Tis the beginning of the year, and we are now roughly three weeks away from Pax South, and I have to say…. I am a bit concerned. It is going to be an awesome time no matter what because right now I know of like a dozen friends that are going to be there… so going to have plenty of people to hang out with. What concerns me though is it seems like Pax South as a whole is a much less hopping place. By this time last year, all three days of the show were down to “low” rating, and Saturday and the Three Day Passes had been sold out for a very long time. Additionally they had already posted a picture of the convention floor and who was going to be inhabiting what booth space. As far as the passes, Saturday was still available on Friday… and just looking at the schedule there don’t seem to be as many “big name” presentations as there were last year. Last year after all we had the world announcement of Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns happening, as well as I believe the first real information about Sid Meier’s Starships. Now… what I see instead is very light on the game content and very heavy on the youtube and stream celebrities.
All of this said I am going to have the best time this year…. because what made last year so much fun was running around with Ashgar and Rae. This time around I will be running around with Ashgar, Rae, Thalen, Dallian, Damai, Lonrem, Helkim, Paragon, Tick, Rylacus, and hell probably several others that I am failing to rattle off on the top of my head. It is the people that make the place awesome, and it is my hope to meet up with as many people as I can over the two days I am going to be there. So if you are planning on going to Pax South please let me know. I did a poor job of actually connecting with people last year and I hope to fix that. The other thing that is going to make this year awesome is that I am no longer going to have to worry about somehow abandoning my wife. Last year she went running around during the day, utilizing the hotels shuttle service, and by all accounts had a lot of fun, or at least enough fun to want to come back again this year.
The problem being that I always felt guilty for leaving her at the hotel and felt the strong pull to rush home at night so we could go out to dinner and such. This time around we are also bringing one of her friends so she now also has someone to run around with and wander San Antonio. What is hilarious is… she feels like I am being awesome, and I think its awesome because I will feel less guilty all the time. This also means I will probably experience a lot of the nighttime content of Pax and go to the concerts and such, and maybe some of the after parties. Granted on Saturday night I don’t want to be out too late… given that I will be driving the eight or nine hours home on Sunday. In any case…. if you read the blog or you listen to AggroChat, drop me a line and it is my hope to catch up with as many people during that weekend as I can. I will be getting into the hotel room late Thursday night, and I am staying about six miles away from the convention center out by the airport… in part because we had a great experience there last year…. and the whole free shuttle service to various destinations thing was awesome for my wife. So yesterday we did a bit of juggling to change our arrangements, and now have a double suite so it should be awesome. There was talk last night about maybe trying to get in together and see Force Awakens as a group while down there… since supposedly there is a theater a few blocks away.
Shamanism
One of the things I am really enjoying about World of Warcraft right now is the ability to fly. I realize that I was heavily in the “no flight in draenor” camp, and for the most part I still am. That said… having it makes everything so damned much easier, and questing through the zones is greatly improved. I feel like WoW content however desperately needs the grounding of players at the beginning of an expansion to keep folks from just blowing through everything instantly. In the past once you had a single character at the new level cap you could purchase flight for your other characters, and that was a great option…. but an extremely expensive one. I think personally I like the Draenor Pathfinder option because even though it was a pain in the butt to complete… now that I have done it the benefit can be used by every single character on my account. As a whole I am a huge fan of account wide unlocks and they actually make it far more likely for me to play other characters. In Final Fantasy XIV everything that I have exists on a single character, and as a result I am completely disincentive from trying any more characters. Same goes for games like Rift that while I have alts… I always tend to play the same main character because he has the best toys.
I feel like playing an Enhancement Shaman is a little broken…. in a good way. After having leveled several other characters, this one seems to be the easiest. I can just straight up shred most mobs without my totems, or heroism…. but then I always have those things waiting in reserve for big mobs and elites. The speed of killing things is just so damned fast, and since I have crafters that can feed me gear…. walking around with a pair of level 630 blue weapons really makes a huge difference. I still don’t fully understand why the crafted blacksmith weapons start at 630 unlike the 640 that all of the other gear seems to start at, but in any case I am fine with it…. it is a huge dps boost over the weapons I am getting in the zones. The thing that I cannot wait for in WoW however is the new transmogging system. WoWhead, being the awesome folks they always are has put up a preview system to show you all of the transmog gear your characters are going to get granted from quest completion. I am really really hoping that the new system is account wide like Diablo 3, because there are certain characters like this shaman that simply don’t have a lot of cool gear to work with yet. I guess I should farm more old world content to get him a decent set to run around in.
Not being able to fly in Draenor has been an interesting experience, and mostly one that I did not fully realize what I was missing until recently. I had got so used to NOT flying… that it always felt strange when I entered the old would and could suddenly take to the skies again. I would lift off the ground in Stormwind or Ironforge and have this momentary pause where I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to do now that I was up above the world. I can’t say I gnashed me teeth wanting flight, in fact I think it was probably a much more enjoyable experience for me because I was forced to be on the ground. I made me actually learn the lay of the land in these zones, and it also got me using the flight point system again. However over the last few weeks I have been working on the final requirements for Draenor Pathfinder, and being shuttled around by one of my friends on her rocket makes me realize just how much easier everything is with flight. Why clear your way through a camp when you can just drop down on top of your objective? But it also has made me realize exactly why they disabled in the first place. Flight is overpowered when it comes to questing, and there is nothing more frustrating than working your way to a treasure chest in Tanaan only to have someone swoop in from above to snatch it from you before you can get to it. When I was wrapping up the last bits of faction yesterday I had this happen three times in the course of a ten minute period.
I honestly don’t so much care about flight for my max level characters, but instead for my characters that I have yet to level further. This means that I can pretty much chain quest my way to 100 by doing ONLY the objectives, and while this means I will be skipping a bunch of content… it is also content I have seen several times. The biggest boon to me is that it will make collecting treasures so much easier, especially the ones that involve a jumping puzzle. The negative is… that I will no longer be cycling through my collection of ground mounts, but in the grand scheme I think I will live. I realize this is months late, but it is still exciting to me to be able to return to the skies. While Draenor Pathfinder was kind of a pain in the ass…. I got lucky and managed to get several medallions from the current Christmas event that helped me leapfrog 1000 faction at a time. The problem is…. now that I am done with this achievement I am not really sure what to do with myself. I could either start pushing the rest of my alliance characters from 90ish to 100…. or I could return to working on my Orc Warlock to hopefully have a second 100 to play with Horde side. In any case… I topped a big goal off of my list and am pretty happy.
Last Gen Destiny
Over the week I have had a friend of mine talking about picking up Destiny now that he realized you could get it for the Xbox 360. I myself have considered picking it up on that console for awhile, especially since I feel bad that my 360 doesn’t see much love. I had been trying to use PSTV to play PS4 downstairs where we have the exercise bike set up, and the lag is just enough that it makes Destiny largely unplayable for me. The answer on all of the forums seems to be to hard wire your PSTV into your network…. but I don’t have the ability to have Ethernet downstairs, and I question how well powerline adapters would work in my house. Which moves me to potentially relocating my Xbox 360 to downstairs and playing some Destiny on it. I ended up picking it up and I have to say… I am pretty impressed. The game for the most part “feels” the same… just at a much lower resolution. To some extent playing on the 360 feels like you are squinting while playing it on the PS4. Everything is just slightly lower resolution, which would make sense considering that Destiny runs at 1080p 30fps on the PlayStation 4 and it runs 720p 30fps on the Xbox 360. The difference is noticeable when you are standing still but for the most part in the heat of the battle I don’t really notice it that much.
The only negative of playing on the Xbox 360 however is that I am starting completely over. I’ve read that apparently you can log your characters in on either Xbox 360 or Xbox One… and the same goes for PS4 and PS3. So if I ever get a Xbox One at some point all of the effort I have done on the 360 will port over. Interestingly enough though that means that I guess I could have picked up a copy for the PS3 and played my existing PS4 characters on it. That said… I have heard some really bad issues with Destiny on the PS3. Everything I had read about the 360 made it sound like it was just a downgraded resolution… but I’ve heard the PS3 version is only running at a strange 624p and also has some framerate dip issues. Mostly I am still amazed at just how well it runs on last generation hardware, and while I won’t have that constant desire to take screenshots because the game is so damned pretty…. it will give me something interesting to do while riding the exercise bike. I have a woefully small number of people on my XBox Live account so feel free to add BelghastStern, and especially if you play Destiny on the 360 please let me know!
First off let me start this post by wishing all of you my readers a Happy New Year. During the course of this past year nearly 70,000 of you have visited my blog, and I am still scratching my head as to why. Whatever I am doing, I guess I will keep doing that in the next year. I do have some cool ideas for things to keep me moving forward, but I don’t really want to go into those right now…. mostly because it will involve some programming on my part to make it function. The thing I have learned over the years of blogging and this coming year will make seven… is that I am really really bad at columns. I will start a feature and then after a few weeks to months it peters out. The MMOs Worth Playing feature was one of my favorite so far, but it was also one of the more time consuming. That said in the coming year I would really like to bring it back, and maybe change its focus to be a little big more manageable…. sort of a MMO of the Month Club type thing. Each week during the MWP thing I was trying to log into that game, play it a bit to remember the things I liked about it… take fresh screenshots and get up a post every single Friday. As we got into the pre-Holiday crunch time it failed miserably. Maybe an MMO of the Month will work better because it gives me more time…. though honestly if the AggroChat Game Club is any evidence I will probably just end up waiting until the week before we record the show before attempting to play the game.
This morning the idea is to do my Awards for the year, since we have officially wrapped up a year now. These are not exactly your normal awards and more like the back of a high school year book… most likely to succeed etc. Though from what I understand…. there are a lot of schools who are no longer doing that for sake of potentially damaging students self esteem. More than anything I want to thank all of you for joining me on this continued journey. The last few months of the year were pretty rough on this side of the equation, but you all kept with me and kept supporting me, and for that I am immensely appreciative. Without further rambling… here is the inaugural edition of “Bel’s Game Awards”.
Biggest Surprise
Hatoful Boyfriend – Feel the Birblove!
I absolutely did not expect to like this game, and in truth I probably never would have played it were not for the fact that my good friend Grace chose this as her aggrochat game of the month. I expected it to be largely played on a goof, and even went to the extreme of recording my first game play session because I expected it would be a maddening experience for me. The end result however was something I did not expect, I really enjoyed it. I laughed more while playing this game than I have laughed in a long time while playing any game…. maybe since initially playing Sam and Max Hit the Road. What is even more shocking is that I continued on after the initial play through and ended up getting six or seven different endings by the time we had recorded the AggroChat show. There has been a whole side discussion since about whether or not Hatoful Boyfriend is actually representative of Otome and Visual Novels in general…. or if it just lampoons the genre. I think more than anything it opened my eyes to the fact that this sort of “non-action” game can be extremely fun, and would make me at least try some other games. So kinda like WoW is an ice breaker for MMOs… this might be that sort of Icebreaker for Otome.
Biggest Disappointment
Citizens of Earth
I remember when I first saw this game… it seemed like this amazing callback to the Super Nintendo era of RPGs where you had such oddball genre bending hits like Mario RPG and Earthbound. The problem is that in application… the game ended up as this soulless hull that simply was not fun to play. This was our very first AggroChat game club game… and none of us really liked it. This was the game that essentially we all unanimously voted that we wanted to play… and was also the game that caused us to change gears and start letting individual members pick a game for us to play, rather than trying to all decided together what the next game we would play might be. The game was frustrating from a technical level, but the level of grind needed to get very far just made the experience simply not enjoyable. The idea of being able to recruit hundreds of potential party members was amazing… until you realized that not a single one of them was interesting at all. The part that ruined it for most people was the fact that the main character, the mayor was so completely unlikable. I think it was Kodra that said that the game would have been salvageable if you could simply leave him at home and go off adventuring without him. The stereotypes were caricatures were humorous for the first fifteen minutes, and then quickly became painful to keep playing.
Most Improved
Destiny – The Taken King
What can I say about Destiny the Taken King that I have not already said. I had no real hopes for this expansion because for the most part I had abandoned all hope for Destiny before the time the first expansion patch landed. Year one was a grindy mess whose light leveling system left me scratching my head and simply not caring anymore about trying to progress. I believe I managed to get to Light 26 before hitting a wall of resource gathering, that I simply lacked the desire to keep pushing through. In year one engrams in general felt few and far between, and you were constantly having to judge whether or not an item provided enough light to make it worth swapping it in, even if in other ways the item might be superior. Year two fixed a lot of this in the same way that the Diablo 3 2.0 patch just magically fixed that game, or at least made it FEEL better. That is the thing with me and games, the moment to moment game play has to feel good and also feel like I am getting something for my time spent. While I could say that technically there is way more grind in Year 2, it feels like you are at least getting something for your time…. even if it is just weapon and armor parts. I would rather see things drop… and all of those things be crap rather than never seeing a drop… and when you finally do it decodes into a lower level than the face value of the engram. The biggest change however is the fact that the Taken King has a story… and it is actually a cool one. Through both the quest narrative and the item descriptions that can be found on the website for each of the items you pick up… the game has started to tell this epic tale of both the Traveller and the Darkness, and how the two have battled through countless races and star systems since time began. For me, I patched up my game and tried the year 2 experience long before picking up the expansion…. and I highly suggest anyone who has not given it another shot do the same.
Game I Still Can’t Get Into
Dragon Age: Inquisition
I love the Dragon Age franchise…. or at least I did. I’ve been a fan since Dragon Age: Origins… and I have beaten at least six different endings of that game. Which as a person who rarely if ever finishes video games… that should tell you something. I even managed to play through Dragon Age 2 a few different times, and largely enjoyed my experience. However when confronted with Dragon Age: Inquisition it feels like this insurmountable wall. Firstly I think the game just looks ugly out of the gate with its overuse of object shine and its strange playdough hair. The other big problem I have is that generally speaking I play roleplaying games on the sofa, where it is nice and comfy… and none of the laptops that I own are capable of playing this game with decent settings, or at least good enough settings to make it look not like shit. Recently I have picked it up for the Playstation 4 over the recent sales and it is my hope to maybe try playing it on the vita. The first statement anyone ever seems to make to me when I talk about my problems with the game… is that I need to leave the hinterlands. I promise I have left the Hinterlands… but the main storyline is just boring to me. It is nothing as awesome as Dragon Age Origins was…. and I think that’s because I just don’t like the Inquisition. I could get 100% behind the Grey Wardens… I believed in their cause and was ready to go into battle for them. I could give a flying fuck about being the Herald of Andraste. I hate this green shit that comes out of my hand… and I hate the feeling that I am constantly fiddling with the magic of the world… and my key goal in life seems to be to close rifts full of annoying demons. I like some of the characters that I interact with, but some of my favorite characters so far are characters you can’t take with you on missions like Scout Harding. My party of choice would be Cassandra, Sera, and Harding…. but instead I tend to go with Cassandra, Sera and Dorian. I wish I knew why this game is just so not enjoyable for me…. but I want to play it… I really do.
Lived Up to the Hype
Fallout 4
The game this year that I was the most hyped about has to be Fallout 4, and that hype cycle started from the moment it was officially announced at E3. This game did so many things right, and really it was starting with the way it was announced. They held off to show any information on the game until it was already pretty damned polished, and then they hit it out of the part by saying that it would be in our grubby little hands only a few months later. In the meantime they gave us a pretty fun mobile game to keep us interested…. which I will talk about later. Fallout is one of those franchises that I place up on a pedestal for always giving me exactly what I wanted out of the game. A big open world with lots of little things to keep me interested, and a complete inability to ever truly “finish” the game. There is more content in Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and now Fallout 4 than I will ever have time to see. Hell in the few days ahead of the launch… I played some more Fallout New Vegas and was still finding things that I had never seen before… and I considered that game pretty damned well trodden. As far as Fallout 4… everything about the game makes me happy… apart from maybe the main storyline. The thing is… I don’t play Fallout games for the story… I play them to go off and inhabit the wasteland and weave my own storyline around me as I go. I thought the voiced protagonist would annoy me… but for the most part I have been able to ignore it. I really like some of the companions this time as well…. namely Piper and Nick. I wish so much that I could adventure together with Piper, Nick and Dogmeat at the same time because I love them all. The biggest moment for me though was when I realized that in this game through the settlement system I could finally make the world a better place. I have a dozen or so different settlements at this point, and I have spent time building on each of them. I feel like I am making things work…. and improving live as I go. As far as the Storyline… I find parts of it frustrating namely that I did not see a good option to broker peace between the three main factions. I would have loved a “Can’t We All Just Get Along” ending option… and maybe it is there but I just have not found it.
Hype That Didn’t Last
Final Fantasy XIV – Heavensward
If I had to pick a game of the year based on sheer amount of time I played it during this year…. the award would go to Final Fantasy XIV. It has been my constant companion… that is until the last quarter of the year when I started to lose interest. I can’t say I am disappointed in the game, because the content leading up to Heavensward… and the launch content was really amazing. The problem I have had is like after the launch of A Realm Reborn there just doesn’t seem to be that much to do to keep me engaged. I guess in truth the game has always been this way… because I remember us running into the same wall a few months after the launch of 2.0, that ended up leading us to un-subscribe shortly after. Coming back when we did July of 2014 meant we had roughly a year worth of content waiting for us to progress through. This content kept us busy up until the point of the Heavensward launch, with us not actually defeating Bahamut until we did it unsynchronized. With Heavensward we lack that backlog of fun older content to work through, and our casual gameplay style just does not really fit with the Final Fantasy XIV bleeding edge. So we managed to down Bismarck Extreme, Alexander normal, and made some pretty good progress on Ravana Extreme before we petered out and started to lose interest. What is making it extra hard is the fact that there are only two max level dungeons at a time this go around. Previous expansion each content patch came with three new dungeons…. and having to run experts by only alternating between the same two dungeons gets old really really fast. I am sure at some time I will get the bug and go back to playing this as my primary game…. but for now I am just basically only playing the new story and holiday content as it arrives and the rest of the time…. simply not logging in.
Shocked I am Playing
World of Warcraft – Warlords of Draenor
At the beginning of the year, I had quite a bit of fun raiding in World of Warcraft, but as Blackrock Foundry drug on…. and the launch of Heavensward loomed I simply lacked the care to keep playing like I have done so many times. In June I quit playing as the chart at the end of this post shows and focused solely upon Final Fantasy XIV, and I think maybe it is this single minded focus that caused me to burn out of that game so quickly. Blizzcon is a primal force of nature that no one can avoid… and I have to say it got me started down this nostalgia trip that ended with me playing the free version of the game on my sub 20 horde characters on The Scryers server. This ultimately ended up with me resubbing to the game and I have to say I am really enjoying myself. I am playing the game in a much more casual fashion than I am used to, and while I am raiding every single week…. I am doing so with a group that only raids on Sunday nights, and during a time slot when I am normally downstairs watching television anyways. I know there is technically no new content, but what can I say… I am having fun. Playing Horde has breathed new life into the game because it is allowing me to not only play with friends I never really got the chance to play with… but also see the world from a slightly different perspective. No clue how long this will hold out but I think so long as I am playing it and OTHER games at the same time… it might just hold for awhile. I think the key for me not getting burnt out is to allow myself the freedom to play whatever I feel like playing in a given moment and not really forcing myself to keep playing something that feels stale.
Made Me Almost Care About Mobile
Fallout Shelter
As I said above, one of the things that Bethesda did right with the launch of Fallout 4, is that they gave us a fun app to play with in the meantime. Fallout Shelter is essentially Sim Tower or the later Tiny Tower mobile game…. set in a Fallout Vault. This was actually a lot of fun for a few weeks and gave me a reason to play games on my phone. The problem is I eventually got bored with it the same way I seem to get bored with all mobile apps. There were a lot of times I thought that I would keep playing it, were it for the ability to play on my desktop while doing something else. But for a brief period of time I found myself caring about a mobile game, and that deserves some recognition. My lifestyle just doesn’t really support mobile gaming, in that if I am going somewhere… I tend to be the one driving. Then when I am at work… I should be you know… working and not playing games. When I am out shopping… most games simple require too much to get into them and do a few moves before you need to move on to the next area. Then when I am home…. I would far rather be using my laptop, gaming desktop, or one of several different consoles than spending time on a mobile device. The one thing that might change this is the fact that I have started spending some time on my new Kindle Fire before going to sleep. Right now that time is mostly occupied with reading comic books… but I could see eventually playing a game like Fallout Shelter while trying to fall soundly asleep.
Game I Wish I Enjoyed More
Rift – Nightmare Tides
If you were to write out every single feature that I would want in an MMO on paper… you would pretty much get the feature set of Rift. That said for whatever reason I have struggled to get into this game since the launch of the first expansion. I will come back and play for a bit but find it far too easy to walk away from. I love Trion, and I love the awesome people that work there. I love some of the awesome folks engaged in that community like Kiwi. All of this said… I just struggle to get into the game itself. I think it is several problems, namely that I just don’t have a large friendly and active community to be part of. I mean I have the House Stalwart guild but it has been dead since the last resurgence several years ago that lead me to go found it. For a long time my hope was Machiavelli’s Cat community, but during Storm Legion the Rift contingency pretty much died, and it lead us to merge into Alea Iacta Est…. who then also seemed to die out. During this awkward period I tried a few other guilds, and never found a home… eventually creating House Stalwart on Faeblight. The big problem that Rift has that WoW does not… is the fact that there is no cross account id system that you can use for communicating with friends regardless of what character they happen to be playing. However with the recent “Glyph ID” that is now showing up in the launcher… I am wondering if they are crafting that infrastructure. I feel like I simply have not put in the necessary legwork to find a new home, because it seems like so much effort. That combined with the fact that finding a workable spec itself is a challenge, has left me in this phase of logging in… playing for a bit and then fading out again. I want to love this game, but it has been a struggle.
Most Emotional Experience
The Beginner’s Guide
This is a strange one for me… because I’ve technically never played this game. The game itself is more of an experience… a visual novel of sorts… than a true game. Sure there are gameplay elements and mechanics… but those remind me of the video game equivalent of one of those pop up books that has levers and such that allow you to move the characters or animate a specific story element. I watched a let’s play video on this game, and in that I pretty much experienced all of it. The end result evoked some of the strangest emotions in me.. and actually lead me to cry at a few points. I think any creative type can understand the emotions that you go through in the experience, and I know for myself…. who tends to suffer from a fairly unhealthy amount of imposter syndrome… it hit incredibly close to home. I am not sure if it was a positive experience, and for all I know given the timing… it might have been the start of my recent funk. The rollercoaster I went through… was not exactly healthy. That said I feel like I have to give the game credit, because it made me feel things… like deeply feel things. Very few video games can do that, and ultimately I ended up purchasing the game as a thank you for the experience…. even though I doubt I will ever actually install it or play it.
Game of the Year
The only thing I can really give you… is a hearty shrug. I don’t know what my game of the year would be. If you judged it on sheer excitement and the eventual execution… it would probably be Fallout 4. If you judged it based on the amount of time I spent playing it through the course of the year, then it would be Final Fantasy XIV. If you based it on the sheer shock that someone got me to play the game in the first place… then Hatoful Boyfriend. Basically every game on my list deserves its recognition, and for the most part that recognition is positive with the exception of Citizens of Earth. I played a lot of games this year… and I hope to play even more next year. Game of the Year is honestly a silly concept… and just like I can’t really give you a firm answer for “Favorite Movie” or “Favorite Song” I could never tell you my absolute favorite Video Game. My mood plays such of a huge role in what I want to play at a given moment…. and if I want mindless destruction right now Destiny is giving me everything that I could ever want. But as soon as my mood changes… so does my preference in games… and I often times fall back on sheer comfort gaming like whatever MMO I happen to be into. So yeah… all of the games on this list… I mentioned because they were important to me, so they are all my Games of the Year.
There are a lot of folks that have goals going into the holiday season, for me… these tend to involve some gaming feat that would normally take a silly amount of time to do. One Christmas break I played through Mass Effect 3, and then started over from scratch and played from 1 to 3 again trying to control the outcome. The Christmas break that SWTOR was released I leveled as part of a duo from level 1 to 50. Other years my mission has been to level a character from start to finish in World of Warcraft, and I made a decent dent in that with pushing the druid from 1 to 40 so I could use that Yeti mount. This year one of the things on my list has been to finish leveling my Warlock who before this week was sitting at level 30 from the last time I got the urge to level. I am not exactly sure why but I have wanted to have a matched set of level capped characters in Destiny for awhile now. I think largely it is because when I am farming exotics, I hate the concept of items going to waste… and I pretty regularly got exotics for Warlocks in spite of not having one. So sitting in my bank I had 3 exotic helms and 1 exotic chest that were warlock only, as well as a few legendary warlock only items as well.
Throughout the course of yesterday afternoon, while the ice was falling outside… I was sitting upstairs in the warmth of my office plugging away at my warlock. Originally I started doing the House of Wolves content, since I tend to like it better than the Dark Below. However I quickly noticed that I was leveling way faster while simply working my way through the back log of bounties I had accumulated. As a result I spent most of my afternoon meticulously narrowing down the number of bounties I had until finally I was a sliver away from 40. I hopped down to Mars and completed a few missions and dinged. After sifting through my bank and spending a few legendary marks, I managed to push my overall light level up to 270 which is not too shabby for a fresh 40. The only negative is… some of my exotics are really specific to sub class and the only one I have made ANY movement in thusfar is Voidwalker. I really like jumping up into the air and throwing down three bombs at people… but at some point I need to push up sunsinger because for group activity that seems to be the best option. Self resurrection is slightly overpowered, but I figure it is something you save in reserve for when it looks like your group is going to wipe. However it should do well to feed Tlaloc whenever I get one.
Matched Set
One of Each
It feels nice to have a matched set, and the funniest thing is…. every single one of my characters is an Exo. Mostly I had issues with not liking the other races character creation options. The humans were out because they lacked a beard…. because seriously… I cannot ever bring myself to play a human that doesn’t have a decent beard. The Awoken were out because well… space elves…. and I have a pretty deep hatred of most things elven. I am fine if other people want to play them… but they are very much not my thing. The best elves ever… were both from the Elder Scrolls setting… because Cannibal Wood Elves and Nasty Vile Dark Elves… are the only ones I can embrace fully. That left me with one race left to play… and since Destiny ultimately reminds me of playing Phantasy Star Online… and Exo is about as close as I can get to my Cast it was the clear winner. The awesome thing is though that each of my classes has a very fitting look and feel for their class, even though they are all technically just big robots.
I’ve not dwelled on it too much, but I really think that Phantasy Star Online being my first MMO… has greatly shaped how I feel about Destiny. The games have a very similar feel, with a lobby system of sorts being the tower… which equates pretty similar to the tower like area you ran around in PSO. Then you go out on missions that involve you going to planets and often times retracing the same areas over and over with slightly different features and creatures dependent upon your mission. I played the hell out of that game, up until the point when I got hooked on Everquest. The funny thing about it is, that as melee heavy as I was in other games… in PSO I always played a Cast Ranger. So the fact that I really enjoy Destiny doesn’t seem that shocking. It feels very much like the spiritual successor, minus the anime skin. At some point I really want to get into the raid in Destiny, but similarly to WoW…. I mostly just want to do it for the gear. Downing new content is cool and all, but the force that always drives me forward in these types of games… is the acquisition of new and cool things. When you take loot out of the equation, like in Final Fantasy XIV it is a serious hit to my enjoyment. Most of my dungeon running in FFXIV was in an attempt to complete cosmetic sets, and ultimately was still gear driven… just gear as an appearance not necessarily as function.
Next Mission
At this point I really need to buckle down and finish Fallout 4 main storyline, because this coming weekend we need to record the review show. I am not sure what exactly has happened but I have simply not been playing Fallout much over the last few weeks. I think we can blame most of it, on my re-entry into World of Warcraft and my desire to play “catch up”. Then this week has been a bit of a resurgence in Destiny, this combined with the only machine I have that plays Fallout 4 well enough is my upstairs computer. Over the course of our movie and television marathons I have largely been downstairs on the sofa in my comfy blanket cocoon. This has meant that Fallout sadly has been abandoned for the moment. I tried last night to play it some over steam in home streaming, and once I sorted out the many technically difficulties, I finally got it up and running. The only problem there was that the video stream would artifact out anytime I encountered much action, making it questionable if it is really worth playing it on my desktop… or if I would simply be better playing it on my laptop with greatly reduced graphical fidelity. My laptop will run it after all, but with a somewhat potato quality. In any case… I need to pick up where I left off and make some forward movement.
