January 2019 - Page 4 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Far Cry 5 Done

January 15, 2019 by Belghast

I still appear to be having screenshot issues. Likely a reboot will take care of it, but right now thing seems to be saving an image in games… so as a result you are going to get some recycled images with this mornings post. Last night I finished Far Cry 5… and I have words about it. The game as a whole is still something I consider to be really awesome. The story and the forced nature of it however is not awesome. After playing through it… I have this feeling that whoever designed the narrative wanted it to be some shocking and moving work of art that would make us feel something. However it is hard to actually feel things about an interactive narrative that you have no control over. This is a game that told me a story, and made my character do things that I would not have done… and the payoff is more shit happening that I was not invested in. The shocking reveal didn’t feel that shocking when the game kept forcibly pushing our noses in it as we played along.

I think this is the challenge with telling a traditional story… in an open world game. The open world nature means that the majority of the time we have complete freedom over our actions and can do whatever the hell suits us. However when the narrative path is one that would better suit an on rails corridor shooter… there is a cognitive disconnect between the freedom you normally experience and the super linear nature of the cutscenes. By contrast if you take something like a Skyrim or a Fallout… you arrive at a conclusion that was driven by your actions and your interactions in the freeroam world and as a result even if that conclusion isn’t exactly what you expected it still feels like yours. For a game that has put so much emphasis on building big open world games… you would think that by now they were a bit better at telling stories in them.

I am still curious to see what happens in Far Cry New Dawn… but I have also lowered my expectations significantly.

There was more game to be played in Far Cry 5 with the DLC… but quite honestly I needed a break from that world for a bit. Originally it was my intend to pop into God of War, but I was too lazy to go upstairs and figure out why PS4 Remote Play was not working. As a result instead I poked my head into Assassin’s Creed… which admittedly is yet another Ubisoft open world game. This one feels considerably different however, and I never actually left Siwa in my initial playing of it. I have this problem when a game gives me a big open world to explore… yet tells me that I should leave it to move on with the story. I want to go out and explore everything, and as a result I spent way the hell too long roaming around the desert tracking down question mark icons on the horizon. I had this same problem with Dragon Age Inquisition and the Hinterlands.

Last night I moved the story ahead a bit and probably will be playing this for the next few nights to see if I can get re-engaged. I like the gameplay a lot, which is shocking considering that I never really clicked with Assassin’s Creed before this game. However considering the number of series Stalwarts that didn’t really like this title… I am guessing maybe there is a reason? This feels more like an action combat MMO-lite sort of feel, and I am largely on board with that. The bow gameplay could be better, but it is passable and serves its purpose. I know I have a ton of game play ahead of me as I have only managed to track down two of the targets I am after. I am sorta feeling like when I kill those targets… it is going to give me a world two sort of thing and I realize that my revenge plot is only the beginning.

Bad Luck and Breach

January 14, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was on the odd side of things. First we had an issue at work that kept me there until after 7 pm on Friday night, so by the time I got home and found food… it mostly felt like I didn’t get an evening. Saturday things were going mostly smoothly until the Podcast when apparently my system started having technical difficulties. During the last fifteen minute of the show the last word of pretty much every sentence was getting cut off. A restart of the server seemed to solve it later, but it made for a frustrating experience for myself and I am sure our listeners. Lastly Sunday morning I was going about my normal routine and wound up getting stranded after popping into QuikTrip for Drinks… and finding out my vehicle wouldn’t start. So I had to wait in the 30 degree weather on AAA to come do service.

I mean in theory I could have probably convinced someone to give a jump start and I had cables… but I mostly waited the hour or so in the cold in the off case that it was something other than the battery and I would need a tow to a shop. What makes this doubly frustrating is that I had just replaced the battery on Labor Day weekend, and something similar prevented us from going to Dallas. By all guesstimations… we are just assuming that I got a lemon of a battery because the rest of the systems check out fine. Thankfully it was still under warranty, but it also made for a very stressful and frustrating day. This morning I am remembering that there was one more thing on the list from the grocery store that we did not pick up yesterday… and am drinking my coffee without sugar (or splenda in my case). I hope this trend does not continue into the new week.

I am however thankfully scheduled to be off Friday, so that I can at least feel like I am getting to participate in Pax South by hanging out at home and watching the streams. For the last two years the timing has been off, with the show effectively happening one week too soon for me to be able to go to it. I’ve largely resigned myself to this fact, but it still bums me out more than a little bit to miss it seeing as I went to the first three shows. Instead I’ve decided to make a batch of Chilli that day and hang out and watch the stream and pretend to be part of it. I’m also contemplating finally using it as an opportunity to start sorting my Magic the Gathering cards which are right now in no semblance of an order. I always have a bunch of projects that I need to do… but regularly get distracted and take forever to actually get around to doing them.

As far as gaming goes… on a whim I decided to look into Breach as several of my friends have been talking about it. I am not sure if there was some sort of a specific event going on, but I signed up on PlayBreach.com and immediately got access to the game. This had not been a title I was following at all, but it appears that they will be entering Steam Early access on January 16th. If you have read my blog for a long while you may know my opinions of Early Access… which is that the game is launching next week no matter how hard they might claim otherwise. The game that is there however is actually rather fun, and I spent some time playing a bunch of different classes. Effectively the game is a weird love child of Overwatch, The Secret World and Heroes of the Storm… with a bit of the Destiny Strikes mixed in for good measure. I realize that is going to sound like an incoherent game, but in truth it works pretty well together.

From Overwatch it borrows the way the narrative of the world is being told through the settings and a general graphical feel and fluidity of motion. From The Secret World it borrows the game setting and a fantasy meets technology universe where the barrier between worlds is failing (and a premise not that dissimilar from the novel I wrote several years back). From Heroes of the Storm it borrows the way you level up throughout the match and choose new traits to help buff your gameplay each time you take an objective. As far as Destiny Strikes… the levels feel a bit like that mixed with some of the objectives like guard the payload that you have in Overwatch.

There is even a bit of Dungeon Keeper as the versus play is asymmetrical where you have a team of four heroes playing against a player that controls an incorporeal demon that can do various things to effect the flow of the game. The demon can summon all sorts of trap and damaging dealing auras, while freely possessing individual “creeps” to use the League of Legends nomenclature and powering them up in the process as well as being able to direct their actions with their own hotbar combat. I personally prefer to play Heroes, but almost every time I have queued for a Versus match I have wound up getting stuck playing the Demon, as it appears to be way less popular than just playing a single character.

Both sides of the equation are rather fun, and you can also opt to play against bot characters if you so choose. It is well worth checking out if you can still get into the game, but I am trying to decide now if it is worth actually buying one of the starter kits that go off sale on the 16th. It is a MOBA like game in its structure, but it appears to be one that is designed more or less for the way I would want to play the game. I spent most of my time playing the Demon Hunter, that sets interesting traps and runs around with a shotgun. They however have a slew of classes already available, and the payment model going forward seems to be much like Riot and that you can try classes for free but have to buy them to unlock permanently with a free assortment available at all times.

Definitely worth looking into if this sounds like your thing. I am curious what my readers think about the game if they have played it as well. My only frustration was that I could not seem to get the game to register with any of my screenshot options… so I am having to go with a shot from the press kit this morning.

Bungie Divorce

January 11, 2019 by Belghast

I had a totally different post planned for today, but since the news of the Activision and Bungie split was announced yesterday… there really wasn’t another topic that I would be discussing today. I also committed memery last night and cobbled together this… since yeah it is sorta relevant. So the details that we know… in 2010 Bungie entered into a 10 year publishing deal with Activision. Over the last few cycles Activision has been making a point of announcing that Destiny 2 as a franchise has been failing to live up to expectations. Behind the scenes for quite some time Bungie devs have been leaking tidbits about them feeling constrained by that relationship.

So at this point we really don’t know how the split was started… did Bungie buy out the remaining two years of the contract? Did Activision decide that Destiny 2 looked bad on their balance sheet and kicked them to the curb? Bungie learned the lesson with Microsoft and seemingly retained the rights to their intellectual property going into the arrangement with Activision, and as a result it appears that we have a newly liberated Bungie with all of the rights to keep making Destiny 2 and in theory Destiny 3… but I will talk a bit more about that later.

I think the question on a lot of minds is going to be… who’s idea was Tess Everis and the Eververse store… and will this change see the focus on this as a monetization vehicle lessen. In truth I think this was a “both of them” sort of decision and not necessarily something we can really pin entirely on the Activision Evil Empire as it were. Going into Destiny 2 I think Bungie knew they had to have some vehicle for long tailed sales… and this new version of Eververse was their answer to that. Now the shop has vacillated back and forth between being grossly unfair at release… to honestly having the deck stacked greatly in favor of the player in its current state. I talked a bit about my thoughts there in the Bright Engrams Revisited post, but I think we have seen all of the tweaks we are going to see to Eververse.

The hard truth is… there will not be a major game release that lives in the MMO space that does not include some sort of pay for cosmetics or loot box scenario. The fact that Destiny 2 hands those Bright Engrams out like Candy for playing through the content, and the fact that you can break down anything into Dust and pick items up as direct sales during the weekly resets… means to me at least that the system is actually pretty reasonable already. Sure people would prefer to simply cherry pick the items that they want each season… but I am okay with the amount of friction that exists. It gives us a reason to keep checking the store each Tuesday and to keep doing the weekly Eververse Bounties to stockpile bright dust and whatever the cores are called that unlock items from the list.

The other burning question is… who’s decision was it to move away from story driven content? This is another one that I don’t really know the answer to either… but I would tend to land that one more in the lap of Activision, given that they just pushed out a Call of Duty game with no single player story in it. I would love to see them return to story beats each time we get a major update, rather than a purely activity driven focus. I think ultimately we will have to see what Penumbra ends up being like to determine if everything is going to be like the Black Armory going forward or not. With this change however I have a whole bunch of wish list items… some of which are wildly speculative but would be amazing.

Shared Game Saves

If I understand it correctly… the Playstation exclusivity deals were between Activision and Sony… and Bungie was not necessarily a party to them but in turn constantly effected by them. I think what this means in the short term is that soon all of the formerly Playstation exclusive content will trickle down to the other platforms as soon as everything is finalized. What I hope this paves the way for however is a shared save state between all of the platforms. Sure I would love it if all of the platforms could play together at the same time… but as an easier hurdle… I would love it if I could log into my PC characters on the Xbox or PS4 so I can keep playing with friends on those platforms. At this point it would require an account merge system but I could see various ways where that might work.

Since the game largely uses an entitlement system now instead of actual items for everything but Forsaken forward… you could do some sort of a system where you choose a primary account and every other account would simply just copy over the achievements and entitlements. Of course at some point I want the ability to play with my PS4 friends while playing on the PC… and with the consoles moving further towards accepting keyboard and mouse as an input option (something both Xbox and PS4 support in limited ways currently) it might be a reasonable option. At the very least it should be completely fine for any PVE activity… with PVP being the outlier where they might still have a segregated “Console” and “PC” play lists. Look we are setting up a wish list here…. so even if it is unrealistic at this very moment… it still definitely falls on it.

Bring Back Destiny 1

It is as simple as it sounds… I would love to see all of the patrol zones and activities from Destiny 1… make an appearance in Destiny 2. They have been cherry picking elements from the first game already, but a lot of us players from Destiny 1 felt a great sense of loss in losing all the places we loved from the first game. It will take some work, but in theory they could start shimming in zones here and there as they release other content. I would love to be able to do Prison of Elders again or take on Oryx. You could even bring in some sort of a time walking like mechanic that lets you run older content without effecting the flow of the current storyline. What if there was an ascendant realm that contained pockets of these old settings or something of that sort. The Destiny story is kooky enough to be able to support it via space magic.

Table Destiny 3

Along the lines of the last topic… I would honestly love to see them completely table the discussion of a Destiny 3. Hell at this point my preference would be for them to rebrand Destiny 2 to simply be “Destiny Franchise” or something of the sort and start treating the game like a more traditional MMORPG with semi-yearly expansions that keep adding new content without doing a nuke from orbit reset every few years. Sure a new game gives players a chance to come back into the game on the same footing of every else… but I legitimately do not thing we will be gaining a much larger audience than the game already has. Destiny 2 was a big push and burned a lot of people… and getting those players back won’t happen with a new numerical release.

Keep the Course

I like the roadmaps that they are now doing… and I like that there are little trickles of new things flowing into the game every so often. Ultimately my hope is that we will see more content without the thumb of Activision… but quite honestly I am not sure that is realistic. The company will be getting a larger share of the profits… but those initial purchase profits are already a sunk cost. They are going to have to prove to us that annual pass is worth it at this point, and I am not entirely certain that Black Armory did that. Additionally they are going to have to give us other things to purchase to keep the cash flow incoming. It will be interesting to see how things move forward as we clear the rest of this year.

If they straight up released Destiny 1 for PC as a stand alone game… I would probably throw money at the screen and buy it. However if they released the content FROM Destiny 1 as an expansion to Destiny 2 that was not part of the Annual Pass content… I would probably throw MORE money at the screen. I do however think they might need to rework Eververse drastically however to give us more reasons to give them money. That does not mean that I think they need to fuck with the math and make Bright Engrams stupid, but instead offer other avenues. Like for example… if I could spend bright dust/silver to unlock shaders permanently… I would probably do that. SWTOR had that functionality of buying things as unlocked for your entire account, so in theory they could do something similar.

Additionally I would throw lots of money at the screen if they created an expansion that added better cosmetic options to the game, and allowed us to create outfits of our favorite gear appearances… decoupling them from what we happened to be actually wearing. Basically there are ways that they can keep improving the game, but also creating vehicles that get us to spend money with them. There are folks that are predicting a switch to a free to play model like Fortnite, but I question if that would actually work. Destiny 2 is not exactly a game that is great at onboarding new players, and they would have to think long and hard about how to address that problem.

At this point I have rambled at length… but these are some of my thoughts. What are your thoughts about this announcement?

Another Seed Down

January 10, 2019 by Belghast

This mornings post will probably have some minor plot point spoilers for Far Cry 5… so be warned.

I am going to have a pretty short post this morning as I need to get into work earlier than normal… and I apparently did not have the foresight to pre-stage something last night. I am finding myself still very much enthralled with Far Cry 5, and quite honestly this is a bit of a rare occasion with me. I am not normally one of those players that has to finish something they have started. My super power has for years been being able to wander away like a bored toddler from literally any game and pick up another shiny object in my field of view. This is why I have not finished God of War for example, in spite of everything up to the moment I sat it down for a bit… being a truly great experience. Maybe 2019 will be the year that I actually start being games instead of just playing them for a really long time and never quite finishing them.

At this point I have finished another chapter of the game, this one involving Faith Seed… the “temptress” of the Seed family. This played out so much differently than I was expecting based on the media I had ingested about this game. I was sort of expecting her to seduce the player… and in some ways that is exactly what happened… but not in the manner that games normally try and seduce players. Instead of sexual gratification… Faith trades in Bliss… a drug induced state where everything is peaceful and joyous. In this state of ecstasy you become the unwitting puppet for whatever she wills her followers called “Angels” to do. The truth is… I thought the section of the game surrounding John Seed was disturbing… but Faith cranked that sense of everything being fucked up and wrong to eleven.

From there I have moved on to Jacob Seed… the hunter that views that the only way to progress as a society is to constantly cull the weak. While Faith was able to invoke a sense of Bliss… Jacob seems to be able to pervert this into a sense of animistic rage. So far however this appears to be the weakest of the chapters… because while I prefer playing games in Murder Hobo mode… that doesn’t exactly make for a compelling character. There are disturbing things about this chapter, but they seem to be largely centered around the stories that the survivors tell and not the actual actions you are having to go through. You end up working a lot for a character that is essentially the living embodiment of Darryl from Walking Dead which is always cool.

This chapter also seems to have my favorite companion… Jess Black who looks like a jacked up Robin Hood. I like her however because she stays the fuck out of the way… as she focuses entirely on far ranged attacks with the bow. Right now my party of choice is her and Boomer… though as always Hurk is pretty entertaining and also arrives during this chapter. For those who have played any other Far Cry games… Hurk is a repeat character that links the worlds together. He shows up in Far Cry 3 and 4… and you find out he actually comes from Hope County as you meet his very cantankerous and very conservative nut of a father.

All in all I am still enjoying the hell out of this game, but the complaint made in the comments the other day still holds true… the cut scenes that involve the various members of the Seed family always feel like they are interrupting the actual enjoyable part of the game. The fun for me is running around and blowing stuff up.