Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

2019 Candy Trading Quest

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One of the hold outs from the original Festival of the Lost is the Candy Trading quest. This involves starting at one NPC and eventually working your way back to that same NPC, swapping candy each time with another that might be interested in the item you just got. In the original Destiny this quest chain more or less died at Eris Morn who gave you a Box of Raisins… and nobody wanted a box of Raisins. This year it begins with Eris on the moon who still has her raisins. However it turns out that maybe the Spider in the Tangled Shore is interested. This kicks off a chain of events and mini quests that require some candy and some of the ever so important Chocolate Strange Coins. Since I had not really seen a run down of the sequence I thought I would create one this morning.

Spider – The Tangled Shore

Spider gives you the quest called Even Handed, which requires the following kills with any weapon or ability.

  • 12 Scorn
  • 12 Fallen
  • 12 Cabal
  • 12 Hive

Handing in the quest will give you an item that you then need to take to Ana Bray.

Ana Bray – Mars

Ana will give you the quest Armed to the Teeth which requires you to get kills with different types of weapons while on Mars.

  • 10 Power Weapon
  • 10 Energy Weapon
  • 10 Kinetic

Turning in will give you an item that a certain gensym scholar might like.

Asher Mir – Io

Asher will give you the Precisely quest that asks you to make precision kills on two different types of mobs that appear on Io.

  • 10 Precision Vex Kills
  • 10 Precision Taken Kills

Asher will give you an item that he thinks the Followers of Osiris might like.

Brother Vance – Mercury

Brother Vance asks you to make kills with specific elements with the In Your Element quest. These can be done with abilities or with elemental weapons.

  • 10 Void Kills
  • 10 Arc Kills
  • 10 Solar Kills

When you turn in he gives you some Splice Drops that look pretty and taste horrible, aka the perfect candy for an AI.

Failsafe – Nessus

Failsafe is going to give you the Touched by the Light quest which asks you to defeat enemies with your abilities. Since my hammer throws are easily repeatable by reclaiming the hammer each time I used this to get through the quest quickly.

  • 5 Cabal Ability Kills
  • 5 Vex Ability Kills
  • 5 Fallen Ability Kills

Failsafe gives you a treat that maybe your friend in the EDZ might like.

Devrim Kay – EDZ

Devrim tarts the Foregone Conclusions quest which asks you to perform finishers on mobs of various types. To get Fallen I went into the Hallowed Grave lost sector in The Sludge.

  • 5 Taken Finishers
  • 5 Cabal Finishers
  • 5 Fallen Finishers

Upon turning in you get a piece of candy fit for someone in the dreaming city, and off we go to there.

Petra Venj – The Dreaming City

Petra gives us the quest The Best of My Abilities and asks us to do a number of specific ability kills.

  • 5 Melee Kills
  • 5 Grenade Kills
  • 10 Super Kills

After turning in we get a piece of candy that sees us travelling over to Titan.

Sloane – Titan

Sloan wants us to help clean up the rig and gives us the Not In Our House quest asking for kills in specific regions of the rig.

  • 30 Kills in Solarium Region
  • 15 Kills in Festering Halls Region
  • 15 Kills in Arboretum Region

This sends us back to Eris with some candy we think she might like.

Eris Morn – Moon

This quest asks us to equip a specific dance and dance in front of Eris with The Dance of My People quest. This is the dance that we got as kinderguardians and likely no longer have equipped. For each race use the following dances:

  • Human: City Dance
  • Awoken: Graceful Dance
  • Exo: Popping Dance

Satisfied with our performance she hands us a bag of goodies… that includes a toothbrush because she is that kind of killjoy.

I am not sure if this is a fixed number of items in the pouch or if this varies. In my particular satchel I got the following items.

  • 5 Fright Night Shaders
  • 5 Chocolate Strange Coins
  • 3 Enhancement Cores
  • 1 Toothbrush

I also got an achievement unlock as part of it, so for me at least it was worth the extreme time sink. Additionally each step of the quest rewarded a couple of the chocolate strange coins and you need a silly number of those to get all of the masks required to get the new auto rifle.

Seeking Infamy

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During the Iron Banner weekend Bungie ran a Double Valor event, and I managed to get two full resets and most of the way to a third. Now things get a little fuzzy, because I swear at some point I saw a note stating that this past weekend was a Gambit Double Infamy event, which caused me to focus in on playing an obsessive amount of Gambit Prime. Now at face value, it feels like it takes way longer to get through a match of Gambit Prime than it does a Crucible match. As a result the entire process of leveling your Infamy feels sluggish at best. So I opted to try and take advantage of whatever resources I happened to have to make it a better experience.

That said… I realized at some point last night that I don’t actually think there was ever a double Infamy event and I have no clue where I saw that stated. That means I ground a completely nonsense amount of Gambit and did in fact get the reset on my own. The reason behind this was that as part of the Notorious Hustle triumph that gates the 21% Delirium Heavy Machinegun I had to get a reset at some point during a season. I find it funny that I knocked out my multikills without issue and now have the Infamy Reset, but am still needing a bunch of Envoy and Primeval kills. I think this is in part because I have gotten randomed into a lot of groups stacked against clan teams lately.

For resetting my rank I picked up a really nice curated roll of the Trust Hand Cannon, which also had a nifty shader I had not seen applied to it called Gambit Chrome. In truth… I am more excited about unlocking a new shader than I am about picking up a curated hand cannon. It is an interesting build with Genesis and Explosive rounds, and I plan on playing around with it a bit in the crucible. Too bad it is not void damage to help out with the Thorn quest. Speaking of which that is probably going to be my next big nonsense push, in order to try and knock that out. I did however get the Lumina quest to 78% buy running around with rose equipped during most of my Gambit matches. That is actually a shockingly good Hand Cannon.

All of the time spent in Gambit allowed me to finish out this seasons Gambit Pinnacle weapon the Exit Strategy. I’ve yet to spend any time playing with it, but I figure at some point I will give it a shot. I love my SMBs but I tend to prefer them in the secondary slot with an energy affix rather than kinetic ones. I may play a few matches with Trust in my energy slot and Exit Strategy in my kinetic, which is effectively a similar loadout to what I have been running of late. SMBs have more or less replaced shotguns for me because they can burn things down super fast but don’t run into the ammunition woes that Shotguns do during strikes. I have an Iron Banner SMB with High Caliber rounds which is nice for staggering out a major while I burn it down.

I think I talked about this a bit yesterday, but I hit a weird streak where Gambit was paying out like a way too loose slot machine. I managed to pick up three of this exact weapon within the span of two matches. I mean the curated roll is fine, I like that it has multi-kill clip on it… I am ambivalent to it having slideways since I am not used to sliding a ton in battle. Again it serves the problem of being a kinetic slot SMB when I am not sued to using them in that slot normally, but I could mix things up a bit. Deconstructing the spares however was a good source of materials.

Also as I said before I picked up seven different exotics dropping from random majors in Gambit. I’ve become another one of those Titans running around with the One-Eyed Mask equipped. I gotta say it is damned handy in Gambit for finding where the invaders are. There are a lot of times you get tagged by someone while running across the map and One-Eyed Mask does an excellent job of drawing a giant bullseye on them so you can go hunt them down. I still think it was just weird that I hit a spot in the randomizer where the game was paying out significantly. I wish I could somehow get banshee on the other hand to keep handing me the same three weapons.

All in all it was a fun grind, and I have reached a point where I like Gambit Prime a lot better than I realized. I have an inventory full of synths and I need to sort out what exactly to do with them. I should really play some Reckoning so I can get a full set of the Reaper armor given that apparently that is the role I play the most often in Gambit Prime. I like burning down those High Value targets. I wish I was a little better at invading and also killing invaders, but apparently I spend the least amount of time picking up large quantities of motes. This week however… is going to be all about the Festival of the Lost and getting myself a Braytech Werewolf.

Outer Worlds Impressions

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I wrote a little bit about this on Friday during my send up of Fallout 76 and the Fallout First subscription. The Outer Worlds came out at some point on Thursday night through the epic games store and then on Friday seemingly through the various sundry Microsoft game stores. This has been a game I have been looking forward to for quite some time, but I have to say cautiously so. What I mean by that is that everything I had seen to date gave me hope, but quite honestly we are living in a time when my hopes are pretty often dashed against the rocks when it comes to new games. What Outer Worlds promised was not only a new game but a brand new IP that seemed like it would be drift compatible with Obsidian games work on the Fallout franchise.

The first and most important step is to see if I can create a proper “Belghast” in this game. After some quick fiddling I managed to dial in what tends to be fairly close to the traditional appearance of all of my characters. The game could have used for a few more beard options but I ultimately went with this nice full beard. As to ponytail options the only thing that was available was some sort of a bun nonsense and as a result I just went with long locks instead. In order to get the over the eye scar thing that I tend to put on all of my characters if it is available, I had to accept some other scaring and I finished things off with the little nose slash makeup. First step passed as I have a character that I am perfectly happy to be playing.

Next we have our setting. At the highest level The Outer Worlds is like you dumped Bioshock, Fallout New Vegas, Firefly, and Paranoia in a blender and mixed up a delicious dystopian slurry. Where Fallout is a game built upon rebuilding the world after a nuclear apocalypse brought on by war, Outer Worlds is a game about what happens if you allow capitalism and corporatism to run amok. You start your life as a colonist that has been stranded on board “The Hope” on the outskirts of the Halcyon system for roughly 70 years. It seems that something went wrong with your colony ship and rather than trying to fix it the corporations just cut their losses and left it out there floating in the void as a stranded hulk.

You begin your life in the cargo hold of one Doctor Phineas Vernon Welles, a fugitive scientist wanted by the Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board. He has figured out a chemical concoction that can be used to revive folks stuck in cryosleep on the Hope. You are unceremoniously deposited on the planet of Emerald Vale and told to meet up with a smuggler who is going to take you the rest of the way to your final destination. Your escape pod happens to land on top of said smuggler… Captain Alex Hawthorne… and which point you are asked to make your way to their ship. It turns out the ship has a blown power regulator which sets you down your primary decision path.

It seems that you can either get a power regulator by helping out the corporate townsfolk, or by helping out a band of separatists. Helping one group means almost certain death for the other group, so you are given a weighty choice almost immediately. The Outer Worlds is a game about choices more than anything. Do you accept the harsh bounty of corporatism, or do you strike out and try and help the little guy whenever you can often times knowing that innocents will suffer in the process? Corporatism is so invasive that it has literally become the religion of the land, and in spite of constant scientific achievement the reality of the world has gotten skewed by whatever is going to make the most profit.

The first colony you visit is Edgewater, is owned by the Spacer’s Choice corporation. Not just the land and the buildings but the people are all property. One of the early missions that drives home the starkness of your situation is that the town is concerned about having to deal with a suicide. This is considered to be damaging company property, and the rest of the townsfolk are going to ultimately have to pay back the Spacer’s Choice corporation because of this. There is another situation where you are trying to help out someone who managed to get sick, and they are unwilling to take any medication because the brand you happen to find while scavenging the world is produced by a rival corporation.

If you played a lot of the Fallout series, the game is going to feel immediately accessible to you. In many ways it feels like Fallout New Vegas, but set in space and swapping the radioactive threat for a corporate totalitarian one. The game is not at all subtle about the messages it portrays, and as a result it ends up being pretty dark, which is weirdly contrasted by how bright and vibrant the game world itself is. The game takes the Fallout format and evolves it a bit by adding better gun play and weaving in some of the companion mechanics from the Bioware games. The end result feels extremely good… that is so long as you didn’t lean heavily on VATS in Fallout games. I personally hated them and because of that the time dilation system feels good and useful, but the end result largely destroys any sort of tactical gameplay.

The writing is excellent as is the voice acting. I am not sure if I could be more happy with the end product and the total package that is The Outer Worlds. I am not terribly far into the game, but what I have played has been excellent. I played the game all of Friday night and for the most part all of Saturday until we recorded the podcast. I have roughly 10 hours of total play time at this point and am at what is I think the third destination? I’ve heard that the game itself is relatively short if you are the sort of person who cares about beating games and following the critical path. I have a feeling that for me personally this is going to be somewhere in the avenue of a 40-60 hour game based on the way I roam around aimlessly and slowly clean areas out of all of the tasty “bits”, aka the currency of the game.

I really don’t want to say too much more, because the game gets really interesting. After comparing notes with Kodra after the podcast we made different decisions and I managed to find a solution to a problem that he didn’t even know was possible. That tells me this is a game with deep replay capabilities, and also that maybe you shouldn’t just accept blindly when the game tries to give you an A or B solution path. There is often times a C and maybe event a D and an E. If you were like me and liked New Vegas way better than the other modern Fallout games then you should stop reading this and go buy Outer Worlds. If you like this style of game in general, you should probably still go buy the game. If you liked the setting and feel of the Bioshock games, then again you should probably buy the game. If nothing else you can try a month of Xbox Games Pass on PC and play the game through that if you are uncertain.

A Partial Defense

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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.