Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Anthem Next No More

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So yesterday was a bit of a busy one for me. I ended up only working half a day as my wife and I got our first round of Covid-19 vaccinations yesterday. I am shocked and amazed that we have at least one round down after hearing all of the horror stories about family members trying to get theirs. It required a bit of a drive however and my phone battery was a little low so I mostly stayed off social media. When I get back home eventually and log into twitter I see a reply from a friend of mine stating that I sounded prophetic about Anthem Next yesterday morning. Of course this lead me to start googling and apparently there was an official announcement about the future of the revamp in BioWare Blog form. The most relevant bits are as follows:

In the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.

Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog

So I guess that is it and now the grieving can finally begin. So yesterday when I said I didn’t think it was actually going to happen, there was a part of me still holding out hope to be proven wrong. I liked the mess that was Anthem quite a bit, but ultimately reached a point where it didn’t feel like my time invested in the game was worth it. Even then if you go look at my Origin profile, I logged 214 hours of gameplay before I ultimately gave up on it. I was pretty damned invested in this game and I wanted it to succeed, but I think we all sorta saw the writing on the wall. Much like the other gut punch of the week, the closing of Fry’s Electronics… it wasn’t a surprise but it still really hurts to see it happen.

What Was Wrong?

So each player is going to ultimately have their own hit list for what went wrong with Anthem, but for me personally it boils down to two points. The first is that the game just needed more content simple as that. The story that you play through in the campaign felt like the opening chapter of a much larger tale. I believe that the intent was to do seasonal content drops that moved the story along and because they had to spend so much time triaging launch issues, this original plan was completely scrapped. The problem with this however is the base version of Anthem almost feels like a Demo for what the final product should have been.

Not only was it missing Story Content but it was missing activities for the players to participate. The game needed easily two to three times as many Strongholds as were available so that you could string together a good play list without it feeling like you were always getting the one you liked or the one you didn’t like. Ultimately the game in its current state has four multiplayer activities that matter:

  • Tyrant Mine – The Bug Hunt One
  • The Temple of Scar – The Protect the thing from the Scar One
  • Heart of Rage – Doesn’t Open Up Until You Beat Game
  • The Sunken Cell – Patched in Post Launch

There simply just needed to be more of these. If you had eight of them instead of four then I think that probably would have felt like a reasonable play list. Destiny for example has 15 Strikes in their current playlist and there were an additional 7 Strikes available prior to Beyond Light. At the launch of Destiny 2 they had 6 Strikes which seemed a bit tight but they rapidly patched in additional strikes with the first two content drops, which landed as planned without interruptions. Basically Anthem just needed more across the board of content to do at all levels because it very quickly became repetitive.

Misunderstanding Their Loot Model

The other major problem that Anthem had was that I do not think at a fundamental level they understood their own loot model. As an avid Diablo 3 player… I fully understood the type of loot that I was receiving. In D3 the loot is plentiful because it feels good to get shiny things, but any given item you get is usually deeply flawed in some way. D3 gives you ways of fixing this but makes it extremely expensive, so the alternative is to just keep doing content until a better version drops. The challenge there however is that in order for this flawed but plentiful loot model to work… the loot needs to flow like water. You need to be deluged with reasonable gear candidates so that from the dross you can piece together a few gems to make a reasonable gear set.

In Anthem there was a massive difference in functionality between a good item and a bad item and this felt awful especially considering how rare it was to get a Legendary item to drop. When that Legendary was something that you either didn’t need or couldn’t use it was extremely demoralizing. I think this was improved a little bit with the Cataclysm they introduced and the ability to target specific gear slots, but at that point the player base as a whole was largely gone. I attempted to play the Cataclysm several times but was never able to matchmake a full team and usually speaking it was just me and another player trying to make it work.

A Last Hurrah

So of those two problems… they cannot fix the first one because the team is being pulled off the project. There will be no more content trickling into the game and that sucks. However since loot setting should just be some server variables if they did things correctly… they could maybe tweak the generosity a bit. Were I BioWare, I would crank up the loot and let those who want to play the game at least do so in a method that fits the gear model that they ended up with. Let the magical 8 sided dice that aren’t called Engrams reign down from above and cover us in sub part loot options for the slim hope that maybe just maybe one of them will be useful! For me personally that would have gone a long ways towards keeping me engaged.

I enjoyed the core gameplay loop but I ended up in a place where it felt like I just could not move upwards because I wasn’t getting the gear needed to keep moving upwards. I was fine grinding the Hive Tyrant over and over and over again so long as there was a loot payout but when I could run for four hours and see a single hint of lime green… it seemed like my time was better spent doing literally anything else. Cranking up the drops would help to salve the community a bit, if there even is a community anymore. The few times they screwed up and accidentally turned the loot up to eleven were some of the most enjoyable periods in the game for me. I happened to catch a few of these lucky streaks and it felt AMAZING.

Damaged Faith

Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog

There is one more relevant quote from the BioWare blog that I want to talk about this morning. The theory is that they are abandoning Anthem to double their efforts on Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects, which is perfectly fine and probably the most reasonable option. That said I have no faith that BioWare in its current state is going to do anything to support those games either. This is the second big BioWare title in a row that they have abandoned support for prematurely. I was a huge fan of Mass Effect Andromeda and I am still pissed that we will never get any DLC content for that game or likely have much in the way of denouement for the loose ends that the game left. Once again it was a game that told a partial story because you could see them leaving the door open for follow up content that never actually came.

Sure this could be a bad streak for a good studio, or it could just be that the BioWare that we knew and loved is no more and whatever is left is no longer capable of the long-term stewardship of our hopes and dreams. Star Wars the Old Republic is mentioned but that game has more or less been in an extended maintenance mode since the wrap up of the Knights of the Eternal Throne storyline far as I am aware. As gamers we have this bad habit of latching onto a studio and viewing them as something different than the assemblage of the people that were in it. BioWare has been bleeding staff for years and thanks to the Dev Whisperer we have seen the pretty sorry state of their internal affairs. I am not sure at what point they stop being capable of supporting the franchise that we have loved for so long.

Grieving is Hard

Anthem was a wound that had never fully healed but I had managed to scab over a bit and put it out of my mind. Yesterdays news however ripped that scab off and I am once again bleeding a bit. So as such I am a bit touchy about it this morning, and with it comes a certain over dramatic melancholy with my writing. Now I am trying to decide if I want to reinstall the game and give it one last shot on the way out the door or just put the entire thing to bed as a failed experiment. Anthem was a good game and I enjoyed it greatly for as much as we actually got of it. I just wanted more or what was working and more generosity. Folks will claim that they have learned their lessons from Diablo 3, but those same folks seem to not actually understand why that game works. As a player that returns like clockwork every time a new Diablo 3 season opens… I can guarantee that Anthem did not learn that lesson.

This post is a bit disjointed but I also feel like I needed to get it out of my system. My blog often times is therapy for me and when I have written something I can finally start to put it out of my mind. I think this might be the case for Anthem. That said I will probably still be in mourning for a bit.

Valheim with People

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Yesterday was the day that Valheim reached critical mass with the AggroChat crew. This might have been achieved earlier were it not for the fact that I blogged about the game but never really talked about it on the show. We had a pretty thick roster the last few weeks of topics and as a result I didn’t feel like it was the right time to slide in a brand new game that at least then I was the only one playing. However and I were having a conversation about the game… and them this perked up Tam and Kodra who apparently tried it… and came back to evangelize the game and the rest is history. I linked my couple of blog posts on the subject as well and yesterday a server was rented and throughout the night more and more of the regulars were logging into it.

Valheim is a game that throws back to the age of renting a private server, and seemingly an entire cottage industry has sprung up around supplying these in rapid form. Granted most of the hosting provides are the same folks who have been hosting Rust and Ark servers for years, but Valheim at least is a relatively new product offering. I did what I often do and went to twitter and over the course of a few hours got not one but six recommendations for GPortal. So yesterday in a few minutes Tam set up a server and I was the guinea pig and figured out how to log in for the first time. The challenge is that so many servers have been set up in such short time that the server browser appears to be overloaded.

I took to the interwebs to glean a method for getting around this problem and encountered this write up. I am essentially doing method two that was outlined, which is comprised of setting up a custom server in Steam… something that I have apparently never done in the over decade I have been on the service. For those who don’t want to travel to another website and watch a less than amazing video… here are the steps I followed:

  1. Open Steam Client
  2. From the View menu select the Servers option
  3. Click “Add a Server” in the Server Browser Window that pops up.
  4. Copy and Past the IP Address and Port Number in the text box that is presented.
    1. For the uninitiated this should be a number that looks like this 111.222.333.444:12345 with those fake numbers representing whatever class D address and port that was assigned to your server by your hosting provider.
  5. You should now see your server in the list in the server browser. Double click the name or select the connect button.
    1. If you get a message about the server being unavailable or that there is no game present, just hit the refresh button a few times. Chances are the virtual server is spinning up if no one is actively on it.
  6. If there is a password on your server you will be prompted to enter that
  7. The game will launch and you will be asked to enter a password again
  8. Play the game

Going forward when you want to connect you open the server browser and double click the name of the server you just added and should be in relatively shortly.

Tam being the excellent host that he is, proceeded to create a massive encampment near the spawn point with lots of beds for anyone who wants to stay there. It expanded a significant amount over the night and now includes walls and a launch bay for a raft. If I remember correctly there is room for I believe six beds in there as well as some of the early crafting machines needed to function.

Being who I am however, without really meaning to… I wandered off on my own and crafted what Kodra referred to last night as Fort Belghast. Since I am further progressed than most of the folks on the server I wanted to be beside the Dark Forest biome and I happened to stumble onto it pretty early and then set up shop along the nearest coastline. I wish I had built on a coast in my single player game so I was effectively remedying this desire. Then last night I proceeded to attempt to jump start my way back to the bronze age so that I could at least repair my gear if I needed to. It took me the better part of the evening but I managed to gather enough resources to build up the crafting progression through a Tier 4 Crafting Bench and a Tier 2 Forge.

I think tonight I might craft a raft and venture across the channel to a nearby island you can see in the distance. There is a weird quirk with our server in that it seems to have a meadow biome maybe one quarter of the size of that of my single player game. It legitimately takes me at least one full day night cycle to run from the spawn to my base on the outskirts of the dark forest. On this server I can cross the meadow into either the Dark Forest or the Mountain region multiple times in the same day cycle. The challenge here is with all of us playing in the same area and the tier 1 biome being so small… we are starting to run into resource contention. I am contemplating going to my single player world and harvesting up a bunch of wood and then dropping it off in woodstack form at Tam’s communal base.

I have a very specific style of home that I like to build in this game, namely because I like having my fire inside. If you do this in a fully closed in area you will kill yourself in your sleep from carbon monoxide. So what I do instead is build a roof in such a way as to leave open eaves which allow for the venting of the smoke and exchange of fresh air, with my bed strategically placed at the opposite end of the domicile as the fire. This allows me to always stay warm and toasty during the nights, never have to deal with my fire being doused by rain and also makes for a much cooler looking inside. There however is room for a spare bed so I might go ahead and build one in case someone needs to use my outpost as a temporary save location.

I didn’t actually interact much with other players apart from chopping down a tree that apparently Neph was fond of. I just viewed it as the next tier up of wood, but I guess it was rather picturesque near her cabin. She opted for reclaiming one of the prefab damaged shacks, which honestly is a great way to start the game. I hope to maybe interact with some folks tonight as I continue this adventure. The Dark Forest is just as aggressive on this server as it is on my single player game, and as a result I spent a lot of time poking my head in for resources and then coming right back out. I’m not even sure how one would survive long enough for a proper base there. We survived the night and now have a multiplayer world, and I am sure we will be talking about it this weekend on the podcast.

Northern Expansion and NDA

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The northern expansion of the Realms server began last night, and most of the evening was spent building a sky road in an attempt to link up with the Taiga Village that I found earlier. I have no clue WHY I have this desire to keep pushing forward into new areas and opening up new possibilities but it is apparently a thing. The skyroads serve a few purposes, not the least of which is safe passage to wherever I am wanting to go. The second is it serves as a nice landmark for me to use while exploring because I have a mighty tendency for getting completely lost. Like in games I struggle until I am able to build a sort of 3D map of where things are and how they relate to others and building these roads helps me do this thing.

I know there are a few deserts that I would like to link up with as well but I think the next big thing that I am going to do is venture forth into the Nether. I think I am mentally prepared for that nonsense and can hopefully get some new resources. I think that might be the side benefit of all of the expansion on the surface, is that it might be useful for linking up portals through the nether given that many of these little outposts are far enough away that they might link to new biomes inside the Nether.

Another thing that I am wanting to return to soon is Valheim. I was really enjoying the flow of this game and I am super happy that it seems to be blowing up right now. More attention means that likely we will see improvements to the game as a result. I’ve still yet to take down the second boss and I should do that thing. While not as fulfilling as Minecraft in the building gameplay, I am enjoying the adventuring quite a bit. I think more than anything I want to get back in and harvest enough metal resources to start building into those weapons.

Another thing that happened over the weekend is that I realized that I had several game test invites sitting in my spam folder. So even though I had been watching and searching for one of these… the key words I was searching on did not apparently resurrect it from my spam folder. The problem with both of these games is that they are also bound by an NDA. So as a result we break out a generic Game Under NDA image and not say much detail. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time playing one of these and I am super happy that the world still feels extremely good to be exploring it. It is something I have tested in the past but I don’t want to go into much more detail than that. Suffice to say some improvements have been made and I am super down with what has evolved while I have been gone from it. Unfortunately this talking around in circles about something doesn’t exactly make for compelling content.

Another thing that I think bears some discussion is that I am not certain how much longer I am going to be able to keep up the YouTube thing AND the blog thing. I am starting to experience some deep conflicts about these competing activities. I am finding myself NOT wanting to talk about certain things on the blog because maybe there is a video queued up that has yet to be released where that thing happens. Even worse however I am finding myself not wanting to do something in Game, because I am not necessarily in the mood to record it and I think that maybe just maybe it is something that should be recorded. Essentially I am not designed for the YouTube style content and I think maybe after this week I might officially let it drop. I proved to myself that I could do something like this, but it has also taught me that I can’t do that and this blog and you know work and life and those sort of things.

It isn’t like I am trying to do any of this for a living, so there are no serious ramifications of any of these decisions. I just personally find I enjoy sharing content more in the pattern of blogging… where I do a bunch of stuff and then talk about it, rather than staging a bunch of video content and then letting it come out slowly. Conceptually I enjoy YouTube videos… but really I am learning that there is not enough creativity in me to make that work in addition to the blogging and podcasting that I don’t want to give up in the process. It was a fun experiment nonetheless.

Snow and Baby Zombies

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Hey Friends! Welcome to the snowpocalpyse! I realize that you fine folks in Northern climates will snicker but we here in Oklahoma were not built for this nonsense. Nor do we have anything resembling the infrastructure required to remove said snow accumulation. Around this point we are somewhere in the vicinity of ten inches of total snowfall with another system coming in tonight and dumping more snow on us. The snow itself isn’t that bad were it not for the icing we had gotten starting Sunday of last week. Thankfully we are fairly well stocked and have no real reason to leave the house given that we are both working remote at this very moment. I have been for the better part of a year and my wife’s school transitioned to distance learning when the weather started. The snow is super powdery which means that in some places that are some massive snowdrifts that have accumulated.

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If you have read this blog for any length of time, you have probably encountered me talking about Kenzie my tortie cat that is pretty much my constant partner in nonsense. In fact as I sit here typing this she is laying on “her box” beside me which is a cardboard box that my current computer case came in that I taped back up because she liked laying on it. So it should come as no surprise that when I was able to get cats in Minecraft this weekend, and finally found a nametag down in a Mine… that the first thing I did was name one of the calicos Kenzie. This was easily the highlight of my weekend, and I spent a lot of time roaming around with Kenzie at my side as she scared away creepers. Unfortunately… Grace had a mishap with one of her cats and it accidentally fell in some lava while she was spelunking and as a result… I have been reluctant to take Kenzie out adventuring much. So she is sitting here with my other two cats waiting on me. It feels real bad when the meow at me… but now I am scared I will lose them.

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Today’s Minecraft video which should release at 11 am CST, will feature a walk through of the World I have been spending a lot of time playing in. Towards the end of last week I investigated the product offering called Minecraft Realms, and ended up creating one that my friend Grace and I could run around in. Shockingly she had never played Minecraft until recently and after spending some time in a solo world it seemed the time to start experimenting with multiplayer gaming. Effectively this is our base camp, because I happened to turn around this corner from where the spawn dropped us and noticed this mostly clear valley with a mountain at the far end. I dug into the side and the rest was history and have slowly been both hollowing out that mountain and expanding via tunnel and sky road.

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Behind our base we have a pond, and it seems like this pond is a magnet for Baby Zombies doing mischief. A few days ago I went out to the back dock because I heard a Zombie groan and encountered this sight. That is in fact a baby zombie trying to use the boat that we have at the end of the pier.

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Then yesterday I go out to the dock because once again I hear a baby zombie…. and this time it is one of the rarest natural spawns in the game which is a Baby Zombie riding a Chicken. The Zombie in the boat was more than happy to sit there doing nothing, but this time the chicken Zombie absolutely made a beeline for me… so I unfortunately had to end it.

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The other side project that I was super invested in yesterday was setting up a Bee farm. I love these doofy little buzzers in Minecraft and as soon as I was able to enchant a pick with Silk Touch, I ventured out into the wild to try and find a hive that I could transplant. If you look hard enough you can see one hive that doesn’t look like the others, and that is the original wild hive. From that I used it to harvest honey comb and make more bee habitat and finally breed the hell out of them until I have a veritable armada of flying cuteness buzzing in and out of base. The side effect is that everything here grows much faster so our crops mature crazy fast thanks to the influence of my Bee friends. Hammond the pig seems to be completely oblivious to their existence. I have a row of campfires underneath so that I can safely light them and harvest either honey or honeycomb whenever I need… but I leave them unlit during other times as to not risk damaging the bees.

And that’s it friends. I have been spending most of my time on this multiplayer world and I am not sure how much time I will actually be spending in single player from this point forward. I mean I could have in theory uploaded my single player world to Realms, but I opted instead for a fresh start and this world has been VERY good to us given how many rare resources we have been able to pull from it.