Month: February 2016

The Division Impressions

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Bad Christmas Simulator

Black Friday Ends in Tears

I have to say I was pretty sad when I found out that The Division beta would be going on the same weekend I would be in San Antonio at Pax South.  So when I heard that they planned on extending the deadlines, I have to say I was pretty pumped.  The Division is one of those games that has looked good on paper up, but I have been really questioning as to whether or not I will like it.  Call of Duty for example, is one of those series that I enjoyed when it first came out, but as it has evolved I have become less and less interested in the continued military operator fantasy.  I think a lot of it has come from the fact that every game seems to use exactly the same guns.  I mean I get why this is the case, since these guns are real world guns… that they are just trying to replicate in a game.  So when I started thinking about The Division versus Destiny…. I have to say I lean heavily towards crazy space guns over things that can actually exist in the world I happen to live in.  However I am also a huge fan of post apocalyptic settings…. and The Division seems like it might deliver on a near future version of that.  So to say I was fraught is an understatement, then over the weekend I ended up talking with a couple that told me who much they liked it, coming from a heavy Destiny background.  So when I got home Sunday night, I went upstairs started the hefty download.

Glad to see Television Still Works
Glad to see Television Still Works

So when I got up yesterday morning I finally got the chance to play the game.  I really was not sure what to expect, and I guess in all of the screenshots and video I had not really gotten it through my head that it was a third person shooter.  This has honestly been the biggest challenge for me when playing Warframe recently, because I am generally bad at playing a shooter from a third person perspective.  Third person definitely makes things easier to move around, but when it comes to aiming a gun…. I just find it awkward.  The fact that this is a game that relies heavily on ducking behind the next patch of cover, it almost HAS to be third person to make that work.  In many ways it reminds me of Gears of War, in that you are constantly rolling forward trying to move up on mobs while at the same time staying in safety.  The problem with that is… I am just not that kind of a player.  I tend to be very run and gun… and sure I use the hell out of cover but I am constantly zipping in and out of it.  This game feels more like a tactical RPG at times than it does a pure shooter, and I am not quite sure how I feel about that.  You have to understand… that I have never played any of the other Tom Clancy branded games, because that player fantasy never really appealed to me.  The fact that this game is an MMO Shooter of sorts… is really the part that places it in my wheelhouse rather than the content matter.

The Systems

Amazing Mapping System
Amazing Mapping System

The thing that I really want to talk about is just how damned good this games mapping system is.  When you pull it up it brings up a holographic representation of the area you are in, and it has various objectives marked.  You can go talk to an NPC inside each of the bases that gives you a situation report on the area, and as a result creates these little highlighted markers.  As you are running through the world, you can see every single blip on the map… but you get special visualization for whichever objective you happen to have highlighted.  In the various screenshots I am posting today, there will be these orange lines running down the street, and these serve to show you the best route to the location you are trying to reach.  This makes movement through the very dense sections of New York city pretty manageable.  What it does not take into account is that in many cases you can actually cut through buildings to get to your destiny and in doing so find all sorts of hidden resources.  As you are roaming around there are lots of caches that you can find, and these have everything from resources to weapons, and it feels like looting structures in a zombie survival game.  I am still not 100% certain what some of the resources are used for, but the obsessive side of me cannot leave a single bag sitting un-looted.

Tom Clancy's The Division™ Beta_20160201101723
Ramshackle Bases

The gameplay for the most part resolves around expanding your reach and setting up these bases of operation in new areas.  At first you start out on the banks of the Hudson River, and you push into the city with the first mission based around driving away the hostiles and reclaiming a base.  From there you start retrieving people from the impromptu medical center set up in Madison Square garden.  So you rescue a virologist to take back to your base, and then that launches a sequence of quests that involve collecting additional resources to help set up your medical facilities.  The problem is for me at least that I cannot seem to stay on track, and that even though I have a giant orange line leading me to the objective…. I keep ending up going off the rails and looting every building that I happen to come across.  The other issue that I am having is that I struggle how to identify who is just a harmless bum roaming down the street…. and who is someone that will actually kill me.  I ended up wandering down this alleyway, without much options for cover… and next thing I know a patch of what I think are harmless survivors… ended up opening fire on me.  In the middle of the batch was apparently a major boss that straight up killed me.  So while the mapping system is amazing, the threat assessment portion seems to be kinda confusing at least for me… since everyone including me… dresses like they just came from a shelter.

Still on the Fence

Tom Clancy's The Division™ Beta_20160201094319

Right now I am not sure if I am on board or not.  I played enough to decide that I mostly liked it…  but I still struggle with whole third person thing.  The big boss fights are pretty hectic, but I have learned that for the most part… I simply need to find a hidey hole and kill mobs until the boss finally comes to me.  It isn’t nearly as heroic as rushing in and dodging bullets…. but it seems to be more consistent than trying to run around and stay alive at the same time.  The other big take away…. is that gear is really damned expensive.  I am used to being able to buy upgrades pretty quickly in games… but I have sold a lot of random crap that I have found out in the world, but have been able to afford absolutely nothing.  One of the things that I love about Destiny is that I am constantly getting new weapons to play with… and if this game ends up keeping the same set of weapons around too long I am going to get bored.  What makes MMOs interesting for me… is the whole aspect of constantly upgrading gear.  I have learned over the years that characters get stale for me, when I stop getting upgrades.  So while I am getting drops that are upgrades are mostly armor, but I have yet to get a single interesting weapon drop.  So I think in the long run that might be an issue if the beta test is relevant to how the rest of the game is going to feel.  The other big problem for me is that I have a feeling that if folks get this…. we are going to be spread out between PC, PS4 and Xbox One… and I am certain that there will not be cross platform play.  Right now I am leaning towards the PS4 version… but I have a feeling that most of the AggroChat folks if they got this… would be playing it on the PC.  So now I just have to decide…. do I pick this up or do I wait, and while making this decision I should probably see how nice the pre-order bonuses are.

 

Pax Deconstructed

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Not Prepared

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It turns out Illidan was right…. I was not prepared.  This morning I thought I would break down some things I learned this weekend while at PAX South.  Overall I had a fun time, but there were just some things that didn’t quite work out as planned.  The first year it felt like I had a lot of my time planned as I had numerous media appointments to attend to.  This year I was going for what ended up being the polar opposite, and that didn’t quite work out either.  Over the course of the weekend I walked roughly 25 miles, and either I have the beginning of the PAX Pox… or my allergies are just going haywire now that I am back in Oklahoma.  I am so insanely sore, and in truth I lacked the stamina for this conference.  Before the first year I had been walking every single day, and for the most part I took it all in stride.  This time around I am thirty pounds heavier and have not been walking at all…  and it took its toll.  Both Friday and Saturday I was up by 5:30-6 am and out at the convention by 8.  Then after wandering around largely aimlessly trying to sort out what to do for several hours…. I ended up leaving around 4pm each day and going back to the hotel room and crashing.  The first day this was largely due to a general lack of parking downtown, and having several of the major garages booked out by another corporate event.  On Saturday however it was absolutely due to the fact that I was simply “PAXed Out” and too tired to keep going.

The other thing that did not phase me during year one, but absolutely did during year two were the crowds.  There was this strange thing going on, where there were fewer big games at the convention…. but the crowds were so much bigger.  A prime example of this is the fact that on Saturday we were trying to find a table in the gaming area to play board games.  This area was over twice the size of it was during year two… but every single table was full with zero signs of anything opening up.  Similarly every other room in the convention seemed packed… the Jam room… the Arcade room… the Intel PC Gaming room…  all were just packed with people.  While the first year did not bother me at all when it came to crowds…. this year definitely did.  It makes me pretty certain that there is zero way I could handle the type of crowds that a PAX prime has.  By the time I left at 4 pm, on top of the exhaustion…. I just needed some peace and quiet and a place to sit down and chill.  I realize I could have probably gotten this in the AFK room…. but given that every other area was packed…. even the first aid station, I figured that would also be completely packed.  I don’t want to give the impression that I did not enjoy myself, because I absolutely did… it was just a much harder convention for me than the first year.  Year one was this super chill event, and it has just gotten considerably bigger.

The People

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For me at least this con was absolutely about the people.  The folks that were in attendance were…  Ashgar, Thalen, Paragon, Rae, John her brother, Tick, Dallian, Damai, Rowan, Sctrz, Genda and his wife, Exale and Maovis.  This at least was the number of people that I actually managed to meet up with at least for a period of time.  The problem is that it is really damned hard to have a meaningful amount of time with fourteen different people, that may or may not be in the same place.  I felt like I was constantly trying to meet up with different groups of people and failed miserably at spending much time with any of them.  Then there were other folks that I meant to meet up with, but never actually saw.  Early on I had every intent to try and meet Fynralyl and Psynister on the way down, or Beau and Leala…  but I simply ran out of mental bandwidth to try and juggle everything.  In theory I could have come up with ways to make it happen, but in trying to keep my schedule super flexible…. I spent a good deal of time simply doing nothing.  So the truth is next year… a bunch of things need to change.  While I hate having every moment of the day scheduled out, I feel like I am going to have to make some hard and fast appointments so that I can feel like I actually made the most of the weekend.  I also plan on making some more media appointments because they did a great job in the first year of breaking up the day… and also giving me a quiet place away from the crowd to sit down and talk about games with the developers.  To facilitate that however I am going to have to really get my shit in gear and get that Media pass.

Now that I am home… I just feel overloaded.  On top of the sore throat and sore everything else…. I am just feeling like I need to hide out from the world for awhile.  It is situations like this that make me realize that I am in fact introverted, regardless of how hard I try and be extroverted.    The happiest moments of the weekend for me, were introducing people to Ultimate Chicken Horse, sitting in the board game area and playing Codenames, or just chilling out and collecting street passes with Dallian early in the morning.  Had I been able to do more of that I probably would have been fine staying considerably longer, but there was one period where I walked non-stop for two and a half hours trying to sort out what the hell we were doing…. and after that, I was pretty much beat.  Essentially I think the key for me to be able to function at this bigger PAX Prime is to have better planning, which is not exactly a strong suit of mine.  I tend to do best when I roll with the punches, but there are far too many punches in this case to be able to roll with them.  I will say it was amazing to get to hang with all of these people in person, but I just feel guilty that I didn’t get to spend all that much time with any one of them.

Next Year

All of this said… I am absolutely going next year.  This is the only PAX that is really viable for me to attend.  Also we have made it into and event that my wife actually looks forward to for completely different reasons.  The big thing for me is going to be sorting out the parking thing.  That first day… was a huge damper on the weekend, and it made me super paranoid about finding parking on Saturday.  I think I am going to try out the bus system next year, that way I can get downtown without having to drive… which also makes me less paranoid about partaking of adult beverages.  Next year I also need to take more photos… because in the entirety of the weekend I only took five or six.  I think the biggest thing however is going to be scheduling actual lunch and dinner times with different groups of people so that I feel less like I abandoned folks.  I got to spend the least amount of time with Rowan and Sctr and Genda and his wife, but in both cases I get to the Dallas area more often than I do San Antonio, so hopefully I will be able to meet up with them on another occasion soon.  The biggest goal however is to be a much smaller person by the time PAX 2017 rolls around, because that thirty pounds and lack of regular walking made the biggest impact on my enjoyment.  Once I made it back to the hotel each night, I was just dead to the world.  I am so thankful that I ended up taking today off from work, because if I had to roll back in after travelling yesterday, and just the sheer exhaustion of the convention…. I am not entirely certain I would be able to function.