RPG Archives - Page 8 of 13 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Empires Fall

May 10, 2017 by Belghast

This is going to be one of those “Bel is very late to the party” sort of posts but bear with me. Additional upfront warnings… I am entering a territory with this post that might have some minor spoilers. For a long while I have avoided Knights of the Fallen Empire because I knew it made some significant changes that you simply could not step back. As a result in my best Mass Effect fashion… I attempted to wring as much joy from the “old world” as I could and made sure that I saw all of the story content before moving forward. Last night however I finally reached that point where I was at least reasonably comfortable taking the plunge and moving forward into the modern era of SWTOR. Having said that… there are a bunch of things I am extremely glad that I completed before doing so. Firstly I am happy that I managed to see the main story arc for each of the classes. Secondly I am happy that I took the time to progress every single companion and see all of their personal story before moving forward. Additionally as far as I am concerned it is extremely important to do both Shadows of Revan and Rise of the Emperor (Ziost) before starting the Fallen Empire content. I mean in theory you can just jump ahead to the modern era at any point you like, but if you want to have completed all of your story elements… you need to do class story to completion, Revan and Ziost.

Functionally Shadows of Revan and Rise of the Emperor are the unlabeled opening acts of the Fallen Empire campaign, and as a result I am extremely glad that I completed both of them. Now the other big piece of warning that I had been given was that anything you want to do with your companions… you need to do before entering “chapters” mode. This is because in truth you may or may not ever see them again. I personally don’t have a list of which companions are findable in the game, and which are just gone indefinitely… but I have heard that some fan favorites are absolutely missing in action. Once you enter Chapters the game is functionally changed, and you are sort of along for the ride. It was that point that really concerned me and kept me from taking the leap for a very long time. I had built up this comfortable stable of characters that I liked using, and enjoyed my jetting around the galaxy life style. Once I started Chapter 1… literally all of that changed and I began playing a very different game. That said… I think it might be a better game.

If Star Wars the Old Republic was functionally World of Warcraft in space… then Fallen Empire is Knights of the Old Republic 3. The game feels like it shifts from being a traditional check all of the boxes MMORPG… to being a much more story focused RPG that just happens to have other people playing it at the same time. At this point I am still wrapping things up in Chapter VI and hope to keep moving forward tonight, but I’ve found myself in a situation that feels very familiar to anyone who has played KOTOR 1 or 2. In that fashion I think its best to think of Fallen Empire and I assumed Eternal Throne as a sequel to Star Wars the Old Republic. You are playing the same character, and you have all of the items you have built up along your first journey, but you are functionally playing a completely different game. Maybe it is more of a new game plus mode than anything, as you shift your focus from the traditional tropes of an MMO, to starting over again. It feels much the same as Mass Effect 2 did after the original, where you are set down in a world that is familiar, but the cast of characters has changed slightly… and you have to rebuild your legacy.

I will likely continue to report in as I travel through the new content, but so far I have to say I am hooked. There are a lot of events that happen in rapid succession, but functionally when you regain full control of your character five years have passed and the future is uncertain. You are presented with a new cast of characters… some of which are familiar and others brand new. That said the cast of characters are interesting and I immediately felt right at home… in spite of no longer having my original team of companions. I can see the potential for setting forth in a matter that cuts across the various class stories and potentially introduces me to characters from them all. The other weird thing about this setting is that I am finding myself turning from pure Jedi… to more of a balanced user. I am giving myself permission to take more dark side choices when I feel like it suits my purpose better. I am going to save the people that need saving… and I am absolutely going to take a lightsaber to the folks who deserve killing. I am no longer the Jedi Battlemaster and am now instead known as the Outlander, and with that comes a change in focus. Belghast is going to be a lot darker than before… and that is going to be okay. I feel like this character is the vanguard of all of the characters I have played, and as a result sort of adopting my favorite traits from each of the class storylines. In wild space, Sith and Jedi don’t matter anymore… but instead what matters is freeing the galaxy of this new threat.

Docks and Bellowbacks

March 9, 2017 by Belghast

I believe I have talked about one of my side projects before, but for those who are un-indoctrinated… I have been charged with setting up a gaming space at work. For the first pass we decided to go with a Wii U given that it is sort of a universal middle ground between folks who self identify as gamers… and those who do not. Everyone has played at least one round of Wii Bowling, and already since installing folks I never thought would sit down for a game of Mario Kart have done so. Part of the build out involved picking out controller docks because we did not want a bunch of wayward cables. For the Wii U pro controllers I chose the above dock by Nyko… admittedly more on price than anything. However after getting it and setting everything up… I am absolutely in love with the design. Each controller has a boot of sorts that you plug into the USB port, and it fits relatively snugly. Then on the backside is a magnet that holds the controller in place on the dock itself. It just works amazingly well and the magnet is strong enough to not only hold the controller but also serve as a guiding mechanism to make sure that the controller gets docked successfully. Which made me start to wonder… does Nyko make these docks for any other console system? My challenge is that in my office I have a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and am contemplating moving my Wii U back upstairs. That is five different styles of controllers that need to be charged and cradled in a reasonable manner to keep from getting a whole slew of cords tangled.

The tragedy however is that while Nyko makes controller docks for pretty much every system available… none of them work like this one. In a perfect world you could simply buy one base dock tree and then a bunch of connectors for the various controller types that you have. After a few hours of frantic googling… it seems like no one really has a system that works like this. There was however one apparently for the previous console generation that had support for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360… but for whatever reason never carried forth into this generation. What I would love is for Nyko to simply just release versions of this docking system for all of the platforms, or in truth… just sell me docks and then controller boots individually and allow me to mix and match my own system. In part I am writing about this problem today, because often times as soon as I complain about an issue… one of my readers comes out of the woodwork to present a solution. So if you have any ideas… that does not involve access to a 3D printer because I am already thinking along those lines… I would love to hear it. It is honestly the magnets that make this system work so amazingly well and quite honestly… I don’t have the electrical chops to make a magnetic USB connection work. I think part of the problem is that the Wii U pro controller uses the USB connector that the previous generation used… so mini instead of micro. That said… this feels like money left on the table because I know a lot of people like me with multiple console systems all with controllers that need charging.

Last night I returned to the cursed lands and continued my process of roaming around aimlessly. I went a completely different direction than the one I had been heading in… and encountered the Fire Bellowback… or as I think of them Fire Beetles. I ran into a trio roaming around some ruins… and after scanning them a few times to sort out how I was going to attack I went after them with gusto. The thing I didn’t expect was the fact that they essentially throw napalm at you, and have an insane range. I was well into the fields on the far side of the river and they were still lobbing fireballs at me. Essentially I got damned good at dodging while fighting them, and eventually whittled them down using my bow kitted out with extra tear damage. As you can see in the above screenshot they each rewarded an insane 1050 experience, but also provided a hefty amount of salvage. Other than that I actually started working on quests… namely the “Revenge of the Nora” story line. I have been playing this game in short spurts, and prior to last night it largely meant just roaming around and taking down machines. I cannot underline just how much fun that is… and how perfect the game play feels as you bulls-eye a watcher in the eye and watch it explode.

I really like that Horizon seems to reward you equally for aimless roaming and focused gameplay. I essentially had looked at the direction that the game was suggesting I go… and went in the opposite direction and largely… that was a completely fine decision. It was not really until last night that I finally sat down and started following the quests… and that too was a perfect fine decision. I am broke once more however because I bought a purple set of armor, and decided to go with the version that has balanced resistances since… more often than not I end up in melee range before fights are finished. Probably a lot of my success with the fire beetles is due to the fact that I had fairly decent resists going on. What I really want now is some upgraded weapons, because I am still using the Carja bow that you get from either collectors edition or the pre-order bonus. I got a whole slew of items and I am not completely sure which ones came from which thing. I’ve heard that the hunter trials reward items, so in theory I need to focus on doing some of those now. Regardless this game is still freaking amazing… and it serves as part of the reason why I have struggled to get into Breath of the Wild. In many ways the newest Zelda game just feels awkward and cludgy… whereas Horizon absolutely nails smooth and flawless gameplay.

Cars and Wielding Garbage

March 6, 2017 by Belghast

I am pretty sure buying a vehicle ranks among the scariest things you do as an adult

— Bel 🆚 Floors 51-60 (@belghast) March 4, 2017

I said this over the weekend and I feel like I need to reiterate it this morning. For a little over a month my wife has been passively looking for a new vehicle. When she hit 120,000 miles on her Pontiac Torrent all sorts of little things started failing. The latest is a check engine light being caused by something in the engine emission filters… which in itself isn’t a huge deal apart from the fact that it disables remote start while the engine is in an error code. So for a month now I have been receiving links to vehicles from my wife, and we’ve made a few ventures out to car lots to see what we think of various models. There is an auto lot within a mile of the house that leaves all of the vehicles unlocked so that it is sort of a tradition to go there on Sunday when you to check out various vehicles unmolested by sales people. There are a lot of vehicles that got marked off of the list simply because my knees would not fit underneath the dash, and some others the first time my wife test drove them. We had narrowed things down to a half dozen different models, and one lot about an hour from where we live seemed to have all of them. The irony is that when we ultimately bought a vehicle… it wasn’t even one that was on the short list. The whole car buying experience thought feels foreign to me, and grossly outdated. During this whole sequence of events we found out that no car lot has anything even resembling updated inventory on their website. Its like this entire process is stuck somewhere back in the 1960s and never quite graduated to modernity.

My wife and I are both very data-centric people… and actively reject the “personal touch” that car salesmen try and put on the deal. Fortunately we maybe found the perfect sales person for us, who literally just handed us the keys to the vehicles we wanted to check out and left us completely alone to wander around the small town. Over the course of the day we drove I think five different vehicles, and spent a ton of time on our phones researching each of them while sitting in said vehicle. The problem is… a vehicle seems to permanent. We are not the type to trade them off frequently and instead tend to buy a vehicle and drive it until past the point it is paid off. Finally it came down to a dance of “funny math” which is frustrating as shit. Ultimately the dance involved the monthly payment rate, and a thin line in the sand that we were not willing to budge off of, which meant that in order to seal the deal given that we were not trading in a vehicle… that the dealership had to come down off the price a bit. There was a funny sequence of events where the dealer and my wife were both on their phones using the exact same financing calculator app trying to reach a consensus of numbers. Whatever the case we wound up buying, after an entire day of looking at this one lot… and made it home just in time for the AggroChat podcast.

The other big happening of the weekend is that I now have Zelda Breath of the Wild in my grubby little hands. No that does not mean I have a switch, but instead have been playing it on the Wii U. The screenshots I will be posting are not mine, but instead ones I have scavenged from the internet, because I do not have my Wii U set up so that it can go through a capture card… and I have never quite figured out how the hell to take a screenshot on the console itself. Even more so I have no clue how to POST a screenshot someplace I can actually snag it if I did take a screenshot. I have to say I have really mixed emotions about this game, and in truth I have barely just scratched the surface. I’ve cleared two of the early plateau shrines and have been trying to figure out how to get to a third one that is in a snowy region. Any time I get close to it, I start taking ticks of damage from the cold… and this is the point where I realized that there was a temperature gauge in the UI. The first hurdle that I have been trying to get past is the controls themselves. The default mapping of buttons is not that great to use… with jump being assigned to X at the top of the button layout… where I am much more used to it being B at the bottom of the button layout. This however apparently is something you can fix, but the other problem is I am so used to using triggers as weapon attacks in modern games and keep accidentally throwing whatever weapon I have equipped when I accidentally hit the right bumper.

The other big problem I have been having is that so far the game has the “Halo problem” for me. What I mean by that is that in Halo you have to constantly keep switching off weapons and wind up using some absolutely trash to try and progress through levels. The same thing is happening here… where a given weapon seems to last maybe one or two combat sequences before it breaks and I have to hurriedly swap to some other random piece of junk I picked up along the way. I’ve killed plenty of things by beating it down with a skeleton arm and I am not super proud of it. This is a Zelda game… I want to use a sword and a shield and until the game gives me some sort of permanent option for this I am not going to be terribly happy. It gave me a foresters axe early on… and I loved that weapon… right up until the point that it broke and now I feel like I am constantly robbed of the amount of fun I had using it. My fear is that I am going to bounce pretty soon if the game does not end up giving me some unlimited durability weapons that I can just use as often as I like. As far as the goods however… once I got used to the clunky controls it does in fact feel like an open world Zelda. I like that I can choose my own battles and that I see enemy camps usually well ahead of them actually attacking me. There was a cool sequence where there were a bunch of bow wielding characters up in a tower with no visible way to get up. However there was a draw bridge and I was able to sever the ropes holding it up with arrows causing it to fall down below and giving me access. This is a primary example of the sort of visual puzzle solving that seems to be going on in this game, and the early shrines I believe are teaching you a toolbox that can then be used later in the game to solve more complex puzzles. I do however absolutely want to stab the “Old Man” or at least push him off the tower, because I find him really annoying.

Horizon Impressions

March 1, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday morning I warned my friends that there was a 99.9% chance that I would end up hunting Zoids all night long, and not to expect me for anything else. This was a completely accurate sentiment. Sure I popped into Final Fantasy XIV long enough to do my Ixal crafting dailies… which admittedly take way longer than any other set of quests… but after that I had a date with Aloy. Now Monday night I got in for about an hour as soon as the game unlocked, and spent at least a little bit of time getting myself adjusted to the world. My goal this morning is to give you my spoiler free impressions… or at least as spoiler free as I possibly can while still talking about the game and showing things off. When I logged in last night I descended into the valley for the first time on zip line to start my first off rails questing, and I have to say… I was instantly hooked on the game. Granted from the moment I booted it up and played through the first little bit… the hook was already setting pretty strongly. One of the things we do as gamers is try and compare every game that comes along to something else that already exists. The problem with doing this in regards to Horizon Zero Dawn is there is just a lot of things this game is drawing from. In theory if you took Skyrim and blended it with Fallout… then mixed in a huge dose of the modern Tomb Raider games with a little Mad Max and in truth a touch of Farcry… and you end up with a pretty good explanation of this game. More importantly than that… this game is what I wanted Turok Dinosaur hunter to always be…. stalking awesomely augmented dinosaurs with only my bow and my wits.

What is most impressive about this melange of different genres is just how damned good it feels. Not only does the world have a high coolness factor but it also feels like it makes sense. Things exist for a reason, and as the player and observer… it feels like you understand the whys of the world better than the characters that participate in it because you can theorize about what each and every little Easter Egg laid before you might mean. In many ways you get the impression that this is an alternate version of Fallout… where instead of returning to the surface and finding the world a barren wasteland… the first survivors found a world reclaimed by nature and populated by the machines they created run amok and self replicating. Granted none of this is stuff that I know, just things that I have started turning around in my head. What is absolutely true is you are existing in a world where the machine and the wildlife are equally at home on the grassy plains, and you as a hunter need components from both to survive. So with your bow and your spear you set out to scavenge what you need from the landscape. You play the role of an outcast, someone shunned by the tribe from birth… and the key driving force of your actions is more than anything to find out why. The shunning aspect feels a little odd, especially given how many of the tribe you end up helping out along your way as optional side missions. I was originally wondering if these wound up effecting the flow of the story at all.. but so far having played through the first little segment it really doesn’t seem to other than offering items and leveling opportunites.

One of my problems with games that put a bow in my hands is generally that bows have extremely limited ammunition. I love bow weapons, but have always hated either trying to make sure I purchased enough arrows before I left town… or making a trip back to do so in the middle of doing something else. Given that the world of Horizon is a world of scavengers… they fix this issue with giving you the ability to craft most of your needs on the fly. So at any point… even in the middle of a battle which seems a little awkward… I can crack open my crafting pane and knock out a few arrows so that I can continue the fight. The same is true with traps when you eventually get the ability to use those, and upgraded ammunition like fire arrows. Similarly your gear can be modified to improve its stats and tweak its abilities… but I question if this is going to be a key mechanic or if its just the equivalent of enchanting something and you will keep shifting bows and spears as you travel through the world and get exposure to better armor and weapons. I wound up getting the digital deluxe edition and on top of the pre-order bonus… I wound up with a bunch of different options for gear that you would not normally start out with. The only negative here is that there is a moment in the story where someone makes what is probably intended to be a significant upgrade for you… and it ends up not being an upgrade at all.

At this point I have finished playing through what could ultimately be referred to as the “starter zone”. So many times in video games there is a closed off and protected area that you start the game in… and through a sequence of events you are pushed out into the much wider world. I stopped playing at roughly 11 pm last night and I had just literally crossed this barrier, and figured that I really should call it a night otherwise I would literally be up for another two hours. That means to complete this “intro” section it took me roughly five hours… one hour the first night and four hours last night, which all things considered seems to be like a fair amount of game play. Granted I always stop and smell the roses and I attempted to do all of the side quests I could possibly do, as well as spending some time gathering resources to upgrade my quiver and various other inventory elements. What I like the most about this game is that it feels like I truly am self sufficient. I can live off of the things that I scavenge from the land… be it herbs to fill my medicine pouch, or upgrading my various pouches to be more effective at gathering.

The only thing that I don’t really like is that it feels like maybe the game sets you up a little bit to fail. There are some items that you scavenge off of the bodies of the machines that are clearly marked as “crafting” materials. So those make complete sense to hold into for long term use. However there is another category that is marked as “trade to vendors, sell for shards” given that metal shards are the universal currency as well as a crafting material. So my immediate thought was that these would be vendor trash and I could simply sell them with impunity. That is absolutely not the case and as I found out from later vendors… certain items require certain scavenged components as well as shards to purchase. So right now there is a set of armor that I would love to have… but it requires me to collect two watcher eyes… something that I have had plenty of in my inventory but had been selling them to vendors for shards up until that point. Basically… what I am telling you is to hold onto the various materials that you pick up off the machines unless you find out for certain that you are not going to need them. The game at least in theory tries to teach you this… but the lesson was not as clearly outlined as it should have been when you trade a part you scavenge for an item. I am used to bringing all sorts of random crap to NPCs for the sake of a quest… and did not realize that the game was attempting to teach me that this is a thing that could and does happen.

Up until this point I have really only talked about the game play, which is generally a safe spoiler free den of information to dwell on. Now I am going to attempt to talk about the story, which is a section where I am going to get a lot more vague and general. For lack of better phrasing… as good as the game feels when you are fighting robotic dinosaurs… it also feels equally good when you are dealing with story elements. The game has created a world that I instantly want to know more about, and populated it with a bunch of interesting characters that I have feelings about be they good feelings… or bad feelings. I already care far more about this game than I do many others that I simply go through the paces because they are mechanically enjoyable. I really like that the game allows me to tailor the Aloy I want to play through giving me a series of dialog choices that are reminiscent of the Bioware games. There will generally be an option marked with a fist, an option marked with a heart, and an option marked with a brain. So far I have not really chosen the fist that often, but I tend to alternate between the heart and the brain depending on how I feel about a given character. These choices do at least somewhat effect how later interactions are going to work out… based at least in one small part on how I interacted with someone when I was a tiny babby Aloy. I chose to use the brain option… and sure enough the game remembered it and brought it up at a later time. The game does a great job of giving you characters that you are going to hate… and other characters that you are either going to genuinely like… or at least begrudgingly respect.

All in all this game has lived up to every expectation I had for it. I wanted an awesome post-apoc game where I roamed around on an awesome bow lady and took down robotic dinosaurs. This game has paid that off in spades, but also given me a really interesting world that I already deeply care about, as well as giving me just enough call to action to make me want to move forward in the quest chain. This is where so many games fail for me when it comes to open world adventures. In Fallout 4… I simply did not give a single fuck about the main story arc. All I wanted to do was explore the world surrounding me and build up the settlement of Sanctuary. I didn’t care about my baby being stolen, and I most certainly didn’t care about trying to track it down. The game completely failed at giving me enough motivation to keep moving forward… however already in Horizon I care… I want to know more about why this world is the way it is and how exactly all of these different pieces that it keeps exposing me to fits together. Guerrilla games has somehow managed to create an open world with an infused sense of purpose behind everything you are doing… and I like it… I like it a lot. I am sure there will be some slow spots… as happens with literally every game but I feel both the desire to keep moving… but also at the same time the freedom to wander about and explore whenever I want to. At this point I am super hooked, and am fighting every desire to boot the game up and play some this morning because it would without a doubt make me super late to work.