Avarice and Guns

Over the course of this week my blog has largely been devoted to E3 show coverage, or at least that thing that I call coverage where I talk about the things I personally cared about. In the background it has also been a pretty crazy week with a good deal of my time going to trying to catch up all on things E3 instead of actually playing games. This was only complicated by the fact that Tuesday night I went to the rebroadcast of RiffTrax live which is all sorts of wrong name-wise. Then on Wednesday night we met some of my in-laws for an early Father’s Day dinner. Which largely left Monday and last night free… but Monday I more or less spent the night cobbling together the footage needed for the Tuesday post.

Over the weekend I finally reached a point where I was ready to make a run at the Avarice Conquest. For the uninitiated this conquest requires you to hit a 50,000,000 gold streak which means every couple of seconds you need to be looting more gold to keep it active. There are a few ways to do this in game, but the most sure fire method requires copious amounts of farming. Since this takes so much time I absolutely went for the overkill method and gathered up a vault and a half worth of stuff… or in my case 8 rows of 7 caches equally 56 bounty caches.

Now the gotcha here is that a bounty cache retains a memory of what difficulty it was looted on and I started banking the caches when I first became able to farm Torment 13 and quickly worked my way up to 15 and 16… and had not really been paying much attention as to which difficulty I got them on. The key to doing this is to dismiss your companion and dismiss your pet… then stand beside your stash and be ever so careful to not touch anything until you are ready to go. I started by loading every bounty I could fit into my inventory and then reloaded the rest without moving at all. For sake of my own sanity I held down the Shift button while opening the Stash to make sure the game would not accept a movement input from me.

The real challenge however… was doing the cleanup. What you see above is somewhat of a lie, because each one of those items actually represents a stack. At this point I had completed a Solo Greater Rift 80 which I believe took my blood shard capacity up to 1300, and I am pretty sure I made twenty trips between Kadala and the bloodshard pile before I finally farmed those down. I probably crunched over a hundred legendaries and I have no clue at all how much I had in the way of crafting materials. Which is good because I also needed the various Kanai’s Cube related achievements as well. I am essentially in a point with Season 17 where I have knocked out a good chunk of most of the remaining steps, but need to spend some time playing clean up and actually start finishing them. I need two more conquests, and I have not even set my signs on what those are going to be yet.

The other game I have spent a bit of time in lately is Destiny 2 and I am largely working on getting my light level up enough to be able to feel like I have some semblance of choice weapon wise. Right now I am largely just using whatever trash happens to drop with a higher level because I do not have a great stockpile of infusion materials. Now the interesting part of this is that I have picked up some weapons that I have found I actually enjoy and probably never would have played with otherwise… like the submachine gun I am current wielding in my primary slot.

I still find it very hard to get into the Crucible, and whereas I played Gambit constantly it feels like the queues for standard gambit are extremely long. I am however trying to plug away at the various tasks that will give me “powerful gear”. Like I knocked out the planetary quest last night and did a heroic adventure… then plugged away a bit at the crucible related bounties. I will say it is really odd getting to the activity tracker off the map screen because I keep wanting to see it on my inventory. Quite honestly I would prefer if they put that tab in both places, because it takes a lot of retraining to stop looking for those items in my inventory. Still having an awful lot of fun in Destiny 2, but I probably should be playing Final Fantasy XIV and prepping for the impending launch of Shadowbringers.

What have you been playing on regular rotation? Drop me a comment below.

Curious Case of Stadia

Yesterday afternoon was the unofficial kickoff of E3 Season, and it started with one of the more bizarre product offerings. For some time we have known that Google was making a large push into gaming with its Stadia product that serves to offer console gaming without a console. Now if this sounds familiar… it is because we have seen this same basic idea numerous times. Just off the top of my head I remember OnLive, Gaikai, Playstation Now and Geforce Now to name a few but I am certain I left off a half dozen of these product offerings. Where they have all fallen short however is in control latency and the amount of bandwidth required to create a playable experience.

Google however thinks it understands exactly how much bandwidth is required to be able to use their product and has produced a handy chart to show what level of gaming will be available and what level of bandwidth. The challenge unfortunately is a little bit more nuanced given that the total bandwidth picture is influenced by the hardware sitting between your device and your internet service provider. I’ve gone to a lot of effort to try and make sure I have more than enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that I want to do online… and I feel like I would probably fall short of what would be required to make 4K gaming on this device stable.

I have what I feel like is better than average internet for the United States. Additionally I have as much as I possibly can connected directly to a Gigabit switch attached hanging off of my AC 5400 router with two separate 5 ghz wireless bands theoretically capable of 2167 Mbps. I’ve segregated a business network and a gaming network all in an attempt to cut down on chatter. In addition to this I have 2 other AC 5400 repeaters helping to form a mesh network around the house. I use Parsec on a nightly basis and with a wired connection 4K streaming from my machine upstairs does not really work well enough to be something I would want to do on a regular basis. Similarly with all of this, none of the 4K video streaming options really feel viable and I always end up downgrading them to 1080p. Basically what I am saying is out of personal experience… their estimates are nonsense and will not produce the sort of results that they think they will.

What Google Stadia is really selling is a vision that I have long sought out myself. The ability to play the same games from any device in the house at any time I would like. In essence this is why I use Parsec, because it allows me to extend my more expensive and capable gaming desktop experience to my less than capable and aging gaming laptop. Even then however the experience works equally well when playing over my Chromebook via the native Android Parsec app, so I can see at least in theory that the vision of Stadia is possible based on my own experiences. I just question if we are at a point bandwidth wise where this level of fidelity is really ready for prime time consumption. Especially once you consider another potential monkey wrench… I am not really the target audience for this device.

That is ultimately the piece we are going to have to factor into our decisions about Stadia is the fact that most of us reading this blog are not what I feel like is actually the market for a device like this. For me personally… I own a 4k capable gaming desktop, an aging but still viable gaming laptop, effectively every console from this current generation and every console from the last generation. I’ve spent the money on hardware and accouterments required to be able to play games at a reasonable level of fidelity and with it comes a large library of games that I already own. Stadia more or less is going to require us to buy into a completely different library of games and potentially deliver a noticeable worse experience than being connected real time to hardware. Sure there will be the bleeding edge early adopters among us that dabble with this… but ultimately I expect we will all return to our comfortable world of hardware based gaming within the week.

I feel the true market for this device is the cord cutter that has already tuned their network and devices to fit a steady diet of media streaming from various platforms. The target individual maybe was a serious gamer in their youth but as life got busy they realized there just wasn’t enough time in the day to play these rather expensive consoles that used to just gather dust in their apartment. Every now and then a game comes along that through the Zeitgeist, friends and a dose of FOMO they really wish they could play… but that proposition seems less elegant when you consider playing a single game might have at a minimum a $360 outlay of cash associated with it. If this person could simply buy the game and be able to play it with a second hand direct input controller over their business class laptop… then I think you have the perfect use case for this network. Stadia is a system built for the occasional gamer and is going to be made or broken on expanding the range of gaming behind those of us who are already sworn acolytes.

I think the real tragedy of yesterdays presentation is the fact that they spent exactly zero air time talking about Stadia Base and instead made a hard push for Stadia Pro. The founders edition is $130 and includes 3 months of the $9.99 per month subscription as well as 3 months for a friend. However if you look at these charts what you are essentially getting for your “pro” money is 4k gaming and I have already stated that I think this is a pipe dream unless you happen to have Gigabit internet. What is way more impressive is the fact that they give you 1080p 60 fps stereo gaming without a reoccurring subscription and the ability to dip your toes into all of the free to play content that is going to be on the platform like Elder Scrolls Online and the recently announced as free Destiny 2 New Light.

This is going to be the real backbone of the player base… folks that purchased a single game or want to try out one of the free to play offerings. Maybe these are folks that are already mobile gamers but crave something more immersive, or maybe they just want to occasionally relive the nostalgia of their youth that their jobs keep them from on a regular basis. In those scenarios I think this platform makes a lot of sense. I do however think that “Netflix for Games” is probably a really bad way to look at this service, and I feel like the as of yet officially announced XCloud is going to be more of that since the Xbox Game Pass already does an amazing job of serving up a ton of games for the subscription fee. Ultimately at the end of the day… what makes Stadia so confusing is that the messaging seems to be targeting so called “core gamers” when in truth that was likely never their intended audience. Once you keep that in mind… the product makes considerably more sense and may just bring a brand new audience to gaming.

Mom and Cross Play

This morning I am attempting to make a quick blog post, but after yesterday I didn’t want to skip today. My Mom is doing considerably better and seems to more or less be out of the woods. The plan to effectively “melt” the clot with super high strength anti-clotting agent seems to have worked and they believe it is largely gone. There was a marked difference between yesterday and today in both her coloration and her demeanor. You could tell she was feeling better because she was way more chatty and also complaining about little things… which weirdly is a good sign. She was largely knocked out and fairly ashen grey when I first got there Tuesday morning.

At this point they have removed whatever the equivalent of a PICC line that she had delivering the clot busting agent directly to the location of the clot. They also removed all of the stuff that was going into her neck in general so currently she just has the IV which will ultimately remain until she is released from the hospital… which in theory should happen at some point today. Thanks for all of the thoughts, wishes and prayers for the last couple of days, and I am also super thankful to the folks in the ambulance for making the determination of what was going on and getting her to a cardiac unit quickly. For being a tiny spec in rural america, my home town has a pretty phenomenal volunteer ambulance service.

I don’t have an awful lot on the gaming front, but when I got home last night I played a bit more Destiny 2 and also spent some time catching up on the last few days worth of news. One of the more interesting rumors coming out of the pre-E3 leaks is that supposedly Bungie will be announcing today during a ViDoc or something similar that they are going cross play. This is legitimately a major wish of mine come true if it actually happens. Additionally there is talk about a Switch port of the game, and while Ashgar disagrees that this can happen it will be interesting to see. For all we know a more powerful version of the Switch is going to be announced at some point soon and that Destiny might be a launch title or something like that. Regardless I am super interested in seeing how well the cross play works.

In related news I have been poking around Dauntless now that it is officially part of the Epic Games store. if you look at the above image close enough you will see that I have a little PC icon beside my name, the second player has a little Playstation icon beside theirs and the last two have Xbox icons. I noticed absolutely nothing different about that fight until I got to the final screen and saw that we were all on different platforms. So this gives me lots of hope about the whole Destiny 2 cross play thing. I hope this also means that in the near future ALL titles will do this going forward.

For now I need to run so making an extra short post. Thanks again for all the thoughts. Hopefully life can get back to normal.

Original Start is Best Start

My schedule is completely out of whack right now because of the stuff I am doing in regards to the flooding in town. We are doing this 24/7 management shifts thing, and previously I took one of those sessions on Friday from 6 am to 3pm, and hoped to keep taking that shift given that it is the closest to my normal sleep patterns. Unfortunately due to some shuffling I am now going to be captain 2pm to 11pm… which is manageable but I’ve not gotten to sleep that late since I was actively raiding. As a result this morning I slept in considerably later than normal as I am not going into the office until right before my shift. The further results of that is that you are getting a blog post later than normal, and that I may partake of a nap at some point between now and 1:30 pm when I leave the house.

I’ve truly been all over the place game wise over the last few weeks and I blame it at least in part of my fragmented schedule due to the weather. One of the things that I poked my head into again was Elder Scrolls Online, in part because the Elsweyr expansion released… and also I find that name complete hell to try and spell. ESO does this interesting thing each time it releases a new expansion, in that it replaces the new player experience with one that begins right at the newest expansion. I believe this started with the Morrowind expansion, continued with Summerset and is now doing it again with Elsweyr, which leads to the problem I am in currently.

I am probably in the minority, but I greatly prefer the original starting experience that shipped with Elder Scrolls Online… aka the three starter islands of Khenarthi’s Roost, Stros M’Kai and Bleakrock. So after piddling around with a Necromancer which so far is nowhere near as much of my jam as I would have thought it would be… I wound up grabbing a character that was still on Khenarthi’s Roost to play around with just because I wanted to experience that start all over again. The funny thing about this is… this is how a character I created as a joke is winding up to be my primary alt. Van Belsing was largely created at the insistence of a friend of mine, and was never intended to be played, but here we are with the fact that I’m now level 8 on that character and having a lot of fun re-experiencing the original starting game flow.

As far as my main goes… I am nowhere near Elsweyr either and still digging into the Vvardenfell campaign. I have a weird requirement when I am playing my main character in that I will only do content in the order in which it was released. Now I had to pace this out a bit given that both Thieves Guild and Assassin’s Guild are not exactly expansion that you can fully complete in this manner given that there is a lot of faction grinding involved. However with the mainline content I have been extremely strict in this nature. I completed all 150 levels worth of original content doing the trip from Daggerfall to Dominion to Ebonheart before touching any of the expansion content.

Now I have a stack of content waiting on me and honestly… that isn’t a bad spot to be in. So often with MMORPGs I am a content locust and can easily gobble up all of the available content leaving me with a feeling of nothing left to do. However the content in Elder Scrolls online is so dense and story driven that I can only handle doing so much of it before I need to go play something else for awhile. The end result is that ESO is a game that I can seemingly constantly return to and experience fresh story driven content that has piled up and is waiting on me. Now I tend to stay subbed pretty much permanently so I can pop in and out at will. I cannot play the game without the magical reagent storage bag, because I like looting pretty much every object that crosses my path.

This is still a really damned good game, but all of that said… I still do think I prefer the story line that came with the original game the best. That is not to knock any of the expansion content, because it has all be excellent. I just prefer the core game flow of the old world. I realized there was a lot of gnashing of teeth and it was fashionable to hate on this game when it first released… but I loved it then and still love it now. It is like a comfy sofa that I can crawl back on at any point I like and take a nap. That might not be the best tagline ever for an MMORPG experience but it seems to have found a niche in my game play schedule that I keep returning to.