Games Archives - Page 327 of 687 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Poor Driving and Change

May 15, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I largely spent the night playing Rage 2 and doing a really poor job of driving around the wasteland. In theory I should use this as an opportunity to test out the little 3D Printed controller wheel that I have… but instead I am just suffering through the mouse and keyboard controls. It is funny how even when they do not feel amazing… I will still gravitate towards mouse and keyboard in part just to keep from having to switch between controller and keyboard all the time. I will always be of the firm opinion that shooters are just better with a mouse… and then many of those shooters also want you to control vehicles which work best with a controller. So either I suffer with the shooter gameplay or I suffer with the often side content that is driving. The problem with Rage 2 however is you spend a lot of time in your vehicle as you cross wide swaths of territory between missions.

So while I did not get a screenshot of this because I was enthralled by the combat… one of the random events that happened in the world is that I encountered an enemy vehicle convoy… which I followed around trying to take out. There were roughly 3 car type vehicles, 3 or 4 motorcycle type vehicles and one giant Semi sort of hauler vehicle that was the primary objective. I managed to whittle down the convoy to just being this big massive vehicle… and chased it around through the landscape for a good fifteen minutes slowly plinking down its health. Often times I would drive poorly and get way off track forcing me to jet booster thrust my way back into gun range. Unfortunately I only managed to know it down by about half health before I got a verbal warning that I was almost out of ammunition. I am guessing I need some of the vehicle upgrades to realistically fare well in vehicle to vehicle combat… but I gotta say… I was completely hooked by the experience.

Every town seems to have a major problem that you need to deal with for them… before they can turn around and help you. Last night I made it through one of those missions… which unlocked another sequence of events that I am going to need to do before they can actually help me. That is fine… like I said yesterday there isn’t a lot of back and forth in the dialog so I more than expected to keep going on fetch and assistance quests until the storyline culminates in a battle with the big bad of the world. It is the moment to moment game play and the exploration of new areas that make the game interesting to me personally. I like checking enemy camps off of my list, especially when they happen to be hiding an ark full of goodies. As I move forward into the game I keep encountering newer and tougher groups of enemies… and I have to say… Authority soldiers are already a pain in the butt because I don’t have an amazing answer to their energy armor yet.

Last night during the quest I was speaking of in the previous paragraph, I picked up my first new weapon… which is a really amazing shotgun. Shotguns are a weapon that I always find deep kinship with, because they are sort of the no-nonsense killing machine option that have been pretty much something I gravitated towards since Doom. The most recent Doom game had an awesome design as far as shotguns go with some interesting mode switching, and Rage 2 does something very similar. If you are firing the weapon blindly you end up with a fairly rapid fire short ranged blast option. However if you hold down the right mouse button and aim the weapon, according to the in game dialog, the weapon melts together all of the shells into one large high powered slug that knocks targets back and has a satisfying thump when it fires. When it says it knocks things back… you can get some interesting situations where you hit a single target and it ends up knocking a whole line of enemies down if they are approaching single file through a choke point. So far this weapon really is my only answer to the Authority troops, and you end up getting it in a mission where things are constantly leaping out of the walls so it also does a great job of twitch reflex killing.

I’m still very much enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it as the week goes on. However there is one more topic that I want to bring up. I will be over the next few weeks moving all of my sites from my current host over to a different host. I’ve been with my current host for the entire decade during which Tales of the Aggronaut has existed. Initially I used them because a good friend of mine was one of the system admins, and I could always poke him if I needed something weird done. However after he left the service has not exactly been that stellar. Additionally there has been a pretty constantly series of blips in server up time and I am getting tired of it. I needed to find a good host to use for another purpose… and instead of doing a single one off… I bought a big enough hosting account to hold everything of mine and even do MP3 hosting if I choose to do so and move away from Libsyn. I will go into more details later as I move everything over depending on how positive or negative the experience is. I’ve moved a single non-gaming site over and it went pretty smoothly. This weekend I plan on moving AggroChat and depending on how well that goes might move Aggronaut as well.

Mostly I just wanted to give my readers a heads up that some changes will be coming in my infrastructure and it might wind up with me being down more than I intend to.

Rage 2 First Impressions

May 14, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I had a bit of a pleasant surprise, in that I came home and noticed that Rage 2 in my Bethesda launcher had 30 minutes left on the countdown to being ready to play. I was fully expecting it to unlock somewhere around midnight, meaning that I would not be playing it last night at all. However in theory the Bethesda launcher unlocked the game at the earliest playable time instead of Steam which I believe unlocked it at Midnight Eastern Standard time. Quake Champions alpha was the game that got me to install the Bethesda Launcher so when Fallout 76 forced me to use it… it was no big deal given that I already had it installed on my system. For Rage 2… it just seemed like a decent idea to go ahead and order directly from the company for fear of there being some last minute storefront shenanigans like there have been recently with the Epic Games store. One thing that you have to know going into this discussion… I loved the original Rage, just felt that it was too short of a game that felt like the opening act of a story and not a complete experience.

So going into Rage I was already familiar with the basic story of how the world went wrong. That said… I do think they did a good job of prefacing the major points through some slightly unreliable narration. Given that if you have not played Rage yet you like area not going to… so here goes my quick rundown of the events as I remember them. Essentially a planet-killer scale meteor named Apophis fell and destroyed the world… and you are one of the representatives of mankind’s best hope that were buried in Arks underground in order to survive the impact. However on the way to earth the meteor bounced off of the moon causing a large chunk to break off… and also causing the impact to not be quite as devastating as originally predicted. So in the first game you encounter survivors of the old world both good and bad… and fight your way through the paramilitary power of the time called the Authority and trigger all of the other Arks to rise to the surface in the final events of that game. However at some point between those events and that of Rage 2 some terraforming satellites have fallen to earth and caused pockets of the world to become a lush oasis… as was in theory the goal of Project Eden to help reclaim the broken world.

There is a thirty year gap between the events of Rage 1 and Rage 2 and in that time a number of major settlements have arisen and solidified their hold on the world. You play as your choice of a male or female character from the Settlement of Vineland. Within moments of starting the game you are thrust into a battle with the Authority that is now returning after a lengthy absense to begin reclaiming the wastes for themselves. Through a somewhat creepy sequence you scavenge a set of ranger armor from a dead body and that is apparently all it takes to make you one? You are sent out on a mission to make contact with three other city states and start something called Project Dagger going. And thus begins the first of the comparisons to Fallout… in that from the moment you leave that tutorial sequence you are no longer fettered by any constraints as to what you should or should not be doing.

Just like your first footsteps out of the vault… you can roam the world freely and do anything that suits your fancy. You have markers on your map directing you to each of these major settlements but also a bunch of other micro objectives that will gain you favor with various entities. The original Rage was essentially “what if Fallout were more like Quake”, and this game is more like “what if Fallout were a better shooter”. I am somewhat cautious on the Fallout comparisons however because Bethesda games are massively different for each of the players that choose to play them. For me that core Fallout experience is going off into the wilderness to be a murder hobo and bring back stacks of blood drenched armor to sell for caps… and then repeating this over and over until I have explored every bit of the world that suits my fancy and done all of the quests associated with them. In those terms Rage 2 feels very Fallout to me, because I can roam around the map and tick off objectives while looking for tasty loot.

Much like the first game you have a trusty steed in the form of a Mad Maxian road war vehicle… this time around it is something called Phoenix equipped with an Alexa style AI that talks to you as you do things. The game also gives you a decent waypoint system that shows up in game as a series of neon pink chevrons directing you towards your target. While on the road there are a number of random encounters… bandit camps of sorts or other vehicles that might try and run you off the road. One of the first objectives that you encounter is a bridge that has been blocked off by bandits and you need to clear the camp and flip a lever to raise the roadblock. That is more or less the sort of level involvement you should expect from the encounters in game… more or less go to an area… murder everything… search for hidden loot boxes and then profit. If Fallout was a deep role-playing experience for you… then maybe Rage 2 won’t feel like a reasonable simulacrum.

For me however the world is interesting and filled with quest givers that want me to help them out either to retrieve items or get much needed revenge on someone who did them or their family wrong. The feel of the world is also excellent, and not at all what I was expecting given the trailers and neon punk aesthetic leading up to the release of this game. Sure there are hot pink flares burning in the distance at times, but the world itself feels significantly more subdued and is filled with the sort of broken people you would expect from a broken landscape. There are no dialog prompts… just click on an NPC and get their story as well as a quest showing up in your journal… which admittedly is perfectly fine for me. I am always going to be the hero and help everyone out… so it isn’t like I need a red or blue option to the dialog to make me happy. That said for some the game will feel like it isn’t giving you any options other than killing everything… but again… it is a shooter first and anything else second.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the game is that each Ark can teach you a super power of sorts. From the first Ark located in Vineland you learn the ability to dodge out of the way of things… which comes in handy in many places. Last night before I shut down for the evening I found an Ark that effectively taught me the ability to double jump, and before that another one that taught me how to take my dodge and turn it into a body slam that can break armor off enemies. All of the abilities have their own skill tree of sorts that allows you to pour resources find in the wastes into leveling them up. As you start gaining these the game begins to feel really interesting and unique in that you are given was to both traverse the world but also interact with its combat. Now so far it is nothing in the way of the types of movement Tam generally craves… but double jump should at least make Ash as happy as it does me. I deeply appreciate the fact that the game has a ledge system that allows you to pull up if you get close enough to it… meaning that traversing areas that at first glance that you might not be able to make becomes a little bit more reasonable.

All in all I am deeply pleased with the experience so far, and all I really wanted in truth was more of the first game. Rage 2 however gives me enough tweaks to make that prospect significantly more interesting. The challenge the game has in front of it however is that so far… the game plays NOTHING like the trailer. The trailers were all so over the top and filled with Neon Punk aesthetic and thus far at least… I have seen very little of it apart from the occasional colored flare. The trailers would make me expect that a rainbow shat on my screen… and so far at least that isn’t exactly the case as you can see from what is a pretty common vista of junk strewn across a wasteland. This might be a turn off for folks expecting the former… for me personally I am completely fine with this as like I said before I loved the original.

I mean I guess the screenshots get a little more over the top when you factor in the photo mode that you can apply to things and add all sorts of neon nonsense to the sides. However that same aesthetic doesn’t really carry over to the gritty world that I have been experiencing. If you like playing murder hobo in Bethesda games… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you like post apocalyptic gopher mission shooters… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you want deep role-playing choices and feeling like you have some effect on the story… then Rage 2 might not be a game for you. If you were expecting a carnal bullet ballet in a neon punk wasteland… then it is probably a coin flip if this game will be for you because there are definitely those elements but as I said before it is nowhere near as over the top as the trailers would lead you to believe. For me personally… this is a positive but it won’t be for everyone.

I will say that the latest trailers for the game are playing down the elements from the earlier ones… so MAYBE the style changed over time? It is a really fun game that I am definitely enjoying, and if what I talked about seems interesting to you then maybe check it out. I am not about to say the game is going to be for everyone, but for me… I am completely down for this nonsense.

Iceborne Frustration

May 10, 2019 by Belghast

Yesterday we were treated to the very awesome gameplay reveal trailer for Monster Hunter World: Iceborne which will serve as both a DLC to the base Monster Hunter World Game and a stand alone game that gives you all of the content contained in both. This is probably a really good call given that Capcom is used to releasing brand new full games anytime they update the Monster Hunter content, and it would have been sorta sad to start over from scratch were that the option. However for anyone who was not hooked the first time around it gives them an easy vehicle for catching up and getting everything. Monster Hunter is a franchise that became near and dear to my heart thanks to World and I have gone back and spent time playing the older titles since finally getting indoctrinated into the flow of the game.

Unfortunately this awesome trailer came with a heap of disappointment in the form of an announcement that while the game would be released on September 6th for console players… that there was no definite date for the second class citizens of the Monster Hunter universe… us PC players. This has been a constant point of frustration during my experience with Monster Hunter World in the fact that the PC release trailed the console release by some seven months. As a result every bit of post release content has been similarly delayed by several months on the PC making us the bastard children of Capcom… never quite having all of the nice things our console brethren had. It was my hope that when Iceborne released that all of this would be a bad memory. That finally a brand new DLC would set straight the records and allow us both to be up to date with the most current content. Instead I find out that Iceborne for Steam doesn’t have a release date but instead a very vague “Winter”… which is similar to the very vague “Spring” the wound up being August for the initial release of the game.

So now I am left with a decision of… do I give in and play the game on consoles initially and then later pick it up for my platform of choice… or do I miss out on all of the fun when it is fresh and bitterly wait to get our turn. I initially played Monster Hunter World on the PS4 but ultimately found the PC experience to be far superior for my specific brand of tastes. There is never going to be a point where I prefer a console over the PC… because console gaming just rarely fits my specific lifestyle. With PC gaming I can play upstairs or downstairs or even remote in via Parsec from my chrome book at work and have a reasonable gaming experience. With PS4 I am stuck to playing upstairs in my office as I generally do not have control of the television in the livingroom… or get to use the cludgy PS4 remote play app which lags constantly unlike my beloved Parsec. Essentially the console experience is never a comfortable one for me and it also forces me to go back to using a controller when I have gotten so comfortable with the keyboard and mouse gameplay.

I am super excited about this expansion but now… all of that excitement is tinged with a bitter aftertaste. For the initial release of Monster Hunter World I swallowed the frustration of the PC release happening so late and chocked it up to this team not being used to releasing on that platform. However it feels inexcusable for that same thing to keep happening as we enter the long tailed life of this product. There is no reason why they should be leaving one of their platforms out of the release… especially when they are still releasing on Xbox which had the smallest user base and absolutely no Japanese presence. In the same announcement they credit their financial success in part to the PC release and it expanding their users… but now they are completely leaving them out of the fun. This feels really bad Capcom.

Part of me knows I will not have the resolve to keep from playing it when it launches on console, in part because very few of my friends followed me when I made the leap to PC. My daydream would be for them to offer interoperability between the console and PC players… but it is still sad that it is a dream that will never happen. I was deeply looking forward to this release, but the entire time I kept thinking in the back of my head “please don’t fuck me Capcom”… and unfortunately they did. I am saddened by the news greatly, but… it still really is an awesome trailer.

Anthem Postmortem

May 9, 2019 by Belghast

As you might have been able to tell from my blog, and the lack of coverage… I’ve more or less stopped playing Anthem. Apologies for using a memey screenshot to lead this discussion off but I somewhat feel like it is fitting for the current state of the game. Anthem does an awful lot right when it comes to the moment to moment gameplay of what it feels like to pilot a mech suit into combat. Once they fixed the controls from the early alpha testing… flying a suit feels amazing and using those same controls to move around the battlefield during combat feels pretty great as well. Additionally I was a huge fan of the characters that were introduced with Anthem and the story arc that was played out… even though it largely felt like the opening chapter of a much larger experience that we have yet to see. I think Bioware had a lot of ambition with this game, but due to all sorts of reasons outlined in the now infamous Jason Schreier “How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong” piece on Kotaku… the game that was released simply did not have enough focus or time to incubate into a finished product.

I legitimately feel bad for the crew after reading that post, but I am also left with the competing interests of being a consumer that bought in hook line and sinker into a broken product. I think given time and money and resources and sufficient good will from the community… Anthem is a ship that could right itself. However on many fronts things are not looking stellar as we move into May some almost 3 months after the early access release began. As many users I spent a good part of April waiting on a big patch they were supposedly working on that would in theory fix a lot of things. While 1.1.0 added a new piece of non-story content and provided some quality of life changes… it also failed to deliver most of the things that were on the road map for April. More damning however it did nothing to fix the core problems that the player base has been chanting since day one… that there were issues with both the quality of loot drops and the quantity of the highest end drops called Legendaries.

April was the month that I more or less stopped playing. Mentally I was thinking to myself… what was the point of grinding when there was supposedly a patch to fix all patches just around the corner. At the beginning of that month it sounded as though the patch would be landing at any day… and as we reached the tail of the month and the eventually release of it on April 23rd as a community the expectations were pretty high. From what I hear the Stronghold that was added is in fact a really good experience and was not plagued by a number of the bugs that the earlier strongholds had. I say “from what I hear” because even if Sunken Cell is the best experience in the world, it does nothing to fix the fact that BioWare built a game different from the one they were intending to build and have done nothing to fix the core loot issues. I just cannot be bothered to log in to play through any more content when I know all that will be waiting on me at the end of the content is a sea of trash purple drops that force me to play a constant game of inventory management just to stay ahead of the tiny 250 item vault limit.

I feel like I need to dig into the statement I just made that BioWare built a game that they never intended to make. Once again if you follow the Schreier piece it tells a take of a game studio that wasn’t exactly sure what they were making part from it absolutely not being a “Destiny Clone”. They leaned heavily into the comparison to Diablo 3, but the problem with that is it denotes a very specific style of game-play. In Diablo 3 post Loot 2.0 update the drops are plentiful with a bad luck timer ticking in the background and making sure that you get a drop every so often that scales with difficulty. The reason why it is so plentiful is that a good number of the drops end up being randomized to be not that great for whatever build you are going for… but they become workable until you can get something better. Getting something better is not a case of praying for the drops, but instead a case of applying time because eventually the thing you want will drop. I know this for a fact given how many seasons I have completed at this point and managed to get all of the drops I needed for a specific build. There is a high chance that you will see literally every item that can drop for your character during the course of a season.

The other thing that the Diablo model has going for it is the fact that the game gives you a number of levers that you can pull to help defeat bad luck streaks as well. They have a machine of sorts called Kunai’s Cube that allows you to pour crafting materials into it to get a Legendary item for a specific slot. Similarly doing higher tier stuff in the game rewards you with Blood Shards and you can spend these with the merchant Kadala in order to again get a chance at items for a specific slot. As a result through a combination of playing the games and getting drops and targeting specific gear slots you can pretty effectively get the items that you were actually needing. It feels as though you are always working towards the goal of getting your full set of gear needed for your specific build, and even when you get gear drops that are less than perfect the game has an enchanting system that allows you to swap a single stat on an item to help fix the problems with any gear. Again the game is exceedingly generous with its drops and also gives the player systems in order to mitigate any issues that might occur where they aren’t getting the items that they actually need.

Anthem is sorta like a kid who only read the first chapter of a novel and is now trying to pass the test in English Lit. They got the part where the gear is randomized, but were apparently absent on the days they talked about all of the ways that Diablo 3 tries to help mitigate any times when the random loot machine isn’t working as intended. Additionally they seem to have missed the part where if you are building a game with loot that swings wildly between “god rolls” and “garbage fire” that you have to make sure that the drops themselves are plentiful so that sharding an item doesn’t feel like you just destroyed what amounted to several hours of your life. Legendary drops in Anthem are still fairly rare in that you may see one in a nights worth of play or you may not. In theory they should be guaranteed drops from the end boss of Tier 2 or higher content, but instead they are an exceedingly rare drop from any encounter in the game which means that you realistically need to clear every single trash mob so that you don’t feel like you are missing the opportunity to see a Lime Green diamond on your screen.

The rarity of Legendary drops feels more akin to Destiny 2 and getting an Exotic Weapon. The challenge there however is that an Exotic weapon when it drops is the only version of that weapon you will ever need, because they had the foresight to make all Exotic weapons drop with static rolls. I have a handful of legendary weapons at this point and none of them are what I would consider to be a good roll for the specific type of weapon or damage that is being dealt with them. You use them because they are significantly higher level than Masterworks, but they don’t necessarily feel great to use or at least good enough to account for the time spent in acquiring them. It takes Legendaries to grind to get more Legendaries to grind to get more Legendaries… and at some point the incentive feels bad and not worth the effort you are expending to get it given the interval of drops seems to ranges from 30 minutes to 300 hours.

The other major issue with Anthem is that months into the game we are still encountering massive issues that tell me that the game itself behind the scenes is held together with duct tape and bailing twine. On May 7th they released a minor patch, large with the purpose of removing the Elysian Cache reward system from the game. I could go into how dumb of an idea I think this is since they removed content from a game that already feels like it doesn’t have enough content… and didn’t replace it with anything. However they did state from the beginning that this was a temporary system and in theory was designed to apply enough friction to keep people grinding until they had gathered all of the 160 or so loot possibilities. The issue however is that when they released the patch they also inadvertently removed loot drops entirely from a handful of encounter types in the process. This has been a pretty common cadence with Anthem so far is that touching one system seems to often times wreck what would seem to be an unrelated system.

One of the things that always impresses me is a PC case that has extremely neat looking cable management. However often times if you pull off the opposite panel on those cases and you see a rats nest of wires in all sorts of odd places in order to achieve what appears to be a polished look on the visible side. This is what I feel like Anthem is probably like once you peel back the pretty facade… a game that has gone through so many rapid iterations and has lots and lots of “temp” code still in place to try and hot wire systems so that they work. I’ve written more than my share of this style of code when we were rushed to meet a deadline and couldn’t be bothered to follow best practices when so much needed to be done in such a short amount of time. Crunch makes you do really dumb things that will ultimately bite you in the ass in the long run… and I feel like Anthem is a game full of Crunch decisions and compromises in order to ship a product that was not ready for shipping.

The challenge however is once they released that road-map, to some extent they are being judged upon it. It is hard to stem the hemorrhaging of all of these short term decisions when you are being pushed to make even more of them. At this point however… I think the race is over and they lost. It is far too late to be able to create a narrative of “we had a rough start but everything is on solid ground now” as has been the case with so many MMO launches. The time has come for them to take their time and figure out what kind of game they want Anthem to be… and then start working towards that FFXIV A Realm Reborn resurrection narrative instead. Anthem is dead… long live Anthem? At this point I could be grinding for Legendaries, but even then I am not sure what the point in doing so would be? There is no real end game in Anthem as of yet, no raid to be gearing towards and not even an equivalent of the Destiny Nightfall. The only end game to the grind is more grind and once I realized that… and the fact that loot would theoretically never get fixed I checked out of the game.

I am however keeping tabs on it as is the case with this postmortem of sorts. I want Anthem to have one hell of a comeback story, much like Destiny did with Taken King… and sadly Destiny 2 did with Forsaken (because they should have learned the damned lessons the first time). The negative of the life and death of Anthem has been that it seemingly has soured my tastes for looter shooters in general… since I seem to have also ejected from Division 2 and cannot seem to get back into the groove of Destiny 2 either. So now I largely wait and hope that BioWare Austin can pick this game out of the dirt and turn it into something we actually want to play.