February 2016 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Unexpected Change

February 22, 2016 by Belghast

Strange Transition

I entered this weekend very much favoring the Playstation 4 version of The Division, because quite simply “it just worked”. Friday and Saturday both I had all manner of problems with the PC version of the game, but it seems like most of those issues were server side. Sometime during the day on Saturday they either ramped up new servers, or did sometime to improve the processing… because when booted up the game Sunday morning, everything seemed to magically “just work”. It is funny just how much network and loading lag can destroy your game experience, because a lot of the problems I had associated with the game client itself… simply went away. Before I thought the console interface felt more smooth, but in truth the PC one works just as well once you are no longer fighting with input processing delays. Additionally I was shocked and amazed at just how well I managed to get this working on my elder laptop. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t nearly as pretty as it looks on my upstairs desktop…. but it works, and enough for me to get in and run missions or explore the world while watching some television. Last night I even managed to do more than that, as I took down several bosses that I apparently forgot to pick up from the Hudson river camp. I had no problem whittling down significantly higher level mobs, and it feels like the longer I play this game… the more I get used to the third person tactical style.

The other big takeaway I have is how much I am now seeming to not only enjoy the PC client… but lean towards it. One of the big reasons for me is Teamspeak and to a lesser extent Discord. Both of which are simple voice solutions that sound so much better than Playstation party chat. Also it allows me to hang out with people who are not necessarily playing the same game I happen to be playing. Since I am part of a very social gaming community, this was a huge problem I had when it came to Destiny, because the entire time I was playing that game I felt walled off from my friends. Another problem I am finding starting to disappear was the whole lack of “space guns” issue I talked about. This game seems to have a really wide variety of weapon options, that cover more than just the AR/AK realm of assault rifles. I’ve picked up no less than four different flavors of shogtun, each of which felt completely different in the way it handled. I also managed to find what seems to be my “Ideal” weapon which is the Enfield L86 LSW rifle that you can see me firing in the above image. It has pretty great single round accuracy and also fires some really tight bursts that while they travel up… seem to do so in a more predictable manner. I guess this isn’t super shocking because in World War II games back in the day I used to love firing the Enfield MK1.

Remaining Challenge

Now the challenge that remains is where exactly to pre-order the game from. Everyone seems to be offering pretty much the exact same stuff for digital copies of the game… with Gamestop being the only retail difference offering the Hazmat Suit seemingly in addition to the National Guard outfit that comes with the gold version. For years I was absolutely opposed to darkening the door of a Gamestop, however at Pax South I met someone that made me start to re-evaluate that line of thinking. Any company smart enough to make @JetPackHattie a manager… and give her free reign to create awesome events for her store seems like a place that cannot be all bad. I also went int the other day when I was tracking down a Hori Fight Commander 4 controller, and no one tried to up sell me on anything…. which was always the problem I had with going in the first place. Problem being at this point… I am not sure if I can pre-order in enough time to guarantee that I get the special bonus stuff. I also hate physical copies of games, but it seems like GameStop now has a download only option for UbiSoft games at least. The problem being… part of me kinda wants this game tracking through Steam even though I still have to launch a horrible horrible secondary UPlay client. So I begin to ask myself…. will I ever actually wear the Hazmat suit? The answer is probably not… whereas I can absolutely see myself wearing the National Guard uniform… or at least parts of it.

In any case I will need to decide something since the game launches in roughly two weeks. Of note… just for the sake of anyone wondering how this game will look on their own aging hardware. Every screenshot I posted this morning is pulled from my laptop which is essentially running 720p and the lowest possible graphical settings. The game still looks really decent, or at least better than a lot of the previous generation of shooters. As far as frames per second… at the high end I could hit 50 and at the low end I was hitting around 35… both of which I consider very playable especially given that I was playing the game on a three year old laptop. Focusing in on targets that are a significant distance away is not the easiest thing in the world. However with the Enfield I was able to headshot enemies that were on a rooftop from the safety of my hidey hole behind a planter box. Sure I was targeting a blurry mess, but it was easy enough to determine where the “head” was in said blurry mess. Essentially at least until the official PS4 Remote Play app releases…. the PC version seems to give me the most options given that I can play upstairs on my desktop, where my PS4 is sitting… or I can play downstairs on my laptop… and in both cases I can play with or without a controller. The PC version also makes it significantly easier to take screenshots given that with the PS4 I have to constantly be swapping a thumb drive back and forth to copy the files off. So yeah… over the course of the weekend I shifted allegiance and am now leaning heavily towards picking it up the PC.

Cat Hangers and Raptors

February 21, 2016 by Belghast

Returning to Life

I am getting a really late start today, because I had to edit an extra long podcast this morning… then from that point on we have been doing adult type activities. We walked to lunch at the local Pho place, and then went grocery shopping. Finally I am now settling in to write my blog post. Anyone who has kept up with my blog over the last month will realize that PAX South kicked my ass in so many different ways. Firstly I was in significantly worse shape this year than I was last year. In 2015 I had been walking every single day… and in 2016 I had pretty much fallen out of that habit. So physically the exertion was real of walking 25 miles over the course of the days I was at the convention. I think I simply wore myself down to the point where it likely made it easier for me to catch something at the convention, because starting that Sunday on the drive home I struggled with this crud quite literally until right now. I am still in the process of fully getting back my voice, and I still go into random coughing fits. That said I am feeling so damned much better than I did, and yesterday really helped that. Also if you have read my blog for a very long time… you will know that one of the pastimes that my wife and I like to partake is what I lovingly refer to as “junking”. Generally speaking this is us going to a bunch of flea markets, thrift stores, and other “junk” shops in search of something. For me personally my constant hunt is for cheap Legos… and for her… the mission varies greatly. Recently she has been on the hunt for cheap board games for her class room.

The other thing that I really enjoy about the process is that I find some really strange shit while roaming around. I tend to take photos of these and either blog about them… or simply post them to twitter throughout the day. Yesterday was no exception, and you can see in the above image gallery some of the oddities I found. The first image…. is apparently a Cat Hanger…. for when you want it to look like your cat is wearing your clothing. The second was this insanely huge raptor mask…. that I thought I really needed, but had zero clue where I would actually put it. I thought it would have been amazing to try and stuff and hang on the wall like a trophy. Next up is the Freddy Krueger “Fright Squirter” which… is a disturbingly named product and I am just going to leave it at that. I really like old school technology, and while roaming around I came across what I can only assume is a key punch of some sort? Either that or a really strange adding machine. I also happened across this insane deal on Funko Pop Vinyl figures, and I managed to exercise real restraint in that I only managed to bring four of them home. They were roughly $10 each before the special so I picked up Illidan, Tyrael, the Lone Wanderer, and the Borderlands Psycho. There were so many that I wanted to pick up, and I probably would have if they had any of the Mass Effect series or some more of the Blizzard ones. Basically it was this awesome day of running around and for once the weather cooperated, making it what seemed to be needed to greatly improve my spirits.

Teetering On the Fence

I am guessing as the day went on yesterday, the folks at Ubisoft made some significant infrastructure changes because this morning I was able to play the Division PC without any of those hiccups I was experiencing yesterday. Now unfortunately I am on the fence as to which platform I favor. There is something nice about being able to play on the PC, especially since in theory my laptop is capable of running it…. albeit extremely ugly. The big thing that concerns me about this game is that I think the Dark Zone will actually be somewhat fun to play around in, especially with a team. On the PC how nice your system is will absolutely dictate how well you perform out there, and there is just something reassuring about knowing that you are on an even playing field with all of the other players you might encounter. I had quite a bit of fun this morning, because I finally completed the cleaner mission unlocking the tech operative and restoring power to the section of the city. I also spent a good bit of time wandering off the beaten path. Last night on the AggroChat podcast I talked a bit about my lament for the lack of content density, and I guess in truth I just needed to wander around off of the main streets. While roaming the back alleys I seemed to encounter quite a few more people than I did in other areas, which also seemed to be lucrative when it came to drops and other rewards.

Essentially I need to see who all is interested in playing the game, and what their platform of preference is. This is the sort of experience that is only really going to be fun if I can get a group of people to play with. The other question is…. do I really have the time to devote to something else. This game is only sixteen days away at this point, and I have so many other things that I want to be playing. After the discussion last night about Warframe I really want to give that another chance, and there is so much left that I want to be doing over in Elder Scrolls Online. Basically I question if I have enough time to devote to this new game, even thought I think it is going to be really fun. One of the problems that Tam and I talked about last night on the podcast was the lack of “space guns” or that the game was essentially locked down to guns that actually exist today. That said it does seem like there is a huge variety in weapons available, because I have at least a dozen different weapons right now that I have picked up as drops and they all perform vastly different. In any case… I guess I need to be making up my mind soon so I can get my pre-order in and lock in those pre-release bonuses. Mostly they are cosmetic in nature…. but you know me and my love of cosmetics. Though I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised in just how many outfit drops I have found by roaming around. The game looks to be a lot of the things that Destiny promised to be… which in some way makes me sad…. because I still very much love Destiny.

Division PC Impressions

February 20, 2016 by Belghast

The Hard Data

This weekend is another beta test of The Division, and from the sounds of it… this is a much larger pool of testers than the weekend of Pax South. That Sunday and Monday after Pax South I managed to play quite a bit of Division on the PS4, so this time around I decided ahead of time that I would be trying it out on the PC just to get the broad feel of how the game performs on multiple platforms. When it comes to PC gaming… a lot of your experience rides upon your hardware. For the purpose of this test I decided to try playing it on both my gaming desktop upstairs, and my older gaming laptop. I knew pretty much that the laptop would not perform well at all, but I was still curious to see if the game could reach a playable state on it. So as a result I thought it was probably best to start by listing the important stats of my two gaming systems… so you can use that hopefully as a judge of how the game will perform on your own systems. Since this is also an online game… I opted to take a quick speed test this morning just to use that for reference as well.

Gaming Desktop

AMD FX-6300 3.5 ghz 6 cores
16 GB Ram
MSI GTX 960 4G Gaming Edition Video

Gaming Laptop

Intel i7-3630QM 2.4 ghz 8 cores
16 GB Ram
2X Nvidia Geforce GT 650M in SLI Video

Internet Speed

The Gaming Desktop

TheDivision 2016-02-19 18-02-25-22 — Gaming Desktop – 1080P Medium Resolution

When I first booted up this game, I have to say I had an inordinate amount of difficulty getting it to run. The problem is the fact that you cannot get to the video and graphics quality settings until you wade through the character creation step. This is unfortunate, since as an MMO gamer primarily… the character creation process is super important to me. Initially the game launched in such a way that I thought it was trying to split the image between my two monitors. I did the Alt+Enter trick to drop it to windowed mode, and then Alt+Enter again to attempt to fix the resolution. However this time I had no mouse input, and could not really touch anything on the screen. After exiting the game and reloading I was finally able to get in and through the character creation process, which is locked down and pretty minimal at the moment. However if you hit randomize enough times you can get a character that you can live with at least for the purpose of this test. Upon entering the video settings…. I realized that for some godawful reason the game was trying to by default run in 4K. I simply do not have a machine capable for 4K gaming, and I think it was just freaking the hell out on my machine and monitors. After dialing back the game to 1080p I started getting a fairly reliable 50-60 fps with dips into the high 40s as you can see in the first screenshot of this post. At least on paper that seems like a really playable framerate, and I give them credit for making the game look gorgeous even on the Medium settings I was running.

TheDivision 2016-02-19 19-06-47-55 — Gaming Desktop – 1080P Medium Resolution

The problem being that the game was not really playable even though I was getting roughly 60 fps. It suffered horribly from some bad hitching anytime I moved into a new area, or often times in the middle of combat. I can’t really call it rubber-banding, because there was no time rollback component but it felt quite a bit like rubber banding in MMOs where you hit this hard wall of lag… and things lock up before the world unfreezes and catches up. This is not too horrible when you are simply running around the city and you enter what I can only assume is a new “zone”, but this is deadly when it comes to combat and encountering mobs that are causing your screen to freeze. Now my friend Jabberant said that he played all last test on the PC and did not experience any of this… so it makes me wonder if this is simply a case of network congestion or some sort of bottle-necking happening on the server farm. In any case it does not bode well for the enjoy-ability and stability of this game at launch. Another friend suggested that I turn off VSync and this to some extent lessened the severity of the freezes…. but they were still very much there anytime I moved into a new area, or encountered hostiles on screen.

The Gaming Laptop

TheDivision 2016-02-20 07-18-58-75 — Gaming Laptop – 720P Low Resolution

Now just a bit of a foreword… I did not expect this game to be playable on my laptop. My laptop is a Lenovo y500 and at this point that model range is over three years old. At the time it was hot shit, featuring one of the only laptops I knew with available SLI. Instead of an optical drive, it features a second hot swappable video card that fits in the multi-bay, and as a result I can still run a lot of games that I should not theoretically be able to run on a GT 650M video card. I have had decent luck by ratcheting games down to 720p instead of the native 1080p resolution, and I can play things like Dragon Age Inquisition that way… that otherwise choke on this machine. As a result I thought this would be a good test of just how well this game might run on an aging system. Firstly I was not shocked that initially I was getting 10-15 fps at 1080p but upon dropping the graphical settings to low and the resolution to 720p I was able to achieve fairly reliable 25-40 fps even in combat. The problem being that at 6:30 am on a Saturday morning… the servers should be under as little load as they will ever be during this weekend test…. and I was still seeing significant stalling and freezing anytime I moved into a new area of town… or entered combat. So this seems to be a general problem with the game, and not necessarily limited to my desktop upstairs. All of which tells me… the PC client needs some serious tuning before it is ready for prime time. Given that “prime time” in this case is Seventeen days away on March 8th… this is a little worrisome.

TheDivision 2016-02-20 07-23-58-54 — Gaming Laptop – 720P Low Resolution

All of this said… the game was shockingly playable on this old hardware. It felt pretty much like playing Destiny on an XBox 360. Sure the world looks like a blurry mess, but the core gameplay itself was pretty solid… apart from the whole freezing thing. I could in theory see myself playing this on the laptop without much issue, and even games like Warframe cause me to make resolution concessions to be able to run them downstairs from the comfort of my couch. I also have to say that as far as controlling the game… I am MUCH better at playing it with a mouse and keyboard, largely because even after all the time spent with Destiny… I am MUCH more accurate with a mouse than I will probably ever be with a controller. So given that Laptop graphics cards generally run an entire generation behind as far as performance goes… that would mean my laptop is the equivalent of an SLI GTX 550 setup…. so a 660/670/680 range video card in a desktop should be able to give equivalent performance. Basically meaning that if you have an old machine, it won’t look pretty but the game should at least still be playable.

PC versus PS4

TheDivision 2016-02-19 18-34-54-70 — Gaming Desktop – 1080p Medium Resolution

There are positives and negatives about both systems. You can read my original thoughts about last beta test, where I talk more about the game-play than the nuts and bolts. A lot of those statements still apply for either version. Largely where I stand at the moment is… the concept of being able to play from my laptop is really nice… but even then I was consistently plagued by problems. The Division on PC will be a viable game at some point, but my fear is it will be months after release and a couple of patches later, which is honestly what I have come to expect from the MMO gaming launch cycle. These sort of games are rarely if ever 100% on the PC at day one, and I fear that The Division is going to be another case of that. The Playstation client however just worked flawlessly. I didn’t need to get in and fiddle with resolutions or slowly and painstakingly ratchet things down until they reached a level of performance I was happy with. Instead I just booted up the client and played the damn game. As someone who has always favored PC as the platform of choice… I have to say it sounds really damned odd to hear myself saying that. Sure there are problems with PSN and such, and I fully expect it to be flaky a bit around launch day to. However once you get into the game it just works, and works well. Sure there are issues with some muddy textures on the PS4, but the game runs without hitching in combat or movement or anything of the sort. So right now I am still very much up in the air about purchasing this game, however if I do… I will more than likely be picking it up on the Playstation 4. The ability to simply turn it on and play without having to worry about framerates and resolutions… is extremely appealing. Additionally there is the problem of this being a heavily PVP game… and at least on a console I know all of us players are on even footing. With the PC… this is absolutely going to be a game where your system will control how well you can play. On low settings…. aiming on encounters is really difficult because the further away from you the mob is… the more it just sort of blends into the background. Running on high resolution and sharp textures is going to give an advantage to anyone who can afford the system to run it. So largely for my impressions… I am a bit disappointed in The Division as PC gaming experience…. but I know that I can always fall back on the PS4 and still be happy as a clam.

Raiding and Judgment

February 19, 2016 by Belghast

Raiding Modes

I have a strange topic inside me, that I am going to try and let out this morning. It has been growing there for some time, but wasn’t exactly sure how it would take shape… that is until yesterday and a small conversation with some awesome folks on twitter. For years now I have seen a tendency to discount raid experience that is not in the hardest possible mode of a game. Now granted this is more of a World of Warcraft thing than any other game… because even in say Final Fantasy XIV folks unanimously agree that “Savage” anything is pure madness. Over the years I have seen so many statements to the equivalent of “but I am only raiding normal” and hell I have found myself doing the same, to underpin that my experiences might not be as intense or serious as those of others. When it starts to get under my skin however is when folks treat it in a way that individuals not raiding in the deepest end of the pool, or not raiding at all… are somehow poor players or otherwise flawed. I realize this is really strange timing considering I spent last night getting drug through Heroic Hellfire by some friends… who are genuinely awesome and very skilled players.

Where I would love to take the conversation when it comes to raiding is not towards a direction of player skill, but instead about one of personal preference and prioritization. It always feels like players expect to be either immediately and magically good at raiding… or to be forever relegated to the back burner of LFR. I would wager a bet that very few active raiders right now are in that “prodigy” territory, in that they were simply born awesome at video games… and never have to put in any work. Instead I would continue to wager that most active Mythic raiders got through through an extended sequence of learning their class and cutting their teeth on less difficult content until they developed the skill package necessary to reach their goal of raiding the highest difficulty. So when I see a server first or god forbid a world first…. I don’t immediately think “my god these are a bunch of naturally talented people”, I instead think “these are a bunch of folks that really put in a bunch of training and effort, and devoted a significant chunk of their life to completing this goal”. It becomes a matter of personal preference, and prioritization of their activities to meet those goals.

A Team Sport

The truth about raiding is that personal skill in itself doesn’t get you terribly far, especially as you escalate your way through the difficulty curve. Competing in difficult raid content, means you need to be effective as a group… not just effective as individuals. It becomes less about making sure you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing… and instead about making sure that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing and also at the same time supporting the goals of the team as a whole. Over the years I’ve personally raided at several different levels in this game… with everything from cutting edge progression, to casual Sunday afternoon romps in raid zones. In all cases… I was the same person playing behind the keyboard with the same skills and the same abilities. What changed between the various modes was the amount of focus I was forced to give the game experience, and at the same time the amount of time I had to spend outside of game doing research and planning. In my more serious forays into raiding, I would spend several hours a week pouring over logs… reading various theory-craft forums… all to see if I could squeeze a little bit more out of my game play to lower the margins on the next fight and make it that much closer to a victory.

Basically where I want to go with this is that I feel like as players we need to change how we talk about raiding. Each tier of raiding requires more commitment from the player, and quite honestly… you have to assess where your happy place is. Having experienced lots of different raiding difficulties over the years, I have come to realize that “serious” and “focused” raiding is not my thing. That does not mean I am some how defective, and that I lack the ability to do serious or focused raiding. It simply means that the risk versus reward equation of the amount of “stuff” that I have to do, and the amount of schedule prioritization that is required to make that serious commitment… is not worth the amount of “enjoyment” that I receive from it. I absolutely respect anyone who is raiding serious content, and I tip my hat to the awesome folks that drug me along last night, and I tried my best to stay focused and avoid doing bad things that would hurt the raid. Even though last night was very much a “roflstomp” occasion, since that group has long since moved on to Mythic raiding… it still required enough focus for me to simply not want to do it on a nightly basis.

The Commitment

Honestly I think the group I was raiding with last night is the perfect illustration that raiding simply takes a lot of hard work. While they have technically progressed past Heroic Hellfire Citadel, they are showing up and putting in time to help gear folks that are new to the team, knowing that the gear will be necessary to reach the performance levels needed to succeed in the later Mythic fights. It is not that they somehow magically transformed into Super Saiyans or somehow unlocked their “final raider form” between defeating Heroic Archimonde and starting Mythic. Instead they put in a lot of hard work, and time working through the content… time that they continue to put in trying to pull up the gear level of players to increase the performance. I would never want to somehow discount how important that hard work is, or how awesome the accomplishment of reaching that point as a raid is. What I do what to change is to somehow remove the judgement from the way WoW players in general talk about raid modes. It is a double edged sword, because for bad seed that is calling anyone not raiding what happens to be raiding a “Scrub” or “Trash”… there are dozens of people that well tell themselves that they are simply not “good enough” to do that content.

I would love us to reach a point where we can be okay with the choices of other players. Looking for Raid is awesome for example, because it allows you to see raid like content without putting in any effort. Normal mode is also awesome because it lets you see legitimate raid content without having to focus quite so hard on optimization, and is this great sweet spot when it comes to raiding with your friends. Heroic is also great because it ratchets up the difficulty significantly and requires both team coordination and personal focus to defeat it. Finally Mythic is that place where it requires you to take everything that you have learned and removes the margin of error to a point where you have to execute flawlessly as a team to really get through it. All of those modes have their places, and I don’t begrudge anyone for choosing to stop at a specific step on the ladder. I know personally the highest mode I would ever be willing to raid for example is Heroic, and I am perfectly comfortable with that decision. I am also perfectly comfortable with anyone deciding that the raid game simply isn’t for them… and that they would rather be crafting, or PVPing, or farming Transmog bits… because we all know the real end game is looking amazing. The best feature that World of Warcraft has going for it, is the simple fact that it has so many different things for players to be doing with their time. However it is you choose the spend your time is awesome, because ultimately it is you that needs to decide what makes you happy.

Like a Bandit

Lastly I wanted to thank once again Pugnodeum and the whole Praetorian Guard crew for letting me ride along last night. I had a blast, and made out like a bandit picking up the scraps that no one needed. These are folks who have worked hard to be able to make this content look so easy, and at the same time they are pretty chill about the whole experience or at least have been on the few runs I have now been on with them. This mornings post was not in any way a reference to my experiences last night, but instead something that had kinda been percolating for awhile in my brain… then was dislodged by some discussion on twitter yesterday. I have nothing but respect for the amount of devotion it takes to get where they are in the game, and last Saturday after getting my moose I stayed on the stream to quietly cheer them on in their Mythic Kilrogg attempts. I will continue to be excited for them as they move through the Mythic progression and am amped to know that several of my friends are there with them. As far as me last night… I made out extremely well…. which should help out our significantly more casual raid that we are in the process of pulling together. One that will once again see me return to tanking on the warrior instead of being the goofy gladiator dps thing that I have been doing up until this point.

This is all the cool shit I ended up with…