Looter Shooter Archives - Page 93 of 111

Not First Rodeo

March 8, 2016 by Belghast

The Waiting Game

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country. Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock. My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us. It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle. The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play. I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo. To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy. My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam… which was a process that took over twenty minutes. I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight. The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division. My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around. After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me. It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing. Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit. That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty. This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead… which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp. The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around. This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation. I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay. If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light. Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it. I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley. The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great. At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them. I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions. I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”. While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again… I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game. It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well. Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us. Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two. I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error. As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard. It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile. My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction. In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines… this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option. During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window. It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable. Dear UbiSoft… never do this again… in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu. I mean I get what they are going for… wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game… but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta. So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan. I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue. I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon. The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available. I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land. If the servers stay stable… like will be golden. I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night. However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.

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!

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Last night was another night that was all over the place. Firstly I decided to reinstall Forge.gg and give it another chance. I have so many mixed emotions about this service, I like the concept that I can grab short clips at the end of my gaming session. I dislike the fact that I can ONLY grab short clips, which are generally too short to show a boss fight for example. I like the always on nature, and that it can just run in the background without me feeling like I need to be entertaining. However I ran into some issues last night where apparently even though I had push to talk set… it was still actively picking up my microphone the entire time as you can see in the above clip. So you get a snippet of a conversation between my wife and I about something I don’t even remember. I like the idea of streaming but I don’t always want to be actively interacting, and forge is this great middle ground. Ultimately I wound up muting my microphone at a system level just to make sure that it was not picking up. I am hoping this is just a bug in the current client, and I will crawl the site to see if I can find out why this was happening.

The other gotcha it seems is that it did not pick up and start recording Elder Scrolls Online. I spent the first part of the evening doing garrison dailies and doing at least one Tanaan objective in World of Warcraft and it recorded all of that perfectly. However as soon as I swapped into ESO, it never came up with the forge icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen letting me know it is recording. I will say that the really really nice thing about the client is sometime in between my last attempt at using the service and this one… it seems to work nicer with Fraps because there is no way I am giving up that just to use the service. I am too used to having a common and centralized screenshot tool for all of the games I play. It is an absolute necessity that I have a fresh source of new screenshots for this blog, and I hate having to try and find the screenshot directory for each individual game. So instead I tend to unbind the screenshot key if it is allowed and just use Fraps for everything. It was awesome last night that I was able to use fraps just fine while still recording on forge…. at least when it came to World of Warcraft. I am going to be a sad panda if that ends up being the issue with it recording Elder Scrolls Online.

Return to Greenshade

eso 2016-02-29 20-13-11-90

The bulk of my time last night was spent wandering around Greenshade in the Elder Scrolls Online. Generally speaking I tend to play this game by wandering aimlessly from objective to objective, but last night I actually seemed to move through the zone with a purpose. That purpose being ingratiating myself to the Court of the Wilderking, a forest spirit that controls the Valenwood and that the local Bosmer worship as a God King. As part of trying to quell the rebellion and steal forces away from the Veiled Heritance, my mission was simple… get the support of the Wilderking to get the support of the local forces…. thus ending the rebellion. I of course did a bunch of other stuff along the way, and I am not entirely complete with the main story sequence… but I am having a blast. I got sidetracked in helping a friend level in World of Warcraft, and then again by the Love is in the Air event…. and finally I am settling back into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. Granted currently I will probably continue to hop games like mad because there is just so damned much stuff that I want to be playing. In Elder Scrolls I have yet to see any of the Imperial City content, or Orsinium… and they are just about to release the Thieves Guild as well. So much catching up to do… but at the same time I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it because I am not playing the game at a serious end game focused level.

eso 2016-02-29 22-47-26-19

The other big happening of the night is that I finally dinged Veteran Rank 4, allowing me access to the next tier of crafted gear. I was doing awesome…. until I screwed up and rushed to get my shield made and forgot to go to the set crafting area. Originally I was planning on having 5 piece Alessia’s Bulwark, and 4 piece Ashen Grip… except I am now sitting at 3 pieces in that set because I got sidetracked and ended up making a non-set shield. Unfortunately I am completely out of the right kind of wood so I will need to do some more adventuring before I can finish things out. For the time being I have opted to abandon my costume and go with the actual armor look because I dig the Imperial armor look. I will probably always favor the Dunmer sword type, though recently I did enjoy using an axe for a bit. The game looks amazing on the laptop, and I am so damned happy with how well everything is performing to be honest. It does get a little hot but then again what gaming laptop doesn’t. My previous one had a SLI graphics card configuration so had insanely hot air venting out of both sides of the laptop. At least this setup isn’t continuously baking my mouse hand. I just need to sort out why exactly Forge was not recording the game.

The Division

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Also looming on the near horizon is the launch of The Division. At this point it is absolutely certain that I will be playing it on the PC, at least at first. When the price comes down a little I will probably also pick it up for the PS4 so that I have access to it for any of the friends that happen to be playing there. For the last few days since the end of the beta I have trying to sort out how best to organize folks for the upcoming launch. The game itself does not really have guilds or clans or any structure like that…. at least that I saw in the two betas I have been part of. So as a result this is going to make getting stuff going a little more difficult than in other games. However my friend Sigtric, the man who coined the hashtag #BelEffect is firing up a Discord group and attempting to get it to be the official/unofficial chat server for the game. If you are going to be playing I highly suggest you pop by and join the “Gone Rogue” community. There is a shared general chat and breakout channels for PC, PS4, and Xbox One to make organizing things a little easier. I honestly wish I had something like this for Destiny. Discord is one of those things that is growing on me, and while I still find Slack easier to use… there is a point in the near future where I could see abandoning traditional voice servers and moving to Discord entirely.