Belghast, Author at Tales of the Aggronaut

Anthem Patch Day

March 26, 2019 by Belghast

Today is in theory a big patch day for Anthem that should be clearing up a lot of the ills that the game has. However I am not exactly holding my breath. What I mean by that is I am certain that there will be in fact a patch today, Game Update 1.0.4. What I am doubting is if it will fundamentally improve the situation for those of us stuck in the limbo between Grandmaster 1 and being able to feel viable in Grandmaster 2 and beyond. What is needed to fix this is Legendaries, and not only that but viable Legendaries. Both patch 1.0.3 and the server side loot tweaks were supposed to give us some remedy, and while I have seen a greater frequency in Masterwork drops it has done nothing to help fill my screen with lime green. Ultimately knowing that today’s patch was on its way served to disincentive me from playing the game at all… because why should I invest any time at all in a largely broken loot system when if I just waited a week there would in theory be some fixes.

Game Update 1.0.4 for #AnthemGame will release Tuesday, March 26th on all platforms. We'll have Update Notes tomorrow as well to go along with the download going live.

FYI: We also have scheduled server maintenance tomorrow from 6:30am – 8:30am PDT/9:30am – 11:30am EDT as well.

— Andrew Johnson (@UNTDrew) March 25, 2019

I think where I am with this game is that I really enjoy the moment to moment game play, but now that the progression train has slowed I am struggling to stay invested given that there is such a limited pool of content available to players. I think the Elysian Caches will help somewhat because it gives a long tailed chase mechanism… and quite frankly what better reward is there than things that make your Javelin look awesome. So that alone will make Strongholds worth running again. Additionally there are the Legendary missions that should produce some replayability of existing content and given how enjoyable some of those story missions were… I can see that helping as well. Quality of life changes like being able to see what World Events are active at any given time will also be a welcome change. The main problem I foresee is that the game really needs fresh content to add to the mix, because as it stands three Strongholds just isn’t enough… when a good deal of us have every line of dialog in them all memorized at this point. I would prefer never to hear again about not wanting that omelet.

I will of course be checking it out tonight and I am hoping that I am wrong, but I am sort of trying to tamp down my expectations so I don’t turn into one of the heaps of rage that inhabit the main reddit. Once again I highly recommend LowSodiumAnthem if you are hoping to stay a fan of this game rather than wading into the mire of hatred of the official Reddit. Bioware Devs post on both locations.

What I wound up spending most of my time last night doing however was playing some more Breath of the Wild via Cemu. The screenshots don’t exactly do it justice of showing off just how damned good this game looks running in 4K resolution. I am consistently impressed by just how good it works, but then again… the developers of Cemu have been tweaking and refining this for roughly two years now with a lot of community modding support that adds in compatibility fixes. I’ve surpassed where I was progress wise from the Switch and have put in around nine hours of gameplay so far, almost all of it stable. The instabilities thusfar have involved encountering something I have not seen yet and having the emulator pause to build shader cache. There are in theory downloadable shader caches that would fix this problem… but I have not really spent any time investigating how to get my hands of them.

Essentially everything about this process is sort of caveat emptor… but seeing as I have done this level of nonsense many times in the past it didn’t worry me too much. Suffice today however there has been copious amounts of virus scanning before I interacted with anything that I acquired in this process. This is probably the first time however that I have seen modern emulation give a game that is on a current platform a run for its money… or in this case greatly improving the visuals. I know there is similar magic you can do with a 3DS emulator, but thusfar I have not really had the horsepower to really make those games perform to their fullest at 4K resolutions. However if you are interested in that sort of nonsense then I would point you at the Simply Austin Youtube channel to see examples of what can be done. It is so bizarre to me how far emulation has come from the days of me trying to play Final Fantasy V on ZSNES and having to apply a frame skip to get some semblance of something playable, to being able to run modern games on high end PCs.

Please note… that while I totally support emulation, I don’t do so as a dodge to getting free games. I have a closet full of classic game systems, and in the case of both Cemu and Citra the Wii U and 3DS emulators respectively I have owned all of the games that I have tried playing. Especially in the era of struggling game studios… they need you buying the games instead of figuring out ways to get free copies. I didn’t exactly have clean hands throughout my high school and college years, but now I think in part I buy so many games as a way of making up for my former warez peddling past. If Nintendo for some reason started releasing these games on PC… I would likely lose all interest in emulating them in the first place. However I somehow doubt that is ever going to happen, and as a result… Nintendo consoles will always be the most widely supported emulation platforms.

Vacation Gaming

March 25, 2019 by Belghast

Today is going to be the first day back after a lengthy break, and as such I am struggling a little bit to get up and around this morning. Last week was the universal spring break week for Oklahoma schools and with that I opted to take Wednesday through Friday off to spend time with my wife. We went back and forth about taking some sort of a trip, but instead just dealt with a lot of things around the house that needed dealing with. I cleaned and organized my office, she tackled the closet, we got a new rug for the living room, made two trips to my mechanic to fix my drivers side window that was having trouble rolling up, finally dealt with our taxes and didn’t have to pay… and a slew of other small things that filled most of the time I took off. In between all of the running around I got in a fair amount of gaming, with the largest single target being The Division 2.

I am completely in the swing of this game and am slowly pushing my way across the map clearing control points and side missions along the way. At this point I have largely cleared the White House surrounding area, Downtown East, Federal Triangle, East Mall and have been focusing my time on clearing out content in the Southwest area. I am spending 99.9% of my time soloing the content and it is going more or less fairly well. My jam is still some sort of a fast firing single shot rifle and a shotgun to back it up when things get too close. What I am actually using for either of those varies based on what I happen to have seen drop… which is the weird thing about this game is the large number of drops I seem to get that are in no way upgrades to the weapon I was using from 3 levels earlier. However as with any Division game… the really important drops are the ones with a teal border like the one shown above.

Another major accomplishment of the weekend is that I finished the Final Fantasy XIV 4.5 content. I was ONE dungeon away from doing so but Anthem launched and then Division 2… and I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to log in and take care of it. Huge kudos to the awesome player who guided three of us newbies through Ghimlyt Dark and did an excellent job explaining the mechanics. I have to say though… it was a WAY easier dungeon than the Burn… which I think Thalen still needs? I need to check into that and help him out this week if that is the case. All in all I am ready for the next content drop to finally explain how we get from this point… to the point shown in the Full Trailer released at Fanfest Tokyo over the weekend. One of my employees is a super serious raider type… so I will be quizzing him this morning as to his thoughts about what was shown.

Another thing that has been stealing my time… namely the hanging out in bed before going to sleep time… is Baba is You. This is a weird puzzle game where you essentially hack reality and rewrite the rules of the universe to get a win condition. It reminds me of this mix between the old shareware title Paganitsu and Basic Programming logic. Paga was a significant title for me growing up because it fit neatly onto a floppy and we could play it clandestine like from the computer lab at school. Baba Is You is great because so often in puzzle games you get introduced to the mechanics and then they simply start dialing up the precision and speed that you need to react in order to complete puzzles. Baba on the other hand keeps challenging your conceptions and does not care at all about the fine motor skills or speed of execution… and as such gives you unlimited rollbacks as you sorta figure out how the pieces move on each map. Well worth checking out if you are interested in such things.

Lastly I started messing around with Breath of the Wild again… but if that were the end of that statement it would not be as nonsense as it ultimately is. I own this game on Wii U and Switch… but last night I started dinking around with Cemu the Wii U Emulator to see just how well it runs and what sort of resolution I could get it working at. The game looks gorgeous running in 4K but requires a bunch of fiddling to get it there. Not to mention just the act of getting it up in running was a pain in the butt which involved a whole slew of hoops to jump through to get the game patched and the emulator running. Then there was the added step of getting it working through Parsec so I could have the same experience while hanging out on the laptop downstairs… which involved installing controller emulators.

Basically I have NO CLUE why I did this thing, but I had a lot of fun and made it as far as Kakariko Village last night. I never made it terribly far into Breath of the Wild in part because of the restart. When the game first came out I did not have a Switch, and then at some point along the line I managed to find one in stock and re-bought the game on that platform. That meant having to redo everything over, which sorta killed my forward momentum. I seemed to log in more to summon treasure chests with Amiibos than I did to actually do anything else. My save game is littered with chests around the Dueling Peaks stable. It is truly shocking how well it runs, but there are a lot of frustrations… because the first time you encounter anything new there is a massive game freeze as it builds shader cache, however from that point on things are fluid again.

Basically chock this up to a long line of stupid things I have done like created a Chinese account so I could try Monster Hunter Online and setting up a Sega of Japan account to play Phantasy Star Online 2. I will likely wander away from it boredly at some point in the near future, but last night I had an awful lot of fun doing things that I should be able to do. I will however due to the potentially shady nature of this not be assembling a guide. I own two copies of Breath of the Wild so I figured it was completely legit for me to do shenanigans, but the real more stable answer to playing Breath of the Wild is to get a Switch.

Regularly Playing: March 2019 Edition

March 22, 2019 by Belghast

We’ve passed the official first day of Spring this week and with it will come a lot more engagement with the out of doors and less sitting at home and playing games. As a result over the spring and summer months this list tends to dwindle down to significantly fewer titles. For the uninitiated I do this thing where I semi-monthly update my blog sidebar and talk about the games that I am regularly playing. During the month of March I am being honest with myself and allowing several titles that have been holding on by a thread to drop down to inactive status. However anyone who has read my blog for any length of time will realize that I regularly revisit older titles when I am feeling nostalgia or otherwise restless. I am notoriously bad at keeping up with series, however this marks three months in a row!

To Those Remaining

Anthem – PC

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While I am taking a little bit of a break this week because there is an upcoming patch landing on Tuesday that should increase drop rates, I am still very much enjoying Anthem. March more than anything has been about me championing the cause of this beleaguered game. There is so much that so many people dislike about it, but I am consistently impressed at how fast we are seeing patches being released to address these issues. At the end of the day it is player fantasy about me flying around in a Robotech style mech suit. It’s a good game brent.

Destiny 2 – PC

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You sir are hanging out by the slimmest of threads. In fact I didn’t have any modern screenshots so I had to pull back into the annals of the blog to find something to use. The Season of the Drifter appears to largely be a dud and I am not entirely certain how engaged this whole era of “No DLC” is going to be. I liked the story driven stuff, as limited as it was. I’ve popped in several times but have struggled to engage. As much as it saddens me, my time in Destiny may be waning.

Dragalia Lost – Android

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I swear Dragalia Lost is the poster child for how you do reoccurring engagement in a game… and I sorta wish that all of the MMO-lites that I enjoy would take note. In general you have roughly two weeks with an event going on, so plenty of time to earn whatever rewards you want without feeling pressured to play constantly. Then within days of the finish of one event a brand new one starts causing you to engage all over again. Because it is Nintendo and they purposefully limit that sort of thing… there really isn’t much in the way of excessive monetization either. You just have a pure diablo-lite experience with a character collecting gacha mini game. Sure it feels super bad when you waste your five star pull on a wyrmprint, but I keep coming back for more.

Pokemon Go – Android

pokemongo-2

Another game that is sorta holding on by a thread is Pokemon Go. If it were not for the fact that I was getting credit for walking from my watch… I would probably not be interacting with this at all right now. As it stands I spend most of my time hatching pokemon… and even then I have like 3 eggs ready to hatch and I can’t seem to be bothered to open the damned app and do that. However with spring and better weather I might be spending more time out and about and reinvigorating my use of this game.

To The Returning and Brand New

Baba Is You – Switch and PC

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This puzzle game is so good, and I have not talked about it much yet since we are probably going to talk an awful lot about it on the podcast. However it is probably seriously in the running for me for game of the year honors… and we are only in March. You hack reality to help you get to the “Is Win” condition. It is one of those things that is really hard to explain but once you grasp it you find yourself thinking in “IS” statements. So part logic puzzle part programming language.

The Division 2 – PC

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To be honest I was not terribly certain how I would feel about this game, but it has been taking up most of my game time since release. The Division 1 was a setting without any semblance of hope… and The Division 2 has lots of hope. Instead of helping out a government that is dying… you end up helping out the communities of survivors trying to struggle to make it in the post biological apocalypse future. Division 2 is everything about the first game but more finely detailed and expanded upon. This is what a game sequel should feel like.

To Those Departing

Assassin’s Creed Origins – PC

I more or less got it out of my system when I became frustrated with what exactly the ending of the game would entail. I have a feeling at some point in the future I will force myself to finish it, but for now… I am just letting it slide away.

The Elder Scrolls Online – PC

I know without a doubt that I will return to this game because I always seem to, but for now that just isn’t the style of game I am interested in for the moment. I seem to be enraptured with the whole MMO-lite emerging genre because I can drop in and out of them really easily and don’t ask an awful lot of me in the process. ESO is a game of excellent storytelling and questing, and I just haven’t been in the mood for that.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I am literally one dungeon away from finishing the Stormblood storyline and I could not seem to push myself across that finish line. For now Anthem and Division 2 have stolen my attention, but I am certain I will be returning at some point soon. However due to the rules of this game, I did not play it during the month of March and as such it is leaving the list.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

Another game that I did not expect to leave the list, but is doing so anyways. Still very much love this game and what they are doing with it… and will probably return soon with the upcoming patch that adds a bunch of additional functionality.

Monster Hunter World – PC

This one saddens me quite a bit, but I have not logged into Monster Hunter World in a really long time. Again this is just a problem of limited play time and Anthem and Division 2 stealing my focus. This will absolutely return to the list and potentially sooner rather than later given there is a high quality texture patch incoming on April 4th.

Summary

This was a month with a lot of movement, as I allowed things that were hanging on barely to slip by the wayside with the release of two back to back juggernauts. Most of the things that are falling off the list will return and probably soon. However for the sake of the way this post is supposed to work they are getting removed for the time being. This is absolutely the shortest my sidebar has been in a really long time.

Incentive Not To Play

March 21, 2019 by Belghast

I am still very much in vacation mode this week and as a result the posts are happening way later than normal. Yesterday Bioware hosted a developer stream and you can check out the VODs on Twitch or Mixer or if you are like me and prefer a bullet point list there is one up on the official Anthem Reddit and a slightly different one up on the Low Sodium Anthem Reddit. Unfortunately both of them seem to have missed at least one detail, but if you are interested in the Reddit at all… I highly suggest the Low Sodium version for overall better reading experiences. Ultimately they went over a bunch of changes to the game for both performance and quality of life as well as adding a few new systems in. First up there are the Elysian Caches that will spawn at the end of Stronghold missions and upon opening will reward either crafting embers or vanity items. I with it was BOTH and not either… and there will honestly be hell to pay if one of these chests starts pooping out lower tier crafting embers instead of Masterworks. The example they gave was 25 Masterwork Embers… which honestly is nowhere near as relevant to me as a Vanity item… so I am hoping that isn’t the majority we get out of these chests. Ultimately each player can get a key through a daily quest and if you have four players with four keys you end up with four times the loot at the end. Opening a chest grants items to everyone in the mission, so I have a feeling we will probably start saving these keys to run with our friends rather than with random people.

On the ever important loot front they stated that they are greatly improving the loot from chests and from the bosses at the end of strongholds, meaning that while you will still get one guaranteed drop you will have a higher likelihood of seeing additional Masterworks and Legendaries instead of the seemingly fixed 2 purples and an orange allotment that we seem to get now. I am hoping this actually maps out into something that feels like progress because for me at least the 1.0.3 loot changes have not actually worked out to being more Legendaries. Again I am at the end of the curve where I shard everything I get from pretty much every bit of content I run. Another big change is that they have removed the loading screen for the forge and put in what appears to be the start of a stat screen where it now shows on a single screen everything in your load out. Legendary Missions are going in which will be retreads of story missions but at harder difficulty and with what they are calling an Apex monster at the end of each, which is going to be like an Ancient Titan or a Luminary or something that is big and that already has its own higher baked in chance of dropping good loot. However the biggest improvement that I am looking forward to is that supposedly World Events will now show up on the damned World Map… so you can navigate your way to them instead of wandering around blindly hoping one will spawn.

I am in this weird place with Anthem where I am super excited to see the changes continue to happen, but it also disincentives me from actually playing the game right now. Why would I spend hours grinding in frustration when all of the activities are in theory improving their loot chances with the next patch? Right now it is targeted at Tuesday, so I will be looking forward to them and hopeful that they actually provide what feels like a benefit rather than just something that maths out over a high number of iterations.

In other news I joined LeavingSafeArea as it appeared to be the Clan with the highest density of folks that I know. Not that I am actually providing any sort of tangible benefit to the clan yet, but I did roam around a bit last night in the area of the White House dedicated to that sort of thing. Apparently in the post apocalyptic future we have randomly floating screens that seem to be projected from nowhere in a very specific location? Whoever this Enforzer person is has a MASSIVE lead on the rest of us. I am still very much in wander around aimlessly mode and explore the city. I knocked out a handful of side missions last night and then struggled to queue for the next main mission. I am not sure if I have missed the boat when it comes to running those missions with other players, or if I just need to bump up the difficulty to catch back up with the train. Right now I am still digging the Marksman Rifle and Shotgun Combo… and have upgraded what represents that combo more than a few times at this point. I miss my preorder shotgun, because none of the options I have found in the wild where anywhere near that good… however I had to walk away when I started getting options that were 2000 more damage. Still enjoying myself but I have to say… the most excited I get is when I see a new cosmetic item drop.