August 2017 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Farm

August 31, 2017 by Belghast

The PC demo of Destiny 2 so far is following the same basic pattern that the PS4 weekend did, including a brief two hour window for players to explore the new Farm social space. During the PS4 weekend I didn’t actually get the participate in this because it happened during a Saturday afternoon when I was out running errands with my wife. As a result I was more than amped to be able to actually see what would ultimately be our new home as Guardians. Are we even Guardians now without the light? The space is gorgeous though I have to admit I am constantly feeling like someone is just about to line up a sniper shot on me. The only times we have been able to be in the EDZ aka the European Dead Zone as player are during a handful of Crucible maps… one of which has this insane corridor down the center of the map where everyone snipes you. The farm as a whole though was a fairly dead experience given that there are no NPCs at all… nor is there even the fabled Chicken. That said I think the farm is going to work a lot better than the Tower did, as everything we need seems to be greatly compacted. I liked this about the Temple of Iron, but the only problem there was we didn’t have access to the various faction vendors. I am however super pumped that Tyra Karn is the Cryptarch we are keeping rather than Master Rahool or the charlatan Master Ives at the Reef that was constantly bugged. This is the point where the AggroChat crew gives me crap for knowing the names of the Cryptarchs.

I think more than anything I am curious to see how this space populates with stuff. I’ve heard rumor that this is going to be a lot like Meredil was in World of Warcraft, that as you roam around the world you “save” people and bring them back to the farm. If this is true then I guess it makes sense why there were no NPCs showing up… because there may simply not be a basepop for the zone. What is available may load based on your progression in the game, with some sort of an instancing tech. Either that or they may have just stripped everything out for the sake of the demo. There are folks in my clan that reported that the social space worked their CPU and GPU harder than any other area we have seen, and I can only imagine that is due to all of the models being tracked. I am not sure what the new social space limits are, but it definitely seemed like a sizable bit larger than tower. During one of the heated football matches, there were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 players actively on the farm. This is small by MMO standards but pretty decent sized for something that is functionally a shooter lobby. The other big takeaway is just how damned gorgeous everything is. There are docks leading out on the lake… and I am hoping that we maybe get a few boats to explore. The area surrounding the Farm in game supposedly has lots of signs and directions in German… so in theory that places this area in Germany? Considering all we have really seen of Earth is the area surrounding the Baikonur Cosmodrome, it is going to be awesome seeing completely new vistas.

After some time roaming around the farm, I gathered together with a few clanmates to run the strike since Tony aka DrGoob had not seen it. The clan is slowly in the process of migrating from Band to Discord… to some success. The primary reason is that the PC chat built into Destiny 2 is absolutely horrible. I mean on some level it is functional chat, but it sounds worse than any audio on a PC should. In many ways it reminds me of the way that the original implementation of voice chat sounded in World of Warcraft. Functionally it is tinny and quiet and compressed to living hell to make it take up as little bandwidth as humanly possible. The other night Grace and I attempted to use it, and ultimately fell back on other voice comms because it was just too bad to stomach. Apparently Tequila Mockingbird reached the same conclusion and finally latched onto Discord with both hands as providing a reasonable chat experience. The voice chat on PSN was always horrible… but you sort of put up with it because it was a console. It is a complete sin to use something this bad on the PC where there is Discord, Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo, Skype and a plethora of other options waiting to be used. The real interesting thing ahead is to see how the game shakes out… and where everyone ends up. Thus far pretty much every PS4 player that has access to a machine that can run this game… is heavily leaning towards the PC version. The PC running on the lowest preset… looks better than the stock PS4 running the game. Let that sink in for a moment. In truth I would say the PC running at Medium… looks better than what I have seen from the PS4 Pro captured footage. My three year old gaming laptop runs the game well enough to give my PS4 a run for its money. Now I plan on playing both platforms because I like the PS4 and I like having multiple copies of Destiny… but It is almost 100% certain that I will be playing almost exclusively on the PC for awhile when it finally launches in October.

When A Beta Isn’t

August 30, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I managed to run the Inverted Spire strike with a few friends… Grace and Ammo. For Grace it was her first time running the strike and while she was not as rabid… was also a veteran of Destiny 1. Ammo on the other hand… the closest she had ever been to Destiny was drawing my Sunbreaker themed avatar. If you know me very well… or are in that core group of people that I hang out regularly with… you have had to listen to countless hours of me retelling things that happened in Destiny. All of that apparently made her curious enough to try it out now that it was coming to the PC and available for download through the already very familiar Battle.net client. Ammo while completely new to Destiny was by no means an FPS rookie because over the last year or so she has played a significant amount of Overwatch and is way the hell better than I am at it. One of the things that I like about Destiny on the PC is how largely ubiquitous basic controls are if you have ever played a modern shooter. Sure there are all manner of extraneous “super power” keys but the core gameplay of shoot shoot reload fall into the standard control scheme we are all used to. The only real adjustment period of me was figuring out which key binds near WASD did which “power moves”. Grace took to the game rather quickly and got to play big kid at several moments as she was able to get over and rez the rookie well before I could. All in all it was a really fun experience and I am super glad that I wound up running the strike in this manner, since during the PS4 beta I largely just random queued for it.

Last nights experience got me thinking that maybe just maybe releasing through the Battle.net client was more than just a way of having to skip the infrastructure development costs of going to a brand new platform. Overwatch is a weird game because while it is at its core a competitive shooter… it is also one wrapped in so much story that it is impossible to not at least know some of it even if you are not actively playing the game. This is a game that I saw be adopted at frightening rates by gamers who were well versed in the Blizzard ecosystem but never really considered themselves fans of the first person shooter genre. As a result many have had their horizons broadened to realize that yes they could do this shooter thing and with practice get rather damned good at it. Now we have this Destiny thing coming along and poking its head into their already familiar gaming environment… so why not take a peek. I’ve already seen a lot of posts on my twitter feed talking about how individuals are enjoying the Destiny experience but only ever downloaded it because it was available for free through the Battle.net client. Cross pollination is really beautiful thing… and I have found myself in this same boat several times in the past. I am not the biggest fan of League of Legends… but I immediately tried Heroes of the Storm because I wanted to see the Blizzard take on it. I am not really a huge fan of RTS games anymore… but I occasionally play Starcraft II because it has amazing storytelling. I think the Battle.net coup for Destiny… will be bringing a whole bunch of new eyes into the franchise.

Here is where we get to the problem. The “Beta” that we are getting to experience isn’t actually Destiny. It is a bit of a hollow shell that should have been clearly labelled as a demo, because it lacks so many of the reasons why I spent so many hours playing the first game. If you look at my time played on the tracker sites… something like 77% of my time was spent doing random stuff on Patrol missions. I liked roaming around, doing events… unlocking secrets on the dreadnaught… all the while enjoying the really amazing gunplay. Where are the events like Archon’s Forge or Court of Oryx… that I could literally spend hours running over and over. Don’t get me wrong… the Inverted Spire strike is a hell of a lot of fun, and even the 4 player Crucible is starting to grow on me. The problem being however is that we really are not putting the best foot forward for a bunch of players that may or may not have ever experienced the franchise. The other problem is that we are not exactly doing a great job of giving players that bounced hard off of Destiny 1 a great reason to feel positive about coming back. Sure the Homecoming mission has more story elements in it than the entire vanilla game… but I am questioning if that is enough. I am bought in for the long haul because I have loved Destiny as a concept and an experience since the moment I got into the original Alpha of the game on the PS4. Taken King proved to me that the game was worth my devotion and I have been back and at least peripherally active ever since. I am a member of their core demographic… but had they maybe given us something other than a demo… it might be enough to gain new followers rather than just galvanize their existing player base. I hope people can see through the cracks and see the game that is ultimately going to be there behind the walled gardens. I feel like I can and since I am also rabidly gobbling up all of the news that is leaking out about the content that is waiting on the console players September 6th… I am so sold that I am planning on playing once again on two different platforms. I am just not sure that we sold Ammo on the experience other than giving her a fun night of running a space shooter dungeon.

Destiny 2 PC Beta Thoughts

August 29, 2017August 29, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was the beginning of the Destiny 2 PC beta for those of us who have already preordered the game. I am one of those weirdos that loves Destiny so much that I plan on playing it on multiple platforms. With Destiny year 2 and beyond I played it actively on both the PS4 and Xbox One… and going forward I am planning on doing the same and splitting time between PC and PS4. One of the things you need to realize is that I have some strange habits when it comes to gaming. I split my time between my gaming desktop upstairs and my gaming laptop in the living room. I’ve found the secret to marital happiness as a gamer is to be able to be flexible in my gaming habits and there are nights when I just need to be more available than cloistered in my office with my ear cans on. As a result I have two systems to worry about being able to play Destiny on. The positive is however as someone who potentially might be interested in Destiny 2, you are going to get functionally two different sets of reviews for the game… one on a system that is heftier than the recommended specifications and one that is closer to the minimums.

Gaming Desktop

Machine Specifications

Intel Core i7 5820k 3.3ghz 6 Core Processor
Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 ATX Motherboard
32 gb G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4-2400 Memory
MSI Geforce GTX 980 4GB Twin Frozr Video Card
System SSD but Game Running on Mechanical Hard Drive

For starters I spent absolutely zero time fiddling with the sliders and I just went with the defaults that it handed to me. The end result was a gorgeous 1080p 60 fps experience. I don’t have fancy monitors or anything even vaguely close to outputting a 4k or even 1440p signal so I went with it. With time I plan on ratcheting up the detail level to see what I can do, but I am hearing from folks with 1080s that they are having issues sustaining frame rate on Ultra so more or less I am pretty damned happy with the results. In truth the hardest thing I had to figure out was some third party screenshot tool that would actually record the screen. Bungie has done a bunch of stuff to disable overlays and I had to fall back on the Nvidia Experience tools to be able to capture anything. I am presently running the game in Windowed Fullscreen which is my preferred method and it just works great. The difference in quality between the PS4 and PC is noticeable even just running the game in 1080p. All of the textures just look crisper and less muddled, but that said the console experience with Destiny 2 on even a stock PS4 like mine…. looks noticeably better than the original Destiny. Last night I tried out everything but the strike, and saw zero frame drop at any point during my experiences. I have been keeping an eye on the lower left corner of the screen where I have the Nvidia framerate tools running… and the only time I saw drop was upon going into a pre-rendered cutscene. All of those are still at 30 fps, which I would assume is to be able to support all of the different configurations of the game.

Gaming Laptop

Machine Specifications

Asus ROG GL551JW
Intel Core i7 4720HQ 2.6 ghz
16 gb DDR3 Memory
Geforce GTX 960M 2GB GDDR5
Mechanical Hard Drive
3rd Quarter 2014 Release Date

While the Desktop was a picture of simplicity… literally everything about the Laptop experience was a hassle. I included the street date of the laptop just for reference and to show that I am attempting to get this running in functionally a three year old machine. I knew that 1080p was largely out of the question so I started trying to dial in specs for a 720p setup. Since my laptop has a 15 inch screen that seemed completely reasonable and generally the only reason why I run MMOs in 1080p is because of the UI element resolution. The biggest issue that I kept running into is that for some reason it felt like my mouse was dying on me. I would have these issues where I could not swing my viewpoint to the right of my model, and then other times I couldn’t scope in my weapon at all. After trying a bunch of configuration options I noticed that it was ultimately happening at the same place each time in the mission, which made me start doubting it was just the mouse. After a bunch of searching I found a thread on Bungie PC Support forum talking about this same issue. What I ultimately had to do was go find the executable for Destiny 2 and choose properties off the right click menu… then change the compatibility settings to disable Scaling on High DPI settings. Note this is called something different depending on the version of windows you are running, but in all cases it will be some Option referencing DPI.

Once this change was made my mouse suddenly started working as it should. One more round of tweaks saw me setting the display mode to Windowed Fullscreen and I was finally playing the game in pretty good shape. While its not amazing… it is playable at a generally 30 fps… however as you can see in the upper right hand corner of the above screenshot… I am dipping down into the high 20s occasionally. The biggest challenge is that Destiny requires a ton of VRAM. When I was playing on the Medium preset I was consuming every last bit of VRAM available and borrowing from the system memory. I really appreciate Bungie including a gauge under the video settings to show just how much you are consuming and how much is left available. The high preset functionally takes a little bit over 2 gb, and I would assume each time you ratchet it up those requirements go up again. The other thing you can take away from the fact I was running it on a laptop… is that effectively everything on a laptop performs like it is a generation older than the equivalent Desktop component. So my 4th gen i7 in truth performs about like a 3rd gen i5… and my gtx 960m… effectively performs the same as a gtx 760 in a desktop card. Between the two setups you should be able to extrapolate how this game should be able to run on whatever your current gaming PC setup seems to be.

Gameplay Discussion

For a complete write up about my feelings of the Destiny 2 beta… I highly suggest you check out my PS4 impressions post from July. I am not going to spend a lot of time this morning talking about general topics. Instead I am going to focus in on the tweaks that were made between the two betas. The first noticeable thing is that the recharge rate that I complain so much about on the PS4 seems to be greatly improved. During the tower courtyard fight on PS4 it felt like I was lucky getting a single super charge and a single grenade charge while fighting the three waves of red legion cabal. During the PC beta… I could easily get 3 super charges and 2 grenade charges during the same time. Grenade still lags a bit from what I would have liked it to be… but part of that might simply be that I am used to running around with the Armamentarium and as a result always have two grenade charges available, so even when I use one… there is almost always one sitting there waiting in reserve. Things just feel “better” as a result of the recharge rates being cranked up, and it feels more like the Destiny experience I am used to. My guess is that they have increased the rate of recharge you get from killing things, because the effect was a bit less noticeable in the Crucible. Previously in the PS4 beta everyone got their supers at exactly the same time… which was just a few minutes from the end of the match. During the PC beta I managed to get off two supers and was getting close to a third by the time the match ended, so in theory had I been playing better I probably would have easily gotten three supers.

The other big takeaway is that everything just feels more polished. This one isn’t easy to quantify, but everything about this build felt production ready. The other big takeaway is that once I got used to the hotkeys… the PC experience is just flawless and before long I reached a point where it was just as instinctive for me to hit F to activate my super as it is to mash my two shoulder buttons. So far I have only modified one hotkey, and that was to change ~ from toggling between weapons since I use that as my push to talk key. Instead I use the alternate key which is mouse wheel to shift between weapons. For those going into the game I thought it might be useful really quick to run down the basic hotkeys.

Movement – WASD + Mouselook
Primary Fire/Light Attack – Left Mouse
Scope/Heavy Attack – Right Mouse
Melee/Block – C
Grenade – Q
Reload – R
Jump – Space
Toggle Sprint – Shift
Toggle Crouch – Ctl
Class Ability – V
Super Move – F
Air Super Move – X
Interact With Objects – E
Kinetic Weapon – 1
Secondary Weapon – 2
Heavy Weapon – 3
Rotation Through Weapons – Mouse Wheel
Toggle Chat – T
Deploy Ghost – Tab
Return to Orbit – O
Character Loadout Screen – F1

It is a lot of hotkeys to remember, but in truth it largely matches the pattern I was used to with PC shooters already. All in all I thought the PC Beta played amazingly well and it is going to be a really hard call as to which game gets the majority of my attention. I think ultimately it is going to be determined by how many people that I know are chosing which platforms. The only other thing that really concerns me are the general limitations of Battle.net already. I feel like I am already bumping up against the maximum friend number there because of the various other Blizzard games that I play… and for the most part everyone in my Destiny clan is not already in that list. So it is going to be a bit frustrating to try and find space to add everyone new in. I am also really curious to find out how each of you felt that the PC Beta was when it goes “open beta” today.

Convenience Items

August 28, 2017 by Belghast

Generally speaking I am pretty neutral towards “cash shops” in MMORPGs. I’ve come to look at them as a sort of necessary evil in a world where the subscription model is largely broken. When monthly subscription revenue stopped being able to support MMO titles… they were forced to branch out and look in other directions to figure out a way to pay for the development of new stuff. There are times where this feels largely okay… and there are other times when it feels exploitative when more limited time cash shop only content is coming out then patch content. All in all the model gets a lot of crap from the gaming community, but there are times when the benefit gained more than makes up for the generally icky feeling inside you get by having to deal with it. In the case of a game like Guild Wars 2 where there is no “player plus plus” sort of system to entice you to go back on the monthly subscription plan to get additional access to shiny baubles… it probably feels better than a lot of options. There is a lot of stuff on the gem store… most of it of no interest to me. Generally speaking the Guild Wars 2 shop is full of a bunch of convenience items and cosmetic items. The value of both is extremely personal, but this morning I thought I would talk about a handful of items that I have picked up over the years that have made my life in game more enjoyable. Something of note… in all cases I caught the items when they were on sale and did not pay the full market value.

Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic

This is hands down the single best purchase I have ever made in Guild Wars 2. One of the biggest problems I have with the game is that it has a constant upkeep cost… namely that you have to keep running to a vendor to buy more salvage kits and as I will talk about later… harvesting tools. Now there are times when I care about what I am getting from salvaging an item… in those times I either dip into my stock of Black Lion Salvage kits that I have accumulated… or my Mystic Salvage Kits that are extremely reasonable to make. However most of the time if the item is green or lower I just want to grind it into bits to get it out of my inventory. In those situations you are largely just going to use basic salvage kits that you can pick up off the vendor cheaply. What the Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic does is save you that trip and simply charge you 3 copper per item salvaged. This is ultimately a savings over the 3.52 copper per salvage from Basic Salvage Kits… but you would ultimately need to grind down something like 3 million items before saving enough money to have it “pay for itself”. The convenience however makes it well worth the normally 800 gem price… and when it goes on sale it is significantly cheaper.

Unbreakable Gathering Tools

In a similar vein to the Salvage-o-Matic… my next favorite purchase is something lumped in the general category of unbreakable tools. I harvest everything in this game, because you never know when you might need all of those Strawberries. As a result I used to have to constantly run to vendors and buy new tools… or in my case I used to carry around a stack of them taking up inventory space just in case one broke… and I was standing beside a rich mithril node. There are lots of different individual tools that have various effects on them… and I managed to pick up my first set of unbreakable tools by slowly snagging them one by one as they went on sale. As a result I have a mismatched set of a Clockwork pick, Molten Axe and Mad Scientists Foraging tool, but the functionality of never having to worry about running out of resources makes me extremely happy. They also have a way less frilly set of tools simply titled Unbreakable Gathering Tools that gives you normal looking versions of each of the tools that simply never break. This basic set normally goes for 2400 gems but over the weekend due to the Anniversary sales was going for 1680.

Mistlock Sanctuary Passkey

One of the things that Guild Wars 2 added in is a number of cloistered areas that require some sort of access pass. All told there is the Captain’s Airship Pass, Lava Lounge, Mistlock Sanctuary, Noble’s Folly, and Royal Terrace… and with Path of Fire they are giving us another one called the Lily of the Elon. Functionally they all serve the same role of giving you instant access to a condensed area that contains every possible NPC that you would need to interact with. What makes Mistlock interesting is that it doesn’t exist in the normal world map… so instead they give you a portal merchant that will take you to any capitol city in the world… or return you to the zone you were just in. I find this functionality to be amazingly useful especially when I need to just step AFK for a bit, and the ability to return me to almost exactly where I standing before is insanely useful. Where this really comes in amazingly well is on alts that maybe don’t have access to the rest of the world yet. There is one weird glitch however… if you take an alt to Lion’s Arch before the story actually takes them there… it will play the intro video as though you had just zoned in every single time you go there. The weird bit of Mistlock Sanctuary… is that it is rarely actually for sale. When it is you can pick it up for 1000 gems… but you have to watch the store like a hawk for when it is listed next. There are limited time passes available on a regular basis… but I personally only care about something like this if it is unlimited use. This may or may not be why I have a bank full of short term convenience items that I will likely never actually use…. and wish I could put up on the market board.

Shared Inventory Slots

I don’t really have a relevant image to this one… but one of the super handy things you can pick up in the game that is super cost prohibitive is shared inventory slots. Sure your bank is shared by your entire account but starting with Heart of Thorns they started giving us the ability to add a special bag at the top of our inventory with items that are shared between all of my characters. This becomes extremely handy when you say… put your Copper-Fed Salvage-O-Matic up there… or your Mistlock Sanctuary Pass. Then every single character you log into can easily benefit from access to these items. I wish the unbreakable gathering tools could work similarly… but unfortunately for those you either need to hot swap them between characters or own multiple sets. When I say these are cost prohibitive… you get one for purchasing heart of thorns and another for purchasing path of fire… then from there they cost 700 gems per slot with price breaks if you buy 3 and 5 at a time. You can in theory have 18 total per account… but I imagine most players have significantly fewer given the cost. Right now I largely use them as a way to give my Salvage-O-Matic, Mistlock pass, and my growing stack of Teleport to Friend items to all characters. In theory if I ever managed to pull one of the unlimited use bank or market passes… they would go there as well. Combined however all of these items have lowered the amount of day to day upkeep I have to deal with when playing Guild Wars 2… and as a result have greatly increased my overall happiness with my gaming experience.