World of Warcraft Archives - Page 22 of 108

Level Scaling Tech

May 11, 2017 by Belghast

I am in this place with SWTOR Knights of the Fallen Empire where I am honestly not sure what more I can say without my blog turning into a massive spoiler fest. There are a lot of events going on and many of them have surprised me. This is a little shocking given that I consume a lot of gaming media and that KotFE has been technically out since October 2015. I am not sure if I purposefully ignored SWTOR articles… or if I just didn’t come across that many. Whatever the case essentially everything from Shadows of Revan onward has been a completely new story experience for me without me knowing any of the elements ahead of time. So while I recognized characters like Theron Shan or Lana Beniko… I knew nothing about them going into this recent binge of playing the game. We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but returning to an MMO and seeing years worth of content laid out in front of you is a pretty great thing. Especially in a situation like SWTOR where they have a reasonable level scaling system.

Yesterday Syp posted something over on his personal blog Bio Break talking about level scaling systems. His specific discussion centered around whether or not level scaling systems were good for games, which was brought on by his recent journeys in LOTRO. Over time my own feelings about the systems have changed. You can scan through the backlog of this blog and find me talking about Mentoring systems, where games allow high level player A to drop down to the level of player B and run content with them. This seemed to me like the most elegant solution to the problem of being able to run content with your friends. That was until I encountered Guild Wars 2, and the fact that no matter where you go your character is scaled down to the level of the world. The concept of evergreen content is a big one for me… because I like when a game expands over time rather than contracts. While Guild Wars 2 is not the best example of this… because of the fact that there is plenty of content that you will never be able to play again in that game… it did make me appreciate level scaling as a replacement for mentoring.

The only problem there is that when the world is constantly the same level as you, it robs you of one of the quintessential MMO experiences of leveling up and becoming more powerful. The world always feels the same to you, because you are functionally always the same relative ability levels to it as you level. In situations like that the levels themselves feel like a completely extraneous concept. Why even have a number that goes up if the world is always going to be functionally the same difficulty. When we started playing Final Fantasy XIV they had an extremely elegant solution for this in the form of their dungeon finder. Each dungeon had a functional level range from the moment you first were able to zone in… to the moment that it considered was the upper bound of levels. So if the average mob level in an area was 35, then functionally the maximum level the game would allow you to be was 40, scaling everyone over that level down to that point. The only negative here is that this ONLY applies to dungeons, and in truth it would have been interesting to see this same sort of system just work out in the world as a whole.

That I guess is functionally what is going on in Star Wars the Old Republic, and I am loving it. Each piece of content be it planet, flashpoint, or something else… has a functional level range attached to it. Once again it is functionally along the lines of being five or so levels over whatever the maximum level of encounter for that area. Then the game rewards you as though you were fighting something your own level in terms of both experience and loot drops. This means that you can go anywhere and do anything without feeling like you are getting nothing from it. At launch this was absolutely a problem with SWTOR and it was extremely easy to out level an area, and reach a point where the experience gain was no longer worth the time you spent on a planet. This was especially true as I remember on Tatooine which in itself was a huge planet with lots of side content. By the time I “did everything” I ended up several levels ahead of the curve and functionally kept getting more and more over-leveled as I went through the rest of the planets.

Now there is a certain measure of freedom in being able to just go and do the content without having to worry about level… and in many cases gear. While leveling my Imperial Agent, there were a few points where I went 10 levels without upgrading any of my gear… and really did not notice a significant amount of power drop off. Then again I did exit the class storyline at level 58… so there was some significant over-leveling going on there that might have been easing the transition. The thing with this system is however that while you are gaining power and you FEEL powerful… there is never a point where you are just waltzing through field of enemies gently tapping them and watching them explode. When you run someone through a low level dungeon in World of Warcraft for example on your level capped main… you can functionally breathe on mobs and they impale themselves in a shower of loot. SWTOR feels like a happy medium, of letting your power level increase without completely trivializing the game. Sure most of the time I am not actually afraid of death, but I still feel heroic doing content… because I am having to use my abilities to take things down rather than a single auto swing. As a result I have somewhat shifted my focus from user driven mentoring systems… to seeing more games adopt this sort of level scaling. The best part about Legion honestly was the way that content has scaled to the player while leveling through it, and if only Blizzard had applied this tech to the world as a whole… it would be a much more enjoyable experience. I like knowing that I can revisit those areas that I enjoyed so much in the past, and still having an interesting time.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.

Twitter GOTY “Poll”

April 26, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of a rough night, because we had a massive storm blow through. A side effect of the storm was the fact that about 11:30 my wife woke up on the couch because something dripped on her foot. In the middle of our living room, dripping from one of the beams was a slow trickle of water. At that point there really isn’t much to do other than put down a towel and a bucket and hope it stops. However that sort of ruined any thoughts of a really solid nights sleep. This morning I had originally intended on writing about a rather hamfisted absurdist article that is making its way through my twitter circle, but in truth I am simply going to not deal with that today. It reminded me of conversations that myself and Tamrielo have on a regular basis… but I also wanted to approach the topic with more grace than I probably have in me right now. So instead I am going to answer a twitter poll in blog form.

TWITTER POLL: Quote this tweet with your GOTY for each year for the last five years, 2012 to 2016.

— Alex Carlson (@PostMesmeric) April 25, 2017

While technically not a poll, it is definitely a thing that I thought looked interesting so this morning instead of tearing into discussions that I don’t really want to get into… I started thinking back upon various years and trying to determine the games that mattered the most to me during that time. Also I may or may not be applying a little “in retrospect” to a few of these choices, but that is also ultimately my prerogative. I limited myself to only picking games released during a specific calendar year, but in many cases the true impact the game had happened much later.

2012: The Secret World

I really cannot say enough good about this game… from the perspective of someone just starting out playing it. I’ve said an awful lot about this game over the years in three pages worth of blog posts… and probably some others that I failed to categorize correctly. This often makes my “best games I am not playing” list whenever I compile one. Functionally there are two vastly different game experiences… the leveling game when you are digging through the story and trying to solve the mysteries of the world… and the end game where you lose all creative freedom that you had while leveling. The first game is phenomenal and something that I feel everyone should experience at least once. The later… is ultimately what caused us to quit and keeps me from reattaching to the game for any length of time. However that said the ride is well worth it, and the game has some of the more interesting dungeons in MMOdom… until you reach nightmare levels where everything sort of falls apart. I am really looking forward to the re-release of the game under the Secret World Legends name… and hoping beyond hope that they can give me an experience to latch onto with both hands.

Aggronaut Posts about The Secret World

2013: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

The impact this game has had on me and my friends is immeasurable. Largely because it gave us a common ground in the form of an MMO experience that we all care about. More than anything however it knows how to tell story in and interesting and serialized fashion, where the story arc from one expansion sets up the key players for the next. This is also the only MMO that has ever sufficiently pulled off a surprise plot twist, and has done so many times…. and been willing to assault structures that I assumed were fixed and sacred to the game itself. From August onwards in 2013… my life pretty much belonged to Final Fantasy XIV until we slowly petered out when we ran out of things we were capable of doing. However we came back and had a renaissance with the game that has continued to the present times with this still being the game we can all sort of agree on.

Aggronaut Posts about Final Fantasy XIV

2014: Destiny

This is another game that realized its ultimate impact on me long after the year it actually released in. Destiny is a really important game to me for a whole lot of reasons. Firstly it has amazing moment to moment gameplay and it is hands down the best feeling shooter I have ever played. From the moment I heard about the world and the setting I was completely sold… and in truth this is the game that pushed me to buy my way into the current console generation. I got my PS4 console the week the first PlayStation exclusive alpha was happening, and the little I played of it hooked me extremely hard on the concept. Year one had a lot of problems, and I sort of picked at it like you might pick at the remains of a meal you know you are done with… but just keep nibbling on. I did return to paying regularly towards the tail end of the first year, so that I was primed and ready for the launch of The Taken King. From Year Two on however I have been a dedicated acolyte of the world, and own it for both PS4 and Xbox One… and am contemplating making the leap to PC version with the launch of Destiny 2. The game still has some narrative problems, but it does not stop me one bit from enjoying it.

Aggronaut Posts about Destiny

2015: Fallout 4

I love Fallout as a franchise. I still remember saving up the cash to buy the first one when we were in college, and I was completely hooked. I am not old school enough to remember Wasteland fondly, but I have always been a fan of the whole post apocalyptic nukepunk genre. So while I am listing this as my game for 2015… it is a hype cycle that began long before and continues long after. This is still the game I boot up when I am in a specific mood. Similarly I have played Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas countless times, and Fallout 4 simply replaces those in succession. This game is proof to me at least that I care far more about systems, and gameplay… than I really do about the main narrative in a game. In fact the only reason why I probably beat this game is because we chose this as our November/December AggroChat game club game for the tail end of 2015. I would probably still be avoiding the main story… and still off on my own having adventures in my head…. which is in truth my preferred method of playing a game. Just talking about the game has given me this huge urge to boot it up… right now… which would be a horrible idea considering I have to go to work.

Aggronaut Posts about Fallout 4

2016: World of Warcraft: Legion

I have to give a lot of credit here to World of Warcraft and the rebirth of the game that happened with the launch of the Legion expansion. They took a game I thought I no longer really cared about, and was legitimately done caring about…. and turned it into an experience that I rabidly played. I even managed to return to raiding and didn’t check out this time until we were a few bosses into Nighthold… which is in truth way longer than I lasted in Draenor. I’ve reached this point where I am not really playing the game or following it now… but the transformation that took place should nonetheless be honored. They tried a whole bunch of new ideas that they admittedly borrowed from other games… but wove it together in a fashion that felt new and fresh. Similarly I feel like it has to be said that they have done and continue to do a great job of managing patch cycles. They finally broke the “three and done” mold that had happened with Pandaria and Draenor and by all accounts are still releasing interesting content. I know at some point I will return and at the very least finish out the Legion flight meta achievement, but for the time being I am simply not forcing myself to play a game I am not super into. Legion however is probably going to go down in history for me as their best expansion… toppling what was previously my current favorite Wrath of the Lich King.

Aggronaut Posts about World of Warcraft

So now that I have given you mine… what are yours? Feel free to post them in the comments section here… or join in the twitter poll. I am curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.

Random Screenshots #4

March 7, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is one of those mornings when I am super thankful that I cobbled together the random screenshot tool. Last night I sort of failed at doing any measure of directed content. I tuned into Spiral’s stream as she continued to push forward into Final Fantasy V and spent most of the night alt tabbing between twitch and Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been on this mission to make sure that I complete the Ixal quests each day, and they take significantly longer than your average quest. In truth the bulk of the slowdown is all of the swapping back and forth between classes and having to craft items over and over until I get X number of high quality baubles for the turn in. Sometimes I just get unlucky, and the higher crafting gets the harder this seems to be. So while I might only need 4 items for the turn in… I might end up with a stack of 15 normal quality items that I had to craft to get those four HQs. Needless to say when I finally finished up with the quests it was around 9 pm last night… and I was feeling largely done with Final Fantasy XIV for the night. So instead I popped into the bedroom where I have my Wii U connected and played some more Zelda. It is growing on me, but I still find a lot about the game frustrating, or at least non-intuitive. As a result I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, and definitely no screenshots so… once again I crawl back into the vault and do a random sort.

wildstar64-2015-04-27-18-24-18-27 — Chua Starting Area – Wildstar

While I may have issues with Wildstar… it will always be a gorgeous game. This is I believe a screenshot from the tail end of Crimson Isle, the Chua/Draken starting zone. There are times I miss my little Chua, and I went so far as to create a new one awhile back as a Warrior. The problem is the game of Wildstar itself just never quite clicks. There is just too much going on visually for me, and the style of targeted directional abilities with hotbar combat never seems to feel as good as I think they hoped it would. I feel like the game would feel a lot better on a console where you can bind your main attacks to the triggers and bumpers and control movement and aiming with both analog sticks. In theory you could emulate this… but keyboard to controller emulators never quite work as flawlessly as if you set the controls up for that purpose out of the box. Just like running a console with a mouse and keyboard… you are trying to fake out the hardware while using out another control scheme under the hood.

Funny thing that I get a World of Warcraft image in this search because I really have not talked about the game lately much. I am admittedly on a bit of a break right now, and in part I am simply just not forcing myself to log in when I don’t really want to. For three or four weeks the real world got in the way of my raiding… and then I just got out of the habit of logging in regularly. As it stands I have this meeting on Wednesdays that usually lets out about 6pm which leaves me an hour to get home.. find food and log into the game for the raid which is simply too rushed for my tastes. So for the moment I am on extended leave, until the spirit drives me to start playing again. This image is from me finding the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker… aka the Protection Warrior alternate appearance. This is probably the moment in Legion when I was playing the most intently, and every single day I made a trek out here to see if the shield was up. The day it finally was… I took lots of screenshots and I so happily used this appearance until I got something newer unlocked recently. The Legion launch and the first few patch cycles will always be a happy memory… even if I have sort of fallen out of the habit of playing the game.

Another happy moment in a game… at the end of a long grind is when I finally got Turquoise on my Chocobo in Final Fantasy XIV. For those who are unfamiliar… your base Chocobo can be dyed through an insane process of feeding the chocobo various fruits. What makes the process maddening is that one set of fruit alters the RGB values… and another set of fruit seemed to instead alter CMYK. When we first started doing this it was largely trial and error before the calculators came out… and even when they existed it never really was an exact science. At the time we were doing this… the fruit for dyeing was prohibitively expensive. While we were trying to keep an active stock of seeds growing in the garden… it never quite met up with the desires. If you find yourself interested in this process, check out this calculator because it seems to be the best. I remember towards the end I teetered back and forth between three colors until it finally clicked and gave me the Turquoise that I was hunting for. All of this… was simply to make sure that it matched my Leviathan Barding.