Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Unsupported Alts

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Good morning friends. Today is my Friday because I took tomorrow off and depending on my mood may be calling it part of the weekend. I am not sure which one of you commented that remembering random things is a sign of a midlife crisis, because lord is it hitting me with a vengeance right now. While getting ready this morning I remembered this one story from my childhood which is dumb but I am still going to share it. My entire life my father had the side hustle of a portrait photographer, this is in part why I tend to take those sort of things for granted because I effectively grew up in the darkroom and one of my first jobs was helping him photograph weddings. My dad gave his business a pretty generic name “Bill’s Photography”, and paid a local calligrapher to create a good clean masthead for him.

During the 90s when direct mail started to computerize some weirdness began happening. Always in the past he would get mail addressed to himself and mail addressed to his business, because a human being was effectively interpreting that business name correctly. However at some point this shifted and he started receiving mail for the mythical being known as “Bill S. Photography” which at the time I thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened on the face of the planet. On very rare occasions it would come through as “Bill S. Photograph” which was even better. So here I am this morning giggling like a madman as I am remembering this, and I am sure my wife thought I had completely lost it.

I think I might be done with Outriders. Recently I started leveling a Technomancer in part so that I could see how the narration and story worked with the female voice actor. I’ve now been through the entire story and I have to say if you are wanting to start the game fresh… absolutely go with the female character because the line delivery just works better. There are so many times when you are playing as the male character, that the line delivery makes it sound like he doesn’t actually understand what he is saying. I was never certain if this was a problem with the audio editing, or the line delivery itself… but after playing through with the female voice actor it seems like maybe it was the later.

Essentially I have reached this place where I don’t feel like going through the world tier grind once again with a second character. I think this is the general problem with the way levels and gearing works in Outriders is that there is zero “catch up” benefit to your alts. Sure I have a vault full of level 42 gear from my main character, but my alts can’t use a single bit of it because they have not “leveled” to the point of being able to use it. In theory this should have worked in a manner like Champion Levels in Elder Scrolls Online, where the World Tier and Challenge Tier are associated with your account and not your character, and once you finished the main story you would zoom forward to whatever your “Account Level” was at that point.

Outriders was an enjoyable but flawed game experience, which I guess is pretty par for the course with outings from companies who are not already seasoned in the looter shooter genre. Then again… I guess I could say the same about most of the other games in the genre as well, they are all sorta flawed experiences. I am hoping that Outriders sold well enough that we might see an Outriders 2 that makes good on the promise of this title, fixes some of the tonal issues of the story, and actually has a proper plan for what to do with players upon completing the final bit of story. They told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a “live service” title and I guess we should have believed them. There are a lot of things that need tweaking but I get the general impression that they are moving on to other game titles and not really that interested in anything that is not strictly a bug fix.

In other news… Fallout 76 is unabashedly a “live service” game and has seemingly found its stride. I have been enjoying myself greatly as I roam around Appalachia, which I really wish was easier to spell. At least with the Commonwealth it was two easy to spell terms jammed together, but maybe over time I will get used to it. That said it took me years to be able to spell shenanigans on the first try… and I LOVE that word. As of last night I am level 8 which means I am rapidly catching up to where I left off with the game the first time. The quests and the NPCs make the entire experience feel more enjoyable. The responder area is more or less intact with it being largely told through audio diaries, but what makes all of that feel more alive is that there are random human NPCs wandering the wastes adding flavor here and there and making it feel less dead.

I’ve built a somewhat nonsense house that cantilevers off the side of the main structure. Given that there is no actual gravity in this game… I didn’t have to do anything to make this more logical but I nonetheless added some support struts because visually it bothered me. Sometimes in a game like this I just keep building in a very “weasley house” manner until I run out of materials. Ultimately what I really need to do is pick up my camp and move it somewhere that works slightly better. For now it has been handy to be next to the Wayward while doing quests, but eventually I can see logic in uprooting it. I wish there was a way to do some terraforming, but you are pretty much stuck with way things are which is what lead me to have the second story wider than the first.

What I really need to do is sort out a more stable method of healing myself and a better source of water and food that don’t irradiate the hell out of me. I mean I have radaway, but I also know that is a fairly limited resource right now. I do pretty well in a stand up fight, but end up needing to heal pretty regularly afterwards. I did find an interesting option for grinding… up at the lighthouse on top of the mountain which seems to have a nigh unlimited number of rad toads. If I hang out in the house I can pretty safely kill those at range. There is also a quest up there for filling up the lighthouse with bioluminescent fluid that I should probably do as well. I wish there was a way to upgrade a piece of gear to the next level range rather than needing to craft a brand new item, but the game is what it is.

All in all however I am having a blast in Fallout 76, so I apparently was away from it the optimal amount of time for it to feel fresh and for the game to have evolved while I was away. Maybe at some point I can return to Outriders and have that same feeling.

Unexplained Hankering

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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.

Moonlight Game Streaming

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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.

A Defense of Andromeda

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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.