Open World RPG Archives - Page 29 of 41

Boy…

October 19, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I decided to test out the wireless ethernet thing a little further, this time focusing on the official Sony Playstation Remote Play app, to see if the connection improved its functionality. In the past it had behaved a lot like Parsec was where it had momentary blips of connectivity, where the sound would drag a bit while the stream was trying to catch up. In truth it happened an awful lot more than Parsec normally does, generally happening every couple of minutes. That said the entire time playing the Remote Play app felt very obvious that there was a bit of lag introduced into the system. For example I could not really stand playing Destiny other than material farming, because I had to lead the shots by a significant margin to try and actually hit anything. As such I only really played RPGs in this fashion that didn’t require me to do much in the way of fine motor skills.

With the connection change however it is not really noticeable that I am not sitting at the Playstation 4 upstairs. Sure I am only able to stream back 720p due to the fact that I don’t have a PS4 Pro… but apart from that one constraint it felt like I was actually upstairs playing the machine natively. I spent most of the evening playing Dad of War… sorry that is all this game will ever be called to me personally. I will comment a bit about the game itself later, but as far as the gameplay experience over Remote Play I put in roughly three hours and never once had a bobble or a hiccup in the connection or anything I could possibly attribute to slowdown or input lag. In fact the game felt silky smooth and largely made me forget how I was doing some nonsense in the process of playing it.

As far as the game itself… it reminds me an awful lot of the way that Horizon Zero Dawn felt in ways that I am not entirely certain if I could explain. Basically Dad of War is Horizon Zero Dawn if you instead were playing as Rost, and spent all your time running around with young Aloy. There are so many ways in which Kratos interacts with Atreus, that remind me of those early interactions between Rost and Aloy. Sure the core of the games themselves are very different, whereas HZD was a big open worldish exploration game… and thusfar Dad of War seems to be largely following a predetermined path with various objectives adjacent to said path. The short period of time I have been playing however makes me feel like playing HZD again.

Even though I generally hate the term Toxic Masculinity, not necessarily for its intended meaning, but more the negative reaction that I tend to have mentally to hearing it… and translating it to “being male is bad”. Dad of War is very much a game about Toxic Masculinity. Kratos wants to be a better “father” than he is capable of being. The game takes painstaking effort to show you all of the times he has the instinct to embrace his son, but for whatever reason cannot and instead focuses on something Atreus did wrong instead of comforting and assuaging his fears. He wants his son to grow up “strong” like he is, and it reminds me so much of every time I saw a father trying to relive their own glory days through their kid via sports. I’m sorta afraid that if I had kids I would feel something similar about all of the geeky things that I did along the way growing up, and wanting to try and force said kids into loving the same things I do.

I have some feelings about how this story is going to play out, but I am going to keep them to myself for now. I just feel like we are telling the final tale of Kratos, and witnessing the birth of the next figure that the series will focus on. I have a feeling that the game as a whole will be a very unexpected emotional trip. Ultimately yesterday I realized that since I am not currently engaged in an MMO that is sapping all of my time… that I should spent some time catching up on the single player games that I either never attempted to got distracted while playing. Example I made a significant amount of progress into Assassin’s Creed Origins but got distracted by some other shiny MMO flavored object that crossed my path. For now I think I am going to spend most of my time playing through Dad of War and after that… probably set my sights on another single player game that I failed to play… maybe loop back around and finish up AC Origins.

Listless Gaming

June 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a fairly fraught evening with me needing to spend more time than I would have liked dealing with work stuff. By the time I shifted over into gaming mode I was struggling to find the fun in almost anything that I played. Initially I attempted to get into Dishonored Death of the Outsider and managed to make a tiny bit of progress… but in the end just wound up taking screenshots of the weird shit appearing in the game like this… that I can only term as some sort of a monkey baron? For whatever reason this game is struggling to hold my attention in quite the way that Dishonored 1 and 2 did and I am not entirely certain why. It could simply be that I am still not the biggest fan of Karnaca and greatly prefer the vibe of Dunwall.

Whatever the case I made it to about the halfway point of a mission before needing to shut down because my wife needed assistance with something. When I returned to my laptop I did not return to the game and moved on to rummage around for something else to do. Evenings like last night are frustrating because it feels like I squandered the opportunity to have a good time. There are times where my mind is just not in the right place to really enjoy anything so I sorta flail about until eventually giving up for the evening and going to sleep. I wish there was a button that allowed me to purge my mind of worries and just be present in the activity I happen to be doing… and before someone suggests it… meditation doesn’t seem to work for me. I just end up sitting quietly thinking about the same nonsense I was thinking about before I actively tried not to think about it.

So what did I do instead of playing something I had not experienced… I started a brand new game of Fallout 4. In theory I need to get Nexus Mod Manager set up on my upstairs machine and get all of the mods I like to use there. This whole remote playing everything is interesting because there were a lot of experiences like Fallout that I managed to make work downstairs… albeit in a way less pretty fashion. I have to say I could really get used to this whole being able to play games in full resolution and fidelity… from the machine that is most comfortable at that very moment. I need to drag my spare laptop to work and see how well this process works over the guest network there because in theory… it should be accessible from any online connection. I could even try tethering my phone and seeing how playable everything is over a 4G LTE connection.

I sorta always create the same basic character in Fallout 4… which is essentially a version of the same character I create in any game. Little details change but the rough outline of the “Belghast” archetype remains the same. Incoming spoiler alert for anyone who might not have played the game. I don’t even mess with customizing the spouse anymore, because I know a few minutes into the experience she will be long gone. I so rarely play female characters in games because they don’t really fit with the whole unified character thing that I tend to do.

I am not rejecting them because they are female… more that I am rejecting them because they don’t fit the character I keep wanting to play over and over in every single game. I do fine in titles that have a strong female character that you assume the reigns of… like Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn or Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider games. However when you give me a game like the Mass Effect series that allows me to craft a tailor made character… I will almost every single time create a “Belghast”. I also have a lot of issue with the game if it impedes me from crafting this character… which I experience a lot when playing games without beard options or “pretty boy” features. Basically I am not really a fan of the whole Bishōnen thing. Belghast is a battle damaged character and as a result I prefer whatever form that representation takes looks that way… though I do worry that at times I am essentially creating a Marlboro Man.

Frying Pans and Nora Braves

February 28, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have had a hankering to play some State of Decay. This was a game that I originally started playing on the Xbox 360, then picked up when it was eventually released on the PC. When the Year One Survivor Edition came out I picked that up too… as well as buying it for a friend that I thought would enjoy it. Since I had not actually tried streaming from my Xbox One, I decided to pick the game up on that platform and give it a go. Basically Undead Labs is an awesome developer and I have no problem supporting them by picking it up on multiple platforms. We don’t officially have a release date for State of Decay 2… but based on the trickle of activity I am hoping we get some more news soon. My hope is the sequel takes everything that worked well about the first game, but adds in the ability to hang out and explore the zombie filled landscape with friends.

Watch Hanging out playing some State of Decay YOSE on Xbox One from Belghast on www.twitch.tvSo as a result last night I fired up the stream while testing out a few new screen elements and bashed some zombies. If you are for any reason interested you can check out the Twitch VOD here (or click the embedded player above thanks to Jaedia), but it involved a lot of me stumbling around trying to figure out what to do and a few gloriously brutal deaths. I also may or may not have run over the NPC that was following me around and bashing things with a frying pan. The kinda cool thing last night is I had a bunch of folks that were completely different from what I would consider the normal crew of people who take pity on me and hang out while I stream. It’s really bizarre for me to have someone pop in the channel that I don’t actually know. It was a surprising amount of fun to just hang out and publicly fail at playing a video game.

Right now I don’t have much in the way of stamina as far as “being on” goes. I lasted a little bit over an hour before needing to go do something else with less of an audience for a bit. I am not sure if it was just that I was tired dying in State of Decay and wanted to play something else for awhile, or if I was tired of interacting. I need to sort out a proper way to swap games when I am just not feeling the one I am playing, because in truth I wound up logging into Monster Hunter World and farming content and it would have been nice to have a little company doing so. I originally logged in with the goal of doing a little SOS Roulette, but noticed a note in the Login Bonus about the Aloy event going live. For those who are curious, the quest is titled “The Proving” and shows up under events as a 6 Star High Rank mission that requires the player to be Hunter Rank 11, so you may need to do a little bit of progressing to get there.

There are two pieces to the set, a full suit of armor similar to the Ryu gear that literally transforms you into the Aloy character model. Additionally there is a version of Aloy’s bow that can be upgraded to a Rarity 7 weapon with some elder dragon bits. The gear can be upgraded a total of 10 times allowing it to remain fairly relevant for a long while. If you want to craft the gear you are looking at collecting the following….

Aloy Armor

Nora Brave Trophy – 4 – Obtained from Event Quest
Anjanath Pelt+ – 14
Anjanath Nosebone+ – 6
Anjanath Gem – 1
30,000 Zenny

Aloy’s Bow

Nora Brave Trophy – 2
Anjanath Fang+ – 3
Monster Keenbone – 5
Anjanath Plate – 1
16,000 Zenny

Aloy’s War Bow – Upgrade to Rarity 7

Nora Brave Trophy – 3
Anjanath Scale+ – 7
Elder Dragon Bone – 3
Wyvern Gem – 1
32,000 Zenny

Now it should be noted that the only part of this that you absolutely have to collect during the event are the Nora Brave Trophies which drop at least one per mission… and there was one time I lucked out and got four in one shot. The rest of the bits can be gained from either normal High Rank Anjanath hunts or in the case of the upgrade by taking down Elder Dragons to get those bones. I ran the mission a total of five times last night and got everything I needed to craft both the base rarity 5 bow and the rarity 5 armor. The cool thing about this is that it not only makes you look like Aloy… but you also MOVE like Aloy. Not really sure how to describe it other than that, because it feels like you are playing Horizon Zero Dawn set in the Monster Hunter World setting. I have no clue how long this event is going to run, but personally I knocked mine out doing good ole SOS Roulette. That said more than willing to help folks get their parts if they need them. Honestly I might farm it a bunch while it is available because it seems to be a really good way to get High Rank Anjanath parts.

Megafauna Rider

October 9, 2017 by Belghast

I spent most of my weekend playing Horizon Zero Dawn instead of Destiny 2 for a change. On Saturday night we recorded our September game club show and as a result I pushed myself to beat the main story quest in HZD. Firstly… this is really a foreign mode of play for me and in many ways it takes a lot of fun for me out of the game to focus fire on the main story. I remember bowing out of the FFXV show in part because I didn’t want to ruin the game by forcing myself to ignore all of the side stuff. With Horizon Zero Dawn I am sorta glad that I forced myself past this hump and buckled down on finishing. This might be some of the best science fiction that I have experienced regardless of form factor be it book, movie or game. The problem is it takes a really long time into the game before the hooks are set and you get enough of an inkling of what might be happening just beneath the surface. There is this place that a lot of people seem to stall out, where you exit the sacred lands of the Nora and before you are handed the reins to the real story of the game. I personally stalled out here as did Void and I have a sneaking suspicion SquirrelPope did as well based on some comments last night. Once you get past this hump however it is an amazing roller coaster of a ride all the way to the finish.

Since I was forced to play in a manner that is really not my style, I spent some time Sunday going back and meandering my way through the world. The game does the whole hand wavy “the final events have yet to happen” thing after you finish the credit roll. I feel this obligation to sit through the credits as a sort of homage to all of the people and work that went into making the game. This one however tested my resolve because it is quite possibly the longest credit roll I have seen, but it just shows how much effort goes into making a modern AAA blockbuster. I do however highly suggest you wade through because there is a massive payoff at the end that explains one of the weird little things that happens in the world as you explore it. I think more than anything that is what I love the most about this game… it is constantly planting seeds that do in fact grow into something cool by the end of the game. There seems to be nothing placed in this world that does not at least eventually lend its way to a larger purpose. The secrets of the game are revealed to you at the same time as they are to your character Aloy, and as a result the experience is really interesting. There were several times I thought I had guessed how this was all going to play out in the end, but the game kept throwing me curve balls. The end result is a mythos as rich as any of the big tenets of geekdom, and I am absolutely rabidly looking forward to the expansion that is coming in November.