I am finding myself in a familiar place where I am sort of flailing about between multiple games right now. I am logging into Elder Scrolls Online each night to play a least a tiny bit, even if it simply means getting my daily reward, sorting out mail and auctions, and then logging right back out. I am also playing a bit of Outriders each day, but I have finished the story on my second character and don’t really relish the process of grinding up world rank yet again. Finally there is Mass Effect Andromeda and I am not really sure I have it in me to replay that game right now either. I ultimately started again because Tam has been playing through it and I more or less wanted a refresher for the story. I feel like I have played enough to jog my memory for conversations, but also not really feeling the drive to push further especially knowing that I am going to want to replay Mass Effect when the Legendary edition comes out.
Last night I was struck with the unexplained desire to play some Fallout 76. I did not make it terribly far in the game and my highest character was only level 11 from the launch. In the time I have been away they have made some fairly sweeping changes to the way the game plays and the content contained within. The biggest of these is the inclusion of NPCs scattered throughout the area, which is sort of huge given that not having them made the game feel weird at launch. All of these combined with my relatively low level has given me the desire for some time to start from scratch. Last night that desire finally turned into action as I rolled out of the vault as Belgrave my second character in the wasteland.
I’ve not made it terribly far yet, mostly just down the hill from the vault to the first settlement area. Having NPCs makes a MASSIVE difference for me personally in how this game feels. At launch it felt like we were wandering around this dead husk of a world and now it feels like everything is alive. I set up my first C.A.M.P. just down the road from the Wayward. Down the road a bit further is a little camp of Brotherhood of Steel folks, and immediately this feels way more like Fallout than the 76 I remembered. I think the biggest part of this change in feel… is there is now an Appalachia radio station playing some very familiar Fallout tunes along with some new ones added to the mix.
I’ve created only the most basic of shacks on the road. I spent some of the Atoms I had on a scraptron but I am uncertain of how well it is actually working. In theory it is supposed to collect scrap for you and deposit it in the box. At least for now I am playing on a private world while I get my bearings in the game, which means I did have to pony up for Fallout First which has apparently had a number of the bugs ironed out. It is my understanding that a private instance exists for five minutes after you log out of the game, allowing you to pretty easily swap items in the world between your characters. Also it allows you to pop over to a public game for a few minutes, wait the timer out… and then spawn into a fresh copy of the world with fresh resources. That intrigued me so I went ahead and picked up a subscription, that along with the unlimited scrap box because I am addicted to the unlimited crafting bag in ESO.
I had an awful lot of fun last night just sorta doing my own thing. I don’t have a large social group in Fallout 76, mostly just the handful of AggroChat folks that I played with when the game initially launched. I am enjoying not having to see other players, because the few minutes I played on a public server already annoyed me enough to abandon ship. I was trying to solve a hacking puzzle and this dude kept jumping up and down on top of me making an awful racket. So I guess I am paying for the First subscription in part for the peace and solitude of never having to see another human being while playing. That does not mean I won’t pop over to public servers occasionally, but I am likely going to hide in my own little private box.
If you have read this blog for any period of time, then you have probably seen me extoll the virtues of Parsec for game streaming. If you have not, then a quick 500ft view is that my world works a little different than your average gamer. I have one beefy but aging gaming machine upstairs, but I also spend a lot of time downstairs on my laptop. Said laptop is old enough that it is long beyond any useful ability to play games on it with its GeForce 960M graphics card in it. However I mitigate this fact by streaming games from my upstairs machine to the laptop over my local area network. I’ve been doing this since 2018 with pretty solid success after having tried a few other options that never quite panned out. There are however a bunch of things that you just sort of take for granted while using Parsec.
First off the connection is going to have intermittent lag causing the audio and controls to have what I can only describe as a “hiccup” where the audio drags for a moment and controls go a little wonky. If this happens at the wrong time it could mean a death, so I find I kinda play accordingly as to not press my luck. The other problem is that the video can artifact something fierce if there is a large amount of movement going on with the screen. For example if a game has rain… prepare for a pixelated mess until you get indoors. I found this particularly bad in Minecraft for some reason, making it extremely hard to play if there was rain or snow happening on screen. These are all things that I have just sort of dealt with because it was the price of entry for being able to play games on my laptop remotely.
The challenge however is that over the last year these have seemingly gotten worse. I know with the pandemic, Parsec has been selling its services heavily not just as a game streaming platform but as a super duper terminal services client. No matter how much I tell the client to directly connect to machines on my network, there is still a remote connection overhead of the client dialing home in order to locate the box it is attempting to connect to. This overhead seems to have gotten worse causing the audio/visual hiccups to come more often. I’ve done everything that I can think of to try and remove issues from the chain… but the end result is that I am less likely to play “serious” games from my laptop leading me to spend way more time at my desktop… which is also doubling as my work computer in the time for remote work.
I am not sure exactly what lead me to stumble onto Moonlight last night, but stumble onto it I did. I remember hearing about this project at one point in the past but never actually getting around to testing it out. Effectively Moonlight is an open source client that takes advantage of the Nvidia Gamestream tools built into GeForce Experience and the Shield infrastructure to allow you to stream games to lots of different platforms. Officially Moonlight has the following clients:
Windows
MacOS
Linux
Steam Link
Raspberry Pi and other SBCs
iOS and Apple TV
Android
Amazon FireOS
Google ChromeOS
PlayStation Vita (homebrew)
Essentially it supports all of the platforms that Parsec does with a few more thrown into the mix. For awhile I had been contemplating trying to build a set top box that would let me stream Parsec to a television but never got around to it. Moonlight however apparently just straight up natively supports the Android TV box that I already own. I will have to hook up a controller to it and test this out more closely to determine how well it works.
One of the challenges with Moonlight is that it is quite a bit more fiddly than Parsec. Essentially Parsec involves setting up an account, installing the client on two machines and then adding one as a host and then you are up and running pretty quickly. Moonlight requires you to have GeForce Experience installed on the host machine and then going into the client under the Shield section and toggling on Gamestream (which requires a GTX 650 or newer graphics card). If you are an AMD graphics card user, it requires more fiddling and apparently the OpenStream platform installed on your host machine. After you have Gamestream turned on, your machine should be findable as host in any Moonlight client that is installed on your network. There is a handshake that requires you to have access to both machines that is reminiscent of bluetooth pairing. When you attempt to connect the first time with Moonlight on a new platform it will show a short code and that code will have to be entered on your host machine in order to verify access.
From there you will be presented with a list of the games that GeForce Experience thinks you have installed on your machine. You might have to manually add games if they don’t show up, or just do what I did and configure a windows app to open… which effectively allows me desktop access to the machine. I did MSTSC.exe because it seemed fitting given that is the Remote Desktop client, but you could just as easily configure it to open Notepad.exe because the end result is it giving you access to the desktop. From there it works just like a normal remote desktop session and you can launch any games you might have on your host system. The individual game shortcuts seem to work pretty well as it will connect you and then automagically launch that specific game.
net stop NvContainerLocalSystem && net start NvContainerLocalSystem
I did end up needing to create a batch file with the above command in order to sort of “reset” the system if anything goes south on the host machine. This is essentially the equivalent of going into GeForce Experience and toggling on and off Gamestream. The default key combination for disconnecting from a Moonlight session is shift+alt+clt+q. However this morning while trying to take screenshots of how the Moonlight process worked, I stranded a session forcing me to run the batch file to disconnect and restore things back to normal. I did notice one of the pieces that did not get restored was my audio settings, so I had to go in and manually flip things back to speakers. Again Moonlight is way more fiddly than using Parsec which more or less just works.
Another thing that I encountered last night is when I first attempted to connect in remote desktop mode, I ended up getting a 4k window with a tiny 1080p window up in the corner. After some googling and messing about I found that I needed to go into the Nvidia Control Panel and change the Desktop Scaling settings. Since I run in native 4k mode while at the machine it doesn’t really do anything, but while remotely connected it takes the 1080p version of the desktop and blows it up full screen granting me easier access to it.
So at this point you are asking yourself… Bel why the hell would you go through this much trouble when you yourself have admitted that Parsec just works easier? Because running Moonlight was the best version of remote game streaming that I have ever experienced. Like I have long said that Parsec when it is working well is like sitting at the machine and controlling the games… but that is a lie. Even when it is working best, there are always some telltale signs in games that I am connected remotely and streaming. Last night while playing through Moonlight it legitimately did feel like I was upstairs playing at the keyboard when instead I was down on my laptop. I played a bunch of different games last night but at some point during the evening I started playing Generation Zero. The above screenshot is taken from the laptop of the game client running over Moonlight and there is no artifacting going on in the rain.
I played quite a bit of Outriders as well and it was so smooth and responsive. Like I think I had just gotten used to the subtle lag that Parsec added to the gameplay experience and don’t get me wrong… Parsec was better than anything I had tried up to that point. Moonlight was just a whole other level of smoothness and I think I could even probably do competitive modes in Destiny 2 through this connection. I remember it lagging three times during the entire night and even then it was only for a second before immediately returning control. I am not sure if Nvidia Gamestreaming has something built in to handle this, but it felt like the game just paused for a second before giving me access again rather than the game continuing running in the background and then having to deal with overcorrection by my character continuing along whatever path they were moving before the lag.
As much as I have loved Parsec these last three years, I think I might have a new main squeeze. As I said before these screenshots were grabbed via Fraps that just happened to be running on the laptop since I used to use that for game capture. Parsec does this thing where it intercepts a number of buttons and keeps them from being intercepted on the client machine, which is what stops voice chat from working but this also stopped me from capturing screenshots of what the Parsec client looked like performance wise. So unfortunately I don’t have any good examples of it artifacting out on me, but I am hopeful that maybe just maybe I can get voice chat working once again while on my laptop downstairs. This has been a huge source of disconnection for me because so often when I am just wanting to chill out I am on the laptop which prevents me from using it.
I will of course keep sharing my thoughts as I get used to Moonlight. I want to try a number of the other platforms like streaming games from my phone with the client. I will obviously report my findings in later posts.
Well friends, I am doing a thing that I didn’t intend to do… but it seems like the AggroChat crew has finally realized that Mass Effect Andromeda exists. This game was released in March of 2017 and heavily panned by the most vocal YouTubers. It was so heavily memed that pretty much everyone ignored that it launched, and I am going to tell you that in spite of all of the bad press you probably missed out on a damned good game. The AggroChat crew, specifically failed to engage because following right on the heels of this release was Persona 5 with a lot of folks doing replays of Persona 4 right before that dropped. The end result was that I was the sole member of the crew that ended up playing it, so I never really got to get the discussions about the game out of my system. It was only years later when I found out that my friend @Pixel_One_ was similarly desperate to discuss the game that I finally got that out of my system.
All of that said it seems that Tam at least has finally seen the light and is knee deep in a playthrough, which prompted me to want to re-experience the game as a bit of a refresher. I figure I won’t ACTUALLY beat the game a second time given that Mass Effect Legendary edition is landing on May 14th, but it might get me back into a Mass Effect mindset. I honestly expect the retooled ME Trilogy to feel a bit like Andromeda since Andromeda also feels more than a little bit like Dragon Age Inquisition. So getting back used to the particular quirks of this combat engine might due me well, to at least lower my expectations after the relatively high combat and movement fidelity of the Outriders engine.
I feel like one of the things we need to get out of the way for those that did not play the game are the memes. These very public and very prevalent images almost destroyed the Mass Effect franchise. The game did not launch in a great state, and as I understand it much like with Cyberpunk 2077 these issues were significantly more prevalent on consoles. The very first patch solved most of the glaring issues, including the extremely creepy facial animations that seemed to hit poor Sara Ryder way harder than it did her brother Scott. Bioware was using this game as a test to roll out a new facial animation system and from what I can tell it just needed more time to bake. By the time the time the paper launch date actually rolled around the game was in a pretty solid state.
The problem however is that EA decided to do some fuckery with the release of this game and instead of just launching the title on March 21st when most of the issues had been resolved… they instead ACTUALLY launched the game on March 16th through the Origin Access program. If you were subscribed to their games on demand service, you got the ability to play 10 hours of the full game starting almost a week earlier. It is those five days that seemed to make all of the difference in the world as to the trajectory of this title. Making it even worse it seems that the early release copies that were sent to press outlets were even in a less completed state than the one that came from early access. The memes hit hard and fast and carpet bombed the media landscape to the point that I doubt ANYONE who was even vaguely interested in the game had not heard about them.
So all of this taken into account… Mass Effect Andromeda was one of my favorite games of 2017 and quite honestly… were it not for some pretty stiff competition in the form of Horizon Zero Dawn and Destiny 2 I could have easily seen it elevating to the top of that list. Coming back and playing the game again has refreshed a lot of these memories. Andromeda was trying to solve some problems most specifically introducing vertical movement into the isometric shooter formula. The end result feels now more like a prototype for some of the things that the Anthem engine absolutely nailed, but the first steps were taken here in Andromeda. The other major takeaway is just how generally likeable the cast of characters is in this game. There is not a single character that I didn’t like… aka I didn’t encounter a Carth/Corso/Kaidan character that I love to hate and desperately want to shove out an airlock.
Unfortunately it took me until this morning to sort out the optimal screenshot settings… and ended up filling a directory full of completely black images so you are not going to get a lot of variety here. The game does a game about exploring hostile terrains extremely well. I have fun checking off the boxes planetside and visiting the various nooks and crannies of each area. Since I have played through the entire game before however… I am already looking at the possibility of trying to some mods to tweak that gameplay experience. Largely I am here for a story refresher so that I can competently talk about my thoughts on the game when we eventually do discuss it again on the podcast.
If you have never played this game and consider yourself a Mass Effect franchise fan, then you really owe it to yourself to give it a shot. It is permanently “value priced” due to its poor reputation, but it was worth every penny of the premium I paid for it when it initially launched.
Good Morning Friends. I normally put an exclamation point at the end of a sentence like that, but forgive me but I am not feeling terribly exuberant. I am not sure if I just slept poorly, or uncomfortably… or simply am generally sleep deprived but all I really want at this very moment is to crawl back into a warm bed and forget the world exists. Mondays being devoted to the Mixtape project… because alliteration… means that now Tuesdays are effectively my first real post of a given week. It is normally in that first post that I catch you up on whatever mischief was managed over the weekend. Probably the highlight is that I managed to ding World Tier 15 now allowing me to run all of the Hunts and Wanted quests at maximum level for theoretically maximum reward.
Or if you just want a more blown up transparent version I have that as well…
I’ve seen multiple versions of this scale, but they have all been exceptionally blurry representations so I decided to just go ahead and make my own version. There is an intentionality of overlap between World Tier and Challenge Tier which are effectively two competing end game systems. World tier will take you up through item level 42 and Challenge tier moves that onwards to 50 which is the current level cap for gear. When I first started attempting the expedition I steam rolled the first one and then got my butt handed to me in the second one I attempted, because it bumped me up to having to deal with level 34 encounters after completing that first one. I was not prepared and as a result I started walking up the World Tier system in an effort to gain gear and prepare for the stark difference in difficulty.
Since capping the World Tier, I have managed to get up to Challenge Tier 9 in the Expedition system. The problem that I have encountered as I go up in tier, the fights become significantly more frenetic. Additionally I have found out that not all expeditions are created equally. Chem Plant for example seems to be pretty easy, and Timeworn Spire on the other hand was 22 minutes of non-stop fighting to stay alive madness. There is a working theory that certain legendary gear is tied to completion of certain expeditions so I am trying to run them all just to make sure I have access to everything. There are reports of folks completing an expedition and then suddenly starting to see legendary weapons they have never encountered before in their loot pool. No clue if this is a real thing or not, because randomizers absolutely seem to get “stuck” on specific items sometimes.
Another thing that I have done is start the campaign over on my Technomancer. I’ve heard really good things about the infection tree for that class. I also wanted to experience what the game is like with a female voice actor, and I have to say if you have the option you might want to go down that route. The game seems significantly less bleak playing as the female character. Her delivery of lines is just more reasonable to what I would be expected in that situation. The male character seems pretty much aloof to the entire situation, and so far the female character seems to be more progressively perturbed by what they are experiencing around them. One massive negative about a replay however is that you don’t get to keep the mods that you have unlocked. Thankfully I had a few trash blues with decent mods on them in the stash allowing me to get a bit of a jump. I might start dumping trash in the bank so that I can deconstruct on my alt and get a boost in resources.
I am still enjoying myself, but I am finding it likely that I really need to try and pull together a group night since we all seem to be coming up against the same expeditions wall. They just end up so freaking stressful as a solo player, especially given that my build is about survival and not killing things quickly. I’ve seen several of us making similar comments and I think it might be fun to do a group play night, but timing is always the challenge. I realistically need to operation on either Central or East Coast times and a lot of the people that I interact with regularly are on West Coast time. Hopefully we can make something happen because I am really enjoying the game, but think it would be even more enjoyable with friends.
