Month: June 2020

Questionable Gameplay

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The Black Armory season added a game mode that shooting glowing mobs, picking up orbs and dunking them into a receptacle in the center of the arena generally referred to as “The Forge”. There are two characteristics about this game mode, the first being you have a very short timer in order to complete it and each time you dunk a new orb you gain more points on the clock. Second it is set up on an endless play list where you will keep re-queuing for the forge over and over allowing you to farm it for drops. These two characteristics have lead to a few interesting circumstances in the past, setting up AFK farms.

With the Season of Arrivals, Bungie added in a chance for the new Umbral Engrams to drop from the end of any activity, including unsuccessful forge ignitions. This set up a scenario where players across the game have been AFKing their way to glory since June 9th when the season became active. Players knew about this in part because previously they could farm planetary materials this way. I tried it for a little bit yesterday afternoon and while afking in the background I racked up something around twenty engrams in total. This was patched yesterday evening after being active for six days and allowing folks to essentially grind up to maximum light in the process.

How did this work you might ask, because in theory your engrams should decode at your current light level. Essentially there appears to be another glitch currently active that allows armor-focused umbral engrams to occasionally decode as powerful gear, meaning it will be few light levels over your current level essentially forever ignoring the soft cap. The seems to only work if you purchase armor-focused Umbral engrams one at a time, but through this slow process of working up your armor folks have been able to max out their light at 1060 for the season. If I got roughly 20 engrams over the course of an afternoon, you can multiply that out over the length of six days of 24/7 AFKing with only a short trip now and then to clean out their mailbox.

This method of AFKing the forge largely worked because the AFK time out in Destiny is much longer than the fail condition of the forge. You are effectively matched with players of your own light level, and as a result afkers would artificially lower their light level to sub 700 with even New Light players starting at 750. The idea being that you would only match with players who were also afking, and as such every 50 seconds the match would complete on its own as a failure and then start a 10 second timer kicking folks back to orbit. So essentially once a minute roughly you had a shot of an engram dropping.

With yesterdays patch Bungie made a simple tweak that stops the Forge from queuing up players again, essentially making folks manually queue each time. The funny thing is… folks are still afking the forge even though they are having to queue back up every minute. If you are just wanting to farm Umbral Engrams, the fastest method I have found so far is one particular Nightmare Hunt, namely Dominus Ghaul. It doesn’t involve an awful lot of trash, Ghaul himself is pretty easy to take down, and in my experience you get an engram almost every time you complete the hunt. Better yet you are actually gaining experience which helps move your seasonal journey path forward.

It is my hope that with the breaking of this farm, that folks will actually start doing the planetary events again because in truth I find them pretty fun. However it was impossible to do pretty much anything that involved other players so long as the loot farm was active. I would have been fine legitimately farming forges as well, because it is one of my more favorite activities. However it is real hard to solo a forge when the other two players are perma AFK. I did one last night and even with two players it was a bit of a challenge to hit the timer, but we did it. This is not a grand start to a season, but I do seem to have the inkling to play once more knowing that come September a bunch of activities will be gone from the game. I think my play is more a farewell to the old world more than anything else at this point.

The Bounty of Not-E3 2020

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PC Gaming Show with Day Nine and apparently Teddy

This time of year is normally a magical time for gamers. It is during June that we traditionally get a bunch of announcements surrounding E3 that ultimately set the expectations for what we should be anxiously watching for the remainder of the current year and most of the next. However there have been a few forces at work that have changed this dynamic significantly since the heady days of the early 2010s. Firstly a number of companies have broken out from the show and started doing their own thing on a more regular basis. Secondly we have a global event like Covid 19 that is causing pretty much everything to be cancelled.

As a result there is a void to be filled and it seems as though we have a wealth of options to fill it. Instead of getting a few big shows from various publishers or console manufacturers, we get an entire summer filled with smaller shows that really started reaching a fever pitch this week. Traditionally I have done coverage of each of the big shows, but quite honestly there is too much to cover at this point and not enough desire to do so. One of the interesting things I have noticed this year is how the various show options have more or less democratized access to smaller studios. As a result we are seeing a lot of A and AA studios punching well above their weight limit and going toe to toe with AAA announcements.

However before I get into specific games I feel like it is important to lay out the landscape. Here is a list of the shows that I am aware of, each of which filling the same sort of niche that the traditional E3 shows have. I have links to videos/vods if available currently and links to what information I do have for everything else.

Schedule of Shows that I am Aware of

There are a handful of events that IGN talks about on this schedule, but they don’t seem to be “named” like the Expo days so I have slipped those in separate from the IGN Expo block. The short of this is that we have a massive block of shows available if we so wish to partake. For those of us who never actually attended E3, but were instead limited to the pre-game that happens with the publisher shows… this is effectively like getting three different E3 periods. It is making me wonder if we are going to see a similar burst of shows around the time that GamesCom and PAX West would have normally been happening.

On With the Games

As I said before there were way too many games being announced to really talk about them all, so instead I am going to talk about a handful of games that stood out for one reason or another. I’ve not managed to make my way through ALL of the content to this point, and now have mostly just been focused on watching individual trailers since some of the shows have way more “couch chat” element than I care to partake of.

Godsfall PC Trailer

First up in the list of things that I want to talk about is Godsfall, which up until the PC Gaming Show I had only actually seen information surrounding it related to the PlayStation 5 release. The PC demo reel showed off significantly more of the world which is good, because I was getting to the point where I was a bit afraid that it might be an arena game. From the look and sound of it, this game is essentially Destiny but with melee combat. I am significantly more interested in it knowing that it is coming out on the PC, given that I tend to prefer this sort of game on that platform. Still very much looks like a higher resolution SkyForge.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World

This game only means something if you were either a Sega Master System kid, or were friends with a Sega Master System kid. There once was a department store chain called Montgomery Ward, and in it they sold Sega an TurboGrafx systems… and I spend so much time while my mom shopped hanging out and playing Alex Kidd. Years later I eventually owned a Sega Master System and the Master Gear Adapter for my Game Gear and these games are criminally underappreciated. Looking forward to playing this in a prettier form and hoping it holds up as well as my memories of it.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse – Earthblood

I feel like I know next to nothing about this game. I’ve done a bit of digging and it seems that this is going to be a third person single player action roleplaying game, but all of the trailers I have seen to date mostly just focus on cinematics of the World of Darkness setting. I am very interested because Werewolf: The Apocalypse was without a doubt my favorite of the World of Darkness settings, so with Bloodlines 2 coming out soon I am super down to see this setting get its due. I guess we will have to wait until July 7th when Nacon is set to show off some footage.

Mafia Trilogy Definitive Edition

I’ve never played one of the Mafia games, but I have to admit this trailer for the reworked first game really interested me. I always assumed incorrectly that the Mafia series was more Grand Theft Auto than story driven tale, and because of that I had more or less ignored it. With the first game getting a remaster treatment, and the second game having already gotten this… I feel like it might be a good time for me to sit down and play through the entire thing.

Torchlight III – Early Access Release

I’ve been in the alpha process for Torchlight III, previously Torchlight Frontiers for quite some time. The thing is however it was NDA bound and as a result I have not been able to talk about it much. During the PC Gaming Show, they shadow dropped the early access release and… what can I say… it is VERY early access. If you are interested in this game I would suggest maybe giving it a few weeks to stabilize before diving in. I spent most of Saturday getting disconnected or not being able to log in generally, and I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon getting disconnected after every quest. Its a good game, but very raw still and I question if they are maybe rushing it out the door a bit since there appears to still be the same infrastructure issues I experiences when a new version released and everyone flocked to test again.

Haven

This is a quirky game that appears to be everywhere right now and has appeared on multiple shows. I vaguely remember Ash talking about this briefly when we did the Pax South 2020 coverage show as it was apparently one of the Indie Megabooth titles. The idea is that you have a couple versus a hostile planet, and the game appears to move back and forth between ARPG type segments and more traditional menu driven JRPG style combat. There are also sequences that were shown that reminds me of a more Bioware style dialog choice story driven gameplay, so honestly right now I am a bit confused as to how the entire thing performs. That said it has made me interested enough to start watching what comes out about it. I dig the art style, and I did the concept of a romantic couple setting out on their own against a harsh environment.

New World

While in the case of Godsfall new information made me significantly more interested, I have to say the New World trailer has made me significantly less interested. I did not see a lot of game-play that actually looked interesting to me. What I did see instead was a bunch of siege game-play that reminded me of the big battles from Shadowbane, a game I was decidedly not into. I am hoping that this is not a PVP siege game that they just added PVE players in place of player characters, because the sizzle reel definitely looks like that. Public testing however will begin in just a few weeks, so I guess I will be able to see better footage of how the moment to moment feels at that point. For now I am super cautious about this maybe not being a game I am going to care about.

A Whole Lot of Games

Those were a few of the games that interested me. However as I said before there is a giant insurmountable wall of new games to talk about and as a result I only covered a small handful. Did you get to watch any of the shows over the weekend? If so what were some of the games that you were interested in that I didn’t cover? Drop me a line below with some of your favorites.

Fixing Launcher Limbo States

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A few days back I talked about losing the hard drive that a lot of stuff was installed on. The games were not that big of a deal, because I can legitimately download them faster than I can copy them to another drive. What ultimately ended up causing an issue however was the fact that all of my storefront game launchers were installed on that drive. This morning through some trial and error I sorted out how to restore them, and I thought I would write up a quick guide to how I fixed each of them.

Fixing Steam

This one was dead simple. I downloaded the steam client and installed it. There was a minor issue with the steam library on the drive that I installed to. Previously I had farmed out library space to all of the drives in my system, meaning that I can a “DRIVELETTER:\Games\Steam” repository on every drive where the games for steam installed. So when I went to install Steam to F, it would not let me mount two repositories on the same drive, considering Steam created its own internal repository. The fix was simple, you can move steam games freely, and I just copied them from the previous “F:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common” folder to the newly created repository.

For sake of anyone finding this at a later down, everything contained within “steamapps\common” is more or less portable. While you can move games around between your repositories from the steam client, you can also simply just copy them freely between “steamapps\common” directories on your system pending the steam client is not running. This also means that if you have large bulk storage you can back up your game at will when you just want to free up some space, and then copy it back in when you want to use it again.

Fixing Origin

This is the beginnings of my woes, because with Steam now having a bunch of EA games… they still require you to have Origin installed. No matter how many times I attempted to run the installer it would crash out telling me that it could not find “G:\Games\Origin” aka the original path. The challenge there is that google doesn’t exactly have a lot of cases of “my drive died and now I can’t install origin” examples. I did however find buried down in the stack someone talking about an uninstall failing, and I followed those directions.

The first step was to boot Windows 10 into safe mode. This would have been the correct way to do it. Another way would have been to hold down Control while booting, but that only works if your keyboard is recognized by the bios quickly during the boot. Instead I jumped through a bunch of hoops, but ultimately ended up in safe mode. You need to locate your AppData folder, and the easiest way is to type %appdata% in your search prompt. You are looking for:

  • AppData\Roaming\Origin
  • AppData\Local\Origin

Once you have deleted these two directories, reboot and you should be able to install Origin fresh once and for all.

Fixing Epic Games Launcher

During the above process I found a folder in AppData for Epic Games Launcher and tried deleting it, thinking maybe just maybe it would work. It did not. What I did instead however on a whim, is grab a random thumb drive and mount it to the same letter as the drive that died, aka G in this case. When I then ran the Epic Games Installer it launched happily and attempted to install the Launcher to this thumb drive. I let it finish doing what it was doing and then turned around and immediately uninstalled the launcher from Control Panel\Programs and Features.

After doing this I was finally able to install the Launcher to a directory of my choosing. This trick MIGHT have worked for Origin, but I was not to the point of desperation that I was with Epic Launcher. For now that appears that my system is back to fighting form with all of the necessarily launchers installed. If I run into any new issues along the way I will try and update this post with the directions on how I fixed them.

AggroChat #303 – Not-E3 and Pinball Gushes

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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

This show has a wide variety of topics that don’t really connect up.  Bel starts with talking about how easy it was to reinstall steam after losing a hard drive, and how impossible it has been to install either Origin or Epic Game Store as they appear to be in a state of limbo, both installed and not uninstallable at the same time.  Grace talks about her recent adventures in figuring out what she wants to play on her brand new Switch without peer pressure of playing a specific title.  This goes into a side topic about Pinball games and also a side topic about a missing style of Arcade Racing games.  We dive into a topic of virtual tabletops and iTabletop specifically as well as a run down of the various options we have tried over the years.  Finally we land on some discussion of Not-E3 and the wide variety of shows surrounding it the biggest being the PS5 reveal.

Topics Discussed

  • Why Steam is Best Storefront
    • Limbo of Origin and Epic Game Store when a hard drive dies
  • Pressure Free Switch Exploration
    • Grace gets a Switch
  • Talking about Pinball Games
  • Talking about the missing style of Racing Games
  • iTabletop and Virtual Tabletops
  • Not-E3
    • Talking about some of the wide variety of shows happening this year without E3
  • Sony PS5 Reveal Show

Podcast: Play in new window | Download