April 2019 - Page 5 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Epic Games Through Steam Launcher

April 5, 2019 by Belghast

I’ve spent more time this morning talking on twitter than actually working on a blog post. I’m still very much in that state where I am fighting something… be it a cold or something worse. The hammer has not quite slammed down on me, but I feel like I am on the cusp of really getting sick. My wife has continued to cough like mad pretty much every night to which I often say “Please don’t die” and she will angrily respond between coughs “I’m Not Dying!”. She also won’t really go seek assistance either… which admittedly were the roles reverse I probably wouldn’t either. Still it is painful to hear her cough like that, and with my own fucked up immune system… I know that it is just a matter of time until I will be doing the same. As a precaution I have been trying to push fluids hard and get extra sleep… but the second point doesn’t exactly make for interesting topics to talk about in the morning when you barely played any games the night before.

One of the things about yesterdays luke warm take on not really caring about Epic Games exclusives that I did not fully estimate… was just how much hatred folks in general seem to have about a game like Borderlands 3 going exclusive on that platform. The latest is a rumor that Epic Games is now doing something to block launching under steam as a “non-steam game”. One of the arguments by supporters of Epic Games has been that you can still launch the games under Steam if you really just wanted to put them all in one location. Were this rumor true it would seem that someone on one side or the other was actively taking moves to ward against this. As someone who has three titles installed through the launcher I figured I would do some detective work. For reference those titles are Fortnite which I picked up prior to the Battle Royale version because it was a game that I had been following in development. The next is Ashen which is a platform exclusive and a game I very much wanted to try out. The last is Hades which was ultimately the game that made me have that “whelp I guess I am installing this launcher” moment because I absolutely love Super Giant Games.

The game that this rumor is circulating around however is Metro Exodus, that I did not purchase on any platform because quite frankly I don’t have the bandwidth to play it. I am maybe finally learning my lesson to put of purchases until I am actually going to do something with the damned game. So this is not necessarily going to be a fair test of the complaint that is circulating, but this should be a test if the launcher itself is blocking access to the games in some manner. For the uninitiated you can effectively add any game to steam by going up to the “Games” menu at the top and choosing “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library”. This ends up bringing up the dialog above and sure enough… none of the three Epic Games Launcher games were showing up in the menu in spite of it seemingly bringing up every other executable on my system. Curiouser and Curiouser.

I am one of those weirdos that allows every game to drop an icon on my desktop, so I decided to check out what exactly Hades was launching. When you look into the shortcut you see something that is complete gibberish and that potentially only the Epic Games Launcher has any idea what to do with it. “com.epicgames.launcher://apps/Min?action=launch&silent=true” is not something that steam can launch seeing as it is looking for some sort of executable. I remember installing Hades to my bulk storage drive and the “Games” directory and sure enough I quickly found its directory. Underneath was an X64 and a X86 directory and inside of each was an executable called “Hades.exe”. So with path in hand I used the browse option to manually add this to steam and sure enough it launched the game as expected.

Now you can do this with games that are purchased through platforms like UbiSoft’s UPlay, but there is almost always the caveat that you need to have the Games Launcher running in the system tray in order for the game to successfully launch. In the case of UPlay even games you purchased THROUGH Steam itself… have to have the Uplay client running to access. To test this theory further I decided to hard kill the Epic Games Launcher and make sure nothing remained of it in memory. Unexpectedly… Hades still launched fine and even managed to get the Steam Overlay successfully over the top of the game play. The above screenshot is originally 4K resolution scaled down to 1080p so I could actually upload it to my blog, but you will see the tiny overlay window from steam in the lower right hand corner happily over top of Hades.

Maybe this was a fluke specific to the way Hades was developed, so I decided to try it again and go for a Ashen this time which is another platform exclusive title. Same process as above, I had to go find the actual game executable but once I knew its location I was able to browse to it through the “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library” dialog. Again the game launched fine and again the steam overlay showed up in the lower right hand corner. So the 25 year plus of experience technologist in me says… that this isn’t a behavior baked into the launcher itself. I am not saying that something shady isn’t happening, just not necessarily the behavior that folks seem to be indicating. I do find it weird that Steam seemingly refuses to find the executables for any of the games that I have installed through the Epic Games launcher, but has picked up like all of my Adobe Products… all of the Asus apps that came with my Motherboard drivers… Skype… every single MMO and all of the games that installed through Origin. Steam literally ONLY excluded the Epic Games titles which was bonkers.

The funny thing is about today’s post… I have already written more words about the Epic Games store than I ever intended to. I am not going to defend it because really I don’t care. I used to have extreme loyalty to Steam as a platform, but originally it was a pretty great place to find new games. I valued its discovery system to help me find titles that I might be interested in. Lately however all of the really poor and asset flip titles clogging the platform… has made it extremely hard to find anything. So often its discovery system now gives me games “because it is popular” and not actually based on any past purchase or play history that I have had. Steam isn’t exactly doing a great job… but the problem is… nobody else is either. I admit I like the more curated experience of Epic Games because it has so many orders of magnitude fewer titles than Steam. Ultimately at the end of the day I will buy the game in whatever digital platform it is available on… and for Ubisoft titles for example I have stopped buying them through steam entirely and just go through the Native launcher since I will have to have it running in the background regardless to play the games.

I didn’t have anything better to talk about this morning, and I spent most of my writing time researching this nonsense… so you are getting it as the daily post. Please note… I am not trying to dissuade you from hating Epic Games or video game exclusivity. You can hate anything you want and there is plenty of ammo on either one of those stances. However the rumor floating around that Epic Games is actively blocking launching games through steam… does not appear to have any validity. I launched two exclusive titles through steam this morning both with and without the Epic Games launcher running in the background. In both cases it just worked without problems. Since Metro Exodus is the game in question and I do not own it… I cannot diagnose what is going on there. It could be that 4A Games or Deep Silver is doing something to block the Steam process from launching their executable, but again I can’t test this. I can say that in my opinion it isn’t actually the launcher at fault.

Borderlands Still Fun

April 4, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I did the thing I have been doing every night and spent enough time in Anthem to unlock another key, and then ran a stronghold in which I managed to expend two of the three keys I had banked. I actually got a purple quality emote, which is a major step up from the various dross I had gotten prior to that. After that I was somewhat listless and ended up landing upon installing the newly released Borderlands Game of the Year Remastered edition that should be showing up on whatever service you happen to own the original Borderlands through. I remember reinstalling the original Borderlands shortly after the launch of Borderlands 2 and thinking to myself that the game in general felt really dated. However this version allows me to push it up to glorious 4k resolutions with graphical clarity… which is awesome and helps to distract me from the fact that it largely has a monotone color palette.

I have to say that I am happy that games are now pushing us beyond the “everything is brown and grey” era of shooters that we were stuck in for so long. Hot pinks and purples absolutely belong in the wasteland, so I feel like it would have been great if they could have maybe splashed a little color here and there for this re-release. That said they did a dutiful job of up-sampling all of the textures so that they pop… the only negative is… it makes me realize how limited the geometry of this game is at times. All of that said does not detract from my hot take of the night: Borderlands is Still Really Fun to Play.

I did not make it terribly far into the game, but I have already noticed a handful of quality of life improvements. For example I did not remember the original borderlands having a mini-map, which was one of my complaints about questing through the game and feeling like I always had to keep popping up my large map. Borderlands is a game without a lot of freedom of movement, and more or less you are travelling down fixed paths… which means in order to get form point A to point B there is pretty much one correct path that you needed to take to get there. Having the minimap makes me significantly less frustrated as I snake my way through a series of winding tunnels to a plateau… that does not have an obvious visual path to help direct you there.

I am playing Roland… because I always play Roland or Axton or whoever the third game will have that fills the roles of the basic soldier plus gadgets. There is little wonder to why in Division 2 running around with a Turret feels so natural. The other take away from the night is that the gunplay in Borderlands 1 is nowhere near as good as I thought I remembered it being. In the meantime I have played Destiny… a game which takes obsessive gun feel to a whole new level. Compared to that… and quite frankly even compared to Anthem… Borderlands weapon design feels like an inaccurate mess. That said I am adjusting and learning to over compensate for the fact that none of the non-scope sights seem to actually bear down on the target correctly.

The other hot take of the night is that I really don’t care about Borderlands 3 being an Epic Game store exclusive title. Basically this is a financial decision and should not be looked at as anything else, regardless of whatever lame commentary the parties involved come up with. The harsh truth is Borderlands 3 will make way more money for the studio on Epic Games regardless of how many sales they make. Borderlands has always been a title developed in Unreal Engine, which means that on top of the 30% Steam cut… there is a 5% Unreal Engine cut. So the studio takes home 65% of every dollar made on Steam. On the Epic store they are completely waving this Unreal Engine fee and then also only taking a 12% cut, meaning the studio takes home 88%.

So in the simplest of possible math… if a game makes 100 million dollars… on Steam they would be taking home 65 million, and on Epic Games store they would be taking home 88 million. That is a difference that you just cannot ignore in the climate of studios trying to figure out how they are going to fund their next title. Especially given that Gearbox has had a number of pretty high profile flops since their last massive success in Borderlands 2. I mean do we need to summon up imagery of Battleborn, Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever? The difference in money a studio can get on Epic Games is just not something that can be ignore especially given that titles like Metro Exodus have proven that in spite of all of the grousing… the majority of fans will not care at all about the platform change. That title sold better than any of the previous titles regardless of the PC storefront exclusivity.

Where I take issue with the jump to Epic Games is in scenarios where pre-order packages have already started being sold on a specific platform. I feel like if you ever start taking pre-orders you are obligated to support that platform indefinitely. I think where this will backfire strategy wise is the fact that high profile titles have jumped ship long after pre-orders had started… will start making the customers question if putting in ANY pre-orders from now on is a good idea at least until things have stabilized a bit more. Personally the only games that I pre-order in the first place are ones that are giving me some sort of a perk for doing so… mostly a cosmetic outfit or a special gun… even though I know that these items will be long forgotten within the first few hours of gameplay.

Ultimately at the end of the day Steam has to come to the table with a better proposition to keep titles from leaving. As it stands if you are releasing a game built in Unreal Engine… you would be dumb not to go with the Epic Games store platform for your release. I think where I come from is maybe a different place than a lot of gamers given that I have traditionally mostly been an MMO gamer. Almost every MMO has its own launcher and does not originally release on Steam… in spite of the fact that many eventually do come to that platform. As a result my system is already strewn with single user launchers so an additional store front here or there does not really phase me in the least. Steam is already not the only platform I bought games through… if it is a UbiSoft title I tend to just buy directly on UPlay since I have to have that client regardless of where the purchase was made. Then there is Origin my least favorite storefront that I continue to begrudgingly use… because Bioware. I more happily use GOG, but largely because I have a bunch of older titles there… and my freebie copy of Witcher 3 had to be redeemed there.

Essentially while I favored Steam… I was not exactly a loyalist. If a company can make more money on Epic Games store… then who am I to halt them. I’ve seen a lot of “whelp I guess I won’t play the next Borderlands game” in my feeds, and that is fine if you truly feel that strongly. Me I will be playing it and enjoying myself because as I found out last night… Borderlands is still fun.

Oracle of Our Age

April 3, 2019 by Belghast

We all knew it was coming, but yesterday Kotaku’s Jason Schreier posted his break down on what happened during the almost seven year development odyssey with Anthem… formerly known as Dylan and formerly known as Beyond. The truth is I had not made the connection there to the original Dylan prototype that was shown off and Anthem… and I also did not make the connection to the leaked Beyond name and Anthem. I somehow thought both of those were scrapped concepts… and I guess in truth they ultimately were. If you have not had a chance to read the article then I highly suggest you do so. There are so many ways to write a post mortem of a game… but Jason always seems to land that perfect mix of giving damning evidence with a non-hyperbolic touch. In most of these tales the staff are the heroes struggling to make the best product they can while caught in a bad situation, and the tale of Anthem really is no different.

What rings true about this for me at least is that I have a lot of friends in game development who have been willing to open up about the process behind closed doors. This is a trust I have not broken other than speaking of these moments in generalities about the industry as a whole without specifically naming names. Ultimately that is probably why I continue to get the treatment of folks willing to talk about them to me. However the anecdotes I hear tell me that the tale of Anthem or Destiny or Andromeda… are not unique to those specific companies but instead a problem with the industry as a whole. There is a manifest destiny that they can punch through any game development cycle with enough hours spent and enough midnight oil burnt… to the detriment of the employees family life and often times sanity.

I know folks who have left the games industry after finding out how generally unstable it is, and found a much better niche in the world of the corporate sector. Growing up… building games was my dream as it is the dream of so many people. My path however lead elsewhere as subtle circumstance after circumstance lead me to the comfortable safety of managing a group of developers. However these side stories that I have been trusted over the years have told me that I ultimately made the right decision. I could not handle the instability and the fact that the majority of folks who work on a title wind up getting laid off and having to find a brand new workplace in-between releases. Then there is the problem of only having specific locations where a group of studios tend to clump… and of those… the only one that is really palatable to me personally is Austin Texas.

The tale of Anthem weirdly gives me hope and renewed patience towards the game as a whole. If they could make the core mechanics of the game feel so good within effectively the last six months of production… imagine what Anthem would have been given another year of development time. I also feel hope because now the game as a whole seems to have been transitioned to the Bioware Austin live services team, and quite frankly I have a lot of faith in that group. Opinions may vary but I feel like they have done an excellent job with the growth of Star Wars the Old Republic, which is another one of those games that I return to regularly to gobble up the content that has been put into the game since my last visit. I feel like it is a better game today than it was at launch by a large measure, and this is in spite of the weird monetization schemes that the game has.

What I am ultimately hoping is that EA will give them time and space to grow Anthem into a really amazing game at some point down the line. The issues are large, but only really something that kicks in once you slam into the concrete wall that is the progression scheme. Shortly after the release of the post Bioware made what feels like a very hollow response, which tells me two things. Firstly they only read the bullet points that Jason Schreier claims to have sent over before publishing the article and wrote the piece entirely based on that. Secondly however it tells me that the points that were made rang true and set them on the defensive. All of this seems really odd given the level of transparency we have gotten from the community team about the state of the game, which makes me think this came from a highly disconnected corporate level instead.

Right now I am pretty much logging into the game on a nightly basis, but only long enough to do whatever challenge grants me an Elysian Key. The last couple of nights I have not stayed in long enough to actually run a Stronghold to open said Elysian Chests. However even the rewards that you get from these chests show that the order of operation has been to take a pat of butter and try and make it spread across an entire loaf of bread. So many of the vinyls that you get are lackluster or are simply resized and less cool versions of the ones that come from the paid shop. The team is struggling to add meaning to the game without having a backlog of content to put in place. I love the core of what this game is so hearing about the struggles and what they accomplished in spite of them… makes me want to stick around and see how things evolve.

That said I also don’t necessarily begrudge anyone who does not care at all about the heartache and struggle that the employees went through, and simply points at the bottom line that they paid for a finished game and didn’t get one. If you are in that camp… then it might just be time to cut your losses and return later when there is the inevitable patch that fixes everything and gives this game their “Taken King”, “Forsaken”, or “Patch 1.8” moment. The fact that I can rattle off a list of moments in Anthem’s direct competitors timelines where the games went from sorta crappy to pretty awesome over night shows that this is not a unique problem they face. Even Diablo 3, which is the title they kept holding themselves up to has their “Loot 2.0” moment that fixed so much of the game. I will be holding out for that day and continuing to poke around in the meantime. Feel free to just use this blog as a litmus test for when it is a good time to check it out again. You know without a doubt I will be making happy posts if that day comes.

Mythic Invitational

April 2, 2019 by Belghast

My wife spent the weekend sick and I think has passed whatever she had onto me. So the end result was last night both of us came home from work completely dead and ready to go to sleep. We managed to last until around 8 pm before hitting the sack, and then slept the entire night through without interruptions. This is not exactly normal for us and as a result I feel a little weird after getting all of that sleep. As far as gaming went I managed to complete the daily key challenge in Anthem before logging out… thankful that you can bank keys for a later time. Shortly after that I attempted to play some more Breath of the Wild and managed to get the outfit needed to sneak into Gerudo Town… but could not stay conscious long enough to actually do that thing. It was around this time that my wife showed visible signs of succumbing to sleep… when in truth I had been quietly nodding off the entire time we were sitting in the living room. Basically I had a very unproductive night gaming wise, but I hope the sleep helps because she sounds miserable… and I am starting to feel that way.

This weekend I got wrapped up in the Magic the Gathering Mythical Invitational happening at Pax East, which is weird considering I generally bounce off of all e-sports streams. However I watched most of the finals on Sunday strangely compelled and finding myself actually rooting for one of the players. What was interesting about this specific format is that it all happened inside of MTG Arena, meaning there was no need for a judge and limited stalling tactics… the end result being very rapid matches given that most of the mechanical stuff was being taken care of by the game. What was also interesting about the roster specifically is it was a mix of Magic Pro League players, 8 Qualifiers that came up from the ladder play on Arena, and a mixture of notable streamer types. So this could have played out a bunch of ways, but if you were a gambler you probably would have bet on one of the battle hardened MPL players to take hope the trophy. However what happened in truth was something slightly more interesting. The final ranking looked a little bit like this…

Andrea Mengucci – MPL member
Piotr Głogowski – MPL member
Janne “Savjz” Mikkonen – Challenger – Mostly known as a Hearthstone Streamer
Ondřej Stráský – Challenger – Top 8 MTG Arena Qualifier

So yes at the end of the day Magic Pro League players took the first two slots… however they absolutely gave them a run for their money. Savjz especially played some matches that could have gone either way and like so many Magic matches it wound up coming down to card draw and top decking. I think this even more than probably anything was a chance for WotC to show that Arena players could in fact compete in the MPL and I wonder if at some point in the future we will see all MPL matches played out using the Arena client. The difference in speed was noticeable as well as the match being way easier to follow for the viewers at home. When watching a normal Magic match, things are happening so fast that you are largely entirely reliant upon the announcers to tell you what is actually happening. Here you can see both sides and the what the players have in their hands as well… and as a result it leads to way more tension as you know what the other player has as an answer to the play that the active player is about to make.

The other cool thing about the tourney is it gave them an opportunity to show off the cosmetic changes to the client including the introduction of special full art skins that you can get for various cards. The game also launched without card sleeve art that is so popular in games like Hearthstone. Throughout the game play they announced redeemable codes over Twitch that allows the players watching at home to pick up some of the things. Here is what I believe is a full list of the codes that are redeemable.

StarterStyles – The Pack Shown in Screenshot
SparkleDruid – Druid of the Cowl
SuperScry – Opt
ParallaxPotion – Revitalize
FoilFungus – Deathbloom Thalid
ShinyGoblinPirate – Fanatical Firebrand

Additionally they are starting to add the cosmetic rewards to various events. Now the interesting thing about a cosmetic is that if you don’t already have the card… you seem to also get the card when you collect its appearance. During one of the various redeems I did not actually have a copy of whatever card it was granting me and the game made a note that I was getting one of that specific card. I fully expect that there to be more cosmetics surrounding the release of the War of the Spark. That is probably a whole other topic however and I am running out of time this morning so going to wrap this post up. I really think Wizards of the Coast finally understands what it takes to make a viable product for the internet age, and I look forward to seeing what happens surrounding the Arena client and future tournaments. This was probably quite literally the first time I cared about anything e-sports related, so good on them.