ps4 Archives - Page 3 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The King Fell

March 9, 2016 by Belghast

The Ship Boss

Since the launch of Destiny I have had a desire to do the raid content… because that is the sort of thing I would do in any of the MMOs. Unfortunately Destiny never really gained the sort of traction that I would have liked among my circle of friends. Initially Tam and Ash and Kodra all played… but petered out pretty quickly. With the launch of The Taken King there was a bit of a resurgence, but similarly did not last terribly long. Another friend that would have probably happily joined in raid time fun… plays on a completely different console. I had gotten to the point where I kept considering trying to brute force a raid to happen by coaxing various friends who I know that play the game casually into joining me for madness. Then out of the blue my good friend Squirrel almost strong arms me into joining the raid with his clan Axioma, which in truth I jumped at the opportunity. Last night was that raid and I have to say I am hooked. Firstly the group of folks I went in with are amazing, and super chill about newbie failures. I cannot fathom how the first people to do this raid figured out some of the crap that you need to do. I swear it took me a solid thirty minutes to get through the ship encounter, where you have to jump from one ship at the right time as another one is fading from underneath you. All the while Wet was super supportive and coaxing me through the process, and while I felt horrible to taking so long to grasp the jumps… it was kinda awesome that they were willing to let me keep attempting it.

The entire night I was admittedly largely clueless and doing everything I could to listen to the directions and execute them to the best of my ability. When playing with a new group of folks, there is always the strong desire to “not fail miserably”. That said I still managed to cause us to wipe a few times, and regardless of the situation everyone was really relaxed and just kept plugging forward. I have to say this has done more than anything to validate my decision to follow Squirrel and jump clans, because it seems like this really is an amazing group of folks. I am just floored that I have gone from being a pre-raid super casual, to having defeated Oryx in a single night. I fully expected the rookie night raid thing to be a much harder slog, but I am guessing we had more than enough ringers to make the entire process feel more manageable. I would happily sign up for this every week, and while the loot is a huge draw… I really enjoyed the process of doing the fights and want to see them keep going more smoothly. My favorite of the fights was probably Golgoroth just because there is something special about taking down a jump sized Ogre. We managed to do the “challenge” version of Oryx… which suddenly makes me wonder just what the challenge versions of the other bosses are. I somewhat doubt that I will be able to attend the hard mode content, but I have to say normal mode was a freaking blast.

Shining Light

I think the thing that I appreciate the most about the King’s Fall encounter is the way that even though I was a first timer… I was still forced to do “real” mechanics. Sure the fact that everyone else was adept at the fights gave me significant more wiggle room, but I still had to do a job in the encounters. Being “carried” is not nearly the thing that it is in other games. For example when I got my Moose in World of Warcraft… my friends in the Praetorian Guard straight up carried me to victory. You could have completely removed my warm body from the equation and none of the fights would have gone any differently. Last night it felt like I had a purpose and I had a role to play, and when I failed to complete my assigned task… we wiped or at the very list struggled for a bit. I think this is largely because of the small raid size of only having six players. The bigger the raid the more padding, and just like in a ten player raid in WoW everyone has to be on point to succeed at a fight. We apparently took roughly three hours to clear the entire raid, but I have to say that the time flew by because all of it was fresh and new and exciting. I am sure the more you do this the less that will be the case, but for right now I am completely enamored with these encounters.

Scroll of Eimin-Tin – 310 Artifact

War Numen’s Mark – 307 Mark

Anguish of Drystan – 310 Auto

Smite of Merain – 310 Pulse

More amazing than pretty much anything however is the fact that I am finally off high center in this game and now have breached the 300 light barrier. You have to understand that I have been struggling bit by bit to get over the 300 light barrier for roughly six months in this game. Now admittedly that is not six months of constant play, but at very least I am spending a little bit of time on my titan every single week. Honestly after having played this game for as long and as often as I have… I am not sure there really is a viable way to hit 300 light apart from the raid. Above is a gallery of the items that I ended up snagging. The only thing not shown is a 300 ghost shell, which I have subsequently passed on to my hunter since I had a better option already on my Titan. The highlight of the evening however is the two weapon drops from Oryx. I guess because we did the challenge mode we were guaranteed a weapon, and I just happened to roll well and get one from the other chest also. Having both the raid Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle would have honestly been the two weapons I would have chose had I been able to snag any of the ones available. Those tend to be my two favorite weapon types in Destiny, and while I have heard that the Auto rifle is less than amazing…. I want to give it a shot for myself. Basically over the next week I need to spend some time leveling all the new stuff that I managed to pick up. It was one hell of a night, and I greatly thank the Axioma Clan folks for taking me with them.

Snagging Playstation Plus Games

February 24, 2016 by Belghast

Playstation Network Trick

This is a trick that my good friend Ashgar showed me some time ago, and I have talked a bit on the blog… but given several comments from my twitter feed I thought it was probably time to create a dedicated blog post about it. One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is the way that it synergizes between all of the available Sony platforms. For the longest time I had only a Playstation 3, but had even intent of some day picking up both a Vita and a PS4. At one point I think I was lamenting having to go upstairs and log in my PS3 because I had forgotten to grab that months free games. It was then that Ash shared with me that you could in fact log in through the Playstation Network website and not only grab games for the systems you owned but also for everything that was currently available. What was great about this is that for several months ahead of picking up my Vita and PS4 I was able to start stockpiling a library of games to play on it, so when I finally purchased them I had more than enough content to keep me interested.

Having done this now for a couple of years… I have to say the Sony Network site is less than easy to navigate. Since their site is somewhat resistant to deep linking, I sorted out the best path to get to where I needed to go in a matter of clicks. As a way of demonstrating the path, I threw together a quick image. Once logged into the website, from the site header click the “Games” tab in the menu bar. On the next screen that loads click “Playstation Plus” which is confusing because there is also a Playstation Plus Specials option that doesn’t really lead where you want to go. Finally on the next page click “Free Games” which will then get you to the area of that months games. Now something I have noticed is that it sometimes takes a few days for the PS+ titles of the month to show up in this section. From here it is simply a matter of adding all of the games to your cart and checking out. The games will all have a $0 price on them, but you still have to formally check out with them to get them added to your account. If you encounter games saying that you are “not eligible” generally speaking that means the game supports cross buy and you only need to have one copy of the game for it to work on all platforms. The store however will be showing a separate copy of the game for each platform it is available on. Go ahead and check out with what is available, and if you refresh the page all of the games should then show up as “Purchased” like the below screenshot.

Game With Gold As Well

The other thing I have realized is that this sort of trick works with Games with Gold from Microsoft as well. Their system of releases is a little bit more fiddly as they seem to like to stagger them throughout the month, and when the next batch is released you generally lose access to the previous batch. I have however been successfully adding Xbox One games to my account, without actually owning an Xbox One. I figure at some point I will pick one up, and it will be nice to have a huge batch of games to play on it when I do. The quirk with Games With Gold is that you have to check out with them individually, and often it still shows a price tag associated with the game… until you get to the final step of the checkout process. Hopefully this post helps some folks out, because it is nice knowing that you can quickly snag your months worth of games without booting up the individual consoles.

PS4 Remote Play

February 23, 2016 by Belghast

Strange Days

ASUS-ROG-GL551JW-DS74 Yesterday was an extremely strange day, because an event happened that was largely unexpected. As I have talked about over the last several months, my laptop is definitely seeing its age. At the time I got it, it was an amazing power house of gaming with dual GT 650m video cards… that could pretty much run whatever I happened to throw at it. The problem is the laptop is from 2012, and in that time a lot of stuff has changed and we have gone through three generations of video cards. So long as games were largely based on the PS3/Xbox 360 architecture everything was peachy, but as games dropped support for that generation and started to focus on the PS4/Xbox One it began to struggle. The first game I can remember that it flat out would not run in a way that I could stand to play it… was Dragon Age: Inquisition which is shockingly taxing on a video card… especially one of this age. Then came Fallout 4… and a long string of games that I had to run at 720p with greatly stripped down resolution options to get them to run at all. So since before Christmas I had been watching the local Craigslist to see if there were any options out on the market that could be snatched up on the cheap. I have a mixed past when it comes to Craigslist, because I have been able to get some insane deals like a Playstation 4 in early 2014 for only $200. I have also gotten insane run around that seemed to last for weeks over a couple of laptops that the other party simply flaked out on.

Still I was not in dire straights and part of me was wanting to wait to see what the next generation of Nvidia cards looked like before purchasing a brand new laptop… which seemed to be the direction I was heading towards. Then over the weekend I actually saw something good on Craigslist, which surprised me in the midst of all of the over priced machines… and laptops that predate my current one. Someone was selling a Asus Republic of Gamers laptop with an Intel Core i7-4720HQ processor, 16 GB of Ram, a Nvidia Geforce GTX 960m video card, with 1TB data drive and a 128GB SSD. At first I apparently texted the wrong phone number, as I missed a zero in a sequence of four zeroes in a row. However after texting the right address the guy responded pretty quickly. I asked the standard questions… like does it have any issues, why are you getting rid of it, etc… and then started making offers. Miraculously I apparently started off the bargaining in the right place, because I was able to talk him down to $600 which is a significant deal for that laptop. So last night I spent the ever so fun game of starting to install everything I “need” to be happy with a laptop, but I have to say anytime I upgrade like this there is a little bit of sadness too. I develop a personal relationship with my computers… and I guess part of me feels a little bad about kicking one to the curb to spend time with a newer model. I know that is a strange sequence of thought… but I can’t help but feel a little sad that I am moving on.

Remote Play

One of the great promises of the Playstation 4 was the ability to remotely play the system from a Vita, Android device, or the Playstation TV set top box. For the most part this works… but with certain constraints. The Vita appears to do an amazing job of remote play, given its limited real estate and the slightly wonky control scheme. However the Playstation TV set top box has been nothing but a disappointment. There are threads all over the place talking about how to somehow get it to perform well, but most of these involve having a hard Ethernet connection back to the same router that the Playstation 4 resides connected to. The problem here is… the entire idea of having it is to be able to extend the reach of your PS4 to another television. Basically for a long time I was looking for a way to play my PS4 somewhere other than sitting up in my office, where I have it for the purpose of recording gameplay footage. Awhile back I read about an unofficial side project that extended Remote Play to the PC, but never actually got around to checking it out. The software is currently in active alpha development, but from what I was reading online it seemed like it actually worked well. The author charges $10 for access to the alpha client… which is the only thing that had kept me from playing with it already. So last night I took the plunge hoping that I could sit there and play PS4 as my laptop downloaded and installed various bits of software.

RemotePlay 2016-02-22 21-43-03-25 — Screenshot taken with Fraps while Streaming from PS4

Firstly I have to say… this thing is phenomenal. There are a few hoops that you have to jump through like registering your PC with your Playstation 4 as a remote play device. Additionally in order to get the native DualShock 4 to work I had to track down LibUSB which honestly took longer than any other part. Once installed my DualShock 4 installed on my system and was recognized by the Remote Play application. Unlike the native Remote Play options… this thing connects insanely fast to your PS4 and even the wake on lan functionality seems to work great. The real test however is if I could manage to play Destiny on my PC without being frustrated by the control input lag. Sure enough I managed to complete several duties and even hopped into some crucible where I managed to rack of some decent kill streaks… all running remote over my wireless network. Every now and then there is a slight bit of artifacting… and occasionally there might be an input hiccup… but in the grand scheme of things it works insanely well. There are some constraints… you are limited to a maximum of 720p running at 60 fps. For the most part I ran the default of 720p at 30 fps and the experience was not necessarily perfect but good enough for me not to care about any imperfections.

RemotePlay 2016-02-22 22-17-20-64 — Screenshot taken with Fraps while Streaming from PS4

Where the really awesome bit comes in is the fact that the software author currently is working on mouse and keyboard controls, and for a little bit I actually tried playing Destiny with mouse and keyboard. There is some work that still needs to be done… and the mouse just doesn’t quite move fast enough yet to make game play truly viable… however since this software is actively being developed on I have a feeling that at some point soon… or with some configuration tweaking I will be able to sit on the sofa and play Destiny without the Dualshock 4. Part of me wants to throw money at this guy to get him to add more features… because seriously this thing is working amazing. Folks have already chimed in with “But Bel, Aren’t they adding official support?”. This is true, but I have a feeling that Sony isn’t going to add in all of the features that this software is already starting to support, like the ability to pretty much play with ANY usb controller and not just the Dualshock 4. I have a feeling that without any doubt Sony is not going to support Keyboard and Mouse emulation either. In any case… it is $10 well spent even if you just want to play around with it. Over the course of the night I played Destiny, Rayman Legends, and Farcry 4 all without issues. Also of note… ALL of this was while I was downloading a game from steam, a game from origin, and copying files across my network… and STILL the remote play session refused to lag.

Division PC Impressions

February 20, 2016 by Belghast

The Hard Data

This weekend is another beta test of The Division, and from the sounds of it… this is a much larger pool of testers than the weekend of Pax South. That Sunday and Monday after Pax South I managed to play quite a bit of Division on the PS4, so this time around I decided ahead of time that I would be trying it out on the PC just to get the broad feel of how the game performs on multiple platforms. When it comes to PC gaming… a lot of your experience rides upon your hardware. For the purpose of this test I decided to try playing it on both my gaming desktop upstairs, and my older gaming laptop. I knew pretty much that the laptop would not perform well at all, but I was still curious to see if the game could reach a playable state on it. So as a result I thought it was probably best to start by listing the important stats of my two gaming systems… so you can use that hopefully as a judge of how the game will perform on your own systems. Since this is also an online game… I opted to take a quick speed test this morning just to use that for reference as well.

Gaming Desktop

AMD FX-6300 3.5 ghz 6 cores
16 GB Ram
MSI GTX 960 4G Gaming Edition Video

Gaming Laptop

Intel i7-3630QM 2.4 ghz 8 cores
16 GB Ram
2X Nvidia Geforce GT 650M in SLI Video

Internet Speed

The Gaming Desktop

TheDivision 2016-02-19 18-02-25-22 — Gaming Desktop – 1080P Medium Resolution

When I first booted up this game, I have to say I had an inordinate amount of difficulty getting it to run. The problem is the fact that you cannot get to the video and graphics quality settings until you wade through the character creation step. This is unfortunate, since as an MMO gamer primarily… the character creation process is super important to me. Initially the game launched in such a way that I thought it was trying to split the image between my two monitors. I did the Alt+Enter trick to drop it to windowed mode, and then Alt+Enter again to attempt to fix the resolution. However this time I had no mouse input, and could not really touch anything on the screen. After exiting the game and reloading I was finally able to get in and through the character creation process, which is locked down and pretty minimal at the moment. However if you hit randomize enough times you can get a character that you can live with at least for the purpose of this test. Upon entering the video settings…. I realized that for some godawful reason the game was trying to by default run in 4K. I simply do not have a machine capable for 4K gaming, and I think it was just freaking the hell out on my machine and monitors. After dialing back the game to 1080p I started getting a fairly reliable 50-60 fps with dips into the high 40s as you can see in the first screenshot of this post. At least on paper that seems like a really playable framerate, and I give them credit for making the game look gorgeous even on the Medium settings I was running.

TheDivision 2016-02-19 19-06-47-55 — Gaming Desktop – 1080P Medium Resolution

The problem being that the game was not really playable even though I was getting roughly 60 fps. It suffered horribly from some bad hitching anytime I moved into a new area, or often times in the middle of combat. I can’t really call it rubber-banding, because there was no time rollback component but it felt quite a bit like rubber banding in MMOs where you hit this hard wall of lag… and things lock up before the world unfreezes and catches up. This is not too horrible when you are simply running around the city and you enter what I can only assume is a new “zone”, but this is deadly when it comes to combat and encountering mobs that are causing your screen to freeze. Now my friend Jabberant said that he played all last test on the PC and did not experience any of this… so it makes me wonder if this is simply a case of network congestion or some sort of bottle-necking happening on the server farm. In any case it does not bode well for the enjoy-ability and stability of this game at launch. Another friend suggested that I turn off VSync and this to some extent lessened the severity of the freezes…. but they were still very much there anytime I moved into a new area, or encountered hostiles on screen.

The Gaming Laptop

TheDivision 2016-02-20 07-18-58-75 — Gaming Laptop – 720P Low Resolution

Now just a bit of a foreword… I did not expect this game to be playable on my laptop. My laptop is a Lenovo y500 and at this point that model range is over three years old. At the time it was hot shit, featuring one of the only laptops I knew with available SLI. Instead of an optical drive, it features a second hot swappable video card that fits in the multi-bay, and as a result I can still run a lot of games that I should not theoretically be able to run on a GT 650M video card. I have had decent luck by ratcheting games down to 720p instead of the native 1080p resolution, and I can play things like Dragon Age Inquisition that way… that otherwise choke on this machine. As a result I thought this would be a good test of just how well this game might run on an aging system. Firstly I was not shocked that initially I was getting 10-15 fps at 1080p but upon dropping the graphical settings to low and the resolution to 720p I was able to achieve fairly reliable 25-40 fps even in combat. The problem being that at 6:30 am on a Saturday morning… the servers should be under as little load as they will ever be during this weekend test…. and I was still seeing significant stalling and freezing anytime I moved into a new area of town… or entered combat. So this seems to be a general problem with the game, and not necessarily limited to my desktop upstairs. All of which tells me… the PC client needs some serious tuning before it is ready for prime time. Given that “prime time” in this case is Seventeen days away on March 8th… this is a little worrisome.

TheDivision 2016-02-20 07-23-58-54 — Gaming Laptop – 720P Low Resolution

All of this said… the game was shockingly playable on this old hardware. It felt pretty much like playing Destiny on an XBox 360. Sure the world looks like a blurry mess, but the core gameplay itself was pretty solid… apart from the whole freezing thing. I could in theory see myself playing this on the laptop without much issue, and even games like Warframe cause me to make resolution concessions to be able to run them downstairs from the comfort of my couch. I also have to say that as far as controlling the game… I am MUCH better at playing it with a mouse and keyboard, largely because even after all the time spent with Destiny… I am MUCH more accurate with a mouse than I will probably ever be with a controller. So given that Laptop graphics cards generally run an entire generation behind as far as performance goes… that would mean my laptop is the equivalent of an SLI GTX 550 setup…. so a 660/670/680 range video card in a desktop should be able to give equivalent performance. Basically meaning that if you have an old machine, it won’t look pretty but the game should at least still be playable.

PC versus PS4

TheDivision 2016-02-19 18-34-54-70 — Gaming Desktop – 1080p Medium Resolution

There are positives and negatives about both systems. You can read my original thoughts about last beta test, where I talk more about the game-play than the nuts and bolts. A lot of those statements still apply for either version. Largely where I stand at the moment is… the concept of being able to play from my laptop is really nice… but even then I was consistently plagued by problems. The Division on PC will be a viable game at some point, but my fear is it will be months after release and a couple of patches later, which is honestly what I have come to expect from the MMO gaming launch cycle. These sort of games are rarely if ever 100% on the PC at day one, and I fear that The Division is going to be another case of that. The Playstation client however just worked flawlessly. I didn’t need to get in and fiddle with resolutions or slowly and painstakingly ratchet things down until they reached a level of performance I was happy with. Instead I just booted up the client and played the damn game. As someone who has always favored PC as the platform of choice… I have to say it sounds really damned odd to hear myself saying that. Sure there are problems with PSN and such, and I fully expect it to be flaky a bit around launch day to. However once you get into the game it just works, and works well. Sure there are issues with some muddy textures on the PS4, but the game runs without hitching in combat or movement or anything of the sort. So right now I am still very much up in the air about purchasing this game, however if I do… I will more than likely be picking it up on the Playstation 4. The ability to simply turn it on and play without having to worry about framerates and resolutions… is extremely appealing. Additionally there is the problem of this being a heavily PVP game… and at least on a console I know all of us players are on even footing. With the PC… this is absolutely going to be a game where your system will control how well you can play. On low settings…. aiming on encounters is really difficult because the further away from you the mob is… the more it just sort of blends into the background. Running on high resolution and sharp textures is going to give an advantage to anyone who can afford the system to run it. So largely for my impressions… I am a bit disappointed in The Division as PC gaming experience…. but I know that I can always fall back on the PS4 and still be happy as a clam.