Belghast, Author at Tales of the Aggronaut

Packed Weekend

November 5, 2018 by Belghast

I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.

Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.

I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.

I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.

Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.

Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.

As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.

IntPiPoMo 2018

November 2, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday did not go according to plan, and as a result I wound up not making a post at all. Essentially I woke up at 5:15 yesterday morning and by the time I finished showering and checked into the world around 5:30 I noticed that we had a major system down at work. This caused me to leap into crisis mode and instead of going upstairs to blog, I went upstairs to remote in and try and assess the situation. As such you got a brief tweet stating that there would be no post and I moved on with what turned out to be an eleven hour day. I had intentions of making a post last night, but by the time I made it home I was mentally soup. I had some awesome tamales from the coney place down the street and largely avoided any mentally strenuous activity.

The only problem with this is that I missed out on making a post for an initiative that has been going on for several years in the blogosphere… but that I have never actually participated in. Everyone knows about NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, where you are challenged to crank out 50,000 words worth of cohesive prose that can in theory get edited into a novel that makes sense. I participated in that initiative back in 2013 and wound up live blogging it as I progressed through the goal of writing 50,000 words. You can see the rough and unedited form here in a series of posts that I started cross linking at some point. The sad part is I never really made it much further than this… there is a google doc floating out there with some edits done but I feel like at some point I largely just need to nuke this from orbit and rewrite the entire thing.

IntPiPoMo plays on the statement that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if NaNoWriMo requires you to crank out 50,000 words…. then IntPiPoMo asks you to post 50 pictures/screenshots/whatever during the month of November. This initiative started back in 2011 and has changed hands a few times until it landed in the lap of my good friend Chestnut who was insanely helpful during the recent running of Blaugust. Admittedly I have never really set out to participate since I felt like it would be cheating… given that my blog is already super screenshot heavy. During the month of October as an example I posted just shy of 100 pictures associated with my blog posts. However she indicated that this didn’t matter and that I should sign up anyways… and as a result I am going to be supporting this process with Aggronaut. If you also feel like participating then you should totally check out her post outlining all of the specifics. There is a very short sign up process and an image seen above that you can incorporate into your side bar as I have done with mine (albeit scaled down a bit since my sidebar is narrow).

One of the things I am sorta known for is my nonsensical storage of screenshots. I have a network attached storage device full of loosely organized screenshots from the various games I have played, and at some point I wanted a way to just randomly pick a few shots from the pile. I thought this was an easy way to do a post when I wasn’t necessarily feeling up to writing something more well formed. The idea being I have the tool pick a few screenshots and then write something about each of them. This is largely something that I built for my own purposes but if you are interested I threw it up on GitHub at the suggestion of a few folks. If you are interested I highly suggest you grab the source code and download Visual Studio Community edition to compile it yourself just to make sure it is completely safe. If you don’t feel comfortable with that I have uploaded a compiled and ready to run version of it out on TinyUpload.com. If you get stuck on trying to decide what screenshots to use on a given day, a tool like this might come in handy.

As an example I decided to use it myself this morning and grabbed 3 random screenshots from the stack. This one is from the PC Beta of Destiny 2 and I largely know this… because the file is named “Desktop Screenshot” because annoying the only way I can get Destiny 2 to capture is by running it Borderless Windowed and capturing it with Nvidia Experience… which probably has another name for the screenshot functionality but I don’t know what it is. I am consistently annoyed that I cannot use a more proper capture technique to grab Destiny 2, but regardless that has nothing to do with the screenshot itself. I have dozens and dozens of screenshots of the “warp” graphic from Destiny 2 because I think it is so damned pretty. This is probably one of the first ones I captured during that PC Beta, and it is making me want to go equip that ship again in the live game for nostalgia sake.

This is a screenshot from Everquest Landmark Alpha… and I am not sure if this was the first reset or the second reset. I am pretty sure this is from the first alpha because I believe I had a better plot when the first major reset happened. Regardless I miss the hell out of this game, because quite frankly it was one of my favorite building games. I loved the tools that it gave us to build really interesting shapes… and then create templates off of them. I also loved the way that you could harvest with a group… and all get the loot that was harvested by any one member of that team. I remember running around with Lethbridge and Rae running amok harvesting everything in sight and all reaping the benefits. I wish someone would functionally reboot this idea in a modern crafting game. Part of the reason why I have a dislike of Daybreak is admittedly because deep down inside I blame them for the death of Landmark.

One of the cooler things about Legion were the hidden artifact appearances. One of them for the Warrior involved finding a shield that looks like Deathwing in a cavern full of Kobolds. What made it frustrating however was that it was a random chance sort of thing, and you had a single chance each day at getting it to show up. It became a ritual on my Warrior to log out at the cave every night, and then check it first thing in the morning and again that night just in case it was on the daily reset cycle and not on the server time cycle. I even had a macro that would tell me whether or not the shield had showed up… just to make sure that I didn’t miss it. The day that it finally showed up for me was extremely exciting, and as a result I took a screenshot for my blog before actually looting it.

Fallout 76 B.E.T.A.

October 31, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the opening of the Fallout 76 PC Beta and by Beta I mean… last minute stress test? I mean there are a bunch of periods between the letters of B.E.T.A. but it might as well have been “Beta”… but my frustrations over people misusing these terms can be a post for another day. The primary reason why I can tell these are Stress Tests and not necessarily bug squashing beta tests is the fact that all of the players have been funneled into a tight play window. So last night for example the test ran from 7 pm EDT to 11 pm EDT… and technically I managed to fire up the game a little bit before that because it seems like they went live a wee bit early. Thursday they are extending the window a bit given the issues that folks ran into last night allowing play from 2 pm EDT to 11 pm EDT… which honestly isn’t super useful to me given that is 1 pm my time and I will be very much at work. However I appreciate the effort and that seems like completely reasonable times for the EU players.

I am not really sure what all I can actually say about this game that hasn’t already been revealed. You need to set your expectations at “this is a Fallout 4 multiplayer mod without NPCs” and if you can sufficiently do that you will probably not be disappointed. The character creator is effectively the same one we are used to with Fallout 4 and I managed to cobble together a reasonable facsimile of Belghast fairly quickly before venturing forth into the world. There is a lot of weirdness going on with the game because at times… it feels like a much higher fidelity version of the Fallout 4 engine, then at other times the world feels like a nonsensical blurry mess even on “ultra” preset. I have a feeling there is some sort of a dynamic scaling functionality going on that I am hoping is something we can eventually disable completely. I would honestly rather have my frame rates dip below 60 occasionally than have the world freak out every so often.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is you are playing with a lot of other players… and this can be a bit of a rude awakening given some design choices they made. Namely when you first log into the game your microphone is completely open by default… and so is literally everyone else’s. At first I thought maybe I accidentally had a window open playing a video or something… because upon arriving at the character creator I had some dude keep saying “PRESS X FOR SEX!” and I could not figure out if this was some sort of edgy tutorial or what. Moments later I had a streamer ask the server to please not say anything racist because she was about to go live. It was around this time that I went to the menus and figured out how to turn off voice chat completely. Additionally I turned on the radio station… both of which are things that greatly improve your experience.

One of the things you have to realize about me and Fallout is just how much time I spent being a murder hobo roaming the countryside. So in truth the lack of NPCs really wasn’t that big of a thing for me personally… the game provides tons of feedback about what events happened before in an area in the form of found notes, journals, holo tapes that thankfully occasionally just start playing on their own without having to fiddle with the interface… and in the scattered computer terminals. Basically Fallout 76 is a game that wants you to read the story, and by doing so… gives us lore hounds something to chew on without getting in the way of the folks who just want to run amok in large packs. Occasionally you will encounter a robot that offers quests, but they largely serve as the only thing that would equate to the traditional fallout dialog options.

The game will put you through a sequence of tutorial steps that are designed to introduce you to how Fallout 4 worked… but if you are like me you will have probably already done those things the moment you find your first crafting machine. Sadly the game does not give you credit for already doing these things. So for example the Second Helpings quest… shows to Cook a Ribeye Steak and to optionally get a piece of Brahmin Meat. At this point I had killed a half dozen Brahmin and had at least ten cooked steaks sitting in my inventory. This is made more awkward in part because various folks will be doing various stages of the quest at the same time… and while it does not appear that you are actually competing with them for any resources… Bethesda made the poor choice to make it so that if another player is using a machine that they lock you out of also using that machine.

The long and short is… it was a fun game and I didn’t really have much in the way of actual interaction with other players. There were to the best of my knowledge no gankers roaming around, in part because the deck is stacked heavily against them in the game. That said I still probably will not get super serious about Fallout 76 until the custom server options are available and I can rent one for my friends to play on. If I had the option to play this single player… I probably would… which I realize completely defeats the point of the game. That said I do think it would be fun to run around with a group of friends and share resources in an environment where you can do things like dump stuff into a crate and not expect someone to come along behind you and take it all.

Death seems to largely be meaningless apart from the fact that you drop some crafting resources when you die. At first I thought you could simply go back to the place of your death and pick these up without issue… however it seems like ANY player can pick up your sack of loot because I got a note saying someone looted mine while I was running back to the corpse. It wasn’t a big deal because I didn’t really have any rare resources like circuit boards, but if I did… that would have been maddening. I’ve not really tried the crafting system out in part because I didn’t want to try building anything in a region where so many random players were roaming around. The positive is basically any town serves as a warp point, and all of them so far have had most of the crafting machines needed, so I didn’t necessarily find the need to build a base as of yet. I enjoyed myself and look forward to playing it legitimately, but like I said… probably won’t play super heavily until I can get my own server or join the server of someone else that I trust.

Five Sixty

October 30, 2018 by Belghast

I had a really great night, largely because over the last few days I have allowed myself to break free of the turtle a bit and communicate with other people. Sunday this was me hanging out with Warenwolf doing some stuff in the Dreaming City. During the first part of last night it was me hanging out on Discord with my good friend Grace while we were doing completely different things. I am not exactly sure what she was up to but I spent my time running strikes and heroic story missions in Destiny 2 to knock out two more powerful engrams for the week. I’ve talked briefly about this but it really is so much easier to get geared now than it was before. There seem to be an endless supply of opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams to drop. I am not sure what the mechanics are behind it, but I have a buff that says it allows for the dropping of Prime Engrams, and to the best of my knowledge in spite of getting several of them… I have never seen it disappear. Apparently there was something I did called “Prime Attunement” that gave me the buff but for me… it largely just showed up without me realizing it.

Later in the evening I got together with SquirrelPope who assisted with one of the quests that I had outstanding and taught me the ropes of the Ascendant Challenge much like Waren had with the Blind Well the night before. Apparently the game took my desire to get a Tigerspite to heart because I now have three of them… none of them sadly with the god roll. I’ve managed to get my light level up to 560 which is still a good ways off from the cap of 600… but nonetheless a lot of progress. I am still very much in the phase of using whatever gear happens to be the highest light level, and that is probably going to be the case for awhile since I figure the grind will slow down significantly at this point. I am not exactly sure when Prime and Powerful engrams stop giving the huge boost that they do now. I will admit a lot of my slingshotting level was was the fact that I picked up Horror Story at 600 light. At some point I will probably start working on my other classes and that slingshot will be similarly handy for them as well.

One of the things that I have to talk about briefly is how great the collections tab is. As you run through the world and get items to drop they flag as being collected. If said item is a static roll, aka a pre-forsaken item you can always reacquire it from the collections tab at a reasonable light level. Right now I am 560 light and everything in the collections tab is showing as 540 light for reference. There are tabs like this for armor, exotics, ghost shells, sparrows, ships… basically anything that takes up vault space that you may or may not need to keep forever. At some point I need to have a great cleaning of the vault as I shard tons of items that I can get back from the collections tab. Similarly I need to start trying to finish the sets, seeing as you can still get most of it from planetary vendors. There are a few items that I got on the console that I never managed to get on PC, that I would really like to add to my collection.