The Division Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Savior of New York

March 14, 2016 by Belghast

Mostly Done

Yesterday we continued on out in the garage and did a much more prodding and tedious detail pass. This meant sitting down and sorting through old boxes that we had not seen in nearly a decade. Among the treasures I uncovered was my Gameboy SP as well as pretty much all of my Gameboy Advance cartridges. I literally had no clue where that was, and the last time I remembered having it was in a car that we traded off long ago. I had feared that I simply forgot to remove it from under the drivers seat… because for a long while it was my “waiting on my wife to finish at school” from a time when we regularly drove in together. Apparently we did in fact pull it out of the car, and it sat in this trash bag filled with lots of other stuff we hurriedly pulled from that car before we traded it off. This is apparently a tradition of ours because not only did we find a bag for when we traded off the Pontiac Grand Am… but also a bag from when we traded off like two other vehicles as well. I also found entire boxes of stuff that I apparently packed up when leaving previous jobs and never bothered to go through. These boxes were full of countless pay stubs and health plan documents… so a good chunk of my yesterday was sitting down listening to podcasts and shredding all the documents.

One of the gems of the day was the above image… a box of essentially all of our ancient cell phones. These pretty much represented our pre-smartphone era and those Nokia 5160s were our very first phones that we used for ages. We also found a bunch of extra face plates… since you could swap them out so easily. The positive about these ancient phones is the fact that we didn’t even really have texting plans on any of them, so there isn’t really data worth harvesting so we can dispose of them pretty easily. My friend Squirrel suggested that he would love to have them, for target practice. Unfortunately by the time he posted that I had already disposed of the entire box. Probably my favorite of that era was the weird white LG flip phone, largely because it had a clock visible on its face without actually opening it. Another interesting find was my “art box” which is a big wooden box that was crammed with all of my watercolor and pen and ink stuff from college. Another strange thing was the truly insane number of World of Warcraft trading game cards that I found stuffed pretty much everywhere. For awhile it was habit to pick up a pack anytime I needed to go to the store… and apparently they just sat around everywhere. At some point I will sift through them all and gather up all of the leftover in game codes to give away to readers or something. They are mostly the “toy” variety, like Path of Cenarus or Illidan or maybe some Pet Biscuits. Still the sort of thing is fun to have if you don’t otherwise have access to them. The strangest thing about the weekend… is I think because we were so tired anyways from the cleaning, I can’t say that losing an hour has really had much effect on me.

Don’t Panic

I spent essentially the rest of the weekend playing The Division. At this point I have logged about thirty four hours since launch, and am sitting just a little past level fourteen. The game still feels very fresh, and it is funny how much my play style has changed as I have moved into the game. Early on I thought I would be super tanky and focus on things that let me survive in an open firefight, but in truth the longer I play the more sniper I become. Right now I am running around with a Covert SRS for sniping purposes and generally dealing lots of damage quickly to targets that are far away from me, and then when they get into closer range I swap to a Police M4 which can whittle down enemies with focused bursts. This works amazingly well against pretty much every enemy type but snipers. Those guys… are pretty much the bane of my existence because they are trying to play the same game I am, and generally the computer is better at it. So I spend a lot of my time trying to get out of line of sight from the snipers while mopping everything else up… and then play this game of chicken popping in and out of cover and trying to quick scope them before popping back down like a prairie dog. The worst snipers so far are the Rikers because they just seem more brutal in every possible way. That said it might simply be that they are the highest level enemies I can encounter currently.

On the podcast Saturday night we got into this long discussion about the morality of The Division, and how it made the other AggroChat folks feel uneasy. I can’t say that I am experiencing this at all, because like always I am writing my own narrative of my character as I go… and the fact that this is a silent protagonist game really helps that for me. So as i move around the city, I am the big damned hero cleaning up the city and saving people. I am absolutely the good guys in my tale, but then again as they said Saturday so are the Cleaners, who absolutely think they are doing what is right for the city. I guess for me I just love how rich this setting is… all of the little details like the graffiti that I am showcasing in the photos for today’s post is just amazing. I think the key difference is… that I never really fully immerse myself into a game setting. It is always a game that I am playing, and always a story where I am the hero. Even if I am not supposed to be… I am building a narrative compatible with my notion that in spite of whatever actions I am taking, I am doing it for some greater good. In the Division I absolutely rush to save hostages, or citizens being held up by looters, because it makes me feel like the hero I am trying to be. When you do a random encounter on the street you are given bonuses for various things… and when I see that survivor bonus it always makes me happy. I also spend a lot of my time going through abandoned buildings so I can make sure I always have whatever item citizens ask for when I come across one in need. I am the one making the city a better place, and I am comfortable with that stance. I guess that might be why I like the post apocalyptic genre so much, is because the world is in such a screwed up state… that there are so many ways for me to help fix it. Even if fixing means simply hunting down the biggest baddest warlord… and putting a bullet in his skull.

Sleeper Awakens

March 11, 2016 by Belghast

Real World Rifts

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Yesterday I took the day off to manage getting a dumpster delivered. This was one of those odd situations where they would not really give us a time of day for it to be delivered, but instead wanted to call on their way. As a result I felt like I was pretty much in a holding pattern until that event happened, largely because we wanted it dropped off in the yard… not in the drive way. So I treated yesterday like a normal work day, except instead of shuffling off to work after posting a blog post… I booted up and played The Division for a bit. I had been months since I attempted to stream anything, and I was also kicking the tires of the new OBS Studio… which seems to obfuscate a bunch of the settings. So the first few minutes of the stream were apparently a slide show narrated by my voice. After that I fiddled with some settings until I finally landed on a combination of levers that seemed to produce a nice watchable streaming experience. The thing about The Division is that I feel like I am constantly doing something… even if it is not the thing I intended. One of the aspects of Rift that I loved was the fact that the world was constantly spawning rifts and invasions that I had to deal with. It felt new and fresh… up until the point that it didn’t anymore. The happenings in The Division are varied enough that I hope they remain fresh, but I worry that there will be a time where I start avoiding the little things going on around me… just so I can complete the thing I am actually trying to focus on.

The other potential issue due to the dynamic interactions is that most of the time I feel like I am not actually making any progress. I might set off in search of this or that… and get distracted by six things that happen along the way. For example last night I was trying to do one of those missing agent location quests, where you pick up on their trail and follow them to what unfortunately usually ends up being a log book. While on the final step of one of those chains… I also got the shout over the radio that looters were attacking a supply drop. Instead of going over and defending I tried so hard to keep following the trail of clues. All the while I was actually feeling like a horrible person for not helping those NPCs. The game makes me feel the weight of my decisions in a way that most games don’t, and I think it is because this game bridges the uncanny valley gap so damned well. The world I am wandering around feels so real to me… that I could step out of the screen and into the real Manhattan and not really notice the difference. It also makes me wonder how amazing a game like City of Heroes would have been… if it were rendered with this level of detail. Right now I am feeling so completely behind in everything I am doing, but I am currently knocking on the door of level 10, whereas lots of other folks are hitting the level cap. I am not really going to worry about grinding my way up, because really… I don’t want to burn out on this title.

Completing Quests

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The strange thing about yesterday was that I had the entire day to play The Division, but instead I largely focused on working on stuff in Destiny. I have been a slacker when it comes to completing any of the end game content, especially if it requires tedium. For example one of the big goals is collecting Calcified Fragments, and they are hidden damned near everywhere on the Dreadnaught. Most of them can be obtained “in the open” while doing patrol missions, but a handful of them are only exposed during strikes or story missions. Even others involve doing events like Skyburners Deployment Code or Wormsinger Rune. The other night while doing the Kings Fall raid, the nice folks made sure that I got all of my fragments from there, which took a big obstacle out of the way. There is a long drawn out quest called “Hunger Pangs” that involves doing a bunch of silly stuff for Eris Morn. Several of the steps are gated by the number of Calcified Fragments you happen to have collected at that point. To do the final part of the quest you have to have found 45 of the 50 total fragments that currently exist in the game. So yesterday during the day I managed to solo most of the quest line, including a rather tough version of the Undying Mind strike. I was however stuck on the final quest, which is a pretty insane version of the Phobos quest that starts the Taken King. Thankfully Squirrel and Jex helped me out last night, and I now have a shiny new Touch of Malice which will come in handy during the raid.

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Since they were looking for something else to do… I coerced them into also helping me out with my Sleeper Stimulant quest. I had been on the final stage of this quest since I believe last October, but didn’t have a ready group of people to talk into helping me with it… and had zero luck pugging it. The quest requires you to run a Nightfall level version of the Saber strike, which is somewhat insane to survive given that you get bombarded by Fallen ships at the start. I had always heard that if you could simply manage to make it through the first sequence… that the rest of the strike was really not that bad. I agree at least in part, that is until you reach the final boss. That encounter was absolutely insane… but we managed to take it down pretty easily. Then feeling our Wheaties turned around and attempted the exact same strike as the weekly Nightfall. The combination of Match Game and Fresh Troops made it so much worse. Towards the end we were ping ponging around the room trying to stay alive long enough to resurrect the next fire team member, usually only ending up getting wrecked ourselves in the process. Through a bit of dumb luck and perseverance we managed to pull out the victory on our third attempt at the final encounter. After that I was needing to log, because in truth I only really intended to do the Malice event but ended up staying upstairs on the PlayStation for like three hours. Was a pretty great night and I feel better having knocked a couple of big goals off of my list in the game.

Division Thoughts

March 10, 2016 by Belghast

Busy Week

The last few days have been unexpectedly busy, which is at least a little unfortunate since The Division launched late Monday night/early Tuesday. Work as always gets in the way of my fun, but even more than that there have been various activities that I needed to be coherent for. On Tuesday I had a blast doing the Kings Fall raid in Destiny, but that also meant a night that I could not really devote much time to Division. Last night I had the World of Warcraft raid, and we managed to duplicate our progress from the previous week… this time with fewer ringers. Granted we still had ringers… just about half as many as we did the previous week so the progression felt more “real”. Today I took off work because I am having to coordinate the delivery of a dumpster. Then tonight, Friday night… and Saturday afternoon we will be cleaning out the garage which is our spring break project. It is going to be awesome to reclaim that space because for the last decade it has been a space where we just threw anything that we wanted out of sight. So there is an old dresser out there, a couple of benches… countless insanely large boxes that we didn’t want to haul to the recycling dumpster at that moment. So in theory I think most of it will go really quickly. The only major concern I have is that I also know there are various chemicals out there as well, and have no real clue what to do with those.

All of this said I have still been trying to squeeze in as much Division as I possibly can during the week and have managed to hit level eight so far. I’ve been loving the insane amount of clothing that I have managed to pick up while wandering around. With all of the options I have cobbled together an outfit that feels uniquely me… in a way I have not experienced in a game since The Secret World. The only problem is… the character models themselves are pretty limited. See the glorious beard that I am wearing? That beard is only available for a single face… which seems insane considering that I might want to have a beard like that on any model. A similar situation is the state of glasses in this game… I ended up going with the round Lennon lenses because they were the only ones that I felt actually fit my face. There were however zero options for actual glasses… like corrective style which I would have happily put on my character instead of permanent sunglasses… even in the middle of the night like the above picture. These frustrations however are relatively minor, and after not being able to get into the game on opening night… I’ve played pretty reliably ever since.

Rewarding Exploration

One of my favorite things in video games is to wander around unfettered by obligations and just explore the world. This is my Bethesda games are such crack for me, because I can absolutely jump off the beaten path at any moment… and am generally rewarded for doing so. One of my subtle frustrations of the beta was the fact that so many areas like the sewers and subway system seemed to have no real purpose. In the live game however… these locations are chock full of interesting encounters. On Tuesday night I was playing for a bit ahead of the Destiny raid, and popped into a sewer… largely because in beta these served as ways to get over to the next city block pretty easily. However while down there I encountered a chest that notified me that I had discovered a gun runners cache or something of the sort. When I opened it up, it had a very nice level 4 blue SMG that I have yet to be able to replace at level 8. I feel similarly awesome when I wander through abandoned buildings and explore them looking for treasure, and this time around it is great that I am not constantly hitting walls that I cannot cross into other areas of town. Sure there are absolutely some places where I really should not be yet due to my level… but I like that the game lets me go there anyway.

The problem with being so exploration based… is that I feel like I am getting absolutely nothing accomplished. I can happily wander around the streets doing random encounters that I happen across for hours… and then realize… oh shit I really meant to be doing this or that objective. I am slowly whittling down the objectives that I have open to me… and I think today I will work on some of the missions that involve rescuing this person or taking out that baddie. I remember there being a whole slew of things around the Hudson camp that I did during beta that I probably want to go back and explore. Granted I might be over level for them… but it should be fun in any case. The big thing that I have to talk about this game is that while I kinda wish you had random encounters with other players… after getting some grouping going I finally understand why that isn’t a thing. When we were running around as a group the other night it was a VASTLY different experience to me wandering the streets solo. With Ashgar and Tam, we were constantly running up against huge groups of mobs, and I have to say…. huge groups of cleaners are the absolute worst. Those damned fire bombs that they throw out… I guess I had gotten used to the looter smoke bombs not being that bad. In any case I hope to do some more grouping over the next few nights, but at this point everyone is going to be massively out of my level range I fear. I wonder how the game handles staggered level ranges… I think a lot of the difficulty we had the other night was due to the fact that Ash and I were level 4, and Tam was level 8. So I cannot imagine what it would be like with a larger disparity. All in all however I am still enjoying myself and having a good time.

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.