Open World RPG Archives - Page 27 of 41

A Partial Defense

October 25, 2019 by Belghast

Earlier this week Bethesda announced the Fallout 1st Membership, and I feel like I had a vastly different take on it than the rest of the community. There are a good number of people up in arms about this, and I can’t say that they are entirely wrong. I myself have deeply mixed feelings about it, but at face value I didn’t balk at the $100 a year price tag. As such I am going to break down my line of thinking. For that $100 or $13 monthly you get the following items.

The part of this that I immediately honed in on was the Private Worlds functionality. See if you have followed my blog for awhile this was what I desperately wanted at launch. In fact there were a bunch of server hosting providers that were advertising having private worlds just ahead of launch. This was likely wild speculation, but the serving up of a private server is not at all a new thing. In fact games like Rust, Minecraft or ARK function heavily on the backs of private hosted worlds that allow you to tweak and mod until your heart is content. This is ultimately what I was expecting from Fallout 76, was the ability to run my own destination to hang out and explore the world with my friends.

Now if you look at the price tag entirely based upon Private Worlds… it becomes honestly a bargain. If we just take a Rust or an Ark server, which I figure are pretty fair equivalents of what sort of horsepower that Fallout 76 would require. Getting a server up and running is going to cost you somewhere between $20 and $30 a month through one of the many hosting providers (though admittedly you can run your own for free if you want to go through that nonsense). The scalar variable there often is based on just how many slots are available for players to log in and join. Immediately it seems like the Private Worlds are capped at 8 players, but then again the normal worlds also appear to be capped at 8 players so I guess that makes sense.

What everyone else appears to have latched onto in the statement is that this is seemingly a package of cosmetics and some core functionality that isn’t available in any other fashion. The Scrapbox honestly reminds me a lot of the crafting inventory from ESO Plus… which did not phase me at all and is worth every penny of that subscription cost. The monthly allowance of Atoms also seemed nice because it would allow you to play with stuff on the item shop all part of your server subscription fee. Again I am looking at this as entirely a way of getting private worlds and getting a bunch of stuff as part of that package. Most people however are just seeing this as a cash grab for a bunch of stuff that should have been available in the base game.

For most of the week I thought I had the right of it, and we were renting server space to play in our private worlds. However it is coming out that this concept is a little bankrupt as well. First the world only exist if the player who is a First Member is actually online. That is way more problematic than renting a server, because in theory so long as you have granted someone access to your server it is up and running 24/7. I was maybe willing to cough up the money for a server if it let me have a place to roam freely with a group of my friends. Strike two is the fact that apparently the controls for this server are set up based on your Bethesda friends list… and anyone on that friends list can pop in freely. So instead of being like I thought and granting permissions to individual players, seemingly anyone can join your game that you have friended.

The other fault that is coming out is that often times the worlds you are going into are not unique to you. What I expected was something akin to Minecraft, where you get a default spawn and the game tracks every change made by you or your friends to that world. There are instead reports of players joining worlds where there are corpses everywhere, items looted and containers empty. So when they say “Private Worlds” they are seemingly talking about just a normal world that has a limited party list to your friends. So yeah… it turns out my line of thinking was the one that was completely wrong. $100 a year for a private server is completely reasonable, but this is seemingly no private server.

Instead of caring about Fallout 76 First subscriptions… I feel like their timing is perfect for pushing players into playing The Outer Worlds that came out apparently some time last night. It is currently available on Epic Games Store, Windows Store, and free as part of the PC Xbox Games Pass. Instead of playing a poorly implemented feature, you can instead explore a brand new IP from the makers of the best Fallout game… Fallout New Vegas. It seems pretty clear to me what the actual choice to make is, and it is what I will probably be spending my time doing this weekend apart from some ventures into Destiny 2.

I got in long enough to make a character and do some of the very early interactions and so far… I am more or less impressed. It has the same sort of feel as Fallout New Vegas did and does a better job of on-boarding you into the new destination than a game that either forces you to care about a father you don’t know or a child you never actually wanted. I am hoping it continues to be as good as it seems to be. This is what you should be spending your time doing instead of playing Fallout 76. So when I said a partial defense… really I mean not much of one at all.

The Will of the Moon

February 11, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about me trying to recuperate from whatever crud I had on Friday. I’m feeling better as a whole but still not feeling 100%. I’ve referred to this weekend as a name brand beta, because when a company throws a special test that most of the world seems to be invited to it definitely comes off as more marketing ploy than actual test of the game infrastructure. Overall the game performed flawlessly other than an apparent known memory leak bug, that I never quite encountered because I didn’t play longer than the requisite two or three hours that it takes to encounter it. The missions that I ran were rather enjoyable, and I fully expect to at a minimum play through the story content and unlock all of that. I make no guarantees about how long it will take me given that it took me a good two years before I reached maximum level in the original game.

I still question how well the game fits my play style, but at the moment I am looking at it for a purely single player experience given that I know going into it that none of the other AggroChat crew will be playing it. They all for the most part bounced off of the original Division, and primarily for the bleak story beats. I think the fact that we were effectively working for the various communities that we discover makes the flow of the story feel better. However as Kodra pointed out on the podcast, it does leave us a question of why exactly we are still an agent if there is no organizational structure left? I mostly view that trope as the lone lawman in the wild frontier sort of approach. I will say the game improved massively after I turned off the HDR, given that I was only able to SEE the HDR effect upstairs in my office and not while playing remotely through parsec… and as such it made everything extremely washed out and hard to pick out details.

The game I spent the majority of Saturday playing was Assassin’s Creed Origins and I have reached a point where I am staring down the barrel of the ending. However I am extremely frustrated by what appears to be the ending that is unfolding in front of me. Now I have said for some time that my opinion is that when this game was originally planned the ultimately design was that you could play it as Bayek or as Aya since the two characters at least on some level are interchangeable and have the same reasons for engaging in the main story plot. For sake of budget I assume they cut one character so that they would not have to animate two copies of everything, but the problem with this is… that every time you are forced to play Aya it is like stepping foot into a level one character.

What I mean by that is through the course of the game you make a lot of stylistic decisions about what weapons you want to use and what talent points to sink into. Then each time you are throw into playing Aya you are forced to return back to the character that lacks the ability to customize anything. So spoilers time… but I just went through a sequence where it appears that I am saying goodbye to my character Bayek… aka the one that I have spent the last 40 levels customizing to be exactly the way I want him to be… and being forced to do the ending of the game with Aya the level 1 blank slate. This makes me really not want to do any of the ending and just call it good enough… returning to playing through the fun part of the game which is doing random quests out in the world. Maybe this isn’t exactly what is about to happen… but it certainly seems like I am just about to be forced into beating the game as a proxy. Please note… I like Aya as a character and would have been fine playing her… if I could actually control what sort of gear and talents she had.

Lastly I spent some time playing Final Fantasy XIV this weekend and accomplished two things. Firstly I managed to get my Blue Mage to 50… which means I now need to find a party of blue mages to go collect the rest of the spells I have available to me given that everything else seems to come from a dungeon or trial. I spent the podcast grinding out mobs in Northern Thanalan and managed to push across the line solo. I also managed to get through The Burn which served as a bit of a roadblock since the final boss of that dungeon appears to be a PUG destroyer. I’ve now moved the quest line along to where I am failing miserably at a fight that is about four times longer than it really needs to be. Actually I have only failed it the one time and it was mostly because I didn’t catch on what was going on fast enough. I opted to play through the mission as a warrior instead of a samurai, but that also meant that I was not prepared for a burn phase, because I assumed I was simply trying to out survive the encounter.

I will likely poke my head back in again tonight and give it another shot. I think I am probably nearing the bridge between 4.4 and 4.5 and as such getting closer and closer to being able to understand what the hell is going on.

Giza and Memphis

January 22, 2019 by Belghast

Today we return to my normal nonsense. Yesterday felt really weird, but not as weird as I guess I expected it to feel? I am still very much engaged in Assassin’s Creed Origins… or in the way that I play it… Egyptian Skyrim? I’ve made it to Giza and can now die happy… or actually at this point I have made it past Giza. Climbing to the top of the pyramids was an interesting challenge as you effectively had to work your way from gap in the capping to the next gap all the way up to the top. That is one of the bizarre things about this game… in some ways it feels very much like Breath of the Wild where it seems like you can climb everything in your view… until you suddenly can’t. When the game wants to cut off a route it makes something un-climbable which just feels really odd considering the rest of the game you are pulling off crazy moves that would be impossible to actually do in real life.

One of the mechanics that I both love and hate is the torch, because I am having to use it an awful lot here in Giza as I explore the depths of many tombs. It feels cool because in theory the torch shows about as much as you would expect from an actual torch. The negative however is the game knows this… and regularly presents you with rooms that have dimensions that do the torch no favors, and in those situations I find myself working around the edge in a vague attempted to not fall into some pit or something. So far I have not actually encountered an actual pit, but by god my mind knows that the moment I stop being vigilant… BAM A PIT. Additionally I love that the game shows me actually equipping weapons… but it really shows the nonsense of my inventory as I am equipping two different bows… a sword and shield… and a giant freaking battle axe.

Another thing we need to continue talking about is how freaking gorgeous this game is. I’ve always been enthralled by Egyptian history… and roaming around all of these locations in virtual avatar form is amazing. Memphis is pretty much how I imagined it… a swampy mess. I also love the fact that there is a dedicated croc hunter in a vague attempt to keep the waterways clear enough for the people to safely traverse. I am not entirely sure why I am on this single player kick, but I am going to roll with it at least until Anthem starts going through its pre-release posturing early next month. I will say… all of this is really making me want to pick back up Witcher 3, which is even less linear than Assassin’s Creed Origins… and quite literally something I could play for six months and never have seen everything. The biggest thing about this game…. is I am always happy to return again the next night.

So readers… what are you up to that is interesting? Playing anything great?

Friends through Food

January 17, 2019 by Belghast

I know I have talked briefly about this in the past, but we have been adopted by two of the neighborhood cats. First we had the cat that we refer to as “big boy” who comes running from several yards away when he sees us come out in the morning. He does this thing where he rears back on his hind paws to reach up and headbutt our hands and it is adorable. He wants food of course but I think he mostly wants attention, and I take a break from the coffee and blogging time to go give it to him when my wife shouts up that he is out there. He isn’t out every single day… but comes close to it and we know which house he belongs at and they have a doggie door so he is sorta on free roam as he likes. He apparently visits lots of houses during the day and ours is but one stop on his trip.

Over time we developed a second cat… that admittedly we refer to as “Two” because we are unoriginal and also have no clue where she belongs. This cat seems way more “permanently struggling” than big boy, and over time our relationship with her has improved. At the beginning she would run the second we got near the door… only returning once she was sure we were no longer around. Each day she would run away a little less… to this morning when she did not budge at all when we opened the door and only eased away as I walked out on the porch to set down some piles of food. I set out two piles since I know that her and big boy have a sort of uneasy truce… but cannot be expected to eat from the same pile.

From what I can tell she lives somewhere behind our house, as often times in the morning I will come into the kitchen and our backyard light has tripped. We have it on a motion sensor and I have looked out a few times and seen her back there and even when I have not… often times she shows up in the front of the house as soon as we turn the porch light on. We’ve built a little box full of blankets on the front porch in hopes of enticing her to snuggle in since it has been fairly cold of late… but so far no luck there. We’ve seen her hanging out on the porch and using it as a windbreak… but no actual snuggling.

I am sure however that at some point in the next few weeks/months we will reach a point where she is comfortable enough around us to stay while we feed… or even let us pet her. She has been super skittish but each day feels like a tiny victory as she becomes less so. I mean it is not like we need more cats… given that we have three indoor ones, but we are suckers for animals that look like they need taking care of. So as a result we now have our indoor family and our outdoor family… and someday maybe an amalgam of the two. For the time being however I am just trying to teach “Two” that we are pretty okay human beings that are setting this food out just for her.

On the gaming front, I am still engaged with Assassin’s Creed Origins, even though I had a bit of a fragmented night for reasons. I didn’t get out of work until almost 6 pm which put me getting home way later than normal… then I fixed dinner for myself and fixed dinner again for my wife when she got home around 8:30 pm. So as a result I got a bunch of little things accomplished in the game, but didn’t move the story forward much past opening up the next sequence of targets. I somehow doubt that those are actually the FINAL list of Targets however… because I figure there will be a final batch after those that represent the end game. These targets mostly seem like they serve a way to open up new areas of the game like Giza and Memphis for example. Still having a blast, especially in the weird amalgam of Egyptian and Greek culture that are sort of mashing together.

One thing the game does a good job of is what Pete mentioned yesterday in the comments… of showing just how insanely long the Egypt was a major world player. The period of Egyptian dominance that we think of in the history books started in roughly 3150 BC and concluded somewhere around 332 BC… which is 2818 years… so yeah no wonder we are exploring ancient ruins in a game that appears to be set towards the end of the Ptolemaic period of Egypt when it is effectively ruled by the Greeks. There are so many interesting themes going on in this game that I just sorta want to wallow in the world instead of pushing the story forward. I’ve helped out so many random people just as a diversion from moving the needle forward. The moment to moment gameplay feels really good and as such I am super happy to be out exploring new areas.

Last night I had to sneak my way up to the Lighthouse of Alexandria… because I assumed there would be a leap of faith… however it was a bit shorter than I was expecting. I halfway expected to have one that would take me down the entire length of the tower, but instead it just deposited me at a hay pile a few stories down. Maybe there is another post that I somehow missed on the climb up that would provide a more gratifying experience. All in all I am still very much enjoying myself and look forward to playing it over the upcoming four day weekend.