Looter Shooter

Yesterday after making my blog post there was an extended back and forth that took place on twitter between me and my friend Pete. When I wrote the post yesterday, I largely considered it to be a positive review of Avengers. However Pete latched onto the fact that I said from the start that this was not a “must buy” game. I feel like I need to delve into that statement a bit further, because one of the things that you have to take into account is that I poke my head into a lot of new games. On a pretty regular basis I will have friends ask me, if this is “the one” aka the game that is going to unite the tribes for an extended period of time.

I have disposable income that I can use to purchase games without really impacting my quality of life. That is not the case for a lot of my friends and there are many folks who can’t afford to pick up a game on the day it is released, or in this case the day that the pre-release happened. It may be two or three pay periods before there is enough free cash to be able to purchase a game. So often when that mythical date finally comes around that someone can buy their way into an experience… that the zeitgeist has already moved on past it. So in the case of Avengers, I do not think this game is going to be something that gains permanent traction, at least not without a good deal of content being released.

I have no clue what the case is on consoles, but at least right at this moment it does not have great traction on Steam. The all time peak was 4 days ago when the game had just over 31k active users. The 24 hour peak was 19,602 so a fall off in concurrency of 37% since launch and the game is effectively nine days old. I’ve not played multiplayer, as I am largely focused on the core single player gameplay loop with bots, but based on the experiences of friends it seems that maybe everyone is doing this thing? The queue times are rough, so unless you are bringing your own team with you, fast groups are not a thing that is going to happen.

All of these things are why I am saying that if you are looking for the next big MMO, then this probably isn’t going to be it. That does not discount the fact that I think the main story is extremely good and that I am still enjoying myself. Honestly based on the conversation with Pete it comes down to a difference in perspectives. I tend to latch super hard onto a single game and play the shit out of it until I reach a point where I disengage because I ran out of content. I’ve already begun to encounter the frayed edges of that now, because as of last night I have collected what is effectively an end game set of gear. I will likely jump around to some other characters in the coming days, but I am not sure how much alting I am going to be down for given that I have clear favorites and then heroes that I cannot stand playing as like Iron Man.

As I talked about yesterday, the highest gear that drops is 130 power level. After that you can raise that gear 10 points if it is epic or legendary, and the Major artifact will add another base 10 points to your power rating. So if I pour a copious amount of materials into the full legendary armor set and then my two minor artifacts and grind out the rest of my Major artifact I will be at 150 the gear cap. This will of course take a really long time, and will be nowhere as enjoyable as actually getting things to drop. However I have effectively reached a point where Captain America is “done for now”, allowing me to shift over to other characters and try bringing them up to level 50.

I thought I would share my farming run with you, because I am absolutely abusing the system in how to get drops. There is a mission called Stark Realities that has a few side objectives that are actually more valuable than completing the mission itself. Avengers uses a check point system, and unless you have completed any objectives you can exit out of the mission and start it again to keep farming the side objectives over and over. Sure this is degenerate gameplay, but it also was a fast way for me to raise my gear level. Lets just say that I did this for science, and for the ability to write about it.

There are three areas on the map that have things that you might be interested in, but after having run this several times I feel that it is best to focus on two specific side objectives for the maximum amount of benefit. The first is the hidden shield vault, and when you drop into the mission you are going to turn left and follow the zone wall around until a tracker appears under the objective on the left hand side of the screen. You could of course play hotter or colder until you find the switch on your own, but it will always be located in the same place so run towards that single solitary tree in near the center of this clearing.

Once you hit the switch the shield bunker will open and inside are two chests, one of which will contain a guaranteed piece of gear and a guaranteed minor artifact. I’ve never seen a legendary minor artifact, so it seems like the best possible thing you can get here is an epic which I have. After this you are going to follow the icon to the mission objective. This route is going to take you in from the side and will end up causing you to miss a bunch of packs, which in this case is a good thing given that you can effectively run all the way to the shield bunker without killing anything.

When you get to the objective a pack of 5 elites are going to spawn in around a bunker. You are going to completely ignore this pack and try and avoid them while going through the bunker gate and then hanging a hard left to go down the path shown in the above image. This will eventually dead end into an area with two side objectives. The first is going to be a single elite that has a guaranteed item drop, and the second is a chest that appears behind one of those destructible walls. Since I have been playing Cap, and there is seemingly no way to break down those walls I have just been farming the mob that has a guaranteed drop.

Once you take out that Elite, it will drop something and will be either a blue, purple or yellow. Once you wrap the pack up you can hit escape and choose the “Return to Quinjet” option allowing you to reset the mission and start it up again. When I was at my peak efficiency, this run was maybe taking two minutes to complete, and technically you can bail as soon as the elite drops. I however preferred mopping up the pack that spawns in with it because I have actually seen a significant number of bonus drops that way. Sure it is repetitive, but it is the sort of activity that is perfect to do while watching something on Netflix because it requires very little focus.

As for leveling other characters… sadly the most efficient way of doing so seems to be repeating the Harm missions over and over. Everything in the game gives you experience, even these tutorial missions. It seems like experience gain is not impacted at all by the difficulty that you are attempting, so that means your best bet is to queue up for anything with a large volume of mob encounters on the lowest possible difficult. You won’t get any gear drops in the Harm challenges, but you will get one to two levels per round until you get fairly high in level. At this point you can bump things up to Harm IV or Harm V which reward more experience, not because of the difficulty but because they spawn in a lot of mini boss type encounters.

I attempted to do some of this on Thor yesterday, and while I was perfectly fine grinding for loot… grinding for experience bored the shit out of me. So I figure I will probably go back to running missions because at least in that way I am getting some gear drops as I continue the leveling process and have a chance of maybe getting wardrobe unlocks through the rare and epic pattern drops. I’ve never seen a legendary pattern drop, but for all I know that might be a thing that exists in super rarity out in the wild. Grinding the levels also gives me a more reliable source of item materials which then can be converted into power level on Cap. For me at least that seems to be the best option, but for sheer speed… those Harm missions cannot be beat.

I spent a significant amount of my weekend playing Marvel’s Avengers, and this morning I am going to talk about it. Last week I talked a bit about my initial impressions of the launch and getting my hands on the full game, and this morning you are going to get more of a 30 hours in view. Lets start off with a statement that I think folks are probably trying to sort out, and that is is this a must buy game? I can give you an unequivocal no. That does not mean it is a bad game or an un-enjoyable game, but I would never throw this on a list of must experience games ever. If you have limited funds and even more limited time, then you can probably safely give this game a pass for now.

Marvel’s Avengers by Crystal Dynamics is an attempt to take the huge stable of Marvel Comics characters and convert them into a reoccurring service game. The thing is… I have a soft spot for this concept because I loved Marvel Heroes the now long dead Diablo-like game from Gazillion. Really to be truthful I just want that game back, but unfortunately that isn’t in the cards. What you have with Marvel Avengers is a somewhat generic albeit competent hero brawler that sets itself in the general mission structure of a Destiny Strike. You take control of one of the heroes, drop into a “War Zone”, complete a sequence of scripted objectives, and win some loot in the process.

Where the game shines however is in the story content. That is the piece that Destiny never really got right. The first ten to twelve hours of gameplay are spent following a sequence of content through what is effectively the heroes journey of Kamala Khan, aka Ms Marvel. She goes from fangirl to glue that holds the team together and becomes a powerful hero in her own right. I personally think that it is worth the price of admission just to experience this story, but I also buy way more games than the average person so my barrier of entry is somewhat low. The story is essentially a “getting the band back together” experience, as you spend your time effectively rallying the troops. The events of “A Day” caused not only the world to lose faith in the Avengers but for them to lose faith in each other.

After the main story arc is finished, the story continues on a little bit further as you are asked to help Shield and the Inhumans on some side content. I am now working through the last bit of that, which I believe unlocks a new bit of story content. It should be known that I am playing entirely solo and in that mode the game includes a bunch of NPC Avengers to come help you complete missions. However based on my reading and watching of content, it seems like the Single Player and Multiplayer experiences are effectively the same with the insert of more humans rather than bots. Now we are going to get into one of the bad aspects of the game.

While you play through the story it feels like you are visiting a number of fairly unique set pieces. However once you enter the less directed Warzone play portion of the game, you quickly realize that there are something in the neighborhood of a half dozen maps in which every bit content takes place. Sure an individual Warzone might shuffle the elements, but you are going to memorize a good number of the venues quickly. The other challenge is that the mission lengths seem to vary wildly from dropping down a fighting a single elite pack to being lead through a sequence of five or six things. I am sure once I have memorized what every mission entails this will feel a little less weird, but for right now it feels a little jarring and makes it very hard to guesstimate how long something is going to take.

During the mission you do a lot of head hopping between multiple characters, but once I was given control I’ve spent the vast majority of my post story game time playing Captain America, who was my main in Marvel Heroes. As of last night I have hit the level cap of 50, which is the point at which you unlock all of your talent points, and I have my power level up to 136. Based on what I am hearing the power level cap is 150, which is achieved through wearing a full set of 130 yellow gear that you then upgrade to 140 with materials. The last 10 points is gained through the Major Artifact which serves as this games equivalent to the Destiny seasonal artifact and will give you those last 10 points.

I am certain at this point that there will be a limited number of things that will give me light levels… sorry I mean power levels. This very much follows the Destiny template, and it is a grind that I am deeply familiar with. The biggest challenge here however is that there just doesn’t feel like there is a lot of meaningful content to be grinding. Each faction gives you a daily mission to take down a boss, but as of right now there are 2 villains comic book villains in the game and 2 AIM mega robots that you can fight. Combine that with the six or so available map types, and the experience gets to feeling really repetitive really quickly. My hope is that we get a pretty rapid cadence of content drops, because at the moment the content available is feeling fairly threadbare.

At the moment I have spent the most time playing Cap and Kamala, but a close third would be Thor. They all command sufficiently differently to make them interesting, but after having ground Cap to 50… it seems like a big ask to grind them ALL to 50. For reference I had all of the heroes above level 5 by the time I finished the story and I believe had cap to around 15 and Kamala to around 10. So suffice to say that the story is not going to get you anywhere near the level cap, and if you want to do this thing it is going to involve a lot of grinding warzones. The levels come rapidly enough, but at this point I think I am around 30 hours into the game and just now have my first character to 50.

Marvel’s Avengers has some good bones, but I guess time will tell if this turns into a really great game or not. The story is solid and as I said before for me personally that was worth the price of entry. I just question if there is enough there in order to keep players engaged between now and when new content drops. The challenge cards I think were designed to be more of a thing than they really feel like, because you can progress them extremely slowly each day and they ask you to play in a very specific fashion to get that progress. I wish you could effectively grind your way through them, that every activity would add a little bit of progress.

So I spent my weekend playing Avengers, but in my heart I was just wishing that I could be playing New World.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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