AggroChat #379 – Rocket Horse Jump

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we have a blend of new topics and bumped topics starting with discussion of recent plays of Chicory, and how the musical soundtrack is phenomenal.  Ash talks a bit about how maybe there are games with too much complexity…  more specifically Xenoblade 2.  From there Kodra talks about his first major VR game experience with Psychonauts Rhombus of Ruin.  We contemplate what the heck a Disco Elysium TV Show might look like.  Tam talks about his experiences with the latest Total Warhammer game.  Finally we finish the show with a long discussion about Elden Ring and how maybe most of the game reviews are a little biased.

Topics Discussed

  • Chicory is Great
  • Xenoblade 2
  • Psychonauts Rhombus of Ruin
  • Disco Elysium TV Show
  • Total Warhammer III
  • Elden Ring
    • Problems with Game Reviews

A Night of Second Choices

I’ve talked about this before, but some weeks back I moved my two main consoles… the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 downstairs. The theory being when I finish working from home for the day, I need a shift in my surroundings which is why I have been spending so much more time downstairs. Now I get this is how almost everyone plays console games already, but the primary reason why this was never the case is because for me… I never felt like I could monopolize the television. Yesterday was the first real negative ramification of my decision, and reminded me of why I kept them in my office up until this point.

My wife has been a follower of Grey’s Anatomy since the show first went on the air in 2005, and is religious enough of a viewer that she used to have post show calls with friends to talk about the episode. So if I am downstairs on a Thursday, then the television is going to be tuned to ABC for a block of watching the Seattle Fire Department show and then Grey’s Anatomy immediately following it. All I really wanted to do last night was pick up where I left off the previous evening with Horizon Forbidden West, but alas for sake of marital bliss… I had to be in the same room as the very loud and obnoxious musical score of a show that loves to kill off its doctors. Granted this is completely fair play given that I have subjected her to the Walking Dead for a similar amount of time.

Since yesterday was Elden Ring day and it is apparently the new hotness… I figured maybe this was a sign for me to dip my toes into it. I played about an hour last night and I am not sure if it is really a game for me or not yet. I’ve never really attached to a Dark Souls game, and so far Elden Ring is no exception. There was also something weird going on performance wise. I am playing on PC, and I had more than a few moments of the game freezing on me. If this happens at the wrong moment… like on a boss or mini boss… it pretty much spells your doom. I might wait a bit for a patch before diving in further because apparently I am not the only one with more than enough system to handle the game experiencing similar freezing.

Instead I spent my night returning to Dying Light 2, which I am still enjoying greatly. One of the things that I do not love about the game however is that you can’t just pick a single faction. You are forced in the story to keep dealing with both. I do not love the Peacekeepers at all, and I very much do not like Renegades. However there is no real way to flip certain territories to your faction of choice. There will always been certain territories that are claimed by one faction or another. I would prefer to paint the entire map yellow, but that does not appear to be in the cards. There are certain territories that are neutral by default, and those you can flip in a specific direction. This is not stopping me from handing every power plant over to the survivors however. I have a feeling that I am just about to be forced into a situation of doing something awful… in order to save my own skin. We will see how it plays out in the end though.

Consoles and Screenshots

There have been a few things that have changed in the way I approach games this year. The first is that instead of being the guy who never “finishes” games, I appear to be on this path of being laser focused on getting that win and moving on to the next game. I have no clue what clicked in my brain that has put me in this mode but I am riding it for as long as it lasts. Generally speaking I have been easily distracted by whatever happens to be going on in the MMO Zeitgeist. Maybe it was the abject failure of New World, a game I deeply cared about… or maybe it was my grind of all of my classes to level 80 in FFXIV… but whatever the case I seem to have been shaken out of my MMO focused mindset and spending a lot more time playing single player narrative games.

Just since Christmas I have finished the following:

  • Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade – PC
  • Witcher 3 (third playthrough) – PC
  • God of War – PC
  • Guardians of the Galaxy – PC
  • Control – PC
  • Alan Wake Remastered – PC
  • Quantum Break – PC
  • Wolfenstein II: New Colossus – PC

The other thing that has changed significantly is that I have altered my approach to console gaming. I have never had my consoles hooked up in the living room on our main television. This is just a thing that has never really happened and they have always been upstairs in my office on my main gaming display. I get that I am basically doing the opposite thing that the majority of players around the world do, but it fit my access patterns for years. However with the pandemic I switched to working from home, and my “office” upstairs has now become my workplace, and at the end of the day I need a change of scenery which means moving downstairs and either remoting back into my computer from the couch over parsec or playing one of my two next gen consoles. With this shift in gameplay has brought back the challenge it is of getting screenshots off my consoles in a reasonable manner. What I actually want… is the ability to type in a UNC path like \\playstation5\screenshots and be able to download things directly. However that is very unlikely to happen so instead we have a number of hoops to jump through.

Microsoft honestly is the clear winner here because they give me a way to download screenshots directly to my PC. Granted it is not through the current Xbox app and is instead a feature that only seems to exist in the outdated “Xbox Console Companion” app, which might be sunset at any moment for all I know. However for the time being I have able to go to Captures and then choose “On Xbox Live” and click on a screenshot and hit download. A few hoops but it gives me quick access to full quality screenshots on this machine that I actually write my blog from. Then I can do the various things that I do every day to reduce the file size and prepare them for being posted. I still would prefer a network share, but this is probably the closest I am ever going to get to that.

For Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation I employ my screenshots twitter account that I set up way back when Rift was a new thing and had added twitter integration. You can tell this because I never changed the Avatar from the Defiant faction symbol. Anyways in both systems I am allowed to attach up to four screenshots to a single tweet, and while it takes a bit… I can offload a number of screenshots rather quickly. Thanks to the miracle of PlayStation remote play, I can even connect to my PS5 and do this in the morning and grab only the screenshots I am going to actually use. Then I have to click through the tweets and save the images off… process them… and I am up and running albeit again through a number of hoops to get there.

Yesterday my good friend Nimgimli tipped me off to a function finally arriving in the United States PlayStation App. For awhile now there has been a function that has been beta tested in Canada and Australia where you can directly upload screenshots from your console to the PlayStation mobile app. From there they will stay under the Captures tab for 14 days allowing you access to them from your phone. This morning when I connected into my PS5 to grab screenshots I noticed that over night I had received this update and now had the ability to enable auto-uploads.

Sure enough on my phone I also have an equivalent captures tab, and I am guessing when I take a screenshot it will now be piped over to my phone. Nothing I had taken prior to this happening has shown up yet, so I might need to spend some time fiddling with this to get everything working. I do know that I had to change my primary console in the app, because when I first set this up on my phone I did not have my PS5. The challenge here however is that this still does not do what I really want. This will in theory give me better access to screenshots from my phone. However it would still make me jump through a bunch of hoops to get them over to my PC. In theory I would either need to hook my phone up to USB and transfer them that way, or wait for them to synchronize over to google photos… and once again download them from another website.

I get that I am very likely an edge case here… but I will never understand why video game consoles make it so cumbersome to get screenshots from the console in bulk. I think what frustrates me the most about the entire experience is that a protocol exists for this purpose already. DLNA or Digital Living Network Alliance protocol exists to provide an interoperability layer between disparate media platforms. I can already consume content ON my PS5 via DLNA being served up by my Plex Server on network, but similarly I have no clue why I can’t access media hosted on the PS5 by the same protocol by other devices on the same network. This friends is why walled gardens suck, because you can get most of the way to things working like you want them to work… but not all t he way.

If I can get the mobile app working as expected I will give it a shot, but I am still uncertain if it actually does anything to improve my workflow. Huge kudos to Nimgimli for pointing it out and that will at least give me a shot to test it.

Curse of Too Many Games

Morning Friends! I am going to give you fair warning that the next little bit is likely going to lead to some fairly boring morning posts. I am very much in a head down mode working my way through two very large open world games… both of which I am trying to be extremely spoiler sensitive. Example I took this screenshot and then realized that the quest dialog might be a bit spoilery and used the mosaic tool to blur it. I spent most of last night playing Horizon Zero Dawn and I’ve started moving the main story forward again. I’ve not gotten anywhere near finished with the first part of the game, but there are certain objectives I have to be in the right mood in order to enjoy. For example Cauldrons and exploring ruins are a very specific mindset, and if I want to just kill things with my bow I am going to shy away from both.

Last night was very much a night for murder as I entered the desert and had my very first experiences with the Tenakth tribe. To be honest I expected this region to be way more hostile than I have found it to be. It is not at all that different from the desert band on the other side of Meridian in the first game. There are way more dangerous dinobots roaming around but in general I know the basics of hunting them and can successfully take them down. The flyers though are always going to be the bane of my existence and ultimately I need to become more proficient with a sling in order to help drop them. I have a bad habit of never wanting to use anything other than the Hunter bow. I go through most of the game without ever swapping weapons unless I am completely desperate.

However not being a controller native player anymore… I need to rest my hands from time to time and return to my significantly more familiar mouse and keyboard gameplay. When this occurs right now my game if choice is Dying Light 2. One of the rough things about February is just how packed it has been with interesting games. In another year any one of these games might have been my sole focus for much of the month. Over the course of this month we have had:

  • Dying Light 2 – 2/8
  • Lost Ark – 2/11
  • Cyberpunk 2077 Next Gen 1.5 Patch – 2/15
  • Horizon Forbidden West – 2/18
  • Destiny 2: The Witch Queen – 2/22
  • Elden Ring – 2/25
  • Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons – 2/28

Now Lost Ark I threw on the list largely because it is eating up a lot of time of folks in the internet zeitgeist. For whatever reason it didn’t really click with me. Elden Ring seems to be the game that the internet is waiting for… and I am deeply interested in it but uncertain it would be a day one play. However the rest of that list are all games that are firmly placed in my wheelhouse and that I want to play… just not sure when I will get around to playing them. Destiny 2 is full of FOMO, but I am going to have to learn to play it on my schedule rather than let it dictate a schedule for me in order to reach a happy place with it. Guild Wars 2… me and this game have struggled for years and I am still trying to figure out how to play it and enjoy it but I am very interested in Cantha.

My prime non-Horizon game right now is Dying Light 2, and I am really enjoying it. It is ultimately my fear that this game is going to get missed in the mix. Essentially if you enjoyed Fallout 4, you are going to enjoy Dying Light 2. The games feel very similar in your interactions with the world and other people in it… but instead of irradiated monsters and questionable nuclear powered tech you have zombies and parkour. The world is chunked up in different zones and I have crossed the river finally into the central loop/downtown area. It also means I finally have access to a bow and the glider…. which is way the hell harder to control than the breath of the wild style glider from Horizon Forbidden West. I might need to change the keybinds because for now the process of popping it open and then stabilizing it feels cumbersome.

What has surprised me the most about this game is just how much I have enjoyed the side stories. I enjoyed Dying Light 1 quite a bit, and the main story while enjoyable was nothing really to write home about. This time around the world seems way more vibrant and while a lot of what you are doing is fetch quests, the story woven around them makes them feel like so much more. For example this is Maya and she had some bandits steal a music box from her… which is the only thing she had left from her mother. There is no way I was not going to go out into the world and retrieve it for her, even though it was quite an ordeal to actually make that happen.

In a perfect world Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West would have been spaced out far enough apart to feel like I had all the time in the world to enjoy both. Also in a perfect world Forbidden West would have launched on the PC so I didn’t need to take controller breaks. We however have what we have and are cursed with an overabundance of excellent new games. As I said for the next bit you are probably going to hear me talking about Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West as I move my way through both games. I fully expect that both are going to be upwards of hundred hour games for me to explore.