Horror Story

desktop-screenshot-2018-10-26-06-15-26-48

Last night I finished up the fragmented souls grind and picked up Horror Story, which is in fact as Squirrelpope suggested just a rebranding of The Origin Story.  However that is perfectly fine with me considering that I really loved that weapon in Year 1.  The biggest benefit of this weapon however is that it comes with baked in 600 light level…  which had a significant boost in my gearing process.  That is something I want to talk about briefly…  gearing feels much better.  Sure blues and purples by default drop at relatively low light levels like they did before.  However there are so many more opportunities to get poweful engrams, in fact it seems like there is the daily ability to get something called a prime engram to drop out in the world while doing other activities or in the crucible.  This also drops at a decent boost to your light levels allowing you to slowly ratchet that up in so many more ways than you were able to before.

desktop-screenshot-2018-10-26-06-16-22-43

In my travels last night I also managed to pick up a new copy of Go Figure, this time with Outlaw in stead of Zen Moment…  which for a Pulse Rifle immediately makes it much better given that Zen Moment really doesn’t work that well for burst fired weapons.  It still has High Caliber rounds and High Impact reserves so for all intents and purposes it is the same weapon with a single perk line swapped out.  Unfortunately this dropped from a regular legendary engram and not one of the powerful/prime versions so it dropped at my then adjusted light level of 506.

desktop-screenshot-2018-10-26-06-16-42-61

The best light level that I can currently high is 527 since I am literally just getting started on the Forsaken grind.  I’ve technically not even finished the storyline, largely because I am not entirely certain where I need to go with that.  This is one of the problems with Forsaken is that you don’t have quite the clear story path as you did with previous content.  Right now I have a milestone that says “hunt barons” but nothing really outlined on how I should go about doing that.  This probably makes the content feel more organic for your average player, but for me… I tend to avoid doing quests like the plague so when I finally buckle down and start doing them… I want a big freaking blinking arrow pointing me in the right direction so I can get them over with and go back to nonsense free play.

desktop-screenshot-2018-10-25-21-27-42-06

Another thing that I messed around with was Dragon Quest XI last night, and I have a lot of issues with this game on the PC.  The control scheme is not great…  and what I mean by that is that while sure you can navigate mostly with WASD and Left Mouse click to attack…  there are a bunch of other menus that drive on some other combination of keypresses.  The problem with that is that the game has baked in reminders to tell you to press an Xbox controller button to do this or that, but it doesn’t actually update to tell you the equivalent keyboard command.  Basically it is a poor console port, that while functionally struggles at actually doing things in a manner that PC gamers are used to.

Basically I have two options…  grab a controller which isn’t super interesting to me…  or spend a bunch of time remapping buttons.  The other big issue that I have with the game is that it has a god awfully long intro sequence that is unskippable… and the first two times I attempted to get through it something happened which caused the game to crash out meaning that I had to set through the whole mess each time I tried to get into the game proper.  The other big problem is that saving the game is super obtuse and apart from auto saves… requires you to pray at shrines to manually save.  PC players traditionally expect that you can hit Esc to bring up some sort of a menu system… however in this game it brings up a prompt telling you that you are about to exit the game and lose all of your progress.

Ultimately… my suggestion if you are interested at all in Dragon Quest XI is just to get a console version.  This is available on pretty much all of the consoles at this point, so save yourself the frustration of dealing with the poorly thought out PC port and play it on a platform it was actually intended for.