawns in some sort of a reward. Finding all of the secrets will reward lots of gold, or slaying the champions will spawn a banner that starts to spit out experience globes for example. Each of the symbols out beside the objective means something different.

Not Perfect, But Fun

When I initially looked at this game, there was a lot that made me interested…. but the big turnoff was that you seemed to be playing a single character named Victor Vran that almost felt like this generic demon hunter character. Now that I have gotten into the game, the setting itself is way cooler than I gave it credit, but at the same time… it does feel a bit like a heavy metal video. You are a lone demon hunter entering a city that has fallen to the demons… one that has been a death trap for so many other hunters. As you go through the zones you are constantly seeing reminders of other hunters fallen and dead, and as the plot unfolds you get an understanding of why exactly this one city has been so besieged. There are so many common tropes here that the story itself could be a bit of a turn off for many players. The gameplay and moment to moment fun of the game however is amazing. You end up picking up a “Bob the Skull” like companion that serves as a voice in your head… and a running narration of your actions. There is a moment when if you don’t head towards the clear objective… but instead wander around trying to make sure you have cleared everything out… he accuses you of going in the wrong direction…. and then begins to sing the “Brave Sir Robin” song from Monty Python. So at times this ever present narrator feels like it does in say Thomas Was Alone or Bastion.

The other negative is… you are stuck being Victor. You don’t get to create your own demon slayer, but instead are dumped into the role of this existing one. So much like playing Uncharted where you are always going to be Nathan Drake… you are always going to be Victor Vran. I mean I get why they are doing what they are doing, because it makes a much cleaner and more simple narrative path for the game. That said you encounter other cool characters, that I had hoped maybe you would be able to take them out adventuring instead. You meet another Demon Hunter pretty early on named Irene, who eventually serves the role of selling advanced gear back in the castle. It would have been really cool if when you met her… you could have chosen to take her out adventuring instead with Victor guarding the hunter stores. Similarly you bump into a royal guard, that I could see taking out for a spin, or a grumpy old military adviser or priest. The feeling that you are adventuring with a team and rather than just one dude with a sword would have been welcome. I guess they are still adding content and planning on releasing expansions, so here is hoping at some point they will flesh out some of that.

Team Play

Last night my focus was less of working through my own story, and more on hanging out with Grace and Thalen who now also have the game. At first it felt like there was not much challenge at all, but I think maybe the game has trouble scaling up content the moment a new player joins. As we started moving around more the challenge level seemed to increase to something of an average of our levels. So for Grace and Thalen the mobs probably felt really rough, and for me… since I was as eight levels over the next closest player in the above example… it felt something on the easy side. What I enjoyed the most about group play, was that even though I had already completed the objectives… I was still able to get rewards from helping Grace and Thalen complete them. Additionally “Kill X” type tasks… count for the entire group so every hammer kill counted for a hammer kill objective… regardless of who got the final blow. The game seems to use Diablo style personal loot, and the exploration aspect was really cool when one of us would figure out how to get up to some secret… then have to show the others how to get there as well. My only real complaint about grouping was that there is no trade system. I would have happily dropped some decent weapons on my friend when we first started, because I personally have ended up favoring a specific set of weapons that is different from what they ultimately ended up enjoying. All of this said… the game works well, is gorgeous to play through… and controls better that I would expect. If you are looking for a fun dungeon crawler with some unique twists on the Diablo model… I highly suggest you check it out.

The Institute

December 31, 2015 by Belghast

Riding the RF

This coming Saturday it is the intention to record the Fallout 4 show for AggroChat since we ultimately put it off until after the Holidays. As a result I am back on the mission of trying to finish up the main storyline so that I can discuss it. I have to tell you… focusing on the storyline has killed a lot of my enjoyment of this game, and even then I find myself having a hard time of not following my instincts and letting myself get lost in the rabbit holes that are the weird side events going on around the commonwealth. However I really really need to focus so I can finish up and be read to discuss the path I took. Tam, Kodra and probably a few others will have likely beaten the game multiple times by the show happens… but so much of my enjoyment has nothing to do with the storyline that I am going to be hard pressed to finish this game once. I’ve logged hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the other Fallout and Elder Scrolls games… and started playing each of them numerous times… and to be honest… I think I have maybe beat the main story exactly once per game. Beating them is just not part of what I find crucial to the enjoyment, but instead roaming around and inhabiting the world is what makes them special. That said I am going to talk a bit about the storyline so if you don’t want to have any plot details spoiled… please just skip the rest of this post.

Firstly… I love the Railroad. I’ve loved everything about the quest sequence so far, from the having to follow the freedom trail to find their base, to the extracting and guarding of runaway synths. One of my favorite missions was when I had to pick up a synth and guard him while waiting on someone else to help ferry him along to his new home. I realized by following the path of the Railroad I would ultimately come into conflict with both the Brotherhood of Steel and the Institute, and more or less I am perfectly fine with both of these choices. The Minutemen however, I am hoping I can retain my position with them, because I really like the concept of them as the unsung heroes of the commonwealth. The only frustration so far has been that working on the main story, and also the railroad story… has forced me to follow at least to a point the institute story. Everything about the institute creeps me the fuck out. They keep trying to tell me that they are no where near the bogeymen that they are acclaimed to be…. but then they want me to go abduct a scientist, and act like they weren’t going to give him a choice in the matter. They also really wanted me to create a radio broadcast threatening the commonwealth that if they messed with the institute they would destroy them. Again there is the whole Synth thing as well… if you create life you have to respect it… and they very much seem to treat synths the same way we would treat a toaster.

Double Agent

You would think that by working with the Institute I would come to respect and understand them, but instead it has only served to make me more creeped out by their actions. The only real positive of the institute is the fact that the Courser outfit looks amazing, and I am more than happy to wear it around everywhere. Basically the Institute reminds me of the Vault, magnified to the extreme. Everything is cold and sterile, and I believe you are supposed to sympathize with your son…. aka “Father” but he seems just as twisted and misguided as the Overseers from the various vaults. There is a point where you have this conversation with him, where he basically writes off everything that is happening in the commonwealth as nothing worth salvaging, but instead I feel like I’ve seen so much good already in the people of the commonwealth. What is killing me is how long it is taking for me to get to the point where I can stop playing nice… and help the synths escape from the Institute. There are a few of the scientists that I like, but it feels very much like running around in a creepy 1980s police state science fiction film. Having every single item in the Institute look like 1970s era “high tech” concepts isn’t helping either. I keep having flashbacks in my mind to movies like Logan’s Run or books like Brave New World. Basically the whole experience with the Institute is a whole lot of nope.

So much of me wants to just open fire and take out everyone down there…. then give the tech they have to people who will actually put it to use for the benefit of everyone. They claim that they are the last hope of humanity…. but they seem to be doing nothing at all to benefit anyone other than themselves. They are a bunch of scientists high on the act of doing science…. and seem go give zero shits about the practical application of the tech they are building when it comes to actually improving the world for anyone other than their cloistered society. Basically the Institute is against everything that makes me really love Fallout 4, the feeling of honestly saving the world a little bit at a time. Both the Insititute and The Brotherhood of Steel are these paternal forces, trying to gather power and resources for themselves at the cost of the common folk. So all of that said… I am going to be damned happy when I can finally open fire and leave the Institute behind me. Tam kept alluding to the Railroad not being what they seem…. but I just have not seen it yet. I don’t see the Institute as the noble force worth committing myself to… instead I see a group that causes a lot of harm and ends up thinking of it as “minor collateral damage”. The hubris is strong with them… and I am really hoping I am getting close to ending the story arc and leaving them behind.