Monster Hunter World Archives - Page 6 of 15

Hunts, Singletons and Dragalias

October 1, 2018 by Belghast

I was all over the place this weekend as far as gaming time spent. I would say that largely this was the weekend that I did not play World of Warcraft… but that isn’t entirely true. I logged in every day and did my Emissary quest, and then last night while watching Fear the Walking Dead season finale I was piddling around on my Draenei Paladin. Past that however I didn’t end up doing much in the game I had until now been almost exclusively playing. This weekend saw a major resurgence of Monster Hunter World, in part because they are just about to release the Wyvern Ignition blade quest to the PC crew and I want it. In fact the Fall Festival event has a bunch of the quests all lumped together at once and I plan on trying to pick them up as well. That means unfortunately I have to be able to get my way to High Rank, which also means I am going to need to play in a more focused manner than I am used to.

Weirdly enough I have found myself lately favoring the Hammer instead of the Long Sword. While I am still maintaining a collection of swords and effectively keeping both weapons up to date… I am finding that there are just some monsters that become easy to farm with the hammer. Namely Radobaan is nonsense easy with a hammer, and the stupid spin attack off of a surface is amazing in a whole lot of situations. Right now I am largely sticking to the Iron line of hammers because it allows me to craft them fairly easily… and also sets me up for a Nergi hammer at some point. I am up to the point in the quest chain where I need to hunt a Rathalos and a Diablos… which will be challenging I am sure but also doable given I have beaten both of them multiple times. Diablos should be considerably easier with a hammer than I am used to with Longsword. The other weapon that I want to craft at some point in the switch axe, which is something I played with and enjoyed at high level but never really messed with at the lower levels. If I am remembering correctly… Zorah Magdaros is immediately following the quest chain I am on and then I will be moving into High Rank territory. If I put my mind to it I should be able to wrap that up before the event starts I believe Thursday or Friday.

The other game that I have been playing a shocking amount of lately is Magic the Gathering Arena. On September 27th they launched the Open Beta and with it in theory the last of the card resets. Since then I have started tinkering with decks and have a few reasonable options…. but honestly mostly find myself playing Stompy Green/Steel Leaf Champion or my Mono Black Burn deck. The first I am still tuning but the Mono Black Burn is still performing like a champ, but since it was built before the advent of Guilds of Ravnica it could probably be greatly improved with a few cards that are now available and with splashing another color. Assassin’s Trophy is still the champion of the new expansion so far, but I am also loving a bunch of cards like the Nullhide Feerox and as far as one drops go… I love Pelt Collector that increases in potency as you start summoning bigger creatures.

They had a freebie event this weekend that allowed you to create a singleton deck and so long as you got a single win… you got an uncommon or better card. This netted me several mythics and rares, but also served to keep me engaged and grinding. Unfortunately they allowed Rat Colony decks… which by rules can have any number of copies of the card rat colony… so essentially when you get matched up with one of those you might as well concede out because there is no way your janky singleton mess can keep up with it. I also had a large number of wins under questionable terms this weekend… namely there were several times when I got an awful lot of damage out of Llanowar Elves. I am not exactly proud of this moment when I enchanted one with Blanchwood Armor to ultimately win the game. Guilds of Ravnica sealed was a heck of a lot of fun and I went 3/3 with my deck… the prime problem being that my love of black and green keep me from drafting pretty much anything else. It isn’t that I cannot see the good in other colors… its just that my brain values those colors over pretty much anything else. I am in fact Golgari at heart.

In the “Game I didn’t expect to play” category… I was somehow busy enough during the tail end of the week to completely miss Dragalia Lost becoming a thing. As such on the podcast I was introduced to the game when all of the other members of the show were talking about it… then was super slow getting the podcast out because I kept spacing out while playing it Sunday morning. It is an awful lot of fun, but I am struggling with the same problem I have with other mobile games in thinking “this would be so much better if it were not a mobile game”. I think I largely just hate touch screen interfaces, and while this game is an awful lot of fun… the clunky nature of having to drag your finger around the screen makes it feel extremely awkward. If this were on the switch I would be completely hooked, but on a phone… you still have that barrier that I don’t like playing on my phone. The other problem I am encountering is it completely shreds my battery, so I guess I need to tweak down the settings to try and come up with a flavor that looks less pretty but doesn’t decimate my charge.

Lastly we have the podcast itself, that I named Gacha of Mana since Dragalia Lost reminded me so much of Secret of Mana. You have a brash guy, a blond girl, and some sort of a sprite thing that provides a lot of the comic relief. Anyways during the show we talk about Spiderman PS4, Magic the Gathering Arena Open Beta, Celeste, Dragalia Lost… and then a conversation about how the grind in Battle for Azeroth just feels lousy. The last part is largely why I had a weekend without much Warcrafting, as I am trying to limit my exposure to maybe extend the amount of time it takes me to angrily quit. I need to spend some time tonight doing Mythics, but in truth I have reached a point where that doesn’t even matter that much to me given it will be a box of disappointment on Tuesday.

Dolly and Dot Are My Best Friends

August 14, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the launch of Battle for Azeroth the new expansion for World of Warcraft, and as I said yesterday it sort of snuck up on me. Blizzard was doing a global release for the first time in my memory meaning that while a lot of the world did in fact get the game on August 14th… the United States got it in the evening of the 13th. So it was in fact midnight CEST on the 14th for Europe but for me personally it launched at 5pm my time. I was not however sitting at the keyboard waiting for the gates to open as it were… because it was 5 before I managed to get to town from work. That then triggered the whole list of things I need to do when I first get home as well as nomming some tasty noms… finally ending up at the keyboard around 6ish.

At that point I was pleasantly surprised that I got right in with zero queue or waiting. There were reports of folks having some issues with the login server, but thankfully I had none of those issues and effectively sailed right in. I even tempted fate about 8:30 last night and decided to swap from my desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs… and even at that point I was able to log straight in without much issue. I am not sure if this is a smaller than normal launch day, or if they were just really that prepared for the launch. Whatever the case it went smoothly and collectively myself, Grace and Mor decided to get the desert zone out of the way first and spent the rest of the evening roaming around Vol’dun.

For my troubles I managed to get my amulet-of-not-artifact-power to level 2 just barely shy of level 3, collected 2 pieces of the upgradeable gear that has talent point unlocks on it, and dinged 111 with about halfway to 112. I consider it a very productive night given that I did not take any time off from work and really didn’t “grind” that hard at anything. I believe both Grace and Mor are further ahead than me, but at some point I will catch up and hopefully reach the first dungeon unlock, though in truth I didn’t notice if there was one we could queue for already or not. I am surprised at just how much story there is in this expansion… like not just text story but I seem to be drowning in really awesome cut scenes. If the rest of this expansion carries on the same way as the beginning has… it is going to maybe be one of the better expansions in World of Warcraft history even with the questionable PVP narrative.

The above video is going to be a bit of a spoiler, but if you care to watch… it features my favorite moment so far in Battle for Azeroth. Meerah the awesome Vulpera responsible for driving the caravan around Vol’dun serenades her pair of Alpacas. Dolly and Dot are the best and are probably going to be the break out hit from this expansion. It reminds me a lot of the singing Quaggan from Guild Wars 2, and is similarly memeable. Meerah herself was apparently voiced by the very amazing Deva Marie, so extra awesome bit about the quest. ~Dolly and Dot are my best friends~ ~they pull my wagon through dunes of sands~ ~they have small teeth and they love to eat…~ then sadly the song is cut off by a mean ole troll who doesn’t appreciate awesomeness.

I am hoping we get a lot more Meerah, Dolly and Dot as I go further into this zone.

Follow Up to Yesterdays Post

As a follow up to yesterdays post about Monster Hunter World PC… when I took a break to move downstairs to the laptop I decided to fire up the game there to see what sort of settings I would have to play on to get the game functional. What you are seeing is MHW on Low settings and 720p resolution and even then… I was only managing to see about 25 fps. For reference the gaming laptop I have is in the top bar of the site but also linking it here. As far as the stats go… it has:

Intel Core i7 4th Gen 4720HQ (2.60 GHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 2 GB GDDR5
16 GB Memory
1 TB HDD
128 GB SSD

The game is effectively unplayable given that I am only seeing 25 fps in town and even then it wildly fluctuates down into the teens and up into the thirties. Essentially hopefully you can make your own determinations as to how well the game is going to run on your system between the two baselines I have given you. Now the positive is… steam does allow you to return games if you end up trying it out and it simply not working at all. Personally right now I am streaming Monster Hunter World through Parsec on my gaming desktop upstairs when I am playing downstairs on the laptop. This is honestly the way I am gaming most of the time these days and is probably going to keep me from upgrading that laptop anytime soon.

Monster Hunter World PC Thoughts

August 13, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend I played a significant amount of Monster Hunter World on the PC. This morning I am going to talk a bit about my thoughts related to it and why it maybe isn’t the dumpster fire that the internet seems to think it is. First off you are not going to get much general Monster Hunter commentary since I have belabored that point at length on this blog. I love the game and think that for the most part everyone should give it a shot on whatever platform seems most comfortable for you personally. I played the hell out of it on the PS4 and only backed off a bit when I got bit by the Elder Scrolls Online bug again… which has moved recently into desperately trying to prepare for the World of Warcraft expansion. Basically don’t ever take me moving on from a game as a reason not to play it because quite honestly I am fickle as hell when it comes to game. I play a lot of different things and shift wildly between them as the mood suits me.

You can get a link to my current PC build up in the menu of this site but for those reading via RSS I will summarize the high points. The relevant information:

I technically have an SSD in this system but have long since run out of space to run games from it… so for the most part I linked the drive that the game itself is running on. For sake of reference I attempted to screenshot all of the relevant graphical settings I am using.

Essentially I set the resolution to 1080p and attempted to max everything out to see what sort of gameplay that would give me. For the most part I get 60 frames per second, with the occasional dip into the 55ish territory as you can sometimes see sub 60 numbers in the lower left hand corner of these screenshots. However it feels very smooth given that I personally cannot seem to differentiate between about 40 fps and 60 fps that well. Ultimately I wanted to throw these numbers out there however I have a 5th gen x99 setup running a still fairly beefy GTX 980 graphics card. Your mileage may vary wildly if you are using a system less capable than that, but I am not really sure how far below.

The game looks infinitely better than it did on the PS4 and had I the time this weekend I would have installed it on my laptop to see what sort of concessions I needed to make it get it running on a far lower end machine. The laptop being a 4th Gen i7 which is the generation of processor in the recommended settings, and a mobile gtx 960M… which given the rules of mobile cards means it likely performs about the same as a desktop 700 series since the desktop did not get the 800 series. Regardless it is further testing I want to do so that I could give some estimates of what the game would run like and look like on a lower end machine. The truth is I played most of the weekend on the laptop, but I did so using Parsec streaming off of my gaming machine upstairs. I still am deeply in love with that software.

The biggest takeaway for me personally is just how phenomenally good the game looks on the PC. On the baseline PS4 everything felt very muddy for lack of a better word. There were lots of moments when everything seemed like there was a thin coat of vasoline on the lens and you couldn’t quite focus on anything specific. This means that a lot of the vistas in this game were completely lost to me and might as well have been static background images. However on the PC there have been numerous points where I just stop and stare the the scenes in awe of just how cool everything looks. I have a hard drive full of screenshots already and according to steam I am only twelve hours into the game.

It is highly likely that this is an experience that the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro players have already had… but for use plebs still stuck on the lower end machines in this generation… the difference is extremely noticeable. Now all of that said… my awe of the game comes from a console player getting to see the world I already love in much higher detail. From the general standpoint of a PC gamer… the game still has some wonky stuff going on in the way that the world looks and it is the same sort of stuff you see in a lot of console ports. Textures don’t always look as crisp as you might expect and what appears to be in focus versus blurred out is all over the place. Notice in the above image who the background appears so much crisper than the character in the foreground for example, just random goofy stuff that you don’t notice in motion but do notice when the action stops.

One of the weirder revelations for me personally is that the game is completely connected into steam groups… and seems to rely on your steam friends list and the groups you are a member of in place of the clan system. This means that I already happen to have a Greysky Armada group ready to go and you can see me up in the gathering hall flying the colors of our guild… even taking into account the custom imagery we uploaded for it from FFXIV. The only problem here is… I think those of us who have lots of groups and massive friend lists at this point… are maybe bogging down the network? It seems to take forever to bring up a friends list dialog, or to browse the sessions that your friends are in. This seems to have improved over the week, but is still way more sluggish than it felt on the console.

The real problem however is that the network connectivity seems to be extremely fickle, with Match Making generally not working at all… and the browsing of existing sessions working about as well. You are going to see this window a lot with a 50382-MW1 error being throw which is essentially the “cannot connect” generic error message. Spawning your own instance however seems to work reliably well, and joining an instance a friend is in also seems to work fairly well. I’ve managed to play with my friend Wolfy at several points during the weekend, but just go into the situation expecting things to be less than reliable. I feel like the PC is a leap forward overall given that it allows you to integrate with your existing list of Steam friends… but the overall way that grouping works in Monster Hunter World is still extremely awkward. This is one thing that Dauntless has going for it, is that grouping as a whole just feels more natural.

If you want to see me fail miserably at a hunt and mash the shit out of my keyboard and mouse here is the stream from Sunday morning. The keyboard is getting more comfortable as I go but I will say it was a challenge to get used to after being fairly comfortable with the PS4 controller. For the most part I have rolled with the default keybinds, but you can in fact remap most everything. The only thing that I really have changed is that the initial set up for Longsword was Left Mouse for basic attacks, Right Mouse for thrust, and Ctrl Key for Spirit Blade… which was functional but not exactly fitting with the priority that I have those attacks. I swapped Right Mouse and Ctrl to give me something that feels more natural given that I rarely actually thrust, the only negative however is that it makes it more challenging to do the leap out of the way slash attack. My fingers are long however and for the most part I can hit any ability that I need to. Your mileage may vary given how comfortable you are reaching into odd spots on the keyboard. I do however need to sort out something other than F1 + Number to get to the quick bar items because that really doesn’t work for me right now.

All in all I am really happy with the PC port and especially if you have been waiting in the wings due to a lack of console… you should totally pick this up. From what I am hearing it is both the biggest selling Japanese Steam game of all time, and the biggest Steam launch of 2018 so far… so much of the issues that are happening currently are probably just compounded by that fact. As the crush of players coming in to hunt some monsters dwindles a bit… I think a lot of the network weirdness is going to mysteriously go away. It is 7 am CST and right now Steam Charts is showing 245,535 concurrent players… with an all-time peak of 329,333 which was also achieved apparently in the last 24 hours. Basically it is super popular right now and as a result there are going to be some growing pains. If you cannot deal with that maybe wait a month before picking it up, however the game does always default back to a single player state allowing you to get in and experience the game play regardless of the current network conditions.

If you found yourself on the fence about this title I hope this post offers some wisdom. Like I said I need to get in and actually install the game on my laptop to give it a lower end impression as well. I will try and do that over the coming days… but not likely tonight given that apparently Battle For Azeroth launches at 2pm CST? Talk about that game release sneaking up on me. I hope you have a great day and an awesome week.

Moms and Minor Gaming

May 14, 2018 by Belghast

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This weekend was largely not about gaming, as is often the case when a major holiday is occurring. In past years we have done the divide and conquer thing when it comes to Mother’s Day festivities, with me getting up super early to go to Mass with my mother and then my wife sleeping in and going to lunch with her mom. However with the amount of work that my wife has been having to do lately trying to prep her kids for the impending AP Exam… after missing two weeks of instruction time due to the walkout… she is more than a little sleep deprived. I was legitimately concerned about her making it home safely if she was on the road for long periods of time alone.

As a result we crammed everything into one day and left the house around 6 am… getting home around 6 pm. However in the middle of all of that I believe there were sufficient moms day festivities for all involved. It did however lead to a really tiring Sunday experience given that we had lots of driving perforated by various other awkward moments like my wife’s sister referring to the litter box as a “poop bed” or her inviting an aunt that neither my wife or I can stand to lunch with us. Later in the evening there was plenty of awkwardness as my wife’s brother and father got into some political diatribe that was just flat out factually incorrect and also highly racist. We made it home in one piece and still have most of our sanity intact… but I did have a rather fitful night of sleep.

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As far as gaming goes I spent some of my time Saturday working on the weekly quests in Monster Hunter World. I am down to just needing three arena challenges and I am hoping I can connect with someone before the reset happens to do some. I can technically solo them, but I really really do not like soloing them. I solo’d the Pink Rathian arena challenge with longsword and that one in particular is really annoying because you do not have the full compliment of healing items. I pulled out a victory, but it took a long time and I wound up taking three of my eight deaths in the process. I am one item away from having enough of the event only Sakura items… but am nowhere near able to craft the set because of general lack of coins.

I wish you could roulette your way into the Arena Challenges because I really am not a huge fan of playing solo in Monster Hunter World. Now that PizzaMaid is easing her way back into the game I might try and snag her for some shenanigans, because most everyone else I know that is still active gets online way later than I do. Grace unfortunately bounced off the game as did Mor and while Thalen and I share a timezone… he is always around significantly later because baby happens. If it does not look like I will have folks to do this with I will ultimately try and solo my way through it, because I know without a doubt I can do it… I just won’t really enjoy it. I also ran quite a few tempered roulettes just for the sake of fun and managed to get a couple of decent decorations from it.

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Over in Destiny 2 I am still roaming around but have made all of the movement I can essentially before the reset. I am still too low level to get into heroic strikes which is unfortunate given that I need to run several of them to move forward a quest line that I am currently on… that I am assuming is related to the sleeper simulant. The highlight of the weekend however was getting the Armamentarium again, which allows me to run around with dual grenades in both void and solar specs. Unfortunately however it does not give me THREE grenades in arc striker spec. This would have been a completely awesome item if it were able to do that… now I am wondering if it is as good as my auto-rifle reloading chest but largely running around with it for sheer nostalgia sake.

I am still largely on the fence with this expansion and am contemplating taking Squirrel up on the offer to get the raid in. I still have yet to defeat Gaul in the raid even though I have a stack of tokens from our attempts. Folks bounced faster than we had time to progress our way through it, and while I would love to resurrect a Greysky raid I somehow doubt that will ever really be a thing again. There just are not enough people active and playing, and part of me is contemplating just pushing the Greysky leadership off on my secondary PS4 account and moving my main back to Tequila Mockingbird so I at least have an active clan of folks to play with. My main PS4 account never left and has always been in TQMB… that is unless they punted me for inactivity.

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I am still enjoying the mechanical loop of Destiny 2 again… but I am also feeling somewhat listless as I don’t have a major goal apart from making my light higher. I managed to level the Hunter to 30 this weekend but have yet to really touch any of the story content. I like that Warmind seems to not be connected to having finished Curse of Osiris or versa vicea. I need to push the Warlock up via event quests so I can at least start doing the milestones on each of them each week to slowly push up my weapon light level that way.