June 2018 - Page 5 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Forsaken and Faction Rally

June 6, 2018 by Belghast

In Today’s adventures of Bel is completely all over the place in his gaming free time… we see see a return to Destiny 2. This should shock no one given that Bungie did a big announcement trailer yesterday for the Year 2 content and the upcoming Forsaken “comet” expansion to the game. I feel like I need to spend some time explaining that term as it gets throw around a lot in Destiny discussions. When the original roadmap for Destiny was laid out they set up two expansions worth of content and then something they referred to as the Comet… or a sort of mega expansion that changes the world in a significant way. The comet for the original game ended up being The Taken King expansion which was an additional purchase and signaled the shift from Year 1 to Year 2 of Destiny.

Similarly in September we have Forsaken acting as the shift between Year 1 and Year 2 of Destiny 2. It seems as though they are solidifying the pace of content releases for Destiny 2 in forming a setup where each calendar year will have a major release in the form of the Comet, and then two follow up expansions the size of Curse of Osiris/Warmind making up the remainder of a “Season” in FPS gaming terms. To coincide with this they are selling annual passes allowing you to pick up the two expansions at a minor discount or you can bundle it in with the deluxe version of the game for a little bit more of a discount depending on how much you value you the extra in game bits.

If this is what it takes to fund constant development of Destiny 2… I am largely okay with it especially considering that maybe just maybe it sounds like they have learned some of the lessons that they should have learned in The Taken King. Namely that players need a wide diversity of activities to do and that Destiny 2 felt like a thinning down of those possibilities rather than an increase in them. I am super amped for the Gambit play mode which is a sort of competitive PVE thing, but I am concerned about the return of random rolls. There is supposedly a new mod system that may fix bad rolls, but we have yet to see much information about that. If I can in fact take a crummy drop and fix its problems with mods… then I would be largely okay with randomized rolls.

The return to Destiny last night however was marked by the beginning of a new Faction Rally event. I almost want to think of this as Faction Rally 2.0 because enough significant changes happened to warrant that sort of nomenclature. First off… you can only pledge one faction per account instead of being able to split the difference like I always have done and choose one of each. As a result I had to struggle a bit here… and chose New Monarchy because I like their old school shaders the best and still have yet to get the Ship or Sparrow. Additionally of all of the armor sets I like the design of the Titan one the best pending I apply a completely different shader to it in order to remove that whole mustard and ketchup appearance.

Additionally I just love the look of the weapon that is up for grabs as part of the rally. It reminds me of a Christian Hosoi Skateboard which I always thought was a great design… in spite of its problematic connotations with the Japanese Imperial Rising Sun flag. The truth is it will be hard pressed to make me change things up and stop using Merciless for my main Heavy weapon… but it would be nice to have a rocket launcher I at least like the look of. Additionally there is a version of the Antiope-D up for grabs as well that seems to have most of the same stats… making it something I am definitely going to grind for.

I have to admit I have not really followed the changes to the Faction Rally that closely, so I was completely confused when I was presented with two tasks… one to do a Lost Sector with 3 Renown and the other to do a Lost Sector with 5 Renown. Essentially now when you complete an event… you gain renown which is a gauge that shows up above your main hotbar of sorts showing you what your current ranking is. This caps out at 5 and doing stuff… makes it go up like Events, High Value Targets and Patrol Missions. When you enter a Lost Sector it scales in difficulty based on the number of pips of renown you currently have and triggers a bunch of negative effects… like the fact your health and shielding regenerates at a snails pace.

Reddit being the place that it will always be of course has a guide that explains all of the various things that allow you to get Renown and the stacking effects that trigger. Firstly you cannot fast travel at all while you have a stack of renown without resetting this back to zero… which gets annoying as the fastest way to stack renown seems to be doing events. When you die it removes a single pip of renown, which means if you are trying to stack up to do the 5 pip challenge you need to play more carefully.

I am not sure how many penalties you wind up with… but the shields very obviously stop recharging around the 3 mark and you also seem to move slower meaning you probably take an agility hit. Lastly each pip seems to make mobs deal more damage to you, but thankfully they don’t seem to take more damage to kill. I was still able to oneshot basically everything with a good hand cannon headshot. I hung out in game for long enough to get enough tokens to open four New Monarchy packages before finally calling it a night. I did however stumble across Scarybooster out in the wilds while doing some events on the EDZ which I guess makes sense because geographically we are fairly close to each other with me being in Oklahoma and him being I believe in Nebraska. It is always really cool when you see someone in game that you know… and unfortunately I didn’t have a simple wave emote on my bar at the time so I think I made a bowl of Ramen, did the salt emote, and danced for him.

Listless Gaming

June 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a fairly fraught evening with me needing to spend more time than I would have liked dealing with work stuff. By the time I shifted over into gaming mode I was struggling to find the fun in almost anything that I played. Initially I attempted to get into Dishonored Death of the Outsider and managed to make a tiny bit of progress… but in the end just wound up taking screenshots of the weird shit appearing in the game like this… that I can only term as some sort of a monkey baron? For whatever reason this game is struggling to hold my attention in quite the way that Dishonored 1 and 2 did and I am not entirely certain why. It could simply be that I am still not the biggest fan of Karnaca and greatly prefer the vibe of Dunwall.

Whatever the case I made it to about the halfway point of a mission before needing to shut down because my wife needed assistance with something. When I returned to my laptop I did not return to the game and moved on to rummage around for something else to do. Evenings like last night are frustrating because it feels like I squandered the opportunity to have a good time. There are times where my mind is just not in the right place to really enjoy anything so I sorta flail about until eventually giving up for the evening and going to sleep. I wish there was a button that allowed me to purge my mind of worries and just be present in the activity I happen to be doing… and before someone suggests it… meditation doesn’t seem to work for me. I just end up sitting quietly thinking about the same nonsense I was thinking about before I actively tried not to think about it.

So what did I do instead of playing something I had not experienced… I started a brand new game of Fallout 4. In theory I need to get Nexus Mod Manager set up on my upstairs machine and get all of the mods I like to use there. This whole remote playing everything is interesting because there were a lot of experiences like Fallout that I managed to make work downstairs… albeit in a way less pretty fashion. I have to say I could really get used to this whole being able to play games in full resolution and fidelity… from the machine that is most comfortable at that very moment. I need to drag my spare laptop to work and see how well this process works over the guest network there because in theory… it should be accessible from any online connection. I could even try tethering my phone and seeing how playable everything is over a 4G LTE connection.

I sorta always create the same basic character in Fallout 4… which is essentially a version of the same character I create in any game. Little details change but the rough outline of the “Belghast” archetype remains the same. Incoming spoiler alert for anyone who might not have played the game. I don’t even mess with customizing the spouse anymore, because I know a few minutes into the experience she will be long gone. I so rarely play female characters in games because they don’t really fit with the whole unified character thing that I tend to do.

I am not rejecting them because they are female… more that I am rejecting them because they don’t fit the character I keep wanting to play over and over in every single game. I do fine in titles that have a strong female character that you assume the reigns of… like Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn or Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider games. However when you give me a game like the Mass Effect series that allows me to craft a tailor made character… I will almost every single time create a “Belghast”. I also have a lot of issue with the game if it impedes me from crafting this character… which I experience a lot when playing games without beard options or “pretty boy” features. Basically I am not really a fan of the whole Bishōnen thing. Belghast is a battle damaged character and as a result I prefer whatever form that representation takes looks that way… though I do worry that at times I am essentially creating a Marlboro Man.

My Bloody Corvo

June 4, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was largely all about the Dishonored franchise for me and making some serious progress through large chunks of it. I wrote a bit about Dishonored 2 and Parsec the other day, but to recap… Parsec is this really cool streaming client that allows you to play games with exceedingly low latency from another machine. When combined with the fact that I have traditionally done most of my single player gaming on my downstairs laptop… this ends up being a revolutionary change for me personally. Dishonored 2 was the first game to release that my GTX 960M graphics card and 4th gen i7 processor could not handle. I could not under any circumstances get the game to run at something I would consider “playable” and as a result I just didn’t play the game. A little less than 2 years alter… with me stumbling onto Parsec… it was absolutely the first game I attempted because I hated that I never got around to playing it.

The reason being that I love the Dishonored setting… and in truth it is probably as close to my ideal game universe as I could possibly assemble. It has steam punk machinations, crazy tentacled whales, a cruel god that bestows dark gifts, and the ability to rack up an insanely high body count. I love the lore and mythology of the world and the fact that it hints at things… and often times doesn’t tell us all the details. There is a point in one of the games where it mentions there are currently eight individuals with the outsiders mark… but then never fills in the details of who those eight are. Even after consulting the Wiki… there are a bunch of options but nowhere near enough to make up that entire gathering. So just knowing that somewhere out there is another super powered being that you have not encountered makes every discussion you get into… feel a little more suspicious. In my mind there is a universe where Dishonored and Bioshock could co-exist… and unfortunately while they don’t link up neatly I would love to see some larger setting that connects the dots between the two.

I remember when I first started playing Dishonored 2 I was not super keen on its design ethic. Gone were the mist shrouded gloomy streets of Dunwall… which were replaced by the sun bathed all too real deprivations of Karnaca. I found it so much harder to skulk about and take out my targets from the shadows and was ultimately forced to change my play style in a way that used a lot more distraction than I was used to in the original game. I also found the story largely incomprehensible because I had fallen for one of the great flaws of the Dishonored series. Arkane studios expects that when you play one of their games… that you have played every other piece of content in that series. For whatever reason I never actually played the Knife of Dunwall or Brigmore Witches DLC, I think in part because I didn’t want to really play as Daud… someone I looked at as the bad guy of the first game. The truth is Dishonored is a setting where everything is nuanced. Daud was no more bad guy than Corvo was a good guy… they were just pawns in a larger tapestry being set in motion by the Outsiders uncanny knack for bestowing his mark upon deeply flawed and broken people.

The problem with not playing these two DLC episodes however is that the events leading up to the start of Dishonored 2 took me completely off guard and I was introduced to a character I knew nothing about… or in truth a pair of characters… Megan Foster and Delilah Copperspoon. So while I found the entire experience of Dishonored 2 enjoyable… it felt way less engaging than the first one did. The other problem I have with Dishonored… is I am a high body count sort of person and the games love making me pay for my actions. Effectively you can play the games in High Chaos or Low Chaos modes… and your actions cause massive ripple effects on the ultimately ending of the game. That means there is traditionally a good ending and a bad ending… and if I am left to my own devices… I always get the bad endings. I tend to see anyone who stands in the way of my goal as someone I need to slice my way through… and as a result I end up building a world bathed in blood that produces a rather disappointing ending.

Knowing that I would ultimately want to play through Dishonored 2 again in as low a chaos manner as possible to see the other ending… I decided to go ahead and play those two DLCs that I had skipped. Now immediately after playing Dishonored 2 I would have said that I enjoyed it greatly but that it is was nowhere near as good as the original game. The DLCs are that difference because after having completed both of them this weekend… it immediately turns my opinion of the second game on its head because the entire experience becomes as deeply nuanced as the first one felt. Essentially Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches are a prequel to the events that happen at the beginning of Dishonored 2 and without knowing any of that lore… it feels really bad. Afterwards however… the end result feels glorious and triumphant as the pieces click into place and you can see this entire story happening behind the scenes that you as Corvo knew nothing about.

It also humanizes the character of Daud… who was not a good man but also not anywhere near as evil as he seemed to be at face value. He was a man who spent his last hours trying to repair the damage he had set in motion. The high chaos ending of Dishonored 2 shows you that Corvo is just as flawed a human being as Daud was, and that ultimately each of these people bestowed the dark gift… are on a bit of a course towards self destruction. I am trying not to be super spoilery about the events of these games… in case someone reading this has not played them. Much like the Mass Effect series… I feel like Dishonored, the DLC and its sequel are must play games. These days you can pick them all up for pretty cheap and I highly suggest you spend a couple of excellent weekends doing the single player thing wrapped up in that world.

At this point however I have moved on to Death of the Outsider rather than an immediate second playing of Dishonored 2. I’ve just barely started and so far it seems extremely interesting because the character of Billie Lurk is now one that I feel familiar enough with to be able to experience this story in full. Prior to playing through the DLCs to the original game however… that would have not been the case. This gets back to the great flaw of this series… in that you cannot simply drop into a new title without having experienced all of the old content. There are going to be so many things you simply never get explained… because Arkane took the time to explore them in depth in another title. I am secretly hoping that the Bethesda show this weekend shows us yet another excellent title in this line of games. We talked a bit this weekend about how amazing the Dishonored-verse would make for a role playing game. There are so many locations that are hinted at in the games that we never get to see, so I feel like the world can keep expanding. I do however hope that the next titles are going to be like Death of the Outsider, in that they take a character connected to the events we have already played… but not someone we have already explored the story arc of like Corvo or Daud.

Dauntless Thoughts

June 1, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I am going to talk a bit about a topic I had originally planned on doing so earlier in the week. Dauntless is a game that I have a brief history with because I got to play it at a Pax South shortly after it was announced. I was supremely bad at this game having never really played a Monster Hunter title before and never quite grasped the concept of being able to heal myself up… and wound up getting downed over and over. Enough times that I fear I was probably the reason why my playtest group of randos failed to take down the encounter. If I am remembering correctly I think we were going up against Quillshot, but I could be completely wrong. The game sparked curiosity in me, but never enough to pay my way into the alpha or beta testing process through a founders pack. Time moved on and Monster Hunter World was announced… at which point I remember saying that Dauntless ultimately had to hit market before that game to be successful. I signed on to play the console version of MHW and everything else is history… with me not being completely indoctrinated into the cult of hunting monsters for fun and profit.

In the meantime however Dauntless has “released” on PC, and I say that in quotes because it claims to be in Open Beta. However if you open the floodgates to all players…. and publicly announce that you are not going to do any more resets… then your game has launched albeit in a super buggy state. I would also argue the moment they started taking money from customers… they also launched the game but that is a whole other discussion. On May 24th I joined the madness as folks bombarded their servers generating queues in the hundreds of thousands. I’ve heard of some folks who had to wait eight hours or more to get through the queue… only to get disconnected and have to deal with the process all over again. I personally lucked out in that I left the launcher running on my Desktop and by the time I made it home from work on Friday I had made my way through the queue and was ready to sit down and play the game.

At it’s core Dauntless is Monster Hunter… but simplified. I am sure this is not exactly the definition they would like me to use… but instead of Hunters we are Slayers and instead of Monsters we are fighting Behemoths. Ultimately Dauntless feels what happens when you create a Monster hunting game… without over a decades worth of history to draw upon. Monster Hunter World feels rich and vibrant in part because it stands on the shoulders of over a dozen different games and a massive back catalog of creatures to draw from. Comparitively Dauntless feels extremely simplistic as if the Monster Hunting concept is drilled down to its most basic concepts. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially for folks coming from the PC who might be completely new to the genre but even after getting used to a single Monster Hunter game I find that Dauntless lacks a lot of the nuance and subtlety that World had.

This is most noticeable in the Behemoth design which feels less like you are fighting an unpredictable living creature and more like you are going through the motions of a World of Warcraft style raid encounter. Behemoths attack in patterns that end up making the encounter feel more predictable. Sure it might be technically challenging to perform the right ability at the right time, but it never really feels like I am trying to read the monster so much as simply responding to a very obvious tell that is happening before each attack. There are several encounters where you just sorta stand back and let the Behemoth finish its nonsense before getting back in an engaging again. The combat also feels fairly formulaic in that I mostly focused on breaking each one of the weak points similar to how we might fight Kulve Taroth, in order to get maximum rewards at the end. Once you have taken out all of the weak points however… the fights largely feel like you are hitting a wet bag of hitpoints with no real visual way of knowing how close you are to winning. Sure the monster tacks on visible damage, but it doesn’t actually seem to make the fight any different, and when a monster runs… they just sort of blink to another area of the island rather than giving you the opportunity to stun and continue the fight. There is never a point where the monster seems to be tired… or limping or otherwise effected by your actions but instead just unceremoniously falls over whenever you have depleted its invisible health bar.

Another challenge with Dauntless is that it feels very limited in scope. You don’t really have world to explore but instead a chain of disconnected floating islands that have no more personality than a walled arena. Sure there are a few resources out there that you can gather to make potions, but there is no real joy of exploration as every single game mode revolves around taking down a specific monster. My favorite mode in Monster Hunter World for example is their version of Expeditions where I can roam around interacting with everything on a map without actually chasing down a Monster… or if I get the urge I can take one out at my own pace. Dauntless has effectively four game modes… quests that you are given by your trainer, patrols, expeditions and pursuit. The quests obviously have a specific scope that generally revolves around introducing you to a new monster that you will be hunting. Patrols involve dropping into a specific zone and facing off against a random monster that lives on that island… giving you some bonus armor and weapon crafting bits to account for the non-targeted nature. Expeditions do a very similar thing… but this time you get a cache of crafting materials used for making potions and such. Pursuit gives you the ability to focus in on a single monster that you want to hunt… with a slightly lesser bit of armor and weapon materials since you know exactly what you are going up against. The problem is… all of these modes are essentially the same apart from the reward package. Behemoth is the game of dropping from weird looking airships onto tiny islands to fight monsters.

I don’t want to give the impression that Dauntless is not an enjoyable experience, because it absolutely is. The problem however is that the one area the game really shines… is only due to the fact that Capcom and the Monster Hunter team really don’t understand how the internet works. I’ve railed on just how annoying the grouping experience in Monster Hunter World is… in that it involves shifting back and forth between lobbies and quest boards… with no real system to let you easily join a party with some of your groups and go off and do stuff together. Dauntless has this all covered with a solid chat interface and friends lists and the simple ability to form a group with people and then queue to do stuff. There is nothing I have encountered that does not support simply queuing for it… which is absolutely not the case in Monster Hunter World. Kulve Taroth is a great example of how contorted the alternative can be… in that you have to find a lobby where people are running that encounter and then hope there is enough room in an active group to be able to get in and fight the monster. You could absolutely have the misfortune of joining what looked like a fully lobby where only one team of four players is actually doing the event… and everyone else is off doing random stuff. Dauntless is simple… if you want to do something with a friend you simply invite them to your party and then start an activity… no fuss no muss.

I feel like at some point in the future… Dauntless is going to be a truly great game. The problem is… it needs time to bake. Sure it has been in development for several years now, but it needs time to gain the same level of richness that the varied Monster Hunter experience has. All of the weapons feel simplistic in comparison to the wide variety of play styles available in Monster Hunter, and there is the huge problem of not actually having a ranged game at all. This was the point at which a few of my friends checked out of Dauntless because they were bow or bowgun mains in Monster Hunter. The problem is after doing some of these fights… the mechanics and encounters really are not balanced in a way as to support a ranged player which is probably going to be an issue moving forward. I like the game quite a bit and have spent a bunch of time playing it over the last week and some change, but it isn’t quite ready to support the level of devotion that I gave to Monster Hunter World. This is likely going to be one of those once or twice a week games for me, because I am extremely curious to see how it evolves. Unfortunately in the meantime though… it lacks a lot of features and cannot really properly be throned as “the PC Monster Hunter”.