RPG Archives - Page 9 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Be Nice to the People

November 20, 2015 by Belghast

Bad Luck

TotallyLegitOvarwotch — This looks totally legit right?

Traditionally I do this Friday thing where I talk about one of the many “MMOs Worth Playing” but honestly…. today I am just not feeling it. I am feeling more annoyed and frustrated about MMOs than I am feeling the love right now, and in this current mindset it is probably best that I simply don’t talk about a game. The purpose of the column is to highlight a game and talk about the things I love about it, in the hopes that it might nudge people into giving it a try. In order to really do that I have to be feeling happy and enjoying the world around me… and right now I am kinda grumpy. Granted I am grumpy over a stupid reason. Right now I feel like I am one of a handful of people who didn’t get into the Overwatch beta weekend. I am largely annoyed by this, because I am in fact one of the people who went ahead and pre-ordered the game knowing eventually that I would want to play it. You would think… that if you have a bit single weekend only stress test that you might want to include the people who are already signed up to spend money on your game.

Maybe that is screwed up in my logic, but it seems to me that they should have pulled from the pool of sign ups first for this one in particular. I am not saying that about the normal always on Beta process… that one is completely luck of the draw. This one however… when you are testing a game for a short period of time… it might be cool to thank the folks who have already pressed that button and said “Yes, I want your game”. Frustrations aside, I am hoping all of my friends who are going to be playing it this weekend will enjoy themselves and have lots of things to talk about. Honestly this test will give me a better feeling of how I am going to like the game, since a lot of the AggroChat folks seemed to have gotten in. This is the hardest part about Betas is standing on the outside watching your friends have fun… and then trying really damned hard to be happy for them… and not sad that you got left out.

People Behind The Thing

It's okay to be sad/frustrated/upset with a thing, but never okay to attack the human being who's job is to represent that thing

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) November 19, 2015

So even though I am frustrated, I am directing my frustrations at an entity… the game Overwatch and or the company Blizzard behind it. I realize that that company is made up of people, and it has to be super tiring to hear people raging at them constantly. I realize over the years I have said some pretty caustic and even pyroclastic things about video games and or the companies behind them. At no point however did I aim that criticism at the people themselves. I never joined the chorus of “I Hate Ghostcrawler” nor will I join any other personally targeted witch hunt in the future. I can dislike a thing… but still have the utmost respect for the people for whom it is their job. Much of this week has felt like I have been attempting to give lessons in how to treat people with simple human dignity… and yesterday continued that trend. These companies have people working there, that go to work every single day hoping to do something cool… and often times get met with this constant wall of negativity. It is no wonder when someone reads one too many “fuck you” posts targeted at them that occasionally community staff snaps. Ultimately how good of a job, and how much satisfaction in it… would you have if someone stood over your desk heckling you the entire day?

Now you can take the path of “they willfully accepted the job”, but that too is utter bullshit. They probably took the job for the same reason that any one of us who are gaming addicts would jump at the chance to do the same thing. The folks that work at games companies do so because they love games with every fiber of their being, so much so that they are willing to sacrifice basic things like stability, and normal working hours… for the chance of being part of something they at least once felt was awesome. So if this week I happen to be complaining about Overwatch… I know that behind the scenes there is a crew of people who are working insane hours right now, and trying their damnedest to please as many people as they can… while at the same time desperately fighting to roll out the best possible product that they can make. I’ve been lucky to know enough people that work at enough companies to know that all of these fine people are grinding themselves into the ground all in the hopes of making each of us happy. So the next time you level an attack at a thing… please make sure it is targeted at the thing… and not the voice of the person hanging out in front of it for whom it is their job to represent said thing. I most definitely don’t believe that games should be above criticism… but I do believe that we shouldn’t be targeting our bile at a human being.

Hoping For a Great Friday

My hope is that I can go into this Friday and not see anything else that makes me sad about humanity. For those of you in the Overwatch beta weekend… have a blast, take lots of screenshots, record lots of video… because I expect some really amazing content as a result. For those of us watching from the sidelines… there are dozens of other things we should be doing. I personally am now 55 hours into Fallout 4… and have yet to make it to Diamond City. I’m also in a strange place when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV where I am logging in each day to do Beast Tribe dailies, but not finding much drive to do anything else. I am in that strange place where I took a long enough break from the game to where I am completely out of touch with what I was doing before I left, but have not been away long enough to make me super nostalgic enough to dive back in with vigor. I am also still fighting the urge to play World of Warcraft, and I am scared that sooner or later I will be giving into it… if for no reason other than to get it out of my system again. I am in a place where I want into the Legion beta more than any other beta in a long while, mostly because I hope beyond hope that Deathknights are fun again. The fact that I had to switch back to my warrior during Warlords honestly was a bit of bummer, and I would love to be a Worgen DK once more. Anyways… that was a long “outro” but hopefully you have a great weekend, and stay safe and happy and warm.

Joys of Exploration

November 12, 2015 by Belghast

Hole in the Bedroom

Yesterday was a strange day, largely because it felt like I was having to be part of something that I had no control over. Wednesday was of course Veterans Day, and as is usually the case I get it off work. Which I immediately thought would be amazing… since I had Fallout 4 to keep me company. The problem being that they did not in fact install the door in the bedroom Saturday like we thought they would. As a result they needed a new target date, and since I was going to be home anyways… we ended up with Wednesday. So I spent most of the day trying to play Fallout 4, without allowing myself to get too engaged in the game play as to miss the extremely subtle knocks that they needed my help with something. The problem is… when there is constant hammering… it is impossible to get a knock from just more hammering. We gave them my text for this reason… or at least for the reason of contacting me directly, but alas that didn’t actually do much.

The scariest moment of the day was when I went down to check on progress and there was a huge gaping hole in the side of our house. It looked like they had to take a lot more than they originally planned and I am sitting there trying to sort out how it is all going to go back together. However by evening they had a door installed and we had moved all of our stuff back in place around it. The awesome thing is it works beautifully and we had this cabinet next to the door that we were concerned might impede it. However it seems to swing open just fine with the cabinet in place, which means… we are going to now have to do something major to our back yard to also make it more inhabitable. I have a feeling that my wife at least is going to want to build some sort of a proper patio just outside the bedroom for sipping coffee in her rocking chair or similar activities. We are hoping there will be enough of a gap between them finishing their project and the waste company picking up the dumpster that we can maybe throw a bunch of crap away from the back yard. At the very least I can almost see the end in this project in sight… and maybe just maybe there will be a point on the near horizon where I can park in my own damned driveway.

Meandering

According to Steam I am now 18 hours into the game… and at this point I have done next to nothing. My quest driven friends are talking about this thing they did or that thing they did… but me… I am building a town. I’ve always played Fallout with a base builder mentality even though it was never really terribly supported. Being the horrific pack rat that I am, I largely played in a pretty predictable manner. I would roam around the wastes until something caught my eye, and then go explore it. During the course of exploring it… I would end up filling up my own inventory and that of my companion… in this case Dogmeat. Then I would fast travel back to base… dump the items I found into a series of containers that I used for sorting such things, rest up if I was low on hit points… and then venture out again. For the Walking Dead fans… I play the game much like Morgan was living his life… making sure to clear everything before moving on. There is a sense of accomplishment at knowing that you took down every raider in a camp, or got every drop of good out of a complex you just explored.

What makes this all so much better this time around is that for the very first time… it feels like I am making the wasteland a better place. In the past becoming the “Savior of the Wasteland” largely involved killing everyone that did not believe like you did. Which I am sure helped the fledgling towns, but it didn’t feel like I was doing more than being a gun for hire. This time around I can build up settlements, and recruit new settlers giving them a nice place to live and the safety of decent protections. I feel like town by town I am actually fixing the problems that were there, and setting up a better way of life as I blaze through the map. “Blaze” might be the wrong word… because realistically at this point I have seen next to nothing. I am largely just fiddling in the same corner of the map that I started in. There are still a bunch of things that I have quite yet to figure out… like how magazines and bobbleheads work this time. So far I have found a single bobblehead, and a handful of magazines. I am also not 100% sure how much I like the talent system which seems a bit more arcane than simply slotting points in skills. Regardless… I am hooked beyond reason and look forward to little else than coming back home tonight after work and exploring some more. This game so far… is exactly what I hoped it would be and more.

Spindle Envy

November 3, 2015 by Belghast

Game of the Month

This month for AggroChat Game Club we decided to do something a little different. This was the brain child of Tam, who wished we had the time to really dig in and explore a much larger game. If you’ve noticed we tend to pick relatively short games for the Game Club because it gives us a shot in hell of beating it before the end of the month and we record the show. We also tend to pick relatively cheap games, making it easier for all of us to pick the title up… which a lot of times limits us to Indie titles. Instead this month we are digging wholeheartedly into post apocalyptic Boston… in Fallout 4. Since we are hitting that time of the year when people start to have conflicts, and we have decided to make Fallout span two months. So the plan is to have it be both the game of the month for November and December, with a bit of a preview show at the end of November to talk about our progress so far. Then around Christmas a tell all show talking about our feelings about the game and more importantly our experiences. This is the sort of game where everyone who sits down in front of it will have slightly different experiences, and at least to some extent I plan on trying to keep a running journal of what all I find in the wastes.

Fallout and I go far back, and I can honestly say I have been a huge fan of the series since its launch. I remember going to the local Wal-mart to buy a copy for the PC shortly after it launched, and pretty much losing all sense of time playing it. I wish I could say that I went as far back as Wasteland, but alas I did not. I remember the game, I remember people talking about it… but when it existed I simply did not have a computer. Fallout is one of those games that changed the way I felt about PC gaming in general. In the years prior to it, I was pretty much heavily a Super Nintendo gamer… thinking that Final Fantasy and the JRPG thing was the superior gaming experience. Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment… changed all of that and I started moving heavily away from the consoles and focusing almost entirely on PC RPGs and eventually allowing myself to get sucked into the MMO world. So it is with zero hyperbole that say that Fallout shaped the way I feel about gaming, so when a new one releases… I end up almost vibrating with excitement. I realize in the coming months I am pretty much going to be dead to the world apart from poking my head into the occasional game here or there. For at least the first several weeks my blog is pretty much going to be entirely devoted to my travels in post apocalyptic Massachusetts. I am hoping that you will join me in this adventure, and we will sort out how best to convey your experiences so we can talk about them on the podcast as well.

Lost to Light

Yesterday the mission in Destiny called “Lost to Light” was the daily heroic, and as a result that meant Black Spindle the exotic sniper rifle was once again available. I had plotted and schemed all day long about this being the night we would actually go do this. I was so phenomenally wrong…. but we at least made an attempt. I grabbed Carthuun and Squirrel Pope and we made a valiant attempt. Earlier in the day Squirrel had actually managed to get through the quest with a group, and while we didn’t succeed we didn’t do that horrible in the grand scheme of things. Basically I think we are still slightly too low light, but that seems to be the general problem… because I have no clue how to get over 300 reliably other than run the raid. Everything was going pretty smoothly, we destroyed the Ogre which started the sequence where we run through the hive fortress and branch off to go up onto the Ketch instead. Once on the Ketch we did fairly well for the most part, other than the room with all the snipers. It took us a lot longer in that room than it probably should have, which made everything feel that much more stressful. We were sitting roughly at the 5 minute mark when we set foot into the final room to fight the taken version of Taniks. From there… things just went bad… we died a lot… we failed to knock out one of the blights in the far back of the room… and we simply were not doing enough damage to the boss fast enough.

From there we decided to lick our wounds and head into Nightfall, because according to Squirrel it would be far easier than what we just went through. I am not disappointed mind you in our progress… it at least gives us a goal to work towards. Nightfall had a few frustrating moments but we took it nice and slow after the rushed experience of trying to clear to and defeat Taniks in ten minutes. When we finally downed Alak-Hul I got lucky enough for him to drop his unique helmet, which I am now rocking after some fiddling with it. I really love collecting these unique items, like the arms with the chain fist from the bond brothers strike. For the Nightfall itself I was awarded a 4th Horseman, which sadly I already had… so it pretty much immediately became an exotic shard which is never a bad thing. I’ve talked about this before but as far as shotguns go… I just cannot think of a situation where I would want 4th Horseman over Invective. From there we attempted to run a few heroics… which we got through the first one without issue… then during the second one Carth disconnected. He has been having some internet issues lately… and I forgot to set the group to “locked” so the game filled for us… and we ended up finishing the restorative mind with a stranger. All in all… which we had some frustrations it was still a really fun night, and I am hoping to be able to get in again tonight and do some more fun stuff.

MMOs Worth Playing: Rift

October 16, 2015October 16, 2015 by Belghast

Why This Series

Happy Friday and welcome to the second part of my “MMOs Worth Playing” series where at the end of the week I try and talk about an MMO that I think is very much worth playing. I thought this morning I would go into some of my thought processes as to why I am doing this. Lately there has been a lot of angst floating around about various games and the state of them, and while I can very much get riled up just like the next person there is a thought that goes through my head. Life is far too short to spend your leisure time playing something that makes you unhappy. There was a time when if you wanted to play an MMO you were pretty much shackled to one of a handful of games in order to get your fix. However now there are tons of really fun games out there, so it quite honestly would serve most people well to pop around and play several of them to see if any are a better fit. The other part of this is the fact that we really have no major new AAA MMOs looming on the horizon. It feels like the era of big releases is over, and instead we have a bunch of existing MMOs that are continuing to make awesome content. Popping back into an existing MMO to see how it has progressed is a great experience, because there is almost always a huge mountain of content waiting for you to explore.

For the Ascended

Rift holds a special place in my heart because it was the the game that first truly pulled me away from World of Warcraft. There were a lot of games that were heralded as the “WoW Killer” and for a time for me at least, it absolutely was. If there is a feature you have always wanted in an MMO, chances are Rift has it. But it was more than just cloning features of other games, it also finally figured out how to do public events in a manner that felt both epic and beneficial in the form of Rifts and Invasions that spawn from them. For a bit about the game setting I am going to draw directly from an early tidbit from the lore team.

Of all the worlds in the universe, only Telara was constructed entirely of sourcestone at an unprecedented nexus of the elemental planes. Elemental energies that come into contact with sourcestone become tangible, and Telara, so heavily influenced by every element, boasts incredible diversity and wealth. Telara’s resources are capable of providing its people endless prosperity, if only they could share the wealth and keep the world safe from those who would plunder it. Though Telara always knew its share of strife, the Blood Storm and the rifts brought entire new plateaus of horror, leading to the edge of oblivion.

Telara is a world that is constantly sieged by forces outside of itself. Over the years this has taken the form of the elemental dragons, and even gone so far as to seeing parts of these planes of existence merging into Telara itself as the various denizens of these alternate realities set up footholds like that of Hammerknell. The storytelling gets a little esoteric at times, but essentially you are thrust into this conflict on the brink of destruction. Most games set up an artificial narrative of good versus evil, and this has pretty much become the standard trope for MMOs. Rift however does something slightly different and gives you a conflict that feels very real and tangible to us… considering we too are constantly seeing the clash of Technology and Religion. The Defiant faction relies on very steampunk feeling technology to tame the wilds of Telara. The Guardian faction instead relies on the Vigil, a pantheon of gods that have long forsaken Telara but are now choosing to make their power known. You the player takes the role of an ascended, which essentially is vessel for the souls of past warriors that ultimately end up giving you your abilities. The opening scenes of the game take place on the eve of a final showdown with Regulos the Death Aspect, and you are sent back through time with the mission of trying to stop these events from unfolding.

Soul Keeper

The most central game play mechanic is that of the souls that you have access to. There were originally four callings in the game, and recently they added a fifth. These callings provide the basic feel for what would ultimately be your “class” in another game. Until the release of the Primalist these all had a clear division based on the armor type… Warrior was Heavy, Cleric was Chain, Rogue was Leather, and Mage was Cloth. The Primalist blends the lines a bit and uses Warrior like two handed weapons, but is a leather based calling. Inside of each of these callings is a number of souls, for the original Callings they each have 11 total souls… with 10 of them available for free and 1 each coming from the two expansions to the game. The Primalist class launched with 6 souls with more supposedly coming over the coming months. Souls are essentially what “WoW like” games would refer to as a Talent tree. The enjoyment of this game for me at least has always been that I get to mix and match any combination of these souls to craft a very personal feeling class out of it. Traditionally in Talent tree based games, there is a lot of “illusion of choice”, meaning that while you have lots of options there are really only a handful that are ever viable at a given time. While there are definitely flavor of the month builds in Rift, it seems like if you are dedicated enough to any given play style you can figure out a way to develop a character that has that feel.

The game has all sorts of trope that simply don’t exist in other games. Want to play a Mage Tank… Sure you can do that. Want to play a Warrior Healer… sure you can do that too. Want to play a brutal Smite Cleric… yup that is a thing too. The game gives you a template that allows you to carve out your own class. Any given “class” is a combination of three Soul trees, and when you slot a given soul it gives you certain abilities by default. You unlock additional abilities through spending points in that tree. You could quickly see how this might become tedious, especially given all of the options you have at your finger tips. It is absolutely possible to create a character with little to no synergy, and that does not play terribly well. To solve this the game gives you a series of templates that essentially direct you down a path that should be good for this or that… and as you hover over these pre-built templates they tell you the skill level of the class and what sorts of roles they can fill. Additionally the game has an extremely active player community, and unlike most games… there forums are actually a great place to find help and information. There are class guide forums that are an awesome place to start for looking at different specs and builds. I am not sure what the maximum is… but I have 8 different “roles” or specs that I can swap back and forth between freely allowing me to get super granular and create specific builds for very specific conditions.

Feature Rich

Calling this game feature rich is a bit of an understatement. Essentially if you can think of a feature that exists in any game… there is likely a version of this fine tuned and available inside of Rift. For the things that don’t exist the game has a fairly robust mod system… though honestly not quite as complete as say World of Warcraft or Wildstar. To keep players from “breaking” the game, you cannot override default features of the original game client. This means that a lot of things don’t integrate fully, but if you really want to use it… the mods are available. The game has quite possibly the best cosmetic gear system called “Wardrobes”. This allows the players to save up to fourty different outfits and change between them freely. Additionally the game uses an appearance collection system, freeing you from having to keep old gear just for the purpose of appearances. Additionally the dye system allows you to collect certain dyes and then apply them at will to any of your wardrobes, allowing you to change things up whenever the mood suits you without an additional cash sink. Similarly the game has an amazingly rich housing system in the form of pocket dimenions, allowing the players to customize area of the world. For example our guild house is the Stone Flask Tavern at Granite Falls in Stonefield, and Rae did some crazy stuff even making a hidden path up the waterfall with a little temple area up there. Essentially if you can dream it up, there are the tools inside of Rift to be able to create it, and the sorts of dimensions that are available are extremely wide and varied. The only negative is that there is no way to put resources in your dimension like you can in other games… so you can’t bank, auction, or craft there… which I realize is an effort to keep the capitol cities feeling vibrant.

The game also has one of the more robust mentoring systems allowing you to drop your level at will while wandering the world. This allows you to vary the difficulty level of a lot of the encounters, but more importantly allows you to hang out freely with your lower level friends without simply steamrolling the content for them. This mentoring system is also the core of one of the coolest features the game has called Instant Adventures. I talked a bit about this concept yesterday in my blog post, but essentially you can pop into game… join the Instant Adventure queue and you will be fed a series of objectives for you and a group of players to complete. What is awesome about this is it is a revisiting of a lot of quest objectives from a given area, but each sequence of objectives generally reaches a crescendo in the form of some sort of mini boss. While doing this you are racking up planar currency and loot bags that usually contain nice relevant level gear. When one sequence finishes you are teleported to a new area and the process begins again. If an area becomes active with a planar invasion, then the instant adventure suddenly shifts purpose to defeating that. It has been one of my favorite leveling means to go through early content, because you are constantly doing something… and at any point you can hop off the train and go do something a little less frantic. It does a great job of breaking up the monotony of following quest chains, and like dungeons just gives you another way to mix things up a bit.

Monetization

This is always the specter looming over a free to play game, is how exactly is it itemized and is it honestly playable for free… or do you really need to subscribe to enjoy it. This is always a difficult question for me to answer since I never actually play these games in free to play mode. From what I understand… if you play this game for free you get access to all 65 levels worth of content, the original four callings, and ten souls per calling. Instead of penalizing the players… Rift took the path of rewarding them for becoming “patrons” because once a game goes free to play.. that is after all what it becomes… a patronage system. As a Patron you get all sorts of perks, and don’t have to worry about any limitations to the number of dungeons you can run a day or anything of the sort. You also get a number of extremely generous boosts to experience, gold gain, as well as daily and weekly rewards that guarantee you at least one cash shop lockbox for free. The only thing that keeps it from being a perfect free to play implementation however is that you gain no monthly stipend of shop currency like you do in other games. With no way of gaining the shop currency in game, it ends up actually making the prices on items feel more reasonable since the game is not having to dilute the price to make up for the fact that players can grind out the currency in game.

Like most cash shops, there are tons of chase items that offer rare and limited time things that you can only acquire through lockboxes. Having these items that you want appear only in lockboxes can be an extremely frustrating proposition, especially if RNGesus is not on your side. To combat this not they offer these super limited time sales that allow you to buy the various mounts outright, and if you regularly watch the Friday twitch stream they often times give away these goodies as well there. So while there are a lot of trappings of the normal insidiousness of a cash shop… I feel like for the most part it is fair, and in truth you can largely ignore it completely. Honestly I would say this is one of the few games that you can literally play without spending a dime and be completely happy doing so. I’ve been subscribed off and on since the release of Rift in 2011… but there are also times where I have played this game for free here and there before picking back up my patronage. I can say I noticed zero difference in the game other than the fact that I was obviously missing my experience boost buffs. The game felt the same, and played the same… and that is just about as high of praise as I can give for a free to play experience. If you’ve never played Rift, you owe it to yourself to give it a try… especially since it can be played completely for free. It is either going to click with you or not, but in any case there is a lot to experience… and I have to say I really enjoy the early leveling experience especially. Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides… is admittedly a bit of a slog, but I keep thinking I must be missing some path that I should be taking there. In any case… I said a bunch of stuff about Rift, and I still definitely burn a candle for this game. Join me next Friday as I talk about another game.