Looter Shooter

Unsupported Alts

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Good morning friends. Today is my Friday because I took tomorrow off and depending on my mood may be calling it part of the weekend. I am not sure which one of you commented that remembering random things is a sign of a midlife crisis, because lord is it hitting me with a vengeance right now. While getting ready this morning I remembered this one story from my childhood which is dumb but I am still going to share it. My entire life my father had the side hustle of a portrait photographer, this is in part why I tend to take those sort of things for granted because I effectively grew up in the darkroom and one of my first jobs was helping him photograph weddings. My dad gave his business a pretty generic name “Bill’s Photography”, and paid a local calligrapher to create a good clean masthead for him.

During the 90s when direct mail started to computerize some weirdness began happening. Always in the past he would get mail addressed to himself and mail addressed to his business, because a human being was effectively interpreting that business name correctly. However at some point this shifted and he started receiving mail for the mythical being known as “Bill S. Photography” which at the time I thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened on the face of the planet. On very rare occasions it would come through as “Bill S. Photograph” which was even better. So here I am this morning giggling like a madman as I am remembering this, and I am sure my wife thought I had completely lost it.

I think I might be done with Outriders. Recently I started leveling a Technomancer in part so that I could see how the narration and story worked with the female voice actor. I’ve now been through the entire story and I have to say if you are wanting to start the game fresh… absolutely go with the female character because the line delivery just works better. There are so many times when you are playing as the male character, that the line delivery makes it sound like he doesn’t actually understand what he is saying. I was never certain if this was a problem with the audio editing, or the line delivery itself… but after playing through with the female voice actor it seems like maybe it was the later.

Essentially I have reached this place where I don’t feel like going through the world tier grind once again with a second character. I think this is the general problem with the way levels and gearing works in Outriders is that there is zero “catch up” benefit to your alts. Sure I have a vault full of level 42 gear from my main character, but my alts can’t use a single bit of it because they have not “leveled” to the point of being able to use it. In theory this should have worked in a manner like Champion Levels in Elder Scrolls Online, where the World Tier and Challenge Tier are associated with your account and not your character, and once you finished the main story you would zoom forward to whatever your “Account Level” was at that point.

Outriders was an enjoyable but flawed game experience, which I guess is pretty par for the course with outings from companies who are not already seasoned in the looter shooter genre. Then again… I guess I could say the same about most of the other games in the genre as well, they are all sorta flawed experiences. I am hoping that Outriders sold well enough that we might see an Outriders 2 that makes good on the promise of this title, fixes some of the tonal issues of the story, and actually has a proper plan for what to do with players upon completing the final bit of story. They told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a “live service” title and I guess we should have believed them. There are a lot of things that need tweaking but I get the general impression that they are moving on to other game titles and not really that interested in anything that is not strictly a bug fix.

In other news… Fallout 76 is unabashedly a “live service” game and has seemingly found its stride. I have been enjoying myself greatly as I roam around Appalachia, which I really wish was easier to spell. At least with the Commonwealth it was two easy to spell terms jammed together, but maybe over time I will get used to it. That said it took me years to be able to spell shenanigans on the first try… and I LOVE that word. As of last night I am level 8 which means I am rapidly catching up to where I left off with the game the first time. The quests and the NPCs make the entire experience feel more enjoyable. The responder area is more or less intact with it being largely told through audio diaries, but what makes all of that feel more alive is that there are random human NPCs wandering the wastes adding flavor here and there and making it feel less dead.

I’ve built a somewhat nonsense house that cantilevers off the side of the main structure. Given that there is no actual gravity in this game… I didn’t have to do anything to make this more logical but I nonetheless added some support struts because visually it bothered me. Sometimes in a game like this I just keep building in a very “weasley house” manner until I run out of materials. Ultimately what I really need to do is pick up my camp and move it somewhere that works slightly better. For now it has been handy to be next to the Wayward while doing quests, but eventually I can see logic in uprooting it. I wish there was a way to do some terraforming, but you are pretty much stuck with way things are which is what lead me to have the second story wider than the first.

What I really need to do is sort out a more stable method of healing myself and a better source of water and food that don’t irradiate the hell out of me. I mean I have radaway, but I also know that is a fairly limited resource right now. I do pretty well in a stand up fight, but end up needing to heal pretty regularly afterwards. I did find an interesting option for grinding… up at the lighthouse on top of the mountain which seems to have a nigh unlimited number of rad toads. If I hang out in the house I can pretty safely kill those at range. There is also a quest up there for filling up the lighthouse with bioluminescent fluid that I should probably do as well. I wish there was a way to upgrade a piece of gear to the next level range rather than needing to craft a brand new item, but the game is what it is.

All in all however I am having a blast in Fallout 76, so I apparently was away from it the optimal amount of time for it to feel fresh and for the game to have evolved while I was away. Maybe at some point I can return to Outriders and have that same feeling.

Outriders World and Challenge Tier Chart

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Good Morning Friends. I normally put an exclamation point at the end of a sentence like that, but forgive me but I am not feeling terribly exuberant. I am not sure if I just slept poorly, or uncomfortably… or simply am generally sleep deprived but all I really want at this very moment is to crawl back into a warm bed and forget the world exists. Mondays being devoted to the Mixtape project… because alliteration… means that now Tuesdays are effectively my first real post of a given week. It is normally in that first post that I catch you up on whatever mischief was managed over the weekend. Probably the highlight is that I managed to ding World Tier 15 now allowing me to run all of the Hunts and Wanted quests at maximum level for theoretically maximum reward.

Or if you just want a more blown up transparent version I have that as well…

I’ve seen multiple versions of this scale, but they have all been exceptionally blurry representations so I decided to just go ahead and make my own version. There is an intentionality of overlap between World Tier and Challenge Tier which are effectively two competing end game systems. World tier will take you up through item level 42 and Challenge tier moves that onwards to 50 which is the current level cap for gear. When I first started attempting the expedition I steam rolled the first one and then got my butt handed to me in the second one I attempted, because it bumped me up to having to deal with level 34 encounters after completing that first one. I was not prepared and as a result I started walking up the World Tier system in an effort to gain gear and prepare for the stark difference in difficulty.

Since capping the World Tier, I have managed to get up to Challenge Tier 9 in the Expedition system. The problem that I have encountered as I go up in tier, the fights become significantly more frenetic. Additionally I have found out that not all expeditions are created equally. Chem Plant for example seems to be pretty easy, and Timeworn Spire on the other hand was 22 minutes of non-stop fighting to stay alive madness. There is a working theory that certain legendary gear is tied to completion of certain expeditions so I am trying to run them all just to make sure I have access to everything. There are reports of folks completing an expedition and then suddenly starting to see legendary weapons they have never encountered before in their loot pool. No clue if this is a real thing or not, because randomizers absolutely seem to get “stuck” on specific items sometimes.

Another thing that I have done is start the campaign over on my Technomancer. I’ve heard really good things about the infection tree for that class. I also wanted to experience what the game is like with a female voice actor, and I have to say if you have the option you might want to go down that route. The game seems significantly less bleak playing as the female character. Her delivery of lines is just more reasonable to what I would be expected in that situation. The male character seems pretty much aloof to the entire situation, and so far the female character seems to be more progressively perturbed by what they are experiencing around them. One massive negative about a replay however is that you don’t get to keep the mods that you have unlocked. Thankfully I had a few trash blues with decent mods on them in the stash allowing me to get a bit of a jump. I might start dumping trash in the bank so that I can deconstruct on my alt and get a boost in resources.

I am still enjoying myself, but I am finding it likely that I really need to try and pull together a group night since we all seem to be coming up against the same expeditions wall. They just end up so freaking stressful as a solo player, especially given that my build is about survival and not killing things quickly. I’ve seen several of us making similar comments and I think it might be fun to do a group play night, but timing is always the challenge. I realistically need to operation on either Central or East Coast times and a lot of the people that I interact with regularly are on West Coast time. Hopefully we can make something happen because I am really enjoying the game, but think it would be even more enjoyable with friends.

Bungie Fails at Transmog

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So this mornings post is not going to be an enjoyable one for most people. Yesterday Bungie released a TWAB (This Week at Bungie) about the new transmogrification system aka Armor Synthesis in their language. For those who are unaware “Transmog” or “Transmogrification” has become the universal name for systems that allow you to change the appearance of your gear in a game. This term was popularized by World of Warcraft when it was released during the Hour of Twilight patch at the end of Cataclysm. It is not the best example of this system, and in fact when it first went in it was fairly horrible… however over the years it has improved to contain most of the same features as better systems. Given the critical mass of players that play World of Warcraft, their specific naming convention stuck to identify ALL wardrobe appearance systems.

Some other details that you should probably know going into this post, and why it took every fiber of my being not to call it “Fuck You Bungie”. Destiny is a pretty important game to me. When it first was announced I used it as the reason to buy a PlayStation 4 just so I could play the Alpha. Granted there were other games I wanted to play, but it was absolutely the catalyst for me wanting to buy into that console generation. I loved the first game and by the time we got Destiny 2 it was in a really amazing place. Even from that first outing however the one system I wanted more than any others was the ability to change my armor appearance. Nothing makes a game feel bad like running around looking like an Fury Warrior from Burning Crusade. Wearing matched gear makes me feel better about playing a character and in relation makes the entire game feel better as a result.

How Transmog in Destiny Should Work

Shortly after the release of Forsaken, a new system went into the game called Collections. If you picked up an item it ended up recording that fact in your collections tab and for a small cost you could retrieve a version of that old item at any time. This gave us some long term goals of completing collections because it was around this time that they began talking about possibly putting in a transmogrification system. In my mind it made sense that we were getting out accounts flagged for having owned a specific item, because the best Transmog systems in general work off item flagging. When you pick up an item you earn the ability to use its appearance. Some systems put additional rules that make this process worse, for example World of Warcraft and not being able to collect appearances of armor types other than the one your class uses but the basics of account flagging have been around for awhile.

In my mental picture of how this system would work, it would rely on everything that you have bound to your account. In a perfect world we would have an additional paper doll that allowed us to place any appearance we had collected on any armor slot. There would of course need to be a carve out for Exotics, given that those give functional information to the players about what sort of abilities they can expect from you as a result. So in theory equipping an exotic would ignore whatever appearance was assigned in the transmog system. This is clean and would build upon a system they already have had in place since 2018. If they really felt them needed to, changing an appearance template could cost a nominal amount of glimmer and/or legendary shards.

A Slightly Worse Way to Implement It

At the tail end of “Year One” they implemented a system called Armor Ornaments, that allowed you to change the appearance of a single piece of armor. It isn’t a great system but until now it has been the only cosmetic system we had in Destiny. In “Year Two” they modified this system to open it up to all cash shop armors leading me to actively start collecting these because it gave me some access to modify my appearance. It was not a great system but again it was better than nothing, and Bungie also began talking about creating some sort of more holistic transmog system. I was willing to accept it because it would tide me over until they had time to build the better system.

Again a reasonable way to implement a cosmetic system would have been to combine the collections tab with the armor ornaments system. This would in theory allow us to swap the appearance of any single piece of gear with any other piece of gear that we have already collected. Again you would have a carve out to Exotics because they have their own appearance system but it would be manageable. Again there would be a nominal glimmer and/or legendary shard fee for swapping an appearance out but it would just be adding in the missing items from the existing ornament system. When they started talking about turning armor sets into ornaments, I honestly thought there would be some sort of nominal conversion fee to make an armor set show up in your ornament menu. I was fine with this and this is ultimately what I had resigned myself that we were going to get instead of the better option.

How Bungie Completely Fucked It Up

At face value this screen looks awesome. It allows you to swap out the appearance and shader for a complete set of gear at a time. This is precisely that additional paper doll that I was hoping they would give us. However they found a way to completely ruin this system. Instead of making it a simple process to turn those items you have collected into transmog appearances they added a needless grind into the system. Here are the basics:

  • ADA-1 is coming back into the tower and will offer you access to the Armor Synthesis System
  • Killing Enemies in the world has a chance of dropping a currency called Synthstrand which I am sure will take up another damned inventory slot
  • You can spend Synthstrand to get bounties from ADA-1 which reward another currency that will also likely take up inventory space called Synthcord
  • When you collect enough of bullshit currency number two, you can turn these in to convert them into Synthweave
  • You can spend Synthweave in your collections tab in order to unlock something as an armor appearance
  • You can earn 10 of these per season for each of your characters

The thing is… they took the system and made it arguably worse than the system I was envisioning but I was largely on board with the whole nonsense until that final bullet point. You can only earn 10 of these tokens per season, or in real world terms you can earn 10 of them every three months. The first season they are being “generous” and allowing players to earn 20 of them per character, which again Bungie fuck you for deciding that was generosity. It sounds like the tokens won’t transfer between characters so you can unlock two full armor sets every three months for each of your characters… when there is a mountain of gear that has been accumulating in our collection since the day we started playing this game.

The Blatant Money Grab

So why did they put the stupid limitations on the system? The short answer is they want to milk silver out of us for a system we have been waiting on years to be implemented. Like I have given Bungie a lot of credit in the past for the way the Eververse store has worked, and I have been more than happy to spend additional funds because I felt like I was more or less supporting a fair game. The items that they were selling me felt like they were worth the money I was spending for them. However this crosses the line. Instead of being limited to 10 pieces of armor per season, you are going to be able to purchase universal synthweave items from the Eververse store and “priced to own” prices to borrow a bullshit phase from the Disney Vault era. The prices they announced are as follows:

  • 1 Synthweave Token – 300 Silver aka roughly $3
  • 5 Synthweave Tokens – 1000 Silver aka oughly $10

So we can “earn” as many appearance sets as we like, pending we are willing to break out the credit card and pay $10 a pop for the right to look cool in Destiny wearing gear we collected years ago. This is a really bad look Bungie and I am feeling like it might be time you and I officially parted ways.

Making things even worse… and me even more salty is that I am not even certain that I am going to be able to transmog to my favorite set of armor in the first place. I loved the year one Iron Banner armor set and I still have it sitting in my vault for the day that we FINALLY got a proper transmog system. However there is also a bit of a note about certain year one armor sets not being supported due to technical difficulties. One of those listed is the Iron Banner set and I am uncertain if they are talking about the entire set as a whole or only if you converted them to Armor Ornaments back in the day… which honestly I didn’t love the look of the ornamented set.

I am frustrated and all of my goodwill for Bungie as a company is gone. I thought we lost too damned much in the move between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. I hated the fact that they decided to blow up half of the world with the Beyond Light expansion and took a number of my favorite places in game away from me. I kept a wait and see attitude but the Weapon Sunset was a horrible idea and served to only put another nail in this coffin for me. That solution was the equivalent of bringing down the hammer or entire group of people because one or two them were fucking up, and it was the chickenshit move because they didn’t want to nerf the few weapons that were out of line for fear of the backlash. When they reversed the sunset they did so on a half assed manner that still locked away some of my favorite items.

Finally delivering on Transmogrification and then making it a complete fucking dumpster fire… I think it is the final straw for me. Fuck You Bungie.

Helping Shy Lizards Hook Up

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Hai Friends! Today is my Friday and I am apparently all over the place when it comes to my gaming. After not having played Outriders for a few days I returned and worked on some monster hunts. I had only really been focused on the Wanted quests since I was seeking legendary weapons. That said I should probably also start acquiring some legendary armor pieces, which are guaranteed for completing a full round of Monster Hunts. Thing I noticed immediately is that it seems Monster Hunts end up scaling more severely than the humanoid based Wanted quests. I struggled a bit at trying to take out the Monsters given their already more bullet sponge nature.

If you are so inclined I recorded another Outriders thing where I track down Bigjaw one of those aforementioned Monster Hunts. Last night I continued this process however and am now two hunts away from my free legendary. While doing this I also leveled the world up to tier 13… and noticed another significant jump in difficulty. I might have to grind for a bit in order to level my gear up to ilvl 40 before making much in the way of forward momentum. I might also swap over and start working on expeditions now that I’ve made some progress from the very raw starting location that I began with previously. World tier activities will take your ilevel up to 42 and expeditions will go all the way up to 50.

After several hunts I needed something a bit more relaxing so I headed downstairs and wrapped myself up in a cocoon of blankets and snuggling cats and finally played some Elder Scrolls Online. After the nonsense of grinding up alts and doing dailies for the anniversary quest, I have now returned to Murkmire and continued trying to help shy awkward Argonians hook up. It is a weird zone with an equally weird main story quest, but I am enjoying it because I am always down with strange lizard people stuff. I needed the super chill nature of ESO last night, and I really would like to keep moving forward that mission of catching up on the story before the impending expansion.

Lastly a reminder that if you are on Windows 10, you can apply for the PSO2 New Genesis Closed Beta but Microsoft had to make it weird. Firstly you have to install the Xbox Insider app… and you can find some directions on how to do this thing here. Next you will find one of the offers being the New Genesis closed beta and it is on a first come first serve basis… but seemingly right now everyone is getting in? The Closed Beta will run from May 14th at 6 pm PDT to May 16th at 7 pm PDT. Not a very long test but should allow us to pop in and kick the tires a bit on this new rendition of the PSO2 game setting. I plan on doing the thing and likely writing about it but you should also do the thing.