Avengers Fixed

So yesterday’s blog post was largely invalidated within a few minutes of logging into New World yesterday. I made this careful decision of where I should purchase my home at based on tax rates and such, only to log in and find that the freaking Fire Nation had taken over that territory. Their brand is to crank up the taxes to the maximum amounts like a plague of locusts upon the face of Aeternum. It seems that Devil Inside, the friendly green guild that cranked down tax rates has moved on to other territories and now holds both Weaver’s Fen and Cutlass Keys. So yeah…. instead of 50 gold a week, if my math is correct my housing upkeep is going to be 500 gold per week which is deeply unfortunate. I guess they are doing a pretty solid job of role-playing the oppressive regime that was the Fire Nation.

Okay, I didn’t talk about it all that much but I had some significant issues with the Avengers Beta. The above clip is an attempt at me showing what was going on with the camera. The only way I can really describe it is like having the camera sitting in a little red wagon that is then attached to my character by a Bungie cord. So long as movement is slow and predictable things were more or less fine, but as soon as there was fast movement everything went haywire as the camera was attempting to over correct. It made the game nigh unplayable and I wound up refunding my game purchase as a result. I thought maybe this was just a problem the game had with Mouse and Keyboard support.

One of the things I am known for is doing nonsense with my equipment. One of those bits of nonsense was getting Nvidia RTX Voice up and running to do noise cancellation. Thing is this was designed to run on an RTX card, and I don’t have one of those… I have an GTX 1080 ti. There is however a way to get it up and running on any card, so instead of the Tensor Cores the software is expecting it ends up using my Cuda cores. You know what else uses Cuda cores a lot? Physics calculations in video games, like maybe those trying to adjust the camera behind the player. I talked to a handful of people who played the Beta with Mouse and Keyboard and none of them seemed to have any of the issues that I had. So for Science… I made a rather expensive gamble and purchased Avengers once again. The gamble is expensive because I doubt Steam would have allowed me to refund it a second time.

Sure enough when I have RTX Voice shut down I have zero problems with the camera. When I turn it on… the camera goes wonky. I am guessing the extra strain on the Cuda cores is maybe slowing down the calculations enough to lag behind as experienced in the video above? I have no clue if this is a similar behavior to those running ACTUAL RTX graphics cards and legitimately have RTX voice installed without the hackery required to get it working on other systems. So the problems seem to be gone when playing Avengers now and I spent most of last night working my way through the campaign. There are aspects of the game that still bug me a bit, but with RTX shut down the experience is fairly fluid in 4k.

There is a sizable amount of story that was cut from the beta, and what I thought was a charming narrative even managed to get more charming. I love that the game focuses on Kamala Khan aka Ms Marvel because she so perfectly represents the fans. She is a comic book geek and loves the super heroes in the same way as we do. So watching her interactions with her idols is adorable. There is a whole reluctant dad thing going on with Bruce Banner and the same goes when he is in Hulk form, and it is super cute. I’ve not made it terribly far because there isn’t a ton of hours in a week night, but I am enjoying myself.

Some of the parts that were missing in the Beta were the bits that actually explain how gearing works. Now that I understand it a bit more I am way less flummoxed by it. The whole “insufficient materials” thing is just a warning that you can’t yet upgrade the item, not that you won’t be able to get any benefit from it or that it isn’t equitable. I am still uncertain of exactly how much the gearing actually factors into the game play, but I am making the numbers go up like a good MMO player. Each mission involves a number of heroes, and it seems like you can pilot any one of your choosing from the list of available that you have unlocked. I am mostly focused on Ms Marvel because I like her skill set considerably more than I do Hulk so far. I’m only far enough in to have those two unlocked right now.

I am thankful that the gamble paid off, and that it really was something as simple as RTX Voice running in the background causing these issues. I did have a few crashes to desktop last night, and I have no clue at all what might have caused those. The game seems to be pretty good about letting you start back up close to where the game crashed however. I am not sure if this is true once you leave the tutorial of the game and start getting into specific missions however. Right now it is just a charming story driven game for me and I am not sure how much of the group content I am going to touch right now. The goal is to complete the story now and see where it goes from there.