trove Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Misery and NDAs

September 24, 2015 by Belghast

Broken

Over the last few days I have felt run down, and I am grasping at straws to figure out exactly why. There seems to be something going around the office, but so far I am not really showing any signs of whatever it is other than simply being exhausted. Last night I largely struggled with a Migraine that kept me in a pseudo hibernation state, but this morning as I sit down to the keyboard and attempt to drink my coffee I am just feeling generally lousy. One of my co-workers has been out for three days with something, so I am hoping I am not coming down with whatever that was. Last night was the night of restless gaming. I attempted to log in and be present in Final Fantasy XIV but only wound up AFKing outside the guild hall. It made me appreciate just how much I love our free company house. It really is in just about the perfect location that seems to be close to just about everything in The Mists neighborhood. The only problem is… it is small. We have talked for a bit about potentially trying to pool our resources and getting a bigger house, but the problem there is we would have to move and likely out of our neighborhood.

One of the things that I like the most about where we are situated is that we actually know a large chunk of the neighbors surrounding us. While it has not been nearly as busy since the launch of Heavensward as everyone has fallen into this pre 3.1 lull… it is still nice feeling like you are part of something larger. While idling in FFXIV I attempted to play some Destiny and managed to complete a few bounties. However my aim was constantly wonky, and I knew I should not be attempting anything serious. As the night wore on the headache got worse and ultimately I ended up retiring to bed for awhile… the finally ending up on the Sofa. I hate those days where you have the will to play something… but cannot struggle through the “bad feels” in order to actually make any headway.

NDAs are Back

I am using Trove as the screenshot for this little section because it was one of the first “who needs an NDA” alpha games that I can remember playing. Everything about that game process was so out in the open that development discussions were openly happening on Reddit. For a period of time it seemed like every new game coming down the pipe was sans NDA so that folks could stream it freely and generate buzz. I was shocked when I managed to get into the Warlords of Draenor friends and family alpha for example… and was told that I could talk about it freely. The problem being… this open transparency bit more than a few games in the ass. Development is a messy time and as things are changing… you end up with features in “partially finished” states that look like a finished product to the gamer. The big problem with open and “pay to join” Alphas is that they no longer feel like testing. Instead you have simply released a broken game.

As a result lately I’ve noticed a significant number of games bringing back the NDA. Hell some of them seem to be almost unwilling to let the NDA go, as they have been in fairly prolific testing for a couple of years. As of right now I am in a handful of NDA bound alpha processes, and each of them seems to be trying to return to the era when Alphas were actually that. The problem with this is, I am finding myself far less interested in playing something that I can’t actually talk about on my blog. So generally speaking I install the Alpha client and play every now and then, but I am not actually playing enough to be a proper tester. I feel bad for this because I have always been the type to bug note the hell out of things as I see them. While I think it is probably a good thing for Alpha processes to regain some of their previous closed nature, I also feel far less invested in a game until it is actually hatched and ready for public consumption. So many things over the last years have blurred the lines between finished product and testing, and the current era of incessant and constant “early access” games just makes me leery to invest too much of myself in a game until I know that it is nearing its finished state.

Universal Patronage

September 15, 2015September 15, 2015 by Belghast

Account Social Systems

One of the things I have been spoiled on by playing quite a few Blizzard games is the existence of Battle.net as a common backbone. When RealID was originally released, I have to admit it bothered me quite a bit. I don’t actually use my real name very much online, and it isn’t necessarily because I am trying to obfuscate who I am… but more that I come from an era in the internet when everyone was their “handle”. Someones handle is more distinct and meaningful for me… than telling me their real name and oddly enough I have a much easier time remembering it. For example… I know several dozen folks with the last name of Smith… but I only know one Scopique. As Blizz took a step back they created the Battle Tag system and since then I have been happily known as Belghast#1752 making it significantly easier to meet up with people regardless of what Blizzard game they happen to be playing. This has been the case with most modern game releases, that they have some underlying account based system that allows me to quickly meet up with my friends by giving them a single idea that relates to all of my characters.

The problem is… when this system is missing I really notice it. It has been a recent struggle while playing Star Wars the Old Republic and the various Trion Worlds games. Sure it is nice to have disconnected alts that you can go hide on… but I have been willing to give up this for the convenience of being easily available. The thing that I find confusing with both SWTOR and Trion is that in both cases they have an underlying system that they could rely on for communication purposes. For SWTOR you have Origin chat… which is pretty horrible, but could at least serve as some common connective tissue. In the same of Trion Worlds though you have a shared account structure that through the use of the Glyph client gives you access to all of the games on your account. All that really seems to be missing is a single “Glyph ID” and a chat infrastructure built around it. The best feature of Blizzard games right now is that you can take your friend list with you into any game you go. So while I am not playing World of Warcraft, I can still keep touch with my WoW playing friends while I am in Diablo or Heroes of the Storm. It would be so nice if I could do this same thing while playing Trove, Rift, ArcheAge or eventually Devilian. Please make this a thing Trion Worlds!

Universal Patronage

While I am asking things of Trion Worlds this morning… I thought I would go ahead and throw in another thing. One of the features of the old Sony Online Entertainment games that I really enjoyed was the concept of the “All Access Pass”. Where you could pay one premium account price and get subscription level access to all of their games. I think back in the day it was something like $25 per month for an All Access account, instead of the individual $15 a month for each game. I loved this concept because it allowed me to pop back and forth freely between their games when I was in the mood to actively play them. The problem there is that for SOE and now Daybreak games… they are all titles that I play in spurts. However since the launch of Rift there has never been a time when I was not at least sometimes playing this game. While I may not play it seriously most of the time, I still keep poking my head in it. Similarly I am really enjoying the current state of ArcheAge, and I love poking my head into Trove. With the addition of Devilian to their lineup… it seems that I am ending up with a situation much like that of SOE where there are lots of different games that I wouldn’t mind playing.

The problem being that I simply cannot justify Patron access to ALL of them. So I have to pick and choose which game I want to activate at a given time. However if there was some sort of universal patron account that allowed me to pay one fee and gain patron access to all of their games… I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat. In the long run I think it would be a net win, since I doubt there are many people out there who are actively maintaining multiple patron subscriptions. You get a little bit per month out of the folks who were already subbing, to give them access to your entire library of games. This also allows you to do cross promotions between them, allowing the achievements in one game to maybe grant you something nifty in another game. This is again one of the strengths of Blizzards stable of games is that they are all interconnected at least to some extent. I feel the same sort of loyalty towards Trion Worlds as others do towards Blizzard, and I just think it would be awesome for something of this sort to happen. I realize Trion is a weird case in the fact that ArcheAge and Devilian for example are not developed in house… but my hope is that there is enough control on the back end systems to be able to implement a sort of universal patronage account.

Gigantic Codes

I have been sitting on an email that I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with it. Gigantic is finally leaving its Alpha process and entering Closed Beta, and with it they are loosening the restrictions a bit and handing out friend codes to a lot of the folks who have been in the closed process for awhile now. There are some constraints on these however and I think it is important to mention that. Right now Gigantic is exclusive to Windows 10 and Xbox One, which I find mildly frustrating since it ran perfectly fine on Windows 8 up until this latest push. This however is a listed requirement, and since I have not been actively testing of late… I have to assume it is probably a legitimate requirement. If you are interested in checking the game out you have to hit the link below and redeem one of the codes I am posting. This is of course a first come first served sort of deal, but I figured the best option was to share them with my readers.

https://www.gogigantic.com/redeem

~~Key 1: 4GB2KE5-I5FBYD-G433KKI-KN723Q~~
~~Key 2: BSKA5FG-SOFHUL-CCVNKBD-WLBRHQ~~
~~Key 3: ZIBOYHQ-ZQVHHX-FC3JL5T-6CMMKQ~~
~~Key 4: 3ML4C2H-RXJD5N-DRCJX3T-I5PAVU~~

Good luck! Hope to see you in game in the near future!

[Edit] and those went WAY faster than I expected them to. Hopefully you all enjoy closed beta!

Blaugust Games of Week – Week 2

August 7, 2015 by Belghast

Another Week Down

One of the things that I find easiest to blog about is when I am experiencing a new game, or re-experiencing a game after some time has passed. As a result last week I started doing the Blaugust Games of the Week thing, and for the first week I posted three vastly different titles. While Marvel Heroes 2015 has been in my gaming rotation for some time now, Everquest II and Dirty Bomb were not and as such I spent a bit of time this past week playing both. While I didn’t really talk much about any of the games this week, I hope some of you out there at least gave them a shot. I spent the most time playing Everquest II on the Stormhold Time Locked Server. It has been so strange starting from scratch without having some of my favorite leveling spots. The later leveling zones like Darklight Wood and Iceclad Ocean are just better designed than the original Everquest 2 leveling process was, and as a result you could tear through them so much more quickly.

As of last night I hit level 10 on my Iksar Shadowknight, and in part I think I was doing things the hard way because I stormed right out into the Commonlands and attempted to start leveling off the mobs out there that tend to be significantly higher than my level. One of the things that I had forgotten about the Commonlands were all of the Small Chests that drop additional quests. At this point my quest log is full of level 15-20 Far Seas supplier quests that essentially ask you to kill X of a thing and then turn in the end result at an NPC. I remember these being the bread and butter of early leveling, but I have to say the thing I miss is all of the individual neighborhoods of Freeport. I think it was a huge disservice to the game when the revamp of Freeport got rid of these completely. They are now instanced zones that you can only enter on specific quests, but I have to say these zones made up a lot of the feel of both Freeport and Qeynos and did a good job of explaining why the cities were the way that they were. Of the three titles from this week, this is the one that I am most likely to keep playing because I am finding an odd enjoyment out of retracing my EQ2 roots.

Trion Theme

Since it is once again Friday it is time for me to pick another three games to talk about and suggest. This time around I decided to go with a theme and as a result I am picking three games from Trion. Again I am limiting my selections to games that you can download and start playing immediately without having to purchase a game client or pay a subscription fee. My goal is to make it so folks who are stuck and in need of inspiration can pop into one of these games and get instant “blog fodder”.

Rift

Considering the announcement of the World of Warcraft expansion yesterday, I thought it was fitting to lead off this morning talking about Rift as it was the first game to actually pry me away from the WoW Juggernaut. The game is designed in such a way so that in theory you can play one character and provide every possible role in the game. This was not necessarily the case at launch but over time they have provided additional talent trees or “Souls” to help flesh out the missing abilities. So now you can absolutely be a healing warrior or a tanking mage. This game has an absolutely phenomenal early leveling game, and the first fifty levels are an absolute joy to level through. The expansions however are a completely different thing. I personally found both leveling in Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides to be extremely tedious, and found myself wishing they had not abandoned the early game that I enjoyed so much.

The core of the game though is great, but there are various things you are going to have to content with especially along the lines of ability bloat. One of my key complaints about Rift has been that you end up with a lot of abilities where ability 2 and 3 are absolutely better than 1… but have long cool downs. The end result is that you usually end up macroing all three together, which can lead to some fairly uninteresting game play. That said the game excels at letting you literally branch out in any possible direction and build a character out however you want to. There are some less than optimal options, but in theory any combination of three Souls will make a potentially viable character, which gives you a lot of freedom to customize things as you see fit. Fortunately the game has an excellent set of prebuilt specs to at least get you going in the right direction. As far as the free to play goes… it is among the least restrictive and there are not really any pay walls standing in your way.

Steam Download – Direct Download

Trove

I was lucky enough to get in on the first wave of Alpha invites for Trove and having played it that long… has been an interesting experience. The game has changed massively in that time, and the key elements have shifted and morphed but the basic game is still the same. I tend to think of Trove as Minecraft meets Diablo, and my recent Bel’s Big Adventure series of Minecraft videos has made me appreciate how important this really is. Minecraft has a fairly horrible combat system, that is passible but frustratingly bad if you are going to spend much time fighting anything. Trove on the other stand decided to go in a direction that allows you to pick one of several classes that each have their own built in abilities and a MOBA style character design. I tend to have a natural synergy with the base Knight class, but have spent significant amounts of time playing the Gunslinger and Neon Ninja as well… and they are all extremely well built. The core gameplay loop in Trove centers around going out into the world and fighting baddies to find interesting stuff in level ranged based worlds that steadily increase the challenge.

On top of this however there is a very awesome building system where you can build extremely complex custom worlds for your “Club”, or you can build out your cornerstone which is a traveling spawn point that you can move with you as you go out exploring the world. I love this aspect of the game because it feels like I am able to take all of my most important resources and keep moving my base of operations as I go exploring. The other thing that makes this game amazing is the community support, and the vast majority of the weapons that you will get were created by fans just like you. The game has a silliness to it that is contagious, and I will forever cherish my Dapper Raptor mount that you can see above. Another favorite of mine is the ability to collect item appearances and then make ANY piece of gear that you get look like that, so as you keep exploring you just keep opening more and more unique looks for your character. If you have never played Trove I highly suggest you download it and give it a shot.

Steam Download – Direct Download

ArcheAge

ArcheAge and I have an extremely checkered past. I was in the early Alpha process of this game and found the community to be among the most toxic I have ever experienced in any game genre. As a result I pretty much actively ignored the game for some time. However with some of the AggroChat folks started testing the waters and playing it… I decided to give it another shot. The end result has been a pretty enjoyable leveling experience and allowed me to see just how subtle and nuanced the game really is. I am not a fan of open world ganker style pvp… and early in the game that seemed to be extremely prevalent. More so than that, the players seemed to revel in griefing others in non-combat ways as well. If you AFK’d in town, someone might come along with a tractor and push you out into the middle of a dangerous area just to watch you die. However all of those elements seem to have gotten bored and moved on, and what is left seems to be a bunch of generally nice folks.

The game play itself is also rather good, and while the quests are pretty basic the world is gorgeous and huge, and the class designs are really interesting. While Rift has an issue with duplication of abilities, ArcheAge seems to be designed in a way so that there is natural synergy between talent trees without giving you a bunch of abilities that you will never actually use. I have gone full circle on my opinion of this game and you can track the progress if you flip through some of my blog entries. The game is absolutely playable on the free to play model, but there are some serious constraints. Namely it is very difficult to do more than just one thing as a “free” player because every action is throttled by your abysmal labour points. As a Patron player your labour regenerates when you are offline… as a free player you have to be logged into the game waiting on your points to come back. The other huge constraint is that free players cannot own land, which means if you get very serious about this game you are likely going to end up subscribing. However in the meantime the free model does allow you to get your feet wet.

Steam Download – Direct Download

Lego Worlds Impressions

June 2, 2015 by Belghast

Lego Open World

On an absolute whim yesterday I popped onto the steam website to check out what had been released, or was impending release this morning. One of the titles listed was something I quite literally knew nothing about called Lego Worlds. After some research, the consensus seemed to be Lego meets Minecraft. It has the same pedigree of the other Lego games out there as it is also created by Traveler’s Tales. Right now the game is on Steam Early Access for $14.99 and I figured for that price it was worth the risk. I was seemingly one of the few people who actually through Lego Universe was a pretty cool game. Similarly I have really enjoyed my time spent in Lego Minifigures Online, and will more than likely pick up the Lego portal based game as well. I may or may not be a Lego Maniac to borrow the 80s commercial catch phrase. As I sit here typing up my blog post I am sitting in an office surrounded by a mountain of Lego sets.

If you have ever played any of the Lego franchise titles like Lego Harry Potter or Lego Star Wars, this game will feel extremely familiar to you at least as far as movement and gameplay goes. Ultimately this is a game about destroying everything in sight, because when you destroy an object it erupts in a shower of “coins” which are represented by the 1×1 round plate pieces in various colors to denote denominations. Essentially as you roam around the world every new object you encounter, you collect its appearance. You can spend your coins to unlock the ability to build with these prefabs. This means that if you are running through an area and there is a neat lamp post along the trail, you can bump into it and collect its appearance and then build with these lamps from that point on. There is a truly overwhelming number of these prefab objects out in the world and in the three hours I spent yesterday playing I collected what seems like hundreds of them.

Custom Minifigures

When you start the game you are given a very limited choice of appearances in the form of either a Male or a Female explorer. As you roam around the world however you encounter lots of other minifigures. Some of them are friendly and simply walking up to them allows you to collect their appearance, and others are more aggressive and you have to defeat them to collect theirs. In either case these minifigures that you have met go into the same “coin store” as the prefabs you encounter, and from there you can spend your coins to unlock their appearance items. At any point while playing you can swap around your look by changing out the various parts that make up a minifigure including head, body, arms, hands, legs, hat, cape, and assorted hair slot options. So far while roaming around I have managed to run into twenty one different figures, ranging from Yeti to a Surfer Girl. Each of them gave me various unique bits to add to my assortment of appearance items allowing me to assemble some fairly strange looks.

LEGO_Worlds_DX11 2015-06-01 23-00-03-30

This for example is the caveman beard and hair combination, with the wizard cape, skull head and outlaw body parts. I got tired of this look pretty quickly but the beauty of the system is that you can swap things out on the fly and incorporate new pieces you might find as you are roaming around. I feel like that is this games strong point is that it really rewards exploration. While roaming around you encounter all sorts of vehicles and animals that you can ride on. Like everything else once you encounter it, you can purchase it in the coin store to permanently unlock it’s appearance. Once you have paid for an vehicle or mount like this, you can then summon it to your location at any point. This means if I want to ride around on a polar bear I can on a whim, or summon a racing bike, or even an airplane. The more you explore the easier exploration gets as you have all sorts of modes of transportations to get you where you need to go. Also while you explore there are special large chests that have items that you can collect like weapons and other items to help you in your adventures. Since I favor melee I am right now using a big club to bash things, but there is also a rifle and a bow that I have managed to find as well to allow you to attack things at range.

Interesting Exploration

One of the most interesting vehicles that I encountered was this Ninjago inspired drill car vehicle. With it comes the special ability to hold A while driving it to drill the terrain. There are a few pitfalls with this vehicle, namely that it always seems to want to drill directly down. That said I had quite a bit of fun tearing up the terrain and drilling under a mountain. Now getting back OUT of that area was more of a challenge. This vehicle from what I can tell only appears in the similarly “ninjago” themed Biome, meaning the one with the cherry blossom trees and the huge pagoda like buildings. Other vehicles similarly spawn in unique biomes, like the Airplane appears to only be in the snowy biome, and the “Monster Fighters” style Roadster only appears in the desert/Egyptian biome with the free roaming Mummies. Essentially each biome seems to be based on a popular family of Lego sets and generally contains creatures that you might also find in that set. The only one that seems to make zero sense so far is that Cavemen and Cavewomen seem to spawn damned near everywhere.

The game right now is very “early access” and I do not mean necessarily that the game feels “beta” and buggy, but more so that the game feels like it is missing a lot of features that will be in what I hope is the final version. Right now there does not seem to be much purpose to the exploration other than to unlock items to build with. The problem there is that there seems to be little to no reason to really build anything. There are certain biomes where skeletons spawn infinitely during the night cycles, but building a structure does not really seem to present you with much shelter against the endless waves of them. For the time being the game is strictly single player, but I know multiplayer is in the works. Right now the list of things planned from the Steam page includes…

Like/Dislike system for tailoring World Generation
Procedurally Generated Underground Cave Networks
LEGO ID integration to allow for sharing and uploading of in-game builds
Additional Biomes
Painting Themes
Pre-Generated Towns/Villages/Settlements relevant to the Biome
Updated AI Behaviors to provide organic feeling to free-roaming creatures and characters
Red Brick Extras
Full liquid behaviors
Additional Minifigure Characters and Creatures
Additional Vehicles and Pre-Built Models
Additional Weapons
Cut/Copy/Paste chunks of landscape
Underwater Gameplay (including Vehicles, Creatures and additional sea life)
Character Customizer
Online Multiplayer”

So as you can see they pretty much intend to flesh this game out to be competitive with the Minecraft genre. For $14.99 it was more than enjoyable enough roaming around and interacting with things. However if you are looking for a complete game, keep moving on. There really is not much “game” to be had here and in that aspect you are far better off for the time being playing Trove because it offers a lot of the same fun and exploration gameplay, while also offering an actual game that creates reasons for your exploration and combat. This is planned to stay in Early Access throughout 2015, and by the time it launches next year it is probably going to be an awesome experience. The biggest suggestion I have if you plan on giving it a try is to hook up a controller, because the keyboard and mouse control options are pretty frustrating. The user interface has been designed for a controller and that experience seems to be the most enjoyable.