Destiny Archives - Page 34 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Day of Destiny

March 7, 2016 by Belghast

Axioma Clan

This weekend largely was a weekend for playing Destiny, or at the very least this was the primary activity for Sunday. The whole sequence of events started when my friend Squirrel mentioned that it was Black Spindle day, and that we needed to get that done. Which itself is a continuation of a conversation I had yesterday with him and several members of his clan. I mentioned it at the tail end of Saturday’s post, but one of the activities that I have really wanted to do over in Destiny is the Oryx raid. One of the challenges seems to be that you get stuck trying to get to 300 light level without access to the much higher light level raid items. For what feels like six months I have been hovering around 298 light, with no amount of activity seeming to push me over that barrier. As a result when Squirrel invited me to partake of a Tuesday night “newbie” raid for King’s Fall I jumped at the chance. Granted Tuesday night is also the prime night for playing The Division since it launches what I believe is essentially midnight EST tonight. That said I am more than happy to blow off that first night of a new game to be able to do the thing that I have been really wanting to do in Destiny. It had gotten to the point where I was going to try and twist a bunch of arms to try and get them to build a raid team to at the very least let me see the content. The prospect of being able to attend a more regular thing however… seems pretty great. It probably won’t be something I can do every week, but this week works out nicely.

So we zoom forward to yesterday, and I get the message that it is Black Spindle day. Now when I got this message it was like 8 in the morning and I was still having to wrap up the post production stuff for AggroChat, and then knock out my own Aggronaut blog post. Sadly by the time I finished everything… the Australian leader of the clan had gone to bed, and we were left with the normal non-primetime Sunday morning group of players. That did not stop Squirrel and I from running a Nightfall and a ton of Heroics back to back. From all of those strikes I managed to pick up a couple of decent exotics, and a few blues that are worthy of feeding into other things. I picked up Claws of Ahamkara for the Warlock, which gives me an extra melee attack which is always amazing. For the titan I picked up a new favorite chest piece, the Armamentarium which gives me an extra grenade. Finally I picked up the above weapon, the Thunderlord which fills a hole in my itemization that I had been looking for. I snagged Truth the rocket launcher and am extremely happy with it, but I had been wanting an Exotic Heavy Machine Gun… and bam I manage to pick one up today. Now I just need to go through the frustration of doing crucible with a sword to finish getting my exotic sword there.

The Spindle Hunt

The problem with yesterday is that I had a fixed time frame that I could do things in. I ultimately needed to be downstairs by 8 pm and so I could wrap some things up, and preferably be in bed at a decent hour. That gave me all day yesterday, but unfortunately for most of the time we were online we lacked a viable third. I am so thankful to Squirrel for the constant attempt to stir the chat and try and find someone. You might have noticed that among other things this weekend you will see that I now have the “Axioma” tag under my name, so that is something that happened as well. During all of my running around I also managed to get another level of Dead Orbit faction which rewarded me the sweet ship that you can see in the above image. Both of us ended up needing to take breaks every few hours, to go off and do a small bit of adulting here and there. The funny thing is… it is amazing how fast two hours can just evaporate when you are chain running heroics. It doesn’t seem like each of them takes that long, but when you stack a bunch of them end to end it really adds up. Finally around 5:30 we managed to get a spindle group together, which meant I needed to quickly learn the role of the Defender Titan on the fight. Please note… while I have a Defender spec, I don’t often play in it other than PVP… and even then its just for the Helm of Saint-14 procs that stun people in my bubbles. I am neither proficient or even effective as one most of the time… so I had a lot of ground to catch up.

We grabbed another Axioma member Jex who was also awesome in helping me sort out what I should be doing. For those who don’t understand the Black Spindle, it is an exotic sniper rifle that comes from the end of a daily heroic mission. The gotcha is that you have to do some stuff that is not intended to actually get it, and it is hands down the roughest thing I have done in this game so far. Essentially at the end of the normal mission you have to rush out of the final chamber and down a series of corridors, where you can’t really fight anything… but instead just need to keep moving forward and avoiding taking as much damage as you can. I believe there is some sort of time limit that you are under during that part, and you have to reach another area before it is considered safe and you can ease up a bit. You have essentially moved into the area where another strike takes place… and from there you proceed as normal for a few rooms until finally you take a detour down the path that would normally lead to the Ketch in the Shadow Thief strike. Now is where the difficult part begins… you take the elevator up into the Ketch and when you enter the first room with mobs, a timer starts. You have ten minutes to get to the end of the strike, take down the boss and destroy all of the taken. We were so damned close… and on my last attempt we literally had TWO mobs up when the timer ran out. There are a bunch of things that I can do to help… namely get my damned exotic sword so that the next time this is available it will be a little easier. Similarly I hope I pick up some gear in the raid on Tuesday so that my overall light level will be higher. I was frustrated that I felt like given another attempt or two… we would have gotten it. However I had pretty much all day to make attempts and simply ran out of time before I needed to pop off the PS4. There will always be a next time.

Why Division Wins

March 5, 2016 by Belghast

Hyperbole Away

This is going to be a needlessly inflammatory blog post, or at the very least the title is. Since The Division was announced back in E3 2013, there has been an immediate and constant comparison between it and Destiny. This speaks more to the problem of the games industry and games media being unable to talk about games without comparing them to something else that at least on the surface looks like it. Hell I am super guilty of this myself, because I am constantly tying games back to World of Warcraft or League of Legends or any of the other “progenitor” games of certain functionalities and features. If you have read my blog for very long you are going to know that I am a huge fan of Destiny, and that I have leaped so much praise upon Bungie for fixing the game in pretty much every possible area with the launch of The Taken King. If you have also read my blog within the last few months you will know that I also enjoyed my time spent playing The Division in beta. Now having played both games… I can tell you that they are very different experiences. That said however… if media continues to link these games then I will too for the purpose of this article.

Let’s Talk Destiny

The problem is that we the gamers and we the enthusiast media always want to declare a winner at something. So this morning I am going to talk about The Division and Destiny and go into why which game will do better. First however I am going to talk about Destiny for a bit and delve into what makes that game enjoyable for me personally. It is a member of an imagined genre that people seem to be calling the “Loot Shooter” which I guess includes the Borderlands family or pretty much anything where you pick up Diablo style loot while going through the world? The coining of this genre seems completely nonsensical but I will go with it for the time being. The important part of that statement is “Shooter” because Destiny at its very core is a shooter. It’s mechanics include the same sort of run and gun game play that we have experienced since Doom. This time however there is a RPG layer lumped onto it as you level your character, learn new abilities and acquire loot upgrades that strengthen your damage and survival. So if I were going to describe the game to someone else… I would do so as a Shooter with RPG elements… and lives in the vague MMOFPS genre.

As much as I love this game… I have had to realize that it is not for everyone. Regardless of how cool I think it is, or how great the moment to moment game play feels… if you are not a fan of shooters you will not be a fan of Destiny. More so than that it requires you to have a certain level of reactive game play to be able to function in it. Mobs come rushing at you and you need to be able to run and dodge and focus in on things while moving. It is a game that rewards precision shots, which means not only focusing in on the target but drawing a bead on whatever weak spot that unit has. Essentially if you do not have a certain level of FPS skills going into the game… or are at least familiar with that sort of movement… you are probably going to struggle and find it a generally “un-fun” experience. Sure you can get better, and the patrol zones are a great low pressure way of wandering around and killing things to hone those skills. However if you have a mental block against shooters then Destiny is not going to be the game for you.

Let’s Talk Division

I admit when I first fired up The Division I was expecting the same sort of game experience that I had playing Destiny. I expected to dodge and weave in and out of cover and charge gun nest to take out the bad guys. This sort of game play… will absolutely get you killed, and it did me quickly. I had to adjust to playing a cover based shooter and taking my time… lining up my shots, and forcing the mobs to come to me rather than charging up on them. Basically I had to slow down my pace and take the game at much more tactical level… and once I made the adjustment I loved it. So while I called Destiny a Shooter with RPG elements…. The Division is the polar opposite… a RPG with Shooter elements. The core of the game play reminds me at times of doing missions in Mass Effect 2 and 3, where you had to draw out the enemies from cover and then strike at the right moment for the largest effect. You can use things like grenades to draw the bad guys out into the open, or my personal favorite the Riot shield which allows me to get up close and personal with moving cover.

My fear however is that for many people they still see this game in the same broad genre as Call of Duty, when in truth it requires a completely different set of skills. Sure you are still aiming down the sight of a weapon and drawing a bead on mobs with a target reticle, but the pace is slowed down to the point where you can call your shots much easier and make them far more effective. There is still game play that rewards movement and a little bit of run and gun, but the vast majority is RPG Shooter where you wait things out from the safety of cover. This also leads itself to creating new kinds of team based game play where someone can really hang back and buff the team, instead of being in the front line vanguard. Essentially I feel like there is more room for different types of game play in Division, which will come in later as I wrap up my comments in the below section. For the longest time I thought the lack of “space guns” would be a nail in the coffin for me… but really the amount of customizing that I could do with the weapon attachments kept me happy and engaged even though the weapons themselves were “normal” and didn’t shoot pulses of plasma or anything cool like that.

Secrets of Success

So now comes the time where I start to wrap things up… and I am trying to set aside the fanboy in me for both of these games. Thing is while the launch of Division is impending and I plan on playing the hell out of it… there is always going to be room in my life for Destiny. The game play there just feels so damned good, and my ability to drop in for a few minutes and feel like I did something… is a huge bonus for me. Especially now that I have the ability to remote play to my laptop, I can pop in and do some bounties any time the mood hits me. However when talking about the success of a game I realize I am not exactly the Bellwether… pun intended. If World of Warcraft has shown us anything, the game that has the most modes of play… and that serves the most different kinds of players tends to win in the end. This is why I declared in my super hyperbolic title that “Division Wins”. Destiny is an amazing shooter, but at the end of the day it requires you to also be pretty good at playing said shooters to really reach the point where things feel enjoyable. The controls are so great, but you have to have played a lot of shitty shooters to really be able to appreciate them.

Division on the other hand really appeals to both the shooter players, but also the RPG players that are used to a much slower pace. I feel like anyone who has played Mass Effect 2/3 or even someone with roots in a game like Knights of the Old Republic might feel just fine playing this game. The fundamentals are the same… find a place of cover and attack from it until you whittle down the numbers of whatever is attacking you. There is also a heavy exploration aspect to this game that would appeal to folks that enjoy the trappings of a Dragon Age game, or someone who loves the Fallout and Elder Scrolls style of open world games. There is so much loot off the beaten path that I spent hours just wandering back alleyways and delving abandoned buildings. What I am painting as a picture as a picture here is that there is a broad range of types of players that I think would enjoy The Division experience, and that is not a statement I can really say for Destiny. You either like really tight shooters or you don’t and no amount of RPG aspect to the game is going to keep you there if you cannot stand run and gun. Ultimately I think Division will be a larger success because they are ultimately targeting several different potential audiences. In the meantime I am just hyped and ready to start…. but also hyped for Destiny because it seems like I might just have an in for a raid group!

Iron Banner

February 27, 2016 by Belghast

Modem Death Cry

Destiny_20160226225411 — Better than Xur

Last night was a bit of a strange night in that I once again flipped between games like mad. I started off in doing my daily love rocket frustration grind… and once again I have nothing to show for it. Then I popped into Dragon Age Inquisition for a bit, but I am having a hard time remembering just what the hell I was doing when I last played. So I wandered around a bit aimlessly and almost accidentally completed a quest. Finally at the end of the session I realized that I apparently have one of those major quests waiting in the queue where I go off to seal some breach somewhere… and have apparently been just avoiding completing it each time I have played lately. Once again I logged out sufficiently avoiding it, but at some point over the weekend I really need to finish it so that hopefully I can get back on stable ground once more with this game. Throughout all of this my wife and I were trying to catch up on iZombie because at this point we are about five episodes behind. It was around this point when the hulu stream stopped and I started having some issues staying connected to the network. I get upstairs and once again my modem is insanely hot, and my internet connection that normally tests out around 200 Mbps is testing 5 Mbps. I unplugged everything and did the “throw it in the fridge for a few minutes to cool it down” trick once more.

When I finally got everything back up and running… I decided to just hang out upstairs and play some Destiny. So I set forth on a sequence of events that wound up keeping me awake until midnight. Destiny is still that game that I can just play happily without much forethought. Since I had not done so in awhile I opted to do a heroic, and I have to say… it was pretty miserable. For whatever reason I almost always get the restorative mind when it comes to heroics…. which is essentially the destiny equivalent of the Oculus. No one that I know of likes it… because for starters it is a huge mission and involves the damned “move the orb” mechanic to keep pushing forward. Additionally there is a segment with a bunch of Vex Cyclops that are just annoying to deal with. Finally you have this horrible segment at the end, where you have to keep running the ball while trying to avoid the beam of death from the restorative mind… and at the same time avoiding waves of goblins and hobgoblins that spawn in. This is pretty easy to deal with in normal, but in heroic the stupid beam of death is quite literally that. I made it though and ended up with a few purples…. that wound up being disenchant fodder. I continued running 36 strikes from that point on until I finally got an Exotic to drop… which is ironically Truth, the weapon Xur is selling this week… but in a much better 290 version.

Player Versus

Destiny_20160226230009 — I Want a Strike on This Map

It is round about here that my night starts to get a little strange. I don’t hate the crucible but it is one of those activities that I never actually participate in. Similarly I have never done Iron Banner or Trials of Osiris… and I completely missed doing any of the Crimson Doubles. Essentially I am a no show for the player versus player activities, and I have no clue why… but on a whim last night I decided to start doing Iron Banner. Firstly I absolutely expected to be horrible, since Iron Banner is in theory worse for new players than Crucible. In the Crucible all players are scaled down gear wise to a happy medium allowing all players of all levels and gearings to be viable and on somewhat even ground. Iron Banner on the other hand does not scale the players down… and my lackluster 298 ass is nothing compared to the 330 folks that are running around in the zone. The funny thing is however that I seemed to do mostly okay. Sure there were occasions where I just got wrecked from out of nowhere, but there were lots of other occasions where I gunned down my target and even so much managed to get a three streak of kills before finally getting wrecked in return.

Destiny_20160226230835 — Actually Won Some Matches

I think what makes this feel more enjoyable than a lot of the player versus player combat I have experiences is that it quite literally feels like there is no negative. You play a match, you shoot some people, and at the end of it there is a chance of loot. There are no repair bills, there are no lasting consequences… and even when you die you pretty much instantly respawn. This feels more like the old school Doom deathmatch gameplay that I originally cut my teeth on. Maybe I have shunned PVP all of this time without good reason. Sure I rarely broke 1.0 KDR but as the night went on I got significantly better. I even managed to pull a legendary from the place, and am pretty close to ranking up with the Iron Banner. I have to say I am shocked at just how much I enjoyed myself, and in truth I really need to do more crucible as a result. All of this kinda makes me look forward to the Dark Zone in The Division, because hopefully I can get a team together and we can roll around as a group exploring. Maybe I am not as carebear as I always thought I was.

PS4 Remote Play

February 23, 2016 by Belghast

Strange Days

ASUS-ROG-GL551JW-DS74 Yesterday was an extremely strange day, because an event happened that was largely unexpected. As I have talked about over the last several months, my laptop is definitely seeing its age. At the time I got it, it was an amazing power house of gaming with dual GT 650m video cards… that could pretty much run whatever I happened to throw at it. The problem is the laptop is from 2012, and in that time a lot of stuff has changed and we have gone through three generations of video cards. So long as games were largely based on the PS3/Xbox 360 architecture everything was peachy, but as games dropped support for that generation and started to focus on the PS4/Xbox One it began to struggle. The first game I can remember that it flat out would not run in a way that I could stand to play it… was Dragon Age: Inquisition which is shockingly taxing on a video card… especially one of this age. Then came Fallout 4… and a long string of games that I had to run at 720p with greatly stripped down resolution options to get them to run at all. So since before Christmas I had been watching the local Craigslist to see if there were any options out on the market that could be snatched up on the cheap. I have a mixed past when it comes to Craigslist, because I have been able to get some insane deals like a Playstation 4 in early 2014 for only $200. I have also gotten insane run around that seemed to last for weeks over a couple of laptops that the other party simply flaked out on.

Still I was not in dire straights and part of me was wanting to wait to see what the next generation of Nvidia cards looked like before purchasing a brand new laptop… which seemed to be the direction I was heading towards. Then over the weekend I actually saw something good on Craigslist, which surprised me in the midst of all of the over priced machines… and laptops that predate my current one. Someone was selling a Asus Republic of Gamers laptop with an Intel Core i7-4720HQ processor, 16 GB of Ram, a Nvidia Geforce GTX 960m video card, with 1TB data drive and a 128GB SSD. At first I apparently texted the wrong phone number, as I missed a zero in a sequence of four zeroes in a row. However after texting the right address the guy responded pretty quickly. I asked the standard questions… like does it have any issues, why are you getting rid of it, etc… and then started making offers. Miraculously I apparently started off the bargaining in the right place, because I was able to talk him down to $600 which is a significant deal for that laptop. So last night I spent the ever so fun game of starting to install everything I “need” to be happy with a laptop, but I have to say anytime I upgrade like this there is a little bit of sadness too. I develop a personal relationship with my computers… and I guess part of me feels a little bad about kicking one to the curb to spend time with a newer model. I know that is a strange sequence of thought… but I can’t help but feel a little sad that I am moving on.

Remote Play

One of the great promises of the Playstation 4 was the ability to remotely play the system from a Vita, Android device, or the Playstation TV set top box. For the most part this works… but with certain constraints. The Vita appears to do an amazing job of remote play, given its limited real estate and the slightly wonky control scheme. However the Playstation TV set top box has been nothing but a disappointment. There are threads all over the place talking about how to somehow get it to perform well, but most of these involve having a hard Ethernet connection back to the same router that the Playstation 4 resides connected to. The problem here is… the entire idea of having it is to be able to extend the reach of your PS4 to another television. Basically for a long time I was looking for a way to play my PS4 somewhere other than sitting up in my office, where I have it for the purpose of recording gameplay footage. Awhile back I read about an unofficial side project that extended Remote Play to the PC, but never actually got around to checking it out. The software is currently in active alpha development, but from what I was reading online it seemed like it actually worked well. The author charges $10 for access to the alpha client… which is the only thing that had kept me from playing with it already. So last night I took the plunge hoping that I could sit there and play PS4 as my laptop downloaded and installed various bits of software.

RemotePlay 2016-02-22 21-43-03-25 — Screenshot taken with Fraps while Streaming from PS4

Firstly I have to say… this thing is phenomenal. There are a few hoops that you have to jump through like registering your PC with your Playstation 4 as a remote play device. Additionally in order to get the native DualShock 4 to work I had to track down LibUSB which honestly took longer than any other part. Once installed my DualShock 4 installed on my system and was recognized by the Remote Play application. Unlike the native Remote Play options… this thing connects insanely fast to your PS4 and even the wake on lan functionality seems to work great. The real test however is if I could manage to play Destiny on my PC without being frustrated by the control input lag. Sure enough I managed to complete several duties and even hopped into some crucible where I managed to rack of some decent kill streaks… all running remote over my wireless network. Every now and then there is a slight bit of artifacting… and occasionally there might be an input hiccup… but in the grand scheme of things it works insanely well. There are some constraints… you are limited to a maximum of 720p running at 60 fps. For the most part I ran the default of 720p at 30 fps and the experience was not necessarily perfect but good enough for me not to care about any imperfections.

RemotePlay 2016-02-22 22-17-20-64 — Screenshot taken with Fraps while Streaming from PS4

Where the really awesome bit comes in is the fact that the software author currently is working on mouse and keyboard controls, and for a little bit I actually tried playing Destiny with mouse and keyboard. There is some work that still needs to be done… and the mouse just doesn’t quite move fast enough yet to make game play truly viable… however since this software is actively being developed on I have a feeling that at some point soon… or with some configuration tweaking I will be able to sit on the sofa and play Destiny without the Dualshock 4. Part of me wants to throw money at this guy to get him to add more features… because seriously this thing is working amazing. Folks have already chimed in with “But Bel, Aren’t they adding official support?”. This is true, but I have a feeling that Sony isn’t going to add in all of the features that this software is already starting to support, like the ability to pretty much play with ANY usb controller and not just the Dualshock 4. I have a feeling that without any doubt Sony is not going to support Keyboard and Mouse emulation either. In any case… it is $10 well spent even if you just want to play around with it. Over the course of the night I played Destiny, Rayman Legends, and Farcry 4 all without issues. Also of note… ALL of this was while I was downloading a game from steam, a game from origin, and copying files across my network… and STILL the remote play session refused to lag.